Black History Month (Part 4): How Blacks got Trapped in that PLACE

I have been asked about the title of my book, Who Put Blacks in That PLACE. The Long Sad History of  the Democratic Party’s Oppression of Black Americans … to this day.”  Why the emphasis on “PLACE?”  I explained it in the book.

“The Meaning of ‘PLACE’

At first glance, the title of this book may seem to be needlessly provocative. But it was selected to bring about a better understanding of how the concept of PLACE has defined the Black experience in America for generations.

It refers to the physical PLACE of segregation, with its strict barriers imposed by law, policy, intimidation, or violence. The PLACE was those segregated communities in the post-emancipation southland. It is those segregated and impoverished inner-city ghettoes that still characterize America’s major cities.

PLACE was also the physical separation at the micro levels. It was that portion of a restaurant or bus to which Negroes were assigned. It was that side of the walkway, that public toilet and that portion of the park. It was those inferior schools.

PLACE was not always a physical area, however. It was an attitude, a demeanor. Expressing an unpopular view, looking into the eyes of a white lady or failing to show proper respect and deference to a white citizen were indications that the Negro did not know his or her PLACE. It was failure to comply with this PLACE that resulted in the brutal death of Emmett Till and many others. Negroes who failed to know their PLACE were considered uppity.”

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A major reason why millions of Black Americans live in oppressive segregated ghettos – with poor education, high unemployment and lack of upward mobility  — is the crippling effects of generational welfare dependency.  This is not due to the nature of Black people, as some suggest.  It is not an unintended social outcome. It has been, by design, a cynical means of keeping the power structure in power.  Welfare dependency became the new civil right – replacing the real civil rights articulated in the Constitution and advanced through years of legislation and court cases.  The scheme was launched in Chicago in the 1930s by a man named William Dawson.  From the book:

“The Chicago Machine and William Dawson

It was in Chicago that the Latin term “de facto” was first routinely applied as a modifier in describing a special form of institutional racism. De facto racism has been more enduring because it is not as obvious as the de jure segregation of the solid Democrat south. It is not as easily addressed by the courts.

The Chicago Democrats did not invent the votes-for-benefits concept. That was already the modus operandi of New York’s Tammany Hall since the eighteenth century. The difference was that the Tammany organization, and its imitators, used privately sourced rewards in return for votes, such things as food, coal and, of course, money. It also might include jobs, obtaining building permits or ‘fixing’ traffic citations. The Chicago model shifted the ‘bribes’ to taxpayer financed benefits.

The strategy to control the vote through welfare did not occur organically by cultural evolution. It was a scheme perfected and implemented by the Chicago Democrat Machine. It was the cynical genius of a man named William Dawson.

Dawson began his political career as a Black Republican in 1930, just as Blacks were switching over to the Democratic Party. He was elected alderman from Chicago’s Second Ward in 1932—a ward with a large Black population.

At the time, the White Democrat Committeeman of the Second Ward was Joseph Tittinger. Following the Democrat’s older strategy, Tittinger doled out jobs and favors to the Ward’s White minority—basically ignoring or discouraging the Negro vote. The Black community, however, was gaining in numbers and influence, and they demanded that Chicago Mayor Ed Kelly remove Tittinger for a Black ward boss. Which he did.

In Tittinger’s place Kelly persuaded Republican Dawson to switch parties in return for controlling patronage in the Second Ward. As the new ward boss, Dawson developed an ingenious means to control the Negro vote in the all-Black segregated communities. He literally abandoned the fight for constitutionally grounded civil rights for a new faux ‘civil right’—access and dependency on welfare.

While Negroes gave Roosevelt overwhelming support in 1932, that loyalty seemed to be weakening in the late 1930s. As late as 1939, the allegiance of the Black vote to the Democratic Party was still fragile, and the Republican Party was gaining as a competitive political force. The majority of Blacks remained registered as Republicans until 1948.

