The study of this booklet provides a historic context within which properties may be evaluated for their significance in civil rights and creates registration guidelines for National Historic Landmark consideration. Completion of this study will also assist in the identification of sites for National Historic Landmark evaluation.
1. National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior National Historic Landmarks Program Civil Rights in America: Racial Voting Rights A National Historic Landmarks Theme Study
2. Cover photograph: NAACP photograph showing people waiting to register to vote, 1948. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records [reproduction number: LC-USZ62-122260]
3. CIVIL RIGHTS IN AMERICA: RACIAL VOTING RIGHTS A National Historic Landmarks Theme Study Prepared by: Susan Cianci Salvatore, Project Manager & Historian, National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers Consultant Essays prepared by the Organization of American Historians: Neil Foley, Historian Peter Iverson, Historian Steven F. Lawson, Historian Produced by: National Historic Landmarks Program Cultural Resources National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior Washington, D.C. 2007, Revised 2009
4. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................................................... 1 HISTORIC CONTEXTS African American Voting Rights, 1865-1965 Part One, 1865-1900 ..................................................................................................................................... 3 Part Two, 1900-1941 .................................................................................................................................. 14 Part Three, 1941-1954 ................................................................................................................................ 20 Part Four, 1954-1965 .................................................................................................................................. 30 American Indian Voting Rights, 1884-1965 ........................................................................................... 73 Hispanic and Asian American Voting Rights, 1848-1975.................................................................... 102 NATIONAL HISTORIC LANDMARKS REGISTRATION GUIDELINES ................................... 111 METHODOLOGY ...................................................................................................................... 119 SURVEY RESULTS Properties Recognized as Nationally Significant ...................................................................................... 121 National Historic Landmarks Study List .................................................................................................. 123 Properties Removed from Further Study .................................................................................................. 125 Table 1. Properties Recognized as Nationally Significant ....................................................................... 129 Table 2. National Historic Landmarks Study List ................................................................................... 130 Table 3. Properties Removed from Further Study ................................................................................... 131 African American...................................................................................................................................... 132 American Indian........................................................................................................................................ 138 Hispanic .................................................................................................................................................... 142 Asian American ........................................................................................................................................ 144 General ...................................................................................................................................................... 144 Appendix A. Selma to Montgomery March: Chronology of Events ....................................................... 146 Appendix B. Chronology of the Mississippi Voting Campaign, 1961-1964 ........................................... 149 Appendix C. Chronology of African American Voting Rights-Related Cases........................................ 152
5. Introduction 1 INTRODUCTION In 1999 the U.S. Congress directed the National Park Service to conduct a multi-state study of civil right sites to determine the national significance of the sites and the appropriateness of including them in the National Park System. To determine how best to proceed, the National Park Service partnered with the Organization of American Historians to develop an overview of civil rights history entitled, Civil Rights in America: A Framework for Identifying Significant Sites (2002, rev. 2008). The framework concluded that while a number of civil right sites had been designated as National Historic Landmarks, other sites needed to be identified and evaluated. Taking this into account, the framework recommended that a National Historic Landmarks theme study be prepared to identify sites that may be nationally significant, and that the study be based on provisions of the 1960s civil rights acts. These include the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (covering voting rights, equal employment, public accommodations, and school desegregation enforcement), the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. This specific portion of the study focuses on the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Inclusion in the National Park System first requires that properties meet the National Historic Landmark criteria, and then meet additional tests of suitability and feasibility. To establish guidance on meeting landmark criteria, this study provides a historic context within which properties may be evaluated for their significance in civil rights and creates registration guidelines for National Historic Landmark consideration. Completion of this study will also assist in the identification of sites for National Historic Landmark evaluation. Voting Rights Overview The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is “generally considered the most successful piece of civil rights legislation ever adopted by the United States Congress.”* Congress adopted this act in response to the ongoing obstruction African Americans faced in exercising their right to vote. As a result, African Americans were overwhelmingly disenfranchised in many Southern states. The act’s adoption followed nearly a century of systematic resistance by certain states to the Fifteenth Amendment guarantee of the right to vote regardless of race or color. While the Voting Rights Act was adopted in response to the African American struggle, other racial groups also fought for enfranchisement. Hispanics, Asian Americans, and American Indians faced the same methods states used to exempt African American voters from the ballot box. Therefore, this study also describes voter discrimination issues faced by Hispanics, Asian Americans, and American Indians. Study Format To establish guidance on meeting landmark criteria, this study provides a historic context within which properties may be evaluated for their significance in civil rights and establishes registration guidelines for National Historic Landmark consideration. The historic context contains separate essays on African American, American Indian, and the Hispanic and Asian American voting rights experience. All three stories begin at a different time period. The African American essay begins in 1865 with the abolition of slavery and the quest for the ballot. The American Indian essay begins in 1884 when the U.S. Supreme Court determined that Quote from “Introduction to Federal Voting Rights Laws,” at http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/voting/intro/intro.htm, United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, accessed on August 25, 2003.
6. Introduction 2 Indians were not American citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment with the right to vote. The Hispanic essay begins in 1848 when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo granted U.S. citizenship to those who did not wish to retain their Mexican citizenship, and the Asian essay begins in 1878 when a federal court upheld the bar against naturalizing Chinese immigrants. The African American and American Indian essays end in 1965 when Congress passed the Voting Rights Act and the emphasis in voting rights changed from an individual right to one of fair representation. The Hispanic and Asian American essays end in 1975 when Congress extended protection of the Voting Rights Act to language minorities. Registration guidelines then outline how properties may qualify for National Historic Landmark designation under this theme study. Subsequently, the methodology section describes how the survey proceeded. Properties identified during the course of the study are divided into three categories: 1) Properties Recognized as Nationally Significant, 2) National Historic Landmarks Study List, and 3) Properties Removed from Further Study. Three appendices conclude the study. Appendix A provides a chronology of the Selma to Montgomery march. Appendix B provides a chronology of the Mississippi Summer voting drive. Lastly, Appendix C lists African American voting rights-related cases.
7. African American – Part One, 1865-1900 3 AFRICAN AMERICAN VOTING RIGHTS, 1865-1965 An illustration in Harper’s Weekly entitled, “The first vote,” 1867. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division [reproduction number: LC-USZ62-97946]
8. African American – Part One, 1865-1900 4 PART ONE: 1865-19001 The right to vote has held a central place in the black freedom struggle. With abolition of slavery, African Americans sought the ballot as a means to claim their first-class citizenship. When emancipated blacks pursued equality, they demanded the franchise on the same basis as that exercised by whites. Indeed, when Abraham Lincoln delivered his historic Gettysburg Address in 1863, universal white manhood suffrage existed in the North and the South. Democratic reforms over the previous half-century had whittled down property qualifications that excluded working class and poor white Americans from voting. Once slaves obtained freedom with passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, they intended to participate actively in the political process and help advance their interests. Before emancipation, blacks residing in five New England states could vote. Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont, which contained only 6 percent of the northern black population, had extended the right to vote to blacks. In New York, blacks owning $250 in freehold property could also cast a ballot; however, the same property qualification did not apply to whites. In the South, where the overwhelming number of African Americans labored as slaves, the right to vote was limited to whites.2 Even before the end of the Civil War, African Americans organized to campaign for the right to vote. In 1864, free blacks gathered in Syracuse, New York, to form the National Equal Rights League (NERL). One of those in attendance was Abraham Galloway, a fugitive slave, abolitionist, and Union spy. He and a delegation of blacks met with President Lincoln to endorse the suffrage for all African Americans. The president did not commit himself and was assassinated in April 1865 before the issue came to a resolution. After the war, Galloway moved to North Carolina and started chapters of the NERL to voice the political concerns of the state’s African American population. Galloway told an audience in New Bern, if the “Negro knows how to use the cartridge box, he knows how to use the ballot box.” In Wilmington, the NERL chapter demanded “all the social and political rights of . . . white citizens” and insisted “that blacks be consulted in the selection of policemen, justices of the peace, and county Throughout the South in 1865 and 1866, ex-slaves and free blacks convened statewide conventions to agitate for their political rights. At these assemblies, speaker after speaker argued that the suffrage was “an essential and inseparable element of self government,” and the delegates invoked the spirit of the Declaration of Independence to justify their cause.4 Blacks in Norfolk, Virginia pressed vigorously for the franchise. On April 4, 1865, the Colored Monitor Union Club met at Mechanic’s Hall with the Reverend William I. Hodges presiding. The group resolved to “promote vision and harmony among the colored portion of the The author of this study’s African American context, Steven F. Lawson, professor of history, Rutgers University, wishes to acknowledge the superb research assistance of his graduate student, Danielle McGuire. Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 91. David Cecelski and Timothy Tyson, eds., Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 55 for the first quote; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 111 for the second quote. Foner, Reconstruction, 114; Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, Proceedings of the Black National and State Conventions, 1865-1900 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), xxi.
