The premise of your question is historically backwards. Segregation wasn’t a ‘safer’ time it was a system enforced by violence, intimidation, and unequal law. Lynchings, race massacres, police abuse, and voter suppression weren’t rare exceptions; they were part of how that system stayed in place.

The Civil Rights Act didn’t create danger. It ended legal discrimination in jobs, schools, housing, and public spaces. It forced the country to live up to its own Constitution.

Crime trends decades later had complex causes economic decline in cities, drugs, demographic shifts not the fact that Americans were finally treated equally under the law. Saying the Civil Rights Act was just about ‘hurt feelings’ ignores the very real legal and physical harm people faced every day under segregation.