Individual Right and Collective Interests

The NAACP and the American Voting Rights Discourse

manfred berg

In March 1911 the third annual conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) passed a “Declaration of Principles and Purposes” that condemned the increasing racial dis­crimination in America and vowed to fight for the rights of black people.

We insist that the colored citizen of the United States is entitled to every right, civil and political, that is accorded to his white neighbor.We hold as a self-evident political truth that no men who are deprived of the right to vote can protect themselves against oppression and injustice. They cannot influence legislation or have a voice in selecting the tribunals by which their rights are determined, and the first step toward the advancement of the colored race is the recognition and protection of their right to vote.¹

The NAACP declaration echoed the two principal reasons why disfran­chised groups have sought the vote throughout American history: They want the ballot because it symbolizes equality and inclusion as “first-class citizens” and because it is seen as an instrument for self-protection and for advancing collective interests. The symbolic function of the ballot is said to confer primarily an individual psychological benefit, the affirmation of civic pride and belonging, whereas its instrumental value only mate­rializes if groups of voters pursue common goals with sufficient electoral clout to ensure that governments will respond to their needs and demands.^{[70] [71] Both motifs have played an important role during the long struggle for voting rights for African Americans. Blacks tried to register and vote simply to assert their claim to first-class citizenship, even if they knew that this would have no impact on the power of white suprema­cists and might very well jeopardize their livelihoods and even their lives.}

Obviously, no exhaustive account of the various legal, political, and organizational actions the NAACP has taken in its long quest for the ballot can be given here. Instead, I address a more specific problem: How did the NAACP react to a culture of voting rights that assumed that black people - individually and collectively - were unfit for first-class citizen­ship? How did it shape its discourse on voting in order to persuade the white majority that it had nothing to fear and much to gain from black participation? The weight of my argument lies in the early period of the NAACP to World War II, when the culture of disfranchisement and discrimination was firmly in place and forced the NAACP to go a long way toward accommodating the anxieties of the majority.

I

By the time the NAACP was founded by white neoabolitionists and black intellectuals in 1909 the white South had just about completed the virtual nullification of the Fifteenth Amendment, which had been ratified in 1870 to ensure suffrage for black men.

It is important to note that the disfranchisement of African Americans in the South was accomplished during a period in American history that otherwise saw the expansion of participation rights. Certainly, the electoral reforms of the Progressive Era that were targeted against urban machines and corrupt bosses betrayed a clear anti-immigrant bias, but whatever dis­crimination occurred was a far cry from southern practices. The introduc­tion of direct primaries and plebiscites, especially in the western states, the direct election of U.S. senators, and the successful conclusion of the push for women’s suffrage in 1920 testify to a strong democratic current in the American political culture of the early twentieth century.^[76]

Black voters, however, were clearly not included. The disfranchisement of southern blacks met with little protest outside the South. Three prin­cipal factors contributed to the tacit acquiescence to this most important setback to participation rights in all of U.S.

As a result of this political marginalization, an essentially premodern discourse on black voting came to the fore. It drew a sharp distinction between the exercise of suffrage as an individual privilege confined to a few “good Negroes” who would follow white leadership, and voting as the pursuit of collective interests, which conjured up the Reconstruction myths of northern carpetbaggers and southern scalawags exploiting the “ignorant Negro bloc vote” to wreak havoc on southern civilization. As late as 1937 the Charleston News and Courier succinctly put it: “We Southerners know that there are intelligent Negroes... of character and information qualifying them for the suffrage. But we know that they are extremely few. We know that were the hordes of negroes voting in South Carolina they would follow, not the white men on whom the existence of the state in decency and civilization depends, but depraved white men cunningly able to equalize themselves with negroes and be beloved by them.”⁹ The token participation of a few black voters served two impor­tant ends: It reinforced the paternalistic self-image of the white South and, more important, helped maintain the fiction that the masses of African Americans were barred from voting not because of their race but because of their inability to meet other, ostensibly color-blind qualifica­tions.

century, see Thomas Goebel, “A Government of Laws or a Government of the People? Direct Democracy and American Political Culture, 1890—1920,”in Knud Krakau, ed., The American Nation — National Identity — Nationalism (Munster, 1997), 123—48.

8 On the Republican retreat from the southern states, see Richard M.Valelly, “National Parties and Racial Disenfranchisement,” in Paul E. Peterson, ed., Classifying by Race (Princeton, N.J., 1995), 188—216; on the national Republican Party’s attitude toward race during the early twentieth century, see Richard B. Sherman, The Republican Party and Black America: From McKinley to Hoover, 1896—1933 (Charlottesville,Va., 1973).

