The Making of the President 1964 by White Theodore H

Author:White, Theodore H. [White, Theodore H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 2010-12-13T21:00:00+00:00

History can signal its changes to wise men without violence, but for those who prefer to ignore its message, it then raps with gunfire to call attention.

The riots of 1964 were episodes far larger than campaign episodes; they were the first violent call upon American politics and civilization to pay attention, before too late, to a condition which may result in a transformation not only of political forms but of American life itself.

Starkly put, the gross fact is that the great cities of America are becoming Negro cities. Today only one major American city—Washington—has a Negro majority. But by 1980—if the arithmetical projections of present population trends come to pass—Negroes will be the majority in Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, Chicago and St. Louis; and in the decade following, in Philadelphia. By 1990, then—which is almost tomorrow in the eyes of history—these trends, if unchanged, will give America a civilization in which seven of her ten largest cities (all except New York, Los Angeles and Houston) will have Negro majorities; and the civilization of this country will be one of metropolitan clusters with Negroes congested in turmoil in the central cities and whites defending their ramparts in the suburbs.

One must look back to grasp the full dimension of this change in the nation’s life in our time—and the direction in which it points.

Until 1940, 75 percent of United States Negroes lived in the South, the great majority of them functionally illiterate, primitive, excluded from society, as they are still excluded in Mississippi and Alabama, and so cruelly policed as to have no understanding of the law but fear. But World War II made the North into a great industrial furnace—and the draft of the furnace sucked Negro labor by the scores of thousands up the Mississippi Valley, up the East Coast to the forges, foundries and factories of the war effort. The postwar boom and the Korean War kept the furnaces blazing, and the migration northward continued. In some years of the 1950s as many as 200,000 Southern Negroes moved north or west to the big cities in search of jobs and freedom.

Where they pooled, Negro death rates fell and birth rates rose. In the twenty years from 1940 to 1960 the Negro populations of New York and Philadelphia doubled (to 1,100,000 and 529,000 respectively); the Negro populations of Chicago and Detroit tripled (to 813,000 and 482,000 respectively), and that of Los Angeles multiplied by five (from 63,000 to 335,000).

Though migration from the South has now slowed, the Negroes’ urban birth rate—approximately 40 percent higher than that of whites—continues to swell their numbers. In the cities, with social services available, with welfare and hospital care provided, with family responsibility assumed by municipality, Negroes grow in numbers at a rate faster than ever before. In Chicago, for example, where Negroes have risen from 278,000 in 1940 to approximately 900,000 (1964 estimate), their natural growth rate is nine times faster than it was before the war. The fertility rate of Chicago Negroes increased in the 1950–1960 decade three times as fast as that of Negroes generally across the country.

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