Plausibility check- one or more southern US states remain black majority throughout the 20th century?

[raharris1973]

Could one or more US southern states have remained black majority into the 20th century, and throughout the 20th century?

In the aftermath of the US Civil War, in the 19th century, looking at population statistics of 1870, South Carolina had a black majority in the neighborhood of at least around 60%. Mississippi a black majority in the mid to high 50 percents. And Louisiana, a fleeting black majority of just over 50.5 to 51%.

Louisiana had turned majority white by some point in the 1880s, certainly by 1890. South Carolina, by some fairly early point in the 20th century, if not 1900 itself. Mississippi, by some point in the second quarter if the 20th century.

Alabama, Georgia and Florida had very large black minorities, approaching the 50% in the 1870 timeframe, with the percentage share of black minorities gradually shrinking as one moves out of the deep southeast core to Arkansas, and to Texas and the upper south like Virginia and North Carolina and Tennessee.

Could any of those three black-majority as of 1870 states have kept their black majority permanently, or any of those deep south close ones have acquired and retained black majority?

If not, why not?

If black majorities existed in any of these states in the middle third of the 20th century or the third quarter of it, would that demographic majority status have hastened the end of Jim Crow segregation and the restoration of black franchise rights? Or would it have strengthened massive resistance by the substantial, but outnumbered, white minority and delayed the end of Jim Crow segregation and the restoration of black franchise rights?

I go back to the question of if this geographic-demographic combination resulting in black majority large states [so no cheating by making DC or an urban core when black majority a state, or the Virgin Islands a state, or arranging for annexation of a Caribbean island as a state] is even plausible within America's democratic capitalist economic political system as it was set up by the end of the Civil War.

Given the grossly uneven distribution of financial and landed property and other capital resources, and educational attainment, and typically quite different occupational profiles of black and white Americans, decade after decade in the late 19th century and 20th century, is there a ratio of black residents to white residents in a jurisdiction on the scale of a US state that is not likely to stay sustained for more than few years at a time? Or could an equilibrium ratio involving a majority, or super-majority of black residents and voters and even office-holders in one or more states have become self-sustaining for decades on end?

 

[raharris1973]

Remember black majority in a state does not have to mean black political control, greater economic prosperity, or general happiness- - just greater proportional presence than white people.

 

[Circle of Willis]

Not all that difficult to achieve I don't think, just have Reconstruction stick in one of the black majority states. As you say, SC and Mississippi with their especially large black majorities would be the easiest to do this with: MS even elected the first black Senators. I think either state remaining black-majority would be contingent on them retaining black enfranchisement & unencumbered black economic opportunities, since these were the main push factors behind the Great Migrations of the 20th century (who would want to stay in states where you were segregated & institutionally discriminated against, could be lynched for looking at a white woman wrong, probably had no economic future except as a dirt-poor sharecropper, have any wealth you were miraculously able to accumulate destroyed or plundered in race riots like Rosewood anyway, etc.?)

As a bonus, if even one Southern state goes down this path, it could become a sort of black sanctuary and become the Great Migration magnet, absorbing black populations from the other, now white-supremacist-ruled Southern states to further reinforce its black majority into a supermajority. No need to travel to Chicago and put up with another sort of racism there to make your fortune if you could just do so among fellow blacks in Charleston and/or Jackson, after all.

 

[raharris1973]

Not all that difficult to achieve I don't think, just have Reconstruction stick in one of the black majority states. As you say, SC and Mississippi with their especially large black majorities would be the easiest to do this with: MS even elected the first black Senators. I think either state remaining black-majority would be contingent on them retaining black enfranchisement & unencumbered black economic opportunities, since these were the main push factors behind the Great Migrations of the 20th century (who would want to stay in states where you were segregated & institutionally discriminated against, could be lynched for looking at a white woman wrong, probably had no economic future except as a dirt-poor sharecropper, have any wealth you were miraculously able to accumulate destroyed or plundered in race riots like Rosewood anyway, etc.?)

As a bonus, if even one Southern state goes down this path, it could become a sort of black sanctuary and become the Great Migration magnet, absorbing black populations from the other, now white-supremacist-ruled Southern states to further reinforce its black majority into a supermajority. No need to travel to Chicago and put up with another sort of racism there to make your fortune if you could just do so among fellow blacks in Charleston and/or Jackson, after all.

Would there be enough jobs, capital, employers in that non-Jim Crow'ed state for life to be economically viable for a black majority? Political and and social rights and courts that take you seriously are great and all but people need to be able to earn and eat.

If any non-Jim Crow'ed state served as a sanctuary and hit a tipping point to preserve itself from white supremacist 'redemption' would this tipping point lead to a near complete self-exodus of whites, including middle and upper class whites, professionals, and entrepreneurs? Or would there always be a set of whites, native to the state, or carpetbaggers, with tangible or intangible capital and skills, who could tolerate living in a state with black political and civic equality because the south's natural agricultural, mineral, and cheap labor assets provide economic opportunity for these whites to personally prosper?

