Best way for Open Thread to have eventual better US race relations

Best place to start open thread for better US race relations earleir

  • Tilden wins 1876,gets assassinated then or after 1880 election

    Votes: 1 5.3%
  • Hancock wins in 1880, gets assassinated

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Some madman decapitating the government in 1881-1900 era

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • No, it can be GOP guy,but must be very popular like TR in 1906

    Votes: 4 21.1%
  • Something else drastic could cause US race relations to improve decades earlier

    Votes: 14 73.7%

  • Total voters
    19
I get that this is a sensitive topic, but the banning(permanently) seems heavy handed. Then again, I don't know this guys posting history either.

From a purely rational PoV, shipping freed slaves back to Africa would likely have drastic ecomic effects for the golden Triangle of trade.

Socially, it would be very disruptive, as from what I've read the southern plantation owners really liked owning slaves and continued to do so even well past the economic viability of slavery. My guess is if the north offered to ship them back it would start a civil war much like the OTL.

As implied before, the best thing for US race relations is if they never had slavery in the first place. The entire institution required the myths of white superiority and enhanced arrogance while denigrating blacks as subhuman. On the flipside in the black community, it also created an enduring suspicion and distrust of white people.
 
I figure Hayes not compromising on Reconstruction would help.

How? Nine of the eleven Confederate States (plus all the Border States) were run by white supremacist Democrats even before Hayes' inauguration. In the other two, Radical governments were clinging on by their fingernails, and surely doomed whatever any President did.


Otherwise you get OTL, where our high school history textbooks portray John Brown as a crazy prophet

Which I'm afraid he was. Terrorism in a good cause is still terrorism.
 
In otl it is true that ordinary white folk became even more racist than the planter class. However had events been different attitudes might have been different. Furthermore a lot of the most racist white folk may well have gone North if it were clear that there would be adminstrations based on support from freedmen
 
How? Nine of the eleven Confederate States (plus all the Border States) were run by white supremacist Democrats even before Hayes' inauguration. In the other two, Radical governments were clinging on by their fingernails, and surely doomed whatever any President did.
Hayes cutting a deal sped up the problem, though. There's still hope, albeit a slim one, for slightly longer military control if he loses.
Which I'm afraid he was. Terrorism in a good cause is still terrorism.
He did nothing worse than those white-supremacist nutjobs who took over that wildlife refuge in Oregon and that traitor scumbag Cliven Bundy. Plus, he was fighting for a damn good cause, and the slaver scum attacked abolitionists first in premeditated killings and beatings trying to drive them out of Kansas.

Either way. The slaver traitors in the South needed to have it beaten into them that they couldn't treat human beings like animals anymore, as quickly and efficiently as possible. I'd personally start by banning the Confederate flag as a symbol of treason, executing Jefferson Davis for high treason (formenting rebellion against the legitimately-elected government of the United States of America, and attempting to gain aid from foreign powers in his unlawful rebellion against the legitimate government of the USA), and enforcing complete voter equality by military occupation for as long as possible. I'd let groups like the KKK exist, but only so long as they did not commit any aggressive actions against the US government or its forces. Probably split off East Tennessee as well, maybe the Free State of Jones just for kicks and to rub it in to the Confederate traitors. At every step it would be essential to reinforce that every action taken by the US government is a reaction to the treason and cowardice of the slaver aristocracy of the south. Obviously, the strongest possible protection of voting rights will be necessary--voting is a duty, not a right, and certainly not a right that can be denied to a US citizen.

That ought to be a good start to help equal rights, at least. Tolerance will come later, but equal rights are mandatory.
 
The best place to start would be slavery abolished earlier and peaceful. Greater European emigration to the south could also be a solution, as it would weaken the Black/White order with a new class of outsiders.
 

Stolengood

Banned
Yeesh... no one using the term "Negro" unironically in this day and age ought to be given the benefit of any doubt. :confused:
 
Here's an interesting thought, if we want to go early in US history but after its founding.

President Madison had a slave, Paul Jennings, who wrote a memoir of his years in the White House in 1865. So, he must have been rather educated to do so. OTL Frederick Douglass had written his book 20 years earlier, but if this Jennings lad (only 15 when the British burned Washington, D.C.) were to be more heroic than in OTL, when he assisted Dolley Madison in saving a number of things, you could start to see gradually greater respect for blacks. (He would have to do so independent of what he was ordered to do so people couldn't jsut say "he just did what he was told.")

Couple that with things going differently then and Missouri being admitted as a free state, then an earlier Civil War - which is eitehr quicker, as some have said, or which is longer and totally destroys the planter class - it might work. (If not Missouri as a free state, Texas could be inhabited by enough people who desired freed soil that it becomes free.

One good way to have this happen would be repeated cotton failures due to the boll weevil. The above or some other POD could lead to a very early introduction. OTL it first crossed the Rio Grande in 1892, reached SE Alabama by 1909, and according to Wikipedia, had spread through all the cotton-growing states by the 1920s. Butterflies could cause it to enter, say, 80 years earlier as people fled the Mexican Revolution. Transportation would be slower, so the spread would be, too, but if we figure it crosses with rebels in 1812, repeated contact with D.C. can cause the butterflies that lead to Jennings having to be more heroic to save Madison and his wife. It can reach SE Alabama 75 years earlier, rather than 80, placing it in 1834, and then have spread through all the cotton states by the time of the Mexican-American War analog. Meanwhile, Texas has such an infestation it's deemed a non-starter as a cotton state and mostly people who don't support slavery move there.