9 Quoted in Rayford W. Logan, ed., The Attitude of the Southern White Press Toward Negro Suffrage (Washington, D.C., 1940), 69. race and a few blacks were permitted to vote, the U.S. Supreme Court would accept them at face value. In 1897, the year after it had legally sanctioned racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, the court ruled in Williams v. Mississippi that the literacy test required by Mississippi regis­tration laws did not violate either the Fourteenth or the Fifteenth Amend­ments to the federal constitution.^{[77] [78]} A few years later the Supreme Court, in one of its most formalistic decisions ever, made clear that it had no intention of protecting the voting rights of blacks. An African-American plaintiff from Alabama who had sought an order to add his name to the registration rolls of his home state was confronted with a marvelous example of “Catch 22” logic: If the voter list of Alabama had been drawn up in violation of the Constitution, as alleged by the plaintiff, the court could not become a part of this by adding another name!¹¹

It is doubtful that such legal sophistry was taken very seriously either in the South or in the rest of the nation.

Porter was not far off the mark. Most conspicuously, the Republican Party for all practical purposes had abandoned its Reconstruction legacy and accepted the tacit consensus that the “Negro problem” was an inter­nal affair of the South. If the party was to regain influence below the Mason-Dixon line, it had to be on a strictly “lily-white” basis. In 1921 former President William Howard Taft, one of the leading spokesmen for rebuilding a lily-white southern Republican Party, openly conceded that the disfranchisement of blacks was a clear violation of the Constitution but argued that “the only hope the Negro has of securing his right to vote is in developing his intelligence and economic utility, so that indi­vidual negroes of character and intelligence may gradually have accorded to them what is theirs now by right.”^[80] Taft, in essence, argued that the Fifteenth Amendment was unenforceable for the time being and that southern blacks, in the spirit of the late Booker T. Washington, ought to resign themselves to this fact. When Taft was nominated for the position of chief justice of the Supreme Court a few months later, the NAACP was understandably appalled and briefly considered a propaganda cam­paign against his appointment. The idea was dropped, however, because the NAACP realistically did not feel it was strong enough to take on a former president.^[81]

ii

The NAACP had to operate in a racist political culture that assumed black people had no legitimate interests that they could articulate and pursue independently of whites. This situation required a delicate balanc­ing act. On the one hand, the advancement of colored people could be achieved only if the association encouraged African Americans to assert their rights and interests as a group. On the other hand, the white major­ity had to be reassured that such assertiveness did not pose a threat to their own interests. Like other reform movements, the NAACP wrapped itself in the flag to persuade the American public that political rights for blacks were in the best interest of the nation.

The discursive strategy that the NAACP adopted in its early days and basically maintained throughout the next six decades can perhaps be best characterized as democratic nationalism. It tried to combine the univer- salist principles and language of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with conventional patriotism. In order to redeem its promise of freedom, equality, and democracy, America had to liberate itself from the blemish of racism. Thus, the struggle against the oppression of black Americans was a service to the entire nation, including the oppressors. “As much as anybody in the country the Negro wants to be a good American,” wrote the NAACP executive secretary James Weldon Johnson in 1929 for the American Mercury; “He is also determined to wear the rights as well as bear the burdens of American citizenship.... He must win not only for himself but for the South.... He must win for the nation, because if he fails, democracy in America fails with him.”^[82]

This did not mean that the white majority could be relieved of its duty to eradicate the evil of racism, as the NAACP’s “Declaration of Prin­ciples and Purposes,” previously quoted, clearly stated. But in dwelling on what Gunnar Myrdal later aptly coined the “American Creed,” the asso­ciation acknowledged that white America had created the very norms and institutions necessary to overcome this evil. The organicist metaphor of racism as a social disease threatening “the whole body of American citi­zenship” implied that both minority and majority had a vital interest in “healing.” As a toothache tells the body of decay, the NAACP journal The Crisis explained, “The function of this Association is to tell this nation the crying evil of race prejudice.”^[83] Obviously, The Crisis extended too much good faith when it blamed “ignorance and misapprehension” for much of the prevailing racism. But in the vein of progressive reform the NAACP honestly believed in the ability of the white citizenry - at least of the vast majority that had no material stake in racial discrimination - to realize that racial prejudice was detrimental to its own welfare and to cure itself of this disease.^[84]

Why should whites in the North care about black voting rights in the South? Racial disfranchisement was not a regional but rather a national problem, the NAACP argued, because it led to a gross overrepresentation of the southern oligarchy in national elections. Because African Ameri­cans were counted in the apportionment of congressional seats to the southern states but were excluded from voting, many fewer votes were needed in the South to win a seat in Congress or to carry a state in a presidential election. For example, The Crisis demonstrated that in 1908 Republican candidate William Howard Taft had received almost 200,000 votes to win the eleven electoral votes of Minnesota, while his Demo­cratic rival William J. Bryan needed fewer than 75,000 votes to pocket an equal number of presidential electors in Alabama. In the congressional elections of 1910 the victorious candidate in the 19th congressional dis­trict of Illinois received about as many votes, namely, 23,000, as all win­ners in Mississippi’s eight congressional districts combined.^[85] Obviously, southern congressmen represented far fewer voters than their northern colleagues, and the individual ballots of southern voters counted for many times more than those of their fellow citizens in the North due to racial disfranchisement. Hence, former Massachusetts Attorney General Albert Pillsbury argued at the founding conference of the NAACP, more than the voting rights of blacks was at stake: “It is not merely a question of Negro suffrage, or Negro equality. It is a question of the equality of white men.”^[86]

