Black majority South

the US Census of 1860 tells us that the CSA had a 40% black population, the break down as such:

1860:
Alabama: 45% black
Arkansas: 26%
Florida: 44%
Georgia: 44%
Louisiana: 47%
Mississippi: 55%
North Carolina: 33%
South Carolina: 57%
Tennessee: 25%
Texas: 30%
Virginia: 31%

so what POD could bring us these numbers:

2010:
Alabama: 48% black
Arkansas: 29%
Florida: 47%
Georgia: 47%
Louisiana: 50%
Mississippi: 58%
North Carolina: 36%
South Carolina: 60%
Tennessee: 28%
Texas: 33%
Virginia: 34%

and how would having so many black majority (or close to majority) state change the USA?
 
Perhaps the Civil War drags on longer and a lot more Confederates die. After the war the area is in chaos and is even poorer postwar than OTL and a lot of Southerners flee because of the chaos and poverty.

But then how to prevent Northerners from settling there during Reconstruction...





EDIT: Actually, just have the Confederates win their independence. After they abolish slavery, blacks will constitute a majority.
 
The numbers of the census surprised me, but ok.

I think I have read somewhere that the CSA was considering to free black slaves if they fought for them, so it would generate a fairly big group of free black people quite early in time.

From them political groups will emerge and over time it is not unlikely that blacks will play an important role or even dominate politics in the CSA.

Following that I could imagine a immigration policy to favor Africans (every industrialist would need cheap labor force). So a black dominant state would exist in the south of Northern America.

I can see a lot of possibilities open for a skilled timeline-writer.
 
My suggestion is a successful radical reconstruction. Perhaps 10 000 leading rebels are exiled and there is land confiscation from 50 000 others. The Federal government is more easily able to enforce voting rights for people who have their own land and thus do not need to fear racist employers.

Numbers of free black and escaped former slaves arrive from the Northern US and from Canada.

A significan number of white people who are not able to accept black rights leave the South.


This creates in the century and in the 20th century a model of inter racial democracy in the South. I suspect it might still be hard in the North for black people to get the best tables in restaurants and buy property in up scale areas
 
My suggestion is a successful radical reconstruction. Perhaps 10 000 leading rebels are exiled and there is land confiscation from 50 000 others. The Federal government is more easily able to enforce voting rights for people who have their own land and thus do not need to fear racist employers.

Numbers of free black and escaped former slaves arrive from the Northern US and from Canada.

A significan number of white people who are not able to accept black rights leave the South.


This creates in the century and in the 20th century a model of inter racial democracy in the South. I suspect it might still be hard in the North for black people to get the best tables in restaurants and buy property in up scale areas

Who knows? We might've even seen a major switch: a racist North{and possibly West, too, to a degree}, and a democratically-minded Southland{including Texas and possibly Oklahoma as well}.
 
Keep so many black Americans from moving out in the first place and heading to better places like the North and West would keep the percentage of blacks high.
 
Who knows? We might've even seen a major switch: a racist North{and possibly West, too, to a degree}, and a democratically-minded Southland{including Texas and possibly Oklahoma as well}.

well given OTL of Racism in major northern (and Cali) Cities its not unlikely, just have them keep OTL race relations in Northern cities, the Mid-West in general was as racist as say Virginia (much of the Mid-west was settled by poor whites from the south hoping to do better, they passed down their views on black, thus why the KKK was so big in Illinois in the 20s) you'll see some (though not as bad) Jim Crow laws in the Mid-west, and race riots and general race issues in New York and LA, as well as other cities in the North.
 
Well, to stop the decline of black percentages in the South, you'd need the following.

No Great Migration: The black population, as a percentage, mainly declined pre-1950 due to migration to cities in the North for greater economic opportunity. A number of factors played into this - a desire to escape Jim Crow laws, the boll weevil infestation in the 1910s, the abrupt end of mass immigration in 1924 requiring a new labor force in much of the North, and the expansion of wartime defense industries just as the number of able-bodied men declined. Essentially, you'd need to dramatically increase economic opportunity within the South, so that even when black families moved off the farm, they moved into cities like Birmigham and New Orleans to work in factories, not Chicago and Detroit.

No Sun Belt: Post 1950, not only were blacks moving out of the South, whites began moving into many regions. You'd need to stop thriving metropolises from forming like Miami, Houston, and Atlanta, instead having smaller cities which only draw on a regional, more black population. The mass settlement of the South was made possible by the development of air conditioning, which is hard to butterfly away. However, the other major reasons for the formation of the sun belt were political. For example, businesses relocated to the south because it was cheaper due to "right-to-work" laws which made operating a union difficult, along with the general anti-union attitude of most white workers outside of the coal mines. This could easily have worked out differently if it wasn't for the historical accident of Taft-Hartley.

These, particularly the first, would require PODs dating all the way back to a successful Reconstruction, as a southern, black class of capitalists would probably be a necessity. It's a difficult tension however, as a successful enough reconstruction would presumably lessen racism in the North as well, meaning blacks would move wherever they pleased, and no one would mind much.

