Ben, this is an educative work, and quite the eye-opener. As a southerner baby boomer, I was vaguely aware of some of these subtler racist mechanisms.

A few years ago, I began research for my 4th novel, King of Soul, about what had happened to our nation during the Vietnam War. What I discovered was: the antiwar movement was quite disorganized until . . . freedom summer 1964, when starry-eyed college kids gravitated from their academic chores to the Deep South (where I was an 8th-grader): the idealistic volunteers got a very rude reality check: they saw the extremity of what was going on down south--that stubborn streak of slavemaster mentality that still survived the civil war and all those intervening years.The volunteer kids were shocked into getting smarter about their ways to organize against the war. . . and they learned to organize.

Eventually, their acquired awareness produced results: they effectively pressured Johnson, then Nixon, into pulling us out of that war--which WAS a racial war.

so, the historical oppression of black people has been--read 'em and weep--the primer education for social change in the modern USA.

Thanks, Ben, for your historical work, and for keeping it relevant by sharing your findings on Medium.

http://www.careyrowland.com King of Soul