To remedy this situation the NAACP demanded the enforcement of Section Two of the Fourteenth Amendment, which stipulates that the congressional representation of states that deny the vote to any number of their adult (male) inhabitants for reasons other than rebellion or crime shall be reduced in proportion to the number of disfranchised voters. Because the Fifteenth Amendment prohibits disfranchisement “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude” the NAACP argued, all other legal voting restrictions, such as literacy tests and poll taxes, would trigger a reduced representation in Congress according to the aforemen­tioned section of the Fourteenth Amendment.^[87] Despite the amendment’s ostensibly unambiguous wording, the association’s attempts to invoke the amendment came to no avail. Its enforcement involved too many intri­cate and extremely controversial constitutional and political issues that touched directly on the fragile balance of power between the regions. The South, for example, could point to a large immigrant population in the North that counted in the apportionment of congressional represen­tation but could not vote, either. Unlike the equal protection and due process clauses of Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment, which developed into the constitutional bedrock of modern American citizen­ship, Section Two could never be divorced from its coercive Reconstruc­tion legacy that few Americans wished to revive.^[88]

The emphasis on the enforcement of Section Two of the Fourteenth Amendment also underscored the proclivity of NAACP leaders to accept a strict textual interpretation of the Fifteenth Amendment. Pillsbury told the founders of the NAACP that the Fifteenth Amendment entitled blacks “to be treated, in respect of the suffrage, only as other men of the same standing or character are treated, and nothing more. The federal law does not make a single Negro a voter, in any state of the union.”^[89] In pondering possible constitutional strategies, Moorfield Storey, the first president of the NAACP and a former president of the American Bar Association, maintained that “it is what the Constitution says which deter­mines what it means.” Storey did realize that a strict interpretation of the Fifteenth Amendment amounted to a recognition of the validity of south­ern voting laws. He considered the Fourteenth Amendment, Section Two, the more promising constitutional argument with which to attack these laws.²3

The view that the Fifteenth Amendment was a mere prohibition against open racial discrimination that otherwise left the states free to impose all kinds of ostensibly color-blind restrictions on voting was by no means confined to prominent white lawyers like Pillsbury or Storey. Many black advocates of civil rights agreed that universal suffrage was not legally required and not desirable, either. In The Souls of Black Folk, first published in 1903,W E. B. Du Bois poignantly criticized Booker T.Wash- ington’s accommodations but conceded that “reasonable restrictions in the suffrage,” even if applied evenly, would disfranchise many African Amer­icans because of “the low social level of the mass of the race.”^{[90] [91] Almost twenty years later, after co-founding the NAACP and editing its journal The Crisis, the leading African-American intellectual of his time had not altered his views. In a 1921 article for The Crisis, DuBois wrote: “As long as the 15th Amendment stands, it is absolutely illegal to disfranchise a person because of �?race, color, or previous condition of servitude.’ But it is absolutely legal to disfranchise persons for any number of other reasons. Indeed a state might legally disfranchise a person for having red hair.”[92] Du Bois may have referred to hair color as a figure of speech, but there is no doubt that he earnestly acknowledged a very broad discretion of the states to impose suffrage qualifications. “If the[se] qualifications are reasonable,” he continued, “it is only a matter of time when Negroes will meet them................. If they are disfranchised by unreasonable qualifications or}

by the unfair administration of the law, they can continue to attack these in the courts and before the public opinion of the nation........................... In such a

case they cannot in the long run fail to triumph.”^[93]

Such language clearly reflected the unwavering faith of the NAACP leaders, white and black, in the Constitution as an inexorable historical force. But the NAACP’s self-imposed limitation to a narrow concept of color-blind fairness also served the purpose of demonstrating to the American public that African Americans neither needed nor sought special privileges. In particular, this defensive mind-set governed the asso­ciation’s attitude toward the most important of nonracial qualifications: the literacy test. From colonial times on, the logic that the responsible exercise of participation rights is predicated on the ability to read and write has retained a high degree of historical and legal dignity within the American culture of rights. Literacy tests as a qualification for voting were also required in many nonsouthern states and sanctioned by the Supreme Court as a legitimate state interest. Despite blatant racial discrimination in the South, advocates insisted that a reasonable institution should not be banished because of misuse in some parts of the country.^[94]

Their wide social and legal acceptance and disproportionate impact on a black population heavily disadvantaged by segregated and inferior schools made literacy tests a favorite instrument of disfranchisement. To allow white illiterates to register, several southern states had passed so- called understanding clauses as an alternative to reading and writing. These required a “reasonable interpretation” of sections of the federal or state constitutions or of the concept of citizenship in a republic.^[95] It is needless to add that the interpretations of black applicants were very rarely accepted as “reasonable.” With an increasing literacy rate among African Americans, some states made these understanding clauses mandatory voting qualifications, giving almost unlimited discretion to registrars.^[96] Anecdotes about outlandish questions and arbitrary administration could be told by the hundreds, illustrating V O. Key’s apt judgment of the late 1940s: “The southern literacy test is a fraud and nothing more.”^[97]

