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The Next Phase in Civil Rights: A Legacy of James E. Blackwell

Benjamin P. Bowser

Abstract

The 1960s American Civil Rights movement was a movement of promise, but there was no blueprint on how that promise would be fulfilled.  The first and second generations of black sociologists, who had come before the movement, were individual pioneers.  James Blackwell is part of the third generation whose unique mission was to push open the doors of the academy.  Blackwell  wrote the blueprint for integrating sociology and made certain that this integration resulted in more than a few individual pioneers.  

This paper will highlight the person, the scholarship, and the activism of James E. Blackwell.  The 1960s Civil Rights promise and activism were only the first phase of a longer, deeper worldwide movement to promote human rights.  The imbalance in the voting franchise is one of the greatest barriers to progressive 21st century politics and the elimination of racism, and gender and class inequality.  The specific mechanisms that perpetuate these barriers include the winner-take-all practice of the Electoral College, and the standard two senator representation per state in the Senate.  The next phase of civil rights will have to address these barriers to civil and human rights, and the legacy of James E. Blackwell will serve as a blueprint for these efforts.    

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The first generations of black scholars who wrote from a sociological perspective in the nineteenth and early twentieth century did so as individual pioneers. Alexander Crummell, William Brown, George Williams, William Farris, and W.E.B. Du Bois challenged the presumption of black racial inferiority and created the canon from which we work today (Bowser 1981). During their careers, all but Du Bois were ignored, but after 1950 even he could not be published and was forgotten. In the 1930s, Robert Park at the University of Chicago sponsored the second generation of black sociologists as graduate students. Their role as researchers was to address the growing concern about the race problem during the Great Depression. Thousands of African Americans were fleeing southern oppression and seeking freedom in northern, midwestern, and western industrial cities. In these cities, there was unlimited potential for social conflict and the possibility of attraction to socialism, as was the case with a number of prominent black intellectuals (Cruise 1967). Charles Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, St. Clair Drake, and Horace Cayton were these second-generation race scholars. They extended in depth and across time Du Bois’s pioneer work on black life in cities (Bowser 2002). Studies of the transition of blacks from the rural South to the emerging ghettos and development of the field of race relations were their legacy. After the publication of Gunnar Myrdal’s American Dilemma (1945) it became clear that African Americans would not become a domestic arm of international radicalism, and the second generation of black sociologists was also forgotten.

The 1960s Civil Rights Movement brought renewed attention to the black plight. The riots, Black Power, and black cultural movements renewed the prospects of black rebellion and disruption (Connery 1969; Kerner et al. 1968). Racial segregation and inequality would not be tolerated any longer. It was a new day. James E. Blackwell was part of the third generation of black sociologists to come of age in this period. Like the second, they too were recruited into the discipline to address the race problem. However, they took on a second mission that was unique to their generation. It was to push open the doors of the academy for more than a few pioneers to enter the disciplines. Blackwell was the most prominent advocate in advancing this mission in sociology. He literally wrote the blueprint for integrating the field (Blackwell 1975a; Blackwell 1977; Blackwell 1987). He was relentless in making certain that affirmative action was broad-based enough to result in scores of new black sociologists. In this sense, he is a father of subsequent generations of black sociologists. What is less apparent is that his life and scholarship amounted to much more than his advocacy. He clearly recognized that the Civil Rights Movement had made tentative improvements, but a lot more progress was needed (Blackwell 1975b).

The purpose of this essay is to project forward the person, the scholarship, and the activism of James Blackwell. The 1960s civil rights promise and activism was only part of a longer, deeper, and worldwide movement for human rights. Blackwell was very much aware of this. The next phase will be prompted ironically by the Trump presidency, and will change who we are and what this nation will be in the future. We must recognize that the United States is an imperfect experiment in democracy, a system that can result in an election were the candidate does not win the popular vote. Slavery and its subsequence, American racism and racial inequality, are clearly not the nation’s only imperfections. There are other sins of the forefathers that need correcting in order for civil rights gains to last and be meaningful. A continuation of a civil rights movement of which Blackwell’s life was an example must now work toward a reestablishing the intrinsic worth of all American voters, black and white.

