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Black Voters and the Democratic Party |
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Prior to the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s, the vast majority of American blacks voted for the Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator. In the 1932 presidential election, in the depths of the depression, when one-third of all black males were jobless, the incumbent Republican president, Herbert Hoover, drew more than three-fourths of the black vote over the Democratic candidate, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Roosevelt won the election, however, and went on to institute a broad program of economic reforms known as the New Deal. The economic benefits of the New Deal were distributed more-or-less equally to blacks and whites, and by January of 1935 more than 3 million blacks, one-fifth of the black labor force, were employed on relief projects instituted by the United States Government. By the time of the 1936 presidential election, millions of black voters began switching from the Republicans to the Democrats because of their strong support for Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal economic programs.
In the years following the New Deal, the Democratic Party found it best to win black votes with economic benefits rather than by advancing the cause of black civil rights. Franklin D. Roosevelt had been elected by an uneasy coalition of northern liberal voters, both black and white, on the one hand and white southern Democratic voters on the other hand. This so-called "Roosevelt Coalition" was strengthened by economic programs, which simultaneously aided southern whites and northern blacks, but it was split apart by civil rights programs, which appealed strongly to northern Democrats but stirred inflamed opposition from segregation-oriented southern Democrats.
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