May 10, 2007

The U.S. Civil war ended in 1865, and the Reconstruction Act created five
Confederacy districts essentially under Martial law protecting the blacks
and keeping the peace with Federal troops. The 14th Amendment in 1868
gave blacks citizenship, and the 15th Amendment created the black vote.
The U.S. Supreme Court left the responsibility for citizens rights up to
the individual states.

In 1877, at the end of Reconstruction, the conditions for the black

citizens deteriorated rapidly. The Southern states used poll taxes,
literacy tests and other schemes to deny most blacks their black vote.
It was at this time the Ku Klux Klan began terrorizing the blacks to the
point of a mass migration Northward in what has been referred as the
Black exodus. The American Colonization Society was founded and created
Monrovia, a colony in Northwest Africa. Very few blacks volunteered to
re-colonize back to Africa. That colony is today the African country
Liberia.

When investigating the evolution of the black vote in American

politics, it seems the black citizen was a race without a country or
any meaningful political representation. Then something happened that
made the black vote very importantthe Russian revolution in 1917. That
revolution was captured by the Marxist/Socialist ideological movement
that was developing in the growing struggle between Capitalism and
Socialism. After the revolution resulted in the creation of the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics(USSR) the movement spread to the U.S. and saw
the founding of the Communist Party USA in 1919. White intellectual
idealogs quickly saw the potential of the black vote for political
influence and began pandering to the black citizen and beginning to make
the black vote desireable.
This new ideological struggle would see the enfranchisment of the black
citizen and the importance of the black vote. The racial struggle
would now join the class struggle in American politics.

In the early 20th Century the Socialist movement began preaching

socialism would solve the problems of the working classboth black and
white. Many Black churches began to preach that religion and socialism
had the same goals. Some of the most influential white socialist leaders
helped the black leaders found organizations like the NAACP in 1909. And
the black voter found themselves the central focus of the Communist
party. When the movement for desegregation and integration came about
there was a loud cry that it was a communist plot to bring about the
destruction of America. Finally during the Truman administration in the
1940s, Truman issued an Executive Order ending racial segregation in the
U.S. military, and from that point on the black vote has been a big
part in the Political party competition and struggle in the combination
class and racial problems of America.