9. African American – Part One, 1865-1900 5 community and to enlighten each other on the important subject of the right of universal suffrage to all loyal men, without distinction of color . . . and to memorialize the Congress of the United States to allow colored citizens the equal right of the franchise with other citizens.” Throughout April and May, African Americans held meetings at Mechanic’s Hall and the Bute Street African Methodist Episcopal Church. They decided to test whether blacks would be allowed to vote throughout the city. In three of four wards, teams of potential black voters were rebuffed; only in Ward 2 were they allowed to vote. On June 15, Norfolk’s blacks met at the Catherine Street Baptist Church and drew up and published an “Address to the People of the United States,” which made the case for black enfranchisement.5 Black conventions in Alexander and Raleigh, North Carolina echoed their Norfolk counterpart. In the Tar Heel State’s capital city, the State Convention of the Colored People of North Carolina met at the Loyal African Methodist Episcopal Church, popularly known as the Lincoln Church. James Walker Hood, the head of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, presided and called upon the government to provide blacks equal protection of the laws, the franchise, and the right to sit on juries. In attendance was Abraham Galloway, who reportedly gave an address that “electrified” the crowd.6 Conventions expressing similar sentiments occurred in Augusta, Georgia; Lexington, Kentucky; Little Rock, Arkansas; Mobile, Alabama; and Washington, D.C. As with all the other gatherings, the church played an enormous role in political mobilization. For example, on January 30, 1866, the National Convention of Colored Men met at the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., with the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet presiding. Delegates assembled from Alabama, the District of Columbia, Florida, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and six New England states. The convention endorsed “the right of impartial suffrage” and sent a delegation, headed by the ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, to meet with President Andrew Johnson, who had succeeded Lincoln. On February 6, 1866, the black emissaries declared to the president that African Americans deserved the suffrage because of the fact that “we are subjects of the Government and subject to taxation, to volunteer in the service of the country, subject to being drafted, subject to bear the burdens of the State, makes it not improper that we should ask in the privileges of this condition.” However, Johnson refused to be swayed. A Tennessee Democrat who opposed slavery not out of any moral consideration for African Americans but on the grounds that it held poor whites under the yoke of elite planters, Johnson had a very dim and racist view of African American capabilities for citizenship. He informed Douglass that granting blacks the franchise would result in “great injury to the white as well as the colored man.” Douglass disparaged the chief executive’s opinion as “unsound and prejudicial.”7 Douglass proved correct. President Johnson did what he could to treat Confederate leaders leniently for their rebellion and prevent extension of civil and political rights to the freed people. In 1865 and 1866, he granted pardons to ex-Confederates and did not oppose the Black Codes that the southern states enacted to restrict free black labor and civil rights. The president vetoed two bills designed to provide economic and educational assistance to the ex-slaves and to furnish them equal rights under law. Dominated by Republicans who believed that the Federal government had to offer protection for black freedom, Congress repassed the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill and the Civil Rights Act over Johnson’s vetoes. Wary of Johnson’s and the South’s Foner and Walker, Proceedings, 80, 81. Ibid., 180; Cecelski and Tyson, Democracy Betrayed, 57. Foner and Walker, Proceedings, 210, 211.
10. African American – Part One, 1865-1900 6 unwillingness to respect blacks as citizens, Congress also adopted the Fourteenth Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification. The amendment defined citizenship to include African Americans, and recognized their right to due process and equal protection under the law, but did not directly extend the right to vote to blacks. Instead, Section 2 of the amendment penalized states that deprived the vote to male citizens (women did not count) over the age of twenty-one. Thus, if a state kept African American men from voting, it would have its representation reduced proportionately in the lower house of Congress. The amendment was ratified in 1868, but the provision to reduce representation was never enforced despite obvious examples of disenfranchisement throughout subsequent history. Congressional action did not deter continued resistance from the president and the South. Consequently, the Republican majority in Congress decided to take matters into its own hands. On March 2, 1867, Congress approved the first of three Military Reconstruction Acts, which ended Johnson’s control over Reconstruction. The legislation divided 10 former Confederate States (Tennessee had already returned to the Union) into five military districts each under supervision of a Union general. The states had to hold constitutional conventions in which all male citizens, black and white, were eligible to vote. In adopting new state constitutions, the conventions had to guarantee suffrage to African Americans. In effect, this became the first extension of the right to vote to African Americans in the South. After approving the state constitutions, the biracial electorate would vote for legislatures that were required to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. The state constitutional conventions inaugurated under Military Reconstruction, a British observer commented, reflected “the mighty revolution that had taken place in America.”8 The constitutions guaranteed blacks civil and political rights, and black delegates played leading roles in the conventions. They helped create documents that for the first time extended public education to southern children of both races. Black representatives displayed a great deal of compassion toward whites, and constitutions crafted in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas did not disenfranchise former Confederates. White Republicans more so than black Republicans were apt to punish ex-Confederates, and in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia, many of the South’s old leaders lost the right to vote.9 Myths of Black Reconstruction notwithstanding, African Americans did not constitute a majority of the legislative bodies elected under the new constitutions. A combination of white Republicans from the North (so-called Carpetbaggers) and white southerners (Scalawags) outnumbered black legislators. Nevertheless, African Americans played a significant role in the governing of the region. Over 1,400 blacks held offices during Reconstruction, and more than 600 blacks served in state assemblies, the majority of whom were former slaves.10 The largest number of blacks served as local officials in Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina; the fewest number in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia. As historian Eric Foner has written, in 1870, “hundreds of blacks were serving as city policemen and rural constables; they comprised half the police force in Montgomery [Alabama] and Vicksburg [Mississippi], and more than a quarter in New Orleans [Louisiana], Mobile [Alabama], and Petersburg [Virginia]. In the courts, defendants confronted black magistrates and justices of the peace, and racially Foner, Reconstruction, 316. Ibid., 324. Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), xiv.
11. African American – Part One, 1865-1900 7 integrated juries.”11 Nineteen black men held office as sheriffs in Louisiana, as did fifteen in Mississippi. In Tallahassee, Florida and Little Rock, Arkansas blacks were elected chief of police, and in Donaldson, Louisiana and Natchez, Mississippi African Americans sat in the mayor’s office. Only one African American occupied the office of state governor. In December 1872, Lieutenant Governor P. B. S. (Pinckney Benton Stewart) Pinchback of Louisiana succeeded Governor Henry Warmoth who had been suspended. Pinchback served for five weeks. Yet African Americans did hold a few high-level state posts. Jonathan C. Gibbs won the position of Florida secretary of state. James Lynch served as Mississippi’s secretary of state, and Francis L. Cardozo occupied the office of secretary of state in South Carolina. In Louisiana, Oscar J. Dunn obtained the position of lieutenant governor, and Antoine Dubuclet won the post of state treasurer.12 Sixteen blacks also won election to Congress during Reconstruction. Two of them, Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce, represented Mississippi in the Senate. Remarkably, nine of the sixteen, including Bruce, were born into slavery. Jefferson Franklin Long of Georgia provides an interesting example. He was born a slave in Knoxville, Georgia on March 3, 1836. Before the Civil War, Long’s owner moved to Macon where Long lived at the time of emancipation. Having learned his trade as a slave, Long opened a tailor shop in Macon following the war. Income from the shop provided the financial security that allowed him to turn his attention to Georgia politics. Long entered politics through the Georgia Educational Association. He attended the group’s conventions and, by 1867, he spoke out in behalf of African Americans at Republican political rallies. Early in his career, Long influenced state politics by acting as an organizer and speechwriter for the Republican Party. In 1869, Long and other black Georgia leaders called for a state convention “to consider the interests of their race.” A testament to his prominence in the black community, Long served as president of the Georgia State Colored Convention. The conference met in October and issued reports and resolutions related to the working and living conditions of freedmen. The conference also appointed a Committee on Outrages. It surveyed 45 Georgia counties and reported that “in four-fifths of them a frightful state of disorder prevails” due to white vigilante assaults against blacks. The convention demanded that Georgia courts be reorganized to protect the safety of black residents and that “the military exercise vigilant care over the state.”13 In December 1870, Georgia Republicans nominated Long for a term in the U.S. Congress. One Georgia newspaper claimed Long was chosen because he was “as light a mulatto and as little negro as they could find in the District, of the reading and writing sort.” Still, Republicans viewed Long’s candidacy as a way to appeal to black voters to support white Republicans. Of the three congressmen elected from Georgia in 1871, Jefferson Long was the only black, and he was elected to serve the shortest term. Congress had refused to seat Georgia’s elected representatives in 1869. It only relented in July 1870. The December 1870 nominees included one who would serve out the final months of the 1869-1871 term and two who would begin serving full terms in March 1871. Nominated for the short term, Long took the oath of office on January 16, 1871, and served until March of that year. Despite his brief tenure, Long became the first African American to deliver an address in the House of Representatives.14 Foner, Reconstruction, 362-63. Ibid., 353, 354, 355. Foner and Walker, Proceedings, quotes on 412 and 413. Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers, 136; John M. Matthews, “Jefferson Franklin Long: The Public Career of Georgia’s First Black Congressman,” Phylon 42 (2nd Qtr. 1981): 145-56.
