Black Game

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.

Local Democratic bosses discovered that it would not be costly to outbid the Republicans for the Negro vote. In St. Louis, for example, there are more than 40,000 Negroes who prior to 1933 voted solidly Republican. Yet since 1909 no Republican had ever been elected mayor of the city by a majority of more than 12,000 votes. In 1933 the Democrats of St. Louis went after the Negroes in a big way, elected the first Democratic mayor in 22 years. He appointed a negro named David M. Grant to be Assistant City Counselor. '"Boy!" exclaimed David Grant last week, "We started out less than two years ago and already have half of the 46,000 colored voters in this city. We have aroused more enthusiasm and done more work among the Negroes in two years than the Republicans did in 20." The methods of Democrats for winning local blackamoors were fairly simple:

P:Give Negroes patronage. Tammany Hall in New York and the Pendergast machine in Kansas City were among the first to see the practical wisdom of this method. Tammany has two Negro judges, two State legislators, two aldermen, two assistant district attorneys, a Civil Service commissioner. One of Boss Pendergast's Negro leaders, Dr. William J. Thompkins, is now Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia. A similar course has been followed in St. Louis since 1933, in Chicago by the Kelly-Nash machine. After the 1934 election, at least seven crackerjack State jobs were found for deserving Negro Democrats, scores of clerkships and janitorships for lesser Blacks.

P:Permit numbers games and other rackets to flourish under protection in Negro quarters. Notable examples of this are Chicago and St. Louis. Protection money fills the party treasury so that the party can well afford to be generous with Negroes.

P:See that Negroes get their full share of relief. In Chicago 40% of Negroes are on relief, in St. Louis 50%. Ward politicians will let it be understood that recipients must vote Democratic if they want to stay on relief.

These local methods gave Boss Farley a good foundation to build on nationally. In 1932 the Democratic Negro campaign was deputed to Pennsylvania's Editor Vann, Boss Pendergast's Dr. Thompkins and Boston's Julian David Rainey. son of a Reconstruction Congressman from South Carolina. All three belonged to the old order of Negro politician. This year they descended on the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, hoping to get their profitable 1932 jobs back. A mighty outcry arose from the new Negroes inside the Democratic Party who protested that they were sick & tired of being led by black bosses who were nothing more than stooges for white bosses. Therefore canny Mr. Farley ditched two of these oldsters, drafted Chicago's Negro Representative Arthur W. Mitchell to head the Democrats' Western Negro drive, with Lawyer Rainey in charge of Eastern activities.

Meantime Republicans had partly waked up. The GOP was even more beset than the Democrats by Negro politicians like Perry Howard of Mississippi, Roscoe Conkling Simmons of Illinois and Robert R. Church of Memphis, Tenn., oldtimers who for years have been accustomed to make a four-year living from the profits of running each Republican campaign. Republican National Chairman John Hamilton, avoiding the worst pitfalls, chose Rev. Mr. Lacey Kirk Williams, parson of the Mt. Olivet Baptist Church in Chicago and president of the Victory Mutual Life Insurance Co.. to head the Republican Negro drive in the West. Unlike most of the other important Negroes in the 1936 campaign, who have more white blood in them than black. Republican Williams is an old-fashioned chocolate color.

Almost pure white was the appearance of the Negro chosen last week to head the Republicans' darktown drive in the East. He was Francis Ellis Rivers, son of the last Negro member of the Tennessee Legislature. He graduated from Yale (Class of 1915) with a Phi Beta Kappa, won a lieutenant's commission during the War, got a degree from Columbia University's Law School, has sat in the New York Legislature. Able and up-to-date Republican Rivers promptly adopted a brain trust including Charles E. Mitchell, onetime Minister to Liberia, Oliver Randolph, onetime member of the New Jersey Legislature, and his own brother Dr. Mark E. Rivers, a Republican leader in Harlem.

These practicalities of politics were undertaken by Bosses Farley and Hamilton as if the Negro were no different from any other racial group in the U. S. electorate. With each of them a vote was a vote and neither was publicly concerned with the volcanoes of prejudice and emotion behind their activities. Both were aware that local machines in the North can give Negroes a semblance of political equality without running into social difficulties. In large cities where the Negro population is packed together in a small area, few whites even have to do business with minor Negro jobholders.

Social equality "for Negroes, in the abstract, is achieved in the North by the simple process of passing laws guaranteeing Blacks the right to demand admission to all theatres, hotels, restaurants, beauty parlors, etc. New York, Illinois and Ohio have long had such laws against Jim Crowism. Pennsylvania got one when Democratic Governor Earle took office (TIME, Aug. 12, 1935). But nowhere, as most intelligent Negroes admit, art: such laws consistently enforced against the strong but silent sentiment of the White majority opposed to close social contact with Blacks. When a bumptious blackamoor attempts to invoke such a statute, he generally gets more publicity than social satisfaction.

In national politics, however, such easy outs are not available to party leaders, because the national election serves to intensify race feeling. The whispered tale that Warren G. Harding had Negro blood did that Presidential candidate enormous undercover damage in the 1920 campaign. In 1928 Herbert Hoover won four Southern States but lost them next year when Mrs. Hoover invited Mrs. Oscar De Priest, wife of Chicago's Negro Representative, to the White House for tea (TIME, June 24, 1929). Photographs of Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt being squired by two young Negroes during a visit to Howard University were given wide circulation in the South this year (TIME, April 27).

Women saw one of their sex in the Cabinet 13 years after they got the vote. Negroes have had the vote for 68 years, but a President who will put a Negro into his Cabinet has yet to be elected. Such a President would also have to pass and enforce an anti-lynching bill, would logically have to invite one Negro to every ten whites to White House functions, would have to smile graciously while his daughter danced with Negro Congressmen and Senators. Despite the earnest efforts of Boss Farley to win the largest Negro vote in Democratic history, Nominee Roosevelt is not such a President. If he were, the chances are that all the money in the Federal Treasury could not hold the already troubled South in line for him.

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