Here's something I've been debating whether to put into my own alternate-universe project, a few alternate history scenarios for civil rights in the 1950s-1960s. It's really a surprisingly neglected field outside of certain "worst case" scenarios.

1. The one "favorite", the civil rights movement and opposing white supremacists escalates to an outright civil war by the 1970s, which was semi-seriously "predicted" at the time. This usually presupposed that the militancy of the Black Panthers would become the norm, by the time of their actual emergence if not at an earlier date. This has since been rightly discounted as unrealistic. However, it's plausible that things could have escalated as far as a state of martial law across the Deep South. The realistic parameters are that this would only occur if black/ minority elements gained the upper hand, or if white racialist retaliations to real and imagined threats escalated to the point of threatening federal authority and public order.
2. An actually realistic scenario would be that the military does not desegregate prior to the 1950s. This would have complex implications. On the one hand, it would remove a significant perceived victory for anti-segregationists that helped inspire further activism. On the other, it would actually give such groups proportionately greater bargaining power in the event of national unrest, to the extent that the military would have to consider the loyalty of all-black units and possibly black officers if called on to respond. The “realistic” counterpoint is that the military would almost certainly have considered this in carrying out actual desegregation.
3. Now the big one people really don’t want to talk about, a significant faction of the civil rights movement opposes the legalization of interracial marriage. From what we know now, this is probably the most significant thing that black/ minority rights groups might have split over, especially in the event of a “big tent” movement that also included native Americans, Jews, etc. The problem becomes what if anything the other side of such a schism could have sought. They could bludgeon local courts and law enforcement into going through the motions of acting on complaints from black women who were assaulted, abused and/ or abandoned by white men. They might get away with exposing and roughing up the most aggressive and overconfident predators and falling back on the defense that they were simply detaining those who had violated the law on their own land. But short of turning Southern black communities into the equivalent of Indian reservations, the miscegenation laws were never going to be enforced independent of a sexualized dominance hierarchy. All this just goes to show the extent to which the actual civil rights organizers were pragmatic rather than idealistic. They would have known there were plenty of ways interracial marriage could end badly for blacks individually and collectively, but there was simply nothing to lose in burning down a system that was always used to their disadvantage.

So those are my logical, horrible thoughts on civil rights history. The real question on my mind is, has anybody really tried a treatment of this subject? Especially independent of the “2nd Civil War in ca. 1970” trope??? For me, I’m still debating whether I want to go there, but this is what I have.
David N. Brown
Mesa, Arizona

The alternate universe scenario that comes to my mind is: World War II - and the
Holocaust - don't happen.
Without Belsen and Dachau making America conscious, first, of anti-Semitism,
and then, as a consequence, of racism in general, things could have gone on as
they did _before_ the war for quite some time - with racial inequality just taken for
granted as inevitable.
Why has this been neglected? Here, I think the answer is obvious; it isn't appealing,
or greatly of interest, to the majority of the reading public that is white.
It's sort of like the reason why Jewish songwriters wrote so many Christmas
songs... about which the CBC aired a documentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8yMdMVRYr0

John Savard