Its not a legacy of segregation and slavery. The black illegitimacy rate has tripled since the end of segregation. It is a legacy of liberalism.
Liberal values are the chief cause of poverty.
To a large degree that's true, the best laid plans of mice and men and all. However, the reason blacks were so vulnerable to this liberalism is the legacy of segregation and slavery. As SheHateMe points out below, blacks were in many cases relegated to very poor quality schools even where there was no legal segregation, simply by economic circumstances. These blacks were thus poorly educated and usually not good employees in jobs that require education. It's a vicious cycle; if your education is crap it's hard to make a good living, and if you don't make a good living you're likely to live in a school district where your children will get a crap education. It's also a brush that tars all blacks to a degree; if the last three blacks you hired were unable to do basic math, you've got to be at least subconsciously discouraged from taking a chance on the black kid who either successfully overcome such an environment, or whose parents had.
Thread topic aside, whites had been feeding that message to blacks for nearly 100 years. Then, after slavery was over and done with, blacks were intimidated by whites not only in the southern states but also in northern states. Blacks went to second rate schools and were only given hand me down books from white schools while white children had access to first rate education. This oppressive system continued until the civil rights era when the government determined that blacks were actually people.
Before that, blacks didn't even count as a whole person when it came to their voting power. It was something like a black vote was only worth 1/3rd of a vote or something like that.
The United States determined that Negroes were too inferior to whites to be able to fly aircraft in the military...yet, we were smart enough to hold a gun and die for the white man on the battlefield. There are published studies backed by the US Government that said the Negro brain was smaller than that of a White brain and that we were basically genetically predisposed to being intellectually inferior to whites.
For anyone in this thread to sit here and say that whites were not the terrorists they were back then are in serious denial.
I don't agree with affirmative action, but if you are going to say something is BS...please know what you are talking about.
With all due respect, black children are probably discouraged more from being told NOW that racism prevents them from being successful than by what their grandparents were told. For that matter, I've not noticed many blacks of that age having this attitude; the much more prevalent attitude (for me looking in, anyway) is I can certainly succeed if you'll just give me a chance. That attitude is far too scarce today.
As far as our World War II pre-integration era military, being a pilot required a LOT of math. There probably weren't a lot of blacks, especially from the South, with that ability. (Or more specifically, with the prerequisite education to learn the math, not the ability to learn the math.) So yes, that was racism, but there was also some empirical evidence to at least give cover. Also, blacks of that era was mostly kept out of direct combat units as well, being in support, combat support, and artillery units.
If anyone is interested in the dynamics, look up the history of the two black enlisted/white officer independent WWII tank battalions. One had a CO who was adamantly against blacks in combat, believing them to be inherently inferior and incapable. That unit broke easily and fought poorly, eventually being pulled from combat and disbanded. The other had a CO who initially believed the same, but decided to voraciously present confidence to his white officers and thus, his black enlisted men. The result was that unit was exemplary, as its men (all volunteers) not only had a chip to prove they could do the job, but also believed in themselves. I think we've gone far overboard on the importance of feelings, but this is a stark lesson in the value of a positive attitude. If you think you can do whatever others can do, you probably can. If you think you cannot do whatever others can do, you probably can't.