AHC: Make racial discrimination illegal in the US by 1939

Somehow get a Socialist Party wank? Socialist Party gets to power and crushes a Southern backlash led by the KKK/Southern Democrats. Segregation in the private and public sector is forbidden, discrimination in voting is forbidden, and so is discrimination when hiring employees and most all forms of legalised discrimination. People might still be racist and detest the government for enforcing this, but they'd be powerless and their voice heard less and less
 
Such a law is incredibly unlikely to pass, without a very early PoD, as @Derek Jackson just said.
If it DID pass, somehow, it would likely be almost completely ignored in much of the South and not well observed in the rest of the country.

@Emperor Julian 's TL
The Ruins of an American Party System: From 1920 Onward
The Ruins of an American Party System, Part Two: Collision
The Ruins of an American Party System, Part Three: Revolution

has something like this, iirc, but it's such a minor part of the TL that I won't swear to it.
Again, legal protection, that's largely ignored in places.
 
Not going to happen with a Post-1900 POD, as it would require radical social restructuring that simply isn't possible with only two generations.
 
1. No Woodrow Wilson Presidency.

2. The US gets dragged into the war earlier, in part because German sabotage from the outset gets recognized as hostile acts of a foreign power. Say they come in in 1915.

3. The U-boat menace is a real threat and you see a group of patriotic and courageous Black seamen volunteer to make up what comes to be known as the Charleston Cutters (though they use older destroyers and minesweepers). They become renowned for their courage and soon they are the main escort forces for even the most bigoted sea captains and numerous wives and mothers know their sons are still alive (at least when they get to Europe) thanks to their bravery.

The fact the regular navy is still integrated also helps with the vets.
 
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Deleted member 94680

Not if WWI relies as heavily on black manpower as WWII did, and WWI is as decisive a victory. Basically, the POD would have to make the First World War the big one and make the result as good for the US and its allies as possible.

Yup because racism disappeared in America after WWII, didn’t it?
 
Yup because racism disappeared in America after WWII, didn’t it?

No, it didn't, but it created the situation that huge numbers of veterans in the Air Force owed their lives to Black fighter pilots, and their wives and mothers would hear that loud and clear. The Battle of the Bulge was also critical in setting up those prejudice-challenging conditions.
 
Somehow get a Socialist Party wank? Socialist Party gets to power and crushes a Southern backlash led by the KKK/Southern Democrats. Segregation in the private and public sector is forbidden, discrimination in voting is forbidden, and so is discrimination when hiring employees and most all forms of legalised discrimination. People might still be racist and detest the government for enforcing this, but they'd be powerless and their voice heard less and less
I like your ideas accept what is a private place. And how do you decide which ones are and which ones are not. Getting into the private side it's a whole different can of worms.
 
Hardly but the ball started rolling toward civil rights after WWII. That's when efforts to desegregate went into full force.


But why did it do so?

There were two main reasons. Firstly the Cold War made the Southern racial setup a potentially crippling handicap when competing with the SU for the support of nonwhite ex-colonies. Secondly the mechanisation of cotton-picking destroyed the economic base of the old system, which no longer required all that stoop labour. Can those two conditions be duplicated earlier in the century?
 

CaliGuy

Banned
Super AHC: make racism as frowned upon as it is today by 1939.
Simple--have the U.S. remain a bunch of British colonies and then have the British aggressively crack down on both slavery and racism in the early 19th century. In turn, this would shift social attitudes in the U.S. so much that racial discrimination becomes almost universally unacceptable in the U.S. by 1939. :)
 

Iron Sun

Banned
Simple--have the U.S. remain a bunch of British colonies and then have the British aggressively crack down on both slavery and racism in the early 19th century. In turn, this would shift social attitudes in the U.S. so much that racial discrimination becomes almost universally unacceptable in the U.S. by 1939. :)
Because Britain itself was a haven of racial enlightenment by 1900 right?:rolleyes:
 

CaliGuy

Banned
Because Britain itself was a haven of racial enlightenment by 1900 right?:rolleyes:
Well, it presumably didn't have things such as bans on interracial marriage in 1900; thus, in this regard, it was better than many U.S. states during this time.
 

Iron Sun

Banned
Well, it presumably didn't have things such as bans on interracial marriage in 1900; thus, in this regard, it was better than many U.S. states during this time.
Neither did the northern states of the US, yet that didn't stop the South.
 

