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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - V. Politics - 23. Trends and Possibilities - 2. The Negro’s Party Allegiance - 3. Negro Suffrage in the South as an Issue
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512 An American Dilemma
divisions of interests and ideals in American society, American politics has
been comparatively empty of real issues. Often the issue, particularly in
local elections, has been simply the demand for efficiency and honesty
—
the very things which have been generally lacking to such a degree that
the ordinary American has come to believe that inefficiency and dishonesty
are inexorably connected with politics as such. Honest and efficient politics
requires political opinions and, indeed, splits in opinion. It also requires an
independent, though democratically controlled, bureaucracy, and a firm
tradition of legality. In these latter respects, too, the American government
is on the move toward acquiring a structure less conducive to incompetence
and graft."
The Negroes as a subordinated group will be among the chief benefi-
ciaries of these changes if they occur. The changes will not come overnight.
They are contingent upon the building up of traditions, and that will take
time. And there is always the danger that intervening happenings will
break the process of orderly growth. Even assuming no such unforeseen
causes of deviation, the task before y\merlca in reforming its system of
government is incomparably grave; it has to cleanse its politics, not—as
other nations have done—in an era of noninterference characterized by
rigidly restricted state activity, but in an historic stage when state inter-
vention is mounting, when state services are multiplying and when billions
of dollars are passing through public budgets,
3. Negro Suffrage in the South as an Issue
The concern of the Southern Negroes is not how they shall use their
votes but how to get their constitutional right to vote respected at all.
Negro political power in the North is, as we shall see, not inconsequential
for this problem in the South. But there are many other forces of change
involved in the matter.
That suffrage should be a major interest for Southern Negroes is demon-
strated in several chapters of this book. There is, indeed, no single one of
the several categories of Southern Negroes’ deprivations and sufferings
which is unconnected with their disfranchisement. In America, with its
tradition of loose and politically dependent administration, there is more
than elsewhere a considerable substance of realism in W. E. B. Du Bois’
blimt statement:
1 hold this truth to be self-evident, that a disfranchised working class in modem
industrial civilization is worse than helpless. It is a menace, not simply to itself, but
to every other group in the community ... it will be ignorant; it will be the play-
thing of mobs; and it will be insulted by caste restrictions.^®
* See Chapter 20, Section 2 .
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