Today, the governing actor of our virtual public squares are corporations - and a significant amount of people (maybe not you) seem to be ok with them taking what actions they wish.
Uh, no. Society has whitewashed the history of the Civil Rights Movement, but popular sentiment at the time was not with Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, the other freedom riders, etc.
Civilians and the government sometimes acted illegally, sure, but some of those actions were absolutely legal. (Not to mention that the government often leaned on citizens to take illegal vigilante action so that "the government" wouldn't have to - the distinction was not always clear cut).
And either way, it's hard to make the argument that they were "taken to task. Even after Brown v. Board, it took over a decade for many local governments (even in the North!) to be forced into compliance. And the actual individuals responsible for the illegal actions rarely faced any serious consequences.
EDIT: Clarified the point of legality.
Sure - I understood "dog bites and hoses" here to be a synedoche for the general government and civilian response to the civil rights protests, some of which was legal and some of which was not. Obviously I don't know the specifics of your teachers' particular stories.
It's easy to write off those atrocities with "that happened, but it was dealt with, and it's in the past now" - which, as you pointed out in the other comment, is a convenient lie. My main point was that these were not isolated incidents (as GP implied), and that - whether legal or not - those involved faced few consequences (if any) for their actions.
It's a quibble but an important quibble imo.
There was a time when wanting free speech was a good thing. It wasn’t that long ago.