Note:
Gunnar Myrdal died in 1987, less than 70 years ago.
Therefore, this work is protected by copyright,
restricting your legal rights to reproduce it.
However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now.
Read more about copyright.
Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - V. Politics - 20. Underlying Factors - 1. The Negro in American Politics and as a Political Issue
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
Below is the raw OCR text
from the above scanned image.
Do you see an error? Proofread the page now!
Här nedan syns maskintolkade texten från faksimilbilden ovan.
Ser du något fel? Korrekturläs sidan nu!
This page has never been proofread. / Denna sida har aldrig korrekturlästs.
430 An American Dilemma
franchised them, as did also some of the older Northern states. At the out-
break of the War, Negroes had votes in only five of the New England
States—Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Ver-
mont. In addition. New York allowed Negroes suffrage under certain
property limitations which did not apply to whites.®
As a result of the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments, Negro
men were enfranchised in the whole Union. In the North this change
became permanent. In the South, where most Negroes lived and still live,
it was rapidly undone. After Reconstruction, a condition gradually fixed
itself upon the nation which has remained fairly unchanged in the twen-
tieth century: that the Negroes in the North enjoy, uninfringed, the right
to vote as other American citizens, while, with quantitatively unimportant
exceptions, the Negroes in the South are kept disfranchised against the
intention and spirit of the amended Constitution. Suffrage for Negroes is
one of the patterns in which the two historic regions of America are most
dissimilar, and in this respect, the greatest factor of change during the last
generation has actually been the migration of one and three-quarter million
Negroes from the South to the North. As we shall find in the course of our
analysis, the situation is highly unstable, and great changes are impending.
While the Negro people have been kept out of politics in the sense that
they have been kept from voting, in another sense, namely, as a political
issue, they have been an important factor in the very region where they have
been disfranchised, the South. A recent well-qualified student of the
Southern political scene has gone so far as to say that “The elementary
determinant in Southern politics is an intense Negro phobia which has
scarcely abated since Reconstruction.”^ The issue of “white supremacy vs.
Negro domination,” as it is called in the South, has for more than a hun-
dred years stifled freedom of thought and speech and affected all other
civic rights and liberties of both Negroes and whites in the South. It has
retarded its economic, social and cultural advance. On this point there is
virtual agreement among all competent observers.®
In the North, on the contrary, the Negro has nowhere and never been
a political issue of primary and lasting importance •
—except in so far as he
* There are secondary reasons for this, other than the main one that the North had never
been obsessed with the Negro and the desire to keep him in a low place that characterizes
the slavery tradition of the South. Before the great mass migration, the Northern Negro
population was numerically small j even after the migration it still remained small in pro-
portion to the total electorates in the cities where they livej Negro voters have usually been
tractable and easily managed by the political machines j their voting strength has often been
held down by gerrymandering and by the failure to redistrict. Negroes could never by
any stretch of the imagination be looked upon as a political danger. They have been a
poor, segregated group showing many signs of social pathology, but—except for the classical
issues of tariff, money and banking, corporate finance, agriculture, and prohibition—socio-
economic problems have, until the New Deal, not played a great role in American politics.
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
