Conventional wisdom holds that national, centralized government protects the interests of minorities. I was talking with a progressive friend recently who trotted out this mantra to defend “modern American democracy.” But this faith in government to protect the interests of minorities seems misplaced. In fact, it required government force to maintain slavery, segregation and other policies oppressive to blacks in America.

I’ve recognized this fact for a long time and wrote an article about it for the Tenth Amendment Center several years ago, but a recent trip my wife and I took to the Kingsley Plantation near Jacksonville, Fla., underscored this truth.

Zephaniah Kingsley ran the plantation on Fort George Island from 1814-1839. In 1806, he married 13-year-old Anna Madgigine Jai after purchasing her in Cuba. In 1811, he freed Anna, and she helped run the plantation.  At one point, this free back woman oversaw around 60 slaves on Fort George Island. She also helped run her husband’s businesses, and managed several other plantations he acquired. Zephaniah fathered a number of biracial children, both with Anna and other black women that he also took as wives. (Zephaniah was a polygamist.)

All of this was possible because the Spanish did not view slavery in purely racial terms. They recognized “free people of color” as a class and encouraged slaves to buy their freedom. Free blacks were heavily involved in the development of northeast Florida and often owned slaves themselves. Anna enjoyed essentially all of the civil liberties of a white woman while Spain controlled the Florida territory.

All of this changed when Florida became a U.S. territory in 1821. The United States territorial government passed stringent laws applying to blacks. They prohibited free blacks from moving into the territory, forbid them the right to assemble, barred them from carrying weapons, prohibited them from serving on  juries and testifying in court, and terminated their voting rights. New laws also ended inheritance rights for biracial children and outlawed interracial marriages. The territorial government made manumission of slaves almost impossible.

The new laws radically disrupted the social culture in northeast Florida. Kingsley eventually bought land in Haiti, and sent Anna and several of his children there to escape the oppressive legal environment. Kingsley wrote that the new system of laws created a “spirit of intolerant prejudice.”

Without laws prohibiting it, white and black people mixed relatively freely in Spanish-controlled Florida. Without prohibitions against it, white and black people voluntarily and freely associated with each other. It took the power of law – coercion and force – to end interracial marriages. It required government power to subjugate free blacks. Ultimately, it took government power to support and perpetuate the institution of slavery. Centralized, nationalized power was friendly to the slaver in the United States, and he embraced it with abandon.

This remained true after the Civil War. Segregation was enforced by Jim Crow laws. It required government force to keep people separated. The passage of civil rights acts wasn’t a case of government rescuing poor oppressed minorities. It was merely government undoing what government did in the first place.

We don’t need government to protect minorities. We need government to go away and allow people to interact voluntarily. Nothing enforces prejudice like a bunch of laws that keep people apart. And nothing erases it like people simply living together and cooperating with each other on a day-to-day basis.

This may come across as some kind of utopian notion. And it’s true there will always be bigots, racists and people with prejudice. But if people are not inclined to get along in a voluntary society, why do we always need to pass laws to institutionalize discrimination? If people naturally refused to associate, the laws would be unnecessary.

Government is not a friend of minorities. It is a reservoir of power just waiting to be tapped into as a tool of oppression. When you remove the power of force and coercion, you allow everybody to flourish as they see fit.