“I don’t remember any protests or riots,”
Same here. Things changed in the early 60s. I remember the first “race riots” being shown on the nightly news starting in 1964 when I was 13. Those black and white images were of something so far away and so alien to us they might have been on Mars.
Coincidentally, I got sucker punched by a black kid that same year at a movie theatre. I was leaving the theatre on a Saturday afternoon when he grabbed my shoulder, wheeled me around, and POW, landed a hard right on my face. I dropped like a sack of potatoes.
We lived in Jersey in a quiet suburb about 30 miles from Newark. My older sister had a friend who had a job there, and during the riots the front windows of the building she was in were shot out. She was lucky, because the National Guard was coming down the street she was on and the rioters left to loot another area. I didn’t understand what was going on at the time, or why, still don’t to this day. Rioting and looting isn’t going to help your cause, and burning down your own neighborhood is beyond stupidity.