The Negro vote in this campaign is heavily supporting the Roosevelt administration and its humane and constructive social policies and program. In so doing, it is right, sensible and far-sighted. For the New Deal has come nearer to being a square deal for the Negro than anything he has had for over a generation. For that length of time, the Negro has had a raw deal economically and a dirty deal politically; and thinking Negroes cannot forget that their traditional friends, the Republicans, were indirectly party to the one and directly party to the other. For by tolerating the disfranchisement of two-thirds of the entire Negro population, they sold the Negro into political bondage to themselves in the North and sold him back to economic serfdom in the land of his old slavery. But now, by an irony of fate, the Negro vote is in a pivotal position to bid for friends and to punish enemies, to get off the auction block and bargain and buy in the open political market.
The Republican Party has little to offer out of its long reign of power and responsibility but broken promises and betrayed loyalties; except a paltry mess of political pottage to a few self-seeking, hireling politicians. No thinking Negro can believe that the Republican Party and its leadership believe in the Constitution except for some people sometimes. The 14th and 15th Amendments, broken and nullified, face him only too clearly and tragically. So the campaign cry of the sanctity of the Constitution has too hollow a sound to deceive Negro ears and the new turn-tail doctrine of “States Rights” holds too sinister a prospect to attract the Negro’s slowly opening political eyes. Many of us now see clearly that it is no longer an issue between old-line parties, one, our traditional friend and the other, our traditional enemy, but a choice between a progressive program of social reform and a reactionary policy of hands off and the devil take the hindmost. Between bread from a strange table and husks and taffy from a familiar hand, the sensible Negro will choose bread. Between blind loyalty to empty traditions and experimental allegiance to new measures, the Negro will prefer delivered performances. Moreover, this new program which has won over many Negroes, against many misgivings, to the Democratic Party is on the verge of winning over the Democratic Party, or the progressive section of it, to the political worth and social deserts of the Negro. A half generation of consistent practise and progress in this direction and democracy may come to spell what it means and mean what it spells.
The practise of the American Constitution for all of the people all of the time is yet far from achievement. Yet we are further along toward real democracy and tangible social justice under the program of the New Deal and the courageous precedent breaking of President Roosevelt than we have ever been before. In that program the Negro hasn’t fared badly thus far. But it is more important to him in the long run to have common justice to the common man than special favor to himself as a handicapped minority or special protection as an oppressed group. It is safer and sounder to arrive at the fulfillment of the Negro’s hope and just due through general social justice, through federally initiated and subsidized social welfare than by any special legislation or particular pampering or coddling. As a vital and integral part of the under-privileged, as just one battalion in the army of “forgotten men,” we have only to contend for fuller and fairer inclusion in the economic relief, the federally controlled working conditions, the publicly enlarged industrial opportunity and publicly subsidized measures of welfare and social security which the New Deal has tried to bring and which it is committed to continue and expand. The logic of the Negro’s position directs his vote to the hearty and grateful support of such a program. Both to pay off an honest debt for creditable and difficult beginning and to roll up excess credit for larger earned dividends and increased participation in it, a record Negro vote should go to the Democratic ticket in this campaign. In this respect, the Negro knows best what the whole country needs,—not a constitutional charter of property and privilege with dead-letter human rights but a flexible, fearless humanized executive program of progressive social action, with the spirit of social justice and humane responsibility for the humblest and most handicapped citizens, regardless of race or creed, but not regardless of condition.