The African American Electorate: A Statistical History 9780872895089, 2012018400

Table of contents :
Cover
Brief Contents
Detailed Contents
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1 - The State of African American Election Data
Chapter 2 - The Literature on the African American Electorate
Chapter 3 - The African American Electorate in the Colonial Era, 1610–1773
Chapter 4 - The African American Electorate in the Revolutionary Era, 1774–1789
Chapter 5 - The Electoral Context in Antebellum America, 1788–1861: The Impact of the Three-Fifths Clause
Chapter 6 - The African American Electorate in Antebellum and Civil War America, 1788–1867
Chapter 7 - The Reversal of African American Suffrage Rights prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1788–1870
Chapter 8 - Suffrage Referenda Prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1846–1870
Chapter 9 - Voting Behavior of the African American Electorate prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1788–1870
Chapter 10 - The First African American Nominees and Public Office Holders, 1776–1870
Chapter 11 - The National Equal Rights League: An African American Suffrage Organization during and after the Civil War
Chapter 12 - The Civil War Election and the African American Soldiers’ Vote, 1864
Chapter 13 - African American Voter Registration and Turnout in 1867 Southern State Elections: The First, Second, Third, and Fourth Military Reconstruction Acts
Chapter 14 - African American Voting Behavior in the First Presidential and Congressional Elections after the Abolition of Slavery in the South, 1868 and 1872
Chapter 15 - African American Voting Behavior in the First Presidential and Congressional Elections after the Abolition of Slavery in the Border, Midwest, and Far West States, 1868 and 1872
Chapter 16 - African American Voting Behavior in Subsequent Elections through Disenfranchisement, 1868–1920
Chapter 17 - African American Voting and Non-Voting Behavior in the Era of Disenfranchisement (1888–1908) and Beyond
Chapter 18 - The Lodge Bill and Beyond: Proposed Federal Supervision of Federal Elections in the South, 1861–1921
Chapter 19 - African American Voters and Electoral Empowerment in the North, 1876–1944: A Mobilizer of the Re-enfranchisement Drive in the South
Chapter 20 - The Enfranchisement of African American Women, 1669–1921
Chapter 21 - The Electoral Revolt of African American Voters in 1920–1921 and Beyond
Chapter 22 - African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1920–1944
Chapter 23 - African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965
Chapter 24 - Rare African American Registration and Voting Data: Episodic Events from the 1920s–1964
Chapter 25 - The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Expansions and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006
Chapter 26 - Felon and Ex-Felon Disenfranchisement: The Newest Technique of Vote Dilution and Candidate Diminution
Chapter 27 - African American Voting Rights in a Historic Presidential Election: The 2008 Election of President Barack Obama
Chapter 28 - Summary and Conclusions
Appendices
Cumulative Bibliography
Copyright Acknowledgments
Index

Citation preview

The African American Electorate

We would like to dedicate this book to family and friends, and most especially to election scholars and academicians, who with their brilliant and memorable teaching, research, and studies have expanded our intellectual imagination with insights that have provided clues, visions, and perspectives on extant, fugitive, and new empirical registration and voting data of the African American electorate. From Hanes Walton, Jr. Professor Robert H. Brisbane Professor Tobe Johnson Professor Samuel DuBois Cook Professor Emmett Dorsey Professor Harold Gosnell Professor V. O. Key, Jr. Professor Robert Martin Professor Ralph Bunche Professor Leslie B. McLemore Professor Matthew Holden Fannie Lou Hamer Gloria Richardson Sojourner Truth Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Reverend Dr. Benjamin E. Mays From Sherman C. Puckett Rosetta, Cheryl, Ann, Wanda, Jamal, Monet, Che’Rai, and Blake Professor Darlene Puckett Simmons Lois Deskins Mrs. Crippens Minerva Hawkins Professor Brice Carnahan Professor Gary Fowler Professor John Nystuen Mayor Coleman A. Young From Donald R. Deskins, Jr. Lois, Sharon, Sharlene, Sheila, Edward, James, Ryan, Selia, Jason, and Justin Professor John D. Nystuen Professor L.A.P. Gosling Professor George Kish Professor Charles M. Davis Professor Robert B. Hall Professor Waldo R. Tobler Professor Otis D. Duncan Professor Amos H. Hawley Professor Angus Campbell Professor Harold M. Rose

The African American Electorate A Statistical History Hanes Walton, Jr. University of Michigan Sherman C. Puckett University of Michigan Donald R. Deskins, Jr. University of Michigan

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Copyright © 2012 by CQ Press, an Imprint of SAGE Publications, Inc. CQ Press is a registered trademark of Congressional Quarterly Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The credit lines for material in this book that is used with permission are listed in the copyright acknowledgments section at the end of Volume 2.

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Walton, Hanes, 1941The African American electorate: a statistical history/Hanes Walton, Sherman C. Puckett, Donald R. Deskins. v. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-87289-508-9 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. African Americans—Suffrage—History—Statistics. I. Puckett, Sherman C., 1948- II. Deskins, Donald Richard. III. Title. JK1924.W36 2012 324.9730089′96073—dc23   2012018400

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12 13 14 15 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Brief Contents VOLUME 1 Preface xxix Introduction 1 Chapter 1. The State of African American Election Data

9

Chapter 2. The Literature on the African American Electorate

25

Chapter 3. The African American Electorate in the Colonial Era, 1610–1773

43

Chapter 4. The African American Electorate in the Revolutionary Era, 1774–1789

79

Chapter 5. The Electoral Context in Antebellum America, 1788–1861: The Impact of the Three-Fifths Clause

95

Chapter 6. The African American Electorate in Antebellum and Civil War America, 1788–1867

117

Chapter 7. The Reversal of African American Suffrage Rights prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1788–1870

133

Chapter 8. Suffrage Referenda Prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1846–1870

145

Chapter 9. Voting Behavior of the African American Electorate prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1788–1870

161

Chapter 10. The First African American Nominees and Public Office Holders, 1776–1870

179

Chapter 11. The National Equal Rights League

191

Chapter 12. The Civil War Election and the African American Soldiers’ Vote, 1864

217

Chapter 13. African American Voter Registration and Turnout in 1867 Southern State Elections: The First, Second, Third, and Fourth Military Reconstruction Acts

231

Chapter 14. African American Voting Behavior in the First Presidential and Congressional Elections after the Abolition of Slavery in the South, 1868 and 1872

255

Chapter 15. African American Voting Behavior in the First Presidential and Congressional Elections after the Abolition of Slavery in the Border, Midwest, and Far West States, 1868 and 1872

279

Chapter 16. African American Voting Behavior in Subsequent Elections through Disenfranchisement, 1868–1920

297

Chapter 17. African American Voting and Non-Voting Behavior in the Era of Disenfranchisement (1888–1908) and Beyond

321

Chapter 18. The Lodge Bill and Beyond: Proposed Federal Supervision of Federal Elections in the South, 1861–1921

363

Chapter 19. African American Voters and Electoral Empowerment in the North, 1876–1944: A Mobilizer of the Re-enfranchisement Drive in the South

387

Chapter 20. The Enfranchisement of African American Women, 1669–1921

411

Chapter 21. The Electoral Revolt of African American Voters in 1920–1921 and Beyond

441

VOLUME 2 Chapter 22. African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1920–1944

459

Chapter 23. African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965

481

Chapter 24. Rare African American Registration and Voting Data: Episodic Events from the 1920s–1964

545

Chapter 25. The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Expansions and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006

605

Chapter 26. Felon and Ex-Felon Disenfranchisement: The Newest Technique of Vote Dilution and Candidate Diminution

649

Chapter 27. African American Voting Rights in a Historic Presidential Election: The 2008 Election of President Barack Obama

673

Chapter 28. Summary and Conclusions

711

Appendices 731 Cumulative Bibliography

903

Copyright Acknowledgments

917

Index I-1

Detailed Contents VOLUME 1 Preface: The Genesis of This Work in the Journeys of Its Authors

xxix

Hanes Walton, Jr. xxix Sherman C. Puckett xxx Donald R. Deskins, Jr. xxxi Acknowledgments xxxi Notes xxxii

Introduction 1 Uniqueness of This Work 2 Methodology of This Study 4 Notes 7

Chapter 1. The State of African American Election Data

9

The African American Electorate in Colonial and Revolutionary America

10

Table 1.1 Voting Rights of Free-Men-of-Color in the Thirteen Original Colonies: Colonial, Revolutionary, and Antebellum Eras Map 1.1 States with Suffrage Rights for Free-Men-of-Color, 1855

11 12

Election Data: From National and State Collections to the Commercial and Scholarly Sources Finding Historical Election Data for African American Candidates: Monroe N. Work, W. E. B. DuBois, and Ralph Bunche

13

Table 1.2 Seven Categories of Political Data and Statistics in the Negro Year Book, 1912–1952

17

The State of African American Election Data: A Summary

20

Conclusion on the State of African American Election Data

21

15

Notes 22

Chapter 2. The Literature on the African American Electorate

25

The Separation Phenomenon in the Reporting of Election Return Data Examining the Suffrage Literature

26 27

Table 2.1 Constitutional Convention and Referenda Votes on Equal Suffrage Rights for Free-Men-of-Color in States and Federal Territories of the United States, 1790–1870

31

The Registration, Turnout, and Voting Data Literature

33

Table 2.2 Percent and Number of Registered Voters in Counties of Arkansas by Race, 1867 Map 2.1 Arkansas Counties with African American vs. White Voting Majorities, 1867 Table 2.3 Percent Ratio of Registered African American Voters to Eligible African American Voters in Arkansas, 1867–1990 Table 2.4 Number and Percent of Counties in Georgia that Reported Separately on Black Voters, 1944–1954

35 36 37 37

The Balance of Power Theory Literature

38

Conclusions on the Literature Concerning the African American Electorate

39

Notes 40

Chapter 3. The African American Electorate in the Colonial Era, 1610–1773

43

The Demography of African Americans in Colonial America

45

Table 3.1 Numbers of Censuses during the American Colonial Period, 1624–1773

47

Table 3.2 African American Populations and Population Growth in Regions of Colonial America, 1610–1770

48

Figure 3.1 African American Share of Population in Colonial Virginia, 1610–1770

49

Figure 3.2 African American Share of Population in Colonial Maryland, 1610–1770

49

Figure 3.3 Distribution of African American Population in Colonial America Regions, 1610–1770

49

Table 3.3 Population by Census or Estimate during the American Colonial Period, 1624–1773

50

Figure 3.4 Percent Change in White and African American Populations, Seventeenth-Century Colonial America

54

Figure 3.5 Percent Change in White and African American Populations, Eighteenth-Century Colonial America

54

Potential African American Voters in Colonial America

54

Table 3.4 African American Populations of “Voting Age” in Colonial America, 1624–1625 to 1773

55

Table 3.5 Voting Rights, Population, and Population Change of African Americans in the Thirteen Original Colonies in the Colonial Era

56

Table 3.6 “Voting Age” African American Populations in Maryland, 1704–1755

58

Table 3.7 Taxable and Untaxable African American Populations in Maryland, 1704–1755

58

Table 3.8 Estimated African American Electorate by Colony, 1703–1773

59

Table 3.9 Local-Level Population Censuses and Enumerations of African Americans, 1624–1773

60

Table 3.10 Settlement-Level Demography for Virginia, Census of 1624

61

Table 3.11 County-Level Demography of Slaves in Massachusetts, Census of 1754

62

Table 3.12 County-Level Demography of Massachusetts, Census of 1764

63

Table 3.13 County-Level Demography of Connecticut, Census of 1756

63

Table 3.14 County-Level Demography of New Hampshire, Census of 1773

64

Table 3.15 Town-Level Demography of Rhode Island, Census of 1708

64

Table 3.16 Town-Level Demography of Rhode Island, Census of 1748–1749

64

Table 3.17 Town-Level Demography of Rhode Island, Census of 1755

65

Table 3.18 County-Level Demography of New Jersey, Census of 1726

66

Table 3.19 County-Level Demography of New Jersey, Census of 1738

66

Table 3.20 County-Level Demography of New Jersey, Census of 1745

67

Table 3.21 County-Level Demography of Maryland, Census of 1704

67

Table 3.22 County-Level Demography of Maryland, Census of 1710

68

Table 3.23 County-Level Demography of Maryland, Census of 1712

68

Table 3.24 County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1712

69

Figure 3.6 African Americans as Percentage of Total Population in New York, 1703–1773

69

Table 3.25 County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1703

70

Table 3.26 County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1712

70

Table 3.27 County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1723

71

Table 3.28 County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1731

71

Table 3.29 County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1737

72

Table 3.30 County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1746

72

Table 3.31 County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1749

73

Table 3.32 County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1756

73

Table 3.33 County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1771

74





Figure 3.7 African Americans as Percentage of Total Electorate in New York, 1703–1773 Figure 3.8 African American Men as Percentage of Male Electorate in New York, 1703–1773 Figure 3.9 African American Share of Taxable Population in North Carolina, 1754 –1773 Table 3.34 County-Level Demography for North Carolina List of Taxables for 1754 Table 3.35 County-Level Demography for North Carolina List of Taxables for 1755 Table 3.36 County-Level Demography for North Carolina List of Taxables for 1756 Table 3.37 County-Level Demography for North Carolina List of Taxables for 1765 Table 3.38 County-Level Demography for North Carolina List of Taxables for 1766 Table 3.39 County-Level Demography for North Carolina List of Taxables for 1767

74 74 75 75 75 76 76 77 77

Conclusions on the African American Electorate in the Colonial Era

78

Notes 78

Chapter 4. The African American Electorate in the Revolutionary Era, 1774–1789

79

The Demography of African Americans in Revolutionary America

80

Table 4.1 Numbers of Censuses in the Thirteen Original States, 1774–1789

81

Table 4.2 Populations by Census or Estimate, 1774–1789

82

Potential African American Voters in Revolutionary America

84

Table 4.3 African American Populations in the Thirteen Original States, 1774–1789

85

Table 4.4 Voting Rights, Population, and Population Change of African Americans in the Thirteen Original States: The Revolutionary Era

86

County-Level Election Data in the Revolutionary Era

87

Table 4.5 Town-Level Demography for Rhode Island, Census of 1774 Table 4.6 Town-Level Demography for Rhode Island, Census of 1783 Table 4.7 County-Level Demography for Connecticut, Census of 1774 Table 4.8 County-Level Demography for Connecticut, Census of 1782 Table 4.9 County-Level Demography for New Hampshire, Census of 1775 Table 4.10 County-Level Demography for New Hampshire, Census of 1786 Table 4.11 County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1786 Table 4.12 County-Level Demography for Massachusetts, Census of 1776 Table 4.13 County-Level Demography for North Carolina, Incomplete Census of 1786 Table 4.14 Local-Level Population Censuses and Enumerations of African Americans during the Period of the American Revolution

87 88 89 89 89 90 90 91 91 92

Conclusions on the African American Electorate in the Revolutionary Period

92

Notes 92

Chapter 5. The Electoral Context in Antebellum America, 1788–1861: The Impact of the Three-Fifths Clause 95 The Demography of African Americans in Antebellum America Table 5.1 House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1788–1789 Elections Table 5.2 House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1790 Census Table 5.3 House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1800 Census Table 5.4 House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1810 Census Table 5.5 House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1820 Census Table 5.6 House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1830 Census Table 5.7 House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1840 Census Table 5.8 House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1850 Census Table 5.9 House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1860 Census Figure 5.1 Number of States Admitted to the United States by Decade, 1787–1860s Figure 5.2 Numerical Parity of Free and Slave States in the United States by Decade, 1787–1860s

96 98 99 100 101 102 104 105 107 108 109 109

Longitudinal Analysis of the Three-Fifths Clause

109

Table 5.10 States Admitted to the Union of the United States, Founding–1870 Figure 5.3 Number of House of Representatives Seats Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause by Decade, 1787–1860s Figure 5.4 Percentage of House of Representatives Seats Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause by Decade, 1787–1860s Figure 5.5 Percentage of Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause by Decade, 1787–1860s Figure 5.6 Total Electoral Votes and Number of Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause by Decade, 1787–1860s Figure 5.7 African American Population Growth in the United States by Slavery Status, 1790–1860 Figure 5.8 White Population Growth in the United States by Slavery Status of Residence, 1790–1860 Figure 5.9 African American and White Population Growth in the United States, 1790–1860 Figure 5.10 Number of Electoral Votes by Slavery Status Grouping of States, 1787–1860s Figure 5.11 Two-Fifths of African American Slave Population as a Share of Total U.S. Population, 1790–1860 Table 5.11 Number of Seats in the House of Representatives Held by the Slave States during and after the Period of the Three-Fifths Clause, 1860, 1872, and 1882

109 110 110 111

Summary and Conclusions on the Impact of the Three-Fifths Clause

115

112 112 112 113 113 114 115

Notes 115

Chapter 6. The African American Electorate in Antebellum and Civil War America, 1788–1867

117

Potential African American Voters in Antebellum and Civil War America

118

Table 6.1 Suffrage Rights of Free-Men-of-Color in the New States, 1791–1867

118

Table 6.2 Year of Eventual Suffrage Exclusion for Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color in the Thirteen Original States

119

Table 6.3 Free African American Population in States that Provided Suffrage Rights to African Americans, 1790–1867

120

African American Partisanship in State Elections, 1788–1866

120

African American Voting in Federal Elections, 1788–1866

126

Table 6.4 Correlations of Voting Behavior Percentages: Voting Age African Americans and Votes for U.S. Presidential Candidates in Massachusetts and New York, 1828–1860

129

Table 6.5 Correlations of Voting Behavior Percentages: Voting Age African Americans and Votes for U.S. Presidential Candidates in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, 1828–1860

130

Table 6.6 Partial Correlations of Voting Behavior Percentages: Voting Age African Americans and Votes for U.S. Presidential Candidates, 1828–1860

130

Summary and Conclusions on the African American Electorate in Antebellum and Civil War America

131



Notes 131

Chapter 7. The Reversal of African American Suffrage Rights prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1788–1870

133

The Politics of Total Reversals: Denial of Suffrage Rights in Eight States during the Antebellum and Civil War Eras

134

Table 7.1 Number of Petitions For and Against African American Suffrage Rights in Pennsylvania: Selected Counties by Submission to the 1837–1838 State Constitutional Convention

136

The Politics of Partial Reversals: The Abridgement of Suffrage Rights in New York and Rhode Island

137

The Politics of Reversal: Granting Suffrage Rights in Louisiana: 1838–1860

139

Map 7.1 Rapides Parish, Louisiana 1840

139

Table 7.2 Presidential Election Vote and Voting Age African American Male Population in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, 1828–1860

140

Figure 7.1 Percentage of Presidential Vote in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, for the Major and Third Political Parties, 1836–1860

141

Summary and Conclusions on the Reversals of African American Suffrage Rights

141

Map 7.2 States that Reversed Suffrage Rights for African Americans during the Antebellum Era

141

Notes 142

Chapter 8. Suffrage Referenda prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1846–1870

145

The Nature and Scope of the Statewide Referenda, 1846–1870

146

Figure 8.1 Number of Referenda on Suffrage Rights for African Americans in States and Territories, 1846–1870

147

Table 8.1 Referenda on Suffrage Rights for Free-Men-of-Color in States and Federal Territories, 1846–1870

147

States with Multiple Statewide Referenda for Suffrage Rights, 1846–1870

148

Table 8.2 Results of Four Statewide Referenda on African American Suffrage Rights in Wisconsin, 1846, 1849, 1857, and 1870

149

Figure 8.2 Results of Four Statewide Suffrage Rights Referenda in Wisconsin, 1847–1865

150

Table 8.3 Results of Three Statewide Referenda on African American Suffrage Rights in New York, 1846, 1860, and 1869

151

Figure 8.3 Results of Three Statewide Suffrage Rights Referenda in New York, 1846–1869

151

Table 8.4 Results of Three Statewide Referenda on African American Suffrage Rights in Minnesota, 1865, 1867, and 1868

151

Figure 8.4 Results of Three Statewide Suffrage Rights Referenda in Minnesota, 1865–1868

152

Table 8.5 Results of Three Statewide Referenda on African American Suffrage Rights in Michigan, 1850, 1868, and 1870

153

Figure 8.5 Results of Three Statewide Suffrage Rights Referenda in Michigan, 1850–1870

154

Table 8.6 Results of Two Statewide Referenda on African American Suffrage Rights in Iowa, 1857 and 1868

155

Figure 8.6 Results of Two Statewide Suffrage Rights Referenda in Iowa, 1857–1868

156

States with Single Statewide Referenda for Suffrage Rights, 1862–1868

156

Table 8.7 Results of Five Statewide Referenda on African American Suffrage Rights in Illinois (1862), Connecticut (1865), Kansas (1867), Ohio (1867), and Missouri (1868)

157

Figure 8.7 Results of Statewide Suffrage Rights Referenda in Illinois, Connecticut, Kansas, Ohio, and Missouri, 1862–1868

157

The Failure of Suffrage Rights Referenda in Federal Territories after the Civil War, 1865–1868: Congress Steps In

157

Table 8.8 Results of Referenda on African American Suffrage Rights in Six Federal Territories and the District of Columbia, 1865–1868

157

Summary and Conclusions on African American Suffrage Referenda prior to the Fifteenth Amendment

158

Map 8.1 States and Territories that Held Referenda on Suffrage Rights for African Americans, 1846–1870

159

Notes 159

Chapter 9. Voting Behavior of the African American Electorate prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1788–1870

161

The Evidentiary Sources for Inferences about African American Voting and Partisan Behavior prior to the Fifteenth Amendment

162

Table 9.1 Three Evidentiary Sources Used to Estimate African American Voting Behavior in Presidential Elections, 1789–1868

163

The Number and Percentage of States Allowing Popular and African American Voting prior to the Fifteenth Amendment

164

Table 9.2 Number of African American Suffrage States by Popular Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections, 1789–1868

165

Figure 9.1 Number of African American Suffrage States in Presidential Elections with and without Popular Voting before the Fifteenth Amendment, 1789–1868

166

Figure 9.2 Percent of States in Presidential Elections Having African American Suffrage with and without Popular Voting Before the Fifteenth Amendment, 1789–1868

166

Table 9.3 Number of African American Suffrage States Making Use of Popular and Non-Popular Voting in Presidential Elections, 1789–1868

167

African American Partisanship and Voting Behavior in Presidential Elections prior to the Fifteenth Amendment

167

Figure 9.3 Number of African American Suffrage States Making Use of Popular and Non-Popular Voting in Presidential Elections, 1789–1868

168

Table 9.4 Three Categories of African American State Party Voting prior to the Fifteenth Amendment

170

Summary and Conclusions on African American Partisanship prior to the Fifteenth Amendment

171

Map 9.1 States Permitting African American Suffrage before the Fifteenth Amendment, 1789–1868

172

Table 9.5 Free African American Male Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections, 1789–1868

173

Notes 177

Chapter 10. The First African American Nominees and Public Office Holders, 1776–1870

179

African American Delegates at the National Conventions of the Anti-Slavery Political Parties

180

Table 10.1 African American Delegates at Anti-Slavery Political Party National Conventions

181

The Anti-Slavery Parties and African American Presidential Nominees

184

Table 10.2 African American Nominees for President and Vice President, 1847–1888

184

Table 10.3 Nominating Votes and Percentages for Presidential and Vice Presidential Candidates at Selected National Conventions of the Liberty and Republican Parties, 1848–1888

185

African American Candidates for Local and State Offices: Before and Immediately after the Civil War

185

Table 10.4 African American Candidates for Local, State, and National Offices, 1792–1866

185

Summary and Conclusions on African American Elected Officials prior to the Fifteenth Amendment

186

Map 10.1 States with African American Candidates for Local, State, and National Offices, 1776–1866

187

Notes 189

Chapter 11. The National Equal Rights League

191

The Rise of African American Political Agency: Individual and Small Group Protests

192

The Birth and Evolution of the National Convention Movement: The Forerunner of the National Equal Rights League

193

Figure 11.1 Number of African American National and State Conventions in Antebellum America, 1830–1865

194

Table 11.1 Number of Delegates and Honorary Members Participating in the Founding National Negro Convention by State, 1830 194 Map 11.1 States and Numbers of Delegates and Honorary Members at the National Negro Convention, 1830

195

Table 11.2 Numbers of States, Cities, and Delegates Participating in the National Negro Convention Movement, 1831–1855 196

The Rise and Evolution of the National Equal Rights League, 1864–1865

197

Table 11.3 Numbers of Cities and Delegates, by Region and State, Participating in the Founding Convention of the National Equal Rights League, 1864 198 Map 11.2 States of the Founding Convention of the National Equal Rights League, 1864

199

Figure 11.2 The Cover of a Model Constitution Pamphlet Used by Local Branches of the National Equal Rights League

199

Diagram 11.1 The Standing Committees of the National Equal Rights League

201

Table 11.4 Leadership and Organizational Structure of the National Equal Rights League at the First Annual Meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, October 19–21, 1865 201 Map 11.3 Branch States of the National Equal Rights League, 1865

202

The NERL, Congress, and the Elective Franchise for Southern Freedmen: The Four Military Reconstruction Acts of 1867

206

Table 11.5 Delegate States and Number of Delegates to the National Convention of Colored Men of America, 1869 208 Map 11.4 Delegate States and Number of Delegates to the National Convention of Colored Men of America, 1869

209

Figure 11.3 Number of Delegates to the National Convention of Colored Men by State, 1869

210

Diagram 11.2 The Rise, Evolution, and Demise of the Three Different National Equal Rights Leagues, 1864–1915

212

Summary and Conclusions on the National Equal Rights League

213

Notes 214

Chapter 12. The Civil War Election and the African American Soldiers’ Vote, 1864

217

The Partisan and Political Debates over Soldiers Voting

218

The Demography and Deployment of African American Soldiers in the Civil War

220

Table 12.1 Civil War African American Troops as Percentage of Total Union Troops by State

221

African American Soldiers’ Field Voting Behavior in the 1864 Presidential Election

222

Table 12.2 Reported Soldier’s Field Vote in the 1864 Presidential Election, Ranked in Order of the Number of Votes for Lincoln-Johnson by State

222

Map 12.1 The Reported Soldiers’ Field Vote in the 1864 Presidential Election for Lincoln vs. McClellan 223 Figure 12.1 Reported Soldiers’ Field Vote in the 1864 Presidential Election for Lincoln vs. McClellan 224 Table 12.3 African American Soldiers’ Field Vote in the 1864 Presidential Election

224

Map 12.2 The African American Soldiers’ Vote in the 1864 Presidential Election 225 Table 12.4 Comparing the Number of the African American Troops to the Difference in Popular Votes between Candidates of the 1864 Presidential Election by State

226

Figure 12.2 African American Soldiers’ Field Vote in the 1864 Presidential Election 227 Table 12.5 Popular Vote, Soldiers’ Vote, and Electoral Vote in the Presidential Election of 1864

228

Summary and Conclusions on the African American Soldiers’ Vote

229

Notes 230

Chapter 13. African American Voter Registration and Turnout in 1867 Southern State Elections: The First, Second, Third, and Fourth Military Reconstruction Acts

231

The Four Military Reconstruction Acts: An Overview

233

Table 13.1 Nature, Scope, and Power of the Four Military Reconstructions Acts

233

The Sources of Political Antagonism and Tension: Southern States Legislatures’ Votes on the Fourteenth Amendment

234

Table 13.2 Voting of Southern White State Legislators For and Against the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, 1866–1867

235

State Constitutional Conventions in the South: Voter Registration in 1867 and Delegates

237

Table 13.3 Number and Percentage of African American and White Registered Voters in the South, 1867 (Original Senate Report) Figure 13.1 Percentage of Registered Voters, African American and White, in States of the South in 1867 (Original Senate Report) Table 13.4 Number and Percentage of African Americans and Whites Voting for State Constitutional Conventions in the South, 1867 Figure 13.2 Percentage of Voters for Constitutional Conventions, African Americans and Whites, in States of the South, 1867 Table 13.5 Number and Percentage of African American and White Voters against State Constitutional Conventions in the South, 1867 Figure 13.3 Percentage of Voters against Constitutional Conventions, African Americans and Whites, in States of the South, 1867 Table 13.6 Number and Percentage of African American and White Registered Non-Voters on State Constitutional Conventions in the South, 1867 Figure 13.4 Percentage of Non-Voters, African Americans and Whites, in Elections for State Constitutional Conventions in the South, 1867 Table 13.7 Number and Percentage of African American and White Voters Disenfranchised by the Military Reconstruction Acts Figure 13.5 Percentage of African American and White Voters Disenfranchised by the Military Reconstruction Acts Table 13.8 Number and Percentage of Registered and Disenfranchised Voters by Race, Southern State Constitutional Convention Referenda, 1867

239 239 240 241 242 242 243 243 244 244 245

Table 13.9 Number and Percentage of African American and White Registered Voters in the South, 1867–1869 (Senate Report Revised and Updated with New Scholarship)

246

Map 13.1 States in the South Differentiated by Median Percentage of African American Registered Voters, 1867

247

Figure 13.6 Percentage of Registered Voters, African American and White, in States of the South, 1867 (Updated Senate Report)

247

Table 13.10 Initial and Supplemental Registrations: The Increase in New Voters

248

The Relationship between the Initial Freedmen Voters and the Number of Freedmen Elected as Delegates to the State Constitutional Conventions, 1867–1868

248

Table 13.11 Number and Percentage of Freedmen and Whites at the State Constitutional Conventions, 1867–1868 Table 13.12 African American Shares of Registered Voters and State Convention Delegations in the South, 1867–1869

248 249

The First African American Federal Registrars: The Case of Georgia

249

Table 13.13 Demographic Characteristics of African American Registrars in Georgia, 1867–1868

250

Map 13.2 Geographic Distribution by County of Residence of African American Federal Reistrars for Georgia, 1867

250

Summary and Conclusions on African American Voters of 1867

251

Table 13.14 Composite Table of Total Voters Ranked by Percentage of Registered Voters

252

Table 13.15 Voters by Race in the Electorate of the Reconstructed South

252

Figure 13.7 Total Voters by Race in States of the Reconstructed South, 1867–1868

253

Notes 253

Chapter 14. African American Voting Behavior in the First Presidential and Congressional Elections after the Abolition of Slavery in the South, 1868 and 1872

255

The African American 1868 Presidential Vote in Seven Southern States

257

Map 14.1 Majority African American Counties in the Southern States of the 1868 Presidential Election

258

Figure 14.1 Number of Southern Counties by Census Racial Majorities, 1860–2000

258

Table 14.1 Number of Southern Counties by Census Racial Majorities, 1860–2000

259

Table 14.2 Number of Majority African American Counties by Census, 1860–2000

259

Table 14.3 Number and Percentage of African American Majority Counties in the Seven Southern States of the 1868 Presidential and Congressional Elections: A Rank Ordering

260

Table 14.4 Popular and Electoral Votes in the Seven Southern States, 1868 Presidential Election

260

Table 14.5 Gain and Loss of Majority African American Counties Voting for the Republican Party in the South in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections

261

Table 14.6 Gain and Loss of Majority White Counties Voting for the Republican Party in the South in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections

262

Table 14.7 Gain and Loss of Votes in Majority African American Counties Voting for the Republican Party in the South in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections

262

Table 14.8 Gain and Loss of Votes in Majority White Counties Voting for the Republican Party in the South in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections

263

Figure 14.2 Percentage of Racial Majority Counties in the South Voting for the Republican Party in the 1868 Presidential Election

264

The African American 1872 Presidential Vote in the Eleven Southern States

264

Map 14.2 Majority African American Counties in the Southern States of the 1872 Presidential Election

265

Table 14.9 Comparing the Vote of the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections in the South for the Major Political Parties

266

Figure 14.3 Percentage of Racial Majority Counties in the South Voting for the Republican Party in the 1872 Presidential Election

268

The Democratic Presidential Vote in the African American and White Majority Counties in 1868 and 1872

268

Figure 14.4 Percentage of Racial Majority Counties in the South Voting for the Democratic Party in the 1868 Presidential Election

269

Figure 14.5 Percentage of Racial Majority Counties in the South Voting for the Democratic Party in the 1872 Presidential Election

270



The Comparative Portrait of Party Voting in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections

270

Table 14.10 Gain and Loss of Counties Voting for the Republican Party in Majority African American Counties of the Original Seven Southern States in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections

271

Table 14.11 Gain and Loss of Counties Voting for the Republican Party in Majority White Counties of the Original Seven Southern States in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections

272

Table 14.12 Gain and Loss of Votes in Majority African American Counties Voting for the Republican Party in the Original Seven Southern States in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections

272

Table 14.13 Gain and Loss of Votes in Majority White Counties Voting for the Republican Party in the Original Seven Southern States in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections

273

The African American Congressional Vote in the 1868, 1869, 1870, and 1872 Elections

273

Table 14.14 Vote for African American Republican Congressional Candidates, 1868, 1869, 1870, and 1872

274

Summary and Conclusions on African American Voting Behavior in 1868 and 1872

275

Figure 14.6 Scatter Plot of Republican Party Percentage of Vote and African American Percentage of Population in the South for the 1868 Presidential Election

276

Figure 14.7 Scatter Plot of Republican Party Percentage of Vote and African American Percentage of Population in the South for the 1872 Presidential Election

277

Notes 277

Chapter 15. African American Voting Behavior in the First Presidential and Congressional Elections after the Abolition of Slavery in the Border, Midwest, and Far West States, 1868 and 1872

279

The African American Presidential Vote in the Border States, 1868 and 1872

280

Map 15.1 Border States, Midwest States, and Far West States with Noteworthy African American Voting Behavior, 1868, 1872, and Beyond

281

Map 15.2 Majority African American Counties in the Border States, 1860 Census

282

Table 15.1 Comparing the Vote of the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections in the Border States for the Major Political Parties

282

Table 15.2 Comparing the Vote of the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections in Border State Counties with Majority African American Populations

283

Table 15.3 Ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in the Border States

283

Table 15.4 Border States and the Potential African American Vote, 1868

283

Figure 15.1 Comparing the Republican Party Percentage of the Vote in Majority African American Counties of the Border States in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections 285 Figure 15.2 Comparing the Democratic Party Percentage of the Vote in Majority African American Counties of the Border States in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections 286 Figure 15.3 Comparing Votes and Percent of Votes for the Democratic Party Presidential Candidate in Majority African American Counties of the Border States in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections 286 Table 15.5 Counties of West Virginia Ranked by Number of African American Registered Voters, 1870

287

Table 15.6 Partial Correlations between African American Registered Voters in West Virginia, 1870, and the Percentage of Votes for the Major Political Parties in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections

289

A Comparative Regional Portrait of the African American Voter in the Southern and Border State Regions

290

The African American Vote and Partisanship in the Midwest and Far West: The Historical Evidence

291

Summary and Conclusions on African American Voting in 1868 and 1872 outside the South

293

Notes 294

Chapter 16. African American Voting Behavior in Subsequent Elections through Disenfranchisement, 1868–1920

297

Map 16.1 Electoral Vote by State, Presidential Election of 1876

300

The 1876 Presidential Vote of African Americans in the South and the Border States Table 16.1 1876 Presidential Election Results and 1870 Census Information for the African American Majority Counties of the Border and Southern States Table 16.2 1876 Presidential Election Results and 1870 Census Information for the White Majority Counties of the Border and Southern States Figure 16.1 Support of Racial Majority Counties for the Republican Party in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina Presidential Elections of 1868, 1872, and 1876 Figure 16.2 Support of Racial Majority Counties for the Democratic Party in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina Presidential Elections of 1868, 1872, and 1876 Table 16.3 Election Results for Rapides Parish, Louisiana, 1868–1920 Figure 16.3 Support for the Democratic Party and the Republican Party in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, Presidential Elections of 1868–1920 Figure 16.4 Support of Racial Majority Counties for the Republican Party in the Border States Presidential Elections of 1868, 1872, and 1876 Figure 16.5 Support of Racial Majority Counties for the Democratic Party in the Border States Presidential Elections of 1868, 1872, and 1876

301 301 302 303 304 305 306 306 307

The Voting Behavior of African Americans in Presidential Elections from 1868–1920 in the Southern and Border States

307

Figure 16.6 Mean Support for Democratic and Republican Parties in African American Majority Counties of the South, 1868–1920

308

Figure 16.7 Mean Support for Democratic and Republican Parties in Majority White Counties of the South, 1868–1920

309

Figure 16.8 Mean Support for Democratic and Republican Parties in Racial Majority Counties of the South, 1868–1920

310

Figure 16.9 Mean Support for Democratic and Republican Parties in Racial Majority Counties of the Border States, 1868–1920

310

County-Level Analysis for 1868–1920 Southern and Border States Elections

311

Table 16.4 Counties with the Largest Black Majorities in Each State of the South, 1860–1920 Censuses

311

Figure 16.10 Mean Support for the Democratic and Republican Parties in Largest Majority African American Counties of the South, Presidential Elections, 1868–1920

312

Table 16.5 Counties with the Largest White Majorities in Each State of the South, 1860–1920 Censuses

313

Figure 16.11 Mean Support for the Democratic and Republican Parties in Largest Majority White Counties of the South, Presidential Elections, 1868–1920

314

Table 16.6 Number of All-White Counties in the South and Border States, 1860–1920

314

Table 16.7 Counties with the Largest Black Majorities in Each of the Border States, 1860–1920 Censuses

315

Table 16.8 Counties with the Largest White Majorities in Each of the Border States, 1860–1920 Censuses

315

Summary and Conclusions Concerning African American Voting from 1868–1920

316

Figure 16.12 Mean Support for the Democratic and Republican Parties, by Race, in Largest Majority Counties of the Border States, Presidential Elections, 1868–1920

316

Figure 16.13 Support for the Democratic Party in the Southern States, 1868–1920

317

Figure 16.14 Support for the Republican Party in the Southern States, 1868–1920

318

Figure 16.15 Support for the Democratic Party in the Border States, 1868–1920

318

Figure 16.16 Support for the Republican Party in the Border States, 1868–1920

319

Notes 319

Chapter 17. African American Voting and Non-Voting Behavior in the Era of Disenfranchisement (1888–1908) and Beyond

321

The Literature on the Redemption Movement: A New Linkage to the Era of Disenfranchisement

325

Figure 17.1 Passage of Separate-Coach Laws in the Redeemed Southern States

326

Table 17.1 Elapsed Years from Southern Redemption to New State Constitutions

327

The Era of Disenfranchisement: Elimination of Freedmen Voting Rights

327

Map 17.1 Southern and Border States by Category of Disenfranchisement, 1888–1908

328

Table 17.2 Enactment Years of the Poll Tax, Literacy Test, Grandfather Clause, and Segregation Laws in the South and Border States

329

Table 17.3 Characteristics of Poll Tax Laws in the South, 1890–1918

330

Table 17.4 Characteristics of Literacy Test Laws and Their Alternatives in the South, 1890–1918

331

Table 17.5 Classification of Southern and Border States Grouped by the Stringency of Disenfranchisement Laws, 1890–1920

332

Table 17.6 Presidential Election Turnout Means of Non-Poll Tax and Poll Tax Counties for the South and Border States

332

Figure 17.2 Impact of the Poll Tax in Racial Majority Counties of the Southern and Border States, 1892–1920

333

Table 17.7 Presidential Election Turnout Means of Non-Literacy Test and Literacy Test Counties for the Southern and Border States

333

Figure 17.3 Impact of Literacy Tests in Racial Majority Counties of the South and Border States, 1892–1920

334

Table 17.8 Presidential Election Turnout Means of Non-Grandfather Clause and Grandfather Clause Counties for the South and Border States

334

Figure 17.4 Impact of the Grandfather Clause in Racial Majority Counties of the South and Border States, 1892–1920

335

Table 17.9 Presidential Election Voter Turnout in Non-Poll Tax and Poll Tax Black Counties of the South and Border States, 1892–1920

335

Figure 17.5 Presidential Election Turnout Means of Non-Poll Tax and Poll Tax Black Counties in the South and Border States

336

Table 17.10 Presidential Election Voter Turnout in Non-Literacy Test and Literacy Test Black Counties of the South and Border States, 1892–1920

336

Figure 17.6 Presidential Election Turnout Means of Non-Literacy Test and Literacy Test Black Counties in the South and Border States

337

Table 17.11 Presidential Election Voter Turnout in Non-Grandfather Clause and Grandfather Clause Black Counties of the South and Border States, 1892–1920

337

Figure 17.7 Presidential Election Turnout Means of Non-Grandfather Clause and Grandfather Clause Black Counties in the South and Border States

338

Table 17.12 Voter Turnout in Southern Counties Imposing the Poll Tax, Literacy Tests, and the Grandfather Clause, 1892–1920

339

Figure 17.8 Comparing the Effects of the Poll Tax, Literacy Tests, and the Grandfather Clause on Voter Turnout in Southern Counties, 1892–1920

340

Figure 17.9 African American and White Voter Registration in Louisiana, 1867–1964

341

Figure 17.10 African Americans as Percentage of Registered Voters in Louisiana, 1900–1948

341

Table 17.13 Longitudinal Analyses of African American Disfranchisement in Louisiana, 1867–1964

342

Table 17.14 Effect of Understanding Clause on Voters in White Majority Counties of Mississippi, 1892

344

Figure 17.11 Understanding Clause Effect on Registering Black and White Voters in Black and White Majority Counties of Mississippi, 1892

345

Maintaining the Era of Disenfranchisement: The White Primaries and Run-Off Primaries in the South

345

Table 17.15 Effect of Understanding Clause on Voters in African American Majority Counties of Mississippi, 1892

346

Table 17.16 Enactment Years of the Direct and White Primaries in the South and Border States, 1888–1915

347

Table 17.17 Year of Run-Off Primary Law Adoption in the South

347

Map 17.2 Southern States that Implemented the White Primary, 1888–1915

348

Rare Data in Georgia, North Carolina, and Oklahoma

349

Table 17.18 Results of Disenfranchisement Referendum in North Carolina by County and Racial Majority, 1900

350

Figure 17.12 Number of Counties by Racial Majority Voting For or Against Disenfranchisement Referendum in North Carolina, 1900

351

Figure 17.13 Percent of Counties by Racial Majority Voting For or Against Disenfranchisement Referendum in North Carolina, 1900

351

Map 17.3 Racial Majority Counties of North Carolina, 1900

352

Figure 17.14 Number of Counties by Racial Majority Voting For or Against Disenfranchisement Referendum in Georgia, 1908

354

Figure 17.15 Percent of Counties by Racial Majority Voting For or Against Disenfranchisement Referendum in Georgia, 1908 Table 17.19 Results of Disenfranchisement Referendum in Georgia by County and Racial Majority, 1908 Map 17.4 Racial Majority Counties of Georgia, 1908

354 355 357

Summary and Conclusions on the Era of Disenfranchisement

359

Table 17.20 Gain or Loss in Number of African American Registered Voters in the South from 1867 to after Disenfranchisement (1888–1908) Figure 17.16 Loss in Number of African American Registered Voters in the South from 1867 to after Disenfranchisement

360 360

Notes 360

Chapter 18. The Lodge Bill and Beyond: Proposed Federal Supervision of Federal Elections in the South, 1861–1921

363

Political Parties, Congress, and the Legislation before the Lodge Bill

364

Figure 18.1 Republican and Democratic Party Majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1860–1920 Figure 18.2 Republican and Democratic Party Majorities in the U.S. Senate, 1860–1920 Figure 18.3 Republican and Democratic Party Majorities in the U.S. Congress, 1860–1920 Table 18.1 Political Party in Control of the Presidency and Congress, 1860–1920

365 366 367 367

Republicans, Democrats, and the Politics of Enforcement of Suffrage Rights

368

Figure 18.4 Number of Convictions under the Enforcement Acts by Region and Year, 1870–1894 Figure 18.5 Number of Dismissals under the Enforcement Acts by Region and Year, 1870–1894 Figure 18.6 Number of Criminal Prosecutions under the Enforcement Acts in the South, 1870–1894 Figure 18.7 Number of Criminal Prosecutions under the Enforcement Acts in the Border States, 1870–1894 Table 18.2 Number of Criminal Cases in the Enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment in the South and Border States, 1870–1877 Figure 18.8 Number of Enforcement Cases for the Fifteenth Amendment in Southern States, 1870–1877 Figure 18.9 Number of Enforcement Cases for the Fifteenth Amendment in Border States, 1870–1877 Figure 18.10 Percentage of Enforcement Cases for the Fifteenth Amendment in Southern and Border States, 1870–1877

368 369 370 370

The Republican Party’s Lodge Bill: The Failure to Pass the New Enforcement Act

373

Figure 18.11 House of Representatives Vote of the Major Political Parties in the 51st Congress for H.R. 11045 (the Lodge Bill), 1890 Figure 18.12 Senate Vote of the Major Political Parties in the 51st Congress for Wolcott’s Motion (1891) Figure 18.13 Republican and Democratic Party Majorities in the U.S. Congress during the Administrations of President Grover Cleveland, 1885–1889 and 1893–1897

371 371 372 372

374 375 376

The Senate Popular Election Bill and the Women’s Suffrage Bill: The Republican Party’s New Political Opportunities

376

Table 18.3 House of Representatives Vote for Congressional Investigations of Suffrage Restrictions (the Burleigh Bill), 56th Congress, 1st Session, 1900 Figure 18.14 Number of Repealed Sections from the Enforcement Acts by Year and Political Party in Control of Congress

378 379

Summary and Conclusions on the Lodge Bill and Beyond

380

Diagram 18.1 The Lodge Bill in the Political Context of the Era of Disenfranchisement, 1877–1920 Table 18.4 Historical Composition of the United States Congress by Session, 1861–1921 Table 18.5 Criminal Prosecutions under the Enforcement Acts, by Region and Year, 1870–1894

381 381 383

Map 18.1 Fifteenth Amendment Enforcement Cases in the South and Border States, 1870–1877

384

Notes 384

Chapter 19. African American Voters and Electoral Empowerment in the North, 1876–1944: A Mobilizer of the Re-enfranchisement Drive in the South

387

The 1876 Chicago, Illinois, Electoral Symbol for African American Electoral Empowerment: North and South

389

Table 19.1 Illinois Legislature Election Outcomes with African American Candidates, 1868–1944

392

Beyond Illinois: Pioneer African American Multistate Legislative Empowerment in the North: An Additional Mobilizer

394

Figure 19.1 Votes for African American State Legislative Candidates in Illinois, 1876–1944

395

Figure 19.2 Number of African Americans Running for and Elected to the Illinois State Legislature, 1876–1944

395

Table 19.2 Early Elections of African American State Legislators, 1868–1944 397 Map 19.1 African American State Legislators, 1868–1944

401

Table 19.3 Pioneering African American Women State Legislative Candidates, 1868–1944

401

Map 19.2 African American Women State Legislative Candidates, 1868–1944

402

Beyond State Legislative Empowerment—Pioneer African American Congressional Empowerment in the North: A New Mobilizer

402

Table 19.4 Election Results Statistics for the First Congressional District of Illinois, 1920–1944

404

Figure 19.3 Votes for Democratic and Republican Candidates in the First Congressional District of Illinois, 1920–1944

405

Figure 19.4 Percentage of the Vote for Democratic and Republican Candidates in the First Congressional District of Illinois, 1920–1944 405

The Roots and Rising of the Northern African American Electorate in Presidential Elections: Another Mobilizer

406

Figure 19.5 Percentage of African American Voters Voting Democratic for President in Selected Wards of Chicago and Philadelphia, 1932–1960

407

Summary and Conclusions on African American Voters and Electoral Empowerment in the North

407

Notes 409

Chapter 20. The Enfranchisement of African American Women, 1669–1921

411

Long before the Women Suffrage Movement: Free Women of Color Voting in Colonial, Revolutionary, and Antebellum America

412

Table 20.1 Inferred and Actual Female Populations in Colonial Virginia Including Years of African American Suffrage Denials

414

Table 20.2 Inferred and Actual Female Populations in Revolutionary and Early Antebellum New Jersey Including Years of Federal Censuses, Presidential Elections, and the Denial of African American and Women Suffrage

415

Table 20.3 Potential African American Female Voters in Colonial Virginia and Revolutionary/Antebellum New Jersey

416

The Struggle for the Re-Acquisition of Voting Rights for African American Women

416

Table 20.4 Potential Women Voters in States and Territories Fully Enfranchising Women Prior to the Nineteenth Amendment

420

Table 20.5 Potential Women Voters in States Enfranchising Women for Votes in Municipal Elections or on Tax and Bond Issues Prior to the Nineteenth Amendment (Exclusive of States Granting Full Suffrage to Women)

421

Table 20.6 Potential Women Voters in States Enfranchising Women to Vote in Elections Dealing with Schools prior to the Nineteenth Amendment (Exclusive of States Granting Full Suffrage to Women)

422

The Nineteenth Amendment: African American Women Suffrage Granted and Restricted in the South

424

Map 20.1 States and Territories that Fully Enfranchised Women prior to the Nineteenth Amendment

425

Table 20.7 Potential Women Voters in States that Enacted Statutes Permitting Women to Vote in Presidential Elections before the Nineteenth Amendment

426

Table 20.8 Distribution of African American Voters by Region and State, Census of 1910

427

Figure 20.1 Distribution of Eligible African American Women Voters by Region, 1910–1930

429

Table 20.9 Distribution of African American Voters by Region and State, Census of 1920

430

Table 20.10 Distribution of African American Voters by Region and State, Census of 1930

431

Table 20.11 Number and Percentage of African American Women Disenfranchised in the 1920 Presidential Election—The NAACP Investigations

434

Map 20.2 States and Cities in which the NAACP Investigated Disenfranchisement of African American Women in the 1920 Presidential Election

435

Table 20.12 1920 Voter Registration of African American Women (and Men) in Selected Cities of North Carolina

435

Table 20.13 African American Registered Voters in Jacksonville, Florida, by Gender, Marital Status, and Occupation: Paul Ortiz Data, 1920 437 Table 20.14 Summary of Election Results by County and Racial Majority for Superintendent of Public Instruction in Virginia, 1921

438

Summary and Conclusions on the Enfranchisement of African American Women

438

Notes 439

Chapter 21. The Electoral Revolt of African American Voters in 1920–1921 and Beyond

441

Motives and Strategies for African American Satellite Parties

442

The Roots and Rising of the Black and Tan Republicans

443

The African American Electoral Revolt in the 1920 Elections: State and National Elections

445

Table 21.1 Votes and Percentages for the Black and Tan Republican Candidates and Opposition Parties in Arkansas, Florida, Texas, and Virginia, 1920–1928

447

Table 21.2 Votes and Percentages for the Black and Tan Republican Candidates and Opposition Parties in Black and White Majority Counties, 1920–1921

448

The Longitudinal Voting Behavior of the Black and Tan Republicans: Mississippi and South Carolina

449

Table 21.3 Comparing the Republican Vote of the Black and Tans vs. Lily-Whites in Racial Majority Counties, 1920–1921 Table 21.4 Total and Factional Republican Vote in Mississippi for the Presidential Elections of 1928–1956 Figure 21.1 Black and Tan vs. Lily-White Vote Percentages for Republican Presidential Candidates in Mississippi, 1928–1956 Figure 21.2 Black and Tan vs. Lily-White Vote Percentages for Republican Presidential Candidates in African American Majority Counties of Mississippi, 1928–1956 Figure 21.3 Black and Tan vs. Lily-White Vote Percentages for Republican Presidential Candidates in White Majority Counties of Mississippi, 1928–1956 Figure 21.4 Black and Tan Vote Percentages for Republican Presidential Candidates in African American vs. White Majority Counties of Mississippi, 1928–1956 Table 21.5 Vote of Republican Factions in South Carolina for Selected Presidential, Senatorial, and Gubernatorial Elections, 1920–1952 Figure 21.5 Percentages of Republican Presidential Votes for Black and Tans vs. Lily-Whites in South Carolina, 1920, 1936, 1940, 1944, and 1952

450 451

Summary and Conclusions on the Electoral Revolt of the Black and Tan Republicans

456

Map 21.1 States with Black and Tan Gubernatorial and Senatorial Candidates in the African American Electoral Revolt of 1920–1921

457

452 452 453 453 454 455

Notes 457

VOLUME 2 Chapter 22. African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1920–1944

459

Legal Battles for African American Voting Rights

460

African American Voters in the Urban Areas of the South, 1920–1940s

461

Table 22.1 First Generation Voting Rights Cases Table 22.2 Total Votes and Percentages for Candidates in Three San Antonio Mayoral Elections, 1939–1941 Table 22.3 African American Votes and Percentages in the Mayoral Election of San Antonio, Texas, 1939 Table 22.4 African American Votes and Percentages in the Mayoral Election of San Antonio, Texas, 1941 Table 22.5 African American Votes and Percentages in the Mayoral Run-Off Election of San Antonio, Texas, 1941 Figure 22.1 African American and Other Votes in San Antonio, Texas, Mayoral Elections, 1939–1941 Table 22.6 Comparing Literate Voting-Age Black Population and Estimated Black Voting Population in Selected Cities and Counties of the Southern States, 1920 Table 22.7 Summary of Voting-Age Blacks and Voting Black Populations in Selected Cities and Counties of the Southern States, 1920

462 464 465 465 465 466 467 468

Table 22.8 Official Louisiana Voter Registration for the State by Race and for New Orleans African Americans, 1896–1928

468

Figure 22.2 Registered Black Voters in New Orleans as a Percent of Registered Black Voters in Louisiana, 1896–1928

469

Changing the Rules: The Elimination of the Poll Tax by Southern States

469

Map 22.1 Southern Cities and Urban Areas that Allowed the African American Electorate to Vote 1896–1930

470

Table 22.9 Southern States that Voted For or Against Repeal or Reduction of the Poll Tax, 1920–1963

471

Federal Elimination of the Poll Tax: Causes and Effects

473

Map 22.2 Southern States For and Against Repeal of the Poll Tax, 1920–1963

474

Figure 22.3 Results of State Referenda to Repeal or Reduce the Poll Tax, 1920–1963

475

Table 22.10 Analysis of the Vote in the House of Representatives on Final Passage of the Anti-Poll Tax Bills

475

Table 22.11 Analysis of the Vote in the Senate on Cloture Applicable to the Anti-Poll Tax Bills

476

Table 22.12 Ratification of the Twenty-Fourth Amendment by the Southern and Border States

476

Table 22.13 African American Voting-Age Population in the Southern States by Poll Tax Repeal, 1920s–1950s

478

Figure 22.4 African American Voting-Age Population and Southern States by Repeal of the Poll Tax, 1920s–1950s

478

Summary and Conclusions on African American Registration and Voting, 1920–1944

479

Notes 479

Chapter 23. African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965

481

The Legal Stages in Dismantling the Democratic Party’s White Primary on the Road to Re-enfranchisement

484

Diagram 23.1 The Legal Stages and Cases in Dismantling the Democratic Party’s White Primary: 1921–1953

485

The African American Electorate before the 1965 Voting Rights Act: An Empirical Overview and Case Study Portrait

487

Table 23.1 Estimated Number of African Americans Registered to Vote in the South, 1940–1956

488

Figure 23.1 Percentage Increase in African Americans Registered to Vote in the South, 1940–1956

488

Table 23.2 Estimated Number of African Americans Registered to Vote in the South before and after Smith v. Allwright, 1940–1947

489

Figure 23.2 Top Ten Counties of Alabama by Number of Registered African American Voters, 1956

489

Figure 23.3 Top Ten Counties of Alabama by Percent of Eligible Black Voters Registered to Vote, 1956

490

Figure 23.4 Percentage of Black Voter Registrations in the Top Ten Counties of Alabama by Eligible Black Voter Population, 1956

490

Figure 23.5 Scatter Plot of Eligible Black Voters by Percent of Eligible Black Voters Registed to Vote in Counties of Alabama, 1956

491

Figure 23.6 Number of and Percent Change in African American Voter Registrations in Arkansas, 1930–1956

492

Figure 23.7 Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote in Arkansas and Alabama by African American Share of County Population, 1958

492

Table 23.3 African American Major Party Registration in Florida, 1944–1956 493 Figure 23.8 Major Party African American Voter Registration in Florida, 1944–1956

493

Table 23.4 Top and Bottom Ten Counties of Florida in Number of African American Registered Voters in 1956, and Change Since 1946 494 Figure 23.9 Top Ten Counties of Florida in Number of Registered African American Voters in 1956 and Change from 1946 to 1956

494

Figure 23.10 Bottom Ten Counties of Florida in Number of Registered African American Voters in 1956 and Change from 1946 to 1956

495

Table 23.5 Purged Voters and Hypothetical Impact of African American Voters in Georgia by County, 1946 Gubernatorial Primary

496

Map 23.1 Counties Won by Talmadge Where Registered and Purged African American Voters Exceeded His Margin of Victory, 1946 Georgia Gubernatorial Primary

498

Table 23.6 African American Voter Registration in the State of Georgia and in the Cities of Atlanta and Macon, 1920–1964

499

Figure 23.11 African American Voter Registration in the State of Georgia and in the Cities of Atlanta and Macon, 1920–1964

500

Figure 23.12 Votes in Predominantly African American Precincts Ranked by Percent Turnout, Atlanta, Georgia, Mayoral Primary Election, May 18, 1957

500

Figure 23.13 African American Voter Registration in Louisiana, March 1940–October 1956

501

Figure 23.14 Number of Louisiana Parishes by Percentage of Registered African American Voters, 1956

501

Figure 23.15 Relation between African Americans in Parish Population and African American Voter Registration, Louisiana, 1956

502

Table 23.7 African American Voter Registration by Religio-Cultural Sections of Louisiana, 1956

502

Figure 23.16 African American Voting Behavior, Louisiana Democratic Primary, 1956

503

Figure 23.17 Percentage of African American Vote for the Long Ticket Inside and Outside New Orleans, Louisiana Democratic Primary, 1956

504

Figure 23.18 Percentage of African American Vote in New Orleans for the Long Ticket vs. Morrison Ticket, Louisiana Democratic Primary, 1956

504

Table 23.8 African American Voter Registration and Voting Behavior in Selected Counties of Mississippi, 1946 505 Table 23.9 African American Registration and Voting Behavior in African American Majority Counties of Mississippi, 1954

505

Table 23.10 African American Registration and Voting Behavior in White Majority Counties of Mississippi, 1954

506

Table 23.11 African American Voting Behavior in Selected Counties of Mississippi by Racial Majority, 1946–1954

507

Table 23.12 African American Voter Registration in North Carolina, 1940–1964

508

Table 23.13 Population, VAP, and African American Voter Registration in Sampled Counties of North Carolina, Grouped by Racial Majority, 1956–1958

508

Table 23.14 African American Voter Registration in Tuskegee, Alabama; Macon County, Alabama; Durham County, North Carolina; and Memphis, Tennessee, 1919–1966

510

Table 23.15 Votes for U.S. Senator in South Carolina by County, Ranked by the Progressive Democratic Party Vote, 1944

512

Table 23.16 African American Voter Registration in South Carolina, 1940–1964 514 Table 23.17 African American Voter Registration in South Carolina, by Racial Majority of the County, 1957–1958

515

Table 23.18 African American Voters in Tennessee, 1940–1962 516 Figure 23.19 Number of Eligible and Registered African American Voters in Tennessee, 1940–1952

517

Figure 23.20 Regional Distribution of African American Registered Voters in Texas, 1956

517

Figure 23.21 Percentage of Registered African Americans in Texas Who Voted, by Urban Status, 1956

518

Figure 23.22 Percentage of Registered African Americans Who Voted in Selected Urban Counties of Texas, 1956

518

Map 23.2 African American Voting and Poll Tax Payment in Selected Urban Counties of Texas, 1956

519

Table 23.19 African American Voter Registration in Sampled Counties of Texas, Grouped by Racial Majority Populations, 1956

520

Figure 23.23 Distribution of African American Registered Voters in Cities and Counties of Virginia, 1952 and 1956

521

Table 23.20 Comparison of African American Voter Registration with African American Population and Literacy, Virginia, 1920–1930 521 Table 23.21 African American Voter Registration in Sampled Counties of Virginia, Grouped by Racial Majority Populations, 1958

522

African American Voting Behavior in the 1952 and 1956 Presidential Elections

523

The Rise of Federal Election Statistics on African American Voters, 1959, 1961, 1963, and 1965

523

Table 23.22 Vote of African American Precincts in Southern Cities, Presidential Elections 1952 and 1956

524

Map 23.3 Non-White Population by County in the Southern and Border States, 1950

525

Map 23.4 Non-White Population in the Southern and Border States, 1950

526



Table 23.23 Attempted and Accepted African American Voter Registrations in Macon County, Alabama, 1951–1958 526 Table 23.24 African American Population and Voter Registration in African American Majority Counties of the Southern States, 1958

528

Figure 23.24 Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote Compared to African American Population in African American Majority Counties in the Southern States, 1958

528

Figure 23.25 Percentage of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote Compared to African American Percentage of Total Population in the Southern States, 1958 Figure 23.26 Number of African American Voter Registrations in the South by State, 1956 and 1962 Table 23.25 Voter Registration Statistics by County in Mississippi, 1962 and 1964

529 530 531

Using the Commission on Civil Rights Reports to Analyze the V. O. Key Thesis

532

Table 23.26 Percentage of African Americans in County Populations of Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi Compared to Percentage of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote, 1958

533

Figure 23.27 Percentage of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote by Percentage of African Americans in County Populations of Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi, 1958

534

Table 23.27 Percentage of African Americans in County Populations of Florida and Georgia Compared to Percentage of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote, 1958

534

Figure 23.28 Percentage of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote by Percentage of African Americans in County Populations of Florida and Georgia, 1958

535

Table 23.28 Percentage of African Americans in County Populations of Louisiana and Texas Compared to Percentage of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote, 1956, 1958, and 1959

536

Figure 23.29 Percentage of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote by African American Share of County Populations, Louisiana (1956 and 1959) and Texas (1958)

536

Table 23.29 Percentage of African Americans in County Populations of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia Compared to Percentage of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote, 1958

537

Figure 23.30 Percentage of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote by African American Share of County Populations in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, 1958

537

Map 23.5 African American Voting Behavior in Selected African American Majority Counties, 1950

538

Table 23.30 Voting Behavior of African Americans in Selected African American Majority Counties, 1950 539 Table 23.31 African American Voter Registration in Selected Louisiana Parishes, Using Permanent and Periodic Registrations, March 1956–November 1958

540

Conclusions on African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965

541

Notes 542

Chapter 24. Rare African American Registration and Voting Data: Episodic Events from the 1920s–1964 545 The Nature and Types of African American Electoral Events, 1915–1964

547

Table 24.1 Place and Type of Rare Electoral Events in the South and a Border State, 1896–1964

547

Map 24.1 States and Counties of Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1896–1964

548

Table 24.2 African American Statewide Voter Registration Organizations, 1940s–1960s

549

The Socio-Demographic Characteristics of African American Voters: Registrants in Savannah, Georgia: 1915–1916, 1920–1921, and 1924–1926

550

Document 24.1 Original “Oath of Voter” Documents from Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia

551

Document 24.2 Original “Oath of Voter” Documents from Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia

552

Table 24.3 African American Voter Registration by Gender in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1915–1926

553

Table 24.4 Oath of Voter Statistics for African American Voters in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1915–1926

554

Figure 24.1 Percentage Distribution of African American Registered Voters by Year and Gender in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1915–1926

555

Figure 24.2 Number of African American Registered Voters by District in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1920

556

Figure 24.3 Age Distribution of African American Voters Registered in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1915–1926

556

Table 24.5 Oath of Voter Statistics for African American Voters in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1915

557

Table 24.6 Oath of Voter Statistics for African American Voters in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1916

557

Table 24.7 Oath of Voter Statistics for African American Voters in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1920

558

Table 24.8 Oath of Voter Statistics for African American Voters in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1921

559

Table 24.9 Oath of Voter Statistics for African American Voters in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1924

559

Table 24.10 Oath of Voter Statistics for African American Voters in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1925

560

Table 24.11 Oath of Voter Statistics for African American Voters in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1926

561

Table 24.12 African American Voter Registrations and Presidential Election Results in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1916, 1920, and 1924

561

African American Farmers’ Voting Behavior in the Carolinas’ Cotton and Tobacco Referenda, 1938–1946

563

Table 24.13 States and Counties of the Cotton Control Program Referendum, 1938

564

Table 24.14 The States and Counties in which Ralph Bunche Field Investigator George Stoney Conducted Interviews on the 1938 AAA Cotton Referenda

566

Table 24.15 Regional and State Summary of Cotton Referendum Votes, March 12, 1938 567 Table 24.16 Voter Participation in the Cotton and Tobacco Referenda of North Carolina and South Carolina, 1938–1946 568 Table 24.17 Populations of Wilson County, North Carolina, and Darlington County, South Carolina, 1940 568 Table 24.18 Distribution of Farm Operators by Race and Tenure in Wilson County, North Carolina, and Darlington County, South Carolina, 1940

568

Table 24.19 Numbers of Farm Operators and Interviewed Farmers in Wilson County, North Carolina, and Darlington County, South Carolina

569

Table 24.20 Participation in the AAA Referenda by Tenure and Race in Wilson County, North Carolina, and Darlington County, South Carolina

570

The African American Statewide Candidates in Louisiana’s 1952 and 1956 Elections

570

Table 24.21 Tabulation of Interview Responses to the Question of White Farmers’ Feelings About Black Farmers Voting

571

Table 24.22 Tabulation of Responses by White Farmers in Wilson County, North Carolina, and Darlington County, South Carolina

572

Table 24.23 Tabulation of Interview Responses Regarding African American Voting in Wilson County, North Carolina, and Darlington County, South Carolina

573

Table 24.24 Democratic Party Primary Election for Governor of Louisiana, January 15, 1952

575



Table 24.25 Democratic Party Primary Election for Attorney General of Louisiana, January 17, 1956

578

The Mississippi “Freedom Elections” for Governor, Congress, and the Presidency, 1963 and 1964

579

Table 24.26 Comparison of Votes for Parker and Amedee in the Louisiana Democratic Primaries and African American Voter Registrations in 1956

580

Table 24.27 Pioneering African American Congressional Candidates of Mississippi, 1962

582

Map 24.2 Counties of the 1st and 3rd Congressional Districts of Mississippi, 1962

583







Table 24.28 Freedom Vote of Mississippi Cities Cast with State Affidavits in the 1963 Democratic Primary

584



Table 24.29 Democratic Primary Election for Governor of Mississippi and the Freedom Vote, 1963

585

Table 24.30 Democratic Run-Off Election for Governor of Mississippi and the Freedom Vote, 1963

587



Table 24.31 Freedom Vote and Official Results of the 1963 Mississippi Gubernatorial Election, by Racial Majority Counties and Ranked by the Freedom Vote

589

Table 24.32 Comparing the Mississippi Freedom Vote of 1963 with African American Voter Registrations in 1962 and 1964

593

Table 24.33 Official Primary and Unofficial General Election Votes for Freedom Vote Candidates in Mississippi, 1964

595

Table 24.34 Unofficial Results for the Mississippi Freedom Vote in the 1964 Presidential Election

595

Rare Data in a Border State: West Virginia

596

Table 24.35 Counties of West Virginia Ranked by Number of African American Registered Voters, 1870

596

Table 24.36 Number of African American Eligible Voters by County in West Virginia, 1920

597

Table 24.37 Voting for African American Candidates to the West Virginia State Legislature, 1896–1952

599

Map 24.3 Counties of African American Candidates for the West Virginia State Legislature, 1896–1952

600

Summary and Conclusions on Rare African American Registration and Voting Data

601





Notes 601

Chapter 25. The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Expansions and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006

605

The Rise of the Voting Rights Issue to National Prominence

607

The Legislative Voting Behavior of Southern Members of Congress on Voting Rights Acts, 1957–2006

609

Table 25.1 Congressional Votes for the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964 and for the Voting Rights Acts of 1965, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006

610

Figure 25.1 Number of Northern and Southern Democrats Voting For and Against Civil Rights and Voting Rights Legislation in the House of Representatives, 1957–2006

612

Figure 25.2 Number of Northern and Southern Democrats Voting For and Against Civil Rights and Voting Rights Legislation in the Senate, 1957–2006

612

Figure 25.3 Number of Southern Democrats Voting For and Against Civil Rights and Voting Rights Legislation in the House and Senate, 1957–2006

613

Figure 25.4 Percentage of Northern and Southern Democrats Voting For Civil Rights and Voting Rights Legislation in the House and Senate, 1957–2006

614

Figure 25.5 Number of Southern Republicans Voting For and Against Civil Rights and Voting Rights Legislation in the House and Senate, 1957–2006

614

Figure 25.6 Percentage of Southern Republicans Voting For and Against Civil Rights and Voting Rights Legislation in the House and Senate, 1957–2006

615

Table 25.2 Presidents and Republican Party Strength during Passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006

615

Assessing the 1965 Voting Rights Act: Reports of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

616

Table 25.3 Commission on Civil Rights and Academic Studies and Reports on the Impact of the 1965 Voting Rights Act

616

Table 25.4 Comparing African American Voter Registrations in Counties under Federal Examination for the Voting Rights Act with Nearby Counties Not Examined

617

Map 25.1 Counties Selected by the United States Commission on Civil Rights for Evaluation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965

618

Figure 25.7 Comparing African American Voter Registrations in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi Immediately after Passage of the Voting Rights Act

619

Table 25.5 Cumulative Totals of Federal Examinations for Voter Registration in Selected Southern States, by County, Following Passage of the Voting Rights Act, August 6–October 30, 1965

620

Figure 25.8 Cumulative Voter Registration Applicants Listed under Voting Rights Examining by Race Immediately Following Passage of the Voting Rights Act

621

Figure 25.9 Cumulative Voter Registration Applicants Rejected under Voting Rights Examining by Race Immediately Following Passage of the Voting Rights Act

621

Table 25.6 Voter Registration Totals in Selected Counties of Selected Southern States Following Passage of the Voting Rights Act, August 6–October 30, 1965

621

Map 25.2 New Voters Registered by Race Following Implementation of the Voting Rights Act, August 6–October 30, 1965

622

Figure 25.10 Accepted Voter Registration Applications in Selected Southern States by Race Following Passage of the Voting Rights Act, 1965

622

Figure 25.11 Rejected Voter Registration Applications in Selected Southern States by Race Following Passage of the Voting Rights Act, 1965

623

Table 25.7 Gains in Ratio of Registered Voters to Eligible Voters by Race before and after the Voting Rights Act of 1965

625

Figure 25.12 Percentage Point Gains in Ratio of Registered Voters to Eligible Voters in Examiner Counties by Race before and after the Voting Rights Act of 1965

626

Figure 25.13 Percentage Point Gains in Ratio of African American Registered Voters to Eligible Voters before and after the Voting Rights Act of 1965

627

Table 25.8 Impact of Federal Examiners for the Voting Rights Act of 1965: Comparison of Voter Registrations by State in Examiner and Non-Examiner Counties

627

Figure 25.14 Impact of the Voting Rights Act on African American Voter Registrations: A Comparison of Examined and Non-Examined Counties, 1965

628

Figure 25.15 Numbers of Counties with VRA Federal Examiners and Persons Listed for Registration, 1974

629

Table 25.9 Voter Turnout in the Presidential Elections of 1964, 1968, and 1972 in Southern States Covered by the Voting Rights Act 629 Figure 25.16 Percentage Point Changes in Voter Turnout for the Presidential Elections of 1964, 1968, and 1972 in Southern States Covered by the Voting Rights Act

630

Table 25.10 Estimated Gap in Voter Registration between Blacks and Whites in Southern States Covered by the Voting Rights Act, 1971–1972

630

Table 25.11 Voter Registration Shares by Race in Southern States Covered by the Voting Rights Act, 1971–1972

631

Figure 25.17 Percentage Point Difference in Voting Age Population Registered to Vote among Blacks and Whites in Southern States Covered by the Voting Rights Act, 1971–1972

631

The Long-Term Impact of the 1965 Voting Rights Act: The Fourth Report, 1981

631

Table 25.12 Counties Designated for Federal Examiners and Number of Persons Listed by Examiners, 1980 Table 25.13 Election Observation Assignments under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 1966–1980 Table 25.14 Percentage of Voting Age Population Reported Registered to Vote in Jurisdictions Covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, by Race and Ethnicity, 1976 Table 25.15 Voting Age Population and Voter Registration in Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina, 1971–1980

632 633

The Major Literature on the 1965 Voting Rights Act and Renewals

635

Table 25.16 Categorization of the Major Literature on the 1965 Voting Rights Act

636

Summary and Conclusions on the Voting Rights Act and Its Renewals

643

Table 25.17 Counties in the 1963 Department of Justice Lawsuit, Examined and Observed under the Voting Rights Act, as of 1980

644

634 634

Notes 645

Chapter 26. Felon and Ex-Felon Disenfranchisement: The Newest Technique of Vote Dilution and Candidate Diminution

649

The Historical Genesis of African American Felon Disenfranchisement: The Slave and Black Codes

650

Before Mass Incarceration: Segregation as a Criminalization System

652

Table 26.1 Number of African American and White Prisoners Sent to State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories, 1939 Table 26.2 Number of African American and White Male Felony Prisoners Sent to State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories, 1939 Table 26.3 Rank Ordered Distribution of Arrests by Race According to Type of Offense, 1940

654

African American Felons and Ex-Felons During Mass Incarceration

655

654 655

Figure 26.1 Rank Order Distribution of Non-Violent Offense Arrests of African Americans, 1940 656 Table 26.4 Statehood, Changes to Felon Disenfranchisement Laws, and Comparison to Adoption of Universal White Suffrage 657 Table 26.5 Disenfranchised Felons by Region and State, 2004 659 Table 26.6 Disenfranchised African American Felons by Region and State, 2004 660 Table 26.7 Race and Gender of Persons Convicted of Felonies in State Courts, by Offense, 2006 662 Table 26.8 Types of Felony Sentences Imposed in State Courts, by Race of Felons and Offense, 2006 662 Table 26.9 Mean Length (in Months) of Felony Sentences Imposed in State Courts, by Race, Gender, and Offense, 2006 663 Table 26.10 Corrections and Felony Disenfranchised Populations by Region and State, 2004–2008 664 Figure 26.2 Number of African Americans Disenfranchised by Felony Convictions in the South and Border States, 2004 666 Figure 26.3 African Americans by Felony Disenfranchisement in the South and Border States as a Share of the Total African American Population in the State, 2004 666 Figure 26.4 African Americans by Felony Disenfranchisement in the South and Border States as a Share of the Total Felony Disenfranchised Population in the State, 2004 667

National Coalition on Black Voter Participation (NCBVP) Report

667

Table 26.11 Procedure for the Restoration of Voting Rights to Ex-Felons and Ex-Convicts in Selected States, 1995 669

Summary and Conclusions on Felon Disenfranchisement

670

Notes 671

Chapter 27. African American Voting Rights in a Historic Presidential Election: The 2008 Election of President Barack Obama

673

Invoking the Voting Rights Act in the 2008 Presidential Election: The Role of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

676

Table 27.1 Federal Election Observations (1966–1980) and Federal Examiner and Observer Assignments (July 1, 1982–June 30, 2004)

678

Table 27.2 Statutory Provisions Enforced by the Voting Section of the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, Fiscal Years 2001–2007

679

U.S. Senator Barack Obama, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and Other Voting Rights Legislation

680

Demography and the 2008 Election: State- and Individual-Level Results

682

The Long-Term Influence of Disenfranchisement on the 2008 Obama Presidential Election

685

Table 27.3 Number and Percentage of African American Majority Counties Lost during the Disenfranchisement Era until 2000 and the Relationship to Coverage by the Voting Rights Act

686

Map 27.1 Past and Present African American Majority Counties in the South

687

Figure 27.1 Coverage of States by the Voting Rights Act and Number of African American Majority Counties Lost

688

Figure 27.2 Coverage of States by the Voting Rights Act and Percentage of African American Majority Counties Lost

689

Table 27.4 2008 Presidential Election in the Southern and Border States

689

Figure 27.3 Difference in Votes between Obama and McCain in the South, Presidential Election of 2008

691

Figure 27.4 Percentage Point Difference in the Vote between Obama and McCain in the South, Presidential Election of 2008

691

Table 27.5 Counties Won by the Democratic Party by Racial Majority, U.S. Presidential Elections 2000–2008

692

Figure 27.5 Percent of Racial Majority Counties Won in the South and Border States by the Democratic Party, 2000–2008

694

Table 27.6 Republican Party Vote and Percent of Total Vote in Racial Majority Counties of the South and Border States in U.S. Presidential Elections, 2000–2008

695

Figure 27.6 Percent of White Majority Counties in the South and Border States Won by the Republican Party, 2000–2008

697

Figure 27.7 Number of Votes Gained or Lost in White Majority Counties Won by the Republican Party in the South and Border States, 2004–2008

698

Table 27.7 2008 Presidential Election in the Southern States by Past and Present Black Majority Counties

699

Table 27.8 2008 Presidential Election in the Southern States by Past and Present Black Majority Counties and by Counties in the VRA Implementation

700

Table 27.9 Projecting Same Support in Former Black Majority Counties as in Current Black Majority Counties Won by Obama in the South in 2008 Presidential Election

702

The Short-Term Influence of Disenfranchisement on the 2008 Obama Presidential Election

703

Table 27.10 Comparing the Actual Outcome of the 2008 Presidential Election in the South with a Model that Awards the Votes of Former Black Majority Counties to Barack Obama 703 Table 27.11 Support for Barack Obama in the South by Race and Coverage under the Voting Rights Act, 2008 Presidential Election 704 Table 27.12 Percentage of the Vote for Obama by Region and Race in the 2008 Democratic Party Presidential Primary Elections 704 Table 27.13 Percentage of the Vote for Obama in the Presidential Election of 2008 by Region, Race, and Coverage under the Voting Rights Act in the South 705 Table 27.14 Percentage Gain or Loss in White Support for Obama From the 2008 Democratic Party Presidential Primary Elections to the General Election 706 Figure 27.8 Percentage Point Gain or Loss in White Support for Obama in the South From the 2008 Democratic Party Primary Elections to the General Election 707

Summary and Conclusions on the 2008 Obama Election

707

Notes 708

Chapter 28. Summary and Conclusions

711

King’s Voting Rights Activism and Policy Agenda: An Additional Perspective on the Relationship between Civil and Voting Rights

712

Diagram 28.1 The Voting Rights Activism of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Public Policy Results, 1957–1965

715

The Origins of Voting Rights Activists and Activism as Variables in the Struggle for African American Suffrage Rights

715

Geography (Political Context) as a Variable in the Struggle for African American Suffrage Rights

716

The Origin of Opponents and Opposition as a Variable in the Struggle for African American Suffrage Rights

717

The Origin of Party Competition as a Variable in the Struggle for African American Suffrage Rights

720

The Origins of Public Sentiment and Mass Public Opinion as a Variable in the Struggle for African American Suffrage Rights

721

Figure 28.1 Percent of the Vote Against and For African American Suffrage Rights in Three Statewide Referenda of New York, 1846, 1860, and 1869

722

Figure 28.2 Percent of the Vote For or Against the Imposition or Repeal of Poll Taxes in Three Statewide Referenda of Texas, 1902, 1949, and 1963

723

Map 28.1 Southern States Holding Referenda on Poll Taxes and African American Suffrage Rights, 1900–1963

723

The Origins of States and Localities as a Variable in the Struggle for African American Suffrage Rights

724

The Courts and Liberal Jurisprudence as a Variable in the Struggle for African American Suffrage Rights

725

African American Election Data as a Variable in the Struggle for African American Suffrage Rights

726

Conclusion of The African American Electorate: A Statistical History 726 Diagram 28.2 The Empirically Based Determinative Variables in the African American Voting Rights Struggle

727

Notes 727

Appendices 731 Introductory Remarks

731

Cumulative Bibliography

903

Copyright Acknowledgments

917

Index I-1

Preface The Genesis of This Work in the Journeys of Its Authors

T

he three authors of this study come from different disciplinary backgrounds. In addition to collaborating on a previous book of county-level presidential election data,1 each of the authors had a different journey to this project. To share their stories is to illuminate both how this study came to be and the individuals whose prior work led to its creation.

Hanes Walton, Jr. Hanes Walton, Jr., the senior co-author on this project, initially heard about African American voters in his hometown of Athens, Georgia, during the 1950s. At the time, he was in high school, and although the White Primary had been outlawed in Georgia, for African Americans to register and vote was still difficult in this city. The state had habitually ignored and defied the Supreme Court in its ruling of Smith v. Allwright in 1944 and delayed their response in defiance of the federal district court ruling in King v. Chapman, a case brought in Georgia in 1946 to outlaw the White Primary there. The African American electorate was—to put it mildly—discouraged from registering and voting. One example of this discouragement and intimidation was the terrible lynching of several African Americans in Monroe, Georgia, when they had neglected to disperse from a sidewalk during the 1946 gubernatorial election. Whispered discussions carried information that well before the 1944 ruling a few handpicked African Americans were allowed to vote. In the research of co-author Walton for his Black Politics book in 1972, he utilized a master’s thesis that had found that “in 1930, for example, thirty blacks voted in the municipal election in Athens, Georgia,” despite the fact that in 1908 African Americans had been disenfranchised from voting in the state.2 Some of those in this group usually spoke at Walton’s church, Ebenezer Baptist Church, West, on Men’s Day and Youth Day about how leading whites in Athens liked their demeanor, political attitude, and behavior and rewarded them with this right. These chosen African American voters would close their addresses with the conclusion that other African American citizenry of the congregations could achieve the same thing if their example was followed of so-called circumspect civic behavior. The official data source, the Clarke County voter registration and voting records, contains very few references to the African American electorate in Athens, Georgia, during and before

1930.3 Of course, at the time Walton did not realize that this data and documentation of these experiences were quietly being omitted from most academic and scholarly studies. At this time Walton was unable to register to vote due to his age, although Georgia was then the only southern state where an eighteenyear-old could register. Walton’s first year at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, 1959, coincided with the beginning of the desegregation sit-ins. Professor of Political Science Robert H. Brisbane in his Introduction to Social Science course discussed with his class the electoral power of the African American electorate in the “balance-of-power” voting strategy as well as such African American political innovations as black political parties.4 During Walton’s second year Professor Brisbane in his American Government classes noted the numerous ways that the African American electorate had been creative and imaginative both in trying to vote and in trying to evade, avoid, and bypass white efforts to disenfranchise them. In his lectures and books Professor Brisbane offered places where data existed about these innovative efforts.5 Walton began his own voting rights activism in the 1962 congressional election in Atlanta, Georgia, concerning the Democratic incumbent James Davis, a rabid segregationist. Davis was in charge of the House of Representatives’ District of Columbia Committee and ensured that the national capitol was tightly segregated, even though this had become an international embarrassment because black ambassadors and diplomats from third-world countries had been forced to endure rigid racial segregation. The African American communities of D.C. and Atlanta protested against Congressman Davis, and the Kennedy administration decided to try to unseat him in hopes that the next chairman would not continue with these tradition-based segregation policies. The challenger to Congressman Davis was a moderate liberal Georgian, Charles Weltner. In order to assist in Davis’s defeat, in a newly reapportioned congressional district, many Morehouse students, including Walton, were recruited to mobilize the African American electorate through door-to-door canvassing and driving African American voters to the polls. This initial “get-out-the-vote” effort succeeded, and Charles Weltner upset the long-serving segregationist to represent this congressional district in Georgia.6

xxx

The African American Electorate

Professor Tobe Johnson arrived during Walton’s third year at Morehouse. Johnson’s Public Administration class provided Walton and his classmates with vividly detailed analyses of public and private bureaucracies and, thereby, state and county voter registration administrative offices in the South; the class also showed how regional and individual personnel policies of these agencies permitted their prejudicial biases to limit and circumscribe the democratic implementation of the suffrage laws of the nation. Johnson’s careful analysis in his lectures on public bureaucracies, especially in this era of the 1960s, was both poignant and significant, as his students tried to make sense of the regional systemic reaction to the civil and voting rights laws of 1957 and 1960 and the 1963 Freedom Vote Campaign and its emphasis on voter registration in Mississippi.7 Thus, in this period of significant African American voting rights activists and activism, one needed to know how values and beliefs of the dominant political behavioral culture influenced a scientific discipline, which declared that values and beliefs had nothing to do with understanding political behavior and public bureaucracies. Professor Johnson provided the necessary intellectual insights.8 After graduating from Morehouse in 1963, Walton began a master’s degree at Atlanta University. In his first year, Professor Samuel DuBois Cook offered a class on the American Political Process, including an astounding lecture on the relationship between the African American electorate in Georgia and the Tom Watson–led Populist Party there and in the nation. It not only was personally electrifying for Walton but also became the motivation for his first book, The Negro in Third Party Politics,9 and for this joint effort. Professor Cook not only brought the African American electorate off the intellectual sidelines in this course but also showed the roles and functions that they played in the political process via their political innovations.10 According to Professor Cook, these roles and functions could be understood through the rare empirical data on the African American electorate, which in turn offered new perspectives on the American political experience. Another major intellectual contribution of Professor Cook was his use of stellar and classic works in the discipline, including those of V.O. Key, Jr. (e.g., his Southern Politics and his textbook, Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups), and those of Professor Key’s mentor, Professor Harold Gosnell (e.g., his Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago). In both authors’ works were new data sources on the African American electorate. Professor Key’s work Southern Politics in State and Nation contained a chapter on the Negro Republicans, particularly the Black-and-Tan Republican satellite parties, while Professor Gosnell’s work had Appendix Table XVIII, which listed all of the pioneering African American state legislators of Illinois from 1876 through 1932. Also assisting Professor Key was another political scientist, Alexander Heard, who went on to gather and publish election returns data on some of the African American political parties and independent candidacies that Professor Cook brought to our attention.11 Here was previously unseen and unused empirical data on the African American electorate. In addition to providing literature that covered little known factual information, Professor Cook left his students with a terrific moral compass to guide them through the civil rights movement, led by

his Morehouse classmate, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who had by then become a national figure. At the doctoral level, Walton’s experience at Howard University included department chairman and Professor Emmett Dorsey and Professor Harold Gosnell, as well as the late Robert Martin and Bernard Fall. At the University of Chicago, Professor Gosnell had taught not only Key but Martin as well and became a co-author with Martin of works on African American elected officials. While several things stand out in this intellectual sojourn, one of particular mention is Professor Gosnell’s discussions and dialogues about the use of homogeneous precinct analysis in studying the African American electorate, which led to its innovative use in this volume. Professor Walton gratefully acknowledges his intellectual debt to these giants in the study of electoral politics and especially to their expertise on the African American electorate when few were paying attention or believed the topic to be worthy of intellectual concern. Their talents, skills, and publications have clearly helped make this volume possible. And Walton would also like to acknowledge his two co-authors, Sherman C. Puckett and Donald R. Deskins, Jr. Having co-authored an earlier volume with them, Walton knew that their superb computer and mapping skills would be essential to producing this volume on the African American electorate, and he is quite pleased that they agreed to join him on this major breakthrough study.

Sherman C. Puckett Co-author Sherman C. Puckett also has southern roots that helped shape him, having grown up in Nashville, Tennessee. He began his collegiate experience at the historic Fisk University, where he majored in mathematics and American history. Despite the pride within his community for classmates who had achieved an undefeated high school basketball season and state championship, there was a certain degree of timidity, unexplained at least to Puckett, surrounding the issue of civil rights. In Puckett’s first year at Fisk, an unannounced visit to the campus by African American activist Stokely Carmichael was met with hostility by school administrators. At the end of his second and last year at Fisk, the assassination of the great civil rights leader, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., induced rioting in African American communities throughout the nation, including Nashville, leading to nighttime curfews for all residents of the community surrounding Fisk University and Tennessee State University, a couple of miles away. The next year Puckett transferred to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor to study electrical and computer engineering. After his first year Puckett had one of his most important experiences while at Michigan when he learned computer programming from, and worked for, engineering Professor Brice Carnahan. Like many other African American students, Puckett became politicized by isolation as a member within an “out” group at Michigan. In his senior year, just when the one protest in which he participated had seemed to fail, a large host of other students joined in an unforgettably dramatic fashion and the university accepted the single demand for increased diversity.

Two of his most rewarding experiences as an engineering student bracketed his senior year. After a period at Cummins Engine Company in Indiana (running a computer laboratory for testing diesel engines), Puckett returned to graduate school in Ann Arbor. Several professors at Michigan left strong impressions upon Puckett: Professor Gary Fowler (statistics), Professor Donald R. Deskins, Jr. (sociology), one of very few African American professors on campus at that time, and Professor John Nystuen (geography). And Thomas Anton, a professor of political science, taught that African American politics had become a practical reality in some of the largest urban areas such as Atlanta, Cleveland, New York, Los Angeles, and Detroit. After earning a PhD in urban and regional planning, Puckett was employed as a political appointee of Detroit Mayor Coleman Young. Puckett had previously assisted a fellow graduate student in conducting and analyzing political surveys during the mayor’s first reelection. As an appointee Puckett also traversed the city on patrols against the arsons of “Devil’s Night,” in sweeps to encourage citizens to come forward for census counts, and, of course, to support various political campaigns. Professor Deskins suggested to Puckett that he could present survey results geographically with choropleth maps of Detroit. Rather than specialized commercial software, only a little computer programming was necessary to produce the spatial polygons and patterns that represented Detroit’s twenty-four community districts. Like the continental United States, the shape of Detroit overall fits comfortably on the screen or landscaped on a sheet of paper. The mayor was thrilled with the results. Convincing the Detroit Elections Commission to report city election results using maps has not been, to this point, successful. The Commission did eventually produce a digital map of its more than 600 precincts, but Puckett could not persuade the then-director to share his vision of the value of showing election results on the map, immediately after any election and to the general public. The current mayor has announced a policy of triage for the delivery of services to the neighborhoods of Detroit, a city with a greater than 80% African American population, and in the fall election of 2011, the city charter was amended to henceforth elect a super-majority of city council members by district.12 Perhaps that outcome coupled with reception of this work will convince the Commission to help its citizenry to realize the potential of all of its neighborhood electorates and even to preserve the legacy of its past elections in the records that it should and can retain, organize, and exploit with current and future mapping technologies.

Donald R. Deskins, Jr. The third co-author of this study, Donald R. Deskins, Jr., is a noted former athlete as well as continuing scholar. His journey to this effort has been long and eventful. He was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and he served in the United States Marine Corps during the Korean War. He was later a member of both the All-Marine and Michigan Wolverine football teams, and he was a first-round draft choice and member of the Oakland

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Raiders professional football team. He returned to the University of Michigan to earn his baccalaureate degree, master’s degree, and PhD and to become a professor of geography and sociology. To these accomplishments he has added several academic publications and awards, as well as the mentorship of numerous former students to noteworthy professional lives and academia. This is the third collaboration of Walton, Puckett, and Deskins. The second to appear, which began as their first, is the forthcoming Presidential Elections 1789–2008, to be published by the University of Michigan Press. We credit Deskins as the inspiration for that project and for bringing us together as a team. His vision and what both Walton and Puckett learned from it have made this current project possible.

Acknowledgments In closing Professor Walton would like to acknowledge the assistance of his sons, Brandon M. Walton and Brent M. Walton, Professor Josephine Allen of Cornell and Binghamton University, his typist and all-around troubleshooter, Margaret Hunter, and diagram maker Greta Blake for their numerous efforts in data collection and continual encouragement during this more than three-decade research and writing process. In particular, Brent Walton made several special trips to the Illinois State Archives to collect the election return data as well as the names of those African American state legislators who came after the ones listed by Professor Gosnell. Moreover, both Brent Walton and all three co-authors would like to acknowledge the excellent help and assistance of the Director of the Illinois State Archives, Dr. David A. Joens, in gathering this rare data. Another gatherer of rare election data, on the two state elections in the Louisiana State Archives, was a former student and native of Louisiana, Tanya Isom. On this same matter, Walton would like to acknowledge the assistance of Archivist Debra Basham in his data-collecting trip to the West Virginia Division of Culture and History in Charleston. At the University of Michigan graduate library, Multicultural Studies Librarian Charles Ransom was of immense help in tracking down fugitive books, monographs, and documents on the African American electorate. Ransom’s great skills and talent in ferreting out vital background works was certainly much appreciated over the three decades of research. He was always gracious in his help and assistance. In addition to Ransom, the rare book and manuscript division in the Hatcher Graduate Library had the complete issues of the elusive and short-lived newspaper, Mississippi Free Press, which contained county-level “Freedom Vote” election return data for the 1963 statewide election in Mississippi. African American voting rights activists chose their own gubernatorial candidates to run in this election. After two trips and numerous written queries to the state of Mississippi, said data was not collected by the Secretary of State nor does it exist in the State Archives, simply because it was not official data. Most books, articles, and doctoral dissertations on this election merely mention grand totals but do not give a countyby-county breakdown. The librarians in the rare book and manuscript division were quite helpful in reading and copying this fragile and rare data. As a consequence of this extant newspaper,

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The African American Electorate

readers will now have easy access to this data. At the University of Michigan Buhr Library storage facility reading room, two individuals deserve mention for their excellent assistance, Andrew Perez, Information Resources Senior Assistant, and Anne Elias, Information Resources Assistant Intern. Besides these individuals, Professor Walton would like to acknowledge his brother, Thomas N. Walton, and his always lovely wife and children, who provided kind words of support and great meals; cousins Edna and Pope Lane and Maxie, Katie, and Geneva Foster. These are a just a few of the people to whom the authors are grateful for assistance with this study. Dr. Puckett would like to acknowledge first of all the help and assistance of his wife, Cheryl, for her encouragement, love, support, and patience. She helped him with typing the input of several large data sets and she has been very tolerant of his sometimes working until the early hours of the morning. He is also grateful to the Boston Athenaeum for the sale of the model constitution for branches of the National Equal Rights League, the cover of which is presented in Chapter 11; to the many state archives, historical societies, libraries, and legislative organizations that are acknowledged in Chapter 19 for providing information on their earliest elected African American legislators; and to his co-authors, Professors Hanes Walton, Jr., and Donald R. Deskins, Jr., for the honor of working alongside them and allowing him to be a part of this journey and accomplishment. Each of the co-authors who signed a contract in August 2006 to write this two-volume work would like to express their sincere appreciation to the individuals who lent their skills, talents, and brilliant insights to this pioneering work and made it possible to complete it in such an informative and scholarly manner. Of the CQ Press acquisitions editors with whom we worked, Mary Carpenter assisted us in the initial overall conceptualization of the work. Later, when she took maternity leave, our new editor, January Layman-Wood, with telephone calls, emails, lunches, and personal conversations guided the work with wonderful patience and insight through several editors and organizational transformations. With her help David Arthur assisted us on the project through several chapters, and in 2009 he was joined by Professor Steven Danver, who provided diligent assistance and editorial changes through the end of the summer. Next came our final development editor, John Martino, who spent the most time with us and produced careful editorial work on both the structure and organization of the two volumes as well as the narrative, tabular, and map presentations. His skillful hands and talented eyes helped us develop a comprehensive bibliography and clear source notes for all of the visual statistical presentations. And most importantly, he made sure that the narrative and the visual statistical work reenforced and effectively complemented each other. This was quite important in a subject matter area where so much of the extant literature and election data was so fragmentary and sketchy. Finally, the work reached the copyediting stage, and CQ Press and SAGE provided us with production editor Gwenda Larsen, project editor Laureen Gleason, and a fine copy editor, Jay Powers.

Their judicious editing, production capabilities, and cooperation helped us reach our deadline with a quite polished manuscript. We salute each and every one of these outstanding individuals. We could not have asked to work with a better group of people. Hanes Walton, Jr., University of Michigan Sherman C. Puckett, University of Michigan Donald R. Deskins, Jr., University of Michigan

Notes   1. Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming).   2. Quoted in Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Politics: A Theoretical and Structural Analysis (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1972), p. 33.   3. A detailed analysis of two works on the state that covers the African American electorate in this period do not show any references. See John Dittmer, Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977); and Laughlin McDonald, A Voting Rights Odyssey: Black Enfranchisement in Georgia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). However, the Dittmer book does reveal that “[v]oter registration lists on microfilm at the Georgia Archives document the decline of black voting both before and after disfranchisement,” p. 214.   4. Robert H. Brisbane, “The Negro Vote as a Balance of Power Factor in the National Elections,” Quarterly Review of Higher Education Among Negroes (July 1952), pp. 97–110. For more on this subject see Hanes Walton, Jr., and William H. Boone, “Black Political Parties: A Demographic Analysis,” Journal of Black Studies Vol. 5 (1974), pp. 86–95.   5. See Robert H. Brisbane, The Black Vanguard: Origins of the Negro Social Revolution, 1900–1960 (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1970) and his Black Activism: Racial Revolution in the United States, 1954–1970 (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1974). See also Hanes Walton, Jr., “Review of Black Activism: Racial Revolution in the United States, 1954–1970,” Journal of Negro History (July 1975), pp. 437–438.   6. Charles L. Weltner, Southerner (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966). For a limited scholarly analysis of this 1962 midterm election see L. Harmon Ziegler and M. Kent Jennings, “Electoral Strategies and Voting Patterns in a Southern Congressional District,” in M. Kent Jennings and L. Harmon Ziegler (eds.), The Electoral Process (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), chapter 7.   7. Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 36–38.   8. Hanes Walton, Jr., Invisible Politics: Black Political Behavior (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), pp. 1–19.   9. Hanes Walton, Jr., The Negro in Third Party Politics (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1969). 10. Samuel DuBois Cook, “Introduction: The Politics of the Success of Failure,” in Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Political Parties: An Historical and Political Analysis (New York: Free Press, 1972), pp. 1–8. 11. See Alexander Heard and Donald Strong, Southern Primaries and Elections, 1920–1949 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1950). This volume is one of the very few reliable election-return data sources that contains significant information on the African American electorate, but it has been rarely if ever used. 12. “Bing’s Neighborhood Plans Draw both Optimism, Fear,” The Detroit News, http://detnews.com/article/20110728/METRO/107280377, accessed July 28, 2011; “Detroit Services to Depend on Neighborhood Condition,” The Detroit News, http://detnews.com/article/20110728/ METRO/107280418, accessed July 28, 2011; “Revised City Charter Closer to Going before Voters,” The Detroit News, http://detnews.com/ article/20110811/METRO01/108110375, accessed August 11, 2011; and “Detroit City Charter Revisions Win Voter Approval,” The Detroit News, http://detnews.com/article/20111109/METRO01/111090390, accessed November 9, 2011.

Introduction Uniqueness of This Work

2

Methodology of This Study

4

Notes 7

2

T

Introduction

his pioneering study offers the first systematic and comprehensive longitudinal analysis of the African American electorate in America. This study describes and then explains both commonly known and newly discovered rare registration and voting data on the African American electorate. Using this empirical data, this study tells the story from the Colonial Era through the Revolutionary, Antebellum, and Civil War eras, through Reconstruction to the Disenfranchisement, pre-White Primary, and Poll Tax eras, to the Voting Rights Act (VRA), and finally to the historic presidential election of African American Senator Barack Hussein Obama, Jr., in 2008. This new study on the African American electorate has a conceptualized dimension that completely distinguishes it from all other works on this electorate, including VRA reports and studies, voting behavior studies, and documentary and compendium volumes, i.e., longitudinal empirical registration, turnout, and voting data. This pioneering study contains detailed chapters on each major era; rare data on the more than twenty statewide suffrage referenda before, during, and after the Civil War; county- and state-level registration, turnout, and voting data on the freedmen in 1867 and 1868 using basically unused Senate and House of Representative reports; and white and African American voting data for African American congressmen from Reconstruction through the enfranchisement of African American women. This study also contains voting data on the enfranchisement and disenfranchisement of African American women and on the African American electoral revolt in the 1920s. Rare data have been gathered and presented on southern urban areas as well as on the federal government’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) Cotton and Tobacco referenda, in which African American farmers in the rural South were given the right to vote with white farmers in the 1930s and 1940s.1 This public policy biracial voting experiment predated the 1965 VRA and was also successful. In addition, one will find new and fresh voting data on the sundry African American political and electoral innovations of the 1960s and 1970s. And there are additional empirical data on the Border States and northern states, especially enumerating the earliest African American statewide elected officials. And all of these established, neophyte, and rare data are presented in such a way that laypersons, academics, and scholars can use the data in their own historical or contemporary studies. As of this writing, this wealth of data on the African American electorate can be found nowhere else without extensive effort to track it down. The data presented here is the fruit of a detective effort that required more than three decades of research and data collection. Presentation of these established and rare election data is not just tabular in nature and scope. This study uses visual statistics to assist with its descriptions and explanations. Tabular data have been supplemented and/or supported with graphs, figures, charts, histograms, and maps. These visual statistics allow the reader to compare and contrast the southern states with the neighboring Border States and beyond to other states. Presentations within this new data-rich study aid further analyses and allow differently designed portraits of this electorate to emerge.

Uniqueness of This Work Unlike previous works on this electorate that have focused on different categories of periodizations, which inevitably causes numerous epistemic and conceptual problems by slicing and dicing this electorate into limited segments of American history, this study has sought linkage, unity, continuity, and connectivity. Although some chapters cover a particular period in time, others span a longer time frame (such as Chapter 20 on African American women in the electorate). This approach of continuity is essential to capture the dynamism of the African American electorate as it moved from the electoral empowerment of Free-Women-and-Men-of-Color in Colonial America to their electoral disenfranchisement in the same era and into subsequent eras. This dynamism continued in the post–Civil War era when Congress, via its Four Military Reconstruction Acts in 1867–1868, electorally empowered the former slaves and shortly thereafter, in 1870 via the Fifteenth Amendment, empowered all of the other African American males living outside of the South and the Border States who had not yet acquired the right to vote.

A Dynamic History of Disenfranchisement Disenfranchisement (and its counterpart enfranchisement) as a central characteristic and feature of the dynamism that surrounds and activates the African American electorate did not begin—as the majority of history books would have one believe— after the collapse of Black Reconstruction (1866–1876) and shortly after the questionable Compromise of 1877.2 Moreover, disenfranchisement is not just a southern phenomenon. Colonial Virginia, as you will see, disenfranchised Free-Women-of-Color in 1699 and Free-Men-of-Color in 1723, while Antebellum New Jersey disenfranchised both groups in 1807. And numerous statewide referenda between 1800 and 1869 either disenfranchised the African American electorate or refused to enfranchise them. Thus, although the southern states of Virginia and South Carolina disenfranchised Free-Women-and-Men-of-Color during the Colonial Era, several states, North and South, disenfranchised them during the Revolutionary and Antebellum eras. Hence, when the South began the process after Reconstruction, they were following a procedure in which northern and midwestern states had already engaged.3 Due to their periodization methodology previous studies have failed to pick up these linkages and continuities and therefore never became aware of the dynamic characteristic of the African American electorate. Conceptualized dynamism is a unique aspect of this study.