More importantly, at best these changes would hold the racial balance to within 1860 norms, or nudge it upward just a bit if blacks have larger families. To really up the percentage, I think you'd either need whites to decline, or blacks to migrate in from somewhere else. The former is unlikely unless radical reconstructionists were really out for dixie blood - even massive land confiscations would lead to mainly wealthy families being effected. As to blacks migrating in, it could just barely be possible that they migrate in from the Caribbean or something, but that would necessitate national, state, and local governments which wanted millions of black immigrants, along with a local black capitalist class to employ them.

I think it's much, much easier to get an overwhelmingly black deep south though. Let's say land redistribution becomes common in SC, GA, FL, AL, MS, and LA, but is largely restricted to those states. There is a small outflow of the former white gentry, who having lost their property migrate into the upper south, west, or out of the country altogether. Some black farmers become wealthy, and by the 1880s form the basis of a black upper class, who uses their capital to get into the manufacturing sector. Just like white factory owners often preferred to hire their own before anti-discrimination laws, so to black factory owners. Initially they only pull from local rural areas, but as time passes, more and more blacks from the upper south move further southward. Soon there is a demand for immigrant labor as there was elsewhere in the country, however in part in the deep south it is taken up by Afro-Caribbean peoples like Haitians, who were in some cases directly sponsored to migrate by the well-to-do and well-connected in the deep south. In many cases the immigrants weren't black, coming from Cuba, Central America, or even Europe. However, within a few generations, they acculturate and often intermarry into the black population. Indeed, as blacks rose in economic clout through the South, some poor native-born whites (women in particular) married into black families.

Okay, so this seems an ASB scenario, as it basically requires a nation within a nation. It seems unlikely to me that local black capitalists could really compete with Northern magnates, for example. But the only real alternative I can think of would be a severe form of Malaria, like Plasmodium falciparum, sweeping through the South and killing off much of the white population, remaining endemic in the southern lowlands until DDT or an analogue removed it from the South in the 1950s.
 
Last edited:

Teleology

Banned
This sounds like it requires the Northern Free Soiler agrarians and the industrial unions, who want to keep the new lands out West and the inner city jobs of the Northeast white, to outweigh wealthy Northern interests that subverted Reconstruction in order to reap profit down there (IIRC often with the partnership of the Southern wealthy and formerly wealthy).
 
More slaves & higher population growth rate

1. According to wiki(couldn't find a better source, but the figure is almost surely correct, at least for the purposes of this comment) only about 5-6% of the Africans involved in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade were brought to the United States. By comparision almost 40%, or over 4 million were shipped to Brazil.

Since the exact number of Africans taken as slaves is impossible to tell anyway(estimates range from 9 to 12 million), it doesn't seem too extreme to imagine a scenario in which several hundred thousand more Africans are brought to the US, say 10% of the total. A tougher question is whether there would have been an economic need for an increased slave-flow; I don't know enough about the subject to decide this, but from what I've read, after the import of African slaves was banned there was indeed a demand for more slaves, which is the reason why so many African Americans from the North were sold to work on southern plantations.

Anyway if instead of the ~1 million slaves in 1800 there would have been 1,5 million for instance, that would have resulted in a significantly larger African American population in the present(~60 million and ~18% of US population), all other factors unchanged.

2. During the 20th century African American population approximately quadrupled (from ~9 million in 1900 to ~36 million in 2000 and ~40 million today)(US census figures). In the first half of the century black percentages were actually declining due to massive immigration from Europe; the lowest point was reached in the 30s at slightly below 10% of the total population. Since then, as a result of a somewhat higher population growth rate, African Americans have increased their proportion to ~13%.

Many other communities in the world have experienced however much much higher population growth rates: most developing third-world countries for instance have quadrupled their population (through natural increase & insignificant immigration) since mid-20th century(www.census.gov) . Of course population growth depends on a great number of social, cultural, economic etc. factors that cannot be simply modified or ignored; still, significantly different growth rates were recorded for communities that were very similar in physical factors(ex. mortality rates) but different in mentalities(and thus in fertility rates).

Given the long history of imposed and voluntary racial segregation in the US, I think one could build a likely alternative scenario in which the black community maintains a higher fertility rate largely due to a different prevalent mentality, and grows faster as a consequence. No major cultural, economic or historical facts have to be altered, only black mothers would have to have more children (of course it isn't this simple, but seems a plausible scenario to me). After all minorities in many other parts of the world do often have significantly different growth patterns than the country as a whole.

Assuming for instance a sixfold increase from 1900 to 2010, there would be between 55-60 million African Americans today, and all other races assumed to have evolved as they did in reality that would give African Americans an ~18% out of a ~330 million large America.

3. If one would combine the two alternative scenarios above, depending on preference and maybe on other small variations introduced, it would be imaginable to have a, say ~80 million large African American population, or almost one quarter of the US population, if all other races had the same numbers as in reality. Needless to say this would have influenced American history greatly; I haven't done the calculations but I think at least several of the Deep South states would be black-majority (Mississippi almost for sure, maybe South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana etc.) even if a proportional Great Migration would have occured.
 
Top