AHC: Civil Rights wank

[TheDetailer]

(I wasn’t sure where to put this so I decided pre-1900.)

From 1865 onwards (or sometime earlier if you want too) and beyond make the Civil Rights movements and other similar progressive movements relating to civil and human rights (African Americans, women, native Americans, Asian Americans, LGBT people, Latino Americans, Pacific Islander Americans, Jews, Muslims, etc.) as successful as possible ITTL, not just in America but elsewhere around the too if anybody has any ideas.

 

[Mr_ Bondoc]

1865-1915: President Abraham Lincoln, Vice-President Andrew Johnson, Secretary of State Andrew Johnson are assassinated, allowing for a more Radical Republican agenda to be established, including a ban on former Confederate officials from holding office, the State of Texas is divided into 3 parts, and African-Americans are granted reparations in the form of "40 acres & mule", with first dibs to land grants in Oklahoma, as well as the newly purchased Alaska, along with the South being divided into military occupation districts until c. 1915, cracking down the KKK and other organizations seen as supporting secessionist sentiment,....

 

[Silvaria]

Basically More Radical Reconstruction is the play here, but I think it requires Abe alive.

 

[TheDetailer]

1865-1915: President Abraham Lincoln, Vice-President Andrew Johnson, Secretary of State Andrew Johnson are assassinated, allowing for a more Radical Republican agenda to be established, including a ban on former Confederate officials from holding office, the State of Texas is divided into 3 parts, and African-Americans are granted reparations in the form of "40 acres & mule", with first dibs to land grants in Oklahoma, as well as the newly purchased Alaska, along with the South being divided into military occupation districts until c. 1915, cracking down the KKK and other organizations seen as supporting secessionist sentiment,....

Basically More Radical Reconstruction is the play here, but I think it requires Abe alive.

- Abraham Lincoln narrowly survives and John Wilkes Booth is captured alive days later in 1865, but Andrew Johnson and William Seward are killed instead.
- Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens, Benjamin Wade, and Charles Sumner take over the Republican Party in response to the assassinations after 1865, resulting in a more radical Reconstruction than IOTL.

 

[Brady Kj]

What would the Radical Republicans do while they're in power?

 

[Mr_ Bondoc]

Just to flag that the ATL is a high-wank:

1872: Victoria Claflin Woodhull launches the third party Equal Rights Party bid for the U.S. Presidency, announcing Frederick Douglass as her running mate, sparking international attention,...

While it the election bid fails, it serves as signal of how different things are...

 

[Infinite-Monkeys]

So specifically around ethnicity

I think a really important part of this is changing the calculation for who counts as 'them' and 'us'. One of the issues post Civil War is the planter elite of the deep South was still seen as very much a core part of the American elite (culturally, politically, historically), so it was fairly easy for them to reassert a degree of dominance in the region and that acted as the weight against the Civil Rights movement in general.

So I'd agree with the above posts about shifting around who is in charge and generally trying to enable radical reconstruction. But add to that more push in the other direction more radical figures gain influence in groups like the KKK, and they decide to focus part of their campaign on Terror attacks on 'race traitors'so not just intimidating and lynching blacks but targeting more and more white people who they see as against their interests. Including some very lurid /extreme cases with the type of victims that tend to set the tabloids aflame (e.g. upper-middle-class + young white WASP women), and increasingly any association with being anti-civil rights is linked with terror groups that are firmly seen as part of the hostile 'them', meaning folk you want to be influential in US industrial politics increasingly shift towards being pro-civil rights.

Ideally the KKK/it's equivalent also end up adopting more explicitly the ideas of fascism/it's equivalent in this timeline in the 30s (which feels quite possible with it alienated from its traditional elite backing, well isolated domestically, and already having a significant overlap in mindset) , so on top of that, these ideals are associated with a hostile genocidal and ultimately defeated power further delegitimising them.

