Beyond Little Rock: The Origins and Legacies of the Central High Crisis

3. Politics and the Early Civil Rights Struggle: Dr. John Marshall Robinson, the Arkansas Negro Democratic Association, and Black Politics in Little Rock, 1928–1952

3 Politics and the Early Civil Rights Struggle Dr. John Marshall Robinson, the Arkansas Negro Democratic Association, and Black Politics in Little Rock, 1928–1952 One of the most far-reaching effects of the New Deal in the United States was its impact on political party allegiances and voting behavior. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s political “New Deal coalition ,” which was formed of diverse groups in American society, including blacks, “farmers, blue-collar workers, ethnics” and residents of northern and midwestern cities, provided the votes that kept the Democratic Party dominant in American national politics for almost five decades. Integral to Democratic power at a national level was an unholy alliance with southern Democrats who, in contrast to the liberal stronghold that the national Democratic Party became, were deeply conservative and racist. The South remained loyally Democrat for historical reasons that identified the party with the Confederate cause in the Civil War and its defense of white supremacy. Considering the very different outlook of the national and southern wings of the Democratic Party, the alliance proved to have a good deal of longevity, serving as a pragmatic basis for maintaining party power that largely benefited both groups. Although that relationship was always tentative and parlous, it was only when the national Democratic Party explicitly supported the civil rights movement in the 1960s that the Democratic “solid South” broke decisively apart.1 35 Far more immediate and dramatic than the gradual southern white disenchantment with the Democratic Party was the switch in political allegiances of the black population. Prior to the 1930s, blacks had voted predominantly for the Republican Party as the party of Lincoln and the party of emancipation from slavery—that is, for essentially the opposite reasons that white southerners voted Democrat. Even up until 1932, blacks continued to vote Republican. But from the 1936 presidential election to the present day, blacks have voted Democrat in large numbers at national elections and they have represented one of the most consistent and reliable blocks of national Democratic Party support. Historian Harvard Sitkoff has suggested that the shift in black votes was based on the perceived racial liberalism of the Roosevelt administration and the national Democratic Party since the 1930s, while Nancy Weiss has suggested that it had more to do with the willingness of Democrats to actively pursue socially progressive policies that delivered practical help and support to the black population from the 1930s on.2 Whatever weight is given to each of these explanations, it is clear that the 1930s marked a significant shift in black politics. Of course, since two-thirds of blacks lived in the South in 1930, and a great many of them were prevented from voting anyway by an array of disfranchisement measures enforced by southern Democrats, it took time to translate black political support into votes and thereby into tangible political power. As the black population in northern cities grew through out-migration from the South, which was particularly pronounced during World War II, a newly enfranchised block of voters began to make their voices heard. A number of commentators point to the 1948 election of Democrat president Harry S. Truman as being the first election in which black votes made a decisive difference in a national election.3 In truth, although the 1930s were clearly a watershed in terms of black politics, the move of blacks toward the Democratic Party during that decade was in many ways equally the final chapter in a long goodbye to the Republican Party. With the end of Reconstruction in 1877, and the steady disfranchisement of the southern black population from the 1890s onward, Republicans had for many years been as concerned with placating southern whites as keeping black political support. The record of Republican presidents from the turn of the century up to the 1930s did little to encourage black voters. Theodore Roosevelt (president from 1901–9) did initially provide some conti36 Beyond Little Rock nuity with previous Republican ties to black politics by appointing blacks to federal offices, strongly stating his opposition to racially motivated lynching in the South, and relying upon the advice of the foremost black leader of the day, Booker T. Washington, whom he invited into the White House. However, during his second term in office, Roosevelt summarily dismissed three companies of black infantrymen who refused to inform on their compatriots about an alleged shootout in Brownsville, Texas. When Roosevelt ran...