Was The American Civil Rights Movement Inevitable?

Was The American Civil Rights Movement Inevitable?

I've been wondering about this for awhile now, so I thought it would make for an intresting discussion.

Although, to clarify, I don't just mean that it never happens. Other questions would be, how could it happen later in the century, and, what is the latest it could happen by?

What would the impact of a latter civil rights movement have on American Society?

And is it possible for segregation to counitue until today?
 
In the long run it (the Civil Rights movement) is inevitable once the Southern states implement Jim Crow laws, and that was largely taken care of by the Edwardian era.

America is too vibrant a democracy to allow millions of its citizens to continue to be subjugated while a mass midle class is being created & extended by the Imperial Presidency. The hyprocisy of economic equality for some and legal inequality for others is too much.

Of course the Civil Rights movement had to fight for years before the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of the sixties were passed, and that movement could have been created slightly earlier, but it was always going to come onto the scene after WWII. You have to retard American democratic & economic advancement at a Bring the Jubilee level to stop it.
 
The civil rights movement was the product of the emergence of the post-WWII American suburban dream: one that excluded non-Caucasians.

Of course, the roots go back to the time of modernization (1910-1930) and the emergence of cinema and television to make the inequities visible. Also, the closing of the passenger railroads in the fifties put much of the rural countryside "off limits" to blacks. In 1940, anybody of any race could ride the train (though in segregated quarters) and get from town A to town B. When Americans became more reliant on cars, those towns in between became serious impediments to blacks who wished to travel: imagine an all-white town that would not even sell goods or serve food to blacks.

In rural Kansas, considered a bastion of historical opposition to slavery in the nineteenth century, there was a segregationist term that was applied in all-white towns: Don't let the sun set on them. That meant if a black person got off the train, he/she had better be on a train out of town by the end of the day.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
If the later Federal administrations hadn't sold out the blacks in the South after the war, then alot of the Jim Crow laws might not have even come into affect. The US troops staying in the South allowed the former slaves to begin integrating themselves into society. The carpetbaggers didn't help, though.

And when those troops went home, those white Southerners who had been rich landowners before the war (rightly) felt that their way of life had been taken away (rightly) by the US government, and began taking out their frustration on the only thing left for them to take out their anger on: the freed slaves left behind after the Federal troops went home.

Of course, you're playing with really strong emotions, here. Between southern whites and blacks, SOME group is going to feel that they've gotten the short end of the stick. When I was at the Vicksburg battlefield, I talked to this park ranger, and he looked me right in the eye and said: "Southerners are the only Americans who ever lost a war."

That's got to weigh on a people.
 
I really don't think you can keep a fifth of your population held down without some form of backlash. Eventually the black Americans will say "enough". Peacefully or violently there will be some crucible event.
 
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