ABSTRACT
In the middle of the twentieth century, the political socialization of the American Negro is rapidly and drastically changing. Political socialization is concerned with how a person “comes to terms” with the roles and norms of the concentric political worlds—local, regional, and national—into which he passes as he grows up. In special ways as well as common ones, American Negroes occupy inferior statuses. By 1960 half of America’s Negro population lived outside the states of the old Confederacy, and nearly a third lived in the twelve largest metropolitan centers. In the study of American race relations today, intellectuals tend to assume that Negroes all along have felt oppressed and constrained at the mold of second-class citizenship, in 1895 as much as 1935 or 1965. The dynamics of political rapprochement in Louisiana communities, according to Fenton and Vines, have occasionally involved an alliance of “shady white and underdog Negro” elements.