12. African American – Part One, 1865-1900 8 Fifteenth Amendment Although the Military Reconstruction Acts ordered the southern states to adopt constitutions that granted blacks the franchise, Republicans in Congress endorsed a constitutional amendment to outlaw discrimination based on race that was subject to national protection and enforcement. In addition, the Reconstruction statutes only applied to southern blacks; in the North, most African Americans still could not vote. Racism was a national problem and not confined to the South. Between 1865 and 1868, white voters in Connecticut, Kansas, Michigan, New York, Ohio, and Wisconsin rejected referenda extending the ballot to blacks.15 The Fifteenth Amendment, adopted in 1870, for the first time guaranteed protection against racial discrimination in voting for all African Americans throughout the nation. However, something of a compromise, the amendment did not affirmatively grant universal suffrage to male adults, but only banned discrimination on the basis of race. Left out from coverage were supposedly non-racial qualifications such as literacy tests and poll tax payments. This omission would prove devastating to African American political freedom in the decades to come. By limiting coverage, however insufficiently to African American men, the Fifteenth Amendment created conflict among former abolitionists, women and men, blacks and whites. Frederick Douglass supported ratification of the amendment. Although a long time proponent of women’s rights, he believed that freedmen could never protect their full citizenship rights without the ballot. Sojourner Truth, on the other hand, feared that if black men gained the suffrage but not black women, then gender discrimination in African American communities would mirror that of whites. White reformers were also divided. Abolitionist Wendell Phillips declared it was the “Negro’s hour” and believed that any expansion of the right to vote, though confined to men, was welcome. He was supported by Lucy Stone and other former white abolitionists. In contrast, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony saw the Fifteenth Amendment as a perpetuation of male domination and opposed any extension of political rights that excluded women. These splits remained alive until ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, which enfranchised women.16 Women in Politics As discussed above, the enfranchisement of blacks through the Military Reconstruction Acts and the Fifteenth Amendment applied to men only. Like their white counterparts, black women remained disenfranchised. Nevertheless, it must be emphasized that black women played an important role in politics even if they could not vote. Women actively participated in political meetings and organized political societies such as the Daughters of Liberty and the Daughters of the Union Victory. Because the church was central to black political mobilization and women were central to the church, they freely joined alongside men in planning strategy to acquire and exercise the vote. In Richmond, Virginia, the First African Baptist Church attracted thousands of black women and men in discussions of political developments. Outside this church, armed women stood guard to ensure the safety of those inside.17 Steven F. Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944-1969 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999), Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), passim; Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), passim. Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture 7 (Fall 1994): 110, 122-23.
13. African American – Part One, 1865-1900 9 In their roles as wives and mothers, women proved resourceful. In South Carolina, women took off from work and went to the polls to influence male family members and friends in casting their ballots and to monitor voting fraud perpetrated against blacks. Congressman Robert Smalls of South Carolina told a story of female power of persuasion reminiscent of the Greek comedy Lysistrata. “When John went to Massa Hampton and pledged his word to vote for him and returned back home,” Smalls related, “his wife told him she would not give him any of that thing if you vote for Hampton. John gone back to Massa Hampton and said ‘Massa Hampton I can’t vote for you, for woman is too sweet, and my wife says if I vote for you she won’t give me any’.”18 Black women openly sported campaign buttons on their clothes for their favorite candidates. The Georgia Weekly Telegraph in Macon commented on the enthusiasm black women exhibited during elections: “The negro women, if possible, were wilder than the men. They were seen everywhere, talking in an excited manner and urging the men on. Some of them were almost furious, showing to be part of their religion to keep their husbands and brothers straight in politics.”19 Thus, long before black women could formally cast ballots, they participated in a variety of critical ways in the electoral process. The End of Reconstruction By 1870, although blacks continued to vote and participate politically, they increasingly encountered resistance. What white southern Democrats called Redemption—the recapture of political control from the Republicans—meant retrenchment of black political opportunities. As early as 1869, the Democrats regained control of the government in Tennessee, and the following year in Virginia and North Carolina. The Republicans fell in Georgia in 1871, Texas in 1873, Alabama and Arkansas in 1874, Mississippi in 1876, and Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina in 1877. Violence played a large part in Republican defeats. The Ku Klux Klan, born in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1865, along with other white vigilante groups such as the Knights of the White Camellia, unleashed a reign of terror throughout the South to intimidate African Americans and their white allies from voting. Klansmen inflicted beatings, committed rape and murder, and drove families from their homes. For example, in Meridian, Mississippi in March 1871, Klansmen killed a white Republican judge and two black defendants in his courtroom. A day of rioting followed during which 30 blacks, including “all the leading colored men of the town with one or two exceptions” were gunned down.20 Throughout their ordeal, African Americans braved great risks to go to the polls, but each year their numbers dwindled. Furthermore, once Democrats returned to power, they enacted measures to restrict black suffrage, such as poll tax requirements, which fell hardest on the poor. Congress took strong action to combat the violence. In 1870 and 1871, lawmakers enacted legislation that made it a federal crime for private organizations like the Klan to deprive citizens of their civil rights. Federal agents rounded up thousands of Klansmen, and grand juries indicted more than 3,000 members. The government had to try these cases before all-white juries in many instances, which limited the convictions to some 600 Klan members. Nevertheless, these prosecutions had a chilling effect on the Klan and helped defuse its power by the mid-1870s.21 Dorothy Sterling, ed., We are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 370. Smalls was referring to Wade Hampton, the Redeemer governor of South Carolina. Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom’: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 32. Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), 185. Foner, Reconstruction, 459.
14. African American – Part One, 1865-1900 10 Indeed, from 1873-1875, black representation in Congress grew from five to eight, and African Americans still held office throughout the South. However, armed violence did not cease despite federal efforts. In Alabama, where Republicans still ruled in 1874, the Democrats waged a campaign of fraud and terror to topple their opponents. In August, two Sumter County Republican leaders, one black and one white, were killed, and on election day a mob murdered seven blacks and wounded nearly 70 others. The following year in Mississippi, white marauders went on a rampage to keep blacks from casting their ballots throughout the state and succeeded in what historian Eric Foner refers to as redeeming the state government for the Democrats. In much the same manner, the final three Republican governmental holdouts in Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi fell to the Democrats in 1876. Blood flowed especially freely in South Carolina. In Hamburg, a “massacre” left six blacks dead, hundreds injured, and the black business district in shambles.22 At around the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court made it more difficult for the Federal government to combat this kind of violence. The high tribunal considered a case arising from the “Colfax Massacre” at the court house in Grant Parish, Louisiana. On Easter Sunday 1873, white Democratic supporters killed at least 50 blacks over a disputed gubernatorial election, marking the “bloodiest single instance of racial violence in the Reconstruction Era in all of the United States.”23 In 1876, the Court ruled in United States v. Cruikshank that the Justice Department could not use the Enforcement Acts to prosecute private individuals for civil rights violations; the Federal government could only prosecute state officials.24 The Court had knocked out the main prop supporting the Federal government’s legal strategy for combating violence against African Americans. At the same time, the Court affirmed in United States v. Reese the power of the national government to prosecute voting rights infractions based on race under the Fifteenth Amendment.25 The problem of convincing white juries to convict perpetrators remained. The final blow to Reconstruction came in 1877, when newly elected president, Rutherford B. Hayes, removed the remaining federal troops stationed in the South.26 Disenfranchisement I Historian Michael Perman has charted the course of disenfranchisement in two stages. He characterized the first as “vote manipulation”—by using election laws of “various levels of ingenuity and Democratic election officials of varying degrees of criminality.” These techniques began in the early 1880s and lasted for about a decade. The second phase consisted of systematic attempts through the adoption of constitutional amendments to drastically reduce black suffrage, which prevailed from 1890 to 1908.27 Ibid., 552-53, 562, 571. “The Cabildo,” at http://lsm.crt.state.la.us/cabildo/cabildo.htm, maintained by the Louisiana State Museum, accessed on March 9, 2009. United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876). United States v. Reese, 92 U.S. 214 (1876); David G. Nieman, Promises to Keep: African Americans and the Constitutional Order, 1776 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 98-99. Hayes had lost the popular vote to the Democratic candidate, Samuel J. Tilden. However, his supporters in Congress secured agreement to count 20 disputed electoral votes, 19 of them from Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, in his favor, thereby giving him a one-vote majority for election. Before the votes were counted, Hayes’s Republican managers met with southern Democrats at the black-owned Wormley Hotel in Washington, D.C. and entered into a bargain that would provide victory for Hayes and in return he would order troops out of the South, appoint a southerner to his Cabinet, and support the building of a railroad through the South. Foner, Reconstruction, Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908 (Chapel Hill: University of
