WI: PODs allow for a stronger segregated US (black/white) to current day in USA

I thought of some interesting PODs. What if Brown vs Board of Education does not rule against segregation per se, but mandated that "separate but equal" be stringently enforced. Meaning, the federal government makes sure southern states give equal resources to black and white schools in the deep south.

What if the civil rights movements emphasize equal, but separate vs "integration" more strongly, looking for better resources. That was the main point of a lot of civil rights protests, equal housing, schools, etc. What if the white establishment is FORCED to acknowledge that and designate such resources to blacks. Black politicians who represent their population? Of course, for that it's probably better for a longer radical reconstruction. I.e. not ending @ 1877, but going until the early 1900s. Black-owned businesses, universities and black politicians resist stronger and the whites in the south are forced to deal with blacks more equal as opposed to OTL.
 
Certainly a plausible WI we're dealing with here.

I think one potential event, or series of events, that could lead to this scenario are the NAACP's court cases against segregated law schools in the 1930s and 1940s being defeated.

Another WI: perhaps Harry Truman loses in 1948? If memory serves, he pushed civil rights during that election after liberal Democrats moved the party in that direction, and the Dixiecrats walked out. Perhaps it doesn't become a cornerstone of the party that's reawakened with the burgeoning Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s?

One last scenario: JFK isn't killed in 1963. Does he get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed?
 

iddt3

Donor
Certainly a plausible WI we're dealing with here.

I think one potential event, or series of events, that could lead to this scenario are the NAACP's court cases against segregated law schools in the 1930s and 1940s being defeated.

Another WI: perhaps Harry Truman loses in 1948? If memory serves, he pushed civil rights during that election after liberal Democrats moved the party in that direction, and the Dixiecrats walked out. Perhaps it doesn't become a cornerstone of the party that's reawakened with the burgeoning Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s?

One last scenario: JFK isn't killed in 1963. Does he get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed?
I think these PoDs are all too late, television and increased intercontectedness are going to make segregation increasingly unpalatable to the north. More importantly I think the South was pathologically incapable of anything remotely approaching true separate equality. even if the court cases went against the NAACP, and the supreme court mandated that the level of resources apportioned to black schools be equal, the south would find new ways to weasel out of it. The inferiority of the black man was a cornerstone of southern political thought and culture.

I think the best shot of getting something like this would be much earlier. It is possible that if during reconstruction the North went the segregation route, forced the south to apportion equal resources to blacks, gave blacks land enough to be self supporting, and created separate congressional districts to guarantee black representation, perhaps even create a specific black majority state, then the south decides that, actually, they rather like not having to deal with the "darkie problem" anymore. Maybe South Carolina is designated the black heartland, blacks are encouraged to move there, and whites to move out, with maybe another state/territory out west getting a similar treatment. It ensures white dominance of the states their in, while requiring much less violence and intimidation to maintain.
 
^
Sea Island/Gullah region was one case but the dispersement of blacks and whites post-civil war was a bit iffy. i.e. Mississippi valley was not settled by freed blacks heavily until like 1870s/1890s. I think a better case will be better voter districts and the north not shitting on the southern state designs, maybe minus the appalachian regions. Black america is better-off, more resources involved AND it means both sides are killing/lynching each other in a relative 'equal' manner :p

EDIT: so you do agree with the 'its probably better for reconstruction to be much longer and thorough' idea.
 
If I'm not mistaken, Dewey was at least as good on Civil Rights as Truman, if not better. Dewey's running mate, then-California Governor Earl Warren, certainly was.

Dewey was slightly inferior to Truman actually. Not even FDR had Truman's balls in desegregating the army. In an election year. In any case, Dewey would not have had much progress facing off against Richard Russell's Senate on the matter.
 
If I'm not mistaken, Dewey was at least as good on Civil Rights as Truman, if not better. Dewey's running mate, then-California Governor Earl Warren, certainly was.
And Wallace was MORE in favor of civil rights than Truman. (His VP Glen Taylor got arrested in Birmingham for entering a meeting through a "Colored" entrance.)

That leaves Thurmond, who did not campaign outside the South.
 
Try and do away with the Cold War - if nec'y by going back to 1917 and aborting the Bolshevik Revolution. Also try and postpone decolonisation.

This means the US is not in competition with the SU for the allegiance of non-white ex-colonies. Segregation is far less of an international embarrassment and "all deliberate speed" can be a good deal more deliberate and altogether less speedy.
 
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Another good start is to get rid of the first Red Scare and the resulting immigration restrictions. Cheap eastern european labor continues to flow into the US, and to fill northern factory positions. Consequentially, the great migration is blunted. Northern black communities are much smaller and much more fearful of exercising their political voice. Likewise the tyranny of Jim Crow continues (and probably worsens) as millions of African Americans, who otherwise migrated, remain stuck in the South.
 
Or you could have 'white flight,' the assassination of civil rights organizers, a so-called 'war on crime' involving massive crackdowns on minority communities and racial profiling at the same time as hands-off policies in white communities, the appointment of a segregationist like Rehnquist as chief justice, a rollback of Warren Court and Berger Court decisions, a series of supreme court decisions that make it much harder to win anti-discrimination cases, etc...
 
Some good responses so far.

In regards to a longer Reconstruction, how would we achieve that? No Lincoln assassination? Perhaps the impeachment of Andrew Johnson goes forward (although the Radical Republicans still basically ran Reconstruction policy after that, if memory serves).

Also the idea of immigration continuing into the USA in the 1920s is a good one, but what about the 1919 race riots being much worse? I'm not sure how much worse they could have become though.

One last WI: Marcus Garvey never has a fall from grace and stays prominent, perhaps holding on to his power into the 1930s?
 

iddt3

Donor
Well you need a different set of concepts going into reconstruction, not just longer (it could even end up begin shorter if it works). Blacks have to be given enough of a power base and a stake in the system to be content, while whites have to not feel threatened. If there is anytime you could do mass relocation of African Americans then the civil war would be that time. Since Lincoln was assassinated and we don't know what he would have actually done, that might be a decent PoD.
In the short term this is actually pretty good for the US, by the standards of the time it would be fairly progressive, and would allow millions of African Americans who were mired in poverty OTL to contribute more. Eventually (by say the 1920's) the system will be stagnant and in need of reform or a return to oppression. The participation of a substantial portion of African Americans will also have some big impacts in the elections of the period. Assuming African Americans are reasonably content to stay where they are, you'd also see smaller African american communities in the north.
 
Woodrow Wilson set race relations back by a generation. This was doubly bad since the 1890s set relations back a generation as well (that's when the South went farther than ever before in regards to Jim Crow). The extremely bad race relations of the 1920s were considerably influenced by Wilson's promotion (instead of crackdown) of the new KKK, endorsing Birth of a Nation (though since it used Wilson's own "history" books of the South as source material, it would be hypocritical of him not to endorse it), resegregating the Federal Government and segregating the Navy. The Republicans after Wilson didn't undo what he did (eerily similar to Obama and Gitmo).

FDR was neutral but slightly positive. Harry Truman was the best thing for the African American community since Abraham Lincoln. But Jimmy Byrnes, of South Carolina, was FDR's first choice for the second slot in '44. I think everyone can see where I'm going with this.
 

iddt3

Donor
Woodrow Wilson set race relations back by a generation. This was doubly bad since the 1890s set relations back a generation as well (that's when the South went farther than ever before in regards to Jim Crow). The extremely bad race relations of the 1920s were considerably influenced by Wilson's promotion (instead of crackdown) of the new KKK, endorsing Birth of a Nation (though since it used Wilson's own "history" books of the South as source material, it would be hypocritical of him not to endorse it), resegregating the Federal Government and segregating the Navy. The Republicans after Wilson didn't undo what he did (eerily similar to Obama and Gitmo).

FDR was neutral but slightly positive. Harry Truman was the best thing for the African American community since Abraham Lincoln. But Jimmy Byrnes, of South Carolina, was FDR's first choice for the second slot in '44. I think everyone can see where I'm going with this.

Yes but by that point segregation is unsustainable, it's either going to die, or going to tear the country apart, but it can't keep going as it had been.
 
You don't need to avoid the Cold War. You need to avoid, at a minimum, the Holocaust, & preferably WW2, also. Seeing the consequences of racism taken to extreme made segregation far less palatable. Seeing black troops as more/less equal to white had an impact on whites, & gave blacks a sense they were entitled to demand change (a sense nothing like so widespread before).

You'd be well-advised in butterflying the Hispanic victories in opposing segregation in California, the black victories in interstate transit, & the rise to power of, frex, A. P. Randolph, too. Preventing the NAACP would probably be good, too.

It probably also needs a genuinely bigoted asshole or two as President to change the national tone.

As noted upthread, killing of TV would be a help; I consider that improbable, & newsreel could have an effect, if not nearly so immediate or persistent, so even doing it is no guarantee. Having smarter local officials not turning police dogs & fire hoses on marchers while cameras were rolling:rolleyes: could work wonders.
 
1337indahouse said:
phx1138 said:
the black victories in interstate transit
huh? Please explain.
I'm thinking of the court challenges to segregated interstate busing, which helped support ("provoke" isn't quite the word) the Freedom Rides. Slightly different membership on SCotUS, different outcomes, & maybe no Freedom Rides, & so less bad PR for Southron LEAs with their police dogs & firehoses on national TV.:eek: (Maybe also fewer murders & disappearances, & at least one fewer bad movie, "Mississippi Burning", masquerading as "history".:rolleyes:)
 
Jackie Robinson tool alot of flack from other black baseball players for joining the white leagues. Thing is they wanted integration but they wanted the Negro leagues and white leagues to merge as a whole. That means players, teams, coaches, trainers, everything. As it all the best players left the Negro leagues which ended up folding in the 1950's.

So what if Jackie refused but the leagues did do a merger? Eventually with the coming of television they would have been forced to merge. Similar to how the football AFL merged with the NFL. We might still have the Kansas City Monarchs and the Homestead Grays. Looking back at history many times white and negro teams played each other and Negro teams won more than their equal share.
 
It's possible to have a different outcome to the US Civil War lead to a rentrenchment of the White-Free Black-Unfree Black racial trichotomy instead of a White-Black dichotomy. That system might well perpetuate itself long as the middle caste has much less interest in changing a system if it fears that means it gets bumped down into the lowest caste, where the lowest caste's efforts to change that system would be resisted by *both* of the other two castes. This'd be more akin to US apartheid than segregation but it would also be more correspondingly enduring in that it's much harder to get rid of this, due to the immensely convoluted social structures that'd rise out of it than it was to get rid of segregation.
 
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