Voting Rights Activism Distinct from Civil Rights Activism Hence, once one conceptualizes the dynamism inherent in the African American electorate’s trek through American history and politics, another unique characteristic and feature surfaces. Not just civil rights leaders and organizations have stepped forward against the suppression, intimidation, and disenfranchisement of African American voters, and against the refusal of the white majority to grant, consider, or even acknowledge



Introduction 3

the possible right to vote of these men and women. Other African American leaders and organizations have emerged with a singular focus on voting rights. There are and have been among the African American electorate a cadre of voting rights activists. There are individuals, men and women, and organizations that act either individually or organizationally to begin the protest and lobbying for the vote, to begin the protest and lobbying against disenfranchisement—and these have operated from Colonial America to the present. Perhaps most importantly, they have operated both separately from the traditional Civil Rights organizations as well as in conjunction with them. The National Equal Rights League (NERL), essentially a voting rights organization, was created by a civil rights organization, the Negro Convention Movement, in 1864. Or in the 1898–1908 period, the National Afro-American Council (NAAC) began legal activism against disenfranchisement.4 After that organization’s demise, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) used the same approach and won an initial victory in 1915 against the grand­father clause and, in 1944, a victory against the White Primary law in Texas. By 1957, another rising civil rights leader, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference gave a voting rights speech at the Prayer Pilgrimage in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. King’s speech helped to generate both the 1957 Civil Rights Act and the 1960 Civil Rights Act; although both pieces of new legislation were called civil rights bills, they primarily dealt with voting rights. In 1965, King would lead another march in Selma, Alabama, which led to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Secondly, prior to the 1965 Selma March, President John F. Kennedy and his staff met with most of the civil rights leaders at the White House and suggested that they work together via the Voter Education Project (VEP) of the Southern Regional Council to electorally empower the African American electorate in the South.5 With the advent of the VRA and its subsequent renewals, the VEP eventually closed its doors. But it was another prime example of the relationship and the distinction between civil rights leaders with their organizations on the one hand and their voting rights activism on the other hand, which demonstrated that the two things were not one and the same thing. This voting rights activism is and has been a fundamental feature and characteristic of the African American electorate longitudinally. And it has helped, as have civil rights organizations, to continue the dynamism, as have white groups and organizations in favor of African American suffrage, as well as presidents like Dwight D. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Barack Obama. The history of African American voting rights activism is another unique aspect of this study.

innovations and creative lobbying and political and electoral protest vehicles that the African American electorate implemented and institutionalized in the American political process. African American voting rights did not just materialize out of thin air and/or overnight. Disenfranchisement did not just halt on its own and/or die a sudden and quick political or legal death. Systemic forces, which enacted and implemented these electoral and political realities, had to be confronted, contested, as well as politically and legally challenged. Nor did the systemic disenfranchisement forces halt because they met resistance from the African American electorate. They had to be challenged and confronted. This study makes clear that the African American electorate at numerous points in American electoral history had no alliances, few political friends, and/or barely any semblance of political goodwill from the white majority. Hence, they had to proceed alone, and their electoral protest results were, at many points in American history, considered minuscule or worthless. Few states, their political leadership, and/or academics or scholars recorded these efforts, and the identities of brave members of the African American electorate in these events were discarded along with their electoral efforts and the resulting empirical data. And much of the electoral data that has not been lost simply has slipped through the political and academic net, despite the fact that it reveals interesting stories of the African American electorate’s attempts to empower themselves and become either enfranchised or re-enfranchised. This study highlights oft-overlooked sources of data: political and electoral inventions like the NERL; state-based NERL chapters like the one in Boston led by newspaperman William Monroe Trotter, which lobbied Congress in 1920 against legislation sponsored by southern congressmen; the NAACP, which lobbied Congress in 1921 after African American women were denied their voting rights in Florida and elsewhere; independent political candidates, independent third parties, and minor African American political parties; satellite political parties like the South Carolina Progressive Democratic Party, the “Black and Tan” Republican parties, the Freedom Elections, the Freedom Vote and Freedom Candidates, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and the National Democratic Party of Alabama; national major party convention seating challenges, congressional seating challenges; and the southern urban and rural areas of the nation that allowed neither slaves nor the segregated free African American electorate to vote. These omitted data sources carry a wealth of empirical registration and voting data on the African American electorate during periods when most scholars have taken for granted that this electorate could not or did not participate. This was a poor assumption.

The Role of Protest Organizations and Votes

At the party and the partisanship levels nationally, the Republican Party took up the mantle first (before, during, and after the Civil War) to support the African American electorate; only since the 1960s has the Democratic Party joined in to support this right for the African American electorate. Prior to the 1960s, the Democratic Party was fundamentally and nearly unalterably opposed to voting rights for African Americans. In fact, it is one of the

This lack of focus on the dynamism and its inherent African American voting rights activism longitudinally, together with the failure to conceptually separate the voting rights movement when necessary from the civil rights movement, have obscured another key aspect of the whole picture that we describe in this study. This critical omission rendered a huge number of political

Partisanship and the African American Electorate

4

Introduction

most distinguishing factors that defined the two major political parties for both the African American and southern white electorates over time. Although the Republican Party since the 1960s has not called for full disenfranchisement, as its party strength has grown in the South it has opposed the extension of the VRA, promoted felony disenfranchisement, and in other ways aligned itself against at least part of the African American electorate. To be sure, there have been a few periods of bipartisanship on behalf of this electorate, notably during the 2006 reauthorization of the VRA, but they have been brief. This major public policy difference between the Republicans and Democrats has had its greatest influence and impact in the South. The South and its White Supremacy Democrats led the fight for disenfranchisement. Recently, however, this struggle has seen dynamism as regionalism, and this type of dynamism has been transformed into an ideological variable and factor in the South, as well as elsewhere in the nation, as seen with the 2008 presidential election. This debate and dialogue about race in the historic 2008 election has generated a rising body of academic and scholarly literature.

Presenting Data over Time on the African American Electorate But looming over all of these characteristics, and emerging when one includes the dynamism surrounding the African American electorate, is the failure of the academic and scholarly community to focus on this electorate, especially in a period of hyperintense election data gathering during the discipline’s major effort to study and analyze electoral behavior. Launched with the publication in 1960 of The American Voter and the political behavioral movement in the political science discipline, the data gathering and analyses of both aggregate and survey-based voting data have generated a voluminous literature in political science,6 history, sociology, and political psychology.7 Yet, despite this huge research effort in this and other disciplines, the African American electorate was in the main passed over. There are only a few works on the African American electorate, voting rights, voting rights activism, voter registration, turnout, voting, voter intimidation and suppression, and the VRA. Essentially, studies, popular and scholarly, have focused on crises, crisis periods, and crisis legislation, such as the often-noted VRA. And in these crises-based studies there has been little data gathering, and almost none of the works attempted longitudinal data gathering. This study is one of the very first works to get beyond this major failure in the literature. This is not to say that limited and partial and scattered efforts have not been made. But there is little linkage and connectivity. And this has long been needed on such a continuing reality as the African American electorate’s sojourn in the American political experience. Thus, linkage and unity are unique to this study. To get beyond this failure in the popular and academic literature on the African American electorate, we began our research and data gathering in Colonial America and continued through to the present. Moreover, as noted above, this study turned to a variety of sources that heretofore had never been used, or were merely omitted due to bad assumptions and poor conceptualization. Some

of these omitted and bypassed research and data sources contain unique and rare data; other researchers often ignored efforts made by the African American voting rights activists, including their political and electoral inventions that were recorded but felt by many not to be significant enough to examine and link to a greater perspective. Here, we turned to fugitive works and sources to gather this bypassed empirical election data on the African American electorate for a greater empirical electoral portrait. And next our conceptualization sought to answer a question never asked in the voluminous literature on voting behavior and the VRA: what about the political and electoral context?

Beyond a South-Only Approach The literature on the African American electorate shows a great and general tendency: a focus almost always on the South. Although one occasionally finds a study that deals with Chicago, beginning with Professor Harold Gosnell’s pioneering Negro Politician in 1935, and a host of articles and some monographs on other northern urban areas such as Philadelphia, New York, and Detroit, most of these voting studies and studies of the VRA focus primarily on the South. This is a single political context and it can only provide a very narrow electoral and political perspective on the African American electorate. Perhaps even more important is the fact that the South was neither the only region of the country with slaves nor the only region where slaves were granted their voting rights during the same time period. Freedmen in the Border States (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and West Virginia) received their voting rights via the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 (about three years after the freedmen in the South got theirs). But how did disenfranchisement proceed in the Border States? Are there parallels in terms of trends and patterns in these states with those in the South? Were there similarities and dissimilarities? Are there empirical data to help to draw comparisons and contrasts between these two different regions in regard to the African Americans residing there? Clearly, to simply leave out the Border States leaves out a significant part of the story of the African American electorate. And the very same question can and should be raised about the northern and midwestern states. Even more so, did the rise of African American elected officials elsewhere in the country have no effect on the enfranchisement and disenfranchisement movements in the South? Thus, to tell the story of the African American electorate from only a southern perspective is to tell the story in a one-dimensional manner, which inhibits a collective and holistic portrait of the African American electorate in America. Hence, another unique feature of this study is that it goes beyond this limited research to display the continual presence and influence of the political context variable on the African American electorate longitudinally.8

Methodology of This Study The methodology for this study derives from its conceptualization. Conceived of and designed as a longitudinal research study of the African American electorate that would be both comprehensive and systematic, even though the election data might be spotty, fragmentary, piecemeal, as well as elusive and fugitive, it was

essential that our methodology include case studies and be integrative in nature and scope. In the past, the dominant and hegemonic periodization approach has fractionalized even the limited registration and voting data on the African American electorate.

Periodization’s Focus on Isolated Events A perfect example of the prevailing approach is found in Steven Lawson’s two books: (1) Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 and (2) In Pursuit of Power: Southern Blacks and Electoral Politics, 1965–1982. Although there is some overlapping in Lawson’s periodization approach, the two break points are (1) 1944, when the Supreme Court ruling in the Smith v. Allwright outlawed the White Primary as a disenfranchising technique, and (2) 1965, the year in which Congress passed the Voting Rights Act. Thus, Lawson’s study focused on pivotal events, like Supreme Court rulings, congressional legislation or reauthorization, the political inventions and innovations like the “Freedom Vote,” and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party national convention seating challenge, the southern and Border states disenfranchisement techniques or procedures, and African Americans’ capture of certain elective offices for the very first time. All of these political and electoral events constitute periodization. And because these events emerge as a fractionalized portrait of the African American electorate, they also allow the spotty, fragmentary, and piecemeal data to continue to prevail as the only available data extant on the African American electorate. But that was just the problem—periodization that obfuscated extant registration and voting data on the African American electorate, causing it to be omitted and remain fugitive. Clearly, a new methodology was and is needed.

Periodization Ignores the Pre–Civil War Time Period The second main epistemic problem with the periodization approach is there was no exploration of registration and voting data before the Civil War. The best data on the pre–Civil War period came from a minimalist research effort to provide a list of the colonies and states, which permitted Free-Women-andMen-of-Color to vote. Even this primary and dominant preoccupation and focus was quite limited and only came into view with the publication of Alexander Keyssar’s book The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, which first appeared in 2000, despite the existence of several scholarly journal articles and book chapters on this reality. Even in the most recent book-length study, Christopher Malone’s Between Freedom and Bondage: Race, Party, and Voting Rights in the Antebellum North, published in 2008, there is only an analysis of four of the six states that allowed Free-Men-of-Color to vote and no coverage of the states that allowed Free-Women-of-Color to vote. Hence, what one is left with is a very thin and truncated coverage of the African American electorate before the Civil War and very little or next to nothing on the huge number of statewide referenda on African American suffrage rights before, during, and after the Civil War. Said empirical data provide the reader with a starting point—the actual beginning in the Colonial Era—and provide continuity from this departure point through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and beyond. A linkage and

Introduction 5 relationship has been made, which distinguishes this study from all previous studies which rely heavily on periodization.

Periodization Ignores Government Reports and Archives The third problem with the periodization approach is the non-use and/or limited recovery of national, state, and local registration data that are embedded in Senate and House documents, state and local archives, as well as data recovered in master’s theses and doctoral dissertations. Much of this empirical information has simply been undisturbed and underexplored. Thus, it could not be linked and/or related to already known and currently used and reported data. An exception is the two volumes done on southern primaries and general elections by two different groups of authors. First, there is the compendia by Alexander Heard and Donald Strong, Southern Primaries and Elections, 1920–1949. The second and follow-up volume is by Numan Bartley and Hugh Graham, Southern Elections: County and Precinct Data, 1950–1972. But these two data compendia are not comparable, especially in terms of their information on the African American electorate.9 The first volume includes categories of data on the African American electorate and political candidates and disenfranchisement that do not appear in the second volume. Unique to the second volume is precinct data in addition to county-level data. Comparability in these two volumes would have been an immense and staggering contribution to a portrait of the African American electorate. As they are now constituted, one volume becomes even more important than the other. However, if the empirical data in these two volumes are merged and used with the study that appears in Lawrence Hanks’ 1990 book, The Struggle for Black Political Empowerment in Three Georgia Counties (Clay, Hancock, and Peach), at least one could develop a longitudinal analysis of these three counties from 1920 through 1980.10 As their separation now stands, here are three periodization studies that are unlinked and distinct. Such is the case with much of the extant data on the African American electorate, and this must be recognized and dealt with so that a more holistic portrait can be made.

Periodization Excludes the Freedmen’s Voting Data The third problem of periodization—limited recovery of national, state, and local registration data—brings us to the fourth problem in this previous methodological approach, the almost universal exclusion of empirical registration and voting data on the southern African American electorate after the Civil War, i.e., the freedmen, generated by the Senate and House of Representatives executive documents.11 The Four Military Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and 1868 empowered the military commanders in the field in the South to register the freedmen in ten of the eleven southern states (Tennessee was excluded because three days before the first of these four acts was implemented, the state’s new constitution granted voting rights to the freedmen) and to permit them to vote. In addition, committees in both houses of Congress required these military commanders to collect registration and voting data by race. These empirical

6

Introduction

compilations appeared in Senate Executive Document 53, 40th Congress, 2nd Session, pages 1–14, and in House Executive Document 342, 40th Congress, 2nd Session, pages 1–208. Embedded in these official government documents are the numbers of registered freedmen voters county-by-county in each of these ten southern states, the number who actually voted, as well as the number of non-voters. Similar data are available for white voters in each state, county by county. And today, there are scholarly publications of these initial registrants by race in Texas and North Carolina. But very few scholarly and academic works have made any use of these official documents in terms of mapping the nature, scope, and significance of these initial racial voters. A lone exception is Richard L. Hume and Jerry B. Gough, Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags: The Constitutional Conventions of Radical Reconstruction. Nor has exploration of this initial data at the state level generated any major works on this southern African American electorate. Needless to say, some historical works have used the grand total of the freedmen registered in these ten states of the South vis-àvis the white electorate but little beyond that. In its place most historical studies used the official racial registration data kept in the state of Louisiana at the parish level from Reconstruction to the present time. This approach left out the other nine states, plus whatever data that were available on Tennessee. Thus, a partial portrait was drawn of the African American electorate in this period and through the Disenfranchisement Era until 1920, when African American women got the vote and joined those few freedmen who had not been stripped of their right to vote. Hence, this exclusion problem was exemplified by the general prohibition of official voting data inherent in both federal and state documents, with the lone exception of Louisiana. This led to questionable interpretations of freedmen voting and political participation in the Reconstruction Era. Unique to this volume is the use of those empirical data that allow continuity and linkage with the data before, during, and after the Civil War, as well as better quantitative assessment of the impact and influence of the techniques of disenfranchisement. And more importantly, it allows continuity and linkage with those data that were generated when African American women became enfranchised.

Longitudinal Data at the Group Level Therefore, once our conceptualization for this volume was developed as a longitudinal one, our integrative approach became to merge, link, and relationally combine all the known, recovered, and new data that we could find. More than thirty years of researching and data collecting for this project yielded the rich treasure trove of new registration, turnout, and voting data on the African American electorate that readers will find in this volume. To continue our longitudinal study even when empirical data no longer existed, as in the state of Louisiana, we have used a surrogate variable: the existence of African American majority counties along with the white majority counties. Examination of racial majority counties has allowed coverage across time and a continuous description of the African American electorate, particularly in presidential elections. Using homogenous county-level data made it possible to trace and evaluate the

African American electorate at the group level longitudinally. Since the county became our unit of political analysis, we could not and did not attempt to describe and explain the African American electorate at the individual level. Thus, the majority of our descriptions and explanations in this volume are at the group level simply because public opinion polls and surveys, especially the former, did not begin until the mid-1930s, while our analysis begins in Colonial America and proceeds to the present. Therefore, our portrait of the African American electorate in this volume is a group-level one and nothing else.

Integrating a Case-Study Approach Beyond our integrative approach for this volume is our casestudy approach. The research for this study did not always turn up longitudinal data. At times it turned up data in great detail and specificity. Hence, we did not discard this new and revelatory electoral information. This study uses these new data in a case-study manner. Embedded in several of our chapter narratives, alongside or in the absence of longitudinal data, one will find in-depth studies of unique and rare events like the Mississippi “Freedom Vote” in 1963 or the electoral revolt of the African American electorate in 1920 and 1921, when African American women joined with the remaining few African American males who had not been disenfranchised to vote for African American political candidates. Hence, the case-study approach allowed this volume to utilize the singular electoral events that happened in the African American community from time to time rather than to dismiss them as unsuccessful efforts. These were not really epiphenomena because in the African American suffrage struggle all of these unusual events originated in the creative aspirations of the African American voting rights activists and their meaningful and linked attempts to get the right to vote in America, successful or not. The case-study approach has helped to preserve these efforts.

Data Sources Our approach links demographic data to electoral data on presidential contests.12 We utilize several datasets of the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), combining them at the county- and election-year levels. Our intent is to provide the reader with a vivid view of the historical journey that has shaped the African American struggle for suffrage rights, to see not only the resistance to these aspirations but also the reactions that have made African Americans a part of the American experience. We began first by determining the population counts of slaves and Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color during colonial and pre-federal periods, from 1624 to 1790, in various colonies and states, using official data from the United States Census Bureau.13 The methods and data sources for this presentation of presidential elections are given in our appendix. We relied on Michael Dubin for county-level data covering the elections from 1789 to 1824, ICPSR datasets for elections from 1828 to 1988, and the Dave Leip Web site for all elections since 1992.14 The ICPSR Study No. 2896 is our primary source for determining the census population counts of Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color, slaves,

and whites by age, gender, and county in the federal period from 1790 to 1870 and the racial majority counties, including component breakdowns by age and gender, in census data since 1870.15 Census data in the studies indicated above provide the group-level foundation for establishing how the partitioning and extent of slave and free populations affected congressional apportionment and representation in the Colonial and Antebellum periods. Census data further provide information on the eligibility of the electorate, including African Americans, based on gender and age in periods after the Civil War: from the initial election of several African Americans to Congress, to the decimation of the African American electorate in the Disenfranchisement Era, to the re-emergence of local and state-level African American legislators and officeholders marked by the Electoral Revolt of 1920 and the enfranchisement of African American women, and to the modern era of political re-enfranchisement with the Smith v. Allwright court decision, the passage and renewals of the Voting Rights Act, and the election of President Barack Obama. Grouping and associating the presidential election results with census data then extends this logical structure by constructing the evolutionary timeline for the political innovations and alignments within the African American electorate and reactions from without to it, especially in making group-level comparisons in and between the geographic regions, and in and between the racial majority counties. Overall, our use of census data from the Colonial and Revolutionary eras combined with that of the Antebellum and more recent eras allows this volume to situate our electoral and political data within the official demographic and geographical contexts of the nation from its founding to the present. And such a methodological and research approach keeps this rare data on the African American electorate within the national and state political contexts across all of the nation’s epochs. This is the dominant feature of this pioneering study.

Presenting the Data Finally, with our integrative and case-study data, there is the matter of presentation. To assist readers we have employed both descriptive and visual statistics for the presentation of our data. We have used not only the traditional tabular presentation method but the newer styled presentations so prevalent in this new media age with its visual technology. These new visuals will allow a greater descriptive analysis and hopefully more useful interpretations of the longitudinal data on the African American electorate, in terms of greater depth and specificity. Such a data-rich study with so much new data needs the kind of summarization that only graphic elements can provide. Embracing visualization technology as this volume does sets it apart from all of the other studies on the African American electorate up to this point in time. Using county-level data, newly found data, in both a longitudinal and case-study format, with a visualization presentation, all in a carefully written narrative thoroughly differentiates this volume from any other work on the African American electorate. We hope that our work sets the stage for new empirical data analyses and future approaches to reforms in the American electoral process.

Introduction 7

Notes   1. For a discussion of African American farmers’ political participation in the AAA Cotton referenda see Ralph Bunche, The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR, Edited and with an Introduction by Dewey Grantham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 505–515.   2. On this point about Professor C. Vann Woodward’s concept of the “Compromise of 1877” see Allan Peskin, “Was There a Compromise of 1877?” in John Herbert Roper (ed.), C. Vann Woodward: A Southern Historian and His Critics (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), pp. 150–164. For another work on another one of Professor Woodward’s concepts that relates to the African American electorate see Hanes Walton, Jr., Josephine A. V. Allen, Sherman C. Puckett, and Donald R. Deskins, Jr., “Beyond the Second Reconstruction: C. Vann Woodward’s Concept of the Third Reconstruction in the South,” American Review of Politics Vol. 32 (Spring & Summer 2011), pp. 105–130.   3. For the most recent and updated study on disenfranchisement, with new data on the beginning and ending dates, see Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).   4. See this new study, which focuses on the efforts of the NAAC that most earlier works simply ignored or omitted, R. Volney Riser, Defying Disfranchisement: Black Voting Rights Activism in the Jim Crow South, 1890–1908 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010). And for the first major scholarly work on the NAAC, see Benjamin Justesen, Broken Brotherhood: The Rise and Fall of the National Afro-American Council (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008).   5. Pat Watters and Reese Cleghorn, Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: The Arrival of Negroes in Southern Politics (New York: Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich, 1967).   6. Jack Dennis, “The Study of Electoral Behavior,” in William Crotty (ed.), Political Science: Looking into the Future, Volume Three: Political Behavior (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), pp. 51–89.   7. For a pathbreaking work on a new subfield in this discipline see Tasha Philpot and Ismail White (eds.), African-American Political Psychology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).   8. For a pioneering work on the political context variable in African American politics see Hanes Walton, Jr., African American Power and Politics: The Political Context Variable (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).   9. See Numan Bartley and Hugh Graham, Southern Elections: County and Precinct Data, 1950–1972 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978). 10. See Lawrence J. Hanks, The Struggle for Black Political Empowerment in Three Georgia Counties (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987). 11. One of the very few historical studies of the Reconstruction Era to make use of the quantitative voting data collected by Senate and House of Representatives committees is the recent work by Richard L. Hume and Jerry Gough, Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags: The Constitutional Conventions of Radical Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008). 12. Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming). 13. United States Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), Chapter Z. See specifically the Series Z tables 1–19 and 24–132, pp. 1168–1171. 14. Michael J. Dubin, United States Presidential Elections, 1788– 1860: The Official Results by County and State (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002). Data from Dubin were used to augment results up through the election of 1860 from the following ICPSR studies: for the presidential elections of 1828 to 1836 ICPSR Study No. 1, United States Historical Election Returns, 1824–1968 [Computer File] http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ ICPSR00001, accessed September 19, 2002; the elections of 1840 to 1972 were covered using Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Election Data for Counties in the United

8

Introduction

States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611, accessed December 26, 2002; and the data source for the elections of 1976 to 1988 was ICPSR Study No. 13, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–1970 [Computer File] http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR00013, accessed December 5, 2002. Data for the elections of 1992–2000 were obtained from Dave Leip, U.S. Election Atlas, http://uselectionatlas.org/ myatlas.php, accessed April 26, 2004; for the 2004 election, results were accessed on November 21, 2005; and for the election of 2008, October 26, 2009.

15. Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File] http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896, accessed April 28, 2005. For 2010 data see the Census Web site http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/ nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml. For book references of census data that identify racial majority counties from 1880 to 1930 see United States Bureau of the Census, Negro Population in the United States, 1790 to 1915 (New York: Arno Press, 1968), pp. 776–797, and United States Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the United States, 1920–1932 (New York: Arno Press, 1969), pp. 683–762.

CHAPTER 1

The State of African American Election Data The African American Electorate in Colonial and Revolutionary America

10

Table 1.1 Voting Rights of Free-Men-of-Color in the Thirteen Original Colonies: Colonial, Revolutionary, and Antebellum Eras

11

Map 1.1 States with Suffrage Rights for Free-Men-of-Color, 1855

12

Election Data: From National and State Collections to the Commercial and Scholarly Sources

13

Finding Historical Election Data for African American Candidates: Monroe N. Work, W. E. B. DuBois, and Ralph Bunche

15

Table 1.2 Seven Categories of Political Data and Statistics in the Negro Year Book, 1912–1952 17

The State of African American Election Data: A Summary

20

Conclusion on the State of African American Election Data

21

Notes 22

10

P

Chapter 1

opular elections have always been a central feature of the American Republic, and African American voters have, at least to a limited extent, participated in these elections throughout the country’s history. The extent of popular voting in federal elections has itself developed and expanded over the years. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the founding fathers created a democratic republic where one of the central elements was the right of citizens to vote for the president and the members of the U.S. House of Representatives. The appointment of U.S. senators was left to the legislatures of the thirteen states. Article I, Sections 1 and 2 of the Constitution set out the requirements for the election of members of Congress and the appointment of senators, while Article II, Section 1 sets out the requirements for election of the president. In the presidential election of 1800, two Democratic-Republican Party candidates, Thomas Jefferson and his vice presidential running mate Aaron Burr, ended up with the same number of electoral votes. One defect of the Constitution was that it did not distinguish between electoral votes for president and vice president, meaning that when states voted for the Jefferson-Burr ticket, both men received electoral votes. To prevent the reoccurrence of this situation, the Twelfth Amendment, ratified on June 15, 1804, requires that Electoral College electors cast separate ballots for president and vice president, thereby eliminating the possibility of a tie between these two positions and a repeat of the controversial thirty-six ballots that it took to finally break the deadlock. On April 8, 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified; this took the power to elect senators away from the state legislatures, where deadlocks and corruption had prevented some senators from being appointed for upwards of two years, and gave it to the people.1 Thus, with these essential changes, popular elections became the true centerpiece of the United States. Nevertheless, constitutional changes to the electoral system did not alter the nature of the voting populace. New amendments had to be added over time to expand the electorate, which had originally consisted mainly but not exclusively of propertyowning white males. Long before the Constitutional Convention or even the Declaration of Independence eleven years before, each of the thirteen colonies created its own legislative body. For example, Virginia created the House of Burgesses in 1655 so elected representatives could help the Royal Governor run the colony. Each colony set formal qualifications for candidates running for seats in legislative bodies. The Virginia colony stipulated that all candidates for the House of Burgesses had to be “Persons of knowne integrity and of good conversation and of age one and twenty years,” and that each member of the electorate had to be a white “gentleman and freeholder [property owner].”2 In fact, all of the colonies modeled their suffrage requirements upon those in their English homeland, requiring that a member of the electorate be a “stakeholder” in society.3 Non-property owners were considered unfit to participate in colonial government, as they were thought to be beholden to the political views of their landlords. Property holdings supposedly gave citizens personal independence and related virtues that entitled them to political participation and power. Even in the Northwest Territory,

“the largest piece of terrain directly controlled by the federal government, citizens and aliens alike had to own fifty acres of land in order to vote.”4 Therefore, early in the colonial period (1610–1773), voting became a defining characteristic of American political life, and the colonies themselves set the criteria and formal qualifications of the electorate. As the historian Alexander Keyssar noted, “The Constitution adopted in 1787 left the federal government without any clear power or mechanism, other than through constitutional amendment, to institute a national conception of voting rights, to express a national vision of democracy.”5 In addition, “By making the franchise in national elections dependent on state suffrage laws, the authors of the Constitution compromised their substantive disagreements to solve a potentially explosive political problem,” which left the nation with “a long and sometimes problematic legacy.”6 States, both then and now, have retained the power to shape the electorate using various criteria—including race, sex, age, citizenship, criminal status, and class—to define who has the right to vote.

The African American Electorate in Colonial and Revolutionary America In Colonial America, “requirements for voting were far more numerous than at present and were related not only to age, residence, and citizenship, but also to race, sex, religion and the holding of property.”7 Of suffrage rights in this era (1610–1773), political scientist Robert Dinkins found that: Just as voting restrictions against religious minorities were not all encompassing, so too were those instituted on the basis of race. Suffrage laws excluding Negroes and Indians were far from universal. In the Southern colonies, where the majority of black, red and mulatto populations resided, disfranchisement came rather late, while farther north no statute ever eliminated nonwhites from the ballot.8 Table 1.1 provides empirical evidence for Professor Dinkins’ observation about the Colonial Era. No colony denied these voting rights from the outset, but three would eventually deny them, while ten never denied them in the Colonial Era. However, as the colonies transitioned into states during the Revolutionary Era (1774–1789), two states—South Carolina and Virginia—denied the right of free blacks to vote from the outset in their state constitutions; only one state, Maryland, would later deny the right; and ten states, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Georgia, North Carolina, and Rhode Island, would never deny the right. Map 1.1 (p. 12) provides a snapshot of the national status as of 1855. Keyssar found that “by 1855, only five states (Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and Rhode Island) did not discriminate against African Americans, and these states contained only 4 percent of the nation’s free black population. Notably, the federal government also prohibited blacks from voting in the territories it controlled.”9 Recent historical evidence



The State of African American Election Data 11 Table 1.1  Voting Rights of Free-Men-of-Color in the Thirteen Original Colonies: Colonial, Revolutionary, and Antebellum Eras Era

Colony

Denied from the Outset

Eventually Denied

Never Denied

Colonial Era (1610–1773)

Massachusetts

 

 

X

Royal

New Hampshire

 

X

Royal

Rhode Island

 

X

Self-governing

Connecticut

 

X

Self-governing

New York

 

X

Royal

Pennsylvania

 

X

Self-governing

New Jersey

 

X

Royal

Delawarea

 

X

Self-governing

Maryland

 

 

X

Self-governing

Virginia

 

X

 

Royal

North Carolina

 

X

 

Royal

South Carolina

 

X

 

Royal

Georgia

 

 

X

Royal

Total

0

3

10

 

Massachusetts

 

 

X

 

New Hampshire

 

Rhode Island

 

Connecticut

 

New Yorkb

 

Pennsylvania

 

New Jersey

 

Delawarea

 

Maryland

 

Virginia

X

a

Revolutionary Era (1774–1789)c

Antebellum and Civil War Eras (1790–1870)

     

Colonial Status

X  

X X

 

X X

 

X X

X

   

North Carolina

 

South Carolina

X

 

X

Georgiaa

 

X

 

Total

2

2

9

 

Massachusetts

 

 

X

 

New Hampshire

 

Rhode Islandd

 

 

Connecticut

 

X

 

New York

 

 

X

Pennsylvania

 

X

 

New Jersey

 

X

 

Delawarea

 

X

 

Maryland

X

 

 

Virginia

X

North Carolina

 

South Carolina

X

Georgiaa Total

 

X X

  X

 

 

 

X

3

5

5

   

Sources: Hanes Walton Jr., African American Power and Politics: The Political Context Variable (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 16. The table has been upated with data from Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 349–353, Table A4. Data updates were found for Georgia and Delaware. Of Georgia upon statehood, Keyssar informs that "all secondary sources agree that blacks could not vote, but a very extensive research effort has not turned up a clear legal basis for that exclusion." (Keyssar, p. 353, footnote 5). In 1777 with the initial formulation of its state constitution Georgia disenfranchised African Americans, but later this exclusion was removed in revisions that were instituted in 1789 and 1798. a

b

New York, in several constitutional conventions, voted to restrict the voting rights of free blacks.

c

Formally beginning with the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.

d

In Rhode Island African Americans were disenfranchised by statute in 1822 but re-enfranchised by the state constitution that was rewritten in 1843.

Louisiana

Arkansas

Missouri

Illinois

Wisconsin

Mississippi

Alabama

Tennessee

Kentucky

Indiana

Michigan

Ohio

Florida Florida

0

Georgia *

South South Carolina Carolina

North Carolina

Virginia

Pennsylvania

New York

Vermont

miles

100

200

Maryland

Delaware

New Jersey

Connecticut

Rhode Island **

Never Denied Denied and Reinstated Restricted

Massachusetts

New Hampshire

Maine

(5) (1) (1)

0

100 miles

200

** In Rhode Island the suffrage rights of Free-Men-of-Color were denied by statute in 1822 but reinstated by the revised constitution in 1843.

* Though no evidence has surfaced that African Americans ever voted in pre–Civil War Georgia, there was also no exclusion of their suffrage rights after the year of Georgia statehood (1789).

Sources: Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 55 and 349–353, Table A4, and Adrian B. Ettlinger, The AniMap Plus County Boundary Historical Atlas, Version 3, Release 2, http://www.goldbug.com (Alamo, California: Goldbug Software, 1991–2008).

Texas

Indian Territory

Kansas Territory

Nebraska Territory

Iowa

Minnesota Territory

Map 1.1  States with Suffrage Rights for Free-Men-of-Color, 1855

provided by Professor Keyssar in his book The Right to Vote adds Georgia to the list of states that granted suffrage rights to Free-Men-of-Color. Georgia, in its state constitutions of 1789 and 1798, did not exclude Free-Men-of-Color from voting as they had excluded them during the Revolutionary Era (1777). Although they were not legally excluded by these state constitutions, no evidence has surfaced that Free-Men-of-Color actually cast ballots in state and local elections in Georgia.10 In addition to the five states (plus Georgia) where the right to vote remained on the eve of the Civil War, there were several states like Tennessee, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey where the right of Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color to vote had been rescinded. New Jersey denied the right to vote to African American females and males in 1807,11 Tennessee to African American males in 1834,12 North Carolina in 1835,13 and Pennsylvania in 1838.14 To date, none of the election statistics on the free blacks who could vote in the other eight states have surfaced in any systematic manner. Scattered throughout a few studies are some conjectures, hints, and an estimate for New York, but nothing else. In fact, prior to the Civil War, these data were not collected, much less maintained. Although state election data are thin and incomplete in this early period of national existence, some gaps in the information can be filled by information inferred from federal data. At the Constitutional Convention, the founding fathers adopted the Three-Fifths Clause for counting slaves as a way to determine the number of seats that slave-holding states would get in the House of Representatives as well as the number of electoral votes they would cast in presidential elections. It was not until the celebration of the bicentennial of the nation in 1976 that a document was uncovered from a delegate to the 1787 Convention that showed the actual impact of the Three-Fifths Clause, and accordingly, the slave vote in the congressional and presidential elections.15 This document, together with other original documents from the Constitutional Convention, showed that the Convention developed a consensus on how to count the slave population in each state so that the number of seats for each slave state in the House of Representatives could be determined. The first session of Congress after the Convention occurred was during 1788–1790—before the first national census was taken in 1790—and this first session was the year that the Three-Fifths Clause went into effect. Thus, with this estimated slave population data from the first session of Congress and the census slave population data for the second session of Congress and every ten years afterward, one can develop estimates of the slave “electorate” from the initial Congress in 1788 until the last antebellum session in 1860. The Three-Fifths Clause became a dead letter when the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865, abolishing slavery. Using this federal data, this study will examine the impact and influence of the non-voting slave population vis-à-vis the Free-Men-of-Color voting population. Such an effort has never before been undertaken. And in the end, sole reliance should not be placed upon state election data because state censuses in the Revolutionary Era were not coordinated, standardized, or consistent.16

The State of African American Election Data 13

Election Data: From National and State Collections to the Commercial and Scholarly Sources It is not only the data for the African American electorate that are thin in the years before and after the American Revolution; the data for the electorate as a whole are problematic. The individual colonies were in charge of collecting and maintaining election return data. Although Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution calls for the federal government to conduct a census of the population every ten years, it does not specify that this census collect election data, only population data. Thus, the collection and maintenance of election return data, even for federal offices, was left up to the states. Of these states’ collection and maintenance efforts, political scientist Walter Dean Burnham wrote: “The variation in the quality, extensiveness and general availability of such official reporting has been enormous throughout American political history, and remains so to the present day. Moreover, mass electoral politics in the United States goes back to a much earlier time . . . indeed, to a time in which social statistics were in their infancy.”17 He added: “Particularly before about 1840, reporting of the most essential political data was correspondingly primitive in vast parts of the country. . . .”18 Some colonies, and later states, stored their election data in their state archives’ manuscript returns collections. Very few states required election returns to be published in public documents, such as newspapers.19 Some states issued official manuals, registers, executive documents, state legislative journals, secretary of state reports, and executive minutes. However, in at least one state, Arkansas, there are no known manuscripts of election returns.20 Overall, there was no uniform or standard format for the maintenance and publication of national, state, or local election statistics. Hence, in this maze of sources and lack of standardization, information about the Free-Men-and-Womenof-Color electorate was, quite literally, lost, and the prevailing sentiment of later commercial publishers and scholars looking back on Colonial (1610–1773) and Revolutionary America (1774–1789) seemed to be that it was not worth untangling the knot of inconsistent documents. None of this plethora of documents was readily available to either the public or the scholarly community. But things were about to change. In 1811, the first commercial venture to provide presidential and other election data appeared, Niles’ Register (1811–1849), published in Baltimore and Philadelphia. This annual publication was quickly followed by another, The Whig Almanac and Politician’s Register (1838–1855), which later became known as The Tribune Almanac (1856–1914). The Whig/Tribune provided both the scholarly and lay communities with “county-level presidential coverage . . . (and) . . . extensive reporting at this level for other offices.”21 Next came the World Almanac, The Chicago Daily News Almanac, and the American Almanac. Although these commercial publications were limited and scattered, they set off scholarly activity intent on making sense of the data. Geographers were the first scholars to take the published election statistics and combine them with maps of the nation, states, regions, and districts. Fletcher Hewes and Henry

14

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Gannett’s Scribner’s Statistical Atlas of the United States, Showing Their Present Condition and their Political, Social and Industrial Development appeared in 1883, while Hewes’ The Citizen’s Atlas of American Elections followed in 1888. In 1932, historian Charles Paullin and geographer John Wright collaborated on the Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States. These pioneering works were followed by two others by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1920 and 1935 that the importance of geographic sectionalism in American electoral behavior and politics. Following these efforts by geographers and historians, political scientists entered the picture. In 1934, Edgar Robinson published The Presidential Vote, 1896–1932, and Walter Dean Burnham in 1955 published the data for the earlier years with his Presidential Ballots, 1836–1892. Now scholars had countylevel election records for most years of the presidential elections. However, data were still missing. Writing in 2002, elections scholar Michael J. Dubin stated: “generally accepted compilations of the popular vote for presidential election date back to 1824. Curiously little is known about the election returns before then.”22 In launching his research to acquire these data, he “found that no definitive set of returns by county exists for the elections from 1824 through 1832.”23 The main reason for the missing presidential election data, as Dubin saw it, was as follows: The number and percentage of states that provided for the popular election of [presidential] electors changed with every election. In 1800, only five states provided for this type of election of [presidential] electors. . . . Not until 1820 did the trend move in an upward direction with 15 states providing for popular elections; 18 did in 1824; and by 1828, all but two chose [presidential] electors by popular vote.24 Put differently, the Constitution left it up to the states to determine how they wanted to choose presidential electors. Some states did it with popular voting, some let the state legislatures do it, while still others used a combination of these two methods. Eventually popular voting would come to dominate, but before 1836 this widely diverse set of procedures became such a barrier and obstacle that scholars and commercial publishers simply didn’t gather these data at all. For instance, South Carolina did not gather this type of data between 1788 and 1860. Dubin collected these data where they existed and made them available. Both prior to and following the commercial and scholarly works, federal agencies began to issue pamphlets and compendia with national election return data. The Bureau of the Census issued Vote Cast in Presidential and Congressional Elections, 1928–1944, and after each biennial election the clerk of the House of Representatives released reports like the Statistics of Presidential and Congressional Election of November 7, 1944 and Statistics of the Congressional Election of November 7, 1950. The Government Printing Office publishes the Congressional Directory for each session of Congress, which includes vote returns. Lastly, the Census Bureau’s Historical Statistics of the United

States: Colonial Times to 1970 and Statistical Abstract of the United States are generally available, as is the Federal Election Commission’s Federal Elections, 1982–2006: Election Results for the U.S. President, the U.S. Senate, and the U.S. House of Representatives. Presently, there are a number of major reference works including the America Votes series, the Guide to U.S. Elections, Presidential Elections, A Statistical History of the American Electorate, and the Student’s Atlas of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1996. To make election return data available in the computer age, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) in the Institute of Social Research at the University of Michigan offers Data Set 0001, “United States Historical Election Returns, 1824–1968” and Data Set 0019, “State-Level Presidential Election Data for the United States, 1824–1972.” Thus, slowly over time, the systematic collection and retrieval efforts of many scholars have been quite successful, resulting in a set of historical election return data that is nearly comprehensive. This material has been made available for dissemination to scholars, academics, political consultants, and the general public. Much can now be found out about voting history in the American past, going back almost to the first elections in the new republic. But this gathering and recording and dissemination have essentially been an endeavor to capture the mainstream. Almost none of these data sources kept track of the African American electorate. Despite the acknowledged fact that race has been a major feature of America’s political life and process, these governmental, commercial, and scholarly compendia have not collected, recorded, and made available for dissemination the nature and scope of the African American electorate. As a consequence, knowledge and scholarship about the African American electorate that are based on empirical interpretations of this incomplete historical election return data are, at best, questionable, if not misleading. Until recently there was thought to have been only one African American who served as a publicly elected official before the Civil War. John Mercer Langston was elected to the post of township clerk in Lorain County, Ohio, in 1854. After the Civil War he would move to Virginia to become the first African American member of Congress from that state.25 However, in 1992 it was discovered that prior to the election of Langston another African American was elected to public office, in the state legislature of Vermont. Regardless of whether the number was one or two, the paucity of African American elected officials before the Civil War suggested even to skilled researchers like political scientist Harold Gosnell “that the direct political importance of the Negro prior to the Civil War was very slight.”26 Indeed, historians until recently considered taking notice of African American elected officials to be of little value in the collection and maintenance of election return statistics for African Americans prior to the Civil War. Despite the fact that the collection and maintenance of election return data gradually became easier, the use of social statistics improved, and the number of African Americans elected to political office increased after the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, the tendency to omit, ignore, dismiss, and generally exclude records of African American voting during the Colonial,

Revolutionary, Antebellum, and Civil War eras continued apace. Simply put, African American voting records were not kept even after African Americans were more fully enfranchised and began holding public office in significant numbers during the Reconstruction Era.

Finding Historical Election Data for African American Candidates: Monroe N. Work, W. E. B. DuBois, and Ralph Bunche To extract election returns for African American voters—past or present—one needs a comprehensive list of African American elected officials for every state, and the years of their election and reelections. African American voters, because of race consciousness in the community, have always tended to vote for African American candidates in high numbers. Hence, the existence of these candidates always suggests that if the African American electorate could vote, they voted for candidates of their own race. Thus, where actual voting data do not exist and/or did not get collected, the presence of African American candidates allows researchers to pinpoint areas of possible and potential voters. Without a list of African American candidates and officeholders for purposes of cross-referencing and comparison, governmental collections, commercial compendia, and scholarly reports have little value for the study of the African American electorate. Sadly, no such list exists. There are several reasons why. Racial prejudice and white supremacy are the dominant factors that help to explain both the small number of colonies and later states that allowed Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color to vote and the small number of African Americans who held elected office during the Early Republic, as compared with the large numbers of officeholders during Reconstruction. Racial prejudice and the ideology of White Supremacy prevented widespread enfranchisement as well as a significant number of African American officeholders. One of the first scholars to address this issue was an African American named Monroe N. Work. Writing in the January 1920 issue of the Journal of Negro History, he described the problem and its relationship to regional, if not national, attitudes and sentiments: “No systematic effort has hitherto been made to save the records of the Negro during the Reconstruction period. American public opinion has been so prejudiced against the Negroes because of their elevation to prominence in southern politics that it has been considered sufficient to destroy their regime and forget it.”27 Work was not alone in understanding this reality. Howard Dodson, longtime librarian and curator at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, made the following remarks about the problem: “Until recently, little was known about black Reconstruction lawmakers. . . . Vilified as ignorant, lazy, illiterate buffoons and gross incompetents, black officials were characterized as unfit to vote, much less to hold elective office. . . . [Thus] they were denied their proper place in the history of our country. Ignored by historians, the vast majority of them remained faceless, voiceless men.”28 Eric Foner, the noted present-day scholar of African American elected officials in the Reconstruction Era, observed that “to

The State of African American Election Data 15 Reconstruction’s opponents, black officeholding symbolized the fatal ‘error’ of national policy after the Civil War. . . . The Democratic press described [state] constitutional conventions and [state] legislatures with black members as ‘menageries’ and ‘monkey houses’ that made a travesty of democratic government. . . .”29 Foner continued: “. . . some opponents of Reconstruction tried to erase black officials from the historical record altogether.” Soon after Democrats regained control of Georgia’s government, Alexander St. Clair Abrams, who compiled the state’s legislative manual, decided to omit black lawmakers from the volume’s biographical sketches. It would be absurd, he wrote, to record “the lives of men who were but yesterday our slaves, and whose past careers, probably, embraced such menial occupations as boot-blacking, shaving, table-waiting, and the like.”30 “These judgments,” noted Foner, “stemmed from a combination of racism and an apparent unwillingness to do simple research about black officeholders,”31 in this time period or before. He concludes by saying that “the lives of most black officials have remained shrouded in obscurity. Many disappeared entirely from the historical record after leaving public office,” if not before. Thus, “available sources are sometimes contradictory or manifestly inaccurate. It is even impossible to ascertain whether certain individuals were in fact black or white.”32 Work noted that the initial problem facing researchers interested in African American electoral, appointive, and participatory politics in the Reconstruction period was one of simple identification. He wrote: “It has been extremely difficult to determine the race of the members of the various Reconstruction bodies. The list of members as published in the Journals of the legislatures does not indicate the race.”33 Work indicated that a rare exception was the state of North Carolina. “The Negro members of the North Carolina General Assembly . . . were indicated by the figure 37 in the State Manual listing all persons who had been in the Assembly. Where no such information could be obtained from printed matter, it has been necessary to rely upon information obtained from individuals who participated in the Reconstruction”34 or from contemporaries who were still living at the moment. Work first attempted a comprehensive identification and listing of the African American members of Reconstruction Conventions and southern state legislatures in 1920. Another major attempt was not made until 1993, some 73 years later. And even this publication, Eric Foner’s Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction, despite the time and expertise that went into looking for these officials, is still incomplete. Work had begun this task of political identification long before his 1920 article. The publication in which Work collected, recorded, and disseminated his research on political identification and later electoral data was the Negro Year Book. Work, who took bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Chicago, began his research at Georgia State College (later Savannah State College) in Savannah, Georgia, resigning on June 29, 1908, to take a job at the Tuskegee Institute, eventually to become head of the Department of Records and Research. When Booker T. Washington interviewed Work for the job at Tuskegee in his private railroad car on May 29, 1908, Washington indicated that

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he wanted Work to consider teaching a course on history and sociology. Washington was concerned that the many speeches he gave around the nation “sometimes contained errors with reference to dates, names, places, and figures. It seemed important to his friends that he correct these deficiencies.”35 Work had been recommended to him to provide this service, yet “Work did no formal classroom teaching during the thirty-seven years he was connected with the institution.”36 Rather, his time at Tuskegee was devoted to gathering and publishing research on the African American experience. The publication of the Negro Year Book largely came about as a result of Andrew Carnegie’s establishment and funding of the Committee of Twelve in 1904 to disseminate publicity relating to the Negro. Washington and his fellow committee members used most of their funding to publish and distribute pamphlets. By the summer of 1910, only $1,000 remained. “In July, Washington wrote Work about the possibility of compiling a yearbook of Negro progress to mark the fiftieth anniversary of emancipation in 1913.”37 Work responded positively. Whereas Washington had envisioned a pamphlet, Work wanted a book and told Washington that the income from the sale of the book “would replenish the fund, providing money for future projects.”38 Shortly thereafter, the Negro Year Book Publishing Company was formed with the Tuskegee Institute, with Work and University of Chicago sociologist Robert E. Park as joint owners. As Work envisioned the Year Book, it would be an annual encyclopedia that would provide “in a condensed form facts in regard to the present and past of the negro in America. It was a new and valuable attempt to register the progress of a race. The volume soon was used as a standard reference in public as well as in private libraries in the United States and abroad.”39 In fact, the “first edition was accepted with such enthusiasm that Monroe edited nine editions during his lifetime.”40 While the Year Book had no peers and quickly established itself as the dominant reference work in the field, “In 1928 it became necessary for Tuskegee Institute to assume the ownership of the Negro Year Book and pay its back debts.”41 While the rate of publication slowed, eleven editions appeared between 1912 and 1952. There is a simple reason for the lack of annual editions after the 1921–1922 edition: finances. There was never enough money to run the Tuskegee Department of Records and Research and meet the demands made on it. Work’s biographer and successor, Jessie Guzman, declared: “He was often beset with financial difficulties. More than once his work was threatened with curtailment because of lack of funds, and it was necessary for him to secure special grants for its continuation. . . . Between 1921 and 1938, mainly through his personal efforts . . . [several foundations] came to his rescue. . . .”42 Even with this help Work still did not have enough funds for an annual publication of the Negro Year Book. Thus, there are significant gaps in its publication. In addition to financial shortfalls, the Great Depression hit both the black community and its colleges very hard, which also contributed to the gaps in the annual publication of this one-ofa-kind reference work. Still, what editions did appear continued to carry excellent, if not the only, materials on African Americans

elections and politics. This body of political and electoral facts served everyone from scholars to laypeople. Table 1.2 summarizes the political identification features inherent in each of the eleven volumes of the Negro Year Book. Using an intensive content analysis of each volume, we were able to discern seven distinct categories of political, statistical, and electoral data. As shown at the top of the table, the first category, “Current Politics,” described all of those African American electoral and appointive candidates who won offices at the state and local levels for the years of that particular Year Book. All eleven editions of the Year Book carried this information. The second category, “Past Politics,” described “Negro Officeholders” during Reconstruction at the national, state, and local levels. Six and a half of the Year Books carried this information. The half-year is the 1941–1946 edition, the first edition not edited by Work, which carried only very limited and brief information about past officeholders. It devoted most of its coverage to current officeholders. This was a departure from the pattern created by Work. The third category, “Suffrage Rights,” described when and where African Americans could exercise their voting rights before the Civil War, after the Civil War, and during the Era of Disenfranchisement. Eight of the nine editions that Work edited carried this information. For some unknown reason, Work dropped this category starting with the 1937–1938 edition. However, this category was transformed into a discussion of poll taxes in the tenth edition and combined in the eleventh edition with a limited discussion of suffrage rights. Thus, ten of the eleven editions dealt with this electoral matter. The fourth category, “Civil Rights,” discussed and noted those civil liberties exercised by African Americans beyond mere voting rights, such as jury duty and accommodation in public transportation. And the fifth category, “Negro Officeholding,” carried information about the locations and terms of African American candidates in state and local positions, particularly in current election years. In this section, Work identifies both African American females and males. All eleven editions of the Year Book carried the fourth and fifth categories. However, only six of the eleven editions carried the sixth category, the number of “Negro Delegates” elected to the Democratic and Republican national conventions, where party nominees for the presidency and vice presidency were nominated. This information contains the names and states of each delegate. From this information, one can discern that African American party behavior was underway to different degrees in different places. Although this information was not published until the fourth edition, it was collected for the earlier years. In the two editions that Guzman edited, this vital party information was dropped. Finally, the seventh category, data on the “Negro Voting Age Population” by gender in each of the states from 1860 through 1950, is unique and quite insightful. These data appear to have been collected from the Bureau of the Census population studies. Work began compiling these data in the second edition, but the information was dropped entirely in the ninth edition, the last one that Work edited before his death. In the second through



The State of African American Election Data 17

Table 1.2  Seven Categories of Political Data and Statistics in the Negro Year Book, 1912–1952 Negro Delegates to National Conventions

Negro Voting Age Population

Year

Current Politics

Past Politics

Suffrage Rights

Civil Rights

Negro Officeholding

1912

X

 

X

X

X

 

 

1913

X

 

X

X

X

 

X

1914–1915

X

 

X

X

X

 

X

1916–1917

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

1918–1919

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

1921–1922

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

1925–1926

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

1931–1932

X

X

X

X

X

Xa

X

1937–1938

X

X

 

X

X

X

 

1941–1946

X

X

X

X

X

 

Xb

1952

X

 

X

X

X

 

X

b d

b

c c

Sources: Data adapted from all eleven editions of the Negro Year Book. a

This volume of the Negro Year Book offers a rich source of voter participation data.

b

In these years the Negro Year Book offers a limited amount of data.

c

In these years the Negro Year Book shifts from a historical discussion of suffrage rights to a focus on poll taxes.

d

In this year the Negro Year Book provides data on United Nations participation.

eighth editions, Work offered a detailed analysis of the voting age population in the African American community. When the eighth edition appeared just before the election of Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt, this suggested to both Roosevelt and the Republican incumbent, Herbert Hoover, the size, location, and potential significance of the African American electorate. Such an empirical message was also available to the mobilizers and party activists in the African American community, but in the next edition, the ninth, this unique information was dropped by Work. However, following Work’s departure, Guzman continued to amass this information, although not in the detail provided in the eighth volume. When seen collectively, the first three editions did not carry all seven categories, but the next five editions did. Beginning with Work’s last edition, the ninth one, the number of categories dropped back to five. Overall, six of the eleven editions have fewer than seven categories while five of the eleven editions carry all of the seven categories. Clearly, part of the reason that a majority of the volumes didn’t carry all of the categories is that in the initial volumes, Work had not developed all of the features and characteristics of African American politics that he wanted to display and reveal. In sum, it took a little time before this annual encyclopedia of the Negro matured and redirected itself. Despite all of its limitations, the Year Book stands as the only major reference work to describe the African American electorate in the Colonial, Revolutionary, Antebellum, Reconstruction, Disenfranchisement, and Modern American periods, albeit in a limited and partial manner. With these eleven volumes, one has

a point of departure for the serious study of the African American electorate. For even though limited, these eleven volumes with their multiple factual categories can, when these data are integrated, offer bold new insights into the nature, scope, and significance of African American political behavior in the American political process. These eleven volumes compiled by Work and Guzman are invaluable and nearly all that is needed to construct a holistic portrait of the African American electorate alone. But when the data in these eleven volumes are used as the groundwork and combined with other scarce data-based works, a whole new reality is possible. Work (and later Guzman) provided the foundation for this epistemological exploration. Despite the quality of these yearbooks, they have been very little used. Work’s biographer, historian Linda McMurry, indicates, “he became a virtually unknown figure after his death . . . [due in part] to his affiliation with Tuskegee . . . as that school became an object of contempt for many later twentieth century scholars.”43 She continues: “The focus of later scholars on the shortcomings of Washington and Tuskegee has obscured their successes,”44 one of which is clearly, the Negro Year Book. Secondly, with the rise of the “behavioralism revolution” in political science in the 1960s, with its focus on the individual and dismissal of political context, election return data took a backseat in the discipline’s research focus. Emphasis on psychological variables at the expense of the state and institutional variables left history out of the conceptualization of politics. Work’s yearbooks simply didn’t surface because data from polls and surveys displaced election returns data as the unit of analysis and measurement. Empirical and quantitative

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political science studies simply ignored and/or dismissed election return data. Finally, it is not just the political identification data that Work generated in the different editions of the Negro Year Book that is so invaluable to scholars, politicians, laypersons, and think tanks then and now; it is equally valuable to those he influenced to build upon his record and take the next steps. Chief among these collectors, recorders, and disseminators of the African American political experience was the first African American political scientist, Ralph Bunche.45 Yet in between Work and Bunche, one finds the contributions of W. E. B. DuBois, who served in part as a link between these two scholarly retrievers. Even before DuBois or Work, the American Negro Academy (ANA) made a limited, almost fleeting, effort as a retriever. The ANA was a learned society founded on “March 5, 1897 in Washington, D.C.” that held its last meeting on “December 28, 1928.”46 During its existence, the ANA “published twenty-two occasional papers on subjects related to the culture, history, religion, civil and social rights, and the social institutions of black Americans.”47 Among these occasional papers, which addressed the major issues of the day, four of the twenty-two papers (18.2%) dealt with disenfranchisement (number 6), the African American elective franchise (number 11), the lost ballot of African Americans in the one-party South (number 16), and the necessity of enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment (number 22).48 Unique among these four occasional papers was number 11, entitled “The Negro and the Elective Franchise.” It was more of a pamphlet with some six different articles, all of which had been written in 1905 by different scholars and men of distinction. Of these six papers, the one written by Professor Kelly Miller of Howard University, entitled “Migration and Distribution of the Negro Population as Affecting the Elective Franchise,” proved to be unlike the others because it included not only an argument but voting statistics as well. And it “was more significant for its statistical tables than for its arguments. The tables contained statistics on the growth of the black population from 1790 to 1900; on the number of blacks living in the South and in the North; on the number of black males of voting age in the northern states; and on the number of black males of voting age in the northern cities.”49 Thus, this paper by Professor Miller pointed to the importance of demographic census data as a tool to understanding potential black political power in the northern states—the destination for most African Americans migrating out of the South. And with this election data Professor Miller might have given the ANA a role in the African American community: promoting the collection of such data to measure the growth of African American political power in the North and the decrease of political power in the South. But it was a moment and role that got lost because it was not promoted as such. At best it was a harbinger of things to come for lone individuals like Monroe Work, W. E. B. DuBois, and others. This fleeting and indirect effort at promoting an effort to collect election data on the African American electorate did not get any support from the last occasional paper written on the subject by the ANA, which was issued in 1924. Entitled “The Challenge of the Disfranchised: A Plea for the Enforcement of

the 15th Amendment,” it devoted more attention to the issue of disenfranchisement but eschewed the need for simple election data collection, even though such data might have helped in motivating and activating the federal government to intervene in the South. This paper emphasized getting the federal courts involved. Thus, this last paper did not build on the lead proffered by Professor Miller. And this turned out to be one of the limitations of the ANA: its work on the disfranchisement of the African American electorate did not build on its groundwork efforts, at least at the statistical level. But after its demise, DuBois did see the necessity of collecting election data and did do so via the The Crisis magazine, which he edited from 1912–1934. Beginning in 1911 until his forced retirement from the NAACP and the editorship of the NAACP’s The Crisis magazine in 1934, DuBois reported all of the names and places of the newly elected African American officeholders at the local, state, and national levels in the United States.50 Despite the disenfranchisement of the African American southern electorate, in the northern, midwestern, western, and Border states African Americans were being elected to city councils, state legislatures, and eventually to Congress in 1928. DuBois’s major contribution is not the simple recordkeeping and the political identification of these pioneering African American political officeholders, but his use of these political successes to motivate and politically socialize the African American middle class into acquiring or regaining the ballot in the places where it had been denied. In addition, DuBois’s work popularized what Work and other African American historians and academics had offered essentially to the educated elite. Now those laypersons in the African American community could hear and read about the meaning, the output, and the influence of having the ballot. African American elected officials were not just theoretical; they were visible and real. Yet of all of the evaluations and assessments made of DuBois’s impact and influence, this aspect of his work is the least known. Nevertheless, Bunche would later gather this African American officeholding data from the DuBois compilations for the Myrdal study. This tabular list is at this writing the very best one in existence. Taking his PhD from Harvard University in 1934, Bunche founded and chaired the Government Department at Howard University. But unlike Work, he was politically involved in the Carnegie Foundation–sponsored study headed by Gunnar Myrdal that was released as a two-volume work, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. Bunche was asked to join the study so as to prevent him from becoming the main critic of the study after it was released.51 Myrdal, when he asked Bunche to join the project and to travel with him around the South, commissioned him “to prepare four memoranda as working papers for the Myrdal study. In fact, of all of the forty-four research monographs prepared for the Myrdal study, ‘the most substantial’ and most important was Bunche’s ‘Political Status of the Negro.’ ”52 This memorandum “consisted of 1,662 typewritten pages,” and was “made up of 19 chapters, three appendices and a preface.”53 Bunche then subdivided these nineteen chapters into seven books. More importantly, the three appendices and thirty-three tables, charts, and graphs in “The Political Status of the Negro”

contained the political identification of African American elected officials past and present, some of which were taken from the sundry listings in Work’s Negro Year Book, while others were found by Bunche’s field researchers. However, one of the major tables in his study was a table containing all of the African American officeholders reported in The Crisis magazine from 1911 until 1934.54 Also unique to this research memorandum is the way that Bunche used his field researchers to get African American voter registration estimates, particularly in southern states and cities during the late 1930s. Prior to Bunche’s field work for the Myrdal study, a major pioneering effort was made by the white historian Paul Lewinson for his work Race, Class, and Party: A History of Negro Suffrage and White Politics in the South in 1932. Bunche’s attempt to find out about African American voter registration in the South after the Era of Disenfranchisement (1888–1901) set him apart from Work.55 However, Work had based his facts on newspaper clippings and on information sent to him by interested volunteers, as well as responses from state and local government officials. In terms of this voter registration data alone, Bunche’s memorandum is a treasure trove and one of the only places this voter registration information can be found. Yet up to the point in time of this writing, this one-of-a-kind type of data had not yet been used in any systematic fashion. Nevertheless, it still exists, albeit in a fairly difficult format to access. Currently, this Bunche memorandum exists in two forms. First, the original memoranda exist on microfilm at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library in Harlem. A microfilm copy can be purchased from the Center.56 Secondly, an edited copy, with an introduction to the memorandum, has been published by historian Dewey Grantham, entitled The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR. Bunche’s memorandum, as Grantham admits in the section “A Note on the Editing,” has been reshaped, reorganized, restructured, divided, and combined in such a manner that some of the pioneering political identification, voter registration, and selected voting data are not included and/or are only partially included; in fact, when the edited volume is compared and contrasted with the original memorandum, they look like two very different documents. Researchers would be well advised to get the original, though limited access to the original memorandum has hampered and hindered its use. Recently, another of Bunche’s memoranda, “A Brief and Tentative Analysis of Negro Leadership,” has been published. However, this one does not suffer from the numerous problems that beset the first published work. The editor, historian Jonathan Scott Holloway, tells us in the section entitled “Note on Editorial Policy and Formatting” that “the content of the memo remains unchanged,”57 unlike the first memo. In it Bunche identifies national, state, and local African American leaders and politicians, along with their party affiliation. In fact, in his two appendixes as well as in the narrative of the book, Bunche uncovers African American leaders who are not found in any other source, making it quite useful for the years under analysis (1800–1939).

The State of African American Election Data 19 Lastly, Bunche in his published article, “Disenfranchisement of the Negro,” provides the reader with the electoral cost to the African American community of the southern Democratic Party’s legal policies to strip the African American electorate of its Fifteenth Amendment right to vote.58 It is a quite learned piece and notable for its insights into the rescission of voting rights. The other two unpublished memoranda are also useful to the study and analysis of the African American electorate and ought to be used in conjunction with the two published ones. Within a decade after his death, Work’s activities had influenced and motivated a new generation of African American scholars. In 1957, the Journal of Negro Education devoted a special edition to “The Negro Voter,” where a variety of African American and white scholars provided systematic analysis of the African American electorate in nearly all of the eleven states that constituted the Confederacy. They looked at voter registration, voter turnout, voting, and political participation. This volume built upon the publications of Work and Bunche. Although single scholars had followed in these leaders’ footsteps and used their groundwork, this special issue of the Journal brought a host of scholars together in one volume to explore and assess the African American electorate.59 Finally, there was one other influence: the federal govern­ ment. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission, created in 1957, published a study of the African American electorate in its first official report, entitled Report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1959. This report provided voter registration data in each of the eleven states that had constituted the Confederacy, using official as well as estimated registration data on the African American electorate. Following this official government report, the Bureau of the Census in its Current Population Reports (CPS), Series P–23, No. 14, gave the number of persons of voting age in 1960 and the votes cast for president in the elections of 1964 and 1960 by race.60 However, starting in 1964, the Bureau of the Census has released all of this information in Series P–20, No. 143. Thus, the Bureau of the Census in 1964, 174 years after the first Census, finally began collecting data on the African American electorate. This development was made possible by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. These government reports do help to supplement the compendia data and studies made available by scholars and research organizations. In addition to scholars and government agencies, at least one African American think tank and one southern civil rights organization were also indirectly influenced by Work’s vision. The first of these private sector organizations to appear was the Southern Regional Council (SRC). From the late 1940s through the 1960s, through its publication The New South and its Voter Education Project (VEP), the SRC published several articles and pamphlets on African American voter registration and voting before and after the reports by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the Bureau of the Census. Moreover, it was the VEP that went into various southern states and conducted voter registration drives. The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank, published an annual Roster of Black Elected Officials from 1970 through 1993, as well as

20

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numerous monographs on different aspects of African American politics throughout the nation and in particular in the South. The annual Roster sought to identify every African American elected official in the nation. Prior to the Joint Center’s annual publication, the SRC-VEP issued such publications. With the rise of the annual Roster, the SRC-VEP publication ceased. Since the discontinuation of the annual Roster, the Joint Center’s newsletter, Focus, and its Web site attempt to continue the tradition of identifying African American elected officials throughout the nation. However, one major flaw with the Joint Center’s two publications is that neither included racial voter registration data nor the number of votes each African American candidate got in the primaries and general election vis-à-vis their opponents. Only their monographs on past Democratic and Republican national conventions contain the total number of African American delegates from each state. Indeed, these publications are the only places where such delegate information can be found. Previously, this information could be found only in the Negro Year Book. In other Joint Center publications, such as its monograph on Reverend Jesse Jackson’s run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1984, there are some primary voting data. Other Joint Center publications on black state legislators and the Congressional Black Caucus contain useful quantitative information. While the publications of these two private organizations do not contain a substantial number of references to Work, they make use of his analytical techniques: (1) political identification at all levels of the political system—national, state, and local; (2) the study of African American delegates to the national Democratic and Republican conventions each presidential year; and (3) the presentation of votes and voting from the African American community in selected races and contests. Finally, these publications contain little analysis and/or interpretation of these voting data. This procedure came directly from Work, who always wanted the “facts”—in this instance, the “electoral facts”—to speak for themselves. Collectively, the data collection, recording, and dissemination launched by Work and Bunche and now enriched and enhanced by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the Bureau of the Census and private organizations like VEP and the Joint Center make it quite possible to appraise and evaluate the African American electorate for patterns, trends, and tendencies in the American political process. Although these data sources still leave a lot to be desired, they have moved the nation and its people a long way from a troubled past of racial inequality. And they have made it a bit easier to make additional progress.

The State of African American Election Data: A Summary Emerging from our overview analysis is a sobering portrait of the state of African American election data. Said data, where they exist, are scattered, piecemeal, fragmented, and inconsistent. Historically, no one kept consistent, systematic, or comprehensive records. Although there were attempts, as the publications of Work attest, the lack of funding and national economic

downturns forced gaps into the collection, recording, and dissemination of election return data. But that was not the only problem. The White Supremacist ideology of past eras pervaded the mindset of archivists and the public alike and prevented the accurate recording and collection of electoral information about African Americas. Even many academics were similarly influenced and bitterly opposed to the archiving of such information. Historian Eric Foner takes one example, University of Georgia history professor E. Merton Coulter, and follows him through time. Foner begins by quoting Coulter’s 1947 work, The South During Reconstruction: “The Negroes were fearfully unprepared to occupy positions of rulership” and black officeholding was “the most spectacular and exotic development in government in the history of white civilization . . . [and the] longest to be remembered, shuddered at, and execrated.”61 Foner continues: As late as 1968, Coulter . . . described Georgia’s most prominent Reconstruction black officials as swindlers and “scamps,” and suggested that whatever positive qualities they possessed were inherited from white ancestors.62 Echoing the racially biased remarks of white ReconstructionEra politicians, Coulter declared without any hesitation that African American congressmen of the 1960s like Adam Clayton Powell, Charles Diggs, Robert Nix, and William Dawson were similarly unfit for office. Coulter’s book carrying these white supremacist remarks, Negro Legislators in Georgia During the Reconstruction Period, was published in 1968. No one knows how these ideas may have stymied and crippled the collection and archiving of data on the African American political experience. However, in the 1968 Georgia Official and Statistical Register, the African American senatorial candidate, attorney Maynard Jackson, was labeled in bold letters, as “Colored.”63 He was the first such candidate to run statewide in Georgia. Like money, ideology was a barrier to the archiving of African American election data. This failure to archive and disseminate data on the African American electorate is not just a southern problem, nor one solely of ideology. In some areas outside of the South the obligation to archive comprehensively has become little more than an afterthought to the election event. Though African Americans now constitute a significant part of the electorate in many major urban areas like Detroit, Michigan, and often have direct responsibility for the conduct of the election process, they may still fail to preserve election information in all of its available dimensions. African Americans are increasingly in a position to contribute significantly to a more complete understanding of themselves and other constituent electorates just by preserving the election return data records of their communities. This recordkeeping should include not only the various election reports of who won and who lost a given election in each precinct but also descriptions by election of precinct and district boundaries, enumerations of the population and registered voters by precinct, polling place locations, assigned precincts and relationships to other representation geographies such as school board and municipal, county, state, and congressional districts.

Moreover, outside of the South where such data are archived, the problem was and is simply the matter of racial identification. Where the data exist and have existed, usually the racial identification of voters and candidates is unrecognizable. No one without a comprehensive and systematic list knows if the elected officials are white, black, or otherwise. Lists of officeholders and their votes are undifferentiated except by party affiliation. This is a central weakness of existing archival data. Only occasionally are African Americans delineated from other racial and ethnic groups. Currently, even the best attempts at master lists have proven to be incomplete and/or inaccurate. Researchers faced with such a daunting task simply omit this variable and/or elected official from their study and interpretation. Thus, nothing is learned about the racial identities of voters and candidates. If one of the dominant characteristics of the data on the African American electorate is that only a smattering of archival data exists, the other characteristic is that a great deal of information has been lost. The data on Free-Men-andWomen-of-Color in Colonial, Revolutionary, and Antebellum America do not exist in any comprehensive manner. This entire period, from about 1610 to 1870, is something of a mystery. In dealing with African American voter registration after the Civil War, J. Morgan Kousser used linear regression analysis to estimate the number of voters, simply because none of the southern states except Louisiana kept voting registration records by race.64 Hence, the data for this period from 1868 until the Era of Disenfranchisement (1888–1908) are also shadowy and unknown. And in the period from 1901 until the work of Bunche in 1940 and the Civil Rights Commission Reports in the late 1950s, the data are scattered, unorganized, and in some instances uncollected. Since 1964 the data have been produced, but they too are fairly widely scattered. Simply put, in some periods the data are not there while in others they exist, but it requires a careful and systematic hunt to find the data and put them in a useable and accessible form. Thus, the current state of the data does not lend itself to easy access for researchers. Again, as noted above, one of the reasons that the existing data have not been gathered is the nature of research in contemporary political science. Survey and polling data are the keys to publication and career advancement. They have literally displaced aggregate election return data. Since the latter are collected for political units like states, congressional districts, counties, precincts, and wards, they cannot effectively speak to individual-level behavior, which is the area of focus in the premier academic journals in the discipline. Time spent collecting, recording, and using aggregate election data returns for analyses will not generate access to the discipline’s most prestigious journals and publications. Thus, such time is seen as wasted and poorly used. Hence, scholars in search of tenure cannot afford the time spent undertaking such collections despite the fact that such work is much needed. Therefore, the task of improving the state of African American election data goes undone. It is not a high priority nor is it a road to prestige and tenure.

The State of African American Election Data 21 In most cases, the task is simply left to the federal agencies, primarily the Bureau of the Census Current Population Reports Series P–20 that are currently organized to collect the racial registration and voting data, but such agencies are not concerned with the past. Hence, data on the past never get dealt with, and neither academic nor federal researchers are inclined to address the situation. We hope that this volume provides a long-overdue remedy to the lack of comprehensive African American election data, and that it will stimulate renewed interest in analyzing these data.

Conclusion on the State of African American Election Data Clearly, some data exist on the African American electorate in each of the different eras of the American political experience. Although not all data are easily accessible, they nevertheless exist in some form or another. Careful historical detective work and investigations have uncovered some of the more obscure information. Over the years, some of these data have been used to provide contextual background information on voter registration and voting behavior in the African American community. At other times selected bits of these electoral data have appeared in sundry reports of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Often, these reports have been generated to support requests for government intervention, particularly in the South, to support legislative efforts to eliminate the poll tax, white primaries, and other barriers to the voting rights of African Americans, which have been constantly under siege since the Era of Disenfranchisement (1888–1908). The fragmentary data that exist require a more holistic assessment. There is a great need to move beyond the current incomplete and sparse political portrait of the African American electorate. The need for a more complete and well-rounded understanding means that these spotty areas of data must be linked so that continuity and a longitudinal frame of reference can be achieved. Previously, not only has the retrieval of this deficient data not taken place, but nothing has been done to connect the dots between the years of the incomplete data to unite them into a coherent whole. In fact, it is this disconnect between the different periods where data on the African American electorate exist that helps to sustain and perpetuate this fragmentary and uneven portrait. Thus, one of the central tasks of this study is to move beyond the simple retrieval of data and to link together data from different periods to create a holistic portrait. Yet the problem here is not simply one of retrieval and linkage. There is the matter of the indirect influence of the African American population during the years when they could not vote. Here inferential (derivative) data can be extracted from the techniques and procedures created to suppress the African American electorate, such as poll taxes, white primaries, and voting experiments like the cotton referendums for black and white farmers during the New Deal. These data show why these electoral barriers were created—namely, due to concern about the potential size of the black electorate in these areas—while

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the cotton referendums show us that blacks wanted to vote and how many took advantage of the opportunity. This participation flies in the face of assertions from southern white politicians that blacks were apathetic and not interested in voting or that they were not “mature” enough to vote on issues. Up to this point, we have discussed the limited existence of data for this electorate, but one must keep in mind the long periods where participation in the electoral process was prohibited by law. Election data from these periods are quite important in generating a complete portrait, and techniques must be employed so that some types of data can be generated to fill in the gaps. Since such election data do not exist and therefore cannot be retrieved, they must be generated indirectly from such factual records of these periods, such as the use of the Three-Fifths Clause in determining seats in the House of Representatives and electoral votes for the presidential candidates of each of the political parties; as well as the identification of “black belt” counties in presidential elections and the use of votes from these counties to suggest how the group, instead of individuals, voted during and after the Reconstruction Era. The existence of poll tax referendums can also be helpful. Another indirect resource would be testing V.O. Key Jr.’s thesis in Southern Politics that voter registration and voting in these same counties decreased with the rise in the size of the black population and increased with the decrease in the size of the black population. Harry Holloway’s thesis in The Politics of the Southern Negro that voter registration and voting was greater in urban areas than in rural areas can also be tested to reveal insights about this electorate. Finally, there are a few monographs released around the time of the Voting Rights Acts of 1965, 1970, 1975, and 1982 that will help to fill in the gaps in the existing data. The point here is that inferential (derivative) data can be extrapolated from existing factual data about the American electoral process, both that designed to exclude as well as that meant to assist the African American electorate, particularly if such information is used in an imaginative and thoughtful manner. Rarely have such data been used, primarily because the lessthan-democratic operation of the electoral machinery is such an embarrassment to a proudly democratic nation. We hope that the combination of retrieval, linkage, and inferential data will establish for the very first time a comprehensive and systematic portrayal of the African American electorate. We also hope to set the stage through subsequent data analyses for useful insights about political participation and voting behavior of a racial group in a modern democratic society. And we hope that the insights generated via this book will, like all of the electoral data found in the sundry compendia and archives, serve policy makers, academics, scholars, politicians, and laypeople, as well as enrich and enhance the intellectual knowledge base of not only the United States but also the global community.

Notes   1. Karen O’Connor and Larry Sabato, American Government: Continuity and Change, 2008 Edition (New York: Longman, 2008), pp. 66–88.   2. John Kolp, Gentlemen and Freeholders: Electoral Politics in Colonial Virginia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 15.   3. Ibid., p. 40.

  4. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 23.   5. Ibid., p. 25.   6. Ibid., p. 24.   7. Robert Dinkins, Voting in Provincial America: A Study of Elections in the Thirteen Colonies, 1689–1776 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), p. 28.   8. Ibid., p. 32.   9. Keyssar, p. 55. 10. Ibid., p. 353, footnote 5. Even a recent analysis concerning an African American slave who was literate and wrote pamphlets before and after the Civil War and became a Republican during Reconstruction in Georgia does not allude to and/or provide evidence of voting by FreeMen-of-Color in the state. See Clarence Mohr, “Harrison Berry: A Black Pamphleteer in Georgia During Slavery and Freedom,” Georgia Historical Quarterly Vol. 67 (Summer 1983), pp. 189–205. 11. Keyssar, p. 351. 12. Ibid., p. 352. 13. Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Political Parties (New York: Free Press, 1972), p. 22. 14. Ibid. 15. Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. xii. 16. See Chapters 3 and 4. 17. Walter Dean Burnham, “Printed Sources,” in Jerome M. Clubb, William Flanigan, and Nancy Zingale (eds.), Analyzing Electoral History (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1981), p. 40. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., pp. 45–70. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., pp. 44. 22. Michael J. Dubin, United States Presidential Elections, 1788–1860 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2002), p. ix. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., p. xi. 25. William Cheek, “A Negro Runs for Congress: John Mercer Langston and the Virginia Campaign of 1888,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 52 (1967), pp. 14–34. 26. Harold Gosnell, Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 3. 27. Monroe N. Work, “Some Negro Members of Reconstruction Conventions and Legislatures and of Congress,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 5 (January 1920), pp. 63–125. Cited in Linda McMurry, Recorder of the Black Experience: A Biography of Monroe Nathan Work (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), p. 63. 28. Foner, p. vii. 29. Ibid., p. xi. 30. Ibid., p. xii. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., p. xiii. 33. Work, p. 63. 34. Ibid. 35. Jessie Guzman, “Monroe Nathan Work and His Contributions,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 34 (October 1949), p. 436; Vernon Williams, Jr., “Monroe N. Work’s Contribution to Booker T. Washington’s Nationalistic Legacy,” Western Journal of Black Studies Vol. 21 (Summer 1997), pp. 85–91. 36. Guzman, p. 437. 37. McMurry, p. 75. 38. Ibid. 39. Guzman, pp. 447–448. 40. Ibid., p. 447. 41. McCurry, p. 76. 42. Guzman, p. 446. 43. McCurry, p. 144. 44. Ibid., p. 146.

45. Hanes Walton, Jr., “Black Southern Politics: The Influences of Bunche, Martin, and Key,” in Hanes Walton, Jr. (ed.), Black Politics and Black Political Behavior: A Linkage Analysis (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), pp. 19–38. 46. Alfred Moss, Jr., The American Negro Academy: Voice of the Talented Tenth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), pp. 1 and 288. 47. Ibid., p. 2. 48. Ibid., pp. 308–309. 49. Ibid., p. 155. 50. For a list of some of the sundry articles that appeared on these officeholders see W.E.B. DuBois (ed.), Selections from The Crisis (Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1983). See also the endnotes for Chapter 19 of this volume. 51. Walter Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938–1987 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 111 and 129. 52. Ibid., p. 22. 53. Ibid. 54. Ralph Bunche, The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR, Edited and with an Introduction by Dewey Grantham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 97, footnote 8. This extensive and

The State of African American Election Data 23 unique compilation of data was not included in the book. In fact, little use has ever been made of it. 55. Ralph Bunche, “Disenfranchisement of the Negro,” in Sterling Brown (ed.), The Negro Caravan (New York: Dryden Press, 1941), pp. 48–59. 56. Walton, “Black Southern Politics: The Influences of Bunche, Martin, and Key,” p. 36, footnote 14. 57. Ralph Bunche, A Brief and Tentative Analysis of Negro Leadership. Edited and with an introduction by Jonathan Scott Holloway (New York: New York University Press, 2005), p. xiii. 58. Bunche, “Disenfranchisement of the Negro,” pp. 48–59. 59. “The Negro Voter,” Journal of Negro Education Vol. 26 (Summer 1957). 60. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Population Characteristics P–20, “Voter Participation in the National Election, November 1966” (October 25, 1968), p. 5. 61. Foner, p. xii. 62. Ibid. 63. The Georgia Official and Statistical Register 1968 (Atlanta: Secretary of State, 1969), p. 153. 64. J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restrictions and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).

CHAPTER 2

The Literature on the African American Electorate The Separation Phenomenon in the Reporting of Election Return Data

26

Examining the Suffrage Literature

27

Table 2.1 Constitutional Convention and Referenda Votes on Equal Suffrage Rights for Free-Men-of-Color in States and Federal Territories of the United States, 1790–1870

31

The Registration, Turnout, and Voting Data Literature

33

Table 2.2 Percent and Number of Registered Voters in Counties of Arkansas by Race, 1867

35

Map 2.1 Arkansas Counties with African American vs. White Voting Majorities, 1867

36

Table 2.3 Percent Ratio of Registered African American Voters to Eligible African American Voters in Arkansas, 1867–1990

37

Table 2.4 Number and Percent of Counties in Georgia That Reported Separately on Black Voters, 1944–1954

37

The Balance of Power Theory Literature

38

Conclusions on the Literature Concerning the African American Electorate

39

Notes 40

26

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Chapter 2

xisting published scholarship on the African American electorate from Colonial times to the present is quite like the nature and scope of the election return data: spotty, scattered, and piecemeal. Most existing literature falls into two distinct categories: the first analyzes the question of suffrage rights, while the second analyzes and interprets African American voter participation. Neither of the categories is comprehensive or systematic in its coverage of the African American electorate, nor are both the only categories, just the major ones. The suffrage literature is focused heavily on the period from the Era of Disenfranchisement (1888–1908) to the present. Also addressed in the modern literature is the matter of felony disenfranchisement, where state laws deny voting rights to former incarcerated persons who have been convicted of felony crimes. Such laws fall disproportionately on members of the African American community.1 In short, for many in the African American civil rights community, felony disenfranchisement means racial disenfranchisement. But while this literature is heaviest in the time frame of 1890–2007, suffrage literature—though spare and spotty—also exists for the Colonial, Antebellum, and Reconstruction periods of American political history. Both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections generated even more suffrage literature as scholars sought to analyze the treatment of African Americans in the contested Bush v. Gore election in Florida in 2000 and Bush v. Kerry in Ohio during the 2004 vote.2 In Florida, where Republican candidate George W. Bush won the state with 530 votes, there were a number of voting irregularities that disenfranchised more than fifteen percent of the African American voters. The United States Commission on Civil Rights held public hearings on this matter on January 11–12, 2001, and found that: (1) the state employed a private contractor to develop a “purge list” of ineligible voters and sent the “purge list” to each one of the county directors of elections; the list turned out to be highly inaccurate, and hundreds of eligible persons were wrongfully turned away on election day; (2) these voters not on the rolls had no mechanism for any type of appeal; (3) polling places closed too early, leaving hundreds in lines, unable to vote; (4) polling places were moved without voters in the area being notified; (5) spoiled ballots that were rejected outright were highest in African American precincts; (6) police were an intimidating presence near polling places in African American precincts; and (7) absentee ballots were denied some African American voters, and when other African American voters went to vote they were denied because records showed that they had been sent absentee ballots. The Commission found that all of these different techniques seriously disenfranchised members of the African American community in the 2000 presidential election.3 In 2004 voter irregularities appeared in the African American communities of Ohio. This time a report on the problems was produced not by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights but by the ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee, Congressman John Conyers of Michigan. Eleven members of the committee, all Democrats because the Republican members boycotted the hearing, investigated the problem of racial disenfranchisement in Ohio. Published by the Government Printing

Office in January 2005, the report pinpointed the negative role played by the Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, an African American who co-chaired the Bush-Cheney Reelection Campaign in Ohio. He deliberately misallocated the number of voting machines for the heavily African American precincts in the urban areas of the state, which, in turn, caused delays of three to four hours and left hundreds of voters unable to vote when the polls closed. In addition, there was illegal purging of the voter rolls. Finally, Republican monitors showed up at these urban precincts and challenged 97 percent of new African American voters, creating further delays. This is a process called “caging,” and it is illegal in the state.4 Events in both Florida and Ohio, in 2000 and 2004, respectively, continued the concern over the long-standing matter of racial discrimination in voting in presidential and state elections. The problems in Florida led Congress to pass new voter legislation to help states acquire electronic voting machines and, subsequently, to renew the Voting Rights Act (VRA), this time by a Republican Congress. The other main body of literature, voter participation literature, tends to focus primarily on those periods of American political history where African Americans registered, turned out, and voted in large numbers. The first period of high African American voter activity was during Reconstruction, in 1868–1876, while the period from the first Voting Rights Act in 1965 to the present has now been called the “Second Reconstruction.”5 While many in the academic and scholarly community object to and are opposed to the term “Second Reconstruction” and do not see the linkage, the vast literature on African American voting behavior in this period outstrips that on any other period in America’s political history. Although a few articles have appeared on voting behavior in the African American community both before and after the VRA in 1965, the promise for study in the future within this field is quite staggering given that more African Americans than ever are running for offices such as governor, senator, and president. In the past such positions were not contested by African American candidates as frequently as they are now.6 In point of fact, the growth potential for this literature is such that it may soon outstrip the suffrage literature and become the dominant body of work about the African American electorate. At the moment, though, study of the suffrage problem predominates.

The Separation Phenomenon in the Reporting of Election Return Data A problematic characteristic of voting literature, including that specific to African Americans, is created by the so-called separation phenomenon, the tendency to split institutional variables (registration and turnout data) from voting variables (the vote and election return data). This tendency brings with it a problem. Unlike the two aforementioned categories with their different foci, the separation phenomenon splits electoral variables that should be connected in order to craft a holistic portrait of any electorate, whether it be African American, white, Latino, or Asian. Only occasionally does one find a pamphlet or monograph that provides complete coverage, including voting age

population, voter registration, voter turnout (entire population) data, and election return data. Even those works that examine African American political candidates—votes cast for them or for their opponents in primaries, runoffs, and general elections—tend to miss some portion of the vital election data. This basic information, which can be found in different degrees of completeness in the Negro Year Book series, tends to be separated except for some selected electoral races.7 However, the separation of voting age population and voter registration data from actual election return data is the central characteristic of most compendia on the American electorate. In fact, the dominant method of reporting electoral information is to list the office, the candidates, the numbers of votes, and the percentages of the total vote that each candidate in that particular race received. Voter registration and turnout information are usually summarized in journalistic accounts. In an era when polling and surveys are the main tools used to predict and explain individual-level vote choice in elections, election return data are rarely used simply because they are collected for aggregate political units like precincts, wards, counties, legislative and congressional districts, and states. Thus, rarely are election return data used and/or reported in poll and survey-based analyses. Hence, separation is maintained in part by the methodological techniques and approaches used in studies. Separation is also maintained because state election manuals have traditionally simply reported offices, parties, candidates, votes, and sometimes the vote percentages received in elections. Voter registration and turnout information are not carried in these state manuals, registers, and reports in any standardized fashion. As the secretaries of state have transitioned to Web sites to replace print publications, some states have begun to provide additional information on registration and turnout, but again, it is not standardized. And most important, these Web site election return data do not go back far in time. Currently, most secretary of state Web sites only carry election data back to the 1990s, making it difficult to overcome the separation pattern. Here, separation was institutionalized by state governmental agencies, and when federal governmental agencies began their own reporting, they copied and continued the pattern set in place by colonial governments, antebellum state governments, and the Bureau of the Census’s Statistical Abstracts series. Separation was inherent in the pioneering academic and scholarly studies. Edgar E. Robinson’s The Presidential Vote, 1896–1932 and W. Dean Burnham’s Presidential Ballots, 1836– 1892 began the pattern in political science, followed by recent studies like Svend Petersen’s A Statistical History of the American Presidential Elections and Michael Dubin’s United States Presidential Elections, 1788–1860. A major exception to this separation approach is Jerrold Rusk’s A Statistical History of the American Electorate, published in 2001. Rusk’s unique volume sought to address the questions of voter registration and turnout with far more precision in terms of definition and measurement than had ever been done before. New election return data had been discovered for 1788–1860, along with new information on state constitutional law related to voting. Crucial among these new data were economic and property requirements that had not

The Literature on the African American Electorate 27 been taken into account when earlier scholars had conceptualized “voter turnout” and measured it. Rusk has written: Without accurate knowledge of economic criteria for voting (landed and personal property, taxpaying), the definitive history of the eligibility and vote turnout of early American state electorates is missing. There are good estimates for eligibility and voting turnout after this period. For the early period, however, recourse to mobilization values and comparison of these values across time in a state’s history may be the best way to gauge voter participation trends longitudinally, especially for the original thirteen states.8 Therefore, to get beyond the limitations of the voter registration and voter turnout concepts, Rusk used two new concepts to make voter turnout much more reliable and understandable in relationship to the suffrage laws of each state at any given time in America’s political history. The first concept is voter eligibility, which he defined as “the percentage of a state’s adult population that is legally allowed to vote according to a state’s suffrage laws at any given point in time. Empirically, its formula is E/A, where E refers to the number eligible to vote and A refers to the total number of adults in a state in a particular year.”9 He continued by noting that voter mobilization is: the percentage of people who actually voted in a particular political race in a state in any given year compared to the state’s entire adult population. . . . Empirically, the formula for voter mobilization is V/A, where V refers to the number of people who actually voted in a given political race in a particular election year and A is the number of adults in the total population in a state in that year.10 Thus, with these refined and precisely measured concepts that help to analyze voter turnout, Rusk could then more precisely estimate voter turnout as V/E. Therefore, with this pioneering volume, the separation phenomenon has come full circle and is now integrated in the literature, at least in this one volume. It is unclear whether others will follow this path. Yet at this moment, separation prevails and impacts the study of all portions of the electorate, including African Americans. Hence, in the small amount of literature that provides election return data on the African American electorate, one will find a separation of the institutional from the voting variables. And while it is essential to acknowledge this major characteristic in all of the literature on the American electorate, this study will, where possible, make adjustments and linkages so that a more holistic portrait can be developed.

Examining the Suffrage Literature There are two great periods covered by suffrage literature on the African American electorate. The first period, from 1800 to 1869, generated a literature about Free-Men-of-Color and the

28

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different statewide referenda that sought to expand or contract their suffrage rights in Antebellum America. (Although the 1869 date is slightly past the Antebellum period, Free-Men-of-Color in several northern states did not get the right to vote until the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in March 1870.) The second period, from 1890 to 1964, dealt with the disfranchisement of the African American electorate and its possible restoration via the elimination of poll taxes and government intervention. Finally, beyond these two great periods covered by the literature, there has been a devolution in the focus of this literature from an all-encompassing perspective to a narrower one dealing first with poll taxes, then with minority vote dilution, and most recently with felony disenfranchisement. To be sure, other literature has surfaced over this long period of African American electoral politics. Such literature has been overshadowed by the various works concerning these two large eras in American political history. No matter the origin of the quantities of literature on the African American electorate, the study of this group of voters has been greatly improved by literature examining the statewide suffrage referenda and the narrower literature on the poll tax, vote dilution, and felony disenfranchisement. Embedded in this literature are newly discovered voter registration and election return data that will enhance and enrich what is available, so as to enable us to develop as complete and holistic a portrait of this group electorate as possible. For instance, in the recently discovered speech of Isaiah T. Montgomery, we have uncovered information concerning the number of African American registered voters in Mississippi in 1890 and the number left after the state constitutional convention. Outside of the South and before the Civil War, the numerous northern, western, and eastern statewide suffrage referenda provide us with some heretofore unknown insights and factual knowledge about the potential electorate and voting behavior of Free-Men-of-Color. Each of these bodies of suffrage literature gives us a better window on an electorate where few official records and holdings now exist. This literature will help us fill in the gaps and the missing data.

Suffrage Literature from Colonial America to the Fifteenth Amendment There is a paucity of literature on the African American electorate in Colonial America. The few articles and monographs that exist on suffrage rights in this era offer only a brief overview of the colonies that made suffrage rights available to this population. The pioneering article on this matter, S.B. Weeks’s “The History of Negro Suffrage in the South,” which appeared in the Political Science Quarterly in 1894, devotes just two and a half pages to the topic, while the initial monograph on the subject, Emil Olbrich’s The Development of Sentiment on Negro Suffrage to 1860, which appeared in 1912, covered this period in one chapter. Both works stood for years as the authoritative word on the topic and were much quoted. Eventually, these works were superseded in 1978 by Robert J. Dinkin’s Voting in Provincial America: A Study of Elections in the Thirteen Colonies, 1689– 1776. In 2000, all of these works were surpassed by Alexander Keyssar’s well-researched and comprehensive work The Right to

Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, which devotes a section of chapter 3 and more than two appendixes to the topic. Yet the coverage is not greatly detailed, nor could it be, given the spotty recordkeeping in that period. Once the time frame changes to the Antebellum Era, which saw the rise of state governments, the literature expands. Led by African American historian Charles Wesley’s two major scholarly articles, “Negro Suffrage in the Period of ConstitutionMaking, 1787–1865” and “The Participation of Negroes in AntiSlavery Political Parties,” both of which appeared in the Journal of Negro History, studies on the suffrage issue blossomed. More importantly, specialized articles appeared that explored the topic in New York,11 New Jersey,12 Pennsylvania,13 Maine,14 Rhode Island,15 Michigan,16 and Wisconsin.17 Three articles appeared on both New York and Pennsylvania, two on Wisconsin, and at least one each on the other states. Eventually, a book emerged on the African American suffrage struggle in New York not only because the state held three statewide referenda on suffrage rights for African Americans but also because in 1821 the state added a $250 dollar propertyholding qualification in order for Free-Men-of-Color to continue to vote in the state.18 To date, historian Phyllis Field’s The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era, which appeared in 1982, stands as the best suffrage work yet to surface. It precisely measured suffrage voting in three statewide referenda using electoral data gathered at the county level. Besides the unique New York situation, which has attracted scholarly attention, there is the matter of Pennsylvania. In the Quaker-dominated state, Free-Men-of-Color had not been denied suffrage rights, but in 1837–1838 a controversy arose when “A decision of the State Supreme Court declared that the Negro was not a freeman, and accordingly was not entitled to vote. In 1837, a candidate for office in Bucks County, who was defeated, claimed his opponent’s seat because Negroes had been permitted to vote for him and that such an action was contrary to the law. . . . In December the court decided that the election was legal. . . .”19 That same year, the state’s constitutional convention “discussed the question of Negro suffrage and decided on January 27, 1838, by a vote of 77–45 that the suffrage should be limited to whites. The constitution with this provision was ratified in October [1838].”20 On June 5, 1837, prior to the passage of this disenfranchisement amendment, two African American activists in Philadelphia, Frederick Hinton and Reverend Charles Gardner, held a mass meeting at the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church and wrote a letter to protest the disenfranchisement politics they anticipated at the convention. The title of this document is “Memorial To the Honorable, The Delegates of The People of Pennsylvania In Convention at Philadelphia Assembled.” Both men signed the document and “presented it to the convention in January 1838.”21 Occurring almost simultaneously with the Hinton and Gardner effort was another led by Free-Men-of-Color in Pittsburgh, who drafted their memorial entitled “Memorial of The Free Citizens of Color in Pittsburg, 1837 and Its Vicinity Relative To The Right of Suffrage Read In Convention, 8 July, 1837.”22 Then, several weeks later, after the disenfranchisement amendment was passed, Gardner spearheaded another mass



The Literature on the African American Electorate 29

meeting on March 14, 1838, at the First African Presbyterian Church, to draft an appeal petition “to dissuade Pennsylvania voters from ratifying the anti-black suffrage amendment.”23 This well-known historical document is entitled “The Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens, Threatened With Disenfranchisement, To the People of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1838.”24 Neither of the two Memorials, which were addressed to the constitutional convention delegates, nor the Appeal, which was addressed to the white voters of the state, stopped the disenfranchisement amendment from being passed and ratified. Other protest petitions followed these, including in 1853 “The Memorial of Black Philadelphians and the Right to Vote,” which was addressed to the “Senate and House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania . . . [and] appealed to conscience, to good will, and to a spirit of justice.”25 Yet each of these memorials, pamphlets, circulars, and proclamations “failed in accomplishing . . . [their] purpose—restoring the right to vote.”26 Thus, “after 1838 no blacks voted until the state’s constitution was changed in 1873 to include all male citizens regardless of color.”27 As a result, it took more than thirty-five years for Free-Men-of-Color to regain their suffrage rights despite the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. Although this unique situation produced two original pamphlets, several articles, and a dissertation, no book-length study has surfaced. Nevertheless it is, like the New York suffrage efforts, an illuminating example of African American suffrage in Antebellum America. Besides this detailed literature on New York and Pennsylvania, a book published in 2008 analyzes the suffrage struggles in four states: New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts.28 Although this is the first book-length study to attempt a detailed comparative analysis of these four suffrage struggles, it misses the three additional suffrage referenda in New York and elsewhere. This literature raises a major question: were there other state suffrage referenda for Free-Men-of-Color in this period of American political history? Political scientists Robert Dykstra and Harlan Hahn, in analyzing the suffrage referendum vote in Iowa in 1868, have answered the question in this manner: “Between Appomattox and the promulgation of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, proposals that would allow Negroes to vote became burning political issues in several Northern states.”29 They continued: Between 1865 and 1870 proposals for Negro suffrage were defeated in at least 14 Northern states. In addition, Colorado Territory jeopardized its admission to the Union in 1865 by a favorable referendum vote on a constitution restricting the franchise to “every white male citizen of the age of twenty-one and upward.” In New Jersey, the question of Negro suffrage was never submitted to a referendum, although the state legislators rejected it decisively by a vote in 1867, and by a subsequent resolution denouncing Negro enfranchisement.30 Historian William Gillette answered the same question from his analysis of the politics involved in the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment by noting the following:

Voters in the North, in referendum after referendum, rejected Negro suffrage by a generally substantial vote. . . . During 1865 five jurisdictions voted down Negro suffrage in popular referendums. . . . Unfortunately, there was no ground swell of popular support or any great decisive change in public opinion between 1865 and 1868 as registered in referendums on Negro suffrage. Instead, white Americans resented and resisted it.31 Gillette concluded after looking at how white historians had treated the African American voter in post–Civil War America by finding that: It has long been considered a commonplace fact that there was a sturdy, steady, and increasing progress toward enfranchisement of the Negro after 1865. In fact, this was not the case. Rather than witnessing inevitable progress and invulnerable principle, there were hard starts and abrupt stops. Indeed, it often appeared that for any step forward there were two steps backward.32 From 1800 to 1869, the very eve of the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, the historical and factual record shows a host of statewide referenda in the North, Midwest, and East that went down to defeat almost every time. Two passed after the Civil War and just prior to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. In the one article that analyzes these suffrage fights in a longitudinal manner (numerous articles analyze these suffrage referendums in single states), historian Tom McLaughlin has written: An examination of the state referenda reveals that (1) proposals for black rights were defeated by northerners in nineteen of the twenty-two referenda; (2) each of the twelve northern states under study rejected a black rights measure at least once; (3) 63 percent of all votes cast in all referenda were against black advancement; (4) of the 668 counties, 507 [76 percent] voted against Black rights.33 Using a correlational analysis, McLaughlin was able to find some interesting relationships between political party variables and the African American suffrage vote. He asserted “the correlation between popular voting on black rights referenda and political party preferences show that nearly all (94 percent in 1836–1848; 98 percent in 1848–1860) of the counties which gave a majority to Democratic candidates in presidential elections also gave a majority vote against black rights.”34 But this major finding showed just the reverse for other political parties. Again, he remarked, “Although a majority of the Whig and Republican counties in Presidential elections (76 percent in 1836–1848; 66 percent in 1848–1860) voted against black rights, the great majority of votes favoring blacks in the twenty-two referenda were cast in those Whig and Republican counties.”35 Since McLaughlin’s article combines both suffrage and exclusion (anti-immigration) referenda in his count of twentytwo ballots, and since he begins his analysis in 1846, we have created our own Table 2.1 (p. 31) that only uses suffrage referenda

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and begins in 1790 and ends in 1869. Thus, by narrowing our focus and expanding the time period to capture those referenda and/or constitutional votes before 1846, we can offer a more systematic and comprehensive analysis of the African American suffrage referenda for the very first time. Table 2.1 shows that after the formation of the federal government, votes on equal suffrage rights for the Free-Men-andWomen-of-Color occurred in three different arenas: (1) state constitutional conventions, (2) statewide referenda, and (3) referenda in territories owned by the federal government. Of the new states to enter the Union that considered extending the right to vote to African Americans, only two, Vermont and Maine, approved this right, while thirteen states denied it. The state of New York had extended the right to vote to Free-Men-of-Color but instead of denying the right, they placed restrictions on it in 1811, 1814, and 1821. Tennessee, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, which had extended that right in the Colonial Era, voted to deny that right in their new state constitutions during the so-called Era of Jacksonian Democracy, when President Andrew Jackson espoused extending suffrage rights to the “common man.” Moving from state constitutions, some nine states decided to put the question to the people via statewide referenda. Five of these nine states—New York, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Iowa—held multiple statewide referenda. Counting both multiple and single referenda, some eighteen states held them. In these eighteen statewide referenda, only two states, Minnesota and Iowa, approved of granting voting rights to African Americans. And these approvals came just prior to the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. Referenda voting also occurred in some of the federal territories, such as Colorado, District of Columbia, and Nebraska. In each of these territories the right to vote was denied. Only in Nebraska did the referendum come close to passing. Combining the states with the territories, eighteen places held suffrage referenda and all of these referenda took place between 1846 and 1869. While this works out to nearly one state or territory referendum per year, only one territory allegedly approved of the right to vote for African Americans. It has been claimed that the Dakota territories voted to grant this right, but at present, there are no corroborating data. Table 2.1 provides us with some collective insight. Using the mean from the extant data for each of the three arenas, we can postulate that more than three-quarters of the white political elites in the state constitutional conventions strongly opposed giving equal suffrage rights, while three-fifths (60.1 percent) of the white electorate as a whole in the states opposed granting this right. Extrapolating again from the extant data, in the federal territories nearly 80 percent of the electorate as a whole opposed granting voting rights. Between the political elites and the electorate in statewide referenda, the electorate came closer to granting the right to vote than did elected state convention leaders, but in the territories where there were very few African Americans, there was very strong opposition. William Gillette summed up the matter by saying, “In retrospect, the postwar movement to enfranchise the Negro was neither steady nor progressive nor inevitable.”36 In the end, the Fifteenth Amendment was needed to rectify this appalling situation.

The Fifteenth Amendment was also needed outside the South, especially in the Border States of West Virginia and Delaware. On the dismal situation in Delaware, see Amy Hiller, “The Disfranchisement of Delaware Negroes in the Late Nineteenth Century”; Harold Hancock, “The Status of the Negro in Delaware After the Civil War, 1865–1875”; Harold Livesay, ”Delaware Negroes, 1865–1915”; and John Munroe, “The Negro in Delaware”; as well as the unique article by Charles Ambler, “Disfranchisement in West Virginia, Part I and Part II,” which contains the only extant official county-level African American voter registration data for 1869. Collectively, these articles provide historical data that strongly support the need for the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment.37

Suffrage Literature from the Era of Disenfranchisement to the Dawn of the Modern Civil Rights Movement The body of literature written on African American suffrage reaches its zenith around the time of passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and rise of Black Reconstruction, but it has never looked beyond the 1877 Compromise, which resolved the disputed 1876 presidential election. This compromise arranged for the remaining federal troops to be withdrawn from the South, and subsequent election events transformed the literature from one focused on suffrage to a new literature focused on fraud, violence, corruption, and intimidation against the African American electorate. This literature and the incidents described led not only to congressional hearings but also to proposed congressional legislation for the protection of African American suffrage rights in the South. On June 26, 1890, Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge, a Republican from Massachusetts, introduced in the House of Representatives “a bill for federal supervision of federal elections. Although opponents of the bill skillfully labeled it a ‘Force Bill’— a term which some contemporary historians still use without the quotation marks—it clearly did not provide for the use of force.”38 According to historian Rayford Logan: In any election district where a specified number of voters petitioned the federal authorities, federal supervisors representing both parties were to be appointed. These supervisors were to have the power to pass on the qualifications of any voter challenged in a federal election. They also were to be given the power to receive ballots, which were wrongfully refused by local officers, and to place such ballots in the ballot box.39 “After a great deal of parliamentary maneuvering, a vote was taken on July 2nd. The bill managed to squeak through by the slim margin of 155 to 149, with 24 not voting. The bill was sent to the Senate on July 7th.”40 Such action “spurred Southern Democrats to take effective action designed to offset federal legislation in support of Negro suffrage.”41 Despite the fact that the Senate had not yet taken up the bill, the first southern state to take action was Mississippi. In fact, Mississippi’s actions were designed to preempt those of the Senate.



The Literature on the African American Electorate 31 Table 2.1  Constitutional Convention and Referenda Votes on Equal Suffrage Rights for Free-Men-of-Color in States and Federal Territories of the United States, 1790–1870

Referenda Votes in the Federal Territories

Votes of Statewide Constitutional Conventions Against Year State

Votes

Percent

Against

In Favor Votes

Percent

Outcome

In Favor

Year State

Votes

Percent

1865 Colorado

4,192

89.8%

 476

10.2%

Denied

(........................... Votes not given ...........................) Denied

1865 District of Columbia

7,333

99.5%

  36

 0.5%

Denied

1802 Ohio

(........................... Votes not given ...........................) Denied

1866 Nebraska

3,938

50.6%

3,838

49.4%

Denied

1807 New Jersey

(........................... Votes not given ...........................) Denied

1867 Dakotas

(.......... Data not found ..........)