15. African American – Part One, 1865-1900 11 The adoption of the secret ballot provides a clear example of the first stage of disenfranchisement. Considered a reform to protect the privacy of the voter and prevent intimidation at the polls, the secret or Australian ballot operated as a literacy test to disenfranchise the uneducated. Prior to the secret ballot, voters went to the polls with printed ballots distributed by political parties with their candidates’ names on them. The secret ballot system prohibited the use of this material and required voters to make their choices from the numerous names and offices printed on official ballots, a task that many of them could not perform. Whatever standards of “good government” the secret ballot may have represented, in the South it “furnishes . . . the only method by which they can get rid of the great bulk of the colored vote in a legal, peaceful and unobjectionable manner,” a journalist reported in 1892.28 South Carolina provided a clever variation on this form of disenfranchisement. In 1882, the Palmetto State adopted an “Eight Box Law,” which established eight separate ballot boxes to correspond with national, state, and local contests. Voters had to place their ballots in the proper boxes or have them thrown out. Like the secret ballot laws in use elsewhere, the South Carolina measure functioned as a confusing literacy test.29 Nevertheless, states did not have an absolutely free hand in excluding black voters. Two Supreme Court decisions upheld the power of the Federal government to prosecute suffrage violations. In Ex parte Siebold, the Court affirmed the conviction of a state election judge in Maryland who interfered with federal supervisors during an election. In Ex parte Yarbrough, the high tribunal upheld the convictions of nine members of a white terrorist group, the Pop and Go Club, who beat a black man at his home to prevent him from casting his ballot in a congressional election in Georgia.30 Speaking for the unanimous Court, Justice Samuel Miller eloquently argued: “If the government of the United States has within its constitutional domain no authority to provide against these evils . . . then, indeed, is the country in danger, and its best powers, its highest purposes, the hopes which it inspires, and the love which enshrines it, are at the mercy of the combinations of those who respect no right but brute force on the one hand, and unprincipled corrruptionists on the other.”31 Notwithstanding these stirring words, in 1890, Congress failed to pass a measure introduced by Henry Cabot Lodge, a Massachusetts Republican, to extend federal supervision over southern elections. Although the bill passed the House, Senate Republicans, seeking an alliance with southern Democrats on economic issues they considered more important than racial reform, helped defeat the measure.32 Even with successful efforts to reduce black voting, African Americans continued casting their ballots and occupying public office in the South. In 1888, seven blacks sat in the Mississippi legislature. Black congressmen went to Washington, D.C. from North Carolina and Virginia. Indeed, factional struggles within the Democratic Party helped keep alive black voting. As wealthy conservatives battled opponents who represented poor whites, each side attempted to mobilize blacks to swing the balance of power in its favor. During the 1880s, the most successful coalition of blacks and impoverished whites appeared as the Readjusters in Virginia. Fusing with Republicans, the Readjuster Party captured the governorship in 1881, and the state North Carolina Press, 2001), 6. Perman, Struggle for Mastery, 20; J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South 1880-1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 51-53. Lawson, Black Ballots, 6. Ex parte Siebold, 100 U.S. 371 (1879); Ex parte Yarbrough, 110 U.S. 651 (1884); Perman, Struggle for Mastery, Ex parte Yarbrough, 667; Nieman, Promises, 99. Lawson, Black Ballots, 8.
16. African American – Part One, 1865-1900 12 legislature promptly repealed the poll tax. Its power came to an abrupt halt in 1883, when its Democratic enemies embarked on a campaign of violence and fraud, culminating in the Danville Riot. Still, black participation did not cease, and African Americans continued to serve on juries and in public office.33 The Populist revolt in the 1890s temporarily invigorated interracial political coalitions that highlighted the importance of the black vote. A revolt of small and middle-size farmers and workers against wealthy conservatives, in the fashion of the Readjusters, Populists throughout the South campaigned for reforms to extend economic and political democracy. Tom Watson, a leading Georgia Populist, explained the need for biracial alliances: “The accident of color can make no difference in the interest of farmer, [share]croppers, and laborers. You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings.”34 Populist successes elicited a potent counteraction from Democrats. They played the race card to unite whites around one party rule, thereby removing the bulk of blacks from the electorate so that they could not take advantage of divisions among whites. To regain power, Democrats tarnished the Populists for appealing to African Americans and threatening white control over politics. The Populist commitment to racial equality proved very thin. Placed on the defensive, most Populists abandoned their African American allies and returned to the Democratic Party to fight their battles. In the name of reform, whites of various political stripes, including Populist leader Tom Watson, targeted blacks as the source of all electoral evil and corruption and took measures to purify politics by banishing African Americans from participation. Disenfranchisement II Between 1890 and 1908, the seven southern states of Mississippi (1890), South Carolina (1895), Louisiana (1898), North Carolina (1902), Alabama (1901), Virginia (1902), and Georgia (1908) adopted constitutional amendments that virtually excluded blacks from suffrage and greatly reduced poor white participation, primarily through literacy/understanding tests and grandfather clauses. In Tennessee, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas, white legislators continued to implement the secret ballot and poll tax requirements to achieve disenfranchisement. Literacy tests, if administered fairly, would have disenfranchised a considerable number of poorly educated blacks and whites. Instead, white registrars decided who passed the exam, and they used their discretion mainly against African Americans. In 1890, the Mississippi constitutional convention adopted a literacy qualification that would become the model for the region. It provided an illiterate suffrage applicant the option of enrolling if he could “understand any section of the state constitution read to him . . . or give a reasonable interpretation thereof.” In this way, voting officials denied registration to blacks but not whites, however unable to read and write the whites might have been. Supposedly to test literacy, Mississippi registrars asked only blacks such absurd questions, which they and no one else could possibly answer, such as “How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?”35 In addition to the Magnolia State, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia adopted literacy tests.36 Jane Dailey, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 121-26; Suzanne Lebsock, A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 71. C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 257. Lawson, Black Ballots, 11, 146; Perman, Struggle for Mastery, 83. Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, 239.
17. African American – Part One, 1865-1900 13 In 1898, the U.S. Supreme Court validated Mississippi’s literacy test. The case, Williams v. Mississippi, resulted from the conviction for murder of Henry Williams, an African American, by an all-white jury. Williams filed an appeal arguing that he did not receive a fair trial because blacks were excluded from the jury. Because the jury list was drawn from the voting rolls, the suffrage provisions of Mississippi’s 1890 Constitution came under scrutiny. The Court ruled that the literacy test was written in a manner that did not discriminate on the basis of race, and consequently the tests themselves served as a legitimate means of discerning voter eligibility. A rejected voter would have the difficult burden of proving in court that the exam had been administered in a racially biased way. In the 1890s, as the South consolidated white supremacy and imposed racial segregation, this became a virtually impossible task.37 Louisiana added a wrinkle to the literacy test that spared illiterate whites the need of having to take the exam. In 1898, delegates to the state constitutional convention met to eliminate “the Senegambian [African American] from politics as far as can be done under the Constitution of the United States,” and pointed to the example of Mississippi.38 In fashioning their state’s literacy exam, Louisiana officials included a “grandfather clause,” which suspended the requirement for those males eligible to vote on or before January 1, 1867, as well as their descendants. In order to qualify under this regulation, applicants had to register by September 1, 1898. On its face, the section did not make any mention of race, but the provision was obviously designed to exclude blacks from taking advantage of it, for the Military Reconstruction Acts and the Fifteenth Amendment, which enfranchised blacks, went into effect after the stipulated date. North Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia followed Louisiana in adopting the grandfather clause.39 Williams v. Mississippi, 170 U.S. 213 (1898); Perman, Struggle for Mastery, 121. Perman, Struggle for Mastery, 134. Lawson, Black Ballots, 13; Perman, Struggle for Mastery, 140-42.
