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A study shows that white voters are reluctant to vote for Black candidates for mayor in cities where Blacks constitute a majority of the population.
1974 (Sep 21)
White voters are reluctant to vote for Black candidates for mayor in cities where Blacks constitute a majority of the population, according to a study appearing in the September issue of Psychology Today. In comparing recent mayoral elections in Los Angeles (a white majority city) with Detroit and Atlanta (Black majority cities), the article's author, Professor Howard Schuman. Research, found that Los Angeles was the only major city where close to a majority of whites voted for a Black candidate (Thomas Bradley) in preference to a white candidate (Sam Yorty). Los Angeles, Schuman said, apparently separated the question of the candidate's own race from the issue of which race would control the city. By contrast, in Atlanta and Detroit, where whites were becoming the minority population, the elections became “full scale battles over which race would run the city.” In a previous study, Schuman had found that about 60 percent of the whites surveyed in fifteen cities said they would be willing to vote for a qualified Black mayoral candidate of their own party. Yet, he pointed out, successful Black mayoral candidates like Maynard Jackson of Atlanta and Coleman Young of Detroit received far less than half of the white vote. Schuman concluded that while whites are becoming more liberal, they are still opposed to basic, structural changes in society. At the same time, he observed, Blacks are becoming more open in their criticism of whites and are more distrustful of whites than in the past. Schuman's study is entitled “Are Whites Really More Liberal?"
References:
- • Hornsby, Alton. Chronology of African-American History: Significant Events and People from 1619 to the Present. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995.