A True History of the United States by Daniel A. Sjursen

Author:Daniel A. Sjursen [Sjursen, Daniel A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

Affirmative Action, but Only for Whites

The Negro was born in depression…. It only became official when it hit the white man.

— Clifford Burke as quoted by Studs Terkel in an oral history of the Great Depression

At the height of the New Deal, according to the black scholar and historian W. E. B. Du Bois, some 75 percent of African Americans still were denied the right to vote. Since at least 1877 blacks could count on neither major political party to reliably champion their rights. Nonetheless, it was undoubtedly during the Great Depression that a supermajority of African Americans moved toward the Democrats. That this should be so is somewhat odd. The Democratic Party, we must remember, was the preferred party not only of Civil War–era Confederates but of postwar segregationists and white supremacists. Indeed, by the 1930s the Democrats boasted a single-party system — in which they were unchallenged by Republicans — across the Old South. Still, there was something about Franklin Roosevelt, a scion of a northern patrician family, and his New Deal that appealed to America’s largely impoverished black population. Black Americans saw hope in the man and his policies. Tragically, their faith would prove misplaced and they would soon find themselves left out of the New Deal’s largesse in a carefully orchestrated system that achieved nothing less than white “affirmative action.”

The main culprits in this epic sellout were powerful southern Democrats along with FDR himself, who proved all too willing to compromise with these white supremacists — a decision that the president saw as politically necessary. The southern wing of the Democratic Party had long been dominant. This requires some explanation and analysis. Given the peculiar American system of state-based senatorial representation, the seventeen states that mandated racial segregation had a combined thirty-four seats in the Senate. Almost all were Democrats; the Republicans rarely even ran an opposing candidate, and blacks (who largely favored the GOP, the party of Lincoln) were disenfranchised. Thus these senators made up the majority of Democrats in the Senate and had undue influence on the party platform and policies. Furthermore, these senators — along with southerners in the House — usually had the most seniority in Congress and thus chaired the key committees, controlling which bills made it to the floor for debate and a vote. Finally, because of the low franchise among African Americans and with blacks counted for representation purposes although they were blocked from voting, each white southerner in Congress had far more statistical sway in Washington than his northern counterpart. Throughout the New Deal era, these dominant southerners would use their power for one primary purpose: to maintain their apartheid system of white supremacy.

The new attraction of northern blacks to the Democratic Party and the apparent sympathy of southern blacks for New Deal socioeconomic reforms were seen very differently by African American leaders and southern white party leaders. Whereas one black preacher in the South hopefully told his flock to “[l]et Jesus lead you and Roosevelt feed

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