Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 5: Voter suppression under Jim Crow

Stetson Kennedy in his 1946 book Southern Exposure from which I've been quoting in this month's series looks at the voter suppression methods used in the segregated South to prevent African-Americans from voting.

Kennedy notes, "Chief among these is the poll tax." This was a tax voters required voters to pay to be allowed to vote. It was eventually outlawed by the 24th Amendment in 1964. But unscrupulous opponents of democracy can still look for backdoor ways to impose functional equivalents of a poll tax. For instance, a state could require a Voter ID for which a fee would be required.

Kennedy provides a table for the 1944 election to illustrate how effective voter-suppression measure were in the poll tax states, at that time eight of the 11 former Confederate states:

Note that these figures also mean that a substantial majority of the white voters were also no-shows on elections day. The poll tax affected poor whites as well as blacks, although they were a secondary rather than a primary target of the voter suppression measures.

But as Kennedy also describes, the poll tax was only one method used to deprive people of their voting rights. As we saw in yesterday's post, states were able to enact explicitly racist legislation. Because of the 15th Amendment of 1870, states could not explicitly ban African-American citizens from voting.

So they did things like this:

For instance, there are the various literacy qualifications for voting, which require that a person be able to read or write any part of the Constitution, or else "give a reasonable interpretation of same." Various states, however, exempt from this requirement Confederate veterans and their "lawful descendants," owners of forty acres of land or $500 worth of other property, or "persons of good character who understand the duties of citizenship." Although the law provides for an appeal to the courts for persons denied registration, the election is generally over by the time a court decision can be had.

Many registrars, instead of running the risk of refusing to register Negroes, simply require them to stand in a Jim Crow line-and let them stand until they become discouraged and leave. Also, in small communities it is quite common to appoint white women as registrars, who operate from their parlors where Negroes dare not intrude.

Today we don't see explicit poll taxes or property requirements for voting. But creating one hurdle after another aimed at areas where African-Americans and Latinos are more heavily concentrated is very much a part of the voter suppression efforts of today's Republican Party.