The Spark, The Cause... A Flood and a Broken Promise...

[5fish]

I always wonder why the Black American vote switched from the Republican party to the Democratic party in the 20th century... I always heard it was FDR and the New Deal and he acknowledge their struggles... I wanted to know what was the spark that cause the Black vote to switch parties... well?

The fuse was The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. When it became 80 miles wide and 30 feet deep in places... Coolidge did not respond to the flood. He ignored it and did not even give a speech to rally America... He did appoint Herbert Hoover to organized the response from other states and private peoples...

Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

snip... the spark...

The refugee camps also dealt with extreme racial inequality, as supplies and means of evacuation after flooding were given strictly to white citizens, with Blacks receiving only leftovers. African Americans also did not receive supplies without providing the name of their white employer or voucher from a white person. In order to fully exploit black labor, Blacks were frequently forced to work against their will, and were not permitted to leave the camps.[30] Later reports about the poor treatment in camps led Hoover to make promises of change to the African-American community, which he broke. As a result, he lost the Black vote in the North in his re-election campaign in 1932.[28]: 259–290  [note 1] Several reports on the terrible situation in the refugee camps, including one by the Colored Advisory Commission headed by Robert Russa Moton, were kept out of the media at Hoover's request, with the pledge of further reforms for Blacks after the presidential election in 1928. His failure to deliver followed other disappointments by the Republican Party; Moton and other influential African Americans began to encourage Black Americans to align instead with the national Democrats.[28]: 415

Next... the whitewash and promise...

Robert Moton and the Colored Advisory Commission | American Experience | PBS

Herbert Hoover appointed Robert Moton to investigate allegations of abuse in the flood area.

www.pbs.org

snip...

Hoover's friends urged him to get what they called "the big Negroes" in the Republican Party to quiet his critics, and Hoover turned to Robert Moton for the job. Hoover formed the Colored Advisory Commission, led by Moton and staffed by prominent African Americans, to investigate the allegations of abuses in the flood area.

snip... the promise was to end sharecropping by giving Southern Blacks 20 acers of land... so Moton whitewashes the report...

The commission conducted a thorough investigation and reported back to Moton on the deplorable conditions. Moton presented the findings to Hoover, and advanced immediate improvements to aid the flood's neediest victims. But the information was never made public. Hoover had asked Moton to keep a tight lid on his investigation. In return, Hoover implied that if he were successful in his bid for the presidency, Moton and his people would play a role in his administration unprecedented in the nation's history. Hoover also hinted that as president he intended to divide the land of bankrupt planters into small African American-owned farms.

snip...

Motivated by Hoover's promises, Moton saw to it that the Colored Advisory Commission never revealed the full extent of the abuses in the Delta, and Moton championed Hoover's candidacy to the African American population. However, once elected President in 1928, Hoover ignored Robert Moton and the promises he had made to his black constituency. In the following election of 1932, Moton withdrew his support for Hoover and switched to the Democratic Party. In an historic shift, African Americans began to abandon the Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, and turned to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Democratic Party instead.

here is...

Robert Russa Moton - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

snip...

Robert Russa Moton (August 26, 1867 – May 31, 1940) was an American educator and author.[1] He served as an administrator at Hampton Institute. In 1915 he was named principal of Tuskegee Institute, after the death of founder Booker T. Washington, a position he held for 20 years until retirement in 1935

 

[5fish]

This paper does get it all but it does show Hoover pushing Black leaders away... We know why he avoid the Black leaders a broken promise...

https://digitalcommons.salve.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1077&context=pell_theses

snip...

The 14th Amendment would continue to have little impact and the Republican Party remained apathetic. Republican President Herbert Hoover, fervent supporter of the Lily White Policy. He did his “best to drive blacks from the Republican Party. He segregated blacks and refused to be photographed with any Negro leaders. In fact he did his best to ignore them altogether.” (Van Rijn 32) Hoovers blatant anti-black actions like the nomination of John J. Parker11 began to make African American Republicans question their loyalty to the party of Lincoln. President Hoover did little to help African Americans, and arguably the country, after the October 1929 stock market crash ushering the Great Depression. The Daniel 4 majority of blacks, who already lived in poverty, were hit especially hard as they were fired to give jobs to unemployed whites. According to the 1930 Census “56% of the total Negro population lived in rural areas…97% lived in the South and 80% of those who resided in the South were at the bottom of the agricultural stratum as wage hands, sharecroppers, share tenants and cash tenants.” (Wolters 18) When the prices of cash crops like cotton plummeted in the early 1930’s12 African-American tenant farmers, who depended on their share of annual crop earnings to stay afloat within a cycle of incessant debt, were devastated. Landlords still demanded production of crops resulting in farmers continuing “to produce surpluses” and “consequently prices fell drastically.” (Wolters 18) Only four years after the stock market crash “prices had fallen by more than 60%, while farm production was 6% below that in 1929”

Here is the Lily White which Regan did achieve decades later...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily-white_movement

snip...

The Lily-white Movement was an anti-black political movement within the Republican Party in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a response to the political and socioeconomic gains made by African-Americans following the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which eliminated slavery. During Reconstruction, black leaders in Texas and around the country gained increasing influence in the Republican Party by organizing blacks as an important voting bloc via Union Leagues and the biracial black-and-tan faction of the Republicans. Conservative whites attempted to eliminate this influence and recover white voters who had defected to the Democratic Party.

 

[Matt McKeon]

I know that when Blacks were thinking of moving North, that while factories jobs were a pull, the flood was sort of the last straw.