Race Relations in the Rural South

I did not get to watching White Trash today. I decided instead to spend a solid afternoon reading about the American South.  Black, White and Southern describes the chronology of race relations from the tail end of the Great Depression to the present. I doubt that I will get past the early 1970s.  In my reading today, I came across an excerpt about the transition African-Americans made from rural to urban areas in the American South. I thought this was particularly timely considering that White Trash is about a jazz singer from the North who winds up stranded on a coastal South Carolina island. His time on the island is extended based on circumstances, and I could not help but think (in anticipation as I have not seen the movie yet) about the reversal from reality to the screen. In the 1950s and 1960s, while the typical white Southerner was moving from rural and urban areas to the newly branded suburbia (sometimes in the North). African-Americans were moving from rural to primarily urban settings. As the Deep South reduced its agricultural output during the post-WWI economic upturn, increases in industry and service industries (and many menial labor jobs) brought African-Americans to urban areas.  This influx triggered the famous "White Flight" movement, in which white Southerners moved outside of cities to new suburbs. Essentially, the segregation that the Civil Rights Era fought to break down was occurring on a macroscopic and microscopic scale. Not surprisingly, the areas where both races coexisted with modest integration was in rural farming communities where tenant farmers and whites worked in adjacent fields. This was evident in To Kill a Mockingbird, where Tom Robinson and the villainous Ewell family live in close proximity. Black Like Me deals with a series of communities where blacks and whites coexist as co-workers and inhabitants of the same professional, urban, space; but by night, there is total segregation. As I read about the conscious efforts by both blacks and whites to maintain separate communities and living spaces during the 1940s, 1950s, and into the late 1960s, I could not help but pose a question for myself: Did the Civil Rights Era seek integration and equality? Or did it seek only equality? What I mean, and I am not trying to be confusing or controversial, is to ask whether separate but equal was what the Civil Rights Era really wanted? And I mean truly separate but equal. A world where blacks and whites have the same rights and neither race can oppress the other through legal or political means. Is this not, to an extent, the world of the American South today? As African and white Americans, and as Southerners, I continue to see a world of segregation. I am sorry to be so provocative and philosophical, and I hope these questions and opinions do not offend my readers. I promise I will watch White Trash tomorrow and get back to commentary.  Until then...