Yet the NAACP never directly attacked the literacy test but merely insisted on its impartial, color-blind administration. Surely, it was difficult enough to prove in court the discriminatory intent of registrars. To attack the Louisiana understanding clause, NAACP legal counsel Charles Houston told the association’s New Orleans branch, he needed a host of well-documented cases of racial discrimination, “rather a thousand than a hundred.”^[98] Still, other motifs also figured in. Most important, the demand for the abolition of literacy tests could have been construed as an implicit admission of intellectual deficiency. The frequent use of the phrase “intel­ligent Negroes” in the NAACP’s rhetoric betrays a deep-seated inferior­ity complex that played directly into the hands of racism.^[99] By accepting educational deficits as a legitimate reason for disfranchisement, the NAACP tended to ignore the fact that the high ideal of the “intelligent voter” served to justify the exclusion of marginalized groups. This atti­tude also mirrored the pride of the association’s black middle-class leaders in their own educational achievements. As Walter White, its longtime executive secretary, wrote in the late 1930s: “We do not care how rigid these tests are, all we insist upon is that they be applied without restric­tion of race, creed, or color.”^[100] White ignored the fact that even if “rigid tests” were administered in a perfectly impartial manner, large numbers of blacks would still be excluded as a result of blatant racial discrimination in education.

To be sure, the NAACP vigorously fought for equal opportunity in education, which was expected gradually to do away with the racial imbalance of literacy tests as a qualification for voting.^[101] But such hopes would not only take time to materialize, they also overlooked the fact that literacy tests and understanding clauses could simply be made more difficult. In the 1950s and early 1960s Alabama used a catalog of sixty­eight possible questions, some of which would have been tricky business for lawyers or political scientists. In Mississippi registrants might be asked to explain the corporate tax laws of the state.^[102] Such absurd practices ceased only after the civil rights movement of the early 1960s had paved the way for the passing of the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 and 1970, which banned the use of literacy tests as a prerequisite for registration.^[103]

It would be highly speculative to argue that a more straightforward attack on the literacy test by the NAACP could have led to its earlier demise. Because the device was not racial on its face and did not tech­nically violate the Fifteenth Amendment, the focus on its racially biased administration perhaps was the only practical legal strategy - albeit one that yielded few tangible results because the courts insisted on a strict standard of discriminatory intent that was almost impossible to prove.^[104] However, legal considerations cannot fully explain why the NAACP remained so acquiescent toward educational tests in its discursive strategy. At least part of the answer lies in its more-or-less explicit acceptance that a large number of African Americans, due to a long history of discrimi­nation, were indeed lacking the basic educational requirements to use the ballot “intelligently,” that is, for the enlightened self-interest of their race.

Ill

Rhetorically, the concept of the “intelligent Negro” came perilously close to the racist claim that blacks as a group were unfit for voting and could only qualify on the basis of individual achievement. However, the NAACP also used the phrase in a very different context that related directly to the assertion of African-American collective political strength. In the associ­ation’s view, the lack of political “intelligence” in black voters was not the result of an innate intellectual inferiority as the pseudoscientific racism of the early twentieth century claimed. Still, it is telling of the cultural hege­mony of racism at the time that the first two speakers at the NAACP founding conference were an anthropologist and a neurologist arguing against the biological distinctiveness, that is, inferiority, of black people.^[105]

That blacks as a group were politically immature was no fault of their own. They were, as Du Bois argued, simply left out of political education by the parties that at best treated them as an ignorant “bloc vote” that could be bought off with a few breadcrumbs: “They are given over to the lowest white politicians and ward heelers, and the only arguments used are money and honeyed words As a method of government, a

way of securing decent schools, healthful conditions of living, the right of administration of the laws and the like, the colored voter is singularly in the dark. He needs systematic education.”³⁹

Traditionally, voters are mobilized and educated by parties and candi­dates seeking their support and promising to represent their interests in return. However, African-American voters in the early twentieth century found themselves in the peculiar situation that nobody was really inter­ested in their votes. Even after the so-called Great Migration of World War I, about 85 percent of the black population lived in the South, where they faced disfranchisement and the monopoly of the white supremacist Democrats. The small black electorate of the North was taken for granted by the Republican Party. Prior to the election of 1924, NAACP Execu­tive Secretary James Weldon Johnson aptly spoke of a “gentlemen’s agreement” among the two parties: “The agreement provides that the Republican Party will hold the Negro and do as little for him as possi­ble and that the Democrats will have none of it at all.” Johnson had few illusions about the political clout of the twelve million blacks in the United States. They were “the least influential and least effective political unit in the whole country... a political nonentity.”⁴⁰

If the parties refused to do their job, the NAACP had to step in and educate African Americans about candidates, issues, and the best interest of their people. By an “intelligent” use of the ballot, black voters could put themselves on the political map and force parties and candidates to face their growing strength. Political “intelligence” first and foremost meant voting as independents. Not tradition, habit, nor petty gains should govern black voting but rather an enlightened nonpartisan approach to politics. “Men and measures” had to be considered strictly in relation to

For a general introduction to the history of (pseudo)scientific racism, see Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York, 1981);William H.Tucker, The Science and Politics of Racial Research (Urbana, Ill., 1994).