The thing about opent hreads is that they tend to be better when they are faster paced., even if they can't (obviously) use many documentaries or movies or TV or radio news. I didn't think it would work starting with such an early POD.

However, I do have an idea for starting it if you think that would be viable. I don't think I've ever seen TL where the boll weevil comes early.
 
In otl it is true that ordinary white folk became even more racist than the planter class. However had events been different attitudes might have been different. Furthermore a lot of the most racist white folk may well have gone North if it were clear that there would be adminstrations based on support from freedmen


There's not the slightest reason for attitudes to change.

For Pete's sake, even in 1864, with the war still in progress, 45% of Northerners voted for a party which was willing to let the South keep slavery (not just white supremacy) if they would return to the Union. And the other 55% must have included many who had little or no interest in Black rights, but just thought Lincoln a better bet to preserve the Union. If such was the attitude in the North, what can you expect in the South?

And during Reconstruction most Southern states did have administrations based on black support. Yet it didn't produce any marked tendency to migrate north.
 
There's not the slightest reason for attitudes to change.

For Pete's sake, even in 1864, with the war still in progress, 45% of Northerners voted for a party which was willing to let the South keep slavery (not just white supremacy) if they would return to the Union. And the other 55% must have included many who had little or no interest in Black rights, but just thought Lincoln a better bet to preserve the Union. If such was the attitude in the North, what can you expect in the South?

And during Reconstruction most Southern states did have administrations based on black support. Yet it didn't produce any marked tendency to migrate north.

Yes but at that time the former slaves were super dependent on the old ruling class for jobs. With land and votes combined it would have been clear enough

Note the change in rhetoric after the 1965 Voting rights act
 
Yes but at that time the former slaves were super dependent on the old ruling class for jobs. With land and votes combined it would have been clear enough

But how do they hold onto either?

It worked in the Sea Islands during the War, but only because the white inhabitants had fled and the ex-slaves were protected (for the moment) by the Union Army.

Try it in any area with a substantial white population and no Union troops near to hand, and any Black rash enough to squat on any seized property [1] will just be found one day on a lonely stretch of country road with bullet holes in his back. Ditto if he shows up at a polling station.


Note the change in rhetoric after the 1965 Voting rights act

Not even remotely comparable.

1965 was the height of the Cold War, when Uncle Sam was in competition with the Reds for the support of a load of mon-white ex-colonies. So the Southern racial set up had become an intolerable handicap about which Something Must Be Done in a way that wasn't necessary a century before. Also, since WW2 cotton picking had become mechanised, and required far fewer workers, so the massive amounts of stoop labour were no longer required. So the economic rationale for the old Southern wol had been undermined.

If this wasn't enough, since the Great Depression the poorer States (which included all Southern ones) had become heavily dependent on Federal programmes and contracts. Governors might grandstand it in schoolhouse doors, but they could no more resist effectively than a teenager could against the parent on whom he depended for his pocket money. This was a totally different world from the Reconstruction years, when in most places the Federal Government just meant a local Post Office.


[1]There was some unoccupied land available under the Southern Homestead Act, but most was of poor quality, unoccupied because it wasn't worth occupying. And it wasn't easy to start a farm if you were penniless, as of course the vast majority of Freedmen were.
 
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So, it would appear that - rather than simply eliminating the "lost cause" problem witha quicker Civil War and fater Emancipation Proclamation, it would be better to have a longer one which totally destroys the planter class, thus allowing the former slaves more of a chance. (Lack of a Lost Cause might make things better by the middle of the 20th century, as in my "If Baseball Integrated Early"/"Brotherhood and Baseball," where the game is integrated from the start so there is a more visible place where they are seen together regularly, but having it go much more smoothly in the '50s and '60s is vastly different from having thigns really improve by 1900.)

So, the key may be a Civil War over a decade earlier (1850 or before) with the Union winning, and where it does become an effort to free the slaves - unless they are already being freed, which the numerous threads on an early boll weevil say is possible if not likely. But, that would create far too many other butterflies for some, though it would be interesting.
 
So, it would appear that - rather than simply eliminating the "lost cause" problem witha quicker Civil War and fater Emancipation Proclamation, it would be better to have a longer one which totally destroys the planter class, thus allowing the former slaves more of a chance.


How does destroying the planter class help the former slaves? When the planters lost power to the poorer whites, the new state governments were even more racist.
 
Basically, the discussion made it appear that it would still at least be easier for the Federal government to then ensure that the former slaves are placed on the same level s the poor whites.

It is definitely a difficult problem.
 
Basically, the discussion made it appear that it would still at least be easier for the Federal government to then ensure that the former slaves are placed on the same level s the poor whites.

It is definitely a difficult problem.

That's putting it mildly.

As the wartime enlistments expired, the Army shrank in size, until by 1876 it was only about 27,000 strong,, of whom only abt 3,000 were available for duty in the South - far too few to police such a vast region.

With such limited force at its disposal, the Federal government is in no position to "ensure" anything.
 
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