alternatehistory.com

The collapse of Reconstruction, perhaps the handling of Reconstruction overall, is seen as a brief age of great change and progress for African Americans. After the end, progress was reversed and the status of African Americans fell into a century long status quo of segregation, oppression, abuse and Jim Crow. It took a century of gradual progress in culture and in the courts and the eruption of a Civil Rights movement in the middle of the 20th century for legal equality and steps towards social equality to come.

The question at hand is what is the best cast scenario for Black Americans with the close of the Civil War? Could we have seen lasting, proper legal and even social equality in the latter 19th century? A scenario, perhaps, where a shot in the moment of an alternate 1910 resembles the situation of the 1970s for African Americans? Or was what occurred the best scenario that could be achieved in the circumstances, with the long road to true success necessary and the only realistic outcome?
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