My general suspicion is so much of US early race relations is impacted by how it treats its black citizens if it comes into the 1930-1940s in a very progressive place there you would in turn see generically better treatment across the board for everyone who isn't a Native American (I'm less sure about how to accelerate progress there with a 1865 pod)

LGBTQ+
For the US specifically I think the answer here is different religious development. Particularly comparing to the US's relative peers in Europe, the churches that have become dominant particularly in battleground states are massively more homophobic and this has led to a much slower direction of travel on a lot of fronts. This might actually feed in the above point as I have a vague understanding that a lot of the more reactionary churches in the south were partially boosted by supporting segregation so maybe you'd see a slightly more European -like development without it but I don't know enough about US church politics/growth to know what else contribute. This would also like to help quite a bit with women's rights at least avoiding some of the backsliding we've seen in the last few years e.g. around abortion, I'd wonder it might make a slightly better environment to push for things like maternity leave which is of course a pretty much universally accepted norm in the rest of the Western world.

I also suspect having the HIV epidemic not initially associated with LGBTQ+ folk would help a lot, maybe it comes in a little bit earlier coupled with a slightly extended/expanded hippie movement and initially tears through a mixed gender/sexuality population of freelove/swingers avoiding the explicit association with homosexuality (this would likely and steadily to a generic pro monogamy backlash).

 

[Mr_ Bondoc]

Something that could add some flavor to the proceedings is the fact that in the 1880s/ 1890s , the LGBTQ+ movement was heavily tied to the science fiction literary movements of the early 20th century. In America, they were called the "Calamites", and in Great Britain, they called the "Uranians". In the ATL, what if the movement by Walt Whitman not only survived but thrived:

Uranians - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[mr morbius]

snip, the State of Texas is divided into 3 parts, snip

That's a genuinly horrible idea.
As pointed out in this Video, splitting Texas does very little and only creates headaches for the Union Army.
Even if you somehow enforce it then they would probably just vote to Re-Unite once the Union Army left - and you can't keep it there forever. If anything, this might horribly backfire if the Insurgency gets too out of hand.

 

[Mr_ Bondoc]

That's a genuinly horrible idea.
As pointed out in this Video, splitting Texas does very little and only creates headaches for the Union Army.
Even if you somehow enforce it then they would probably just vote to Re-Unite once the Union Army left - and you can't keep it there forever. If anything, this might horribly backfire if the Insurgency gets too out of hand.

If anything, the problem in the meantime would be how to finance the division. Consider that occupation means that the region is reduced to a resource and agrarian economy for the Confederate states, as opposed to the black-majority populated states.

 

[Emperor Norton I]

Concerning Radical Reconstruction, even for a just cause, vengeance breeds resentment. Even against an adversary that wants to be an adversary and will draw their resentments from wrong beliefs or presumed trespasses regardless of their treatment, this is true. I know the story of the Radicals is more than that stereotype, but I'd argue the Antebellum nature of the South may not be domesticated by a hard hand for its own sake but purely in justice.

Forgiveness is key. However that is not to say accepting injustice, cruelty or evil. That must be prosecuted, prevented and dealt with. If Lincoln survives, you would not have utopia but he would be the needed careful navigator between malice towards none and no acceptance of injustice by the White South. The South won the cultural war and it's myth became the narrative, to the detriment of all Black Americans.

The story of race in America will continue to be rough. The need for live and let live between North and South is going to let bad people get away with it; not all but more than should, as that is a frequent fact of history. There's going to be old men sitting in wicker chairs with grandchildren on their knees thinking they're a hero, despite all their sins. But we would have a better starting ground to move forward in subsequent generations.

 

[Onedotman]

A Radical Reconstruction that fundamentally changes the South's socio-economic fabric is a good start. Land redistribution to freedmen and industrialization of the South would both economically empower the freedmen and weaken the privileged planter class. Securing black voting rights from the very start is also crucial.

However as previous users have said, Reconstruction should never be too harsh and vengeful if you don't want an entire generation of angry white Southerners.

