Could an apartheid system have emerged following the ACW?

The Jim Crow segregation that emerged in much of the south following reconstruction showed that reconstruction did not work as originally intended.

However in a scenario where things were even less successful following the war could an actual apartheid system have emerged with blacks legally segregated into the american equivalent of Bantustans?
 
There was a desire for separate homelands in Alaska. The committee for a 49th state, advocated southern separatistsm. Howard Campbell sent up a government on tigby islands.
Liberia had a great increase between 1865 and 1880
 
The thing is power remained in white hands. In apartheid in theory a black Elite had sone role to play, in the name of effective government if nothing else.
 
This more or less was the case in most of the American South until 1944, when White Primaries were declared illegal, and even after that point until the Civil Rights era. It is extremely difficult to go beyond that however in terms of restricting the political participation of African Americans, if only because they were as successful as they were, and I doubt that the Supreme Court given the margins involved would have dithered on these issues much longer than they did, or decided otherwise.

As for Bantustans, I don't believe any State would have been willing to cede their land in order to establish some sort of faux Black Republic, and even if they did, those areas where the African-American population was concentrated at the time were generally still of economic interest to both the States and the Federal Government.
 
As for Bantustans, I don't believe any State would have been willing to cede their land in order to establish some sort of faux Black Republic, and even if they did, those areas where the African-American population was concentrated at the time were generally still of economic interest to both the States and the Federal Government.

Yep. The Mississippi Delta is sometimes cited as a place for an American Bantustan or a place for an otherwise African American state, but no way in hell would Mississippi ever willingly part with what was one of their most productive regions. Although maybe the local elite might support it if they can be assured that lots of black sharecroppers would move there--not that blacks would have much political power, since the planter elite would remain in control of the government and likely use rigged elections which allow (some) blacks to vote assuming they vote for the right candidate (somewhat common in the Jim Crow South).
 
I think Liberia was supposed to be America's version of a Bantustan (albeit different timeframe). White Americans didn't want to part with any of "their own land," nor did they need to pay lip service to native sovereignty like in South Africa because black people are the majority there, while they are a minority in the United States. So I don't think it's likely that Americans would part with any of the continental US to make a homeland, even the black dominated parts of the Mississippi Delta IMO. It could be possible however for a Bantustan to be created in the Caribbean, in an ATL where the Teller Amendment isn't passed and the US annexes Cuba.

Having said that, segregation and apartheid were already pretty much the same OTL in terms of how much they restricted black people. For starters, segregation and "apartness" mean pretty much the same thing, and they were viewed as near identical structures by contemporary pan-Africanists. If you go to the apartheid museum in Johannesburg you can see benches that say "For Europeans Only," similar to pictures I have seen of water fountains labeled "Whites Only." The major difference IMO is the apartheid government paid lip service to the concept of black sovereignty by creating "independent" bantustans with black political leaders (puppets, but still) while segregation-era US didn't even do that.
 
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