CaliGuy

Banned
Neither did the northern states of the US, yet that didn't stop the South.
As a colonial power, though, I think that there is a possibility that Britain would be more willing to force its will on the South than the North was in our TL.
 
But why did it do so?

There were two main reasons. Firstly the Cold War made the Southern racial setup a potentially crippling handicap when competing with the SU for the support of nonwhite ex-colonies. Secondly the mechanisation of cotton-picking destroyed the economic base of the old system, which no longer required all that stoop labour. Can those two conditions be duplicated earlier in the century?

World War II had a lot to do with that. Sure, the US had to clean up its racial act because of the Soviets, but it was more the fact that a lot of black folks did jobs they previously couldn't do during the war, and the cat was not going back in the bag. So yes, further industrialization coupled with a need for blacks to do jobs previously reserved for whites would accelerate the Civil Rights movement and probably push racial attitudes in 1939 to at least the level they were at in OTL 1960s - anti-discrimination laws on the books, interracial marriage legal in all 48 states (AK and HI come later) and schools desegregated. Doesn't mean everyone holds hands and sings kumbaya across racial lines, but at least the law recognizes equality on a greater level earlier.
 
I agree we are in the wrong forum, we need a POD during or before the Civil War to enable a more deeply grassroots Reconstruction after it. Getting Congress to be determined by a form of Proportional Representation, aggregated nationally, would help by automatically undercutting any venue that suppresses the vote. To enable that needs a different form of the Union political coalition during and after the CW and also a strong dependence on African-American self-liberation via regional organized comprehensive slave revolts (with Union aid) and post-war strong organization of black-majority regions. I do think they need to enact PR and make it the national norm and equivalent to the definition of democracy to cement the deal. All of that might put enough of a spoke in the Redeemer wheel to make white supremacism limited regionally, strongly challenged when most in ascendency, and eventually erode away its legitimacy in hard core supremacist regions.

Ain't nothing going to make it vanish overnight, but if people who aren't exactly comfortable with interracial political coalitions can nevertheless stick to them and profit by them, the next generation will have a wider pool of open-minded people and around them, a wider one of people willing to deal with the minority race for pragmatic purposes and shrug off accusations of race betrayal. And so on.

A lot of socialism would help, but it has to be socialism for all races. The US Socialist Party I am afraid tended to throw black people under the bus. I would like to hope the membership was less racist than the US norm at the time but that is a low bar to clear, and I believe the party did choose strategically to steer clear of racial "controversy" in an effort to maximize possible appeal to the Southern white majority. And that is fatal because the function of the perceived "black race" in post-slavery America is to be last hired, first fired, and other wise serve as the shock absorber of the cyclic bumpy ride the capitalist cycles inherently create for workers. By taking a lot of the sting out of it it was easier for the white majority to accept capitalism without the belief that their lives would suck until they got democratic control over it through a democratic socialist state that could override capitalist decisions. Without that belief, that "they had nothing to lose but their chains" essentially, allowing for some relativism, socialism had limited appeal that dissolved away completely except for fringes and diehards in post-WWII prosperity. And as long as the working class is mainly accepting of an untamed capitalist regime, someone or other in the working class must take the hits of the cyclic downturns. By making people of color take it the hardest, white workers got a smoother ride; if the working class and their bosses went colorblind, the average, voting worker would have a harder time of it during the downturns and thus be more liable to radical solutions. Playing it safe on race doomed the Socialists of the USA. Playing it fair between workers means white workers suffer equally along with black; accepting discriminatory policies cushioned the quality of life for white workers and thus made them actively complicit in the national apartheid system of double standards, and of course alienated the two races from one another.

So I'd aim for a trifecta of 1880s-'90s radicalism leading to a big tent social democratic victory that would not necessarily go so far as to abolish capitalism, but would at least claim the power, in the name of the working majority of the people, to tax and regulate it so as to smooth out the bumps for the working class as a whole. If we come out of the 19th century as laissez faire as OTL, then the temptation to throw people of color under the bus and rationalize it with essentialist racist nonsense of any kind, be it race-theory and pseudo biological or a culture based theory ignoring the systematic social machinery at work, and either would undermine the ability of a populist social democracy to set sensible policy.
 
Full-on socialist/communist revolution with the Reds waging an extended campaign across the Deep South.
 
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