Black Politics: A New Power

Political Sociology of Racism

For the first half-century after slavery was abolished in the United States, the Negro lived mainly in the rural South and, save for a brief 10-15 years of Reconstruction, he had no rights of political participation. During this same period, the major white nonProtestant ethnic groups were crowding into the cities of the East, North, and Midwest, and by the end of the 19th century they had laid the basis for mastering the politics of the emerging urban society. But the Negro did not enter urban society in significant numbers until World War I, and so for nearly 40 years, roughly from the early 1880s to 1915, the typical black had neither political rights (stripped from him by the whi...