In Boston for instance the opposition to racial desegregation in every respect was centered in the South Boston district....
Opposition to desegregation, and the fights over busing, was not limited to South Boston. It wasn't just Southies who refused to cooperate with the Racial Imbalance Act.
Don't forget, one of the "solutions" to the busing crisis was White students switching to private schools; and White flight out of urban centers to heavily White suburbs, often "protected" from busing and Blacks by redlining and discrimination. Boston public school attendance dropped by 40-60% during the crisis. That wasn't all happening in South Boston.
A black family lived two houses from us and one of its kids and I became BFF for a good while there until they moved to super liberal and expensive Lexington. All the way up through public school there were black faces in the halls and classrooms as if it had always been so -- and was in fact so from long before Brown v Board.
That's nice, but unprovable anecdotes do not refute anything I said. There was -- and still is -- lots of
de facto racial segregation all over the US. Redlining, job discrimination, higher ed, the list goes on.
Boston conducted its own school desegregation business without the state's National Guard and without the 101st Airborne Division both of which were required in the hard core Confederate South where vicious racism permeated every aspect of life.
Again, if you're trying to say that "it was only the Southies that were racist in the 70s!" then I am absolutely not buying it.
Yes, I know that many Northerners like to feel all smug about how they're morally superior to the South. The North certainly was enough of an improvement that millions of Blacks moved north for decades. It also certainly was not, and is not, a post-racist society.
As to the whole of your posting self indulgence
Talking about the history of racism in the US is "self indulgence?" Who knew?
....the weak and feeble liberals are better for America than are the domestically centered fascist aggressor and sorehead alternative. The problem is that for the liberals to succeed in government they can't have a fundamentally fascist opposition because it's wiping 'em out and rather easily at that. Indeed, now that the fascists are in complete charge in Washington -- which your post ignores to dwell in the past -- you need to be advised the '24 election looks with each passing week as fixed in time to become the last free and fair election and federal voting in the USA.
And again, none of that refutes anything I've said. As a reminder, my points are:
- MAGA is nowhere near as numerous as you seem to assume.
- Civil rights aren't all
that much more popular today than in the past, and movements that use civil disobedience certainly don't need to be popular to succeed.
- Non-violent civil resistance and civil disobedience works and can definitely take down autocratic regimes -- equally, if not slightly better, than violent resistance.
I'd add that giving up now is pretty much the worst thing you can do. That's what the authoritarians
want you to do. The reality is that they're much weaker than you think, and they only get away with it if you let them beat you without even putting up a fight.