Approved

1811 New York

(........................... Votes not given ...........................) Restricteda

1868 Washington

(.......... Data not found ..........)

Denied

1814 New York

(........................... Votes not given ...........................) Restricteda

1868 Idaho

(.......... Data not found ..........)

Denied

1818 Connecticut

(........................... Votes not given ...........................) Denied

1868 Montana

(.......... Data not found ..........)

Denied

1819 Maine

(........................... Votes not given ...........................) Approved

1821 New York

(........................... Votes not given ...........................) Restricteda

1834 Tennessee

(........................... Votes not given ...........................) Denied

1790 Vermont

(........................... Votes not given ...........................) Approved

1799 Kentucky

(........................... Votes not given ...........................) Denied

1801 Maryland

1835 North Carolina

66

52.0%

61

48.0%

Denied

1838 Pennsylvania

77

63.1%

45

36.9%

Denied

1847 Illinois 1849 California 1850 Indiana 1851 Ohio 1857 Oregon Totals

137 94.5% 8 5.5% (........................... Votes not given ...........................)

Denied Denied

122

99.2%

1

 0.8%

Denied

66

84.6%

12

15.4%

Denied

(........................... Votes not given ...........................) 468

78.7%

127

Denied

21.3%

Referenda Votes in the States Against Votes

1846 New York

224,336

72.4%

85,406

27.6%

Denied

1860

345,791

63.6%

197,889

36.4%

Denied

1869

282,403

53.1%

249,802

46.9%

Denied

1847 Wisconsin

Percent

In Favor

Year

Votes

Percent

Outcome

14,615

65.9%

7,564

34.1%

Denied

1849

4,075

43.6%

5,265

56.4%

Approvedb

1857

45,157

58.6%

31,964

41.4%

Denied

1865

55,454

54.3%

46,629

45.7%

Denied

1850 Michigan

32,026

71.4%

12,840

28.6%

Denied

1868

110,582

60.7%

71,733

39.3%

Denied

1870

50,598

48.3%

54,105

51.7%

Approved

1857 Iowa

49,387

85.3%

8,489

14.7%

Denied

1868

81,119

43.5%

105,384

56.5%

Approved

1865 Minnesota

14,838

54.9%

12,170

45.1%

Denied

1867

28,759

51.2%

27,461

48.8%

Denied

1868

29,906

43.2%

39,322

56.8%

Approved

211,405

84.9%

37,548

15.1%

Denied

33,489

55.2%

27,217

44.8%

Denied

1862 Illinois 1865 Connecticut 1867 Kansas

19,600

65.1%

10,529

34.9%

Denied

1867 Ohio

255,340

54.1%

216,987

45.9%

Denied

1867 New Jersey

(…………. No referendum held ………….)

Deniedc

1868 Missouri Totals

74,053

57.3%

55,236

42.7%

1,962,933

60.1%

1,303,540

39.9%

Denied

Totals

15,463

78.0%

Votes

4,350

Percent

Outcome

22.0%

Sources: Adapted from Emil Olbrich, The Development of Sentiment on Negro Suffrage to 1860 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1912); William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969); Phyllis Field, The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1982); John Mohr (ed.), Radical Republicans in the North: State Politics During Reconstruction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); and Richard Curry (ed.), Radicalism, Racism, and Party Realignment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962). Referendum data for Kansas in 1867 and for Missouri and Iowa in 1868 are from The American Annual Cyclopedia and Register of Important Events (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1967). In addition, the following articles were consulted: Michael McManus, “Wisconsin Republicans and Negro Suffrage: Attitudes & Behavior, 1857,” Civil War History Vol. 25 (March, 1979), pp. 36­–54; John Rozett, “Racism and Republican Emergence in Illinois, 1848–1860: A Re-evaluation of Republican Negrophobia,” Civil War History Vol. 22 (June, 1976), pp. 101–115; Ronald Formisano, “The Edge of Caste: Colored Suffrage in Michigan,” Michigan History Vol. 56 (Spring 1972), pp. 19–41; Marion Thompson, “Negro Suffage in New Jersey, 1776–1875,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 33 (April, 1948), pp. 168–224; Charles Wesley, “Negro Suffrage in the Period of Constitution Making, 1787–1865,” in his Neglected History (Ohio: Central State College Press, 1965), pp. 41–55; S. B. Weeks, “The History of Negro Suffrage in the South,” Political Science Quarterly Vol. 9 (December, 1894), pp. 671–703; and Alice Hahn, “The Exercise of the Electoral Franchise in Iowa in Constitutional Referendum: 1838–1933” (master’s thesis, Drake University, 1933). Calculations by the authors. a

Outcome in favor of African American suffrage but with property, tax, or other restrictions.

The governor of Wisconsin set aside the referendum outcome that actually favored suffrage after claiming that he did not understand the results. Later, the state supreme court upheld the outcome that had been rendered by the electorate. b

The New Jersey legislature decided against allowing a state referendum, deliberating instead within their body to directly withhold suffrage rights from African Americans. c

On August 12, 1890, some six weeks after the bill’s passage in just the House of Representatives, the Mississippi Constitutional Convention met in Jackson to revise their state constitution to disenfranchise as much of the African American electorate as possible. Of the 134 convention members, only one, Isaiah T. Montgomery, was African American. Montgomery’s position, stated in his convention speech, seemingly endorsed and approved of the convention’s final document that disenfranchised the African American electorate in the state. Logan says: Montgomery favored, in October, a bill that would disfranchise 123,000 Negroes and 12,000 whites, leaving a total Negro vote of about 66,000 and a white majority of more than 40,000. Montgomery perhaps sincerely believed that relations between the races would be improved and that as Negroes increased in knowledge and property, they would be allowed to vote.42

32

Chapter 2

In his further evaluation of Montgomery’s speech, Logan found that “Montgomery’s speech naturally won the approval of the Democratic press in Mississippi and in the nation as a whole. Even [former President] Cleveland praised it.”43 The former president and several Republican senators seemingly had forgotten “the act of Congress, approved February 23, 1870, by which Mississippi had been ‘readmitted’ to the Union.” One of the fundamental conditions of readmission—as for other Confederate states—was the pledge that the state constitution should never be ‘so amended or changed as to deprive any citizen, or class of citizens of the United States, of the right to vote, who are entitled to vote by the Constitution (of 1868) herein recognized, except as punishment for such crimes as are now felonious at common law.’44 For Logan, Montgomery’s presence and speech enabled the collapse of suffrage rights for the African American electorate in Mississippi. However, long before Logan arrived at his evaluative position, numerous others—including contemporaries of Montgomery—had arrived at evaluative positions that were much harsher than his. The harshest declared Montgomery to be an “Uncle Tom” who conspired to destroy suffrage rights in the state, and later the South, for his race. The eminent African American political scientist and third African American to become president of the American Political Science Association, Matthew Holden, Jr., who also happens to be a native Mississippian, began a search for the actual convention speech because, except for a few excerpts, an original copy had not surfaced. Holden put it thusly: The speech is very hard to get. A Web search is useless. . . . Those who are accustomed to the old-fashioned paper searches are no better off. . . . [T]he Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported substantial portions (September 18, 1890) . . . [but] seemed to have omitted most, if not all, the historical and philosophical explanation that Montgomery put forth. The Memphis Appeal (September 16, 1890) also reported on the Convention in a way that refers to Montgomery’s presence. After much search, I have found a copy published in the New York World, September 30, 1890 . . . [and later] I was privileged to find another copy that had been published in a souvenir program for the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Mound Bayou.45 Using the entire speech, Holden discovered that previous existing excerpts had been taken out of context and that they offered a portrait of Montgomery’s actions that did not correlate with the entire speech. Hence, in a larger and forthcoming monograph entitled The World and Mind of Isaiah T. Montgomery: The Greatness of a Compromised Man, Holden argues persuasively that when the entire speech is analyzed and placed in the political context of the times, Montgomery’s action was one of “strategic surrender,” because this was the only possible option left to him given the determination to eliminate the

suffrage rights and political power of African Americans in the state’s legislature and local governments.46 However one views Montgomery’s speech, “on October 22, 1890, the convention adopted a report of the state judiciary committee that it was unnecessary to submit the proposed changes to the people. The convention approved the new [state] constitution on November 1, 1890.”47 The new provisions for disenfranchising certain members of the electorate included that the state government “imposed a poll tax of two dollars, excluded voters convicted of certain crimes, and barred from voting all those who could not read a section of the state constitution, or understand it when read, or give a reasonable interpretation of it.”48 In his annual message on December 1, 1890, President Benjamin Harrison, a Republican, only indirectly mentioned Mississippi’s action but proposed no new action. Just over three months prior to the president’s remarks, the senate Republican majority, acting on the very day of the Mississippi Constitutional Convention, set aside the Lodge Bill that the House of Representatives had passed to discuss instead the Tariff Bill, which took up the rest of the congressional session. The consideration of a silver bill drew higher priority from some Republicans, and the Lodge Bill was set aside again.49 With the passage of the silver bill on January 14, 1891, “the contest on the Elections bill had to be resolved.” A Republican motion to reconsider the Lodge Bill “resulted in a tie vote, 33 to 33, which Vice President (Levi P.) Morton broke with an affirmative vote.”50 A Democratic filibuster began that lasted until January 20, when an attempt at cloture began. The Democrats had maneuvered for two days to prevent cloture when help arrived from several silverite Republicans. One of them proposed consideration of an apportionment bill. It was approved by a vote of 35 to 34, and the Lodge Bill was set aside for the final time. A recent scholar using the unopened papers of the Lodge Bill senate Floor Manager, Republican Senator George F. Hoar of Massachusetts, found that the bill was defeated in the Senate due to its being “postponed in behalf of the tariff legislation, crippled by the controversy over silver, damaged by its association with cloture, the Federal Election Bill of 1890–1891 suffered the final humiliation of being sacrificed to a bill to which neither party had pledged it opposition, nor its honor.”51 This Senate defeat of the federal election supervision bill combined with the failure of the president to take any additional action sent a signal to the other southern states. Historian C. Vann Woodard, in his chapter on the “Mississippi Plan as the American Way,” describes how the success of the Mississippi Constitutional Convention in nearly eliminating suffrage rights for the African American electorate became the model that all of the southern states copied between 1891 and 1901.52 The new state constitutions that emanated from that model circumvented the Fifteenth Amendment and disenfranchised African Americans. After this period from 1888 to 1908, aptly called the Era of Disenfranchisement, a new suffrage literature emerged. Debates, discussions, dialogues, and arguments about the loss of suffrage rights for the African American electorate in the South abounded in most major newspapers and nationally known monthly magazines, as well as in leading literary magazines and academic journals. Some defended disenfranchisement, objected to disenfranchisement, or cried for a middle ground,

while other articles suggested a brighter future for African American voters that loomed out of sight but just over the political horizon. In this period a voluminous literature on suffrage arose. We know about the nature and scope of this literature owing to the eleven volumes of the Negro Year Book series that kept track of all published articles in a cumulative, comprehensive, and systematic manner. Nearly every edition of the Year Book carried a listing of all of the articles published on African American suffrage in each year of that edition’s cycle. Beginning in 1914 and moving through the last edition in 1952, one will find a full listing of articles on suffrage in the bibliography of each volume. No other publication carried such a comprehensive listing. At this writing, the diverse arguments and proposals in this large body of suffrage literature still have not been analyzed. But by the early 1940s Congress was starting to take notice and act. Beginning in 1940, the suffrage literature was displaced and transitioned into a new literature on poll taxes. The main reason for this transition and narrowing of the focus was that Congress was now seeing an increasing introduction of bills to ban and/or eliminate the poll tax in the South. The NAACP, along with a number of African American activists, had persuaded several congresspersons that one of the ways to solve the perpetual suffrage problem was to introduce anti-poll tax legislation. Frederick D. Odgen’s 1958 book The Poll Tax in the South is excellent on this topic and the huge number of congressional bills introduced to resolve the matter. Two other useful works on the topic in this period include Rayford Logan’s 1940 book The Attitudes of the Southern White Press Toward Negro Suffrage, 1932–1940 and Raymond Lloyd’s 1952 White Supremacy in the United States: An Analysis of Its Historical Background, with Especial Reference to the Poll Tax. These books offer previously unseen and unnoticed data on the poll tax referenda and votes. Additional election return data can be found in Alexander Heard and Donald Strong’s 1950 book Southern Primaries and Elections, 1920–1949, and some of these data offer previously unknown information on the African American electorate. These poll tax bills continued to come forth until the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which tried to address the lack of voting rights through legal action. The 1960 Civil Rights Act strengthened the federal government’s power in dealing with the loss of voting rights. Eventually, Congress passed and the states ratified the Twenty-Fourth Amendment on January 23, 1964, which abolished poll taxes in federal elections. With this action, the second great period of literature dealing with the suffrage rights of the African American electorate ended.

Felony Disenfranchisement Literature In the struggle for the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and its subsequent renewals, this suffrage literature reemerged. But during the renewal phases it was carefully and narrowly focused on matters of minority vote dilution, including examination of those techniques and procedures that emerged not to disenfranchise the African American electorate but only to diminish and decrease the impact and influence of the Act. Currently, the limited suffrage literature now being published focuses on felony disenfranchisement. Numerous southern states have enacted

The Literature on the African American Electorate 33 legislation to restrict or eliminate voting rights for members of the electorate who have been sent to jail for felony crimes. Such laws disproportionately affect African Americans. Even after serving their time, former felons face major challenges in getting back their right to vote. Such legislation may presage the future of suffrage rights literature.

The Registration, Turnout, and Voting Data Literature Besides the legal and constitutional literature on the suffrage rights of the African American electorate, there exists another body of literature on the voter participation of this electorate, consisting of voter registration, turnout, and behavior records, and the related election return data. As noted earlier, in Colonial and Revolutionary America, this literature is scattered, piecemeal, and sketchy. It improves in Antebellum and Reconstruction America, declines in the Era of Disenfranchisement, and slowly increases during the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, data collection on the African American electorate improves and increases significantly because these laws require the federal Bureau of the Census to collect and disseminate it, which they do with their CPS P–20 series. Prior to the role mandated by law for the Bureau of the Census, the 1957 Civil Rights Act created the United States Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR), which produced several hearings and reports beginning in 1957 that collected voter participation information on the African American electorate. Thus, we need to ask what is the state of the literature on voter participation dealing with the period before—in fact, well before—the arrival of the USCCR and the Bureau of the Census? The collection and reporting of such voter participation data were left to interested scholars and academics; interested organizations like the Southern Regional Council and its Voter Education Project (VEP); the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, under the leadership of W.E.B. DuBois; Tuskegee’s Monroe N. Work and his Negro Year Book series; the Carnegie Foundation’s Gunnar Myrdal study led by Ralph Bunche; some state agencies; and a few issues of the early encyclopedia, The American Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events of the Year, 1868– 1872. There is not much literature here concerning the period predating the USCCR and the Census Bureau, even less for the Antebellum and Revolutionary periods, and hardly anything at all for Colonial America. However, persistence and systematic research over more than thirty years have uncovered some voter participation data going back to 1867, the beginning of Black Reconstruction. In 1990, a letter was discovered, Senate Executive Document Number 53 of the 2nd Session of the 40th Congress, responding to a Senate Resolution of December 6, 1867, which stated: Statement of the number of white and colored voters registered in each of the States subject to the reconstruction acts of Congress, the number of white and colored voters voting for and against the calling of a [state constitution] convention, the number of white

34

Chapter 2

and colored voters who failed to vote either for or against the calling of a convention, and, as far as practical, the number of white and colored persons disfranchised and rendered incompetent by the reconstruction acts to vote for a [state constitution], and the number of white persons entitled to be registered but who did not apply for registration.53 Nearly simultaneously with the publication of the Senate Executive Document 53 covering the initial registration and voting of the African American electorate in the South in 1867–1868 was the publication of House Executive Document 342 that also covered the very same issue. However, coming a bit later than the Senate document, the House document gives updated voter registration and voting data for the African American electorate in the same years. Despite the existence of the official voter registration data contained in these official federal documents, the data had not surfaced in books or articles on presidential or congressional reconstruction studies, nor in the sundry state reconstruction books and articles. There data are even missing in the historical works of African American historians and political scientists. In fact, these unique Senate and House documents have been almost universally neglected and omitted, and this neglect or omission is not due to a question of accuracy or validity. Corroborating statelevel voter registration data for the same year have been found in the Texas State Archives, where there are individual registration certificates from every county of the state in existence in 1867, and in the North Carolina State Archives.54 A recent scholarly study on Georgia found that “voter registration lists on microfilm at the Georgia Archives document the decline of black voting both before and after disfranchisement” in the state; but except for a few footnote references in the book Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920, this rare racial voter registration data has not surfaced.55 The American Annual Cyclopaedias of 1867 and 1868 further corroborate the Senate and House documents and provide voter registration data for other southern states at this time.56 Hence, the widespread under-usage of the data in the documents cannot be due solely to its potential inaccuracies. Part of the explanation may be that the government volumes listing all of the congressional documents had no index for these years and, therefore, all of the volumes had to be gone through page by page, often item by item, to make these discoveries. Recently, the availability of both a published series and an online source allowed easier access to such important documents. Using this Senate data, another study was undertaken of the African American and white electorates in Arkansas in the crucial year of 1867 to create a map of the counties with African American and white majorities. For the first time a longitudinal analysis of voter registration by race in the state from 1867 through 1990 was also obtained.57 Table 2.2 provides the actual numbers and percentages of African American and white voters in 1867. In three counties in Arkansas, African American voters made up 72 to 77 percent of the electorate; while in five other counties African Americans made up 62 to 68 percent of registered voters; and in two other counties 51 to 57 percent of the electorate was African American.58

Map 2.1 (p. 36) shows exactly where these ten African American–majority counties were located. Likewise the map shows us the geography of all of the counties and the proximities of white majoritarian counties to the African American ones. Such information gives us further insight on how these counties voted in congressional and presidential elections. This is the first time that this information has been published at the scholarly level for ten of the eleven southern states. (Although Tennessee was excluded from congressional Reconstruction we have also added data on the African American electorate in that state.) The rest of the southern states will be discussed in detail in Chapter 14. Finally, in Table 2.3 (p. 37) one can see in a longitudinal manner the relationship of the African American voter registration to the voting age population (VAP) in the state.59 Through time one can see the changing ratio of registered African American voters to eligible voters in the state. In 1944 the Supreme Court, in the famous Smith v. Allwright case, outlawed the White Primary in Texas, and other state level cases were victorious, so that the White Primary barrier was basically but not completely gone by the late 1940s. Since the unveiling of the Arkansas information on the African American electorate, similar studies on the electorates in Georgia and Texas have been made.60 Therefore, using the model approach employed in these three states, this volume will produce and examine, where similar data exist, voter participation data on all of the former Confederate states. Prior to Bunche’s data collection and reporting studies on the voter participation of the electorate, another pioneering academic work was that of Paul Lewinson, Race, Class, and Party: A History of Negro Suffrage and White Politics in the South, published in 1932. In his appendix, Lewinson lists estimates of the number of registered voters for each of the southern states. He sent a questionnaire to southern registrars and knowledgeable observers to collect this information. Instead of listing similar information in a separate section, Bunche distributed his analyses of voter participation throughout his 1,660-page narrative for Myrdal. Hence, it needs to be retrieved from the various pages of the narrative in order to capture a comprehensive listing. In addition to the voter participation data, Bunche and his student Robert Martin collected voting data from the southern cotton and tobacco referenda provided for by the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) during the 1930s. In these referenda African American and white farmers voted on crop allotments. Of this rural voting behavior, Bunche observed: Not since Reconstruction days has any numerous group of Negroes had the opportunity to cast the independent ballot that is cast by Negro cotton farmers in the cotton marketing quota referenda. Most significantly, many thousands of Negro cotton farmers each year now go to the polls, stand in line with their white neighbors and mark their ballots independently without protest or intimidation, in order to determine government policy toward cotton production control.61 Scholars have largely overlooked this unique intervention by the federal government in southern voting practices, even though



The Literature on the African American Electorate 35

Table 2.2  Percent and Number of Registered Voters in Counties of Arkansas by Race, 1867  

Free-Men-of-Color

County

Percent of Total Voters

Number of Voters

Chicot

77%

 894

Phillips

74%

2,681

White Percent of Total Voters

 

Number of Voters

Total Number of Voters

23%

268

1,162

26%

955

3,636

Jefferson

72%

2,738

28%

1,048

3,786

Desha

68%

592

32%

281

873

Arkansas

68%

1,030

32%

495

1,525

Crittenden

67%

505

33%

245

750

Lafayette

62%

962

38%

583

1,545

Pulaski

62%

2,402

38%

1,494

3,896

Little River

57%

426

43%

327

753

Monroe

51%

551

49%

525

1,076

Hempstead

48%

1,195

52%

1,307

2,502

St. Francis

47%

484

53%

544

1,028

Union

46%

798

54%

922

1,720

Ashley

46%

604

54%

710

1,314

Quachita

45%

870

55%

1,084

1,954

Mississippi

40%

193

60%

292

485

Columbia

36%

740

64%

1,313

2,053

Drew

35%

577

65%

1,079

1,656

Woodruff

34%

354

66%

673

1,027

Dallas

34%

337

66%

668

1,005

Prairie

32%

512

68%

1,071

1,583

Sevier

32%

261

68%

567

828

Cross

31%

184

69%

415

599

Calhoun

30%

184

70%

422

606

Clark

29%

464

71%

1,112

1,576

Bradley

29%

368

71%

908

1,276

Jackson

25%

283

75%

849

1,132

Poinsett

18%

39

82%

172

211

Sebastian

17%

203

83%

1,012

1,215

Van Buren

17%

148

83%

746

894

Crawford

17%

148

83%

746

894

Yell

14%

131

86%

831

962

Conway

14%

146

86%

934

1,080

Pine

13%

76

87%

489

565

Franklin

13%

107

87%

740

847

Hot Spring

12%

102

88%

723

825

Pope

11%

94

89%

771

865

White

11%

155

89%

1,279

1,434

Johnson

10%

73

90%

682

755

9%

140

91%

1,455

1,595

Independence

Craighead

7%

42

93%

523

565

Perry

7%

23

93%

295

318

Randolph

7%

59

93%

848

907

Saline

6%

42

94%

712

754

Montgomery

5%

27

95%

491

518

Washington

4%

84

96%

1,834

1,918

Lawrence

4%

43

96%

971

1,014

Izard

4%

31

96%

763

794

Scott

3%

17

97%

557

574

Fulton

3%

9

97%

297

306

Marion

2%

9

98%

382

391

Madison

1%

10

99%

709

719

Benton

1%

11

99%

998

1,009

Greene

1%

5

99%

922

927

Polk

0%

1

100%

392

393

Newton

0%

1

100%

425

426

Searcy

0%

1

100%

574

575

Carroll

0%

0

100%

767

767

Totals

35%

23,166

65%

43,197

66,363

Source: Hanes Walton, Jr., Re-election: William Jefferson Clinton as a Native-Son Presidential Candidate (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 93–94.

it was a major precursor to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Most of the scholars who saw its importance were African American, but the existence of this material greatly helps one to understand the nature and significance of the African American electorate, particularly in rural areas. Appearing in 1960, shortly after the studies of Lewinson and Bunche and Martin, is a rare state compilation, Joseph Bernd’s Grass Roots Politics in Georgia: The County Unit System and the Importance of the Individual Voting Community in Bi-Factional Elections, 1942–1954. “This study uses . . . segregated voting data collected on the black electorate in the state of Georgia from 1944 until 1964.” Because some of Georgia’s 159 counties required blacks to vote in separate voting precincts and to have their votes counted and reported separately “[Bernd] carefully and persistently collected this aggregate voting data.”62 Table 2.4 (p. 37) reveals the number of counties reporting separated black votes as well as the number of counties that reported that blacks voted. The Bernd study also showed the actual number of blacks voting in the Democratic primaries and referenda elections from 1946 to 1954. Later Bernd followed up on this work by using a secret FBI file compiled on the Georgia electorate during the 1946 gubernatorial election. The resulting article, “White Supremacy and the Disenfranchisement of Blacks in Georgia, 1946,”63 analyzed the number of blacks and whites purged from the registration rolls and the number of votes captured by the winner of each of the Georgia counties where purges of the voting rolls took place. Another Georgian, historian Numan Bartley, collected similar data on the city of Macon, Georgia, for the same time period.

36

Chapter 2

Map 2.1  Arkansas Counties with African American vs. White Voting Majorities, 1867

CARROLL

BENTON

FULTON

BOONE

SHARP

MARION

NEWTON

SEARCY STONE

CRAWFORD FRANKLIN

POPE

LOGAN

SEBASTIAN

INDEPENDENCE JACKSON

VAN BUREN

JOHNSON

CLEBURNE

CONWAY CONWAY

MISSISSIPPI

POINSETT

CRITTENDEN

WOODRUFF

YELL

ST. FRANCIS

PERRY

PRAIRIE LONOKE

LEE

PULASKI

GARLAND

MONROE SALINE

MONTGOMERY

PHILLIPS

POLK

JEFFERSON

HOT SPRING HOWARD

CRAIGHEAD

CROSS

WHITE FAULKNER

SCOTT

GREENE

LAWRENCE

IZARD

MADISON

WASHINGTON

CLAY

RANDOLPH

BAXTER

ARKANSAS

GRANT

PIKE CLARK DALLAS

SEVIER

LITTLE RIVER

HEMPSTEAD

CLEVELAND

LINCOLN DESHA

NEVADA OUACHITA

DREW

CALHOUN BRADLEY MILLER LAFAYETTE

COLUMBIA UNION

ASHLEY

CHICOT

County with an African American voting majority

Source: Hanes Walton, Jr., Reelection: William Jefferson Clinton as a Native-Son Presidential Candidate (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 95.

Although he did not publish these data in the 1975 book he coauthored with Hugh D. Graham, Southern Politics and the Second Reconstruction, he did discuss them with and later send an entire copy of his file to one of the authors of this study. Such invaluable information provides both state- and city-level data on the African American electorate that had not previously surfaced but appear in this volume. However, the election return data collected for the Bartley and Graham volume eventually made it into a continuity compendium. This work, Southern Elections: County and Precinct Data, 1950–1972, was designed to update the Heard and Strong compendium, Southern Primaries and Elections, 1920–1949.64 And this volume contains some limited election return data on the African American electorate that do not exist elsewhere.

Following these works on Georgia, there appeared in 1987 Lawrence Hanks’ The Struggle for Black Political Empowerment in Three Georgia Counties. In the appendix to this unique volume African American political scientist Hanks collected forty-two tables of rare and fugitive registration, black elected officials, and election return data on African American political participation that do not surface anywhere else.65 In 2003, civil liberties attorney Laughlin McDonald wrote A Voting Rights Odyssey: Black Enfranchisement in Georgia, which provided a comprehensive overview of the suffrage struggle in the state and a very rare look at the African American electorate in a very small, all African American township, Keysville, Georgia.66 And in 2010 Pearl Ford edited the volume African Americans in Georgia: A Reflection of Politics and Policy in the New South, which offered empirical data on voter suppression in the presidential election of Barack Obama in 2008.67



The Literature on the African American Electorate 37

Table 2.3  Percent Ratio of Registered African American Voters to Eligible African American Voters in Arkansas, 1867–1990

Year

Number of African Americans of Voting Age

Number of African American Registered Voters

Percent Ratio of African American Registered Voters to African Americans of Voting Age

1867

N/A

23,166

N/A

1900

 87,157

N/A

N/A

1910

111,523

N/A

N/A

a

1920

124,062

17,240

13.9%

1930b

257,130

5,100

2.0%

1940

270,995

4,000

1.5%

1946

245,013

5,000

2.0%

1947

240,685

47,000

19.5%

1950

227,691

N/A

N/A

1952

220,353

61,413

27.9%

1956

205,676

69,677

33.9%

1957

202,007

64,023

31.7%

1958

198,338

64,023

32.3%

1959

194,669

72,604

37.3%

1960

191,000

73,000

38.2%

1961

191,300

68,970

36.1%

1963

191,900

77,714

40.5%

1964

192,200

81,178

42.2%

1970

194,000

153,000

78.9%

1980

217,000

128,467

59.2%

1990

195,000

99,060

50.8%

Source: Hanes Walton, Jr., Re-election: William Jefferson Clinton as a Native-Son Presidential Candidate (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 103. The actual vote for the African American gubernatorial candidate is used in place of registration data. a

Voting data from Paul Lewinson, Race, Class, and Party: A History of Negro Suffrage and White Politics in the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932), p. 218. b

Earlier, there were three major voter participation compilations from the Southern Regional Council and its VEP. First, there is Luther Jackson’s notable 1948 article, “Race and Suffrage in the South since 1940,” in the journal New South. It offers voter participation information on all of the southern states in the 1940s. Two monographs by Margaret Price followed this: The Negro Voter in the South in 1957 and The Negro and the Ballot in the South in 1959. In 1967 there would arrive a book-length study, Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: The Arrival of Negroes in Southern Politics. “Climbing Jacob’s Ladder” was the theme song for several Negro-voting leagues in the South at this time, which the authors of the book, Pat Watters and Reese Cleghorn, visited in the course of researching their book. Needless to say, other studies appeared, but many did not carry factual voter participation data in full detail. They used selected voting data to make their arguments and advance their theses. However, the Watters and Cleghorn book launched a new approach. This book, which had several tables on the voter participation of the African American electorate in the South, spawned a series of similar works, which included several tables on the

Table 2.4  Number and Percent of Counties in Georgia that Reported Separately on Black Voters, 1944–1954

Year

Number of Counties

Number of Counties Reporting the Black Vote Separately

Number of Counties Reporting That Blacks Voted

Percent of Counties Reporting That Blacks Voted

1944

159

0

0

0

1946

159

12

10

6.3%

1948

159

12

11

6.9%

1950

159

11

8

5.0%

1952

159

15

14

8.8%

159

11

10

6.3%

12.2

10.6

6.7%

1954 Mean

Source: Hanes Walton, Jr., “Black Voting Behavior in the Segregation Era, 1944–1964,” in Hanes Walton, Jr. (ed.), Black Politics and Black Political Behavior: A Linkage Analysis (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994), pp. 123–125.

electorate’s voter participation. These new works included historian Steven F. Lawson’s Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 (1976) and In Pursuit of Power: Southern Blacks and Electoral Politics, 1965–1982 (1985); and David Garrow’s Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (1980). These works were aided by the passage and the success of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This genre of books has tables, many of which rely on earlier compilations, updated to show different aspects of voter participation in the African American community. Instead of mere data collecting and reporting, these works provide analyses and interpretations of the voter participation data. Then, Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act, 1965–1990, edited by Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman, brought this genre of works full circle, as it sought to prove the successful impact and influence of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The book used the increased number of African American elected officials in some eight states, as well as the increases in African American voter registration, to provide proof of the success of this public policy and to laud its effectiveness. To generate registration and election data, several of the chapters had to use inferential and derived data in their equations to produce estimates where gaps existed in the official data. The result is the very best book written to date on the impact and influence of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and its three subsequent renewals in 1970, 1975, and 1982. It is a work without peer but not without limitations.68 The limitations of Davidson’s and Grofman’s work are that it was written during the first term of the William J. Clinton presidential administration, and it omits Arkansas, Florida, and Tennessee. The experiences of Arkansas’s African American electorate offer contrary evidence to their thesis that this public policy has been a great success in the South, especially given the more than six voting rights suits brought against Clinton during his five terms as governor of Arkansas. Literally nothing is said about Arkansas in the Quiet Revolution. Nor are Florida or Tennessee discussed, both of which have had very few African American elected officials and even fewer statewide officials.69 Beyond

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the state-by-state analyses, there is a chapter on voter registration among the African American electorate. The registration data are not new but are corrected for four states where data permit correction for the overestimation of black registration.70 Nevertheless, this voter registration data is essentially recent data and not past historical data. A few additional works have not been previously mentioned because, while they are not compilations in and of themselves, they do offer interpretations and analyses that provide some unique tabular data that support their contentions. Two studies on the city of Tuskegee, Alabama, reflect upon the question of racial gerrymandering, including Charles V. Hamilton’s Minority Politics in Black Belt Alabama (1960) and Bernard Taper’s Gomillion Versus Lightfoot: The Tuskegee Gerrymander Case (1962). Next, there is a work on how black votes count in the state of Mississippi by Frank R. Parker, Black Votes Count: Political Empowerment in Mississippi after 1965 (1990), and two works on minority vote dilution, Chandler Davidson (ed.), Minority Vote Dilution (1984), and Bernard Grofman and Chandler Davidson (eds.), Controversies in Minority Voting: The Voting Rights Act in Perspective (1992). Each of these studies offers some tabular data on voter participation in the African American community, though much of it has appeared elsewhere before. However, what is new and different are some of the innovative interpretations that abound in these volumes, although many of these interpretations, where they are based on quantitative and qualitative data or both, in the end rest upon incomplete and inadequate data compilations. Such interpretations mainly serve to prove the point that more data need to be compiled on their subject, the African American electorate.

The Balance of Power Theory Literature The nature of theory-based literature also requires a few observations. Since the African American electorate has always been a minority in presidential electoral politics (some writers have argued permanently so), how can this minority have any influence and impact, once they acquire the vote, to achieve some of their public policy objectives? Beginning with the African American journalist T. Thomas Fortune just before the turn of the twentieth century, there has been the idea that the African American electorate could play a “balance of power” electoral strategy in presidential elections in order to influence the outcomes and achieve the public policy goals that the community needed. Although numerous other African American leaders over the years continued to advance this theory, it was not developed into a full-fledged statement and strategic vision until the arrival of NAACP publicist Henry Lee Moon’s Balance of Power: The Negro Vote in 1948. Moon asserted that African Americans should wait and see how the white electorate divides between presidential candidates and then vote in a bloc fashion to determine the winner. Afterwards, the winner could be made to acknowledge the power of the African American electorate and the debt owed to them for his or her election victory. To provide evidence and support for this theory, the Moon volume offers numerous tables of voting data to show how this theory

had played out in the past for the electorate. Much of the tabular evidence came primarily from the urban areas in the North, East, and Midwest. Moreover, in the 1948 presidential election, President Harry Truman’s political advisor Clark Clifford cited the Moon book in a memorandum that advised the President to use this strategy to win the very close 1948 election.71 Truman, acting upon Clifford’s advice, desegregated the armed services, put a civil rights plank in the Democratic platform, and created a Committee on Civil Rights that produced a report recommending civil rights legislation for African Americans. The theory became a model national strategy with potential for use at state and local levels as well.72 Such a new and bold theory with serious possibilities and consequences created its own literature. Another major book in this genre, Chuck Stone’s Black Political Power in America, appeared in 1968, when liberal Democratic candidate and vice president Hubert Humphrey, with solid African American support, lost to conservative Republican and former vice president Richard Nixon. An African American journalist, Stone laid bare all of the weaknesses and shortcomings inherent in the balance of power theory, namely that the white electorate did not always divide their vote. When they vote as a bloc, as they did in 1968, the power of the black vote could not overcome it. Stone then discarded the theory and offered a new one with accompanying election return data to prove and support his case. Simply put, this new attack brought forth new data about the African American electorate. The presidential elections in 1980 and 1984 bore out Stone’s critique. Former California governor Ronald Reagan, a conservative Republican, swept into office despite nearly complete electoral opposition from the African American electorate. To help rectify this situation, Jesse Jackson entered the 1984 and 1988 Democratic presidential primaries, seeking to win the party nomination. He lost both times, but with a far better showing the second time around. One of his campaign managers, African American political scientist Ronald Walters, later wrote about the campaigns and revisited the balance of power theory in the process. Like Stone, Walters found the theory wanting and essentially weak because most African American voters were trapped in the Democratic Party. Walters, like Stone, sought to show them how to extricate themselves from this captive position and become a truly independent lever in national presidential politics. He set forth his case in his book, Black Presidential Politics in America: A Strategic Approach. When the 1965 Voting Rights Act came up for renewal in 2006, Walters followed up his popular initial study with another entitled Freedom Is Not Enough: Black Voters, Black Candidates, and American Presidential Politics. Both of these books, like the prior works by Moon and Stone, offered tabular data on voter participation in the African American community to critique the balance of power theory and support the case for a new approach. Each work offers some limited new voter registration data as well as voting data that have been collected but not widely reported in leading magazines and journals. And usually the data in these works spawn some interesting interpretations but not very much new, raw, and unknown electoral data.

Overall the literature of theory-based data is related to that of voter participation data in that both literatures generated new interpretations of black political power and, at times, some very clever insights. Missing for the most part is discovery of any new electoral data, but this was not their intent. Both literatures are intended to advance commentary, explanation, and discussions and debates. Most works in these genres accomplish these goals in a very significant fashion.

Conclusions on the Literature Concerning the African American Electorate The three basic categories of literature tell us much about where new and promising election return data on the African American electorate can be found so that a holistic portrait can be constructed and developed. First, the suffrage literature from the Antebellum period and the voter participation data from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s are most promising. These literatures tell us how and where potential new discoveries of election return data might surface and how new models of this data can help one to develop longitudinal analyses. These literatures further suggest that new information can be crafted from this original material, and that more data can be derived from this recently located information. Such new points of departure in the collection and reporting of this data can potentially create new avenues for further explorations. Much potential information is embedded in this material, and the new information may lead to new interpretations and analyses. Second, we now know where the literature is unpromising and highly overlapping and repetitive. This literature is primarily the volumes that have emerged from the debate and discussion over the renewals and efforts to repeal the 1965 Voting Rights Act, as well as those studies which preceded the Act that focused on the Era of Disenfranchisement and the legal success made through the Supreme Court’s 1944 decision Smith v. Allwright. It is what one might categorize as progress in voting rights literature. Inherent in this literature is a frequent rehashing of the victories at the Supreme Court over the grandfather clause, the White Primaries, the poll taxes, and other barriers, as well as the attainment of the 1957 and 1960 voting rights legislation. It tends to depict a linear progress model of African Americans gaining suffrage rights after they were denied in the Era of Disenfranchisement. But linearity, as some of the forthcoming chapters will show, does not come close either to describing or to explaining the sojourns of the African American electorate. In contrast to the stale literature referred to above, new and recent works shed new light on these issues. For example, Professor Richard Franklin Bensel’s The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century inventively and creatively used the House of Representatives Hearings on Contested Elections to tell us about voters at the ballot box between 1850 and 1868. Since many of the initial southern African American members of Congress were challenged in their election to the House, such a work is very useful.73 Professor Michael Perman’s book Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 provides a greater and better explanation of this concept by extending the

The Literature on the African American Electorate 39 period rather than using the traditional periodization, 1890– 1901.74 Adding to the superb insights generated by Professor Perman is the recent state study of Alabama by Professor R. Volney Riser, Defying Disfranchisement: Black Voting Rights, Activism in the Jim Crow South, 1890–1908.75 Although this book does not have any registration and voting data, it covers African American voter rights activists in Alabama that worked through, with, and beyond the Afro-American Council to halt disenfranchisement via legal efforts before the rise of the NAACP and its use of the legalism strategy. And finally, Richard Hume and Jerry Gough’s book Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags: The Constitutional Conventions of Radical Reconstruction used the voter registration and voting of 1867 mandated by the four Military Reconstruction Acts to give us a new understanding of how these first-time African American registrants and voters elected individuals to the state constitutional conventions and the southern state legislatures during Reconstruction. Moreover, this is one of the very first scholarly works to combine and use data from both the Senate and House Executive Documents to explain political and voting behavior of the political neophytes, the freedmen.76 Such works allow current and future scholars to use this newly uncovered data to develop better and more precise insights and findings than previous scholars and academics. Thus, what will differentiate this study is the presentation of new election return data and voter participation data, together with fresh analyses that cover the well-known topics. Research time should not be spent in cluttered places and dead-end roads. Such literature that rehashes the “progress” theme prior to the 1965 Voting Rights Act and its renewals should be given low priority in this and future research. Finally, there is a body of literature that has gone without discussion and review here but that might offer clues and tips leading to other unknown literature. This “minor” literature, which this study will review, might yet make or lead to some interesting breakthroughs. For instance, our five years of research on African American senatorial candidates from 1870 to 2006 has already produced new election return data, as has similar research on African American presidential candidates.77 Then there is the election return data of African American candidates who ran on third-party tickets for federal offices, such as president, senator, and representative. They also ran for a variety of statewide offices like governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, and attorney general. Most of the books on the endless array of third parties do not provide these data, but a few do provide some political identification. Yet there is no comprehensive list, only a partial listing. Hanes Walton, Jr.’s The Negro in Third Party Politics pioneered in this area, and his subsequent work has expanded it.78 Thus, in the end, this type of information embedded in our category of “minor” literature is somewhat promising and intriguing. So it is not always the major categories of the literature that hold promise, for in the end some contributions can be made and found in the minor literature. This study plans to make use of a portion of all of the literature that has come our way, albeit in different ways, but before closing there is one more statement about the literature that must be made.

40

Chapter 2

This literature review has been focused almost entirely upon aggregate election return data and group, rather than individual, voting behavior. This is exactly what most compilations contained. Nevertheless, voting participation studies have evolved from the aggregate-based studies to the studies that are now based on commercial and academic polls and surveys. From these new data sources, several major books on the African American electorate have arrived. One of the first sprang from social psychologist James S. Jackson’s National Black Election Surveys (NBES) at the Institute of Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan. Jackson collected data for the 1984, 1988, 1993, and 1996 election years, and a new survey promises studies for the 2004 election year. The first book to appear from these academic surveys was Patricia Gurin, Shirley Hatchett, and James Jackson’s Hope and Independence: Blacks’ Response to Electoral and Party Politics (1990). Next to come was Michael Dawson’s Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics (1994),79 followed by two major works by Katherine Tate, From Protest to Politics: The New Black Voters in American Elections (1994), which was enlarged in a second edition, and Black Faces in the Mirror: African Americans and Their Representatives in the U.S. Congress (2003). The first three books cover the two Jesse Jackson presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988, as well as the Reagan Revolution and its impact and influence on the voting behavior of the African American electorate, while the last book looks at how African Americans constituents view their congresspersons. These and several other studies using academic surveys and focus group data have created a contrasting portrait of African American voters and their participation and have broken away from the usual reliance on election return data. An especially good example of this type of study is Professor Lisa Nikol Nealy’s exceptional gender-based book, African American Women Voters.80 Thus, this budding literature is separate and distinct from the aggregate election return data-based studies. Hopefully, the day will come when both of these data sources can be used together and become interactive. But before that can happen, the election return data need to be collected and reported.

Notes   1. Hanes Walton, Jr., and Simone Greene, “Voting Rights and the Million Man March: The Problem of Restoration of Voting Rights for ExConvicts,” African American Research Perspectives Vol. 3 (Winter 1997), pp. 73–78. See also Aman McLeod, Amelia Gavin, and Ismail White, “The Locked Ballot Box: The Impact of State Criminal Disenfranchisement Laws on African American Voting Behavior and Implications for Reform,” Virginia Journal of Social Policy and the Law 11:1 (2003), pp. 67–88.  2. See Katharine Seelye, “Senators Hear Bitter Words on Florida Vote,” New York Times, June 28, 2001, p. 1.  3. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2001), pp. 6–24. See also the Commission’s appendix book, Voting Irregularities in Florida during the 2000 Presidential Election: Appendix (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2001).  4. U.S. House of Representatives, Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio: Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2005). For a paperback copy of the report see Congressman John Conyers and

Anita Miller, What Went Wrong in Ohio: The Conyers Report on the 2004 Presidential Election (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 2005).  5. See Numan Bartley and Hugh Graham, Southern Politics and the Second Reconstruction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). For the latest discussion see Richard Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 1–25. The concept of the Second and Third Reconstruction was developed by Yale University historian C. Vann Woodward. See his article, “The Political Legacy of Reconstruction,” Journal of Negro Education Vol. 26 (Summer 1957), pp. 231–240. For a detailed analysis of his two concepts see Hanes Walton, Jr., Josephine A. V. Allen, Sherman C. Puckett, and Donald R. Deskins, Jr., “Beyond the Second Reconstruction: C. Vann Woodward’s Concept of the Third Reconstruction in the South,” American Review of Politics Vol. 32 (Spring 2001), pp. 105–130.   6. Hanes Walton, Jr., and Robert C. Smith, American Politics and the African American Quest for Universal Freedom, 4th Edition (New York: Longman, 2008), pp. 10–15.  7. Monroe Work, “Total Number Males and Females Voting Age in Southern States in 1920,” Negro Year Book, 1921–1922 (Tuskegee, AL: Negro Year Book Publishing Company, 1922), p. 42 for data on the voting age population, p. 44 for votes cast, and pp. 181–182 for officeholders.  8. Jerrold Rusk, A Statistical History of the American Electorate (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2001), p. 38.  9. Ibid., p. 37. 10. Ibid. 11. Phyllis Field, “Republicans and Black Suffrage in New York State: The Grass Roots Response,” Civil War History 22 (June 1975), pp. 136–147. 12. Marion Wright, “Negro Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1875,” Journal of Negro History Vol. XXXIII (April 1948), pp. 168–224. 13. David McBride, “Black Protest Against Radical Politics: Gardner, Hinton, and Their Memorial of 1838,” Pennsylvania History Vol. XLVI (April 1979), pp. 149–162. See also Maxwell Whiteman, A Memorial to the Honorable Senate and House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania by the Colored Citizens of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Rhistoric Publications, 1969) and “Appeal of Forty Thousand, 1838” in Herbert Aptheker (ed.), A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States (New York: Citadel Press, 1959), pp. 176–186; Roy Akari, “Black Suffrage in Bucks County: The Election of 1837,” Bucks County Historical Society Journal (Spring 1974), pp. 28–39; and Eric L. Smith, “End of Black Voting Rights in Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania History Vol. 65 (1998), pp. 279–299. 14. Edward Schriver, “Antislavery: The Free Soil and Free Democratic Parties in Maine, 1848–1855,” New England Quarterly (March 1969), pp. 82–94. See also, James Adams, “Disfranchisement of Negroes in New England,” American Historical Review 30 (April 1925), pp. 543–547. 15. J. Stanley Lemons and Michael McKenna, “Re-enfranchisement of Rhode Island Negroes,” Rhode Island History 30 (February 1971), pp. 3–13. 16. Ronald Formisano, “The Edge of Caste: Colored Suffrage in Michigan, 1827–1861,” Michigan History 56 (Spring 1972), pp. 19–41, and Willis Dunbar with William Shade, “The Black Man Gains the Vote: The Centennial of ‘Impartial Suffrage’ in Michigan,” Michigan History 56 (Spring 1972), pp. 42–57. 17. Michael McManus, “Wisconsin Republicans and Negro Suffrage: Attitudes and Behavior, 1857,” Civil War History 25 (1979), pp. 36–54. See also Leslie Fishel, Jr., “Wisconsin and Negro Suffrage,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 446 (Spring 1963), pp. 160–197. 18. Phyllis Field, The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). 19. Charles Wesley, “Negro Suffrage in the Period of Constitution Making, 1787–1865,” Journal of Negro History 32 (April 1947), p. 162. 20. Ibid., p. 163. 21. David McBride, “Black Protest Against Radical Politics: Gardner, Hinton, and Their Memorial of 1838,” Pennsylvania History Vol. XLVI (April 1979), p .156. 22. Ibid., p. 150.

23. Ibid., p. 157. 24. Ibid., pp. 149–150. 25. Whiteman, p. i. 26. Ibid. 27. McBride, p. 158, footnote 44. 28. Christopher Malone, Between Freedom and Bondage: Race, Party, and Voting Rights in the Antebellum North (New York: Routledge, 2008). 29. Robert Dykstra and Harlan Hahn, “Northern Voters and Negro Suffrage: The Case of Iowa, 1868,” Public Opinion Quarterly 32 (Summer 1968), p. 201. See also G. Galin Berrier, “The Negro Suffrage Issue in Iowa, 1965–1968,” Annals of Iowa 39 (Spring 1968), pp. 241–260. 30. Dykstra and Hahn, p. 203. For some additional studies on suffrage referenda votes see Edgar Toppin, “Negro Emancipation in Historic Retrospect: Ohio: The Negro Suffrage Issue in Post Bellum Ohio Politics,” Journal of Human Relations 11 (Winter 1963), pp. 232–246; and Victor Howard, “Negro Politics and the Suffrage Question in Kentucky, 1866–1872,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 72 (April 1974), pp. 111–133. 31. William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), pp. 25 and 27. 32. Ibid., p. 167. 33. Tom McLaughlin, “Grass-Roots Attitudes Toward Black Rights in Twelve Nonslaveholding States, 1846–1869,” Mid-America: An Historical Review 56 (July 1974), p. 177. 34. Ibid., p. 180. 35. Ibid. 36. Gillette, p. 45. 37. On Delaware, see Amy Hiller, “The Disfranchisement of Delaware Negroes in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Delaware History Vol. 13 (October 1968), pp. 124–154; Harold Hancock, “The Status of the Negro in Delaware After the Civil War, 1865–1875,” Delaware History Vol. 13 (April 1968), pp. 57–66; Harold Livesay, “Delaware Negroes, 1865–1915,” Delaware History Vol. 13 (October 1968), pp. 87–123; and John Munroe, “The Negro in Delaware,” South Atlantic Quarterly Vol. 56 (Autumn 1957), pp. 428–444. On West Virginia, see Charles Ambler, “Disfranchisement in West Virginia, Part I” Yale Review Vol. 14 (May 1905), pp. 38–59; and his “Disfranchisement in West Virginia, Part II,” Yale Review Vol. 14 (August 1905), pp. 155–180. 38. Rayford Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson, New Enlarged Edition (New York: Collier Books, 1965), p. 71. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., p. 74. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., p. 75. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Matthew Holden, Jr., “What Answer?”: Speech in Support of Franchise Committee Report, Mississippi Constitutional Convention, 1890 by Isaiah T. Montgomery (Charlottesville, VA: Isaiah T. Montgomery Studies Project, 2004), p. 7. 46. Matthew Holden, Jr., The Reputation of Isaiah T. Montgomery: The Greatness of a Compromised Man (Itta Bena, MS: Occasional Paper for the Delta Research and Cultural Institute, Mississippi Valley State University, 2008). 47. Logan, p. 76. 48. Ibid. 49. Bess Beatty, A Revolution Gone Backward: The Black Response to National Politics, 1876–1896 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987), pp. 119–120. 50. Logan, p. 80. 51. Richard Welch, Jr., “The Federal Election Bill of 1890: Postscripts and Prelude,” Journal of American History Vol. 52 (December 1965), pp. 521–522. 52. C. Vann Woodard, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951).

The Literature on the African American Electorate 41 53. U.S. Senate, “Letter of the General of the Army of the United States Communicating In Compliance with a resolution of the Senate of December 5, 1867, a statement of the number of white and colored voters registered in each of the States subject to the reconstruction acts of Congress, with other statistics relative to the same Subject,” Senate Executive Document Number 53, 40th Congress, 2nd Session, May 13, 1868 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1868), p. 1. See also U. S. House, House Executive Document Number 342, 40th Congress, 2nd Session, with similar statistical data. 54. See the 1867 Texas Registration list of Colored and White Voters in either book format or on file in the Texas State Archives. For the book/computer disk see Donald Brice and John Barron, An Index to the 1867 Voters’ Registration of Texas (Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 2000); and for the file that is available in the Archives, see Jean Carefoot, Guide to Genealogical Resources in the Texas State Archives (Austin: Archives Division, Texas State Library, 1984), pp. 95–97. Besides Texas, North Carolina is the only one of the ten southern states to have a file on its 1867 voter registration list. See Frances H. Wynne, North Carolina Extant Voter Registration of 1867 (Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 1992). This book contains a selected reporting of African American voter registration by county. Such publications of single-state African American voter registration data in 1867 are currently not yet available for the other nine southern states of the old Confederacy. 55. John Dittmer, Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), p. 214; see also pages 97 and 103 for footnotes that offer additional information on these microfilms in the State Archives. See also Dewey Grantham, “Georgia Politics and the Disenfranchisement of the Negro,” Georgia Historical Quarterly Vol. 32 (March 1948), pp. 1–21. 56. See The American Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Independent Events of the Year 1868 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1869) and a similar volume for 1869. 57. Hanes Walton, Jr., Reelection: William Jefferson Clinton as a Native-Son Presidential Candidate (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 93–94. 58. Ibid., p. 95. 59. Ibid., pp. 97–98. 60. See Hanes Walton, Jr., Pearl K. Dove, and Josephine A. V. Allen, Remaking the Democratic Party: Lyndon B. Johnson as a NativeSon Presidential Candidate (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013). 61. Quoted in Hanes Walton, Jr., “Black Southern Politics: The Influences of Bunche, Martin, and Key,” in Hanes Walton, Jr. (ed.), Black Politics and Black Political Behavior: A Linkage Analysis (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994), p. 29. 62. Hanes Walton, Jr., “Black Voting Behavior in the Segregation Era, 1944–1964,” in Hanes Walton, Jr. (ed.), Black Politics and Black Political Behavior: A Linkage Analysis (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994), pp. 123–125. 63. Ibid., p. 130. 64. Numan Bartley and Hugh Graham, Southern Elections: County and Precinct Data, 1950–1972 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1978). 65. Lawrence Hanks, The Struggle for Black Political Empowerment in Three Georgia Counties (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987). 66. Laughlin McDonald , A Voting Rights Odyssey: Black Enfranchisement in Georgia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 67. Keesha Middlemass, “Racial Politics and Voter Suppression in Georgia,” in Pearl Ford (ed.), African Americans in Georgia: A Reflection of Politics and Policy in the New South (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2010), pp. 7–24. 68. Hanes Walton, Jr., “Review of Quiet Revolution in the South,” Georgia Historical Quarterly Vol. 79 (Summer 1995), pp. 516–518. 69. See DeWayne Wickham, Bill Clinton and Black America (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002). 70. James Alt, “The Impact of the Voting Rights Act on Black and White Voter Registration in the South,” in Chandler Davidson and

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Bernard Grofman (eds.), Quiet Revolution in the South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 376. 71. Hanes Walton, Jr., “Black Presidential Participation and the Critical Election Theory,” in Lorenzo Morris (ed.), The Social and Political Implications of the 1984 Jesse Jackson Presidential Campaign (New York: Praeger, 1990), pp. 44–64. 72. Clark Clifford, Counsel to the President: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1991), pp. 189–195. 73. Richard Bensel, The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 74. Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 75. R. Volney Riser, Defying Disfranchisement: Black Voting Rights Activism in the Jim Crow South, 1890–1908 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010).

76. Richard Hume and Jerry Gough, Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags: The Constitutional Conventions of Radical Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008). 77. Walton and Smith, pp. 161 and 167. See also Hanes Walton, Jr. and Robert Starks, “African American Lawyers in the United States Senate: The Election of Barack Obama in 2004 and the 2008 Presidential Race” (forthcoming). 78. Hanes Walton, Jr., and Marion Orr, “African American Independent Politics on the Left: Voter Turnout for Socialist Candidate Frank Crosswaith in Harlem and New York,” Souls: Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 7 (Spring 2005), pp. 19–33. 79. Hanes Walton, Jr., “Black Group Interest as Individual Intent: The Empirical Black Politics of Michael Dawson: A Book Review Essay,” The Black Scholar 25 (Winter 1995), pp. 48–51. 80. Lisa Nikol Nealy, African American Women Voters (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2009).

CHAPTER 3

The African American Electorate in the Colonial Era, 1610–1773 The Demography of African Americans in Colonial America

45

Table 3.1 Numbers of Censuses During the American Colonial Period, 1624–1773

47

Table 3.2 African American Populations and Population Growth in Regions of Colonial America, 1610–1770

48

Figure 3.1 African American Share of Population in Colonial Virginia, 1610–1770

49

Figure 3.2 African American Share of Population in Colonial Maryland, 1610–1770

49

Figure 3.3 Distribution of African American Population in Colonial America Regions, 1610–1770

49

Table 3.3 Population by Census or Estimate During the American Colonial Period, 1624–1773

50

Figure 3.4 Percent Change in White and African American Populations, Seventeenth-Century Colonial America

54

Figure 3.5 Percent Change in White and African American Populations, Eighteenth-Century Colonial America

54

Potential African American Voters in Colonial America

54

Table 3.4 African American Populations of “Voting Age” in Colonial America, 1624–1625 to 1773

55

Table 3.5 Voting Rights, Population, and Population Change of African Americans in the Thirteen Original Colonies in the Colonial Era

56

Table 3.6 “Voting Age” African American Populations in Maryland, 1704–1755

58

Table 3.7 Taxable and Untaxable African American Populations in Maryland, 1704–1755

58

Table 3.8 Estimated African American Electorate by Colony, 1703–1773

59

Table 3.9 Local-Level Population Censuses and Enumerations of African Americans, 1624–1773

60

Table 3.10 Settlement-Level Demography for Virginia, Census of 1624

61

Table 3.11 County-Level Demography of Slaves in Massachusetts, Census of 1754

62

Table 3.12 County-Level Demography of Massachusetts, Census of 1764

63

Table 3.13 County-Level Demography of Connecticut, Census of 1756

63

Table 3.14 County-Level Demography of New Hampshire, Census of 1773

64

Table 3.15 Town-Level Demography of Rhode Island, Census of 1708

64

Table 3.16 Town-Level Demography of Rhode Island, Census of 1748–1749

64

Table 3.17 Town-Level Demography of Rhode Island, Census of 1755

65

Table 3.18 County-Level Demography of New Jersey, Census of 1726

66

Table 3.19 County-Level Demography of New Jersey, Census of 1738

66

Table 3.20 County-Level Demography of New Jersey, Census of 1745

67

Table 3.21 County-Level Demography of Maryland, Census of 1704

67

Table 3.22 County-Level Demography of Maryland, Census of 1710

68

Table 3.23 County-Level Demography of Maryland, Census of 1712

68

Table 3.24 County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1712

69

Figure 3.6 African Americans as Percentage of Total Population in New York, 1703–1773

69



44

Chapter 3

Table 3.25 County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1703

70

Table 3.26 County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1712

70

Table 3.27 County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1723

71

Table 3.28 County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1731

71

Table 3.29 County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1737

72

Table 3.30 County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1746

72

Table 3.31 County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1749

73

Table 3.32 County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1771

73

Table 3.33 County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1771

74

Figure 3.7 African Americans as Percentage of Total Electorate in New York, 1703–1773

74

Figure 3.8 African American Men as Percentage of Male Electorate in New York, 1703–1773

74

Figure 3.9 African American Share of Taxable Population in North Carolina, 1754–1773

75

Table 3.34 County-Level Demography for North Carolina List of Taxables for 1754

75

Table 3.35 County-Level Demography for North Carolina List of Taxables for 1755

75

Table 3.36 County-Level Demography for North Carolina List of Taxables for 1756

76

Table 3.37 County-Level Demography for North Carolina List of Taxables for 1765

76

Table 3.38 County-Level Demography for North Carolina List of Taxables for 1766

77

Table 3.39 County-Level Demography for North Carolina List of Taxables for 1767

77

Conclusions on the African American Electorate in the Colonial Era

78

Notes 78



The African American Electorate in the Colonial Era, 1610–1773 45

D

ata and information on politics in the Colonial Era, 1610– 1773, are thin, scattered, and fragmented, particularly as they relate to African American political participation. Previous scholarship has focused on legal suffrage rights in this era. This chapter will for the first time establish African American electoral behavior in Colonial America and provide a foundation for the study and analysis of racial political participation prior to the Revolutionary and Antebellum eras in America. Since the thirteen colonies were each governed separately, Colonial America lacked a central government to collect and archive records in a comprehensive fashion. Hence, each of the colonies had to collect and archive its own records about registration and voting behavior. Such record keeping evolved slowly and gradually over time. Shortly after they were founded, each of the colonies began passing laws that set forth the rules and guidelines about who could and could not vote. Thus, rules and regulations concerning suffrage rights became law, and voting results began to be preserved in a fairly continuous fashion. Recordkeeping of voting was initially documented in pollbooks. John Kolp wrote in 1998 about these pollbooks: One hundred years ago, a New England historian discovered in the records of colonial Virginia a peculiar set of documents called Pollbooks. Frequently found in county deed and record books and occasionally in private papers, pollbooks report the voting behavior of individual adult male freeholders in elections for the provincial legislative assembly, the House of Burgesses. They not only include a listing by name of all persons voting for each candidate but often the total votes appear at the bottom followed by the signatures of the county sheriff and clerk attesting to the document’s accuracy and authenticity. Concentrated in the fifty-year period before the American Revolution, these surviving colonial pollbooks have long puzzled historians, for it has never been perfectly clear what they reveal about the political culture of this critical era in Virginia’s and America’s past.1 These books—along with other colonial documents like county deeds, wills, tax records, executive journals, as well as laws and statutes—serve as the primary sources of voting records in Colonial and Revolutionary America. Where gaps in these records exist, secondary sources such as newspapers, individual diaries, personal papers “both in printed and in manuscript form,” as well as pamphlets, broadsides, political memoirs, and the clipping files of early libraries provide useful semi-official election data.2 Needless to say, these different sources were not uniform or standardized. Dates of elections and methods of collecting and recording results were not consistent among the colonies, or even sometimes within them, making a comprehensive portrait nearly impossible.3 Even more in flux than the electoral processes themselves were the laws of different colonies concerning whether FreeMen-of-Color could vote.4 During the Colonial Era, suffrage laws continually changed for the free population of African

Americans.5 Any reconstruction of the African American electorate must begin with the demography of African Americans in Colonial America, particularly the dualism of that demography. Historian John Hope Franklin described the origin of this duality. He stated: “the twenty Africans who were put ashore at Jamestown in 1619 by the captain of a Dutch frigate were not slaves in a legal sense. . . . These newcomers, who happened to be black, were simply more indentured servants. They were listed as servants in the census counts of 1623 and 1624. . . .”6 Under Judeo-Christian teaching then in place, indentured servants were supposed to be freed in seven years. Thus, by 1626 these twenty African Americans had become Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color, and in some of the thirteen colonies Free-Men-of-Color had the right to vote. Hence, these individuals represent the beginning of the first category Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color of the African American population. Eventually, all of the thirteen colonies would have Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color. Franklin described the second category in the African American population thusly: “the actual statutory recognition of slavery in Virginia came in 1661. The status of blacks already there was not affected if they had completed their indenture and were free.”7 He continued: “the Virginia slave code, borrowing heavily from practices in the Caribbean and serving as a model for other mainland codes, was comprehensive if it was anything at all.”8 Thus, in America’s first colony, Virginia, there developed, almost from its inception, two African American populations, one free and one slave. This, too, became the model for other colonies. Maryland was the second colony to institute slavery. Franklin described the date and process there: While slavery in Maryland was not recognized by law until 1663, it came into existence shortly after the first settlements were made in 1634. As early as 1638 there was reference to slavery in some of the discussion in the legislature, and in 1641 the governor himself owned a number of slaves. . . . The law of 1663 was rather drastic. It undertook to reduce to slavery all blacks in the colony even though some were already free, and it sought to impose slave status on all blacks born in the colony regardless of the status of their mothers. It was not until 1681 that the law was brought in line with established practices by declaring that black children of white women and children born of free black women would be free.9 Laws in the original colonies allowed both slave and free populations to grow through the Colonial, Revolutionary, and Antebellum eras. This dual population was counted in the official censuses from 1790 to 1860. When slaves were finally set free in 1865 via the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, this dualism in the population ended.

The Demography of African Americans in Colonial America In 1976 the Bureau of the Census prepared a two-volume, bicentennial edition of the Historical Statistics of the United States:

46

Chapter 3

Colonial Times to 1970. Volume two (or Part 2) had a final section entitled “Colonial and Pre-Federal Statistics.” This was Chapter Z, and in the Series Z 1–19 there appeared a table with the “Estimated Population of American Colonies: 1610–1780.”10 These population data cover the 170-year period encompassing both the Colonial and Revolutionary eras, but primarily those years before the official U.S. Census started in 1790. Table Z 1–19 contains both white and African American population information. This table shows that in the 1620 census data from Virginia, twenty Africans were counted in the Virginia population. In 1909, the Bureau of the Census had issued a compilation entitled A Century of Population Growth. This contained a considerable amount of material on American population before 1790. Chapter I of this volume, entitled “Population in the Colonial and Continental Periods,” summarized the information available for the area and offered official enumerations for seven of the original thirteen states: New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland. In these tables population was grouped not only into local subdivisions but also into other demographic categories, including age, gender, race, and servile or free status.11 By the 1930s demographic scholars and historical researchers had unearthed not only additional census data for the seven colonies but also for the other six original colonies that had not appeared in the 1909 volume. These new data were assembled in a single volume: American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790.12 For the analyses presented in this chapter and in Chapter Four, the two census studies and Evart Greene and Virginia Harrington’s academic study were used to construct tabular data on the dual African American populations in the Colonial and Revolutionary eras and to derive from those populations the number of potential African American voters and their locations.

Censuses Taken in the Colonial Era The 1909 Census publication reveals the total number of censuses taken in the Colonial and Revolutionary eras. Table 3.1 lists the statistics of the Colonial Era. It offers the total number of censuses for all of the colonies in the Colonial Era, broken down over time by fifty-year cycles from 1600 until the eve of the Revolutionary Era in 1773. Table 3.1 also delineates this information by region and by individual colonies, illustrating that the majority of censuses took place in the 1700s, primarily in the Middle and New England colonies. Very few censuses were conducted in the Southern Colonies. In fact, it was in the Middle Colonies of the early 1700s where over a third (34.5%) occurred, followed by the New England Colonies with 10.3%. New York alone, with ten censuses during the Colonial Era, counts for over a third (34.5%) of the total. After New York is Rhode Island with four (13.8%), New Jersey with three (10.3%), and Connecticut, Delaware, and New Hampshire with two (6.9%) each. Several colonies—Pennsylvania in the Middle Colonies, and Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina in the Southern Colonies— conducted no censuses. Of the southern region, Virginia had one census, and that was in the very beginning of the Colonial Era. Delaware’s two censuses came in the same period. The initial one

was simply a list with no demographic categories and the second census was only for one county, Kent. These restrictions severely limit their usefulness for this study.

The African American Population by Region Table 3.2 reveals the African American populations, their percentages and their percentage of change (used here as the population growth) in the four regions of the country during the Colonial Era, 1610 to 1770. Although Virginia, one of the Southern Colonies, was the first to have an African American population, which arrived in August, 1619, in the Middle Colonies in 1640 and 1650 African Americans composed a larger proportion of the total population. However, that region later saw their numbers grow at a rate much smaller than the Southern Colonies. Not only is the growth rate in the South higher, the actual African American population is greater beginning in 1660. This growth rate in both percentages and actual numbers of African Americans results in a rank-ordered grand total in 1770 that renders the African American population as follows: (1) Southern Colonies with 343,208, (2) Border Colonies with 66,318, (3) Middle Colonies with 34,929, and (4) New England Colonies with 15,367. Moreover, while New England had a greater number of colonies than all other regions, it was the region where African Americans represented the smallest proportion of the total population.

African American Population Growth in Maryland and Virginia Two things stand out in Table 3.2 (p. 48). First, the Border (i.e., Maryland and Kentucky) and Southern colonies had the two largest populations of African Americans and eventually the largest percentages. Secondly, the southern region in the decade between 1680 and 1690 more than tripled its African American population. Thus, within two decades after Virginia and Maryland instituted legal slavery, both of their respective regions (Virginia in the South and Maryland as a Border Colony) began periods of high population growth. This population growth occurred in both of the two categories, free persons of color and slaves. By disaggregating the demographic data from a regional to an individual colony basis, it is possible to focus on the two individual colonies where high population growth occurred. Figures 3.1 and 3.2, for Virginia and Maryland, respectively, show how the population growth in each of these colonies accelerated. Figure 3.1 (p. 49) shows that the African American population percentage in Virginia grew steadily, with only a pause in 1730, peaked in 1750, and slowly declined from this peak between 1750 and 1780. Figure 3.2 (p. 49) shows that the African American population in Maryland peaked three times, 1660, 1710, and 1750, but continued to rise instead of declining. Returning to our regional analysis in a comparative manner, in the southern region the African American population reached a peak of 42.3%, while in the Border Colonies it peaked at 30.4%. African American populations in both Virginia and Maryland exceeded these regional percentages. Figure 3.3 (p. 49) reveals the total distribution of the African American populations in the four regions during seventeen different



The African American Electorate in the Colonial Era, 1610–1773 47 Table 3.1  Numbers of Censuses during the American Colonial Period, 1624–1773

1624–1649 Colony

1650–1699

1700–1749

Percent

Number

Number of Censuses in Colonial Era

1750–1773

Percent

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

Number

Percenta

Number

New Hampshire Massachusetts Maineb Rhode Island Connecticut Vermontc

           

           

           

           

      3    

      10.3%    

2 1 1 1 2 1

6.9% 3.4% 3.4% 3.4% 6.9% 3.4%

2 1 1 4 2 1

6.9% 3.4% 3.4% 13.8% 6.9% 3.4%

New England Colonies Subtotal

0

 

0

 

3

10.3%

8

27.6%

11

37.9%

New York New Jersey Pennsylvania Delaware

       

       

1     2

3.4%     6.9%

7 3  

24.1% 10.3%

2    

6.9%    

10 3 0 2

34.5% 10.3% 0.0% 6.9%

Middle Colonies Subtotal

0

3

10.3%

10

34.5%

2

6.9%

15

51.7%

1

3.4%

1

3.4%

1

3.4%

1

3.4%

Maryland Border Colony Subtotal

0

0

Virginia North Carolina South Carolina Georgia

1      

3.4%      

Southern Colonies Subtotal

1

3.4%

0

 

0

 

0

Total Censuses of All Colonies

1

3.4%

3

10.3%

14

48.3%

11

6.9% 2

6.9%

1 0 0 0

3.4% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0%

 

1

3.4%

37.9%

29

100%

Source: Table “Censuses Prior to 1790,” A Century of Population Growth From the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth, 1790–1900 (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1909), p. 4. a

All percentages are of the total number of censuses for all colonies in the Colonial Era (29).

b

As part of a census of Massachusetts.

c

As part of a census of New York.

decades, 1610–1770, showing that the population in the Southern Colonies eventually outstripped all other regions in the Colonial Era. Initially it was the Middle Colonies and New England that had the largest African American populations, but after the 1660s they gave way to the Southern and Border colonies. It is precisely these latter colonies, with the exception of Tennessee and North Carolina, that did not provide African American suffrage. Besides Virginia and Maryland, one can see population acceleration and decline in other individual colonies in the Colonial Era. In Table 3.3 (pp. 50–53), by using both colonial censuses and population estimate data, it is possible to provide demographic data for the four colonies listed in Table 3.1 where no pre-federal censuses have been found. It illustrates the African American and white populations in Pennsylvania and in all of the Southern Colonies, including Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, heretofore missing. As the above narrative indicates, recently uncovered Delaware censuses are now available with limited data. Hence, Table 3.3 offers demography data for all of the thirteen original colonies and two territories, the Wabash valley (traversing parts of Indiana and Illinois) and Michigan, in the Colonial Era. Such data provide a nearly complete portrait of the African American population during this time period.

Population Change during the Seventeenth Century Figure 3.4 (p. 54) provides a visual representation of the percentages of population change in the white and African American populations during the seventeenth century using the tabular data in Table 3.3. In 1620, the end of the first decade of our data analysis, the white population was dominant, but within a decade the African American population showed the greatest percentage change. This peaked in 1640, and the rate of change, with each group having a larger base, declined for both whites and African Americans. Only thereafter, in the decade ending in 1670, did the white population growth rate exceed that of African Americans.

Population Change during the Eighteenth Century Figure 3.5 (p. 54) extends use of the same tabular data in Table 3.3, revealing population changes in eighteenth century America, and indicating that in every decade African American population growth outstripped that of whites in the original thirteen colonies and in the two territories of Tennessee and Kentucky. In fact, in the seventeen decades of the Colonial Era, the white population grew faster only in the decades prior to 1620, 1670, and 1730.

102

1,796

13,679

22,832

15,136

51,896

68,462

86,961

92,763

115,094

170,893

217,351

289,704

360,011

449,634

581,038

1620

1630

1640

1650

1660

1670

1680

1690

1700

1710

1720

1730

1740

1750

1760

1770

15,367

12,717

10,982

8,541

6,118

3,956

2,585

1,680

950

470

375

562

380

195

0

0

0

African American

2.6%

2.8%

3.1%

2.9%

2.8%

2.3%

2.2%

1.8%

1.1%

0.7%

0.7%

3.7%

1.7%

1.4%

0.0%

0.0%

  0

0

20.8%

15.8%

28.6%

39.6%

54.7%

53.0%

53.9%

76.8%

102.1%

555,904

432,904

296,459

220,545

146,981

103,084

69,592

53,537

34,841

14,915

7,454

-33.3% 25.3%

5,476

4,301

1,930

350

Total

34,929

29,049

20,736

16,452

11,683

10,825

6,218

3,661

2,472

1,480

790

630

515

232

10

0

0

African American

Populationse

47.9%

94.9%

 

 

 

 

African Percent American Change Percent in African of Total American Population Population

6.3%

6.7%

7.0%

7.5%

7.9%

10.5%

8.9%

6.8%

7.1%

9.9%

10.6%

11.5%

12.0%

12.0%

2.9%

20.2%

40.1%

26.0%

40.8%

7.9%

74.1%

69.8%

48.1%

67.0%

87.3%

25.4%

22.3%

122.0%

220.0%

African Percent American Change Percent in African of Total American Population Population

Middle Coloniesb

0

0

0

218,299

162,267

141,073

116,093

91,113

66,133

42,741

29,604

24,024

17,904

13,226

8,426

4,504

583

Total

66,318

49,004

43,450

24,031

17,220

12,499

7,945

3,227

2,162

1,611

1,190

758

300

20

0

0

0

African American

Populationse

30.4%

30.2%

30.8%

20.7%

18.9%

18.9%

18.6%

10.9%

9.0%

9.0%

9.0%

9.0%

6.7%

3.4%

 

 

 

35.3%

12.8%

80.8%

39.6%

37.8%

57.3%

146.2%

49.3%

34.2%

35.4%

57.0%

152.7%

1400.0%

 

 

 

 

African Percent American Change Percent in African of Total American Population Population

Border Coloniesc

792,835

553,820

373,217

279,221

174,000

126,075

104,284

74,984

64,546

50,226

39,359

28,020

18,731

10,442

2,500

2,200

350

Total

343,208

235,036

161,252

101,000

56,000

41,559

28,118

19,249

11,145

3,410

2,180

970

405

150

50

20

Middle Colonies = New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware.

Border Colonies = Maryland and Kentucky.

Southern Colonies = Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee.

African American is the term used for Negro and mulatto populations.

c

d

e

New England Colonies = Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Plymouth, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

b

a

0

African American

Populationse

43.3%

42.4%

43.2%

36.2%

32.2%

33.0%

27.0%

25.7%

17.3%

6.8%

5.5%

3.5%

2.2%

1.4%

2.0%

0.9%

0.0%

46.0%

45.8%

59.7%

80.4%

34.7%

47.8%

46.1%

72.7%

226.8%

56.4%

124.7%

139.5%

170.0%

200.0%

150.0%

 

 

African Percent American Change Percent in African of Total American Population Population

Southern Coloniesd

Source: “Table Series Z 1–19: Estimated Population of American Colonies: 1610 to 1780,” Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975), p. 1168.

0

Total

1610

    Year

Populationse

New England Coloniesa

Table 3.2  African American Populations and Population Growth in Regions of Colonial America, 1610–1770



The African American Electorate in the Colonial Era, 1610–1773 49 Figure 3.2  African American Share of Population in Colonial Maryland, 1610–1770

50% 45% 40% 35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0%

Percent of Total Population

35%

25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 70

60

17

50

17

40

17

30

17

20

17

10

17

00

17

90

17

80

16

70

16

60

16

50

16

40

16

30

16

20

16

16

Year

16

10

20 17 30 17 40 17 50 17 60 17 70

10

17

00

17

90

17

80

16

70

16

60

16

50

16

40

16

30

16

20

16

16

16

30%

0%

10

Percent of Total Population

Figure 3.1  African American Share of Population in Colonial Virginia, 1610–1770

Year

African American Percent of Population in Virginia

African American Percent of Population in Maryland

Source: Adapted from Table Series Z 1–19: Estimated Population of American Colonies: 1610 to 1780,” Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975), p. 1168.

Source: Adapted from Table Series Z 1–19: Estimated Population of American Colonies: 1610 to 1780,” Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975), p. 1168.

Figure 3.3  Distribution of African American Population in Colonial America Regions, 1610–1770 100%

Population Distribution by Region (Percent)

90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 1610

1620

1630

1640

1650

1660

1670

1680

1690

1700

1710

1720

1730

1740

1750

1760

1770

Decade Southern Colonies

Border Colonies

Middle Colonies

New England Colonies

Source: Adapted from Table Series Z 1–19: Estimated Population of American Colonies: 1610 to 1780,” Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975), p. 1168.

50

Chapter 3

Table 3.3  Population by Census or Estimate during the American Colonial Period, 1624–1773

  Colony

  Year

Reference [source note number]: page numbers

New Hampshire

1715

[2]: 4, 71.

Population

9,650

9,500

150

General estimate of 1715.

1721

[2]: 71.

Population

9,000

8,850

150

Computed white population.

1730

[2]: 71.

Population

10,200

10,000

200

Computed total population.

1737

[2]: 71.

Population

11,000

10,800

200

Computed white population.

1754

[2]: 72.

Population

80,000

79,450

550

Computed white population.

1761

[2]: 72.

Taxables or Polls

9,146

8,868

278

As given by estimates, population-to-poll ratio = 4:1.

1767

[1]: 1170.

Census

52,720

52,087

633

Census of 1767.

1767

[2]: 72, 74–79.

Census

52,700

52,067

633

Census of 1767: computed white population.

1767

[3]: 149–150.

Census

52,720

52,087

633

Census of 1767.

1773

[1]: 1170.

Census

73,097

72,423

674

Census of 1773.

1773

[2]: 73.

Census

72,766

72,092

674

Census of 1773.

1773

[3]: 150–154.

Census

73,097

72,423

674

Census of 1773.

1715

[2]: 4, 14.

Population

96,000

94,000

2,000

General estimate of 1715.

1718

[2]: 15.

Population

94,000

90,800

2,000

White population = Total population (94,000) minus # slaves “mostly Negroes” (2,000) and minus # Indians (1,200).

1735

[2]: 15.

Population

144,308

141,708

2,600

Tot. pop. = 4 x # whites 16 yrs or older (35,427).

1736

[2]: 15.

Militia

123,000

120,000

2,000

White population = 4 x ratable male polls, given as 30,000.

1751

[2]: 15.

Population

122,000

120,000

2,000

Estimate based on 20,000 militia given for 1728.

1754

[3]: 156–157.

Census

 

2,712

Census of 1754: slave population. White/total not available.

1763–1765

[2]: 16-17, 21.

Census

241,024

235,810

5,214

Census of 1765.

1763

[2]: 16.

Population

200,000

197,779

2,221

Computed white population.

1764–1765

[1]: 1170.

Census

223,841

216,700

4,891

Census of 1764-1765.

1765

[2]: 17.

Population

250,000

243,000

5,500

Computed white population.

1773

[2]: 17.

Population

300,000

292,500

6,000

Computed white population.

1708

[1]: 1171.

Census

7,181

2,432

426

Census of 1708: white males.

1708

[2]: 62.

Census

7,181

426

Census of 1708: 1,015 freemen; 1,362 militia; 56 white servants; 426 black servants. White total not available.

1708

[3]: 162.

Census

7,181

6,755

426

Census of 1708: computed white population.

1715

[2]: 4, 62.

Population

9,000

8,500

500

General estimate of 1715.

1730

[1]: 1171.

Census

17,935

15,302

1,648

Census of 1730.

1730

[2]: 62–63, 66.

Census

17,935

15,302

1,648

Census of 1730.

1748

[1]: 1171.

Census

34,128

29,755

3,101

Census of 1748.

1748

[2]: 63, 66.

Census

34,128

29,755

4,373

Census of 1748: computed total population.

1748

[2]: 63, 66.

Census

32,773

28,439

3,077

Census of 1748.

1748

[2]: 63, 66.

Census

34,128

29,755

3,101

Census of 1748.

1748

[3]: 162.

Census

17,935

15,302

1,648

Census of 1748.

1755

[1]: 1171.

Census

40,536

35,839

4,697

Census of 1755.

1755

[2]: 63, 67.

Census

40,636

35,939

4,697

Census of 1755, “4,697 blacks and Indians, chiefly Negroes.”

Massachusetts

Rhode Island

Populations Enumeration Type

Total

White

African American

  Comments



The African American Electorate in the Colonial Era, 1610–1773 51

  Colony

  Year

Reference [source note number]: page numbers

Connecticut

1715 1730 1754 1756 1756 1756 1762

[2]: 4, 49. [2]: 49. [2]: 49–50. [1]: 1169. [2]: 50, 58–61. [2]: 50. [2]: 50.

New York

1698 1698 1703 1703 1712–1714 1712 1715 1723 1723 1723 1731 1731 1731 1737 1737 1737 1746 1746 1746 1749 1749 1749 1754 1756 1756 1756 1771 1771 1771

New Jersey

Populations Enumeration Type

Total

White

African American

 

Population Population Population Census Census Census Population

47,500 100,000 138,500 130,612 129,994 129,994 146,520

46,000 70,000 135,000 126,976 126,975 128,212 141,000

1,500 1,000 3,500 3,019 3,109 3,587 4,590

General estimate of 1715. Total population as given by estimates. Computed total population. Census of 1756. Census of 1756: computed total population. Census of 1756. Computed total population.

[1]: 1171. [3]: 170. [1]: 1171. [2]: 90, 94–95. [1]: 1171. [3]: 181. [2]: 4, 90. [1]: 1171. [2]: 96. [3]: 181. [1]: 1171. [2]: 90, 97. [3]: 181. [1]: 1170. [2]: 90, 98. [3]: 182. [1]: 1170. [2]: 91, 99. [3]: 182. [1]: 1170. [2]: 91, 100. [3]: 182. [2]: 91. [1]: 1170. [2]: 91, 101. [3]: 183. [1]: 1170. [2]: 91, 102. [3]: 183.

Census Census Census Census Census Census Population Census Census Census Census Census Census Census Census Census Census Census Census Census Census Census Population Census Census Census Census Census Census

18,067 18,067 20,665 20,665 22,608 22,608 31,000 40,564 40,564 40,564 50,286 50,289 50,286 60,437 60,436 60,437 61,589 61,589 61,589 73,348 73,448 73,348 85,000 96,760 96,775 96,590 163,348 168,007 168,017

15,897 15,897 18,282 18,282 16,979 16,979 27,000 34,393 34,393 34,393 43,055 43,058 43,055 51,496 51,495 51,496 52,482 52,482 52,482 62,756 62,756 62,756 74,000 83,242 89,233 83,242 143,474 148,124 148,124

2,170 2,170 2,258 2,383 2,425 2,425 4,000 6,171 6,171 6,171 7,231 7,231 7,231 8,941 8,941 8,941 9,107 9,107 9,107 10,592 10,692 10,592 11,000 13,548 13,542 13,348 19,874 19,883 19,893

Census of 1698. Census of 1698. Census of 1703. Census of 1703. Census of 1712–1714. Partial census of 1712. General estimate of 1715. Census of 1723. Census of 1723. Census of 1723. Census of 1731. Census of 1731: computed white population. Census of 1731. Census of 1737. Census of 1737: computed white population. Census of 1737. Census of 1746. Census of 1746: computed white population. Census of 1746. Census of 1749. Census of 1749. Census of 1749: computed total population. Computed white population. Census of 1756. Census of 1756. Census of 1756. Census of 1771. Census of 1771. Census of 1771.

1715 1726 1726 1726 1737–1738 1738 1738 1745 1745 1745 1754 1754 1755

[2]: 4, 106. [1]: 1170. [2]: 106. [3]: 184. [3]: 184. [1]: 1170. [2]: 106, 110. [1]: 1170. [2]: 106, 111. [3]: 184. [2]: 107. [2]: 107. [2]: 107.

Population Census Population Census Census Census Census Census Census Census Population Population Population

22,500 32,442 32,446 32,442 46,676 46,676 47,369 61,403 61,383 61,403 81,500 78,500 81,500

21,000 29,861 29,861 29,861 42,695 42,695 43,388 56,797 56,777 56,797 80,000 73,000 80,000

1,500 2,581 2,581 2,581 3,981 3,981 3,981 4,606 4,606 4,606 1,500 5,500 1,500

1772

[2]: 108, 112.

Census

71,023

67,710

3,313

Comments

General estimate of 1715. Census of 1726. According to estimate. Census of 1726. Census of 1737–1738. Census of 1738. Census of 1738. Census of 1745. Census of 1745. Census of 1745. Computed total population. Computed total population. Floor estimate of total population based on black population from 1,500 to 1,800. Census of 1772. (Continued)

52

Chapter 3

Table 3.3 (Continued)

  Colony

  Year

Reference [source note number]: page numbers

Pennsylvania

1715 1721 1730 1754 1766

[2]: 4, 114. [2]: 114. [2]: 114. [2]: 115. [2]: 116.

Population Population Population Population Population

Delaware

1665–1697

[4]: 32.

Taxables or Polls

 

1684

[4]: 135–141.

Taxables or Polls

117

1704 1710 1710 1712 1715 1719 1732 1748 1754 1755 1755 1755 1756

[1]: 1169. [1]: 1169. [2]: 124. [1]: 1169. [2]: 4, 125. [2]: 125. [2]: 125. [2]: 125. [2]: 125. [1]: 1169. [2]: 125–126. [3]: 184. [2]: 126.

Census Census Census Census Population Population Population Population Population Census Census Census Population

1761

[2]: 126.

1624–1625 1624 1625 1648 1671 1708 1712 1715 1743 1749

Maryland

Virginia

North Carolina

Populations Enumeration Type

Total

White

African American

45,800 65,000 49,000 206,000 180,000

43,300 60,000 45,000 195,000 150,000

2,500 5,000 4,000 11,000 30,000

  Comments General estimate of 1715. According to estimate. According to estimate. According to estimate. According to estimate.

 

List of land owners by name, but not by gender, age, or race.

103

14

Kent County only. Freeholders, family members, household servants, and freemen by name; numbers of Negroes.

34,912 42,741 42,741 46,151 50,200 80,000 96,000 130,000 148,000 153,505 153,564 153,505 154,188

30,437 34,796 34,796 37,743 40,700 55,000 75,000 94,000 104,000 108,193 107,208 108,193 107,963

4,475 7,945 7,945 8,408 9,500 25,000 21,000 36,000 44,000 45,312 46,356 45,312 46,225

Census of 1704. Census of 1710. Census of 1710. Census of 1712. General estimate of 1715.         Census of 1755. Census of 1755. Census of 1755.  

Population

164,007

114,332

49,675

 

[1]: 1171. [2]: 136. [2]: 143. [2]: 136. [2]: 136. [2]: 139. [2]: 139. [2]: 4, 139. [2]: 140. [2]: 140.

Census Census Census Population Population Taxables or Polls Militia Population Population Taxables or Polls

1,227 1,275 1,227 15,300 40,000 30,000 24,102 95,000 130,000 135,000

1,202 1,253 1,202 15,000 38,000 18,000 12,051 72,000 88,000 85,000

23 22 23 300 2,000 12,000 12,051 23,000 42,000 40,000

1754 1755 1756

[2]: 140. [2]: 150–151. [2]: 140.

Population Census Taxables or Polls

284,000 103,407 293,472

168,000 43,329 173,316

116,000 60,078 120,156

1770

[2]: 141.

Taxables or Polls

447,008

259,402

187,606

Census of 1698. Census of 1698. Census of 1698.     Estimated “tithables.” Estimated white militia equal to Negroes. General estimate of 1715.   “135,000 souls: 85,000 tithables, 40,000 being blacks.”   Census of 1755; computed total population. Estimated from 4 times white tithables and 2 times Negro tithables. Estimates based on numbers of tithables.

1715 1732 1752 1754 1756 1761 1765 1766

[2]: 4, 156. [2]: 156. [2]: 157. [2]: 157. [2]: 157–158. [2]: 158. [2]: 158. [2]: 158–159.

Population Population Population Population Taxables or Polls Taxables or Polls Taxables or Polls Taxables or Polls

11,200 36,000 30,000 90,000 25,737 34,000 45,912 48,610

7,500 30,000 20,000 70,000 12,069 22,000 28,542 16,183

3,700 6,000 10,000 20,000 13,668 12,000 17,370 12,923

General estimate of 1715.       Estimated taxables. Estimated taxables. Estimated taxables. Estimated taxables.

1767

[2]: 159.

Taxables or Polls

51,044

17,700

12,382

Estimated taxables.



The African American Electorate in the Colonial Era, 1610–1773 53

  Colony

  Year

Reference [source note number]: page numbers

South Carolina

1699 1703 1708 1715 1720 1737 1741 1742 1745 1749 1751 1754 1755 1756

[2]: 172. [2]: 172-173. [2]: 173. [2]: 4, 173. [2]: 174. [2]: 174. [2]: 174. [2]: 174. [2]: 174. [2]: 174. [2]: 175. [2]: 175. [2]: 175. [2]: 175.

1763 1765

Populations   Enumeration Type

Total

White

African American

Population Population Population Population Population Militia Population Militia Population Population Population Population Population Militia

62,500 7,150 9,580 16,750 21,000 27,000 45,000 54,500 50,000 64,000 65,000 80,000 110,000 22,500

12,500 3,800 4,080 6,250 12,000 5,000 5,000 5,500 10,000 25,000 25,000 40,000 25,000 5,500

50,000 3,000 4,100 10,500 9,000 22,000 40,000 49,000 40,000 39,000 40,000 40,000 50,000 17,000

[2]: 175. [2]: 175.

Population Population

105,000 125,000

35,000 40,000

70,000 85,000

1769 1770 1773

[2]: 175. [2]: 175, 176. [2]: 176.

Population Militia Population

125,000 115,000 175,000

45,000 10,000 65,000

80,000 75,178 110,000

1751 1753 1753 1754 1755 1760 1761 1765 1766

[2]: 181. [2]: 181. [2]: 181. [2]: 181. [2]: 181. [2]: 181. [2]: 181. [2]: 181. [2]: 181.

Population Population Population Population Population Population Population Population Population

2,120 3,447 3,861 7,000 6,500 9,578 9,700 11,300 17,750

1,700 2,381 2,261 5,000 3,000 6,000 6,100 6,800 9,950

420 1,066 1,600 2,000 3,500 3,578 3,600 4,500 7,800

1773

[2]: 182.

Population

33,000

18,000

15,000

Illinois Country

1726 1732 1750 1763 1765 1766 1772

[2]: 186. [2]: 187. [2]: 187. [2]: 187. [2]: 188. [2]: 188. [2]: 189.

Population Population Population Population Population Militia Population

409 672 1,460 970 2,950 0 1,500

280 388 1,100 670 2,050 300 900

129 165 300 300 900 230 600

Wabash Valley, Indiana

1767

[2]: 190.

Population

400

10

17

 

Michigan Territory (Detroit)

1765

[2]: 191.

Population

799

701

60

 

Georgia

  Comments Four Negroes to one white man.     General estimate of 1715.   White fighting men.   (White) provincial militia.           Estimated population of white militia and Negro males 16 years and older. 30,000 to 40,000 whites. White population estimate based on 7,000 to 8,000 militia; 80,000 to 90,000 Negroes.   White militia.             Negro population estimate deemed excessive.     White population estimated in range from 9,900 to 10,000.             White “fencible” men.  

Sources: [1] “Table Series Z 24–132: Population Censuses Taken in the Colonies and States During the Colonial and Pre–Federal Period: 1624–25 to 1786,” Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975), pp. 1169–1171. [2] Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932). [3] A Century of Population Growth From the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1909), pp. 149–185. [4] Ronald Vern Jakson and Gary Ronald Teeples (eds.), Early Delaware Census Records, 1665–1697 (Bountiful, UT: Accelerated Indexing Systems, 1977), pp. 1–32, and Jeffrey L. Schieb, “A 1688 Census of Kent County, Delaware,” Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine Vol. 37 (Philadelphia: Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, 1991), pp. 135–141.

54

Chapter 3

140%

15% 66%

34%

35% 54%

98% 55%

11% 83%

87% 168%

101% 200%

468%

552%

Percent Change in Population

1000% 900% 800% 700% 600% 500% 400% 300% 200% 100% 0%

895%

Figure 3.4  Percent Change in White and African American Populations, Seventeenth-Century Colonial Americaa

1610 1620 1630 1640 1650 1660 1670 1680 1690 1700 Decade White

African American

Source: Adapted from Table Series Z 1–19: Estimated Population of American Colonies: 1610 to 1780," Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975), p. 1168. a

Includes the Original Thirteen Colonies, plus Tennessee and Kentucky.

33%

36% 38%

41%

58% 24%

30%

Primary Source Data on Voting Age

40%

40%

39%

50%

36% 32%

53%

61%

60%

29%

Percent Change in Population

70%

65%

Figure 3.5  Percent Change in White and African American Populations, Eighteenth-Century Colonial Americaa

20% 10% 0%

1710

1720

1730

1740

1750

1760

1770

Decade White

African American

Source: Adapted from Table Series Z 1–19: Estimated Population of American Colonies: 1610 to 1780," Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975), p. 1168. a

New Jersey and New Hampshire. Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Virginia each had one year of gender data. One year of gender data is available for Maine, although Maine was not one of the original thirteen colonies but initially a province of Massachusetts that did not join the federal system until 1820. Notably, five of the original colonies are missing from Table 3.4: Pennsylvania, Delaware, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Gender data by census were not collected for them in the colonial and pre-federal periods. Thus, said data existed only for eight of the thirteen original colonies, and only sporadically. When the Bureau of the Census published this material in its bicentennial edition of Historical Statistics, other extant data were not yet discovered or may simply have been omitted from Table Z 24–132. Hence our analysis must rely upon this data, which do provide specific information on Free-Menof-Color, that category of the African American demography that could vote. Occasionally, some of the colonies allowed women to vote. Virginia was the first to allow women, including Free-Women-of-Color, the legal right to vote between 1626 and 1699. Thus, in the final analysis, the data in this table show the principal number of African American males who potentially could have been in the electoral pool of voters. As to the matter of definition, the African American population should be read to include both Negro and mulatto populations.

Includes the Original Thirteen Colonies, plus Tennessee and Kentucky.

The Colonial Population by Race and Gender The colonial and pre-federal statistics provide much more than the total populations by region and individual colony. Table Z 24–132 in the historical statistics volume provides population breakdown by gender for some years, as well as information about the age distributions of the white and African American populations in Colonial America. Table 3.4 shows that not all of the colonies kept gender data on the African American population during this time frame. New York kept a significant amount of this data, as did

The colony of New York provides the richest series of data across time in the Colonial Era. Table Z 24–132 of Historical Statistics provides not only some gender data but also age data for five of the eight colonies. Of those five colonies, three demarcate their age data at “16 and over,” while another distinguishes its data at age “20 and over.” New York, in 1723, simply had “adult” and “non-adult” age categories. Thus, the age of sixteen tends to predominate as the possible voting age in these colonies. However, in the colony of New York in 1731 and 1737, census data of age start at “10 years and over.” Presumably ten year olds did not vote, and since other voting data for New York are available, it can be estimated that the population potentially eligible to vote was at or near the age of “16 and over.”

Potential African American Voters in Colonial America The total demography in Table 3.2 as well as the gender data in Table 3.4 provide for the first time an empirical look at the potential African American electorate in Colonial America. Matching up this demographic data with those colonies that legally allowed African Americans the right to vote provides some sense of how many Free-Men-and-Women-of Color had the potential right to cast ballots. Besides this basic empirical demographic and gender data on the Colonial Era, there are two other unique features. First, census data were collected for Maine when it was a province of Massachusetts. Table 3.4 shows that in this territory during the years 1764–1765, there were 344 African Americans, 192 males (55.8%) and 152 females (44.2%). And like the first

7,181 17,935 34,128 40,536

1708

1730

1748

1755

Rhode Island

73,348 96,790 163,348

1749

1756

1771

57,596

58,040

1701

1699  

 

 

23

45,312

8,408

7,945

4,475

 

4,606

3,981

2,581

19,874

13,548

10,592

9,107

8,941

7,231

6,171

2,425

2,258

2,170

3,019

4,697

3,101

1,648

426

344

4,891

674

633

Number

 

 

 

1.9%

29.5%

18.2%

18.6%

12.8%

 

7.5%

8.5%

8.0%

12.2%

14.0%

14.4%

14.8%

14.8%

14.4%

15.2%

10.7%

10.9%

12.0%

2.3%

11.6%

9.1%

9.2%

5.9%

1.6%

2.2%

0.9%

1.2%

 

 

 

11

23,746

 

 

 

 

2,588

2,208

1,435

10,623

7,570

5,696

4,857

4,948

4,334

3,364

1,334

1,174

 

 

2,387

 

 

 

192

2,824

379

384

Number

Males

 

 

 

10

20,179

 

 

 

 

2,018

1,773

1,146

9,251

5,978

4,896

4,250

3,993

2,897

2,807

1,091

1,084

 

 

2,310

 

 

 

152

2,067

295

249

Number

Females

 

 

 

 

16

 

 

 

 

 

16

16

16

16

16

16

c

c

‘Adult’

16

16

 

 

‘Adult’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  “Voting Age”b

 

 

21,189

 

2,357

1,502

11,404

7,488

5,973

4,927

6,265

4,785

3,996

1,581

1,409

 

2,542

 

 

Number

 

 

 

 

13.8%

 

 

 

 

 

5.0%

4.6%

7.0%

7.7%

8.1%

8.0%

10.4%

9.5%

9.9%

7.0%

6.8%

 

 

6.3%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

11,696

 

 

 

 

 

1,359

872

6,209

4,290

3,317

2,893

3,551

2,932

2,186

900

707

 

 

1,277

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Number

 

 

 

 

7.6%

 

 

 

 

 

2.9%

2.7%

3.8%

4.4%

4.5%

4.7%

5.9%

5.8%

5.4%

4.0%

3.4%

 

 

3.2%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Percent of Total Population

Males

 

 

8,646

 

998

630

5,195

3,198

2,656

2,034

2,714

1,853

1,810

681

702

 

1,265

 

 

 

 

5.6%

 

2.1%

1.9%

3.2%

3.3%

3.6%

3.3%

4.5%

3.7%

4.5%

3.0%

3.4%

 

3.1%

 

 

Percent of Total Population

Females

Number

African American Population of Voting Age Percent of Total Population

Total

In this table, African American includes Negro and mulatto populations.

Age is derived from age strata in source data.

Demographic demarcation at 10 years of age.

a

b

c

Source: Adapted from “Table Series Z 24–132: Population Censuses Taken in the Colonies and States During the Colonial and Pre-Federal Period: 1624–25 to 1786,” Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975), pp. 1169–1171. Calculations by the authors.

 

4,909

1634

153,505

1755 1,227

46,151

1712

1624–1625

42,741

1710

Virginia

34,912

1704

Maryland

122,003

1772

 

61,403

61,589

1746

1745

60,437

1737

46,676

50,286

1731

1738

40,564

1723

32,442

22,608

1712–1714

1726

20,665

1703

New Jersey

18,067

1698

New York

130,612

1756

Connecticut

21,857

1764–1765

Maine

73,097 223,841

1773

1764–1765

1767

New Hampshire

Massachusetts

52,720

Year

Colony

Total Population

Percent of Total Population

Total

African American Populationa

Table 3.4  African American Populations of “Voting Age” in Colonial America, 1624–1625 to 1773

56

Chapter 3

federal territories, such as Indiana, wherein Congress restricted African American suffrage and only white males could vote, Massachusetts blocked Free-Men-of-Color from voting in Maine. However, once it became a state, Maine never blocked them from voting, even up through the Civil War. A second unique feature is that Maryland, at least for one year in the Colonial Era, broke down its census data on African Americans by free male and female as well as by slave male and female. There was a mulatto breakdown as well. If data such as Maryland’s existed for all thirteen colonies it would be possible to quickly and accurately estimate the proportion of the African American population in Colonial America who were potential voters. Such information would provide us with a comprehensive and systematic portrait of African American voters in this era. Although we are lacking this type of empirical data for almost all of the colonies, a case study of the unique Maryland data will be the first of its kind. A unique feature of the Maryland data is that the data tell us that each of these African American demographic populations had taxes levied upon them. This means that these Free-Menand-Women-of-Color had acquired enough real and personal property in the colony to become taxpayers and thereby qualify as societal “stake-holders,” a qualification that was the main basis

for voting in Colonial America. These data, although limited to a single year, demonstrate that in Maryland, and probably in the rest of the thirteen colonies, some free African Americans satisfied the qualification of holding property as a basis for voting.

The Colonies That Gave African Americans the Legal Right to Vote Table 3.5 lists the original thirteen colonies and shows those which provided legal voting rights for Free-Men-of-Color. None of the thirteen colonies initially denied suffrage rights to African Americans. As time passed during the 163-year Colonial Era (1610–1773), only three of the thirteen colonies, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, changed their statutes to deny suffrage rights to Free-Men-of-Color. The other ten colonies did not deny suffrage rights based on color but rather upon the condition of property ownership. Suffrage rights in this era rested upon the ideology and concept of the voter as “a stakeholder in society,” which was the dominant requirement. Although there were other qualifications, the property qualification was the most pervasive, and each one of the colonies set its own requirements for property held in terms of acres owned and, later, valuation in dollars.

Table 3.5  Voting Rights, Population, and Population Change of African Americans in the Thirteen Original Colonies in the Colonial Era Voting Rights of Free African Americans 1770 Estimated Totala Population

Percent Total Population Increaseb (1760–1770)

1770 Estimated African American Population

1770 African American Percent of Total Population

Percent African American Population Increaseb (1760–1770)

Denied from the Outset

Denied by 1770

Never Denied

New Hampshire







62,396

59.6%

654

1.0%

9.0%

Massachusetts







235,308

16.1%

4,754

2.0%

4.1%

Rhode Island







58,196

28.0%

3,761

6.5%

8.5%

Connecticut







183,881

29.1%

5,698

3.1%

50.6%

New York







162,920

39.1%

19,112

11.7%

17.0%

New Jersey







117,431

25.2%

8,220

7.0%

25.2%

Pennsylvania







240,057

27.2%

5,761

2.4%

30.7%

Delaware







35,496

6.8%

1,836

5.2%

5.9%

Maryland







202,599

24.9%

63,818

31.5%

30.2%

Virginia







447,016

31.6%

187,605

42.0%

33.5%

North Carolina







197,200

78.6%

69,600

35.3%

107.4%

South Carolina







124,244

32.1%

75,178

60.5%

31.1%

Georgia







23,375

144.0%

10,625

45.5%

197.0%

Totals

0

3

10

2,090,119

32.4%

456,622

21.8%

40.3%

Colony

Source: “Table Series Z 1–19: Estimated Population of American Colonies: 1610 to 1780,” Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975), p. 1168. a

Total population = white population + Negro (African American) population.

b

Percent population increase or decrease = (population in 1770 – population in 1760)/population in 1760.



The African American Electorate in the Colonial Era, 1610–1773 57

As Alexander Keyssar wrote, “The linchpin of both colonial and British suffrage regulations was the restriction of voting to adult men who owned property. On the eve of the American Revolution, in seven colonies men had to own land of specified acreage or monetary value in order to participate in elections; elsewhere, the ownership of personal property of a designated value (or in South Carolina, the payment of taxes) could substitute for real estate.”13 In all of the colonies that provided the legal right to vote to Free-Men-of-Color, they also had the right to purchase property and the obligation to pay taxes on their real estate. They did so in each and every one of the thirteen colonies. Thus, with the data in Table 3.5 that pinpoint the exact colonies where Free-Men-of-Color had legal suffrage rights, the demography of total population and male population within these specific colonies can be combined to structure a portrait of potential voters via estimations based on the known male and free male populations from the “Colonial and Pre-Federal Statistics.” Table 3.5 provides estimates showing that several of the Southern Colonies—including South Carolina, where African Americans constituted 60.5% of the population, Georgia with 45.5%, Virginia with 42.0%, North Carolina with 35.3%, and Maryland with 31.5%—did not deny African Americans suffrage rights despite their large proportions and population growth. This is just the opposite of what would later happen during the Reconstruction Era, 1868–1877, when states with large African American populations moved to disenfranchise them. The conclusion, at least from the demographic data, is that neither colonies with large African American populations nor those with large increases in the African American population pursued the diminution of legal suffrage rights. Thus, neither the population size nor population increase resulted in either outright or eventual denial of suffrage rights during colonial times. Even Virginia, which became one colony of the three to deny this right, did not do so until 1699 for Free-Women-ofColor and 1723 for Free-Men-of-Color.

