Is Mayberry segregated?

The TAGS spinoff Gomer Pyle USMC nearly always had African Americans in Gomer's platoon in any given episode along with Asian Americans. It was probably a bigger deal to showcase an Italian American such as it was with Ted Bessell's Frankie Lombardi.
Jack Webb made it a policy on Adam 12 that no one group was disproportionately portrayed as criminals on that show.

However, in the 60's when this show was made, tv and movies were produced out of Hollywood and NYC. The show's creators were liberals who would never intentionally support segregation.

So if we try to conceptualize Mayberry as a real place, there would have been segregation, de facto but not legal. That's how the South was in 1960.

But as you say, there were few blacks on American tv in the 60's, in general.

"We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone", with a cartoon picture of a negro (the polite term at that time) eating a big piece of watermelon.

Why does NC have to be like Texas? I've known people from both states and the cultures vary significantly. As a Yankee from the North if given a choice I would rather mingle around NC than Texas as a lot of Texans are xenophobic. As to casting on a sitcom I would not draw too many conclusions as to social policy and practice. As said elsewhere in this forum the Mayberry shown on the show would not overly reflect a NC town in the early 1960's. The show was good for some laughs but was never presented as a history lesson. By the way the episodes "A Black Day for Mayberry" and "Citizen's Arrest" are coming up on the Me TV schedule and you will see African Americans in the crowd scenes.

For the most part you are reading into things that do not exist. The only evidence I would accept in terms of segregation are signs written or otherwise that say so. Mayberry had maybe 2,000 people and maybe 50 people were portrayed in that town. This means we do not know what the makeup and character was for 98 percent of the town. I never saw any signs on the show that said "whites only" or "colored people not allowed." What Griffith said decades after the fact or was pressured to say really had no bearing on it. I never heard Floyd the Barber or Wally the filling station owner say anything derogatory towards minorities on the show. Also, shows back then were budgeted cheap when it came to actors. There was never going to be a huge cast to reflect every person in a small town. A fair number of episodes only had Aunt Bea, Andy, and Opie in them. As said elsewhere in this forum minorities were probably fortunate not to be protrayed as a fair number of the characters shown would be on the other side of the law. After all Andy was the Sheriff and Barney a deputy so law enforcement would be the subject of a fair number of episodes. The Mayberry jail did have occupants in a fair number of episodes. Would it be fair to have all the law breakers white and nothing else? I think it is ridiculous to look for racism in a show that was about one small family and not much else. Their reach in the community was quite limited as it often happens in real life. Floyd and Goober were never invited to dinner once at the Taylors! Not once! Sure, there was racism in the South but it is quite a stretch to go looking for it on TAGS. As others pointed out bigotry comes in many forms and is directed at many people. But somehow I don't think that fits the agenda you have here.

Hahaha at Family Guy.

It would have been disingenuous for Mayberry to have been a happily integrated town in the 1960's.