Moreover, in those instances where the political success of a minority group has come first, the result has often been slower socioeconomic progress. The Irish immigrants who came to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century arrived from a country where 80 percent of the population was rural. Yet they settled in industrial centers like New York, Philadelphia, and Boston and took low-skill jobs. Their rise from poverty was especially slow—as late as 1920, 80 percent of all Irish women working in America were domestic servants—despite the fact that Irish-run political organizations dominated local government in several big cities with large Irish populations. “To most Americans today, it is not immediately obvious that the black migrants who left the rural South for the industrial cities of the North starting in the 1940s resemble the Irish immigrants who left rural Ireland and crossed the ocean to the great cities of the Atlantic seaboard starting in the 1840s,” wrote political historian Michael Barone. “Yet the resemblances are many.”22 Among other things, explained Barone,
both groups looked to control of government as a means of advancement, and both excelled at politics. They built their own political organizations, modeled on their churches: the Irish, hierarchical political machines; blacks, ad hoc organizations assembled by charismatic local leaders. They were initially the object of competition between Democrats and Whigs or Republicans, but within about twenty years both became heavily, almost unanimously, Democratic. Both used politics to create large numbers of public sector jobs for their own people. In some cities where they were majorities—Boston and Jersey City for the Irish, Detroit and Washington for blacks—they created predatory politics, which overloaded the public payroll and neglected to enforce the law, ultimately damaging the cities’ private economies.23
Yet it was only after the decline of the famed Irish political machines that average Irish incomes began to rise. Irish patronage politics was not the deciding factor in group advancement, Barone noted.
Society addressed the ills of the Irish through private charities, the settlement house movement, temperance societies, and police forces, all of which tried to improve individuals’ conduct and to help people conform to the standards of the larger society. The Irish rose to average levels of income and education by the 1950s, and in 1960 an Irish Catholic was elected president of the United States. 24
Sowell and Barone are conservatives, but some liberal scholars have made the same point. In their 1991 case study of Atlanta, political scientist Gary Orfield and coauthor Carole Ashkinaze described the city as “a center of black power” that at the time had been run by “two nationally prominent black mayors” for more than a decade. “Atlanta has been celebrated as a black Mecca, where the doors are open and a critical mass of black leadership already exists,” they wrote. “Atlanta’s first black mayor, Maynard Jackson”—elected to the first of his three terms in 1973—“expressed this in his frequent public promises to give minorities ‘a piece of the pie.’” Jackson and his successor, Andrew Young, implemented racial preference programs for hiring city workers and contractors, and the number of successful black firms increased rapidly. But according to Orfield and Ashkinaze, average blacks in Atlanta were left behind, and the black underclass lost ground.
“If economic growth and black political leadership were sufficient to resolve racial differences in the 1980s, tremendous mobility for the region’s poor blacks should have taken place,” they wrote. “Indeed, some blacks made it. On average, however, the situation of the black population relative to whites became significantly worse in very important respects.” The authors went on to make a broader point about intentions versus results. “The late 1960s’ prophecies of dangerous racial separation have given way to a vague hope that racial inequalities are being resolved, perhaps through the election of black officials,” wrote Orfield and Ashkinaze. “Many blacks have reached positions of local power, such as mayor, county commission chairman or superintendent of schools, positions undreamed of 30 years ago. But these achievements do not necessarily produce success for blacks as a whole. In fact, they may contribute to our lack of knowledge about low-income blacks. Black officials, like their white predecessors, tend to publicize successes, not problems.”25 History, in other words, provides little indication, let alone assurance, that political success is a prerequisite of upward mobility.
The 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed to ensure black access to the ballot, particularly in the states of the Old Confederacy where blacks risked life and limb to exercise their basic rights. Vernon Jordan, a former head of the National Urban League, called it “probably the most significant accomplishment” of the civil rights movement. The right to vote is a cornerstone of our democracy, but it was routinely denied to blacks in the states where most of them lived. “Prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, blacks were roughly one-tenth of the Deep South’s registered voters,” explained J. Harvie Wilkinson in his civil rights history, From Brown to Bakke. “By 1970 they comprised approximately 30 percent of the Mississippi electorate, a quarter of that in South Carolina, a fifth in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana.”26 In 1964, black voter registration in Mississippi was under 7 percent, the lowest in the region. A year after the act passed, black voter registration in Mississippi had climbed to about 60 percent, the highest in the South. The law was a success.
“Nothing short of radical federal intervention would have enfranchised southern blacks,” wrote voting-rights scholar Abigail Thernstrom. “Sometimes good legislation works precisely as initially intended.”27 But like so much civil rights legislation, the law’s justification soon shifted from equal opportunity to equal results. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act requires states with a history of racially motivated voter intimidation to have any changes in voting procedures cleared by a federal court or the Justice Department. This so-called preclearance provision, always intended to be temporary, was slated to sunset after five years, but Congress renewed the provision repeatedly well after it became obvious that ballot access was no longer a problem for blacks. In 1982 a permanent part of the law, Section 2, was amended to allow for racial gerrymandering, or the drawing of voting districts to ensure that a candidate of a particular race is elected. The measure of success was no longer whether blacks had ballot access. Instead, it was whether enough black officials were being elected to office, and liberals became hell-bent on using Sections 2 and 5 to achieve proportional racial representation. “In 1965, the Voting Rights Act had been simple, transparent and elegant. Its aim was to secure basic Fifteenth Amendment rights in a region where they had been egregiously denied,” wrote Thernstrom. “But the cumulative effect of these amendments was to turn the law into a constitutionally problematic, unprecedented attempt to impose what voting rights activists, along with their allies in Congress, the Justice Department, and the judiciary, viewed as a racially fair distribution of political power.”28 In 2006, Congress renewed Section 5 for another twenty-five years.
We are in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and a black man has twice been elected president in a country where blacks are only 13 percent of the population. Yet liberals continue to pretend that it’s still 1965, and that voters must be segregated in order for blacks to win office. Never mind that in 1982 five black candidates from majority-white districts won seats in the North Carolina State House of Representatives. Or that from 1983 to 1995 a majority-white district in Missouri was represented in Congress by Alan Wheat, a black Democrat. Or that between 1991 and 1997 Gary Franks, a black Republican from Connecticut, represented a congressional district that was 88 percent white. Or that in 1996 Sanford Bishop, a black Democrat from Georgia, easily won reelection to Congress in a district that was only 35 percent black. Or that in 2010 Tim Scott of South Carolina and Allen West of Florida, both black Republicans, were elected to Congress from districts that are overwhelmingly white. Or that Representatives Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri and Keith Ellison of Minnesota are black Democrats who represent districts that are more than 60 percent white.
In 2008 Obama not only won the presidency of a majority-white country; he did better among white voters in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia than John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000. Yet after the Supreme Court, in its 2013 decision Shelby County v. Holder, effectively nullified Section 5’s “preclearance” provisions by ruling that Congress was using an outdated formula to determine which states must have federal oversight