Volume 30, Number 19 · December 8, 1983
The Not-So-New Deal
By C. Vann Woodward
Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR
by Nancy J. Weiss
Princeton University Press, 333 pp., $32.50; $12.50 (paper)
Large and sudden transfers of ethnic group loyalties from one party to another are relatively rare in American political history. The largest and most sudden of them—that of black voters from the Republican to the Democratic party—was the most improbable and anomalous of all. Age-long, unbroken, and all but unanimous, the black attachment to the party of Lincoln, emancipation, and reconstruction was obvious and inevitable enough. The improbabilities and anomalies come in the sudden shift by blacks to the party traditionally identified with the fight against emancipation and reconstruction and with an ongoing record of racial discrimination, segregation, disfranchisement, exclusion, white primaries, and white supremacy. Explanations have been troubled by controversy.
Review, 2048 words
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