Colony-Level Election Data: The Colonial Maryland Free and Taxable African American Population A case study of Colonial Maryland is possible, and instructive, due to the historical statistics from their census materials. Table 3.6 (p. 58) reveals that during the year 1755 when the African American population was nearly 30% of the total population, the Free African American population was just over 0.5% and stood at 1,817 individuals. The slave population was 43,495 (or 97.8% of the total African American population), and males in the slave population outnumbered females. Hence, because Maryland did not prohibit Free-Men-of-Color from exercising their suffrage rights, some 895 were of voting age and eligible to cast ballots if they were also male and also passed the economic requirement of being “taxable.” Table 3.7 (p. 58) further breaks down the year 1755 data into two categories of “taxable” and “untaxable” populations, showing that a large plurality of Free-Men-and-Women-ofColor was considered “taxable” and therefore likely paid taxes. More than 40% of this group, or 742 out of 1,817 individuals,

were eligible under the law to be potential voters in the colonial elections. Table 3.7 also reveals that 100% of the large “taxable” slave population in the colony that year, some 19,600 persons, was of the voting age. Of this number 11,270 were male, and they were eligible to vote just as were the Free-Men-and-Womenof-Color or even as the free white men (23,386). The voting age taxable slave population would have constituted 7.3% of the total population or 32.5% of a voting age male electorate. Because the “male” question and the “taxable” question were tallied separately, we do not know exactly how many FreeMen-of-Color were of voting age and taxable, as opposed to Free-Women-of-Color who could not vote even if of voting age and taxable. But the data we do have allow us to estimate their numbers. Males constituted 57.5% of the voting-age African American population; if they also constituted 57.5% of the free population, then approximately 427 of the 742 free and taxable African Americans in Maryland in 1755 were male and therefore could vote. Males constituted 53.5% of the total African American population; if they also constituted 53.5% of the free population, then approximately 396 of the 742 free and taxable African Americans could vote. Even more conservatively, if males were 50% of the free and taxable African population, they would have numbered 371 voters. These unique census data from Maryland give us both an empirically based glimpse and a suggestive clue about the potential voters in this single colony during the Colonial Era. The data tell us about the property holding that the Free-Men-andWomen-of-Color had in this time frame and how these taxable property owners were “stakeholders-in-society,” rendering them as potential voters. Historian William Gillette in his analysis of newspaper and scholarly sources about potential African American voters noted that journalistic works had a consensus of about “onesixth” of the African American population, while scholars used a consensus of about “one-fifth” of the African American population.14 Using the only colony where detailed data exist, Maryland in 1755, we have estimated that the number of voters was probably between 371, or 20.3% of the colony’s free African American population, and 427, or 23.5% of the colony’s free African American population. In other words, our rare findings, which Gillette does not analyze, confirm the basic validity of the rule of thumb that Gillette uses—if one calculates the percentage by dividing the number of voters by the total free African American population. If one divides the number of voters by the entire African American population, including the slave majority, the percentages are much lower. The low-end estimate (371) of the number of voters is only 0.8% of the total African American population in 1755 and 1.5% of the male African population, while the high-end estimate (427) is only 0.9% of the total African American population that year and 1.8% of the male African American population. The difficulty of estimating the African American electorate in other colonies is that they did not record how large their free African American population was, but only their total African American population, broken down into male and female. Therefore, we have used the consensus figure of “one-fifth” or 20% of the African American male population for each of the

 34,912

 42,741

 46,151

153,505

1704

1710

1712

1755

23,746

 

 

 

Number

20,719

Number

Female

1,817

Number

Free

43,495

Number

Slave

45,312

8,408

7,945

4,475

Number

29.5%

18.2%

18.6%

12.8%

Percent c

Total

21,189

 

 

 

Number

13.8%

Percent

Total

11,696

 

 

 

Number

7.6%

Percent

Male

8,646

 

 

 

Number

5.6%

Percent

Female

895

Number

0.6%

Percent

Free

African American Population of Voting Agea, b

20,294

 

 

 

Number

13.2%

Percent

Slave

Voting age was 16. Age is derived from the strata of age in the source data.

Percent of total state population.

b

c

34,912

42,741

46,151

153,505

1704

1710

1712

1755

45,312

8,408

7,945

4,475

  Population

29.5%

18.2%

18.6%

12.8%

Percent of Totalb

21,189

 

 

 

Number

13.8%

Percent of Totalb

742

Total

742

 

 

 

Number

0.5%

 

 

 

Percent Of Totalb

Of Voting Age

Free

1,075

 

 

 

  Total

153

 

 

 

Number

0.1%

 

 

 

Percent Of Totalb

Of Voting Age

Untaxable

African Americana

19,600

Total

19,600

 

 

 

Number

12.8%

 

 

 

Percent Of Totalb

Of Voting Age

Taxable

Slave

23,895

Total

694

 

 

 

Number

0.5%

 

 

 

Percent Of Totalb

Of Voting Age

Untaxable

The population of African Americans includes Negro and mulatto populations.

Percent total state population.

Voting age was 16. Age derived from the age strata in the source data.

a

b

c

Source: Adapted from “Table Series Z 50-59: Population Censuses Taken in the Colonies and States During the Colonial and Pre-Federal Period: 1624–25 to 1786,” Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975), pp. 1169–1171. Calculations by the authors.

Total Population

Year

Population of Voting Agec

Taxable

Table 3.7  Taxable and Untaxable African American Populations in Maryland, 1704–1755

African American population includes Negro and mulatto populations. A group of 847 African Americans is not broken down by gender.

a

Source: Adapted from “Table Series z 50–59: Population Censuses Taken in the Colonies and States During the Colonial and Pre-Federal Period: 1624–25 to 1786,” Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2 (Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1975). pp. 1169–1171. Calculations by the authors.

Total Population

Year

Male

African American Populationa

Table 3.6  “Voting Age” African American Populations in Maryland, 1704–1755



The African American Electorate in the Colonial Era, 1610–1773 59

colonies with census data with the exception of New Jersey. New Jersey allowed Free-Women-of-Color to vote until 1807, so we used the total African American population there as our base. Placing these data in Table 3.8, our resultant estimations have been placed in the last two columns. In making estimations for this time period for these other colonies, one must understand that the extant census data for the slave and free populations are not broken down as in Maryland but combined. Such a limited breakdown forces us to drop the 40% standard found in the Colonial Maryland data and use a 20% standard to determine our estimations for the other colonies. The patterns and trends in both numbers and percentages are very clear. Maryland, a Border State, has the largest number and percentage of potential Free-Men-of-Color voters. New York and New Jersey follow Maryland, particularly through years

prior to 1755 in numbers and percentages of potential voters. Then in the New England area, there is Rhode Island followed by Massachusetts. And given the numbers and percentages, the possible electoral impact and influence of these potential voters would be as “balance-of-power” voters, if concentrated in township and district elections, simply because their numbers are likely too small to affect statewide elections. In close local and district elections these potential voters had a chance for electoral impact and influence.

County-Level Election Data in the Colonial Era In addition to state-level data there are Colonial Era demographic data at the county and township levels. Heretofore, this countyand township-level data have not been used in the study of African American politics and history in the Colonial Era. The

Table 3.8  Estimated African American Electorate by Colony, 1703–1773 African Americana Population Total Population

Percent of Total Population

Percent of Total Population

Year

Non-South    

New Hampshire

1767

52,720

633

1.2%

384

0.7%

77

0.1%

 

1773

73,097

674

0.9%

379

0.5%

76

0.1%

Massachusetts

1764–1765

22,384

4,891

2.2%

2,824

1.3%

565

0.3%

Maine

1764–1765

21,857

344

6.0%

192

0.9%

38

0.2%

Rhode Island

1755

40,536

4,697

11.6%

2,387

5.9%

477

1.2%

New York

1703

20,665

2,258

10.9%

1,174

5.7%

235

1.1%

 

1712–1714

22,608

2,425

10.7%

1,334

5.9%

267

1.2%

 

1723

40,564

6,171

15.2%

3,364

8.3%

673

1.7%

 

1731

50,286

7,231

14.4%

4,334

8.6%

867

1.7%

 

1737

60,437

8,941

14.8%

4,948

8.2%

990

1.6%

 

1746

61,589

9,107

 

4,857

7.9%

971

1.6%

 

1749

73,348

10,592

14.4%

5,696

7.8%

1,139

1.6%

 

1756

96,790

13,548

14.0%

7,570

 

1,514

1.6%

 

1771

163,348

19,874

12.2%

10,623

6.5%

2,125

1.3%

New Jerseyc

1726

32,442

2,581

8.0%

1,435

4.4%

516

1.6%

 

1738

46,676

3,981

8.5%

2,208

4.7%

796

1.7%

 

1745

61,403

4,606

7.5%

2,588

4.2%

921

1.5%

Maryland

1755

153,505

45,312

29.5%

23,746

15.5%

4,749

3.1%

 

d

453

3.0%

 

356e

2.0%

 

   

 

   

 

 

Number

Percent of Total Population

Colony

 

Number

Estimated Electorateb

Region

Border States

Number

Male Population

Source: Adapted from Table 3.4. The methodology for estimating the African American electorate is taken from William Gillette, Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), p. 105, Table, footnote C. Here the calculation is applied to the African American male population instead of the total African American population. Calculations by the authors. Calculations at notes d and e by the editor. a

African American includes Negro and mulatto populations.

b

Estimated African American electorate = 0.2 x African American male population.

c

Estimated African American electorate = 0.2 x African American total population.

d

Estimated African American electorate of Maryland = 0.01 x African American total population.

e

Estimated African American electorate of Maryland = 0.015 x African American total population.

60

Chapter 3

data offer the opportunity to see where in a particular colony the African American population resided, as well as the size and percentage of that population in relationship to the white population. The data provide some empirical data to estimate the potential electoral influence and impact of that population. In addition, the data allow the reader to see the growth and the spread of this population over time during the Colonial Era. Table 3.9 shows the colonial censuses that broke down their demographic data by counties for nine different

colonies from 1624 through 1773, a period of 149 years. New York colony had the largest number of these county-level breakdowns with nine, followed by six in North Carolina, four in Maryland, three in both Rhode Island and New Jersey, two in Massachusetts, and one each in New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Virginia. Together, there are thirty different county-level data points, and of these thirty different countylevel data points, gender information appears in nineteen of them.

Table 3.9  Local-Level Population Censuses and Enumerations of African Americans, 1624–1773

African American

Colony

Year

Locale

Table No.

Total Population

New Hampshire

1773

County

3.14

73,097

Massachusetts

1754

County

3.11

N/A

 

1764

County

3.12

245,698

16a

1708

Town

3.15

7,181

1748–1749

Town

3.16

31,778

 

1755

Town

3.17

40,536

Adult

Connecticut

1756

County

3.13

130,612

 

New York

1703

County

3.25

20,665

1712

County

3.26

22,608

1723

County

3.27

40,564

1731

County

3.28

1737

County

1746

Voting Age

Males

 

379

Females

Population

295

674

1,505

855

2,712

3,016

2,219

5,235

 

 

426

 

2,082

1,277

1,265

2,542

 

 

3,019

16

707

702

1,409

16

900

681

1,581

Adult

2,186

1,810

3,996

50,289

10

2,932

1,853

4,785

3.29

60,437

10

3,551

2,714

6,265

County

3.30

61,589

16

2,893

2,034

4,927

1749

County

3.31

73,309

16

3,317

2,656

5,973

1756

County

3.32

96,790

16

4,290

3,198

7,488

1771

County

3.33

168,007

16

6,220

5,197

11,417

1726

County

3.18

33,442

16

872

630

1,502

1738

County

3.19

47,369

16

1,359

998

2,357

1745

County

3.20

61,403

16 a

2,588

2,018

4,606

1704

County

3.21

34,912

 

 

 

4,475

1710

County

3.22

42,741

 

 

7,945

1712

County

3.23

46,151

 

 

8,408

1755

County

3.24

153,505

16

11,696

8,646

20,342

Virginia

1624–1625

Settlement

3.10

1,232

 

12

11

23

 

1755

County

 

103,328

 

 

 

59,999

North Carolina

1754

County

 

24,861

 

4,275

2,911

7,186

1755

County

 

24,607

 

 

7,018

1756

County

 

25,737

 

 

7,661

1765

County

 

45,912

 

 

12,303

1766

County

 

48,610

 

 

12,923

1767

County

 

51,044

 

 

11,884

Rhode Island

New Jersey

Maryland

 

 

 

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932) and A Century of Population Growth From the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1909), pp. 149–185. Calculations by the authors. a

Data source does not stratify the enumerated African Americans by voting age.



The African American Electorate in the Colonial Era, 1610–1773 61

Beyond these different data points, we have data over time from two colonies: New York has nine data points and North Carolina provides six. These two colonies are indeed quite unusual in this manner. But even more unusual is the settlement (before counties) breakdown in Virginia, which shows the growth and movement of America’s original African American population. Collectively, these case studies of county- and townshiplevel demography allow us to supplement the state-level data and see precisely where African Americans had a possible chance to influence electoral outcomes in their communities. And these data show in place after place that in every census taken the male population outnumbered the female population, which is quite important because, except in Virginia and New Jersey, only male voters held the legal right to suffrage.

before their indentured servitude was to be completed—the census of 1624 revealed that they had grown from the original twenty to twenty-three and that they had been dispersed to six of the nineteen settlements. Although ten were still located within the Jamestown area (renamed James City and James City Neck of Land), the next largest concentration of this founding population was in Piersey’s Hund, where some seven of them were living. Moreover, females nearly matched males in number, and overall they constituted about 1% of the total population in Virginia. Finally, these rare demographic data precede the legal change in status of these indentured servants to Free-Men-andWomen-of-Color, allowing their acquisition of property, which would in turn allow them to become “stakeholders” in society and thereby voters.

Virginia

Thirteen years after Jamestown’s founding, the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1620 began English settlement in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, there were no censuses until 1754 and 1764. In the initial census, which is shown in Table 3.11 (p. 62),

Table 3.10 lists the specific locations of the twenty African Americans who arrived in the recently established colony of Jamestown in 1619. Five years after they arrived—two years

Massachusetts

Table 3.10  Settlement-Level Demography for Virginia, Census of 1624 African Americans Whites Settlement

Males

Males Females

Number

Females

Percent of Total Population

Number

Percent of Total Population

Total Population

Basses Choyse

16

3

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

19

Chaplain Choice and Truelove’s Co.

13

4

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

17

Charles City Neck of Land

25

19

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

44

Colledge Island

20

2

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

22

Eastern Shore

44

7

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

51

Elizabeth City

198

59

2

0.8%

1

0.4%

260

78

20

1

1.0%

0

0.0%

99

Hog Island

40

13

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

53

James City

122

53

3

1.6%

6

3.3%

184

James City Neck of Land

126

19

1

0.7%

0

0.0%

146

Jordan’s Journey

36

19

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

55

Martin’s Hund

20

7

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

27

Mulbury Island

25

5

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

30

Newportes Newes

20

0

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

20

Pasheayghs

35

8

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

43

Piersey’s Hund

40

9

4

7.1%

3

5.4%

56

The Maine

30

6

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

36

W. and Sherley Hund

44

16

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

60

8

0

1

10.0%

1

10.0%

10

940

269

12

1.0%

11

0.9%

1,232

Elizabeth City beyond Hampton Road

Wariscoyack Totals

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 144. Calculations by the authors.

62

Chapter 3

Table 3.11  County-Level Demography of Slaves in Massachusetts, Census of 1754 African American Slaves Males County

Number

Females

Percent of Total Slave Population

Number

Unspecified Gender

Percent of Total Slave Population

Number

Percent of Total Slave Population

Total Slave Population

Barnstable

36

47.4%

30

39.5%

10

13.2%

76

Bristol

39

32.0%

22

18.0%

61

50.0%

122

Dukes

3

42.9%

4

57.1%

0

0.0%

7

Essex

178

40.5%

122

27.8%

139

31.7%

439

Hamphire

56

75.7%

18

24.3%

0

0.0%

74

Middlesex

210

58.2%

123

34.1%

28

7.8%

361

Nantucket

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

0

Plymouth

63

50.8%

49

39.5%

12

9.7%

124

798

62.6%

424

33.3%

52

4.1%

1,274

Worcester

47

53.4%

22

25.0%

19

21.6%

88

York

75

51.0%

41

27.9%

31

21.1%

147

1,505

55.5%

855

31.5%

352

13.0%

2,712

Suffolk

Totals

Source: Adapted from A Century of Population Growth From the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1909), pp. 156–157. Calculations by the authors.

we see the African American slave population broken down by gender. In this colony, the African American slave population includes 55.5% identified as male and 31.5% identified as female (the remaining 13.0% are not identified by gender). This population resided in ten of the eleven counties in the colony. We can infer from this census data where the Free-Men-of-Color who had the right to vote possibly resided. Extant records tell us that Suffolk County had some. As shown by Table 3.12, with the publication of the second census in this colony ten years later, even greater demographic information is provided, showing that the African American population had grown from 2,712 to 4,891 and that the male population still outnumbered the female population. In addition, Suffolk still had the largest population, followed by Middlesex, Essex, and Plymouth. Also, in this census one finds an African American population in every one of the reported eleven counties. Appended to Table 3.12 is the demographic data on the territory of Maine, which at this time was a part of Massachusetts. African Americans made up about 1.6% of Maine’s population, and they were to be found in all three of its counties. Males slightly outnumbered females, and the largest population was in York County. However, the small size of this population suggests that they would have had very limited electoral influence in this period if they, in fact, voted.

Connecticut Connecticut issued its first census in 1756. African Americans composed 2.3% of the total population and were found in all of the six counties. Table 3.13 tells us that two counties, Fairfield and New London, had the largest percentage of African Americans with 3.5%; while the Hartford county percentage of

African Americans matched the state mean. Free-Men-of-Color initially had the legal right to vote in this colony. So some portion of the census population, qualified on the basis of property ownership, had this right.

New Hampshire The other New England colony to produce a census in the Colonial Era was New Hampshire. Their census appeared in 1773 on the eve of the Revolutionary period. As shown in Table 3.14 (p. 64), the African American population in this colony was just less than 1.0%. Of this population, males slightly outnumbered females, and they were located in all of the five counties in the state, with more than half of the total population in Rockingham County. However, they were not large enough overall in population size to have effectuated any kind of influence upon electoral politics.

Rhode Island Finally, there is the colony of Rhode Island, which produced three censuses during the Colonial period, in 1708, 1748, and 1755. Table 3.15 (p. 64), which provides the 1708 demographic data by township rather than by county, is quite similar to other area colonies, like New Hampshire and Connecticut, in that the African American population was less than 6% of the total and was located in all nine of the townships in this colony. Only the townships of Jamestown and Newport had a sizable presence. In Rhode Island, Free-Men-of-Color had the right to vote. Forty years later in the second census, as indicated in Table 3.16 (p. 64), the African American population had grown from 426 to 2,082, and from 5.9% to 6.6% of the total population. As the colony increased in population so did the number of



The African American Electorate in the Colonial Era, 1610–1773 63 Table 3.12  County-Level Demography of Massachusetts, Census of 1764 African American Populationb White Electorate  

Males

a

County Barnstable Berks

Males

Females

2,970

3,250

Number

Females

Percent of Total Population

135

1.1%

Number

Percent of Total Population

96

0.8%

Total Population 12,464

772

676

50

1.5%

38

1.2%

3,250

Bristol

4,333

4,768

165

0.9%

128

0.7%

18,076

Dukes

618

660

25

0.9%

21

0.8%

2,719

Essex

10,727

12,664

624

1.4%

446

1.0%

43,751

Hampshire

4,363

4,407

121

0.7%

73

0.4%

17,245

Middlesex

8,218

9,196

485

1.4%

375

1.1%

33,732

Nantucket

904

882

24

0.7%

20

0.6%

3,526

Plymouth

5,305

6,028

243

1.1%

219

1.0%

22,256

Suffolk

8,054

9,307

814

2.2%

537

1.5%

36,410

Worcester Massachusetts Subtotals

7,488

7,663

138

0.5%

114

0.4%

30,412

53,752

59,501

2,824

1.3%

2,067

0.9%

223,841

Counties of the Maine Territory of Massachusetts, later counties of the separated state of Maine Cumberland Lincoln York Maine Subtotals Totals

1,898

1,718

55

0.7%

40

0.5%

878

847

17

0.5%

7

0.2%

7,474 3,644

2,562

2,839

120

1.1%

105

1.0%

10,739

5,338

5,404

192

0.9%

152

0.7%

21,857

59,090

64,905

3,016

1.2%

2,219

0.9%

245,698

Source: Adapted from A Century of Population Growth From the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1909), pp. 158–162. Calculations by the authors. a

Electorate as defined by persons of age 16 years and older.

b

Data source does not stratify enumerated African Americans by voting age.

Table 3.13  County-Level Demography of Connecticut, Census of 1756

Whites

County

Number

African Americans

Number

Percent of Total Population

Total Population

Fairfield

19,849

711

3.5%

20,560

Hartford

35,714

854

2.3%

36,568

Litchfield

11,773

54

0.5%

11,827

New Haven

17,955

226

1.2%

18,181

New London

22,015

829

3.5%

23,461

19,670

345

1.7%

20,015

126,976

3,019

2.3%

130,612

Windham Totals

Source: Adapted from A Century of Population Growth From the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1909), p. 164. Calculations by the authors. a

Total population includes 617 Indians.

townships, moving from nine to twenty four. In 1748, African Americans were located in each and every one of the townships, with the largest number being in South Kingstown and the second largest in Providence. However, the highest percentage (26.2%) resided in Jamestown. In point of fact, the percentage

of African Americans stood above the overall colony population proportion in ten of the twenty-four townships. Clearly, in two townships, Jamestown and South Kingstown, they had enough size to influence township elections. When Rhode Island took its third census seven years later in 1755, shown in Table 3.17 (p. 65), the adult African American population had become larger than the previous reported total, which was undistinguished by age. Adult males outnumbered adult females, and together their percentage of the total adult population was slightly less than in 1748, dropping from 6.6% to 6.3% of the total. The number of townships had grown by one, from twenty-four to twenty-five, and African Americans resided in all of them. There was one exception for females: none lived in the Gloucester township. However, the most discernible change was in the possible electoral impact of African Americans within the townships. Two more townships now had a sizable enough percentage to exert some electoral power, Charlestown and New Shoreham, along with the townships of Jamestown and South Kingstown in the previous census. Overall, the censuses in the New England colonies tell us that the African American populations there were quite small, but that within some of these colonies at the county and township levels there were locations where electoral influence could have been possible. This reality was nearly impossible to see from reviewing only the state-level data.

64

Chapter 3

Table 3.14  County-Level Demography of New Hampshire, Census of 1773 White Population Males Females County Cheshire Grafton Hillsborough Rockingham Strafford Totals

Number 5,018 1,974 6,978 17,273 5,496 36,739

African American Slaves Males

Number 4,466 1,563 6,459 17,968 5,228 35,684

Females

Percent of Total Population 0.1% 0.3% 0.3% 0.7% 0.6% 0.5%

Number 7 9 39 260 64 379

Percent of Total Population 0.0% 0.3% 0.3% 0.6% 0.4% 0.4%

Number 2 11 38 206 38 295

Total Population 9,493 3,557 13,514 35,707 10,826 73,097

Source: Adapted from A Century of Population Growth From the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1909), pp. 150–151. Calculations by the authors.

Table 3.15  Town-Level Demography of Rhode Island, Census of 1708 Whites Town Greenwich Jamestown Kingstown New Shoreham Newport Portsmouth Providence Warwick Westerly Totals

Freemen 40 33 200 38 190 98 241 80 95 1,015

Militiaa 65 28 282 47 358 104 283 95 100 1,362

Servants 3 9 0 0 20 8 6 4 5 55

African Americans Percent of Total Servants Population 6 2.5% 32 15.5% 85 7.1% 6 2.9% 220 10.0% 40 6.4% 7 0.5% 10 2.1% 20 3.5% 426 5.9%

Total Population 240 206 1,200 208 2,203 628 1,446 480 570 7,181

Source: Adapted from A Century of Population Growth From the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1909), p. 162. Calculations by the authors. a

All freemen within the colony, from age 16 to 60, were also members of the militia.

Table 3.16  Town-Level Demography of Rhode Island, Census of 1748–1749 Whites

African Americans

Whites

Town

Number

Bristol

928

128

12.0%

1,069

Providence

Charlestown

641

58

5.8%

1,002

Richmond

Coventry

769

16

2.0%

792

Scituate

Cumberland

802

4

0.5%

806

Exeter

1,103

63

5.4%

1,174

Gloucester

1,194

8

0.7%

Greenwich

956

61

Jamestown

284

110

Little Compton

Number

Percent of Total Population

Total Population

Town 

Number 3,177

African Americans Number

Percent of Total Population

225

6.5%

Total Population 3,452

500

5

1.0%

508

1,210

16

1.3%

1,232

Smithfield

400

30

6.7%

450

1,202

South Kingstown

1,405

380

19.2%

1,978

5.8%

1,044

Tiverton

842

99

9.5%

1,040

26.2%

420

Warren

1,004

62

5.4%

1,152

Middletown

586

76

11.2%

680

New Shoreham

260

20

6.7%

300

Newport

5,335

110

2.0%

5,513

North Kingstown

1,665

184

9.5%

1,935

Portsmouth

807

134

13.5%

992

Warwick West Greenwich Westerly Totals

600

50

7.4%

680

1,513

176

9.9%

1,782

757

8

1.0%

766

1,701

59

3.3%

1,809

28,439

2,082

6.6%

31,778

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 66. Calculations by the authors.



The African American Electorate in the Colonial Era, 1610–1773 65 Table 3.17  Town-Level Demography of Rhode Island, Census of 1755 White Electoratea

Males

Percent of Male-Only Electorate

Percent of Total Electorate

Females

Percent of Total Electorate

Male-Only Electorate

Total Electorateb

Total Population

Town

Males

Bristol

210

252

44

17.3%

8.1%

35

6.5%

254

541

1,100

Charlestown

171

187

100

36.9%

17.5%

112

19.6%

271

570

1,130

Coventry

298

232

4

1.3%

0.7%

2

0.4%

302

536

1,178

Cranston

375

354

21

5.3%

2.7%

22

2.8%

396

772

1,460

Cumberland

230

254

4

1.7%

0.8%

2

0.4%

234

490

1,083

East Greenwich

319

238

33

9.4%

5.3%

33

5.3%

352

623

1,167

Exeter

347

236

16

4.4%

2.6%

20

3.2%

363

619

1,404

Gloucester

332

327

4

1.2%

0.6%

0

0.0%

336

663

1,511

Jamestown

Females

African American Electoratea

86

100

42

32.8%

15.6%

41

15.2%

128

269

517

Little Compton

244

342

28

10.3%

4.3%

43

6.5%

272

657

1,272

Middletown

153

206

29

15.9%

7.0%

26

6.3%

182

414

778

83

77

29

25.9%

12.6%

41

17.8%

112

230

378

New Shoreham Newport

1,696

1,633

400

19.1%

9.8%

341

8.4%

2,096

4,070

6,753

North Kingstown

544

465

70

11.4%

6.0%

87

7.5%

614

1,166

2,109

Portsmouth

243

228

51

17.3%

8.8%

60

10.3%

294

582

1,363

Providence

747

741

72

8.8%

4.4%

75

4.6%

819

1,635

3,159

Richmond

199

195

9

4.3%

2.2%

5

1.2%

208

408

829

Scituate

392

403

4

1.0%

0.5%

4

0.5%

396

803

1,813

Smithfield

448

454

16

3.4%

1.7%

17

1.8%

464

935

1,921

South Kingstown

366

321

137

27.2%

14.7%

109

11.7%

503

933

1,913

Tivertown

277

217

44

13.7%

7.3%

67

11.1%

321

605

1,325

Warren

193

217

26

11.9%

5.7%

23

5.0%

219

459

925

Warwick

426

422

48

10.1%

5.0%

62

6.5%

474

958

1,911

West Greenwich

275

292

12

4.2%

2.0%

10

1.7%

287

589

1,246

Westerly

523

551

34

6.1%

3.0%

28

2.5%

557

1,136

2,291

9,177

8,944

1,277

12.2%

6.2%

1,265

6.1%

10,454

20,663

40,536

Totals

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 67. Calculations by the authors. a

Electorate is defined as the segment in the data source consisting of “adult” persons.

b

The total electorate is the sum of “adult” persons among white and African American populations.

New Jersey New Jersey, which permitted both Free-Men-and-Women-ofColor to vote, conducted three censuses: in 1726, 1738, and 1745. As shown in Table 3.18 (p. 66), in 1726 the African American population sixteen years of age or older was 4.5% of the colony’s total population and had a presence in all ten counties, with males outnumbering females. Though this presence exceeded the average proportion for the colony in only three counties, seemingly only in one county, Bergen, could African Americans have had some electoral influence.

By the time of the second census in 1738, as shown in Table 3.19 (p. 66), the African American population had grown from 1,502 to 2,357 for an increase of 855 individuals. Moreover, the adult African American population as a percentage of total state population increased slightly from 4.5% to 5.0%. Along with this increase males still outnumbered females, while this population was distributed among all ten counties. As for potential electoral influence, Bergen County again seems to have offered the best chance, with Somerset County as a close second. Elsewhere in the colony, the demographic data suggest no other substantial potential.

66

Chapter 3

Table 3.18  County-Level Demography of New Jersey, Census of 1726 White Electoratea

African American Electoratea Males

Percent of Total Electorate

Females

Percent of Total Electorate

509

173

12.6%

121

8.8%

1,372

2,673

1,080

983

86

3.9%

63

2.8%

2,212

4,129

209

156

8

2.1%

5

1.3%

378

668

Essex

992

1,021

92

4.2%

78

3.6%

2,183

4,230

Gloucester

608

462

32

2.8%

21

1.9%

1,123

3,229

Hunterdon

892

743

43

2.5%

45

2.6%

1,723

3,377

County

Males

Bergen

569

Burlington Cape May

Females

Total Electorateb

Total Population

Middlesex

953

878

90

4.5%

73

3.7%

1,994

4,009

Monmouth

1,234

1,061

170

6.7%

90

3.5%

2,555

4,879

Salem

1,060

861

52

2.6%

38

1.9%

2,011

3,977

582

502

126

9.6%

96

7.4%

1,306

2,271

8,179

7,176

872

5.2%

630

3.7%

16,857

33,442

Somerset Totals

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 109. Calculations by the authors. a

The electorate is defined as persons 16 years of age and older.

b

The total electorate consists of the white and African American electorates, each of persons 16 years of age and older.

Table 3.19  County-Level Demography of New Jersey, Census of 1738 White Electoratea County Bergen Burlington Cape May

Males

Females

African American Electoratea Males

Percent of Total Electorate

Females

Percent of Total Electorate

Total Electorateb

Total Population

939

822

256

11.5%

203

9.1%

2,220

4,095

1,487

1,222

134

4.6%

87

3.0%

2,930

5,238

261

219

12

2.4%

10

2.0%

502

1,004

1,118

1,720

114

3.7%

114

3.7%

3,066

7,019

Gloucester

930

757

42

2.4%

24

1.4%

1,753

3,267

Hunterdon

1,618

1,230

75

2.5%

53

1.8%

2,976

5,507

Middlesex

1,134

1,085

181

7.2%

124

4.9%

2,524

4,764

Monmouth

1,508

1,339

233

7.2%

152

4.7%

3,232

6,086

Salem

1,669

1,391

57

1.8%

56

1.8%

3,173

5,884

967

940

255

10.9%

175

7.5%

2,337

4,505

11,631

10,725

1,359

5.5%

998

4.0%

24,713

47,369

Essex

Somerset Totals

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 110. Calculations by the authors. a

The electorate is defined as persons 16 years of age and older.

b

Total electorate = white electorate + African American electorate.

In 1745, seven years after the second census, the colony produced its third census of the Colonial Era. Table 3.20 indicates further growth in the African American population, rising from 2,357 to 4,606 for an increase of 2,249, almost doubling over the previous census. This increase was accompanied by a rise in the percentage of total population

from 5.0% to 7.5%. Once again, males outnumbered females, but both could potentially vote in this colony. Note that unlike in previous censuses the census of 1745 did not stratify the African American population by age. The place with the most electoral influence for African Americans was, once again, Bergen County, followed by possibly Middlesex, Somerset, and Monmouth for



The African American Electorate in the Colonial Era, 1610–1773 67 Table 3.20  County-Level Demography of New Jersey, Census of 1745 White Electoratea

African American Populationb

  County

Males

Females

Males

Bergen

721

590

379

12.6%

237

7.9%

3,006

Burlington

1,786

1,605

233

3.4%

197

2.9%

6,803

Cape May

306

272

30

2.5%

22

1.9%

1,188

1,694

1,649

244

3.5%

201

2.9%

6,988

Essex

Percent of Total Population

Percent of Total Population

Females

  Total Population

Gloucester

913

797

121

3.5%

81

2.3%

3,506

Hunterdon

2,302

2,117

244

2.7%

216

2.4%

9,151

Middlesex

1,728

1,659

483

6.3%

396

5.2%

7,612

Monmouth

2,071

1,783

513

5.9%

386

4.5%

8,627

Morris

1,109

957

57

1.3%

36

0.8%

4,436

Salem

1,716

1,603

90

1.3%

97

1.4%

6,847

740

672

194

6.0%

149

4.6%

3,239

15,086

13,704

2,588

4.2%

2,018

3.3%

61,403

Somerset Totals

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 111. Calculations by the authors. a

The electorate is defined as persons of age 16 years and older.

b

The data source does not stratify enumerated African Americans by age.

contests involving several seekers for the same office. Thus, over three different time periods it appears that the electoral influence of Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color in New Jersey was slowly growing.

Table 3.21  County-Level Demography of Maryland, Census of 1704 White Electoratea

Maryland Maryland conducted four different colonial censuses, in 1704, 1710, 1712, and 1755. Starting with the 1704 census, as shown in Table 3.21, slaves composed 12.8% of total population and they resided in all eleven counties of the colony. Four of the eleven counties had higher percentages of African Americans than the colony mean; in Calvert County, African Americans exceeded a quarter of its total population. Six years later, in 1710, as shown in Table 3.22 (p. 68), the African American population had grown from 12.8% to 18.6% of the colony total. African Americans also had a greater presence in Prince George’s County, at 32.5% of the county population, followed by Anne Arundel with 32.0%, Calvert with 29.0%, and Charles with 18.6%. These four of the twelve Maryland counties had proportions of African American residents equal to or higher than the colony as a whole. This expansion of the African American population continued on to the next census, which occurred two years later in 1712. Table 3.23 (p. 68) indicates that the total population of African Americans rose from 7,945 to 8,408, for an additional 463 individuals in two years, but that the African American percentage of the total population actually decreased, from 18.6% to 18.2%, indicating that the white population was also growing rapidly. By 1712 the proportion of African Americans in Calvert

County

Masters

Free Men

Slavesb

Percent   Free of Total Total Women Number Population Population

Anne Arundel

765

503

1,058

672

14.7%

4,561

Baltimore

364

235

418

204

10.6%

1,927

Calvert

309

619

560

938

26.0%

3,611

Cecil

407

430

489

198

8.5%

2,335

Charles

408

390

485

578

19.3%

2,989

Dorchester

305

418

512

199

8.6%

2,312

Kent

264

393

413

159

8.4%

1,891

Prince George’s

416

464

530

436

14.0%

3,104

Somerset

804

642

1,167

305

6.9%

4,437

St. Mary’s

418

938

617

326

9.3%

3,515

Talbot

712

822

914

460

10.9%

4,230

Totals

5,172

5,854

7,163

4,475

12.8%

34,912

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 128. Calculations by the authors. The electorate is described by the data source as consisting of masters and “free” men and women. a

The data source does not stratify the enumerated slave population by race or gender. b

68

Chapter 3

Table 3.22  County-Level Demography of Maryland, Census of 1710 White Electoratea

County Anne Arundel

Masters and Taxable Men

Women

Table 3.23  County-Level Demography of Maryland, Census of 1712

African Americansb

Number

Percent of Total Population

White Electoratea   Total Population

  County

Masters and Taxable Men

African Americansb

Women

Number

Percent of Total Population

  Total Population

1,559

31.2%

5,003

1,014

793

1,528

32.0%

4,778

Anne Arundel

985

885

Baltimore

733

558

438

15.5%

2,827

Baltimore

785

572

452

15.5%

2,923

Calvert

708

560

934

29.0%

3,216

Calvert

644

597

1,179

33.7%

3,500

Cecil

497

406

197

10.1%

1,956

Cecil

504

435

285

13.6%

2,097

Charles

951

641

638

18.6%

3,429

Charles

993

783

724

18.1%

4,007

Dorchester

499

430

343

15.7%

2,181

Dorchester

759

747

387

11.1%

3,475

Kent

974

753

479

17.4%

2,753

Kent

830

575

485

16.8%

2,886

Prince George’s

845

637

1,297

32.5%

3,994

Prince George’s

790

600

1,202

31.7%

3,790

Queen Anne’s

808

644

374

12.2%

3,067

Queen Anne’s

1,011

843

550

14.3%

3,850

Somerset

1,871

1,194

579

9.2%

6,314

Somerset

1,616

1,368

581

9.1%

6,352

St. Mary’s

1,088

827

668

16.2%

4,121

St. Mary’s

998

812

512

12.5%

4,090

Talbot

1,103

851

470

11.4%

4,105

Talbot

1,114

864

492

11.8%

4,178

Totals

11,091

8,294

7,945

18.6%

42,741

Totals

11,029

9,081

8,408

18.2%

46,151

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 128–129. Calculations by the authors.

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 129. Calculations by the authors.

a

The electorate is defined as the population excluding children.

a

The electorate is defined as the population excluding children.

b

The data source does not stratify enumerated African Americans by age.

b

The data source does not stratify enumerated African Americans by age.

(33.7%), Prince George’s (31.7%), and Anne Arundel (31.2%) counties far exceeded that of the other counties; in this census only these three counties had a higher percentage of African Americans than the colony as a whole. The final Maryland census in the Colonial Era appeared in 1755 and is shown in Table 3.24. This census broke down the African American population by gender to reveal another instance of males outnumbering females. This adult population is distinguished as taxable, including both free African Americans and slaves, and in number is more than twice that reported for all African American adults in the previous census forty-three years earlier. Note that, besides their average distribution for all counties, African American male slaves ranged from a high of 11.4% of a total county population to a low 3.2% of another. Of those counties at the high end, Anne Arundel and Prince George’s County had 11.4% and 11.3%, respectively; Calvert and Charles counties had 9.6% and 9.5%, respectively; and Talbot had 8.4%. Thus, slave African American males composed a significant portion of the population in five of the fourteen Maryland counties, while the free African American population was quite small in all counties.

New York New York, in the Middle Atlantic region, conducted nine censuses from 1703 to 1771. It gave to Free-Men-of-Color the legal right to suffrage, and the historical record includes

evidence that qualified Free-Men-of-Color did vote in state and county elections.15 Figure 3.6 visually presents the percentages of the total African American population at each census along with the component percentages of males and females. In this colony the total African American population peaked in 1737 but then began a steady decline, ending up very close to the level in the initial census of 1703. These fluctuations in the total African American population are repeated at the gender levels. However, there is one consistency: except in 1703, males always outnumbered females. The New York counties with the largest African American populations included New York, Kings, Richmond, and Queens, and, occasionally, Ulster. Falling just below the levels in these counties was Albany, where African Americans made up about 10% of the population for eight of the nine censuses (Albany was not listed in the census for 1746). In each of these counties, Free-Men-of-Color composed a large enough proportion of the population to have possibly influenced electoral contests at the local and county levels. Tables 3.25 through 3.33 (pp. 70–74) show that in the Colonial period, the colony of New York conducted some nine censuses. When these nine censuses are combined, the mean number of counties in the colony stood at 9.9, ranging from nine counties at the time of the 1703 census to a high of twelve counties at the census of 1771. And in these counties over these nine censuses we found that the population range for the



The African American Electorate in the Colonial Era, 1610–1773 69 Table 3.24  County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1712 Free African Americans White Men

County

Men

Percent of Total Population

African American Slaves

Women

Percent of Total Population

Men

Percent of Total Population

Women

Percent of Total Population

  Taxable Populationa

  Total Population

Anne Arundel

2,156

24

0.2%

26

0.2%

1,497

11.4%

1,071

8.1%

4,774

13,150

Baltimore

3,697

38

0.2%

23

0.1%

1,169

6.8%

849

4.9%

5,776

17,238

733

24

0.4%

9

0.2%

550

9.6%

523

9.2%

1,839

5,715

Calvert Cecil

1,782

2

0.0%

14

0.2%

406

5.3%

302

3.9%

2,506

7,731

Charles

2,307

63

0.5%

37

0.3%

1,244

9.5%

983

7.5%

4,634

13,056

Dorset

2,129

16

0.1%

10

0.1%

633

5.4%

536

4.6%

3,324

11,753

Frederick

3,085

68

0.5%

30

0.2%

447

3.2%

338

2.4%

3,968

13,969

Kent

1,901

18

0.2%

18

0.2%

698

7.4%

532

5.6%

3,167

9,443

Prince George’s

1,843

20

0.2%

24

0.2%

1,315

11.3%

194

1.7%

3,396

11,616

Queen Anne’s

2,316

26

0.2%

29

0.3%

676

6.0%

604

5.4%

3,651

11,240

Somerset

1,380

27

0.3%

19

0.2%

652

7.5%

586

6.7%

2,664

8,682

St. Mary’s

1,784

32

0.3%

22

0.2%

860

7.6%

788

7.0%

3,486

11,254

Talbot

1,542

36

0.4%

21

0.2%

719

8.4%

658

7.7%

2,976

8,533

Worcester

1,814

32

0.3%

34

0.3%

404

4.0%

366

3.6%

2,650

10,125

28,469

426

0.3%

316

0.2%

11,270

7.3%

8,330

5.4%

48,811

153,505

Totals

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), pp. 125–126. Calculations by the authors. a

The taxable population includes persons of age 16 years and older. Taxable population = white men + free African American men and women + African American slave men and women.

Figure 3.6  African Americans as Percentage of Total Population in New York, 1703–1773

Percent of Total Population

12% 10% 8% 6% 4% 2% 0%

1703

1712

1723

1731 1737 1746 Census Year

All African Americans African American women

1749

1756

1771

African American men

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), pp. 95–103 and 181. Note: All populations consist of persons of age 16 years or older, except in the years 1723 (“adult”), 1731 (10 years or older), and 1737 (10 years or older).

male African American voters ran from a high of 10.0% in 1723 to a low of 6.8% in 1771. The mean percentage level during these nine censuses is 8.5% while the median is 8.6%. New York was one of few colonies in this period to undertake censuses of its African American populations by age and gender, and in ways comparable to the same stratifications of its white populations. The tables of the New York census series show numbers of African American men and women that reveal their shares of “voting-age electorates” and electorates based exclusively on male membership. Figures 3.7 and 3.8 (p. 74) summarize these electoral statistics, showing that African American men and women of voting age reached their largest proportion of the populations that included similarly aged white men and women in the census of 1723. This zenith of proportions among the censuses is observed in the same year for African American men with their share of the maleonly electorate that includes white men. Of course, the actual electorates of the time were restricted to property-owning adult white males that excluded not only African Americans—men and women—but white women as well.

North Carolina estimated Free-Men-of-Color voters ran from a low of 707 voters in 1703 to a high of 6,220 voters in the last colony census in 1771. The mean is 3,000 Free-Men-of-Color voters and the median is 2,932 such voters. Finally, at the percentage level the range of

Finally, North Carolina is the one southern state besides Virginia where some demographic census data were kept and are available in the historical record. North Carolina provides six different data points, from the year 1754 to 1767. As in New York, North

70

Chapter 3

Table 3.25  County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1703 White Electoratea

African American Electoratea Males

County

Males

Albany

510

Kings New York

Females

Percent of MaleOnly Electorate

Number

Females

Percent of Total Electorate

Percent of Total Population

Number

Percent of Total Electorate

Percent of Total Population

MaleOnly Electorate

53

5.1%

2.3%

593

Total Electorate

Total Population

1,031

2,273

385

83

14.0%

8.1%

3.7%

345

304

135

28.1%

15.7%

7.1%

75

8.7%

3.9%

480

859

1,912

813

1,009

102

11.1%

4.6%

2.3%

288

13.0%

6.6%

915

2,212

4,375

Orange

49

40

13

21.0%

11.9%

4.9%

7

6.4%

2.6%

62

109

268

Queens

952

753

117

10.9%

6.0%

2.7%

114

5.9%

2.6%

1,069

1,936

4,392

Richmond

176

140

60

25.4%

14.7%

11.9%

32

7.8%

6.3%

236

408

504

Suffolk

787

756

60

7.1%

3.6%

1.8%

52

3.1%

1.6%

847

1,655

3,346

Ulster

383

305

63

14.1%

8.0%

3.8%

36

4.6%

2.2%

446

787

1,649

Westchester Totals

472

469

74

13.6%

7.0%

3.8%

45

4.2%

2.3%

546

1,060

1,946

4,487

4,161

707

13.6%

7.0%

3.4%

702

7.0%

3.4%

5,194

10,057

20,665

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 95. Calculations by the authors. a

The electorate is defined as persons of age 16 to 60 years.

Table 3.26  County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1712 White Electoratea

African American Electoratea Males

  County

  Males

Albany

688 89

Dutchess Kingsb

Females

Number

Percent of Male-Only Electorate

676

155

18.4%

9.4%

4.7%

122

7.4%

3.7%

843

1,641

97

12

11.9%

5.9%

2.7%

7

3.4%

1.6%

101

205

Females

Percent of Total Electorate

Percent of Total Population

 

New York Orange Richmond

b

Number

Percent of Total Electorate

Percent of Total Population

    MaleOnly Electorate

 

  Total Electorate

 

Total Population 3,329 445 1,925

1,062

1,268

321

23.2%

10.8%

5.5%

320

10.8%

5.5%

1,383

2,971

5,841

98

91

21

17.6%

9.5%

4.8%

12

5.4%

2.7%

119

222

438

 

 

 

1,279

Suffolk

929

926

116

11.1%

5.7%

2.6%

70

3.4%

1.6%

1,045

2,041

4,413

Ulster

424

406

148

25.9%

14.0%

7.0%

78

7.4%

3.7%

572

1,056

2,120

560

539

127

18.5%

9.8%

4.5%

72

5.5%

2.6%

687

1,298

2,818

3,850

4,003

900

18.9%

9.5%

4.0%

681

9.5%

3.0%

4,750

9,434

22,608

Westchester Totals

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 95. Calculations by the authors. a

The electorate is defined as persons of age 16 to 60 years.

b

The source provides no data for the electorates of Kings and Richmond counties.



The African American Electorate in the Colonial Era, 1610–1773 71 Table 3.27  County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1723 White Electoratea 

African American Electoratea Males Percent of Male-Only Electorate

Percent of Total Electorate

Percent of Total Population

  Total Electorate

    Total Population

Males

Females

Albany

1,512

1,408

307

16.9%

9.0%

4.7%

200

5.8%

3.1%

1,819

3,427

6,501

276

237

22

7.4%

4.0%

2.0%

14

2.6%

1.3%

298

549

1,083

Kings

Number

Percent of Total Electorate

County Dutchess

Number

Percent of Total Population

    MaleOnly Electorate

Females

490

476

171

25.9%

13.6%

7.7%

123

9.8%

5.5%

661

1,260

2,218

1,460

1,726

408

21.8%

10.0%

5.6%

476

11.7%

6.6%

1,868

4,070

7,248

Orange

309

245

45

12.7%

7.2%

3.6%

29

4.6%

2.3%

354

628

1,244

Queens

1,568

1,599

393

20.0%

10.2%

5.5%

294

7.6%

4.1%

1,961

3,854

7,191

335

320

101

23.2%

12.3%

6.7%

63

7.7%

4.2%

436

819

1,506

1,441

1,348

357

19.9%

10.2%

5.7%

367

10.4%

5.9%

1,798

3,513

6,241

642

453

227

26.1%

15.7%

7.8%

126

8.7%

4.3%

869

1,448

2,923

Westchester

1,050

951

155

12.9%

6.8%

3.5%

118

5.2%

2.7%

1,205

2,274

4,409

Totals

9,083

8,763

2,186

19.4%

10.0%

5.4%

1,810

10.0%

4.5%

11,269

21,842

40,564

New York

Richmond Suffolk Ulster

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 96. Calculations by the authors. a

The electorate is defined as “adult” persons, i.e., men and women.

Table 3.28  County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1731 White Electoratea

African American Electoratea Males Percent of Male-Only Electorate

Percent of Total Electorate

Percent of Total Population

Percent of Total Population

  Total Electorate

    Total Population

Males

Females

Albany

1,212

1,255

568

18.6%

12.7%

6.6%

185

4.1%

2.2%

3,049

4,489

8,573

298

481

59

9.4%

5.2%

3.4%

32

2.8%

1.9%

629

1,142

1,727

268

518

205

24.6%

13.7%

9.5%

146

9.7%

6.8%

834

1,498

2,150

1,024

2,250

599

18.6%

9.8%

6.9%

607

10.0%

7.0%

3,227

6,084

8,622

Kings New York

Number

Percent of Total Electorate

    MaleOnly Electorate

County Dutchess

Number

Females

Orange

299

534

85

11.9%

6.6%

4.3%

47

3.6%

2.4%

712

1,293

1,969

Queens

1,139

2,175

476

17.5%

9.1%

6.0%

363

6.9%

4.5%

2,715

5,253

7,995

Richmond

256

571

111

20.8%

9.2%

6.1%

98

8.1%

5.4%

534

1,203

1,817

Suffolk

955

1,130

239

10.0%

6.6%

3.1%

83

2.3%

1.1%

2,383

3,596

7,675

Ulster

515

914

321

24.5%

13.3%

8.6%

196

8.1%

5.3%

1,311

2,421

3,728

Westchester Totals

707

1,701

269

12.5%

6.8%

4.5%

96

2.4%

1.6%

2,148

3,945

6,033

14,610

11,529

2,932

16.7%

9.5%

5.8%

1,853

6.0%

3.7%

17,542

30,924

50,289

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 97. Calculations by the authors. a

The electorate is defined as persons over 10 years of age.

72

Chapter 3

Table 3.29  County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1737 White Electoratea

African American Electoratea Males

  County

  Males

Females

Albany

Number

Percent of Male-Only Electorate

Percent of Total Electorate

Percent of Total Population

    MaleOnly Electorate

Females

Percent of Total Electorate

Percent of Total Population

Number

  Total Electorate

    Total Population

1,384

2,995

714

18.2%

9.6%

6.7%

496

6.7%

4.6%

3,923

7,414

10,681

Dutchess

646

860

161

14.6%

8.0%

4.7%

42

2.1%

1.2%

1,101

2,003

3,418

Kings

264

631

210

24.3%

12.6%

8.9%

169

10.2%

7.2%

864

1,664

2,348

New York

1,036

3,568

674

17.2%

8.3%

6.3%

609

7.5%

5.7%

3,927

8,104

10,664

Orange

433

753

125

12.7%

6.8%

4.4%

95

5.2%

3.3%

985

1,833

2,840

Queens

1,656

2,290

460

16.0%

8.3%

5.1%

370

6.7%

4.1%

2,867

5,527

9,059

266

497

132

21.3%

10.7%

7.0%

112

9.1%

5.9%

620

1,229

1,889

1,008

2,353

393

14.6%

7.3%

5.0%

307

5.7%

3.9%

2,690

5,350

7,923

Ulster

601

1,681

378

24.3%

10.8%

7.8%

260

7.4%

5.3%

1,553

3,494

4,870

Westchester

944

1,890

304

12.6%

6.7%

4.5%

254

5.6%

3.8%

2,414

4,558

6,745

17,393

17,518

3,551

17.0%

8.6%

5.9%

2,714

6.6%

4.5%

20,944

41,176

60,437

Richmond Suffolk

Totals

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 98. Calculations by the authors. a

The electorate is defined as persons over 10 years of age.

Table 3.30  County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1746 White Electoratea

African American Electoratea Males Percent of Male-Only Electorate

Females

Percent of Total Electorate

Percent of Total Population

Percent of Total Electorate

Percent of Total Population

  County

  Males

Females

Dutchess

2,256

1,750

186

7.6%

4.3%

2.1%

100

2.3%

1.1%

506

464

199

28.2%

15.1%

8.5%

152

11.5%

2,246

2,897

721

24.3%

11.2%

6.2%

569

8.8%

Kings New York

Number

Number

    MaleOnly Electorate

  Total Electorate

    Total Population

2,442

4,292

8,806

6.5%

705

1,321

2,331

4.9%

2,967

6,433

11,717

Orange

830

721

133

13.8%

7.7%

4.1%

44

2.5%

1.3%

963

1,728

3,268

Queens

2,059

1,914

527

20.4%

10.8%

5.5%

361

7.4%

3.7%

2,586

4,861

9,640

411

414

101

19.7%

9.9%

4.9%

94

9.2%

4.5%

512

1,020

2,073

Suffolk

2,061

2,016

445

17.8%

9.2%

4.8%

310

6.4%

3.3%

2,506

4,832

9,254

Ulster

1,160

1,000

374

24.4%

13.4%

7.1%

264

9.4%

5.0%

1,534

2,798

5,265

Richmond

Westchester Totals

2,393

1,640

207

7.6%

4.3%

2.1%

140

2.3%

1.1%

2,600

4,380

9,235

13,922

12,816

2,893

17.2%

9.1%

4.7%

2,034

6.4%

3.3%

16,815

31,665

61,589

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 99. Calculations by the authors. a

Electorate defined as “women” of unspecified age and males aged 16 years and older.

Carolina gave Free-Men-of-Color the legal right to suffrage, and the historical record includes evidence that qualified Free-Menof-Color did vote in state and county elections.16 Figure 3.9 (p. 75) shows that African Americans accounted for more than a quarter of the colony’s population for most of the period. This proportion peaked in 1756 and then declined by about 6% over the next eleven years.

Tables 3.34 through 3.39 (pp. 75–77) reveal what the six colonial censuses conducted in North Carolina show about African Americans in actual numbers and percentages in each of the counties in the state. Taxable African American males had the right to vote in North Carolina. In New Hanover County the censuses record that throughout the period the taxable African American population made up 75% or more of all taxable



The African American Electorate in the Colonial Era, 1610–1773 73 Table 3.31  County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1749 White Electoratea

African American Electoratea Males

Females

Percent of Male-Only Electorate

Percent of Total Electorate

Percent of Total Population

Percent of Total Electorate

Percent of Total Population

    MaleOnly Electorate

  Total Electorate

    Total Population

  County

  Males

Females

Albany

2,681

2,087

472

15.0%

8.4%

4.4%

365

6.5%

3.4%

3,153

5,605

10,634

Dutchess

1,980

1,751

176

8.2%

4.4%

2.2%

79

2.0%

1.0%

2,156

3,986

7,882

499

391

265

34.7%

20.3%

11.6%

149

11.4%

6.5%

764

1,304

2,283

2,939

3,268

651

18.1%

8.6%

4.9%

701

9.3%

5.3%

3,590

7,559

13,285

Kings New York

Number

Number

Orange

922

899

111

10.7%

5.5%

2.6%

103

5.1%

2.4%

1,033

2,035

4,234

Queens

1,659

1,778

429

20.5%

10.2%

5.4%

349

8.3%

4.4%

2,088

4,215

7,940

456

434

130

22.2%

11.6%

6.0%

98

8.8%

4.5%

586

1,118

2,154

Suffolk

2,111

1,969

396

15.8%

8.3%

4.2%

293

6.1%

3.1%

2,507

4,769

9,384

Ulster

1,102

979

351

24.2%

13.1%

7.3%

240

9.0%

5.0%

1,453

2,672

4,810

Richmond

Westchester Totals

2,540

2,233

336

11.7%

6.2%

3.1%

279

5.2%

2.6%

2,876

5,388

10,703

16,889

15,789

3,317

16.4%

8.6%

4.5%

2,656

6.9%

3.6%

20,206

38,651

73,309

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 100. Calculations by the authors. a

The electorate is defined as “women” of unspecified age and males of age 16 years and older.

Table 3.32  County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1756 White Electoratea 

African American Electoratea Males

Percent of Total Population

    MaleOnly Electorate

  Total Electorate

    Total Population

Females

Percent of Male-Only Electorate

Percent of Total Electorate

Percent of Total Population

Percent of Total Electorate

  County

Males

Females

Albany

4,251

3,846

862

16.9%

9.0%

4.9%

603

6.3%

3.5%

5,113

9,562

17,424

Dutchess

3,076

2,782

323

9.5%

5.1%

2.3%

162

2.6%

1.1%

3,399

6,343

14,157

551

536

235

29.9%

15.5%

8.7%

197

13.0%

7.3%

786

1,519

2,707

New York

2,482

3,667

672

21.3%

8.9%

5.2%

695

9.2%

5.3%

3,154

7,516

13,046

Orange

1,162

998

140

10.8%

5.8%

2.9%

94

3.9%

1.9%

1,302

2,394

4,886

Queens

2,400

2,365

618

20.5%

10.6%

5.7%

470

8.0%

4.4%

3,018

5,853

10,786

518

471

122

19.1%

10.1%

5.7%

101

8.3%

4.7%

640

1,212

2,132

Suffolk

2,362

2,335

337

12.5%

6.4%

3.3%

236

4.5%

2.3%

2,699

5,270

10,290

Ulster

1,843

1,618

486

20.9%

11.3%

6.0%

360

8.4%

4.4%

2,329

4,307

8,105

Westchester

3,947

2,379

495

11.1%

7.0%

3.7%

280

3.9%

2.1%

4,442

7,101

13,257

22,592

20,997

4,290

16.0%

8.4%

4.4%

3,198

6.3%

3.3%

26,882

51,077

96,790

Kings

Richmond

Totals

Number

Number

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 101. Calculations by the authors. a

The electorate is defined as “women” of unspecified age and males aged 16 years and older.

persons. In Bladen County, African Americans made up nearly half of the taxable population. Thus, we will infer from this data, since property qualifications were necessary to vote and taxes were levied on property, that there is the possibility that FreeMen-of-Color in these two counties voted. Surprisingly, the initial colonial census of 1754 provides a gender breakdown, while the other five censuses in 1755, 1756, 1765, 1766, and 1767 do not. These five latter censuses combined

both male and female African Americans into the same taxable group. Hence, we calculated the black male percentage in the first census at 59% and used that figure to estimate both the number and percentage of African American males in each of the other census years. Summarizing the data in these six tables, the number of counties in colonial North Carolina ranged from a low of twentytwo in the 1754 census to a high of twenty-nine in the 1767 one.

74

Chapter 3

Table 3.33  County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1771 White Electoratea

African American Electoratea Males

Females

County

Males

Females

Number

Percent of Male-Only Electorate

Albany

10,958

9,045

1,350

11.0%

6.0%

3.2%

980

4.4%

2.3%

12,308

22,333

42,706

Cumberland

1,061

862

7

0.7%

0.4%

0.2%

2

0.1%

0.1%

1,068

1,932

3,947

Dutchess

5,071

4,839

451

8.2%

4.2%

2.0%

328

3.1%

1.5%

5,522

10,689

22,404

193

151

4

2.0%

1.1%

0.6%

0

0.0%

0.0%

197

348

722

Gloucester Kings

Percent of Total Electorate

Percent of Total Population

Number

Percent of Total Electorate

Percent of Total Population

MaleOnly Electorate

Total Electorate

Total Population

720

680

309

30.0%

15.4%

8.5%

295

14.7%

8.1%

1,029

2,004

3,623

New York

5,363

5,864

932

14.8%

7.0%

4.3%

1,085

8.2%

5.0%

6,295

13,244

21,863

Orange

2,464

2,124

206

7.7%

4.1%

2.0%

174

3.5%

1.7%

2,670

4,968

10,092

Queens

3,033

2,332

782

20.5%

11.7%

7.1%

534

8.0%

4.9%

3,815

6,681

10,980

534

595

174

24.6%

12.1%

6.1%

137

9.5%

4.8%

708

1,440

2,847

Suffolk

3,181

3,106

448

12.3%

6.3%

3.4%

334

4.7%

2.5%

3,629

7,069

13,128

Ulster

3,285

3,275

573

14.9%

7.6%

4.1%

441

5.8%

3.2%

3,858

7,574

13,950

Richmond

Westchester Totals

5,753

5,266

984

14.6%

7.6%

4.5%

887

6.9%

4.1%

6,737

12,890

21,745

41,616

38,139

6,220

13.0%

6.8%

3.7%

5,197

5.7%

3.1%

47,836

91,172

168,007

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), pp. 102–103. Calculations by the authors. a

The electorate is defined as “women” of unspecified age and males aged 16 years and older.

20% 18% 16% 14% 12% 10% 8% 6% 4% 2% 0%

Figure 3.8  African American Men as Percentage of Male Electorate in New York, 1703–1773 25% Percent of Male Electorate

Percent of Total Electorate

Figure 3.7  African Americans as Percentage of Total Electorate in New York, 1703–1773

1703

1712

1723

1731

1737

1746

1749

1756

1771

Census Year All African Americans African American women

20% 15% 10% 5% 0% 1703

1712

1723

1731

1737

1746

1749

1756

1771

Census Year African American men

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), pp. 95–103 and 181. Note: All populations consist of persons of age 16 years or older, except in the years 1723 (“adult”), 1731 (10 years or older), and 1737 (10 years or older).

The mean number of counties is 25.3 while the median is 25.5 counties. According to our 59% estimate, the number of taxable African American males—potential voters—ranged from a high of 7,625 in the 1766 census to a low of 4,141 in the 1755 census. The mean for these six censuses stands at 5,805 and the median is 5,766. In terms of percentage of the taxable population in the

African American men Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), pp. 95–103 and 181. Note: All populations consist of persons of age 16 years or older, except in the years 1723 (“adult”), 1731 (10 years or older), and 1737 (10 years or older).

colony, African American males ranged from a high of 17.8% in the 1766 colonial census to a low of 11.3% in the 1767 census. The mean percentage is 15.4% while the median is 15.7%. Thus, our estimated data tell us that Free-Men-of-Color had the qualification to vote in some respectable numbers in local and county elections in colonial North Carolina.



The African American Electorate in the Colonial Era, 1610–1773 75 Taxablea African Americans

Figure 3.9  African American Share of Taxable Population in North Carolina, 1754 –1773

Males

Percent of Taxable Population

35% County

30% 25% 20% 15%

500

100

(additions to Beaufort and Anson)

120

40

12,493

4,275

a

1754

1755

1756

1765

1766

1767

Census Year

Males

Taxable Whites

60

6.9%

870

Beaufort

771

567

41.0%

1,383

346

50.6%

 

Bladen

338  

400

Chowanc

 

1,481

Craven Cumberland

40

4.6%

20

2.3%

870

267

20.4%

218

16.7%

1,306

Currituck

1,220

289

16.9%

200

11.7%

1,709

Duplin

 

 

 

870

468

 

 

33.0%

120

17.5%

    28.4%

308

18.7%

 

989 d

637

226

684

Carteret

810

 

1,876

c

Beaufort

338

Taxable Populationb

810

Bertie

Females

Number

Percenta of Taxable Population

Anson

Anson

Cumberland

24,861

Taxable African Americans

Taxablea Percent Percent White of Taxable of Taxable Taxableb Males Number Population Number Population Population

Craven

11.7%

Table 3.35  County-Level Demography for North Carolina List of Taxables for 1755

Taxablea African Americans

Chowan

2,911

These are the taxable populations indicated by the source and not intended as calculated totals.

c

c

17.2%

0

The source does not break down the taxable population data for this county.

Table 3.34  County-Level Demography for North Carolina List of Taxables for 1754

Carteretc

690

c

County

Bladen

13.0%

24

The taxable populations included persons of age 16 years and older.

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), pp. 162–167.

Bertie

90

b

Taxable African Americans

County

14.5%

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 162. Calculations by the authors.

5% 0%

Tyrrel

Totals

10%

Females

Taxablea Percent Percent White of Taxable of Taxable Taxableb Males Number Population Number Population Population

934

48.6%

1,923

474

150

24.2%

620

 

 

460

168

26.8%

628

684

Edgecom

1,611

924

36.4%

2,535

400

Granville

779

426

35.4%

1,205

1,481

Hyde

237

183

43.6%

1,646

Johnstonc

 

420 1,425

850

New Hanover

362

1,374

79.1%

1,736

Currituck

470

80

12.7%

70

11.1%

629

Northampton

902

834

48.0%

1,736

Duplin

560

105

16.7%

63

10.0%

628

Onslow

448

247

35.5%

695

1,611

508

20.0%

416

16.4%

2,535

Orange

950

50

5.0%

1,000

1,205

Pasquotank

563

366

39.4%

929

420

Perquimans

Edgecombe Granville

779

Hyde

237

261 100

21.7%

165

23.8%

83

13.7% 19.8%

c

 

1,176

 

 

1,425

Rowan

1,116

54

4.7%

1,160

New Hanover

362

799

46.0%

575

33.1%

1,736

Tyrrel

477

335

46.4%

722

Northampton

902

510

29.4%

324

18.7%

1,736

Totals

11,287

7,018

28.5%

24,607

Onslow

448

151

21.7%

96

13.8%

695

Orange

950

35

3.5%

15

1.5%

1,000

Pasquotank

563

266

28.6%

100

10.8%

929

a

Perquimansc

 

 

1,117

b

These are the taxable population numbers that are provided by the source.

c

1,116

30

The source provides only the total taxable population for this county.

d

No data is provided by the source for Cumberland County.

Johnston

c

Rowan

 

  2.6%

24

2.1%

1,170

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 163. Calculations by the authors. Percentages are based on taxable populations reported by the source.

76

Chapter 3

Table 3.36  County-Level Demography for North Carolina List of Taxables for 1756

Table 3.37  County-Level Demography for North Carolina List of Taxables for 1765 Taxable African Americans

Taxable African Americans Taxable Whites

County

Number

Percent of Taxable Population

  Taxable Populationa

18.3%

1,383

Beaufort

411

470

53.3%

881

1,876

Bertie

636

877

58.0%

1,513

684

Bladen

604

633

51.2%

1,237

400

Brunswick

209

1,106

84.1%

1,315

6.9%

870

Beaufort

771

567

41.0%

338

346

50.6%

Carteret

b

Chowan

 

b

Craven

989

934

48.6%

1,481 1,923

Carteret

411

931

69.4%

1,342

610

1,017

62.5%

1,627

1,284

1,320

50.7%

2,604

866

366

29.7%

1,232

Cumberland

302

74

19.7%

376

Currituck

470

150

24.2%

620

Craven

Duplin

460

168

26.8%

628

Cumberland

Granville Hyde New Hanover Northampton Onslow Orange

1,091

39.5%

2,765

835

470

36.0%

1,305

Dobbs

1,176

609

34.1%

1,785

424

Duplin

848

130

13.3%

978

148

34.9%

397

24.2%

1,639

Edgecombe

396

1,420

78.2%

1,816

Granville

1,736

Halifaxb

695

Hertford

902

563

Perquimans

b

 

1,242

834 247

48.0% 35.5%

 

Pasquotank Rowan

1,674

448

b

2,078

Currituckb

276

Johnston

366

39.4%

  1,116

54

4.6%

974

929

38.4%

653

Johnston

984

458

31.8%

1,442

1,476

73.6%

 

1,176

Northampton

 

722

Totals

12,069

7,661

29.8%

25,737

b

These are the taxable population numbers that are provided by the source. The percentages of taxable population are calculated based on these numbers rather than the calculated sum of the taxable white population and the taxable African American population. a

1,352 2,005 2,434

Onslow

678

451

39.9%

1,129

Orange

2,825

579

17.0%

3,404

b

Pasquotank

 

1,106

Perquimansb

 

1,531

Pitt

750

Rowan

b

The source provides only the total taxable population for this county.

1,567 251

529

46.4%

1,675 2,628

 

New Hanover

335

41.9%

402

Mecklenberg

477

701

Hyde

1,176

Tyrrel

1,739

  b

1,113

796

 

b

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), pp. 163–164. Calculations by the authors.

b

 

715

Buteb Chowan

Edgecombe

Taxablea Population

131

60

Bladen

Number

584

810

Bertie

County

Percent of Taxable Population

Anson

Anson b

Taxable Whites

429

36.4%

 

1,179 3,059

Tyrell

538

368

40.6%

906

Totals

15,319

12,303

26.8%

45,912

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), pp. 165–166. Calculations by the authors. These are the taxable population numbers that are provided by the source. The percentages of taxable population are calculated based on these numbers rather than the calculated sums of the taxable white and African American populations. a

The source provides only the total taxable population for this county.

b



The African American Electorate in the Colonial Era, 1610–1773 77 Table 3.38  County-Level Demography for North Carolina List of Taxables for 1766

Table 3.39  County-Level Demography for North Carolina List of Taxables for 1767

Taxable African Americans Taxable Whites

County Ansonb Beaufort

Number

 

 

432

476

Percent of Taxable Population

Taxable African Americans Taxablea Population

County

786

Anson

696

173

19.9%

869

908

Beaufort

410

481

54.0%

891

 

1,745

Bertie

 

1,262

Bute

Taxablea Population

 

Bladenb Brunswick

Number

Percent of Taxable Population

52.4%

Bertie

b

Taxable Whites

 

b

1,829

Bladen

791

716

47.5%

1,507

229

1,177

83.7%

1,406

Brunswick

224

1,085

82.9%

1,309

Bute

1,172

967

45.2%

2,139

1,299

941

42.0%

2,240

Carteret

460

269

36.9%

729

Carteret

470

290

38.2%

760

Chowan

 

Craven Cumberland Currituck

616

1,082

63.7%

1,698

Chowan

1,391

1,298

48.3%

2,689

Craven

900

387

30.1%

1,287

Cumberland

 

b

Dobbs Duplin Edgecombe

b

Granville

b

875

Currituck

2,898

28.7%

1,261

1,268

706

35.8%

1,974

1,071

437

29.0%

1,508

906

47.0%

34.7%

1,854

Dobbs

883

359

28.9%

1,242

Duplin

2,066

Edgecom

 

1,735

Granville

1,022

  809

46.6%

b

 

2,894

Halifax

 

1,667

Hertford

Johnston

52.4%

362

643

Hertfordb Hyde

1,520

899  

b

Halifax

b

1,378

1,211

926

1,653

889

2,260

 

b

2,806

 

b

430

286

39.9%

716

1,003

511

33.8%

1,514

Johnson

1,461

Mecklenbergb

 

Hyde

1,928 1,690

441

282

39.0%

723

1,129

567

33.4%

1,696

Mecklenbergb

 

New Hanover

507

2,038

New Hanover

511

Northamptonb

 

2,497

Northampton

 

2,557

Onslowb

 

1,192

Onslowb

 

1,216

Orange

1,531

75.1%

b

3,324

649

16.3%

3,973

Orange

Pasquotank

740

606

45.0%

1,346

Pasquotank

Perquimans

527

1,017

65.9%

1,544

Perquimans

Pitt

798

470

37.1%

1,268

Pitt

3,059

Rowanb

Rowanb

 

b

2,163 1,492

74.5%

2,003

3,573

729

17.0%

4,300

433

359

45.3%

792

  775

1,472 448

36.6%

 

1,223 3,643

Tyrell

634

386

37.8%

1,020

Tyrell

594

390

39.6%

984

Totals

16,183

12,923

26.6%

48,610

Totals

16,984

11,884

23.3%

51,044

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), pp. 165–166. Calculations by the authors.

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), pp. 166–167. Calculations by the authors.

These are the taxable population numbers that are provided by the source. The percentages of taxable population are calculated based on these numbers rather than the calculated sums of the taxable white and African American populations.

a

a

The source provides only the total taxable population for this county.

b

These are the taxable population numbers that are provided by the source. The percentages of taxable population are calculated based on these numbers rather than the calculated sums of the taxable white and African American populations. The source provides only the total taxable population for this county.

b

78

Chapter 3

Conclusions on the African American Electorate in the Colonial Era While information on African American voters in Colonial America was heretofore sketchy, fragmentary, and scattered, a much better organized and structured portrait of this potential group of voters is now possible. Useful information has been compiled on the categories of African Americans who could vote and in which colonies they could vote. In addition, there is now some idea of the size and scope of those voting populations. Although the census and estimated demographic data are incomplete for many colonies, there is now a starting point to try to recapture lost or strayed data. The extant empirical data that this chapter uncovers and analyzes relieve current and future researchers from relying solely upon the existence of legal suffrage for African Americans in each and every colony to merely speculate about where and when African Americans might have voted in Colonial America. This chapter pinpoints exactly where the potential African American voting populations existed and in some instances the sizes and percentages of those populations. The data in this chapter also provide an empirical foundation upon which scholars can build to reveal the evolution and progression of African American voting behavior early in our nation’s history. No longer will it be necessary for academics and scholars to quickly skip over this period with an apology, stating that African Americans probably did not vote in this epoch of American history. With this data, and taking the variables of population size and population increases into account, it is possible to determine the true effects of efforts in the Revolutionary and Antebellum periods to extend suffrage rights or to deny them.

Notes   1. John Kolp, Gentlemen and Freeholders: Electoral Politics in Colonial Virginia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. ix.

  2. For more on this topic see the “Bibliographical Essay,” in Robert Dinkin, Voting in Provincial America: A Study of Elections in the Thirteen Colonies, 1689–1776 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), p. 263.   3. Walter Dean Burnham, “Printed Sources,” in Jerome Clubb, William Flanigan, and Nancy Zingale (eds.), Analyzing Electoral History: A Guide to the Study of American Voter Behavior (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1981), pp. 39–42; and Michael Dubin, United States Presidential Elections, 1788–1860: The Official Results by County and State (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2002), p. ix.   4. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), see Table A.1 Suffrage Requirements: 1776–1790, and Table A.4 Race and Citizenship Requirements for Suffrage: 1790–1855; pp. 340–341 and 348–353.   5. Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Politics (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1972), pp. 21–26, as well as Figures 2 and 3 for the fluctuations over time. For an analysis in one state, New York, see Phyllis Field, The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 59, 124–126, and 198.   6. John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom, 7th Edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), p. 56.   7. Ibid., p. 57.   8. Ibid., p. 58.  9. Ibid. 10. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975). See also Evart Greene and Virginia Harrington, American Population before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932). 11. Bureau of the Census, A Century of Population Growth (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909), pp. 3–15. 12. Greene and Harrington, p. v. The authors want to thank our developmental editor, David Arthur, for bringing the recently discovered Delaware census data to our attention. Two researchers at the Library of Michigan in Lansing helped us find this fugitive demographic information. 13. Keyssar, p. 5. 14. William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), p. 105, Table 5, note C. 15. See Dixon R. Fox, “The Negro Vote in Old New York,” Political Science Quarterly Vol. 32. (June 1917), pp. 252–275. 16. See Emil Olbrich, The Development of Sentiment on Negro Suffrage to 1860 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1912). pp. 8–11, 41–42.

CHAPTER 4

The African American Electorate in the Revolutionary Era, 1774–1789 The Demography of African Americans in Revolutionary America

80

Table 4.1 Numbers of Censuses in the Thirteen Original States, 1774–1789

81

Table 4.2 Populations by Census or Estimate, 1774–1789

82

Potential African American Voters in Revolutionary America

84

Table 4.3 African American Populations in the Thirteen Original States, 1774–1789

85

Table 4.4 Voting Rights, Population, and Population Change of African Americans in the Thirteen Original States: The Revolutionary Era

86

County-Level Election Data in the Revolutionary Era

87

Table 4.5 Town-Level Demography for Rhode Island, Census of 1774

87

Table 4.6 Town-Level Demography for Rhode Island, Census of 1783

88

Table 4.7 County-Level Demography for Connecticut, Census of 1774

89

Table 4.8 County-Level Demography for Connecticut, Census of 1782

89

Table 4.9 County-Level Demography for New Hampshire, Census of 1775

89

Table 4.10 County-Level Demography for New Hampshire, Census of 1786

90

Table 4.11 County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1786

90

Table 4.12 County-Level Demography for Massachusetts and Maine, Census of 1776

91

Table 4.13 County-Level Demography for North Carolina, Incomplete Census of 1786

91

Table 4.14 Local-Level Population Censuses and Enumerations of African Americans during the Period of the American Revolution

92

Conclusions on the African American Electorate in the Revolutionary Period

92

Notes 92

80

A

Chapter 4

s the thirteen colonies transitioned to the original thirteen states, the number of colonies/states that permitted African Americans the legal right to vote declined significantly. Indeed, the Revolutionary Era, 1774–1789, ended with a more limited— not less limited—franchise than had previously existed. There was almost no continuity between voting rights in the Colonial Era and the Revolutionary Era. This was in spite of the fact that African Americans bravely fought for the future United States in early skirmishes prior to the Revolutionary War and, eventually, in the war itself. Initially, African Americans were not welcome in the Revolutionary Army, but when Lord Dunmore proclaimed that those African Americans, slave and free, who would fight with the British would be given their freedom after the war, it forced General George Washington and the Continental Congress to draft and recruit African Americans into the Revolutionary Army and Navy.1 Once drafted, recruited, or sent as substitutes for their slavemasters, these people of color fought for all of the idealistic principles found in the Declaration of Independence and for the spirit of Revolution as set forth in the numerous pamphlets and broadsides of the period. Yet in the midst of all of these philosophical explanations of independence and freedom from tyranny, the colonies wrote, then ratified, and approved new state constitutions, several of which replaced the property-based voting rights of the Colonial Era with “white only” clauses as the legal bases for voting rights in the Revolutionary Era. Alexander Keyssar, a leading scholar of this period, wrote: “for many participants, values and principles at the heart of the revolution were difficult to reconcile with the practice of denying voting rights to men simply because they were poor or African American.”2 Nevertheless, this is exactly what the framers of these pioneering state constitutions did. The Articles of Confederation, which provided the legal basis for the national legislature/government (Continental Congress), made no provisions for national voting rights. Each state had one vote in the Continental Congress. Thus, institutions rather than individuals had voting rights at the national level. Individual suffrage rights were left to each of the new thirteen states to decide, as they had done during the Colonial Era. However, when the Continental Congress was considering the Articles of Confederation, the proposed ninth article stated that “the requisitions for the land [military/Army] forces should be apportioned among the several states according to the number of their white inhabitants”3 [emphasis added]. Since only states had representation in the Continental Congress, New Jersey objected to this white only clause because it violated their state constitution, which had embedded the principle of the Revolution that all men were equal. Due to this objection, the white only section was removed from the article.4 On the same day, there was an objection to the fourth article by South Carolina. This article provided “that the free inhabitants of each of these States . . . shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several states.”5 This article would, by its wording, convey suffrage rights to Free-Men-ofColor. However, according to historian Emil Olbrich, South Carolina, which had in 1716 disenfranchised Free-Men-of-Color, moved in this Congress “to insert ‘white’ between the words ‘free inhabitants,’ and also to insert after ‘several states’ the words

‘according to the laws of such states respectively for the government of their own free white inhabitants.’”6 “Both these amendments were defeated; eight states voted against them, one state was divided and two states voted for them. Congress therefore was not willing to refuse Negroes the ‘privileges and immunities of free citizens.’”7 The Continental Congress, however, had to rule on the qualifications of electors in organizing the Northwest Territory; in the Ordinance of 1787, no colored discrimination was inserted. This first experiment in democracy saw the Continental Congress keep a color discrimination clause out of its formative document, the Articles of Confederation. And when this Congress had to consider suffrage rights in the Northwest Territory, it was consistent in letting Free-Men-of-Color have suffrage rights like all other free men. In the only overview book on voting in the Revolutionary Era, Voting in Revolutionary America: A Study of Elections in the Original Thirteen States, 1776–1789, Robert J. Dinkin wrote: Racial requirements for voting were also being altered at this point. Several states allowed free Negroes to possess the franchise for the first time, though often due to inadvertence, confusion, and haste in constitution-making, rather than to conscious design. In Pennsylvania, North Carolina and New York, free blacks became members of the electorate on the same terms as whites. (Of course, the latter state’s property qualification continued to serve as a barrier to many.) Maryland’s constitution (1776) permitted voting for the lower house without color discrimination, but a statute in 1783 denied the ballot to anyone manumitted after that date. . . . The Massachusetts Constitution approved in 1780 did not specifically give the franchise to persons of color; the lack of any distinction among males in the voting provision was interpreted to mean that such individuals could take part.8 Despite the emergence of a new ideology, based on the Declaration of Independence, that stressed equality as the foundation of American nationalism, a uniform philosophy for dealing with suffrage rights did not emerge. Put differently, state and local leaders enacted the Revolution’s vision and philosophy in varying ways.

The Demography of African Americans in Revolutionary America In 1909 the Census Bureau noted, “In November, 1781, a resolution was introduced in [the Continental] Congress recommending to the several states that they make an enumeration of their white inhabitants pursuant to the ninth article of the Confederation. The Resolution failed to pass and the article was inoperative. Several of the states, however, made an enumeration about that time” independently of a confederated agreement.9 There were eleven official censuses conducted during the fifteen-year period from 1774 to 1789, along with numerous population estimates. These data reveal



The African American Electorate in the Revolutionary Era, 1774–1789

the size and distribution of the dual (slave and free) African American populations in certain locations. It is also possible to discern the potential voting population of African Americans in each of the thirteen new states. Table 4.1 lists the eleven censuses conducted in this fifteenyear period by the former colonies. Nine were conducted in New England, but only one each in the middle (coastal Atlantic) states (New York) and in the southern states (Virginia, which also completed a population estimate). Despite the fact that a war for independence from England was underway during this period, the number of censuses conducted is comparable to the Colonial Era (see Table 3.1), with only minor differences. Hence, the war, somewhat surprisingly, appears not to have been a disruptive factor. In fact, Rhode Island conducted two more censuses than it had during the Colonial Era, though it was the only state to conduct more. In addition, several states conducted censuses and estimates to determine how many men, both white men and Free-Men-of-Color, could be mustered for the militia and the Continental Army. After the war was over, there was the added imperative for censuses due to the “settlement of the national [war] debt . . . [so that each state could] assume their equitable proportion.”10 Thus, in this manner the Revolutionary War helped to create a greater understanding of the demography of the thirteen original states. Table 4.1  Numbers of Censuses in Thirteen Original States, 1774–1789 Colony / State

Number

Percent of Total

New Hampshire Massachusetts Mainea Rhode Island Connecticut Vermontb

2 1 1 3 2

18.2% 9.1% 9.1% 27.3% 18.2%

New England Colonies/States Subtotal

9

81.8%

New York New Jersey Pennsylvania Delaware

1

9.1%

Middle Colonies/States Subtotal

1

9.1%

Border Colony/State Subtotal

0

0.0%

Virginia North Carolina South Carolina Georgia

1

9.1%

Southern Colonies/States Subtotal

1

9.1%

11

100%

Maryland

Total Censuses of All Colonies/States During the Revolutionary Era

Source: Table “Censuses Prior to 1790,” A Century of Population Growth, from the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth, 1790–1900 (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1909), p. 4. a

Though Maine was part of Massachusetts, there was also a census of the counties that formed Maine.

b

As part of a census of New York.

81

The state census data from this fifteen-year span lack the same demographic detail concerning the African American population as is available for the Colonial Era. Only one state census from this period (Connecticut in 1774) contained detailed data on African Americans. As a consequence of this extremely limited data, our tabular display is not as robust as those in the Colonial Era. As a result, Table 4.2 (pp. 82–83) covers the censuses for each state as well as the population estimates for other states where no censuses were conducted. Table 4.2 offers a clear portrait of the African American population in the newly created thirteen states. Delaware is the one exception among states emerging from the Revolutionary War Era for which no census data or population estimates exist. It is not clear why Delaware made no count of its population.11

The Three-Fifths Clause and the Slave Population Unique to the Revolutionary Era are the population estimates made by the Constitutional Convention in 1787, during its meeting in Philadelphia to work out the so-called ThreeFifths Clause. Since state representation in the House of Representatives was to be based on population, one of the three major compromises at the Convention was to let slave states count five slaves as equal to three whites, or, put another way, each slave was deemed equivalent to three-fifths of a person. Though the first federal census was not conducted until 1790, the first session of the House of Representatives was to take place in 1789, just after the first national election in 1788. The Convention leaders developed a set of population estimates of slaves so that the number of seats in the first Congress could be worked out for each of the states where large proportions of the population consisted of slaves. Recent examination of these estimates has revealed the following: In the first congressional election in 1788 five states (Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia) gained 14 seats or a bonus of 48%, allowing them to reach near parity in the number of House seats (47–53) with the eight larger northern states. This bonus in numbers increased until 1830 and in percentages until 1860, when the numbers began to decline somewhat. Over the nine (national) censuses and reapportionments of House seats from 1788 until 1860 (the Clause was abolished during the 1860s as a result of the Civil War), the mean or average bonus percentage of seats were 25.12 Since the Three-Fifths Clause allowed the slave states to gain bonus seats in the House of Representatives, there was also an increase in the number of electoral votes for the slave states. Each additional House seat translated to an additional electoral vote for each slave state. “The percentage of additional electoral votes going to the slave states, as a result of the Three-Fifths Clause, ranged from a low of 8 percent in 1792 to a high of 19 percent in most presidential elections between 1788 and 1860 (the

82

Chapter 4

Table 4.2  Populations by Census or Estimate, 1774–1789 Populations   Colony/State

  Year

Reference ([footnote]: page)

  Enumeration Type

New Hampshire

1775

[1]: 1170.

Census

81,300

80,644

656

Census of 1775.

1775

[3]: 152–153.

Census

81,305

80,649

656

Census of 1775, white population = total population – black population.

1786

[3]: 156.

Census

95,801

95,452

46

Census of 1786. Free inhabitants included African Americans.

1786

[2]: 73.

Census

95,801

95,452

349

“95,452 free inhabitants (whites); 46 slaves (blacks); 303 others (former slaves and black).” Total population = # whites + # blacks.

1786

[1]: 1170.

Census

95,849

95,452

46

1787

[2]: 8, 73.

Population

102,000

102,000

0

1776

[1]: 1170.

Census

290,900

286,139

4,761

Census of 1776.

1776

[2]: 17.

Census

290,900

286,139

4,761

Census of 1776, after deducting 3 counties of Maine.

1776

[2]: 30–40.

Census

338,667

333,418

5,249

Census of 1776.

1776

[1]: 1170.

Census

290,900

286,139

4,761

Census of 1776.

1784

[2]: 18, 46.

Census

357,510

353,133

4,377

Census of 1784, including 3 counties of Maine.

1785

[2]: 18.

Population

335,024

330,836

4,188

Total population = # whites + # blacks.

1786

[3]: 18.

Census

356,642

352,171

4,371

Total population = # whites + # blacks.

1787

[2]: 8, 18.

Population

360,000

360,000

0

1774

[1]: 1171.

Census

59,678

54,435

3,761

Census of 1774.

1774

[3]: 162.

Census

59,607

54,460

3,668

Census of 1174.

1783

[1]: 1171.

Census

51,887

48,556

2,806

Census of 1783.

1783

[2]: 64, 67, 69–70.

Census

51,869

48,538

2,342

Census of 1783.

1787

[2]: 8, 64.

Population

58,000

58,000

0

1774

[3]: 168.

Census

197,842

191,378

6,464

Census of 1774. Total population computed.

1774

[2]: 50, 58–61.

Census

199,169

191,342

6,464

Census of 1774.

1782

[1]: 1169.

Census

209,177

202,904

6,273

Census of 1782.

1782

[2]: 50.

Population

208,840

202,567

6,273

Total population = 202,567 whites + 6,273 “Indians and Negroes.”

1787

[2]: 8, 50.

Population

202,000

202,000

0

1774

[2]: 91.

Population

182,247

161,098

21,149

Estimated from population increases from 1756 to 1771.

1776

[2]: 91.

Population

191,741

169,148

21,193

Estimated based on ratio of population increases from 1771 to 1774.

1786

[1]: 1170.

Census

238,897

219,996

18,889

Census of 1786.

1786

[3]: 183.

Census

238,897

219,996

18,889

Census of 1786.

1786

[2]: 92.

Census

238,897

219,996

18,889

Census of 1786.

1787

[2]: 8, 92.

Population

233,000

233,000

0

1784

[1]: 1170.

Census

149,435

138,934

10,501

Census of 1784.

1784

[2]: 108, 113.

Census

149,435

139,934

10,501

Census of 1784.

1787

[2]: 8, 108.

Population

138,000

138,000

0

Massachusetts

Rhode Island

Connecticut

New York

New Jersey

Totala

White

African American

  Comments

Census of 1786. Estimate of 1787 for 3/5 of slaves; “or 82,000 white inhabitants.”

Estimate of 1787 for 3/5 of slaves; “or 352,000 whites.”

Estimate of 1787 for 3/5 of slaves.

Estimate of 1787 for 3/5 of slaves.

Estimate of 1787 for 3/5 of slaves; “280,000 souls, … and adding 50,000 for Vt. Livingston to Lafayette, April 24, 1787 … 233,000 population; or 238,000.”

Estimate of 1787 for 3/5 of slaves; “or 138,000 to 145,000.”



The African American Electorate in the Revolutionary Era, 1774–1789

83

Populations   Colony/State

  Year

Reference ([footnote]: page)

  Enumeration Type

Delawareb

1787

[2]: 8.

Population

37,000

37,000

0

Pennsylvania

1774

[2]: 116.

Population

300,000

200,000

100,000

1775

[2]: 116.

Population

302,000

300,000

2,000

1787

[2]: 8, 116.

Population

360,000

360,000

0

1782

[2]: 127.

Population

254,050

170,688

83,362

 

1782

[1]: 1169.

Census

254,050

170,688

83,362

Census of 1782.

1787

[2]: 8, 127.

Population

218,000

174,000

80,000

Estimate of 1787 for 3/5 of slaves; “218,000 population . . . or 174,000 whites, and 80,000 blacks.”

1774

[2]: 141.

Population

500,000

300,000

200,000

“A very rough guess.”

1782

[2]: 141.

Population

567,614

355,916

211,698

Partial census of 1782 and estimates from tithable-topopulation ratios.

1785

[2]: 142.

Taxables or Polls

73,000

55,985

17,015

1787

[2]: 8, 142.

Population

700,000

420,000

280,000

Estimate of 1787 for 3/5 of slaves; “420,000 inhabitants, including 280,000 Negroes; or 300,000 whites and 300,000 blacks.”

1788

[2]: 142.

Population

588,000

352,000

236,000

Also “800,000 and over in population: 503,248 whites; 12,880 free colored; and 305,257 slaves.”

1774

[2]: 159.

Taxables or Polls

64,000

54,000

10,000

Taxables, equivalent to Congressional total population estimate of up to 300,000.

1775

[2]: 159.

Militia

30,000

20,000

10,000

Estimated militia.

1786

[2]: 160.

Population

224,000

164,000

60,000

Estimated population.

1787

[2]: 8, 160.

Population

200,000

181,000

60,000

Estimate of 1787 for 3/5 of slaves; “or 181,000 whites.”

1774

[2]: 176.

Population

200,000

40,000

160,000

1775

[2]: 176.

Population

174,000

70,000

104,000

1775

[2]: 176.

Population

150,000

60,000

90,000

1785

[2]: 176.

Population

188,000

108,000

80,000

1787

[2]: 8, 176.

Population

150,000

93,000

80,000

Estimate of 1787 for 3/5 of slaves.

1774

[2]: 182.

Population

100,000

20,000

80,000

White population estimated at one-fifth of total population.

1774

[2]: 182.

Population

32,000

17,000

15,000

1787

[2]: 8, 182.

Population

90,000

70,000

20,000

Maryland  

Virginia

North Carolina  

South Carolina

Georgia

Totala

White

African American

  Comments Estimate of 1787 for 3/5 of slaves. According to estimate, of total “1/3 are blacks.” According to estimate. Estimate of 1787 for 3/5 of slaves; “or 341,000.”

Estimated tithables, yielding equivalent total population of 448,008.

White population estimated at one-fifth of total population.

Negro population estimated in range from 80,000–100,000.

Estimate of 1787 for 3/5 of slaves; “including 20,000 negroes; or by another estimate, 27,000.”

Sources: [1] “Table Series Z 24–132: Population Censuses Taken in the Colonies and States During the Colonial and Pre-Federal Period: 1624–25 to 1786,” Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975), pp. 1169–1171. [2] Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932). [3] A Century of Population Growth, from the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1909), pp. 149–185. a

The totals come from the source materials, unless indicated by calculation formula in notes.

b

The population estimate for Delaware in 1787 is not based on an available census but rather on varied and partial counts from its counties that were taken in prior years.

84

Chapter 4

mean over these 19 elections was a 17% bonus). This helped the southern states to elect four of the first five presidents.”13 Seen in this perspective, the votes of Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color ironically lacked the power and influence of their non-voting slave brethren. In Table 4.2 the 1787 population estimates for apportioning seats in the House of Representatives for each state are given. With this data, one has a good sense of the number of slaves in the new nation. South Carolina had the largest slave population proportion (53.3%), followed by Virginia (40.0%), Maryland (36.7%), North Carolina (30.0%), and Georgia (22.2%). Eight of the original states reported no slave populations and, therefore, the Three-Fifths Clause did not increase their representation in the House of Representatives. In each of these eight states (Delaware is missing due to the lack of available census or estimated demographical information), the African American populations were quite small compared to the total populations in the five southern states.

States that Tracked Gender as Well as Race Two of the Revolutionary Era states, Connecticut and New York, provided gender and racial breakdowns of their census data for single years of the period; Table 4.3 (p. 85) provides that information. New York permitted Free-Men-of-Color to vote, and for the year preceding the 1787 Constitutional Convention, the African American population stood at 7.9% of the total and there were more males than females. In Connecticut during the first year of the Continental Congress, African Americans made up 2.6% of the population, and males there also outnumbered females. Among all of the original states, Maryland had the largest African American population, accounting for 32.8% of the total population. All of the other states in this group reported African American populations of less than 10% of their total populations. In two states, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, the African American populations declined during the Revolutionary Era, but in Connecticut this population grew, albeit slowly.

Potential African American Voters in Revolutionary America Table 4.4 (p. 86) lists the states and whether they provided or denied suffrage rights to Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color in their original state constitutions. In addition, one state (Maryland) changed its policy during the Revolutionary Era.

States that Banned African American Suffrage Two states, Virginia and South Carolina, banned suffrage rights immediately upon making the transition from colonies to states. Virginia and South Carolina had also banned this right in the Colonial Era; these same two states had large African American populations. Maryland eventually denied suffrage rights to Free-Menof-Color during the Revolutionary Era. At one point, based

on early historical findings by Emil Olbrich, a pioneering student of African American suffrage rights, it was thought that Maryland did not deny suffrage rights in this period. Here is how Olbrich initially wrote about it: “Maryland, which had passed in 1783 and re-enacted in 1796, a law forbidding emancipated slaves to exercise the elective franchise, adopted, by a bill . . . in November 1801, a constitutional amendment . . . that only free white male citizens should be electors. This alteration was confirmed in November 1802”14 and retained in an amendment confirmed in 1810. In its 1776 state constitution, there was no color discrimination. However, a Maryland law of June, 1793, entitled ‘an act to prohibit the bringing [of] slaves into the state,’ provided that slaves might be manumitted under certain conditions, and ‘that no colored person freed thereafter, nor the issue of such should be allowed to vote, or to hold office, or to give evidence against any white, or to enjoy any other right of a freeman than the possession of property and redress at law or equity for injury to person or property.’15 That yet another state law of December 31, 1796, made no mention “of the issue of manumitted slaves” suggests these children of Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color could vote.16 Later, a much more carefully researched study, focused entirely on Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color in the state, corrected these earlier factual errors by asserting: “In 1783 a state statute restricted the right to Negroes who were free prior to that year, and in 1810 Negro suffrage was ended completely by a constitutional amendment that limited the franchise to whites.”17 The state legislature had passed a statute in 1801 that restricted suffrage rights to whites only. In the final analysis, Maryland’s legislative behavior toward African American suffrage in this era was typical of several states and, prior to that, several colonies, which continually revisited the question of the African American right to vote. In point of fact, the right to vote was continually debated throughout both eras, and in a state like Maryland action was eventually taken to deny the right to vote. In other places, where it continued, it was still brought up for debate.

States that Allowed African American Suffrage Nine states never denied suffrage rights to African American males in the Revolutionary Era (up to 1789). Comparing Table 4.4 with Table 3.5 for the Colonial Era, there are some noticeable differences in the Revolutionary Era. There were no outright denials during the Colonial Era, but eventually three of the southern colonies came to deny suffrage rights. Two of those three, Virginia and South Carolina, did so when they made the transition from colonies to states. However, North Carolina, seemingly affected by the war and principles of natural rights, allowed Free-Men-of-Color suffrage rights when it became a state. All the other colonies continued the traditions that they had in place in the Colonial Era.

 

Georgia

 

 

 

254,050

 

 

149,435

 

 

 

83,362

 

 

10,501

18,889

6,273

5,101

2,806

3,668

 

488

 

4,761

46

656

Number

 

 

 

32.8%

 

 

7.0%

7.9%

3.0%

2.6%

5.4%

6.2%

 

1.0%

 

1.6%

0.0%

0.8%

Percent of Total Population

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

9,521

 

2,883

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Number

Males

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

9,368

 

2,218

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Number

Females

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

20

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Voting Ageb

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2,630

 

 

 

 

 

 

Number

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.3%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Percent of Total Population

Total

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1,577

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Number

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

0.8%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Percent of Total Population

Males

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1,053

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

0.5%

 

 

 

 

 

 

Percent of Total Population

Females

Number

African American Population of Voting Age

African American population includes Negro and mulatto populations.

Age is derived from age strata in source data.

a

b

Source: Adapted from “Table Series Z 24–132: Population Censuses Taken in the Colonies and States During the Colonial and Pre-Federal Period: 1624–25 to 1786,” Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975), pp. 1169–1171. Calculations by the authors.

 

1782

Maryland

South Carolina

 

Delaware

 

 

Pennsylvania

North Carolina

1784

New Jersey

238,897

209,177

1782

1786

197,842

51,887

1783

1774

59,607

50,493

1784

1774

47,767

1776

307,018

1784

New York

Connecticut

Rhode Island  

Maine  

290,900

1786

1776

95,849

1775

New Hampshire

Massachusetts  

81,300

Year

Colony/State

Total Population

Total

African American Populationa

Table 4.3  African American Populations in the Thirteen Original States, 1774–1789

86

Chapter 4

Table 4.4  Voting Rights, Population, and Population Change of African Americans in the Thirteen Original States: The Revolutionary Era Voting Rights of Free African Americans

1780 Estimated Totala Population

Percent Total Population Increaseb (1770–1780)

1780 Estimated Negro Population

1780 African American Percent of Total Population

Percent Negro Population Increaseb (1770–1780)

Denied from the Outset

Denied by 1789

Never Denied

New Hampshire







87,802

40.7%

541

0.6%

-17.3%

Massachusetts







268,627

14.2%

4,822

1.8%

1.4%

Rhode Island







52,946

-9.0%

2,671

5.0%

-29.0%

Connecticut







206,701

12.4%

5,885

2.8%

3.3%

New York







210,541

29.2%

21,054

10.0%

10.2%

New Jersey







139,627

18.9%

10,460

7.5%

27.3%

Pennsylvania







327,305

36.3%

7,855

2.4%

36.4%

Delaware







45,385

27.9%

2,996

6.6%

63.2%

Maryland







245,474

21.2%

80,515

32.8%

26.2%

Virginia







538,004

20.4%

220,582

41.0%

17.6%

North Carolina







270,133

37.0%

91,000

33.7%

30.8%

South Carolina







180,000

44.9%

97,000

53.9%

29.0%

Georgia







56,071

139.9%

20,831

37.2%

96.1%

Totals

2

1

10

2,628,616

25.8%

566,212

21.5%

24.0%

Colony

Sources: “Table Series Z 1-19: Estimated Population of American Colonies: 1610 to 1780,” Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975), p. 1168 and Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 349–353, Table A4. a

Total population = white population + Negro (African American) population;

b

Percent population increase or decrease = (population in 1780 – population in 1770)/population in 1770.

To be sure, extant data reveal that several of the nine states that never denied Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color the right to vote continued to debate the extension and granting of this right but, for one reason or another, permitted suffrage rights to continue. New Jersey, for example, permitted Free-Women-ofColor to vote until February 22, 1807. In the state constitution of 1776, it provided “that all inhabitants of this colony, who had the requisite property, age, and residence qualifications should be entitled to vote.” There is evidence that this clause was interpreted literally because in the historical record there are instances where African American women voted.18 New Jersey is the one locale, other than Virginia until 1699, not to impose gender restrictions that barred African American women from voting.19

“Negro Elections” Historian Emil Olbrich discussed “a peculiar slave custom in colonial Rhode Island and Connecticut” which, he argued, provided “interesting and curious evidence of the African’s appreciation of the elective franchise, even in slavery.”

He wrote: In both colonies the imitative Negroes follow the example of the whites on election day and elected a governor. In Rhode Island, where slaves were still numerous, each town held its own election to which the slaves looked forward with great anxiety and which is said to have been marked by as violent and acrimonious party spirit as among the whites. . . . As the number of slaves diminished, these mock elections became less general and, toward the end of the 18th century, finally disappeared.20 Olbrich described the same situation in Connecticut: In Connecticut, the earliest evidence of the custom is the record that, in 1766, after having held the office ten years, Governor Cuff [a slave] resigned in favor of John Anderson [a slave]. There Negro elections continued into the nineteenth century after the Negroes were freed, and their last governor held office down to within a few years of the civil war.21



The African American Electorate in the Revolutionary Era, 1774–1789

Olbrich further described these mock elections held by slaves in Connecticut by giving a portrait of the inauguration of these “Negro Governors,” whose only function was ceremonial within the slave community:

87

Table 4.5  Town-Level Demography for Rhode Island, Census of 1774 White Electoratea Town

African American

Female

Total

Barrington

142

162

304

41

6.8%

601

Bristol

272

319

591

114

9.4%

1,209

Charlestown

312

350

662

52

2.9%

1,821

Coventry

474

493

967

20

1.0%

2,023

Cranston

476

517

993

60

3.2%

1,861

Cumberland

400

478

878

17

1.0%

1,756

East Greenwich

416

464

880

69

4.1%

1,663

Exeter

441

478

919

67

3.6%

1,864

Glocester

743

740

1,483

19

0.6%

2,945

Hopkinton

427

477

904

48

2.7%

1,808

Jamestown

110

118

228

131

23.3%

563

Re-enacting the Ordinance of 1787

Johnston

242

254

496

65

6.3%

1,031

Finally, during this period, the newly elected federal government in 1789 re-enacted the Ordinance of 1787 with its impartial suffrage provision. This re-enactment and subsequent ones that provided for “a territorial government,” like those for the Mississippi, Indiana, Orleans (Louisiana), Michigan, and Illinois territories, shifted away from impartiality. Instead, they set the qualification for who could vote at the first election for the general assembly and/or delegates to the constitutional convention and “then left the fixing of permanent suffrage qualifications to the territorial legislature.”23 Thus, on the verge of the creation of new states from the sundry territories, the federal government was against color discrimination in suffrage rights, but, as in some states, this would change in later years.

