Poll Power

The Voter Education Project and the Movement for the Ballot in the American South

Evan Faulkenbury

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781469651323
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Afroamerikanische Studien

The civil rights movement required money. In the early 1960s, after years of grassroots organizing, civil rights activists convinced nonprofit foundations to donate in support of voter education and registration efforts. One result was the Voter Education Project (VEP), which, starting in 1962, showed far-reaching results almost immediately and organized the groundwork that eventually led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In African American communities across the South, the VEP catalyzed existing campaigns; it paid for fuel, booked rallies, bought food for volunteers, and paid people to canvass neighborhoods. Despite this progress, powerful conservatives in Congress weaponized the federal tax code to undercut the important work of the VEP. Though local power had long existed in the hundreds of southern towns and cities that saw organized civil rights action, the VEP was vital to converting that power into political motion. Evan Faulkenbury offers a much-needed explanation of how philanthropic foundations, outside funding, and tax policy shaped the southern black freedom movement.

CHAPTER ONE

Southern Disfranchisement and the Long Origins of the Voter Education Project

For a century, to register and vote as a black southerner meant to risk death. White southerners lost the Civil War, but they exacted their revenge on black southerners by keeping them politically powerless, often through violence and threats. After Reconstruction ended, southern states conceived insidious means to effectively nullify the Fifteenth Amendment of the United States. Southern states amended their constitutions and passed laws to erect barriers to stop African Americans from voting and holding office. For over seventy years spanning the Jim Crow era, white southerners enshrined political monopoly through legal and extralegal means, including the use of poll taxes, literacy tests, gerrymandering, registration slowdowns, voter roll purges, economic intimidation, all-white primaries, roving poll places, absent or uncooperative registrars, and outright violence. Yet these barriers failed to extinguish African Americans’ drive to participate in a democracy.1

To overcome these hurdles required more than individual effort. No arc bent naturally toward justice, for voting became more difficult year by year for African Americans. Civil rights leaders perceived the need for a massive registration drive—an engine to convert the will to vote into a southwide movement. They believed that only a united movement could break the segregationist, one-party South. White supremacists constituted the majority, and their grip on political power neared absolute. Their hatred of black skin, obsession with interracial sex, fear of integrated schools, and paranoid belief that civil rights activists were communists anchored their resolve to fight. Black registration rose during the mid- to late 1940s on the heels of a progressive, left-labor movement, but rising anticommunist fervor wiped out the momentum by 1950. In 1954, the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision galvanized African Americans across the South, but it also reenergized the segregationist movement. Black voting became even more difficult as southern lawmakers tightened restrictions and violence surged.2

Between 1955 and 1958, white southerners attacked or murdered black southerners in 530 documented cases. The actual number was surely higher. In Brookhaven, Mississippi, Lamar Smith encouraged his neighbors to cast absentee ballots in the 1955 primary. Three white men gunned him down outside of the Lincoln County courthouse, and no one ever faced charges. In Prichard, Alabama, Joshua Barney, a sixty-eight-year-old reverend and carpenter, ran for city council in 1956. Barney lost, but he stayed in the race even after someone riddled his home with bullets. In Abbeville County, South Carolina, where only 15 out of 3,687 African Americans were registered in 1957, fear pervaded the community after a black man took a beating for voting. In Liberty County, Florida, where only a single African American was registered to vote in 1958, four made the attempt one day, including Reverend Dee Hawkins. Later that night, Hawkins was shot and his home bombed. On May 7, 1955, the Reverend George Washington Lee, the leader of the Belzoni branch of the NAACP, was assassinated after refusing to take his name off the polls and for working to register members of his community. The following year, Lee’s successor as leader of the NAACP, Gus Courts, nearly died after being fired upon by a passing vehicle while working in his grocery store. Speaking to a reporter in his hospital bed, Courts said, “I’ve known for a long time it was coming, and I’d tried to get prepared in my mind for it. But that’s a hard thing to do … I’ve never been a trouble maker and I’ve never had on handcuffs. I’m 65 years-old and I’ve never had the vote. That’s all I wanted.”3

