Michigan: Still Listening for the Lash

For months, Democrats and Republicans alike have waited warily to hear the first crack of the white “backlash” vote against the excesses of the Negro revolution. And if such a vote were ever to make its sting felt in U.S. politics, it seemed certain to do so in last week’s Democratic primary in Michigan’s newly created 16th District.

The Obvious Issue. There, after redistricting last April, Incumbent Con-gressmen John Dingell, 38, and John Lesinski, 49, found themselves running against each other. Both men are of Polish extraction. Both are the sons of Congressmen: Dingell’s father served the old 15th District from 1932 until his death in 1955; Lesinski’s father represented the old 16th from 1933 until his death in 1950. The Dingells were liberals and champions of the Negroes, who comprised some 46% of the population in their longtime constituency. The Lesinskis stood fast against any Negro penetration of their own home ground of Dearborn, a virtually all-white city of 115,600.

Predictably, Dingell this year voted in Congress for the civil rights bill, while Lesinski was the only Northern Democratic Congressman to vote against it. Dingell’s vote took some courage. In Michigan’s redistricting, he lost most of his old Negro constituency, faced Lesinski in a new district that included 80% of Lesinski’s old territory and was 90% white.

In the new district, bordered by Negro neighborhoods and beset by fears of black incursions, the backlash, so everybody thought, was an “obvious” issue. Dingell accused Lesinski’s followers of “trying to use it. They’re raising the bogeyman, telling people that if I’m elected there will be two Negro families on every block in Dearborn.” Lesinski indeed raised some bogeymen. “The other day,” he cried in a typical speech, “a 35-year-old man was set upon and stabbed by four colored fellows. He was stabbed to death. It didn’t appear on TV or in the papers. They hushed it up. Now that’s the kind of thing that the people are worried about.”

Time to Count Again. To believers in the backlash theory, Lesinski’s victory seemed a cinch. But Dingell won by a vote of 30,791 to 25,620. In a district that was clearly liberal on almost every issue other than civil rights, his liberal record was the big difference. Moreover, as Dingell himself said, with more accuracy than modesty: “I can make an understandable and intelligent speech, where my opponent, frankly, cannot.”

Some Detroiters thought they heard a flick of the backlash when voters in a citywide referendum approved an ordinance that would, in effect, give property owners the right to refuse to sell or lease to Negroes. The referendum certainly did indicate that whites were not anxious to have Negroes move into the block. But it hardly amounted to backlash in the sense of whites turning against one of their own simply because he had espoused the civil rights cause.

In short, the backlash issue may yet have some effect somewhere this year —but any politician who counts on its being a decisive factor had better start counting again.