So things have become demonstrably better since that epochal moment, over what would have happened anyway? Do tell!

When someone starts telling me that we have to follow the Constitution; the Bible; or the Koran, I suspect they are a little fey on all the factors that make a society work. Hint: personnel is policy.

As far as the Constitution gives the larger society some semblance of justice; domestic tranquility; common defense; general welfare; and hope for a better future, slaves enjoyed a share of that right along with everyone else. The feedback of the current narrative leads us into imagining Black slavery as a worse and worse sin, and we need to dig ever deeper levels in Hell to accommodate the fervent emotional posturing of the Correct class.

I don’t care what the reasons are for slavery. That is beside the point. Much of racism in any direction is just a political justification for resource control rather than real racialism. History shows us that many racists had no problems doing long-term deals with the racial enemy when it suited them.

The point is that most of the southern population and a big part of the northern had no care for the Constitution. And this Constitutional denial went up to the middle of XX Century.

Rather oblique, considering American Blacks wouldn’t even exist if not for slavery, and there wasn’t much for better options at that place and time; the point above was that some former slaves were able to reflect on the choices available and suggested politically incorrect results.

Slavery has been a human institution since forever, yet we are supposed to believe that the American South woke up one day and decided to start the institution purely for racial animus.

So the fact that the US Constitution, just the most important rule book of the Republic, wasn’t applied to everyone does not bother some here.

The fact that some blacks prefered slavery to the uncertainty of life, or that they felt inadequate to modern life, doesn’t make that a significant consideration to extract from slavery? The significance is that they didn’t have a choice. And that lack of that choice was a Constitutional violation.

Today everyone is free to be a slave, today some people still act like they are, but those people have a choice. In the past they didn’t have a choice.

There’s several post-Lincoln memoirs that fondly recall slavery, written by blacks. Generally, it’s good to let folk speak for themselves, rather than speaking for them.

There’s numerous reports of blacks saying they still experience racism daily. It’s not clear all this anti-racism has helped their subjective experience. Maybe try asking one.

I said most people. Most people are not black, then or now. In addition, I’m sure that at least some black people do remember the ’50′s with fondness; crime and family dysfunction were much lower for the black community then, as for the white community. The late 1960′s were a nightmare for blacks, in any case.

I love the fact that whenever you mention the fact that something might have been better pre-1965, you always get somebody spluttering about black people, whether the thing in question has anything to do with civil rights or not. Crime, divorce, and social dysfunction were lower in the 1950′s, for everyone, despite mediocre economic indices. Where Rosa had to sit on the bus is hardly germane to these points.

The same can be applied today when they realise they are instrumentalized as part of the Media-Democratic Party Plantation.

I think it is one more testament that culture defeat laws — including the US Constitution, in how it was not applied to a part of its population.