Nothing. As in, nothing would have been a huge improvement.
This is a snapshot of history as it occurred.
1940-1960: Black Americans enjoy the greatest economic improvement ever, without the U.S. Civil Rights Act, Voter Rights Act, Martin Luther King Jr., etc. Black neighborhoods across America bustle with black-owned small and not-so-small businesses.
1944: In a landmark legal case, a young black Army officer is courtmartialed. A bus driver who was also a deputy sheriff, orderd him to sit in the back of the bus, because of the color of his skin, and he refused. The young officer won the case. His name: Jackie Robinson.
1946: The same Jackie Robinson is signed to a minor league baseball contract by the Brooklyn Dodgers' Branch Rickey.
1947: Jackie Robinson breaks the color line, playing in his first major league game for the Dodgers. The world will never be the same again. (Robinson was a lifelong Republican.) After 1947, many black stars (Larry Doby, Roy Campanella, Monte Irvin, Satchel Paige, et al.) come over from the Negro Leagues to the formerly all-white major leagues.
1948: Harry S. Truman successfully integrates the Armed Forces, over the objections of Douglas MacArthur.
1949: James Edwards stars in the movie, Home of the Brave. Edwards, a fine but now largely forgotten actor who suffered mightily and died too young, would pave the way for Sidney Poitier to become the world's #1 movie star in 1967-68.
1950s: Black economic progress continues apace.
1953: Hulan Jack is elected Manhattan borough president, the first black since Reconstruction to win major elective office.
Skipping to the 1960s:
1963: King gives "I Have a Dream Speech" in DC.
1963: JFK assassinated.
1964: U.S. Civil Rights Act enacted by Congress.
Lyndon Johnson begins War on Poverty. Civil rights leaders tell blacks that the answer to all of their ills lies in government handouts.
1964-ca. 1968: Civil rights leaders begin inciting riots in cities across America. Thousands of private businesses are gutted and jobs lost, never to return. The losses are "replaced" by welfare programs and social workers. Millions of black children now grow up in hopeless slums where they see black people as either civil servants or criminals.
1965: Malcolm X assassinated.
Circa 1965: Civil rights leaders ally themselves with the communist National Welfare Rights Organization, in encouraging unwed black mothers, during an economic boom, to quit their jobs and go on welfare.
1965: Daniel Patrick Moynihan is made an example of, race-baited for raising alarms about the deterioration of black family. Moynihan shuts up, as do other whites who share his concerns.
Black economic progress slows down, then stagnates.
1966: Leftist NYC Mayor John Lindsay (though nominally a Republican) hires NWRO leader to be welfare commissioner, increases roles by 120% and increases welfare payments. Blacks flock to NYC, drunk on welfare. Housing is inadeqaute for the masses, and Lindsay doesn't want to discourage anyone from coming, so he builds huge housing projects that are unfit for families to live in.
1968: Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy are assassinated.
From the late 1960s on: a susbstantial and politically dominant portion of the black middle and upper-middle classes becomes the jailer of the black lower classes. As teachers, principals, college professors, social work bosses and poverty pimps, these "role models" tell black youngsters that due to white racism, they have no chance in life (while never explaining how the role models are doing so well, in spite of said racism). The role models encourage black youngsters to break the law, and when they are arrested, encourage them to cry racism. The role models make it impossible for the police to maintain order in black neighborhoods, and present gangsters as heroes.
Instead of demanding the highest standards of speech and conduct, as black educators did during segregation, the role models encourage slovenly dress, thuggish behavior, and street slang, which they christen "Black English," and then, "Ebonics."
Beginning late 1960s: Black role models and their Marxist comrades attack the very notion of illegitimacy as "racist." The black illegitimacy rate more than triples, from 22% to 70%.
True, without a civil rights movement, there might not have been a Voting Rights Act. But the VRA turned into an unconstitutional monstrosity, assuming it wasn't one to begin with. Without the VRA, blacks would pretty much have had to leave the South, in which case Jim Crow would have collapsed. No victims, no system. And without welfarism, when those blacks headed North, they would have had to work.
Without the civil rights movement, there would be fewer incompetent black public school teachers and administrators, and few poverty pimp and shakedown millionaires, a la Jesse Jackson. On the other hand, millions of blacks who were consigned by "the movement" to lives of poverty would have been able to climb out of poverty. Work would not have "disappeared," because willing workers would not have disappeared.
Good analysis.. Much truth here, PARTICULARLY the "Great Society's" impact on the black community. I think that the Federal legislation was inevitable, given the South's stonewalling.