 

[Derek Jackson]

Well what one needs is a true anti Racist Radical taking power in the aftermath of Lincoln’s murder.



He calls a special session of Congress. Constitutions of the rebel states will be written by loyal conventions chosen by ever loyal man. That will in many cases mean that former slaves dominate.

He says that he will grant immunity from prosecution for treason to all former confederates but conditions it on those with significant land holdings forfeit those.



Former slaves and some white who resisted secession get land and security.



There is some resentment. Some former confederates move to places like Kentucky and Maryland.

There is large scale attempt to say that the Rebellion was wholly done for the planter class.

The US Constitution is amended by a radical convention. The rights of former slaves and their descendants are guaranteed in all states and territories which took part in the “Treasonous rebellion”. Former slaves are permitted to serve on juries. In any case anyone can require that potential jurors or judges who supported the rebellion not serve.

There will be some population exchange. Many African Americans in the North or border states will move South.



The new South will placea huge importance on education.

Sometime in the 1870s or 80s a widow of a black union soldier will win a court case and will vote

 

[mianfei]

Really, the only way what is described here could be achieved is for there to be much more international pressure — plainly put much greater success of revolutionary socialist movements outside the United States, who would aim to isolate powerful American capital and landed interests.

Ronald Rogowski in his book Commerce and Coalitions (pages 165 and 166 of the original 1989 edition) has argued that even lower-class white Americans have no incentive to support equality because the US has been enduringly short of labor. Thus, expanding international trade and political internationalism means white workers are out-competed by much more abundant labor abroad, thus driving what Sebastian Lamb refers to as “patriotic nationalism” amongst poorer white Americans who gain from isolation from international competition and extending of the split labor market to international nonwhite labor via imperialism:

It’s easy to see that this reality also has the effect of dividing the working class. Because it does this, racism weakens workers’ collective power in the unceasing class struggle. White workers suffer less from the weakness of their class than workers of colour do, but they are still affected by it in countless ways.

We can see this in the US, where the intensity of racism is directly related to many well-known features of US society and the weakness of the US working class (bad jobs, low pay, low level of unionization, the dominance of bureaucratic business unionism, no mass workers’ party organizationally independent of the ruling class, almost no public health care or welfare, the influence of patriotic nationalism and narrow individualism etc.).

If revolutionary socialism was more successful outside the US, isolation would strengthen the lower classes of the US to a much greater degree than even during the Great Depression (which some argue was caused or partly caused by the failure of the Bolshevik Revolution to expand outside Russia). This would allow far more radical civil and other rights movements than possible during the limited contraction of the Depression and New Deal.

 

[Mr_ Bondoc]

To keep things moving, here are a few PODs to flag that the TL is more than just America:

* Starting in c. 1945, United States of Africa, as envisioned by Booker T. Washington,...

* Anglo-French Federation in c. 1914, as a means to counter American hegemony,...

* Inukai government of Japan starting in c. 1933,...

* In c. 1936, Chinese Kuomintang and Communist Parties form a Coalition government,...

* Pope Pius XIII issues encyclical condemning anti-Semitism,...

 

[CHKeeley]

Forgiveness is key. However that is not to say accepting injustice, cruelty or evil. That must be prosecuted, prevented and dealt with. If Lincoln survives, you would not have utopia but he would be the needed careful navigator between malice towards none and no acceptance of injustice by the White South. The South won the cultural war and it's myth became the narrative, to the detriment of all Black Americans.

