Reply #14: I remember the America in which my father and uncles lived in terror of being lynched

[HamdenRice]

and my cousin was shot in the head for trying to open a construction business in Virginia.

I distinctly remember one morning during family reunion week in rural Virginia when some white man came knocking on the door of my grandparents' farm house at the crack of dawn asking for food. My step grandfather ran him off with a shotgun. A few hours later, a car full of state troopers drove up as we were having breakfast, and the back seat was loaded with rifles and shot guns, and everyone went into a kind of catatonic shock.

Turned out, they were looking for the white man who was an escaped convict, and they were very polite and thankful for my step grandpa's information, but I'll never forget seeing my father and uncles, who all lived in the north and were visiting, but had been born in rural Virginia so scared. I'd never seen them look like that in the north.

The economics of the America you are describing was based in part on excluding vast numbers of people from those factory jobs through a reign of terror.