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FREEDOMWAYS        SECOND QUARTER 1972

46 of the 48 states for the Democratic ticket. The concessions won by the working class, black and white, small business people and small farmers and intellectuals, and the impact of the World War against Hitlerism sustained this progressive coalition for more than a decade. One of the concessions won by the black community during this period was the Supreme Court decision of 1944 outlawing the Democratic Party's "white primary" elections in the South. 

In the first Congressional elections after the War's end, the Republicans recaptured their losses among the mid-western farmers and elected a majority of their party to the 80th Congress. This signalled the beginnings of a sustained attack upon the New Deal coalition even while President Truman, a Democrat, remained in the White House. The passage of the Taft-Hartley bill, a piece of anti-labor legislation, among other things had the effect of putting a strait jacket on labor's organizing in the South (Operation Dixie). The Truman administration in 1947 broke the railroad workers strike by threatening to draft them into the armed forces and set into motion the "Cold War" politics in foreign policy which later escalated into the political repression known as McCarthyism. 

In the 1948 elections a progressive wing of the Democratic Party under the leadership of Henry A. Wallace, who had been President Roosevelt's Secretary of Agriculture, formed a third party, the Progressive Party. The Progressive Party got on the ballot in that election in about 40 states, received a million votes, lasted about five years, and then succumbed to the red-baiting, McCarthyite hysteria.* During the late 40's, Harlem became a Congressional district and joined Chicago in electing our second Congressmen, both of them Democrats (Adam Powell, and William L. Dawson) while at the local level the voters of Harlem elected Ben Davis, a Communist, to the New York City Council for two terms. 

In 1948, the Southern part of the right wing of the Democratic Party walked out of the Democratic National Convention in protest against the civil rights talk of the convention and the growing black vote in the South. They formed a fourth party, the Dixiecrat Party, with Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Governor Fielding Wright of Mississippi as their candidates. This party was on the ballot exclusively in the South but received enough popular votes to take the electoral college votes of two or three states in the South

* A black woman, Mrs. Charlotta Bass, publisher of the California Eagle newspaper, was Vice-Presidential candidate on the Progressive Party ticket in the 1952 elections.

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THE TWO PARTY SYSTEM       O'DELL

away from Truman. This party was the historical predecessor of Alabama Governor George Wallace's third party in the 1968 elections which received 10 million votes. The Dixiecrat Party in 1948 acted in the absence of any Republican Party organization in the South through which to express its racist revolt. 

Despite an atmosphere of lynch terror in the South and the general tendency to return to "normal" practice of racial discrimination in the North in the immediate post-war years (1945-52), the Afro-American community began to make some substantial gains in closing the income gap between the average white family and the average black family. However, these gains were practically wiped out by the effects of the three economic "recessions" of the Eisenhower-Nixon years during the 1950's and the first year of the Kennedy administration, (1961-62). This experience with general impoverishment during this ten-year period, certainly played a role in shaping the new black voters' political outlook of pressing its effort through the channels of the Democratic Party rather than through the Republican Party. This ten-year period was also marked by the re-emergence in the South of a Republican Party based upon a conservative white middle-class suburban electorate. Except for one or two urban centers like Nashville, Tennessee, and Richmond, Virginia, the Republican Party enjoyed no support among the growing number of Black voters in the South. On the other hand, the continuing migration pattern of Southern Blacks into the urban centers of the North and the West continued to strengthen the political base of the Democratic Party in these states. Meanwhile the Black vote in the South continued to grow by leaps and bounds. From 1948 with a vote of 250,000, it increased five times by 1960 and then doubled again by 1970. Encouraged by their growing knowledge of the colonial liberation movements in Africa and Asia and 1954 desegregation decision of the Supreme Court, the growing black vote during this period became the cutting edge for the reformation of Democratic Party politics in the South which continues to this day. By 1970, the nearly three million black voters in the South and the four million more outside the South had begun to exercise the kind of political power that had resulted in nearly 2,000 black elected officials being put in office across the nation.

The Movement years of the 1960's had been one of an all-sided improvement in the economic, political and human rights status of the Afro-American population. Yet, opposition to this momentum and thrust consistently came from the alliance of Northern conservative 

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