AHC: End racial segregation in the U.S. before 1900

With a P.O.D. no later than 1763, your goal is to end not only chattel slavery, but all forms of de jure, state-sanctioned racial segregation at both the Federal and State levels, prior to the turn of the 20th century. Though the P.O.D. pre-dates the American Revolutionary War, there must be a roughly analogous independence and subsequent union of the 13 Colonies to that of OTL.

Hard mode: End slavery and segregation between 1789 and 1900

God mode: End segregation between 1865 and 1900.
 

CaliGuy

Banned
You need to have better U.S. Supreme Court Justices as well as greater federal engagement in the South after Reconstruction. Indeed, perhaps a post-Civil War Marshall-like Plan for the South could have done the trick here and resulted in large-scale support for racial integration as well as for the Republican Party among poor Southern Whites.

Now, the crucial questions here are these--where exactly does the money come from for this plan and where exactly does the political will come from for this plan?
 

B-29_Bomber

Banned
Hard mode: End slavery and segregation between 1789 and 1900

This is incredibly easy.

Delay the Cotton Gin until the late 1830s.

With this you'd probably see the OTL Civil War Border States plus Virginia (maybe even Tennessee) vote to end slavery by the 1830s. Without the Upper South to back them up the Deep South wouldn't have the political clout to raise as big of a stink in the 1840s and 1850s, thus avoiding the polarization of the 1850s that led to the Civil War OTL.

As for the Deep South, you'd probably see a greater push from the rest of the country to end slavery through compensated emancipation. This'll probably take place between 1865-1900 with most of the Deep South ending slavery during the 1890s due to the Boll Weevil blight.

As for Segregation, without the Civil War you wouldn't have the bitterness of having their way of life end at the gun barrel of those Damn Yankees, so there'd be less hatred of the freedmen. You'd probably see less institutionalized Jim Crow in the South.

While this might not end Segregation outright by 1900, it does change the nature of the issue during the 20th century into being largely irrelevant. By the ALT 2017 I doubt most would even remember Segregation and Jim Crow even being a thing.
 
In addition to delaying the cotton gin, you always have the old standby that negotiations over the Constitution go a little differently, or westward expansion gets fleshed out differently. A few states, like Virginia, has early support for compensated emancipation, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. A few butterflies flap their wings, and Kentucky and Tennessee could have been free states, while Virginia has a plan in place to end slavery within a generation.

The earlier you end slavery, the less racism there would likely be as well - most of what we understand as racism was cooked up over decades to justify the continued existence of slavery. It's hard to justify owning another human being, especially in a country where human beings are supposed to have rights - this is why later slaveowners increasingly viewed slaves as property, not people, and jumped through a number of insane hoops - head bumps, to name one - in order to justify that view, that the black man not only is not equal to the white man, but less then a man.

Most of the founders did not view blacks as inherently inferior - were you to say, introduce them to President Obama, they wouldn't be too shocked, because for many of them, class and education determined your status, not your skin color, and Obama is a well-dressed educated rich guy. You get a large population of free blacks early on, give them a generation to homestead, start businesses and educate their kids, and most importantly, plant the idea that given the same opportunity as white people, black people can succeed just as capably, and you strangle a lot of the roots of racism in the cradle, which strikes another blow against remaining slave states. It's hard for a South Carolinian slave owner to say slavery is the natural state of existence for the black man, when an abolitionist can point out to a host of black men up north that own land, operate businesses and serve as judges, sheriffs and even mayors.
 
Of course if the African Americans are freed this early, I doubt they would exist as a separate group today. We would have seen increased racial mixing, but also a American south more open to European immigration. The result would be outside a few isolated groups, the African Americans would likely have ended up assimilate into the general American population.
 
I wonder if a very early POD would be necessary. Looking at Bacon's Rebellion, in the 1670s, if the rebellion hadn't happened and indentured servants from Europe were the dominant form of servitude over the next 100 or 150 years, North American would look entirely different. Maybe the Irish would be at the bottom of the social pecking order in that scenario.
 
Why not a horse-drawn cotton picker at approximately the same time that the cotton gin is invented...reduces the need for slaves exponentially and makes it possible for smaller farmers to successfully grow cotton (at the same time marking the death knell for plantations as such)...
 

Schnozzberry

Gone Fishin'
Donor
Another thing that could potentially nudge segregation away could be a religious revival of sorts. Perhaps a new church arises that promotes the idea of everyone being equal before God?
 
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