Was a "Race War" in 60s/70s America Actually possible?

There's always the option for ironic usage, like the Chicago cops' '68 beatdown of the hippies being labelled a 'police riot' by federal investigators.

Anyway, I remember the guys on Social.History.What-if once doing a good job debunking the idea that escaped antebellum slaves would or could ever have engaged in rampant domestic terrorism; same thing goes for every AA group in American history, even including those handful of late sixties urban radicals in the NY/SF/LA areas.

Black Panthers wanting to initiate a race war is on the level of Charles Manson wanting to initiate a race war. Isolated acts of violent craziness do not a war make.

(And widespread rioting does not meet the criteria of 'warfare', either.)
You are correct sir, hence my point. I have discovered that in most cases those who seriously speak of "Race war" understand neither the meaning of the word "Race" nor the meaning of the word "War".
 
Sorry, but your premise was so wide open, it was easy for me to see the downside to what you wrote; this ain't Turtledove fiction, man.

You should console yourself with the fact that most people on this thread do appear to believe that, why actually, yes, this is Turtledove fiction.

You confuse me, sir.
 
We've explored this in FaT, guys

I could see a much more radicalized Black Power movement goosed by the FBI into being much spookier to the Silent Majority 1968-1975, but not a full-on race war for several reasons:
  • Blacks were hardly a monolithic bloc in the US without any variances in opinion
  • Same goes for whites.
  • Nobody had a big enough beef to make revolution seem like THE answer outside of some college kids looking for a romantic Cause. Vietnam was winding down, overt racism was getting officially discouraged, and there was enough economic mobility going on that folks didn't feel like they were missing out.
  • Folks saw what happened to Cinque and the SLA- they tried fighting the LAPD and got crushed. Neither the Weathermen or SLA or any other wacky-left terrorist groups developed the cohesive discipline and network to carry out attacks around the country and develop enough of a passive following to become a popular movement as Maoist guerrilla doctrine demanded for success.
  • There's an intense and immense difference between the Black Panthers, who emphasized community self-defense and empowerment, and Nation of Islam's nuttier fringes who really wanted to go beyong black separatism and self-empowerment to give Whitey what for. Both were very intensely penetrated and probed by the FBI and CIA during COINTELPRO and had as much chance of overthrowing the US government as I do of becoming Pope.
  • As awful as the hollowing out of American cities was for their tax bases, it allowed middle-class whites a sense of security and disengagement that made it difficult for them to support the kind of measures that would lead to race war.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
Soft bigotry and indifference were what helped Jim Crow survive. Wallace was voted for by millions of poor and middle-class Southerners, who went to school, read the paper, perhaps had a black servant and treated them courteously, and then voted for Wallace. Only a tiny minority of Southerners were picketing at the schoolhouse door. Passive racism is the most common kind.
Yup. It's the passive racism that basically kneecapped the Civil Rights Movement when it tried to tackle things in Northern cities (Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, NYC, etc.).

That's actually the part of the Civil Rights Movement people tend to ignore--the Northern Theater. The South was basically a morality play; as has been mentioned, people didn't much like seeing policemen attacking protestors with dogs and firehoses or reading about the Klan klowning around and killing Northern teens and black Sunday Schoolers and was often cast as, "Let them vote and let them be your classmates."

Yet in 1964, you have black ministers frankly saying that the crisis of black housing in Northern cities was far greater than that affecting the voting rights of Southern blacks (who had higher employment and homeowner rates than their cousins across the Mason-Dixon.) The great irony is that overt monstrosity of Jim Crow was far easier to defeat (and face) than the realities of housing covenants, slums, city machines, and police-riots in Northern cities that saw the "race problem" as a strictly Southern one in an ugly case of passive neo-sectionalism.
 
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