Within this context, three key events laid the foundation for the VEP. The first was the emergence of the Southern Regional Council as a leading voice within the civil rights movement. A research agency in Atlanta, Georgia, with roots stretching back to 1919, the SRC turned increasingly outspoken against segregation during the 1950s and began compiling and publishing data on disfranchisement. Comprehensive research on black voting did not exist prior to the SRC, and its ability to document the severity of disfranchisement illuminated the issue and gave activists a cause around which to rally. The second event was the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom on May 17, 1957, the three-year anniversary of the Brown decision. Put together by A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and Martin Luther King Jr., the Pilgrimage brought 25,000 people to the Washington, DC mall and directed the nation’s attention toward the southern freedom movement in pursuit of black voting rights as a moral, religious, and patriotic imperative. The third was the Crusade for Citizenship in 1958. Following the Pilgrimage, the newly formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference launched the Crusade, an ambitious attempt to set in motion a voter registration campaign across the American South. The Crusade failed, but the idea took hold that a coordinated, interagency southwide movement for the ballot was possible.

IN ADDITION TO THE constant threat of violence, white southerners overrode the Fifteenth Amendment most successfully through poll taxes, literacy tests, voter purges, and the all-white primary, allowing county registrars wide latitude in overseeing each. Poll taxes—a class-based impediment as much as it was about race—charged American citizens money to cast ballots. Until the Twenty-Fourth Amendment outlawed poll taxes in federal elections in January 1964, five southern states still required the payment of poll taxes to vote—Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia. For decades, anti–poll tax legislation had stalled in Congress after southern Senators voted against and filibustered any such proposals. Poll taxes usually consisted of an annual payment of between $1.00 and $2.00, an amount the poor could rarely spare. Local registration campaigns sometimes tried to raise poll tax money to distribute evenly to the community, but this annual requirement often drained energy as much as resources. In some states, poll taxes snowballed, meaning that failure to pay for five years where the annual poll tax was $1.50 would require $7.50 before receiving a ballot. Poll taxes raised little revenue for states but sowed resentment and confusion. Registrars would ensure payment had been received, sometimes by arbitrary dates well in advance of the election. Registrars would not always issue receipts, leaving black southerners with no proof that they had paid. Poll taxes helped keep elections white. In 1957, State Senator Sam Engelhardt of Macon County, Alabama, stated bluntly that poll taxes “serve as a deterrent to Negro voter registration.”4

If they had the funds, black southerners could overcome the poll tax barrier, but they often could not pass literacy tests. These exams did not measure the ability to read or write, but they provided registrars with a tangible reason to deny the franchise. Most often, state literacy tests asked prospective voters to write from memory and interpret portions of the state or federal constitution. No matter how reasonable the responses, registrars could fail according to their whim. As part of the tests, applicants had to fill out forms and questionnaires about themselves, often having to list the names of their employers or properties owned. Placing on record personal information left black registrants vulnerable and exposed their families to possible reprisal. By the time the Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed literacy tests, seven southern states had continued to use them—Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. In Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, for example, the registrar, Mae Lucky, developed a reputation for intimidating black registrants by distracting them while they worked on literacy tests, slowing down the lines, requiring three forms of identification, and openly mocking applicants as they filled out paperwork. On July 29, 1964, Ella Lee White tried to register in Ouachita Parish, but on her test, Lucky accused her of misspelling the word democratic and failed her.5

In addition to literacy tests and poll taxes, counties could purge their rolls to disqualify as many black voters as possible in a single stroke. Under the guise of electoral integrity to ensure accuracy, implement new technology, or take off deceased and former residents, segregationists learned that purges could preserve white political power. In 1948, the registrar of Laurens County, Georgia, sent notices to all black registered voters instructing them to appear at the courthouse for a literacy test. Failure to appear within a certain time meant automatic disqualification. White registrants received no such notices. In McCormick County, South Carolina, every black voter was purged in 1948. Louisiana began a wholesale purge of its northern parishes in 1958, lowering black registration in Ouachita Parish from 5,700 to 776, Morehouse Parish from 935 to 200, and Natchitoches Parish from 2,800 to 1,300. African Americans had few options to combat purges, and disillusionment in the democratic process often followed. White supremacists took notice and advocated more purges. In a 1958 tract for the Jefferson County Citizens Council, Grover S. McLeod wrote that in response to growing black political power, “the answer is simply this, that we must purge the polls.”6

