SOUNDS A BIT DIFFERENT THAN BEING A BELTWAY CHILD OF PRIVILEGE:

The great American book that refutes Rand Paul: A book published nearly 50 years ago utterly destroys any distinction between private and public discrimination (Michael Lind, 5/25/10, Salon)

As a native of Texas, where white-only businesses were legal until the Civil Rights Act passed, where interracial marriage was illegal until the Supreme Court issued its holding in Loving v. Virginia in 1967, and where private racial discrimination in housing was legal until President Johnson pushed through one of his personal obsessions, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, I can suggest a book that Rand Paul and like-minded libertarians really ought to read: John Howard Griffin's "Black Like Me."

Griffin, a native of Dallas, was at different stages in his polymathic career a decorated combat veteran in World War II, a music teacher, a philosopher, a novelist and a convert to Catholicism. In 1959, with the help of a dermatologist in New Orleans, this white Southerner had his skin darkened so that he could try to understand what black people experienced in the segregated South. Published in 1961, "Black Like Me" was the book that emerged from his journal entries. It became a best-seller and made Griffin (who was portrayed by James Whitmore in a 1964 movie adaptation) an international celebrity.

It also made him, his elderly mother and wife and children the targets of threats, including a public hanging in effigy in the town where he lived at the time, Mansfield, Texas. For a while, the Griffins and their children found safety by living in Dallas with Decherd Turner and his wife, Martha Anne (who were close friends with my family in later years). Before becoming one of the world's greatest librarians, running first the Bridwell Library at Southern Methodist University and then the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Turner had grown up on a small farm in Missouri, where every Christmas morning his father forced the family to gather on the front porch of the farmhouse while he fired a round into the sky shouting, "God bless Jefferson Davis!" Inheriting the ebullience of his father while rejecting the politics, Turner shared Griffin's strain of defiant Southern liberalism. His typically fearless response to the threats against his friend was to offer him not only his home but also an office and a public lecture at SMU.

Having been forced out of his home and his town and into hiding by white supremacists, Griffin had no patience for the kind of sophistry employed by people like Barry Goldwater and Rand Paul, who argue that, while they are personally opposed to private sector racism, they believe that a commitment to individual liberty requires us to tolerate racial discrimination by private businesses, but not by public agencies.

On rereading "Black Like Me" with Rand Paul's controversial comments in mind, I was struck by how very few truly public places there were in the apartheid South. Employers, subdivisions, stores, restaurants, gas stations, hotels -- Rand Paul would have allowed all of these to be segregated to this day because they are privately owned. According to this disingenuous theory, in the segregated South everyone, black or white, should have had a right to work, eat and sleep at the small-town post office or police station, because they were public agencies -- but no right to work, eat or sleep anywhere else.