While I agree in principle, I think even for Lincoln it is going to be a very very hard mountain to climb. The planter class, along with most of the white yeomanry, *already* felt victimized and occupied. This is a population that also has been conditioned to view black people as mere chattel incapable of self-sufficiency, let alone citizenship. I think that even an administration that can calm the radicals and proceed with a gentler Reconstruction will find that the former planters will stop at nothing to regain political power and disenfranchise Black Americans. The war had already polarized opinion, and it isn’t like there’s much of a clean slate to work with here. No matter if the federal government is kind or vengeful, they’re still “hated Yankee occupiers” who subdued the South by the sword and, in their mind, elevated racial inferiors not just to equal but privileged status. I feel as if the constituency of the potentially receptive white southerner who was offput by Radical Reconstruction is something of a mirage. The swift implementation of the Black Codes during Johnsonian Reconstruction is a glimpse into the attitudes of former rebel leaders to black southerners even under a very lenient Reconstruction regime. Cooperation with Federal/Republican officials was seen as traitorous and worthy of condemnation and social ostracism whether in 1865 or in 1872. Violence in the South and efforts to completely reject the programs of Johnsonian Reconstruction was one of the very factors that empowered so-called radicals in the North to try a different approach in the first place, and I don’t think Lincoln’s approach would have been significantly different from Johnson’s aside from more finesse and different emphasis. So I’m a tad skeptical that any sort of amicable settlement can be reached in the south given how polarized it already was in 1865 and how southern political leaders took advantage of Johnson’s leniency rather than seriously considering it an olive branch.

With that being said, I do agree that a more vengeful Reconstruction or one similar to what we saw OTL certainly has near fatal drawbacks. The south will resist and the northern public's will to enforce civil rights is sadly fickle and finite. But considering what I just said on a lenient Reconstruction, you can probably tell that I'm a bit skeptical that a Reconstruction post-1865 has much chances of success. I've read and looked for formulas that could have worked longterm since its of personal interest, and its very difficult when all factors are considered. I almost fall back to Machiavelli's dictum that men ought to be indulged or utterly destroyed. The sad fact is that the north was unwilling to decapitate the planter class, literally or metaphorically, and so was doomed to wage a losing war in the planter's own country to enforce rules the planter could never abide by. Foreign radical observers like Count Adam Gurowski were probably correct in declaring that defeating a rebellion without cutting it at the roots made the whole endeavor nearly pointless. I think expropriating the master class and distributing the land to freedmen tillers possibly could have achieved a happier end, but thats really about it. But maybe I'm a tad pessimistic and there's some other combination of circumstances that could have worked.

 

[Mr_ Bondoc]

While I agree in principle, I think even for Lincoln it is going to be a very very hard mountain to climb. The planter class, along with most of the white yeomanry, *already* felt victimized and occupied. This is a population that also has been conditioned to view black people as mere chattel incapable of self-sufficiency, let alone citizenship. I think that even an administration that can calm the radicals and proceed with a gentler Reconstruction will find that the former planters will stop at nothing to regain political power and disenfranchise Black Americans. The war had already polarized opinion, and it isn’t like there’s much of a clean slate to work with here. No matter if the federal government is kind or vengeful, they’re still “hated Yankee occupiers” who subdued the South by the sword and, in their mind, elevated racial inferiors not just to equal but privileged status. I feel as if the constituency of the potentially receptive white southerner who was offput by Radical Reconstruction is something of a mirage. The swift implementation of the Black Codes during Johnsonian Reconstruction is a glimpse into the attitudes of former rebel leaders to black southerners even under a very lenient Reconstruction regime. Cooperation with Federal/Republican officials was seen as traitorous and worthy of condemnation and social ostracism whether in 1865 or in 1872. Violence in the South and efforts to completely reject the programs of Johnsonian Reconstruction was one of the very factors that empowered so-called radicals in the North to try a different approach in the first place, and I don’t think Lincoln’s approach would have been significantly different from Johnson’s aside from more finesse and different emphasis. So I’m a tad skeptical that any sort of amicable settlement can be reached in the south given how polarized it already was in 1865 and how southern political leaders took advantage of Johnson’s leniency rather than seriously considering it an olive branch.

