Abstract

The Negro Waits to See

As November approaches, the Presidential race seems to be too close for partisans of either side to take comfort. For a variety of reasons, internal and external, no racial or economic bloc in this year's elections is more undecided, nor does any group have a better chance to swing a reasonably dose election, than the Negroes. They do not want to be a racial bloc; they would prefer to vote, as citizens, as individuals. But the Negro has been forced to think and to vote racially by the discriminations to which he is subject, by the coalition of Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats in the U.S. Congress, and by the new awareness of race, which the war has created throughout the world. The political lynching of politician Wendell Willkie by the Old Guard Republicans and of politician Henry Wallace by the equally Old Guard Democrats was fought more consistently and is resented more deeply by the Negroes than by any other group of voters.