18. African American – Part Two, 1900-1941 14 PART TWO: 1900-1941 The combination of poll taxes, secret ballots, literacy/understanding tests, grandfather clauses, and the biased manipulation of these registration procedures achieved the goal of disfranchising the overwhelming number of African Americans. Once Louisiana adopted its new constitution in 1898, the number of black voters plummeted from 130,000 to 5,000. In Virginia, the number dropped from 147,000 to 21,000. The Constitutional Convention in Mississippi cut black enrollment from approximately 147,000 to around 8,600. In 1906, five years after Alabama designed its exclusionary suffrage proposals, only 2 percent of the black voting-age population remained on the registration books.40 The last black congressman from the South until the early 1970s, George H. White of North Carolina, departed the House in 1901. The relatively few black southerners who still could vote encountered a final hurdle in making their ballots count: the white Democratic Party primary. Once upper-class whites managed to snuff out the biracial political threat posed by the Populists, the Democratic Party again reigned supreme. Although Republicans continued to exist, and indeed blacks operated within their ranks, they posed little danger for the reunited Democrats. The class struggle that had divided wealthy and poor whites and that occasioned third parties persisted mainly within the confines of the Democratic Party. To exclude blacks from exercising renewed political leverage, white Democratic officials closed their doors to African Americans. By excluding blacks from their primaries, they stopped African Americans from voting in the sole contest that counted in the one-party Democratic South. Without the white primary, a progressive North Carolina newspaper editor explained, “the divisions among white men might result in bringing about a return to deplorable conditions when one faction of white men called upon the negroes to help defeat another faction.”41 The NAACP and the Challenge to Disenfranchisement As polling places shut out black voters in the South, northern blacks and whites took notice. In 1909 and 1910, a group of black intellectuals and political activists joined with the descendants of white abolitionists and professional social workers to establish the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In fact, the spark that ignited those to form the group occurred in the North and not the South. A bloody riot against blacks in Springfield, Illinois in 1908 prompted prominent individuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, social workers Jane Addams and Mary White Ovington, and Oswald Garrison Villard, crusading newspaper editor and scion of the heralded abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to create the NAACP as a vehicle for obtaining black enfranchisement and equality under the law. Du Bois, who held a doctorate from Harvard, was the leading black intellectual of the 20th century. Prior to his participation in the NAACP, he taught sociology at Atlanta University and had been a co-founder of the Niagara Movement, the forerunner of the NAACP. The movement was a short-lived, all-black organization that advocated first-class citizenship for African Americans. In his classic book of essays, Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, Du Bois asserted that “Negroes must insist continually that voting is necessary to modern manhood” and Lawson, Black Ballots, 14-15. Ibid., 13; V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 619-43. During the Progressive Era, northerners also adopted primaries. Presented as a means of wresting power from political cliques and extending democracy to the popular masses, many Progressive Era reforms had a dark side. In the North, middle- and upper-class whites designed primaries, commission forms of government, and at- large elections to reduce the influence of working-class immigrants.
19. African American – Part Two, 1900-1941 15 urged blacks “to protest emphatically . . . against the curtailment of their political rights.”42 In advocating this approach, he challenged that of Booker T. Washington, the former slave, black educator, and founder of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Washington was the most powerful African American of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Washington opposed voting regulations that discriminated against blacks no matter their educational and economic attainment while at the same time allowing the least educated and most impoverished white men to vote. However, at a time when lynching was on the rise and segregation and disenfranchisement were becoming solidified, Washington advocated accommodation instead of outspoken protest of white supremacy. Self-help played a larger part in his strategy for black advancement than did political involvement. In contrast, Du Bois’s NAACP directly challenged racial inequality.43 The NAACP mainly chose the judicial path to securing the right to vote. At about the same time that the national association came into existence, the state of Oklahoma added the grandfather clause to its constitution. The provision excused from taking the literacy test anyone who was entitled to vote on January 1, 1866 or “anyone who was a lineal descendant of such persons.” Although the clause did not refer to race, the Justice Department prosecuted two Oklahoma registrars, Frank Guinn and J. J. Beal, for exempting whites but not blacks from having to take the literacy exam. A jury convicted the registrars under the terms of the 1870 Enforcement Acts, and the defendants appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court. In Guinn v. United States, the NAACP filed an amicus curiae brief that along with the government’s brief did not challenge the validity of the literacy test. Rather the lawyers argued that the grandfather clause operated to discriminate against African Americans who were unable to vote in 1866. In 1915, the Supreme Court agreed.44 From a practical standpoint, the NAACP’s victory in Guinn amounted to very little. Striking down the grandfather clause did not invalidate literacy exams, which still provided white registrars the opportunity to keep blacks off the voting rolls. The clause itself had been designed to help illiterate whites by excusing them from having to pass a literacy exam and only if they took advantage of the chance within a brief time frame. Moreover, the Federal government had brought proceedings in Oklahoma mainly for political reasons. At the behest of a Republican U.S. District Attorney who wanted to recruit black support for white GOP candidates in the Sooner State, the Justice Department became involved. Furthermore, President William Howard Taft viewed the case as an opportunity to appeal to black delegates for his renomination at the Republican convention of 1912, where he faced stiff competition from former president Theodore Roosevelt.45 In any event, the outcome of Guinn proved symbolic, as Oklahoma’s response reflected the pattern that other efforts to remove voting barriers through lawsuits would follow in the years to come. States made every effort to evade the Court’s rulings by tailoring their laws to modify but still retain the results of offensive suffrage provisions. In 1916, Oklahoma lawmakers enacted a statute that froze in place the names of people who had voted in 1914, and gave those who had W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: New American Library, 1969), 91; Lawson, Black Ballots, 16; David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 1868-1919: Biography of a Race (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993), 288. Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), passim. Lawson, Black Ballots, 18, 19; Guinn v. United States, 238 U.S. 347 (1915). Kermit L. Hall, The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 356.
20. African American – Part Two, 1900-1941 16 not voted two weeks to register or remain permanently disenfranchised. In effect, this allowed whites who had qualified under the grandfather clause to stay on the suffrage rolls, whereas blacks, who before 1914 were unable to take advantage of the clause, were given only a brief time to register or else continue to lose their right to vote. This subterfuge went unchallenged for over two decades, until in 1939, Robert Lane from Waggoner County, Oklahoma and his NAACP attorneys convinced the Supreme Court to void it. In Lane v. Wilson the justices viewed the 1916 law as merely a clever means of keeping the effects of the grandfather clause intact, and Justice Felix Frankfurter underscored that the Fifteenth Amendment “nullifies sophisticated as well as simpleminded modes of discrimination.”46 Women’s Suffrage Prior to ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, black women continued to participate in politics. In fact, black women actively voted in non-electoral arenas, such as church conferences and temperance organizations. In electoral politics, black women found ways to encourage black men to vote. In North Carolina, during the 1896 election, Sarah Dudley Pettey and other middle-class black women went into working-class black sections of Raleigh to convince “wives, sisters, and mothers . . . to influence their husbands, brothers, and sons.”47 In 1898, the “Organization of Colored Ladies” in Wilmington warned the city’s black men: “Every Negro who refuses to register his name . . . that he may vote, we shall make it our business to deal with him in a way that will not be pleasant. He shall be branded a white-livered coward who would sell his liberty.”48 After the Tar Heel State and the rest of the South imposed measures to disenfranchise the bulk of African American males, women’s influence as collateral agents in electoral politics also declined. Nevertheless, black women continued to wield their collective power through church and civic groups to advance the race. The Nineteenth Amendment provided limited opportunities for African American women to enter the electoral arena, as they faced the same problems as did African American men with respect to poll taxes and literacy requirements. Those relatively small numbers that did join black men on the suffrage rolls also found themselves effectively excluded by the white Democratic primary from voting in the South’s key political contests. Nevertheless, black female and male voters could participate in non-partisan elections at the local level, in which the Democratic primary did not figure. Tampa, Florida offers a case in point.49 Tampa women would have an early opportunity to test their electoral power. A feud between white men over ward-based versus city commission government had raged for several years. Commission supporters wanted to reduce electoral graft and the strength of mainly Spanish, Cuban, and Italian immigrants, and to a lesser extent, after the introduction of the white primary in 1910, African American voters who could influence the choice of representatives from racially- and ethnically-homogeneous districts under the ward system. In July 1920, a Charter Commission, elected under the white primary, proposed the replacement of the ward-based city council with a commission, all five members of which would be elected at large. A binding referendum on the issue was scheduled for October. Lane v. Wilson, 307 U.S. 268, 275 (1939). Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 102. Ibid., 107. The following pages on Tampa are excerpted with permission of Nancy A. Hewitt from Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s-1920s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 237-42.