THE CHALLENGE

Fundamental to our mission as sociologists is to explore social structure. This is the very organization of society that creates dynamic hierarchies in which social roles are defined and assigned, and individual and group outcomes are prescribed. The extent to which individuals can exercise agency and the size of the challenges they face to improve their circumstances varies greatly depending on their relative social position. Inequality and racism are not episodic, random, or due to individual flaws, nor is inequality an exception to the norm. Racial inequality is built into the very social fabric of American society. Blackwell understood this. He would have supported the necessity of sociological analyses that go to the heart of such structurally generated inequalities.

The 2016 presidential election has shown to us that there is no better place to start a structural analysis of the United States than with the Constitution. In the original version, each slave was counted as three-fifths of a person to determine the number of congressional representatives allotted to a state. This gave advantage the South in Congress. Today, for other but related reasons, the votes of a majority of Americans in large, culturally diverse states are worth considerably less than one person, one vote, while the votes of a minority of voters in small rural and predominantly white states are worth considerably more. This imbalance in franchise is now the greatest barrier to the elimination of racism and gender and class inequality in the United States. The specific mechanisms that perpetuate this imbalance are: 1) the allotment of two senators from each state regardless of population; and 2) the winner-take-all practice of the Electoral College. Additional mechanisms perpetuating inequality are: 3) the timing of political party primaries to select presidential candidates that favor rural states with small populations over more populated states; and 4) partisan state redistricting. One can argue that all civil rights abuses and new racial barriers since Emancipation have been sustained by these practices and justified by the Constitution. These four practices are not only barriers to civil rights, but also barriers to human rights for all Americans. What is the contemporary equivalent of three-fifths of a person for all Americans, not just African Americans?

The problem started with the founding fathers (there were no founding mothers). They were not poor or working-class white men. The founding fathers were elite colonists by education and financial success; they were all property owners and the majority (thirteen of twenty) owned slaves. They were deeply suspicious of people who lived in cities and towns because of the corruption and depravity that were common in colonial cities (Russell 2010). Concentrations of people who did not own property, as was the case of the majority of citizens, had demonstrated a tendency for rebellion and violence that clearly threatened physical persons and properties. It was the view of a number of the founding fathers that a pure democracy was akin to mob rule. John Adams referred to democracy as the “tyranny of the majority” (Adams 1788), as did Alexander Hamilton. The people who could best maintain enlightened government, the founders believed, were rural farmers, planters, and workers of the land—fellow male native white property owners. Some of the founding fathers may have started from humble backgrounds, but by the time they wrote the Constitution, they were quite well-off, an elite class apart (Wood 2006). In creating a “democracy,” they also defended their interests (Beard 1936). How did they do it? It all starts with the Senate.

The Senate

The founding fathers intended for the House of Representatives to fulfill the democratic ideal. Representatives would be elected by popular vote and by one person, one vote—everyone’s vote is equal. However, the founding fathers’ suspicion of the masses led them to enact restraints on the House. The first restraint was that representatives in the House would serve for only two years before coming up for reelection. The second way to restrain the House’s potential for extremism was to have a smaller parallel and more stable body representing states, and not directly elected by the people, but selected by state legislatures. Senators would serve in office for six years and there would be two senators per state. The founders’ goal was a Senate that would be less influenced by mass opinion, common sentiment, conventional wisdoms, fads and fashions. Senators could pursue higher wisdom than shorter-term representatives could. Furthermore, only the Senate would have the responsibility to make treaties with foreign countries and “advise and consent” to appointments of federal judges, ambassadors to foreign countries, presidential cabinet appointees, and other top federal officials. Not all the founding fathers wanted a Senate; those who initially opposed it saw the upper house as a clear violation of the democratic ideal (Swift 1996; Wirls and Wirls 2004). However, opponents of the Senate ended up compromising with those who insisted on having it to prevent representatives of smaller states from walking out of the proposed United States of America and aligning themselves with France or Great Britain (Rosenfeld 2004)—so much for the patriotism of some founding fathers.

