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My point is that blacks in America went straight from being supervised and kept in line by whites, to being largely dependent on the welfare state. There was never any period where they basically stood on their own and demonstrated what I mentioned earlier.

Incidentially, I just happened to come across this in a comment on another article:

5 December 1957
“Some Things We Must Do,” Address Delivered at the 2nd Annual Institute on Nonviolence
Montgomery, Ala.

“Now we must admit that we have some weaknesses (Yes) and some shortcomings (Yeah), and we must seek to gain the respect of others by improving on our shortcomings. (Yes) Now I realize, and I want to say this quickly, because I see a reporter here and I don’t want to be misquoted. I want to say quickly that I realize that these standards in which we lag behind, whether they are cultural, whether they are moral, criminal, or what not, they are like they are because of segregation; I know that. (That’s right, yeah) They are here because of segregation (Yes); segregation is the causal factor.”

“Let us be honest with ourselves, and say that we, our standards have lagged behind at many points. Negroes constitute ten percent of the population of New York City, and yet they commit thirty-five percent of the crime. St. Louis, Missouri: the Negroes constitute twenty-six percent of the population, and yet seventy-six percent of the persons on the list for aid to dependent children are Negroes. We have eight times more illegitimacy than white persons. We’ve got to face all of these things. We must work to improve these standards. We must sit down quietly by the wayside, and ask ourselves: “Where can we improve?”

Thanks for the extended quote, but it would be helpful to know who the speaker was. It sounds like it might have been Rev. King (I noticed the apparent call-and-response participation by the audience, if that is what the words in parenthesis are supposed to mean), but I would add two points here. One, King was not a Bookerite, which means he was influenced by not one but two socialists -- the board of the NAACP and Mahatma Gandhi, whose lifetime work left India a permanently-riven socialist country. (Given that the rift was induced by Moslem religious savages, perhaps I should give him more slack on that point.)

Two, socialism as a social experiment had been underway for 15 or 20 years by 1957 in the big cities, especially New York City and St. Louis. If he'd quoted stats from smaller cities with "racial problems" (Jim Crow problems) like Tulsa and Little Rock and Montgomery, the numbers might not have been as supportive as his concession argues, for the idea that Nero social slippage was due to the evil influence of Jim Crow, rather than to the solicitous ministrations of corporative (ie. fascist) socialism.