Little Compton

304

382

686

47

3.8%

1,232

Middletown

210

259

469

64

7.3%

881

New Shoreham

109

121

230

55

9.6%

575

2,100

2,624

4,724

1,246

13.5%

9,209

North Kingstown

538

595

1,133

211

8.5%

2,472

North Providence

193

230

423

31

3.7%

830

Portsmouth

343

400

743

122

8.1%

1,512

Providence

1,219

1,049

2,268

303

7.0%

4,321

Richmond

286

324

610

24

1.9%

1,257

Scituate

909

933

1,842

55

1.5%

3,601

Smithfield

742

769

1,511

51

1.8%

2,888

South Kingstown

550

597

1,147

440

15.5%

2,835

Tiverton

418

438

856

95

4.9%

1,956

Warren

237

255

492

44

4.5%

979

Warwick

569

615

1,184

89

3.8%

2,338

West Greenwich

429

465

894

19

1.1%

1,764

Westerly

421

443

864

69

3.8%

1,812

14,032

15,349

29,381

3,668

6.2%

59,607

On the day of the inauguration of governor of the state, they followed whites to the capital, enjoyed the military parades and the procession to hear the election sermon, elected a governor, inaugurated with great ceremony and with shouting, laughing and singing, listened to an address from their governor, ate a dinner, and then danced until noon of the next day.22 However, there is one thing which sets the Connecticut mock slave elections apart from those in Rhode Island. From our data, we know that in 1818 Connecticut eliminated the right to suffrage for Free-Men-of-Color and restricted the right to only white males. Rhode Island never did this during the Revolutionary Era. Thus, the mock slave elections became the only electoral outlet for Connecticut African Americans until just before the Civil War.

Newport

County-Level Election Data in the Revolutionary Era In this section, we will focus upon those states that produced state censuses and broke the population down to the township or the county level. These data were, in some instances, further broken down by gender and age. Our examination of this data will permit the reader to see not only which states allowed African Americans to vote in the Revolutionary Era but the number of these potential voters who lived in towns and counties. These data have heretofore never been organized and structured so as to permit a county-level analysis.

Totals

Rhode Island Table 4.5 provides this view from twenty-nine towns in Rhode Island in 1774. Three of these towns had doubledigit percentages of African American population, including Jamestown (23.3%), South Kingstown (15.5%), and Newport (13.5%), while twenty-five other towns had the population in single digit percentages, and one, Gloucester (0.6%), had less

Population

Percentc

Total Populationb

Male

Source: A Century of Population Growth, from the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1909), pp. 162–163. The census enumerates the white population in age stratifications. The electorate is defined here as persons age 16 years and over. a

b

Total population = African Americans + whites + American Indians.

Percent of total population. The census did not stratify the African American population by age. c

88

Chapter 4

than one percent. The capital of the colony and later state, Providence, had 7.0%. Overall, the African American population stood at 6.2%. In the final analysis, only in Newport and South Kingstown did the African American population rise to a level where the potential African American electorate could have influenced the outcome of county and state elections. Nine years later, in 1783, Rhode Island conducted another census, the results of which are shown in Table 4.6. The total African American population had dropped considerably, to only 5.4% of the state’s population. This decrease was noticeable in the towns mentioned previously. Jamestown, which had the largest African American population of all Rhode Island towns in 1774, still had the largest in 1783, but the proportion dropped from 23.3% to 19.9%. Newport also dropped from 13.5% to 10.8%, while South Kingstown increased from 15.5% to 16.9%. Except for the increase in South Kingstown, there was no increase in the potential influence of African Americans upon elections through the rest of Rhode Island.

Table 4.6  Town-Level Demography for Rhode Island, Census of 1783 African Americans Town

Connecticut Table 4.7 shows that in Connecticut, with its six different counties, African Americans comprised 3.1% of the electorate, which included them along with the white population of age 20 years or older. Within the African American population, males outnumbered females. All of the counties in the state had single-digit African American population percentages, with the range running from a low of 1.5% in Litchfield to a high of 4.6% in Fairfield; but even in this highest percentage county, the population numbers were so small that African Americans would have had extremely limited electoral influence. Connecticut took another census eight years later, in 1782, and Table 4.8 summarizes the results. The small African American population in this state declined from 6,464 to 6,273, while its percentage of the total population also dropped slightly from 3.1% to 3.0%. The previous breakdown by gender is no longer present in the latter census. This 1782 census shows a decline in the already small potential influence and impact of African American voters in the electorate.

Total Whites Indians Mulattoes Blacks Percenta Populationb

Barrington

488

0

20

26

8.6%

534

Bristol

954

2

13

63

7.4%

1,032

Charlestown

1,204

280

9

30

2.6%

1,523

Coventry

2,093

2

3

9

0.6%

2,107

Cranston

1,508

9

17

50

4.2%

1,584

Cumberland

1,537

0

2

9

0.7%

1,548

East Greenwich

1,529

10

17

53

4.4%

1,609

Exeter

1,946

18

7

87

4.6%

2,058

Foster

1,756

0

0

7

0.4%

1,763

Gloucester

2,769

0

0

22

0.8%

2,791

Hopkinton

1,677

30

11

17

1.6%

1,735

270

0

0

65

19.4%

335

Jamestown Johnston

928

3

37

28

6.5%

996

Little Compton

1,294

13

0

34

2.5%

1,341

Middletown

646

0

4

29

4.9%

679

Newport

4,914

17

51

549

10.8%

5,531

North Kingstown

2,110

8

22

188

9.0%

2,328

North Providence

676

5

0

17

2.4%

698

Portsmouth

1,266

7

11

67

5.8%

1,351

Providence

4,015

6

33

252

6.6%

4,306

Richmond

1,061

1

15

17

2.9%

1,094

Scituate

1,613

0

19

3

1.3%

1,635

Smithfield

2,158

12

7

40

2.1%

2,217

South Kingstown

2,190

32

38

415

16.9%

2,675

New Hampshire

Tiverton

1,792

21

44

93

7.0%

1,950

In the state of New Hampshire, which allowed suffrage rights to African Americans, two censuses were conducted during the Revolutionary period, one in 1775 and another in 1786, and in each of these censuses, they disaggregated the data by county. For 1775, Table 4.9 reveals that only in one of the state’s five counties, Rockingham, did the African American population reach or exceed one percent. In all of the other counties, the total was under one percent, and this also held true for the entire state. Thus, the potential voting African American population in this state had minimal potential influence and impact. Eleven years later, the census of 1786 (Table 4.10, p. 90) indicated that there were fewer African Americans (who were merely listed among “Slaves” or “Others”) in the state than before, making it possible that there were fewer potential voters than before. Thus, while African Americans could vote in the Revolutionary Era in New Hampshire, their potential influence was very small indeed.

Warren

867

3

5

30

3.9%

905

Warwick

1,951

37

36

100

6.4%

2,124

West Greenwich

1,677

0

7

14

1.2%

1,698

Westerly

1,667

9

36

28

3.7%

1,740

48,556

525

464

2,342

5.4%

51,887

Totals

Source: Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), pp. 69–70. a

Percent of total population. Data source does not stratify enumerated populations by age.

b

Total population = African Americans + whites + American Indians.

New York Table 4.11 (p. 90) provides a look at New York at the county level in 1786. These data are also broken down by gender for



The African American Electorate in the Revolutionary Era, 1774–1789

89

Table 4.7  County-Level Demography for Connecticut, Census of 1774 White Electoratea

African American Electoratea

Total Populations

County

Male

Female

Total

Male

Female

Total

Total Electorate

Fairfield

6,260

6,119

12,379

358

234

592

12,971

28,936

1,214

30,150

48.3%

47.2%

95.4%

2.8%

1.8%

4.6%

100%

96.0%

4.0%

100%

10,745

11,398

22,143

370

201

571

22,714

50,666

1,215

51,881

47.3%

50.2%

97.5%

1.6%

0.9%

2.5%

100%

97.7%

2.3%

100%

5,668

5,154

10,822

99

61

160

10,982

26,844

440

27,284

51.6%

46.9%

98.5%

0.9%

0.6%

1.5%

100%

98.4%

1.6%

100%

5,811

5,843

11,654

268

181

449

12,103

25,896

925

26,821

48.0%

48.3%

96.3%

2.2%

1.5%

3.7%

100%

96.6%

3.4%

100%

6,617

6,965

13,582

335

255

590

14,172

31,542

2,036

33,578

46.7%

49.1%

95.8%

2.4%

1.8%

4.2%

100%

93.9%

6.1%

100%

5,696

6,210

11,906

147

121

268

12,174

27,494

634

28,128

46.8%

51.0%

97.8%

1.2%

1.0%

2.2%

100%

97.7%

2.3%

100%

40,797

41,689

82,486

1,577

1,053

2,630

85,116

191,378

6,464

197,842

47.9%

49.0%

96.9%

1.9%

1.2%

3.1%

100%

96.7%

3.3%

100%

Hartford

Litchfield

New Haven

New London

Windham   Totals  

White

Black

Total

Source: A Century of Population Growth, from the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1909), pp. 166–169. a

Electorate defined as persons 20 years of age and over. Electorate percentages are percent shares of total electorate.

Table 4.8  County-Level Demography for Connecticut, Census of 1782 Whites

African Americansa

County

Population

Population

Percent of Total Population

Fairfield

29,722

1,134

3.7%

30,856

Hartford

55,647

1,320

2.3%

56,967

Litchfield

33,127

529

1.6%

33,656

New Haven

25,092

885

3.4%

25,977

New London

31,131

1,920

5.8%

Windham

28,185

485

202,904

6,273

Totals

Table 4.9  County-Level Demography for New Hampshire, Census of 1775

Whites

Total Population

Percent of Total Population

Total Population

County

Male Electoratea

Cheshire

2,708

7

0.1%

10,659

Grafton

1,108

24

0.6%

3,880

33,051

Hillsborough

3,983

87

0.5%

16,108

1.7%

28,670

Rockingham

9,272

435

1.1%

37,945

3.0%

209,177

Stafford

3,077

103

0.8%

12,713

20,148

656

0.8%

81,305

Totals

Source: Evarts B. Green and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 61. a

African Americans and Slavesb

This enumeration of African Americans also includes some American Indians.

both races. Here as in other states, the African American male population outnumbers the female population. As a percent of total population, the largest African American population was in Kings County with 17.4% and 15.6%, for males and females, respectively. The county with the second largest percentage of African Americans was Richmond, with 11.7% and 10.3%. Then, there were three counties, Queens, Ulster, and Suffolk, which

Population

Source: A Century of Population Growth, from the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1909), pp. 152–154. The electorate is defined as male persons 16 years of age and over, whether in the army or not. The census does not enumerate African Americans or white females by age. a

b

The census does not distinguish African Americans from the slave population.

had African American population percentages larger than the state’s mean. The county with the smallest population—both in number and percentage—was Washington, where fifteen

90

Chapter 4

Massachusetts

Table 4.10  County-Level Demography for New Hampshire, Census of 1786

County

Free Inhabitants

Slavesa

Cheshire

15,160

7

6

15,173

Grafton

8,344

0

56

8,400

Hillsborough

25,933

9

48

25,990

Rockingham

32,138

21

185

32,344

Stafford

13,877

9

8

13,894

Totals

95,452

46

303

95,801

The demographic data for Massachusetts, as shown in Table 4.12, follow the patterns seen in the other New England states. African Americans made up only 1.5% of the total population in 1776. The percentage of African Americans in each of the thirteen counties was quite small. Nantucket had the highest percentage of African Americans with 2.9%, followed in order by Suffolk with 2.4%, Bristol with 2.3%, and Dukes and Essex with 2.0% each. Overall, none of these population totals or percentages gave the Free-Men-of-Color enough numerical strength to have had any significant electoral influence in the state during the Revolutionary Era.

Total Population

Othersa

Source: A Century of Population Growth, from the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1909), pp. 154–156. These enumerated populations include African Americans as well as some American Indians. ‘Free Inhabitants’ are not indicated to have included African Americans. No population in the census was stratified by age. a

African Americans made up about 0.2% of the total population. Therefore, one sees from the table that clearly there were several counties, especially Kings and Richmond, where African Americans could possibly have had some influence and impact upon the outcome of elections

North Carolina Table 4.13 shows data from the 1786 census of North Carolina, a southern state where Free-Men-of-Color intermittently had the right to vote. This table isolates a segment of the county populations by a threshold voting age, permitting one to see the approximate size of the voting age population in each of the eighteen counties. Eight of the counties had an African American voting age population percentage above that for the state; and in four counties, voting age African Americans accounted for at least a quarter of the total population. In those counties where the African American population was sizable, they presumably

Table 4.11  County-Level Demography for New York, Census of 1786 White Electoratea

African American Populationb

County

Males

Females

Males

Percent of Total

Females

Percent of Total

Total Population

Albany

17,230

16,093

2,335

3.2%

2,355

3.3%

72,360

7,601

7,481

830

2.5%

815

2.5%

32,636

842

766

695

17.4%

622

15.6%

3,986

Montgomery

3,829

3,415

217

1.4%

188

1.2%

15,057

New York

6,141

6,746

896

3.8%

1,207

5.1%

23,614

Orange

3,429

3,187

442

3.1%

416

3.0%

14,062

Queens

3,012

3,140

1,160

8.9%

1,023

7.8%

13,084

665

638

369

11.7%

324

10.3%

3,152

Suffolk

3,475

3,633

567

4.1%

501

3.6%

13,793

Ulster

5,256

4,865

1,353

6.1%

1,309

5.9%

22,143

Washington

1,210

983

8

0.2%

7

0.2%

4,456

Westchester

4,968

4,818

649

3.2%

601

2.9%

20,554

57,658

55,765

9,521

4.0%

9,368

3.9%

238,897

Dutchess Kings

Richmond

Totals

Source: A Century of Population Growth, from the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1909), p. 183. a

The electorate is defined here as the population segment that includes persons of age 16 years and older.

b

The census does not have age stratifications of the African American population.



The African American Electorate in the Revolutionary Era, 1774–1789 Table 4.12  County-Level Demography for Massachusetts and Maine, Census of 1776 Whites

County

Population

Table 4.13  County-Level Demography for North Carolina, Incomplete Census of 1786 Whites

African Americans

Population

Percent of Total Population

Total Population

91

Countya

African Americans

Percent Males Other All of Total Other Total 21–60b Males Females 21–60 Populationc Blacks Populationd

Franklin

740

1,069

1,814

931

17.0%

913

5,475

Barnstable

12,936

171

1.3%

13,107

Tyrrell

552

966

1,488

374

9.7%

379

3,859

Berkshire

17,952

216

1.2%

18,168

Pasquotank

615

1,023

1,551

789

16.5%

815

4,793

Bristol

24,916

585

2.3%

25,501

Northampton

763

1,329

1,966

1,721

24.4%

1,564

7,043

New Hanover

579

722

1,397

1,332

26.4%

1,012

5,042

Duplin

734

1,356

1,997

605

11.5%

548

5,248

Warren

735

1,399

2,499

1,792

21.6%

1,870

8,295

Dukes

2,822

59

2.0%

2,881

Essex

50,923

1,049

2.0%

51,972

Hampshire

32,701

245

0.7%

32,946

Middlesex

40,121

702

1.7%

40,823

Nantucket

4,412

133

2.9%

4,545

Plymouth

26,906

487

1.8%

27,393

Suffolk

27,419

682

2.4%

28,101

Worcester

45,031

432

1.0%

45,463

286,139

4,761

1.6%

290,900

MA Subtotals

Addition to above Richmond

Counties of the Maine Territory of Massachusetts, later counties of the separated state of Maine

 

701

380

757

1,126

168

6.5%

154

2,585

Caswell

1,273

2,748

3,611

1,110

11.3%

1,097

9,839

Chowan

463

641

970

992

26.2%

716

3,782

Nash

650

1,269

1,850

799

15.1%

709

5,277

Edgecomb

1,045

1,977

2,985

1,271

15.0%

1,202

8,480

Halifax

1,088

814

3,145

2,638

25.5%

2,552

10,327

Gates

543

901

1,361

927

18.9%

1,183

4,917

Granville

733

1,486

2,149

925

14.8%

954

6,247

Cumberland

14,110

162

1.1%

14,272

Addition to above

Lincoln

15,546

85

0.5%

15,631

Sampson

565

1,197

1,786

384

9.0%

338

4,268

York

17,623

241

1.3%

17,864

Hyde

496

584

1,282

430

12.6%

376

3,421

Surry

340

837

436

105

6.7%

94

1,559

12,294 21,075

33,413

17,293

16.4%

16,476

105,213

ME Subtotals Totals

47,279

488

1.0%

47,767

333,418

5,249

1.5%

338,667

Source: Evarts B. Green and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), pp. 30–40. Note: The census does not have stratifications of the enumerated populations by age.

had the potential to impact county level elections. Opposition to this influence became one of the causes for the contraction of the legal right of African American to vote in North Carolina and the eventual denial of voting rights in 1835.

Overall View of African American Electorate in the Revolutionary Period Overall, Table 4.14 (p. 92) provides a synopsis of the African American population during the Revolutionary Era for six states—Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, Massachusetts, and North Carolina—as well as a breakdown by gender in two of them, Connecticut and New York. Using the county or township population sizes in these states, shown in Tables 4.5–4.13, we are able to infer the possibility of electoral influence and impact. Such data allow a refinement from the

Totals

 

4,055

Source: Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 169. North Carolina’s census in 1786 was not a completed census. In some instances the census indicates “additions” to the total population count without identifying the contributing counties or distributing the “added” population among identified counties or segmenting the “added” enumerations by race and age as was done in the identified counties. a

The census segmented white males and all African Americans, male and female, who were 21 years to 60 years of age. White females were not distinguished in this manner. b

c

Percent of the reported total population.

d

Reported total populations may not match the sum of the component populations.

state level, and this refinement tells us exactly where in each state the largest and smallest African American populations resided. In the three states where two censuses were conducted during this period, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, we were able to compare and contrast the growth and decline in the African American populations and to get some sense of the size of the male and female populations. The North Carolina data provide a portrait of the South that helps to explain what might have eventually ended the legal right of African Americans to suffrage in this state, as well as why other southern states may never have granted this legal right despite the national revolutionary spirit and its principles.

92

Chapter 4

Table 4.14  Local-Level Population Censuses and Enumerations of African Americans during the Period of the American Revolution African American Colony

Year

Locale

Table No.

Total Population

Age Strataa

Males

Females

New Hampshire

1775

County

4.9

81,305

16

 

 

656

1786

County

4.10

95,801

 

 

 

46

Massachusetts

1776

County

4.12

338,667

 

Rhode Island

1774

Town

4.5

59,607

 

 

 

3,668

1783

Town

4.6

51,887

 

 

 

2,806

1774

County

4.7

197,842

20

1,577

1,053

6,464

1782

County

4.8

209,177

 

New York

1786

County

4.11

238,897

16

9,521

9,368

18,889

North Carolina

1786

County

4.13

105,213

21–60

 

 

17,293

Connecticut

Population

5,249

6,273

Sources: Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932) and A Century of Population Growth, from the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1909), pp. 149–185. The age used by some states to define the electorate or potential electorate. In most cases, the data was collected for whites or white males exclusively. Connecticut, in its census of 1774, was the only state in the Revolutionary period to count whites and African Americans in the same comparable age and gender stratas. a

Conclusions on the African American Electorate in the Revolutionary Period During the Revolutionary Era, nine of the thirteen states (69.2%) allowed the exercise of suffrage rights by Free-Men-and-Womenof-Color. Thus, more than two-thirds of the original states granted legal suffrage rights. Unlike the Colonial Era, where none of the original thirteen colonies initially denied suffrage rights to Free-Men-and-Womenof-Color, two states denied them throughout the Revolutionary Era and another eventually denied the right. Virginia and South Carolina adopted anti-suffrage laws during the Colonial Era and simply carried them over into the Revolutionary Era. North Carolina barred suffrage for free African Americans in 1715 during the Colonial Era but within thirty years, around 1734–1735, reversed its position and again permitted free African Americans to have the legal right to suffrage.24 Delaware adopted antisuffrage laws during the Antebellum Era, although free African Americans had the legal right to suffrage in both the Colonial and Revolutionary Eras.25 On the other hand, a majority of nine states permitted the legal right to suffrage to continue for Free-Men-and-Women-ofColor. This had been set in motion during the Colonial Era, and these states embedded this right in their state constitutions. In eight of these nine states, property qualifications were the only barrier that Free-Men-of-Color faced. In Vermont, even property qualifications were wiped away. The one reality not swept away was the anti-suffrage sentiment. It lingered. Moreover, the rise of two national governments during the Revolutionary War Era (the Continental Congress from the Articles of Confederation and the United States of America from the

United States Constitution) did not settle the matter because the power to determine the right to vote remained with the states. The Constitution did establish a linkage between the states and the federal government because Article 1, Section 2, calls for state voters to cast their ballots directly for members of the House of Representatives. But even with this constitutional linkage, the power to determine who votes still resided with the state governments. Commenting on the lack of continual progress in the suffrage struggle, Emil Olbrich wrote: The evolution of democracy rarely followed a straight path, and it always has been accompanied by profound antidemocratic countercurrents. The history of suffrage in the United States is a history of both expansion and contraction, of inclusion and exclusion, of shifts in direction and momentum at different places and at different times.26 This has been especially true for African Americans, for their quest started in the Colonial Era and continued into the Revolutionary Era. “The chief problems that have faced the black electorate have been the acquisition and retention of the franchise.”27 Neither era permanently settled the matter. And as a consequence, linear progress never became a feature of the suffrage struggle for the potential African American electorate in these two eras.

Notes   1. John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 7th Edition (New York: McGrawHill, 1994), pp. 74–75.



The African American Electorate in the Revolutionary Era, 1774–1789

  2. Alexander Keyssar, The Right To Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 25.   3. Emil Olbrich, The Development of Sentiment on Negro Suffrage to 1860 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1912), p. 19.   4. Ibid., pp. 19–20.   5. Ibid., p. 20. See also Marion Wright, “Negro Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1785,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 33 (April 1948), pp. 168–224.   6. Olbrich, p. 20.  7. Ibid.   8. Robert Dinkin, Voting in Revolutionary America: A Study of Elections in the Original Thirteen States, 1776–1789 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), pp. 41–42.   9. Bureau of the Census, A Century of Population Growth (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909), p. 4. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. See also John Munroe, “The Negro in Delaware,” South Atlantic Quarterly Vol. 56 (Autumn 1957), pp. 428–443, and Harold Livesay, “Delaware Negroes, 1865–1915,” Delaware History Vol. 13 (October 1968), pp. 87–123. 12. Hanes Walton, Jr. and Robert Smith, American Politics and the African American Quest for Universal Freedom, 4th Edition (New York: Longman Publishers, 2008), pp. 10–11. 13. Ibid., p. 11. See also how this affected presidential and congressional campaigns during this era because those candidates who won these

93

slave states’ electoral votes and bonus congressional seats were referred to as “Negro Presidents and Negro Congressmen,” Garry Wills, “Negro President”: Jefferson and the Slave Power (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003). 14. Olbrich, p. 21. 15. Ibid., p. 10. 16. Ibid. 17. James Wright, The Free Negro in Maryland, 1634–1860 (New York: 1921), p. 119. See also Margaret Callcott, The Negro in Maryland Politics, 1870–1912 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), p. 3. 18. Olbrich, p. 23. 19. John Kolp, Gentlemen and Freeholders: Electoral Politics in Colonial Virginia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 41. 20. Olbrich, p. 11 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. See also Joseph P. Reidy, “ ‘Negro Election Day’ and Black Community Life, 1750–1860,” in Marxist Perspectives (Fall 1978), pp. 102–117. 23. Olbrich, p. 26. 24. Ibid., p. 8. 25. Ibid., p. 10. 26. Ibid., p. xx. 27. Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Politics: A Theoretical and Structural Analysis (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1972), p. 33.

CHAPTER 5

The Electoral Context in Antebellum America, 1788–1861 The Impact of the Three-Fifths Clause The Demography of African Americans in Antebellum America

96

Table 5.1 House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1788–1789 Elections

98

Table 5.2 House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1790 Census

99

Table 5.3 House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1800 Census

100

Table 5.4 House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1810 Census

101

Table 5.5 House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1820 Census

102

Table 5.6 House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1830 Census

104

Table 5.7 House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1840 Census

105

Table 5.8 House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1850 Census

107

Table 5.9 House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1860 Census

108

Figure 5.1 Number of States Admitted to the United States by Decade, 1787–1860s

109

Figure 5.2 Numerical Parity of Free and Slave States in the United States by Decade, 1787–1860s

109

Longitudinal Analysis of the Three-Fifths Clause

109

Table 5.10 States Admitted to the Union of the United States, Founding–1870

109

Figure 5.3 Number of House of Representatives Seats Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause by Decade, 1787–1860s

110

Figure 5.4 Percent of House of Representatives Seats Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause by Decade, 1787–1860s

110

Figure 5.5 Percent of Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause by Decade, 1787–1860s

111

Figure 5.6 Total Electoral Votes and Number of Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause by Decade, 1787–1860s

112

Figure 5.7 African American Population Growth in the United States by Slavery Status, 1790–1860

112

Figure 5.8 White Population Growth in the United States by Slavery Status of Residence, 1790–1860

112

Figure 5.9 African American and White Population Growth in the United States, 1790–1860

113

Figure 5.10 Number of Electoral Votes by Slavery Status Grouping of States, 1787–1860s

113

Figure 5.11 Two-Fifths of African American Slave Population as a Share of Total U.S. Population, 1790–1860

114

Table 5.11 Number of Seats in the House of Representatives Held by the Slave States during and after the Period of the Three-Fifths Clause, 1860, 1872, and 1882

115

Summary and Conclusions on the Impact of the Three-Fifths Clause

115

Notes 115

96

Chapter 5

R

atification of the U.S. Constitution on June 26, 1788, created a new electoral system requiring the election of a president and members of the House of Representatives. While the Senate would be elected by the state legislatures, the House and the executive branch of government required popular participation by the state-based electorates. Each state government—thirteen at that time—would set the qualifications for voting in this new federalist system comprised of national, state, county, and local governments. This new document enabled the transition from a confederation of states organized under the Articles of Confederation and operating through the Continental Congress into a federalist system of government. In the Continental Congress only states could vote, and state legislatures, not the voters, decided which delegates would represent the state in the Continental Congress. Now with the Constitution in place, national elections had to be held in the same way as state, county, and local contests. Although the Constitution did not set suffrage qualifications for national elections, it did recognize the duality of the African American population, free and slave. Southerners at the 1787 Constitutional Convention demanded that if the House of Representatives was to be based on population, then slaves had to be counted in the apportionment for the House. Leaders from the slave states demanded a full count of this group, while the leaders from non-slave states declared that they could not be counted in the population for the purposes of representation because they were used and treated as property. Eventually, a compromise was worked out known as the Three-Fifths Clause. It is written into Section 2 of Article I of the Constitution in the following manner: “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”1 James Madison later reflected on this constitutional decision, writing in Federalist 54 that The true state of the case is, that they [slaves] partake of both of these qualities: being considered by our laws, in some respects, as persons, and in other respects as property. . . . [T]he slave is no less evidently regarded by the law as a member of the society, not as a part of the irrational creation; as a moral person, not as a mere article of property. The federal Constitution, therefore, decides with great propriety on the case of our slaves, when it views them in the mixt character of persons and of property. This is in fact their true character. It is the character bestowed on them by the laws under which they live; and it will not be denied, that these are the proper criterion. . . .2 Later in the very same essay, Madison reiterated his justification that the nation had done the right thing in adopting the Three-Fifths Clause: “Let the case of the slaves be considered, as it is in truth, a peculiar one. Let the compromising expedient of the Constitution be mutually adopted, which regards them as inhabitants, but as debased

by servitude below the equal level of free inhabitants, which regards the slave as divested of two-fifths of the man.”3 Ratification of the Constitution, therefore, did not convey suffrage rights to African Americans, but it did allow three-fifths of the slave population, or 60%, to be counted as the population base for slave state representation in the House of Representatives. Thus, the Three-Fifths Clause in the Constitution not only allowed slave states to increase the number of seats that they would have in one house of the national congress but, as the electoral votes of each state are determined by the number of senators and representatives that they have in Congress, it also increased the number of electoral votes that each slave state would have in presidential elections. Of course, if each slave had been counted as a full person, those states would have gained even more. Therefore, along with the creation of national elections came one institution (the House of Representatives) of the new nation built upon non-voting slaves as well as another institution (the Electoral College) residing on the very same foundation. Ironically, Free-Men-of-Color voters found themselves structurally compelled to participate in national elections that were undergirded by the suppression of their fellow men and women of color, but then, they had been in the same situation in the elections of Colonial and Revolutionary America.

The Demography of African Americans in Antebellum America Madison’s argument for the ratification of the Constitution with the Three-Fifths Clause may have effectuated the adoption of this formative document and assured the entrance of the southern states into the Union. Yet he and the other Federalist writers, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, paid no attention to how this clause would provide the political, electoral, and opinion context for the entire Antebellum Era. On this point, African American historian Charles Wesley wrote, “the failure to settle this issue [of slaves being both human and property] laid the foundation for considerable confusion concerning the Negro’s right to vote, for if they were property manifestly, there was no adequate argument for this right.”4 Similarly, constitutional scholar Donald Nieman noted that the Three-Fifths Clause “became an important tool that southerners would use during the next seventy years to bend national policy to their will and make the Constitution a proslavery document.”5 He added: “between ratification of the Constitution and the Mexican War (1846–1848) the American political system worked against realization of the Constitution’s antislavery potential.” As they had at the Philadelphia Convention, southern political leaders doggedly insisted that the national government show solicitude for slavery and challenged measures that threatened the institution. Although northern politicians sometimes resisted these demands, more often they backed down or broke ranks in the face of southern initiatives. Confronted with southern assertiveness, many northern leaders believed that preservation of the Union required them to make concessions to southerners on an issue so vital to their interests.6

The North was not merely interested in saving the Union. Niemann continued, “White attitudes toward blacks, which had taken root during the previous century [in Colonial America] reinforced slavery and the system of racial hierarchy which it created. . . . Such attitudes legitimized existing social arrangements and provided ready arguments against emancipation.”7 Thus, once the Three-Fifths Clause was embedded in the Constitution, along with the fugitive slave clause and another that protected the importation of slaves for twenty years, a political and legal environment was created that placed the Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color in grave jeopardy. Free African Americans existed at the mercy of the state, and many leaders in the slave states equated African Americans with slaves. Nieman observed, “Southern laws governing free blacks were much more restrictive and repressive than those on northern statute books, making southern free blacks little better than slaves without masters.”8 Thus, Free-Men-and-Womenof-Color in Antebellum America found themselves, both in the North and South, “with limited citizenship privileges,” and “they occupied a subordinate position between the whites and the slaves. They were between freedom and bondage.”9 The Three-Fifths Clause drained not only the humanity away from slaves but from free blacks as well. It eroded rights of the latter in both the northern and southern states because the Three-Fifths Clause implied legally that an endless array of restrictions could be visited upon blacks for the good of sectional unity. If the Constitution could count a portion of the African American population while excluding them from suffrage rights, then state legislatures, which had the power over suffrage rights qualifications, could use the existence of the Three-Fifths Clause to diminish the voting rights of free blacks. As this chapter will show, this is exactly what the states did during the Antebellum era. Before we discuss how the Three-Fifths Clause was used to restrict and circumscribe the rights and liberties of the FreeMen-and-Women-of-Color, it is essential to show how this clause empowered the slave states in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. Here, for the very first time, is an empirical analysis and assessment of the impact of the Three-Fifths Clause upon the number of seats in the House of Representatives and the number of electoral votes in presidential elections, beginning with the initial election of 1788–1789 and, subsequently, in every federal Census from 1790 through 1860. On July 9, 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, the Three-Fifths Clause was no longer operative. Also, since the nation had no census for the initial national election in 1788, population estimates were put forward by the 1787 Constitutional Convention regarding the number of slaves in each of the six slave states. The Convention also fixed a population of 30,000 as the criterion for one seat in the House of Representatives, although the population requirement for at least one seat in the House of Representatives changed with the appearance of each Census. All of the thirteen original states were granted provisional representation (based on estimated populations) for the first federal election in 1788–1789. Table 5.1 (p. 98) groups these states according to geography and the status to which each had evolved on the question of slavery by 1860, the eve of the Civil War, as (1) free states, (2) border slave states, and (3) southern

The Electoral Context in Antebellum America, 1788–1861

97

slave states. The next columns analyze the number of seats that each state had in the House of Representatives of the first Congress, as well as the number of electoral votes in the first presidential election. The non-slave column reveals the number of House seats (and electoral votes) given to the states based on free population (including both whites and blacks); the slave column shows the number of seats (and votes) based on the slave population, made possible by the Three-Fifths Clause. Finally, the table disaggregates the actual state populations into their non-slave population, the three-fifths of the slave population, the population used for apportionment to representation, and the total population for each of the thirteen original states in the new nation. At the bottom of Table 5.1 are the grand totals. There were 65 seats in the initial House of Representatives and a total of 91 electoral votes (achieved by adding the total of 65 seats in the House and the 26 senators) for the presidential election. From these numbers we find that 55 House seats were attributable to non-slave (or free) populations. Thus, a total of 10 House seats, and therefore 10 electoral votes, were attributable to the ThreeFifths Clause.

The 1790 Census Table 5.2 (p. 99) shows how matters stood at the time that the first United States Census was taken in 1790. Three new states, Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee, had been added to the Union, and since Tennessee entered the Union after the Census had been taken, it was allocated one seat in the House of Representatives on a provisional basis. Examining the grand totals, there were 106 seats in the House of Representatives of the Second Congress, and presidential elections during this decade would have had 138 electoral votes. Of these numbers, 95 seats and 127 of the electoral votes were attributable to non-slave populations. Because of the Three-Fifths Clause, slave states received 9 seats and 9 electoral votes; adding the seats and votes of border slave states, enslaved populations accounted for 11 seats and 11 electoral votes. This decade was also the first time there were an equal number of free and slave states. Vermont entered as a free state and Tennessee as a slave state. Nonetheless, the free states had 57 seats in the House of Representatives and the slave states 49, so viewed by their status on the question of slavery, the states were not on parity: the free states had 8 more seats. There is also no parity shown between the states in Table 5.1, for the free states had 35 seats and the slave states only 30, and this disparity between the states begins to grow slightly in Table 5.2. This same reality pertains in the presidential elections. In 1790, the free states had 73 electoral votes and the slave states only 65 votes, a difference of 8 electoral votes. In the first federal election (Table 5.1), the free states had 49 electoral votes compared to the slave states’ 42, for a difference of 7 electoral votes. Clearly, the slave states needed the Three-Fifths Clause to stay near to parity with the free states in terms of political power in the House of Representatives. However, as representation in the Senate became equal in the 1790s, the southern states did gain effective veto power over legislation that might negatively impact slavery. Although the number of states would not always be equal, the

98

Chapter 5

Free/Slave Status (1860) Free

Border Slave

Slave

Provisional Representationa

Table 5.1  House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1788–1789 Elections Congressional Seats and Electoral Votes House of Representatives

State

Non-Slaveb House Seats

Slavec House Seats

Populations

Total House Seats

Senate Seats

Electoral Votes

NonSlave

(3/5) x Slave

Constitutional Reapportionmentd

Totale



Connecticut

5

0

5

2

7

202,000

0

202,000

202,000



Massachusetts

8

0

8

2

10

360,000

0

360,000

360,000



New Hampshire

3

0

3

2

5

102,000

0

102,000

102,000



New Jersey

4

0

4

2

6

138,000

0

138,000

138,000



New York

6

0

6

2

8

238,000

0

238,000

238,000



Pennsylvania

8

0

8

2

10

360,000

0

360,000

360,000



Rhode Island

1

0

1

2

3

58,000

0

58,000

58,000

 

Subtotal (7)

35

0

35

14

49

1,458,000

0

1,458,000

1,458,000



Delaware

1

0

1

2

3

37,000

0

37,000

37,000



Maryland

4

2

6

2

8

218,000

80,000

298,000

351,333

 

Subtotal (2)

5

2

7

4

11

255,000

80,000

335,000

388,333



Georgia

2

1

3

2

5

90,000

20,000

110,000

123,333



North Carolina

4

1

5

2

7

200,000

60,000

260,000

300,000



South Carolina

3

2

5

2

7

150,000

80,000

230,000

283,333



Virginia

6

4

10

2

12

420,000

280,000

700,000

886,667

 

Subtotal (4)

15

8

23

8

31

860,000

440,000

1,300,000

1,593,333

Total (13)

55

10

65

26

91

2,573,000

520,000

3,093,000

3,439,666

Sources: Bureau of the Census, Negro Population: 1790–1915 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918), pp. 44–45, 57; Joint Committee on Printing, Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1988). a

Provisional representation accorded by Congress to newly admitted states; not based on any census but pending the next census for determination by reapportionment.

b

Number of Non-Slave Representatives = Rounded((Non-slave population)/(Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population)) x Total House Seats).

c

Number of Slave Representatives = Rounded((((3/5) x Slave population)/(Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population)) x Total House Seats).

d

Populations in this column are constitutionally re-apportioned, except when provisionally represented. Re-apportioned population = Non-slave population + ((3/5) x Slave population).

e

Total population = Non-slave population + Slave population.

southern states would fight hard to maintain their numerical parity. Another interesting feature in Table 5.2 is that by the time of the initial Census there were slaves in the so-called free states because southern slave owners sometimes transported slaves with them when moving to free states. (This situation would be the crux of Dred Scott’s unsuccessful argument for his freedom in the 1857 Supreme Court case that helped set the stage for the Civil War.) The number of slaves in the free states was much smaller than in the slave states but significant enough that free states began to get fractions of seats and electoral votes just like the slave states. For instance, if New York’s seats and votes were

examined in terms of fractions, New York might have obtained almost a half-seat and a half-electoral vote because of its slave population.

The 1800 Census In 1803 Ohio entered the Union as a free state. Table 5.3 (p. 100) indicates that a near balance in numbers of free and slave states had been maintained, with nine of the former and eight of the latter. However, of the total 142 House seats, the free states had 77, compared with 65 for the slave states, for a difference of 12. In terms of the 176 electoral votes, the free states had 95,



The Electoral Context in Antebellum America, 1788–1861

99

Free/Slave Status (1860) Free

Border Slave

Slave

Provisional Representationa

Table 5.2  House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1790 Census Congressional Seats and Electoral Votes House of Representatives

State

Populations

Non-Slaveb House Seats

Slavec House Seats

Total House Seats

7

0

7

2

9

235,145

1,589

236,734

237,793

Senate Seats

Electoral Votes

NonSlave

(3/5) x Slave

Constitutional Reapportionmentd

Totale

 

Connecticut

 

Massachusetts

14

0

14

2

16

378,693

0

378,693

378,693

 

New Hampshire

4

0

4

2

6

141,727

94

141,821

141,884

 

New Jersey

5

0

5

2

7

172,716

6,854

179,570

184,139

 

New York

10

0

10

2

12

318,824

12,716

331,540

340,017

 

Pennsylvania

13

0

13

2

15

430,630

2,224

432,854

434,337

 

Rhode Island

2

0

2

2

4

67,954

575

68,529

68,912

 

Vermont

2

0

2

2

4

85,423

0

85,423

85,423

 

Subtotal (8)

57

0

57

16

73

1,831,112

24,052

1,855,164

1,871,198

 

Delaware

1

0

1

2

3

50,209

5,332

55,541

59,096

 

Kentucky

2

0

2

2

4

61,247

7,458

68,705

73,677

 

Maryland

6

2

8

2

10

216,692

61,822

278,514

319,728

 

Subtotal (3)

9

2

11

6

17

328,148

74,612

402,760

452,501

 

Georgia

2

0

2

2

4

53,284

17,558

70,842

82,548

 

North Carolina

8

2

10

2

12

293,245

60,470

353,715

394,028

 

South Carolina

4

2

6

2

8

141,979

64,256

206,235

249,073



Tennessee

1

0

1

2

3

32,274

2,050

34,324

35,691

 

Virginia

14

5

19

2

21

454,983

175,576

630,559

747,610

 

Subtotal (5)

29

9

38

10

48

975,765

319,910

1,295,675

1,508,950

Total (16)

95

11

106

32

138

3,135,025

418,574

3,553,599

3,832,649

Sources: Bureau of the Census, Negro Population: 1790–1915 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918), pp. 44–45, 57; Joint Committee on Printing, Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1988). a

Provisional representation accorded by Congress to newly admitted states; not based on any census but pending the next census for determination by reapportionment.

b

Number of Non-Slave Representatives = Rounded((Non-slave population)/(Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population)) x Total House Seats).

c

Number of Slave Representatives = Rounded((((3/5) x Slave population)/(Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population)) x Total House Seats).

d

Populations in this column are constitutionally apportioned, except when provisionally represented. Re-apportioned population = Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population.

e

Total population = Non-slave population + Slave population.

compared to the 81 for the slave states, for a difference of 14. Hence, in each decade since the formation of the new nation, the slave states moved further and further away from parity, losing power and influence in the Congress and in each of the presidential elections. This was a far cry from the Continental Congress, where each state had one vote. Table 5.3 (p. 100) shows that slave populations in free states declined compared to the 1790 Census, because in these states the process of emancipation had begun, and they were

gradually abolishing slavery. However, while slavery in the free states was starting to disappear, the loss of this population did not result in the loss of seats and/or electoral votes. As shown in Tables 5.1 and 5.2, none of the free states had large enough slave populations to gain seats through reapportionment. Indeed, when former slaves remained in the state and became Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color, the state’s representation grew as they were counted as whole persons, rather than only as three-fifths of a person.

100

Chapter 5

Free/Slave Status (1860) Free

Border Slave

Slave

Provisional Representationa

Table 5.3  House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1800 Census Congressional Seats and Electoral Votes House of Representatives

State

 

Connecticut

 

Non-Slaveb House Seats

Slavec House Seats

Populations

Total House Seats

Senate Seats

Electoral Votes

NonSlave

(3/5) x Slave

Constitutional Reapportionmentd

Totale

7

0

7

2

9

250,051

571

250,622

251,002

Massachusetts

17

0

17

2

19

568,564

0

568,564

568,564

 

New Hampshire

5

0

5

2

7

183,850

5

183,855

183,858

 

New Jersey

6

0

6

2

8

198,727

7,453

206,180

211,149

 

New York

17

0

17

2

19

568,148

12,542

580,690

589,051



Ohio

1

0

1

2

3

45,365

0

45,365

45,365

 

Pennsylvania

18

0

18

2

20

600,659

1,024

601,683

602,365

 

Rhode Island

2

0

2

2

4

68,742

228

68,970

69,122

 

Vermont

4

0

4

2

6

154,465

0

154,465

154,465

 

Subtotal (9)

77

0

77

18

95

2,638,571

21,823

2,660,394

2,674,941

 

Delaware

1

0

1

2

3

58,120

3,692

61,812

64,273

 

Kentucky

5

1

6

2

8

180,662

24,230

204,892

221,045

 

Maryland

7

2

9

2

11

235,913

63,381

299,294

341,548

 

Subtotal (3)

13

3

16

6

22

474,695

91,303

565,998

626,866

 

Georgia

3

1

4

2

6

103,280

35,644

138,924

162,686

 

North Carolina

10

2

12

2

14

344,807

79,978

424,785

478,103

 

South Carolina

6

2

8

2

10

199,440

87,691

287,131

345,591

 

Tennessee

3

0

3

2

5

92,018

8,150

100,168

105,602

 

Virginia

16

6

22

2

24

534,404

207,478

741,882

880,200

 

Subtotal (5)

38

11

49

10

59

1,273,949

418,941

1,692,890

1,972,182

128

14

142

34

176

4,387,215

532,067

4,919,282

5,273,989

Total (17)

Sources: Bureau of the Census, Negro Population: 1790–1915 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918), pp. 44–45, 57; Joint Committee on Printing, Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1988). a

Provisional representation accorded by Congress to newly admitted states; not based on any census but pending the next census for determination by reapportionment.

b

Number of Non-Slave Representatives = Rounded((Non-slave population)/(Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population)) x Total House Seats).

c

Number of Slave Representatives = Rounded((((3/5) x Slave population)/(Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population)) x Total House Seats).

d

Populations in this column are constitutionally apportioned, except when provisionally represented. Re-apportioned population = Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population.

e

Total population = Non-slave population + Slave population.

The 1810 Census In the decade after the third Census in 1810, five new states joined the Union. There were two free states (Illinois, and Indiana) and the three slave states (Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi). Table 5.4 shows that four of these five states came in with provisional representation, and each received one seat in the House of Representatives. The Census of 1810 apportioned the 186 seats in the House of Representatives and the 230 electoral votes for presidential elections. The free states had 105 seats in the House and the slave states 81, for a difference of 24 seats. As for electoral votes, the free states had 127 and the slave states 103,

for a difference of 24 electoral votes. Thus, despite the balance in the number of states, the slave states were dropping further and further away from parity in political representation in the House and Electoral College influence with each Census. Of the free states of Table 5.4, only two, New York and New Jersey, reported significant slave populations, but the number of slaves in free states continued to drop. Slavery, as an institution, was slowly becoming geographically regionalized, from the free states in the North to the slave states in the South. The first three Censuses, as illustrated in our tables, document a slowly emerging trend that did not favor the slave states.



The Electoral Context in Antebellum America, 1788–1861

101

Free/Slave Status (1860) Free

Provisional Representationa

Table 5.4  House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1810 Census Congressional Seats and Electoral Votes House of Representatives

State

Slave

Slave House Seats c

Populations

Total House Seats

Senate Seats

Electoral Votes

NonSlave

(3/5) x Slave

Constitutional Reapportionmentd

Totale

 

Connecticut

7

0

7

2

9

261,632

186

261,818

261,942



Illinois

1

0

1

2

3

12,114

101

12,215

12,282



Indiana

1

0

1

2

3

24,283

142

24,425

24,520

 

Massachusetts

20

0

20

2

22

700,745

0

700,745

700,745

 

New Hampshire

6

0

6

2

8

214,460

0

214,460

214,460

 

New Jersey

6

0

6

2

8

234,711

6,511

241,222

245,562

 

New York

27

0

27

2

29

944,032

9,010

953,042

959,049

6

0

6

2

8

230,760

0

230,760

230,760

Ohio

Border Slave

Non-Slave House Seats

b

 

Pennsylvania

23

0

23

2

25

809,296

477

809,773

810,091

 

Rhode Island

2

0

2

2

4

76,823

65

76,888

76,931

 

Vermont

6

0

6

2

8

217,895

0

217,895

217,895

 

Subtotal (11)

105

0

105

22

127

3,726,751

16,492

3,743,243

3,754,237

 

Delaware

2

0

2

2

4

68,497

2,506

71,003

72,674

 

Kentucky

9

1

10

2

12

325,950

48,337

374,287

406,511

 

Maryland

7

2

9

2

11

269,044

66,901

335,945

380,546

 

Subtotal (3)

18

3

21

6

27

663,491

117,744

781,235

859,731



Alabama

1

0

1

2

3

0

0

0

0

 

Georgia

4

2

6

2

8

147,215

63,131

210,346

252,433



Louisiana

1

0

1

2

3

41,896

20,796

62,692

76,556



Mississippi

1

0

1

2

3

23,264

10,253

33,517

40,352

 

North Carolina

10

3

13

2

15

386,676

101,294

487,970

555,500

 

South Carolina

6

3

9

2

11

218,750

117,819

336,569

415,115

 

Tennessee

5

1

6

2

8

217,192

26,721

243,913

261,727

 

Virginia

16

7

23

2

25

582,084

235,510

817,594

974,600

 

Subtotal (8)

44

16

60

16

76

1,617,077

575,524

2,192,601

2,576,283

167

19

186

44

230

6,007,319

709,760

6,717,079

7,190,251

Total (22)

Sources: Bureau of the Census, Negro Population: 1790–1915 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918), pp. 44–45, 57; Joint Committee on Printing, Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1988). a

Provisional representation accorded by Congress to newly admitted states; not based on any census but pending the next census for determination by reapportionment.

b

Number of Non-Slave Representatives = Rounded((Non-slave population)/(Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population)) x Total House Seats).

c

Number of Slave Representatives = Rounded((((3/5) x Slave population)/(Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population)) x Total House Seats).

d

Populations in this column are constitutionally apportioned, except when provisionally represented. Re-apportioned population = Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population.

e

Total population = Non-slave population + Slave population.

The 1820 Census Table 5.5 (p. 102), which is based on the fourth Census in 1820, further demonstrates this emerging trend. Only one state was admitted during this decade, Missouri, which came

in as a slave state. Parity was again achieved, as there were now twelve free states and twelve slave states. The House of Representatives that year had 213 seats, with the free states accounting for 123 and the slave states 90, a difference of

102

Chapter 5

Free/Slave Status (1860) Free

Border Slave

Slave

Provisional Representationa

Table 5.5  House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1820 Census Congressional Seats and Electoral Votes House of Representatives Non-Slave House Seats

b

State

Slave House Seats c

Populations

Total House Seats

Senate Seats

Electoral Votes

NonSlave

(3/5) x Slave

Constitutional Reapportionmentd

Totale

 

Connecticut

6

0

6

2

8

275,151

58

275,209

275,248

 

Illinois

1

0

1

2

3

54,294

550

54,844

55,211

 

Indiana

3

0

3

2

5

146,988

114

147,102

147,178

 

Maine

7

0

7

2

9

298,335

0

298,335

298,335

 

Massachusetts

13

0

13

2

15

523,287

0

523,287

523,287

 

New Hampshire

6

0

6

2

8

244,161

0

244,161

244,161

 

New Jersey

6

0

6

2

8

270,018

4,534

274,552

277,575

 

New York

34

0

34

2

36

1,362,724

6,053

1,368,777

1,372,812

Ohio

14

0

14

2

16

581,434

0

581,434

581,434

 

Pennsylvania

26

0

26

2

28

1,049,247

127

1,049,374

1,049,458

 

Rhode Island

2

0

2

2

4

83,011

29

83,040

83,059

 

Vermont

5

0

5

2

7

235,981

0

235,981

235,981

 

Subtotal (12)

123

0

123

24

147

5,124,631

11,465

5,136,096

5,143,739

 

Delaware

1

0

1

2

3

68,240

2,705

70,945

72,749

 

Kentucky

10

2

12

2

14

437,585

76,039

513,624

564,317

 

Maryland

7

2

9

2

11

299,953

64,438

364,391

407,350

 

Missouri

1

0

1

2

3

56,364

6,133

62,497

66,586

 

Subtotal (4)

19

4

23

8

31

862,142

149,315

1,011,457

1,111,002

 

Alabama

2

1

3

2

5

86,022

25,127

111,149

127,901

 

Georgia

5

2

7

2

9

191,333

89,794

281,127

340,989

 

Louisiana

2

1

3

2

5

84,343

41,438

125,781

153,407

 

Mississippi

1

0

1

2

3

42,634

19,688

62,322

75,448

 

North Carolina

10

3

13

2

15

433,912

122,950

556,862

638,829

 

South Carolina

6

3

9

2

11

244,265

155,085

399,350

502,740

 

Tennessee

8

1

9

2

11

342,716

48,064

390,780

422,823

 

Virginia

16

6

22

2

24

640,218

255,089

895,307

1,065,366

 

Subtotal (8)

50

17

67

16

83

2,065,443

757,235

2,822,678

3,327,503

192

21

213

48

261

8,052,216

918,015

8,970,231

9,582,244

Total (24)

Sources: Bureau of the Census, Negro Population: 1790–1915 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918), pp. 44–45, 57; Joint Committee on Printing, Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1988). a

Provisional representation accorded by Congress to newly admitted states; not based on any census but pending the next census for determination by reapportionment.

b

Number of Non-Slave Representatives = Rounded((Non-slave population)/(Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population)) x Total House Seats).

c

Number of Slave Representatives = Rounded((((3/5) x Slave population)/(Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population)) x Total House Seats).

d

Populations in this column are constitutionally apportioned, except when provisionally represented. Re-apportioned population = Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population.

e

Total population = Non-slave population + Slave population.

33 seats. In the Electoral College, there were 261 electoral votes in total, with the free states holding 147 for a 33 vote edge over the 114 electoral votes of the slave states. Hence, even with a balance in number of states, the erosion of power and influence in terms of seats and electoral votes meant that the slave states were falling further and further behind. Up to this time New York and New Jersey were still reported to have slave populations; these two were the slowest of free states to emancipate their slave populations. Accompanying this Census in 1820 was the passage of the Missouri Compromise. Designed to reduce the intersectional strife and friction caused by power struggles that went along with adding slave and free states, this compromise “said that slavery was congressionally banned north of Missouri” in the federal territories.10 This congressional action allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state and Maine to enter as a free state because the compromise forbade slavery in places north of Missouri. Besides creating a geographical basis for the existence of slavery, the compromise also laid the foundation for Congress to pursue a policy of balance in admitting new states to the Union. For each new state admitted to the Union, there had to be an equal number of free and slave states after 1820. But as the Census data reveal, this compromise, rather than limiting the intersectional strife, increased it.

The 1830 Census With the 1830 Census, the slave states could readily see that their disadvantages were steadily increasing. Table 5.6 (p. 104) shows that two new states, Michigan and Arkansas, were added to the Union on a provisional basis and each was given one representative. Michigan was admitted as a free state and Arkansas as a slave state. During the 1830s, there was a grand total of 242 seats in the House of Representatives and 294 electoral votes for the presidential races. Of the 242 House seats, the free states had 142 to the slave states’ 100, for a difference of 42 seats. The free states had 168 electoral votes to 126 for the slave states, for a difference of 42 electoral votes. The data of 1830 reveal that the gaps in seats and votes between free and slave states had widened over the differences seen in the 1820 data.

The 1840 Census During the Census decade of 1840, as shown in Table 5.7 (p. 105), four new states were added to the Union, all provisionally: two free states, Iowa and Wisconsin, and the last two slave states, Florida and Texas. For the first time the House of Representatives actually declined in its number of seats over the previous decade, dropping to a total of 230 seats from 242 in 1830. Even with the additional states admitted, the number of electoral votes also declined to 290. Of the 230 House seats, the free states had 139 and the slave states had 91, for a difference of 48 seats, up 6 seats over the 1830 count despite the overall shrinkage of the House. Free states had 169 of the electoral votes and slave states had 121, for a difference of 48 votes, 6 more votes than the difference of the previous decade. Thus, with each passing decade, in a House of Representatives of increasing numbers and in a House of declining numbers,

The Electoral Context in Antebellum America, 1788–1861

103

the slave states, despite adding new states to their bloc, were losing power and influence in the Congress and presidential elections—the Three-Fifths Clause notwithstanding. The 48-seat and 48-vote disparities were the largest to this point in time. If this trend continued, the slave states would become too much of a minority in the House to defend the culture and politics of their region.

The 1850 Census To stop this erosion of political and electoral power, the slave states were able to push the Compromise of 1850 through Congress. “The period was ushered in by the controversy over slavery in the newly acquired territory in the Southwest,” that resulted from the United States’ war with Mexico.11 “With the discovery of gold in California in 1848 and the rapid peopling of many areas in the Mexican cession, a policy had to be decided upon.”12 In a bid to enhance its chances for statehood, California adopted a state constitution in 1849 with a clause prohibiting slavery. Historian John Hope Franklin described the situation: Some leaders held that the new territory should be divided into slave and free sections as in the Missouri Compromise. . . . Others . . . wanted . . . total exclusion of slavery from the territories. . . . Still others were of the position that the question should be decided by the people who lived in the new territories. . . . Finally, there were those who insisted that slavery could not be legally excluded anywhere. . . . 13 One of the things that helped to set off this renewed intersectional strife and animosity was the Supreme Court’s decision “in 1842, in the Case of Prigg v. Pennsylvania . . . [which ruled] that state officials were not required to assist in the return of fugitives, and the decision did much to render ineffective all efforts to recover slaves.”14 Leaders in the slave states felt that the fugitive slave clause in the Constitution had been set aside, and that this decision made the recovery of their human property even more difficult and expensive. Thus, slave state leadership and their slave owner constituencies felt that now they were not only losing political and electoral power but also their economic power. Therefore, they demanded that the 1850 Compromise contain “a stringent fugitive slave law,” but being a compromise, the non-slave states demanded and received the entrance of California as a free state and the end of the slave trade in Washington, D.C.15 It created, at best, a very uneasy and untenable situation for the moment, but the moment did not last long, and the nation stood on the verge of a dramatic re-shaping of the political landscape. Two years later, in 1852, “the appearance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin . . . increased the strain on intersectional relations. This novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe sold more than 300,000 copies in the first year of publication and was soon dramatized in theaters throughout the North.”16 The novel described in vivid and moving language the inhumanity and cruelty of slavery and the fugitive slave law and catchers. Now along with the attacks

104

Chapter 5

Free/Slave Status (1860) Free

Border Slave

Slave

Provisional Representationa

Table 5.6  House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1830 Census Congressional Seats and Electoral Votes House of Representatives Non-Slave House Seats

b

State

Slave House Seats c

Populations

Total House Seats

Senate Seats

Electoral Votes

NonSlave

(3/5) x Slave

Constitutional Reapportionmentd

Totale

 

Connecticut

6

0

6

2

8

297,650

15

297,665

297,675

 

Illinois

3

0

3

2

5

156,698

448

157,146

157,445

 

Indiana

7

0

7

2

9

343,028

2

343,030

343,031

 

Maine

8

0

8

2

10

399,453

1

399,454

399,455

 

Massachusetts

12

0

12

2

14

610,407

1

610,408

610,408



Michigan

1

0

1

2

3

31,607

19

31,626

31,639

 

New Hampshire

5

0

5

2

7

269,325

2

269,327

269,328

 

New Jersey

6

0

6

2

8

318,569

1,352

319,921

320,823

 

New York

40

0

40

2

42

1,918,533

45

1,918,578

1,918,608

Ohio

19

0

19

2

21

937,897

4

937,901

937,903

 

Pennsylvania

28

0

28

2

30

1,347,830

242

1,348,072

1,348,233

 

Rhode Island

2

0

2

2

4

97,182

10

97,192

97,199

 

Vermont

5

0

5

2

7

280,652

0

280,652

280,652

 

Subtotal (13)

142

0

142

26

168

7,008,831

2,141

7,010,972

7,012,399

 

Delaware

1

0

1

2

3

73,456

1,975

75,431

76,748

 

Kentucky

11

2

13

2

15

522,704

99,128

621,832

687,917

 

Maryland

7

1

8

2

10

344,046

61,796

405,842

447,040

 

Missouri

2

0

2

2

4

115,364

15,055

130,419

140,455

 

Subtotal (4)

21

3

24

8

32

1,055,570

177,954

1,233,524

1,352,160

 

Alabama

4

1

5

2

7

191,978

70,529

262,507

309,527



Arkansas

1

0

1

2

3

25,812

2,746

28,558

30,388

 

Georgia

6

3

9

2

11

299,292

130,519

429,811

516,823

 

Louisiana

2

1

3

2

5

106,151

65,753

171,904

215,739

 

Mississippi

1

1

2

2

4

70,962

39,395

110,357

136,621

 

North Carolina

10

3

13

2

15

492,386

147,361

639,747

737,987

 

South Carolina

5

4

9

2

11

265,784

189,241

455,025

581,185

 

Tennessee

11

2

13

2

15

540,301

84,962

625,263

681,904

 

Virginia

15

6

21

2

23

741,648

281,854

1,023,502

1,211,405

Subtotal (9)

55

21

76

18

94

2,734,314

1,012,360

3,746,674

4,421,579

218

24

242

52

294

10,798,715

1,192,455

11,991,170

12,786,138

 

Total (26)

Sources: Bureau of the Census, Negro Population: 1790–1915 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918), pp. 44–45, 57; Joint Committee on Printing, Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1988). a

Provisional representation accorded by Congress to newly admitted states; not based on any census but pending the next census for determination by reapportionment.

b

Number of Non-Slave Representatives = Rounded((Non-slave population)/(Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population)) x Total House Seats).

c

Number of Slave Representatives = Rounded((((3/5) x Slave population)/(Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population)) x Total House Seats).

Populations in this column are constitutionally apportioned, except when provisionally represented. Re-apportioned population = Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population. d

e

Total population = Non-slave population + Slave population.



The Electoral Context in Antebellum America, 1788–1861

105

Free/Slave Status (1860) Free

Border Slave

Slave

Provisional Representationa

Table 5.7  House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1840 Census Congressional Seats and Electoral Votes House of Representatives     State

Non-Slave House Seats

b

Slave House Seats c

Populations

Total House Seats

Senate Seats

Electoral Votes

NonSlave

(3/5) x Slave

Constitutional Reapportionmentd

Totale

 

Connecticut

4

0

4

2

6

304,961

10

304,971

304,978

 

Illinois

7

0

7

2

9

475,852

199

476,051

476,183

 

Indiana

10

0

10

2

12

685,863

2

685,865

685,866



Iowa

2

0

2

2

4

43,096

10

43,106

43,112

 

Maine

7

0

7

2

9

501,793

0

501,793

501,793

 

Massachusetts

10

0

10

2

12

737,699

0

737,699

737,699

 

Michigan

3

0

3

2

5

212,267

0

212,267

212,267

 

New Hampshire

4

0

4

2

6

284,573

1

284,574

284,574

 

New Jersey

5

0

5

2

7

372,632

404

373,036

373,306

 

New York

34

0

34

2

36

2,428,917

2

2,428,919

2,428,921

Ohio

21

0

21

2

23

1,519,464

2

1,519,466

1,519,467

 

Pennsylvania

24

0

24

2

26

1,723,969

38

1,724,007

1,724,033

 

Rhode Island

2

0

2

2

4

108,825

3

108,828

108,830

 

Vermont

4

0

4

2

6

291,948

0

291,948

291,948



Wisconsin

2

0

2

2

4

30,934

7

30,941

30,945

 

Subtotal (15)

139

0

139

30

169

9,722,793

678

9,723,471

9,723,922

 

Delaware

1

0

1

2

3

75,480

1,563

77,043

78,085

 

Kentucky

8

2

10

2

12

597,570

109,355

706,925

779,828

 

Maryland

5

1

6

2

8

380,282

53,842

434,124

470,019

 

Missouri

5

0

5

2

7

325,462

34,944

360,406

383,702

 

Subtotal (4)

19

3

22

8

30

1,378,794

199,704

1,578,498

1,711,634

 

Alabama

5

2

7

2

9

337,224

152,119

489,343

590,756

 

Arkansas

1

0

1

2

3

77,639

11,961

89,600

97,574



Florida

1

0

1

2

3

28,760

15,430

44,190

54,477

 

Georgia

6

2

8

2

10

409,848

168,566

578,414

690,792

 

Louisiana

3

1

4

2

6

183,959

101,071

285,030

352,411

 

Mississippi

2

2

4

2

6

180,440

117,127

297,567

375,651

 

North Carolina

7

2

9

2

11

507,602

147,490

655,092

753,419

 

South Carolina

4

3

7

2

9

267,360

196,223

463,583

594,398

 

Tennessee

9

2

11

2

13

646,151

109,835

755,986

829,210



Texasf

2

0

2

2

4

0

0

0

0

 

Virginia

11

4

15

2

17

790,810

269,392

1,060,202

1,239,797

 

Subtotal (11)

51

18

69

22

91

3,429,793

1,289,214

4,719,007

5,578,485

209

21

230

60

290

14,531,380

1,489,596

16,020,976

17,014,041

Total (30)

Sources: Bureau of the Census, Negro Population: 1790–1915 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918), pp. 44–45, 57; Joint Committee on Printing, Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1988). a Provisional representation accorded by Congress to newly admitted states; not based on any census but pending the next census for determination by reapportionment. b Number of Non-Slave Representatives = Rounded((Non-slave population)/(Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population)) x Total House Seats). c Number of Slave Representatives = Rounded((((3/5) x Slave population)/(Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population)) x Total House Seats). d Populations in this column are constitutionally apportioned, except when provisionally represented. Re-apportioned population = Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population. e Total population = Non-slave population + Slave population. f Census population data were not available for the provisional admission of Texas to the United States.

106

Chapter 5

and criticisms from the abolitionists, the slave states were losing the battle for public opinion. More importantly, the impact and influence of the novel had the potential to further erode their political and electoral power by setting into motion two new political realities. First, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, introduced by Illinois’ Democratic senator Stephen Douglas, undermined the temporary sectional truce generated by the 1850 Compromise. This new legislation provided that “Kansas and Nebraska should be organized as territories and that the question of slavery should be decided by territorial legislatures.”17 It ended up creating what historians call “Bleeding Kansas,” due to violent confrontations in the territory between pro-slavery southerners and “free soil” northerners over the type of state that the territory would become. The second new political reality occurred in the same year, 1854, with the founding of the Republican Party in Ripon, Wisconsin, dedicated to stopping the expansion of slavery into the new territories. Republican leaders vowed to halt the continuing efforts of pro-slavery political forces to return the nation to a pro-slavery republic. The Republican Party was developed to fill the political vacuum created by the collapse and fall of the Whig Party.18 Although these two new political realities became the new political engines driving intersectional strife and rivalry, the slave states were further aggrieved by the results of reapportionment from the 1850 Census. Table 5.8 displays the results of the 1850 Census. Near the end of this decade two new states, Minnesota and Oregon, entered the Union as free states. The slave states lost significant ground simply because, for the first time, there was no admittance of slave states to offset the new free states. With this handicap, the advantage of the free states in the House of Representatives increased to 57 seats over the slave states (only 90 seats as compared to the free states’ 147 out of the grand total of 237 seats). In the Electoral College there were 303 votes, of which free states held 183 and slave states 120, creating a difference of 63 votes. The pattern of lost political power and influence in presidential elections through the shift in the Electoral College was quite apparent. The leaders of the slave states could clearly see that free states had an ever-rising majority of seats in the House of Representatives and could outvote the slaves states; this was even more likely as northern public opinion was becoming strongly anti-slavery. Without new slave states, not even the Three-Fifths Clause could forestall the political and electoral power of the slave states slipping away, and the possibility grew that the very institution of slavery might also perish.

The 1860 Census With the advent of the 1860 Census, the nation was on the verge of civil war. Kansas entered the Union as a free state in January 1861, just months ahead of the start of hostilities in April 1861. In 1863, the Union-occupied territory of West Virginia was

formed as a free state, separated from the slave state of Virginia in the midst of the war. Nevada was also admitted in 1864. Of course, all of these states entered as free states. Two of these states had provisional representation, while one, Kansas, was fully represented. The point here is that with the onset of the war, the political and electoral power of slave states continued to decline. Table 5.9 (p. 108) shows that in 1860 the House of Representatives had a grand total of 243 seats and that the free states held 158 seats to only 85 for the slave states, for difference of 73 seats. Free states now had a near two-thirds majority (65.0%) of seats in the House of Representatives and a 42 to 30 advantage in the Senate. The slave states were at their political mercy. At the Electoral College level, there were 315 votes for presidential elections. Here, the free states held 200 electoral votes to the slave states’ 115—a difference of 85 electoral votes. This meant that the free states alone had enough electoral votes to decide a presidential contest—indeed, in 1860, Republican Abraham Lincoln won the White House without a single southern electoral vote. If the Three-Fifths Clause population were to be eliminated, slave states would drop to an even smaller minority, and possibly to a “permanent minority” in the congressional and presidential politics of the nation. This population predicament makes evident the urgency that led the slave states to withdraw from the Union after Republican Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860. South Carolina seceded first, and the other ten states of the old South followed in short order, setting up the Confederate States of America. Despite this secession, the Three-Fifths Clause remained in the Constitution, and the four border slave states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri remained in the Union to fight against the South in the Civil War. During the eight decades prior to the Civil War, some twenty-one states were added to the Union. Twelve of the twenty-one were admitted as free states and only nine were admitted as slave states. Figure 5.1 (p. 109) shows the number of states admitted by decade. Aside from the initial year of 1789, the decades of the 1810s, 1840s, and 1860s were the periods when the largest numbers of states joined the Union. Table 5.10 (p. 109) lists the states by the decade that they were admitted as well as the year of admission and their status on the issue of slavery as of 1860. Eventually, the slave states simply ran out of geographical territory for more states, as the western climate was not amenable to the cash crops that slaves had planted and harvested, and the would-be western states, seeing the growing power of the existing free states, cast their lot against becoming slave states. Figure 5.2 (p. 109) shows the numerical parity of free and slave states from the national founding through the decade of the 1860s. There was parity in the number of free and slave states in the 1790s and again from 1812, when Louisiana became a slave state, until 1850, when California was admitted as a free state. Then began a run that added two more free states before the advent of the Civil War and three more during the war.



The Electoral Context in Antebellum America, 1788–1861

107

Free/Slave Status (1860)

Provisional Representationa

Table 5.8  House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1850 Census

Free

Border Slave

Slave

Congressional Seats and Electoral Votes House of Representatives     State

Non-Slave House Seats

b

Slave House Seats c

Populations

Total House Seats

Senate Seats

California

2

0

2

2

 

Connecticut

4

0

4

 

Illinois

9

0

9

 

Indiana

11

0

 

Iowa

2

0

 

Maine

 

Massachusetts

Electoral Votes

NonSlave

(3/5) x Slave

Constitutional Reapportionmentd

Totale

4

92,597

0

92,597

92,597

2

6

370,792

0

370,792

370,792

2

11

851,470

0

851,470

851,470

11

2

13

988,416

0

988,416

988,416

2

2

4

192,214

0

192,214

192,214

6

0

6

2

8

583,169

0

583,169

583,169

11

0

11

2

13

994,514

0

994,514

994,514

 

Michigan

4

0

4

2

6

397,654

0

397,654

397,654



Minnesota

2

0

2

2

4

6,077

0

6,077

6,077

 

New Hampshire

3

0

3

2

5

317,976

0

317,976

317,976

 

New Jersey

5

0

5

2

7

489,319

142

489,461

489,555

 

New York

33

0

33

2

35

3,097,394

0

3,097,394

3,097,394

Ohio

21

0

21

2

23

1,980,329

0

1,980,329

1,980,329



Oregon

1

0

1

2

3

13,294

0

13,294

13,294

 

Pennsylvania

25

0

25

2

27

2,311,786

0

2,311,786

2,311,786

 

Rhode Island

2

0

2

2

4

147,545

0

147,545

147,545

 

Vermont

3

0

3

2

5

314,120

0

314,120

314,120

 

Wisconsin

 

Subtotal (18)

   

3

0

3

2

5

305,391

0

305,391

305,391

147

0

147

36

183

13,454,057

142

13,454,199

13,454,293

Delaware

1

0

1

2

3

89,242

1,374

90,616

91,532

Kentucky

9

1

10

2

12

771,424

126,589

898,013

982,405

 

Maryland

5

1

6

2

8

492,666

54,221

546,887

583,034

 

Missouri

6

1

7

2

9

594,622

52,453

647,075

682,044

 

Subtotal (4)

21

3

24

8

32

1,947,954

234,637

2,182,591

2,339,015

 

Alabama

5

2

7

2

9

428,779

205,706

634,485

771,623

 

Arkansas

2

0

2

2

4

162,797

28,260

191,057

209,897

 

Florida

1

0

1

2

3

48,135

23,586

71,721

87,445

 

Georgia

6

2

8

2

10

524,503

229,009

753,512

906,185

 

Louisiana

3

1

4

2

6

272,953

146,885

419,838

517,762

 

Mississippi

3

2

5

2

7

296,648

185,927

482,575

606,526

 

North Carolina

6

2

8

2

10

580,491

173,129

753,620

869,039

 

South Carolina

3

3

6

2

8

283,523

230,990

514,513

668,507

 

Tennessee

8

2

10

2

12

763,258

143,675

906,933

1,002,717

 

Texas

 

Virginia

 

2

0

2

2

4

154,431

34,897

189,328

212,592

10

3

13

2

15

949,133

283,517

1,232,650

1,421,661

49

17

66

22

88

4,464,651

1,685,581

6,150,232

7,273,954

217

20

237

66

303

19,866,662

1,920,360

21,787,022

23,067,262

Subtotal (11) Total (33)

Sources: Bureau of the Census, Negro Population: 1790–1915 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918), pp. 44–45, 57; Joint Committee on Printing, Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1988). a

Provisional representation accorded by Congress to newly admitted states; not based on any census but pending the next census for determination by reapportionment.

b

Number of Non-Slave Representatives = Rounded((Non-slave population)/(Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population)) x Total House Seats).

c

Number of Slave Representatives = Rounded((((3/5) x Slave population)/(Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population)) x Total House Seats).

d

Populations in this column are constitutionally apportioned, except when provisionally represented. Re-apportioned population = Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population.

e

Total population = Non-slave population + Slave population.

108

Chapter 5

Free/Slave Status (1860)

Provisional Representationa

Table 5.9  House of Representatives Seats and Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause, 1860 Census

Free

Border Slave

Slave

Congressional Seats and Electoral Votes House of Representatives     State

Non-Slave House Seats

b

Slave House Seats c

Populations

Total House Seats

Senate Seats

Electoral Votes

NonSlave

(3/5) x Slave

Constitutional Reapportionmentd

Totale

California

3

0

3

2

5

327,263

0

327,263

 

Connecticut

4

0

4

2

6

460,131

0

460,131

327,263 460,131

 

Illinois

14

0

14

2

16

1,711,919

0

1,711,919

1,711,919

 

Indiana

11

0

11

2

13

1,350,138

0

1,350,138

1,350,138

 

Iowa

6

0

6

2

8

674,848

0

674,848

674,848

 

Kansas

1

0

1

2

3

107,015

1

107,016

107,017

 

Maine

5

0

5

2

7

628,274

0

628,274

628,274

 

Massachusetts

10

0

10

2

12

1,231,034

0

1,231,034

1,231,034

 

Michigan

6

0

6

2

8

742,941

0

742,941

742,941

 

Minnesota

2

0

2

2

4

169,654

0

169,654

169,654

 

Nebraska

1

0

1

2

3

28,763

9

28,772

28,778

Nevada

1

0

1

2

3

6,857

0

6,857

6,857

 

New Hampshire

3

0

3

2

5

326,073

0

326,073

326,073

 

New Jersey

5

0

5

2

7

672,017

11

672,028

672,035

 

New York

31

0

31

2

33

3,880,595

0

3,880,595

3,880,595

Ohio

19

0

19

2

21

2,339,481

0

2,339,481

2,339,481

1

0

1

2

3

52,288

0

52,288

52,288

 

Oregon

 

Pennsylvania

24

0

24

2

26

2,906,208

0

2,906,208

2,906,208

 

Rhode Island

2

0

2

2

4

174,601

0

174,601

174,601

 

Vermont

3

0

3

2

5

315,078

0

315,078

315,078

 

Wisconsin

6

0

6

2

8

774,864

0

774,864

774,864

 

Subtotal (21)

158

0

158

42

200

18,880,042

21

18,880,063

18,880,077

 

Delaware

1

0

1

2

3

110,418

1,079

111,497

112,216

 

Kentucky

8

1

9

2

11

930,168

135,290

1,065,458

1,155,651

 

Maryland

5

0

5

2

7

599,860

52,313

652,173

687,049

 

Missouri

8

1

9

2

11

1,067,061

68,959

1,136,020

1,181,992

 

West Virginia f

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

 

Subtotal (5)

22

2

24

8

32

2,707,507

257,641

2,965,148

3,136,908

 

Alabama

4

2

6

2

8

528,961

261,048

790,009

964,041

 

Arkansas

2

1

3

2

5

324,287

66,669

390,956

435,402

 

Florida

1

0

1

2

3

78,678

37,047

115,725

140,423

 

Georgia

5

2

7

2

9

595,050

277,319

872,369

1,057,248

 

Louisiana

3

2

5

2

7

376,103

199,036

575,139

707,829

 

Mississippi

3

2

5

2

7

354,672

261,979

616,651

791,303

 

North Carolina

5

2

7

2

9

660,405

198,635

859,040

991,464

 

South Carolina

2

2

4

2

6

301,214

241,444

542,658

703,620

 

Tennessee

7

1

8

2

10

834,022

165,431

999,453

1,109,741

 

Texas

3

1

4

2

6

421,246

109,540

530,786

603,812

 

Virginia

9

2

11

2

13

1,105,341

294,519

1,399,860

1,596,206

44

17

61

22

83

5,579,979

2,112,667

7,692,646

9,101,089

224

19

243

72

315

27,167,528

2,370,329

29,537,857

31,118,074

 

Subtotal (11) Total (37)

Sources: Bureau of the Census, Negro Population: 1790–1915 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918), pp. 44–45, 57; Joint Committee on Printing, Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1988). a Provisional representation accorded by Congress to newly admitted states; not based on any census but pending the next census for determination by reapportionment. b Number of Non-Slave Representatives = Rounded((Non-slave population)/(Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population)) x Total House Seats). c Number of Slave Representatives = Rounded((((3/5) x Slave population)/(Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population)) x Total House Seats). d Populations in this column are constitutionally apportioned, except when provisionally represented. Re-apportioned population = Non-slave population + (3/5) x Slave population. e Total population = Non-slave population + Slave population. f West Virginia, formed from the slave state of Virginia, was admitted to the Union as a free state in 1863, one year after the reapportionment based on the 1860 census became effective in 1862. West Virginia is introduced here among the Border (Slave) states without population and representation data.



The Electoral Context in Antebellum America, 1788–1861 Figure 5.1  Number of States Admitted to the United States by Decade, 1787–1860s

Number of States Admitted

14

Table 5.10  States Admitted to the Union of the United States, Founding–1870

13

Decade of Admittance to the Union

12 10 8 6

5

4

4

3

2

2

1

2

Original Thirteen States 1787–1790 a

4

3

Slaveholding Status as of 1860 Number Admitted

Year Admitted

13

1787 1787 1787 1788 1788 1788 1788 1788 1788 1788 1788 1789 1790

s 60 18

s

s

s 50 18

40 18

30

s

s

18

20 18

10

s

18

17

00

s 90

79 –1 17

87

18

0

0

Decade

Source: Table 5.10.

State

3

25

1800s

18 15 15 15

15 11 11

10 6

5

8 8

7

8

1

1803

15

1810s

5

1820s

2

9

1812 1816 1817 1818 1819

s 60 18

s 50 18

s 40 18

s 18

30

s 20 18

s 10 18

s 00 18

90 17

79 17

Decade Border and Slave States

1830s

2

1840s

4

Free States

1836 1837

Longitudinal Analysis of the Three-Fifths Clause Moving from our decade-by-decade analysis of the impact and influence of the Three-Fifths Clause and to a more dynamic longitudinal analysis, as shown in Figure 5.3 (p. 110), one sees how the number of seats granted by the Three-Fifths Clause evolved and peaked in the decade of the 1830s and began a descent afterward until 1860. The average number of seats granted to the slave states by the Three-Fifths Clause for this period was 18, and this number was surpassed in the decade of the 1810s, shortly after the new nation was formed. When these data concerning the number of seats in the House of Representatives attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause are analyzed from the perspective of percentages, Figure 5.4 (p. 110) reveals that in 1789 the House of Representatives began with over 15% of its seats attributable to the clause. Slave states held nearly 80% of

1845 1845 1846 1848

3

1850 1858 1859

1860s

4

1861 1863 1864 1867

Total Number of States 37

11

3

5

3

5

3

8

Free Border Slave 12

4

8

Slave Free 13

4

9

Slave Slave Free Free 15

California Minnesota Oregon

4

11

Free Free Free 18

Kansas West Virginia Nevada Nebraska

Cumulative Totals 1787–1870

4

Slave Free Slave Free Slave

Florida Texas Iowa Wisconsin

Cumulative Totals

2

Free 9

Arkansas Michigan

Cumulative Totals 1850s

8

Maine Missouri

Cumulative Totals Source: Table 5.10.

Slave

Free Border Slave Slave

Louisiana Indiana Mississippi Illinois Alabama

Cumulative Totals

87

–1

s

0

1820 1821

7

Ohio

Cumulative Totals

Border Slave Border Slave Free Free Slave Free Free Border Slave Slave Free Slave Free Slave Free

Vermont Kentucky Tennessee

Cumulative Totals

13 13

12 12

1791 1792 1796

Cumulative Totals

22

0

Cumulative Number of States in the Union

1790s

Free

Delaware Pennsylvania New Jersey Georgia Connecticut Massachusetts Maryland South Carolina New Hampshire Virginia New York North Carolina Rhode Island

Cumulative Totals Figure 5.2  Numerical Parity of Free and Slave States in the United States by Decade, 1787–1860s

20

109

4

11

Free Free Free Free 22

4

11

Free States Slave States Border Slave States

22 11  4

59.5% 29.7% 10.8%

Source: Adapted from Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), p. 38. Calculations by the authors. a

By year of ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

110

Chapter 5

Figure 5.3  Number of House of Representatives Seats Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause by Decade, 1787–1860s 30

Number of House Seats

25

20

15

10

5

Decade

0

Number of HR Seats Mean

1787–1790

1790s

1800s

1810s

1820s

1830s

1840s

1850s

1860s

10 18

11 18

14 18

19 18

21 18

24 18

21 18

20 18

19 18

Sources: Tables 5.1–5.9.

Figure 5.4  Percentage of House of Representatives Seats Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause by Decade, 1787–1860s 18% 16%

Percent of House Seats

14% 12% 10% 8% 6% 4% 2% 0%

1787–1790

1790s

1800s

1810s

1820s

1830s

1840s

1850s

1860s

% of HR Seats

15.4%

10.4%

9.9%

10.2%

9.9%

9.9%

9.1%

8.4%

7.8%

Mean % of HR Seats*

10.1%

10.1%

10.1%

10.1%

10.1%

10.1%

10.1%

10.1%

10.1%

Decade

Sources: Tables 5.1–5.9.



The Electoral Context in Antebellum America, 1788–1861

these seats (with the rest among the border slave states) and kept this advantage as slavery concentrated in its grip and the percentage of attributable seats steadily declined. The causes of this decline included a steadily increasing national population with most of the growth in the free states, the increasing number of people represented by each House seat, and the constricted size of the House of Representatives beginning with the reapportionment of 1840. The mean percentage of the seats in the House of Representatives attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause stood at 10.1% for the eight decades covered during this period. The graphic data are a reflection of the tabular data. In both data sets the decade of the 1830s is revealed as the turning point in terms of the number and percentage of seats attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause. Again, analyzing these data from the perspective of percentages, Figure 5.5 indicates that both initially and for the next two decades, the 1790s and 1800s, the percentages of Three-Fifths Clause electoral votes that the slave states could cast in the Electoral College declined from 11.0% to 8.0%, just above the mean of 7.9% for the period (1787–1860s). Through the decades of the 1810s, 1820s, and 1830s, the electoral votes given by the ThreeFifths Clause stood near and slightly above the mean. Then, in 1840, the turning point came with a decline which continued below the mean until 1860. In the final analysis, what happened with the numbers and percentages of seats in the House of Representatives is reflected in the numbers and percentages of the Electoral College votes. The slave states steadily lost both seats and electoral votes in the competition with the free states. Power

was lost in both the House of Representatives and the Electoral College in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, and the slave states never again increased their political and electoral power. Figure 5.6 (p. 112) shows the total number of electoral votes cast each decade in relationship to the number of votes that were attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause and the mean of the clause votes over the Antebellum period. The growing number of states in the Union and the growing population of the nation greatly increased the total number of votes in the Electoral College. The electoral votes attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause were basically overwhelmed. From the initial conception of the nation these votes declined steadily as a political advantage for the slave states. Still, only three-fifths of the slaves counted in this scheme. There was no way, given the ban on importation of slaves after 1820, for the formula to maintain parity with the other populations, where each person, including the Free-Menand-Women-of-Color, was counted at 100% in apportionments for representation. The slave states had to discount two-fifths of their slaves in the political bargain of the Three-Fifths Clause. They fell victim to a power arrangement that was supposed to yield a sustaining political advantage from their slave populations. Ultimately, the formula could not protect the slave states from the diminishing returns of slavery in a growing and evolving nation. Somehow, their leadership did not see this coming or could not find a way to overcome it. The duality of African American demography was dynamic and continued to grow and expand throughout the expansion of

Figure 5.5  Percentage of Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause by Decade, 1787–1860s 12%

Percent of Electoral Votes

10%

8%

6%

4%

2%

Decade

0%

% of Electoral Votes Mean % of Electoral Votes* Sources: Tables 5.1–5.9.

111

1787–1790

1790s

1800s

1810s

1820s

1830s

1840s

1850s

1860s

11.0% 7.9%

8.0% 7.9%

8.0% 7.9%

8.3% 7.9%

8.0% 7.9%

8.2% 7.9%

7.2% 7.9%

6.6% 7.9%

6.0% 7.9%

112

Chapter 5

Figure 5.6  Total Electoral Votes and Number of Electoral Votes Attributable to the Three-Fifths Clause by Decade, 1787–1860s 350

Number of Electoral Votes

300

250

200

150

100

50

Decade Number of Electoral Votes

0

1787–1790 91

1790s 138

1800s 176

1810s 230

1820s 261

1830s 294

1840s 290

1850s 303

1860s 315

10 18

11 18

14 18

19 18

21 18

24 18

21 18

20 18

19 18

Number of 3/5 Clause Votes Mean of 3/5 Clause Votes Sources: Tables 5.1–5.9.

the new nation. Figure 5.7 demonstrates the evolution of these dual populations over the eight decades in this era. The slave population grew substantially during this period, reaching some 4 million individuals. The population of Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color increased much more slowly and reached about 500,000. The growth rate of the slave population and application of the ThreeFifths Clause yielded a rather steady percentage—about 23%—of the House of Representatives and electoral vote delegations for the slave states.19 While with more limited growth and few states willing

Figure 5.7  African American Population Growth in the United States by Slavery Status, 1790–1860

to grant them suffrage rights, the free population contributed little to their states’ congressional delegations and electoral votes. Yet the problem overall for the slave states was that their total population never amounted to much more than half that of the free states. Figure 5.8 illustrates that the white population in the slave states did not keep pace with the white population in the free states. In free states Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color counted as whole persons and counted equally in reapportionments for seats in the House of Representatives, even though many of these

Figure 5.8  White Population Growth in the United States by Slavery Status of Residence, 1790–1860

4.5 3.5

Population (Millions)

Population (Millions)

4.0 3.0 2.5 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0.0

1790

1800

1810

1820 1830 Census Year

African American Slaves

1840

1850

1860

20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0

1790s

1800s

1810s

1820s

1830s

1840s

1850s

1860s

Census Year Free African Americans

Source: Bureau of the Census, Negro Population: 1790–1915 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918), pp. 44–45, 57.

Free States

Slave States

Border Slave States

Sources: Bureau of the Census, Negro Population: 1790–1915 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918), pp. 44–45, 57.

The Electoral Context in Antebellum America, 1788–1861

states forbade them from voting. Since there were few Free-Menand-Women-of-Color in the slave states, their numbers did not contribute nearly as much to garnering House seats for slave states as did counting 60% of the much more numerous slave population. In addition, the free states that had slaves could still count them under the Three-Fifths Clause. Thus, the free states, with collectively a greater population that was fully counted, had an advantage over the slave states. Figure 5.9 highlights this dilemma and the problem inherent within the Three-Fifths Clause for the slave states by juxtaposing the population growth of these groups against one another. It becomes quite clear that the white population grew much faster than the slave population. Thus, since the slave population, concentrated in the slave states, did not grow as rapidly as total white population, the slave states’ reliance on the Three-Fifths Clause appears, in hindsight, to have had diminishing benefit over time. Finally, Figure 5.10 provides a longitudinal portrait of how the Three-Fifths Clause contributed to the electoral votes of the slave states. There is no question that the slave states initially

113

Figure 5.9  African American and White Population Growth in the United States, 1790–1860 35 30 Population (Millions)



25 20 15 10 5 0

1790s

1800s

1810s

1820s 1830s Census Year

Whites Free African Americans

1840s

1850s

1860s

African American Slaves Whites + African Americans

Source: Bureau of the Census, Negro Population: 1790–1915 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918), pp. 44–45, 57.

Figure 5.10  Number of Electoral Votes by Slavery Status Grouping of States, 1787–1860s 350

Number of Electoral Votes

300 250 200 150 100 50 0

1787–1790

1790s

1800s

1810s

1820s

1830s

1840s

1850s

1860s

Total Votes

91

138

176

230

261

294

290

303

315

Free States

49

73

95

127

147

168

169

183

200

Slave States

31

48

59

76

83

94

91

88

83

Border Slave States

11

17

22

27

31

32

30

32

32

Decade

Source: Joint Committee on Printing, Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1774–1989 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1988).

received a significant boost in electoral votes through the ThreeFifths Clause, but as previous data analyses have shown, the turning point came after the 1830 reapportionment when this electoral vote advantage began to dissipate. Secondly, from the outset of the nation the free states had a clear electoral advantage over the slave states; over time this advantage increased despite the constitutional reapportionment mechanism that had been intended to maintain a measure of political parity between free and slave states.

Population growth in the largely rural slave states simply did not keep pace with that of the free states. Matching the free states in number rather than population was more practical and realistic for the slave states because they wanted both to continue with slavery and to remain politically competitive with the free states, and they could not legally import slaves after 1808. In 1830 the population gap between the two regions had become wide and continued to grow ever wider.

114

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Accounting for the Missing “Two-Fifths of a Person” The Three-Fifths Clause enhanced the power of the slave states in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. Such a constitutional clause not only depicted the other two-fifths (2/5ths) of every slave as a non-person/non-human and simply property but the whole of these slaves as non-political forces and factors. The clause put 40% of the slave population tally completely outside of the political system in order to limit the political enrichment of slave states. But certainly the concept may very well have had the result of discounting full suffrage rights for Free-Men-andWomen-of-Color, even in non-slave states. In fact, no previous scholarly work on the Three-Fifths Clause has ever empirically analyzed the 2/5ths feature longitudinally. By presenting only 60% of a people, one leaves out the other 40%, and the resultant portrait is only a partial one. Discussion of this second dimension permits a complete portrait. Nor has anyone, at this writing, empirically analyzed what eventually happened to the Three-Fifths Clause in terms of the representation of former slave states in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College when action of the federal government eventually reversed the Three-Fifths Clause. Figure 5.11 shows the political meaning of the 2/5ths feature throughout the Antebellum Era. Holding slaves generated more representation and enhanced political power for the slave states up until 1830. Although the overall slave population steadily declined as a proportion of total population, among slave states the uncounted 2/5ths portion of slaves still remained as a potential reapportionment bonanza. But realizing this voting power would have required removing the yoke of slavery from most African Americans in slave states. The equivalent of nearly one million slaves were excluded from the 1840 House of Representatives reapportionment. Since the southern political leaders felt that their political power was being slowly eroded by the entrance of new states and the growing population in the north, they might have considered revisiting the lost 2/5ths component of the African American slave population as a strategy to regain empowerment, but this idea never surfaced as a tool to re-empowerment. Not only did it not surface amidst a large Figure 5.11  Two-Fifths of African American Slave Population as a Share of Total U.S. Population, 1790–1860

Percent of U.S. Population

8% 7%

7.3%

6.7%

6.6%

6%

6.4%

6.2%

5.8%

5.6%

5%

5.1%

4% 3% 2% 1% 0%

1790

1800

1810

1820 1830 Census Year

1840

1850

1860

Two-Fifths of African American Slave Population Source: Bureau of the Census, Negro Population: 1790–1915 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918), pp. 44–45, 57.

array of southern tactics and strategies, but redeeming this population would not in the end have helped very much with the losses of political power and economic riches. Undoubtedly, to count this lost population in favor of the slave states was a conjecture that the free states saw as ludicrous, without granting full citizenship to African Americans in the slave states and destroying the institution of slavery. However, recognizing African Americans, even in the free states, as equal human beings and citizens was a thought that was beyond the imagination of most of the electorate.

The Death of the Three-Fifths Clause Now we turn to the second aspect of the federal government and suffrage rights: government action to reverse the Three-Fifths Clause came about not as a determined and carefully worked out approach. It came instead with the secession of South Carolina from the Union in 1861, followed by ten other southern states, launching the Civil War. Constitutional scholar Nieman opines that “in the spring and summer of 1861, few predicted the revolutionary consequences of the Civil War for American constitutionalism and the rights of blacks.”20 The next step in this unplanned process to reverse the Three-Fifths Clause was the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, which was supposed to free the slaves in the states of the Rebellion and not in the four border slave states that remained and fought with the Union. Hence, only the eleven states of the Confederacy lost their right to the Three-Fifths Clause representation in the House of Representatives. But since these states had already withdrawn from the Union, the question about their use of the Three-Fifths Clause was moot and academic. Nevertheless, the Three-Fifths Clause was still legally binding for the states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Thus, initially the Three-Fifths Clause was not eliminated but only partially reversed. The actual death of the Three-Fifths Clause came when the North won the Civil War in 1865 as the president and later the Congress would set the terms for the re-admission of the former Confederate states to the Union. In addition, there was the matter of the limitations and weaknesses embedded in the Emancipation Proclamation: Because the Proclamation left many slaves—including most of those in the border states—in bondage and was almost certain to be challenged in the courts, Republicans employed the amendment process to make emancipation universal and irreversible. Senate Republicans mustered enough votes to pass an antislavery amendment in early 1864, but despite solid Republican support, the House fell several votes shy of the two-thirds majority necessary to pass it. On January 31, 1865, however, with Lincoln promising patronage to gain votes from the opposition, Congress passed an amendment prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States and giving Congress authority to enforce the prohibition. Before the year was out, three-fourths of the state legislatures had given their assent, and the Thirteenth Amendment became a part of the Constitution.21



The Electoral Context in Antebellum America, 1788–1861

Ratification of this amendment took place on December 6, 1865, and later the Fourteenth Amendment on July 9, 1868; with that, the Three-Fifths Clause passed into oblivion. It had been at this point in time legally destroyed. The federal government had finally reversed both the Three-Fifths Clause and the 2/5ths feature of that clause. The subsequent Civil War amendment, the Fifteenth, which was ratified on February 3, 1870, further buried the Three-Fifths Clause. And long before the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment the Military Reconstruction Acts, which “passed over a presidential veto in March 1867,” provided that military commanders in ten of the southern states register African American voters to participate in the state constitutional conventions as well as to elect representatives to state legislatures and Congress.22 Such actions allowed even former slaves to become members of Congress. Table 5.11 shows the number of representatives that each of the states of the Confederacy had in the House of Representatives in 1860 with the Three-Fifths Clause in place and the number in 1872 and 1882 after these states had been re-admitted to the Union and reapportionment had occurred. The data in this table show that most of the states of the Confederacy, which had been advantaged by the Three-Fifths Clause, gained even more advantage after the Civil War and their re-admittance to the Union simply because now the entire African American population was counted. In 1872 these eleven states had five more representatives than they had when they seceded from the Union in 1861. After another decade, in 1882, these eleven states would have eighteen more seats in the House of Representatives and votes in the Electoral College than they had before they seceded. Table 5.11  Number of Seats in the House of Representatives Held by the Slave States during and after the Period of the Three-Fifths Clause, 1860, 1872, and 1882 During the Three-Fifths Clause States

After the Period of the Three-Fifths Clause

Difference (1860–1882)

1860

1872

1882

Alabama

7a

7

8b

1

Arkansas

2

4

5

3

Florida

a

2

2

b

2

0

Georgia

8a

9

10b

2

Louisiana

a

4

6

b

6

2

Mississippi

5a

6

7b

2

North Carolina

a

8

8

b

9

1

South Carolina

6a

5

7b

1

10a

10

10b

0

a

2

Virginia

13a

Total

67a

Tennessee Texas

a

b

6

b

11

9

9

10b

-3

72

85b

18

Source: Adapted from Guide to U.S. Elections, 4th Edition (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2001), pp. 889–891, 910–913, and 930–933. a

Elections for the House of Representatives in these states were held in 1859.

b

Elections for the House of Representatives in Texas were held in 1871.

115

In 1860, the range of seats in the House of Representatives ran from a low of two in Florida to a high of thirteen in Virginia. This range worked out to a mean of 6.1 seats per state. By 1872 the range ran from a low of two in Florida to a high of ten in Tennessee, with a mean of 6.6 seats per state. And in 1882, the range went from a low of two seats in Florida to a high of eleven in Texas, for a mean of 7.7 seats per state. Thus, the slave states of the Confederacy not only gained a political advantage in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College by the Three-Fifths Clause but these very same states got a second advantage with the removal of the Clause. African Americans were disadvantaged by the Clause because the vast majority never got any representation in the federal system when it was in place. Even after its demise they received only limited representation because the racial prejudices which the slave system made possible survived the Civil War and Reconstruction and subsequently made winning congressional contests difficult for African American candidates.

Summary and Conclusions on the Impact of the Three-Fifths Clause With the establishment of the federal government at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, there was a new institutional player in the voting system in America. During the Colonial and Revolutionary eras, voting qualifications were essentially left to the colonial and local governments. Creation of a federal government, with two houses of congress and a presidency, led to voting becoming a national, as well as a state and local, matter. Although the national government left the matter of voting qualifications up to the states, the Constitution did establish an indirect voting qualification, the Three-Fifths Clause, in terms of counting individuals to be represented by a seat in the House of Representatives. Such an indirect qualification sent a signal to the states about what they might decide to do about their African American populations. Nearly all of the new states that entered the Union, from the Northwest Territory, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Southwest Territory, prohibited, or eventually prohibited, free blacks from voting. Because the federal government set part of the electoral context with the Three-Fifths Clause, new states followed suit and discriminated against free blacks.

Notes   1. Samuel Kernell and Gary Jacobson, The Logic of American Politics (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2000), p. 500.   2. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2006), p. 303.   3. Ibid., p. 305.   4. Charles Wesley, “Negro Suffrage in the Period of ConstitutionMaking, 1787–1865,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 32 (April 1947), p. 146.   5. Donald Nieman, Promises to Keep: African-Americans and the Constitutional Order, 1776 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 11.   6. Ibid., p. 14.   7. Ibid., p. 8.   8. Ibid., p. 28.

116

Chapter 5

  9. Wesley, p. 149. 10. Garry Wills, “Negro President”: Jefferson and the Slave Power (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), p. 24. See also, Albert Simpson, “The Political Significance of Slave Representation, 1787–1821,” Journal of Southern History Vol. 71 (1941), pp. 321–341. 11. John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 7th Edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), p. 192. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., p. 193. 16. Ibid.

17. Ibid. 18. Michael Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 931–950, 983–984. 19. This percentage is calculated as the number of House seats attributable to the slave population divided by the total number of Representatives in the Border and southern slave states. The percentage ranges from 33.3% in 1789 down to 21.5% in 1800. The average is 23.3%. See Tables 5.1 to 5.9 for the numbers of Representatives in the Border and southern slave states. 20. Nieman, p. 52. 21. Ibid., pp. 55–56. 22. Ibid., p. 71.

CHAPTER 6

The African American Electorate in Antebellum and Civil War America, 1788–1867 Potential African American Voters in Antebellum and Civil War America

118

Table 6.1 Suffrage Rights of Free-Men-of-Color in the New States, 1791–1867

118

Table 6.2 Year of Eventual Suffrage Exclusion for Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color in the Thirteen Original States

119

Table 6.3 Free African American Population in States That Provided Suffrage Rights to African Americans, 1790–1867

120

African American Partisanship in State Elections, 1788–1866

120

African American Voting in Federal Elections, 1788–1866

126

Table 6.4 Correlations of Voting Behavior Percentages: Voting Age African Americans and Votes for U.S. Presidential Candidates in Massachusetts and New York, 1828–1860

129

Table 6.5 Correlations of Voting Behavior Percentages: Voting Age African Americans and Votes for U.S. Presidential Candidates in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, 1828–1860

130

Table 6.6 Partial Correlations of Voting Behavior Percentages: Voting Age African Americans and Votes for U.S. Presidential Candidates, 1828–1860

130

Summary and Conclusions on the African American Electorate in Antebellum and Civil War America

131



Notes 131

118

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T

he 1787 Constitution enabled the transition from a confederation of states organized under the Articles of Confederation and operating through the Continental Congress to a federalist system of government. In the Continental Congress only representatives of states could vote, and state legislatures decided which delegates would represent the state in the Continental Congress, not the voters. Now with the Constitution in place, national elections had to be held in the same way as state, county, and local contests. However, no federal apparatus or structure was created to set the rules and regulations for who could participate in these new elections. Thus, in the states where African Americans had the legal right to vote and did vote, they could now continue to vote in national elections as long as the states did not modify or reverse that right. Yet in most states this reversal is exactly what happened in the Antebellum and Civil War eras. This problem of reversal and modification of suffrage rights did not just exist in the original thirteen states; the purchase of the Louisiana Territory under President Thomas Jefferson in 1803 literally doubled the size of the new nation and set the stage for the entrance of new states into the Union. Each of these new states would have to decide whether the Free-Men-of-Color within their borders would be granted suffrage rights or be denied them in each of the original state constitutions. As discussed in Chapter Four, the federal government allowed Free-Men-of-Color suffrage rights in the Northwest Territory, but a few states that emerged out of this territory, such as Indiana, rescinded that right even before writing a state constitution. Thus, new states emerging out of this new territory were not hindered in any way by suffrage rights granted by the national government prior to their entrance into the Union. States had the final decision on this matter.

Table 6.1  Suffrage Rights of Free-Men-of-Color in the New States, 1791–1867a

Year Black Suffrage Denied

State/ Territory

Potential African American Voters in Antebellum and Civil War America Coming out of the Revolutionary War Era nine of the thirteen original states accorded suffrage rights to free African Americans. Twenty-four new states were admitted into the Union between 1790 and 1867. Table 6.1 lists these states in chronological order according to when each entered the Union and indicates the year when they denied Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color suffrage rights. The very last column of the table shows the number of years between their entrance into the Union and the date of denial of suffrage rights to free African Americans. This table also shows that there were three new states that never denied Free-Menof-Color their suffrage rights: Vermont, Maine, and Nebraska. Interestingly, two of these states are in the New England region, where suffrage rights had been granted to Free-Men-of-Color since the Colonial and Revolutionary eras. This tradition of both suffrage and voting extends back for more than a century. In the immediate wake of the Civil War, Nebraska also granted freedom, citizenship, and suffrage rights to African Americans.

States that Initially Allowed Suffrage upon Entry to the Union Of the twenty-four states shown in Table 6.1, both Kentucky and Tennessee entered the Union with state constitutions that allowed Free-Men-of-Color to have suffrage rights and kept those

Year Black Denial Admitted Suffrage After Union in in to Union Denied Admissionb Territory State

Years of Black Suffrage

Vermont

1791





 

 

Continual

Kentucky

1792





 

1799

7

Tennessee

1796





 

1834

38

District of Columbiac

1802





1802

 

0

Ohio

1803





 

1803

0

Louisiana

1812





 

1812

0

Indiana

1816





 

1816

0

Mississippi

1817





 

1817

0

Illinois

1818





 

1818

0

Alabama

1819





 

1819

0

Maine

1820





 

 

Continual

Missouri

1821





 

1821

0

Arkansas

1836





 

1836

0

Michigan

1837





1835

1837

0

Texas

1845





 

1845

0

Florida

1845





 

1845

0

Iowa

1846





 

1846

0

Wisconsin

1848





 

1848

0

California

1850





1849

1850

0

Minnesota

1858





 

1858

0

Oregon

1859





 

1859

0

Kansas

1861





 

1861

0

West Virginia

1863





 

1863

0

Nevada

1864





 

1864

0

Nebraska

1867





 

 

Continual

Sources: Adapted from Charles Wesley, “Negro Suffrage in the Period of Constitution-Making, 1787–1865,” Journal of Negro History, Vol. 32 (April 1947), pp. 153–154; Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 349–353; Emil Obrich, The Development of Sentiment on Negro Suffrage to 1860 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1912). a

Excludes the Thirteen Original States.

Indication that African American suffrage was denied after date of state or territory admission to the United States. b

c

Territory.

constitutions for several years. Although Kentucky permitted suffrage rights for seven years after admission to the Union, African Americans retained these rights in Tennessee for thirty-eight years. Tennessee’s stance is explained, in part, by its origin in the westward expansion of North Carolina, itself one of the original states that granted suffrage rights to Free-Men-of-Color until 1835. This is somewhat surprising because both Kentucky and Tennessee were in a region where slavery was predominant. However, along with North Carolina and Georgia, these southern states gave the ballot to their free African American male populations.



