Segregationists simply felt the best deal for blacks was for them to have their own segregated stuff equal to whites... it was actually ANTI-racist in terms of the times.
Yeah, that the ticket, my wife, Morgan Fairchild, told me so......
Well... Again... for the slow-witted... You can certainly pretend that people in 1950 were of the same cultural mindset as they are today... I know that it's not the truth or we wouldn't have needed Civil Rights. So we have to be honest in assessing what the cultural mindset of the time was, if it wasn't like it is today. Just as we can't live in the past, we can't judge those in the past by how we live today. It's real easy to tee off on segregation now, everyone agrees (pretty much) that it was not a good policy. So you're not really taking any kind of radical position there... you would have been in 1950. And that is really my only point here... Segregation was not a "racist" policy at the time... A "racist" policy was stringing up black men for flirting with white women.
Segregation was an honest attempt, in earnest, to resolve a social problem. It didn't fly but it was not racist. It's racist today, and maybe we just can't comprehend how it wasn't also racist back then, but it was a different time. It's like the issue of slavery wasn't about "equality of race" in 1860. Virtually everyone in society back then would be a flaming racist by today's standards. We must put these things in context of the times in which they happened in order to honestly assess them.
Look... We are having a great debate today about abortion.... Now, let's imagine that somewhere in the future, our society decides that the unborn fetus DOES have a Constitutionally protected right to life.... We pass an Act or a law to codify said right and society accepts that previous ideas were abhorrent and wrong... Would it be fair to then castigate all the people from 2016 who supported abortion on demand? Could we simply ignore your arguments for a woman's right to choose and denigrate you as monsters and morally corrupt people who didn't have any decency? Would that be fair to judge you by tomorrow's standards? I don't think it would be. I think we have to accept things in context of the time in which they happened and judge accordingly.
In practice Separate but Equal was always racist. From it's beginning to it's end. You can try to re-write history but it was alwasy about keep the blacks at the back of the bus. The accommodations were never equal. It was never an honest attempt to resolve anything. Most white people in the south at the turn of the century were still very racist.
No it wasn't always racist, that is the point I am making and you're missing. You have been taught that it was racist and it's racist by how we define racist today. Blacks being put on the back of the bus was a
policy of the bus companies who were catering to their mostly white patronage... it was NEVER a law and had zero to do with segregation... which illustrates just how little you actually know on this subject.
It's true the accommodations weren't equal and were never going to be equal and this is why segregation was a bad policy idea and ultimately failed. Again... this has nothing to do with actual racism. It was because of economic resources which the black community didn't have to compete with the white community.
Again... I am not here to argue that segregation was some great and wonderful thing we should have stuck with! I know that's what you would like to twist my comments into, and there are probably some backward-thinking racist rednecks here who will give you that argument. I am simply approaching this from an intellectual and objective viewpoint of evaluation. It was not about racism or intended to be a racist policy. It was intended to resolve a social problem in the most amicable way possible at the time. It didn't work and it wasn't going to work... but it wan't racist.
In the 1990s, a school board in... (I think Kentucky?) Petitioned the Justice Department to have desegregation laws overturned so that they could have community schools with predominately black student bodies as opposed to having their kids bused across the county to white schools. So there you have black people supporting segregation... and I think they actually won their case and were allowed to do this.
I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about with "turn of the century" ...do you mean the 20th or 21st century? Because, at the turn of the 20th century, most of white America was considerably racist by today's standard in the North, South, East and West. At the turn of the 21st century, however, I would argue that the Southern US was less racist than most of the country. This is evidenced in the relatively low number of racial riots and turmoil as compared with the rest of the country. I think the reason for this is simple... In the south, we grow up with the stigma of our past. Every year in Alabama history, our children learn about Selma to Montgomery... Rosa Parks... MLK... etc. It is a part of our heritage and we've had this continual conscious awareness of it for several generations. People don't get that in Wisconsin or Ohio.
I'm also going to say this, and you're not going to like it... I think a LOT of northern racists hide their own bigotry and prejudice by scapegoating the South.