re: To Kill a Mockingbird

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Ultimately it is about a longforgotten aspect of this - the necessity of white involvement for there to be any change at all. When white opinion (North, South, East and West) was consensus that blacks were inferior, it took a few dissenting white folks to generate any sort of movement in the right direction.

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Really? That seems like an incredibly obvious and assumed point to me. When one race holds all the power, unless there is a literally armed coups of some sort (which everyone knows there was not), then clearly something must be acceded.

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When one looks at how carefully the public image of Joe Louis, for example, was protected (his private life was a shambles, multiple women, terrible business decisions, just bad with money), to the selection of Jackie Robinson - a black player who was most acceptable to white baseball fans at the time (I'm a huge fan of Jackie Robinson, but it was not widely publicized, at least at the time he was historically called up from the minors, that he had led a civil rights protest, himself, while in uniform in the U.S. Army, shortly before Truman integrated the U.S. military).

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Rosa Parks was also "curated" by the civil rights establishment. Two other model plaintiffs were considered, as they had been arrested for the same offense months before Parks. However, true to the "politics of respectability" cast upon black folks hoping to gain anything, those two were dismissed for reasons that seem ridiculously anodyne in arrears (e.g. Mary Louise Smith's father was thought to be an alcoholic.)