Civil Rights Movement w Earler CRA?

I'd been thinking on this recently -- if 1957 got a stronger Civil Rights Bill,* with say stronger enforcement on voting rights violations (closer to AG Brownell's original bill in this respect), how would that affect the subsequent Civil Rights Movement? Would it just move everything up -- the desegregation and employment rights of OTL's 1964 CRA getting passed in 1961, for example?

Would that extend to other milestones, like the March for Equality and Freedom? Actually, this event alone in TTL is interesting to think about -- if Civil Rights Leaders have more to show sooner, does that mean they're less likely to do the march? Or does it make the next step just expected sooner, leading to the march coming earlier? For that matter, how important is the timing of the march in the election cycle -- would it be less effective, for example, in 1961, less than a year after the last Presidential Election?

Any thoughts here?

*while I remember it's a contended point, let's see if we can put it aside for now
 
I can't conceive of Civil Rights passing without a mass CR movement first being in effect. Heck, you handwave away the impediments to what we now know as the Great Society bills, in the fifties, then you might as well turn America into Trudeau's Canada.

"Once you start to filibuster, you find you can count to 33 [the number needed to prevent cloture in that era] really quickly."

But generally, see guys like C. Vann Woodward or David Halberstam for reasons why the moral imperative for passing race reforms in the fifties wasn't anywhere near strong enough to overcome the obstructionists.
 
I can't conceive of Civil Rights passing without a mass CR movement first being in effect. Heck, you handwave away the impediments to what we now know as the Great Society bills, in the fifties, then you might as well turn America into Trudeau's Canada.

First, the Civil Rights Movement did exist at the time, it was wasn't the vast grassroots protest movement of the 1960's, and even there it was fast emerging (most prominently with the Montgomery Bus Boycotts).

Second, I am doing nothing so drastic here -- all the OP says is that the law that passes Congress TTL is stronger with respect to voting rights, closer to AG Brownell's original proposal. Hell, I'm not even sure what passes this year would even surpass OTL's 1960 Civil Rights Act, but that would still be significant change.

Third, while I do realize that even Congress managing to do that much is a contested point, I have argued elsewhere (see OP link, and links within) that a stronger bill passing a thinly Republican Senate was not only plausible, but more likely than under the thinly Democratic one of OTL.

All that said, these debates (of point 2 and 3 at least) have been hashed over before, so I'm just going to see if we can get back to the question of the thread: If a stronger voting rights law was passed (as the Civil Rights Act of 1957), how would that affect the larger Civil Rights Movement? I'm also still interested in all the OP's follow up questions.
 
First, the Civil Rights Movement did exist at the time

As I alluded to above. But the basic ability of the Movement to win supermajority support outside of the South, that's in it's very early stages at exactly this point you mention (which is as much to do with Emmet Til's murder as the boycotts); it's that supermajority support that eventually makes it possible to break the congressional obstructionists.

To be frank, Northerners outside the ADA didn't really discover the plight of the Southron AAs until basically a year or two leading up to when you have magic-cloture-powers Bill Knowland passing a Brownell bill. Plenty of Liberal Northerners, Ivy League professors even, were still open to believing that the paternalistic ways of the South were okay.

Second, I am doing nothing so drastic here... I have argued elsewhere (see OP link, and links within) that a stronger bill passing a thinly Republican Senate was not only plausible, but more likely than under the thinly Democratic one of OTL.

Plumber addressed the institutional problems with that line of thought in the thread you link to. Read Caro.

I'm just going to see if we can get back to the question of the thread: If a stronger voting rights law was passed (as the Civil Rights Act of 1957), how would that affect the larger Civil Rights Movement? I'm also still interested in all the OP's follow up questions.

Okay, handwave. Let's have Knowland and Nixon somehow kill off Jim Crow in public amenities.

Even then, I don't have to look up the specifics of the original draft Brownell bill to know it's voting enforcement portions couldn't really be much stronger than that of RFK/Katzenbach's Omnibus Bill, and that's a bill LBJ correctly decided was barely the beginning for opening up the Southron power structure.

So Voting Rights is still stuck. And what's more, it's potentially cut off, decoupled, from the argument about the necessity for de-segregation. As the Republican efforts of the late fifties were not designed to open up a New Deal type agenda of rolling legislative reform.

The still-growing Civil Right movement is forced to choose between pushing for school de-segregation to be enforced (which was doable), or for a VRA to be passed. At a point when it's just not as comprehensive a force as it becomes in OTL when King reaches the heights of his powers, post 1960.

I think the Northern moderate CW would be sorely tempted to ignore VR, much like it would later ignore (or do worse than ignore) unofficial modes of segregation after the Great Society. After all, Ike's law has already solved everything, hasn't it?

So, net result, I reckon complacency and wilfull ignorance from the Unionist states confronts the nascent movement, when reform is not even half over, over an issue that King IOTL was actually able to get thrown into sharp relief when the time came.

Couldn't happen, you say? Well, economic segregation fell by the wayside as an issue after King, the Great Society, and RFK left the stage.
 
<answer in third part>

Many thanks! The idea of earlier voting rights breeding complacency in the larger Civil Rights struggles does have the sad ring of plausibility to it -- I'll have to reflect on it, though I certainly won't say it "coupdn't happen".

Read Caro.

I actually did; it was his telling of how the Civil Rights Act of 1957 came about (and what LBJ did and didn't do to it) that got me started on the threads linked in the op. (And, to stay on topic, that's all I'm going to say here.)
 

katchen

Banned
There was an earlier generation of Civil Rights activists in the 1940s affiliated with the Communist Party USA and Henry Wallace's Progressive Party that basically were silenced by the crusade against Communism of the late 1940s and the 1950s. People like Paul Robison. They might have made a lot more headway if FDR had passed away prior to the 1944 Democratic National Convention and Henry Wallace had won re-election in 1944 as the incumbent Democratic President, attempting to lead the US to full social democracy. That would be a very interesting TL indeed. Has anyone done anything on that TL?
 
There was an earlier generation of Civil Rights activists in the 1940s affiliated with the Communist Party USA and Henry Wallace's Progressive Party that basically were silenced by the crusade against Communism of the late 1940s and the 1950s. People like Paul Robison. They might have made a lot more headway if FDR had passed away prior to the 1944 Democratic National Convention and Henry Wallace had won re-election in 1944 as the incumbent Democratic President, attempting to lead the US to full social democracy. That would be a very interesting TL indeed. Has anyone done anything on that TL?

What? Wallace succeeding FDR before 1944? You must never have heard of For All Time, and why do you hate America?
 
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