language.” He even says that the 1896 Supreme Court doctrine of “separate but equal,” which made Jim Crow segregation legal in the South, “was a very good doctrine for its day,” since it allowed “the gifted members” among ex-slaves, a “culturally backward” people, to show, as a few had done in sports and the arts, “irrefutable proof that these deficiencies were not due to ‘innate’ inferiorities.”
