Where was the incumbent president?

That's what Goldwater said in his 1959 book "The Conscience of a Conservative". In his chapter on integration (which focused almost entirely, and narrowly, on schools), Goldwater was so negative about the very concept of civil rights legislation that it was decided he had to add a coda at the end of the chapter stating that he happened to agree with the notion behind Brown v. Board of Education, that allowing blacks to attend schools with whites was a good thing, and that preventing it "carried with it strong implications of inferiority." ("Strong implications"?! Gosh, ya think so?) But he said the same thing you just did, that he had no right to tell the people of Mississippi or South Carolina how to run their own state, etc., etc., etc.

Apart from the fact that the problem of legalized discrimination went far beyond the issue of schools, the fact is that "the people" of those and other states meant, to Goldwater, "the people" and apparently you, the white people -- the only ones who had the right to vote, who outnumbered the blacks and who exercised absolute control over the political processes of their states. How can a minority deprived of any right of expression effect change or make their voices heard?

You may argue about "forced integration" and the like but the right to vote is guaranteed by the fifteenth amendment, and the right to the full, unfettered enjoyment of the rights of all citizens is guaranteed under the fourteenth -- both of which were not only ignored but explicitly violated by the South for nearly a century after the Civil War. The Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act essentially only made more explicit what the Constitution had long guaranteed, though for a hundred years nobody bothered to address the flagrant violation of those rights in much of the country.

You say you draw a distinction between legalized and private discrimination, but don't make the connection that legalized discrimination was born out of private discrimination: the majority who wanted to discriminate constructed their state governments to expressly carry out their private agendas. How can you end the one without ending the other? And what constitutes "private" discrimination? You seem to limit that to your right not to allow a black man into your house -- but no one says you can't do that. This is another straw man set up by die-hard racists. What you can't do is prevent people from using a facility open to the public on the basis of their race, color or ethnicity, or discriminate in hiring, renting, etc., on that basis. This is what you're defending, and that is not simply "private" discrimination, even if the facility in question is privately owned.

It may be that things such as busing and quotas go too far in attempting to remedy discrimination but the alternative, to do nothing, was what we had for 100 years, and that didn't address the problems at all -- it caused most of them.

By the way, in the 1990s, William F. Buckley, Jr., who in the 50s and 60 had vociferously opposed civil rights legislation and even specifically stated that he felt blacks were inferior and needed whites to control local governments, wrote a long mea culpa in The National Review, in which he recanted his earlier racism and said that the civil rights measures enacted in the 60s had not only been constitutional but necessary and that they relieved the country of a terrible burden it had had hanging over it for centuries. With all the triumphs of the American conservative movement in the late 20th century, he wrote, its one glaring fault was its failure to support the civil rights movement, whose goals, he now said, were in line with what he called the true values of conservatism.