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Footnotes X323
5, 1936, attacks the absence of a secret ballot in Georgia and the need for an Australian
Ballot, stating, in part: . . the present method can hardly be called a secret ballot
because friends, relatives, supporters, and sometimes even the candidates themselves,
literally stand over the voting booths, making it impossible for a person to mark his
ticket without several persons knowing for whom the vote has been cast.’ ” {Ibid.y
VoL I, p. 194.)
“The numbers on the ballot are used to check up on how people vote in almost
every precinct. Almost every election after the official burning of the ballots, lists of
names of those who voted and how they voted on major offices are Tor sale.’ ” (Inter-
view with a member of the Alabama Legislature, February, 1940, cited in ibid.y p.
125.)
® V. O. Key, Jr., Political Parties and Pressure Group (1942), pp. 402-407.
® Bundle, “The Political Status of the Negro,” Vol. 5, p. 1180.
Lewinson, of, cit,^ pp. no and 170.
For a history of the movement, see ibid,^ pp. 166 ff.
This is a tradition from Reconstruction. Many Southerners find a partial motiva-
tion for the disfranchisement of the Negroes in the fact that Negroes voted against
the whites. Many stories are told to illustrate this tendency. The best one is Booker T.
Washington’s about an old Negro in Reconstruction time who relates:
“We watches de white man, and we keeps watching de white man till we finds out
which way de white man’s gwine to vote 5
an’ when we finds out which way de white
man’s gwine to vote, den we votes ’xactly de other way. Den we knows we’s right.”
(Booker T. Washington, Uf from Slavery [1915; first edition, 1900], p. in.)
See Section 4 of this chapter. Wendell Willkie, the defeated Republican candidate
for President in 1940, has recently made a number of speeches condemning race prej-
udice and discrimination against Negroes. He even delivered the keynote speech at
the 1942 convention of the N.A.A.C.P. If he should again become the Republican
candidate for President, which does not seem likely at the present time, it is probable
that he would get many Negroes to vote for him who had voted for Roosevelt in 1936
and 1940. The same would happen if any other Republican candidate should demon-
strate friendliness toward the Negro, or if the Democratic candidate should be a
Southerner.
Theoretically, anyone not qualified by the grandfather clause (i.e., Negroes) could
still register if he paid taxes and met a battery of other restrictions. Another theoretical
weakness of the grandfather clause arose from the fact that many Negroes had white
fathers and grandfathers who had voted before 1861 or who had served in a military
capacity ; such white ancestors could not be formally claimed by Negroes, however.
Guinn v. United States^ 238 U. S. 347 (1915).
Bunche, of, cit,, Vol. 4, p. 982.
Nixon V. Herndon^ 273 U. S. 536 (March, 1927). In this brief resume of the
legal status of the white primary, we shall not present the decisions reached by state
courts or lower federal courts, but only those of the United States Supreme Court.
Nixpn V. Condon, 286 U. S. 73 (1932).
Grovey v. Townsend, 295 U. S. 45 (1935).
United States v. Patrick B, Classic et al,. No. 618 (October Term, 1940). See
Ralph J. Bunche, “The Negro in the Political Life of the United States,” Journal
of Negro Education (July, 1941), p. 574.
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