Page "lore" Paragraph 1196

The achievement of the desegregation of certain lunch counters not only by wise action by local community leaders but by voluntary action following consultation between Attorney General Rogers and the heads of certain national chain stores should, of course, be applauded.

But for it to be just to attain this same result by means of the force of a boycott throughout the nation would require the verification of facts contrary to those assumed in the foregoing case.

The suppositions in the previous illustration might be sufficiently altered by establishing a connection between general company practice and local practice in the South, and by establishing such direct connection between the practice and the economic well-being of stores located in New York and general company policy.

Then the boycott would not be secondary, but a primary one.

It would be directed against the actual location of the unjust policy which, for love's sake and for the sake of justice, must be removed, and, indivisible from this, to the economic injury of the people directly and objectively a part of this policy.

Perhaps this would be sufficient to justify an economic boycott of an entire national chain in order, by threatening potential injury to its entire economy, to effect an alteration of the policy of its local stores in the matter of segregation.

Such a general boycott might still be a blunt or indiscriminating instrument, and therefore of questionable justification.

Action located where the evil is concentrated will prove most decisive and is most clearly legitimate.

Moreover, prudence alone would indicate that, unless the local customs are already ready to fall when pushed, the results of direct economic action everywhere upon national chain stores will likely be simply to give undue advantage to local and state stores which conform to these customs, leading to greater decentralization and local autonomy within the company, or even ( as the final self-defeat of an unjust application of economic pressure to correct injustice ) to its going out of business in certain sections of the country ( as, for that matter, the Quakers, who once had many meetings in the pre-Civil War South, largely went out of business in that part of the country over the slavery issue, never to recover a large number of southern adherents ).