39 W E. B. Du Bois, “Lessons in Government,” Crisis 12 (Oct. 1916): 269.

40 James Weldon Johnson,“The Gentlemen’s Agreement and the Negro Vote,” Crisis 28 (Oct. 1924): 260—4. On the distribution of the black population among the sections, see Jessie Carney Smith and Carrell Peterson Horton, eds., Historical Statistics of Black America, 2 vols. (New York, 1995), 2:1589—90, 1595—6. According to the 1920 census the potential black electorate nowhere exceeded 4 percent of the total in the northern industrial states. Ibid., 1319—20. black interests. “Friends” would be rewarded and “enemies” punished at the polls.^[106]

As an organization dedicated to the advancement of African Ameri­cans, to be taken seriously the NAACP had to adhere to the principle of nonpartisanship. But nonpartisanship also formed the cornerstone of its electoral balance-of-power strategy, which it hoped would revive party competition for black votes. Given that African Americans were a minor­ity in the first place and that only the tiny fraction living in the North could vote freely, the association tried to cultivate the idea that black voters could sway the balance of power in close races and then expect the gratitude of the victorious side. For this theory to work, it was necessary that no party or candidate ever take black support for granted. African Americans, NAACP co-founder William English Walling told the 1926 annual conference, had to follow the lead of the progressive, labor, women’s, and prohibition movements, all of which had practiced “organized nonpartisan voting” and gained considerable influence in both parties.^[107]

To underscore the claim that black voters held the balance of power, the NAACP did its best to inflate their numbers and to dramatize their alleged key position. For the presidential elections of 1912, for instance, Du Bois estimated that there were 600,000 eligible African-American voters outside the South and predicted that they would decide the outcome in the states of Illinois, Indiana, New York, and Ohio. Only in Illinois did the race even come close. According to Du Bois’s generous estimate, the winning contender,Woodrow Wilson, received no more than 100,000 black votes nationwide - a negligible quantity with regard to his total of six million.^[108] Yet even the constant blurring of the difference between the potential electorate and actual turnout - for the 1924 elec­tions The Crisis tacitly assumed a fantastic black turnout of 90 percent - did not impress parties and politicians who knew quite well that African Americans, except in a few localities, could be safely ignored because their numbers simply were not large enough.^[109]

The balance-of-power theory is not exactly an original idea; it has been employed by many interest groups and minorities throughout American political history. Still, the NAACP’s claims appear especially questionable considering the specific conditions on which balance-of-power elections are based.^[110] First, the concept requires a homogeneous, disciplined, and well-informed voting bloc that can be easily mobilized. Second, to lend credibility to the claim of volatile nonpartisanship this voting bloc must continuously shift its electoral allegiance in a clear and visible manner. Third, only if the white majority is divided into two camps of roughly the same strength will blacks be in a position to tip the scales. This last assumption was the most problematic because the specter of the “Negro bloc vote” could easily be exploited to unify white voters in the name of white supremacy. Where racial polarization played into electoral cam­paigns blacks could hardly expect to be allowed to hold the balance of power.

Despite its obvious shortcomings, the balance-of-power theory remained the NAACP’s political mantra for decades. This was hardly due to a lack of analytical skills but rather to a lack of viable alternatives. The idea of an all-black party was incompatible with the association’s integrationist creed and even less realistic than the balance-of-power concept.^[111] In addition, the call for voting as independents met with very limited resonance. To most African-American voters Frederick Douglass’s famous words remained an article of faith: “The Republican Party is the deck, all else is the sea.” In Herbert Hoover’s 1932 landslide defeat by Franklin D. Roosevelt blacks still formed the most loyal Republican voting bloc, following twelve years of “lily-white” Republicans in the White House. Undaunted, the NAACP declared the end of “blind alle­giance” to the Republican Party.^[112]

Four years later African Americans terminated their loyalty to the GOP in the most massive shift of a single group of voters in American politi­cal history. FDR’s performance in black districts even exceeded his 61 percent overall share of the popular vote; in Harlem he received 81 percent. But given Roosevelt’s smashing victory, any claim to a balance-of-power role by the black vote would have been preposterous. Moreover, the African-American defection to the Democrats was hardly an exercise in independent nonpartisan voting. As historian Nancy Weiss has convincingly argued, blacks joined the New Deal bandwagon for the same reasons most Americans did: They hoped for an improvement of their economic plight, even though many of the New Deal programs heavily discriminated against blacks.^[113]

The NAACP actively supported the shift toward the New Deal coali­tion, but it warned the Democrats not to consider black voters their prop- erty.^[114]9 Only if the African-American vote was seen as a prize coveted by both parties could electoral strength be translated into tangible gains. Although it took the national Democratic Party another thirty years to come down squarely and unequivocally on the side of civil rights, black voters after 1936 became the most loyal Democratic constituency without receiving substantial political compensation. When they could claim a decisive part in the razor-thin victories of Harry Truman in 1948 and John F. Kennedy in 1960, little more than tokenism followed. In retro­spect it seems obvious enough that the NAACP’s rhetoric of indepen­dent nonpartisanship and balance of power had a very tenuous base in the American political realities and consequently yielded few results.^[115]

