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GREAT MIGRATION POLITICS

The Impact of The Great Migration on Democratic Presidential Election campaigns from 1948–1960

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2020

Keneshia N. Grant
Keneshia N. Grant*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Howard University
*
*Corresponding author: Assistant Professor Keneshia Grant, Department of Political Science, Howard University, Douglass Hall 144, 2441 Sixth Street, Northwest, Washington, DC, 20059. E-mail: Keneshia.Grant@Howard.edu.
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Abstract

The Great Migration fundamentally reshaped Northern electorates. Millions of Black voters, who had been unable to vote in the South, became eligible to vote through their resettlement in the North. In many instances, parties and politicians believed that Black voters were the balance of power in elections. This belief led them to change their approaches and make specific appeals to Black voters in an effort to win their support. Although scholars of American politics have revised the dominant narrative about the development of the Democratic Party on issues related to race, they fail to account for the role of Black voters in contributing to the Party’s change. The goal of this work is to describe how the Great Migration influenced Democratic Party interactions with Black voters in presidential elections from 1948–1960. I argue that increasing competition between the Democratic and Republican Parties, coupled with Black migrants’ location in electorally important states, made Black voters an important target of presidential campaign strategy in the post-war era.

Keywords

Great MigrationBlack PoliticsAmerican PoliticsDemocratic PartyRepublican PartyPresidential Politics
Type
State of the Discipline
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , Spring 2019 , pp. 37 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © Hutchins Center for African and African American Research 2020 

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