The Black Submachine

Dawson’s influence grew beyond the Second Ward. He became the go-to man for Chicago’s entire Black population. He was the boss of what some called ‘the submachine.’ At Chicago’s PBS affiliate WTTW, the article ‘DuSable to Obama’ states:

Dawson proved adept at organizing the increasing number of black Democrats on the South Side and soon consolidated his political power. He effectively used patronage and precinct workers to develop a strong voting bloc that generally gave local, state, and national Democratic candidates impressive majority votes. Dawson would eventually control as many as five wards, forming the city’s first black political machine.

Based on his rhetoric more than his actions, Dawson became a hero to the Black community. Like the house slave of the early Nineteenth Century, however, Dawson’s loyalty was to the White Democrat bosses in City Hall.

According to Christopher Manning in his 2009 book, ‘William L. Dawson and the Limits of Black Electoral Leadership’:

Dawson was also leader of the African American ‘sub-machine’ within the Cook County Democratic Organization. In the predominantly African American wards, Dawson was able to act as his own political boss, handing out patronage and punishing rivals just as leaders of the larger machine, such as Richard J. Daley, did. However, Dawson’s machine had to continually support the regular machine in order to retain its own clout.

He chose to work on city politics from this stance, rather than to conduct open civil rights challenges, and did not support the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Chicago in the 1960s.

By 1957, Black leaders, such as Martin Luther King, were pushing back against both de jure racism in the south and the de facto racism in the major cities. With more aggressive civil rights activism on the rise, The Chicago Defender, a Black publication, said that Dawson as a civil rights leader was ‘non-committal, evasive, and seldom takes an outspoken stand on anything.’

The Dawson Strategy Goes National

Dawson’s welfare-for-votes scheme was so effective in recruiting and retaining Blacks for the Democratic Party in Chicago that he attracted national attention, including the eye of the president. FDR saw the value in the Dawson welfare-for-votes strategy.

Dawson was elected to Congress and was named assistant chairman of the Democratic National Committee. His specific responsibility at the DNC was to spread the welfare-for-votes concept to Black voters in other cities.

Black leaders like Dawson became part of the established Democrat political machine. In New York City’s Harlem, congressmen William Clayton Powell took on the Dawson role under Big Jim Pemberton. The importance of Dawson, Pemberton and Powell to the Democratic Party was chronicled in a major feature article in Life magazine in 1944.”

Today, virtually every discussion about civil rights involves welfare – providing enough for recipients to survive but not to thrive and succeed.  In the Preface to my book, I recounted one youthful experience that led me to understand THE SYSTEM. 

“Al’s Tap and Pizzeria

Al’s was the local saloon for the blue-collar community, and a back-room pizza joint for the underage. One of the regulars was the local Democrat precinct captain. He was a gregarious sixty-ish Irishman. Even though I had already become a Republican, we would often have friendly discussions. I think he saw me more as John’s and Lorraine’s kid than political competition.

On one occasion, I raised a subject that had been bewildering me. How did Mayor Daley get the majority of both Black and White votes when they seem at odds with each other?

Without a moment to ponder, the Democrat precinct captain responded in his distinct Irish brogue. ‘It very simple, me boy,’ he said. ‘I go around this neighborhood and tell the voters that we need to vote for Mayor Daley because he is keeping the niggers from moving north of Division Street and ruining our nice neighborhood.’

He continued. ‘Now, there’s a guy like me, a nigger guy, who tells the folks south of Division that they have to keep voting for Mayor Daley if they want to get into public housing and get their welfare checks—or if they need a favor from city hall. They get taken care of as long as they know their PLACE.’  PLACE, that word stuck with me.

In that one conversation, that blue collar Irish Democrat precinct captain taught me more how the system really worked than my high school civics teacher and my college political science professors combined. It was the first, but not by far the last time, that I heard of Blacks having their own peculiar PLACE in which they must remain.”

In Black History Month (Part 5), I will move the discussion to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

So, there ‘tis.

EDITOR NOTE: Larry’s book is available on Amazon in both paperback and eBook.