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POLITICS. The advances have been enormous: the potential is even bigger. The number of Negroes running for elective office has risen 25% to 30% in the Democratic Party over the past two years alone. This autumn, a record 210 Negroes of both parties are trying for seats in state legislatures, and hundreds more for other local offices. The number of Negroes in the U.S. Congress has risen from two in 1954 to six now; altogether, 17 are running for Congress this fall (eleven Republicans and six Democrats). Massachusetts' Republican Attorney General Edward Brooke is the first Negro since Reconstruction to campaign for the U.S. Senate on a major party ticket. Last November, Cleveland's Carl Stokes, a Negro state legislator, came within 2,000 votes of unseating Mayor Ralph Locher, and Houston recently became the first Southern city to appoint a Negro assistant district attorney, Clark Gable Ward.
Negroes will not live up to their full potential in politics until they become more diligent at the polls. While the number of registered Negro voters in the South has risen from 1,900,000 to 2,300,000 in the past ten years, scarcely 35% of the eligible Negroes bother to vote in local elections up North; by contrast, 85% of the Jews vote, and get commensurate rewards when politicians pass out patronage or nominations. New York's 16% Negro population elects only one of the city's 19 U.S. Congressmen, two of the 37 city councilmen.
SOCIAL ACCEPTANCE. The most obvious and humiliating forms of discrimination have become illegal or unfashionable (at least in the North), but there are subtler problems. The Negroes, like the Catholics and Jews before them, want to be welcomed in the private clubs, on the golf courses and at weekend parties with their co-workers and customers. As it is, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission estimates that 90% of its state's whites have no contact with nonwhites, and the situation is much the same elsewhere.
The Negro thus has to look inward and, in so doing, is slowly beginning to discover a long-submerged sense of pride. That sense is essential to remedying the lower-class Negro's other social and economic ills, since only pride can overcome the defeatist attitude that has contributed so much to his high rates of unemployment, illegitimacy, delinquency and crime. In Rochester, St. Louis and a dozen other cities, Negroes in the past two years have organized to clean up their neighborhoods, finance small businesses, pressure for school improvements and get police action to chase out the "white hunters," white men who crash the ghetto in search of black prostitutes. There is a trend among Negro coeds and career girls to wear their hair "natural" instead of attempting to unkink it by "conking"—rinsing it with lye and binding it with handkerchiefs. Yet for every Negro who flaunts his identity, a hundred try to camouflage it. Advertisements in the Negro magazines still hymn Nadinola skin bleach: "Lightens and brightens skin."