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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - V. Politics - 22. Political Practices Today - 2. Southern Techniques for Disfranchising the Negroes
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48o An American Dilemma
In perfect opposition to this is the Southern caste principle that no Negro
should be allowed to vote. The history of legal voting qualifications in the
South since Restoration is the history of the attempt to find some formula
which will reconcile these two opposing principles. A third principle may
be discerned: this holds that Negroes may be allowed to vote according to
the discretion or need of those whites who exercise influence over the
conduct of the election. This third principle is the cause of the variation
in Negro voting in different parts of the South. Some Negroes may be
permitted to vote because they are ^^good” (a reward for obedience to the
caste rules), because an influential white group needs their votes, because
so few Negroes vote that it is not worth the effort to hamper them beyond
a certain point (lack of “clear and present danger” to the caste principle),
or because a few Negro votes are handy to refute the accusation of uncon-
stitutionality.*
State laws setting the qualifications for voting have usually been the
result of an attempt to get the caste principle around the Constitution.
Clearly, the Constitution prohibited any law which explicitly restricted the
vote to whites, since this would involve a reference to “race or color.” The
next best thing was to determine some attribute which was had by whites,
but not by Negroes—other than race or color. Perhaps the safest and most
ingenious of these discoveries was that of ancestry: the so-called ^^grand-
father clauses^^ restricted registration for voting^^ to those persons who had
voted prior to i86i and to their descendants, or to persons who had served
in the federal or Confederate armies or state militias and to their descend-
ants. The United States Supreme Court, however, found these clauses un-
constitutional under the Fifteenth Amendment.^‘’^
Certainly the most efficient device in use today to keep Negroes from vot-
ing where the vote would count most in the South is the ^^white primary,
The Democratic party prohibited Negroes from participating in its pri-
mary** by means of state-wide rule (in 1940) in nine Southern states:
Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana, Arkan-
sas, Virginia and Texas. Only in central Texas and some counties of Vir-
ginia was the rule relaxed to any significant degree. In North Carolina and
Tennessee, the determination of who may vote in the primary is left to the
Democratic party committees of the separate counties: Negroes are per-
mitted in the primaries in several counties in these states. Kentucky no
longer has even county organizations restricting the primaries.^**
• There are also a few small all-Negro communities in the South—such as Mound Bayou,
Mississippi—where Negroes vote unhampered in the local elections. But their votes arc not
always accepted in county, state and federal elections.
^ This inability to participate in the primary also involved an exclusion from other party
activities, such as conventions, caucuses of voters, mass meetings, party offices and candi-
dacies.
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