What if Ike had not forced integration in Little Rock and so on...

[repoman]

I was trying to mull in my head an alternate history for the US starting around 1957 where segregation was just left to continue by the President flaunting the Supreme Courts decision in Brown vs Board of Education by not forcing integration.

I think that it would probably made the Great Society and Voting Rights and even immigration reform of 1965 be delayed for a long time.


Interesting that he mentions Woodrow Wilson who segregated the military and the federal government. He must have known about that.


Any alternative historians here?

 

[ronburgundy]

Depends on if you assume that Kennedy wouldn't have done it just a few years later, or others who followed him.

IF we assume no Federal force was used against States that refused to enforce integration themselves, then a whole lot could have changed, including the rise of the GOP as the party of paranoid racists that is today. It is likely that forced integration helped set the stage for the Republicans to use the Southern Strategy to gain massive support in the South among white racists.

Also, it might have meant far greater "black flight" from the Southern States to more progressive States willing to enact integration. That would further reduce the focus of southern whites on race, impeding the Southern Strategy. Its plausible that far greater influx of blacks into other States could have triggered more of a negative reaction, increasing racist sentiments in those States, at least during a transition period.