>Seems to me that the civil rights movement expressly
>rejected this proposition and relied on an
>anti-democratic institution (the Supreme Court) to
>override the will of the people in the name or moral
>rightness.
>Do you reject that approach? Or reject the calim that
>the Court is anti-democratic?
The civil rights movement did not depend on the courts- although they used them on occasion, largely because the courts in the 19th century had overridden Congressional support for civil rights and imposed Jim Crow over the democratic will of Congress. See the Civil Rights Cases in 1883 where segregation was reimposed by the Supreme Court and Congressional power to enforce civil rights was gutted antidemocratically.
Brown v. Board accomplished very little substantively-- most of what the Court did that made any difference was protect the free speech rights of civil rights activists. Real change in this country came democratically through the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts and the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
The Supreme Court has often been anti-democratic but almost universally on behalf of elite interests. Where it has overridden legislatures in progressive ways, it has almost universally been to support democratic movements where the democratic process had broken down, largely due to the denial of the vote driven by Jim Crow. "One person, one vote" was a pro-majoritaria decision and most civil rights rulings were restoring the democratic power of Congress to promote civil rights, which the Court itself had taken away a century earlier.
To the extent that mass movements came to depend on courts for progress, they almost universally lost power and success.
-- Nathan Newman