It started with a dream.
A moderate one, really - a measure to just elimimate the most intolerable and internationally-embarassing consequences of Dixie race politics. Enforcement of lynching bans, if not a true guarantee of equal rights under the law. Requiring businesses over a certain size to have a separate counter for nonwhite customers, rather than turning them away on sight. Guaranteeing public education to every black child, even if it might not be as good as that provided to whites.
This was the Civil Protection Act, pushed forward by the Readjuster Yarborough administration after the landslide victory of 1963, brought on by race riots and economic slump under Democratic governance. Liberals saw it as a necessary reform to stave off the rise of black revolution - rumored to be funded by the Yankee goliath. Conservatives saw it as the first step towards racial equality and integration - and doom to the Southern way of life.
By Election Day 1966, the Democrats thought they had won the political battle. Despite being on their political last legs, they had filibustered and obstructed the Act every step of the way, all the while warning of catastrophe if it were to pass. They expected to retake the Senate, at least, and put the Act in its grave. Instead, by the smallest of margins, the Readjusters held on to their majority - all but guaranteeing the Act would be passed in the coming months.
How involved Democratic officeholders were in what followed is still a historical controversy, and will likely forever remain so, as any evidence there might have been burned in the 1971 Siege of Montgomery. In any case, on December 4, during a routine meeting with military leadership in the White House, President Yarborough and much of his cabinet was arrested. At the same time, military units across the country were seizing state capitals and asking local leaders - often literally at gunpoint - to acclaim the new regime or be removed themselves. Some, like Georgia's Maddox, were all too happy to do so. Others, like Alabama's Wallace, had to be physically removed from the door of his office by soldiers.
The coup became civil war in Louisiana, where Senate majority leader Long had coincidentally made a last-minute flight home to make Christmas arrangements. Tipped off about the coup by a friend on the staff of one of the putschists, Long rushed to the State House, and together with Governor McKeithen, called up the Louisiana National Guard, which assembled just in time to block the progress of a column of Marines advancing from New Orleans. While this map was being produced in the depths of the Pentagon in Washington, the two sides exchanged fire near the sleepy town of Duplessis, setting the fire which would soon consume the Confederacy whole.
Meanwhile, the United States - long invested in undermining the status quo in the Confederacy - was deciding how to respond. For decades, American policy was covert arming of black partisan groups, trained and armed in secret camps in the Upper South and infiltrated across the border in motorboats. An armed conflict within white society hadn't been thought a serious possibility, and now that it was happening, Washington rushed to exploit the situation. After pondering a peacekeeping occupation of the Mississippi, it ultimately decided to approve plans for an armed rising combined with an invasion of a U.S.-trained black liberation army launched by way of Mexico. The plan would succeed beyond all expectations - but with consequences no one had foreseen...
See also (in a slightly retconned timeline):
People's Republic of New Africa, 1978
Martin Partition Plan, 1963
