That is not what he was talking about, and you know it. Or you are a Simpleton..
Were you ever on a real southern farm back in the early 1960's. If the answer is no then you are unqualified to discuss the subject. I was.
Tell you what, I grew up in SE Georgia during the 1950's-1960's and I even went to farms. (Had friends that had farms in Hephzibah, Blythe, and many other small farming communities outside Augusta, GA.)
Sure, the blacks back then seemed contented.....singing, hoeing cotton, etc. Just as I'm sure they were really contented to be forced to sit in the back of the bus.....the buses back then, at least the ones in Augusta, used a black rubber-type flooring with a 3" white piece of rubber imbedded in the floor, making a white line across the floor, just ahead of the back door. Signage on the interior of the bus plainly stated "Colored behind the white line." Yep, dem coloreds just loved that!
And the blacks also loved the separate water fountains (they were labeled colored only or white only) separate waiting rooms in any establishment that allowed blacks to enter the establishment, usually through the back door. Train stations come to mind....took a train from Augusta to Boston when I was 5 years old and distinctly remember the "Colored Only" waiting room and "White Only" waiting area. And the blacks just loved not being able to frequent certain establishments simply because they were black....Woolworth's was one store on Broad Street in downtown Augusta that had a whites only policy, among the vast majority of stores. If the blacks wanted to shop, they had to do it in the black operated stores or in the very few stores operated by enlightened whites.
And woe unto any black that dared enter a "Whites Only" establishment...that meant instant arrest and jail, never mind the pounding he'd take for daring to enter a white establishment, much less try to mingle with whites.
But if you try to narrow your scope of blacks back in the 1950's to farming only, and try to deny any of the other ills of discrimination in society back then, sure it appeared the blacks were "contented." Heck, they sang.....work songs that frequently were purposefully obtuse/unable to be understood by whites because they frequently spoke to the trials and troubles of being colored in a white world.
And while Robertson may have been poor white trash, as he put it, he certainly had advantages the colored folk didn't have, such as being able to actually buy land and own his own farm and progress upward. This is something coloreds just could not do---buy land, and while not typically written/codified as law, may as well have been. Blacks were not usually given the opportunity to buy land....well, except minor, small parcels the whites found to be not good for much, esp. farming. Almost all blacks back then were sharecroppers and the end result was unending poverty as the rent for the land usually was just under what they could grow and sell. And the prices blacks got for their crops were nowhere near what whites got.
Guess that's what contented was about...that whites just didn't have to interact with blacks in any way except when the black was serving the white in jobs such as janitor, maid, etc.
Yeah, it was so good back then for the coloreds. The white conservative establishment back then just couldn't fathom that coloreds could possibly be discontented....the hangings were decreasing in frequency, they got to eat, etc., etc. That damn Civil Rights crap was just meddling by those damned liburls and progressives.
To deny society was screwed up completely in relation to race back in the '50's is to deny reality.
