Professor Robert Slayton has a must-read op-ed piece in the Washington Post on what it meant when integration was a crime. The details of the laws that states enacted and the places they were implemented, are just shameful.

"Oklahoma required separate phone booths for white and black patrons. North Carolina and Florida not only segregated schoolchildren but insisted that their schoolbooks be segregated -- in Florida they even had to be stored in separate warehouses -- so that no white boys or girls could ever be contaminated by even the dream of racial contact. States enforced segregation in prisons and in homes for orphans, the deaf, the poor and -- my favorite -- the blind. People who could not even see color had to be separated by race."

"It was always clear, as well, that this was not just about physical separation but about keeping one group constantly ostracized, always humiliated. The Clarion-Ledger, Mississippi's leading paper, editorialized that, "If every negro" in the state "was a graduate of Harvard and had been elected class orator, he would not be as well fitted to exercise the rights of suffrage as the Anglo-Saxon farm laborer." In one small Delta community, the local postmaster made sure, before he boxed any mail for black residents, to mark out one word -- Mr., Miss or Mrs. -- so that no African American would ever be addressed by a title."

There's a lot more to the article, and Prof. Slayton's conclusion succinctly says it all:

"Running for president on a ticket of blind, absolute segregation was a nasty business in 1948; commenting favorably on that episode in 2002 should be unthinkable."