All indications were that this combination of offical discrimination against African-Americans would continue to enforce relatively low rates of education, relatively low wealth, and rampant poverty into the indefinite future. But there seemed to be no reason why the country could not live with this dilemma. The contradiction had been there in 1775. President Abraham Lincoln could abolish slavery in the Civil War because it was seen as a means of preserving the nation in a strongly nationalist context. There are still some who think that the Democratic Party's rejection at its 1964 convention of a Mississippi delegation with no African-American representation was an unconscionable mistake.
Discrimination is still a reality in America today.
Yet by the end of the century things were very different. Virtually all whites would publicly espouse the principle of equal employment opportunity for African-Americans. Educational attainment by race was almost identical for those finishing school in the late 1980s and 1990s. It is impossible not to credit the change to the extremely wise leadership and the extremely skillful use of moral force by the leadership of the African-American community. Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Thurgood Marshall, earlier leaders like Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, and many others played an extremely weak hand with immense skill and patience, and with extraordinary long-run success.