The African American Electorate in Antebellum and Civil War America, 1788–1867 119

States that Forbade Suffrage upon Entry to the Union A clear-cut majority of new states that entered the Union during 1800–1860, nineteen out of twenty-four states, regardless of whether slavery was permitted within their boundaries, entered the Union with state constitutions that excluded and barred suffrage rights for Free-Men-of-Color. None of these states would ever revise their constitutions to permit Free-Men-of-Color to have suffrage rights before the Fifteenth Amendment. During this period, geographic region did not matter in the politics of exclusion. Far western states like California and Oregon, midwestern states like Michigan and Illinois, southern states like Texas and Arkansas, and coastal states like Florida and Louisiana all denied African Americans suffrage rights. Even the federal District of Columbia, from the date of its incorporation, refused suffrage rights to African Americans. Seven states—Kentucky, Ohio, Louisiana, Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, and Michigan—held additional state constitutional conventions after their admittance to the Union, which allowed them one or sometimes two opportunities to remove the words “white only” from their constitutions, but none of them ever made this modification. The suffrage ban on African Americans remained in place. Another oddity is that two states, Michigan and California, specifically excluded Free-Men-of-Color from voting even while they were territories. Exclusion occurred in the Michigan territory in 1835, two years before Michigan became a state, and in California in 1849, one year before it entered the Union and forbade slavery in its state constitution. Overall, the twenty-four states that joined the Union during the Antebellum Era were less eager to extend suffrage rights to Free-Men-of-Color than the original thirteen colonies had been. Few states, even those evolved from territories without extensive slavery, desired to encourage suffrage rights for free African Americans. If the new states did not enlarge the pool of eligible Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color voters, did those states that denied and excluded African Americans during the Colonial and Revolutionary eras change their political minds and re-grant suffrage rights? Table 6.2 offers insights into this query. This table shows the dates that eight of the original thirteen states legally denied Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color suffrage rights. Two colonies, Virginia and South Carolina, excluded these individuals during the Colonial Era. During the Revolutionary and Antebellum eras, six of the original states—Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Connecticut, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania—revised their constitutions and/or passed legislation excluding African American voters. Four of the six states passed multiple exclusionary procedures, such as moving from statutory exclusions to state constitutional exclusions, or revised older state constitutions and replaced them with new ones that continued to exclude African Americans.

States that Considered Reduction of African American Suffrage Rights Of the five remaining states where exclusion did not exist—at least on a permanent basis—during the Revolutionary and Antebellum eras, two made moves toward exclusion. New York, which had permitted Free-Men-of-Color to exercise suffrage

Table 6.2  Year of Eventual Suffrage Exclusion for Free-Men-and-Womenof-Color in the Thirteen Original States

Year Black Suffrage Evenually Denied to Women

to Men

Suffrage Never Denied

Multiple Exclusions

1699

1723





South Carolina

a

1716





Delaware

a

1792





Maryland

a

1801





New Jersey

1807

1807





Connecticut

a

1818





North Carolina

a

1835





Pennsylvania

a

1838





Massachusetts

a





New Hampshire

a





Georgia

a





Rhode Island

a





New Yorkc

a





State Virginia

b

Source: Adapted from Chapters 3 and 4. a

African American women were never accorded suffrage in these states.

In 1841, Rhode Island had an insurgent government that excluded African Americans from voting during its one year in power. Their suffrage rights were restored in the following year. b

c

In 1821 New York raised property qualifications for African American suffrage.

rights, reconsidered the matter at the 1821 state constitutional convention, for both partisan and racial reasons. Though they did not totally deny suffrage rights to blacks, they eventually added several onerous restrictions. Once the debate ended, a “provision was adopted on October 8, 1821, which placed the qualification for whites at the forty pound freehold but required Negroes to have a two-hundred-and-fifty dollar freehold. Negroes were also required to live in the state for three years and to have paid taxes. White men could vote after one year’s residence and the payment of taxes or the rendering of highway or military service.”1 Rhode Island, which had allowed Free-Men-of-Color to vote since it was founded, had an “insurgent take-over” in 1841: a property-less group took over state government from the landed gentry and stayed in control for a little more than a year. During that year the insurgent forces denied African Americans the right to vote and considered adopting a constitution that would have permanently denied the right of suffrage to blacks. In the next year, however, suffrage rights were permanently restored. Thus, in the decades leading up to the Civil War, only five of the original thirteen states gave suffrage rights to Free-Men-of-Color. During the transition from the Colonial Era to the Antebellum Era, the transition to constitutional government and federalism did not expand suffrage rights for African Americans but rather restricted them. Moreover, during this era of new states came the presidency of Andrew Jackson, from 1829 to 1837, and the birth of the mass-based Democratic Party. In the Jacksonian period suffrage rights were expanded and extended to the so-called common man, as states dropped their

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property qualifications. According to some historians, this led to a greatly expanded electorate and the rise of the first broad based political party in America. However, in a tremendous contradiction, Tables 6.1 and 6.2 reveal that in the Jacksonian time frame, two of the original states, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, and one of the new states, Tennessee, curtailed suffrage rights for Free-Men-of-Color. During the Antebellum Era, suffrage rights for African Americans underwent a serious contraction in existing states and saw very limited expansion in the states that were newly

admitted to the Union. Table 6.3 offers a composite portrait of the original and new states that allowed suffrage rights to African Americans through the entire Revolutionary, Antebellum, and Civil War periods. Of the thirty-seven states that belonged to the Union during these periods, only eight, or less than one-fifth of them, allowed Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color to have the legal right to vote. The historical record shows that some African Americans did exercise their electoral power in the first federal elections, i.e., the initial presidential and congressional elections of 1788–1789.

Table 6.3  Free African American Population in States that Provided Suffrage Rights to African Americans, 1790–1867 Original Thirteen States 1790

1800

1810

1820

1830

1840

1850

1860

Free Black % of Free Black % of Free Black % of Free Black % of Free Black % of Free Black % of Free Black % of Free Black % of Population Total* Population Total* Population Total* Population Total* Population Total* Population Total* Population Total* Population Total*

State Massachusetts New Hampshire Rhode Island Georgia

5,369

1.4%

6,452

1.5%

6,737

1.4%

6,740

1.3%

7,048

1.2%

8,669

1.2%

9,064

0.9%

9,602

0.8%

630

0.4%

852

0.5%

970

0.5%

786

0.3%

604

0.2%

537

0.2%

520

0.2%

494

0.2%

3,484

5.1%

3,304

4.8%

3,609

4.7%

3,554

4.3%

3,561

3.7%

3,238

3.0%

3,670

2.5%

3,952

2.3%

398

0.7%

1,019

1.0%

1,801

1.2%

1,763

0.9%

2,486

0.8%

2,753

0.7%

2,931

0.6%

3,500

0.6%

New York

4,682

1.5%

10,417

1.8%

25,333

2.7%

29,279

2.1%

44,870

2.3%

50,027

2.1%

49,069

1.6%

49,005

1.3%

Subtotals

14,563

1.5%

22,044

1.6%

38,450

2.1%

42,122

1.8%

58,569

1.8%

65,224

1.6%

65,254

1.3%

66,553

1.1%

New States 1790

1800

1810

1820

1830

1840

1850

1860

Free Black % of Free Black % of Free Black % of Free Black % of Free Black % of Free Black % of Free Black % of Free Black % of Population Total* Population Total* Population Total* Population Total* Population Total* Population Total* Population Total* Population Total*

State Vermont

269

0.3%

557

0.4%

750

0.3%

903

0.4%

881

0.3%

730

0.3%

718

0.2%

709

0.2%

Maine

536

0.6%

818

0.5%

969

0.4%

929

0.3%

1,190

0.3%

1,355

0.3%

1,356

0.2%

1,327

0.2%

 

0

 

67

0.2%

Nebraska Subtotals Grand Totals

0

 

0

0

 

0

 

0

 

0

 

805

0.4%

1,375

0.4%

1,719

0.4%

1,832

0.3%

2,071

0.3%

2,085

0.3%

2,074

0.2%

2,103

0.2%

15,368

1.3%

23,419

1.4%

40,169

1.7%

43,954

1.5%

60,640

1.6%

67,309

1.4%

67,328

1.1%

68,656

1.0%

Sources: Adapted from Tables 6.1 and 6.2; Bureau of the Census, Negro Population: 1790–1915 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918), p. 57. *

Percent of total free population (total free white population + total free African American population).

African American Partisanship in State Elections, 1788–1866 Given the fact that five of the original thirteen states granted suffrage rights to African Americans, this electorate could participate in the first elections for members of Congress and the president. House elections took place in 1788 and the presidential election followed in 1789. Merrill Jensen and Robert Becker’s four-volume study, The Documentary History of the First Federal Elections, 1788–1790, was started during the bicentennial of the nation in 1976 and completed in 1989. These volumes contain documents covering the initial congressional elections in each of the thirteen states as well as the first election for president and vice president. This comprehensive and systematic work includes “the official documents, such as legislative journals, debates, and laws relating to the elections, and materials from letters, diaries, newspapers and other sources” and manuscripts that pertained

to these congressional elections.”2 These four volumes provide a rich source of data on the participation of African Americans in the first federal elections. Although the extant documents show that only free Negroes in New Jersey voted in the initial congressional election, African Americans were themselves a political issue in congressional elections elsewhere, in Georgia, South Carolina, Maryland, and Rhode Island. In Georgia, a seeker after a seat in the U.S. Senate, General Anthony Wayne, sought to overcome residency issues by proclaiming his credentials as a slave owner.3 Similarly, in South Carolina, a candidate for the House of Representatives, Dr. David Ramsey, lost an election in part due to accusations of sympathy for abolitionism, which he subsequently vehemently denied in a campaign of letters to the editor.4 In Rhode Island, where abolitionism was more popular, a key issue in the contest for U.S. representatives was a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning the slave trade immediately.5 Finally, the records



The African American Electorate in Antebellum and Civil War America, 1788–1867 121

include the following remark made by one Maryland observer after the state convention had ratified the Constitution: “I expect the rule of tythes will be their guide—that is, to take in three fifths of the blacks, the which, I conceive to be right, as our delegation is increased by that rule, and we are also to be taxed accordingly.”6 All of these interesting documents give a glimpse of the context in which the first African American voters had to operate. Before we begin a discussion of Free-Men-of-Color voters in the early presidential elections, we will focus on their voting behavior and activity at the state level, so as to provide insights into their acquisition of political partisanship and party affiliation in the different political contexts in each state. Put another way, different states had different political partisan dominances, for the balanced two-party system did not exist at the state level in this period. We have chosen to rely on studies of these early factions, like the Federalists in New York, because in the absence of reliable state and local voting data on Free-Men-of-Color during the Antebellum Era, we adopted a methodological approach of examining factional affiliation in order to get some indications about African American voting behavior. Such findings from these factional groupings not only reveal how, and the manner in which, these African Americans came to vote in the early years of the Republic in state and local elections, but also how free African Americans acquired their partisanship in comparison to other contemporary Americans. In New York, for this first time in American political history, we now know that these Free-Voters-of-Color began their partisan attachments with personal factions or cliques of individual Federalists, and then transitioned into attachments and affiliations with a specific wing of the Whigs or in certain areas of the state with Democrats, because each faction backed an extension of suffrage rights in the state for the African American community. Later, when the anti-slavery parties allowed full participation at their state and national conventions, some African Americans became identified and aligned with these party organizations.

New Jersey In the initial congressional election for New Jersey the top four vote-getters, out of the fifteen candidates running, were sent to the House of Representatives. One of these four was Middlesex County candidate James Schureman who had been in the New Jersey state legislature and who, during his tenure there, led the successful effort to pass the “Law . . . to free the Poor Negroes,” and they “have all voted for him.”7 When the governor certified the vote to the clerk of the House of Representatives, congressional candidate Schureman got the most votes, 12,597, while his closest competitor, Lambert Cadwalader, got 8,685 votes, and the remaining top competitors, Elias Boudinot and Thomas Sinnickson, received 8,603 and 8,240, respectively. Extant documents tell us that “the Federal Constitution was very popular in New Jersey (the state Convention had ratified it unanimously)” and that congressional candidate James Schureman, due to his voting behavior and popularity among his constituents, was a Federalist.8 As for the 1789 presidential election, the free Negroes that voted in the congressional election for Schureman of Middlesex

County could not vote for the presidential candidates simply because New Jersey was one of the states where presidential electors were instead “chosen by the state legislature.”9 New Jersey at this time did not have popular voting in presidential elections as it had in congressional elections. Popular voting for the president in this first federal election occurred in only six of the thirteen states.10

Maryland African American historian Benjamin Quarles wrote about an instance in which an African American male not only voted but ran for office at the state level: Five of the thirteen states forming the new nation— New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and North Carolina—did not exclude blacks from voting. Indeed, in one of these states, Maryland, a black candidate ran for public office in 1792, very likely the first of his color ever to take this bold step. Thomas Brown, a horse doctor, sought one of the two seats allotted to Baltimore in the House of Delegates.11 Quarles assessed Brown’s effort and impact by saying: His vote so minuscule as not to have been recorded, Brown was defeated in his bid for office, a circumstance reflecting the times. In but a few scattered instances were blacks a political factor during the eighteenth century, and black enfranchisement in postrevolutionary America was generally short-lived. In fact after 1810 Thomas Brown himself could not even have voted, Maryland having barred blacks from the polls as of that year.12

New York During this same time frame African Americans in New York were becoming active in the Federalist Party. Historian Dixon Ryan Fox described how this African American partisan identification evolved. First, noted Fox, “the Negroes had been reared in Federalist households; their cause had been advocated by distinguished Federalists, and now under the auspices of that party freedom was provided. When they reached the estate of citizens, their political attachment could be easily foretold.”13 The reason that all of this came about according to Fox was that “the Federalist party was the party of the aristocracy, especially in large communities, the party of the wealth won by a century of trade.”14 These men of wealth, property, and comfort hired slaves as “household servants” and treated them “with a careful kindliness,” making these slaves in this colony/state “a luxury rather than an investment in agriculture.”15 Moreover, these Federalist masters preferred to see their Negroes free, and led the movement in New York state for their betterment. Governor John Jay, who was one of the three authors of the Federalist Papers, organized the Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves and became its first president in 1785. He was succeeded by fellow Federalist Papers author, Alexander Hamilton.16 “It was a Federalist legislature and a Federalist governor who enacted the law of 1799 [gradual and general emancipation],

122

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by almost a straight party voted of sixty-eight to twenty-three.” New York’s Federalist political leaders voted for the principle of gradual and general emancipation in the state.17 Eventually, the Federalists would organize “among the Negroes a chapter of their partisan fraternity, the Washington Benevolent Society,” for political indoctrination and education.18 Finally, noted Fox, in opposition to equal suffrage rights the Democratic-Republican Party captured the state legislature in 1811 and enacted a law that severely restricted suffrage rights for African Americans despite strong objections from the Federalists. Reacting to this obstacle to suffrage posed by the new political party, “the votes of three hundred Negroes in the city of New York, in 1813, decided the election in favor of the Federal party, and also decided the political character of the legislature of the state. Not the number of the Negroes who were qualified made them formidable, but the strategic strength of their location.”19 Future president Martin Van Buren, a founding organizer of the mass-based Democratic Party along with President Andrew Jackson, observed the following about the African American identification and alliance with the Federalist Party in New York: The Negroes, with scarcely an exception, adhered to the Federalists. Their number in the city of New York was very great, and parties in that city were so evenly divided, that it was often sufficient to hold the balance between them, at times, too, when the vote of New York, in the legislature, not unfrequently decided the majority of that body.20 Van Buren, seeking to hinder his opponents in the Federalist Party, inserted a higher property qualification clause into New York’s 1821 state constitution that greatly restricted the voting rights of Free-Men-of-Color in state and local elections. On this point, historian Lee Benson notes: “the conservative majority led by Van Buren [and joined by even ‘liberal’ Democrats] supported . . . efforts to write a property restriction clause into the Constitution that limited suffrage to a small fraction of the Negro population.”21 Moreover, Van Buren’s Democratic Party would continue to deny unrestricted voting rights to Free-Men-of-Color in the 1846, 1860, and 1869 statewide referenda. In fact, the Van Buren “qualification of two hundred and fifty dollars passed into the fundamental law to remain until 1870.”22 This enduring property qualification for blacks only was not removed until the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and even then the Democratic Party in the state bitterly protested the Amendment’s existence. Simply put, “it was the Democratic legislature which retained the qualification for the blacks” in the state of New York.23 During this nearly five-decade period of restricted suffrage rights, 1821–1870, Free-Men-of-Color identified with the political party in the state that was pro-suffrage for them. If the Federalist Party began to decline, nationally, after the War of 1812, Fox told us that on the state level in New York, “the Federalist party as an organization in 1821 was already passing into history;” and eventually, as the leading Federalist party transitioned into the newly emerging Whig party, so did the party identification of African Americans. Benson noted that “since the

Whigs had favored equal suffrage before 1846, the Negroes’ solid vote can partly be attributed to their pursuing a political goal,” vital to the interest of Free-Men-of-Color.24 To strengthen his observation, Benson adduced this additional insight: Thus, it seems reasonable to say that Negro voting behavior in New York was primarily determined by this factor: men most hostile to them tended to be Democrats, men most favorable to them tended to be Whigs. Put another way, once we find that Democrats were considerably more likely to be “Nigger-Haters,“ we can deduce from our theory of American voting behavior that Negroes would range themselves solidly against the Democratic Party.25 However, in a more recent and statistically sophisticated analysis, John Stanley challenged the Fox and Benson argument about the linear continuity of African American partisanship in the state. Analyzing vote return data from the 1846 statewide referendum on extension of suffrage rights to Free-Men-of-Color, John Stanley wrote: “As far as party leadership was concerned, there is little doubt that the Democrats opposed suffrage with near unanimity. . . . Similarly, it is true that most men in public life who supported Negro suffrage were Whigs. This is a far cry, however, from saying that the Whigs as a party supported the principle of Negro suffrage.”26 Stanley concluded that “suffrage was not an issue between the parties, but rather a question that split Whig party leaders into two fairly even camps.”27 From his data he found that “at best only forty percent of Whig voters actually supported Negro suffrage.”28 Stanley continued: “Surely it would have been in the interest of Whig leaders and the rankand-file partisans to have obtained Negro suffrage in full. . . . Yet it was precisely in those areas in which the Whigs as a party had the most to gain from Negro suffrage that voting against suffrage was the heaviest and in which enfranchisement was most offensive to Whig voters.”29 Therefore, this anti-suffrage stance of about 60% of the Whigs led to a split within areas of the free African American electorate and in voting behavior in state and local elections. Essentially, in New York of 1846, African Americans identified with the (Horace) Greeley-(William) Seward(Thurlow) Weed wing of the Whig party and the candidates whom those leaders backed. Also, not all of the free New York blacks voted for Whigs. Some voted for other anti-slavery parties like the Liberty and Free-Soil parties.30 What the research of Fox and Benson and Stanley does not tell us is that while the suffrage issue split the Whigs in New York, it eventually fragmented the Democratic Party there as well. Stanley did show that several predominantly Democratic communities voted in favor of the 1846 referendum, i.e., for the extension of unrestricted suffrage rights to Free-Men-of-Color, but he treated this as an exception. Stanley declared: “the leading prosuffrage county in the state, Clinton, was a Democratic county. Town-by-town results show that in two cities in Clinton County the number of pro-suffrage votes exceeded the number of combined Whig and Liberty votes . . . and . . . three of the ten pro-suffrage counties were Democratic. . . .”31



The African American Electorate in Antebellum and Civil War America, 1788–1867 123

Stanley found that in a very competitive part of the state, Courtland County, the local newspaper, the Cortland Democrat, during this 1846 referendum election “announced its support of Negro suffrage and accused the Whigs of being ‘secretly’ hostile to giving the right of suffrage to the colored population . . . and . . . the Cortland County Democratic party resolved to abolish the property qualification for Negroes.”32 Finally, during the 1846 referendum election, an unusual observation was made. “A black Democratic club in Clifton Springs was continually mentioned as an illustration of fondness of blacks for the Democratic Party.”33 This is the earliest extant record to date of the formation of African Americans into a Democratic Party organization. Prior to the fragmenting of the Democratic Party over the suffrage issue and the splintering of the Whig party into two opposing groups, the Liberty Party was organized in the state of New York “on April 1, 1840, at Albany” with the purpose and intent “to overthrow slavery” in the nation.34 This new party attracted African American leaders from its inception to the founding convention and converted some of them to its banner in support of its state and local candidates. The unequivocal, principled stand of the Liberty Party on the anti-slavery issue expanded African American public policy options beyond the issue of suffrage rights. However, after the Liberty Party’s founding, Free-Menof-Color voters in New York saw limited electoral success and continual failures of the party at the ballot box both at the state and the national levels. According to Benson, who studied the Liberty Party in state elections, its share of election votes went from 0.6% in 1840 to 4.1% in 1847. The highest percentage came in the 1846 election, with 4.7%, and the average over the eight state elections of this period was 3.0%. From this election data Benson concludes that “the Liberty Party’s gain had actually been scored between presidential years, and the party’s numerical vote remained relatively stable between 1843 and 1847, inclusive, whether cast in a state or national election.”35 With this minimal level of electoral support, Field found that it “remained politically impotent, never winning a single elective office,” in the state.36 At the very moment that their strength and influence had stalled at the ballot box, Free-Men-of-Color came under great pressure not to align themselves with the Liberty Party because the leader of the abolitionist movement, William Lloyd Garrison, urged his members and followers to use “moral suasion” instead of political and electoral power to defeat slavery in the nation. The leading African American spokesperson, Frederick Douglass, initially agreed with this philosophy and urged fellow New Yorkers to follow this idea.37 Eventually Douglass broke with Garrison and supported partisan voting, but while he held the nonpartisan approach it dampened the vote from the African American community, despite the fact that lesser-known African American leaders in the state were quite active in and for the party. Therefore, given the continual failures of the Liberty Party at the ballot box in the state of New York, “desertions increased as skepticism rose and enthusiasm [waned]. Many anti-slavery proponents moved back to their old parties. Knowing that their vote was small and that the Liberty party was collapsing, Negro

leaders were not desirous of fixing their allegiance. They, too, moved on to a more influential party.”38 Some Free-Men-of-Color moved into the Liberty League with the famous white abolitionist Gerrit Smith and his 1848 political vehicle, the National Liberty Party, while others attended the founding convention of the Free-Soil Party. “The actual organization of this party [Free-Soil] began at its Convention in Buffalo, August 9, 1848, where an effort was made to unite the discontented elements of the Whigs, Democrats, the Barnburners, the Free Democrats, the Hunkers and the political Abolitionists. They resolved to inscribe on their banners, ‘Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor and Free Men.’ ”39 At this founding convention, there were leading Free-Men-of-Color from throughout the state: “Samuel R. Ward, Henry Highland Garnet, Charles L. Remond, Henry Bibb, . . . Frederick Douglass . . . and . . . other colored gentlemen.”40 Three of these men, Garnet, Ward, and Douglass, were “permitted to give a speech, but none received any notable appointments,” to the convention organizational committees nor to the party’s national or New York state organization.41 This marginalization was just a harbinger of things to come for the African Americans. “Over 20,000 elected and self-appointed delegates poured into Buffalo for the August convention. Uniformly zealous, they were a heterogeneous lot . . . and they included three main groups: antislavery Whigs from New England and the Midwest, antislavery Democrats, including New York’s Barnburners, and Liberty men.”42 At earlier and separate conventions the New York Barnburner Democrats had nominated former president Martin Van Buren, while the Liberty Party men had nominated Senator John Hale of New Hampshire. However, at the August Convention the Barnburners “primarily wanted Van Buren; they were less concerned about the platform, which they thus used to pacify Libertymen and Whigs.”43 Thus, the convention nominated Martin Van Buren for its presidential candidate and Charles Francis Adam for vice president. The nomination of former Democratic president Van Buren caused great consternation among the Free-Men-of-Color at the convention and in the state of New York. The main historian of the party, Frederick Blue, has written: Opposition to Van Buren was based primarily on the contradictions between his past record and free-soil principles. As vice-president, in 1834, he cast the deciding vote in the Senate for a bill to suppress abolitionist literature in the slave states. As president, he opposed the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia without the consent of the slave states. In the Amistad case he tried, through an executive order, to force the black mutineers back into slavery. He endorsed the gag rule, a rule many northerners considered to be a gross infringement upon freedom of speech. He insisted that slavery in the South be left to the discretion of the southerners.44 Beyond his previous actions on public policies for the free and slave African American communities, there were additional problems of his candidacy which alarmed the free colored voters.

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“Predictably, most of the platform addressed the slavery question. Although it pledged noninterference with slavery in the states where it existed, it incorporated [the] demand that the federal government divorce itself from slavery . . . in the District of Columbia . . . and the [federal] territories. . . . [I]t insisted that Congress bar slavery from all free territory and that there be ‘no more slave states and no more slave territory.’ ”45 With this type of platform and the past history of Van Buren, several of the African Americans at the founding convention were quite skeptical of Van Buren’s true commitment, as well as that of the party as a whole, to African American rights. Since “the party did not demand equal social and political rights for Free Negroes, as did the earlier [anti-slavery] parties,”46 Douglass and others severely criticized the party and urged African Americans not to support it because it had a very limited anti-slavery program and policy.47 According to historian Eric Foner, “it was because of the Barnburners’ opposition that no call for equal rights for free Negroes of the North had been included in the Free-Soil platform of August, 1848.” As for the reason given, Foner says, “the Barnburners had emphasized that their opposition to the extension of slavery was motivated solely by concern for the interests of free white laborers, who would be ‘degraded’ by association with ‘the labor of the black race.’”48 Like the Democratic, Whig, and Liberty parties, the Free-Soilers had individual party members who held prejudices and stereotypical views about racial inferiority. “Almost all accepted the prevailing belief in the Negro’s intellectual inferiority, and many were uneasy about the prospect of a permanent Negro population in their own states.”49 Nonetheless, several Free-Men-of-Color voted for the party in the state of New York and at the national level. “By 1850, the Barnburners had returned to the Democratic Party, leaving the Free-Soil party in the hands of former Whigs and Liberty men, who viewed more favorably the demand for equal rights by Northern Negroes. But the national Free-Soil platform of 1852 continued to avoid this issue.”50 The national convention of the party met on August 11, 1852, “at Pittsburgh for the purpose of nominating party candidates for national office. . . . One of the first acts of this convention was to elect Frederick Douglass a secretary by acclamation. He was also invited to speak on entering the hall.”51 In his speech he urged the party to take a stronger stand on equal rights for Free-Menof-Color. However, the platform of that year did not reflect stronger stands for equal rights for African Americans. After this election the Free-Soilers fell from political sight, leaving African American members to seek other partisan homes. The last party to emerge in the Antebellum Era in New York was the Republican Party. Formally organized in Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854, the party surfaced a year later organizationally in New York. Phyllis Field, a historian of this era, wrote: “In 1855 the Republican Party appeared for the first time and provided a more permanent organizational structure for many of the fusion groups of the previous year. These new parties [Republican and others] attracted some former Democrats but also repelled many ex-Whigs, thereby changing the nature of the Democratic coalition, already hopelessly split between the Soft and Hard factions.”52 One year later during the party’s initial presidential

election in 1856, “a black state convention endorsed the Republican ticket. Henry Highland Garnet, the main speaker, admitted that the party was far from perfect, but it did come closest to positions on suffrage and slavery favored by blacks and should be supported ‘regardless of the unkind things uttered by some of the Republican leaders.’”53 Field adds on this point of an emerging alliance between Free-Men-of-Color and the fledgling Republican party in the state of New York: Certainly the Republicans had contributed support for equal suffrage in the legislature, but Garnet was also drawn to them by the increasing number of antiblack immigrants in the Democratic ranks: ‘The oppressed Irismen (sic), once naturalized, are the loudest shouters for Buch(anan) and Breck(enridge) and Slavery extension, and the bitterest foes of the negro.’54 The rising free African American partisan identification and allegiance with the Republicans did not stop with Garnet’s call. “By 1858 . . . a black suffrage convention met in Troy, New York, and advised ‘the eleven thousand colored voters of this state to concentrate their strength upon the Republican ticket for governor.’”55 Two years later, the newly created Republican Party and Free-Men-of-Color would be on the same side politically during the 1860 statewide referendum on suffrage rights for African Americans. Very early in the life of the nation, Free-Men-of-Color forged party affiliations that allowed them to vote at the state and local levels for candidates in their best interests. Then, gradually, these initial partisan affiliations transformed as the political context evolved, and African Americans began to ally themselves with the coalition that best fit their interests, concerns, and public policy needs. During the seventy years or so following independence, the American political party system was in the throes of forming, reorganizing, and evolving. Simply put, the American party system was in its infancy, and instead of political parties the nation had, in the words of James Madison’s Federalist Paper Number 10, factions: “By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregated interest of the community.”56 Although all of the founding fathers opposed these factions,57 personally or group based, they would evolve into the modern political parties visible starting around the 1840s.58

Michigan African American party affiliation in Michigan began, in part, with a free African American candidate for the state legislature. In Michigan, free African Americans were seemingly attracted to the Liberty Party in 1843 on the basis of the anti-slavery issues but were not allowed political participation. Historian Theodore Clarke Smith wrote: “At the State Convention a ludicrous incident occurred: two colored delegates were not allowed to participate in nominating because they were not legal voters [in the



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state].”59 Although free African Americans acquired partisanship affiliation on the basis of issues, they were not allowed to vote. Hence, partisanship evolved even before the legal right to vote.60

Tennessee and North Carolina Moving from the Northwest to the South, we learn from the historical record how Free-Men-of-Color in Tennessee acquired their party voting behavior. Emil Olbrich wrote: “John Bell and Cave Johnson said that they were elected to Congress by the aid of colored men’s votes, the latter boasting that he owed his election in 1828 to one hundred and forty-four free negroes who worked in his mills.”61 Attraction to this personal faction/clique was not just due to economic employment, because Olbrich said that “opposing candidates, for the once oblivious of social distinction and intent only on catching votes, hobnobbed with the men and swung corners all with dusky damsels at elections balls.”62 What this insight tells us is that social recognition and decent treatment was extended to this voting segment of the African American community. In North Carolina, especially in selected counties, “it was said that there were 300 colored voters in Halifax, 150 in Hertford, 50 in Chowan, and 75 in Pasquotank,” who tended to vote for those abolitionists who spoke against slavery and for similar individuals who supported suffrage rights for the group.63 Again, here is voting behavior predicated upon personal factions/cliques. Since in both Tennessee and North Carolina the right of African Americans to vote was reversed in 1834 and 1835, respectively, party identification and affiliation never had a chance to evolve and mature to the extent that it did in places like New York.

Maine Finally, there are the states of New England, where from the beginning Free-Men-of-Color had the right to vote. The issue of suffrage rights never really entered into their faction or subsequent party voting behavior. The key issues here were matters of anti-slavery and other equal rights, like schools, employment, interracial marriages, and holding elective and appointed offices. One historian describes these other rights very vividly: [N]orthern Negroes found themselves systematically separated from the white community. They were either excluded altogether from railway cars, omnibuses, stage coaches, and steamboats, or assigned to special “Jim Crow” sections; they sat in secluded and remote corners of theaters; they could enter most hotels, restaurants, and resorts only as servants; and they prayed in ”Negro pews” in the white churches. Moreover, they were educated in segregated schools, punished in segregated prisons, nursed in segregated hospitals, and buried in segregated cemeteries.64 In battling these forms of racial discrimination the FreeMen-of-Color in Maine had choices, such as the Maine Liberty Party up until 1848, then the Free-Soil Party after it was organized on September 27, 1848, with “nearly two thousand

excited and hopeful delegates . . . participating in the business of organization formation.”65 Eventually, with the failure of the Free-Soil Party at the ballot box, “abolitionists changed the party designation from Free-Soil to Free Democracy. . . . Next, the Maine Free-Soilers allied themselves with other Free Democrats in the nation by adopting the platform drafted by the national convention of the Free Democracy of the Union at Pittsburgh in August, 1852.”66 Later, to improve their ballot box support the organization became the Liberty League. The Liberty League was commissioned to secure party unity, to circulate antislavery documents, and to keep lecturers constantly in the field. A constitution was drafted and a membership of twenty-cents levied. But despite its high aims and the seal of its founders, the League did not measure up to their expectations.67 Thus, in Maine the electoral context did not sustain the antislavery parties, and the abolitionists in the state had to finally re-name themselves the Free Democrats while others took up the banner of the anti-slavery Whigs. And by 1854, “the die had been cast—Liberty and Free-Soil lived on in the new Republican Party which was formed out of these elements” in the state.68 FreeMen-of-Color voters found in Maine’s political context little support for the anti-slavery third parties. Here, they had to align with the major parties.

New Hampshire The political situation was different in New Hampshire. The leading anti-slavery individual in the state during the Antebellum Era was John Hale, who began as an independent Democrat but found the party not as strong in its anti-slavery position as he wanted. He then exited the party to become a Liberty Party man, and later the presidential nominee of the Free-Soil Party in 1852. Initially, there was reluctance on his part to accept the third-party route simple because he “had been elected to the Senate by the New Hampshire legislature in a political bargain with the aid of Liberty, Whig, and Independent Democratic support. . . . He agreed with the Liberty party’s anti-extension position, but Liberty identification might label him an extremist and harm his Senate career before it even started.”69 Nevertheless, he accepted and became the type of political leader with whom some of the FreeMen-of-Color voters in the state wanted to align. Outside of the state, African American abolitionists, such as Frederick Douglass, supported him.

Massachusetts In Massachusetts, Free-Men-of-Color voters had a host of individual anti-slavery leaders and political parties with which to affiliate in state and local elections. Individuals associated with the anti-slavery cause included people like John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Charles Sumner, John Palfrey, James Russell Lowell, Joshua Leavitt, John G, Whittier, and Charles Francis Adams, to name just a few. In terms of parties there were the “Conscience” Whigs, the Liberty Party, the FreeSoilers, Independent Democrats, and eventually the Republicans.

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Beginning in February 1844, African American abolitionist leader Henry Highland Garnet was invited to speak at the Liberty Party State Convention in Massachusetts. There, he endorsed the party as well as its state and local candidates. Later, African American leaders from other states, such as Douglass, were brought in to endorse national, state, and local candidates of the Free-Soilers and the Republicans. Thus, in Massachusetts, the Free-Men-of-Color voters had partisan identification, affiliation, and voting choices for national, state, and local elections. Consequently, this group of voters had choices of personal factions/ cliques and the anti-slavery parties, as well as the anti-slavery wings of the Whigs and the Democrats. Free African Americans could get their voting cues and affiliations from any individual or organization, including the anti-slavery societies and the state auxiliary of the National Negro Convention Movement. There was never a shortage of individuals or organizations in the state of Massachusetts. Collectively, the historical narrative offers useful insights and data on how Free-Men-of-Color shaped their voting behavior and party identification in the Antebellum period. The dominant issues that were important to this group—suffrage rights, anti-slavery matters, and equal rights—all had political avenues for opposition and protest and reform within the context of the state and local environs. By combining knowledge of the historical narrative from the state and local levels with that occurring on the national level, a picture of African American participation in the Antebellum period begins to develop.

African American Voting in Federal Elections, 1788–1866 Little evidence has been located on African American voting behavior in the first presidential election. Nevertheless, some information is available about the states that permitted popular voting in the presidential elections. By matching up the demography of the African American population with county-level voting for the presidential candidates/electors, some insight is possible.

First Federal Election In 1788–1789 only Delaware, Maryland, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Virginia allowed popular voting for the presidency. In this initial election only two states, Maryland and Pennsylvania, had popular voting statewide, while Delaware and Virginia allowed popular voting by some, but not all, of their internal election districts. New Hampshire allowed popular voting with the caveat that the state legislature would step in and make the choice if no candidate received an electoral majority. Massachusetts had popular voting within election districts, but then the state legislature would select between the top two popularly chosen candidates. By the time of this initial federal election, Free-Men-andWomen-of-Color could not vote in Virginia, but Free-Men-ofColor could vote in Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. Therefore, of the ten original states that voted in this initial election, free African American males could have participated in five of these states. Although no evidence has yet been found to allow independent confirmation

of this electoral participation, population data shown in Table 6.3 indicates the size of the Free-Men-and-Women-ofColor population two years after the election and permits insight into the possibility of African American participation in the first presidential election. Recent historical research has uncovered rare county-level voting data in all of the five states where Free-Men-of-Color had the legal right to vote. Using the standard consensus estimate in historical research of taking 20% of the total population of free African Americans, this then becomes the estimate of the number of potential African American voters in the initial federal election of 1788–1789.70 In addition to this estimation procedure, several historical narratives and accounts for subsequent elections in some of the states in the Antebellum Era offer brief discussions of voting by Free-Men-of-Color in state and local elections.

Anti-Slavery Parties of the 1840s and 1850s Due to limited data, the historical narrative is sketchy and incomplete for the Free-Men-of-Color voters in the first federal election. After the rise of the anti-slavery political parties in the 1840s, the narrative becomes more complete because of better data and coverage of the Free-Men-of-Color party and voting activism. Anti-slavery parties allowed African Americans to participate in their national conventions. The Anti-Masonic party held the first national nominating convention in Baltimore, on September, 26–28, 1831; the Democratic Party became the first of the major parties to hold a national convention on May 21–23, 1832, also in Baltimore. The Liberty Party held its initial national convention on November 13, 1839, in Warsaw, New York. Both of the Liberty candidates, James Birney and Francis Lemoyne, declined the nomination for president. Then, on April 1, 1840, the Liberty Party held another national nominating convention in Albany, New York, and James Birney and Thomas Earle accepted the presidential and vice presidential nominations, respectively. Of this new national political vehicle “Negro leaders began to express interest in the Liberty Party and to associate themselves with it. Samuel Ringgold Ward . . . allied himself with this party,” along with Henry Highland Garnet, J.W. Loguem, and William Wells Brown.71 Both Logeum and Brown became lecturers for this new political party during the 1840 presidential campaign. These supporters faced a major obstacle in their community in the early 1830s when William Lloyd Garrison “established the Liberator [newspaper] and formed the New England Antislavery Society” because he forbade and “denounced all political activity.” “The Garrisonians were sure that moral suasion would overcome the slavocracy.”72 Politics for them did not operate from pure motives and actions disentangled from mundane obligations. Simply put, Garrison and his followers were opposed to the Liberty Party, and among his followers were many Free-Men-of-Color, including the great Frederick Douglass. Hence, such men became ambivalent about supporting this new political party. Some Negroes tried to remain in both camps, supporting both the moral suasionists and political activists. Due to the schisms among the free blacks, and “on account of its poor organization and the divisions among its ranks”



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and near total media blackout, the party received less than 7,053 votes, which was less than 1% of the total votes cast in the presidential election of 1840. Some of these votes were cast by Free-Men-of-Color.73 This led to further African American participation with the party in sundry state and local conventions and elections. However, the most historic moment came at its next national convention held at Buffalo, New York on August 30, 1843: Several Negro delegates were present. Among these were the distinguished public figures of Henry Highland Garnet, Charles B. Ray and Samuel R. Ward. Garnet was appointed on the committee on nominations of officers, . . . Charles B. Ray was appointed on the committee to make a roll of the convention and was elected one of the convention secretaries. Samuel R. Ward led the convention in prayer and delivered an address. This was the first time in American history that Negro citizens were actively in the leadership of a political convention.74 Besides making history as participants in a national convention, Garnet offered and got adopted a resolution. This, too, became another historic first. This resolution read as follows: Resolved, that the Liberty Party has not been organized for any temporary purpose, by interested politicians, but has arisen from among the people, in consequence of a conviction, hourly gaining ground, that gaining ground, that no other party in the country represents the true principles of American Liberty, or the true spirit of the Constitution of the United States.75 During the national convention, James G. Birney was once again nominated as the party’s presidential candidate, and Thomas Morris got the bid for vice president. Next, the party platform included two planks for African Americans. The 35th resolution read: Resolved, that this Convention recommend to the friends of Liberty in all those free States where any inequality of rights and privileges exist on account of color, to employ their utmost energies to remove all such remnants and effects of the slave system.76 The thirty-sixth resolution read: Resolved, that we cordially welcome our colored fellow citizens to fraternity with us in the Liberty Party, in its great contest to secure the rights of mankind, and the religion of our common country.77 No other political party, major or minor, up to this point had made use of a party platform to welcome African American political and electoral participation. In the 1844 presidential

election the party received 62,197 votes, about 3% of the total votes cast. Hence, in 1843–1844 the Liberty Party made history and would continue to do so in the national elections of 1848, 1852, 1856, and 1860. African American voting and participation continued in a dwindling manner throughout the life of the party. Other, smaller third parties, like the National Liberty Party and the Political Abolition Party, received support from the FreeMen-of-Color voters. But they in turn received competition from the Liberty Party and the new Free-Soil Party that arose in 1848.78 As noted earlier, at their founding national convention in Buffalo, New York, on August 9–10, 1848, “the discontented elements of the Whigs, Democrats, the Barnburners, the Free Democrats, the Hunkers, and the political abolitionists,” as well as free blacks, came together and helped form the Free-Soil Party.79 However, because so many different motives led to the founding of this new political party, with the dominant one being to attract more followers and voters than the Liberty Party, “the Free-Soil Party only went so far as to oppose the extension of slavery into newly acquired territories; to cull the support of Democrats and Whigs, it did not advocate action against states where slavery already existed.”80 Therefore, several of the free black delegates in attendance at this founding convention were like Samuel Ward, who urged in his “Address to the Four Thousand Colored Voters of the State of New York” that they not vote for the Free-Soil Party and its candidate, former president Martin Van Buren. In his address he stated: Vote according to your principles of abhorrence of slavery; vote in accordance with your desire for enfranchisement of all the colored men of the State; vote against the extension of slavery, by voting against its existence; vote with a party that is true to all the great interests of the crushed, poor, black or white, bond or free, a party that has not deserted us to rally around the standard of one of our most implacable foes; vote so as to maintain your own self-respect, so that your children shall not be ashamed to own you as fathers; . . .81 Ward wanted his community to vote for the Liberty Party. In fact, Douglass, who was also a delegate, agreed with Ward, and he editorialized in his newspaper urging his readers not to vote for the Free-Soil Party and Van Buren. In the 1848 presidential election the Free-Soilers captured 291,263 votes to 2,733 for the National Liberty Party. This was a much greater national showing than the initial Liberty Party effort. According to the historical record, “the Negro voters in New Bedford, Massachusetts, who were . . . between six hundred and seven hundred, were reported to have voted, ‘almost to a man,’ for the Free-Soil ticket. Frederick Douglass is the authority for the statement that this was the case in all parts of Massachusetts.”82 To obtain this level of support the majority of abolitionists and anti-slavery and Liberty Party men moved into the emerging Free-Soil Party and attracted the Free-Men-of-Color with them. However, not all of the Free-Men-of Color voters in 1848 went for the Free-Soilers and the smaller anti-slavery parties: “in Rhode Island, the situation was a different one. The Colored

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Voters in Providence are said to have ‘almost unanimously supported the [Zachary] Taylor ticket,’” the Whig candidate for president.83 Historically, the state “Law and Order” party (as the Whigs were named in Rhode Island) in 1842 restored suffrage rights to free black voters after they had been taken away in 1822. Thus, in the words of Frederick Douglass, who had traveled to the state during this crisis: “This circumstance has given the Whigs almost complete control of the colored voters; so that if the Whigs should nominate Satan himself, they might calculate upon a large dark vote in Rhode Island.”84 Accordingly, since the elites of the party knew this, they issued during the 1848 presidential campaign an address to the African American electorate in the state entitled “Address of the Whigs to Colored Voters,” which reminded them in no uncertain terms that this was not the time for them to show their “ingratitude.” However, in 1850, two years after the Free-Soil defeat, “the Barnburners had returned to the Democratic Party, leaving the Free-Soil Party in the hands of former Whigs and Liberty men, who viewed more favorably the demand for equal rights by Northern Negroes. But the national Free-Soil platform of 1852 continued to avoid this issue [equal rights for African Americans].”85 Historian Foner tells us that racial prejudices, which had plagued the party from its inception, continued to do so in the presidential election of 1852 simply because party leaders “realized that in a society characterized by an all but universal belief in white supremacy, no political party could function effectively which included a call for equal rights in its national platform.”86 When the second national convention of the Free-Soil party convened in Pittsburgh on August 11, 1852, and nominated John Hale for president and George Julian for vice president, several African American delegates were present. Douglass, who spoke to the convention, “was elected secretary of the Convention. Upon receiving the appointment he completely endorsed the party and its endeavors. . . . During the year, Douglass also entered the ranks of the old Liberty party and worked for both parties and their candidates throughout the elections.”87 Seemingly, Douglass took this unprecedented party activism because the convention “adopted a resolution favoring the enfranchisement of all men without regard to color.”88 In this the party’s final election appearance, it “polled 156,297 votes in the election; the Liberty party 72. . . . After this defeat, the Free-Soil party dissolved.”89 Afterwards, the Liberty Party, along with a couple of smaller anti-slavery parties, labored on, but all of them gave way in 1856 to a new party, the Republican Party.

The Republican Party On June, 17–19, 1856, the newly formed Republican Party met at Music Fund Hall in Philadelphia and nominated John Fremont for president and William Dayton for vice president. Historian Charles Wesley noted: “The participation of Negroes in early Republican Party politics is uncertain. In the first place, this party was not an anti-slavery political party. . . . It proposed not to interfere with slavery where it existed.”90 It was only opposed to the extension of slavery, like the Free-Soilers. As far as the extant historical record shows there were no free

black delegates at this initial Republican National Convention. There is no clear historical data on how Douglass and others responded to this new party. From the party’s inception in 1854, Douglass’s newspaper, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, carried notices about meetings of the party. But in the 1856 election, “there is no indication that any special effort was made to attract Negro voters nor to interest the American people in extending the suffrage to Negroes.”91 In the 1856 presidential election the party received 38.5% of the total votes cast and 114 electoral votes (compared to the 174 electoral votes for the Democratic Party) and instantly became the second major political party in the nation. Therefore, when the Republicans held their second national convention in Chicago on May 16, 1860, nominating Abraham Lincoln for president and Hannibal Hamlin for vice president, African Americans took notice but no delegates attended the convention. At nearly the same time, leading African American spokespersons were in attendance at a Political Anti-Slavery Convention in Boston on May 29, 1860. Later, on August 29, 1860, at the party convention of the Radical Political Abolitionists, the remnant faction of the Liberty Party, Douglass “was appointed to the business committee . . . and was chosen as one of two electors-at-large. Again this was the first time that an American Negro had been nominated for such a party position.”92 After the convention Douglass declared his support for his long time abolitionist friend Gerrit Smith, who would be running as the presidential candidate of the party. Douglass in this 1860 election eventually changed his mind as he watched the Lincoln campaign become clearer on the question of limiting the expansion of slavery vis-à-vis the Democratic candidate Stephen Douglas, who embraced each state’s electorate deciding the existence of slavery. Thus, Frederick Douglass, late in the campaign, “ended up endorsing Lincoln and campaigning for him in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa,” states where FreeMen-of-Color did not have suffrage rights.93 Nevertheless, Lincoln and the Republican Party won with 59.4% of the vote and 180 electoral votes, primarily because the Democratic Party in the election had split and splintered into three different factions, each one having its own set of candidates. Lincoln would win reelection in 1864, and white Lincoln delegates from the South were elected at the national convention, of Lincoln’s reelection. At the 1868 Republican National Convention, African American delegates would appear at a major political party convention for the very first time. And since 1868, African American delegates have been present at every one of the national conventions of the Republican Party.

Statistical Analyses for the Antebellum Era At this point, the historical literature and narratives that discuss and describe how the Free-Men-of-Color voted in national elections during the Antebellum Era comes to an end. This is very similar to the literature on their voting in the first federal election. Historians and political scientists have not focused on the years shortly after the 1860s. Thus, we now seek to determine if an empirical analysis can provide further insights and findings not embedded in the historical and political science literature.



The African American Electorate in Antebellum and Civil War America, 1788–1867 129

In order to gather the necessary empirical data, we turn to the United States censuses conducted during the Antebellum Era. First, we must take into account the limitations in the census data during this era. No gender breakdown by race was presented in the census data until 1820. Hence, there is no such data usable to isolate African American voters for the census years of 1790, 1800, and 1810. However, beginning with the 1820 census, the number and percentages of voting age Free-Men-of-Color in counties of every state that allowed them to vote is given. Next, we obtained the votes and percentages of the vote in counties of these states for each political party in every presidential election from 1828 through 1860. This county-level presidential voting data and Free-Men-of-Color population data have been combined for the first time ever and placed in Appendix A of this volume. Secondly, with this county-level census data and the countylevel presidential voting data, we can, for the first time, use the statistical technique of correlation to see if there is an association of the Free-Men-of-Color voters with any of the political parties that the historical literature illuminated. Typically, historians and political scientists correlate the total African American countylevel population with the county-level presidential vote. Such

an approach tends to overstate the relationship between the two variables because the total population includes women, children, and infirm individuals who did not or could not vote. For our analysis, we eliminated that problem by taking only African American males and using only the states where they had the legal right to vote to determine if a significant statistical correlation occurred. Our analysis shows that such a relationship occurred almost continuously in two states, Massachusetts and New York, for presidential elections during the Antebellum Era. Table 6.4 shows the strengths of those state-level correlations in a longitudinal manner. Although the correlations are low, this is to be expected simply because of the numbers; the electorate percentages of Free-Men-of-Color voters are small. However, the correlations are statistically significant. For example, Table 6.4 shows that at the 95% confidence level nearly 30% of each percentage increase of the vote in New York for Jackson in the presidential election of 1832 was associated with the presence of Free-Men-of-Color. Another example, in Table 6.5, shows that 42% of each percentage increase of the opposition vote in Pennsylvania against Jackson in the same election was associated with the presence of Free-Men-of-Color. The statistically significant correlations

Table 6.4  Correlations of Voting Behavior Percentages: Voting Age African Americans and Votes for U.S. Presidential Candidates in Massachusetts and New York, 1828–1860

State

Year

Number of Counties

Candidate

Political Party

Massachusetts

1828 1828 1832 1844 1844 1844 1848 1848

13 13 14 14 14 14 14 14

J.Q. Adams Others Clay Birney Clay Others Others Taylor

National Republican 

1832

55

1832 1844 1848 1848 1848 1852 1852 1856 1856 1856 1860 1860

55 56 56 56 56 59 59 59 59 59 60 60

New York  

Correlation

Significance Level

Whig

–0.7761 0.6911 0.5332 –0.6565 0.5540 0.7062 0.8448 0.5821

0.01 0.01 0.05 0.05 0.05 0.01 0.01 0.05

Clay

National Republican

–0.2938

0.05

Jackson Birney Cass Taylor Van Buren Hale Pierce Buchanan Fillmore Fremont Breckinridge Lincoln

Democratic Republican Liberty Democratic Whig Free Soil Free Soil Democratic Democratic American Know Nothing Republican S. Democratic Republican

0.2938 –0.5449 0.3169 0.4328 –0.4780 –0.4856 0.3719 0.4398 0.5166 –0.5778 0.4891 –0.4894

0.05 0.01 0.05 0.01 0.01 0.01 0.01 0.01 0.01 0.01 0.01 0.01

National Republican Liberty Whig  

Sources: ICPSR Study No. 1, United States Historical Election Returns, 1824–1968, 2nd ICPSR ed. [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR00001 (Ann Abor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved June 2002; Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved June 2002; and Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, Historical Census Browser, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/index.html (Charlottesville: University of Virginia), retrieved April 13, 2008. See Appendices 6.A.1–6.A.9.

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suggest that the historical literature is quite meaningful. These data tell us that at least in these two states Free-Men-of-Color voters were almost always either active or influential in these presidential elections. Table 6.5 reveals that in the states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Rhode Island Free-Men-of-Color voters were intermittently active in presidential elections. As we have mentioned, North Carolina and Pennsylvania African Americans lost the right to vote in 1835 and 1838, respectively. Thus, these limited voting data occurred in part because of legal realities. In Rhode Island, Free-Men-of-Color voters were denied their suffrage rights in 1822 but gained them back in 1842, so legal reasons also existed there. Finally, after establishing that a significant statistical correlation existed between free blacks and certain presidential parties, we performed some partial correlational analyses where we controlled

for competing party variables. We found that significant partial correlations existed for some years in Pennsylvania, New York, New Hampshire, and North Carolina. Table 6.6 indicates the presidential election years in which the partial correlations occurred and gives us the strength of those partial correlations. And while these partials occurred across time, they did so in only a selected number of years. Moreover, these partial correlations tell us that the relationships between the free black voters and these presidential parties held even when everything else was controlled for. Hence, out of our empirical analyses, we obtain the insight and suggestion that the data help to corroborate the findings and insights in the historical literature. African Americans in national elections voted for those candidates and parties that their political context and culture allowed them to identify and affiliate with, as well as for those who spoke to their interests about suffrage rights, slavery, and equal rights.

Table 6.5  Correlations of Voting Behavior Percentages: Voting Age African Americans and Votes for U.S. Presidential Candidates in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, 1828–1860 State

Year

Number of Counties Candidate

North Carolina

1828

62

Others

Pennsylvania

1828 1828 1832 1832

47 47 49 49

Rhode Island

1852

 5

Political Party

Correlation

Significance Level

 

0.5374

0.01

Jackson J.Q. Adams Jackson Wirt

Democratic Republican National Republican Democratic Republican Anti-Masonic

–0.4254 0.4254 –0.4934 0.4934

0.01 0.01 0.01 0.01

Hale

Free Soil

–0.8833

0.05

Sources: ICPSR Study No. 1, United States Historical Election Returns, 1824–1968, 2nd ICPSR ed. [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR00001 (Ann Abor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved June 2002; Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved June 2002; and Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, Historical Census Browser, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/index.html (Charlottesville: University of Virginia), retrieved April 13, 2008. See Appendices 6.A.1–6.A.9.

Table 6.6  Partial Correlations of Voting Behavior Percentages: Voting Age African Americans and Votes for U.S. Presidential Candidates, 1828–1860 State

Year

Number of Counties Candidate

Political Party

Correlation

Significance Level

New Hampshire

1848 1848 1848

8 8 8

Cass Taylor Van Buren

Democratic Whig Free Soil

–0.8928 –0.8928 –0.8918

0.017 0.017 0.017

New York

1832 1836 1836

55 55 55

Clay Harrison Van Buren

National Republican Whig Democrat

–0.2938 0.3067 0.3067

0.029 0.024 0.024

North Carolina

1828

62

Others

0.5297

0.000

Pennsylvania

1828

47

Jackson

Democratic Republican

–0.4254

0.003

Sources: ICPSR Study No. 1, United States Historical Election Returns, 1824–1968, 2nd ICPSR ed. [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR00001 (Ann Abor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved June 2002; Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved June 2002; and Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, Historical Census Browser, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/index.html (Charlottesville: University of Virginia), retrieved April 13, 2008. See Appendices 6.A.1–6.A.9.



The African American Electorate in Antebellum and Civil War America, 1788–1867 131

Summary and Conclusions on the African American Electorate in Antebellum and Civil War America With the establishment of the federal government at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, there was a new institutional player in the voting system in America. During the Colonial and Revolutionary eras, voting qualifications were essentially left to the colonial and local governments. Creation of a federal government, with two houses of congress and a presidency, led to voting becoming a national, as well as a state and local, matter. Although the national government left the matter of voting qualifications up to the states, the Constitution did establish an indirect voting qualification, the Three-Fifths Clause, for counting individuals to be represented by a seat in the House of Representatives. Such an indirect qualification sent a signal to the states about what they might decide to do about their African American populations. Nearly all of the new states that entered the Union—from the Northwest Territory, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Southwest Territory that were ceded to the United States after the Mexican War—prohibited, or eventually prohibited, free blacks from voting. Because the federal government set part of the electoral context with the Three-Fifths Clause, new states followed suit and discriminated against free blacks. How did free African Americans vote in the very first federal election? The historical record shows that in several of the thirteen original states some African Americans did vote and in other states, issues of central concern to the African American community arose even though they could not vote. But to be sure, there was limited African American voting in the earliest federal election. Since suffrage rights existed and had been exercised by free blacks in both the Colonial and Revolutionary eras, this form of political participation continued as the nation transformed. African American voting behavior at the state and local levels moved from political factions and personal cliques to the early precursor of national political parties, essentially the Federalists, and then to wings of the Whigs and eventually to the anti-slavery parties, and finally, to the Republican Party. There was also affiliation with the anti-slavery wing of the Democratic Party. The historical record shows significant African American support for several different anti-slavery parties. Finally, there is the matter of voting behavior in the subsequent federal elections after 1788–1789. Here, using both historical and empirical data, we show that the emerging political party system attracted continuous political and electoral participation throughout the Antebellum Era. Although African Americans could only exercise their suffrage rights in a limited number of states, there was a great deal of political activity. The rise of both major and minor political parties helped greatly in this early voting. The anti-slavery parties, particularly the Liberty and the Free-Soil parties, despite the fact that both exhibited racial prejudices, attracted and cued the Free-Menof-Color on how and for whom to vote to advance their cause. Still, during this time of change and transition, a number of the

original states were reconsidering the suffrage rights that they had granted to Free-Men-of-Color and began the process of reversals.

Notes   1. Charles Wesley, “Negro Suffrage in the Period of ConstitutionMaking, 1787–1865,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 32 (April 1947), pp. 159–160.   2. Merrill Jensen and Robert Becker (eds.), The Documentary History of the First Federal Elections, 1788–1790, Vol. I (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), p. xi.   3. Gordon DenBoer, Lucy Trumbull Brown, and Charles Hagermann (eds.), The Documentary History of the First Federal Elections, 1788–1790, Vol. II (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 444 and 447.   4. Jensen and Becker, p. 187.   5. Gordon DenBoer, Lucy Trumbull Brown, Alfred Lindsay Skerpan, and Charles Hagermann (eds.), The Documentary History of the First Federal Elections, 1788–1790, Vol. IV (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 436.   6. Gordon DenBoer, Lucy Trumbull Brown, and Charles Hagermann (eds.), The Documentary History of the First Federal Elections, 1788–1790, Vol. II (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), p. 373.   7. Ibid., p. 90.   8. Ibid., p. 116.   9. Michael Dubin, United States Presidential Elections, 1788– 1860: The Official Results by County and State (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2002), p. 2. 10. Ibid., p. xii. 11. Benjamin Quarles, Black Mosaic: Essays in Afro-American History and Historiography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 62. 12. Ibid. 13. Dixon Ryan Fox, “The Negro Vote in Old New York,” Political Science Quarterly Vol. 32 (June 1917), p. 254. 14. Ibid., p. 253. 15. Ibid., pp. 252–253. 16. Ibid., p. 253. 17. Ibid., p. 254. 18. Ibid., p. 256. 19. Ibid., p. 257. See also Wesley, “Negro Suffrage in the Period of Constitution-Making, 1787–1865,” pp. 157–158. 20. Quoted in Fox, p. 263, footnote 2. 21. Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 8. 22. Fox, p. 262. 23. Ibid., p. 263. 24. Benson, p. 320. 25. Ibid. 26. John Stanley, “Majority Tyranny in Tocqueville’s America: The Failure of Negro Suffrage in 1846,” Political Science Quarterly Vol. 84 (September 1969), pp. 415–416. 27. Ibid., p. 417. 28. Ibid (emphasis in the original). 29. Ibid., p. 419. 30. Charles Wesley, “The Participation of Negroes in Anti-Slavery Political Parties,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 29 (January 1944), pp. 47–55. 31. Stanley, p. 422. 32. Ibid., and footnote 23. 33. Phyllis Field, The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 120. 34. Wesley, “The Participation of Negroes in Anti-Slavery Political Parties,” p. 39. 35. Benson, pp. 135–136 (emphasis in the original).

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36. Field, p. 83. 37. On this point see Benjamin Quarles, “The Breach Between Douglass and Garrison,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 23 (April 1938), pp. 144–154. 38. Hanes Walton, Jr., The Negro in Third Party Politics (Philadelphia: Dorrance and Company, 1969), p. 15. 39. Wesley, “The Participation of Negroes in Anti-Slavery Political Parties,” pp. 52–53. 40. Ibid., p. 53. 41. Walton, p. 15. 42. Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 338. 43. Steven Rosenstone, Roy Behr, and Edward Lazarus, Third Parties in America: Citizen Response to Major Party Failure (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 53. 44. Frederick Blue, The Free-Soilers: Third Party Politics, 1848–54 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), p. 61. 45. Holt, p. 339. 46. Walton, p. 16. 47. Wesley, pp. 54–58. 48. Eric Foner, “Politics and Prejudices: The Free-Soil Party and the Negro, 1849–1852,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 50 (October 1965), p. 239. 49. Foner, p. 240. See also Eric Foner, “Racial Attitudes of the Free-Soil Party in New York,” New York History Vol. 46 (October 1965), pp. 311–329. 50. Foner, “Politics and Prejudices: The Free-Soil Party and the Negro, 1849–1852,” p. 240. 51. Wesley, p. 64–65. 52. Field, p. 86. 53. Ibid., p. 95. 54. Ibid. 55. Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Politics (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1972), p. 84. 56. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2006), p. 52. 57. Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), Chapter One. 58. Samuel Eldersveld and Hanes Walton, Jr., Political Parties in American Society, 2nd Edition (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), pp. 43–64. 59. Theodore Smith, The Liberty and Free-Soil Parties in the Northwest (New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1897), p. 58. 60. Ronald Formisano, “The Edge of Caste: Colored Suffrage in Michigan, 1827–1861,” Michigan History Vol. 56 (Spring 1972), pp. 19–41. See also, Willis Dunbar with William Shade, “The Black Man Gains the Vote: The Centennial of ‘Impartial Suffrage’ in Michigan,” pp. 42–57.

61. Emil Olbrich, The Development of Sentiment on Negro Suffrage to 1860 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1912), p. 40. 62. Ibid., pp. 39–40. 63. Ibid., pp. 42. 64. Leon Litwack, “The Abolitionist Dilemma: The Antislavery Movement and the Northern Negro,” New England Quarterly Vol. 34 (March 1961), p. 50. 65. Edward Schriver, “Antislavery: The Free-Soil and Free Democratic Parties in Maine, 1848–1855,” New England Quarterly Vol. 42 (March 1969), p. 83. 66. Ibid., p. 86. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., p. 94. 69. Frederick J. Blue, The Free-Soilers: Third Party Politics, 1848– 54 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), p. 12. See also Richard Sewell, “John P. Hale and the Liberal Party, 1847–1848,” New England Quarterly Vol. 37 (March 1964), 200–223. 70. For a discussion of the one-fifth estimate consensus see William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), p. 83, footnote b, and p. 105, footnote c. 71. Wesley, “The Participation of Negroes in Antislavery Political Parties,” pp. 39–40. 72. Walton, The Negro in Third Party Politics, p. 10. 73. Wesley, “The Participation of Negroes in Anti-Slavery Political Parties,” p. 40. 74. Ibid., p. 44–45. 75. Ibid., p. 45. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid. 78. Walton, The Negro in Third Party Politics, pp. 17–20. 79. Wesley, “The Participation of Negroes in Anti-Slavery Political Parties,” p. 52–53. 80. Rosenstone, Behr, and Lazarus, p. 51. 81. Wesley, “The Participation of Negroes in Anti-Slavery Political Parties,” p. 54–55. 82. Quoted in ibid., p. 57. 83. Ibid., p. 57. 84. Ibid., p. 57–58. 85. Foner, “Politics and Prejudices: The Free-Soil Party and the Negro, 1847–1852,” p. 240. 86. Ibid. 87. Walton, The Negro in Third Party Politics, p. 19. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid. 90. Wesley, “The Participation of Negroes in the Anti-Slavery Political Parties,” p. 71. 91. Ibid., p. 72. 92. Ibid., p. 73. 93. Walton, The Negro in Third Party Politics, p. 20.

CHAPTER 7

The Reversal of African American Suffrage Rights prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1788–1870 The Politics of Total Reversals: Denial of Suffrage Rights in Eight States during the Antebellum and Civil War Eras

134

Table 7.1 Number of Petitions For and Against African American Suffrage Rights in Pennsylvania: Selected Counties by Submission to the 1837–1838 State Constitutional Convention

136

The Politics of Partial Reversals: The Abridgement of Suffrage Rights in New York and Rhode Island

137

The Politics of Reversal: Granting Suffrage Rights in Louisiana: 1838–1860

139

Map 7.1 Rapides Parish, Louisiana 1840

139

Table 7.2 Presidential Election Vote and Voting Age African American Male Population in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, 1828–1860

140

Figure 7.1 Percent of Presidential Vote in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, for the Major and Third Political Parties, 1836–1860

141

Summary and Conclusions on the Reversals of African American Suffrage Rights

141

Map 7.2 States that Reversed Suffrage Rights for African Americans during the Antebellum Era

141

Notes 142

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A

constant problem for the early African American electorate was the retention of their suffrage rights. During the Colonial, Revolutionary, and Antebellum periods African Americans saw the ballot extended to them, then denied to them, then given back to them, by colonies, states, and the federal government. Indeed, the acquisition and retention of suffrage rights has been a significant part of the African American political agenda in every era. In elections prior to the Fifteenth Amendment (1788–1870), African American suffrage rights were denied in spite of the promises of freedom and liberty outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. Andrew Jackson, as the leader of the Democratic Party, transformed his political organization from a party of elites to a party of the masses using the theme that the “common man” should vote for and run his own government.1 For President Jackson and his disciples, the older idea of a “stakeholder” or “property-based” electorate was inimical to America’s system of democratic government. Citizenship, not property, increasingly became the basis for voting. Yet it is precisely during this era, when mass political participation began, that the greatest number of states totally or partially reversed suffrage rights for Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color.

The Politics of Total Reversals: Denial of Suffrage Rights in Eight States during the Antebellum and Civil War Eras During the struggles to expand and broaden suffrage rights to a greater proportion of the white populace, eight different states reversed themselves and removed existing suffrage rights from Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color. Prevailing in this era in America were reform movements to eliminate property and taxpaying requirements to vote. Put differently, the concept of a “stakein-society” as the essential qualification for suffrage rights came under increasing attack after the Revolutionary War, initially by the militiamen. Slowly and gradually, these soldiers of the war attracted workingmen to their reform movement, and together they pressured and lobbied the state legislatures to eliminate the property and tax requirements. The final factor, which helped the reform movement to succeed, was the leadership of Andrew Jackson, from his failed presidential election bid in 1824 through his two terms in the White House that ended in 1837. Although the reform movement succeeded in some places before Jackson, elsewhere it needed the Jackson presence to undercut a recalcitrant opposition. Ironically, the reform movement to expand and extend suffrage to the “common man” resulted in the denial of suffrage rights to Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color who had possessed these rights in both Colonial and Revolutionary America.

Delaware Delaware was the first state, in 1792, to reverse previously granted suffrage rights for African Americans. This occurred in the very same year that Delaware dropped its property qualifications on whites for voting. “The constitution of 1792 employed the language, ‘Every white free man,’ to describe the voter. No other state constitution excluded Negroes from the electorate

during this period.”2 Delaware, in making the transition from its colonial charter to its first state constitution, reversed suffrage rights for Free-Men-of-Color while dropping property qualifications for white males. Delaware, one of the original thirteen colonies, had set in motion a trend toward reversals, the Revolution notwithstanding.

Kentucky The border state of Kentucky, which, like Delaware, entered in the Union in 1792, denied suffrage rights to African Americans seven years later in 1799. The new Kentucky state constitution in that year “recognized equality in the foundation of a social compact only in the case of ‘free men’ and confined the right to vote to free white male citizens.”3 The state had not enacted a property or tax qualification and did not enact one in its new 1799 state constitution. African Americans in Kentucky had the right to vote for only seven years.

Maryland Following Kentucky two years later, Maryland, in 1801, reversed its suffrage rights to Free-Men-of-Color by legislative statute while—almost simultaneously—eliminating its property qualification by statute. Of Maryland’s situation, one scholar writes: “Under the Maryland Constitution of 1776, free Negroes had been allowed to vote if they met certain property qualifications. In 1783 a state statute restricted this right to Negroes who were free prior to that year,”4 and “later the right to vote was specifically restricted to free whites in this state by a constitutional amendment of 1801 and by acts of 1802 and 1810.”5 The 1810 denial was a constitutional act, as was a second exclusion of Free-Menof-Color in a subsequent constitution in 1851. Maryland, like Delaware, expanded white suffrage by dropping its property qualification even while it ended African American suffrage rights.

New Jersey New Jersey originally permitted both Free-Men-of Color and Free-Women-of-Color to have suffrage rights. Previously, only Virginia had briefly permitted Free-Women-of-Color to vote, a right halted in 1699. New Jersey stood alone in providing the vote to both black men and women, but like other states it also had a property and/or tax qualification to vote. In 1807 when the state legislature passed a statute to deny Free-Men-and-Womenof-Color the vote, it also re-enacted an earlier (1776) property and/or tax qualification for the vote by free white males. Thus, when New Jersey denied free African Americans suffrage rights, it also maintained restrictions on the white male electorate. Historian Marion Thompson Wright noted of New Jersey that “in the years, 1776–1807, many of the instances of voting by Negroes came to light through contested elections which caused widespread public comment,” due to the fact that voting by the Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color had influenced the outcomes.6 A second motive behind the elimination of suffrage rights was partisan conflict: Because of the feeling existing among Democrats that Federalists were making use of Negroes in their efforts to win at the polls, the Democrats resisted in many cases the extension of suffrage to Negroes. Where the franchise was being



The Reversal of African American Suffrage Rights, 1788–1870 135

exercised by them, Democrats sought to impose restrictions on their use of this privilege.7 A third factor arose: “in 1804, due to the activities of the Society of Friends and other liberal persons, the Legislature had passed a law providing for the gradual emancipation of slaves in the state.”8 The emancipation of slaves would cause larger numbers of Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color to become eligible to vote. New Jersey at the time had the largest percentage of FreePeople-of-Color in the nation, some 2%. The loudest complaints came following the election of 1802. A leading New Jersey politician, John Condict, argued that an 1802 deadlock in state politics was allegedly caused by the exercise of voting rights by Free-People-of-Color. Condict argued that “the vote of a Negro slave, herself the property of another slave, elected one of the Hunterdon [County] members on that occasion [1802], produced an equality of parties in the legislature, and deprived the state of a governor for a year.”9 This and other complaints of the difference made by the African American vote in hotly contested races converged with the state election of 1806, which produced more complaints and ultimately led to the reversal of state policy on suffrage rights. “Following the election of 1806 in which fraudulent balloting was said to have been rife, action was taken to restrict suffrage to free white males.”10 Thus, in this 1806 election, “women and girls, black and white, married and single, with and without qualification, voted again and again.”11 As a result the legislature passed a statute eliminating suffrage rights for African Americans. By 1844, a new state constitution replaced the statute to the same effect. Of the reversal in New Jersey, Wright said: “the Whigs and Republicans were more tolerant toward Negroes than were the Democrats. For many years even the Whigs or Republicans were lukewarm in the matter of including Negroes in the electorate. The Democrats were inexorable in their determination to deny the freedmen the privilege of white citizens.”12

Connecticut The year in which Connecticut was long assumed to have reversed its policy of suffrage rights for African Americans— 1814—has recently been proven incorrect. Political scientist James Adams wrote in 1925 that “Connecticut continued under . . . [its] old [colonial] charter, and in [that] state the qualifications for electors were fixed from time to time by legislative enactment.”13 Using this approach, he demonstrated that “at the May session of the Connecticut legislature in 1814, it was enacted that ‘no person shall be admitted a freeman in any town in this state, unless, in addition to the qualifications already required by law, he be a free white male person.’”14 Then “in the May session of 1818 it was again provided in an amendment to the election law that only ‘white male’ inhabitants might be made freemen [voters].”15 Thus, “in the constitution convention of the same year . . . the original draft, excluding Negroes, was then submitted and passed by a vote of 103 to 72. This race distinction was renewed in the constitutional amendment of 1845.”16 Emil Olbrich opined: “Connecticut’s Negro population was 8,041 with 267,161 white persons, and it is possible that Negro voters were becoming inconveniently numerous.”17 It is also

highly possible that simple racial prejudice was the underlying cause for this reversal in policy.

Tennessee The first state of the future southern Confederacy to reverse suffrage rights for African Americans during the Antebellum Era was Tennessee in 1834. There, Free-Men-of-Color had been voting for some thirty-eight years. Two men, John Bell and Cave Johnson, had credited their elections to Congress to “the aid of colored men’s votes, the latter boasting that he owed his election in 1828 to one hundred and forty-four free negroes who worked in his mills.”18 Despite this rather positive regard of two elected officials for black suffrage rights, mass sentiment and public opinion was changing against anti-slavery, and toward pro-slavery, ideas. Emil Olbrich wrote: “During the twenties, the anti-slavery agitation in the North and the growing pro-slavery sentiment in the South, produced throughout Tennessee, strong manifestation of opposition to negro citizenship. The laws against free negroes became stricter, and at length, on December 16, 1831, the legislature forbade them to enter the state. . . .”19 This law also declared that “slaves should not be freed except on condition that they be removed from the commonwealth as soon as they might be emancipated.”20 Thus, the constitutional convention of 1834 passed a white-only clause by a vote of thirty-three to twentythree. With this action, Tennessee had reversed suffrage rights in their state.

North Carolina North Carolina was the seventh state in which total reversal occurred. This southern state, which had been one of the thirteen original colonies, followed Tennessee by one year in denying suffrage rights to Free African Americans in 1835. In fact, North Carolina was one of those states that had multiple reversals. The state “gave blacks this freedom, the right to vote, in 1667 and withdrew it in 1715. This withdrawal was repealed in 1734 but the right to vote was again withdrawn in 1835.”21 The denial of African American suffrage rights in North Carolina, as in many other states, occurred simultaneously with the expansion of white suffrage rights as the state dropped property qualifications for white males in voting for candidates for the state House of Representatives and governor. Property qualifications were retained in voting for the state senate, requiring “freehold of 50 acres for 6 months prior to elections.”22 Olbrich tells us that when the constitutional convention began on June 12, 1835, “The friends of the African seem to have had no hope of securing for him equal voting privileges with white men. They put forth all their efforts to secure a property qualification that would permit some negroes to retain the valued right and offered several propositions looking to that end.”23 Some even pointed out how the limited number of free voters appeared inconsequential, with only “300 colored voters in Halifax [county], 150 in Hertford, 50 in Chowan, and 75 in Pasquotank,” but to no avail.24 When the debate ended over suffrage rights for free blacks, they had permanently lost their suffrage rights. And with this action, no southern state except Georgia left Free-Men-of-Color with the right to vote.

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Pennsylvania Two factors stand out in the reversal of suffrage rights for FreeMen-of-Color in Pennsylvania in 1838. First, there was a race riot in the city of Philadelphia in 1834, which generated significant racial antagonism and sentiments against Free Blacks. Thus, when the new state constitutional convention convened in 1837, “stridently racist views were galvanized by the fear of black migration: in New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and elsewhere, convention delegates claimed that enfranchising blacks would only encourage freedmen and runaway slaves to flock to their state.”25 Secondly, there was a complaint and subsequent court case lodged by the loser of an election in Bucks County. Of this conflict, historian Charles Wesley wrote: “In 1837, a candidate for office in Bucks County, who was defeated, claimed his opponent’s seat because Negroes had been permitted to vote for him and that such an action was contrary to law.”26 Another added “that the year before they had come within twelve votes of electing their candidate to congress.”27 Said criticism and protest caused the Democrats of this county to meet in convention and [to decide] that they would petition the legislature to oppose the voting of Negroes, that they would use the courts to prevent this activity by Negroes and that they would amend the constitution to this effect. In December [1837] the court decided that the election was legal and that the right of the Negro to vote in the state depended upon the interpretation of the constitution in its use of the word freeman.28 “In the fall of 1776,” when the colonial charter was transformed into a state constitution, that convention “produced the most democratic constitution in the thirteen original states: it abolished property requirements and enfranchised all taxpaying adult males as well as the nontaypaying sons of freeholders.”29 Under this initial state constitution, Free-Men-of-Color retained their suffrage rights. They were considered freemen. Therefore, “in Pennsylvania, in 1837, there were many Negro voters. It was roughly estimated by a member of the convention that some hundreds of colored men voted in York County, and some thirty or forty in Bucks county.”30 To halt this voting, the Democrats of Bucks County, after having lost in the courts, took their fight to the state constitutional convention on May 2, 1837. The first round of debate over the suffrage issue adjourned on July 14 but reconvened on October 17. In the interim, on July 8, eighty Free-Men-of-Color in Pittsburgh sent a petition entitled “Memorial of the Free Citizens of Color In Pittsburg and Its Vicinity Relative To the Right of Suffrage Read In Convention.” It immediately “aroused public interest, newspapers discussed the question and popular excitement spread over the whole state.”31 But the convention adjourned six days later without taking any action. In response to the petition, numerous other petitions and memorials were submitted to the convention when it reconvened on October 17, 1837. Table 7.1 reveals the fifteen counties whose residents submitted petitions for or against granting suffrage rights. There were seventy petitions (63.6%) against continuing to extend suffrage rights to African Americans and forty

Table 7.1  Number of Petitions For and Against African American Suffrage Rights in Pennsylvania: Selected Counties by Submission to the 1837–1838 State Constitutional Convention African American Suffrage Petitions

County Bucks

Number Against Suffrage

Number in Favor of Suffrage

Included an African Amercan Community Submission*

Total

26

7



33

Chester

0

15



15

Dauphin

0

1



1

Lancaster

0

1



1

Luzerne

1

4



5

Lycoming

0

1



1

Mifflin

2

2



4

Montgomery

18

2



20

Philadelphia

14

6



20

Schuylkill

1

0



1

Susquehanna

1

0



1

Washington

0

1



1

Westmoreland

5

0



5

York

2

0



2

70

40

 

110

63.6%

36.4%

 

 

Totals Percentages

Source: Adapted from Emil Olbrich, The Development of Sentiment on Negro Suffrage to 1860 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1912), p. 53. * All petitions submitted by African American communities were in favor of African American suffrage rights.

petitions (36.4%) for continuing to extend suffrage rights to African Americans. At least two of the petitions, both of which were for continuing suffrage rights, came from African American groups. But clearly, statewide public opinion was strongly against the continuance of suffrage rights for African Americans. However, this did not deter African American protest. In Chester and five other counties in the state, petitions for continuing African American suffrage rights outnumbered those in opposition to the continuation of suffrage rights. In Philadelphia, Frederick Hinton, an activist in the National Convention Movement and cofounder of the Philadelphia Library Company of Colored Persons joined forces with Reverend Charles W. Gardner, who was temporary pastor at the African Presbyterian Church. They began on June 5, 1837, drafting a petition to send to the state constitutional convention from Philadelphia. This petition was completed shortly after the “mass meeting of blacks held at the Bethel A.M.E. Church in” the city.32 A well-known Whig politician, James Biddle, presented the document to the convention on January 8, 1838, “shortly before the Pennsylvania Constitution Convention passed the black disenfranchisement amendment (Article III, Sec. 1), and can be viewed as a last-ditch effort by blacks of Philadelphia to persuade the convention body not to adopt the measure.”33 The convention decided “on January 27, 1838, by a vote of 77–45 that the suffrage should be limited to whites.”34



The Reversal of African American Suffrage Rights, 1788–1870 137

In terms of the voting at the constitutional convention, one scholar reports it as follows: The convention was composed of senatorial and representative delegates. Of seven representative delegates from Philadelphia city, where the number of blacks was largest, four voted against the dis-franchising amendment. One out of eight from Philadelphia county, two of three from Bucks county, four of six from Lancaster, one of two from Adams, and all four from Chester also voted on the side of the black man.35 Pennsylvania became the last state to deny suffrage rights to African Americans in the Antebellum period. Although denied their long held suffrage rights, African Americans did not give up without a fight. Two months later, on March 14, 1838, a mass meeting of African Americans assembled at “the Presbyterian Church on Seventh Street below Shippen [Street]” to prepare a report protesting their disenfranchisement. “The report was adopted unanimously by the assembled audience. It is known as the Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens, Threatened with Disfranchisement, to the People of Pennsylvania.”36 While this petition, like the others, had no effect, African Americans continued to protest. “Between 1839 and 1851 a total of eighty-one petitions and memorials by blacks on the voting issue reached the legislature.”37 It was not until 1873, some thirty-five years later, that their suffrage rights were fully restored. Out of Pennsylvania’s reversal came a political figure who would eventually have a tremendous impact on the issue of African American suffrage: Thaddeus Stevens. In fact, he was a delegate to the 1837–1838 state constitutional convention that stripped Free-Men-of-Color of their suffrage and did not even enter into the debate. But “when the constitution was finally adopted however, he refused to sign it because he could not sanction any discrimination on account of race or color.”38 According to Olbrich: Thaddeus Stevens, a native of Vermont, and a graduate of Dartmouth College, had come down into Pennsylvania and established himself as a lawyer in York county near the border of Maryland. Here he observed the workings of the fugitive slave law, saw one of the worst aspects of negro servitude, helped defend colored men claimed as fugitives, and developed an intense hatred of slavery.39 With this background Stevens entered the U.S. House of Representatives and became a major anti-slavery legislative force but also a restorer of the suffrage rights lost in the Antebellum period.

The Politics of Partial Reversals: The Abridgement of Suffrage Rights in New York and Rhode Island If the denial of African American suffrage rights was widespread, it was not necessarily inevitable. The Antebellum Era was the age of party formation and competition. Thus, it should come as no surprise that one of the issues over which parties competed was the suffrage right for Free-Men-of-Color. In the North, debate

about suffrage rights took place between the Federalists and their Democratic opponents in New York (1799–1821), between the Democrats in both of their manifestations (Jeffersonian and Jacksonians) and their Whig opponents (1832–1850), between the Northern Whigs and their opponents (1832–1852), and between the anti-slavery parties and their opponents (1840–1860). In the two northern states where partial reversals of suffrage rights occurred, New York and Rhode Island, there was a partisan debate and struggle in these electoral contests over suffrage.

New York Of the politics of partial reversals in New York, historian Phyllis Field wrote: The Age of the Common Man . . . theoretically began a new era in American politics, one in which all men became equals, and the requirement that voters own property was abolished forever. Following the trends of the times, New York in its 1821 constitutional convention changed its suffrage provisions. Non-propertyholding white males gained new rights, but, at the same time, black males found their right to vote restricted by a freehold qualification.40 This freehold qualification was a property qualification for Free-Men-of-Color of only $250 dollars. Professor Field concluded: “As has happened many times in American history, egalitarian ideals did not cross the color line.”41 What were the political motives that caused this partial reversal at the 1821 convention? Pioneering historian Emil Olbrich wrote: “In New York, in 1785, two-thirds of the senate and a majority of the assembly were in favor of forbidding negroes to vote; but the suffrage was preserved to black men by a veto of the Council of Revision.”42 Then, at the state legislative session in 1811, a law was passed that required each Free-Manof-Color to prove that he had been emancipated in order to have a right to vote. Later in 1814, a new section was added to that law, which applied only to New York City, “provided that certificates of freedom should be recorded in the office of the registrar; and that a copy of the record should be the certificate of freedom which a free black was required to produce at elections before he could vote.”43 Seemingly, political motives lurked behind these institutional requirements and the 1821 partial reversal. Olbrich noted, “in 1813 the votes of three hundred free negroes in New York City decided the election in favor of the Federalists and determined the character of the state legislature.”44 Then, he wrote, “one hundred and sixty-three Negroes . . . voted in New York at the spring election of 1821. There were more than five hundred, however, who tried to vote, and it was estimated that if all property qualifications were abolished, there would be twentyfive hundred Negro electors in the city of New York alone.”45 Historian Alexander Keyssar added: In New York . . . Republican factions were hostile to black voting between 1810 and 1820, in part because they feared (correctly) that blacks would constitute a

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Federalist voting bloc, especially in New York City; politically active blacks, throughout the North, tended to support the Federalists because of their opposition to slavery.46 Therefore, given the evolution of several new institutional restraints as well as these political motives, it should come as no surprise that, despite a vigorous debate at the 1821 convention, the new constitution partially reversed the right of African Americans to vote in the state. Of these new legal requirements historian Wesley says that a free African American male “had to own real estate worth two hundred and fifty dollars and he had to be a citizen of the state for three years, although no property qualification was required of whites and only one year of residence was required of them.”47 With these new legal requirements, Free-Men-of-Color had their suffrage rights partially reversed by a heightened property and residence requirement. This outcome could be seen as a victory of sorts, because in the legislative debates, a minority had sought the restriction of suffrage rights to white males only.

Rhode Island The elimination of African American suffrage rights, which nearly happened in New York in 1821, did happen a year later in Rhode Island during the struggle for the expansion of suffrage rights beyond property holders. Thus, following Connecticut in 1817, which eliminated suffrage rights for Free-Men-of-Color, and New York which severely restricted black suffrage in 1821, “Rhode Island altered its franchise law in 1822 so that only white male adults were eligible to be ‘freemen,’” those citizens designated eligible to vote in state and local elections.48 However, about twenty years later, Free-Men-of-Color in Rhode Island would be re-enfranchised as a result of the struggle to expand suffrage rights in the state to non-propertyholding males. Two historians state: “The Negro in Rhode Island regained the right to vote in the political turmoil resulting from a movement to expand the suffrage for whites. . . .”49 After the Revolutionary War, Rhode Island had not written a new state constitution but let its original colonial charter stay in force, which had limited voting only to property holders, i.e., “those who owned real estate valued at $134 or rented property for at least $7.”50 Those who had fought in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 sought suffrage reforms, and by the 1820s they were joined by the workingmen and “by sympathetic freeholders, the most famous of whom was Thomas Dorr.”51 This political activist, Dorr, had strenuously “supported the anti-slavery movement and worked for Negro rights,” but at the crucial moment of the creation of the Rhode Island Suffrage Association in March, 1840, found that “he could not overcome the ‘white only’ attitude of most in the suffrage movement,” which reconstituted itself in 1841 as the Suffrage Party in the State.52 Immediately, “in 1841, the Suffrage Party held a series of mass meetings and called an extralegal convention to write a constitution for the state. They held an election in July for delegates to the Suffrage or People’s Convention, and declared the voting to be open to all male citizens regardless of nativity or race.”53

When the African American political activists in Rhode Island tried to join the Suffrage Party led by Dorr and attempted to influence the inclusion of Free Blacks as voters, they quickly learned that the party was anti-Negro. “In early October,” 1841, the party’s convention “proposed to liberalize the franchise for all white-males, including foreign born, but excluded the Negro.”54 Although African Americans petitioned the convention to drop the “white only clause,” it was to no avail, and the convention proceeded to write a new state constitution with this clause in it. At the November, 1841, convention of the Dorr-led Suffrage Party, further entreaties and protests were made, and a concession was offered that after the proposed constitution was put forth to the Rhode Island male electorate in December and possibly approved, the party would put the Free-Men-of-Color matter itself to a referendum. Despite the exhortations of abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and other free African Americans who joined with the local Rhode Island AntiSlavery Society to cry for a reconsideration, the party approved its state constitution by a vote of 13,944 to 52. The Dorr-led constitutional convention did not establish a new constitution in Rhode Island; indeed, it constituted a political rebellion against the sitting and duly elected and constituted government already in place. The government, “in November, 1841 . . . [called] a Legal [freeholders] Convention” to write their own new state constitution, “and like the [Suffrage Party] People’s Constitution the draft proposal excluded Negro suffrage. . . . The Legal Convention reconvened in February, 1842, to complete the drafting of its constitution.”55 On March 21–23, 1842, they submitted their new constitution to the electorate of Rhode Island, but it was rejected. Once it was rejected, the Dorr-led Suffrage Party quickly moved to hold elections for state officials under their extralegal constitution in April 1842. In response, the state government, with promises of military support from President John Tyler (a Whig), passed a series of bills known as the Algerine Law “which levied heavy penalties on anyone accepting office or exercising power under the [Suffrage Party] People’s Constitution.”56 The Dorrites, on the other hand, were encouraged by declarations of support from Democrats such as Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren. 57 The election was held despite the legal threats, Dorr was elected governor, and some of his supporters won seats in the state legislature. To ensure that they could take the seats of power, Dorr and his group “led an attempt to seize the Providence Arsenal. The attack fizzled and the Dorrites scattered . . . and Dorr fled from the state.”58 In the aftermath of the failed insurgency, the Legal Constitution group, renamed “themselves the Law and Order Party . . . called a new constitutional convention . . . and scheduled the election of delegates for August and . . . opened the voting to all native male citizens.”59 The convention drafted a new state constitution and deleted the word “white.” African Americans joined this new movement and, when this state constitution was accepted by voters in 1842, found their suffrage rights restored. J. Stanley Lemons and Michael McKenna, two historians of Rhode Island who have documented these events, wrote that the conservative members of the Law and Order Party “were more prejudiced against the foreign-born than they were against the Negroes. For their part, the blacks resented the Suffrage Party’s concern for the foreign-born voter while excluding native



The Reversal of African American Suffrage Rights, 1788–1870 139

Americans only on the basis of color.”60 They added: “as a result of Negro support in the Dorrite disruptions, the Law and Order Party incurred an obligation to the black community which was repaid with the franchise. . . . The convention voted 45–15 to drop ‘white’ from the suffrage clause. The [new] constitution was approved in November, 1842 by a vote of 7,024–21, and Negroes voted almost unanimously for it.”61 Yet the Rhode Island grant of suffrage rights to African Americans carried a property qualification. In fact, when the Civil War began, only New York and Rhode Island still had property qualifications and only for African Americans.

The Politics of Reversal: Granting Suffrage Rights in Louisiana: 1838–1860 When Louisiana became a state in 1812, it denied suffrage rights to Free-Men-of-Color in its state constitution. However, the political elites of both major parties, Democrats and Whigs, mustered African Americans to the polls from 1838 until 1860 in Rapides Parish, located in central Louisiana.62 (A parish in Louisiana is equivalent to a county. See Map 7.1 for the location of Rapides Parish.) In Rapides Parish, partisans condoned an illegality, and the state government allowed it to happen. Free-Menof-Color were allowed to vote in this parish/county for some twenty-two years leading up to the Civil War. Historian Roger

Map 7.1  Rapides Parish, Louisiana 1840

0

100

200

miles

Claiborne

CLAIBORNE CLAIBORNE

Shreveport NATCHITOCHES NATCHITOCHES

Natchitoches

Catahoula

CATAHOULA CATAHOULA

Rapides

Avoyelles Baton Rouge

St Landry Calcasieu

CALCASIEU CALCASIEU

ST ST LANDRY LANDRY

New Orleans

0

100

200

miles

Sources: Adrian B. Ettlinger, The AniMap Plus County Boundary Historical Atlas, Version 3 Release 2, http://www.goldbug.com (Alamo, CA: Goldbug Software, 1991–2008), and Carville Earle, Historical United States County (HUSCO) Boundary Files, http://www..ga.lsu.edu/husco .html (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University GeoScience Publications, 1991–1999).

Wallace Shugg suggested that this situation was not unheard of: “despite the restriction of the franchise to white men in every ante-bellum constitution, local elections were sometimes so bitterly fought that rival candidates called Negroes to their aid.” He gives Rapides Parish as an example.63 The population of Free-Men-of-Color in Rapides Parish began from several emancipated slaves who migrated to central Louisiana from North Carolina in 1804 “and squatted on public lands. Their children were so closely related that when nearly sixty of them voted, a generation later, only a dozen answered to different names.”64 This group of Free-Men-and-Women-ofColor lived in an area known as “Ten Mile Precinct,” along Ten Mile Creek, which today is in Allen parish. Moreover, “relations between the Negroes and poor whites of this region were not so unfriendly as to prevent considerable miscegenation, for the color of their progeny was admitted to be no clue to their race.”65 By 1838, these light-skinned FreeMen-of-Color began “passing” for white voters in local, state, and federal elections. Only in 1857, some nineteen years after it had commenced, did a public outcry against this practice surface from the white community. Of this affair, Shugg wrote: The scandal of such people voting was first aired in the Louisiana press by the American or local KnowNothing party in a desperate effort to discredit the Democratic candidate in 1857. Colonel Robert A. Hunter, the nominee, was called an ”African suffragate” in affidavits filed by citizens of Rapides. They accused him of having armed and mustered Negroes to the polls in the Presidential election of 1856, and of now being ready to repeat this fraud in behalf of the Democratic State ticket.66 Court documents of the trial revealed that to prove their charges, members of the Know-Nothing party offered depositions from “a Democrat and nine old residents of the parish.”67 At the trial, these witnesses refused to blame Colonel Hunter, but they did say under oath “that more than two score ‘Africans’ had cast ballots in previous elections.”68 In addition, these witnesses for the Know-Nothing party let it be known that the names of these African voters “could be found in a register known as ‘Boyce’s list,’ and the so-called ‘Ten Mile precinct’ had been especially created to provide them with a safe and ostensibly legal polling place.”69 At the trial, “Colonial Hunter . . . did not deny that his party had enlisted the suffrage of a few colored people. With all the candor of a seasoned politician, he simply demurred.”70 Hunter, who was the defendant, got help from “the Democratic district attorney” simply because the sympathetic prosecutor “neglected to introduce enough evidence to prove that the defendants were colored.”71 Both the Democratic defendant and district attorney got even more help from “the Democratic Judge, who would not permit the jury to draw obvious conclusions from their appearance.”72 Thus, it should come as no surprise that the Democratic Party won their case, upholding their electoral victory over the Know-Nothings and upholding the votes of the Free-Men-of-Color.

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Later, “before an audience of conservative planters,” Colonel Hunter declared that it was the Whigs who had first marched Negroes to the polls in 1838: Since the constitution at that time limited the franchise to white men who had paid taxes or purchased public land, and the Negroes of Ten Mile Precinct were not tax-payers, public land was entered in their names by Whig politicians to give them some legal ground for voting. Three years later, in 1841, ”some of the Democratic boys got in among them and changed them over to their side.“ The Whigs, as surprised as they were indignant, ”kicked up against it, and a trial ensured,“ but the Democrats never failed thereafter to collect all the free Negro votes in Rapides.73 Writing about the outcome of the 1857 election, Shugg noted that: In his campaign for Treasurer in 1857, ”Ten-Mile Bob“ Hunter, as he was dubbed by his opponents, carried the parish by sixty-eight votes—presumably colored— and along with the rest of his ticket swept the State by several thousand—unquestionably white. In Rapides Parish, it is plain to be seen, free men of color held the balance of power at the polls.74 By 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, a traveling correspondent to the area wrote in the New Orleans Crescent newspaper that in Rapides Parish “about eighty colored men are voted at the Ten Mile by the unterrified Democracy whenever an emergency demands their loyal aid in carrying an election.” Thus, the 1857 trial did not stop this de facto granting of suffrage rights to FreeMen-of-Color, albeit illegally, by the two parties.

The situation of African American voters in central Louisiana contrasts with their fate in its largest city. In the 1840s, shortly after this voting began in Rapides parish, the Free-Menof-Color in New Orleans, who “were reputed to own one-fifth of the taxable property in New Orleans, . . . [petitioned] for admission to the municipal franchise.”75 The Conservative Whigs of the city refused to “allow urban Negroes to vote legally and for their own interest.”76 Owning property, paying taxes, and having light-colored skin were not enough in and of themselves to make an exception and permit the granting of suffrage rights for free African Americans in the big cities of Louisiana. Hence, the lone exception in the state was in the rural area of Rapides parish because of party competition. How many Free-Men-of-Color voted in Rapides parish in these contests? The extant historical record says sixty-eight in 1857 and “about eighty” in 1860. Table 7.2, using data from the 1820 through the 1860 censuses, sheds some further light on the subject. In 1820, the Census Bureau began to enumerate Free Blacks by gender. Thus, Free-Men-of-Color made up 3.5% of the population in 1820 and 1830, 5.6% in 1840, 2.3% in 1850, and less than 1.0% in the 1860 decade. From this table, it is clear that the Free Black males peaked in electoral strength in 1840 and began a steady decline in the parish thereafter, reaching their lowest level in the year just before the Civil War. This gendered data suggest, but do not confirm, two potential possibilities about the discrepancy. Either Free-Women-of-Color were allowed to vote to make up the difference between the census data and the vote, or male slaves voted and were declared to be Free-Men-ofColor for this election. And as shown in Map 7.1, the city of New Orleans was too far away to bring in Free-Men-of-Color from the Orleans Parish. Maybe Free-Men-of-Color were brought in from parishes adjacent to Rapides Parish. Since the political elites were already engaged in illegal activity by permitting these Free-Menof-Color to vote, these other possible illegal voting subterfuges do

Table 7.2  Presidential Election Vote and Voting Age African American Male Population in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, 1828–1860 African American Election Year

Total Vote

Winning Party

Census Year

Total Population

Total Electorate

White

Male Votersa

Percent of Total Population

Percent of Electorate

Males Votersa

Percent of Total Population

Percent of Electorate

1828

324

Democratic

1820

6,065

620

22

0.4%

3.5%

598

9.9%

96.5%

1832

250

Democratic

1830

7,575

664

23

0.3%

3.5%

641

8.5%

96.5%

1836

295

Whig

1830

7,575

664

23

0.3%

3.5%

641

8.5%

96.5%

1840

857

Whig

1840

14,132

1,062

60

0.4%

5.6%

1,002

7.1%

94.4%

1844

1,005

Democratic

1840

14,132

1,062

60

0.4%

5.6%

1,002

7.1%

94.4%

1848

926

Democratic

1840

14,132

1,062

60

0.4%

5.6%

1,002

7.1%

94.4%

1852

1,024

Democratic

1850

16,561

1,417

32

0.2%

2.3%

1,385

8.4%

97.7%

1856

1,347

Democratic

1850

16,561

1,417

32

0.2%

2.3%

1,385

8.4%

97.7%

1860

1,754

S. Democratic

1860

25,360

2,706

57

0.2%

2.1%

2,649

10.4%

97.9%

Sources: ICPSR Study No. 1, United States Historical Election Returns, 1824–1968, 2nd ICPSR ed. [Computer File], http://dx.doi:10.3886/ICPSR00001 (Ann Abor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved June 2002; Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File], http://dx.doi:10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved June 2002; and Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, Historical Census Browser, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/index.html (Charlottesville: University of Virginia), retrieved April 13, 2008. a

Male Voters = number of eligible male voters.



The Reversal of African American Suffrage Rights, 1788–1870 141 Map 7.2  States that Reversed Suffrage Rights for African Americans during the Antebellum Era

Figure 7.1  Percentage of Presidential Vote in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, for the Major and Third Political Parties, 1836–1860

Percent of Presidential Vote

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 1836

ME

VT NH MA

Wisconsin Territory

RI

NY MI

1840

1844 1848 1852 Presidential Election Year

% Democrats

% Whigs

1856

1860

New Jersey OH

IN

IL

Delaware Delaw are

% Third Party

Mary land Maryland

VA MO

Kentucky

Sources: Walter Dean Burnham, Presidential Ballots, 1836–1892 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1955), p. 494, and Michael J. Dubin, United States Presidential Elections 1788–1860: The Official Results by County and State (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2002), pp. 144 and 170. Calculations by the authors. Note: In 1856, the third-party candidate was former U.S. president Millard Fillmore, who appeared on the ballot in Rapides Parish as an American ("Know Nothing") Party candidate. John C. Breckinridge, of the splinter Southern Democratic Party, was the third-party candidate in 1860.

Connecticut

Pennsylvania

Iowa Territory

North Carolina Tennessee SC AR MS

GA

AL

LA

0

not seem out of the realm of the possible. In the decade between 1840 and 1850, this vote could have been quite influential in local and state elections. Hence, there is little wonder that the local party elites seized the moment to enhance their political power and impact. Finally, extant parish-level presidential voting data as shown in Figure 7.1 offer additional insights. In 1836 and 1840 the Whig party carried the parish, while in 1844, 1848, 1852, and 1856 the parish was won by the Democratic Party. These presidential electoral outcomes nearly parallel the historical narrative about party victories at the state level and again suggest that the Free-Menof-Color vote served as a balance of power factor that helped both the Whigs and the Democrats to win. And the closeness between these two data sources further supports that there may be some validity to the stories about Free-Men-of-Color voting in Rapides parish between 1838 and 1860.

Summary and Conclusions on the Reversals of African American Suffrage Rights States, during the Antebellum Era, were just one of the institutional players that impacted suffrage rights. The new federal government made possible by the 1787 Constitutional Convention determined suffrage rights in the territories. These included the Northwest Territory, the territory conveyed by the Louisiana Purchase, and later the lands obtained after the Mexican War. In these areas, the federal government, specifically Congress, had the power to determine suffrage rights. Speaking on this point, historian Olbrich informed us that “the Federal Government passed the last act permitting negroes to vote in the territories in 1809 in organizing the Territory of Illinois.”77 Map 7.2 shows the states where suffrage rights were reversed—whether totally or partially—during the Antebellum

Florida Territory

100 200 miles

States Reversing African American Suffrage United States 1842

Sources: Hanes Walton, Jr., African American Power and Politics: The Political Context Variable (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 16, and Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 349–353, Table A4.

period. In all, the reversals took place in eight states and three territories administered by the federal government. Reversals took place in each and every region of the country. They occurred in the New England area, in the Middle Atlantic area, in the Border States, and in the South. They occurred in states with very small populations of Free-Men-and-Women of Color as well as in states with supposedly large free populations. Reversals took place in slave states and non-slave states. They took place in areas where all of the adjacent states permitted Free Blacks to vote. And they took place in states such as Tennessee and North Carolina in order to conform to the cultural habits and patterns in the region. Thus, geographically and demographically, there were no great distinctive markers and characteristics. Even historical traditions of letting African Americans vote in the Colonial and Revolutionary eras did not prevent some of these reversals. In these reversals, one sees the role and function played by the emerging political parties. The Democrats and the Whigs, present at the local and state levels, played roles, and where these national parties did not exist, the local parties affiliated with one or the other of the rising parties.

142

Chapter 7

Partisan competition could occasionally work in favor of suffrage, even without changing the law, as we saw in Louisiana. Partisan competition in the end mattered more than the law. Moreover, on no occasion in Rapides Parish in Louisiana did the state government step in and uphold state law prohibiting actual suffrage for free African Americans. Their voting continued for nearly a quarter of a century. Or partisan competition could change the law, as shown by Rhode Island, the one reversal that was overturned. Conservative whites in Rhode Island granted suffrage rights to African Americans because of their antipathy toward foreign whites and aliens as well as their need to stay in power against the reform movement in the state. Prejudice in this case was stronger against other whites than it was against free African Americans. And the flexibility and dynamic leadership of African American leaders in the state also contributed. Initially, they tried to join the reformers, only to be rebuffed, but they just as quickly switched sides and joined the “Law and Order Party.” The time frame is important to observe. All of the reversals at the state level were over and completed by 1838. Every state that engaged in the politics of reversals finished its changes within four decades in the new century. Only the reversals of the federal government came long after state action. And in terms of the nature of the times, the Post-Revolutionary War period and the coming “age of the common man,” the elimination of one barrier to suffrage rights—property-holding—was coupled with the erection of another—denial of suffrage rights to Free-Menand-Women-of-Color. Almost in every case these two contradictory changes went hand-in-hand. Reformers in Antebellum America carefully and intentionally left out the African American electorate. All kinds of factors intertwined in these reversals—political and personal motives; race, racial fears, and racial competition; partisan competition, lost elections and the fear of black migration to states with suffrage rights; and, needless to say, the matter of social distinction—those with the vote could use it to distinguish themselves from those without it. Usually, these factors worked in conjunction with each other to produce the reversals that mostly limited the extent of the African American electorate. In closing, it is worth considering another factor that helped to overcome these reversals in the end: personality and determined leadership. Thaddeus Stevens, the congressman for Lancaster, Pennsylvania, became a leader of Congressional Reconstruction as well as a legislative force behind the three Civil War Amendments that granted federally mandated suffrage rights for African Americans during post-Civil War America. Congressman Stevens in this quest helped to displace his own state’s reversal of 1838 and all of the others. And in the final analysis these reversals (at the time, these acts were not called disenfranchisement, yet this is exactly what they were) in the northern and southern states before the Civil War were the precursors to the South’s Era of Disenfranchisement (1888–1901). This new period of reversal came at the end of the Era of Black Reconstruction and the Compromise of 1877 and effectively ended that era. However, just as the earlier reversals in the northern and southern states were undone by the Civil War

Amendments, particularly the Fifteenth Amendment, so would the Civil Rights Acts of the twentieth century finally undo the Era of Disenfranchisement.

