Race relations with a surviving Huey Long?

Suppose Huey Long is not assassinated and either becomes president or continues to accrue power as a prominent senator, going on to achieve other political heights. How would he have affected race relations?

I didn't want to make the focus on a President Long timeline, because that would be tricky on its own and most of the focus would then be on his potentially radical economic policies.

This thread was inspired by this meme from the /r/Kaiserreich - the man was such a chameleon you could find any quote to support almost any ideology.

CHSAiGCqkZPwmmfUTZ_TYHEjRAbF8tq5DU5ioD5IkHI.png
 
Huey wouldn't have had much effect. He didn't use race baiting in his campaigns, but he didn't push for equality either.

A President Long would most likely have been a lot like FDR. If he didn't make it to the White House, he would have just been 1 of 100 Senators.
 
Huey wouldn't have had much effect. He didn't use race baiting in his campaigns, but he didn't push for equality either.

Of course, a President Huey Long elected in, say, 1940 would be shameless enough to seek more than two terms even in the absence of an international crisis, and assuming he's successful and serves as POTUS during the late 1940s and early 1950s, he'd have to handle many of the civil rights issues that Truman and Eisenhower did IOTL (butterflies may mean they take on a slightly different form, but they'd be present regardless). For instance, does a President Long desegregate the military?
 
Suppose Huey Long is not assassinated and either becomes president or continues to accrue power as a prominent senator, going on to achieve other political heights. How would he have affected race relations?

I didn't want to make the focus on a President Long timeline, because that would be tricky on its own and most of the focus would then be on his potentially radical economic policies.

This thread was inspired by this meme from the /r/Kaiserreich - the man was such a chameleon you could find any quote to support almost any ideology.

CHSAiGCqkZPwmmfUTZ_TYHEjRAbF8tq5DU5ioD5IkHI.png


You can do this kind of stuff with most of the populists
 
Domestically, Huey would have been very similar or even preferable on economic issues to FDR and no different on racial ones. However his stringent isolationism might have been problematic in the long-term. Huey may not maintain the embargo on oil exports that forced Japan into the strategic position of needing to declare war on the US. If this leaves the US out of the war, and Huey's isolationism prevents lend-lease from going through you may very well have an Axis victory. In that case, race relations will be catastrophically worse with racist, eugenicist, and fascist ideals having won the war.

On the other hand, if the Soviet Union wins a long, drawn out war and pushes all the way to the channel, American anti-communism will likely see racial unrest as a sign of red activity and similarly try to keep it under control.
 
As a southerner, would he have had different views on how to handle Jim Crow from the New Yorker? At the very least, it would be interesting having a native son of the south who is somewhat anti-racist and for improving the lives of black people in the highest office of the land.
 
Long's power base would never have stood for even the relatively modest racial gains made under FDR. I don't know enough about Long to say what might have been in his head, but I do know what his power base in the south was like. If the southern bloc had had their way, you would never have seen the Tuskegee Airmen, or blacks in any role other than service troops, laborers in uniform etc, even in a WWII like OTL. Even the limited black combat units that saw action and the numbers of blacks who received infantry/weapons training was grit under the saddle for much of the south.
 
Long is not one of my favorite historical figures- I think if he lived he would have lit-
erally attempted to make himself dictator of
the USA- yet it should be said of him that he
saw to it that blacks also benefitted from his
programs & did not use racial slurs, once going so far as to publicly apologize for using the "N" word. Believe me, for a southern politician in the 1930's IOTL to do
this was virtually an act of Sainthood (just
look @ Theodore Bilbo for a comparison).
 
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As far as Southern politicians go, Long was fairly liberal when it came to race. I don't see him pushing civil rights, but he probably would make some concerted effort to make sure blacks would benefit from his agenda.
 
As far as Southern politicians go, Long was fairly liberal when it came to race.
So was Strom Thurmond, believe it or not. One of Thurmond's first acts as Governor of SC in 1947 was to order the arrest of several leaders of a lynching. They were acquitted after a sham trial, but the mere fact of the arrests was a strong message, which put an end to lynching in SC.

Though to be sure, lynching had been declining all across the South for decades: from hundreds per year in 1900 to about 30 by 1930, to less than 10 in 1940. Still, Thurmond took a step forward.
 

Japhy

Banned
So was Strom Thurmond, believe it or not. One of Thurmond's first acts as Governor of SC in 1947 was to order the arrest of several leaders of a lynching. They were acquitted after a sham trial, but the mere fact of the arrests was a strong message, which put an end to lynching in SC.

Though to be sure, lynching had been declining all across the South for decades: from hundreds per year in 1900 to about 30 by 1930, to less than 10 in 1940. Still, Thurmond took a step forward.
This basically hits home how useless "Fairly Liberal on Race" was in the Solid South, unless we're going to pretend that Thurmond wasn't still completely repulsive. Which is fair in regards to Long because like All Southern Populists he was going to drop his black support the moment it wasn't useful to him anymore.
 
Which is fair in regards to Long because like All Southern Populists he was going to drop his black support the moment it wasn't useful to him anymore.

Having grown up in Louisiana and having a native's understanding of the Long family, I have to disagree with this...compared to the vast majority of Southern politicians, they were never anti-black. Not only Huey, but his brother Earl (read A.J. Liebling's book, The Earl of Louisiana )
 
But wasn't there that whole "tarbrush" thing with Dr. Weiss? Not that makes him George Wallace or anything, but still...
 

Japhy

Banned
Having grown up in Louisiana and having a native's understanding of the Long family, I have to disagree with this...compared to the vast majority of Southern politicians, they were never anti-black. Not only Huey, but his brother Earl (read A.J. Liebling's book, The Earl of Louisiana )
Earl wasn't ever trying to run for President, so his relationships had to be different. He just wanted to run Louisiana. Huey's national alliances weren't going to work if he kept being vaguely nice about race issues. I'm not capable of having faith in anyone who works with Gerald L. K. Smith and Father Coughlin.
 
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