Today's Voter Suppression Tactics Have A 150 Year History
Rebels in the post-Civil War South perfected the art of excluding voters, but it was yankees in the North who developed the script.
By Gregory Downs | July 26, 2018
On March 13, 1902, as the Alabama River began to rise, a black middle-aged postal clerk named Jackson Giles tried to convince three white registrars in Montgomery, Alabama to add his name to the rolls. Giles had been voting for years, but under the new constitution passed to “establish white supremacy in this State,” he had to register anew. To exclude voters, the constitutional convention turned to literacy tests, poll taxes, felony exclusions, grandfather clauses, and lengthy residency requirements, but perhaps no single measure did more ruthless work than the requirement to register anew. In many ways Jackson Giles was precisely the kind of man of “good character” that the voting “reform” contemplated: a father of two daughters and a son, a widow, a taxpayer, and, newly, a husband to his second wife, Mary. But the registrars turned him out anyway; in Alabama, the criteria for good character was white skin.
Like many other aspiring Montgomery African Americans, Giles lived in a house in Centennial Hill, less than a mile from the state Capitol. Back in February 1861, when Giles was a toddler and a slave, Jefferson Davis moved near those Capitol grounds into the “First White House of the Confederacy” until he, his family, and the Confederate capital decamped in May for Richmond, Virginia. Seventeen years after Giles tried to register to vote, the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church bought a cottage around the corner from Giles’ Watts Street residence, and in October 1954 a young pastor named Martin Luther King Jr. moved his family into that small house. In January 1956, the neighborhood shook. Terrorists opposed to the Montgomery Bus Boycott had bombed the parsonage while King spoke a mile away at the Rev. Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church.
In 1902, almost exactly halfway between the slaveowners’ rebellion that brought Jefferson Davis to Montgomery and the Civil Rights Movement that apotheosized Martin Luther King Jr., Jackson Giles fought to defend his right to vote. Because of the detective work of historian R. Volney Riser, we know some precious details about the steps he took in the weeks after the registrars refused to enroll him. In late March 1902, as the Alabama River rose 12 feet above the “danger line,” washing out farmland and railroads across the region, Giles and fellow postal clerks James Jeter and Edward Dale created a new organization, the Colored Men’s Suffrage Association of Alabama, to raise funds to take their case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Already it was clear that Alabama’s registration system had worked all too well. Black registration had fallen to fewer than 3,000. Even 40,000 white men had failed to register. Voter turnout, already declining due to 1890s “reforms,” dropped from 162,302 to 91,863. On its official ballots, the State of Alabama soon printed the Democratic Party motto: “White Supremacy.”
The starkness of those declines makes it easy, too easy, for Americans to talk about Jackson Giles’ story as something that only happened to black Southerners. When Americans treat voter disfranchisement as a regional, racial exception, they sustain their faith that the true national story is one of progressive expansion of voter rights. But turn-of-the-20th-century disfranchisement was not a regional or a racial story; it was a national one. Even though rebels perfected the art of excluding voters, it was yankees who developed the script. During the 1901 convention, Alabama delegates circulated copies of Massachusetts’ voting laws with the Bay State’s grandfather clause, literacy test, registration requirement, and secret ballots, all intended to make voting more difficult for immigrants. These Massachusetts laws worked, if not quite as well as they did in Alabama; voter turnout fell from 55 to 41 percent.
more
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/feature/todays-voter-suppression-tactics-have-a-150-year-history
= new reply since forum marked as read
