I was in the Navy between 1951 and 1955, home port Norfolk, and there was Jim Crow Laws in the South. The Military was integrated and while we could not hang out together on the beach in the south we could on ship, and in foreign countries. Met some of the best men I have ever known then, they just happened to be Negro.
There are so many race baiters nowadays. It is only respect for my old friends and men like Lt. Col. Allen West that stop me from universalizing a poor opinion of almost every Negro who opens his or her mouth.
I worked for a company headquartered in NJ that had branches throughout Virginia & Georgia; I would speak to the branch staff on a daily basis, and had great working relationships with them (this was in the early 1990s).
We had a meeting in the headquarters for much of the staff, and I was surprised that some of the people I talked to every day were black. You would never know it by their speech, knowledge, etc. (race never came up); I had only dealt with urban blacks in the north, and was pleasantly surprised. It taught me a lot; it is a shame they are lumped with their urban counterparts. I guess they are the 10% that didn’t vote for Obama.