Note: A black 65 year old Charleston SC man wrote to Post and Courier complaining about gentrification of Charleston. Included in his comments was a reference to a separate society for blacks and whites in America. My reply:
----------------------------------------------------------------

I love this letter. Brings to the forefront an opinion not often expressed here in Charleston, or around the country.

It raises an interesting question. Has integration failed in America? Since 1945 we Americans have: integrated our armed forces; ensured blacks the right to vote without restrictions, the same as white folks; opened up pools and schools, drinking fountains, bathrooms, busses, and boarding houses; established Affirmative Action programs to give folks a boost; finally got schools across the country and especially in the South, at all levels, by the early 1970s, to obey a 1954 SC integration order to finally actually integrate; seen blacks enter politics at all levels from school boards to governor to President, and succeed in changing their communities, states, and nation. None of this happened without civic involvement, marches, violence, injury, and death to both shades.

Fast Forward to 2016: We have a U.S. Congressional Black Caucus; Black Entertainment T.V. ; Black and White Ms. America contests; predominantly black colleges; private and charter schools established to circumvent the 1954 school desegration order. We still have serious inner-city poverty issues in every city, mostly involving black folks. Their neighborhoods tend to be devoid of banks and national-chain grocery stores, dependable bus service, taxi services, but somehow manage to have mass transportation systems of trains and expressways cutting through or overhead crumbling local facilities and buildings. We have serious issues nationally with our police department staffs and their attitudes towards black people in general and known criminal thugs in particular. We have municipalities using poor blacks as ATMs, consistently fining and adding additional fines and fees for simple traffic and yard appearance violations, etc.

I wonder what Dr. MLK, Jr. would think, should he be able to spend 24 hours in today's America. What would he think, of young black men, angry, armed, violent, acting without thinking? What would he think, of the horrible high school graduation rates of blacks, nationally, so much lower than whites? What would he think, of the lack of money not pouring into inner-city schools, while watching suburban schools with pools and planetariums and green practice fields and working HVAC systems ? What would he think, of higher interest rates for blacks for car loans, house loans, higher rental rates for apartments, lack of public transportation preventing blacks for getting to the available jobs? What would he think, of black teenagers wearing their pants so low their buttocks and underwear show, and of a high black teenage pregnancy rate, and the failure of blacks to form basic family values 150 years after slavery ended, yet still offered as an excuse and used far too heavily as a crutch, for not advancing further? His Dream, was of little black boys and little black girls to play and live together in peaceful brotherhood. We seem, we are, so far away from that reality.

I don't believe the picture is too bleak, but I will admit it is weak. Gun deaths in American inner-cities have risen sharply. It is not middle and upper class whites who are doing the shooting, nor the dying. It is young blacks.

Education, family values, setting life examples seem to be the way out of the morass. Separating the cultures and/or asking one of them to leave the country does not seem to be the right approach.