Given the political isolation of African Americans in the first half of this century, there were no readily available alternatives to the NAACP’s approach. Still, it is remarkable that the black and white leaders of the association never questioned their elitist ideal of the “intelligent” rational- choice voter that had little meaning for the vast majority of the black population. How could the black proletariat of the big cities, which made up the bulk of the black electorate, be induced to cast their ballot “intel­ligently”? Not only did the NAACP have a hard time reaching these people, but due to its adherence to the principle of nonpartisanship, it could rarely offer them clear-cut recommendations. And what should motivate the black masses to vote, if the educated NAACP leaders told them prior to every election that there were but marginal differences between the major parties, that there was only, as Du Bois once put it, the choice between “the Democratic devil and the Republican deep blue sea”?^[116] What the NAACP defined as “intelligent voting” perhaps was not so much a problem of educational deficits as one of meaningful political choices and incentives.^[117] The efforts in political education by the NAACP, meritorious and important as they were, simply could not provide the mobilizing force of true political competition and alterna­tives. Black voters were as sensitive to this as all other Americans. As soon as they perceived Roosevelt and the New Deal as a political alternative that promised to improve their economic condition, they responded enthusiastically.

iv

The efforts of the NAACP to reward “friends” and to punish “enemies” at the ballot box were not altogether unsuccessful. In the 1922 congres­sional elections the association successfully targeted several opponents of a federal antilynching bill that was stalled in Congress. After 1930 it worked for the defeat of senators who had supported the nomination to the Supreme Court of North Carolina Judge John J. Parker, a notorious racist who had publicly approved of black disfranchisement.^[118] Moreover, the hope that the constant northward migration of southern blacks would increase their voting strength and political influence was not completely unwarranted. In 1928 the black Republican Oscar DePriest was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from a district in Chicago, the first African-American member of Congress in almost thirty years.^[119] But this process was slow and by no means unambiguous. Southern racists even hoped that the black migration would win over many white north­erners to the southern viewpoint on race, and not entirely in vain:When black voters helped elect “Big Bill” Thompson, a scandal-ridden foe of prohibition, as mayor of Chicago in 1927, the New York Evening Post com­mented: “Chicago, like Indianapolis and other northern cities, is learning what Negro control means and why the South has kept these voters from the ballot box. May the day never come when Harlem runs New York.”^[120] Ironically, the paper had once belonged to Oswald Garrison Villard, grand­son of the famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and co-founder of the NAACP

Except for a few isolated incidents, no systematic attempts to disfran­chise African Americans were undertaken outside the South, but black support for corrupt party machines frequently aroused the dismay of northern whites who considered themselves friends of the black cause. The NAACP refused to hold African Americans to a higher standard of probity than whites, but the sale of votes by corrupt black leaders remained a source of embarrassment and frustration. The Reconstruction myths of chaos and “black supremacy” were still potent ideological forces to which the NAACP felt compelled to respond. It was not true, Pillsbury had proclaimed at the founding of the association, “that Negro suffrage means Negro control or domination, in any state of the Union. There is not a state in which impartial suffrage, honestly administered, would endanger white supremacy for a day.”^[121]

The simplistic dichotomy of white versus black supremacy would continue to shape the discourse on African-American voting rights for many more years, much to the chagrin of the NAACP and white liber­als alike, who time and again were forced to profess that they did not advocate “black supremacy” and “social equality,” the southern code for sexual relations between the races.^[122] The NAACP courageously defended the right of all Americans to enter into private relations and marriage with whomever they wished but maintained that “intermarriage” was an issue of little concern to the black community that was exploited only by racist demagogues. Most important, the question of voluntary private association had nothing to do with the free exercise of the right to vote.^[123]

Black voters, the NAACP was trying to convey to the general pub­lic, were not out to dominate their fellow citizens but were merely seek­ing their constitutional rights and pursuing their legitimate material interests. The very concept of racial bloc voting was forced on them by the evil of racism. As long as race was a powerful topic for demagogues, blacks had no choice but to unite and vote against their enemies. Without this external pressure and without the overriding sig­nificance of racial discrimination for every single African American, the black vote, like that of other groups, would divide along class lines. “They will vote on issues and on candidates as individuals,” NAACP leader Roy Wilkins predicted in the late 1940s; “they will vote for the best interest of their class (rather than their race) and of a community as a whole.”^[124]