Notes   1. John Aldrich, Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 104–122.   2. Emil Olbrich, The Development of Sentiment on Negro Suffrage to 1860 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1912), p. 10.   3. Ibid., p. 21 (emphasis in original).   4. Margaret Law Callcott, The Negro in Maryland Politics, 1870– 1912 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), p. 3, footnote 1.   5. Charles Wesley, “Negro Suffrage in the Period of ConstitutionMaking, 1787–1865,” Journal of Negro History, Vol. 32 (April 1947), p. 154.   6. Marion Thompson Wright, “Negro Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1875,” Journal of Negro History, Vol. 30 (April 1948), pp. 168–224. Quote on p. 174.   7. Ibid., p. 175.   8. Ibid., p. 177.   9. Ibid., p. 175. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., pp. 223–224. 13. James Adams, “Disfranchisement of Negroes in New England,” American Historical Review, Vol. 30 (April 1925), p. 545. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Olbrich, p. 24. 18. Ibid., p. 40. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Politics: A Theoretical and Structural Analysis (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972), p. 33. 22. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 345. 23. Olbrich, pp. 42–43. 24. Ibid., p. 43. 25. Keyssar, p. 57. 26. Wesley, “Negro Suffrage in the Period of Constitution-Making, 1787–1865,” pp. 162–163. 27. Olbrich, p. 51. 28. Wesley, “Negro Suffrage in the Period of Constitution-Making, 1787–1865,” p. 163. 29. Keyssar, p. 18. 30. Olbrich, p. 51. 31. Ibid., p. 52. 32. David McBride, “Black Protest Against Radical Politics: Gardner, Hinton, and their Memorial of 1838,” Pennsylvania History Vol. 46 (April 1979), pp. 155–156. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., p. 163. 35. Olbrich, p. 68. 36. Herbert Aptheker (ed.), “The Appeal of Forty Thousand Disfranchised Citizens of Pennsylvania,” in his A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States: From Colonial Times Through the Civil War (New York: Citadel Press, 1967), pp. 176–178. 37. McBride, p. 158, footnote 44. 38. Olbrich, p. 69. 39. Ibid., p. 68. 40. Phyllis Field, The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 19.



The Reversal of African American Suffrage Rights, 1788–1870 143

41. Ibid. 42. Olbrich, p. 29. 43. Ibid., p. 30. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Keyssar, p. 56. 47. Charles Wesley, “The Participation of Negroes in Anti-Slavery Political Parties,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 29 (January 1944), p. 35. 48. Ibid. 49. J. Stanley Lemons and Michael McKenna, “Re-enfranchisement of Rhode Island Negroes,” Rhode Island History Vol. 30 (February 1971), p. 3. 50. Keyssar, p. 71. 51. Lemons and McKenna, p. 7. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., p. 8. 55. Ibid., p. 9. 56. Ibid., p. 10. 57. Keyssar, p. 74.

58. Lemons and McKenna, pp. 10–11. 59. Ibid., p. 11. 60. Ibid., pp. 11–12. 61. Ibid., p. 12 62. Roger Wallace Shugg, “Negro Voting in the Ante-Bellum South,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 21 (January 1936), p. 360. 63. Ibid., p. 359. 64. Ibid., p. 360. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., pp. 360–361. 67. Ibid., p. 341. 68. Ibid., p. 361. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., p. 362. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid., p. 363. 76. Ibid. 77. Olbrich, p. 69.

CHAPTER 8

Suffrage Referenda prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1846–1870 The Nature and Scope of the Statewide Referenda, 1846–1870

146

Figure 8.1 Number of Referenda on Suffrage Rights for African Americans in States and Territories, 1846–1870

147

Table 8.1 Referenda on Suffrage Rights for Free-Men-of-Color in States and Federal Territories, 1846–1870

147

States with Multiple Statewide Referenda for Suffrage Rights, 1846–1870

148

Table 8.2 Results of Four Statewide Referenda on African American Suffrage Rights in Wisconsin, 1846, 1849, 1857, and 1870

149

Figure 8.2 Results of Four Statewide Suffrage Rights Referenda in Wisconsin, 1847–1865

150

Table 8.3 Results of Three Statewide Referenda on African American Suffrage Rights in New York, 1846, 1860, and 1869

151

Figure 8.3 Results of Three Statewide Suffrage Rights Referenda in New York, 1846–1869

151

Table 8.4 Results of Three Statewide Referenda on African American Suffrage Rights in Minnesota, 1865, 1867, and 1868

151

Figure 8.4 Results of Three Statewide Suffrage Rights Referenda in Minnesota, 1865–1868

152

Table 8.5 Results of Three Statewide Referenda on African American Suffrage Rights in Michigan, 1850, 1868, and 1870

153

Figure 8.5 Results of Three Statewide Suffrage Rights Referenda in Michigan, 1850–1870

154

Table 8.6 Results of Two Statewide Referenda on African American Suffrage Rights in Iowa, 1857 and 1868

155

Figure 8.6 Results of Two Statewide Suffrage Rights Referenda in Iowa, 1857–1868

156

States with Single Statewide Referenda for Suffrage Rights, 1862–1868

156

Table 8.7 Results of Five Statewide Referenda on African American Suffrage Rights in Illinois (1862), Connecticut (1865), Kansas (1867), Ohio (1867), and Missouri (1868)

157

Figure 8.7 Results of Statewide Suffrage Rights Referenda in Illinois, Connecticut, Kansas, Ohio, and Missouri, 1862–1868

157

The Failure of Suffrage Rights Referenda in Federal Territories after the Civil War, 1865–1868: Congress Steps In

157

Table 8.8 Results of Referenda on African American Suffrage Rights in Six Federal Territories and the District of Columbia, 1865–1868

157

Summary and Conclusions on African American Suffrage Referenda Prior to the Fifteenth Amendment

158

Map 8.1 States and Territories that Held Referenda on Suffrage Rights for African Americans, 1846–1870

159

Notes 159

146

D

Chapter 8

uring the Antebellum Era (1788–1860) and prior to the Fifteenth Amendment (1870), numerous states used referenda to determine if the white electorate in these states wanted to allow African American Free-Men-of-Color to have suffrage rights. Instead of state legislatures and/or constitutional conventions deciding on suffrage rights, referenda in these states allowed the voting populace to determine suffrage rights for African Americans. New York, for example, which had property qualifications only for Free-Men-of-Color, held three referenda on the question of removing said qualifications. Reversals, the loss of existing suffrage rights, were decided by state legislatures via legislative statutes, and by constitutional conventions placing “white only” clauses in the new state constitutions, which were then ratified by popular vote. Ratification, however, was for the entire document and not for or against specific clauses in a new constitutional document. Ten states and seven federal territories—prior to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment—submitted some twenty-seven suffrage referenda to their voters for approval. These referenda took the decisionmaking powers on suffrage rights away from elected officials and convention delegates and placed it in the hands of the white electorate. Twenty-seven total black suffrage related referenda were placed in the hands of the white electorate between 1846 and 1870, with multiple referenda being conducted in some states. Wisconsin, which had the most, held four separate referenda in 1847, 1849, 1857, and 1865, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court had to finally adjudicate the matter. The Dakota Territory and four states held one referendum each in 1867. None of the seven federal territories, which included the District of Columbia, held more than one referendum each prior the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. A referendum in New Jersey was blocked by the state legislature before it could take place. Of the twenty-seven referenda, only one state (Minnesota in its third referenda in 1868) and one territory (the Dakotas in 1867) approved suffrage rights for African Americans prior to the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment. Michigan in its third referendum approved suffrage rights after the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment. New York, which held three referenda, the last occurring in 1869 (one year before the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment), refused in all three referenda to lift the property qualification imposed only on Free-Men-of-Color. It would take the Fifteenth Amendment to remove the property qualification in New York and to grant the right to vote in the other states and territories. The last three reversals of suffrage rights that were not referenda-driven occurred in Tennessee in 1834, North Carolina in 1835, and Pennsylvania in 1838. Yet the launching of statewide referenda did not occur until 1846. A number of factors caused this reconsideration. The National Negro Convention Movement, founded in 1831, and the American Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1833, spawned the larger abolitionist movement and crusade. In 1840 the creation of the Liberty Party launched a host of additional anti-slavery political parties. The Convention Movement with its broad-based and very active and aggressive state auxiliaries—along with the more radical and militant

anti-slavery parties—began the hue and cry for equal voting rights for African Americans.1 Black Abolitionists, many of whom became activists in the anti-slavery political parties, along with their allies submitted petitions, memorials, and prayers and engaged in pressure group activity upon state legislative and power elites to regain those suffrage rights denied them during the reversal period.2 The anti-slavery parties made a full-scale attack upon slavery and the extension of slavery to the new states and territories. Suffrage rights became a major political issue alongside the problem of slavery. Simply put, the reversal of suffrage rights soon produced an opposite reaction, the demand for suffrage rights and/or the restoration of denied suffrage rights.3 Another factor was the rise of mass-based political parties, the Democratic and Whig political parties. According to Professor John Aldrich’s pioneering work on the rise of the mass-based party, by 1828 six states had an organized Democratic party, four more in 1832, eight more in 1836, and an additional seven in 1840.4 These mass-based parties were driven by key issues. The Democratic Party, with a few exceptions in different states, took a tough, hard-line stance against both suffrage rights for Free-Menof-Color and any anti-slavery position or rhetoric. This continuing position of the initial mass-based party mobilized African American activists in the opposite direction, to support for the anti-slavery Whigs, Liberty, and Free-Soil parties. With these major and minor parties behind them, Free-Men-and-Womenof-Color fought for and got reconsideration of their suffrage rights by way of the referenda movement from 1846 until 1870.5

The Nature and Scope of the Statewide Referenda, 1846–1870 Figure 8.1 offers a longitudinal examination of the years from 1846 to 1870, in which statewide (or territory-wide) referenda occurred. The first occurred in New York in 1846 and the last in Michigan in 1870. The graph shows a clustering of referenda in the post-Civil War era. Illinois was the only state to hold a suffrage referendum during the Civil War period. In 1865, the year that the Civil War ended, three states and two federal territories held referenda. A referendum was held in Nebraska in 1866, while in 1867 three state referenda were held and another in a federal territory, for a grand total of four. (New Jersey never actually held a referendum because it was blocked by the state legislature.) The largest number of referenda ever held in a single year occurred in 1868, when referenda were held in four states and three federal territories, for a total of seven. Finally, Michigan held its third referendum in November 1870, some eight months after the Fifteenth Amendment had been adopted and ratified. Overall, in the period from 1865 to 1870, there were referenda in thirteen states and seven federal territories for a grand total of twenty in six years. Indeed, the end of the Civil War set off a rash of these suffrage rights referenda. Prior to this time period there had never been more than one referendum held in a single year, except in 1857 when referenda occurred in both Wisconsin and Iowa, and no referenda had been held between 1850 and 1856. Table 8.1 provides the votes and percentages for each of the state and federal territory referenda. Rank ordering the



Suffrage Referenda prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1846–1870 147 Figure 8.1  Number of Referenda on Suffrage Rights for African Americans in States and Territories, 1846–1870 8 7

Number of Referenda

6 5 4 3 2 1

70

69

18

68

18

67

18

66

18

65

18

64

18

63

18

62

18

61

18

60

18

18

59

58

18

57

18

18

56

55

18

54

18

53

18

52

18

51

18

50

18

49

18

48

18

47

18

18

18

46

0 Year

Source: Table 8.1.

Table 8.1  Referenda on Suffrage Rights for Free-Men-of-Color in States and Federal Territories, 1846–1870 Against

Votes in the Federal Territories

In Favor

Year

State

Votes

Percent

1846

New York

224,336

72.4%

85,406

27.6%

Denied

1860

345,791

63.6%

197,889

36.4%

Denied

1869

282,403

53.1%

249,802

46.9%

Denied

14,615

65.9%

7,564

34.1%

Denied

1849

4,075

43.6%

5,265

56.4%

Approveda

1857

45,157

58.6%

31,964

41.4%

1865

55,454

54.3%

46,629

32,026

71.4%

1868

110,582

1870

50,598

1847

1850

Wisconsin

Michigan

Votes

Percent

Territory

Votes

Percent

1865

Colorado

4,192

89.8%

476

10.2%

Denied

1865

DC

7,333

99.5%

36

0.5%

Denied

1866

Nebraska

3,938

50.6%

3,838

49.4%

Denied

1867

Dakotas

(……………. Data not found …………….)

Approved

1868

Washington

(……………. Data not found …………….)

Denied

Denied

1868

Idaho

(……………. Data not found …………….)

Denied

45.7%

Denied

1868

Montana

(……………. Data not found …………….)

Denied

12,840

28.6%

Denied

60.7%

71,733

39.3%

Denied

48.3%

54,105

51.7%

Approved

Iowa

49,387

85.3%

8,489

14.7%

Denied

1868

 

81,119

43.5%

105,384

56.5%

Approved

1865

Minnesota

14,838

54.9%

12,170

45.1%

Denied

1867

 

28,759

51.2%

27,461

48.8%

Denied

29,906

43.2%

39,322

56.8%

Approved

211,405

84.9%

37,548

15.1%

Denied

1862

Illinois

1865

Connecticut

33,489

55.2%

27,217

44.8%

Denied

1867

Kansas

19,600

65.1%

10,529

34.9%

Denied

1867

Ohio

255,340

54.1%

216,987

45.9%

Denied

1867

New Jersey

1868

Missouri Totals

In Favor

Year

1857

1868

Against

Outcome

(…………. No referendum held ………….)

Deniedb

74,053

57.3%

55,236

42.7%

Denied

1,962,933

60.1%

1,303,540

39.9%

 

Totals

15,463

78.0%

Votes

4,350

Percent

22.0%

Outcome

 

Sources: Adapted from Emil Olbrich, The Development of Sentiment on Negro Suffrage to 1860 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1912); William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969); Phyllis Field, The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); John Mohr (ed.), Radical Republicans in the North: State Politics During Reconstruction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); and Richard Curry (ed.), Radicalism, Racism, and Party Realignment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962). Referendum data for Kansas in 1867, and for Missouri and Iowa in 1868, are from The American Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1967). In addition, the following articles were consulted: Michael McManus, "Wisconsin Republicans and Negro Suffrage: Attitudes and Behavior, 1857," Civil War History Vol. 25 (March 1979), pp. 36–54; John Rozett, "Racism and Republican Emergence in Illinois, 1848–1860: A Re-evaluation of Republican Negrophobia," Civil War History Vol. 22 (June 1976), pp. 101–115; Ronald Formisano, "The Edge of Caste: Colored Suffrage in Michigan," Michigan History Vol. 56 (Spring 1972), pp. 19–41; Marion Thompson, "Negro Suffage in New Jersey, 1776–1875," Journal of Negro History Vol. 33 (April 1948), pp. 168–224; Charles Wesley, "Negro Suffrage in the Period of Constitution Making, 1787–1865," in his Neglected History (Ohio: Central State College Press, 1965), pp. 41–55; S. B. Weeks, "The History of Negro Suffrage in the South," Political Science Quarterly Vol. 9 (December 1894), pp. 671–703; and Alice Hahn, "The Exercise of the Electoral Franchise in Iowa in Constitutional Referendum, 1838–1933" (master's thesis, Drake University, 1933). Calculations by the authors. The governor of Wisconsin set aside the referendum outcome that favored suffrage after claiming that he did not understand the results, thereby denying suffrage rights. Later, the state supreme court upheld the outcome that had been rendered by the electorate. a

The New Jersey legislature decided against allowing a state referendum, deliberating instead within their body to directly withhold suffrage rights from African Americans. b

148

Chapter 8

percentages for these referenda at the state level shows that the range in favor of suffrage rights for African Americans went from a low of 14.7% in Iowa in 1857 to a high of 56.8% in Minnesota in 1868. The mean for the state level support stood at 40.7%. Conversely, the table shows that the percentages of the opposition (those against African American suffrage) ranged from a high of 85.3% in Iowa to the low in Minnesota of 43.2%. The mean number of individuals voting against suffrage rights for Free-Men-of-Color stood at 59.3%. Voting data and percentages exist for only three of the seven federal territories that held suffrage referenda. In those territories, the range of percentages in favor of extending suffrage rights to Free-Men-of-Color moves from a low of 0.5% of the voters in the District of Columbia to a high of 49.4% in the Nebraska territory. The mean vote for suffrage rights in these three territories stands at 20.0%. Likewise, the table shows that the range for vote percentages against suffrage rights went from a high of 99.5% to a low of 50.6%, with the mean standing at 80.0%. Interestingly, of these twenty-seven referenda, the nation’s capital voiced the greatest opposition to suffrage rights for Free-Men-ofColor. The District of Columbia, as the Border States of Maryland and Missouri had before and during the war, attracted a lot of white southerners, many of whom came to the District of Columbia primarily to spy for the Confederacy as well as to promote and lobby for their anti-slavery causes. Only four of the twenty-seven total referenda (three states and one territory) were approved: in the Dakota Territory in 1867 (although no data are available), in Iowa and Minnesota in 1868, and Michigan in 1870. An 1849 Wisconsin referendum approved suffrage rights for Free-Men-of-Color, but the governor set the results aside and denied that approval. (In 1866, the Wisconsin supreme court retroactively overturned the governor’s action and validated the referendum results.) Therefore, with only four successful suffrage rights referenda out of the twenty-eight considered by votes either popular or legislative, the success rate is only 14.3%; and if one counts the 1849 vote in Wisconsin the rate of success rises to 17.9%. Thus, it is amply demonstrated that most American states and territories, more than eight out of every ten times they had the opportunity, evidenced a strong majority opposition to granting or (in the case of New York) enhancing African American suffrage rights.

States with Multiple Statewide Referenda for Suffrage Rights, 1846–1870 If the longitudinal data offer empirical evidence on public opinion and sentiment about opposition to suffrage rights for Free-Men-of-Color, then further empirical evidence can be seen in those states that had multiple statewide referenda on the issue.

Wisconsin Wisconsin had the greatest number of statewide referenda, four, over a eighteen-year period from 1847 to 1865. The state’s second referendum, in 1849, actually resulted in approval of suffrage rights for Free-Men-of-Color, but the governor set the decision aside because a technicality arose that grew out of the second state constitutional convention held in Madison in December, 1847. “Debate on Negro suffrage began in earnest on January 3,

1848. It was neither extended nor extreme.”6 It ended with a final resolution that read: The Legislature shall at any time have the power to admit colored persons to the right of suffrage, but no such act of the Legislature shall become law until the same shall have been submitted to the electors at the next general election succeeding the passage of the same, and shall have received in its favor a majority of all the votes cast at such election.7 Shortly after this convention finished with the new state constitution, “it was approved by the voters without fanfare. The resolution about Negro suffrage received little attention. Wisconsin became the thirtieth state in the Union, and the first legislature acted on the resolution during its first session. Without significant debate, it authorized a referendum on Negro suffrage at the general election of 1849.”8 In this second referendum election on suffrage rights, “5,265 citizens voted ‘Aye’ and 4,045 voted ‘Nay’ on this issue, 31,759 voted in the gubernatorial election. Fifty-two hundred was not a majority of 31,700, not ‘a majority of all the votes cast at such election.’”9 Immediately, the State Board of Canvassers delivered a decision that neither the letter nor the spirit of the resolution had been met. The Governor simply set the outcome of the election aside, declaring that he did not understand what the election results meant. Then, “late in 1855, some Milwaukee Negroes gathered together to seek a way out of the impasse. At the time, there were only about 100 colored people in the city. . . . They resolved to distribute petitions for signatures throughout the state requesting the legislature to hold another referendum to give Negroes their ‘God-given right . . . most unjustly withheld from us as men.’”10 To get the signatures, the group enlisted others: One Charles Russell was authorized to gather signatures throughout the state. Russell got busy immediately and traveled to Janesville, Beloit, Madison, Liberty, Prairie, and Portage [counties] acquiring signatures. . . . [Further] the use of newspapers to publicize the effort and the appointment of an agent to secure signatures were two steps symbolizing a new awareness of political action by the Negro in Wisconsin. 11 During the time of the third referendum, African Americans— despite their even smaller population numbers—brought in the well-known and highly respected black abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond to speak and lecture to both the black and white communities about the need to give suffrage rights to Free-Men-of-Color. Hence, they introduced a new tactic to generate support for this third referendum, which both houses of the Wisconsin legislature put on the ballot for the November 1857 election. Additional support for “Negro suffrage” came from the newly organized Republican Party during this referendum election. Of the political party that arose around this issue historian Michael McManus has written:



Suffrage Referenda prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1846–1870 149 During the months between the passage of the suffrage resolution and the state party conventions, Democratic partisans made a determined effort to insure that the Republican party would be unable to avoid the ‘nigger question’ in the coming campaign. Insisting that enfranchisement of the Negro was a cardinal principle of Republicanism, they defied the Republican leadership to proclaim so publicly.12

The Negro suffrage resolution went down to defeat. The complete returns show that 45,157 votes were cast against the measure, 31,964 in favor. In the general election . . . the Republicans recaptured the governorship by fewer than 100 votes out of 90,000 ballots cast. They also eked out narrow victories for two other state offices. The Democrats won four state offices and confidently predicted the rapid demise of the ‘nigger party.’19

At their August 1857 state party convention, the Democrats adopted the following plank: “Resolved, That we are unalterably opposed to the extension of the right of suffrage to the Negro race, and will never consent that the odious doctrine of Negro equality shall find a place upon the statute books of Wisconsin.”13 The Republicans at their state convention on September 2, 1857, responded to the Democratic Party’s challenge not by putting a plank on Negro Suffrage in their platform but instead by demanding “the complete abrogation of the Fugitive Slave Law, the restriction of slavery to the states where it already existed, the admission of no more slave states, and the prohibition of slavery from all territories under federal jurisdiction.”14 Nevertheless, although the party did not take up in a formal manner the “Negro Suffrage” issue, “of the 34 Republican [news]papers whose position it was possible to ascertain, 29 supported Negro suffrage, 3 opposed it, and 2 were neutral. Twelve Republican papers mounted FOR EXTENSION OF SUFFRAGE on their bannerhead.”15 Therefore due to the vagueness, ambiguity, and indirect manner of the Republican Party response to the “Negro Suffrage” issue, the Democratic party launched an all-out effort to tie the party to the issue anyway and thereby defeat the statewide referendum in the 1857 election. Accordingly, the party “chided the feeble effort of the Republicans to disguise their stand and insisted that they had ‘swallowed the nigger whole, wool, boots, breaches and all.’ The Democrats also attempted to capitalize on white fears and hatred of the Negro. They fulminated against the ‘absurd and revolutionary’ Republican belief that Negroes could be elevated from their ‘condition of inferiority . . . to the white race.’”16 Historian McManus added:

In this election, the referendum and the general election were two separate voting items, and while the Republicans won at the state level they lost on the suffrage issue. Using the ecological regression statistical technique, historian McManus estimated that Republican and Democratic voters who participated in the gubernatorial election voted in a slightly different manner. About three-fifths (61.6%) of Republican voters supported the suffrage issue, while 10.4% opposed it, and some 28.0% did not vote in the referendum. As for Democrats, fully three-fourth (74.7%) opposed the issue, 5.6% supported for the suffrage issue, and 19.7% did not vote at all on the issue.20 Table 8.2 summarizes the results of all four of Wisconsin’s referenda on African American suffrage. But even after two defeats and one questionable victory, African Americans in the state of Wisconsin did not give up the fight for suffrage rights. “Late in January 1865, one hundred and two Negroes asked the legislature to authorize another referendum on Negro Suffrage. . . . The legislature responded with a bill authorizing another referendum on Negro suffrage. . . . On March 31, the Assembly passed the bill, 55–32, . . . and the Senate . . . passed it, 24–8. Three days later, the Governor returned the bill, signed the law.”21 This fourth referendum, coming as it did immediately after the Civil War, captured national attention together with other northern referenda. “President Andrew Johnson was more than passively interested in the conventions of Northern states, anxious to retain support for his Reconstruction plans. His friends in New York and Pennsylvania had already reported to him. His chief lieutenant in Wisconsin, Senator James R. Doolittle, was about to take charge in Wisconsin.”22 Senator Doolittle, who like President Johnson had been a Democrat before becoming a Republican, “embraced gradual emancipation and colonization, espousals, which were not altered by the facts of war.”23 Thus, at the state

The Democracy added to this bleak picture by assuring white Wisconsin that social equality and amalgamation naturally would follow the elevation of the Negro to political equality. . . . Finally, the Democrats courted Wisconsin’s large immigrant population. They claimed that the Republicans cared more for Negroes than foreigners, that they would subordinate their needs to those of Negroes.17 Finally, during this 1857 referendum election, “Republicans and Democrats were not alone in voicing their opinions on the suffrage questions. Wisconsin blacks demonstrated their increasing political awareness by ‘sending forth their orators’ to rally support for the measure. Predictably, the Democratic press ridiculed their efforts and referred to the black spokesmen in highly disparaging terms.”18 Thus, in such a heated and conflicted electoral contest, the outcome was a foregone conclusion.

Table 8.2  Results of Four Statewide Referenda on African American Suffrage Rights in Wisconsin, 1846, 1849, 1857, and 1870 For Suffrage Rights

Against Suffrage Rights

Year

Votes

Percent

Votes

Percent

Total Votes

Outcome

1847

7,564

34.1%

14,615

65.9%

22,179

Denied 

1849

5,265

56.4%

4,075

43.6%

9,340

Denieda

1857

31,964

41.4%

45,157

58.6%

77,121

Denied 

1865

46,629

45.7%

55,454

54.3%

102,083

Denied 

Source: Table 8.1. The governor of Wisconsin set aside the referendum outcome that favored suffrage after claiming that he did not understand the results, thereby denying suffrage. Later, the state supreme court upheld the outcome that had been rendered by the electorate. a

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convention of the Union Party (the renamed Republican party) in Wisconsin, the senator became “chairman of the committee on resolutions . . . [which] reported out the Doolittle resolution on suffrage” that sought to forestall the matter.24 Moreover, “Doolittle reported the affair to the President . . . [and] in blocking the minority report favoring Negro Suffrage and Congressional Reconstruction, Doolittle had provided his White House mentor with another state endorsement of Johnson’s national policies. . . . If Northern states refused to support Negro suffrage, there was less chance of it materializing in the South.”25 In this 1865 election, the Union party “was a mixture of Republicans and War Democrats, hot abolitionists and lukewarm anti-slavery men welded together by the stress of war and the elusive Madison Regency, a powerful political cabal.”26 With this wide ranging electoral coalition, the Union Party did not take a foursquare stand on the “Negro suffrage” issue any more than the Republicans had before the party’s name had changed during the Civil War. The so-called radical wing of the party, however, did take a stand for “Negro suffrage.” “The Radicals suffered sharply from the Union party’s calculated and successful strategy to isolate and ignore the Negro suffrage issue, even though it was on the ballot.”27 Thus, in the election both the Union and the Democratic gubernatorial candidates maneuvered so as to avoid taking a direct stand on the issue. In this silent election on “Negro suffrage,” the Union/ Republican Party candidate Lucius Fairchild won the governorship, and the Democrats defeated the suffrage amendment by 9,000 votes. The election results showed that: Out of fifty-seven counties, thirty-eight went for Fairchild and only twenty-four for suffrage; fourteen of Fairchild’s counties voted against suffrage and no county voted for the Democrats and suffrage. In all fifty-seven counties Fairchild led suffrage, polling more than 12,000 more votes than the suffrage ‘ayes.’ The soldiers’ vote, tabulated separately, gave Fairchild a 6 to 1 majority and suffrage a 6 to 1 setback.28 Still, this fourth defeat did not deter African Americans in the state. In Milwaukee, African American leaders were expecting a defeat and prepared for it by calling on October 9, 1865, a meeting to determine “the most practicable means to secure a fair and impartial expression of the voters at the coming fall election for the amendment to the constitution granting to all men the right of suffrage irrespective of color.”29 This call was signed by seven members of the community. The meeting was held and several resolutions were passed. “One of the signers of the call also helped to draft the resolution. His name was Ezekiel Gillespie and, like all of the men involved in the meeting, he was a Negro. . . . In January, he had signed one of the petitions to the Legislature requesting that a referendum on Negro suffrage be authorized.”30 It was his action at the meeting of colored men that led to this new legal strategy: Gillespie marched up to the board of registry of voters in his ward and asked that his name be placed on the list

as a voter. The board refused on the grounds that he was a person of ‘mixed African blood.’ On election day in November he appeared at the polls and offered his vote to the inspectors of election of the ward, Henry L. Palmer and associates. They refused it. Not quite three weeks later, Gillespie was in the office of an attorney, notarizing a statement that he had been prohibited from voting.31 His attorney filed a legal suit against the inspector of elections of that ward. “The case of Gillespie v. Palmer et al. was neatly arranged. Gillespie had appeared at the polls on election day in November armed with two affidavits, one explaining why he was not registered and one affirming, on behalf of two ‘householders,’ that he was a resident of the ward.”32 Once filed, the case “moved through the county court on a demurrer filed by the defendants, the inspectors of election of the seventh ward. . . . The case on appeal [went] to the [state] Supreme Court, January, 1866 session. . . . On February 15, the case was tried before the Supreme Court in Madison.”33 Then, by the end of March 1866, the three-member state supreme court rendered its decision, with two justices agreeing and one justice writing a separate concurring opinion. The court noted: “the simple majority by which the voters had favored Negro suffrage seventeen years ago was sufficient. Not only was the Negro of Wisconsin now empowered to vote, but irony of ironies, he had possessed that right since 1849.”34 Historian McManus opines: “to the more than 1,500 Negroes of Wisconsin, it was justice.”35 Therefore, in the first election where African Americans could vote, April, 1866, “in Madison . . . there were only about forty eligible Negro voters . . . and . . . a few Negroes voted the Democratic ticket, but most of them followed the Union party. And some, undoubtedly, exercised their newly won right by not voting.”36 Figure 8.2 shows that support for suffrage rights for Free-Men-of-Color in Wisconsin increased between the initial referendum of 1847 and 1849 by 22.3 percentage points. Then between 1849 and 1857 there was a decline of 15.0 percentage points, and between 1857 and 1865 a rise of white voter support of 4.3 percentage points. In terms of percent of votes cast, the Figure 8.2  Results of Four Statewide Suffrage Rights Referenda in Wisconsin, 1847–1865

Percent Voting for African American Suffrage Rights

150

60%

56.4%

50% 40%

41.4%

45.7%

34.1%

30% 20% 10% 0%

1847

1849

1857 Year

Source: Table 8.1.

1865



Suffrage Referenda prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1846–1870 151

highest level of support came in the second referendum with 56.4% and the lowest level of support was at the initial referendum in 1847. The last two referenda had greater support than the initial effort but did not reach the level of the second referendum. Ultimately, African American leaders had to go to court to resolve the referenda vote in the state in 1866.

New York New York was the very first state in Antebellum America to hold a statewide referendum on African American suffrage. Like Minnesota and Michigan, New York would hold three statewide suffrage referenda. New York was one of the original thirteen colonies and had allowed African Americans to vote since the Colonial Era. The three statewide referenda in New York concerned a property qualification that restricted suffrage rights, namely requiring ownership of $250 worth of property. Table 8.3 compares the 1846, 1860, and 1869 statewide suffrage referenda in New York. It includes the total number of votes cast in these special referenda elections, the votes for the elimination of property qualifications for Free-Men-of-Color, the votes against the elimination of property qualifications, as well as the percentages for and against. In all three cases, the referenda were voted down. Not surprisingly, “the most dedicated group supporting equal suffrage proved to be New York’s black community. Not only

Table 8.3  Results of Three Statewide Referenda on African American Suffrage Rights in New York, 1846, 1860, and 1869 For Suffrage Rightsa

Against Suffrage Rights

Year

Votes

Percent

Votes

Percent

Total Votes

1846

85,406

27.6%

224,336

72.4%

309,742

Outcome Denied

1860

197,889

36.4%

345,791

63.6%

543,680

Denied

1869

249,802

46.9%

282,403

53.1%

532,205

Denied 

Source: Table 8.1. The three statewide referenda in New York concerned a property qualification that restricted suffrage rights, namely requiring ownership of $250 worth of property. a

Percent Voting for African American Suffrage Rights

Figure 8.3  Results of Three Statewide Suffrage Rights Referenda in New York, 1846–1869 50% 45% 40% 35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0%

Source: Table 8.1.

46.9% 36.4%

did they actively lobby the [state constitutional] convention itself, but they also issued public addresses and letters throughout the referendum campaign to explain why they wanted and needed the franchise.”37 On the occasion of each of these three suffrage rights referenda, the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass “lobbied not only the white community but the state legislature, governor and the African American community as well.”38 In fact, the protest and lobbying efforts of African Americans in New York became the model for all of the other referenda states. Also notable in New York, African Americans who could meet the property qualification requirement voted in these statewide referenda. In Figure 8.3 one sees a linear rise in support for suffrage rights. Between the initial referendum of 1846 and the second one in 1860 support rose 8.8 percentage points and between 1860 and 1869 there was a rise of 10.5 percentage points. Yet despite the well organized African American efforts in New York, success was never achieved. All three of the referenda failed.

Minnesota Minnesota’s three suffrage referenda all came after the Civil War, between 1865 and 1868.39 This differentiates it from the other states with three or more suffrage referenda votes—Wisconsin, New York, and Michigan—each of which held at least one referendum before the war. In terms of partisan support, Minnesota reflected the common trend of Republican support for the issue and Democratic party opposition. Table 8.4 provides results for the three suffrage referenda held in Minnesota. Each time a referendum failed, the Republican-dominated state legislature authorized a new one. In the initial referendum of 1865, people voted against giving suffrage rights to blacks, with a majority of 2,670. In the second referendum in 1867 there was a smaller majority of 1,298 in opposition. Finally, in 1868, voters approved the third referendum with a majority of 9,416 votes. This time 56.8% of the white electorate voted to give African Americans the right to vote. To ensure passage on the third try, state Republicans had placed “the suffrage question on the presidential ballot to discourage ticket splitting, and concealing the issue by labeling the question not ‘Negro suffrage’ but rather ‘revision of section 1, article 7.’ ”40 Not only had “Minnesota Democrats termed the referendum a swindle,” they voted against the issue. 41 Gillette has written: “The hard core opposition to Negro suffrage came from ten counties along or near the Mississippi River. All these counties were strongly Democratic and voted against Negro Table 8.4  Results of Three Statewide Referenda on African American Suffrage Rights in Minnesota, 1865, 1867, and 1868

27.6%

For Suffrage Rights

1846

1860 Year

1869

Against Suffrage Rights

Year

Votes

Percent

Votes

Percent

Total Votes

1865

12,170

45.1%

14,838

54.9%

27,008

Denied

1867

27,461

48.8%

28,759

51.2%

56,220

Denied

1868

39,322

56.8%

29,906

43.2%

69,228

Approved

Source: Table 8.1.

Outcome

152

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suffrage in all three referendums. . . . Yet Hennepin county [Minneapolis], with a large proportion of the state’s Negro population, was consistently progressive, favoring Negro suffrage in all three elections, though by a close margin in 1865.”42 Gillette closes with the interesting observation that “it would thus appear that at least in Minnesota people opposed Negro suffrage more out of Democratic sympathy than out of fear of Negro presence.”43 Figure 8.4 shows the rise in the percentage of the white electorate that voted for suffrage rights for African Americans. Between the initial and second referenda there was a rise of 3.7 percentage points, and this increase in the rate of support was maintained between the second and third referenda, with a rise of 8.0 percentage points. Clearly, the strategy of choosing a presidential election year with the popular Ulysses S. Grant as the candidate worked quite favorably in achieving passage of the referendum. Figure 8.4  Results of Three Statewide Suffrage Rights Referenda in Minnesota, 1865–1868

Percent Voting for African American Suffrage Rights

60% 50%

56.8% 45.1%

48.8%

40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

1865

1867

1868

Year Source: Table 8.1.

Michigan Michigan held three referenda on Negro suffrage, but the early political context in the state became over time mired in the racism of a Negrophobic white majority. Historian Ronald Formisano, the leading scholar of caste in this state, found that “for some three decades before the Civil War this northwestern frontier state, where the egalitarian ethos otherwise reigned supreme, denied black citizens the right to vote. But almost continuously from 1835 to 1861 a black and white vanguard of reformers challenged this mainstay of caste, and even the very assumptions upon which it rested.”44 Formisano continued his description of the unusual political context in Michigan: Michigan’s experience supports the propositions that the broader the political movements against slavery extension became, the more free black rights were left out of them; . . . In the 1850s, particularly, sectional conflict between North and South, and white social group antagonisms within Northern society caused a heightening of racial consciousness, white fears, and

resistance to amelioration. White allies became defensive, cautiously pragmatic, or indifferent. By 1860 the colored suffrage issue in Michigan had become almost the sole property of blacks.45 There is another unique feature in the Michigan political context. “Colored suffrage . . . became politically intertwined with the issue of ‘alien suffrage,’ and interacted symbolically with the status of ethnic minorities, especially foreign immigrants.”46 This issue of giving aliens suffrage rights arose in a major way at the state Constitutional Convention of 1835. At that Convention, “Democrats favoring alien suffrage held a strong majority but failed to dominate proceedings completely because of an intraparty split.” One Democrat, Ross Wilkins of Lenawee County, wanted to strike “out the word white from the franchise article” and permit both aliens and blacks to have the right to vote. Another Democrat at the convention, John Norvell, was a “champion of Alien suffrage,” but opposed blacks having the right to vote. The matter came to a vote and the “Wilkins’ amendment failed by a vote of 63 to 17 with the few identifiable Whigs [who opposed alien suffrage] joining the Democratic bloc in opposing it. Democratic supporters of colored suffrage joined the Democratic bloc in opposing it. Democratic supporters of colored suffrage, however, tended also to be those who opposed alien suffrage.”47 Formisano wrote that “these patterns would reappear: supporters of alien suffrage tended to oppose nonwhite [Free-Men-of-Color] voting while advocates of colored suffrage tended to oppose non-citizen voting [alien].”48 This matter of alien suffrage rights, like party cohesion and unity in Minnesota, became the dominant issue and feature of the Negro suffrage struggle in Michigan. In fact, the first time that the suffrage issue surfaced was in 1834 when the Legislative Council of the then Territory of Michigan “briefly enfranchised Indians and ‘persons of color’ who paid taxes. . . . But the very next day the Council excluded non-whites as it broadened white suffrage to allow all free, white male inhabitants above 21 and three months resident to vote. . . . A minority of three Whigs and two Democrats opposed this bill, because they wanted voting limited to citizens and extended to non-whites.”49 Thus, Michigan, even before it entered the Union as a state, had barred Free-Men-of-Color from suffrage rights. The next time that the suffrage rights issue surfaced in Michigan was “in 1840–41 [with] the new Liberty party and its organ, the Ann Arbor Signal of Liberty, [making] colored suffrage the leading issue of abolition’s domestic war on slavery by launching a petition directed at the state legislature.”50 Each year after the formation of the Liberty Party, “local abolition societies and churches all over the state sent petitions to the legislature . . . praying that the legislature” would provide suffrage and other civil rights for Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color.51 The African American population in the state, inspired by the African American suffrage struggles in Pennsylvania in 1838 and New York in 1837, became increasingly politically active. Hence, “by 1842 Detroit had a Colored Vigilant Committee, formed to wage ‘moral and political warfare’ for equal rights.” Also, the National Negro Convention Movement was revitalized in 1843



Suffrage Referenda prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1846–1870 153

and resumed national meetings in that year. Therefore, its state auxiliaries also became reactivated. “In its wake Michigan’s ‘Colored Citizens,’ like those of other states, held a state convention in October at Detroit.”52 After an eleven-day meeting, this state convention adjourned and sent another petition to the state legislature requesting suffrage rights. 53 While the state legislature had simply ignored prior suffrage petitions, there was a decision to respond to the 1843 submission— by denying it. A year later, in 1844, “hundreds of white voters over the entire state joined in the petition campaign. The legislators ignored them but the flow revived the next year, finally triggering two more opposing reports.”54 Nevertheless, the struggle for suffrage rights did not stop in 1845. For “in 1846 another black and white petition campaign elicited one more round of reports from the legislature on colored suffrage,” which again rejected the matter.55 A concern that surfaced in several of these legislative opposition reports were instances where Free-Men-of-Color had voted illegally in selected cities and counties despite the ban. One report noted that “Negroes appear to have voted in county elections in Washtenaw . . . and in Detroit in 1844.”56 When the other anti-slavery parties arrived in the state, the petition trend which the old Liberty Party set into motion was not carried on. “In 1848 Free Soilers and Whigs cooperated in congressional and local elections. By 1849 the two parties united on candidates for state office: their platform wholly ignored racial political equality.”57 Moreover, their candidate, Whig–Free Soiler Flavius Littlejohn, who had previously been a Democrat, “assumed black inferiority and opposed black suffrage” and never retracted this stance during the gubernatorial campaign.58 Thus, the new anti-slavery party in the state conveniently dropped the issue of Negro suffrage. Yet suffrage sentiment remained alive, especially among black leaders and white moral reformers. When a constitutional convention gathered in 1850, long petitions from all over the state arrived asking suffrage extension. A state convention of colored citizens assembled at Marshall in March to voice its grievance of taxation without representation.59 When the 1850 state Constitutional Convention had completed its business, “the convention as expected retained white suffrage, though it allowed detribalized Indians to vote and decided to submit colored suffrage to a popular referendum. Over 71.4 percent of the 44, 914 votes cast in the state went against colored suffrage.”60 Table 8.5 reveals the votes and percentages for and against suffrage rights for Free-Men-of-Color in the 1850, 1868, and 1870 suffrage referenda. Only 28.6% of the white voters supported suffrage rights in the initial 1850 referendum. Opposition votes amounted to nearly three-fourths of the white electorate (71.4%). Clearly, the white voters in the state were not disposed to letting African Africans vote. A further pattern was revealed when a correlation analysis performed by Formisano was applied to township data “within eighteen counties, representing all parts of the state except the extreme north. . . . Seventeen of the eighteen counties showed a positive correlation between Democratic loyalty and antisuffrage voting. In twelve of the seventeen that correlation could be described as strong; in ten it was over +.50.”61

Table 8.5  Results of Three Statewide Referenda on African American Suffrage Rights in Michigan, 1850, 1868, and 1870 For Suffrage Rights Year

Votes

Percent

1850

12,840

1868a

71,733

1870

54,105

Against Suffrage Rights Votes

Percent

Total Votes

Outcome

28.6%

32,026

71.4%

44,866

Denied

39.3%

110,582

60.7%

182,315

Denied

51.7%

50,598

48.3%

104,703

Approved

Source: Table 8.1. a

Voting was for a proposed state constitution that included African American suffrage rights.

The author did an additional analysis by selecting townships from five counties from eastern, central, and western Michigan and comparing the suffrage vote with economic and social data in each township. The data categories were (1) ruralness, populations engaged in farm-related work and in a non-urban setting; (2) rural lower classes, i.e., unskilled laborers, tenants and farmers with less than $500 of real estate; and (3) the percent of foreign-born population. The five counties under analysis showed “no strong tendency except for the positive relationship of Democratic voting to opposition to equal suffrage. . . . Detroit, the only town resembling a city or urban area in Michigan, voted 87.0 percent ‘no,’ higher than the county aggregate ‘no’ vote of 84.2 percent and well above the state percent of 71.3.”62 Towns supporting colored suffrage could be found in various sections and represented both frontier and advanced stages of development. The presence of blacks did not seem related to pro or anti suffrage voting. Only the religious factor appears to have some association with ‘yes’ voting. Quaker influence usually acted to produce sympathy for racial political integration. In Cass County, where almost 400 of Michigan’s 2,500 blacks lived, some 160 dwelled in Calvin township. The predominantly Quaker voters there gave the town an unusual 60 percent majority for colored suffrage.63 Following the failure of the 1850 referendum, new petitions arrived at the state legislature in 1851. They were rejected, and nothing happened again until 1854 and the formation of the Republican Party. The appearance of the new party and its capture of the state legislature by 1855 revived petitions for suffrage rights. “On the local level the black farmers of Calvin Township in Cass County won the right to vote at school district meetings and to hold district offices.”64 Despite this electoral breakthrough, the Republican-controlled state legislature took no action on the suffrage petition. Therefore, in 1857, the new state legislature—also controlled by the Republicans—“was besieged with petitions from whites and blacks . . . and . . . in 1859 a new and larger flurry of petitions from blacks and whites greeted the legislature.”65 Both were rejected by the state legislature. Finally, in the 1860 electoral campaign, the issue of Negro suffrage never even surfaced at all. “Republicans carried the state comfortably, and before Lincoln called out the troops in 1861 the Republican legislature showed even less willingness to consider

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colored suffrage seriously. A small parade of petitions straggled in, led by one from a convention of colored citizens protesting ‘Taxation without Representation.’”66 Needless to say, this petition and all of the others were summarily rejected. This set the stage for two post–Civil War referenda. The second referendum vote came in the April 1868 election. This time the matter was not separated from a new proposed state constitution. This newly proposed state constitution had a clause in it which would have extended suffrage rights to African Americans. The white electorate in this election rejected the proposed constitution by a vote percentage of 60.7 and supported it with a percentage of 39.3. About this vote, historians Willis Dunbar and William Shade wrote: The parties split neatly on the new constitution. The Republicans gave it such strong support that many voters were bothered by its partisan coloring. Strong Republican counties voted heavily for the constitution, but Democratic and crucial “swing” counties generally rejected it soundly. Democrats throughout the state had staunchly opposed the new constitution because of its provision for Negro suffrage and hailed the outcome as a great victory. They claimed that it was, in essence, a referendum on the extension of the franchise to black men.67 If this vote on the constitution is taken as a referendum simply on African American suffrage, the percentage of the white electorate in support of suffrage rights rose by 10.7% between 1850 and 1868, which is less than a one percent increase per year. The racial climate in the state did not improve much during this time frame of nearly two decades, despite the efforts of several white reformers and anti-slavery men involved in state politics.68 However, Republicans won the presidency with Ulysses S. Grant in November 1868, and the U.S. Congress submitted the Fifteenth Amendment to the states on February 27, 1869. The Governor of Michigan “transmitted it to both houses of the legislature on March 3, four days later; and it was ratified by both houses on March 5. In the Michigan legislature every Democrat in both houses voted against ratification and every Republican voted for it. Partisan discipline waxed strong and was clearly apparent.”69 Eventually, “ratification by the requisite number of states, twenty-seven, was proclaimed on March 30, 1870.”70 The entire suffrage rights matter should have ended there, but after the Michigan legislature ratified the Fifteenth Amendment on March 5, 1869, they also adopted a new proposed amendment to the state constitution to strike the “white only” clause from the state suffrage section as well as from the “apportionment, and militia service sections . . . to be submitted to the people at the next general election. Although [state] legislative action on the proposed amendment was completed on March 31, 1869, the people did not vote on it until the November election, 1870.”71 Moreover, this proposed amendment did not refer to the matter as Negro suffrage but as “Impartial Suffrage,” setting the stage for the third statewide referendum on Negro suffrage in Michigan and the final such vote in any state. With the national ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment on March 30, 1870—which made it immediately a part of the

federal Constitution—the November 1870 statewide referendum was little more than an afterthought. Nevertheless, Michigan went through with their third referendum. Some 51.7% of the electorate voted for “Impartial Suffrage” and 48.3% against it. In fact, the passing of this state amendment was achieved by a narrow margin of only 3.4% (3,507 votes). Passage was helped by the African American electorate who had been eligible to vote since the spring elections of 1870. Of this matter, scholars reported that “Negroes themselves voted in this election and on the ‘impartial suffrage’ amendment. The [Detroit] Free Press estimated that between 600 and 700 Negroes went to the polls in Detroit alone.”72 At the county level in the state of Michigan: More than one-third of the majority for the amendment came from Wayne County alone, where 2,023 voted in favor and only 478 against. But the amendment went down to defeat by decisive margins in Allegan, Cass, Eaton, Genesee, Jackson, Lapeer, Livingston, Monroe, Saginaw, Shiawasee, St. Joseph, and Washtenaw, and by smaller margins in several others. Some counties with relatively large Negro populations, like Cass and Washtenaw, had majorities against the amendment, while others, which also had large numbers of Negroes, such as Berrien and Oakland, voted in favor of adoption.73 With this action on their third referendum, Michigan became the only state in the Union to hold a statewide referendum on Negro suffrage rights after the passage and adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Figure 8.5 shows the rise in support in Michigan for suffrage rights for African Americans before and after the Civil War. There was a rise of 10.7 percentage points between 1850 and 1868 and 12.4 percentage points between 1868 and 1870, which was barely enough to approve the referendum. Thus, two of the three referenda held in Michigan failed to grant suffrage rights to African Americans. Regarding the failure of the initial

Figure 8.5  Results of Three Statewide Suffrage Rights Referenda in Michigan, 1850–1870

Percent Voting for African American Suffrage Rights

154

60% 51.7%

50% 39.3%

40% 30%

28.6%

20% 10% 0%

1850

1868 Year

1870

Source: Table 8.1. Note: African American suffrage rights was a critical issue in the voting for a proposed state constitution in 1868.



Suffrage Referenda prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1846–1870 155

referendum, Formisano wrote, “the stiffening of white hostility must be examined first in the context of mid-nineteenth century party warfare. Democrats had habitually stimulated Negrophobia, first as a weapon against abolitionists, later as a defense against Whig and Free-Soil anti-Southernism and antislavery”74 and equal suffrage rights.75 He further added: “The Democrats had exploited the Negrophobia of their ethnic supporters to reinforce party loyalty. As the Democratic political hegemony disintegrated after 1853, they desperately sought to stimulate racial fears in an attempt to undercut the Republican’s use of the sectional issue and shore up their crumbling majority,” and in each instance they succeeded.76 However, on the third attempt, the state Democrats failed to stop the extension of suffrage rights because the Republicans had prevailed nationally on the issue and thereby enabled the state party to prevail. Reflecting on the success of the third referendum, historians Willis Dunbar with William Shade opine: “It was only after great effort and intricate maneuvering that the Republican leadership finally brought the Michigan electorate to grudging and largely tacit acceptance of black voters at the polls.”77 They continued by saying: Michigan’s Republican politicians, who were for the most part associated with the Radical wing of the party, struggled to gain the ballot for the black man in the state. Their record was often halting but on the whole consistent, as was the record of their Democratic opponents who agitated racial prejudice among the voters to oppose Negro suffrage and all things Republican. They aimed “to keep this country as our fathers made it, a white man’s government.”78 In Michigan they failed after the third referendum, even though “Michigan’s Negroes represented only 1 percent of the population; and black voters, who numbered between 1,300 and 2,400, had a minimal impact on the Republican majority in the state, which grew from 31,000 in 1868 to 60,000 in 1872.”79

Iowa Iowa was the only state to hold exactly two referenda, the second of which came in 1868. In fact, “the presidential election of 1868 represented a peak time for voting on Negro suffrage. In that year voters approved franchise extension in Iowa and Minnesota. . . . The only straightforward victory for Negro suffrage in 1868 occurred in Iowa.”80 Indeed, the victory in Minnesota came as a result of a clever political maneuver. Thus, Iowa became “the only state that adopted franchise extension by means of a single, uncomplicated referendum.”81 Table 8.6 reveals that in the initial referendum in 1857 only 14.7% of the white electorate favored suffrage rights for African Americans. In this election, “although Iowans approved the new constitution by a slight majority, they turned down the proposal to strike the word ‘white’ from its suffrage provisions by an overwhelming margin of 85.4 percent [sic]. But at the same time, more than one-fourth of the people who cast ballots on the new constitution failed to vote on suffrage amendment.”82 Further analysis “of the 1857 voting returns by area [county] permits some interesting insights. Only two counties in the state

Table 8.6  Results of Two Statewide Referenda on African American Suffrage Rights in Iowa, 1857 and 1868 For Suffrage Rights Year

Votes

Against Suffrage Rights

Percent

Votes

Percent

Total Votes

1857

8,489

14.7%

49,387

85.3%

57,876

1868

105,384

56.5%

81,119

43.5%

186,503

Outcome Denied Approved

Source: Table 8.1.

recorded a majority for the amendment. In Mitchell County, which contained a large Scandinavian settlement, the proposal received a plurality of less than one percent; but a unanimous vote of 284 to 0 was delivered for it in Cedar County, at that time populated almost exclusively by Quakers.”83 In opposition to the suffrage amendment, “the largest vote against Negro suffrage was recorded in southeastern Iowa, which contained the state’s earliest and most Southern settlements.”84 The state held a second referendum eleven years later in 1868. This “Iowa referendum was fully described to the voters, who could agree or disagree to strike the word ‘white’ from five provisions of the state constitution.”85 Of these five, it was “the first amendment [which] removed the qualification of race from voting requirements” and the sixth clause which confined “membership in the legislature to free whites.”86 The voters removed the clause in the first amendment but let the clause in the sixth amendment stay. Hence, African Americans got the right to vote but “were still forbidden in Iowa to run as candidates for the state legislature.”87 Using a correlation analysis two scholars of the 1868 Iowa referendum vote, Robert Dykstra and Harlan Hahn, discerned some additional patterns in the vote which gave suffrage rights to African Americans. Besides approving the referenda by 56.5%, “the coefficient of correlation between the percentage of the vote for U.S. Grant, the Republican candidate for President, and the percentage of the vote in favor of Negro suffrage was +.91.” This very high correlation—close to a perfect 1.00—tells us that those individuals who voted for President Grant also voted for Negro suffrage. Percentage-wise this means that 83% of those who voted Republican voted for Negro suffrage. “This correlation probably reflects the success of Republican leaders who sought to identify their party with the cause of extending additional liberties to Negroes in the postwar era. As early as 1866 Iowa was the only state in which the Republican party had strongly endorsed Negro suffrage.”88 In addition to a high correlation with the presidential vote, on the state level there were similarly high correlations with the vote for the Republican candidates for both governor and secretary of state, +.84 and +.92 respectively. This “high association between the vote for Republican candidates and for suffrage extension indicates that a large number of Iowa Republicans heeded their party’s exhortation.”89 But there is more: Party regularity, however, does not provide the only explanation for the remarkable discipline the parties apparently exerted on the referendum vote. The

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balloting on Negro suffrage also was somewhat related to settlement patterns. Several measures of population characteristics suggest that the greatest support for Negro enfranchisement was concentrated in rural or farming regions and that its principal opponents were located in the relatively urbanized or densely settled areas of the state.90 Overall, the typical partisan conflict which appeared in other states with referenda prevailed in Iowa, but what set this victory apart was the “remarkable discipline” which the Republican Party exercised in this state and in this election. Clearly, “the results of Iowa’s referendum voting indicate that Democrats generally were successful in arousing antipathy to Negro suffrage among immigrants,” but this tactic did not mobilize enough immigrant voters to overcome the Republican discipline in Iowa as it had in other northern and midwestern states.91 An analysis of Figure 8.6 shows that in Iowa, “the vote for Negro enfranchisement increased from 14.7 percent in 1857 to 56.5 percent in 1868.”92 Such a fourfold increase surely suggests that pro-suffrage voter turnout was spurred by the presidential election but also that a major shift in public opinion and sentiment had occurred in the state between these two referenda. Thus, the Republican Party cohesion and its effectiveness in influencing the electoral outcome in Iowa cannot be seen or was not replicated in the two other referenda taking place at the same time in Michigan and Missouri.

Percent Voting for African American Suffrage Rights

Figure 8.6  Results of Two Statewide Suffrage Rights Referenda in Iowa, 1857–1868 60%

56.5%

50% 40% 30% 20%

14.7%

10% 0%

1857

Year

1868

Source: Table 8.1.

States with Single Statewide Referenda for Suffrage Rights, 1862–1868 Five states, Illinois, Connecticut, Kansas, Ohio, and Missouri, held only a single statewide suffrage referendum. Ordinarily, New Jersey is included in this list, but because of a unique situation it must be excluded. Instead of the state legislature submitting the Negro suffrage question to the white voters as all of the other states did, this state legislature decided to act on the matter themselves. Dykstra and Hahn report that “in New

Jersey, the question of Negro suffrage was never submitted to a referendum, although the state’s legislators rejected it decisively by a vote in 1867 and by a subsequent resolution denouncing Negro enfranchisement.”93 Thus, since New Jersey did not have a popular referendum like all of the other states, it cannot properly be included with the above mentioned five. Illinois was the only state to hold a suffrage referendum during the Civil War, in 1862. Interestingly, it held two referenda simultaneously. The second referendum was to exclude African American migrants from even coming to the state of Illinois. The exclusion referendum was approved by 71.0%, and the suffrage referendum was rejected by 84.9%. The white electorate in Illinois did not want African Americans to come into the state, and they voted in larger numbers on this matter than they did on the suffrage question (251,537 to 248,993).94 Whatever principles and values were espoused to fight in the Civil War, these elections suggest that for most of the people of Illinois, they included neither a humanitarian feeling toward African Americans nor concern for their political rights—or at least, not a feeling or concern that would allow African Americans to become neighbors and fellow electors. Table 8.7 tells us that Illinois had the lowest level of electoral support for suffrage rights for Free-Men-of-Color of any of the five states that conducted single referenda between 1862 and 1868. Only 15.1% of the white electorate voted for suffrage rights, which is less than one-sixth of the total vote. The second lowest support was given by the white electorate in Kansas, which gave barely more than one-third (34.9%) of its vote in favor of suffrage rights. Next in rank were Missouri with 42.7%, Connecticut with 44.8%, and finally Ohio with 45.9%. “Capturing the heat of the Ohio campaign,” one observer noted at the time, “both sides are making their strongest appeal to prejudice—the one [Democrats] harping on the ‘nigger’ and the other [Republicans] harping on the ‘copper-head.’”95 The outcome of the Ohio election did not bode well for the Republican Party. “Republicans won ten out of nineteen Congressional districts in 1866, but the Republican state ticket in 1867 carried [only] three districts. Because of the size of the turnout in Ohio and because referendums on Negro suffrage went down in decisive defeat in Ohio, Kansas and Minnesota, not to mention the discussion of it elsewhere, the Republican losses were widely interpreted as repudiating extension of Negro suffrage in the North.”96 The losses of the referenda in all five states coincided with Republican losses at the congressional, state, and local levels. Figure 8.7 reveals the differences in the level of white electorate support in each of the five states for African American suffrage rights. The results range from the lowest support in Illinois at 15.1% to the highest level of 45.9% in Ohio. The mean level of support for suffrage rights in these five states stood at 36.7%, although support in three of the five states in this figure is above the mean, which is pulled down by the remarkably low percentage in Illinois. Nevertheless, not one of the five states approved its referendum. The essential difference between the states with multiple referenda and those with a single referendum—even though there are five states in each of these categories—is that two of the multiple-referenda states, Iowa and Minnesota, passed their



Suffrage Referenda prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1846–1870 157 Table 8.7  Results of Five Statewide Referenda on African American Suffrage Rights in Illinois (1862), Connecticut (1865), Kansas (1867), Ohio (1867), and Missouri (1868) For Suffrage Rights Year State

Votes

1862 Illinois

Against Suffrage Rights

Total Votes

Votes

Percent

37,548

15.1%

211,405

84.9%

248,953 Denied

1865 Connecticut

27,217

44.8%

33,489

55.2%

1867 Kansas

10,529

34.9%

19,600

216,987

45.9%

55,236

42.7%

1868 Missouri

For Suffrage Rights Year Territory

Percent

1867 Ohio

Table 8.8  Results of Referenda on African American Suffrage Rights in Six Federal Territories and the District of Columbia, 1865–1868

Outcome

Votes Percent

Against Suffrage Rights Votes

Percent

Total Votes

Outcome

1865 Colorado

476

10.2%

4,192

89.8%

4,668

Denied

36

 0.5%

7,333

99.5%

7,369

Denied

60,706 Denied

1865 District of Columbia

65.1%

30,129 Denied

1866 Nebraska

3,838

49.4%

3,938

50.6%

7,776

Denied

255,340

54.1%

472,327 Denied

1867 Dakotas

74,053

57.3%

129,289 Denied

1868 Washington (………….... Data not found ………………...) Denied

Source: Table 8.1.

(………….... Data not found ………………...) Approved

1868 Idaho

(………….... Data not found ………………...) Denied

1868 Montana

(………….... Data not found ………………...) Denied

Source: Table 8.1.

Percent Voting for African American Suffrage Rights

Figure 8.7  Results of Statewide Suffrage Rights Referenda in Illinois, Connecticut, Kansas, Ohio, and Missouri, 1862–1868 Connecticut 44.8%

50% 45%

Ohio 45.9%

Missouri 42.7%

1867

1868

Kansas 34.9%

40% 35% 30% 25% 20% 15%

Illinois 15.1%

10% 5% 0%

1862

1865

1867 Year

Source: Table 8.1.

suffrage referenda while none of the states that tried it once did. Secondly, if one includes the other multiple-referenda states of Wisconsin—which passed a suffrage referendum on its second attempt in 1849 but had the outcome set aside on a technicality until the state supreme court resolved the matter—and Michigan—which passed a referendum after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment—then four of the five states with multiple referenda approved suffrage rights for African Americans. This record suggests that states with only a single referendum might well have improved the chances for passage of African American suffrage rights had any of these states attempted more referenda.

The Failure of Suffrage Rights Referenda in Federal Territories after the Civil War, 1865–1868: Congress Steps In Table 8.8 documents how suffrage referenda fared in the seven federal territories that launched them in the three years after the conclusion of the Civil War. There were six failures and only one success, in the Dakota Territory. Simply speaking, the success rate for referenda in the territories controlled by the

federal government was even worse than in the states which held referenda. However, because these territories were under congressional control, Congress could and did step in to alter the final outcomes. Two of the failed referenda took place in 1865, one in Colorado and the other in the nation’s capital, the District of Columbia. Washington, D.C., held its referendum in December 1865, and “voters in the southern-oriented District of Columbia rejected Negro suffrage by 6,521 to 35 in Washington City and 812 to 1 in Georgetown.”97 Prior to the District vote, Colorado held its referendum in September 1865, and conservative voters opposed suffrage rights for African Americans with an 89.8% “no” vote, despite Republican control of the territory government. Supporters in the District could mobilize only 0.5% of the white electorate, while in Colorado 10.2% of the white electorate voted in favor of African American suffrage. After these two defeats, Congress acted first on the District of Columbia case. In December 1865, Republican congressman William Kelley of Pennsylvania introduced a bill in the House of Representatives to allow African American suffrage in the District. It was “finally passed on January 18, 1866, 166 ‘yes’ to 54 ‘no.’ ”98 However, the Senate did not take up the Kelley bill until after the midterm congressional elections in the fall of 1866, in which the Republicans were victorious. On December 13, 1866, the Senate approved the suffrage bill. “But President [Andrew] Johnson vetoed the bill on January 7, 1867. . . . Republican congressmen retaliated by overriding the presidential veto on January 8, 1867. The Negro could now vote in the nation’s capital.”99 Bolstered by their successful action in the District of Columbia case, the Senate moved to grant suffrage rights in the other federal territories. This time the Senate continued its earlier action by passing a measure on January 10, 1867, to provide suffrage rights in all of the remaining federal territories. “On the same day it was supported by the House, President Johnson, apparently in a state of resignation after the District of Columbia defeat, acquiesced and Negroes after January 31, 1867 had the formal right to vote in federal territories.”100 A year later “a federal law creating the Territory of Wyoming on July 25, 1868, prohibited racial discrimination in voting and holding office. The

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legislative assembly complied and went a step further by establishing women suffrage as well on December 10, 1869.”101 This meant that for federal and state elections in this state, African American women now reentered the voting arena. There had not been such a right since New Jersey banned African American women from voting in 1807. Although the Wyoming territory complied with congressional laws on suffrage rights, the other territories failed to follow suit as quickly. One scholar of this process noted that the territories of Washington, Idaho, and Montana did not move forthrightly to immediately delete and strike the word “white” from their election laws. Failed referenda elections in these territories had not removed these “white only” clauses, and now congressional action allowed them to remove these clauses in their own good time. However, even with the congressional action, a special situation arose in the Nebraska territory. Nebraska wanted to enter the Union as a new state, but its referendum in 1866 had denied the Negro suffrage rights. Congress, in January 1867, after having required the other territories to grant suffrage rights, insisted that “as a condition of statehood that the Nebraska Territory must enfranchise the Negro.”102 Then, the matter went to the president. On January 30, 1867, President Johnson vetoed the measure, but Congress again ignored presidential opposition and overrode the veto on February 9. Strongly Republican, the Nebraska legislature accepted Negro suffrage and Nebraska was admitted to the Union as the thirty-seventh state. Thus, in one month all the territorial subdivisions under the direct control of Congress had received Negro suffrage.103 After Congressional implementation of suffrage rights in the federal territories, African American suffrage was still not permitted in two large areas, the South—all of the states of the old Confederacy—and those northern and midwestern states that had not granted suffrage. Congress first moved on the South with its decision to adopt the fifth section of the First Reconstruction Act of March 2, 1867. Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania led the way by having this congressional law require “Negro suffrage as a condition of readmitting the former Confederate states to the Union and seating their representatives in Congress.”104 Once this matter was completed, Stevens and his other Republican congressional allies passed the Fifteenth Amendment, which would enfranchise African Americans in all of those states either that had denied it by their state constitutions and state legislative statutes or that had failed to remove “white only” clauses via statewide referenda. The Fifteenth Amendment would remove the paralysis that had been there throughout Colonial, Revolutionary, and Antebellum America.

Summary and Conclusions on African American Suffrage Referenda prior to the Fifteenth Amendment Map 8.1 offers a visual summary of the statewide and federal territorial referenda which took place before (and just after) the

Fifteenth Amendment. Moreover, this map indicates where referenda succeeded (in three states—plus the State Supreme Court decision in Wisconsin—and one federal territory). Of the twentyseven referenda in seventeen states and territories, three passed and eventually a fourth one was legally approved. This means that of the total twenty-seven referenda, 14.8% passed and 85.2% failed. Thus, we can reasonably conclude that African Americans would never have gotten the vote after the Civil War without Congress stepping in to propose the Fifteenth Amendment. Looking at these numerous referenda elections, historian Gillette observed that “voters in the North, in referendum after referendum, rejected Negro suffrage by a generally substantial vote.”105 Moreover, many of these statewide referenda occurred in “Republican states with few potential voters and with an infinitesimal percentage of Negro inhabitants. Unfortunately there was no groundswell of popular support or any great decisive change in public opinion between 1865 and 1868 as registered in referendums on Negro suffrage. Instead, white Americans resented and resisted it,” both before the Civil War and significantly after the war.106 Public opinions and attitudes formed the basis for partisan differences. Nationally, the Democratic Party strongly opposed suffrage rights, while on the state and local level there were some cleavages and cracks where anti-slavery Democrats resided. In some of these geographic areas, even Free-Men-of-Color affiliated with and voted for these anti-slavery Democratic candidates. Nationally, the Whigs took ambiguous or neutral positions on Negro suffrage rights, though at the state and local level there were cleavages and cracks among this political party as well. Free-Men-of-Color found alliances and affiliations with some of the anti-slavery or Conscience Whigs. With the arrival of the anti-slavery parties—notably the Liberty and Free-Soilers—FreeMen-of-Color had some options and alternatives but not always: some of the leaders of anti-slavery parties voted against suffrage rights. The situation remained the same when the Republican Party arrived on the scene. After the Civil War, however, the Republican Party took the lead on this issue and resolved it by getting the Fifteenth Amendment adopted and ratified. Finally, African Americans themselves played a significant role. In some states, like Michigan and New York, African Americans led the protest fight and made the demands for suffrage rights. African American veterans of suffrage referenda from states like New York traveled to other states where such referenda were taking place for the first time to assist in advocacy efforts. In other states, such as Minnesota, the Republican Party and white reformers and anti-slavery leaders carried the suffrage fight. Nevertheless, it was a combination of leaders, white and black, and partisan organizations that fought to expand the U.S. electorate beyond the confines of color. In the final analysis, federal action was required to circumvent state and territorial inaction. Perhaps newspaperman, anti-slavery activist, and Liberal Republican party presidential nominee Horace Greeley best summed up the failures of the referenda in the state and federal territories when he said, “The Northern voter tended first to reject the colored elector when directly faced with him, and then turn around and support the party behind him.”107



Suffrage Referenda prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1846–1870 159 Map 8.1  States and Territories that Held Referenda on Suffrage Rights for African Americans, 1846–1870

New York (1846, 1860, 1869)

Wisconsin (1847, 1849*, 1857, 1865)

Washington Territory (1868)

Minnesota (1865, 1867, 1868*)

Montana Territory (1868)

Michigan (1850, 1868, 1870*)

VT

OR

ME NH MA

Idaho Territory (1868) (Wyoming)

Dakota Territory (1867*) Nebraska Territory (1866)

Utah Territory

NV CA

Arizona Territory

Colorado Territory (1865)

Oklahoma and Indian Territories

New Mexico Territory

PA

Iowa (1857, 1868*)

Kansas (1867)

Illinois (1862)

Ohio (1867)

IN

WV

Missouri (1868)

VA

KY NC TN SC

AR MS

TX

RI Connecticut (1865) New Jersey DE (1867) MD District of Columbia (1865)

AL

GA

LA

0 FL

100 200 miles

States and Territories with African American Suffrage Rights Referenda (Years) Approved by 1870 Approved Once, but Denied by 1870

Former Confederate States (Not yet readmitted to the Union)

Denied by 1870 United States and Territories, 1866 Source: Table 8.1. * Referendum year in which African American suffrage rights were approved.

Notes    1. Howard Bell, “National Negro Convention of the Middle 1840’s: Moral Suasion vs. Political Action,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 22 (October 1937), pp. 247–260. See also his “The Negro Convention Movement, 1830—A New Perspective,” Negro History Bulletin (February 1951), pp. 104–123.   2. Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).    3. Charles Wesley, “The Participation of Negroes in Anti-Slavery Political Parties,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 29, No. 1 (January 1941), pp. 32–74.   4. John Aldrich, Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 117, Table 4.3.    5. Wesley, pp. 34–74.    6. Leslie Fishel, Jr., “Wisconsin and Negro Suffrage,” Wisconsin Magazine of History Vol. 46 (Spring 1963), p. 183.    7. Ibid., p. 184.   8. Ibid.    9. Ibid., p. 185.  10. Ibid.  11. Ibid.   12. Michael McManus, “Wisconsin Republicans and Negro Suffrage: Attitudes and Behavior,” Civil War History Vol. 25 (March 1979), p. 39.  13. Ibid.

  14. Ibid., p. 40.   15. Ibid., pp. 42–43, footnote 26.   16. Ibid., p. 42.  17. Ibid.   18. Ibid., p. 45.   19. Ibid., p. 46.   20. Ibid., p. 48.   21. Fishel, p. 189.   22. Ibid., p. 190.   23. Ibid., p. 191.   24. Ibid., 192.  25. Ibid.   26. Ibid., p. 189.   27. Ibid., p. 192.   28. Ibid., p. 193.   29. Ibid., p. 194.  30. Ibid.  31. Ibid.   32. Ibid., p. 195.  33. Ibid.   34. Ibid., p. 196.  35. Ibid.  36. Ibid.   37. Phyllis Field, The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 59. Quoted in Hanes Walton, Jr. and Robert C. Smith, American

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Chapter 8

Politics and the African American Quest for Universal Freedom (New York: Longman, 2000), p. 162. See also Field, pp. 61, 127, and 199.   38. Walton and Smith, 2000, p. 162.   39. William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), p. 27.   40. Ibid., p. 26.  41. Ibid.   42. Ibid., pp. 27–28, footnote 10.  43. Ibid.   44. Ronald Formisano, “The Edge of Caste: Colored Suffrage in Michigan, 1827–1861,” Michigan History Vol. 56 (Spring 1972), p. 20; see also his The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827–1861 (Prince­ ton: Princeton University Press, 1971).  45. Ibid.   46. Ibid., pp. 21–22.   47. Ibid., p. 23.   48. Ibid., p. 22.  49. Ibid.   50. Ibid., p. 24.  51. Ibid.   52. Ibid., p. 25.  53. Ibid.   54. Ibid., p. 26.  55. Ibid.   56. Ibid., p. 27.   57. Ibid., p. 28.   58. Ibid., p. 24.   59. Ibid., p. 28.   60. Ibid., p. 30.  61. Ibid.   62. Ibid., p. 32.   63. Ibid., p. 33.   64. Ibid., p. 36.  65. Ibid.   66. Ibid., p. 38.   67. Willis Dunbar with William Shade, “The Black Man Gains the Vote: The Centennial of ‘Impartial Suffrage’ in Michigan,” Michigan History Vol. 56 (Spring 1972), pp. 47–48.   68. Yvonne Tuchalski, “Erastus Hussey: Battle Creek Antislavery Activist,” Michigan History Vol. 56 (Spring 1972), pp. 1–18.   69. Dunbar and Shade, p. 51.   70. Ibid., p. 53.   71. Ibid., p. 54.

  72. Ibid., p. 55.  73. Ibid.   74. Formisano, p. 39.   75. Ibid., p. 35.   76. Ibid., p. 39.   77. Dunbar and Shade, p. 56.  78. Ibid.  79. Ibid.   80. Robert Dykstra and Harlan Hahn, “Northern Voters and Negro Suffrage: The Case of Iowa, 1868,” Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 32 (Summer 1968), p. 205.  81. Ibid.   82. Ibid., pp. 206–207.   83. Ibid., p. 207.  84. Ibid.   85. Gillette, pp. 26–27.   86. Dykstra and Hahn, p. 207.   87. Gillette, p. 27.   88. Dykstra and Hahn, p. 208.   89. Ibid., p. 209.  90. Ibid.   91. Ibid., p. 215.   92. Ibid., p. 207.   93. Dykstra and Hahn, p. 203.   94. Tom McLaughlin, “Grass-Roots Attitudes Toward Black Rights in Twelve Nonslaveholding States, 1846–1869,” Mid-America: An Historical Review Vol. 56 (July 1974), p. 176, Table I.   95. Gillette, p. 32. See also Edgar Toppin, “Negro Emancipation in Historic Retrospect: Ohio: The Negro Suffrage Issue in Post-Bellum Ohio Politics,” Journal of Human Relations Vol. 11 (Winter 1963), pp. 232–246.   96. Gillette, p. 33.   97. Ibid., p. 26.   98. Ibid., p. 29.   99. Ibid., pp. 29–30. 100. Ibid., p. 30. 101. Ibid., p. 30, footnote 13. 102. Ibid., p. 31. 103. Ibid. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid., p. 25. 106. Ibid., p. 27. 107. Leslie Fishel, Jr., “Northern Prejudice and Negro Suffrage, 1865–1870,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 39 (January 1954), p. 22.

CHAPTER 9

Voting Behavior of the African American Electorate prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1788–1870 The Evidentiary Sources for Inferences about African American Voting and Partisan Behavior prior to the Fifteenth Amendment

162

Table 9.1 Three Evidentiary Sources Used to Estimate African American Voting Behavior in Presidential Elections, 1789–1868

163

The Number and Percentage of States Allowing Popular and African American Voting prior to the Fifteenth Amendment

164

Table 9.2 Number of African American Suffrage States by Popular Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections, 1789–1868

165

Figure 9.1 Number of African American Suffrage States in Presidential Elections with and without Popular Voting before the Fifteenth Amendment, 1789–1868

166

Figure 9.2 Percent of States in Presidential Elections Having African American Suffrage with and without Popular Voting before the Fifteenth Amendment, 1789–1868

166

Table 9.3 Number of African American Suffrage States Making Use of Popular and Non-Popular Voting in Presidential Elections, 1789–1868

167

African American Partisanship and Voting Behavior in Presidential Elections prior to the Fifteenth Amendment

167

Figure 9.3 Number of African American Suffrage States Making Use of Popular and Non-Popular Voting in Presidential Elections, 1789–1868

168

Table 9.4 Three Categories of African American State Party Voting prior to the Fifteenth Amendment

170

Summary and Conclusions on African American Partisanship prior to the Fifteenth Amendment

171

Map 9.1 States Permitting African American Suffrage before the Fifteenth Amendment, 1789–1868

172

Table 9.5 Free African American Male Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections, 1789–1868

173

Notes 177

162

Chapter 9

I

n Chapters 3 through 8, we have described and explained the legal right to vote in Colonial, Revolutionary, and Antebellum America, as well as examining the colonies and states that legally reversed these rights to vote. Then we have analyzed the states that held referenda on extending suffrage rights to Free-Men-of-Color before (or immediately after) the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified on February 3, 1870. In fact, these six chapters have laid out in a comprehensive and systematic manner when and where African Americans, both Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color and even slaves, could legally and illegally vote in the United States prior to the constitutional enfranchisement of African American men via the Fifteenth Amendment. This chapter will present, as much as possible through the available data, a holistic portrait of not only where (the states and their counties) but also for whom (which presidential parties and candidates) these legal African American voters did cast ballots, beginning with the first presidential election (1789) through the last presidential election (1868) prior to the Fifteenth Amendment. It should be noted that on March 2, 1867, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867 that required ten former states of the Confederacy to write new state constitutions granting suffrage rights to all males, as well as the ratification of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, as a condition of re-admission to the Union.1 (Tennessee was excluded because just days before the passage of the Act, on its own it had granted freedmen the right to vote.) Therefore, the electorates of those southern states that had been readmitted to the Union before the 1868 presidential election— which was held on November 3, 1868—actually included African American males. However, as only seven of these states had been re-admitted by that date, only a fraction of the African American electorate was able to vote in the 1868 presidential election. Thus, the very first presidential election in which the Fifteenth Amendment was in effect—allowing all registered African American males twenty-one years and older to vote— was the 1872 contest between the popular Civil War general President Ulysses S. Grant (the incumbent Republican) and the newspaperman (editor of the New York Tribune) and Liberal Republican nominee Horace Greeley, who had also been nominated by the Democrats at their National Convention.2 Overall, from the signing of the new U.S. Constitution in 1787 to the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment on February 3, 1870, there were twenty-one presidential elections. Before examining the partisanship, voter turnout, and voting behavior of the African American electorate during this period of limited participation, it is necessary to explain the vagaries of the election return data for these twenty-one elections.

The Evidentiary Sources for Inferences about African American Voting and Partisan Behavior prior to the Fifteenth Amendment In the time frame of the first twenty-one presidential elections, 1789–1868, collecting election return data at the

county, state, and national levels was everything except systematic, comprehensive, and well archived. These failings were particularly true for the earliest presidential elections, 1789–1824. Added to these problems is the lack of data on voter registration in each county and state and of information on voter turnout in this period. Nor did the federal census provide information on gender breakdown, despite the fact that only males (whites and some Free-Men-of-Color) could vote, thereby making it more difficult to use the census as a surrogate data source. Yet another problem plagues the incomplete, scattered, and piecemeal election return data: a lack of uniform standards at the state level for voting for presidential electors. The Constitution, in Article I, Sections 2, 3, and 4, and Article II, Section 1, gave the states the right to set their own criteria about voting eligibility in national elections for Congress and the presidency. With this power, the states created a series of options for themselves. States could choose among several different methods: (1) popular voting, (2) selection by state legislatures, or (3) a mixture of these two. States also had the option to change these voting procedures at each presidential election, and many did just that. A uniform standard of popular voting did not occur until 1832. Even then South Carolina opted out by allowing their state legislature to select presidential electors through 1860—and without providing the electoral results from this procedure, making it impossible to know how people voted in the state.3 Therefore, confronted with these data problems for voters in general, it is even more difficult to find out about minority racial voters because there were fewer of them and even fewer states allowed them to cast ballots. To resolve some of these data problems, we have made adjustments to the data so that we can generate evidentiary-based inferences instead of the prevailing estimates and/or omissions that abound in current academic and scholarly literature. Table 9.1 shows that we have triangulated the historical and statistical evidence for each of the twenty-one presidential elections prior to the Fifteenth Amendment. The first source of our evidence is simple correlations between the percentage of Free-Men-of-Color and the voting percentage for each presidential candidate and their political parties. In the presidential election years, 1789–1828, the U.S. Census did not delineate a gender breakdown, which requires us to correlate the entire Free Black population percentage with the party vote percentage. Once the census began to provide male and female data, we took a more refined approach by correlating specifically the FreeMen-of-Color populations with the party percentages in those states where African Americans were allowed to vote. Column 8 in Table 9.1, labeled “S.L.,” indicates if the correlation which we found was an important and consequential one. And this would be the case if the level of significance falls in the range from 0.00 to 0.05. The second source of our evidence are the historical accounts of African American voting found in African American academic and scholarly journals, monographs, doctoral dissertations, books, and edited volumes. We have performed an extensive content analysis on the extant literature on



Voting Behavior prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1788–1870

163

Table 9.1  Three Evidentiary Sources Used to Estimate African American Voting Behavior in Presidential Elections, 1789–1868 Scholars Election Year

Black

White

Party

Candidate(s)

State

Corr.a

S. L.b

1789

No data

Yes

Federalist

Washington

Inference Sources (0–3)

 

 

 

1792

No data

Yes

Federalist

1

Washington

 

 

 

1796

No data

Yes

1

Federalist

J. Adams

 

 

 

1800

No data

1

Yes

Federalist

J. Adams

 

 

 

1804

1

No data

Yes

Federalist

Pinckney

 

 

 

1

1808

No data

Yes

Federalist

Pinckney

 

 

 

1

1812

No data

Yes

Federalist

Clinton

 

 

 

1

1816

No data

Yes

Federalist

King

 

 

 

1

1820

No data

No data

 

 

 

 

 

0

1824

No data

No data

 

 

 

 

 

0

1828

No data

No data

Democratic Republican

Jackson

Pennsylvania

–0.4254

0.01

0

1828

No data

No data

National Republican

J. Q. Adams

Massachusetts

–0.7761

0.01

0

1828

No data

No data

National Republican

J. Q. Adams

Pennsylvania

0.4254

0.01

1

1832

No data

No data

Anti-Masonic

Wirt

Pennsylvania

0.4934

0.01

1

1832

No data

No data

Democratic Republican

Jackson

New York

0.2938

0.05

1

1832

No data

No data

Democratic Republican

Jackson

Pennsylvania

–0.4934

0.01

0

1832

No data

No data

National Republican

Clay

Massachusetts

0.5332

0.05

1

1832

No data

No data

National Republican

Clay

New York

–0.2938

0.05

0

1836

Yes

Yes

Whig

Harrison, Webster

New York

 

 

2

1840

Yes

Yes

Liberty

Birney

New York

 

 

2

1840

Yes

Yes

Whig

Harrison

New York

 

 

2

1844

Yes

Yes

Liberty

Birney

Massachusetts

–0.6565

0.05

2

1844

Yes

Yes

Liberty

Birney

New York

–0.5449

0.01

2

1844

Yes

Yes

Whig

Clay

Massachusetts

0.5540

0.05

3

1848

No data

No data

Democratic

Cass

Georgia

0.2431

0.05

1

1848

No data

No data

Democratic

Cass

New York

0.3169

0.05

1

1848

Yes

Yes

Free Soil

Van Buren

New York

–0.478

0.01

2

1848

Yes

Yes

Whig

Taylor

Georgia

–0.2432

0.05

2

1848

Yes

Yes

Whig

Taylor

Massachusetts

0.5821

0.05

3

1848

Yes

Yes

Whig

Taylor

New York

0.4328

0.01

3

1852

No data

No data

Democratic

Pierce

New York

0.3719

0.01

1

1852

Yes

Yes

Free Soil

Hale

New York

–0.4856

0.01

2

1852

Yes

Yes

Free Soil

Hale

Rhode Island

–0.8833

0.05

2

1856

No data

No data

American Know Nothing

Fillmore

New York

0.5166

0.01

1

1856

No data

No data

Democratic

Buchanan

New York

0.4398

0.01

1

1856

Yes

Yes

Liberty

J. Smith

New York

 

 

2

1856

Yes

Yes

Republican

Fremont

New York

–0.5778

0.01

2

1860

Yes

Yes

Republican

Lincoln

New York

–0.4894

0.01

2

1860

Yes

Yes

Liberty

J. Smith

New York

 

 

2

1860

No data

No data

Southern Democratic

Breckinridge

Georgia

0.2595

0.01

1

1860

No data

No data

Southern Democratic

Breckinridge

New York

0.4891

0.01

1

1864

No data

No data

Democratic

McClellan

 

 

 

0

1864

Yes

Yes

Republican

Lincoln

4c

 

 

3

1868

No data

No data

Democratic

Seymour

 

 

 

0

1868

Yes

Yes

Republican

Grant

7d

 

 

3

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved June 2002; and Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, Historical Census Browser, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/index.html (Charlottesville: University of Virginia), retrieved April 13, 2008. Calculations by the authors. a Correlation: Correlations of African American electorate demography with county-level presidential election data were obtained using the data in Appendix A. b Significance Level: All of the numbers reported in this column indicate statistically important correlations, with those at the 0.01 level more significant than the correlations of data reported at the 0.05 level. c The number of states that allowed African American soldiers to vote in the field includes the following: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Rhode Island. d The number of reconstructed southern states granting suffrage to African American freedmen includes Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee.

164

Chapter 9

these twenty-one presidential elections that refers to the Free Black populations and where they could vote. All of this literature can be found cited in the endnotes and the bibliography. Finally, the third evidentiary source are the academic and scholarly journals, monographs, doctoral dissertations, books, and edited volumes that have been produced by white scholars and academics down through the years. (We separated the scholars by race simply because African Americans had written more works on the Free-Men-of-Color voters in the anti-slavery political parties. The combined works supplement each other.) Systematic content analyses were undertaken on these sources, and these works can also be found in the endnotes and bibliography. This approach is obviously far superior to relying solely upon a single evidentiary source to declare how Free-Men-of-Color voted in each of these twentyone presidential elections. Our categorization permits a quantitative range of 0-to-3, where “0” indicates that there is no evidence available about how Free-Men-of Color voted, to “1” where there is minimal evidence about voting behavior, to “2” where the evidence is quite strong, and “3” where the evidence is very strong about this group’s voting behavior and an inference can be made with confidence from the correlation and historical findings. Even with our scale, which appears in the “Inference Sources” column in Table 9.1, we do not jump directly to the conclusion that a “3,” very strong evidence, ensures an accurate portrait of Free-Men-of-Color voting behavior. Because the extant election return data are still incomplete and scattered, and they simply do not allow perfect precision, the findings in the “Inference Sources” column are meant to provide the opportunity to draw provisional inferences, not to settle the question. For example, Georgia legally allowed Free-Men-ofColor and later African American males to vote in twenty of these twenty-one presidential elections, but there is no scholarly or academic data to show that African Americans ever exercised this right. Clearly, caution and respect for the limitations of data must be taken into consideration as the reader exercises his or her own judgment. The other major adjustment to the data is categorizing for each of the first ten presidential elections, 1789–1824, those states that allowed popular (direct) voting for the president and those states that did not allow popular (only indirect) voting. States with popular voting are then matched to states that permitted Free-Men-of-Color to vote. Such a rendering appears for the very first time in this volume; all previous historical studies have created an inaccurate portrait of FreeMen-of-Color voting behavior by failing to distinguish those states with popular (direct) voting from those that lacked it (indirect).4 For instance, New York participated in twenty of the first twenty-one presidential elections, but it held only eleven of the twenty as popular (direct) elections, since the first nine were decided by the state legislature alone (indirect). Free-Men-of-Color had no vote in the first nine elections, nor did anyone in New York except state legislators. Hence, our study analyzes voting behavior only in states that held popular

votes, even while we acknowledge those states that permitted indirect voting for president. Despite the many limitations of the data, such an approach allows the reader to see a comprehensive portrait of voting behavior, direct and indirect, that has never before been available.

The Number and Percentage of States Allowing Popular and African American Voting prior to the Fifteenth Amendment Table 9.2 presents data for each of the first twenty-one presidential elections on states that allowed Free-Men-ofColor to vote (referred to as African American suffrage states). One column reveals the number of African American suffrage states that permitted popular voting for the president; another column shows the number of African American suffrage states that did not permit popular voting; while a third column in the table gives the total number of African American suffrage states. The table clearly shows that after the 1824 presidential election, all of the states permitting Free-Men-of-Color to vote also permitted popular voting for the president. (Indeed, of all the states in the Union, only South Carolina did not move to popular voting for the president, but it was not an African American suffrage state.) The large jump between 1864 and 1868 in African American suffrage states was caused primarily by the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867, which required as a condition of southern states re-entry to the Union that they not only ratify the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments but also permit African American males to register and vote in local, state, and national elections. By 1868 seven of the eleven states of the old Confederacy had accepted these conditions, returning to the Union and voting in the presidential election of that year.5 This table provides a longitudinal view and a holistic portrait of states in which Free-Men-of-Color could vote and permits the reader to see the vicissitudes that confronted this group of American voters across these twenty-one presidential elections. The only period of great stability was from 1840 through 1860, a twenty-year period of six presidential elections when a maximum of seven states with popular voting allowed this group to vote in presidential elections. Aside from this period, change (i.e., states that allowed voting) instead of stability dominated the contours of the rights of Free-Men-of-Color to vote in the first twenty-one presidential elections. Figure 9.1 allows the reader to see the number of states that permitted this group to vote. The key factor in this change was the number of states that reversed their laws from permitting Free-Men-of-Color to vote to excluding them. Chief among them are Connecticut, Tennessee, North Carolina, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey. Of all of the new states admitted to the Union, only three affected the graph: Vermont, Maine, and Nebraska. The first two allowed Free-Men-of-Color to vote, and Nebraska, which entered in 1867 after the Civil War, also allowed African American males to vote. Hence, change came primarily from reversals instead of new states, as other new



Voting Behavior prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1788–1870

165

Table 9.2  Number of African American Suffrage States by Popular Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections, 1789–1868 African American Suffrage States

Presidential Election Year

with Popular Voting in Presidential Elections Number of Suffrage States

without Popular Voting in Presidential Elections

Percent of All Suffrage States

Number of Suffrage States

Percent of All Suffrage States

Total Number of African American Suffrage States

All Suffrage States as Percent of Election States

Total Number of States in Presidential Election

1789

5

62.5%

3

37.5%

8

80.0%

10

1792

5

38.5%

8

61.5%

13

86.7%

15

1796

7

53.8%

6

46.2%

13

81.3%

16

1800

3

25.0%

9

75.0%

12

75.0%

16

1804

5

45.5%

6

54.5%

11

64.7%

17

1808

4

40.0%

6

60.0%

10

58.8%

17

1812

4

40.0%

6

60.0%

10

55.6%

18

1816

5

50.0%

5

50.0%

10

52.6%

19

1820

7

70.0%

3

30.0%

10

41.7%

24

1824

7

70.0%

3

30.0%

10

41.7%

24

1828

10

100.0%

0

0.0%

10

41.7%

24

1832

10

100.0%

0

0.0%

10

41.7%

24

1836

8

100.0%

0

0.0%

8

30.8%

26

1840c

7

100.0%

0

0.0%

7

26.9%

26

1844

7

100.0%

0

0.0%

7

26.9%

26

1848

7

100.0%

0

0.0%

7

23.3%

30

1852

7

100.0%

0

0.0%

7

22.6%

31

1856

7

100.0%

0

0.0%

7

22.6%

31

1860

7

100.0%

0

0.0%

7

21.2%

33

1864

6

100.0%

0

0.0%

6

24.0%

25

1868

17

100.0%

0

0.0%

17

50.0%

34

a

b

Sources: Adapted from Hanes Walton, Jr., African American Power and Politics: The Political Context Variable (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 16; Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Conested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000 ), pp. 54–60 and 349–354; William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passageof the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969). pp. 25–45. Calculations by the authors. The thirteen states with African American suffrage rights in 1796 were Connecticut, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hamphire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Vermont. a

The ten states with African American suffrage rights in 1828 were Georgia, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hamphire, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Vermont. b

c

States with African American suffrage rights in 1840 through 1860 included these seven: Georgia, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hamphire, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

states were never African American suffrage states and hence never included in this graph. Figure 9.2 offers three percentages in a longitudinal fashion over the first twenty-one presidential elections: percent of election states with African American suffrage; percent of election states with African American suffrage and popular voting for president; percent of election states with African American suffrage but without popular voting for president. Unique in this figure is the percentage of states allowing Free-Men-of-Color voting rights in relationship to the total number of states that participated in each presidential election. Seen as a percentage of the entire nation, the greatest increase in states with African American suffrage and popular voting comes in the

1868 presidential election. In fact, from this figure one sees that the percentage of states which allowed African American voting in presidential elections steadily declined from its peak in 1792—except for a plateau from 1820 to 1832 when nearly all of the states began to feature popular voting—and only began a rapid upward rise in 1868 just prior to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment with the re-admission of seven of the old Confederacy states. This decline happened despite a dramatic expansion overall in states allowing popular voting. Moving from a collective portrait of the states that allowed popular and racial voting in these twenty-one presidential elections, Table 9.3 (p. 167) portrays individual states. This table reveals that two of the original thirteen colonies/states, New

166

Chapter 9

Figure 9.1  Number of African American Suffrage States in Presidential Elections with and without Popular Voting before the Fifteenth Amendment, 1789–1868 18

Number of States with African American Suffrage

16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0

1789 1792 1796 1800 1804 1808 1812 1816 1820 1824 1828 1832 1836 1840 1844 1848 1852 1856 1860 1864 1868 Presidential Election Year Number of African American Suffrage States with Popular Voting Number of African American Suffrage States without Popular Voting Total Number of African American Suffrage States

Source: Table 9.2.

Figure 9.2  Percent of States in Presidential Elections Having African American Suffrage with and without Popular Voting before the Fifteenth Amendment, 1789–1868

Percent of States Participating in the Presidential Election

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

1789 1792 1796 1800 1804 1808 1812 1816 1820 1824 1828 1832 1836 1840 1844 1848 1852 1856 1860 1864 1868 Presidential Election Year African American Suffrage States with Popular Voting African American Suffrage States without Popular Voting African American Suffrage States

Source: Adapted from Table 9.2.



Voting Behavior prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1788–1870 Table 9.3  Number of African American Suffrage States Making Use of Popular and Non-Popular Voting in Presidential Elections, 1789–1868 Number of Popular Vote Elections

Number of Non-Popular Vote Elections

New Hampshire

20

1

Massachusetts

18

3

Rhode Island

18

2

Maine

13

0

Pennsylvania

12

1

Georgia

11

9

New York

11

9

Vermont

11

9

North Carolina

10

2

Tennessee

 6

5

Maryland

 4

0

Kentucky

 2

0

Delaware

 1

1

Alabama

 1

0

Arkansas

 1

0

Iowa

 1

0

Louisiana

 1

0

Minnesota

 1

0

Missouri

 1

0

Nebraska

 1

0

South Carolina

 1

0

Connecticut

 0

8

New Jersey

 0

5

State

Source: Adapted from Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), including Chapter 2 for data on the popular and non-popular voting procedures in presidential elections. For data on the states which allowed Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color to vote, see Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), Appendix A, pp. 349–353.

Hampshire and Massachusetts, allowed Free-Men-of-Color/ African American males to vote in all of the twenty-one presidential elections before the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. New Hampshire had popular voting in twenty of the twenty-one elections and Massachusetts had popular voting in eighteen of those elections. Rhode Island also had eighteen elections with popular voting and allowed Free-Men-of-Color/African American males to vote in twenty of the twenty-one presidential elections. Maine, which did not enter the Union until 1820, allowed popular and racial voting in all of the thirteen

167

presidential elections in which the state participated prior to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. The only other state to have the popular voting procedure—albeit for the first four presidential elections—was Maryland, but before the fifth presidential election took place in 1804 the state had disenfranchised the Free-Men-of-Color voters. The other states in this table that allowed popular and FreeMen-of-Color voting in presidential elections but eventually disenfranchised black voters are Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Delaware. Two states, Connecticut and New Jersey, allowed Free-Men-of-Color voting for a time but never also popular voting for president before the states disenfranchised these voters. And finally, in Georgia, where Free-Menof-Color voting was legal, no historical evidence or data have surfaced indicating that these voters actually cast ballots before the 1868 presidential elections. The other unique feature about Georgia is that it did not participate at all in the 1864 presidential contest because it had withdrawn from the Union at this time and joined the Confederacy. Figure 9.3 offers a visualization of all of the states that allowed both popular and racial voting in these twenty-one presidential elections, as well as the number of times each of the states allowed non-popular and racial voting in all of the elections prior to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. The twenty-three states of this figure are ordered by their rank in terms of the number of times they used the popular (direct) voting procedure, running from the highest number of times to the lowest number of times. New Hampshire is the first, while both Connecticut and New Jersey are last because they never used the popular procedure, only the indirect procedure, while they allowed Free-Menof-Color to vote.

African American Partisanship and Voting Behavior in Presidential Elections prior to the Fifteenth Amendment Having summarized where Free-Men-of-Color could vote in the first twenty-one U.S. presidential elections and the rules (popular vs. indirect elections) governing these elections, we can turn to which candidates and parties they voted for in these elections. The historical record is reasonably well-known for the anti-slavery third parties that came into existence in the 1840 presidential election and continued through the 1860 presidential election. There is substantial and well-regarded historical evidence from both African American and white scholars and academics; little dispute exists here. The same situation occurs when one analyzes the historical evidence on the major parties after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by Republican president Abraham Lincoln in 1863. By the next year, the presidential election of 1864—and continuing into the following presidential election of 1868—African American voters had acquired Republican partisanship, or at least had become politically affiliated with this major political party. The historical record on this is quite clear and insightful. Where the record is less clear and the evidence is more fragmentary is with the pre- and early-party period, 1789–1860.

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Chapter 9

Figure 9.3  Number of African American Suffrage States Making Use of Popular and Non-Popular Voting in Presidential Elections, 1789–1868

Number of Presidential Elections with African American Suffrage

25

20

15

10

5

M

Ne

w Ha as mps sa hi c r Rh hus e od et e ts Is la n Pe M d nn ain sy e lva n Ge ia or Ne gi w a Yo No Ve rk r rth m Ca ont Te roli nn na es M see ar y Ke land nt De uck la y w Al are ab Ar ama ka ns as Io Lo w a ui M sian in ne a s M o ta iss o So Neb uri ut r a h s C ka Co aro l nn i n a Ne ecti w cu Je t rs ey

0

Elections by Popular Voting

Elections by Non-Popular Voting

Source: Table 9.3.

Historical records on partisanship, affiliation, turnout, and voting behavior in this period are less than robust for the major parties for several reasons. First, the extant historical evidence has not been pulled together and organized in any systematic and comprehensive manner. Second, extant election return data at the county level which show popular voting for the period 1789–1824 are incomplete for several states, making correlations near impossible. Third, for a long time, there was not an accurate list of the states that allowed Free-Men-of-Color to vote. Fourth, once a list of states allowing popular and indirect voting did exist, this information had not been cross-referenced with the African American suffrage states. And fifth, there had been a failure to combine the available data into a holistic portrait. However, there is another way to conceptualize this election return data so that it will permit making empirically based inferences. We looked at (1) the number of parties in each state where popular and Free-Men-of-Color voting were permitted, and (2) how competitive these parties were in these presidential elections. Using the number of parties in each state, immediately a pattern and trend emerged. In nearly every presidential election between 1789 and 1824— ten different elections—we found at least one state (and as many as three states) where only one political party existed, as well as states that had realigned to new and different oneparty systems.6 For instance, in the first presidential election in 1789, New Hampshire had only a single party (the Federalist) but by 1820 it had realigned to a different single party—the Democratic-Republicans, founded by Thomas

Jefferson. Therefore, in states where only one party existed, the Free-Men-of-Color voters had no real choice but to vote for that party in the presidential election or not vote at all. By 1840 and continuing until 1856, a new trend and pattern emerged in both popular and Free-Men-of-Color voting in presidential elections that goes beyond the one-party approach. There was the rise of the first anti-slavery party, the Liberty Party (which competed in every presidential election from 1840 to 1860) and a gradual increase in these anti-slavery parties through the Free-Soil party of 1848 and 1852. FreeMen-of-Color voters were very active in participating in and supporting these parties. In fact, these were the very first parties that allowed African Americans to attend their national conventions and to hold appointed and elected positions at these national conventions. The historical evidence on this relationship between the Free Black northern community and the anti-slavery parties is quite considerable. Simultaneously, the historical record shows that this same community also supported the Whig party, particularly the “Conscience Whigs” in the New England states as opposed the “Cotton Whigs.”7 The former were basically opposed to slavery, while the latter tended to support the South and their position on slavery, primarily because the cotton from this region provided the raw materials for the New England mills manufacturing industries. This intra-party rivalry was so sharp and so bitter in the North that it forced individuals to take political sides. The principled positions taken by these “Conscience Whigs” attracted the support of the Free Black community.



