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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 - 3. The Negro Vote in the South
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486 An American Dilemma
The illegal activities of persons not connected with the administration
of the election also take many forms. The hangers-on at the polling places
insult and stare at Negroes, especially Negro women. Negroes have
received threats, such as, ^‘If you vote, you will never return home alive,”
and ‘^You have always been looked on as a good character. But from now
on you shall be looked on as a dangerous character.”^® White newspapers
have openly warned Negroes not to vote and intimated violence if they
did vote. In the 1939 election in Miami, the Ku Klux Klan rode the
streets in full regalia and passed out handbills threatening Negroes if they
voted. In the same year, riots and other forms of violence occurred because
of Negroes voting in Greenville and Spartanburg, South Carolina.’^® Keep-
ing in mind this review of the techniques for keeping Negroes from voting
in the South, we may turn to the question of how many Negroes do vote
in spite of this pressure.
3. The Negro Vote in the South
As has been observed, the general pattern in the South since the "new”
constitutions of 18901910 has been to deny the vote to Negroes. Still a
small proportion of Negroes do vote, and the local variations in the
number of their votes are significant.^^ Since no statistics are compiled
which •separate the Negro votes from the white votes, there is no exact
record of these variations. Further, it is practically impossible to compile
exact statistics on registration of Negroes, as many election officials do not
make accurate designations of voters according to color in the registration
books. Knowledge of local variations must come, therefore, from a mass
of newspaper articles, interviews, registration reports and local studies.®
As we have noticed, the most important voting in the South is in the
Democratic primaries, and these are restricted to whites. Here and there
a community will let one or two "good” Negroes vote in the primary. In
some of the cities, especially where political ‘machines can control the
Negro vote—such as in San Antonio and Memphis—Negroes vote in the
primaries in restricted numbers. With these negligible exceptions, no
Negroes are permitted to vote, under a state-wide party rule,** in Alabama,
Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina.
Texas and Virginia also have state-wide rules prohibiting Negroes from
voting in the primary, but, nevertheless, Negroes are permitted to vote
in a few counties. North Carolina and Tennessee leave the primary rule
to county party organizations, and several of these do not prohibit
• Such a collection was made by Ralph J. Bunche and his assistants for this study {of, cit,,
Vol. 4, Chapter yj Vol. 5, Chapters 9, 10 and iij Vol. 8, Appendix 2.) A few of Bunche’s
most general findings will be summarized here.
**
See Section 2 of this chapter for a description of the type of rules restricting Negro
voting in primaries.
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