Who says God doesn't intervene?

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I was just reading an article on segregation in the North during the Civil War era. Adam Goodheart tells the story of social activism by African Americans that led to streetcar segregation ending in New York City in 1860. In his account, historian Goodheart said something that was probably more theological than he had any idea of. Noting that famed journalist Horace Greely had invoked the name of Jesus in advocating the end of segregation on the streetcars, Goodheart commented: "By that point - thanks less to messianic intervention than to the activists' tenacity - almost all the streetcar lines had accepted integration." That statement struck me forcibly. What Goodheart was doing, intentionally or not, was making a theological statement that God does not intervene in human affairs. If God does sometimes so intervene, how could Goodheart possibly know that He hadn't done so in this case? So Goodheart's claim could only be that divine intervention doesn't happen. Yet the instances of divine intervention described in the Bible are often just the kind Goodheart scoffed at. Rather than performing some obvious miracle, God moves behind the scenes, as it were, to cause events to work out the way He ordained. I'm not sure Goodheart meant to make a theological statement of unbelief, but by assuming that if an event seems to result from human activity, God cannot have been involved, that's exactly what he did.