WITH THE EXCEPTION of '56--when Eisenhower was mistakenly credited for the Supreme Court decision on integration in '54--the bulk of the black vote has been reliably Democratic since the New Deal.

The Democratic Presidents, in turn, have also made efforts to respond to aspects of the condition of blacks in America. Some of these efforts have been purely political in motivation and equally useless in effect, others have grown out of a President's personal or legal convictions and have been significantly more valuable.

The relationship between the national Democratic leadership and the black vote has produced a number of mutually profitable cooperative actions including the defeat of Richard Nixon in 1960.

II

THE KEY to the Kennedy victory (or the Nixon defeat) and the black role in it was a telephone call made by Kennedy to Correta King after her husband had been sentenced by a DeKalb County, Georgia judge to four months of hard labor "in the closest thing possible to a Georgia chain gang" for driving with an out-of-state license.

Few blacks expected that King would emerge in recognizable form after doing four months, and many doubted that he would emerge at all. The Kennedy phone call served notice that he and whatever political power he represented would not permit King to be led down the traditional way of all black flesh caught in the joint of the Georgia cracker.

The phone call also served another purpose. As Theodore White wrote in The Making of the President, 1960:

The father of Martin Luther King, a Baptist minister himself who had come out for Nixon a few weeks earlier...now switched. "Because this man," said the Reverend Mr. King Senior, "was willing to wipe the tears from my daughter (in-law's) eyes. I've got a suitcase of votes, and I'm going to take them to Mr. Kennedy and dump them in his lap."... When one reflects that Illinois was carried by only 9,000 votes and that 250,000 Negroes voted for Kennedy, that South Carolina was carried by 10,000 votes and that an estimated 40,000 Negroes voted for Kennedy, the candidate's instinctive decision must be ranked among the most crucial (of the campaign).

Although Republicans argued at the time that Kennedy's decision to call Corretta King was prompted by a Machiavellian as opposed to a humanitarian instinct, Nixon's decision not to contact the Kings or express any concern was no less political. As White observed:

Either President Eisenhower or Vice President Nixon could have acted (by issuing the statement supporting the release of King that had been drawn up by the Justice Department the afternoon of King's sentencing)--yet neither did. However obscure Eisenhower's motivations were, Nixon's are even more perplexing, for he was the candidate. He had made the political decision at Chicago to court the Negro vote in the North: only now, apparently, he felt it quite possible that Texas, South Carolina, and Louisiana might well be won to him by the white vote and he did not wish to offend that vote.

III

SO BEGAN the Southern Strategy. A long time coming to the Republican party, it appeared as if it might be a long time gone when, after its initial failure in 1960, a modified version was far more successful in '68. The full development and deployment of the Agnew Backlash Missile system in '69 and early '70 seemed to promise even better results.

Yet the defeats of the Haynsworth and Carswell nominations prefigured one of the more subtle lessons of the past two national elections that Richard Nixon is obviously pondering as he looks forward to November.

Briefly, that lesson is that Nixon's political hand is too weak over-all for him to enter the upcoming campaign with an absolute void in Spades.

In electing a President, the black vote is simply too pivotal for either party to ignore. Although, according to the Census, blacks compose only about 10 to 11 per cent of the population and accounted for only 8 per cent of the total vote cast in '68, one out of every five votes Humphrey received in '68 was a black vote, and 12 per cent of Nixon's total were votes by blacks.