During the campaign, Democrats charged that if the Republicans won the election, they would abolish slavery and grant civil equality to Negroes. Lincoln himself had repeatedly voiced his opposition to equal rights for free Negroes. The political parties that were born, regenerated and remodeled after that great and bloody conflict still owe much to their patrimony under the years of bondage. From such unpromising beginnings, today's parties do the treacherous business of politics. In the throes of the social upheaval occasioned by the Civil Rights Movement there has been an explosion in the number of Black politicians in various levels and strata of the political system, with the logical result that Black politicians now are in their highest numbers in U.S. history.
Nothing can be farther from the truth.
Absent cries make empty phrases. Presence, even in the halls of political power, is not power. Black political representation in the white supremacist state, is symbolic, but not real, for they are constantly in such numerical inferiority that they can only align themselves with one or the other wing of the Big Bird in power. Yet, we remain, powerless in the Citadels of Power.