Sorry, to answer twice, but I had two answers
My experience is clearly different than yours. I grew up in Chicago, which was very segregated. The south side was mostly black people and the north side was mostly white people. It was segregated more than by black/white, too. There were lots of ethnic neighborhoods - irish, polish, puerto rican, and so on.
The black/white issue was just terrible for the black folk. There was a mass migration from the south (Jim Crow, the racism, the threat to their lives and livelihood) to Chicago. Mayor Richard J. Daley was a terrible racist. He took federal money and built these nice new low-income apartment buildings called Cabrini Green and targeted the black folk to move in. And they did, because the banks wouldn't lend them money to buy houses and so on. Once they moved in, he built freeways around the project to keep the black folk in, to keep make it difficult for them to establish business, etc. Then he let the place crumble to some of the worst conditions imaginable. Elevators didn't work so a mother would have to carry groceries up five flights or more of stairs and that sort of thing.
I grew up on the south side, and what I saw was white flight. The more black people moved in, the more white people moved out. They took their wealth with them. The banks wouldn't lend to the black people to buy and fix up the homes. A lot of the homes there were Frank Lloyd Wright designs. Seriously wonderful architecture that all went to shit.
50 years ago, you say, would be 1963.
Well, in 1983 (that would be 30 years ago), Harold Washington ran for mayor of Chicago.
Washington wasn't allowed to attend the college of his choice. He went to Roosevelt College which was where black and jewish people were allowed to attend. He did so well that Northwestern University Law School accepted him - he was the only black student in his class. He excelled. He graduated with a law degree (JD) in 1952. Sure, that was before 1983 or 1963, but bear with me.
He went on to work in Chicago City and Illinois State government from 1951 to 1983.
So he runs for Mayor against Jane Byrne and Richard Daley Jr. (the long time mayor's son). They basically split the vote in the primaries, something like 33% to 32% to 32% and Washington won. Realize 2/3 of the people in this "liberal democratic" city voted against him. Then came the mayoral election when he ran against some cannon fodder republican opponent, Bernard Epton. In a city where no republican won the mayor's seat since the 1920s if not earlier, and democrats won election with 80% or more of the vote, it was a 51%-49% election with Washington winning.
That's racism at play. I seriously don't think that passing some laws in 1963 eliminated racism. In 1983, it sure looks to me like black people still needed to overcome a lot of racism.
As mayor, Washington pissed off a lot of people. He started construction on all three major freeways in the city at once, giving the work to black owned contracting firms. Of course, the white owned contracting firms were livid, and the residents were too, since freeway construction meant traffic jams. If anything, he did the right thing by enabling black enterprise (no affirmative action/quotas, just give people jobs). He was in just too much of a hurry.
So now your 50 years looks like 30 years, and even so, the contracting jobs are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to entrenched favoritism given to white people.
30 years isn't when it all ended, either. The Chicago Police department got sued and lost $25M in a case where policemen were busted for hassling innocent black men, taking them into abandoned buildings and beating them with hoses or burning them on radiators. Torture.
In 1995, the city fire department bypassed 6,000 black would-be firefighters through discriminatory handling of the entrance exam; the city lost a ~$80M lawsuit on their behalf.
I don't see how one can really accept that 50 years ago it was all settled.
You live in NYC? Don't they routinely stop and search black men looking for guns? Or at least they did until the courts stepped in and rightly pointed out it was a violation of their civil and constitutional rights? That's not 50 years ago, that was this year.
What about black on black crime. Serious stuff. It's a real problem, of course. But it's also the result of other problems. If everything was fixed in 1963, we wouldn't even be talking about this sort of thing.
Oh yeah, the south side of chicago is now beautiful. It seems a bunch of black folk pooled their money and bought out the neighborhood bank. Then the bank started giving out loans and those wonderful Frank Lloyd Wright homes got all fixed up, the cars on blocks out front removed, etc. The south side had such a revival that white people moved back.
