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 - 22. Political Practices Today - 5. What the Negro Gets Out of Politics
<< 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.
498 An American Dilemma
Political spoils, favors and ^^protection” also are given to Negroes for
their votes. Any Negro who can control a given number of Negro votes
may aspire to an appointive political position for himself or for persons
designated by himself. Petty favors to the mass of Negro voters are the
stock-in-trade of the local politicians: they can save their supporters from
fines and short jail sentences 5
they can “fix” personal property taxes and
traffic violations 5
they can help poor Negroes to get relief or to get on
W.P.A. without the usual red tape. Many a Negro church has been able
to avoid closing its doors or to buy a new altar when its minister has made
his pulpit available to political candidates, Negro or white. Nearly every
Negro newspaper is supported, to some degree, by funds supplied by
political parties or candidates. Negro criminals, racketeers, vice “kings,”
and gamblers get protection from the law and from each other to the
extent that they can influence or buy votes. In getting all these illegal and
extra-legal returns for their votes, Negroes are quite like whites, except
that they probably do not get so much on the average. As Gosnell and
Bunche point out, Negroes seldom get the really big graft.*^® While this
may be looked on as another form of discrimination, it also allows us to
infer that Negroes have not so much to lose if city politics are cleaned up.
City reform movements not only tend to be fairer in granting Negroes
their civic rights, but in reducing corruption they take away less from the
few Negroes than from the few whites who benefit by corruption.®
Just as they are practically voteless in the South, Negroes there have a
minimum of what we have called “legal justice,” as we shall describe in
the following part. Where they have a few votes, as in the cities and in
the Upper South, they have a roughly corresponding measure of legal
justice. While this is the general rule, there are minor exceptions: Lewin-
son tells the story of the president of a Southern State Normal School for
Negroes who was rewarded with new buildings for “minding his business”
when it came to politics,’^® But this is—^to repeat—an exception. It is not
as the average white Southerner often is heard saying—^that Negroes are
given a fair share of their legal rights if they do not disturb the smooth
course of white men’s politics.
Even where Negroes have only a few votes in the South they have at
least some opportunity to bargain for police and court protection. The lack
of a vote is especially dangerous in many Southern communities where
even the police are elected or dependent for their tenure on elected office-
holding friends.*^^ Even Southerners come to recognize this. After three
Negroes were killed in one month by policemen in one Alabama city, a
“In some cases, this is not true. The corrupt political machine of Mayor Thompson in
Chicago was very friendly to Negroes, and one of the aims of the reformers was to clean
out the “Negro influence.” Negro racketeers, like other racketeers, also stand to lose if a
reform movement is successful.
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
