DBWI: End segregation

A lot of Americans, including myself, feel shameful that there is still segregation and no voting rights for blacks in the South. But how could segregation end?
 
I think it's easy for a privileged Northern white liberal to look down on us Southron folk. You guys never had to experience the horrors of Reconstruction. But really, you have to understand that segregation is the best option we have. It allows both the White and Negro communities to exercise their right of self-determination. More importantly, it's a cornerstone of our culture. It's really quite oppressive for Northerners to expect that their systems are suited to our way of life. Just let each society decide how it should live.
 
Unfortunately, the evidence available is that your "separate but equal" communities are neither separate nor equal. Black communities are routinely below white communities in every economic indicator, from income to infrastructure. Attacks by whites upon black communities are over three times as common as the reverse, and your voting regulations are specifically designed to exacerbate the situation by effectively disenfranchising as may blacks as you can. As for the "horrors" of Reconstruction, I can't begin to imagine how awful it must have been for the planter class to have to become productive members of society, and learn to treat their workers, even the ones with dark skin, like actual people. How terrible, how unendurable of an oppression to have to actually apply the law equally to all! If you had, perhaps the Southern US wouldn't be regarded as a contemptible backwater, clearly an unendurable proposition.
 
The old American government was on the verge of ending Jim Crow when World War 3 broke out in October 1962. Had they not collapsed after Washington DC got nuked to hell with several other cities, they might have been able to kill segregation for good. Everybody knows that the "Restored Confederate States of America" that emerged from the wreckage of the South is nothing more than a racist dictatorship masquerading as a democracy.
 

missouribob

Banned
OOC: Considering that segregation and Jim Crow never truly ended in OTL anyway shouldn't we just be talking about the status quo?
 
Well first and foremost you need to destroy the Democratic Party. They've been the bulwark of Jim Crow on a state level, and breaking them, along with preventing the States Rights Act getting passed (not impossible, LBJ had to use every dirty trick in the book to get it passed in the first place), is absolutely required to allow desegregation to go through. IOTL even during Republican administrations desegregation was only limited to the armed forces and Federal employees, with the GOP unable, and let's be honest often unwilling, to challenge the State powers that upheld Jim Crow, even under outspokenly pro-civil rights Presidents like McCarthy or Goldwater.

Whilst it is true that there were anti-segregation elements in the Democratic Party, and some have suggested having them become dominant in the party, I think that's unlikely. A more realistic scenario would be to have Henry Wallace's Social Democratic Party somehow supplant the Democrats, but even then that's a long shot that would require preventing both the Second and Third Red Scares, WW3, and the post-war anti-leftist reaction in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union. The destruction of the Social Democrats effectively destroyed the anti-segregation wing of the Democrats along with the more actively pro-civil rights Republicans, and is part of the reason why it wasn't until the mid-80s that desegregation was back on the agenda for American progressives (and there are still plenty of people trying to make the progressive case for "separate but equal").

To be perfectly blunt, short of a revolution I don't see it happening. White supremacy is just too heavily entrenched in the US political system to allow it to reform away.
 
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