Not quite. The Barbarians assimilated into Roman Civilization and adopted Roman Law and Roman ways. They became Romans. The Barbarian generals who conquered Rome were Roman generals leading Roman formations in Roman arms and regalia.Odoacer was that Roman general come to Rome to collect on arrears in pay for the troops. Rome did not “Fall.” It dissipated. The Barbarians in the successor states maintained Roman civilization for two more centuries, individual rulers ruling in deference to a Roman system that had no longer a center. Roman Civilization was carried by the descendants of the barbarians until the conquests of the Moslems in the East cut off trade with the East which had been for several centuries the cosmopolitan and production center of the Empire. When the Mohammedan pirates cut off the connection with the East the supply of papyrus ceased. Previous to that the population had ben literate to a large extent. With the decline of literacy Roman civilization finally ended.<p?As for the blacks in the USA, in the 40s and 50s there was a migration from the South into the industrial North such that the Negroes become very similar to the Irish and other Europeans who immigrated in great numbers in the first part of the last century. Their trajectory was following that of the immigrants. They rapidly were entering American civilization. Along came LBJ and the War on Poverty and Medicaid and Welfare and the induced disintegration of the family. Just as the motor was starting to crank the Democrats kicked the wheels off the car. The decline of public education overall and more in the schools attended by Negro kids accelerated the disintegration. The same process is coming to much of the white population, just at a slower pace because we start at a much higher level than the sharecroppers of the old South.
That’s late Rome. I was talking about at its height, by which I meant late Republic and early Principate. Yes, by the later years, they just sort of became whatever the people around them were; sort of like the USA today. I was simply making the point that the Romans established a great civilization before the advent of Christianity.