Obviously, the NAACP could not go so far as to suggest that blacks had no common interests other than those imposed on them by racial discrimination. Because the vast majority of African Americans belonged to the working class, their voting behavior would be rather uniform in any case, but for different, more acceptable reasons. As long as the Amer­ican labor movement continued to be a stronghold of exclusion and the white working class remained hostile to black advancement, there appeared to be little hope in calls for class solidarity.^[125] But with the onslaught of the Great Depression the social and economic dimension of the race issue became much more prominent in the NAACP’s discourse. “We are becoming convinced that it is because we are poor and voice­less in industry,” the 1932 NAACP annual conference declared, “that we are able to accomplish so little with what political power we have, and with what agitation and appeal we set in motion.”^[126] The right to vote was defined primarily as an instrument to bring about economic reform. Some leftist members even tried to get the NAACP to shift its focus away from opposing racial discrimination in a narrow sense and “to attempt to get Negroes to view their special grievances as a natural part of the larger issues of American labor as a whole.”^[127]

Although the NAACP did not become subsumed into the labor move­ment and remained a civil rights organization, the emerging New Deal liberalism with its emphasis on class made it easier to conceptualize black interests as part and parcel of a larger cause. In the field of voting rights this tendency resulted in the formation in 1941 of the interracial National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax (NCAPT), which was supported by both labor unions and civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union.^[128] Like the literacy test, payment of the poll tax was an additional burden on registrants in the southern states, albeit one that kept at least as many poor whites from voting as blacks. According to one estimate by the NCAPT the ratio was three whites for every two blacks. Critics viewed the tax as the most important reason for low voter turnout and the predominance of ultra-conservatives in the South.^[129] Abolishing the poll tax, however, was a long shot. Although the tax enjoyed little support outside the South, the Supreme Court accepted it as a qualification for voting as long as it was fairly administered.^[130] Con­gressional bills against it were routinely filibustered to death by southern senators. As with the literacy test, the poll tax would be overcome only during the civil rights revolution of the 1960s.^[131]

Because the poll tax also disfranchised whites, it provided an excellent case for both interracial class interests and for fighting the violation of the American democratic creed by the southern oligarchy. Unlike their rather timid opposition to educational tests, NAACP leaders attacked the poll tax head-on. Many Americans were poor, and their right to partici­pate in their government could not be predicated on their ability to pay.^[132] Abolishing the poll tax would lead to the destruction of the dispropor­tionate power that the southern elite exerted on both state and national levels and facilitate progressive legislation that would benefit poor blacks and whites alike. Moreover, with America entering World War II, the poll tax - and disfranchisement in general - ceased to be just an issue of race and class and became a truly national concern. It undermined the war morale of many Americans and America’s credibility as the bulwark of democracy. In 1943 Walter White called the poll tax “part and parcel of a fascist system in no wise different in concept from that of Hitler and Hirohito.”^[133] Supporters of the tax were accused of playing into the hands of the enemy.

Such rhetoric reflected the spirit of militant protest that many African Americans adopted during World War II, making this war a watershed in the history of the civil rights struggle. That the United States confronted an enemy who advocated a racist ideology not unlike that of white supremacists at home was bound to have significant repercussions on domestic race relations.^[134] The NAACP had particular reason not to pass by this opportunity. In World War I, The Crisis had called on blacks to “close ranks” with their white compatriots and postpone their own griev­ances for the duration of the war.^[135] Instead of being rewarded for their loyalty, black troops were subjected to discrimination and chicanery in every possible way, and a wave of racist violence followed that war. The next time around, African-American opinion leaders, including the NAACP, made clear from the outset that if the world was to be made safe for democracy again, democracy had to begin at home.^[136] More than a year before America became a belligerent, the NAACP annual confer­ence declared that patriotism was not tantamount to patience: “We will do our part and more to defend our country and its principles. We are equally determined to make our country and its practices worth defend­ing.” A few weeks after Pearl Harbor, The Crisis proclaimed: “Now is the time not to be silent! ^[137]

The economic radicalism of the Depression era and the racial protests during World War II had a profound impact on the American culture of rights, paving the way for the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s.^[138] The NAACP not only articulated this militant mood in an assertive rhetoric, it also benefited tremendously in membership and income. According to an internal estimate, the association had fewer than 20,000 dues-paying members by the late 1920s, which slowly increased to 50,000 in 1940. In 1946 the NAACP counted no fewer than 400,000 members; its Detroit branch alone claimed 20,000.^[139] This newly found organizational strength did not, however, lead to any principal changes in its political ideology or strategy. It continued to demand a free and equal right to vote for all American citizens, called on blacks to exercise this right “intelligently,” and repeated its inflated claims that black voters held the balance of power in important elections. The war also did not alter the NAACP’s message that black voters would be no different from whites once they were accorded equality of rights and opportunity. All patriotic whites had a vital interest in, and the duty to work for, the end of racial discrimination, which threatened both victory and the survival of democ­racy at home.^[140]

