The Negro in the Political Life of the United States

Abstract

American political philosophy and institutions are rooted in the fertile soil of eighteenth century liberalism. The dominant influence in American thinking at the time of the Revolution was civil libertarianism. This promised much for the status of the individual in the society. The American Revolution, admittedly bourgeois in character, and more a secession than a revolution, revealed a high regard for the rights of property as well as for the rights of the individual. Of greatest significance to the Negro, however, is the fact that this revolt handed down to the American society a constitutional framework that has become a sacred tradition, which embraces fundamental concepts of human equality and human rights. It is within this conceptual milieu, inherited from the American Revolution, that the Negro has carried on his struggles for social, political and economic emancipation. These concepts have given a measure of realism to the Negro's persistent assumption that he is entitled to equal status in the society, that he too has rights that he must fight for, that an individual black citizen is due as full a measure of human dignity as a white one. The Constitution itself, of course, represents a compromise solution between those conflicting groups in the Convention which actually feared democracy as a hydra-headed monster, on the one hand, and those which sincerely subscribed to the principles of fundamental equalitarianism, on the other. The entire constitutional history of the nation has reflected this compromise in the quixotic tendency to sanctify its democratic creeds while stubbornly retaining its racial bigotries. Paradoxical as it may seem in the light of the historical record, however, the fact remains that the Constitution did lay the basis for the most broad ideological pattern of individual human equality, human liberty and human rights that the modern world has known. The goal set for this nation by the Founding Fathers is the attainment of political democracy. It is the people who are to count in this society. Government is to be theirs-of, by and for them-all of them. Perhaps the most serious obstacle to the realization of this ideal goal has been the frailty of those who make up the society: the apathy, prejudices, intolerance, greed, and ignorance of the citizenry. Yet, it is, in a sense, of the essence of democracy that this should be so. This is at once the promise and the hazard of the democratic way. As one author aptly puts it: