> Thank you, this is very well written.
Thanks! Was trying to keep it concise and tight enough to be both informative and interesting to someone who's not American, while still hitting the "highlights", especially the relative recency of outright racist laws and of how recently private and public racial discrimination was legal (if not always required by law) and normal.
> I'd also just like to highlight how much extrajudicial violence there was perpetrated by white men against minorites, which while technically illegal was just completely overlooked by the white male dominated political and judicial system. For example the Tulsa Race Massacre.
... which is why I didn't even try to cover these instances of what I guess could be grouped together as something like "civil strife", which actions were or are explicitly outside the law, not simply not-illegal, but have been or are often tolerated or overlooked, but you're absolutely right to bring them up.
In the case of the Civil Rights Movement it wasn't only (though, to be clear, it was mostly) black people being killed by racists, often with no consequences for the perpetrators—several white participants in civil rights marches and rallies were also targeted and murdered. Often Quakers or (IIRC?) Catholics, participating in part due to their religious convictions—the whole "social justice" angle held greater sway in US Catholicism then than it does now, I gather, which was also evident in the anti-war movement of the 60s and 70s. These killings weren't legal, of course, and I expect they'd have been quite unpopular if you'd polled the whole US population, but such actions had enough support locally, including among public officials, that many of the killers escaped justice anyway, so long as the killings were in the name of preserving white supremacy, even if that meant killing some white people, too.
A read over a Wikipedia timeline of 1960s US history is pretty wild—the entire decade was batshit crazy, not to put too fine a point on it.