The mostly Northern whites who legislated against Jim Crow saw themselves as making a grand and magnanimous gesture, cutting a heroic figure. They would affirm the moral principles on which the Constitution rested by extending its legal principles to a region where they had never really been applied. Black people, and the most zealous among the civil rights activists of all races, saw whites as having entered a guilty plea in the court of history, and thus as repudiating the moral posturing on which the good name and the good conscience of their constitutional republic had rested.
