 Bittker seems aware that the official enforcement of civil and political rights might not nullify the effects of personal prejudice and asks whether “personal” prejudice without official segregation would have produced segregation, “first in the home, then in Mrs Murphy’s boardinghouse, and then in business and politics”. This issue is of decisive importance for the implied contention that even without reparations blacks would have made themselves equal to whites if there had been no Jim Crow legislation. He rejects William Graham Sumner’s maxim “law-ways cannot alter folkways” which implies that segregation and prejudice could have persisted without the help of Jim Crow laws. However, there seems to be no argument to show that Sumner’s maxim is mistaken. Bittker takes it as a “working hypothesis” that “statutes, ordinances, and other official actions have been the predominant source of the racial discrimination that has blighted our public and private life,” given that we have no science “capable of producing a model of the United States as it would have been if blacks had come here as voluntary immigrants rather than as slaves, or if emancipation had been followed by an integrated society” (Bittker 2003: 26).