I certainly concur. Consider that to this day, any talk of "compromise" is actually pretty dehumanizing of African-Americans. Notice that the onus is placed on the federal government to show leniency against those who before the institution of the Black Codes were already planning the eventual overturning of the political reforms that were passed, and would often label local African-American Reconstruction leaders as "outsiders and carpetbaggers". With the risk of dragging the conversation into modern political chats/ discussion, consider that even today, many conservatives claim that the Founding Fathers universally believed that slavery was evil, but dismantling the system was too disruptive and the country needed the white majority to continue to maintain national unity:

Frederick Douglass depiction in PragerU slavery video called "sickening"

A lesson featuring the animated likeness of the famous abolitionist has attracted criticism over its "ahistorical" portrayal of his views.

www.newsweek.com

In fact, at least according to PragerU and the state of Florida, "slavery wasn't so bad":

PragerU videos teach Florida students that slavery wasn’t so bad | Commentary

The rightwing propaganda outfit Prager University has received the green light from the Florida Department of Education to have its slavery-defending, pro-colonialism videos shown in public school …

www.orlandosentinel.com

 

[SomeGuyOnline]

One of the first things I thought of is prevent the Holocaust from occurring, thus preventing Nazism and anti-Semitism from becoming widespread. Either Hitler is somehow never born, he grows up to become an artist like he originally wanted, or he gets killed by a stray bullet during the Beer Hall Putsch, causing a power vacuum within the Nazi Party and leading it to fall apart and fizzle out without a clear leader.

 

[Mr_ Bondoc]

Consider the idea that in the TL, that not only does Adolf Hitler not get born, but the Protocols of the Elders of Zion never gets published, removing one of the mainstays of anti-Semitism...

 

[ComradeHuxley]

One idea I had for a while was an African American science/economy wank.

The starting point would be the POD of „Children Of Fire: An African-American TL” with a more successful freedman bank as explained by its author Kooluk Swordsman:
„The POD I have set is that the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company (or simply Freedman's Bank) survives thanks to a perfect storm of good luck: Douglass is offered leadership earlier, the mismanagement isn't as deep or widespread, the company still has enough assets, yadda yadda. I'm not giving much specifics simply because there aren't many specifics on the company itself. However, the collapse of the Bank was a catastrophe for African-Americans on several levels -it wiped out nearly $3 million in savings (a giant amount for newly freed people) and created massive distrust of the financial system among African-Americans. It also thrust many blacks who were beginning to acquire financial security -including the Civil War veterans- back into poverty. Saving this bank will have great, great repercussions.“

But in addition I‘d like to explore some interesting black scientist of the time and give them a more commercially/scientific impactful role. For example:

Edward Alexander Bouchet (September 15, 1852 – October 28, 1918) was an American physicist and educator and was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from any American university, completing his dissertation in physics at Yale in 1876. On the basis of his academic record he was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society. In 1874, he became one of the first African Americans to graduate from Yale College.
- Turn him into the Alexander Bell of this timeline including his own version of the Bell Lab but as an opportunity for smart black people as well.

George Washington Carver (c. 1864 – January 5, 1943) was an American agricultural scientist and inventor who promoted alternative crops to cotton and methods to prevent soil depletion. He was one of the most prominent black scientists of the early 20th century-
- Have him rediscover Mendel genetics or do something with hybrid-seeds.

Charles Henry Turner (February 3, 1867 – February 14, 1923) was an American zoologist and entomologist, educator, and comparative psychologist, known for his studies on the behavior of insects, particularly bees and ants. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Turner was the first African American to receive a graduate degree at the University of Cincinnati and most likely the first African American to earn a PhD from the University of Chicago.
- Have him follow up his OTL research into mammal behaviour theory upstaging Pavlov. About 13 years before Pavlov published a renowned paper on salivating dogs and the fundamental form of learning called classical conditioning, Turner published a report describing how he trained moths to flap their wings in response to whistling, revealing that they can hear pitch. “That very well may have been the first example of classical conditioning—certainly for invertebrates,” says Abramson, who published a biography of Turner in 2003.