@Fishrrman
I am very old, soon to be 87. My mother was born in the 1800s. Both parents grew up on farms in Arkansas. She married my father and they moved to east Texas in the oil field. My father worked for Sun Oil Company his entire life. Their living area was known as the Sun Oil Camp.
My mother had a black woman who came there on Monday's to help mother with the washing. I did not see any other black people in that area. My mother said to me as I was growing up - "nixxers are okay as long as they stay in their place." That was the only name I heard for black people; she grew up using that name; that is what they were called, just as white people were called white people.
When my mother first saw a black person on TV, she said, "If they are let on TV, they will start marrying white people." Evidently, being on TV was not "staying in their place".
That is how it was back in those days.
You are nearly my mother's age. I had a very different experience in Southern MD where nearly half the population was black. There were black folks who worked as maids, servants, caretakers, field hands and laborers, sure. There were also black businessmen, tradesmen of note, and even fishing boat owners. Many last names were trade names: Butler, Baker, Cooper, Smith. Regardless, your place was where you made it. Blacks and Whites went to the same Catholic Church services, even if they partied in different nightclubs and drank in segregated bars, not so strange, as there were stag bars, then, too (no women served/allowed).
Neither my parents nor grandparents ever used the word "ni**er" within my earshot, though locally it was understood as and retained for those criminal ne'er do wells who were just like dark skinned "white trash". We were taught to treat all people with respect, unless they proved themselves unworthy of that. The terms "colored" and "darky" were descriptive, not pejorative, and we played with black kids we worked with on the farm. Eventually, by Federal decree, we even went to school together. Problems didn't start until agitators from D.C., adherents to the Marxism of The New Left who co-opted the Democrat Party in the '70, for all practical purposes, started trouble, much as the current unrest. That's why all this seems so familiar to me, it's a case of Deja Vu, only the Democrats running cities now have no desire to restore order.
Now, the avant garde of the Democrat Party, and even the mainstream, are openly advocating Marxism, and in the '70s, they'd never have acted that way.
