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Notes -
So I've lived in a variety of cities around the US and it strikes me that for all the stereotypes of "Racist Rednecks" my experience of the south has been that racial tensions are in fact much less pronounced than they are in say Massachusetts or California. Sure you might hear the N-word more in the south but it also feels far more "integrated". IE you go into a bar, a church, or a doctor's office in a city like Atlanta or Gulfport you'll find a fairly representative sample of whites and blacks amongst both the patrons and staff. Sure the ultra-wealthy "Old Money" types might all be white landowners who's families have been there since the 1800s but in terms of people John Q Public is going to be interacting with on a regular basis no-one is going to raise an eyebrow at a black doctor or white homeless guy.
Meanwhile a cities like LA or Boston where the only black people one is likely to meet are either criminals or working menial/low-status jobs is also where the worst stereotypes seem to be the most pronounced, and are the places that inevitably get trotted out by race-essentialists as examples of why integration can't work.
A thought that occurs to me is that segregation might have ironically helped on this front by both inoculating everyone against progressive nonsense like "safe spaces". "Safe? This space is not safe this space is a gym". and by ensuring that these cities had an existing tradition of black-owned businesses and kids having those sorts of local role-models that @JTarrou describes.
Edit: Paragraphs reordered
I've noted before the perverse character of segregation, that the same system that so badly disenfranchised black americans also kept their "role model" types in the community.
After official segregation ended, unofficial segregation was left, and the people who escaped it were mostly the middle- and upper-class blacks. While some discrimination lingered to this day, it wasn't enough to stop the talented and motivated members of the black community from moving up in the world. For very understandable reasons, these upwardly mobile, assimilationist black people moved out of the poorer neighborhoods. This lead to an "evaporative cooling" of areas, especially in the north where large numbers of blacks had migrated for factory work. It left them stranded in very white states (Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, etc.) with all the black doctors and lawyers moved out to the suburbs. Combined with the collapse of the manufacturing sector, the jobs that had provided the structure for their community went back down south. This leaves islands of heavily black towns in burnt-out industrial areas in the midwest with high crime, high poverty, low educational attainment and a host of metastasized underclass problems.
I do agree that the south seems to have better race relations than the north, and it's probably to do with this more stark difference, plus a lack of historical structure to race relations.
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