Here's one I posted about a year ago on DC's own boards. I don't think I ever bothered to post it anywhere else. Don't remember why not.
Sometime in 2004, someone on DC's old "Elseworlds" board said something that got me thinking about the following question:
"What if the Silver Age JLA had been almost entirely black instead of almost entirely white?"
(And remember: In the original version, the one guy who
didn't look white in the SA JLA was a green-skinned Martian instead.)
I started fooling around with the idea in my head . . .
If most of the SA heroes who were particularly powerful had been dark-skinned for one reason or another (in Superman's case, it would definitely NOT mean that he had tons of African ancestry in his family tree
), it would have made an interesting situation if we arbitrarily assume that it was happening back in the 1960s, when the early issues of the JLA were actually published in our world and the civil rights movement and all that was suddenly hitting its stride.
Of course, if the heavy hitters of the Silver Age JLA had all (or almost all) looked African-American (even if one or two of them were from other planets and it was sheer coincidence), and if they had met while fighting alien invaders from Appelax, and had banded together so they could face future Big Threats as a team, then other Americans (white, black, prejudiced, unprejudiced) would have seen them as being an exclusive, "segregated" group that obviously only took black men and women.
If that wasn't what they had in mind, and if most of the best powers had gone to black people by pure chance as far as anyone knew at the time, then the JLAers might have quickly invited one or two costumed white people to join as the "tokens" representing racial diversity.
Batman and/or Black Canary, maybe. Batman, of course, doesn't have powers at all. The Canary, of course, had a screaming power but wasn't able to move superfast or move mountains with her hands, so she too might feel like a weaker outsider compared to all the others. (Superman, Flash, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter, and Green Lantern in particular.) Accepting them would be meant to "prove" to their public that high-powered white superheroes of the current generation were not being excluded, there just didn't seem to be many to choose from! It was pure luck of the draw that black people had gotten all the breaks when it came to receiving Abin Sur's ring, and being struck by lightning and turned into the Flash, and being chosen as the representative of the Amazons, and being able to breathe underwater, and so forth!
One interesting conflict of agendas might come if the black members of the JLA had offered membership to a dark-skinned Superman while assuming he was an African-American who would be eager to put himself up as an example for young black people everywhere in how to succeed in a white man's world, and then were rather embarrassed when he revealed in a TV interview, the first time he was asked, that he wasn't from Earth at all and felt no greater (and no lesser) solidarity with people of African descent than he did with people of any other shade, since he was just a nonhuman immigrant!
Meanwhile, one of the African-American members of the League could have a well-publicized romance with some Caucasian person of the opposite sex, maybe a superhero, maybe a civilian celebrity, which would cause the Ku Klux Klan to go absolutely crazy and try to kill both of them in the name of racial purity . . . (the KKK wouldn't succeed in that, though. I like happy endings.)
To be absolutely fair, we could have more of the 1960s villains be dark-skinned as well, instead of the situation that actually applied in the comics of that era, where it seemed virtually everyone with superpowers was either a Caucasian from Earth, or an alien who might look Caucasian or might have some very unusual color of skin instead (green, blue, etc.)
On the Interracial Romance thing and the explosive reaction to it when one of the couple was a high-profile superhero, I'm remembering the way Captain Kirk was scheduled to kiss Lieutenant Uhura in the script of a Star Trek episode in the 60s, but the version that was finally aired only showed him bending over her or something, without actually showing the kiss as such. Apparently, the network was terrified that millions of white Southerners of that era would start foaming at the mouth if Star Trek actually broadcast the first explicit on-screen interracial kiss in American TV programming history. (I read something about this in William Shatner's book "Star Trek Memories." He was perfectly willing to take the risk of being the first white man in an American TV show to brazenly kiss a black woman, and he did in fact get to kiss Nichelle Nichols when they filmed the scene - but that particular bit was clipped out so that the audience was only able to guess from context that he had kissed her without actually seeing the lips make contact. He regretted that.)
