How wrong were the segregationists?
About as wrong as they could possibly be, at least if you believe in the words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
From a purely practical POV, they may have had a point.
But I think it’s pretty obvious that the issue is not whether they should have been “kept in their place,” it’s that we’ve had many decades now of opportunists and ideologues beating the racial war drums.
Can we expand on that?