AHC: Make Separate but Equal Real

So here a challenge for everyone make the separate but equal mantra less of joke and actually make it so blacks and whites are equal
 
Maryland and Louisiana came closest. The long's were populists, the Catholic Church and the Jewish population were somewhat more flexible. Maryland wanted to give itself a better image. It was not total, but better than the Deep South.
 
Maryland and Louisiana came closest. The long's were populists, the Catholic Church and the Jewish population were somewhat more flexible. Maryland wanted to give itself a better image. It was not total, but better than the Deep South.

I guess this is as good a place as any to ask a question that's puzzled me for a while. From a 1948 editorial by Mencken, calling for an end to all segregation in Baltimore...

It is high time that all such relics of Ku Kluxry be wiped out in Maryland. The position of the colored people, since the political revolution of 1895, has been gradually improving in the State, and it has already reached a point surpassed by few other states. But there is still plenty of room for further advances, and it is irritating indeed to see one of them blocked by silly Dogberrys. The Park Board rule is irrational and nefarious. It should be got rid of forthwith.

What exactly happened in Maryland in 1895?

link
 
I guess this is as good a place as any to ask a question that's puzzled me for a while. From a 1948 editorial by Mencken, calling for an end to all segregation in Baltimore...



What exactly happened in Maryland in 1895?

link

A bit of googling seems to indicate it was the election of a Republican governor:

The crisis began in 1895 when Republican Lloyd Lowndes carried Baltimore by over 11,000 votes and won the gubernatorial election, and when reform Republican Alcaeus Hooper became mayor of Baltimore. After this, the Democrats’ campaigns became more racist and efforts to disenfranchise blacks increased. In Baltimore City, for example, one of the displays carried in a torch-lit parade was a transparency depicting a black teacher, in an integrated classroom, flogging a white child.8 In this year Dr. John Marcus Cargill was first elected to the City Council, continuing to campaign in the face of unhidden Democratic appeals to racist sentiment.

The Democratic-controlled state legislature then passed a series of laws to inhibit black voter participation. In 1904, they removed all party labels from the ballot." But that still did not prevent blacks from voting. Then, three separate disenfranchisement amendments were passed by the state legislature in 1904, 1908, and 1910.12 They used the devices of literacy clauses, grandfather clauses, and property requirements to reduce the number of black voters. All three amendments were defeated in the required referendum by an interesting combination of voters not present in such large numbers in most southern states where blacks were disenfranchised. Working against the amendments were: all blacks; most white Republicans; leaders of local reform movements, both Republican and Democratic, who sought to keep power out of the hands of the Democratic-controlled machine; and many immigrants and their leaders, sometimes even those allied with the machine, who feared that literacy tests and the grandfather clause would take away their political power as well as that of blacks.

https://baltimoreheritage.github.io/civil-rights-heritage/voting/
 
Thanks. I thought for sure I had checked the dates of elections, and that 1895 wasn't one of them. Guess I was wrong.
 
You need a government and populace that is willing to finance either mediocrity for all (because of double the infrastructure everywhere) or you need a major committment on both white and black counts that the races just do not mix but that they truly equal. This leads to extensive black separatism and perhaps even a few black states. It's almost completely unworkable post 1900 and dubiously so before.
 
What's more realistic would be "oriental" fantasy taking hold that unlike Africans (remember 1800s-1900s mentality) the Chinese or Japanese are an ancient and revered culture, but it's incompatible with the West. I could see a reverse Hong Kong or semi-sovereign Asia blocs with distinct laws and traditions.

My whole point here illustrates just how unlikely it'd be to actually be equal.

Maybe the easiest example that also proves just how illusory equal is here is the Native Reservation system. An equal reservation system would have eventually sparked a civil war or pogroms.
 
Why does anyone even consider 'separate but equal'? Because of racism.
To actually make the system work, you'd need racism on both (all) sides, and a balance of power between the various sides.

@Theoretical_TJ 's idea is a start.

A wildly alternate Singapore, with separate Chinese, Malay, Anglo streams might MIGHT work.

Or, alternately, on a much reduced level, the Catholic vs Protestant system I grew up with in Saskatchewan, where both schools systems got equal funding. As opposed to the Catholic vs Protestant system in Québec (which ended up being Anglo vs Franco, and there was no balance of power there).
 
The closest thing you could get is parts of the Southern aristocratic class having their ideas more widespread. Where basically there's not too much different between black and white sharecroppers, they're both picking your cotton/whatever. These people hated the KKK and the extreme and violent racism (especially lynching) that caused the Great Migration, since it caused potential economic loss. Although blacks were separate and not equal where they ruled, they tended to make things more equal between blacks and whites and blacks "had it better" so to speak than elsewhere.

