I marvel at you, BOTR. Maybe your training as a lawyer has made you incapable of giving a simple answer to a question or assertion. Or perhaps you are simply in too big a hurry to make your own statements without reading others' words. In any case, I challenged your statement that those of us who lived in the American South during the Civil Rights era should have been so paralyzed by fear that it would have taken insanity not to have felt anythng else. I gave you examples of why this was not true from my own family history to contradict your statement. Your reply was to talk about your work and acquaintances as well as life in Newark, New Jersey. None of that is relevant to my point.
Please read carefully before responding because you do yourself a disservice otherwise. Your latest reply only underscores this. You failed to address my original point. Instead, you went off on a tangent, talking about your reading and how this has made you an expert. I pointed to the actual lives of friends and family to say that murder, mayhem, intimidation and unjust law did not stop us. I would say thst our experience outweighs your reading by a long, long way.
The song "We Shall Overcome" has lyrics which state, "We are not afraid." We certainly weren't. To have felt no fear didn't mean we were "crazy" as you asserted in your first post on this thread. It meant we had the courage of our convictions and weren't going to be intimidated, willing even to face death if necessary because we believed our cause was just. And that was the entire point I wanted to make and which you seemingly failed to grasp.
Quendi