The US finally begins to crawl out of the third world
By the way, de jure segregation in the U.S. was judicially invalidated by Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The innovation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was prohibition of most kinds of discrimination by private actors, a separate issue altogether. I have some reservations from the latter on Freedom of Association grounds. Does increased acknowledgement and protection of free association among private individuals render a society more "advanced" in your view? I just notice that you tend to emphasize what you perceive to be "advanced" in the realm of law and policy, but I've come to suspect that it's just a way of begging the question by pre-assuming that your own political views are the advanced ones, and who, after all, doesn't want to be "advanced?"
Of course the adjective "advanced" is culturally subjective and perhaps somewhat arbitrary when used to refer to the chronological progression of legal norms. But I'll wager that as a rule, you'd be hard pressed to find many citizens of the modern world who would be willing to chose institutionalised discrimination, social inequality and violent punishments, over human rights, civil liberties, egalitarianism and humane justice
Wow, it takes a real overdose of loaded terminology to produce such a whopper of a complex question.
You've only proven my point, All political terminology is essentially subjective, There is virtually no such thing as an impartial assessment. The only true litmus test of how "advanced/progressive or Backwards/regressive" a policy is to observe the general long-term worldwide chronological trend, which has historically been to abandon certain policies in favour of others. Which policies over the past 500 years have become more common, and which have become more rare?
I'd say totalitarianism has become more common. That form of centralized state did not exist in pre-modern times. That must be one of the advanced and progressive things we should aspire to.