The Future of the Negro Voter in the United States

Since last November's election I have managed to pull in the voting returns for predominantly Negro wards and precincts in 86 cities, representing a total of nearly one million Negro votes. Taking the precincts and wards which are comparable in both 1952 and 1956, I find that Eisenhower drew 36 per cent of the vote last fall compared to 25 per cent four years ago, for an eleven per cent gain. One thing that is particularly striking about these returns is the wide variations between cities. I have not been able to go into every one of these communities. But as one studies these returns it becomes clear that the crucial struggle in the minds of Negroes during the last campaign was the conflict between their anger over incidents of racial violence in the South and the economic attachment that they felt to the Democratic party. Where unemployment was heavy and Negroes were more effectively integrated into the labor movement, as in Michigan and Toledo, Ohio, the break to the Republicans was small. The shift was also small in cities where the Democratic machines had given Negroes a fair degree of political recognition or where the candidates were known friends of the Negro-as in Albany, Philadelphia, Portland, Oregon, Minneapolis and St. Louis. The dramatic Eisenhower gains among Southern Negroes largely refleet the fact that the Democratic party in the South has so much less of an economic appeal to Negroes than in the North. In the Northern cities Eisenhower's gain over 1952 was 8 per cent while in the South the same Southern Negro wards and precincts which gave Eisenhower 19 per cent of their vote in 1952 gave him 47 per cent in 1956. In several Southern cities the Negro vote for the Republican candidate for Congress was even heavier than for the President. So far I haven't found any Northern city where Negroes voted more heavily Republican for Congress. While in the North the protests against racial violence were checked by the economic appeal of the New Deal, in the South there were no such levees to hold back the waters of racial anger. The voting returns also indicate a somewhat heavier shift to the Republican party in higher income Negro precincts. Certainly the Republican percentage of the vote rises as one moves up the economic scale. Harlem's famed Sugar Hill gave Eisenhower 38 per cent of its vote in 1956 compared to the 31 per cent that he drew among New York Negroes generally. In Chicago several well-to-do homeowning precincts I sampled after the election gave Eisenhower 50 per cent of their vote compared to 36 per cent in nearby low income Negro precincts. The 1956 vote, in other words, was

Geography · Political science · Psychology · Public Administration · Race, History, and American Society

• Recent Negro Ballots in Philadelphia

  Oscar Glantz•The Journal of Negro Education•1959

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