that experienced by many older blacks who had migrated north to escape the oppression in the south (although northern oppression was rampant as well but in a different form). However they still wanted to touch base with their relatives who remained. And this brought about a quandary regarding safety when traveling around.
We once lived next door to an older professional black couple who were southerners with PhDs and whose own parents were physicians or dentists (they would be nearing their 100s now if they had still been alive). Yet when they made the annual trek by car back down south, the husband had to don a "chauffeur's cap" to help avoid being targeted once he crossed the Mason-Dixon Line. And we're talking all the way up into the 1990s. And God forbid, don't be a black male with a white (or even "white-looking"
woman in the car - again, unless you don "the cap" - literal "Driving Miss Daisy" style. See the ridiculously touted "Birth of a Nation" and "Gone With the Wind" for part of the problem of engraining stereotypes (let alone much of the modern entertainment fare that continues the perpetuation).
We are talking literal cultural conditioning that has so permeated into the fabric of the United States that it will probably take a century or more to eradicate the stench.
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