Not all white people in the south were racist

Don't feed the trolls.

Certain trolls don't like their history, and instead of understanding it, and making the PRESENT better, they would rather complain and whine...just like their parents taught them, in certain cases.

Movies dramatize things.

I was born and raised in south Louisiana. It was only the redneck bubba white trash that were like those who attacked the freedom rideers. Ordinary white people were NOTHING like that. In towns in the south, the whites and blacks knew each other. If the blacks had staged a protest by sitting in a white diner, no one I knew would have touched them or anything of the sort. Maybe some white trash bubbas would have, but those are the trashy people that normal whites didn't normally associate with. The governor, in fact, had relied on teh black vote to get elected.

Louisiana also had blacks who had come from Haiti. Louisiana also had a large French and Spanish (not from Mexico....from Spain centuries ago) population, so that may have made a difference.

There was segregation, but the current white people at the time were not the ones who passed the laws, which had been in existence for some time. A lot of white people recognized the unfairness of it...but people don't write the laws. Until there started to be protests on tv, we all assumed that the blacks were okay with the laws. As a kid, I was aware of the unfairness, and I remember it making me sad. I wondered why the blacks put up with it. Then, like the child I was, I decided that they must agree with the laws, or they'd say something.

I don't recall ever hearing the N word growing up. And I had some crude relatives who lived in southeast TX, the headquarters of the KKK at the time. If they all talked that way, I would've heard it.

There just was NOT this sort of the same issue all across the south. When the segregation laws were repealed, there were no problems integrating blacks into the white schools, although there were some issues surrounding the unfair forced bussing (busing?) of kids, and some other things.

I think Alabama may have been worse, though. But that's just going by what we saw on tv. It was generally big city stuff, is the way we viewed it. There were also more racial problems up north, going by the tv news. Again, in big cities. We all thought the instigators of the violence were black militants in big cities and white trash bubba types.

And that really was the way it was in my part of the deep south in the '60s.

And let's not forget there were other things going on....like it not being a crime to beat up your wife and kids, not a to rape your wife (the husband having ownership rights), women legally underpaid because they are female, women not being allowed to work certain places because they were female, no sports programs for girls in school (only boys' sports was funded), etc.

EDITED to add: It has occurred to me, since growing up, that it is very likely that some of the men I ran across (friends of uncles, neighbors, or whatever) were racist bubbas and possibly members of the KKK, but they were careful not to mention such things. Since the KKK was active then (and still is), I think it's likely, but I don't know that for a fact. But if some were, that shows that it was not accepted in police society, since they were careful not to talk about activities or overtly racist statements.

Also to add: the kind of racism that existed was something like this: My grandma was watching her favorite tv show with us grandkids there. Then a black character appears in the show. She is surprised and looks at us and says, "Is that a n___a in the show?" We laugh and say, "Yes, grandma!" She says, "Well, I declare!" The N word used was an old timey expression...not the N word you're thinking of. She had been born in 1898, so things like that were naturally a shock to her. Even so, I never heard her express a racist thought beyond what I just reiterated. And that was just her being surprised, not saying he shouldn't be in the show. She cont'd watching that show until the day she died.

Fox News said all white people in the south were racist? What?