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.
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.
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?
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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.
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.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
To actually make the system work, you'd need racism on both (all) sides, and a balance of power between the various sides.
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).
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!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".