The belief in the liberating potential of the ballot would be put to hard tests after the end of the war. Although the Supreme Court in 1944 struck down the “white primary,” which excluded blacks from the Demo­cratic primaries in the South on the theory that parties were private asso­ciations not bound by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the South continued its defiance of democratic principles. Black veterans who tried to register there were greeted with brutal violence.^[141] Despite this resistance, the number of black registered voters in the South continued to rise, from approximately 150,000 in 1940 to about 1.2 million in 1952. To a considerable extent, this upsurge was due to the tenacious fieldwork of the local NAACP branches.^[142] After the Supreme Court, in its famous Brown v. The Board of Education ruling of 1954, declared racial segregation in education unconstitutional, the NAACP’s leaders and lawyers could not only take due credit for having brought about this major blow against Jim Crow, they also became convinced that the tide was finally turning. “We have won our propaganda battle,” Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins wrote to his colleague Whitney Young of the Urban League. “It is no longer a tenable or fashionable policy to discriminate racially.”^[143]

Ironically, as the prospects for securing civil rights and equal oppor­tunity for African Americans through the political process seemed to be vastly improved, civil rights activists began challenging racial discrimina­tion through nonviolent direct action. Although it did not object in prin­ciple to the disruptive tactics of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience, the NAACP clearly preferred the kind of orderly change associated with the electoral process. Basically, it stuck to the bargain it had offered since its founding: If the white majority agreed to laws and measures that would effectively protect black voting rights, it could expect to be rewarded with domestic tranquillity. The vote would enable African Americans to take care of their interests locally and remove the contentious civil rights ques­tion from national politics. As NAACP leader Wilkins put it in a letter to the New York Times: “Following a period of transition and training, many aspects of civil rights now considered ponderously in Washington will plague the Hill less and less as the state capitols and the county court­houses take over. The Hill can then concern itself with the myriad �?normal’ problems of federal-state relationships, budget, defense, foreign policy, and space.”^[144]

In reality, history took quite a different path. The end of segregation and disfranchisement was not achieved primarily at the ballot box but came on the heels of a nonviolent social movement that pressured the federal government into taking truly drastic steps. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, undoubtedly the most revolutionary national legislation in terms of federal-state relations since Reconstruction, did away with the tradi­tional forms of racial disfranchisement and secured the individual right of African Americans and all other minorities to register and vote.^[145]

V

In its “Declaration of Principles and Purposes” of 1911 the NAACP called the recognition and protection of black voting rights “the first step” toward the advancement of African Americans.^[146] Throughout the roughly sixty years of struggle it had taken to attain this goal, the NAACP never lost its faith in the political process as the appropriate means to secure equal rights and opportunity for black people. Ironically, when the vote as a token of “first-class citizenship” had been secured, a growing number of blacks had already begun to question both the symbolic and instru­mental value of suffrage. Heeding the battle cry of “Black Power,” young radicals attacked the integrationist vision of the NAACP and called for separate black institutions. Far from accepting the frequent charge that its goals and tactics had become “irrelevant,” the association remained stead­fast in its ideological commitment to a color-blind democracy. Respond­ing to the National Black Political Convention held in Gary, Indiana, in early 1972, which had urged retreat from “decadent white politics” and the creation of an “independent black political agenda,” Wilkins insisted that the historical mission of the NAACP had always been and would continue to be participation and inclusion: “The NAACP... was organized to win for nonwhite citizens complete equality within the American system, using the American documents of citizenship and the tools available within the American system to achieve equality and to make reality of the doctrine of �?all men’ enunciated in the Declaration of Independence.”^[147]

Wilkins’s statement indeed sums up the essence of the NAACP’s dis­cursive strategy during the age of segregation and disfranchisement. To some degree this strategy was disingenuous in understating racial cleav­ages and in overstating the potential of the vote. Quite obviously, it exag­gerated the power of persuasion and the self-executing force of American democratic ideals. The NAACP did not question the American political and social system at large, and it took pains to reassure white Americans that black voters would not pursue any collective goals that were incom­patible with or adversarial to their own best interests.

From the vantage point of the post-civil rights era it is easy to point out that the ballot has hardly solved the problems of racial discrimination and vast social disparity for African Americans.⁸³ It is equally easy to crit­icize the NAACP for its limited vision of freedom as “social acceptance and upward mobility” for the black elite within the confines of corpo­rate capitalism.⁸⁴ Whether socialism or black nationalism ever presented viable historical alternatives to the reformist and integrationist thrust of the mainstream civil rights struggle as embodied by the NAACP is open to debate. As I have tried to show, the NAACP faced the challenge of how blacks could assert their individual rights and their collective inter­ests within a culture of rights that had excluded them both practically and discursively. In order to gain legitimacy for its demands, it chose to employ the language and the ideological arsenal of the American demo­cratic creed that spoke to the white majority. In doing so, the leaders and followers of the NAACP not only revealed their own deep roots within the American culture of rights but also made an important contribution to transforming that culture.

NAACP’s reaction to the Black Power movement, see Manfred Berg, “Black Power:The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Resurgence of Black Nationalism During the 1960s,” in Krakau, ed., American Nation, 235-62.

83 For disillusioned and outrightly pessimistic assessments of the civil rights struggle, see Derrick Bell, And We Are Not Saved:The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (New York, 1987);Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York, 1992).

84 See Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945—1990 (Jackson, Miss., 1991), 86-7, passim. Among the overall accounts of the civil rights struggle, Marable is consistently the most critical toward the role of the NAACP.