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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - V. Politics - 22. Political Practices Today - 5. What the Negro Gets Out of Politics
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502 An American Dilemma
men may be appointed without this inference. Both whites and Negroes
usually look upon the Negro appointees as representatives only of the
Negro population. Negro appointments are usually to minor offices. Since
much is made of appointments even to clerical and janitorial positions,
while major appointments are regarded as news throughout the country,
a white politician is usually well repaid for appointing a Negro to any
position he may control. It is astonishingly easy to build up a reputation
among Negroes as a ^Vhite friend of the Negro people.”®^ Mayor La
Guardia has appointed Negroes to the Special Sessions Court, Domestic
Relations Courts, and Civil Service Commission In New York, and has seen
to it that Negroes are allowed to compete freely for positions In the city
civil service and relief administration. In Chicago Negroes have been
appointed to the posts of Assistant State’s Attorney 5
Assistant Attorney
General j
Assistant City Prosecutor; Deputy Coroner; Assistant Traction
Attorney; Assistant Corporation Counsel; Civil Service Commissioner;
member of the Housing Authority, of the I.ibrary Board and of the
Recreation Board.®- Mayor Kelly of Chicago has also followed the policy
of his Republican predecessor—^Thompson—in allowing Negroes a signif-
icant number of ^^clvil service” positions—especially in the city school
system, the Public Library, the Health Department and the Water
Bureau.®^ Other Northern cities have similarly given Negroes minor
positions in the local government, although perhaps in a lesser degree than
in New York and Chicago where the Negro vote Is unusually well organ-
ized and flexible.
Because voting Negroes are concentrated in a half dozen Northern
cities, they can exert little influence on the federal government.®^ This is
more than balanced, however, by the federal government’s greater con-
formity to the principles of the American Creed. The federal courts,
especially the United States Supreme Court, have been traditional guard-
ians of the Negro’s rights. Congress and the Presidents—even, to a certain
extent, the Southern Democrat Wilson and the lily-white Hoover—have
usually sought to be fair to Negroes. Negro claims have usually received
a sympathetic hearing in Washington: Judge Parker was not confirmed as
a Justice of the Supreme Court mainly because of his anti-Negro attitude;
the anti-lynching bill has more than once been on the verge of passage
hindered only by a filibuster by Southern senators.
As we had occasion to mention earlier, the only elected Negro repre-
sentative in Washington is a congressman from Chicago. Few Negroes
hold top rank appointive positions, and these few are usually in positions
that have “traditionally” been held by Negroes since Reconstruction days
(such as Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia). These tradi-
tional appointments are not so stable as is sometimes thought. There was
a steady decline in their number from the Taft administration to the
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