The theory of places with with equality for blacks, or even majority black electorates and representation being a Great Migration sounds great - in theory.

But in historic experience, Haiti the first new world black ruled state, and then later in the 20th century, the first self-governing and then independent black majority countries of the Anglo-Caribbean were not recipients of net black immigration but net exporters of black emigrants. And not to black majority countries in their own region like Haiti, or to African countries either, but to white majority countries like the USA, Canada, Britain, and similarly with emigration flows from the French and Dutch Caribbean to the metropolis.

 

[Circle of Willis]

Would there be enough jobs, capital, employers in that non-Jim Crow'ed state for life to be economically viable for a black majority? Political and and social rights and courts that take you seriously are great and all but people need to be able to earn and eat.

If any non-Jim Crow'ed state served as a sanctuary and hit a tipping point to preserve itself from white supremacist 'redemption' would this tipping point lead to a near complete self-exodus of whites, including middle and upper class whites, professionals, and entrepreneurs? Or would there always be a set of whites, native to the state, or carpetbaggers, with tangible or intangible capital and skills, who could tolerate living in a state with black political and civic equality because the south's natural agricultural, mineral, and cheap labor assets provide economic opportunity for these whites to personally prosper?

The theory of places with with equality for blacks, or even majority black electorates and representation being a Great Migration sounds great - in theory.

But in historic experience, Haiti the first new world black ruled state, and then later in the 20th century, the first self-governing and then independent black majority countries of the Anglo-Caribbean were not recipients of net black immigration but net exporters of black emigrants. And not to black majority countries in their own region like Haiti, or to African countries either, but to white majority countries like the USA, Canada, Britain, and similarly with emigration flows from the French and Dutch Caribbean to the metropolis.

I don't believe a Haiti situation is in the cards, despite the white supremacist fearmongering about it even before the ACW & then as late as and well beyond Birth of a Nation. The black-majority state is still part of the US and there isn't anyone who could realistically be elected president, not even among the Radical Republicans, who would have tolerated an 1804-esque genocide on their watch. 'Kill whitey and take all his stuff' was also not a policy proposed by literally any black politician from the Reconstruction South that I am aware of - if anything, they would have known that saying or doing anything in that direction would be playing directly into the propaganda of their enemies, and far from trying to exterminate them men like Hiram Revels worked hard to cultivate alliances with the whites.

Conversely, I also don't believe that all whites in that state would flee to whiter pastures, not even necessarily all or most of the rich whites: there were actually a lot of Southern whites who worked with Reconstruction called 'scalawags', apparently up to 15% of the white population in South Carolina even. As you say there was also an influx of Northerners called 'carpetbaggers' who would also have brought additional skills & capital to a black-majority SC or MS. If the rampant corruption which undermined their political coalition with the freedmen historically can be mitigated, I see no reason why they would launch into an exodus, regardless of the black demographics in their state (they didn't historically when those states were black-majority and under Reconstruction after all). The push & pull factors driving white flight from the 50s-60s onward (suburbanization, black-led race riots, etc.) didn't exist at the time.

Would there still be some level of segregation inside the 'Black State' itself? Yeah probably, in the sense that the white minority and black majority will most likely still choose to live in separate neighborhoods (with perhaps a rare few exceptions) even if the law doesn't expressly forbid their mingling, and even if they do still have to work and share communal spaces (city halls, parks, etc.) together. But that would be considered fine even by the blacks at the time themselves, for black political thought in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was dominated by the school of Booker T. Washington, who prioritized education & accumulating economic wealth over directly confronting segregation and also cultivated close ties with the white upper/upper-middle class. The existence of a black state where they could move around and engage in business without restriction or intimidation would already far exceed his expectations: he, his political machine and those in power who are influenced by him would, IMO, without doubt be content not to further push boundaries and engage in deeper social experimentation in favor of building up the state and the black middle class as much as they are able.

Now the vision of Washington historically lost out to that of his rival WEB Du Bois & the latter's NAACP due to 1) his death and the lack of an adequate successor, and 2) the 1919 Red Summer and absolute nadir of American race relations, which destroyed much of the work toward black economic empowerment that had been done and essentially proved Du Bois right in a sense (as much as it pains me to say he had any point at all over Washington, who I admire a good deal more): that acquiring political power and breaking institutional white supremacy was actually necessary to black prosperity since otherwise anything they built could be torn down & plundered by hateful and envious white mobs with no recourse. Or to quote a politician from a whole other country & the opposite end of the political spectrum - politique d'abord.