21. African American – Part Two, 1900-1941 17 Ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment only heightened the concerns of white political leaders. A number voiced anxiety about "what the woman voter [will] do with her newly acquired rights and privileges."50 The state Democratic Party chairman began urging white women to register in order to counterbalance the feared influx of their black counterparts. In September, when the state attorney informed Tampa officials that the charter issue could not be resolved through the white Democratic primary but must be introduced to the general electorate, including newly-enfranchised women, the recruitment of white women voters intensified. City officials aided the effort by assuring local residents that blacks would be assigned to separate lines at polling places, thereby forestalling fears of racial mingling. The concern voiced by white civic leaders about the potential political power of black women was not simply a convenient argument for inspiring racial fears and inducing white women to vote. Such fears were certainly at work in charter advocates' claims that their opponents were attempting to mobilize "the suffrage of the purchasable colored women of the city."51 But black women in Tampa, over half of whom were in the paid labor force in 1920, were eager to participate for their own reasons. As a result of both the contest over charter reform and the advent of women's suffrage, African American registration peaked in 1920 with 18.5 percent of local blacks signed up to vote, including nearly 1,298 women, who formed over 60 percent of the total black registrants. They claimed the right to vote both to redress black men's disenfranchisement and to expand upon their earlier efforts at community uplift. Inez Alston, for instance, had gained respect and experience in public speaking as a teacher and clubwoman. In fall 1920, she presided over a series of debates on charter reform held at black churches such as Bowman Methodist Episcopal. Awareness of activism in African American neighborhoods and fear that such efforts would disrupt existing racial hierarchies help to explain why so many whites, already in control of elections through the white primary, felt it necessary to further dilute minority voting power through at-large elections. These fears of black political power, which drove the establishment of the white primary a decade earlier, assured that white civic leaders would rush to enlist the electoral aid of their female counterparts immediately upon their enfranchisement. The white women fulfilled their duty. On October 20, the Tampa Tribune headline proclaimed, “Charter Wins by 770, Commission Plan Triumphant Despite a High Vote Cast Against in the Town's Black Belt.” The story credited the victory to white women who recognized “that it was largely a contest between their votes and those of negroes” and that the new charter provided “a weapon by means of which they could protect their homes and children.” The report concluded, “Tampa women have shown they are able to rock the cradle and the politicians at the same Despite the attempts of black Tampans organizing for voting rights, white civic leaders rejected the possibility that African American women and men might justifiably pursue political power on their own terms. Yet the presence of hundreds of black voters revealed their ongoing desire for political power. Unfortunately, even when African Americans did organize on their own Hewitt, Southern Discomfort, 238. Nancy A. Hewitt, “In Pursuit of Power: The Political Economy of Women’s Activism in Twentieth-Century Tampa,” in Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism, ed. Nancy A. Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 209. Hewitt, Southern Discomfort, 241.
22. African American – Part Two, 1900-1941 18 behalf, they could still be defeated by the combination of racism and political corruption. The advent of women’s suffrage did little to change that volatile mix. The NAACP’s Challenge of the White Primary: Opening Rounds Whatever participation southern blacks exhibited in non-partisan municipal elections, such as those in Tampa, was offset by their exclusion from white Democratic primaries. In 1923, the Texas legislature, dominated by supporters of the recently revived Ku Klux Klan, barred African Americans from voting in Democratic contests. In response, the El Paso branch of the NAACP asked the national office to file suit against the lily-white primary. Lawrence Aaron (L. A.) Nixon, an El Paso physician and head of the local NAACP branch, served as the plaintiff after the election official, C. C. Herndon, blocked him from voting in the July 26, 1924 Democratic On March 7, 1927, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and his Supreme Court brethren unanimously upheld the NAACP’s position in Nixon v. Herndon. Holmes argued that the white primary violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law by excluding blacks from participation. He did not rule whether the Fifteenth Amendment covered voting in a primary conducted by a political party. Previous court rulings suggested party primaries were separate from state-sponsored elections. However, in this case, state action was clearly involved in black exclusion, thus depriving African Americans of equal treatment.53 Texas Democratic officials had no intention of opening their primary to African Americans. A few months after the Supreme Court ruling, the legislature decreed that it was up to the party executive committee, and not state lawmakers, to determine the qualifications of party members. Thus, the Democratic Party, supposedly a private organization, would not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. Nixon filed suit again after another election official, James Condon, refused to furnish him a ballot to vote in the primary. This time the Supreme Court narrowly decided in Nixon’s favor. In 1932, speaking for the majority in Nixon v. Condon, Justice Benjamin Cardozo declared that the Democratic Executive Committee had received its authority to determine membership through state legislation, and by excluding blacks had violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Cardozo left open the possibility, however, that a party convention, independent of state authority, could decide its own membership requirements and exclude Afro-Texans from participation.54 Not surprisingly, a few weeks after Nixon v. Condon, the Democratic Party held a convention and voted to keep its primary all white. The persistence of white Texans finally paid off. The Supreme Court upheld their action. Weakened financially and worried about whether it could win, the NAACP decided to refrain from mounting a fresh legal challenge. However, a group of blacks in Houston, under the auspices of the Negro Democratic Club, decided to pursue litigation without the NAACP’s support. Richard R. Grovey, became the plaintiff in the new case. Active in organizing blacks to vote through his Third Civic Ward Club, he enlisted the aid of Carter Wesley, the editor of the black Houston Informer, and J. Alston Atkins, a prominent black attorney. Both men had wanted the NAACP to use more black lawyers in the Nixon cases, but the association relied mainly on distinguished white attorneys from its national board. On this occasion, with the NAACP declining to file suit, the local black Houstonians handled the litigation. In the end, the NAACP’s concerns proved correct, and on April 1, 1935, the Supreme Nixon v. Herndon, 272 U.S. 536 (1927). Nixon v. Condon, 286 U.S. 73 (1932).
23. African American – Part Two, 1900-1941 19 Court, in Grovey v. Townsend, unanimously upheld the latest version of the white primary. Justice Owen Roberts concluded that despite state regulation of primaries, the party determined its own members and conducted the contest with its own funds.55 For the next decade, the Supreme Court ruling kept Democratic primaries in the South open only to whites. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to provide relief and recovery from the Great Depression offered some significant political assistance to African Americans. Much of the benefit was indirect. Because his first priority was to end the Depression and maintain close relations with southern Democrats in Congress whose support he needed to enact his programs, Roosevelt did not propose a civil rights agenda. He believed that African Americans, as an impoverished class, would gain more from measures that stimulated the economy than from any race-based legislation. Thus, the president’s New Deal agencies failed to challenge segregation and were administered in the South to the detriment of blacks. Furthermore, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when proposals to make lynching a federal crime and to abolish the poll tax were introduced, Roosevelt gave them lukewarm support, and they went down to defeat in the Still, the Roosevelt Administration encouraged African Americans to gain increased political access to government. Although blacks faced discriminatory treatment in the application of New Deal programs, especially in the South, they did manage to participate alongside whites. For example, under New Deal agricultural plans, black and white farmers voted each year in determining production levels for cotton. In this way, blacks sustained a suffrage tradition in spite of their exclusion from Democratic Party primaries. In addition, the president made a number of high-level appointments of African Americans including Mary McLeod Bethune and Robert C. Weaver, who held a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University and would later serve as the first Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Lyndon B. Johnson. Indeed, with black officials on the rise, they could form a “kitchen cabinet,” which met informally to discuss matters of common concern to African Americans. Perhaps their greatest access to the White House came through the president’s wife, Eleanor, who, more than her husband, had a close connection to the NAACP and to black and white southerners who believed in interracial cooperation and reform of the South. The recognition that President Roosevelt extended to African Americans and the partial relief furnished by the New Deal initiated a key partisan realignment of the black electorate. In the 1936 presidential election, the majority of black voters in the North abandoned the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln and supported the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt.56 Over the next several decades, this shift would help reshape the political landscape of the nation and lead to the enfranchisement of African Americans. Grovey v. Townsend, 295 U.S. 45 (1935); Lawson, Black Ballots, 25-35; Merline Pitre, In Struggle against Jim Crow: Lulu B. White and the NAACP, 1900-1957 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999), 19-24. Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), passim; Nancy J. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), passim.
