U.S. Slave Insurrection (HBO edition!)

Alright, so without going too much into it, there's a bit of controversy on the creators of Game of Thrones wanting to make an alternate history show about a surviving Confederacy once they complete Game of Thrones. While I'm very happy for any form of Alternate History to leak into the main stream, I totally understand (with the current political climate in the States) some thinking this is a bit insensitive.

I have seen some complaints that it is a "white person fantasy" and suggestions to instead do a show "where black people were armed & supported (not abandoned) by the US military to defeat KKK and finish Reconstruction". I thought it was an interesting enough concept to at least explore over here.

Now, there were a variety of reasons that Reconstruction ended. It's just a hard ask for the North to occupy the South forever. And the Grant administration really did try to set things up in a reasonable way (when they weren't knee deep in graft, that is). So, I understand that plausibility-wise, this is a hard ask. But so is a Confederacy that survives to modern day (IMHO).

Hence the subtitle of the thread "HBO edition" or if you prefer "Turtledove edition". The goal is not necessarily to create an airtight, 100% plausible scenario. But rather to get one "close enough" to plausible that it could be accepted by a normal (non-historian) audience's suspension of disbelief.

Hopefully this doesn't sound too stupid, and if it is considered overly political I am ok with this being shifted to the Political Chat subforum.

Also, feel free to not restrict yourself to Reconstruction - this could almost be described as a sort of anti-TL-191. Want to use a successful raid on Harper's Ferry? A successful Turner rebellion? Let's here it! :)
 
Here's a brief sketch of a somewhat plausible scenario, inspired by Male Rising a bit: Turn one of Louisiana, Florida, South Carolina, or Mississippi into strongholds of freedmen political power, probably through changes during the war like the breakup of plantation holdings and their distribution to freedmen in areas of at least one of those states. Those states actually had majority black populations, so if the freedmen can get enough political power to be doing things like drawing district boundaries and if they're able to hold off attempts to force them down through arms, then there's a good chance that they could survive the "Redeemers". Those are big ifs, but I don't think they're impossible ifs, the way trying to hold the entire South would be. Of course, you would expect a white flight out of the state subsequently, and the Great Migration would, at least in part, flow to these states, so any of them could easily become supermajority black, 70, 80, maybe even 90%. I strongly suspect that in this world there would never be a time at which there was not a black Senator or Representative between 1865 and the present day, and quite possibly the first black president would be elected before 2008 given that this state would be an incubator of black political talent. It would also be highly interesting to see how this state's laws interact with the Supreme Court, especially their anti-Civil Rights actions from the 1870s into the early 20th century.

This state, whichever of the four gets chosen, would almost assuredly become a powerhouse of black industry and finance thanks to the racism of the rest of the country. The "Black Wall Street" would certainly be located here, and I would expect that people like John Johnson (of Johnson Publishing), Charles Spaulding, and the like would tend to flock there, and be more common there than in the rest of the country. Optimistically, the reinvestment of capital into local businesses, akin to immigrant experiences, might lead the state to take off and become a powerhouse of industry, period; pessimistically, limited capital pools might lead it to remain underdeveloped, possibly even relative to other southern states, so that it remains mostly agricultural well into the 20th century. In the latter case, and possibly the former, the entrance of white firms into the market following regulation might pose some issues, the way a lot of black-owned businesses have faltered before them IOTL.

I think a show on this might be most interesting if it's set in the 1920s or so, where you could set up a really strong contrast between this location--which would be less than perfect, but still far better than the surrounding states--and the rest of the South. But setting it up in the present day might also be interesting, just more controversial.
 
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