But in the end, these people were driven out of power by the rise of white populism (not just on racial matters), and in general they weren't particularly sympathetic to blacks when if they weren't racist, they should've been. And you can't even have a "moderate" system in the worst land in the South, where of course blacks will be oppressed since there is no "Southern aristocracy" to protect them since they have no need of them. I don't see a way to make the South think in favour of these "moderate" ideas, since a key part of the system of the New South relied on even the poorest white forced into the shittiest conditions (like so many were) being able to think "at least I'm not black".
 

CaliGuy

Banned
So here a challenge for everyone make the separate but equal mantra less of joke and actually make it so blacks and whites are equal
You'd need a U.S. Supreme Court which is more willing to defend Black rights yet not to the point of making super-controversial rulings like Brown v. Board of Education initially was. To accomplish this, you somehow need to keep public interest in the affairs of the South after the end of Reconstruction.

Of course, it is worth noting that having a genuine system of separate but equal would still allow for anti-miscegenation laws; after all, those laws were equal in a textual sense (in the sense that the same rule was applied to everyone).
 
To actually make the system work, you'd need racism on both (all) sides, and a balance of power between the various sides.

Meaning no disfranchisement.

If a county commission isn't facing the Black vote, they will not be pressured to make Black schools good nor making libraries (in some districts, no library was available for Blacks!).

You'd need a U.S. Supreme Court which is more willing to defend Black rights yet not to the point of making super-controversial rulings like Brown v. Board of Education initially was. To accomplish this, you somehow need to keep public interest in the affairs of the South after the end of Reconstruction.

Of course, it is worth noting that having a genuine system of separate but equal would still allow for anti-miscegenation laws; after all, those laws were equal in a textual sense (in the sense that the same rule was applied to everyone).

Could a different outcome for the Slaughterhouse Cases saving the Priviledge and Immunities Clause do the trick?

Else, starting with the New Deal, federal programs should have been more closely monitored by Washington to prevent any discrimination, such as what happened in health and agriculture.

For exemple, John Rankin making the GI Bill benefits managed by the states caused Black veterans in the South to have less opportunities than those elsewhere.
 
The closest thing you could get is parts of the Southern aristocratic class having their ideas more widespread. Where basically there's not too much different between black and white sharecroppers, they're both picking your cotton/whatever. These people hated the KKK and the extreme and violent racism (especially lynching) that caused the Great Migration, since it caused potential economic loss. Although blacks were separate and not equal where they ruled, they tended to make things more equal between blacks and whites and blacks "had it better" so to speak than elsewhere.

But in the end, these people were driven out of power by the rise of white populism (not just on racial matters), and in general they weren't particularly sympathetic to blacks when if they weren't racist, they should've been. And you can't even have a "moderate" system in the worst land in the South, where of course blacks will be oppressed since there is no "Southern aristocracy" to protect them since they have no need of them. I don't see a way to make the South think in favour of these "moderate" ideas, since a key part of the system of the New South relied on even the poorest white forced into the shittiest conditions (like so many were) being able to think "at least I'm not black".
Wham, Bam, thank you Metalinvader...your last sentence is the nuts...that's the "WHY" of the ACW! Wasn't states rights or even slavery, neither was popular enough or essential enough to risk civil war. It was the everyday non-slave owning white that was about to lose his safety blanket of "At least I'm better (off) than them!" You can still see that kind of thinking if you watch the audience in Jerry Springer reruns..."Separate, but equal" is a sham, a scam, worst than spam, not worth a damn!
 
Making separate but equal even close to "equal" is ASB. The black population in the south was economically well below the white population in the aftermath of emancipation, and this was true still in the last decades of the 19th century when separate but equal and Jim Crow became legally established (and is still true today). Therefore to have "equal" in education with physically decent schools and per pupil expenditures, equal in services like paved streets, central water and sewage, equal in medical care with publicly funded hospitals, and so forth, you'll need to take "white" tax money and spend it on "negro" facilities. Unless the federal government is enforcing this, which it won't, it is not happening. While separate but equal might be theoretically possible (which I highly doubt) actually making it happen and paying for creating it is politically impossible.
 
The trick with separate but equal, short of giving Black Americans their own government, is that it's an impossibility.
 

Ak-84

Banned
There was in OTL two aspects to this. A racial one which was explicit and mandated in law. And an economic one which was implicit and mandated by fact and politics. Between the start of Jim Crow and the start of civil rights a black professional working class arose. The experiences and facilities that they had access to often did approach the "white" facilities. Now black middle and professional classes were a small proportion but their very existence i) meant that segregationists could point to them and say they did not oppose blacks per se and ii) working class whites would be the mosy opposed to desegregation since many of them got as much of a raw deal as many blacks did and they resented time and money spent on them.

You need to resolve this political and economic issue.
 
The POD that most comes to mind is the Southern states being dissolved altogether (or the worst offenders like the fire eating Deep South) and new Black only or Black-dominant states being created, with plantations being dissolved into homesteads. The resulting state of New Africa gets funding and the remaining states are told they better get with the picture or they'll be erased too.

You'd need a longer guerrilla war and significant postwar Northern terrorism akin to that of the Irish Troubles to get this radical approach to take hold.
 
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