Plausibility Check: The creation of Black paramilitaries in the post-Civil War Southern U.S.?

CaliGuy

Banned
Would it have been plausible to create Black paramilitary armies in the post-Civil War Southern U.S. so that Blacks (African-Americans) in the Southern U.S. would be able to protect themselves and their own rights even without the help of Northern/U.S. troops?

Any thoughts on this?
 
As the north progresses in battle train and arm liberated freedmen using black union soldiers as leaders. Or create conditions with which black yankeeism takes hold and freedmen seek out those to train them.

If you can prevent the Northerners from leaving and install black forces in the Delta counties of Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Georgia and Northern Florida; legalize blacks in jury and install black judges for even white cases and make illegal white vigilante groups you can prevent the KKK from being a real threat.

Oh and prevent Plessey v Ferguson and other cases like it + remove mulatto status from census and society including the Adams Onis Treaty Creoles.
 
I have no doubt they could form, a longer, even bloodier reconstruction could do it. Or simply a group of escaped slaves who served with the union smuggling themselves some weapons. Now their ability to stop the rise of Jim Crow is a different story.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Oddly enough, my ACW/Trent TL has at least one regiment of Louisiana Militia who are all Black.

This really freaks out the Confederate Government, who accidentally relegalized arming Blacks and then have been staring in shock as these black Louisianans then act like model Southerners - most of them are planters themselves, they're expert riflemen, and many of them have been beating the countryside looking for the slaves who murdered one of their NCOs.

Because sometimes things that are just plain freaky have to go into a TL...
 

Towelie

Banned
Weren't the Reconstruction State Militias little more than Black paramilitary groups?

I know that the Redeemers axed the state militias and replaced them in their first acts in 1876.
 

missouribob

Banned
In this ATL state death theory is accepted and a majority black state based on the Mississippi Delta is created. Lincoln, who not only evolves on the state death issue due to his lack of better options to keep the peace in the south along with a desire by 1865 to give Black Americans some type of political franchise, does not get assassinated and works with Radical Republicans in the weeks after the Civil War to create this new state of Delta. Lincoln is given extra political capital after he escapes assassination but the Vice President is killed in the plot.

In any case Congress creates the State of Hamilton which due to its overwhelming black majority population is the bastion of reconstruction. Many of the Blacks who in OTL went west after the war go to Hamilton. The state's constitution is written by a supermajority of Black Republicans. The State of Hamilton mandates (relative) egalitarianism on the basis of race by law and has NO Jim Crow or Black Code laws.

Anyway this sparks a white reactionary backlash much larger than OTL but also less effective. The KKK and other terrorist organizations CAN'T dislodge the State of Hamilton's government due to continued federal support. Many of the wealthy white landowners who provided support to the Klan are imprisoned, stripped of their land and it is redistributed to the state's poor, black and white. Basically a half assed land redistribution campaign occurs that is far more effective than any we saw in our universe.

By the 1880s no matter what political butterflies Reconstruction in the south is a dead letter and white Democrats have retaken control of the state governments, EXCEPT Hamilton. In Hamilton the land is largely out of the hands of the former planter class, many of the lower class white population has fled but many blacks from the Jim Crow south have taken their place, a Black run state government exists with Senators, Congressmen and clout in the Federal Government. The state has a majority black militia that has sometimes fought with out of state groups (having long ago crushed the internal reactionary white population), has black juries and has a mostly black population with the same colored people in local, county and state government to boot.
 
Top