AHC WI: Jim Crow Alive And Well In 2016

Your challenge, should you accept it, is to keep Jim Crow, segregation and all that alive and well into the present day. The PoD has to be after 1932, and preferably after 1950. Nothing like splitting the US in two, or causing a nuclear war, is allowed. So, how could Jim Crow stay alive and what would be the effects? Go ahead!
 
Your challenge, should you accept it, is to keep Jim Crow, segregation and all that alive and well into the present day. The PoD has to be after 1932, and preferably after 1950. Nothing like splitting the US in two, or causing a nuclear war, is allowed. So, how could Jim Crow stay alive and what would be the effects? Go ahead!

The Democrats keep the two-thirds rule for their convention, along with an alternate decision on the white primary cases. That ensures that they can't win without making a nod of the head to Jim Crow, and the GOP can't do anything because they're shut out of most Southern politics anyway.
 
The Democrats keep the two-thirds rule for their convention, along with an alternate decision on the white primary cases. That ensures that they can't win without making a nod of the head to Jim Crow, and the GOP can't do anything because they're shut out of most Southern politics anyway.

That could be good, but the civil rights movement would sooner or later shift public opinion unless it is stopped otherwise. Change would probably come sometime. Then again the US system makes change pretty hard so that PoD could work.
 

Ian_W

Banned
The Democrats keep the two-thirds rule for their convention, along with an alternate decision on the white primary cases. That ensures that they can't win without making a nod of the head to Jim Crow, and the GOP can't do anything because they're shut out of most Southern politics anyway.

Still doesnt work - if you give the GOP the black vote, then it winns Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and so on, and Nixon is elected as a pro-Civil Rights president.
 
A stricter reading of the Interstate Commerce clause perhaps?

It was often used against Jim Crow laws even when products didn't cross state lines or businesses served only in state customers.
 
2016 USA with Jim Crows laws would have very little moral highground over a few other "evil" countries from past and present. This could mean that while economical needs would require some countries to remain linked to the US, others might actually impose sanctions on it.

It would also more then likely mean a more militant civil right movement leading to event more frequent race riot then seen OTL.
 
Butterflying WW2 and the Holocaust, and delaying the subsequent collapse of the European colonial empires and the Cold War, should result in a longer lasting Jim Crow (and consequently a more drawn out and violent Civil Rights Movement).

The Holocaust, the failure of European colonialism, and the United States competing for influence against the Soviets in the decolonising Third World did a lot to discredit blatant racism in the West.
 
Still doesnt work - if you give the GOP the black vote, then it winns Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and so on, and Nixon is elected as a pro-Civil Rights president.

The idea behind it was to get the Democrats and their plarfirm firmly against civil rights. Generally you need a congressional supetmajority(Obamacare, New Deal) to pass big social reforms or bipartisan support(civil rights) to pass historic social reforms. And in 1960, President Nixon would have no bipartiaan support for civil rights and be facing a Democrat Congress, led by LBJ who harbouring presidential ambitions would be opposed to civil rights. Civil rights in this scenario qould be delayed at best for at least a decade and probably far longer.
 
Well, it has been argued that Jim Crow is still around today, but in a mutated, yet still insidious form...

Yes, but what this challenge is suggesting is that the progress on civil rights, from voting rights to desegregation and fair housing etc, etc is not made, or at least made in a far slower and less effective form. That's pretty hard to do, but i think it can be done.
 
The truly dystopian extreme of this challenge would be to maintain and indeed nationalize the full extent of "Jim Crow" discriminations and restrictions while having essentially free society for "white" people. Note that OTL, the South African Apartheid regime could not operate without special sweeping police powers such as "banning" individuals--even "White" individuals who enjoyed the maximum panoply of civil rights the state extended to anyone. To me, it seems morally necessary that a society that arbitrarily limits one set of people's range of human rights must suffer a general cancer of meaningful freedom for all the rest--but a sufficiently clever and uninhibited author might be able to conceive of a society that is quite liberal for "white" people while being exclusive of "colored."

But I suspect such a narrative must be founded on the unquestioned notion of genuine racial disparities, on the idea that race is a true and relevant criterion. Since the uncritical, serious holding of such an idea would get one banned from this site, I don't think we should expect to see it here. Nor do I regret that! My head really does not want to go there.

Given that racist stratification has no scientific basis, it is only sensible that any society that maintains it must suffer deficiencies and derangements. The coexistence of racist and liberal, even progressive, ideals and goals is certainly possible. But not stable; human society is always in flux and dynamic agitation. For Jim Crow to go unquestioned, or anyway triumphant, for the past 60 or 80 years would I think imply the overwhelming victory of reaction across the board.

Whether that would be compatible with a society that is fundamentally not too dissimilar to the modern USA of OTL is another conversation!:eek:
 
The truly dystopian extreme of this challenge would be to maintain and indeed nationalize the full extent of "Jim Crow" discriminations and restrictions while having essentially free society for "white" people. Note that OTL, the South African Apartheid regime could not operate without special sweeping police powers such as "banning" individuals--even "White" individuals who enjoyed the maximum panoply of civil rights the state extended to anyone.

Except that blacks outnumbered whites in South Africa, leading to a siege mentality that did not exist in the American South.
 
I personally suspect that a significant impetus in ending/reducing Jim Crow was the development of better communication technology, which allowed the shear ugliness of it and the horror of a lynching to be broadcast to the living rooms of people who'd never had to think about it.
 
The only way I can think of is to have the Civil Rights Movement be violent, thus making it harder for Whites to sympathize with it.
 
The Cuban Missile Crisis leads to a nuclear exchange between the USA and USSR. The USSR gets blasted to oblivion. America doesn't get hit as badly but its federal government is either decapitated or withers into impotence. The Southern governors get together and decide to revive the Confederate States of America. The new Confederate constitution enshrines Jim Crow as the law of the land. All of the moderate civil rights activists are either killed or imprisoned for life, leaving the radicals to take over.

54 years later, the new CSA is a tottering entity shunned by the world. While theoretically a liberal democracy, the Democratic Party maintains a stranglehold on the government, with any dissent being crushed by the massive state security apparatus. The economic situation, while not exactly at Third-World level, is still far less prosperous than OTL America. Blacks are treated little better than animals, leading to violent action by black power militias that only furthers the cycle of repression. The government tries to put on a show of power, but everyone knows it's only a matter of time before it collapses under the strain of discontent.
 
Last edited:
ddd

What if there is a mix between hardline deep south and paternalists who want better conditions within separate but equal? The nation of islam makes an informal deal with the Wallace Barnett types to keep their people in line provided conditions are improved.
 

Tovarich

Banned
Yes, but what this challenge is suggesting is that the progress on civil rights, from voting rights to desegregation and fair housing etc, etc is not made, or at least made in a far slower and less effective form. That's pretty hard to do, but i think it can be done.

Howabout if voting rights were removed not only upon conviction of a felony but also a misdemeanour?

It'd probably have to be only a temporary loss (or too many whites would be hit), but a determined Sheriff GoodOl'Boy could keep nicking almost every black in his patch for something like jaywalking once a year, so they're on a rolling-ban.
 
What if there is a mix between hardline deep south and paternalists who want better conditions within separate but equal? The nation of islam makes an informal deal with the Wallace Barnett types to keep their people in line provided conditions are improved.

nation of islam are, at their core, ethnic separatist. Promises of some improvement in exchange for keeping quiet is a lot less likely then having a "homeland" set up for them with them in control of it.
 
Top