Having a senate is not only a violation of the democratic ideal, but also ensured the continuing power of state legislatures, which especially in smaller states, were largely controlled by wealthy property-owning white male elites. The founding fathers therefore ensured the perpetuation of their class privileges and advantages through states. This is especially the case in the South where plantation owners dominated not only their region, but also the national economy and culture until the Civil War in 1860. A hypothesis even today is that the less populated a state is, the more likely it is still heavily influenced, if not dominated, by old-line families. Smaller states serve as vehicles to advance and protect the interests of local elites. Members of these family oligarchies have long histories of routine service in the U.S. Senate.

Just as racism has never been directly or fully addressed, neither have class and gender privileges and the rural bias built into the electoral process. One person, one vote is a myth. The value of one’s vote varies dependent upon what state you live in and whether you are in a rural or urban community. A slave was counted as three-fifths of a person in 1787; ironically, this is now the condition for a majority of American voters. There has been no section two of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution passed to correct this devaluation of the franchise for the majority of Americans. How do contemporary practices for electing senators increase or decrease the value of citizens’ votes in the same way as the three-fifths provision?

Every six years, voters elect or reelect two senators from each state. This gives states equal representation in the Senate regardless of each state’s population and number of voters. This means voters do not have equal representation in the Senate. The extreme case is Wyoming with a population of 583,107 in 2015; Wyoming elects two senators. In 2015, California had 39.1 million people. California elects two senators as well. California has 66.7 times the population of Wyoming. Yet, Wyoming elects the same number of senators as California. There are at least half-dozen small cities in California with the same number of people as Wyoming and the five smallest states combined. This is the equivalent of Oakland, California, being able to elect two senators to Congress and having equal representation as Texas, Florida, New York, or Illinois. If a voter in California moves to Wyoming, suddenly his or her Senate vote is equal to that of sixty-seven voters back in California. This means sixty-seven votes in California equal one vote in Wyoming. Wyoming, Montana, North and South Dakota, and Vermont have so few people that they have only one representative in the House of Representatives, but all of these states send two senators to the Senate.

Table 1 provides the population count for the five most populated states and the five least populated states. In addition, it shows the number of voters who cast ballots in the 2016 presidential election in each of these states. Two measures are presented as the values of senatorial votes in the five largest states. The first in table 2 is a population measure of the value of Senate votes in each of the five most populated states. The five largest states’ populations are divided into the five smallest states’ populations. The results are ratios showing the value of senatorial votes in the five most populated states relative to the senatorial votes in the five least populated states. The second measure in table 3 is a ballot-based measure of the senatorial votes in the five most populated states. The number of ballots cast in the 2016 federal election from the five most populated states was divided into the number of ballots cast in the five least populated states. The results in both tables are two sets of ratios showing the potential value of senatorial votes in the five most populated states relative to the senatorial votes in the five least populated states.

Table 1

 Table 2—Pop. in Most Populated States as Ratios of the Population in Least Populated States

Table 3—Ballots Cast in 2016 for Highest Offices in Most Populated States as Ratio of Ballots in Least Populated States

Source: McDonald 2016

Because of the extreme population imbalances between states, table 2 shows that a senatorial vote in California is worth only .015 of a vote in Wyoming, .016 of a vote in Vermont, and .019 of a vote in North and South Dakota. Ratios improve somewhat as the most populated states get smaller. Senatorial votes in the smallest of the most populated states, Pennsylvania, were worth .046 of a vote in Wyoming, .049 in Vermont, .058 in Alaska, .059 in North Dakota, and .067 in South Dakota. If these analyses were done with all the other forty states, the resulting ratios would be between the ranges of devaluations in table 2, .015 and .067.

