I should have put Percy's comment in the proper context. If I remember correctly, the article he had written was intended to paint a picture of race relations in the U.S. 100 years after the Civil War.
Thanks for mentioning WP; his book of essays is a favorite and I've read "The Moviegoer" five times. I was in a state of fear when it was announced that it would be filmed starring...Tim Robbins. Fortunately that version was canned.
I think race relations in the NE were set in stone by the large wave of Southern and Eastern European immigrants at the turn of the last century. These people and their children had never seen a black person in their life and freaked out when overnight there was a huge influx of blacks from the south and the Carribean and did not know how to react towards them. Add to that the tradition Irish-American antipathy towards blacks (see the NY draft riots and Pete Hamill's essays on the subject) and you get the hypocritical racial attitudes that you see today.