White people have largely made their peace with the changes that were initiated with the Civil Rights Act that Lyndon B. Johnson signed in 1964 in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. The Jim Crow era that included segregated schools and other indignities is long gone, but it took a hundred years past the Civil War to reach that point.
Race has always been a factor in American life dating back to the importation of the first slaves to the colony of Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. One of America’s leading historians, Thomas Fleming recently had a new book published, “A Disease in the Public Mind: Why We Fought the Civil War”, that recounts the problems the Founding Father’s encountered as they sought to fashion the Constitution in 1787. The issue of slavery was an obstacle and, as the Founders feared, it led to the Civil War.
