Yeah - the "One Drop" PoV was beyond strange:

  The one-drop rule was a legal principle of racial classification that was prominent in the 20th-century United States. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of Black African ancestry ("one drop" of "black blood") is considered black (Negro or colored in historical terms). It is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status, regardless of proportion of ancestry in different groups.

> I thought civil rights was for African Americans?

It was for the benefit of anyone sent to the back of the bus, forced to drink from other fountains, lynched, etc. That included minorities other than "classic Black" and all the people treated as Black despite not appearing black.