[gedy]

Late to reply, but assuming you are not American, Black folks in America are quite a spectrum of mixed race from their history. It's not unreasonable to call/identify themselves as black in this situation. I would not extrapolate to the extremes like some repliers are talking about "one drop", etc. That's not practically what the situation is.

[pfannkuchen]

I am American, though I don’t really feel culturally American for whatever reason.

Anyway, the vast, vast, vast majority of self identifying blacks living in America at the time of the civil rights movement were of imported-by-force African slave ancestry.

Are we to believe that those people, whose line did not even come here voluntarily, and who were treated as literally subhuman for centuries, just cared about anybody who identified as “black” anywhere in the world who would voluntarily immigrate to America in the future? To the point that they would consider those people’s wins as their own? Even when they themselves still lacked such wins?

I believe they were mostly concerned about themselves and their own descendants, actually. That’s how humans are. The thing people say they thought is basically propaganda as far as I can tell. I don’t believe just about anybody back at that time thought that way.

Now I do believe that people “with the zeitgeist”, so to speak, think what you are saying. But I’m not asking what they think.