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Chapter 23. Trends and Possibilities 517
the Negro vote in the North will in all probability exert a considerable
pressure in this same direction. The labor vote might be primarily interested
in freeing the poor whites from the poll tax in the South and, generally,
in defeating the conservative hold over Southern politics. But Negro dis-
franchisement is so thoroughly interwoven with these two other goals that
a separation is not possible technically. It is not desirable from a tactical
standpoint, either, that labor tolerate discrimination against the Negro,
at least as far as legislation and national policy are concerned. This is so
because labor must seek support in the industrial South from the Negro,
where the Negro constitutes an important element in the industrial popula-
tion, and it is true also because labor, from the standpoint of national
strategy, cannot afford to fall in with the status quo.
Northerners far to the right of labor also have cause to feel increasingly
uneasy about Southern disfranchisement of Negroes as well as about
judicial and economic discrimination. There is a disturbing racial angle to
the Second World War, and to the planning for a world order after the
War, for which the United States is bound to assume a great responsibility.
The issue of democracy is fatefully involved in the War and the coming
peace. The Northern press reflects abundantly this growing anxiety around
the Negro problem. A recent editorial concludes:
This is a national, not a sectional problem. ... It has to be solved if the white-
skinned majority is to avoid the sinister hypocrisy of fighting abroad for what it is
not willing to accept at home.^®
Southern conservatives dislike nothing more than the threat of federal
interference in their ^^states’ rights.” The anti-lynching legislation was
fought on this ground. Several conservative Southerners have explained to
me that they did not have so much against the measure ’per se, but that
they dreaded it as a first step in the regulation of civic rights in the South
by federal legislation. Even many liberal white Southerners want to con-
fine the Negro problem, and particularly the Negro suffrage, to a local
issue.-^ But the South’s strategic position is weakening every day. Southern
conservatism is, on this point, defending an indefensible position. There are
reasons to anticipate both that the Negro and the labor bloc will exert
increasing political power, and that liberalism generally will become
stronger both in the South and in the North. The Supreme Court is likely
to continue in its new trend. The only means of escaping federal inter-
Constitution, such as the Fifteenth Amendment (which says that “the right of citizens of
the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any
State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude” but says nothing about
poll tax, or similar economic or geographical barriers).
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