DB AH Challenge: Make the Democrats the "party of civil rights"

With a POD after Lincoln's assassination, your challenge is to make the Democrats the party most supportive of civil rights and supported by a majority of African-Americans within a century of the end of the American Civil War. Have fun.
 
With a POD after Lincoln's assassination, your challenge is to make the Democrats the party most supportive of civil rights and supported by a majority of African-Americans within a century of the end of the American Civil War. Have fun.

Wait weren't the Democrats the big supporters of the Civil rights movement:confused:?
 

Sabot Cat

Banned
The challenge for this thread is nigh impossible. This really should be moved to the ASB forums for the PoD constraints alone. There's simply no way that the Democrats, Ku Klux Klan vehicle that they are, could EVER support the Civil Rights Movement, let alone be the vanguards of it.
 
The challenge for this thread is nigh impossible. This really should be moved to the ASB forums for the PoD constraints alone. There's simply no way that the Democrats, Ku Klux Klan vehicle that they are, could EVER support the Civil Rights Movement, let alone be the vanguards of it.

100 years is a lot of time, maybe have a secret anti-segregation elected VP and have the President die. Doesn't even have to be secret, just put an old Dixiecrat on top, and let him die for someone young and politically powerful enough to push congress around. Maybe something like Strom Thurmond/John Kennedy? Although Kennedy took a long time to warm up to Civil Rights, he was one of the high profile ones to side with the Republicans when the first big Civil Rights Act's came around.
 
The challenge for this thread is nigh impossible. This really should be moved to the ASB forums for the PoD constraints alone. There's simply no way that the Democrats, Ku Klux Klan vehicle that they are, could EVER support the Civil Rights Movement, let alone be the vanguards of it.

They were, actually. Not anymore, though, as the conservatives were ALL booted out by the early '70s; they ended up forming their own party, the American Conservative Party....now THEY, the ACP, are the modern day KKK vehicle.

One thing you could do, though, is butterfly the failed Presidency of Tom Dewey(OOC: A Democrat ITTL), of 1949-53, and the assassination of John Roosevelt in Austin in '63, as well as the successful one of California Republican Robert Ellsworth(OOC: Think along the lines of JFK & FDR combined, only with changed parties), from 1960-72.

Dewey was a right wing anti-Communist nutjob, Roosevelt's death delayed the rise of the Progressive wing of the Dems for almost 15 years and Ellsworth saved the liberal wing of the GOP from falling apart and dying.
 
This is a tough one. The Democratic party had to have votes from the diehard neo-Confederates who would never vote for the "party of Lincohn" in order to put together enough electoral votes to win the presidency and to control the house and senate. From the 1870's, when the Democratic party in the south destroyed Reconstruction-era governments that protected blacks and violently suppressed black voters and then institutionalized that suppression in the form of the various Jim Crow laws, into the mid-1960's, the Democratic party was an unspoken bargain: The party could be as progressive as it wanted to be in everything else, but it had to leave the Democrats in the South alone to do what they wanted to with their black populations.

The only way I could see the Democratic party becoming a vanguard for Civil Rights is if African-Americans suffered some kind of massive collective amnesia about slavery and nearly a century of Democratic party-led voter suppression and denial of rights under the Jim Crow laws, and started voting mostly Democratic once they did get the right to vote. That's about as likely as Democratic governor George Wallace appealing to black voters in a close race after standing in the schoolhouse door to stop blacks from entering all-white schools.

Bottom line: The challenge is ASB. The Democrats were the party that tore the country apart to keep slavery. They had to know that blacks would overwhelmingly vote Republican if they got the vote, which is why the Democratic party in the south worked so long and so hard to keep blacks from voting in the century after the Civil War.
 
With a POD after Lincoln's assassination, your challenge is to make the Democrats the party most supportive of civil rights and supported by a majority of African-Americans within a century of the end of the American Civil War. Have fun.

Well, this just barely happened by 1948 - 83 years later.

Incidentally - are you using "civil rights" as the usual shorthand for "equal civil rights for all citizens regardless of race", or in the more general sense of "civil liberties": freedom of speech, press, and religion, the right to keep and bear arms, right to property, due process, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures?

Because it wouldn't be that hard to make up a TL in which

a) racial equality is achieved much sooner
b) the other party is less deferential to civil rights claims
c) most blacks, being poor, support the Democrats for economic reasons

Or, let's say, the other party is Red socialist and fairly openly wants a bolshevik state in which "reactionaries" are silenced, property is confiscated, "class enemies" are summarily imprisoned or liquidated, and
"superstitions" such as Christianity are suppressed (thus alienating the devout majority of black Americans).
 
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