By Lee A. Daniels

Proponents of Arizona law SB1070, the state government’s wrong-headed attempt to stem the influx of undocumented immigrants into the state from Mexico, have taken comfort in the fact that recent polls show broad support for it in both the state and throughout the country. A recent survey by The Pew Research Center for The People & The Press found that overall 59 percent of Americans support the controversial law and 32 percent do not. Further, when asked their view on the law’s provision “allowing police to question anyone they think may be in the country illegally,” 62 percent approved of it while 35 percent did not.

The law’s supporters claim this proves the law is neither unjust nor racist.

I’m a great believer in surveys. They’re a great way to take an accurate measurement of popular sentiment. But I learned a long time ago that the popular sentiment isn’t always morally correct.

The results of the Pew poll reminded me of the popular sentiment in America in the early 1960s when the mass-action phase of the Civil Rights Movement was exploding across the South and capturing the attention of the entire world. In early 1961, just after President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, civil rights activists began the Freedom Rides to force the federal government to end segregation on interstate bus travel through the Old Confederacy.

That action, which provoked a furious violent reaction from local police departments and white extremists throughout the region, is celebrated now. It wasn’t then by a majority of whites. Then, according to a Gallup Poll taken that spring, 63 percent of those questioned disapproved of the increased, nonviolent actions of the civil rights coalition.

Sixty-three percent. At a time before civil rights activity in the North, where de facto segregation was the rule, helped bring the temperature of the entire country to a boiling point. At a time before the phrase “white backlash” became a staple of American politics. At a time when blacks in the South were hemmed in by a rigid web of racist laws that – just like SB 1070 – were enacted by those state legislatures and signed by those states’ governors.

There was a fierce debate in the country then, too, over whether such laws were unjust and racist. As the 63-percent finding by the Gallup survey indicates, many whites throughout the country supported their continuation.

Fifty years ago some Americans, like those in this video, stood up against an outrageous injustice – and against the satisfaction with or indifference to that injustice of a majority of white Americans. This video of Americans asking “Do I look illegal” ought to remind us, as do the photographs and film we have of the civil rights years, that a majority’s acceptance of such injustice is always despicable.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.; and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.