On the eve of the Iowa caucuses, Congressman Ron Paul is being pressed about his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The question was put to him over the weekend by Candy Crowley of the Cable News Network. What Ms. Crowley asked the libertarian Republican was whether he thought the country would have been better off in terms of race relations without the 1964 Act.

Dr. Paul replied that “we could have done it a better way because the Jim Crow laws, obviously had to get rid of and we’re all better off for that. And that is an important issue, so I strongly supported that. What you don’t want to do is undermine the concept of liberty in that process. And what they did in that bill was they destroyed the principle of private property and private choices.”

It happens that these questions were hashed out in a famous Supreme Court case called Heart of Atlanta v. United States. The Heart of Atlanta was a 216-room motel on Courtland Street in the capital of Georgia. It denied accommodations to African-Americans even after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 specifically forbade such a practice in, among a list of public accommodations, inns and restaurants.

Heart of Atlanta seemed to have precedent on its side. The precedent had been laid in 1883, when the Supreme Court found unconstitutional the Civil Rights Act that Congress passed in 1875. That act had required that “all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement.”

The 1875 act specifically noted that the law was applicable to “citizens of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude.” But in 1883 the Supreme Court had cast aside the law, saying that not even the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment gave the Congress the power to outlaw racial discrimination among private individuals. That is one of the openings via which Jim Crow dug in after the end of slavery.

So it seemed like the Heart of Atlanta Motel had the wind at its back when, nearly a century later, it went to court to challenge a new civil rights act, a law that had been called for by President Kennedy and passed by Congress with leadership from President Lyndon Johnson. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, like the law passed in 1875, also outlawed discrimination in public accommodations like restaurants and hotels. But when the case got to the highest court in the land, the justices concluded that the nature of the country had changed.

It was not the Constitution that had changed, that is, it wasn’t “living Constitution” versus a “dead Constitution” case. It was a changing America. And it wasn’t that Americans were becoming more or less racist. It was that they were traveling more. The court quoted testimony to the effect “that our people have become increasingly mobile, with millions of people of all races traveling from State to State” and that African Americans “in particular have been the subject of discrimination in transient accommodations.”

So widespread was this plight, the court noted, that a special guidebook was being published for African Americans seeking accommodations. It quoted a letter from a federal official reporting that the lack of accommodations for African Americans was negatively affecting air travel, by which millions were now moving among the various states. So the court reached for, among other provisions of the Constitution, the commerce clause granting Congress the power to regulate commerce among the several states. The ruling was nine to zero.

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Our own sense of Ron Paul is that he is not a racist. He is concerned with libertarian principles. What is striking about the Heart of Atlanta v. United States is that in the end the court wasn’t really concerned with the theoretical issues of which Dr. Paul speaks today. It was concerned with the practical problems that were presented by the lack of public accommodation for African Americans in a nation that was suddenly traveling inter-state by the tens of millions.  Automobiles and airplanes swelled the numbers to the point where it suddenly seemed constitutionally logical to let Congress come in under the commerce clause. And today the whole country — including, we have no doubt, Ron Paul — would be aghast were new attempts ever made to deny accommodations on the basis of race.