The year the black vote switched: Will 2020 be 1936 in reverse?

In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt lost the black vote overwhelmingly, receiving just 21% support from black Americans in Chicago (there were no national polling organizations).

Such a loss was understandable, considering that the Democratic Party was the party of slavery and the party instigating segregation in the South. Moreover, the Democrats had made it clear that black Americans were unwelcome in the Democratic Party. In fact, Roosevelt, as undersecretary of the Navy, had actively assisted in President Woodrow Wilson's resegregation of the military.

Roosevelt had even used the n-word in personal correspondence. Or, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. put it generously, Roosevelt “was fairly conventional in his racial attitudes.” Not surprisingly, there had never been any black Americans serving as delegates or alternate delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

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