One might protest that not everyone is eligible to vote and not everyone who is eligible actually votes. Table 3 addresses this objection. Ballots cast in the 2016 federal election in the most populated states were presented as ratios of ballots cast in least populated states. Here again, the results show that a vote in California is worth .018 of a vote in Wyoming, .022 of votes in Vermont and Alaska, .024 of a vote in North Dakota, and .026 of a vote in South Dakota. The devaluation ranges from Texas, Florida, and New York to the highest ratios again for Pennsylvania. A 2016 ballot cast in Pennsylvania was worth .042 of a ballot cast in Wyoming, .052 in Vermont and Alaska, .056 in North Dakota, and .061 in South Dakota.

What table 1 shows is that the unchanged electoral system we inherited from 1787 has exaggerated its original electoral inequalities between states with regard to the U.S. Senate. The antidemocratic bias of small-state founding fathers, which produced the current Senate, has resulted in an electoral absurdity some 225 plus years later. The irony is that the original Constitution counted slaves as three-fifths (.60) of a person—a precise measure of the racism of the times. The Fourteenth Amendment superseded this provision. But two centuries later the unaddressed social class, gender, and anti-urban biases of our forefathers has resulted in a greater devaluation of the votes of white people as well as people of color across the entire United States, not just the South. The larger the state population and the more urban it is, the more the value of a Senate vote drops below .60. Because of this structural inequity, the majority of smaller rural states in the United States dominate political decision-making despite the fact that the vast majority of Americans live in cities and suburbs.

THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE

Senatorial voting is not the only civil rights abuse that needs reform. Voters do not elect the president directly. Five hundred and thirty-eight state electors elect the president. Popular vote-counts are taken under advisement! This is another forefather-devised barrier to mob rule as well as a way to protect smaller states. If an elector believes his or her state voting process was defective, forced, or coerced, he or she has the authority to disregard the majority vote and to vote to elect an alternate candidate. In practice, electors have almost never contradicted the majority vote, but they can if they wish. However, let’s look at the practice of “winner-take-all,” when the presidential candidate who gets the majority of votes in a state gets all of the electoral votes for that state. This is the Electoral College practice in forty-eight of the fifty states. Therefore, a candidate who beats his or her opponent in the popular vote by 1 percent gets the votes of 100 percent of their state electors. Electoral votes are not based upon the proportion of the popular vote each candidate wins. Therefore, a presidential candidate can win a national election by getting all of electoral votes in the majority of states, as Donald Trump did in 2016 and as did George W. Bush in 2000. If the Electoral College vote were distributed proportionally to the popular vote in states, the results would reflect more closely a democratic ideal of one person, one vote. A further problem is that neither a majority of the population nor the majority of voters lives in the majority of states. The majority of the population and of voters lives in a minority of states. The result is that voters in less populous rural states can elect the president and largely ignore the will of voters in more populated urban states like New York, California, Texas, and Florida.

STATE PRIMARIES

State political party primaries determine who will run for the presidency. Primaries start in New Hampshire (Iowa has a caucus, not a primary) and work their way through a series of small New England, midwestern, and southern states. Primaries in the most populated states such as New York, California, and Pennsylvania come last. The problem with this arrangement is that party candidates are selected primarily by white rural voters before they get to more populated and diverse states. Candidates are already rejected who might be more familiar with issues and may advance policies more favorable to the majority of voters who are urban and suburban dwellers.

Table 2 illustrates this potential for disregarding a large part of the electorate. States are listed in order of their 2016 electoral primary dates. In some states, the Democratic and Republican primaries are on different days, and in some cases, in different months. Next, the 2015 census population is listed for each state with its rank in population size. The next two columns list the number of Democratic and Republican Party delegates assigned to each state in 2016. Then, the last three columns list cumulative populations by primary date and the cumulative party delegates by primary date. Points are highlighted in each cumulative distribution. The first highlight is the primary day when half the population is reached in the cumulative count. The second and third highlights are the earliest possible points when candidates could accumulated enough delegates to win their party’s nomination.

