12.1: Black Politics - Readings and Media

The selected readings, images, and videos of this module will inform students about Black Politics.

Readings and Media

Political Realignment and African Americans

The shift of African Americans from the Republican to the Democratic Party is one of the striking political phenomena of the 20th century, and one in which the Great Migration played an important role. Black loyalty to the Grand Old Party (GOP) was forged during the Civil War—Democrats were the party of Southern racism, Republicans the party of Abraham Lincoln and emancipation. For decades thereafter, in thrall to the Lincoln legacy, African Americans sustained their historic political allegiance in plain defiance of the disappointing records of successive Republican administrations on issues of concern to the race. The allegiance was dramatically sundered by the economic crisis of the 1930s. Responding to the economic benefits of the New Deal and believing themselves to be included in Franklin D. Roosevelt's concern for the common man, African Americans transferred their loyalties from Lincoln to Roosevelt. Later, the embrace of civil rights on the part of Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson turned devoted black Roosevelt supporters into committed black Democrats.

In the early decades of the 20th century, black fealty to the GOP was sorely tested as successive Republican administrations cultivated the white South, failed to appoint African Americans to federal offices, promoted segregation in the federal civil service, and ignored problems of segregation, discrimination, disfranchisement, and racial violence. Yet the Democrats failed to present a compelling alternative.

By the election of 1932 the crippling economic burden of the depression gave African Americans good reason to question their continuing Republican allegiance. Equally a matter of concern was President Herbert Hoover's stance on race. In addition to continuing the offensive racial practices of his predecessors, Hoover took two celebrated actions that African Americans interpreted as deliberate slaps: the segregation of Gold Star Mothers traveling to Europe to visit the graves of soldier sons and husbands, and the nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court of John J. Parker, a circuit court judge in North Carolina who was reported to have spoken in favor of disfranchisement in an earlier campaign for governor.

Still, the Democratic nominee, Roosevelt, offered African Americans little inducement to overcome their traditional antipathy to the party, and neither Republicans nor Democrats did very much to court black votes. It was little wonder. Two-thirds of all African Americans of voting age lived in the 11 former Confederate states and the District of Columbia; poll taxes, property qualifications, literacy tests, white primaries, intimidation by voting registrars, and a variety of other devices kept the vast majority of them away from the polls. The 2.1 million African Americans who resided elsewhere and who were 21 years of age or older in 1930 constituted less than 3% of the potential national electorate.

Since African Americans were at best of incidental importance to the major parties in 1932, how were enfranchised African Americans to cast their vote? For the first time there was a lively debate among black spokesmen. While many African Americans argued that it was safer to stay with the Republicans, others made the case that splitting the black vote would be smart politics, evidence of political maturation, a declaration of political independence that would make it impossible for either party to take African Americans for granted. African Americans had long ago repaid their debt to Lincoln and the Republicans, so the argument went, and the Republican Party in its modern incarnation could no longer lay claim to the enduring elements of the Lincoln legacy.

Despite the disenchantment of many African Americans with Hoover, deep-rooted wariness of the Democratic Party kept most of them in the Republican camp. Hoover ran far ahead of Roosevelt in black election districts in most cities; in some cities Hoover even increased his share of the black vote in comparison with 1928.

The dramatic break came with the election of 1936. African Americans were more politically engaged by the time of this election. Migration played a critical role. Seeking relief from the economic emergency, some 400,000 African Americans left the South between 1930 and 1940. The large majority of them gravitated to eight Northern states: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The massing of African Americans in limited geographic areas made possible the articulation of common political interests. It fostered the development of specialized interest groups with particular political objectives. It created an environment conducive to the emergence of black political leadership. It brought African Americans under the sway of local Democratic political machines. And with 202 of 523 electoral votes at stake in the states where African Americans congregated, the black vote became a sufficient force to warrant attention from the major parties. The Republicans grounded their appeal to African Americans in the Lincoln legacy; the Democrats mustered a raft of symbolic overtures to African Americans at their national convention, followed by highly publicized outreach that continued during the subsequent campaign.

