JAMES TARANTO ON CIVIL RIGHTS PROGRESS:

Now, why would blacks move out of big cities in the Northeast, the Midwest and California and into the South and the suburbs? In part for the same reasons nonblacks do: in search of better economic opportunities and quality of life. But also because the factor that drove blacks in particular to leave the South no longer exists. Jim Crow is now long dead, but it had been dead a decade at most by the time the New Great Migration began.

But for some people — for reasons of political power or simple self-image — it must always be 1963.