Table 4—State Primary Dates, Population, party Delegates, and Accumulative Population and Delegates

Source: McDonald 2016

The earliest a Democratic Party nominee could gain enough delegates to win the party’s nomination is March 22. The same earliest date for a Republican candidate is March 16. For candidates to wrap up their party’s nomination by either date, they would have to win all of their party’s prior primaries. This is unlikely. The more competition within a political party the more primaries it will take for any one candidate to accumulate enough delegates to win his or her party’s nomination. What table 4 shows is that a party with a popular nominee in the first twenty-nine primaries in states with mostly small and moderate population sizes and voters could clinch the nomination before the other half of the population and voters could even vote in a primary. Of the five most populated states with the most voters, Texas is the only one with a primary before March 15 and Florida’s is exactly on that date. The New York, Pennsylvania, and California primaries are in April and June, long after nominees are generally decided. Here again, a minority of the nation’s voters in less populated states, which have primaries before the most populated states, have a greater say in who will be selected to run for president in either major party.

REDISTRICTING

Voters’ ballots are further overvalued or reduced in value when one or the other political party dominates a state legislature and is responsible for redistricting its state and federal voting boundaries. Redistricting has to be done every ten years based on the Census to account for changes in populations within and between districts for proper congressional representation. Partisan state representatives can draw district boundaries in such a way that their party voters are a majority of voters in congressional and the other party’s voters are a consistent minority. This is known as gerrymandering. It means Democratic voters will find themselves as a minority of voters in large Republican districts and vice versa, depending on which party dominates the state legislature. Gerrymandering makes it harder for the minority party to win elections, thereby increasing the value of dominant party votes and reducing the value of minority party votes. Social activists in many states are trying, by ballot or through the courts, to have redistricting done by nonpartisan bodies.

THE NEXT PHASE IN HUMAN CIVIL RIGHTS

To eliminate the Electoral College and change the Senate would require amending the U.S. Constitution. This would require affirmative votes from the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate as well as a majority of state legislatures. The majority of small-state federal and state legislators would have to vote against the advantages they now enjoy. Yet, real and permanent advances in civil and human rights and reducing poverty in the United States over time are all dependent upon reducing, if not eliminating, the structural biases outlined above emanating from the Constitution and how its provisions are applied. These abuses have to be the targets of the next phase of the civil rights movement to enfranchise fully the majority of voters in urban and suburban districts in the most populated states in the union. The next phase of the movement will not be just about black rights, but also about the rights of the majority of Americans whose franchise the constitutional founding fathers restricted as well—the urban and town-based populations. What workable reforms should be our objectives?

First, without a constitutional amendment, the Senate could be pressured to amend its rules so that the vote of each senator’s vote could be weighted or made proportional to the number of people in their state. Therefore, the votes of senators from New York or California would count more than that of senators from smaller, less populated states like Wyoming. This reform would not require a change in the Constitution, just a change in Senate practice.

Second, we should get as many states as possible to drop winner-take-all electoral voting. Instead, electoral votes should be allotted to candidates in the proportion to the popular votes they received in the state, as is now the case in Maine and Nebraska.

Third, large, heavily populated states should have their state primaries earlier in the primary calendar. This will make candidates come to larger states and cities to be vetted by urban and suburban voters, as they should.

Finally, bipartisan state commissions should have the responsibility of redistricting after each Census to adjust fairly district boundary lines. Independent bipartisan commissions are the only ones that can adjust district boundaries according to changes in population, not based upon concentrations of voters in one or the other party.

Until such reforms are made, any civil rights gains for people of color or gains in gender and class equality can and will be wiped out by rural white voters in less populated states. They are already a minority of all voters. Yet, their inherited suspicion of cities and racism toward people of color dominated the country politically. They will dominate American politics unfairly until reforms are made. They will retard progress in improving health care, education, the economy and the quality of life for all Americans, including themselves. They will elect as many Donald Trumps as they can to ensure their continued dominance as a minority of American voters. Correcting these abuses is the next phase in civil and human rights that James Blackwell would wholeheartedly support.

About the Author

Benjamin P. Bowser is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Social Service, California State University–East Bay.

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References

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