[Verginius Rufus]

Gunnar Myrdal in An American Dilemma (1944) argued that even though whites had all the power, the blacks had a powerful ally--the American ideals. People like Martin Luther King, Jr., recognized that and made a moral case for civil rights based on American ideals.

King's path of non-violence succeeded. Segregation seemed well-entrenched and immutable in much of the South in the 1950s but it had collapsed by the late 1960s with only a handful of people killed (I don't know the total but I think it's in the low double digits), compared with over 600,000 dead in the Civil War. A lot more people died in race riots in the 1960s in parts of the country which had not had government-sanctioned racial discrimination.

[cgbg]

Legally enforced segregation was ended.

However, the facts on the ground are _very_ different.

Here in the north our cities are heavily black and our suburbs and rural areas are almost entirely white.

Just saying....