A 'Black State' which survived Reconstruction should already have the best of both worlds: a black majority and consequent majority rule & control over their state institutions (most certainly including law enforcement & the National Guard to keep racists out), tempered by an accommodationist elite and the fact that their being part of the US means that they can't go full retard Haiti, and a self-segregating but cooperative white minority willing to work with them in building up their economic base. These I think are the ideal conditions in which you can have a majority black Southern state indefinitely, since otherwise the push & pull factors for them to flee north or west away from Jim Crow will be too strong: as you say they must eat first to live, but the Jim Crow South necessarily had to keep them economically crippled (either as poor sharecroppers or, for those blacks who did go into business, by preventing them from doing business with whites) and vulnerable to repression & plunder by white supremacists (politics & the courts aside, Southern state governments crapped on the Second Amendment as hard as or even harder than NY & CA do today when it came to black gun ownership) among its pillars. When that's the case and their ability to make a living is constantly being inhibited or outright under threat, you will sooner or later have a black Great Migration as soon as the blacks are able - and if not to a 'Black State' down south, then certainly out of the South.

 

[S'task]

The core issue preventing a successful majority black southern state from emerging is mainly economic. Even assuming equal rights and such, all the southern states were agrarian based economies well into the 20th century and that was due to factors outside of those state's control. The South lagged behind with building railroads, and lacked the aquatic infrastructure that drove the massive economic industrial boom of the Steel Belt in the late 19th and earth 20th century that led to the economic conditions that enabled the Great Migration. Something to bear in mind is that that pretty much every major city in the Old Northwest and Northeast were linked into a hybrid aquatic-railroad industrial network which brought together all the materials needed to drive a MASSIVE industrialization boom in the region, mainly on the back of the Steel Industry and related manufacture. It was this boom that then created the economic conditions that led to the Great Migration.

Nowhere in the South has those conditions or ability to really tap into that network, not even Louisiana. Even though many southern states did deliberately set policies to discourage industrialization in the period in order to maintain the status quo, having one state buck that trend would not be enough to let it industrialize and support such a situation.

The only State that might have been able to link into that network and industrialize earlier was Virginia, as it was already partially linked to the aquatic networks and many of the rail lines were already close by to extend them, plus you could have had governmental interest and support of greater industrialization due to the importance of Hampton Roads shipyards. The flipside problem of this is that AFAIK Virginia was never close to being majority black, and had been seeing it's black population as a percentage falling even before the Civil War due to the plantation economy not working in Virginia and so major planters leaving and slaves being sold south...

 

[raharris1973]

What about post-Reconstruction, 20th century divergences instead? Redeemer government was reestablished in South Carolina in 1876, yet South Carolina was black majority in 1920, not switching to white majority until 1930 (for the first time since 1810). I looked up Ben Tillman, and I could say that although white supremacist government existed before and after him, with his state constitutional revision of 1895, that made sure that white supremacy regime was worse for blacks after 1895 than in, say, 1880-1895.

During the four decades after the Civil War, the state's African American population continued to hover right around 60 percent. Then, beginning in the 1920s, thousands of black Carolinians left the state because of Jim Crow and a lack of economic opportunity. In 1930 the state had a white majority for the first time in 120 years. There would be another major black out-migration the years after World War II, but by the last decades of the twentieth century more African Americans were moving to South Carolina than were leaving the state.

Mississippi retained a black majority of 52% up through 1930, but by 1940, whites had surpassed the 50.5% mark at least with the margin only increasing until at least the 70s. Mississippi saw its Reconstruction govts defeated earlier than 1876, at times between 1827 and 1874, but like South Carolina, had an initial period of non-total disenfranchisement, followed by a more repressive state constitution, theirs in 1890. Blacks still remained the state majority for nearly fifty years afterward. But by the 1930s deployments of the mechanical cotton picker were more ubiquitous and the agricultural adjustment act by offering subsidies to stabilize crop prices, including for cotton, including by payments to restrict production, which removed farmland owners' incentives to hire maximum numbers of workers.

Could Mississippi have an African-American majority in the future?
Mississippi already has a massive Black population -- 37% of the State is Black. Mississippi actually used to be Black-majority, until the Great Migration.

But there are several reasons why it's not likely to happen anytime soon:

• Mississippi is poor. The poorest state in the nation. And its rural. So there aren't many jobs there, meaning that most Black people would not move there. Jobs are the #1 factor in almost all moving decisions.
• Mississippi has an atrociously bad reputation in America, which further wards people off. And, for African-Americans specifically, Mississippi has a reputation as the "heart of Jim Crow", a place of extreme racism and racist terror. So Black people who aren't directly familiar with Mississippi will be hesitant to move there. Personally I know Black Southerners who are afraid to step into Mississippi.

Mississippi at the moment can't compete with places like Maryland and Georgia for Black migration. So its demographics will probably remain as they are, for some time.