As horrible as racism in the 50's/60's was, it wasn't comparable to apartheid. I would not casually toss words around in order to set up simplistic equivalences. Calling 1960's America (or for that matter, modern Israel) apartheid smacks to me of ignorance of simply how incredibly awful apartheid was. There is a very good reason that of all the racist regimes in the world (and there were many) at the time, only South Africa (and I suppose Rhodesia too, but nobody cares about Rhodesia anymore) became an international pariah.
No.
Of course Apartheid was quite different from the US south - but that was partly due to demographics rather than 'stronger racist sentiment'.
