You've not spent too much time in the south, have you?
The average southern position towards the negro was not simply unbridled hate to be bridged if and when the negro proved himself to be a stand up guy. It was more a conception of society; whites were at the top, negroes were at the bottom and that was that. . .
Actually, whereas my parents were 'yankees,' I did grow up in the south.
I lived in Orlando, Florida, in 1969 at age 6. And I don't remember a single other kid saying a thing about black persons, either pro or con. I guess it's relevant to point out that I'm a white guy.
Years and years later, like when I was in my forties, I read that Orlando was a pretty bad city in segregation terms, with a local NAACP guy having had his house bombed in the mid 60s. I thought back to Mary, a very nice black lady who was our family's maid for a good long while. And how unfair and personal it was that she had to live under this terror. If I was a little bit quicker on the uptake, I might have also thought that with a better economic arrangement, she'd have a variety of good jobs to choose from and wouldn't have to work as anyone's maid, other than maybe part-time basis for fun and a little extra money. (and my family wasn't rich by any stretch, nor was the neighborhood, maybe upper middle-class ever so slightly)
I lived in southern Virginia in '70 and '71 at ages seven and eight. Hardly any conversation about black persons. One conversation which I can barely remember was one where it was claimed that black persons typically liked purple clothes. On one bad occasion, Kimberly said something to my friend Mike and he charged at her and ended up putting his hand through the thin glass on the top half of a screen door. His mom had to race Mike to the emergency room. In things I later heard which partially revealed and hinted what had been said, it seems Kimberly had called Mike a "n***er ass." Well heck, kind of unfortunate, but Michael didn't need to do all that.