AHC: Make racial discrimination illegal in the US by 1939

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.

Yet WW1 had no such effect.
 
Yet WW1 had no such effect.

That's because Woodrow Wilson re-segregated the Navy and was an overtly racist bastard who influenced from the top.

In addition, his policies of segregation and restrictions in the bureaucracy destroyed much of the nascent Black Middle class by destroying one of their best opportunities for economic and social improvement at the time: federal employment.

With a Teddy or Taft Presidency, or even a reverse-course Hughes one in 1917, and it's entirely possible you see some big shifts happen that would make this work.

I think if you want a post-1900 POD, a GREAT candidate is a William Jennings Bryan whose Christian convictions lead him to anti-segregation and civil rights stances sometime in the early 1900s. Double bonus points for a major cause being social Darwinism and its view of blacks and other non-Whites. Flip that switch and you have an extremely influential Fundamentalist (classic 1910s definition) who is fighting modernism tooth and nail and linking Darwinist thinking to racism when all men need Christ equally and "there is no Jew or Gentile or male or female." Well that in the hands of an orator like Bryan=butterflies.

Related to this is if in the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversies of the 1910s-1930s that the Fundamentalists win, expelling the Modernists, but the only reason they win is because their Black denominational leaders side with the Fundamentalists to provide key victories in the early 1920s.
 
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Japhy

Banned
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
Kate Richards O'Hare was one of the most successful pamphlet writers in the History of the SPA. In 1916 when the party opened things up to the extent that the nomination was decided by mail in mass voting she, even before women could vote came impressively close to being chosen by the rank and file as the VP nominee.

Just because Debs opposed segregation doesn't mean that there wasn't an intensely strong force in the Party that didn't have any problem with opposing what Mrs. O'Hare famously referred to as "Nigger Equality". As much as that may shame the folks who followed a generation later when the party was far more decent on the issue but also an irrelevance.
 
That's because Woodrow Wilson re-segregated the Navy and was an overtly racist bastard who influenced from the top.

In addition, his policies of segregation and restrictions in the bureaucracy destroyed much of the nascent Black Middle class by destroying one of their best opportunities for economic and social improvement at the time: federal employment.

With a Teddy or Taft Presidency, or even a reverse-course Hughes one in 1917, and it's entirely possible you see some big shifts happen that would make this work.

Yet none of Wilson's three Republican successors bothered to reverse his policy.
 
Yet none of Wilson's three Republican successors bothered to reverse his policy.

It also highlights the hazards of a bad president like Wilson. The KKK and Red Scare were FAR more of a factor in 1921 than they were in 1912. Those 9 years may as well have been 30 for how much the world changed.
 
And the Klan moved north into states like Indiana and ran them in the '20s. Post WWI the Republicans abandoned African Americans completely and the Democrats were decades away from cultivating their northern city branches of settlement; during the Depression they were last in line too.

I have the impression, perhaps quite wrong, that part of what Huey Long did with his "Share the Wealth/Every Man A King" demagoguery was to help African Americans via backdoor routes even though they did not actually vote; he would not attack white supremacy head on but he did subvert it in various ways. Whether that was the act of a would-be dictator or just a man who looked at the structure of discrimination and as a genuine grassroots populist it revolted him, I do not know--indeed he may have been a hardliner racist though my impression remains opposite. It helps me to hope that the mere sight of injustice does motivate people to move out of their comfort zones and take some risks to alleviate it. Harry Truman also, despite being raised in a very pro-Dixie household, claimed to be motivated to end discrimination out of personal outrage at the humiliations he witnessed, which did strike him harder when he realized some of these victims of racist terrorism were WWI veterans. His own Army service was not in the trenches but it was in harm's way as an artillery officer and he did have sympathy for veterans in general--and poor folk, in general.

But in terms of formal patronage of the established parties and even the larger of the revolutionary ones, African Americans were abandoned in the 1910s-30s. Toward the later years, the rise of urban ghettos in the north began to give them some political clout, and surely Truman and Long understood that too.
 
Warren didn't have the means, and died trying to support a Federal Anti-Lynching Law.

Hughes probably wouldn't have the means either, given that he would have faced a Democratic Senate and possibly a Democratic House.

Coolidge and Hoover didn't have the interest.

Nor, probably, would most Presidents at that time. Neither Clark nor Bryan (the likeliest alternatives to Wilson) was likely to take it up.

This is the whole problem. Until the Cold War came long, the issue just wasn't important enough for anyone (either in the White House or Congress) to take it up in any serious way.
 

Japhy

Banned
Hughes probably wouldn't have the means either, given that he would have faced a Democratic Senate and possibly a Democratic House.

Nor, probably, would most Presidents at that time. Neither Clark nor Bryan (the likeliest alternatives to Wilson) was likely to take it up.

This is the whole problem. Until the Cold War came long, the issue just wasn't important enough for anyone (either in the White House or Congress) to take it up in any serious way.

There were Several Republican Presidents between Grant and FDR with the interest to do it. They just tended to have the bad luck of Dying in office or being Benjamin Harrison.
 
There were Several Republican Presidents between Grant and FDR with the interest to do it. They just tended to have the bad luck of Dying in office or being Benjamin Harrison.

Did FDR do anything in particular about it?

As for the earlier ones, whatever they might have privately liked to do, none of them succeeded at doing anything, and most were too sensible to waste time trying.
 
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