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Notes -
There was a violent struggle. Southern white supremacists attempted to suppress the civil rights movement by force until the federal government stepped in and made them stop.
They failed. There was the 101st airborne, yes, but the majority of the south saw no federal troops deployed. The KKK burned crosses and it didn’t work.
What you didn’t see was mass black terrorism. It wasn’t a thing.
History didn’t end up going that way, partially because the federal government finally put its foot down, but the first five years of the civil rights era and the first five years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland are almost beat for beat the same. You even had American equivalents of Republican and Unionist paramilitary groups forming. The main difference is that in Ireland the military rolled in to protect the old social order, not to impose the new one.
There’s a saying in war colleges that you don’t notice the successful counter insurgencies, because the successful ones deflate the causes of the insurgency before it breaks out into mass violence. The civil rights era was a successful counter-insurgency. And I think had the situation been handled differently by the federal government it could have very well exploded into a 30 year long bleeding ulcer like Northern Ireland did.
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