As efficient as poll taxes, literacy tests, and purges later proved in keeping black southerners away from the polls, before 1944, the all-white primary functioned as the main barrier. Southern states argued that the Fifteenth Amendment stated nothing about primaries. In the South after Reconstruction, the Democratic Party rose to dominance, meaning that in most cases, the primaries were the only elections that mattered. Barring African Americans from primaries cut off their political influence at the root. In 1944, the Supreme Court struck down the white primary in Smith v. Allwright. The NAACP had fought the all-white primary in court, and the decision culminated a half-century fight for black voting rights. Middle-class black leaders began battling disfranchisement in the courts back in 1890, but in all twelve cases that reached the Supreme Court between then and 1908, the justices allowed southern states the freedom to discriminate at the polls.7 In 1909, activists founded the NAACP and, with it, developed a goal of reclaiming black voting rights across the United States. At the NAACP’s seventeenth annual conference, Moorfield Storey outlined the objectives of African Americans nationwide, which “above all” included “the right to vote.”8 During the 1920s and 1930s, the NAACP aided its southern branches working to register voters, but the case-by-case approach drained resources and remained tedious. The NAACP continued to fight in court, and amid the height of World War II and the Double V campaign to fight for democracy at home and abroad, the victory of Smith v. Allwright promised easier access to the franchise for African Americans.9

Following the Smith v. Allwright decision, black registration grew amid a left-wing political movement, but it did not last. Looking ahead to the 1946 midterm elections, interagency coordination between the NAACP, the Progressive Democratic Party of South Carolina, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW), and the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) worked to break the one-party South and register African Americans. Although more black southerners registered, especially in such cities as Memphis, Tennessee, and Richmond, Virginia, white supremacists continued their electoral dominance in the South. During his presidential campaign of 1948 on the Progressive Party ticket, Henry A. Wallace courted southern black voters and promised to fight segregation, but his support among communists doomed his chances of winning. Accusations linking civil rights organizations and alleged communist sympathizers undercut the momentum of Smith v. Allwright, and a long-term, southwide movement for the ballot never materialized.10

The Southern Regional Council was an unlikely organization to reignite interest in southern black disfranchisement during the mid-1950s. The SRC’s origins stretch back to 1919 with the founding of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC). The Methodist minister Will W. Alexander and one of his parishioners, Willis Weatherford, established the CIC in Atlanta to be “a meeting ground where the best people of both races could work together to dispel prejudice, tensions, and violence.”11 The CIC included moderate ministers and businessmen in a church-based, mostly white, middle-class association that advocated for better race relations, but not to end segregation. Under Alexander, the CIC supported affiliates throughout the South that organized moderate leaders to address local issues. Above all, the CIC wanted to educate white and black community leaders about the dangers of racial violence and promote interracial harmony. The CIC did so by cultivating relationships with newspapers and by appealing to the white upper middle class, asserting that racial strife was bad for business. After the Great Depression set in, CIC leadership scaled back their operations to concentrate on publishing and education, primarily on antilynching. In 1929, Jesse Daniel Ames, a suffragist and antilynching advocate, joined the CIC as leader of the Women’s Committee, and along with her management of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, Ames kept the CIC afloat during the 1930s. Alexander and Howard Odum, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, were unhappy with the decline of the CIC, and after a series of conventions in 1942 and 1943, they wrested control away from Ames and consolidated the CIC into a new organization: the Southern Regional Council. The old CIC had grown stagnant, and its male-dominated leadership wanted to refocus its mission on the academic study of southern racial and economic problems. Organizers chartered the SRC on January 6, 1944, in Atlanta.12

The SRC at first mirrored the racial timidity inherited from the former CIC, but beginning in 1947, SRC leaders began denouncing segregation. Testifying before the President’s Committee on Civil Rights on May 14, 1947, Guy B. Johnson, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina and the SRC’s first executive director, outlined obstacles to black voting. He called for “a wide campaign of popular education which will inform Negroes as to their suffrage rights and instruct them as to the procedures they should follow in trying to exercise those rights.”13 In 1951, the SRC “formally committed itself to the aim of an unsegregated society.”14 Under the leadership of Paul Williams, a Richmond publisher, and George S. Mitchell,...