"Whenever They Judge It Expedient": The Politics of Partisanship and Free Black Voting Rights in Early National New York (original) (raw)

2. Hitting the Smiling Wall: Postwar Civil Rights in New York City.

The Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant uprisings in July 1964 were weeklong upheavals in New York City, the first of the 1960s urban black rebellions. New York’s uprisings inaugurated a new phase of American urban history that permanently reshaped race relations throughout the United States. Within days, similar explosions began in cities around the country and would continue through the summer; literally hundreds would come over the decade. During that period, tension increasingly filled the American social atmosphere every summer, with newspapers, politicians and people on the street wondering where and how destructive the next rebellion would be. At the local level, New York’s uprisings were indicative of the city’s profound, chronic unwillingness to attend to the most basic matters of civil rights. From the end of World War II through the 1964 rebellions, the New York City government professed great regard for civil rights and had a reputation as one of the most liberal, cosmopolitan cities in the country. Its black residents, however, faced pervasive economic and social segregation and discrimination, despite notable advances in national civil rights legislation. In nearly every measurable way, black people in New York were worse off than they were twenty years earlier. School segregation had increased, both in terms of quantity and its deleterious effects, housing segregation was more pronounced, unemployment had become more deep-seated and racial economic disparity had widened. Momentous achievements such as the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 left black New Yorkers’ lives largely untouched. This situation presents one of the most clearly contrasted examples of the difficulty in fighting northern de facto segregation: black New Yorkers had plenty of laws on their side, but few people in power willing or able to enforce them. Politicians and bureaucrats steadfastly frustrated civil rights activists through a combination of stonewalling, passing responsibility and making empty promises. While the city presented a progressive face to the world, it was, in practice, no more willing to meet civil rights demands than any southern city. It succeeded in creating a generation of black youth that was much less willing to accept the city’s glacial pace approach toward these matters than its parents’ generation was. From 1945 through 1964, the city government had changed little, but that failure to evolve had deeply affected the attitudes of its large young black population toward the government and its various appendages.

“The Cause of This Blackness”: The Early American Republic and the Construction of Race

American Nineteenth Century History, 2012

Race is routinely defined as ‘‘socially constructed,’’ from which it follows that there was a time before its construction. What that time looked like, and how Africans were then viewed by white Americans, is difficult to perceive from a vantage point within the paradigm of race. This essay considers important but neglected cultural referents to argue that a binary distinction between black and white did not emerge on theoretical grounds until the 1780s, when Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia shrewdly redirected growing challenges to slavery into quasi-metaphysical reflections on the gulf between whites and blacks.

Race Formation, Voting Rights, and Democratization in the Antebellum North

This article puts forth a theoretical framework for understanding the impact of race on democratization across much of the antebellum North in the United States by looking at the changes in voting rights for blacks in four states. Racial voting restrictions across these state lines, despite different outcomes, can be understood by accounting for three factors: first, how racial conflict is structured through economic competition; second, how partisan competition is structured by racial cleavages; and third, how racial coalition formation is structured through racial narratives and a racialized discourse—what I call a racial belief system. Three factors comprise what is called “race formation.” Racial voting restrictions were enacted in Northern states: (1) when racial conflict took place as an outgrowth of rapid economic and demographic change; (2) when political actors seeking electoral advantage were in a position to successfully prey upon this racial conflict by arousing newly enfranchised white ethnic voters; and (3) when an ascriptive racial belief system became the dominant racial paradigm for understanding citizenship rights for blacks. The article suggests that race formation played a significant role in the democratization of 19th century America.

Race and the Representation of Blacks' Interests during Reconstruction

Political Research Quarterly, 2001

A majority of recent studies finds that black members of Congress are more supportive of blacks' interests than are white members of Congress, even white Democrats. These results are limited exclusively to the contemporary period, however, as scholars have not studied how black members of Congress behaved during Reconstruction, the first era of blacks' descriptive representation. Although black representatives from this era are typically portrayed as having been responsive to blacks' interests, some recent studies suggest that they often supported whites' interests on issues important to their black constituents. Employing a measure of racial ideology as well as a measure of general ideology developed by Poole and Rosenthal (1997), we investigate the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation in the U.S. House immediately after the Civil War, through the use of descriptive statistics, OLS regression, and forecasting techniques. We find that black Republicans during Reconstruction were more ideologically liberal on both general and racial issues than their white Republican colleagues in the South. These results suggest that the linkage between descriptive and substantive representation for blacks is not merely a recent phenomenon, but rather has more general applicability across time.