The Civil Rights Issue and Presidential Voting Among Southern Negroes and Whites

The role of the civil rights issue in the 1960 presidential election was investigated through a survey of the voting intentions of 130 Negroes and 147 whites in a southern city. The civil rights issue proved to be of central importance in the decisions of the Negro voters. The white voters, on the other hand, tended to make their decisions on other grounds, and the civil rights issue played a much lesser role. This was due not to indifference toward the issue but rather to the belief that the stands of Nixon and Kennedy were equally unacceptable. Thus Kennedy was able to attract a majority of Negro voters by adopting a somewhat more militant stance than his opponent on civil rights without alienating a large number of southern whites, who tended to regard any differences between the candidates on civil rights as insignificant. O S NE OF THE major issues of recent presidential election campaigns in the United States has been the question of civil rights for Negroes. Yet, in spite of the great importance attached to the issue by the candidates in the conduct of their campaigns, the impact of the issue upon the voting decisions of the public has not generally been studied except in indirect fashion, primarily through the analysis of gross voting returns. Thus we have little knowledge of the specific effects of the civil rights issue as distinct from other issues with regard to the voting patterns of either Negroes or whites. There have been many studies of Negro presidential voting based primarily upon the analysis of voting returns in predominantly Negro wards and precincts in southern and northern cities.' These studies show that until 1936 Negroes in the United States tended to vote Republican as a kind of perpetual monument to Reconstruction. New Deal economic and welfare measures, however, tended to attract Negroes to the Democratic party in the elections between 1936 and 1952. In 1956 there were widespread defections back to the Republican Party. According to Lubell's study of 86 cities, Eisenhower received only 25 percent of the Negro vote in these cities in 1952 but received 36 percent in 1956.2 The change was especially great in the southern cities, where the percent voting for Eisenhower rose from 19 percent in 1952 to 47 percent in 1956. A Gallup poll in January 1957, showed that "of all the major groups of the nation's population, the one that shifted most to the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket... was the Negro voter."3 The reason for the shift of the Negro vote in 1956 has been the subject of much speculation. Moon believes that "civil rights was most certainly an important consideration in the minds of Negro voters," and he points out that their switch was most pronounced in the South, where the issue was sharp and inescapable.4 Lubell states that ... . the crucial struggle in the minds of Negroes during the last campaign was the conflict between their anger over incidents of racial violence in the South and the economic attachment that they felt to the Democratic party."'5 Where unemployment was heavy and where Negroes were relatively well integrated into the labor movement, as in Michigan and Toledo, there were few defections from the * Paper read at the twenty-fourth annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Miami Beach, Florida, April 1961. I am indebted to the Research Council of Florida State University for financial support of this study and to Charles U. Smith of Florida A. & M. University for his co-operation and assistance during the field survey phase of the study. 1 See Elston Roady, "The Negro's Role in Southern Politics," The Negro in American Society (Tallahassee: Florida State University Studies, no. 28, 1958); Hugh D. Price, The Negro and Southern Politics (New York: New York University Press, 1957); Margaret Price, The Negro Voter in the South (Atlanta: Southern Regional Council, 1957); and the numerous articles in the Journal of Negro Education, 26 (Summer 1957). 2 Samuel Lubell, "The Future of the Negro Voter in the United States," Journal of Negro Education, 26 (Summer 1957), pp. 408-417. 3 Henry Lee Moon, "The Negro Vote in the Presidential Election of 1956," Journal of Negro Education, 26 (Summer 1957), pp. 219-230. 4 Ibid. p. 226. 5 Lubell, op. cit., p. 408. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.208 on Fri, 14 Oct 2016 04:22:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms