Clearly there was some dissatisfaction before Civil Rights or the movement would never have started. In some ways racial tensions have gotten worse since my youth, and in some ways they have gotten better. This bad economy is straining attitudes in many ways.
I knew an old southern black woman who told me that poor people in the south were too busy being poor to be terribly racist. She said that they really didn’t encounter much racism from neighbors and only really saw it in the bigger towns and cities. She also taught me the term “Down North” about coming north and finding a whole different kind of racism that came with a smile on its face.
I met her when I was very young and she was a coworker of my mother. I talked to her in depth when I was 30ish and I was a trustee from the county jail (drunk driving) and I was working at the senior center.
He’s just saying what he saw — the lefties always have a problem with truth.
You're right. I've been around a little longer than Phil has and can say with certainty the country was well on its way to healing civil rights inequities before the 60s. But LBJ and the New Left saw a golden political opportunity, using charges of racism as a wedge issue, that's now paying bigger dividends than ever. They also saw that Blacks could be radicalized (Black Power movement, Black Panthers, Jesse Jackson ad nauseum) to help the socialists divide American unity and conquer. Marxism 101.
That was Phil’s personal observation. Who are we (or anyone else) to question that? He didn’t claim blacks everywhere were treated fine. He only claimed the blacks he knew were godly, hard-working, good people who weren’t, to his knowledge, mistreated.
Robertson was relating his personal observations, with the caveat that he had never seen *with his own eyes* a black person being beaten or abused. He stated that the blacks he worked side by side with (him being “white trash” - his words) never griped about ‘the man’ - but rather they sang and chatted while they worked - content to live their lives to the best of their ability instead of being discontent and angry with some faceless person who was ‘repressing’ them.
It was more a comment on the advent of the victim culture to me - it just happens that the times he was describing happened to be before the civil rights movement took off.