Quick note - the sentence "If you want to know whether blacks are people, the dictionary can't answer you," in comparison to the sentence "Or consider the fight to blend together blacks and whites as 'people'," unnecessarily normalizes whites as people (though, historically, that is how the fight felt from the white perspective). I don't know if you should change this, but I just wanted to point it out.
Quick note - the sentence "If you want to know whether blacks are people, the dictionary can't answer you," in comparison to the sentence "Or consider the fight to blend together blacks and whites as 'people'," unnecessarily normalizes whites as people (though, historically, that is how the fight felt from the white perspective). I don't know if you should change this, but I just wanted to point it out.
Altogether, good post!