In no national
election since 1860 have politicians been so Negro-minded as in 1936.
There were 32 blackamoor delegates and alternates at the Democratic
National Convention in Philadelphia last June. Fortnight ago, after
much soul-searching, Democratic National Chairman James A. Farley
picked his Negro campaign managers. Last week the Republicans
completed their slate of Negro managers. Estimates of the amount of
money both parties will spend to corral the Negro vote before election
day ran as high as $1,000,000. All emotion aside, the principal reason for this unparalleled political
excitement over Negroes was mathematical. Outside the South, Oklahoma
and Maryland, there are only nine States which have more than 100,000
Negro inhabitants. In Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, West
Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York live some 2,500,000
Negroes, of whom over 1,000,000 are prospective voters this year.
Moreover, in these same nine States the Roosevelt-Landon battle will be
waged especially hard, with the result in each perhaps turning in
favor of the party which can bag the largest Black vote. This year, for the first time in history, Democrats are making a serious
bid for the Negro vote everywhere in the U. S. except the South. For
nearly 70 years all Negroes were Republicans because Republican
Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves in battle and blood. But today
slavery, in the form of political gratitude, is paying the GOP steadily
diminishing returns, and Lincoln's name, by itself, no longer works its
oldtime magic. Republican Pundit Mark Sullivan, disgruntled by the thought that Black
Republicans were being lured over to the Democratic side, last week
warned his readers as follows: “The situation contains many kinds of political and social dynamite. One
wonders if the Negroes as a race will be wise to accept the
solicitation of the Northern Democratic leaders, to change their party
affiliation. . . . “It is well known that the New Deal stirs up class consciousness in the
economic sense; President Roosevelt's own speeches are permeated with
such appeals. However unfortunate appeals to economic class
consciousness may be, an appeal to race consciousness has possibilities
even more somber.” All the Democratic high command of 1936 was doing was to adopt the
successful tactics which local Democratic machines in the big
cities of the North have independently developed in the last ten years.
Before that time any Negro who voted Democratic was threatened with
social ostracism if not bodily harm by Republican members of his race.
No respectable Negro congregation would dream of allowing a
Democratic political meeting to be held in its church. Moreover most
Negro politicians were subservient blackamoors who sold their flocks
to this or that white Republican faction paying the highest price.
