Report: Despite Increase in Black Voting, Black Elected Officials Still Woefully Underrepresented
With Selma March This Weekend, Public Policies that Support Blacks are also Still Low
By Hazel Trice Edney
Spencer Overton, president, Joint Center
Khalila Brown-Dean, political scientist
Christina Rivers, political scientist
Zoltan Hajnal, political scientist
(TriceEdneyWire.com) - A new report on race and voting in America 50 years after the Voting Rights Act says despite massive increases in voting by African-Americans since 1965 and despite the growth in Black elected representatives, the number of Blacks and people of color in elected offices remains woefully underrepresented.
“Since 1965, the number of elected officials of color has grown enormously. Over this period, African Americans went from holding fewer than 1,000 elected offices nationwide [to] over 10,000,” says the report released this week by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.
But, then the report drops the other foot: “Based on the most recent data, African Americans are 12.5% of the citizen voting age population, but they make up a smaller share of the U.S. House (10%), state legislatures (8.5%), city councils (5.7%), and the U.S. Senate (2%).”
The report, titled “50 Years of the Voting Rights Act, the State of Race in Politics”, was released March 3, four days before the commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.
Thousands are expected to march in unity and President Obama is scheduled to speak in commemoration of that day of violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge when members of the Student Non-Violence Coordinating Committee were viciously attacked and beaten by Alabama State Troopers. This was the turning point in the fight for voting rights. Largely because of that nationally televised violence and the violent deaths of activists Jimmy Lee Jackson, Viola Liuzzo, and James Reeb in by racists in Selma, President Lyndon B. Johnson implored Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, which he signed into law on Aug. 6, 1965.
Still, nearly 50 years later, the Joint Center’s report also states that African-Americans remain at the rock bottom among racial minorities who have received fair and applicable public policies in America, including economic policies.
“Based on available data from 1972 to 2010, blacks were the least advantaged group in America in terms of policy outcomes. Blacks were policy winners only 31.9% of the time, compared with 37.6% for whites. This difference seems small, but it is ten times larger than the 0.5 point difference between high- and low-income earners,” the report states.
The low number of Black elected officials is not for the lack of trying. “Race is the most significant factor in urban local elections,” the report states.
“In urban local elections, race is a more decisive factor than income, education, political ideology, religion, sexuality, age, gender, and political ideology. The 38 point racial gap exceeds even the 33 point gap between Democratic and Republican voters,” the report states.
The research for the study and report was conducted by prominent political scientists Khalilah Brown-Dean of Quinnipiac University; Zoltan Hajnal of the University of California at San Diego; Christina Rivers of DePaul University, and Ismail White of George Washington University.
“We have elected an African American president, but studies have shown that some government officials are less likely to respond to inquiries from citizens with seemingly black or Latino names,” writes Joint Center President Spencer Overton in an introduction to the report. “How much progress have we made since 1965? How much more work is there to do? These are contested questions, subject to ideology and opinion,” Overton writes.
Other revelations in the report:
- The black/white racial gap in voter turnout has decreased dramatically since 1965 in presidential elections. Turnout among black Southerners exceeded that of their white counterparts in four of the twelve presidential elections since 1965, and nationwide black turnout clearly exceeded white turnout in presidential elections in 2012 and perhaps in 2008.
- Local election turnout is lower and possibly less diverse. Presidential general election turnout is generally 60% of the voting-age population, but local election turnout averages 27% and in some cases is less than 10%. As overall turnout declines in local elections, the electorate may become less representative of the racial diversity of the community as a whole.
- Latino and Asian American turnout increased but remains low. Turnout rates among both Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans in presidential elections remain 10 to 15 percentage points below black Americans and 15 to 20 points below white Americans.
- Party politics is increasingly polarized by race. Since 1960, the party identification and partisan voting patterns of blacks and whites have become sharply divided
- Latinos make up 11% of the citizen voting age population, but they are a smaller share of the U.S. House (7%), state legislatures (5%), the U.S. Senate (4%), and city councils (3.3%). Asian Americans are 3.8% of the citizen voting age population but a smaller share of the U.S. House (2%), state legislatures (2%), the U.S. Senate (1%), and city councils (0.4%).
- Elected Latinos have grown from a small number of offices to over 6,000, and Asian Americans from under a hundred documented cases to almost 1,000.
Concluding his introductory letter, Overton said the questions dealt with in the report are also important because they are “at the core of many ongoing debates about voting rights in the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress, as well as in many states, counties, and municipalities.”