Society That Puts Equality Before Freedom Will End Up With Neither: The Greatest Success Of The Civil-Rights Movement Was Getting Government Off The Backs Of Blacks By Defeating Jim Crow

From The Wall Street Journal, Opinion, "Progressives Put the Racial ‘Equity’ Squeeze on Biden: The left wants a spoils system on steroids. If the president gives it to them, heaven help us." by Jason L. Riley, Feb. 2, 2021:

Milton Friedman said the “society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither,” while “the society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both.”***The greatest success of the civil-rights movement wasn’t a new government program but getting government off the backs of blacks by defeating Jim Crow. Nothing the government has done since then in the name of advancing blacks has been more effective than simply ending government-sponsored discrimination. Black poverty fell by 40 percentage points between 1940 and 1960. It continued to decline in the wake of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society interventions, but at a much slower pace. Similarly, blacks were joining middle-class professions at a much faster pace in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s than they would after affirmative-action programs were implemented in the 1970s. In fact, we now have evidence that suggests racial preferences have been not only ineffective in helping the black poor but also counterproductive. After the University of California system ended race-conscious admissions policies in 1996, black and Hispanic graduation rates rose dramatically.*** If history is any guide, what blacks most need from the government is for it to get out of the way. Stop forcing poor black children to attend failing schools by denying them school choice. Stop increasing the minimum wage and pricing black young adults out of jobs. Stop implementing occupational licensing regulations that prevent black entrepreneurs from starting a business. And stop pretending that policing is a bigger problem than violent crime in poor black neighborhoods. In 2019 there were 492 homicides in Chicago, according to the Sun-Times, and only three of them involved police.

From Cafe Hayek, "The Market Makes People Pay for Their Prejudices" by Don Boudreaux:***

***[T]his scene [from 42] does capture much of the manner in which market competition actually works to impose on bigots the costs of exercising their irrational prejudices. It depicts also the fact that many bigots, unwilling to pay those costs, change their behavior for the better.
It’s beautiful to behold!
Contrary to popular belief, such competition was at work in America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as Bob Higgs documents in his book [Robert Higgs, 1977, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865-1914]. Indeed, the reality of such competition is what drove state and local governments during the Jim Crow era to forcibly impose racial discrimination by enacting Jim Crow legislation.