From where you are standing probably.
Within the context of the POD, an earlier abolition of slavery, probably.
Gammon and spinach. This was set off by your statement about
OTL,
'My personal view is that Reconstruction is the main reason that race relations in the South were so terrible in the late 19th century and into the 20th century'
Unless I'm fundamentally misunderstanding you, you are claiming that OTL's poor racial relations are due to attempting to establish full civil rights in the south after 1865. Really, from "where I am standing", it seems less insulting to Southerners to suggest that poor racial relations were rooted in attitudes from before the civil war than that the south was still hating on black folks in the 1950's as a result of a struggle they had essentially _won_ by the 1880's. This would seem to indicate an almost pathological need for scapegoats.
(Perhaps German tourists in France are regularly beaten and lynched and prevented from sitting at lunch counters as a result of the events of 1940-44, but I am unaware of it.)
I mean, really, try googling on "black codes 1865." That predates reconstruction. You simply aren't going to look sympathetically on legal equality for someone that just the other day you considered essentially subhuman and property, and to which popular wisdom ascribed an abiding lust for white women.
Now, the business about the context being one of an earlier abolition of slavery: this is
not a POD, it is a
result of some earlier POD. Abolition of slavery is not a coin-toss. We _seriously_ need to consider when and how this occured, and it probably requires a POD before the cotton gin made plantation slavery so very much more profitable.
Perhaps a successful early (under Pres Jefferson, perhaps?) move to prevent the movement of slavery into new western territories? And I see someone suggested a pre-Revolutionary POD...hm. The British hold onto part of the South in a less successful revolution, weakening the power of the slave states. Expansion of slavery is forbidden by the rump US, which later grabs (South Carolina? Georgia?) in an alternate *1812...with no possibility of expansion, slavery becomes a minor regional issue rather than a nation-splitting one...
Other suggestions?
Bruce