The stunning Roosevelt victory—the largest popular plurality, 60.8%, to that point in American history—brought with it a fundamental change in black political behavior. Roosevelt's share of the black vote substantially exceeded his nationwide average: for example, 81% in Harlem, 75% in Pittsburgh, 69% in Philadelphia, 66% in Detroit, and 65% in Cincinnati. Roosevelt won anywhere from 60 to 250% more votes in black neighborhoods in these cities in 1936 than he had in 1932.

In voting Democratic in 1936, African Americans were behaving like most other poor people in the United States. While African Americans were certainly aware that FDR had failed to act on such issues as lynching, disfranchisement, and discrimination, racial concerns had to be fitted into a scale of priorities, and there was overwhelming agreement that economic problems were more pressing than racial concerns. New Deal programs often made the difference between starvation and survival, and African Americans who were suffering the most from the depression responded accordingly.

African Americans not only voted for Roosevelt but also idolized him as a hero, the savior of the race. They believed that Roosevelt cared personally about them and that the slights and injustices they suffered, even the rank discrimination in the administration of relief, were the products of underlings who acted in contravention of the president's wishes. African Americans believed also that Roosevelt shared in the racial sensibilities of his wife, whom they regarded as a genuine friend. Eleanor Roosevelt's sympathetic ear in the heart of the administration made the critical difference in conveying a sense of caring, and her racial involvements made many African Americans believe that the president was more interested in racial justice than he actually was.

African Americans thought of themselves as Roosevelt supporters well before they called themselves Democrats. Throughout the New Deal there was a significant discrepancy between the way African Americans voted and the way they described their political affiliation. Identification with the president, then, played an important part in the politicization of black Americans. Roosevelt was a magnetic symbol of political authority who drew people into a positive identification with the larger political system. Now what happened in Washington, D.C., vitally affected the lives of African Americans, as it did those of other Americans. Accordingly, the New Deal brought new black voters to the polls at the same time that it swung African Americans who were already voting away from the Republican Party.

Several circumstances thrust the Democratic Party's appeal to black voters into a more explicitly racial context after 1940. Politicized by the New Deal, African Americans moved increasingly to use the ballot as a lever to encourage attention by the national parties to racial concerns. At the same time, migration and urbanization continued apace as African Americans left the South in search of employment in war industries. The increasing concentration of black voters in states that held the balance of power in presidential elections made the black electorate more important in the Democratic Party's calculations.

The death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945 raised the question of the transfer of black political loyalties from the president to his party. The rise of the civil rights movement, the increasing racial consciousness of black Americans as a consequence of World War II, and the diminution of the economic emergency brought racial issues to the fore in the 1940s in ways that had not occurred in the previous decade. With Harry S. Truman's embrace of civil rights, the gap between black voting behavior and party identification narrowed significantly.

From 1940 to 1960, generally two-thirds or more of black voters supported Democratic candidates in presidential and congressional elections. In the presidential elections of 1948, 1952, and 1960 (and the congressional election of 1952), the black Democratic vote topped 75%. In subsequent presidential elections 8 out of 10 or even 9 out of 10 African Americans voted Democratic, their allegiance sealed by the explicit embrace of civil rights on the part of John F. Kennedy and especially Lyndon B. Johnson. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the soaring rhetoric of presidential speeches about fundamental human dignity, the administrations' support, symbolic and real, for peaceful protesters seeking their civil rights—this was the stuff that cemented political loyalty. The black political realignment that had begun during the New Deal had become a near-unanimous black commitment to the Democratic Party.

Weiss, Nancy J. "Political Realignment and African Americans." In The American Mosaic: The African American Experience, ABC-CLIO, 2026. Accessed January 2, 2026. https://africanamerican2-abc--clio-c...isplay/1400593.