(crikey, my first post)
Came across this after reading BooMan’s What’s a Realignment Look Like?, describing when, why and how the Negro Vote swung to the Democratic Party. As an African-American I deeply appreciate BooMan’s focus on race and racism and what can be gained and lost during this realigning election.
This excerpt from Carl N. Degler‘s [Who’s Who of Pulitzer Prize Winners (1972 for History)] Out of Our Past: The Forces that Shaped Modern America (428-430):
Perhaps the most unexpected result of the revolution in politics spawned by the Great Depression was the transfer of the Negro vote from the Republican party, where it had lain for three generations, to the Democratic party. Like so much else in the twentieth century, this change in the voting habits of blacks is closely linked to the growth of industrialization. For almost half a century after the end of slavery, about 90 per cent of the black population of the country lived in the South… But with the expansion of northern industry during the First World War, there was an increasing demand for skilled and unskilled labor. For the first time in American history, large numbers of Negroes, attracted by the new opportunities in northern industry, left the South. In the seven years after 1916, it has been estimated, as many as a million Negroes migrated northward. Northern industrial centers experienced enormous increases in their black populations between the censuses of 1910 and 1920. In Akron, Ohio, for example, the increase was over 780 per cent; in Cleveland, 307 per cent; and in Detroit, the automobile industry attracted enough new workers to swell the Negro population by over 620 per cent. … So massive was this new migration, much of which came out of the Deep South{1} that in 1920, for the first time in the history of the nation, the statistical center of the Negro population reversed its historical southwestern course and shifted north and east.
{1: <snip> This movement of Negroes out of the area of their greatest concentration, of course, has had a profound effect not only on the future of the Negro in the South but has also exposed white hostility in the North}.
In moving out of the South black people divested themselves of two distinguishing social and political characteristics. In the South the Negro was typically rural and usually disfranchised despite the Fifth Amendment. Once in the North, blacks became primarily city dwellers, and they were permitted to vote. The new urban setting of the Negro, of course, was dictated by the industry which drew him northward. In 1930, over 88 per cent of the northern blacks and 82 percent of blacks in the West lived in cities; by contrast, 68 per cent of southern blacks lived on the land. The concentration of Negroes in northern cities was even greater than these figures suggest; one third of them lived in only four northern cities. The conjuncture of the ballot and urban concentration created a formidable Negro voting power for the first time in the North. It is not surprising, therefore, that the election of the first black congressman outside of the South—that of De Priest in 1929—occurred in Chicago only a decade after the massive migration to the North. Not much before that date were there enough northern Negroes to compel politicians and parties to take them into account.
What party allegiance they would assume, however, was determined by other considerations. As Mark Hanna, the powerful Republican boss at the turn of the century, said, “I carry the Negro vote around in my vest pocket”. He did; and other Republican bosses before and after him could say the same. To tell the truth, where could the Negro find sympathy but in the Republican party, the party of the Emancipator? As the black leader Frederick Douglass is supposed to have warned his followers: “The Republican party is the ship; all else is the sea.” Was it to be expected that the black man could look for support from the Democrats, the party of the Southern white man? Well, at least not until Republican promises on behalf of the black man had worn thin enough to force his looking elsewhere.
During the optimism of the Progressive period, a few middle-class Negroes and intellectuals did talk of playing off the Democrats against the inertia-ridden Republicans. Some black leaders, for example, urged support of Woodrow Wilson in 1912 on the ground that he was untainted with the “lily-white” practices of which both Taft and Theodore Roosevelt were plainly guilty. Disillusionment for those Negro leaders, however, was fast in coming. True to his Southern training and the southern bias of his party, Wilson in office quickly introduced segregation into the federal service in Washington. Thus it turned out that Progressivism, in both its Democratic and Republican forms, failed to include blacks in its vision of a better America. The incipient movement for a two-party system for blacks was halted for another two decades.
In the depths of the depression, even though there was some dissatisfaction with Hoover among black leaders, it is clear that the rank-and-file black voter clung to the Republican faith. The name Franklin Roosevelt carried no magic for Negroes in 1932. In the black wards of Chicago that year, Roosevelt picked up only 23 per cent of the vote—a ratio smaller than Al Smith’s in the prosperous year of 1928. It was the same among the Negroes in Cleveland; Detroit Negroes awarded F.D.R. only a little more than a third of their votes.
By 1936, however, the somersault had been executed. At the election Chicago’s Black Belt gave Roosevelt 49 per cent of its votes; the Negroes of Cleveland went all out for the President—62 per cent—even though in 1932 they had awarded Hoover 72 per cent of their ballots. Roosevelt garnered almost two thirds of the black vote in Detroit, and the four black wards in Philadelphia each gave him a majority of 5,000. The swing to the Democrats had been forecast in 1934, when the first Democratic black congressman in American history was elected from Chicago. Between 1936 and 1940, exactly half of the eighteen Negroes elected to state legislatures were Democrats. Though a tendency has been developing among some black leaders since the Second World War to be more critical of their new Democratic allies, Samuel Lubell reported that in the election of 1950 there was “less of a break among Negroes than among any other major group in the Roosevelt Coalition.” Despite the fact that civil rights had become a supercharged issue in the country at the time of the 1956 elections, Negroes, particularly in the North, continued to adhere to their recent Democratic conversion, as they would down into the 1980’s.
What brought about this dramatic reversal? Part of the answer, of course, lies in the demographic facts of migration, but, as black voting in 1932 demonstrates, the really operative force was the Roosevelt administration’s recognition of the Negro.
