Working within the Labyrinth of Race

Abstract

Over the past forty years, historians have extensively probed the causes of the historic political realignment of urban African American votes in the United States from 1928 through 1936. In particular, historians such as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Linda Materson, and Deborah Gray White have demonstrated how northern urban African American women shifted their party allegiances. Yet no one has examined whether that realignment continued among this group in the late 1930s and early 1940s. This article uses the brief yet complicated national political career of Crystal Bird Fauset (1893–1965) to demonstrate how black urban women in the United States continued their political realignment while still retaining their agency. Fauset continued the dual strategy previously established by black urban women in the United States, in which a combination of pragmatism and critical detachment enabled its proponents to support political parties without forsaking criticism of those parties’ failures. While Fauset’s personal prickliness played some part in the decline of her national political career, her continuation of the previous strategy eventually prompted her endorsement of Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey in September 1944. The primary evidence of this process can be seen in her working relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt, which went from close association to total estrangement. This process began during the 1940 national campaign, as Fauset felt slighted by Roosevelt’s seeming exclusion of both herself and black urban women in general, and deepened during the spring and summer of 1944, as Roosevelt increasingly opposed Fauset’s aggressive promotion of African American women voters and civil rights.