WI: Segregated Disneyland

What if Walt Disney created a theme park which was largely segregated in it's early years? It has separate entrances for Blacks and Whites, separate restrooms, ride queues, etc.
 
What if Walt Disney created a theme park which was largely segregated in it's early years? It has separate entrances for Blacks and Whites, separate restrooms, ride queues, etc.

It could have happened, I suppose, but I don't think "Uncle" Walt was particularly favored to that kind of thing, regardless(he didn't do this in Florida, either): earlier in his life, he might have been a paranoid anti-Communist to the point of largely ignoring the Nazis(and still willing to court German business), up until the end of the '30s, but he wasn't a dedicated racist(nor an anti-Semite, despite some rumors).
 
Not legally possible in California in the 1950's: "California has a long-reaching history of anti-discrimination law. Extending as far back as 1897, California law has prohibited discrimination against individuals in places of public accommodation..." http://www.cd-lawyers.com/americans...ations-the-california-unruh-civil-rights-act/

I always knew that California had, at least in some aspects, been a little more progressive in at least some aspects than many other states, even back in the late 19th Century, but I didn't know that anti-discrimination laws were in place as early as 1897 IOTL: Good on CA! :D:cool:
 
for an actual segregated Disney, i'd say it's ASB

for an possible example from fiction, look no further than Emporia, and by extension Columbia in general
 
What do you mean?

California did have a nasty segregation streak vis a vis Asian people. It tried to close down Chinese schools entirely in the 1880s and proceeded to segregate them thereafter, attempted to destroy the Chinese laundromat business sector, to segregate Japanese schools (which was only stopped by an agreement between Roosevelt and the Japanese that stopped Japanese immigration in exchange for not segregating Japanese schools), and passed laws preventing aliens who wouldn't be naturalized (Ie. Chinese, Japanese, a host of others) from owning land. Plus very severe racial tensions. California's history in regards to Asian people isn't exactly stellar. We also didn't allow Chinese to vote, and established numerous judicial and employment barriers for them, part of a belief that they couldn't be naturalized, and were a threat to local workers.

As an example;

"[The codes] let us keep our public schools free from the intrusion of the inferior races. If we are compelled to have Negroes and Chinamen among us, it is better, of course, that they should be educated. But teach them separately from our own children. Let us preserve our Caucasian blood pure. We want no mongrel race of moral and mental hybrids to people the mountains and valleys of California."

The San Francisco Evening Bull, Feb. 24, 1858

Admittedly as the following article points out this did start to change later on and earlier than what we'd think of as the Civil Rights era, but it was still a pretty unfortunate display.

Good article on the subject
 
I bet those laws in Cali excluded Chinese and Japanese.

I'm not convinced of that; I'm fairly sure that would have been made explicit if that were the case. This isn't to say that racism and general prejudice (as well as unofficial exclusionary practices) weren't still a problem-they certainly were-but the fact that California did enact these kinds of laws in 1897, during the beginning of what was essentially the "Nadir of Race Relations" as some historians put it, does tell you something.

Is a segregated Disneyworld a possibility then?

You'd need a different Walt Disney, I think. Maybe Snow White fails at the box office or never gets finished at all?
 
California did have a nasty segregation streak vis a vis Asian people. It tried to close down Chinese schools entirely in the 1880s and proceeded to segregate them thereafter, attempted to destroy the Chinese laundromat business sector, to segregate Japanese schools (which was only stopped by an agreement between Roosevelt and the Japanese that stopped Japanese immigration in exchange for not segregating Japanese schools), and passed laws preventing aliens who wouldn't be naturalized (Ie. Chinese, Japanese, a host of others) from owning land. Plus very severe racial tensions. California's history in regards to Asian people isn't exactly stellar. We also didn't allow Chinese to vote, and established numerous judicial and employment barriers for them, part of a belief that they couldn't be naturalized, and were a threat to local workers.

As an example;

"[The codes] let us keep our public schools free from the intrusion of the inferior races. If we are compelled to have Negroes and Chinamen among us, it is better, of course, that they should be educated. But teach them separately from our own children. Let us preserve our Caucasian blood pure. We want no mongrel race of moral and mental hybrids to people the mountains and valleys of California."

The San Francisco Evening Bull, Feb. 24, 1858

Admittedly as the following article points out this did start to change later on and earlier than what we'd think of as the Civil Rights era, but it was still a pretty unfortunate display.

Good article on the subject

Yeah, it does show that things got pretty bad in a good number of places before 1900. :(
But it could have been even worse.....
 
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