24. African American – Part Three, 1941-1954 20 PART THREE: 1941-1954 World War II As it did for so many aspects of civil rights, World War II boosted opportunities for expanding black suffrage. The democratic, anti-racist ideology of the war against Fascism abroad prompted blacks to pursue a “Double V” campaign for victory both abroad and over white supremacy at home. The participation of black troops on the ground, albeit in segregated units, as well as the heroic combat record of the Tuskegee Airmen, the specially trained unit of black pilots, provided palpable arguments for extending full citizenship rights to African Americans. Although the war heightened black expectations of securing the right to vote, it did not guarantee that a half- century of disenfranchisement would end. Fulfilling the promises of the Fifteenth Amendment would take more than wartime rhetoric to achieve; it would require litigation, lobbying, and direct action. Even then, it would take another twenty years after the end of World War II before the majority of black southerners obtained the right to vote. The Final Victory Against the White Primary The white primary, which had been under legal assault since the mid-1920s, sparked a renewed challenge during the war. With its victories in Nixon v. Herndon and Nixon v. Condon cancelled by the Supreme Court’s decision in Grovey v. Townsend, the NAACP took advantage of a new opening to oppose the restrictive Texas Democratic primary. In 1941, in an unrelated voting- fraud case from Louisiana, United States v. Classic, the Supreme Court ruled that a primary was not a private affair where state law made it part of the electoral process or the primary in effect determined the outcome of the general election. This case established “federal authority to redress discrimination in the state electoral process” and supplied the precedent NAACP attorneys needed to overturn Grovey and attack the Texas white primary as a direct violation of the Fifteenth Amendment.57 Led by Thurgood Marshall, a Howard Law School student of Charles H. Houston and his successor as the NAACP’s legal director, the national association worked closely with its State Conference of Branches in Texas and filed suit against the all-white primary. Lonnie E. Smith, a dentist from Houston and an NAACP member, sued S. E. Allwright, a local election official, for $5,000 for refusing to give him a ballot in the 1940 Democratic congressional primary. Along with William Hastie, Houston’s successor as dean of Howard Law School, Marshall argued before the Supreme Court that the Texas Democratic Party derived its power to conduct primaries from state statutes and the results of the primaries determined the selection of candidates for governmental office. Thus, the NAACP lawyers contended that by excluding black Texans from the only election that counted, the state deprived Lonnie Smith and his fellow black registrants of their right to vote.58 The high tribunal agreed. On April 3, 1944, Justice Stanley F. Reed, who had served as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Solicitor General, in an 8-1 decision, ruled in favor of Smith and the NAACP. Reed and his brethren based their reasoning on the decision in United States v. Classic and concluded that because Texas had delegated to the Democratic Party the power to exclude blacks from the primaries, the party did not function as a private organization but as an extension of the United States v. Classic, 313 U.S. 299 (1941); Hall, Oxford Companion, 157 for quote. Lawson, Black Ballots, 41-43; Darlene Clark Hine, Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas (Millwood, NY: KTO Press, 1979), passim.
25. African American – Part Three, 1941-1954 21 state, thereby subject to the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition against racial discrimination. Hastie guessed that historians would write one day that the Court’s decision in Smith v. Allwright “released and galvanized democratic forces which in turn gave the South the momentum it needed toward ultimate leadership in American liberalism.”59 Lulu White, the executive secretary of the Houston branch of the NAACP, hailed the decision as a “Second The white primary ruling expanded the right to vote in the South and sparked further efforts to challenge other barriers to enfranchisement, but the path to success would be littered with piecemeal victories and obstructions. Although the Court had spoken clearly in Smith v. Allwright, a number of southern states attempted to evade the ruling. In July 1944, the Georgia Democratic Party declared that the Texas decision did not apply to its state because state law did not mandate the primary. A group of blacks from Columbus, Georgia, along with the local chapter of the Atlanta NAACP and C. A. Scott, the publisher of the Atlanta Daily World, contested the decision of the state Democratic Party to continue to exclude blacks from its primaries. Over the next two years, federal courts sided with the black plaintiffs, ruling that state law regulated the conduct of primaries once the Democratic Party decided to hold them. However, in February 1947, the legislature tried to outmaneuver the NAACP by repealing all of its primaries laws, presumably leaving the Democratic Party free of state supervision.61 A case from South Carolina finally put a stop to these subterfuges. On April 20, 1944, the Palmetto State General Assembly repealed all of its laws pertaining to primary elections. The NAACP brought suit in Elmore v. Rice against the official who refused to allow George Elmore, one of its members, to vote in the Democratic primary. On July 12, 1947, federal judge Julius Waties Waring, a prominent Charlestonian, ruled in favor of Elmore. Waring braved personal threats against himself and his family and warned fellow South Carolinians: “[R]ejoin the Union. It is time to fall in step with the other states and to adopt the American way of conducting elections.”62 Although Judge Waring simply carried the landmark Smith v. Allwright reasoning to its logical conclusion, this native southerner showed uncommon courage. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld his decision, effectively bringing an end to the white primary in South Carolina and throughout the South. In 1940, approximately 250,000 black southerners were registered to vote in the South; by 1948 the number had risen to over 775,000. The figure had jumped from 3 percent to 12 percent of blacks eligible to vote.63 Even before the final outcome of the white primary rulings in South Carolina, local black activists organized to expand the right to vote and to challenge the legitimacy of the state Lawson, Black Ballots, 46; Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944). The lone dissenter in the case was Justice Owen Roberts who had authored the opinion in Grovey. Pitre, Lulu B. White, 43. This case had a wider constitutional impact than on racial matters. It helped establish the concept of “public function,” in which traditional government functions performed by private entities are considered state action. Hall, Oxford Companion, 800. Lawson, Black Ballots, 48. Elmore v. Rice, 72 F. Supp. 516 (1947); Lawson, Black Ballots, 51. Steven F. Lawson, Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in America Since 1941, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997), 81. The courts had some mopping up to do of remaining attempts to avoid the white primary decisions. In 1948, Judge Waring struck down another attempt to discourage black voting. The South Carolina Democratic Party allowed whites to automatically vote in its primaries, but required blacks to take an oath to support racial segregation before they could vote. Brown v. Baskin, 78 F. Supp. 933 (1948). As late as 1953, Fort Bend County in Texas permitted the Jaybird Democratic Party, an all-white group, to hold primaries closed to blacks. The victors in these contests went on to run as the official candidates of the Democratic Party. The Supreme Court declared that the Jaybird primaries, though held under private auspices, effectively controlled the outcome of the general elections and overthrew it. Terry v. Adams, 345 U.S. 461 (1953).
26. African American – Part Three, 1941-1954 22 Democratic Party, which discriminated against them. In cooperation with the NAACP, the Reverend James Hinton, Osceola McKaine, and John McCrary formed the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP). Members of the black middle class, Hinton headed the state’s NAACP Conference of Branches and McKaine and McCray edited the black newspaper, Lighthouse and Informer. McKaine, who had fought in World War I, explained that the right to vote for blacks was critical not in and of itself but because “[t]he use and nonuse of the ballot can determine whether . . . [people] shall have adequate schools and school bus transportation for their children or whether the present handicaps to their educational and personality development shall continue or become intensified.” For these reasons, McKaine asserted, the acquisition and strategic deployment of the vote interested the black masses most of all. In a bold and imaginative move, the PDP selected a group to challenge the seating of the regular South Carolina delegation at the Democratic National Convention in 1944. The Progressive Democrats failed largely because President Roosevelt and the national Democrats did not want to cause any white defections from the powerful wing of their party in the South. Nevertheless, leaders of the PDP continued their efforts to organize black voters. They met some success as a record number of blacks, 35 thousand, turned out to vote in the 1948 regular Democratic primary.64 Poll Tax The white primary was only one major hurdle for blacks to overcome. They still had to deal with the discriminatory impact of poll taxes. World War II also helped spur challenges to this requirement, although the outcome was less successful. Whereas the effort to remove the white primary was largely directed by the NAACP and its branches, progressive white southerners and their black allies led the challenge to the poll tax. Indeed, the poll tax proved as difficult a barrier for poor white southerners to overcome as it did for blacks. Moreover, some states such as Alabama required the payment of back poll taxes if an individual had not voted in several previous elections. States also required voters to pay the tax well in advance of the election, before candidates and issues were determined, and required voters to keep their receipts and present them at the ballot box. With these handicaps placed upon them, white and black southerners had the lowest rate of voter participation in the nation.65 Southern progressives took aim at the poll tax, especially after the Great Depression had made the payment even more difficult to satisfy for the majority of potential voters. Encouraged by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms, in 1938 southern liberals formed the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) to seek ways to extend economic and political democracy to the region. The group’s headquarters rotated with the city in which it held its biennial conventions—Birmingham (1938), Chattanooga (1940), Nashville (1942), and New Orleans (1946).66 As an outgrowth of this organization, Joseph Gelders and Virginia Foster Durr spearheaded the formation of the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax (NCAPT) in 1941. Gelders had been a physics professor at the University of Alabama and a fearless supporter of union organizing in the steel industry in Birmingham. In contrast, Durr represented the model of southern femininity. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, she came from a respected family, the daughter of a minister. Her husband, Clifford Durr, was one of many bright southerners that the Roosevelt Administration had attracted to Washington, D.C. Virginia Durr counted among her close friends Eleanor Roosevelt and Lady Bird Johnson, the wife of the rising star from Texas, The quote comes from Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 202. See also Lawson, Running for Freedom, 16-17, 26. Lawson, Black Ballots, 55-56. Linda Reed, Simple Decency & Common Sense: The Southern Conference Movement, 1938-1963 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 29.
