Do you have any idea how many black kids don't have fathers because they are in the joint for murder, drugs, robbery etc?
Do you have any idea how many young inner city blacks are threatened into joining gangs that leaves many of them dead and bloody in the gutter or on their way to the local ER with sucking chest wounds?
Do you have any idea how many young blacks don't even know who their own fathers are today?
Do you have any idea how many blacks are locked in cages because they wanted to be like the guy down the block or on TV and play the gangster role.
So to answer your naive question, yes, I would have much rather been a black 50 years ago in American, than today.
No question about it.
As a black man who was born around the time the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, I say without fear of contradiction you're full of it.
My father was born in segregationist Alabama, joined the service after graduating high school, served overseas, fought in Korea, and came back to the West Coast. He never went back "home."
My father is not like the people that you outlined in your post. He has never served a day in jail, much less prison; he has been married to my mother coming up on half a century; he has suffered discrimination but has never been embittered by it.
Most of all, his experiences with some white people in the past did not cause him to be suspicious or dismissive of all of them.
He didn't pass along many of his stories about segregation or racist violence along to me because he didn't want to burden me with it. Race was a virtually a non-issue in our house. I was not indoctrinated with pride in my skin as a youth. When I was called racial epithets in school, I ignored it. I frankly didn't understand what other kids' problem was, and they would always get in trouble for harassing me.
My parents have lived outstanding, virtuous, and Godly lives that I can only hope to weakly imitate. But I cannot say for certain what each of their lives -- and thus, me and my siblings' lives -- might have been like if he had returned from the Pacific to a California that 'followed Mississippi's lead.'
From a post of mine yesterday:
Thanks to my father and mother, I am today a black man who knows who his father is, who has never done drugs or abused alcohol, who has never been shot, and who has never been locked in a cage because I wanted to be like the guy down the block. (Even if I wanted to be like the guy down the block where I grew up, that would have meant being a decent, peaceful, hard-working good neighbor).
One of my strongest memories of my early years (pre-kindergarten) is when my mother took me and my sisters shopping, and I got my first real restaurant hamburger at the lunch counter at Woolworth's in downtown San Francisco. As I learned later in life, that's something my father never got to do.
But all of that would have only gotten me so far in 1952. I would have been defined by my skin before anything else.
The problem with black society today is that it hasn't learned what my father did -- the bitterness of past injustice is poisonous. So much of black culture has to do with an inability to attain "The American Dream" that it becomes a perpetual self-fulfilling prophecy. Meanwhile, immigrants who formerly toiled in godforsaken lands just to reach USA poverty levels thrive once they arrive here, where their hard work pays off.
Although I detest this state's current politics, I am delighted that I was born in California, and grew up in San Francisco, where I have fond memories of childhood friends free of any hang-ups about mingling with people who didn't look like them. There is no doubt that things have swung too far in the opposite direction, but nonetheless, I can't for the life of me imagine living in a society like the one my father grew up in.
And neither can you.
In the future, try to talk about what you know. It makes you look smarter.
Born in 1951, I can remember thinking it just stupid that blacks and whites could not mix---but I was in Arizona, and for the most part racial issues were minor. I can remember going to Phoenix Suns basketball games and LITERALLY not realizing that the players were of different colors. To me, they were all "Suns" or "Lakers," and that was all that mattered.
Only later, when I played in a rock band with Lynard Skynnard types from Alabama and Mississippi, did I really see racism up close. These musicians who would in a SECOND play on stage with blacks would utterly treat them like dirt offstage and, as was clear from their talk, could not comprehend that they might, just might, be equals.
The people here who "yearn" for the "good old days" before Civil Rights would have worn the sheets 50 years ago.
You just made the case for #861. Thanks.