"How much of what you fellas are remembering was influenced by the antebellum south?"
Well, the stories of country livin' in the South reminds me of my distant youth. Don't know much about any "antebellum south" influence tho. In fact, no one ever mentioned the War of Northern Aggression within my hearing, I didn't know a thing about it until it came up in the history books in grade school.
There was some racial "discrimation" for sure but all I ever saw or heard about was based on facts of personal behaviour and cleanliness, or lack of it, not skin color as such. Hard working, respectful blacks were as about as well respected and well treated as hard working, respectful whites, at least so far as I could tell as a youngun. And I did get a good and long, if low level, look.
Unlike today, it certainly seemed the blacks back then respected and liked the whites and rightly so because those poor white farmers gave the poor blacks a lot of food and clothing when it was needed and when they could. The donated clothes were simple and usually well used for sure, but the whites giving them away didn't have any fancy or large collection of clothes themselves.
Normally, most of the men I knew owned three pair of bib overalls. And maybe three or four shirts, one was white and the others most likely blue, sometimes the old white ones were dyed blue too. Each man would kept the newest set of overalls for Sunday, the two older two were for work. His Sunday dress included a clean white shirt and a tie, frequently loud colors, and wide. It would be neatly tied around a tighted buttoned collar, then tucked under the bib and held straight on the shirt with a safety pin. When one pair of work overalls was completly worn out, he would get a new pair and move the previous "dress" set into the work collection. He usually owned two pair of "brogan" shoes, usually black. Same drill for the shoes, one set for Sunday, the other for work. The same system was used to move them down too. A very small collection of cotton socks were mostly for Sunday too.
And no one killed any mocking birds.
But liberals made new laws to force togetherness. They taught a lot of non-factual "history" and said a lot of PC stuff just to make things all better. Now, neither side seems to have much contact with or respect for each other and the only charity is what money is taken away for redistrubted by the government. Sad, we were all poor then but things were much better in many ways for both groups before all that "improvement" happened. For instance, back's illegitimacy rate was said to be about 10-15% and most of them were married, now it's said to run closer to >80% and few are married.
Oh, well...with liberals it's the nice thoughts that count, not the actual results.
