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ArisKatsaris comments on Value evolution - Less Wrong Discussion
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Burning witches required false beliefs (belief in the existence of witches), but I don't see how American slavery required false beliefs -- except perhaps the false belief that it was a sustainable system. It just required for white people not to particularly care about black people.
Yes, not-caring can be helped along by several false beliefs (e.g. religious ideas like the curse of Ham, or Mormons thinking that black people had been unloyal angels in their pre-existence), but caring can similarly be helped along by false beliefs (e.g. "We are all children of the same God", "we were endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights"). And ultimately neither caring, nor not-caring actually requires false beliefs, or true ones either.
It seems to me that the abolition of slavery was a moral accomplishment, not an epistemic one like e.g. the defeat of heliocentrism was, or the defeat of creationism would be. Be careful not to confuse the two in your mind, the moral and the epistemic.
As the link to Google Books in the grandparent (and the list of related books) shows, people devoted a lot of space to false and anti-rationalist claims about black people. Why?
I just edited my above comment to add the middle paragraph, before I had seen you replied to it already. I think it answers your question: not-caring can be helped along by several false beliefs, but then again caring can be helped along by several false beliefs too.
So we should ask about the correlation?
If it's really caring as such that we care about, this seems like an easy question. People tend to care more about people when they know personal details about the person. We would therefore expect accurate knowledge to show at least some correlation with caring, unless fear or deliberately misleading knowledge came into play. (And fear should matter less under CEV, if that rule works at all.)