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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - V. Politics - 20. Underlying Factors - 3. The North and the South
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440 An American Dilemma
inclined to favor any restrictions on suffrage. So there is apparently nobody
in the North engaged in the political game who has any particular reasons
to object to the Negroes^ enjoying their franchise in peace.
Whether or not these explanations are adequate, it seems to be a fact
that Negroes can feel sure thaty unless this country undergoes a veritable
revolutiofty their right to vote will remain unquestioned in the Northy
independent of any increase due to continued migration from the South.
Without any doubty this is one of the strategic protections of the Negro
people in American society. The Negro vote in the North is already of
some importance. It could become of much greater importance were it
more wisely used. As the educational level of the Negro people is being
raised and as the northward migration is continuing, it might become
powerful enough within the next couple of decades to demand some real
reward not only in local Northern politics but also in national politics.
The Northern vote might become the instrument by which the Negroes
can increasingly use the machinery of federal legislation and administration
to tear down the walls of discrimination.
The white people’s attitude in regard to Negro suffrage in the South,
and, specifically, in the eleven states which seceded from the Union and
formed the Confederacy, is a much more complicated matter. Even a
summary interpretation requires sketching the main elements of the
historical heritage of the region. Negro disfranchisement is evidently part
and parcel of a much more general tendency toward political conservatism
which stamps the entire life of the region. The Negro is, as we shall find,
a main cause of this general conservatism. Southern conservatism is a
unique phenomenon in Western civilization in being married to an estab-
lished pattern of illegality.^ In the South, it is the weak liberal reformers
who have had, and have now, to stand up for the majesty of the law.
Correspondingly, a person may be ranked as liberal in this region merely
by insisting that the law shall be adhered to in practice.
This is a most extraordinary situation. Everywhere else in the world
it is the strategy and—from one point of view—the “function” of conserv-
atism in the democratic state to stand for “law and order,” while the
liberals and, still more, the radicals want to change this order. When the
latter succeed in bringing about changes, it is the conservatives’ “function”
to see to it that due procedure and all legal formalities are observed.
Thereby they usually succeed in slowing down the tempo of the induced
changes. To function as the guardians of the law, and all it stands for in
the way of individual security in an established order, becomes thus a
natural strategy for the conservatives who want to check change and
preserve the status quo.
In the South we have, however, the unmatched political spectacle that
“This pattern of illegality will be studied in some detail in Part VI.
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