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13. A Tale of Two Campaigns
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
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162 13 A TALE OF TWO CAMPAIGNS Ebony celebrated a milestone in the 1960 election year, publishing its fifteenth anniversary issue in November. The magazine had grown to an impressive 172 pages, printing more than 800,000 copies, read by about four million people around the world. It was shipped to some 30 countries, and could be found on newsstands in Paris, Addis Ababa, Lagos, Berlin, and Tokyo. Johnson Publishing Co. had well-outfitted bureaus in Beverly Hills, New York’s Rockefeller Center, and downtown Washington, D.C. As for its editorial concept, the magazine noted that it, too, had evolved: “Ebony will try to mirror the happier side of Negro life—the positive, everyday achievements from Harlem to Hollywood. But when we talk about race as the No. 1 problem of America, we’ll talk turkey.” And it did, in its editorials, its year-end tallies of black gains and losses, its feature articles on the civil rights movement, and its stunning photographs by, among others, David Jackson, G. Marshall Wilson , Maurice Sorrell, Ernest Withers, and Moneta Sleet. Sleet would make history before the end of the decade as the first black person in journalism to win a Pulitzer Prize.1 In the closing weeks before the November presidential election, when reports from the field showed that Republicans were about to lose heavily in Negro precincts, GOP strategists came up with a last minute plan. Two days before the election, Secretary of Labor James P. Mitchell, campaigning heavily for the Republican ticket, unveiled a new report: “The Economic Situation of Negroes in the United States.” The foreword of the study, signed by the secretary, included a hard-to-believe message, which received wide publicity in the press. Citing “steady improvement” in the social and economic status of Negroes, Mitchell claimed that in key measurable areas—including education, type of work, income, and housing, among others—the “historic differentials between whites and Negroes have narrowed.” Backing up this claim were statistics carefully skewed to influence the reader to believe the A Tale of Two Campaigns 163 “race gap” between white and Negro standards of living was slight after eight years of prosperity under the GOP. Negroes didn’t buy it, and the report had little if any impact on the vote in the fourteen states where it was important, possibly because up to that point, the party had shown little interest in winning the black vote. Several years earlier, an Eisenhower appointee, speaking in New Orleans about black gains in federal employment, had made the astonishing announcement that under the Republicans the rate of increase of Negroes in government employ there was 300 percent. Newspapers carried the story, with few reporters having checked to find that government employment of Negroes in the “Big Easy” had grown from two to six people. Even in 1960, government exploitation of data on blacks in an effort to show progress and consequently win their support was not unusual or unique. Starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt during the New Deal, politicians learned how to use this information skillfully to attract votes in the North, and encourage Negro leaders to believe that racial problems were being solved, if very slowly. Following the same strategy, Eisenhower aides once estimated Negro income at about 20 million annually, setting off a boom in advertising in the black community as companies sought to tap into this reputed wealth. Unfortunately, much of the advertising was for products such as liquor and cigarettes. In truth, the economic condition of the Negro on the whole was, in a word, miserable. A million Negroes were unemployed, many without skills or education or any reasonable prospects in an era of automation. Yearly wages for some Negro families in Southern states failed to reach 400 annually . Thousands were on relief, welfare, and unemployment compensation. National Urban League Executive Director Whitney Young also used 1960 figures to tell black audiences what they already suspected: that the masses of Negro citizens were actually farther removed, relatively speaking, from the mainstream of American life than they were twenty years earlier. Among the facts he cited: average family income of Negroes was 54 percent of the average white family’s, after a steady decline from a high of 59 percent in 1952; nationally there were twice as many blacks unemployed than whites; blacks represented only 12 percent of those in professional, managerial and technical operations, as compared with 42 percent of whites. In housing, Negroes were...