27. African American – Part Three, 1941-1954 23 Representative Lyndon Baines Johnson. Virginia’s older sister was married to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black of Alabama. Durr, Gelders, and their circle of southerners who supported New Deal liberalism believed that abolition of the poll tax was a necessary step in reshaping the Democratic Party in the South and defeating the conservative oligarchy of large planters and industrialists that kept most of the people disenfranchised and impoverished.67 With her connections to powerful movers and shakers in the nation’s capital and their courageous support for biracial progressive activism in the South, Virginia Durr was instrumental in helping shape and carry forth the suffrage agenda throughout the South and the country during the early years of the civil rights movement. The NCAPT welcomed support from the NAACP, but it played down the race issue in order to avoid charges that eliminating the poll tax would threaten white supremacy. Thus, the NCAPT targeted its newsletter and educational materials to reach a largely white audience. It worked closely with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), a union that sought to recruit workers in the South to its ranks. Moreover, the committee focused on the single issue of the poll tax and political democracy and avoided positions on racial integration and equality. The titular head of the organization was Jennings Perry, the editor of the Nashville Tennessean and outspoken advocate of poll tax repeal in his state. As vice-chair, Durr coordinated much of the group’s activities. As a result of her tireless efforts and important political contacts, the NCAPT persuaded Democratic Congressman Lee Geyer of California and Democratic Senator Claude Pepper of Florida to introduce anti-poll tax measures in the early 1940s. The Sunshine State had eliminated the poll tax in 1937, a move that Pepper attributed to his Senate victory in 1938. For constitutional reasons, the repeal bills covered national elections but not state contests, especially after the Supreme Court had ruled in Breedlove v. Suttles (1937) that the Constitution did not prevent a state from adopting a poll tax on voting.68 Article One, Section One of the Constitution stipulated that qualifications for national elections must be the same as those established by the states in voting for representatives to state legislatures. Reformers argued that the imposition of the poll tax was not a reasonable qualification and the national government did not have to accept it for federal elections. Opponents just as vigorously countered that the Constitution clearly left the matter to the states to determine the exact standards for voting. As with the white primary, World War II enhanced the arguments for abolishing the poll tax while the nation was fighting overseas to halt antidemocratic fascists. The NCAPT declared that “our country today is engaged in a war between a free and a slave world. A world in which the prerequisite for a victory is that we move forward now to full freedom for the common man.”69 In 1942, the door to repeal opened slightly when Congress approved a proposal offered by Senator Pepper that waived the poll tax payment for soldiers attempting to cast absentee ballots. In practice, the Soldier Vote Act still left the majority of southerners subject to the poll tax, but it did provide both encouragement and a precedent for further action. In October 1942, the House of Representatives passed the Geyer bill over the stiff opposition of southern Democrats. Although the bill affected whites more than blacks, representatives from the South believed that repeal would provide the momentum to remove other barriers to black voting and racial equality in the South. Lawson, Black Ballots, 61; Virginia Foster Durr, Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr, ed. Hollinger F. Barnard (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 152-58. Breedlove v. Suttles, 302 U.S. 277 (1937). A white male, Breedlove challenged the Georgia poll tax under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The plaintiff’s race underscores how the poll tax impacted working-class and progressive whites, as well as blacks. Lawson, Black Ballots, 72.
28. African American – Part Three, 1941-1954 24 Southern senators, with the exception of Pepper, agreed. The rules of the Senate provided them with the means to block further consideration of the repeal bill. Unlike the House, the Senate permitted unlimited debate unless two-thirds of the body agreed to impose cloture and shut off the filibuster. A month after passage of the Geyer bill in the House, the Senate refused to approve cloture against the filibuster its southern members had waged. The repeal forces received no help from President Roosevelt, who during wartime did not want to jeopardize the support he needed from powerful southern senators for his military objectives. The losing legislative struggle in 1942 set the pattern that would be repeated throughout the decade. In 1943, the House once again passed a repeal measure, only to see the Senate fail to defeat the southern filibuster in May 1944. Whatever chance the bill had for passage in the Senate evaporated as southerner lawmakers dug in more deeply to retain the poll tax and defeat cloture one month after the Supreme Court outlawed the white primary in Texas. Two years later the outcome was the same. This time Harry S Truman had replaced the deceased President Roosevelt, and like Roosevelt he both supported the elimination of the poll tax but refused to fight for it in Congress. As a new president facing serious problems of economic reconversion from wartime and the onset of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, Truman did not desire to confront southern senators whose support he needed for domestic and foreign policy issues he accorded much higher priority than the poll tax. For the fourth time since 1942, the House overwhelmingly approved poll tax repeal in 1947, and for the fourth time the Senate discarded the repeal measure in 1948. In the latter instance, the Republicans controlled a majority of both houses of Congress, but it mattered little. The Republican leaders of the Eightieth Congress were no more willing than their Democratic counterparts to mount the necessary battle to impose cloture. In the past, Republican conservatives had worked closely with southern Democrats to oppose Roosevelt’s and Truman’s social and economic programs; they too had no incentive to upset that coalition over the poll tax.70 Despite these legislative defeats, some progress was made in the 1940s in challenging the poll tax. After World War II, Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee discarded their poll tax requirements. States like Mississippi in 1946 exempted homeward bound soldiers from having to pay their poll tax for the previous two years. A one-shot deal, this action temporarily pried open ballot boxes for those who previously had been unable to pay the tax. Furthermore, poll tax repealers won the endorsement of a blue-ribbon panel established by President Truman in 1946 to study racial bigotry in the United States. In 1947, the President’s Committee on Civil Rights issued its report, To Secure These Rights, that included among its recommendations congressional action to outlaw payment of the poll tax as a voting qualification. Although Congress failed to do so, voting rights advocates succeeded in gaining moral support from the Federal government.71 Grassroots Voting Drives Black soldiers returning home following World War II helped spearhead efforts to vote following both the demise of the white primary and the relaxation of poll tax requirements for military veterans. Roy Wilkins, assistant secretary of the NAACP, pointed out that for black soldiers who had dodged enemy fire in Europe and Asia, “bullets or threats of bullets are not likely to cause them to bow and scrape once they are home.”72 The above paragraphs are based on Lawson, Black Ballots, 66-85. Steven F. Lawson, ed., To Secure These Rights: The Report of Harry S. Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003), passim; Lawson, Black Ballots, 84, 103. Lawson, Black Ballots, 102.
29. African American – Part Three, 1941-1954 25 One of those soldiers expecting to cast his ballot was Medgar Evers, a veteran from Decatur in eastern Mississippi. In the Mississippi to which Evers returned, less than 1 percent of adult blacks—about 5,000 of almost 350,000—had registered to vote. Evers looked forward to voting against Senator Theodore Bilbo, the rabid segregationist running for reelection in 1946. Despite the ruling in Smith v. Allwright, Bilbo publicly informed campaign audiences that blacks should stay away from the polls in the Democratic primary, and “red blooded” white men would make sure that they did. In fact, a delegation of whites showed up at Evers’s house the night before the election to warn his father to keep Medgar from voting. Unafraid, Evers and four other veterans showed up the next day to vote; however, a group of whites waving pistols turned them away. Although perhaps 2,500 blacks managed to vote in Mississippi’s Democratic primary in 1946, the determination of World War II veterans would not let the matter rest. Organized by the Mississippi Progressive Voters League (a middle-class black civic association), local branches of the NAACP, and the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, 50 people complained to the U.S. Senate Committee to Investigate Campaign Expenditures. They stated that Bilbo, who easily won the election, had intimidated black voters and should be barred from taking his seat in the Senate. The committee agreed to hold hearings in Jackson, Mississippi in December 1946, but the prospects for ousting Bilbo did not appear bright. Three of the five senate investigators came from the South and the other two were conservative northern Republicans who had not championed civil rights. Nevertheless, the four-day inquiry that began on December 2 received widespread media coverage and the rest of the country learned just how difficult, if not impossible, it was for most blacks to register and vote in the Magnolia State. Two hundred blacks, a majority of them veterans, packed the Federal Building courtroom in Jackson to testify against Bilbo. Wearing his army Good Conduct Medal, Etoy Fletcher charged that a group of white men assaulted him in the town of Brandon after the local registrar told him that “Negroes are not allowed to vote in Rankin County.”73 Another veteran, Vernando R. Collier, president of the NAACP chapter in Gulfport, described how he and his wife were assaulted by a pack of white men as they tried to enter the polling place. The committee also heard the testimony of white registrars who, although they did not condone violence, deployed so-called legal methods to keep blacks disenfranchised. Mississippi’s “understanding clause” went beyond mere literacy and allowed registrars to devise esoteric questions based on the state constitution, which were designed to keep blacks from enrolling. White applicants did not have to display the same feats of understanding. Many of these witnesses acknowledged the double standard they employed, leading Charles Houston, who observed the proceedings for the NAACP, state that these officials were “so dumb and vicious they proved the charges rather than refuted them. Sometimes I think Jesus Christ must be ill at ease in Mississippi.”74 The outcome of the probe proved inconclusive. On the final day of the hearings, Bilbo took the stand. While admitting that he made inflammatory statements against black voting during his campaign, he denied that he had anything else in mind other than advocating lawful and peaceful means to dissuade blacks from participating in the white man’s election. Even if the majority of the committee had been more sympathetic to the black position, its members would have had a Ibid., 108. Ibid., 110; John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 3-9.
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