It does sound a tad arrogant to me.  As general principle it's true, not only for individuals but for nations.  David Blight's book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory deals with exactly this phenomenon as it relates to the late Rebellion. However, as it relates to my family the in the 1960s, I have way too many data points and corroboration from friends and relatives to reject my memory of that era.  Since you challenged my memory, I thought that I would paste below an excerpt from a eulogy that my sister wrote for our father's funeral.  I had to read most of it at the funeral because my sister choked up too much while trying to read it. 

    My father leaves a great legacy of kindness, compassion, and reaching out to help others.  He was a good Samaritan -- he did not pass by on the other side of the road when someone was in need.  Where he saw injustice, he fought it -- whether it be at the university or in the larger community.  In speaking about my father and his lifelong commitment to fighting injustices, I can't speak only of my father because he and my mother were a team for 55 years.
    One example of their efforts was their response in the early 1940's to the visit to Athens of Paul Robeson, the famous black bass/baritone.  Robeson was scheduled to perform at the university but no hotel in Athens would permit him to stay there and the university planned no reception for him.  It is ironic that in an earlier, more tolerant era, the largest hotel in Athens had been founded by a black man.
    When my parents and their friend Dorothy Oberdorfer learned that Robeson had no accommodations and that the university had failed to plan the reception customary for visiting artists, they set to work to rectify the situation.  They gave Robeson accommodations at Dorothy Oberdorfer's house and organized a reception there, my parents at the time having only a small apartment. . . .

Perhaps this gives you some sense of why our family supported most of the actions taken by activists in the South in the late 1950s and through the mid 1960s to end apartheid in those states and to bring about racial integration to replace the segregationist model that had taken root there since the end of Reconstruction.  

Another discussion on this issue that I found interesting. It's clear that there are a number of ways to view what these NFL players are doing. Again, this has nothing to do with their right to protest how they want to, given whatever workplace restrictions they might have. In my mind it's a question of just how effective this method of protest is in terms of getting any kind of lasting result. I could be wrong. I often am. But, I see this current set of protests as counterproductive. I see very little parallel between these protests and those of the mid-20th Century Civil Rights protests. In both cases I support the goals. In the earlier protests I supported the method. In this current case, I'm very skeptical of the methods, as is Jason Whitlock in this video. Perhaps, we are both wrong. Time will tell.