%**$ it I'll bite:
It seems like a grand wise statement, but it's at best a misstatement and at worst completely false.
Slaves were freed after Civil War. That's a legal fact. Of course this didn't magically bring them up to the level of whites in societal terms, and they may have still been "enslaved" in a broader sense of the term due to Jim Crow and whatnot, but legal freedom was achieved through the Reconstruction amendments after the Civil War. Further legal remnants of slavery were removed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
So to say that slaves were never freed is wrong, legally. If he means it in a broader sense of the term "enslaved," that's another issue, but the fact that he followed up to say that blacks were "satisfied" with what they got makes it seem that his criticism is not of people but of the government, i.e. that the government should have given black people more. The thing is, a government that guarantees equality is ill-suited to give any certain group of people anything more than equality. Despite the fact, the terrible marks of slavery moved the government to institute such things as affirmative action, which remain hugely controversial and problematic from a purely Constitutional standpoint. Regardless of where you stand on affirmative action, I think its somewhat clear that anything FURTHER than affirmative action (reparations, etc.) is not a realistic option given our government. Is that a good thing? Who knows. But for the guy to say that black people were simply "satisfied" with what they got in terms of legal rights, his statement ignores the reality of a democratic system of government based on equality.
If what he meant by "satisfied" is that black people continued to "enslave" themselves by their own choices, i.e. they didn't take advantage of the rights they were given, that's another issue.
But to claim that the government somehow didn't "satisfy" black people by denying them some rights to which they were entitled, and thus kept them enslaved, is false.