Voting Behavior prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1788–1870

Finally, by the beginning of the 1856 presidential election, some Free-Men-of-Color activists and voters saw the rise of a new political party, the Republican Party. It represented a rising alternative to the smaller and unsuccessful anti-slavery parties in presidential elections, and it employed the major African American leader of that time, Frederick Douglass, to campaign for its presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, in the 1860 contest. The African American female leader Sojourner Truth joined Douglass, and they continued their campaigning efforts on behalf of Republicans in the 1864 and 1868 presidential elections. Their efforts—along with the party’s public policies like the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments—set into motion a new partisan realignment in the African American community. Drawing from this party conceptualization we can now offer a threefold categorization of Free-Men-of-Color voting behavior and partisanship: (1) One-party voting, which occurred in those states which offered the Free Black voters no other option, (2) multi-party voting, which occurred in those states where the Free Black voters could vote for both the anti-slavery party and the Whigs and Democrats, and (3) Republican Party voting, which emerged following the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and showed up in the 1864 and 1868 presidential elections. Although this threefold categorization does not cover all of the presidential elections or all of the states, it does permit a new set of innovative, empirically based inferences from the extant election return data. However, as we noted earlier, it is not wise to rely solely upon the empirical data given its limitations, nor to abstract it out and away from the historical and political context. Any political party conceptualization must take into account the transformation of the early parties in the American political process from elite parties to mass-based parties. When Martin Van Buren and Andrew Jackson transformed the Democratic political party into the first successful mass-based party in American politics (1828–1840), they did so by taking a well known and publicly articulated pro-slavery position and by creating a negative stereotype about African Americans. Once these stances were taken, the Democratic Party did not equivocate on them through the Civil War, despite a split within the party on the expansion of slavery to new territories. At that time, the African American community was creating newspapers and national and state organizations to abolish slavery and racial discrimination in American life and politics, allowing African Americans to publicly see the vigorous positions the Democratic Party took on issues and policies important to them. Hence, in our inferences about Free-Men-of-Color partisanship and voting behavior prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, we must take into account the impact and influence which the Democratic Party and its candidates had on shaping the electoral and party behavior of these Free Black voters—mostly by stirring them to action, rather than attracting them. Table 9.4 (p. 170) shows that in the 1789 presidential election three of the five states that allowed popular and racial voting had only a single political party, the Federalist. One can therefore infer that if the Free-Men-of-Color voted, they had by default to vote for the Federalist presidential candidate, George Washington, to

169

become the nation’s first president. This same configuration continued in the next presidential election of 1792. In these first two elections in the majority of states, Free-Men-of-Color acquired a Federalist partisanship as a matter of a lack of an alternative. In the 1796 election, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, future leaders of the fledging Democratic-Republican Party, competed against the Federalist instead of the Anti-federalist faction. For the first time in this election, dual-party states outnumbered single-party states. In the dual-party states from 1789 to 1796, the option of voting for Anti-federalist presidential electors was possible, but none of the extant historical literature indicates that Free-Men-of-Color took this option. And in three presidential elections, 1800, 1808, and 1812, there were no single-party states, so the Free-Men-of-Color voters had a choice between the old Federalist Party and Thomas Jefferson’s new Democratic-Republican Party. However, party data in the table indicate that in the 1804, 1816, and 1820 elections there were a number of states where these Free Black voters could vote only for the DemocraticRepublican Party candidates, again purely by default. Again, there were a number of states in which these voters had a dual option, and with the 1824 election the single-party states were down to a couple and would not exist thereafter. 1816 was also the year that the old Federalist Party ceased to exist. It was largely defunct by 1816, but some votes for it in presidential elections continued in 1820. 1824 was the heart of the “Era of Good Feeling,” a period where only one party fielded all of the presidential candidates and contenders. By 1828, the rise of the mass-based Democratic Party led by Andrew Jackson invigorated party competition with the new National Republicans, who were led by surviving members of the old Federalist Party as well as Democratic-Republicans who opposed Jackson. In all of the states there were, by 1828, at least two competing political parties, making it more difficult to determine the partisanship and voting behavior of the Free Black electorate. Thus, there is a gap in the table until the 1840 election begins the period of the anti-slavery, Whig, and Republican parties. We can infer because of the extant historical literature the most likely party voting. In 1840 Free-Men-of-Color voted for the Whigs and to a lesser extent the Liberty Party. By 1848 they voted for the FreeSoil party and the collapsing Whig and Liberty parties. This continued until 1856 when there was a new party to replace the Whigs, the Republicans, toward which Free-Men-of-Color quickly gravitated. But all of this would change by 1860, when both Douglass and Truth hit the campaign trail on Lincoln’s behalf. The new partisanship and voting pattern to emerge became clear in the 1864 and 1868 presidential elections. Bloc voting in the African American community occurred for the Republican Party candidates President Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. Although the transition to this new partisanship and voting began in the 1860 election, the public policies of the party (including support of Negro suffrage and freedom) made African American support nearly unanimous by the 1864 and 1868 elections. Overall, Table 9.4 permits us to infer from the party structured data that the initial partisanship and voting of Free-Men-of-Color voters was Federalist, supporting Washington and Adams; and that they transitioned to become

170

Chapter 9

Table 9.4  Three Categories of African American State Party Voting prior to the Fifteenth Amendment Single Party Voting

Dual Party Voting

Election Year

Political Party

Number of Suffrage States

Percent of All Suffrage States

1789

Federalist

3

60%

Federalist, Anti-Federalist

 2

40%

 5

1792

Federalist

3

75%

Federalist, Anti-Federalist

 1

25%

 4

1796a

Federalist

1

25%

Federalist, Democratic-Republican

 3

75%

 4

1800

 

 

 

Democratic-Republican, Federalist

 3

100%

 3

1804

DemocraticRepublican

1

20%

Democratic-Republican, Federalist

 4

80%

 5

1808

 

 

 

Democratic-Republican, Federalist

 4

100%

 4

1812

 

 

 

Democratic-Republican, Federalist

 4

100%

 4

1816

DemocraticRepublican

2

50%

Democratic-Republican, Federalist, Independent Republican

 2

50%

 4

1820

DemocraticRepublican

4

57.1%

Democratic-Republican, Federalist, Independent Republican

 3

42.9%

 7

1824

Independent Republican

2

28.6%

Independent Republican, Democratic-Republican

 5

71.4%

 7

Political Parties

Number of Suffrage States

Percent of All Suffrage States

All Suffrage States

Multiple Party Support 1840

Whig, Liberty

 7

100%

 7

1844

Whig, Liberty

 7

100%

 7

1848

Free-Soil, Whig, Liberty

 7

100%

 7

1852

Free-Soil, Whig

 7

100%

 7

1856

Republican, Know Nothing

 7

100%

 7

1860

Republican, Liberty

 7

100%

 7

Republican Party Support 1864

Republican

 6

100%

 6

1868

Republican

17

100%

17

Source: Tables 9.2 and 9.5. Georgia is excluded as a state with dual-party voting because there is no evidence that eligible African American males actually voted there in 1796. New Hampshire Federalists received nearly 90% of the vote against unspecified party opposition. a

Democratic-Republican voters, possibly supporting Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe (if they chose to vote in that era); and that they later supported the Whigs and the anti-slavery candidates; and finally became Republican partisans supporting Lincoln in a major way in 1864 and Grant in 1868. The fact that some of the Federalist partisanship and voting occurred by default is not to say that issues and policies were not a causal factor. Extant historical evidence demonstrates that many Federalist leaders and candidates espoused suffrage equality, which attracted these African American voters. And this constantly came out in the

inter-party rivalry, especially between the Democrats and the Whigs. However, issues and policies tended to become paramount in the Free-Men-of-Color partisanship and voting behavior only with the rise of the anti-slavery parties and the “Conscience” Whigs and later with the Republicans, many of whom supported the non-expansion of slavery and at least the idea of equal suffrage rights. Parties associated with these issues and policies captured the attention, support, and backing in the African American suffrage community.



Voting Behavior prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1788–1870

Free-Men-of-Color Partisanship and Voting Behavior in the Missing Presidential Elections: 1828, 1832, and 1836 Three election years, 1828, 1832, and 1836, are not covered in Table 9.4 simply because all of the states conducting presidential elections in these three elections had two or more political parties offering up presidential candidates, and a party approach given the political content does not offer clear-cut or straightforward inferences. But that does not preclude empirically based inferences about partisanship and voting behavior. Extant case studies of single states such as New York, Rhode Island, and to a lesser extent New Hampshire describe which political parties the Free-Men-of-Color affiliated with and voted for in local, state, and national elections. At New York’s 1821 state constitutional convention, a motion to lift the property qualifications for Free-Men-ofColor so that they could have universal suffrage rights was blocked by the Martin Van Buren–led Democrats. Historian Lee Benson’s influential, pioneering study The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case, empirically demonstrates that after this action, those roughly 1,000 FreeMen-of-Color who could do so voted as a bloc against the Democrats and nearly 95% for the Whigs. He wrote: “Because of the property restrictions upon Negro suffrage which the Van Buren faction had written into the 1821 State Constitution . . . Negroes voted solidly Whig.”8 He continued: “Thus, the [Thurlow] Weed-[William] Seward-[Horace] Greeley wing of the Whig party strenuously urged passage of a constitutional amendment providing equal suffrage for Negroes.”9 And he noted that this Whig partisanship and voting behavior “were influenced by special factors which aroused intense emotions and . . . did not relate to socioeconomic issues” but racial ones.10 In New Jersey, where none of the presidential elections used popular voting, the extant historical literature indicates that the African American voters there were possible “Whigs and Republicans.”11 While in Maine from 1848 to 1855 the suggestion is that Free-Men-of-Color could have on the basis of issues voted for the Free-Soil and Free Democratic (anti-slavery wing of the Democratic Party) parties. In New Hampshire, there was possibly a partisanship with the Liberty and Free-Soil parties; and in Massachusetts Free-Menof-Color possibly supported the “Conscience” Whigs, the Liberty and Free-Soil parties, and a few scattered votes for the Democratic party. Finally, there is considerable historical evidence indicating that “the Colored Voters in Providence are said to have ‘almost unanimously supported the [Whig] Taylor Ticket.’”12 This was due to the fact that the Democratic Party in Rhode Island, “known as the ‘Free Suffrage Party,’ had taken the leadership in proposing a constitution in 1842 with an amendment restricting the right to vote to white persons alone. The Whig Party, known as the ‘Law and Order Party’ led in defeat of this constitution and drafted another with the color provision omitted. . . . This circumstance has

171

given the Whigs almost complete control of the colored voters.”13 To shift these Whig voters to Free-Soilers in Rhode Island in 1848, Douglass and a host of other well known African American abolitionists went to the state and gave speeches and lectures. However, the record is not yet clear about how effective this effort was. In 1848, the Whig presidential candidate Zachary Taylor carried all six counties, with 60.8% of the vote, to Lewis Cass the Democrat at 32.7%, and the Free-Soiler former president Martin Van Buren at 6.5%. This was a slight improvement over the Whig party’s 60.1% in 1844 and a major improvement for the Free-Soil Party because no third party appeared in the state at all in 1844. Thus, we have empirical data on several states that provide some insight on a case-by case basis about how Free-Men-ofColor acquired partisanship and voted for different presidential candidates, but it is very limited. More cases studies are needed in the years ahead to better understand some of these omitted presidential elections.

Summary and Conclusions on African American Partisanship prior to the Fifteenth Amendment Despite the limited quality of the extant data and literature, our work makes it possible for the very first time to make reasonable, reliable inferences about the partisanship and voting behavior of the Free-Men-of-Color/African American male in the twenty-one presidential elections prior to the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment. Moreover, we can also infer that the early party affiliations, partisanship, and voting support of African Americans grew at first from the forced choice available in several states due to the lack of party competition. Later, the political image and ideology of the Democratic Party from 1828 forward helped to make Free Black partisanship a forced choice even when two-party competition did emerge in states. Finally, the political image and public policies of the Republican Party drew a reliable bloc of African American voters when the Democrats and Republicans began competing with each other from 1856 to 1868. Map 9.1 reveals geographically where the twenty-three states that allowed both popular and Free-Men-of-Color voting were located. Some were in the South and the Border states, while others were clearly in the East and Midwest during this period. But none were in the West or the Far West. Equal suffrage rights did not sweep the country and pervade all sections. Much had to be done by the time that the Fifteenth Amendment was passed and adopted. Even many of the northern states that vigorously supported the Union and the Civil War failed at the end of that war, as they had at the end of the Revolutionary War, to grant equal suffrage rights. When analyzing this map, it must be kept in mind that while several states did extend equal suffrage rights, they later rescinded those rights, as shown in Chapter 7.

172

Chapter 9

Map 9.1  States Permitting African American Suffrage before the Fifteenth Amendment 1789–1868

Washington Territory

VT VT Montana Territory Dakota Territory

OR Idaho Territory

NV CA

ME

MN NY

WI MI

Wyoming Territory

IA IL

Utah Territory

CT CT NJ NJ

PA NE

Arizona Territory

NH NH MA MA

Colorado Territory

KS

MO

Oklahoma Territory

New Mexico Territory

States of the Union* With African American suffrage in 1864

DE DE WV

MD MD

VA*

KY NC

TN

SC

AR MS*

TX*

OH

IN

RI RI

AL

GA*

LA

0

100 200 miles

FL

With African American suffrage for the first time in 1868 With African American suffrage rescinded by 1842 (see Chapter 7) With African American suffrage during 1789–1868 Without African American suffrage during 1789–1868 *Note: Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia were not readmitted to the Union until 1870.

Other states in sundry referenda simply refused to extend these rights. Several states like Wisconsin and New York held several referenda on this question in different decades but time and again voted down any expansion of the electorate to include African Americans. Hence, party affiliation and partisanship of the Free-Men-of-Color voters evolved not only as a consequence of structural defaults but also as a result of racism and racial discrimination throughout the country. The emergence of the anti-slavery third parties, while not always truly competitive on the state and national levels, did raise moral questions about

slavery and equal suffrage that helped the leaders of the nation to revisit and rethink the lofty rhetoric and values of the nation’s formative documents. The ensuing partisan struggle between human rights versus states’ rights ended in disaster for the proponents of the latter position. In closing, we provide the reader with Table 9.5, which includes more detailed and basic information on matters of the Free Black voters, the states, state partisanship, and party strength for convenience and further analysis and reflection. It will also serve to provide a check upon our other data offerings.



Voting Behavior prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1788–1870

173

Table 9.5  Free African American Male Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections, 1789–1868 Free Black Males as % of Total Electoratea

Total Black Vote

Winning Party

% of Total Black Voteb

Losing Party #1

% of Total Black Voteb

Losing Party #2

  22.9%  0.0%  0.0%  9.1%

         

Election Year

State

1789        

Delaware Maryland Massachusetts New Hampshire Pennsylvania

8.7% 4.4% 1.9% 0.6% 2.0%

685 9,945 14,688 8,954 7,382

Federalist Federalist Federalist Federalist Federalist

100.0%  77.1% 100.0% 100.0%  90.9%

  Anti-Federalist Anti-Federalist Anti-Federalist Anti-Federalist

1790

1792        

Kentucky Maryland Massachusetts New Hampshire Pennsylvania

0.3% 4.4% 1.9% 0.6% 2.0%

No Returns 898 19,929 11,954 4,619

Federalist Federalist Federalist Federalist Federalist

100.0% 100.0% 100.0%  72.7%

        Anti-Federalist

1790

1796

Georgia

1.0%

Federalist

 29.9%

 

Kentucky

0.3%

No Returns

Federalist

 

Maryland

4.4%

13,469

Federalist

 

Massachusetts

1.9%

No Returns

Federalist

   

New Hampshire North Carolina

0.6% 2.3%

21,613 No Returns

Federalist Federalist

 89.1%

 

 

Pennsylvania

2.0%

24,491

Federalist

 49.8%

1800

1800

Maryland

8.9%

20,647

 

 

North Carolina

2.8%

14,943

 

 

Rhode Island

5.8%

4,494

DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican

1800

1804

Massachusetts

2.0%

55,346

 

 

New Hampshire

0.6%

17,452

 

 

North Carolina

2.8%

1,532

 

 

Pennsylvania

3.1%

23,320

 

 

Rhode Island

5.8%

1,311

1800

1808

New Hampshire

0.6%

26,750

 

 

North Carolina

2.8%

18,834

 

 

Pennsylvania

3.1%

54,243

 

 

Rhode Island

5.8%

5,864

1810

1812

Massachusetts

1.8%

78,250

 

New Hampshire

0.6%

36,040

 

Pennsylvania

3.5%

78,906

 

Rhode Island

5.5%

6,116

Census 1790

 

 

8,844

27.3%

         

DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican (Unspecified) DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican

70.1%

 

 51.5%

% of Total Black Voteb  

 

Losing Party #3          

% of Total Black Voteb  

 

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10.9%

   

   

50.2%

 

 

 

 

Federalist

48.5%

 

 

 

 

 50.5%

Federalist

49.5%

 

 52.2%

Federalist

47.8%

 

 

 

 

DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican

 53.3%

Federalist

46.7%

 

 

 

 

 52.1%

Federalist

47.9%

 

 

 69.7%

Federalist

30.3%

 

 

 94.7%

Federalist

 5.3%

 

 

100.0%

Federalist

 0.0%

 

DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican

 47.6%

Federalist

52.4%

 

 

 57.7%

Federalist

42.3%

 

 

 78.4%

Federalist

21.6%

 

 

 45.9%

Federalist

54.1%

 

 

DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican

 34.9%

Federalist

65.1%

 

 43.8%

Federalist

56.2%

 

 

 62.6%

Federalist

37.4%

 

 

34.1%

Federalist

65.9%

 

 52.2%

47.8%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  (Continued)

174

Chapter 9

Table 9.5 (Continued)

Free Black Males as % of Total Electoratea

Total Black Vote

Census

Election Year

State

1810

1816

New Hampshire

0.6%

28,527

 

North Carolina

3.6%

10,189

 

Pennsylvania

3.5%

43,242

 

Rhode Island

5.5%

1,236

 

Tennessee

0.9%

1820

1820

Maine

0.4%

5,454

 

 

Massachusetts

1.5%

24,030

 

 

New Hampshire

0.4%

9,448

 

 

North Carolina

3.8%

3,300

 

 

Pennsylvania

3.3%

32,206

 

 

Rhode Island

4.6%

724

 

 

Tennessee

1.0%

2,055

1820

1824

Maine

0.4%

13,307

 

 

Massachusetts

1.5%

38,711

 

 

New Hampshire

0.4%

9,454

 

 

North Carolina

3.8%

36,039

 

 

Pennsylvania

3.3%

47,186

 

 

Rhode Island

4.6%

2,342

 

 

Tennessee

1.0%

20,413

1820

1828

Georgia

1.1%

18,308

 

 

Maine

0.4%

34,366

 

 

Massachusetts

1.5%

35,858

 

 

New Hampshire

0.4%

45,302

 

 

New York

2.3%

276,176

 

 

North Carolina

3.8%

51,572

 

 

Pennsylvania

3.3%

152,914

 

 

Rhode Island

4.6%

3,573

 

 

Tennessee

1.0%

46,332

 

 

Vermont

0.5%

32,700

No Returns

% of Total Black Voteb

DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican

 89.2%

Others

10.8%

 

 32.0%

Federalist

68.0%

 

 

100.0%

Federalist

 0.0%

 

 

100.0%

Federalist

 0.0%

 

 

 94.1%

 5.9%

 

 

100.0%

Independent Republican Others

 0.0%

 

 

100.0%

Others

 0.0%

 

Independent Republican Independent Republican Independent Republican Independent Republican Independent Republican Independent Republican Independent Republican

 77.3%

DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican

22.7%

 

 

17.7%

 

 

 0.0%

 

 

56.7%

 

 

88.5%

 

 

 0.0%

Others

98.9%

 

 3.3%

 

59.8%

 

 

83.2%

 

 

53.2%

 

 

49.0%

 

 

27.0%

 

 

33.2%

 

 

77.1%

 

 

 4.8%

 

 

74.5%

 

Winning Party

DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican DemocraticRepublican

Losing Party #1

% of Total Black Voteb

Losing Party #2

 53.3%

Federalist

46.7%

 

 

 93.7%

Federalist

 6.3%

 

 

 59.3%

Independent Republican Others

40.7%

 

 

 0.0%

 

 

 

 

100.0%

 

 82.3% 100.0%  43.3%  11.5%  91.5%   1.1%  96.7%  40.2%  16.8%  46.8%  51.0%  73.0%  66.8%  22.9%  95.2%  25.5%

National Republican National Republican National Republican National Republican National Republican National Republican National Republican National Republican National Republican National Republican

% of Total Black Voteb

 

 

8.5%

Losing Party #3

 

 

% of Total Black Voteb

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 



Voting Behavior prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1788–1870

Winning Party

% of Total Black Voteb

21,248 62,165

Democratic Democratic

100.0%  54.7%

1.2%

60,438

Democratic

 23.1%

New Hampshire

0.2%

45,077

Democratic

 56.3%

 

New York

2.4%

323,482

Democratic

 52.1%

 

North Carolina

3.7%

29,793

Democratic

 70.5%

   

Pennsylvania Rhode Island

2.9% 3.5%

157,679 4,936

Democratic Democratic

 57.7%  43.1%

 

Tennessee

0.9%

30,878

Democratic

 94.0%

 

Vermont

0.3%

32,138

Democratic

 24.5%

 

1836              

Georgia Maine Massachusetts New Hampshire New York Pennsylvania Rhode Island Vermont

0.9% 0.3% 1.2% 0.2% 2.4% 2.9% 3.5% 0.3%

46,952 38,090 73,140 24,929 305,649 178,502 5,674 35,031

Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic

1840            

1840            

Georgia Maine Massachusetts New Hampshire New York Rhode Island Vermont

0.7% 0.3% 1.4% 0.2% 2.0% 2.7% 0.3%

72,168 93,007 126,197 59,152 441,144 8,495 50,766

1840            

1844            

Georgia Maine Massachusetts New Hampshire New York Rhode Island Vermont

0.7% 0.3% 1.4% 0.2% 2.0% 2.7% 0.3%

1840            

1848            

Georgia Maine Massachusetts New Hampshire New York Rhode Island Vermont

1850

1852            

Georgia Maine Massachusetts New Hampshire New York Rhode Island Vermont

Census 1830

1830

 

Free Black Males as % of Total Electoratea

Total Black Vote

Election Year

State

1832  

Georgia Maine

0.9% 0.3%

 

Massachusetts

 

Losing Party #1   National Republican National Republican

% of Total Black Voteb

Losing Party #2

Losing Party #3

 1.4%

   

24.3%

 

 0.2%

 

47.9%

AntiMasonic  

15.2%

Democratic

14.3%

 

42.3% 56.9%

  AntiMasonic Others

 0.0%

   

 0.3%

 

40.8%

 

 

 

               

 0.2%  1.3%  0.2%  0.6%  0.2%  0.6%

             

44.0% 52.7%

  AntiMasonic AntiMasonic

% of Total Black Voteb

National Republican National Republican National Republican Anti-Masonic National Republican National Republican National Republican

43.5%

34.7%

AntiMasonic

 46.9%  60.1%  45.1%  75.0%  54.6%  51.2%  52.2%  40.1%

Whig Whig Whig Whig Whig Whig Whig Whig

53.1% 39.9% 54.9% 25.0% 45.4% 48.8% 47.8% 59.9%

               

Whig Whig Whig Whig Whig Whig Whig

 55.8%  50.1%  57.5%  44.5%  51.2%  61.4%  63.9%

Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic

44.2% 49.7% 41.2% 55.4% 48.2% 38.4% 35.5%

  Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty

85,372 84,913 131,295 49,161 485,884 12,198 48,796

Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic

 50.8%  53.8%  40.7%  55.4%  48.9%  40.0%  37.0%

Whig Whig Whig Whig Whig Whig Whig

49.2% 40.5% 51.1% 36.1% 47.8% 60.0% 54.9%

  Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty   Liberty

0.7% 0.3% 1.4% 0.2% 2.0% 2.7% 0.3%

92,332 87,101 134,689 50,109 455,970 11,155 47,717

Whig Whig Whig Whig Whig Whig Whig

 51.5%  40.3%  45.3%  29.5%  47.9%  60.8%  48.1%

Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic

48.5% 45.8% 26.2% 55.4% 25.1% 32.7% 22.9%

  Free-Soil Free-Soil Free-Soil Free-Soil Free-Soil Free-Soil

13.9% 28.5% 15.1% 26.4%  6.5% 29.0%

    Liberty    

0.5% 0.3% 0.9% 0.2% 1.5% 2.4% 0.2%

62,472 82,182 128,431 50,535 522,873 17,005 43,821

Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic

 55.6%  50.6%  35.7%  56.4%  50.1%  51.4%  29.8%

Whig Whig Whig Whig Whig Whig Whig

26.6% 39.6% 41.2% 30.6% 44.9% 44.8% 50.6%

Others Free-Soil Free-Soil Free-Soil Free-Soil Free-Soil Free-Soil

17.8%  9.8% 21.8% 13.0%  4.9%  3.8% 19.7%

    Others   Others    

5.7%

175

% of Total Black Voteb

 

   5.7%  8.2%  8.5%  3.3%  8.1%

             

 

 

 

 

   

0.6%

  1.3% 0.1%   (Continued)

176

Chapter 9

Table 9.5 (Continued)

Free Black Males as % of Total Electoratea

Total Black Vote

Winning Party

% of Total Black Voteb

Losing Party #1

% of Total Black Voteb

Election Year

State

1856  

Georgia Maine

0.5% 0.3%

99,182 109,784

Democratic Democratic

57.0% 35.6%

Know-Nothing Republican

43.0% 61.4%

 

Massachusetts

0.9%

167,056

Democratic

23.5%

Republican

64.8%

 

New Hampshire

0.2%

69,774

Democratic

45.7%

Republican

53.7%

 

New York

1.5%

595,415

Democratic

32.9%

Republican

46.1%

 

Rhode Island

2.4%

19,822

Democratic

33.7%

Republican

57.8%

 

Vermont

0.2%

50,687

Democratic

20.9%

Republican

78.1%

1860

1860

Georgia

0.5%

106,822

Republican

 

10.9%

 

 

Maine

0.2%

101,099

Republican

62.2%

 

 

Massachusetts

0.7%

169,340

Republican

62.9%

 

 

New Hampshire

0.2%

65,943

Republican

56.9%

   

   

New York Rhode Island

1.2% 2.1%

658,905 19,951

Republican Republican

53.7% 61.4%

 

 

Vermont

0.2%

44,541

Republican

75.9%

Northern Democratic Northern Democratic Northern Democratic Northern Democratic Fusion Northern Democratic Northern Democratic

19.4%

Southern Democratic

1860          

1864          

Maine Massachusetts New Hampshire New York Rhode Island Vermont

0.2% 0.7% 0.2% 1.2% 2.1% 0.2%

109,869 175,479 69,620 730,514 22,157 55,726

Republican Republican Republican Republican Republican Republican

57.9% 72.2% 52.6% 50.5% 61.8% 76.1%

Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic

42.1% 27.8% 47.4% 49.5% 38.2% 23.9%

           

1860                                

1868                                

Alabama Arkansas Georgia Iowa Louisiana Maine Massachusetts Minnesota Missouri Nebraska New Hampshire New York North Carolina Rhode Island South Carolina Tennessee Vermont

0.5% 0.0% 0.5% 0.2% 3.8% 0.2% 0.7% 0.1% 0.4% 0.2% 0.2% 1.2% 4.0% 2.1% 2.6% 0.8% 0.2%

147,927 41,190 160,333 194,439 113,488 112,962 195,471 72,102 152,488 15,291 68,290 849,615 181,496 19,511 107,538 82,757 56,224

Republican Republican Republican Republican Republican Republican Republican Republican Republican Republican Republican Republican Republican Republican Republican Republican Republican

51.5% 53.7% 35.7% 61.9% 29.3% 62.4% 69.8% 60.9% 57.0% 63.9% 55.2% 49.4% 53.4% 66.8% 57.9% 68.4% 78.6%

Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic Democratic

48.5% 46.3% 64.3% 38.1% 70.7% 37.6% 30.2% 39.1% 43.0% 36.1% 44.8% 50.6% 46.6% 33.2% 42.1% 31.6% 21.4%

Others                                

Census 1850

29.4% 20.3% 39.3% 46.3% 38.6%

Losing Party #2   KnowNothing KnowNothing KnowNothing KnowNothing KnowNothing KnowNothing Southern Democratic Southern Democratic Southern Democratic Southern Democratic    

% of Total Black Voteb

Losing Party #3

 3.0%

 

11.7%

 

 0.6%

 

20.9%

Others

 8.5%

 

 1.1%

 

48.8%

Constitutional Union Constitutional Union Constitutional Union Constitutional Union    

% of Total Black Voteb

 

 6.3%  3.6%  3.2%

 4.2%

Constitutional Union

 0.0%

40.2%  2.0% 13.2%  0.6%

 0.5%

            0.00%

 

                                 

 

 

Sources: Adapted from Michael Dubin, United States Presidential Elections, 1788–1860: The Official Results by County and State (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Company, 2002); and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File]. ICPSR02896-v2, http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), accessed June 2009. Calculations by the authors. For the census decades of the 1790’s through the 1810’s the free African American male population is calculated as 35% of the difference between the total non-white population minus the total slave population. The percent of free African American males is calculated as the population of African American males divided by the sum of the free African American male population plus the white male population. For the census decades of the 1820’s through the 1860’s the voting ages of white males and free African American males are collected starting with the first age group of the census below 20 years of age. a

b

Not all of the rounded percentages of the total black vote sum to 100 percent.



Voting Behavior prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 1788–1870

Notes   1. Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860–1910 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), pp. 34–39.   2. Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), Chapter 24. The Democratic Party undertook this unusual nomination because they had lost badly in the 1868 presidential contest. In that election, they were labeled as the party responsible for the Civil War, and no viable Democrat would run for or accept the party’s nomination and be embarrassed by the outcome. Hence, Greeley, a Republican who had been critical of the Grant administration’s numerous financial scandals and corruption, became the Democrats’ default candidate. The Democrats reasoned, who better to take on President Grant than one of his own party members? There was a serious flaw in this strategy, however: on account of Greeley’s harsh criticism over the years of the Democratic party in his influential newspaper, many Democrats could not support him and instead created their own party, the Straight-Out Democratic Party, which nominated its own presidential and vice presidential candidates, Charles O’Conor and Charles F. Adams, respectively. Also see Paul Boller, Jr., Presidential Campaigns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 123–130.   3. Deskins, Walton, Puckett, Chapter 2. See also J. Clark Archer, Stephen Lavin, Kenneth Martis, and Fred Shelley, Historical Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, 1788–2004 (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006), pp. 1–3.   4. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States of America (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 55.   5. Fred Israel, Student Atlas of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1996 (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1997), p. 65.

177

  6. See the only county-level book on this matter, Michael Dubin, United States Presidential Elections, 1788–1860: The Official Results by County and State (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company Publishers, 2002).   7. See Charles Wesley, “The Participation of Negroes in AntiSlavery Political Parties,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 29 (January 1944), pp. 32–74; James Adams, “Disfranchisement of Negroes in New England,” American Historical Review Vol. 30 (April 1925), pp. 543–546; Eric Foner, “Politics and Prejudices: The Free-Soil Party and the Negro, 1849–1852,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 50 (October 1965), pp. 239–256; Richard Sewell, “John Hale and the Liberal Party, 1847–1848,” New England Quarterly, Vol. 37 (March 1964), 200–223; Edward Schriver, “Antislavery: The Free-Soil and Free Democratic Party,” New England Quarterly, Vol. 42 (March 1969), pp. 82–94; Hanes Walton, Jr., The Negro in Third Party Politics (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1969), pp. 9–29.   8. Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 179. See also Michael Holt, American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).   9. Ibid., p. 303. 10. Ibid., p. 317. 11. Marion Wright, “Negro Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1875,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 33 (April 1948), p. 223. 12. Wesley, p. 57. See also J. Stanley Lemons and Michael McKenna, “Re-enfranchisement of Rhode Island Negroes,” Rhode Island History Vol. 76 (Winter 1971), pp. 3–14. 13. Wesley, pp. 57–58. See also Christopher Malone, Between Freedom and Bondage: Race, Party, and Voting Rights in the Antebellum North (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 101–142.

CHAPTER 10

The First African American Nominees and Public Office Holders, 1776–1870 African American Delegates at the National Conventions of the Anti-Slavery Political Parties

180

Table 10.1 African American Delegates at Anti-Slavery Political Party National Conventions

181

The Anti-Slavery Parties and African American Presidential Nominees

184

Table 10.2 African American Nominees for President and Vice President, 1847–1888

184

Table 10.3 Nominating Votes and Percentages for Presidential and Vice Presidential Candidates at Selected National Conventions of the Liberty and Republican Parties, 1848–1888

185

African American Candidates for Local and State Offices: Before and Immediately after the Civil War

185

Table 10.4 African American Candidates for Local, State, and National Offices, 1792–1866

185

Summary and Conclusions on African American Elected Officials prior to the Fifteenth Amendment

186

Map 10.1 States with African American Candidates for Local, State, and National Offices, 1776–1866

187

Notes 189

180

A

Chapter 10

frican American males participated in party politics and voted in the twenty-one presidential elections that occurred before the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in February 1870. Since all of the presidential candidates were white and the numbers of enfranchised minority voters were small, it is necessary to look at other sources to see whether any African Americans were elected or appointed to any other office or political position during this period. It is well known that many African Americans, as major party participants, were elected to both the Senate and the House of Representatives, and since 1868, as state delegates to the Republican National Convention. There is even documentation that African Americans received nominations as vice presidential candidates during the period known as Black Reconstruction, 1867–1877, though none were accepted. However, the data on office holding during the period of 1788–1866 have yet to be uncovered, organized, and presented in a systematic and comprehensive manner. This chapter will describe the African American nominees, appointees, and elected officials in public office and party positions up to the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. African American historian Benjamin Quarles described possibly the first black candidate in America who ran for office the year that incumbent president George Washington sought reelection. He wrote: “Indeed, in . . . Maryland, a black candidate ran for public office in 1792, very likely the first of his color ever to take this bold step. Thomas Brown, a horse doctor, sought one of the two seats allotted to Baltimore in the House of Delegates.”1 During his campaign, Brown put a public letter in the Baltimore Daily Repository newspaper, addressed to voters in the city of Baltimore, where he set forth his credentials, as having “been a zealous patriot in the cause of liberty during the late struggle for freedom and independence,” and promised to “exercise . . . my genius, and agility of my limbs . . . for the good of the state.”2 In closing Quarles noted that the vote for Brown was “so minuscule as not to have been recorded.”3 Similar findings are scattered throughout scholarly publications, but there is no single organized collection of the candidates for office nor of the officeholders. In fact, Quarles says: “No black would hold elective office until 1854, when the voters of Oberlin, Ohio, choose John Mercer Langston as township clerk.”4 This was the only historical finding for a very long time, until a recent study uncovered another. Suffrage rules were not one and the same thing as officeholding rules, not only in this period but even after the Civil War. States, North and South, tended to treat them differently. Professor Leslie Schwalm found: “In the 1868 fall elections, white voters in Minnesota and Iowa approved the extension of the franchise to black men.” But she later writes: “White Iowans proved even more resistant to naming African Americans to government posts; in fact, until 1880, the state constitution prohibited black men from holding elective office.”5 Whether these two rules were legally and formally based or whether they were informally based, one cannot assume that they were one and the same thing. This chapter uses the extant historical documents to describe (1) African American elected officials prior to and just after the Civil War, (2) those chosen to institutional positions

such as delegates to third-party national conventions, (3) those elected or appointed to positions at the national conventions of third parties, and (4) those nominated at national conventions, particularly those individuals who received delegate votes for presidential or vice presidential nominations. Such an initial collection of individuals will allow us to see the nature and scope of the African American road to political power in America in the period before they received the right to vote from the federal government. Prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, states had different suffrage rules. From Quarles’ account we know that Maryland allowed African American males to vote at least when Brown ran for office. Ohio, however, never allowed African Americans to vote prior to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. Yet Ohio was one of the very few places where an African American actually won an elective office during this era.6 Therefore, it is important also to explore how public opinion shaped opportunities. This chapter will probe not only for the unknown individuals but also for the key variables in explaining African American political power in this period of American politics: suffrage rules, public opinion, the political context, and the political parties.

African American Delegates at the National Conventions of the Anti-Slavery Political Parties Although a Free-Man-of-Color was elected to the Vermont state legislature in 1836, the rise of sundry anti-slavery political parties in 1840–1860 provided the greatest number of political opportunities for Free Coloreds to hold elective and appointive offices before the Civil War.7 Despite the rising number of elective and appointive offices available at the local, state, and national levels, as well as those in the major political parties, race and racism as manifested in the political and economic systems prevented Free Coloreds from attaining such offices. Despite these obstacles, members of free African American communities laid a broader foundation for office holding in Antebellum America by seeking these positions where they could. A great opportunity for Free-Men-of-Color to run for office came with the birth of the Liberty Party.

The Liberty Party In the years leading up to the Civil War, proponents for the abolition of slavery were divided into two camps. Political abolitionists sought the destruction of slavery via the political system, while the moral suasionists felt that an argument for a righteous cause was enough and that participation in the political process led to moral compromise. On November 13, 1839, the political abolitionists met in Warsaw, New York, and organized the Liberty Party. The nearly 500 delegates at this founding convention nominated James Gillespie Birney of New York for president and Thomas Earle of Pennsylvania and Francis Julius Lemoyne for vice president. All three men declined.8 But this did not stop the organizers. Thus, “a second nominating convention was held on April 1, 1840, in Albany, New York. Some six states sent delegates.”9 Two of the original nominees, Birney and Earle, were re-nominated. “The party had but a single principle,



The First African American Nominees and Public Office Holders, 1776–1870 181

opposition to slavery; its platform rested on Birney’s character, reputation, and Christian piety.”10 Although this new party faced a virtual press blackout, “Negro leaders began to express interest in the Liberty Party and to associate themselves with it.”11 The party, in its initial outing, got on the ballot in thirteen of the twenty-six states in the 1840 presidential election and captured nearly 7,000 votes. While this was not the showing for which the organizers had hoped, the party nevertheless had an impact on the Free Colored communities in the United States. In 1831 Free Coloreds had created a National Convention Movement, which held annual conventions that attracted delegates from the northern, border, and some southern states. By 1838 the conventions were no longer being held on an annual basis, but with the arrival of the Liberty Party the National Convention Movement began once again. A meeting was held in Buffalo, New York, on August 15, 1843, where the Convention of Colored Citizens successfully passed a resolution over the opposition of the moral suasionists, led by Frederick Douglass, “advocating and sanctioning the principles of the Liberty Party.”12 In another resolution, the convention endorsed the party principles because these espoused equal suffrage rights for all citizens. This convention spread the word about the party and made it acceptable for Free Coloreds who were moral suasionists not only to vote for the party but also to participate in its national convention. The Liberty Party again held its convention a year before the upcoming presidential election on August 30, 1843, in Buffalo, New York, with 148 delegates coming from twelve states. They again nominated Birney for president and Thomas Morris of Ohio for vice president. Given the enormous interest generated by the National Convention Movement, not only were there many African American delegates; many of them secured national convention positions. Table 10.1 lists the six known delegates and the convention positions that they acquired. Charles B. Ray was secretary and held a position on the Convention Roll Committee, which recorded the names of all of the attending delegates for historical reasons. Delegates Brown and Loguen became members of the Speaker’s Bureau for the party, traveling around the country to promote and spread the word about the party for the 1844 presidential election. Samuel Ward gave a prayer at the convention and also addressed the national convention along with several others. Such political participation by African Americans was not possible at the national conventions of either the Democratic or the Whig parties. As a consequence of these first national delegates’ participation, the party passed its thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth resolutions at this convention that specifically spoke to the needs and concerns of African Americans. “The 35th called on all liberty-loving people to fight inequality based solely on color, and the 36th . . . welcomed all colored citizens into the Liberty Party.”13 The party also emphasized other issues so as to broaden its appeal. This new surge in activity attracted the attention of the Whig Party, which claimed that the Liberty Party wanted the dissolution of the Union. Even so, support for the Liberty Party in the 1844 election increased to 62,025 votes (2.3% of the total) in twelve of the twenty-six states in the Union. Its strongest support came from New York (15,814 votes), Massachusetts (10,830), and Ohio

Table 10.1  African American Delegates at Anti-Slavery Political Party National Conventions

Year

Political Party

Convention

Delegate(s)

Convention Position(s) Held

1843        

Liberty        

National        

William Wells Brown

Traveling Speaker for Party

Henry H. Garnet

Committee on Nominations

J. W. Loguen

Traveling Speaker for Party

Charles B. Ray

Committee Secretary; Committee on Convention Roll

Dr. James M. Smith 1848            

Free-Soil            

Founding            

1852  

Free-Soil

National

Liberty

1860

Radical Political Abolitionists

Samuel R. Ward

Committee on Prayer

Henry Bibb

 

William Wells Brown Frederick Douglass

 

Henry H. Garnet

 

Lewis Hayden

 

Charles L. Redmond

 

Samuel R. Ward

 

Frederick Douglass

Convention Secretary

National

Frederick Douglass

National Committeeman

National

Frederick Douglass

Business Committee Member; Presidential Elector at Large

Sources: Adapted from Charles Wesley, “The Participation of Negroes in Anti-Slavery Political Parties,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 29 (January 1944), pp. 32–74; Eric Foner, “Politics and Prejudices: The Free-Soil Party and the Negro, 1849–1852,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 50 (October 1965), pp. 239–256; Eric Foner, “Racial Attitudes of the Free-Soil Party in New York,” New York History Vol. 46 (October 1965), pp. 311–329; and Hanes Walton, Jr., The Negro in Third Party Politics (New York: Dorrance, 1969), pp. 9–29.

(8,050). Rhode Island, which had supported it in 1840, did not cast a single vote for it in this election, partially because the Colored community there felt loyalty to the Whigs, who had allied with a local party to restore African American suffrage in 1842. In neither of these two elections did any southern state cast a single vote for the Liberty Party. If 1844 was a political breakthrough for African Americans in national politics and a high-water mark for the Liberty Party, the year also marked the moment that the party began its rapid collapse. Desertion set in among both the leaders and the rank and file. The party would continue to compete in presidential elections until 1860, but it would never again reach the electoral plateau established in the 1844 election. After two unsuccessful electoral attempts, the politically ambitious leaders of the Liberty Party surmised that they needed a new and different political vehicle. The deserters formed the Liberty League and the Industrial Congress for the 1848 election. Both of those organizations settled on Gerrit Smith for their nominee, and they merged just before the 1848 election into the National Liberty Party. At its June 14–15 national convention in Buffalo, African American leader Frederick Douglass received one vote for president, becoming the first African American to receive a nominating vote for president at a national party convention.

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The Free-Soil Party Simultaneously with the collapse and rebirth of the old Liberty Party, another anti-slavery third party was created, the Free-Soil Party.14 Its founding national convention was held on June 22, 1848, in Utica, New York, followed by a second one on August 9–10 in Buffalo. At both conventions the party selected former Democratic president Martin Van Buren (1836–1840) as its presidential candidate, and at the second convention it chose Charles F. Adams as its vice presidential candidate. This new party made it quite clear that it opposed the extension of slavery into the new territories made possible by the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican-American War. It did not oppose slavery in those states where it already existed. In order to attract other voters who were not interested in the slavery issue, the party offered public lands (“free soil”) to settlers and tariff relief for the use of employed (“free”) labor. Its slogan became: “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men.” Such a change in issues did not deter Free Coloreds from participating in the Free-Soil Party. Table 10.1 lists those Free Colored delegates who were present at its 1848 founding convention. Although none of these delegates garnered any national convention positions, at least three of them—Douglass, Garnet, and Ward—were allowed to give speeches to the convention. If the Free-Soilers equivocated on the issue of equality for free and slave African Americans, Free Coloreds did likewise by associating with the old Liberty Party, the Free-Soil Party, and the National Liberty Party. Douglass, after abandoning moral suasionism for political activism, had worked for the former party on the local and state levels and for the two latter parties at the national level. In the 1848 presidential election the Free-Soil Party got on the ballot of seventeen of the thirty states, while the Liberty Party appeared on the ballot in four states. The Van Buren ticket won 291,409 votes (10.1% of the total) to Smith’s 2,751 (0.1%). Once again, an anti-slavery party did not receive any votes from the southern states. The greatest support for the new party came from New York (120,515 votes), Massachusetts (38,333), Ohio (35,452), and Illinois (15,702). And despite the fact that this party was the most successful at the polls of all of the anti-slavery parties, it also appeared to be the most racially prejudiced of the anti-slavery parties. Writing of this point, historian Eric Foner, who studied this aspect of the party in greater detail than anyone else, wrote: In the United States of mid-nineteenth century, racial prejudice was all but universal. Belief in Negro inferiority formed a central tenet of the Southern defense of slavery, and in the North too, many who were undecided on the merits of the peculiar institution, and even those who disapproved of it, believed that the Negro was by nature destined to occupy a subordinate position in society. After all, until 1780 slavery had existed throughout the country, and it was only in 1818 that provision had been made for its abolition in every Northern state. And even after slavery had been banished from the North, that section continued to subject Free Negroes to legal and extra-legal discrimination in almost every phase of their lives.15

What did this type of political and social context mean for a new and emergent party like the Free-Soilers? According to Foner, “the Free-Soilers were the first major anti-slavery group to avoid the question of Negro rights in their national platform. . . . [They] recognized that many Northerners, although opposed to the peculiar institution or its extension into the territories, were alienated by these appeals for equal rights for colored citizens.”16 He added: “the successes of the Free-Soil party and its successor, the Republican, were to show that most of these Northerners would support an anti-slavery doctrine which did not touch on the demands of Free Negroes for political and social equality.”17 Therefore, the political price for the party’s broad appeal and support from the white electorate was that neither the 1848 party platform nor its 1852 platform carried a plank demanding equal rights of the Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color in the northern states. In fact, the Free-Soil Party never developed a position on the Free Coloreds. Professor Foner tells us why there was this avoidance in the party platforms about equal rights by noting: “The Free-Soil Party numbered in its ranks the most vulgar racists and the most determined supporters of Negro rights, as well as all shades of opinion between these extremes.”18 And simply “because the question of Negro rights . . . [was] such a divisive issue,” the national platforms had to avoid it.19 Therefore in concluding, declared Professor Foner, the Free-Soilers “were . . . prepared to acquiesce in the elimination of equal rights from the anti-slavery platform in 1848 and bow to considerations of political effectiveness in 1852, by refusing to reinsert that plank.”20 But having drawn this conclusion about the manner in which the party platform divorced the issue of “anti-slavery . . . [from] the ideal of equality,” Professor Foner offers additional insights about why this separation was not so necessary in the 1852 campaign. In his historical analysis, Professor Foner found that: The leading organizers of the Free-Soil party in 1848 had been the New York Barnburners, who had bolted the Democratic party of the Empire State when it refused to endorse the Wilmot Proviso. The Barnburners had emphasized that their opposition to the extension of slavery was motivated solely by concern for the interests of free white laborers, who would be “degraded” by association with “the labor of the black race.” It was because of the Barnburners’ opposition that no call for equal rights for free Negroes of the North had been included in the FreeSoil platform of August 1848. By 1850, however, the Barnburners had returned to the Democratic party, leaving the Free-Soil party in the hands of former Whigs and Liberty men, who viewed more favorably the demand for equal rights by Northern Negroes. But the national Free-Soil platform of 1852 continued to avoid this Issue.21 Commenting on the re-configuration of the Free-Soilers in 1850 and how that impacted their party platform in 1852, the leading third-party experts indicate: “Left with only Whigs and former Liberty Party abolitionists, the Free-Soil Party



The First African American Nominees and Public Office Holders, 1776–1870 183

had little impact on the 1852 presidential election.”22 Two significant political events had occurred that drew the New York Barnburners out of the party. First, the election “outcome disillusioned many Free-Soilers, giving the major parties a chance to coax defectors back to the fold. In some states, like Illinois and Vermont, the Democratic Party’s tactic was to adopt the Free-Soil position outright. In others, Free-Soilers formed compromise coalitions.”23 Secondly, Congress passing the “Compromise of 1850, which admitted California as a free state and allowed Utah and New Mexico to decide the issue for themselves, was seen as the ‘final settlement’ of the slavery question.”24 This placed the slavery issue straight back into the nation’s headlines and made a hot issue for the 1852 presidential campaign. Professors Rosenstone, Behr, and Lazarus remarked: “Slavery was once again an issue, but even Free-Soilers recognized that their party was [now, in 1852] neither vital enough nor broad enough to defend the abolitionists’ cause.” Hence, while the “platform was more anti-slavery than it had been in 1848,” it did not win the Libertymen and abolitionists greater control of the party than in 1848; the separation remained. This intentional omission caused great consternation within the Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color northern communities as well as hesitation about voting for this party. The reason for this was that “from the beginning, the anti-slavery movement had included social and political equality for Northern Negroes as an essential aspect of its program,” and Free Colored voters had come to expect this.25 Thus, the failure of the Free-Soil party platform to speak to these issues was a complete departure from the previous anti-slavery parties. Leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Samuel Ward spoke out and criticized the party almost immediately. However, each of these Free Colored leaders eventually ended up in urging the Free Colored voters to base their vote behavior upon the actual “deeds” of a party and not its words. These critics indicated that the presence and participation of African American members of the party might be more successful in combating prejudice and bias by “working within the new organization” than in criticizing it from the outside.26 In fact, even the African American delegates to both of the Free-Soil party national conventions in conjunction with their white allies were not able to prevent the party from divorcing their anti-slavery position from an equal rights one. According to Professor Foner’s summary: The Free-Soilers who favored equal suffrage and opposed racial discrimination, were themselves highly ambiguous in their attitudes towards the Negro race. Almost all accepted the prevailing belief in the Negro’s intellectual inferiority, and many were uneasy about the prospect of a permanent Negro population in their own states. Even where the Free-Soil party fought resolutely for the rights of the free Negro, it always treated this problem as a local issue, irrelevant to the central problem of the extension of slavery.27 Thus, the negative racial attitudes which the Free-Soilers had toward the Free Coloreds in the North allowed them to

broaden their party platforms, intentionally omit the divisive issue of equal rights, and attract the largest electorate ever for an anti-slavery party, but it also allowed them to maintain their racial prejudices and biases. And the Free Colored voters’ partisanship and affiliation with the Free-Soil party occurred mainly because they did not have many other options open to them at this moment in American history, these negative racial attitudes notwithstanding. Even with the Free-Soil Party’s negative racial attitudes, Free Coloreds got another chance at national convention participation and critical electoral experience. Surely they were learning about party politics and the differences between the major and minor political parties.

Fall of the Free-Soil Party and Rise of the Republicans At the August 11, 1852, National Convention of the Free-Soil Party in Pittsburgh, Frederick Douglass became the convention secretary and witnessed the party’s nomination of John Parker Hale for president and George Washington Julian for vice president. Douglass continued his political strategy from 1848 and also in 1852 became one of the national committeemen at the Liberty Party convention. The Free-Soil Party won only 155,441 votes (or 4.9% of the total) to the Liberty (Abolitionist) Party’s 72 votes. With this decline in electoral support, the FreeSoil Party disbanded, and many of its members merged with the newly formed Republican party at its founding convention in Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854. Free Coloreds, going into the 1856 presidential election, found themselves with only the Liberty Party and two new parties, the Radical Political Abolition Party and the Republican Party. Douglass used his newspaper to denounce this new Republican Party because it took a stand similar to the Free-Soilers: it opposed only the extension of slavery into the new territories. Republican Party nominees John C. Fremont and William L. Dayton, especially Fremont, made many speeches, which were heard “by thousands of Negroes, and they very naturally took up the idea that they had a great friend in that Mr. Mont to whom they heard the epithet ‘Free’ so constantly applied, and that he was to free them all as soon as he was elected.”28 Some Free-Men-of-Color voted for the Fremont-Dayton ticket in 1856, while others supported the usual anti-slavery parties. The Liberty Party with Gerrit Smith as its nominee won 320 votes. The other third party in this election was a pro-slavery party, the Native American (Know-Nothing) Party, which nominated former president Millard Fillmore.29 The Republican Party made a very strong showing in its initial outing in 1856 by coming in second, as the Whigs had all but dissolved. Therefore, the Republicans decided to redouble their efforts for the 1860 presidential election. At its national convention in Chicago on May 16–18, 1860, the party nominated Abraham Lincoln on the third ballot. Lincoln had attained national popularity during the 1858 U.S. Senate contest in Illinois in his series of debates with Stephen Douglas and from his sensational speech at Cooper Union Hall in New York City on February 27, 1860, where he declared that “Right makes might.”30 As soon as the 1860 presidential election got underway, Frederick

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Douglass endorsed the Liberty Party and its nominee Smith. However, as the campaign progressed, “and as Lincoln’s thoughts became increasingly vivid, Douglass’ opinion changed. He ended up by endorsing Lincoln and campaigning for him in Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa.”31 Table 10.1 shows that before he made this political alignment, Douglass had involved himself with another anti-slavery third party, the Radical Political Abolitionists. He went to their national convention and became both a member of the party’s Business Committee and one of its presidential electors. His subsequent re-alignment to the Republicans enabled him to participate in his initial presidential campaign of a major political party. Lincoln won for the Republicans their first presidential victory with 39.7% of the vote against a field of candidates in which the Smith-led Liberty Party received only 176 votes. With this defeat, two decades of efforts by the anti-slavery third parties with African American participation came to an end, and the rise of African American participation in major party politics was underway. The 1860 election not only led to a cadre of African American voters to join these party activists, but the activists themselves had acquired political training from this invaluable nation-transforming experience. Lincoln’s election in 1860 via the Republican Party set into motion South Carolina’s secession from the Union, which was followed by the departure of ten other southern states and the founding of the Confederate States of America. A new political party, which had taken a firm stance against the extension of slavery into the new territories, became a major political party during this election and put slavery in its political platform, which precipitated a national crisis around a dominant issue inside the African American community. For the very first time, this electorate saw the nation take up their issue, albeit in a truncated fashion. It had nevertheless been taken up and this set into motion a transforming experience.

The Anti-Slavery Parties and African American Presidential Nominees African American political participation in the national conventions of the anti-slavery parties led not only to resolutions and platform planks, but also to the repeated nomination of one of these Free Colored delegates for the offices of president and vice president—Frederick Douglass. Table 10.2 provides a list of the political parties that nominated Douglass and the number of votes that he received at these conventions. The table also includes the same information for the first African American nominees of the Republican Party through 1888. Frederick Douglass was the first African American man to be nominated for executive office. This was a political breakthrough. He received his first such nominations at the national conventions of the Liberty League (1847) and the National Liberty Party (1848), both anti-slavery parties. He received no votes from the former and one vote from the latter. In 1856, there was a rumor that he received the vice presidential nomination of the newly formed Political Abolition Party, but no documentation has been found to substantiate this story. Seemingly, this was, in modern campaign parlance, a trial balloon, launched by a newspaper editor. In modern campaign politics, the names of potential candidates

Table 10.2  African American Nominees for President and Vice President, 1847–1888 Year

Candidate

Political Party

Nominated Position

Convention Votes

1847

Frederick Douglass

Liberty League

President

 0

1848

Frederick Douglass

National Liberty

President

 1

1856

Frederick Douglass

Political Abolition (Rumored; Not Nominated)

 

1872

Frederick Douglass

Equal Rights

Vice President (Declined)

*

1880

Blanche K. Bruce

Republican

Vice President

 8

1888

Frederick Douglass

Republican

President

 1

1888

Blanche K. Bruce

Republican

Vice President

11

Sources: Adapted and compiled from James Havel, U.S. Presidential Candidates and the Elections, Vol. 2 The Elections, 1789–1992 (New York: Macmillan Library Reference, 1996), pp. 24, 44, 53, and 63; Charles Wesley, “The Participation of Negroes in Anti-Slavery Political Parties,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 29 (January 1944), p. 73. *Douglass was nominated by acclamation but declined.

can be put forward to see if they catch on with the electorate or the parties’ primary voters. If there is a groundswell of support, reluctant candidates can come forth and officially declare. And in earlier years, there would be a “draft movement” to draw reluctant candidates into the presidential race. There was no groundswell for Douglass in the 1856 presidential sweepstakes. After the Civil War and following the demise of the anti-slavery third parties, Douglass received the vice presidential nomination of the Equal Rights Party at their 1872 national convention on May 10 in New York. The nomination was by acclamation, to run with Victoria C. Woodhull, a leading female suffragist of this period. Douglass declined the nomination. Another budding political organization, the Liberal Republican Convention of Colored Men, met on September 25 in Louisville, Kentucky. It overlooked all of the pre-and post-Civil War African American political activists to nominate two white men, Horace Greeley and Benjamin Brown, the candidates of the Liberal Republican and the Democratic parties as their presidential and vice presidential candidates.32 Douglass and most other African American citizens worked for the Grant-led Republican Party. By 1868, African American political activists had become delegates to the Republican National Convention and had begun to hold convention positions like their pioneering counterparts in the anti-slavery parties. In 1880, U.S. Senator Blanche K. Bruce (R-MS) became the first African American to receive the nomination for vice president of a major party. He was nominated at the Republican National Convention that year and received eight votes. At the 1888 Republican Convention, Douglass and Bruce received the presidential and vice presidential nominations, respectively. There, Douglass received only one vote and Bruce received eleven.33 These small numbers of votes suggest that the Republican Party elites were not really devoted to making either of these nominees serious contenders for the top positions in the country. Further empirical evidence for the minimal convention support for these early African American nominees can be seen in Table 10.3, which displays them in relationship to the white nominees at the same national conventions. Their small numbers



The First African American Nominees and Public Office Holders, 1776–1870 185

of votes reveal that the other delegates did not take them very seriously. In fact, the votes for Bruce and Douglass at the 1880 and 1888 Republican conventions never even reached the level of the numbers of African American delegates. At the moment, the best extant data show us that from the reconstructed southern states there were 24 delegates from all ten of the southern states at the 1880 National Republican Convention, Tennessee excepted. In 1888 there were 17 African American delegates from seven southern states, Arkansas, Georgia, and Virginia excepted.34 In 1880 the Republican National Convention had a total of 756 delegates, and the African American delegates from the South made up 3.2% of the convention. In 1888 the

Table 10.3  Nominating Votes and Percentages for Presidential and Vice Presidential Candidates at Selected National Conventions of the Liberty and Republican Parties, 1848–1888 Year

Political Party

Ballot

Nominated Candidate

Votes

Percent

99 2 1 1 1

95.2% 1.9% 1.0% 1.0% 1.0%

Total Votes

104

100%

John Sherman Benjamin Harrison Russell Alger Walter Gresham William Allison James G. Blaine William McKinley Robert Todd Lincoln Joseph Foraker Frederick Douglassa

235 217 135 98 88 42 11 1 1 1

28.3% 26.2% 16.3% 11.8% 10.6% 5.1% 1.3% 0.1% 0.1% 0.1%

Total Votes

829

100%

Chester A. Arthur Elihu Washburne Marshall Jewell Horace Maynard Blanche K. Brucea James Alcorn Edmund J. Davis Thomas Settle Stewart Woodford (Not Voting)

468 193 44 30 8 4 2 1 1 5

61.9% 25.5% 5.8% 4.0% 1.1% 0.5% 0.3% 0.1% 0.1% 0.7%

Total Votes

756

100%

Levi Morton William Phelps William Bradley Blanche K. Brucea Walter Thomas

591 119 103 11 1

71.6% 14.4% 12.5% 1.3% 0.1%

Total Votes

825

100%

Presidential Candidates Nominated 1848          

Liberty        

1st        

1888                    

Republican                  

4th                  

Gerrit Smith Beriah Green Frederick Douglassa Amos Sampson Charles Foote

Vice Presidential Candidates Nominated 1880                  

Republican                  

1st                  

Republican        

1st        

  1888  

Source: Adapted from James Havel, U.S. Presidential Candidates and the Elections Vol. 2 The Elections, 1789–1992 (New York: Macmillan Library Reference USA, 1996), pp. 24, 53, and 63. Calculations by the authors. a

African American candidate.

Republican National Convention had a total of 832 delegates— 214 from the South, and the African American delegates from the South numbered 17 or 7.9% of the southern delegation and 2.0% of the convention. Essentially, these early candidates were little more than symbolic. Interest at the conventions seemed to have stopped at the equal right to vote and did not extend to office holding, at least at the national level.

African American Candidates for Local and State Offices: Before and Immediately after the Civil War Given this paucity of support for national political candidates, we turn to office holding at the local and state levels to see if either the major or minor parties ran or elected African Americans. Limited concern existed among majority white voters and the states for full suffrage rights, and only a small number of FreeMen-of-Color were enfranchised to exercise those rights. Would the white electorate engage in “crossover voting,” that is, become willing to vote for African American candidates rather than exclusively for white candidates? The extant literature reveals that there was some interest by African Americans in office holding, and that there were places where white crossover voting did occur. However, Table 10.4 shows that prior to the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment there were eleven such candidates and that seven won their Table 10.4  African American Candidates for Local, State, and National Offices, 1792–1866 Year

Candidate

Office

State

Election Outcome

1792

Thomas Brown

State Legislator

Maryland

Lost

1805

Wentworth Cheswell

Justice of the Peace

New Hampshire

Appointed

1836

Alexander L. Twilight

State Legislator

Vermont

Won

1841

Alfred Niger

Treasurer, State Constitutional Convention

Rhode Island

Lost

1843

Wentworth Cheswell

School Board

New Hampshire

Won

1848

George B. Vashon

Attorney General

New York

Lost

1854

John Mercer Langston

Township Clerk

Ohio

Won

1855

Frederick Douglass

Secretary of State

New York

Lost

1860

Frederick Douglass

Presidential Elector-at-Large

New York

Won

1866

Edward G. Walker

State Legislator

Massachusetts

Won

1866

Charles L. Mitchell

State Legislator

Massachusetts

Won

Sources: Adapted from Benjamin Quarles, Black Mosaic (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), pp. 62–63; David Bositis, Black State Legislators (Washington, DC: Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 1992), p. 6; J. Clay Smith, Jr., “In Freedom’s Birthplace: The Making of George Lewis Ruffin, The First Black Law Graduate of Harvard University,” Howard Law Journal Vol. 39 (Fall 1995), p. 218, footnote 105; William Cheek and Aimee Lee Cheek, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829–65 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 121, footnote 28; and Christopher Malone, Between Freedom and Bondage: Race, Party, and Voting Rights in the Antebellum North (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 132.

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elections. All of the listed states except Ohio let Free-Men-ofColor vote at one time or another during the years covered by the table. The most common office for which these few candidates ran was that of state legislator. Of these four elections, FreeMen-of-Color won three, two of which were in Massachusetts immediately after the Civil War. The only border state to have a candidate was Maryland in 1792, which, by 1800, would rescind the suffrage rights of Free Coloreds. Candidates from New York appear three times in the table, although this state applied a property qualification to Free-Men-of-Color voters that it did not place on whites. According to historian Michael Hahn, Alexander Twilight, a Free-Man-of-Color and the first African American college graduate, “was sworn in as a member of the Vermont House on October 13, 1836” and spent one full term, 1836–1837, in that state legislature’s lower House.35 State Representative Twilight graduated from Middlebury College in 1823 and was a preacher initially after graduation. In 1829, he became the principal of the Orleans County Grammar School in the city of Brownington, Vermont.36 Popular and ambitious, he sought to expand the school and latched upon the idea of building a granite-based four-story dormitory with his own funds to house the rising number of students. The building was completed in 1836, and because of its Greek revival architecture Twilight named it the Athenian Hall. In order to obtain public funding for the school he decided to run for the state legislature. After winning the election, Twilight “was appointed to serve on the five-person Committee on Education. The members of the committee were selected to study bills related to education and then report their findings to the rest of the House. Serving on the committee was a good position for Alexander [Twilight] because it gave him an opportunity to influence the vote.”37 However, during this legislative session, a bill dealing with funds for the Grammar School Lands in Orleans County came up for a vote. “Alexander [Twilight] made a motion to dismiss the bill,” but he was simply out-voted and the bill passed.38 In fact, Twilight failed on most of the bills for which he tried to influence passage. As a consequence, he gave up legislative politics and never ran again for public office. Overall, there are six states where African American office holding is known to have occurred through 1866, all outside of the South and most in the Northeast. New York is the state where the first attempt by a Free-Man-of-Color to win a state-wide office occurred in 1848, and we have reported how New York was most frequently the site of anti-slavery political conventions. Clearly, the anti-slavery parties served as the most likely sponsor of these pioneering candidates until after the Civil War, when the Republicans became the primary political vehicle of support for African American candidates. Despite all the differences in terms of the time, place, and type of political office sought by these early pioneers, the most unusual event displayed in Table 10.4 was the election of John Mercer Langston in Lorain County Ohio as township clerk in 1854.39 First, Langston was the only African American resident of the township in which he was elected. Second, he was a graduate of nearby Oberlin College and a lawyer as well. Third, being an attorney, he had handled almost all of the legal affairs of the

white citizens in the township, and as a consequence personally knew many of the townspeople. Others knew him by reputation. Fourth, he was personally endorsed and promoted by the leading family in the township. Fifth, Ohio barred Free-Men-of-Color from voting in its state constitution.40 Thus, in a Lorain County township where an African American candidate was not even allowed to vote himself, Langston was elected to public office. Eventually Langston would leave the state and move to Virginia, where he became the first African American elected to the U.S. Congress from that southern state, in 1888. The anomaly of Langston’s election, several years before the Civil War, offers unique insights about the white voters for this early candidate. Clearly, men and women of conscience supported abolitionism not only in a philosophical, abstract form but in practice as well. Such idealism led one community in Ohio to disobey state law and go beyond it when they found a wellqualified African American whom they personally knew and one who was strongly endorsed by a leading family in the community to hold office. In fact, while the state of Ohio had banned Free Colored voting, it never had bothered to ban African American office holding. Obviously the prospect had not occurred to the state constitution’s writers, given the ban on Colored voting. One community of white voters proved just how short-sighted they were.

Summary and Conclusions on African American Elected Officials prior to the Fifteenth Amendment The extant literature offers insights into the very limited office holding by Free Coloreds prior to the Civil War. The end of the war and subsequent legislation brought a huge number of elected and appointive African Americans to public office during what is called the “Black Reconstruction” (1867–1877). However, the implication has been that African American office holding did not occur before this period, especially before the Civil War. The empirical data presented in this chapter reveal otherwise. On the national level, African Americans were intensely involved with the national convention politics of the anti-slavery parties from their founding in 1840. They not only became delegates to the conventions, through their participation African Americans achieved national convention positions. In addition, one of them won nominations for the two highest executive positions in the land, and captured at least a minimal number of convention votes for the nominations. When these parties collapsed amid the fractious politics of the time, African Americans moved into a major political party, the Republicans. African Americans’ search for political office also manifested itself at the state and local levels. Map 10.1 displays the states where African Americans contested and were elected to political offices in the period from the founding of the nation in 1776 until after the Civil War in 1866. Free Coloreds ran for several state legislative positions, with the first victory coming in Vermont in 1836. They participated in races for attorney general and secretary of state as well. There is nothing in the extant literature to suggest that any African American ran for a gubernatorial position prior to the Civil War. However, as far back as



The First African American Nominees and Public Office Holders, 1776–1870 187 Map 10.1  States with African American Candidates for Local, State, and National Offices, 1776–1866

New Hampshire (2, 2) Washington Territory

Vermont (1, 1)

Montana Territory Idaho Territory

NV

WI

Dakota Territory Nebraska Territory

Utah Territory

CA

Colorado Territory

KS

Massachusetts (2, 2)

New York (3, 1)

MN

OR

ME

MI

CT

PA

IA IL MO

NJ

Ohio (1, 1)

IN

Rhode Island (1, 0)

DE WV

Maryland (1, 0)

VA

KY NC

Arizona Territory

New Mexico Territory

Oklahoma Territory

TN AR

SC MS

TX

AL

GA

LA FL

0

100 200 miles

States of the Union, 1866 States with African American candidates; numbers in parentheses represent (African American candidates, African American victories) All states, including those without African American candidates for office Source: Table 10.4.

1776, Free-Man-of-Color Wentworth Cheswell won an elective position on the local school board in Newmarket, New Hampshire. After he served his term, the townsmen appointed him to serve as the county justice of the peace, a position he held from 1805 until his death in 1817. Prior to the Civil War, especially in Colonial, Revolutionary, and early Antebellum America, the political context was filled with racial prejudices about African American suffrage rights, and similar biases prevailed about African American office holding. However, with so few individual breakthroughs, it is not a topic that has been explored in either historical or political science scholarship. Hence, most of the extant literature focuses upon African American office holding in an empirical manner during the Reconstruction Era and the Disenfranchisement Era. Although the pioneering work of Professors Monroe Work, Luther Jackson, Richard Hume, and Thomas Holt launched the studies into African American office holders during Reconstruction, the most systematic study was Professor Eric Foner’s Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction.41 Following Foner’s pioneering work is a newer one by Richard Hume and Jerry Gough, Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags: The Constitutional Conventions of Radical Reconstruction.42 This innovative study analyzes all

of the delegates who went to the ten southern states’ constitutional conventions mandated by the Military Reconstruction Acts of 1867. This large volume identifies the delegates and then divides them into three categories: (1) blacks, (2) southern whites, and (3) outside whites. Next follows an analysis of each of these three categories in terms of leadership roles and functions as well as their voting behavior on all of the issues facing these conventions, in order to provide the very first empirical evaluation and assessment of these initial political neophytes, including these newly elected African American delegates, and to compare and contrast them with each other. No other such work exists on the period prior to the Civil War, and we have made an effort using the current extant literature. But the reader should be aware of why so few such office holders existed prior to the war: in part because of the party politics in this period and also because of the racial attitudes prevailing during this time. Historian Michael Perman is one of the very first scholars to look beyond the number and types of African American office holders and to turn his scholarly attention to the political parties’ role in recruiting and nominating as well as fully sponsoring them for elective and appointive public. In undertaking this task for his award-winning book, Perman wrote that his “attention

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has been focused . . . on the composition of both parties and on the images they projected and identities they assumed.”43 He continued: Indeed, because the Democrats, unlike the Republicans, had already been in existence in the South for many decades and would, as events transpired, also outlive Reconstruction and later dominate the region’s political life, more attention has been devoted to them than to their opponents. But their importance is greater than that, because, in effect, the Democrats embodied the continuities and the elements of persistence in southern politics with which the Republicans had to deal if they were to endure.44 From his political party approach, which focused heavily upon the Republican party, Professor Perman found: “The alternative options open to the Republican party in the South were presented most sharply and irreconcilably in the party’s formative years, from 1868 to 1870. During the constitutional conventions of 1868 and in the state elections that followed them, two distinctive wings developed within the party.”45 He dubbed these two wings: (1) the Radical wing and (2) the Centrist wing. The former wing believed that if “the new state constitutions restricted white voting, and perhaps officeholding as well, the Republicans would probably be able to maintain their hegemony without having to rely on obtaining additional votes” from the white electorate. This faction saw whites in control of the top elective offices and the freedmen in minor and local offices. And in this case, the party could rely solely upon its “original base of electoral support from blacks and a cadre of loyal whites would prove sufficient.” On the other hand, the Centrists believed that “the party had to seize the initiative” and adopt “a conciliatory and inclusive approach . . . towards southern whites,” and that unless they did so “the kind of Republican party that, in their view, was likely to result would be not simply uncongenial and undesirable but ineffectual as well.”46 This faction saw African Americans in a very subordinate role and in very few offices if at all. This would be a white led and white controlled party. The freedmen could be voters. There were other distinguishing characteristics. The leadership of the Centrists faction was “overwhelmingly native and local in origin, whereas the other [Radical] was generally headed up by newcomers from the North.”47 Clearly, this put the Centrists faction at a greater advantage in the long run. Secondly, beyond the leadership characteristic there was the matter of patronage. The Centrist faction “invariably derived its strength from control of state patronage, while the other [Radical faction] was maintained by access to federal office. The latter was distributed through the state’s congressional delegation, primarily senators; state jobs . . . were in the hands of the governor.”48 And there were more of the state patronage than federal and state positions. The Centrists therefore had another advantage. Moreover, any time the Centrist won a federal office, it automatically reduced the patronage going to the Radicals.

Finally, there was the matter of the African American population in each state. Some southern states had large populations of African Americans and others had small populations. In those states with small or modest African American populations, the Centrist faction from the outset would have to build the party’s base on the white electorate, while in places where there were mixed populations and where whites had pluralist majorities, the party’s base would rest on the white majority. In those few states where African Americans had majorities—Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana—the base of the party rested upon this electorate. Divide or manipulate that African American population, and this base would be lost or disadvantaged. Professor Perman’s analysis also overlooks the advantage of previous political experience and voting. This advantage goes to the Centrists. This group, who called themselves the DemocraticConservatives, had been political leaders and activists prior to the Civil War, and they got the first chance to set up Reconstruction governments from President Andrew Johnson. President Johnson allowed these individuals to take over the southern governments and state and local legislatures from 1866 through 1867–1868. Hence, they brought advantages of political and electoral experiences which the Radicals and the freedmen did not have. Eventually, these prior experiences would enable the Centrist leaders to “redeem” the state government from the Radical factions and within two decades fully disenfranchise the Radical leaders and the freedmen. The die was cast, due to these characteristics, against the Radical faction. One sees this coming by 1889 when the Republican factions were reborn—beginning in Texas, by becoming the Lily-Whites and the Black and Tans. The racially based divisions finally formalized themselves in Texas in that year. And this revolt of African American Republicans had begun over the question of office holding and policy benefits. Professor Perman wrote: “In a party whose priority was now to recruit and reassure white voters, the options open to blacks became limited. . . . Since they could neither leave the party nor control it, black Republicans began to operate as a pressure group within it. . . . Operating as a group, they tried to barter votes for offices and benefits.”49 And when this strategy failed, African American Republicans began organizing their own Black and Tan parties and running for offices on them, beginning in 1889 but especially in the 1920s onward. Overall, the empirical data provide a portrait of very limited Free Colored office holding beginning from Revolutionary America through the Civil War and to the cusp of Black Reconstruction. From this data we learn a little about both the African American and the white electorates. Since Free Coloreds had few places where they could vote, some in the white electorate must have stepped forward to increase their suffrage rights and later to support Free Colored candidates for public offices. These actions allowed a few African Americans to win at all three levels of the government. In closing, we wish to point out that the listing of candidates presented here is most likely not complete. As more historical documents become available to modern scholars, information on other pioneering African American candidates might very well come to light.



The First African American Nominees and Public Office Holders, 1776–1870 189

Notes   1. Benjamin Quarles, Black Mosaic: Essays in Afro-American History and Historiography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 62.  2. Ibid.   3. Ibid., pp. 62–63.   4. Ibid., p. 63.   5. Leslie Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), pp. 185 and 189.   6. Edgar Toppin, “Negro Emancipation in Historic Retrospect: Ohio: The Negro Suffrage Issue in Post-Bellum Ohio Politics,” Journal of Human Relations Vol. 11 (Winter 1963), pp. 232–246.   7. David Bositis, Black State Legislators: A Survey and Analysis of Black Leadership in State Capitals (Washington, DC: Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 1992), p. 6.   8. James Havel, U.S. Presidential Candidates and the Elections, Vol. 2 The Elections, 1789–1992 (New York: Macmillan Library Reference, 1996), p. 17.  9. Ibid. 10. Hanes Walton, Jr., The Negro in Third Party Politics (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1969), p. 12. 11. Charles Wesley, “The Participation of Negroes in Anti-Slavery Political Parties,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 29 (January 1944), p. 39. 12. Walton, p. 14. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., pp. 16–17. 15. Eric Foner, “Racial Attitudes of the New York Free-Soilers,” New York History Vol. 46, (October 1965), p. 311. 16. Eric Foner, “Politics and Prejudice: The Free-Soil Party and the Negro, 1849–1852,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 50 (October 1965), p. 239. 17. Ibid. 18. Foner, “Racial Attitudes of the New York Free-Soilers,” p. 325. 19. Ibid. 20. Foner, “Politics and Prejudice: The Free-Soil Party and the Negro, 1849–1852,” p. 255. 21. Ibid., pp. 239–240. 22. Steven Rosenstone, Roy Behr, and Edward Lazarus, Third Parties in America, 2nd Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 55. 23. Ibid., p. 54. 24. Ibid., p. 55. 25. Foner, “Racial Attitudes of the New York Free-Soilers,” pp. 311–312.

26. Ibid., p. 321. 27. Foner, “Politics and Prejudice: The Free-Soil Party and the Negro, 1849–1852,” p. 240. 28. Walton, p. 20. 29. Rosenstone, Behr, and Lazarus, pp. 56–59. 30. Mario Cuomo and Harold Holzer (eds.), Lincoln on Democracy (New York: HarperPerennial, 1990), p. 174. 31. Walton, p. 20. 32. Joseph Nathan Kane, Janet Podell, Steven Anzovin (eds.), Facts About the Presidents: From George Washington to George W. Bush, 7th Edition (New York: H. W. Wilson, 2001), p. 201. 33. Lawrence Otis Graham, The Senator and the Socialite (New York: HarperCollins, 2006). 34. Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Republicans: The Politics of the Black and Tans (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1975), pp. 171 and 172. 35. Michael Hahn, Alexander Twilight: Vermont’s African American Pioneer (Shelburne, VT: New England Press, 1998), p. 40. 36. Ibid., p. 19. 37. Ibid., p. 41. The author of this brief biography refers throughout the book to this pioneering state legislator by his first name, which is the traditional stereotypical manner that white southern segregationists used. 38. Ibid. 39. Toppin, pp. 232–246. 40. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 351. 41. See Monroe Work, “Some Negro Members of Reconstruction Conventions and Legislatures and of Congress,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 5 (January 1920), pp. 63–119, 235–248, 388–389, 467–474; Luther Jackson, Negro Office-Holders in Virginia, 1865–1895 (Norfolk, VA: Quality Press, 1945); Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 42. Richard Hume and Jerry Gough, Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags: The Constitutional Conventions of Radical Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008). 43. Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869–1879 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), p. xiii. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., p. 25. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., p. 42. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., p. 38.

CHAPTER 11

The National Equal Rights League An African American Suffrage Organization during and after the Civil War The Rise of African American Political Agency: Individual and Small Group Protests

192

The Birth and Evolution of the National Convention Movement: The Forerunner of the National Equal Rights League

193

Figure 11.1 Number of African American National and State Conventions in Antebellum America, 1830–1865

194

Table 11.1 Number of Delegates and Honorary Members Participating in the Founding National Negro Convention by State, 1830 194 Map 11.1 States and Numbers of Delegates and Honorary Members at the National Negro Convention, 1830

195

Table 11.2 Numbers of States, Cities, and Delegates Participating in the National Negro Convention Movement, 1831–1855 196

The Rise and Evolution of the National Equal Rights League, 1864–1865

197

Table 11.3 Numbers of Cities and Delegates, by Region and State, Participating in the Founding Convention of the National Equal Rights League, 1864 198 Map 11.2 States of the Founding Convention of the National Equal Rights League, 1864

199

Figure 11.2 The Cover of a Model Constitution Pamphlet Used by Local Branches of the National Equal Rights League

199

Diagram 11.1 The Standing Committees of the National Equal Rights League

201

Table 11.4 Leadership and Organizational Structure of the National Equal Rights League at the First Annual Meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, October 19–21, 1865 201 Map 11.3 Branch States of the National Equal Rights League, 1865

202

The NERL, Congress, and the Elective Franchise for Southern Freedmen: The Four Military Reconstruction Acts of 1867

206

Table 11.5 Delegate States and Number of Delegates to the National Convention of Colored Men of America, 1869 208 Map 11.4 Delegate States and Number of Delegates to the National Convention of Colored Men of America, 1869

209

Figure 11.3 Number of Delegates to the National Convention of Colored Men by State, 1869

210

Diagram 11.2 The Rise, Evolution, and Demise of the Three Different National Equal Rights Leagues, 1864–1915

212

Summary and Conclusions on the National Equal Rights League

213

Notes 214

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W

hile the colonies, states, Congress, the Constitution, and political parties all played roles in determining suffrage rights for Free-Men-of-Color, often without input from those whose rights were being debated, there was also an evolution and maturation of African American organizations to protest, lobby, and pressure for suffrage rights, both nationally and at the state level. Although Free-Men-of-Color politically participated in the diverse anti-slavery third parties beginning in 1840, they also formed their own organizations to address slavery and suffrage rights. Initially, such national and state organizations were umbrella organizations that addressed a host of missing citizenship rights and varied forms of racial discrimination. As the Civil War led to the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery as a dominant issue started to fade and take a secondary position to the new priority, voting rights. And as this transformation of public policy priorities took shape, so did the organizations inside the African American communities. Thus, this chapter turns to these organizations and their transformation as well as their tactics and techniques. In her pioneering and comprehensive study of the three suffrage referenda in New York (1846, 1860, and 1869), Professor Phyllis Field found that African American agency (leadership) was both vital and critical. She wrote: “The most dedicated group supporting equal suffrage proved to be New York’s black community. Not only did they actively lobby the convention[s], but they also issued public addresses and letters throughout the referend[a] campaign[s] to explain why they wanted and needed the franchise.”1 She continued: New York blacks stepped up their efforts to assure their own rights. In August 1837 . . . noted black leaders . . . launched a petition drive in support of full black suffrage. In the following year a New York City suffrage association was formed, and two years later a state convention attended by as many as 140 delegates was held in Troy. The strategy was to organize all blacks throughout the state, coordinate a systematic petitioning campaign to show the intense interest of blacks in the suffrage, provide information to political leaders through lobbying efforts in Albany, and similarly educate the public through published appeals.2 Additionally, her research found statewide organizing. Of this organizing effort she noted: A free-suffrage convention, which had representatives from eleven counties . . . [outlined] a general plan of action. The group appointed a central committee of thirty-five to direct the prosuffrage campaign and designated six agents to canvass the state to speak in behalf of equal suffrage and accept donations for the cause. At the local level blacks formed suffrage clubs and associations to distribute tracts and ballots. There were forty-eight such clubs in New York City alone and eighteen in Brooklyn. The New York City and County Suffrage Committee issued at least seven thousand copies of an address to blacks urging them to organize and work for

equal suffrage and five thousand copies of a pamphlet appealing for voter approval of black suffrage.3 The main and essential reason that African American leaders, groups, and organizations had to become self-reliant in the struggle for freedom and suffrage is that all of their allies— abolitionists, anti-slavery Democrats, Whigs, Republicans, and pro-suffrage voters—had at one time or another and under varying circumstances embraced political expediency that had left the African American suffrage community devoid of victories. Hence, group agency had proven vital in the 1846 and 1860 referenda, and when a new major crisis evolved despite the four major Union military victories in September 1864, there was a corresponding effort to set into motion group agency in the form of the National Equal Rights League (NERL).

The Rise of African American Political Agency: Individual and Small Group Protests African Americans arrived in the American colonies in 1619 as indentured servants but by 1626 many eventuated into FreeMen-and-Women-of-Color. In 1661 the legislative bodies of Virginia and Maryland established slavery as a new and different legal category for people of color. Shortly after these two distinct and different African American populations came into existence in Colonial America, along with knowledge and experiences of the differences in their societal, economic, and political treatment, individual and small group political protests over this racially discriminatory treatment came to the Colonial governors, legislatures, and courts. These political protests from both slaves and Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color took the form of petitions, memorials, prayers, and letters inveighing against their legal disabilities. Occasionally, some of these political protests met with success, but for the most part they were denied. Extant documents exist from both groups, from Free Coloreds as early as 1661 through 1837 and from slaves from 1741 through 1841.4 Such fledging efforts became the bases for larger and forthcoming national organizations. The second source of the national organizations was the rise of Mutual Aid Societies. African Americans “on April 12, 1787, formed the Philadelphia Free African Society in order to support one another in sickness, and for the benefit of their widows and fatherless children.”5 Soon these types of local societies were created in “Newport, Boston, and New York. They maintained a steady correspondence and members exchanged visits. In the same year the ‘Negro Masonic Order’ was granted a charter from the Lodge in London. Next came the ‘Boston African Society’ in 1796.”6 Following in the wake of these mutual aid societies and fraternal organizations were the African American Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal churches in Virginia, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. The Free Coloreds throughout the thirteen colonies moved to expand their associational groupings. Although the slave population segment of the African American community could not form recognized organizational groupings, their roles as runaways and fugitives and seekers of freedom led to external organizations formed by others in their behalf, known as the abolitionists’ societies. Three years before the creation of

the American Anti-Slavery Society (AAAS) in 1833 and ten years before the creation of the rival and politically oriented American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (AFASS) in 1840, the first African American national convention organization came into existence in 1830.7 However, the foundation for such a national assembly of cooperation and assistance had been laid in part by the rise of different African American abolitionist societies scattered throughout the northern part of the nation. Long before the two national anti-slavery organizations came into being, African Americans had the “Free African Society of Philadelphia.”8 Therefore, “by 1830 they had fifty groups, one that was very active in New Haven, and several in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. One of the strongest was located in New York and named for the famous English antislavery leader Thomas Clarkson.”9 And these local, state, and regional organizations had learned to cooperate and function together around one single “issue.” These scattered organizations were the groundwork for the initial efforts at an African American national unity organization. This single “issue,” opposition to slavery, led to “Blacks . . . in the abolition movement as agents and speakers for various societies. Several were full-time employees of local or national bodies.”10 Prominent among these speakers and agents were Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. Moving from her home in Michigan, Truth carried the message from the Midwest to New York, New England, and the West.11 And several of these African American abolitionists, carried the message beyond the shores of the North American continent. “More than a score of black abolitionists went to England, Scotland, France, and Germany. . . . They were received with enthusiasm almost everywhere and were instrumental in linking up the humanitarian movement in Europe with various reform movements on this side of the Atlantic.”12 And this single “issue” had allowed female leaders to arise and many to meet and cooperate with each other. The “issue” spawned a training ground for national action based in a national organization simply because it was not a local, regional, or state issue, but a national and international one. Finally, this “issue” had set into motion a potential national communication device, an African American newspaper. Emerging in 1827, Freedom’s Journal, the first African American newspaper, gave birth to a continuing series of such communication devices that permitted African American leaders and masses to be in touch with each other. Now, individuals could continually talk with each other, express themselves, and opine about their burden and the problems inherent in the nation’s social systems known as slavery and quasi-segregation for Free Colored. They could for the very first time reach out to each other beyond local and regional and state boundaries. A national assembly or convention could be called for via African American newspapers. If the “issue” had formal features and manifestations and structural and organizational components, there was a hidden and informal structure to the “issue,” the Underground Railroad. Inherent in this very human “machinery” was cooperation, assistance, and unity of purpose. The destination of this Underground Railroad was not localized but rather reached across the nation and over an international border, Canada, as well as at other times into emigration to the Caribbean, England, or Africa.

The National Equal Rights League 193 And the very essence of success for this invisible railroad was cooperation and assistance. Hence, when the idea for a national assembly of cooperation emerged in 1830, groundwork had already been laid for decades. These different building blocks simply had to be assembled together.

The Birth and Evolution of the National Convention Movement: The Forerunner of the National Equal Rights League According to the Anglo-African Magazine, “It was in the spring of 1830, that . . . Hezekiah Grice, conceived the plan of calling together a meeting or convention of colored men, in some place north of the Potomac, for the purpose of comparing views and of adopting a harmonious movement either of emigration, or of determination to remain in the United States.”13 At this point, the newspaper notes how the next step in this convention process took place: On the 2nd of April, 1830, he addressed a written circular to prominent colored men in the free States, requesting their opinions on the necessity and propriety of holding such convention, and stated that if the opinions of a sufficient number warranted it, he would give notice of the time and place at which duly elected delegates might assemble.14 Eventually, several individuals in Philadelphia—led by Bishop Richard Allen of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME)— agreed and urged Grice to make the call before African American leaders in New York to launch such innovative action. The catalyst and trigger for this call for a national organization came from an event and crisis in Cincinnati, Ohio: “in 1829 and 1830, savage white mob action forced more than a thousand blacks to leave Cincinnati—most of whom headed for Canada in desperation and great need—the determination of their Northern brothers and sisters to develop organized assistance for the exiles led to the creation of the National Black Convention movement of the 1830s,” 1840s, 1850s, and the National Equal Rights League in 1864.15 The initial call led to the founding National Black Convention in the city of Philadelphia September 20–24, 1830, at Bethel AME Church. Delegates and honorary members elected Bishop Richard Allen president, wrote a Constitution with eight articles (which set up the organizational structure for the national body and provided for state level auxiliaries), prepared an address to the “Free People of Color of these United States” urging them to come together and form a national organization, set a date for the next national convention for the first Monday in June, 1831, and created a dues payment system for new members.16 Following this initial formation action, the national body held a subsequent meeting on November 30, 1831, to reelect organizational leaders for the coming year. Bishop Allen was re-elected president of the organization. Beginning in 1831 and through 1836, there would be six consecutive annual meetings. Internal factionalism and intra-group rivalry led to a discontinuance of the National Conventions until they were revived for three meetings in the 1840s: 1843, 1847, and 1848. They were

194

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revived again for two meetings in the 1850s: 1853 and 1855. Finally, in 1864, just prior to the presidential election of that year, the final meeting established the NERL. Visualization of this decade-by-decade number of National Convention meetings can been seen in Figure 11.1, where the number of national and state conventions are compared and contrasted with each other. After the 1830’s, the number of state conventions blossomed even as the number of national conventions was few. And while it cannot be seen from the figure, the number of state conventions continued on a yearly basis while the National Conventions appeared intermittently and on an irregular basis. Hence, state conventions carried on the struggle in the absence of the National Conventions.17 Table 11.1 depicts the number of delegates and honorary members sent to the founding National Convention in 1830 by state. Map 11.1 displays the states that participated. A total of eight states sent delegates, honorary members, or both. In fact there were twenty-six delegates and fourteen honorary members for a grand total of forty National Convention participants in the four-day meeting in Philadelphia. Of these participants, the largest number and percentage came from Pennsylvania, where the meeting was held. The second largest number came from Maryland, while New York and Virginia tied for the third largest number. Virginia was the only southern state to send delegates and the first of the original thirteen colonies/states to have a Free Colored population. And it is most interesting how, given the limited communication and transportation realities at this time, the Free Black community heard about this founding meeting and was able to get delegates to the Convention. This presence speaks volume about the nature of the interest in the African American community about their plight and problems. Table 11.2 (p. 196) provides a summary and comprehensive overview of the number of states, cities, and delegates

Figure 11.1  Number of African American National and State Conventions in Antebellum America, 1830–1865 30 25

Number of Conventions

25 20 15 10 5 0

13 9

7 4

1830–1839

3

2

1840–1849

1

1850–1859

1860–1865

Years National Conventions

State Conventions

Source: Adapted from Hanes Walton, Jr., "Protest Politics," in Minion K. C. Morrison, ed., African Americans and Political Participation: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003), pp. 63–115, see Table 2.3, p. 85.

Table 11.1  Number of Delegates and Honorary Members Participating in the Founding National Negro Convention by State, 1830 Delegates

  States Pennsylvania

Number

Percent of Total Delegates

Honorary Members

Number

Percent of Total Honorary Members

Total Number of Convention Participants

12

46.2%

6

42.9%

18

Maryland

4

15.4%

2

14.3%

6

New York

3

11.5%

1

7.1%

4

Virginia

3

11.5%

0

0.0%

3

Rhode Island

2

7.7%

0

0.0%

2

Connecticut

1

3.8%

0

0.0%

1

Delaware

1

3.8%

2

14.3%

3

New Jersey

0

0.0%

2

14.3%

2

Ohio

0

0.0%

1

7.1%

1

Totals

26

100%

14

100%

40

Source: Adapted from "Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men (Syracuse, NY: 1864)," in Howard Holman Bell, ed., Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions: 1830–1864 (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969). Calculations by the authors.

participating in each of the National Conventions through 1855. This accounts for every convention except the final one in 1864 that established a separate and different organization, the NERL. From the table one can see that the first National Convention in 1831 had the fewest number of states (five), while the greatest number of states (ten) participated in 1843. Both the median and the mode of the states are eight, which occurred in 1832, 1833, 1834, and 1853, while the mean number of states participating in these National Conventions stands at 7.9. In all, these measures show a fairly consistent number of states represented, although the number of representatives was more variable. In 1835, the District of Columbia sent three delegates, and in 1855 Canada sent one—in both cases, these are counted as “states” in the table. In 1855 Canada’s delegate, Mary A. Shadd, was also the first African American woman delegate.18 In the 1840s, the convention had voted to accept African American women delegates, and their participation on equal terms with men as well as the issues facing the Free Colored community in America was of interest to the Free Colored community in Canada, many of whom had escaped from slavery via the Underground Railroad. Moreover, Delegate Shadd’s father, Abraham D. Shadd, had been president of the National Convention for the Improvement of Free People of Color in Philadelphia in 1833 and a delegate from Delaware in 1830, 1831, and 1832.19 Thus, he had made his daughter quite aware of the importance of the Convention movement, and she carried on this tradition in a pioneering manner. Table 11.2 also shows the number of different cities whence the delegates and honorary members came. Although these data were not given in four of the National Conventions, they are available for the other six. In 1848 the data were not directly available, but there were enough data in the proceedings on that convention that the information was culled from that document. Combining these ten conventions along with the two founding



The National Equal Rights League 195 Map 11.1  States and Numbers of Delegates and Honorary Members at the National Negro Convention, 1830

0

100

200

miles

ME VT NH

MA

MI

IN

KY NC

0

100

200

miles

TN

Participating States of the Founding National Negro Convention, 1830 States with Honorary Members only

All Represented States

Source: Table 11.1.

conventions, Philadelphia was the host city six times (one half), the state of New York was the host five times but with different cities (New York City in 1834, Buffalo in 1843, Troy in 1847, Rochester in 1853, and Syracuse in 1864), while Cleveland, Ohio, hosted it in 1848. Finally, Table 11.2 provides the total number of delegates attending each and every one of these National Conventions. The range of delegates went from a high of 124 at the 1855 National Convention to a low of 15 at the 1831 National Convention. The

median for this group of delegates stands at 44 and the mean is at 50.5. Its up-and-down attendance seemingly fluctuates with the events occurring in the political context. The 1833 Convention, when 62 delegates attended, occurred soon after the Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia in 1831 and the southern states’ reactions to it, while in the 1850s there was the Fugitive Slave Law as well as the Compromise of 1850. As the Free Colored community felt itself facing new burdens and difficulties, there was a tendency to seek some united action and response.

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Table 11.2  Numbers of States, Cities, and Delegates Participating in the National Negro Convention Movement, 1831–1855 Convention Year

Number of States

Number of Cities

Number of Delegates

1831

 5

---c

 15

1832

 8

15

 29

1833

 8

24

 62

1834

 8

25

 49

1835

 7a

15

 35

1836

---

c

---

c

---c

1843

10

29

 58

1847

 9

---

c

 68

1848

 9

---

c

 26

1853

 8

12

 39

1855

 7

---

124

b

d

c

Sources: Adapted from “Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men (Syracuse, NY: 1864),” in Howard Holman Bell, ed., Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions: 1830–1864 (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969) and for 1836 see Bella Gross, Clarion Call: The History and Development of the Negro People’s Convention Movement in the United States from 1817 to 1840 (New York, 1947). Compilations by the authors. a

This number includes the District of Columbia.

Although Gross indicates a convention call for 1836, the authors found no evidence that a convention took place. b

c

No data available.

d

Includes Canada.

Although turnout dipped to 35 delegates in 1835, it rose back to 58 delegates in 1843, following the Supreme Court decision in 1842, Prigg v. Pennsylvania, which upheld both the Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause and Congress’ Fugitive Slave Law of 1793. Historian Donald Nieman explained that Justice Joseph Story’s decision “held that the fugitive slave clause recognized a property right, that extended throughout the Union . . . he reasoned, slave-owners and their agents had the right to enter free states, seize fugitives, and carry them back to the South without obtaining judicial authorization.”20 Nieman continued: “Story’s interpretation left free blacks at the mercy of those who had the audacity to claim them as slaves and the power to seize them and carry them out of the state.”21 He concluded by saying that “the Prigg decision gave explicit constitutional sanction to slavery, eroded the rights of free blacks, and made their liberty precarious.”22 Moreover, on the state level prior to the 1843 Convention, “various southern states [and a northern one] early on passed laws that barred the entrance of free blacks, presuming that any substantial free black presence would threaten the permanence of slavery. . . . Arkansas and Missouri added even more restrictions to black residency in 1843.”23 And due to the growing presence of the Free Colored communities in some northern states, several anti-free black riots occurred, notably “in Cincinnati (again in 1841); and in Boston (1843).”24 Finally, inside the Free Colored communities Frederick Douglass in 1841 became a traveling agent for several anti-slavery societies and began to carry the message to these communities to organize and protest not only against the position of the slave but against the racial discrimination which they faced. Next came an increase in the number of African American anti-slavery weekly

newspapers and slave narratives such as those of William Wells Brown and Lunsford Lane in 1842. Moreover, there was a noticeable increase in the education and social and economic life of the urban Free Colored communities in cities such as Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, but especially in Philadelphia. Collectively, all of these pertinent issues and the growing Free Colored communities allowed African Americans to participate more actively. The delegate level rose again in 1847. At the national level, “the annexation of Texas [as a slave state] in 1845” and the Mexican War of 1846–1848 added the vast territories of the Southwest to the Republic.25 They also ignited a bitter debate over slavery and whether it should be permitted in the newly acquired territories. Congress introduced on August 8, 1846, the Wilmot Proviso legislation and passed it in February 1847, banning slavery in the newly acquired Southwest territories. Southern Democrats, led by South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, reacted fiercely. At the state level, the southern slave states were trying to agitate the northern and midwestern states to accept the expansion of slavery into the new territories and to urge them to back new legislation for a stronger and more powerful Fugitive Slave Law. And in the Free Colored community in 1847, “Frederick Douglass was elected president of the New England Anti-Slavery Society,” and slavery was now the dominant issue in American society.26 Hence, the Free Colored community in this type of political context was increasing their membership in their National Convention. However, the number of delegates sharply declined to twenty-six when another Convention was held just a year later in 1848 and remained relatively low in 1852 despite the potential provocation of the Compromise of 1850. In 1855, membership increased once again, in part due to Congress’s new legislation, “the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 . . . [which accepted] southern demands for repeal of the Missouri Compromise’s exclusion of slavery from the two territories [Kansas and Nebraska].”27 This gave the impression to the North and the Free Colored communities that slavery could now expand to these two future states. It propelled both groups into political action. Overall, in 1843, 1847, and 1855, when both interest and membership rose in the National Conventions, there were not only external political forces from the national government activating the Free Coloreds but also internal political forces within the Free Colored communities themselves. And there were more internal pressures beyond the ones mentioned for these particular years. The leading student of the first twelve of these thirteen National Conventions, historian Howard Bell, found that the main public policy issues addressed at these national conclaves were the abolition of slavery, a settlement and land in Canada, a national college and—when that proved impossible—a Manual Labor School, equality for African American women, a National Council to induce unity among African Americans, moral reform on matters of temperance and individual conduct and behavior, a national newspaper, and unrestricted franchise. The conventions denounced the American Colonization Society, emigration out of the country, and both the Democratic and Whig political parties, while they endorsed both the Liberty and Free-Soil anti-slavery parties and endorsed their presidential candidates. Initially, the priority was a settlement and land in Canada; by the mid 1830s the priority was moral reform (and during the period 1836–1841, their splinter

organization, American Moral Reform Society, tried unsuccessfully to fill the void);28 and by the 1840s with the rise of the Anti-Slavery third parties the focus shifted to political activism and participation. Finally, in the 1850s, priorities shifted back to Black Nationalism, both at home and abroad, and continuing interest in suffrage rights, political participation, and political party activism. These latter issues were especially germane to the growth of the African American electorate, particularly through the rise of the NERL.

The Rise and Evolution of the National Equal Rights League, 1864–1865 The decade of the 1860s began with a new political party, the Republicans, electing their first president, which led to the launching of the Civil War in 1861, the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and the use of Colored Troops by the Union Army and Navy. These momentous events all occurred in the absence of meetings of the National Negro Convention Movement; only state conventions and a few individual national leaders tried to speak for the community. Then came the presidential election of 1864 with the National Convention of the Republican Party (renamed the National Union Party) being held on June 7–8 in Baltimore and the Democratic Party National Convention occurring on August 29–31 in Chicago. The dominant issue for both parties was the conduct and status of the war. At the time of these two conventions the war was going badly for the Union, and it appeared that President Lincoln would not be reelected. At their convention the Democrats adopted a “peace” platform “that criticized the Lincoln administration’s handling of the war and called for a cease-fire and immediate negotiation with the South.”29 The Democrats also nominated a Union general, George McClellan, whom Lincoln had dismissed for “slowness” in carrying the war to the South, for president, and a peace advocate, Congressman George Pendleton of Ohio, for vice president. As for African Americans, General McClellan let it be known that he was opposed to the Emancipation Proclamation and “maintained that emancipation should not be a war goal” and that southern states could be restored to the Union with a constitutional guarantee of protection for slavery.30 But not all of the reelection problems facing President Lincoln were coming from the Democrats. Part of his problems were emanating from his own party. If the Democrats in this election season had split into two groups, the “war” and “peace” Democrats, the Republican split had gone much further. One week prior to President Lincoln’s re-nomination, the Radical Republicans held their own National Convention and nominated General John C. Fremont—the party’s 1856 nominee—for president on a platform of equality and victory in the war. Many Republican Party elites endorsed and backed Fremont, including Frederick Douglass. Hence, the Republicans had two candidates running, which clearly jeopardized the president’s reelection chances. President Lincoln was so concerned about losing that he called African American leader Frederick Douglass to the White House on August 10, 1864, for advice on this problem of having to conclude the “war by a negotiated peace” and not making “the abolition of slavery a prior condition to the re-establishment of the Union.”31 Since these compromises had become possibilities given the Union’s lack of success in ending the war, President

The National Equal Rights League 197 Lincoln “asked the Negro leader his reaction to establishing an unofficial agency which would urge slaves to escape prior to the completion of possible peace negotiations. . . . The President suggested the need of a general agent with twenty-five assistants. These men would conduct squads of runaways into the Union lines.”32 With this plan the president hoped to get as many slaves as possible out of the South, if the “negotiated peace” ended with the South keeping the slave institution. Douglass urged him to give himself more time rather than take such drastic public action. About “three weeks later Douglass wrote a lengthy letter” to President Lincoln, which indicated that other leaders in the African American community were somewhat lukewarm to the idea they had discussed.33 Vacillating plans and proposals like this, which caused apprehension and concern within the African American community, also helped to generate the need for a new national organization. Fortunately for the anti-slavery cause, Douglass’s response letter to President Lincoln “reached the President’s desk on the same day that General William Tecumseh Sherman’s telegram did with the message: ‘Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.’”34 More news came in September 1864, of major victories by the Union Army in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and the Union Navy in Mobile Bay. These victories allowed President Lincoln first to heal the splits in his own party by having General Fremont withdraw from the race and then to win by an Electoral College landside in his reelection bid.

The Founding of NERL at National Convention, 1864 But African American leaders were concerned by the combination of the president’s consideration of a “negotiated peace” as well as his “mild requirements for readmission to the Union” of the rebellious Confederate states. “Those requirements called for a minimum of ten percent of the state’s 1860 voting population to pledge loyalty to the Union and to approve a new [state] constitution abolishing slavery and repudiating secession—a plan whereby blacks were consciously excluded from the Reconstruction process.”35 And concerning matters as vital as “the recognition of black citizenship, Lincoln was of the opinion that with education blacks would qualify for it,” and on the key question of the elective franchise they would also qualify for it “at least on a restricted basis.”36 All of these matters provoked African Americans north and south to call a national convention on October 4–7, 1864, in the city of Syracuse, New York. Table 11.3 (p. 198) indicates that eighteen states sent 145 delegates. Twelve of the eighteen states were non-southern states—North or Midwest—while the other six were southern states. The states outside the South sent 129 delegates or 89% of the grand total, while the southern states sent 16 delegates or 11% of the grand total. The delegates from the non-South came from fifty-eight different cities, while those from the South came from ten different cities. And for the southern delegates to travel during wartime all the way to Syracuse, New York, was indeed an accomplishment. It could not have been easy even for the non-South African American delegates even though they were quite concerned about their future in America. States of the founding delegations are shown in Map 11.2 (p. 199). Once in Syracuse, the delegates elected John M. Langston (former town clerk of Lorain County Ohio) the temporary Chairman of the Convention. Langston later became president of the new organization.37 This new National Convention created

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Table 11.3  Numbers of Cities and Delegates, by Region and State, Participating in the Founding Convention of the National Equal Rights League, 1864 Cities

State (by Region)

Number

Delegates

Percent of National Total

Number

Percent of National Total

North New York

20

29.4%

53

36.6%

Pennsylvania

12

17.6%

36

24.8%

Ohio

6

8.8%

10

6.9%

Connecticut

4

5.9%

7

4.8%

Massachusetts

4

5.9%

6

4.1%

New Jersey

3

4.4%

5

3.4%

Michigan

2

2.9%

4

2.8%

Maine

2

2.9%

3

2.1%

Rhode Island

2

2.9%

2

1.4%

District of Columbia

1

1.5%

1

0.7%

Illinois

1

1.5%

1

0.7%

Missouri

1

1.5%

1

0.7%

58

85.3%

129

89.0%

North Subtotals

South Tennessee

2

2.9%

5

3.4%

Virginia

3

4.4%

5

3.4%

Louisiana

1

1.5%

2

1.4%

North Carolina

2

2.9%

2

1.4%

Florida

1

1.5%

1

0.7%

Mississippi

1

1.5%

1

0.7%

South Subtotals

10

14.7%

16

11.0%

National Totals

68

100%

145

100%

Source: Adapted from “Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men (Syracuse, NY: 1864),” in Howard Holman Bell, ed., Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions: 1830–1864 (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969). Calculations by the authors.

the National Equal Rights League (NERL), wrote a preamble and constitution for this new organization with nine different sections, passed thirteen resolutions, crafted six different committees to provide power and guidance to the new national organization, and wrote a Declaration of Wrongs and Rights with six different wrongs they recorded and four different rights which they wanted. Figure 11.2 displays the cover of a pamphlet intended to guide local branches in their formation of organizational constitutions. Finally, the Convention prepared an “Address of the Colored National Convention to the People of the United States” that listed three major objectives for the NERL, along with their plan for freedom and citizenship in the post–Civil War United States: (1) “complete emancipation,” (2) “enfranchisement,” and (3) “elevation of our race.”38 In the NERL’s “Address to the American People” they clearly stated why they felt great anxiety about the African American future in America. The document declared: “our cause may suffer even more from the injudicious concessions and weakness of our friends, than from the machinations and power of our enemies. The weakness of our friends is strength to our foes.”39 Later in the address, the document reiterates this

concern, stating, “The weakness and hesitation of our friends, where promptness and vigor were required, have invited the contempt and rigor of our enemies.”40 But the slowness and indirection of presumed allies, in the Abolitionists movement, in the Anti-Slavery political parties, in the actions of President Lincoln, and in the ambiguity of the Republican Party, were seen as manifestations of the “powerful reactionary forces arrayed against” African Americans. Thus, the address sought to describe these reactionary forces and explain their agents: The first and most powerful is slavery; and the second, which may be said to be the shadow of slavery, is prejudice against men on account of their color. The one controls the South, and the other controls the North. Both are original sources of power, and generate peculiar sentiments, ideas, and laws concerning us. The agents of these two evil influences are various: but the chief are, first, the Democratic party; and second, the Republican party. The Democratic party belongs to slavery; and the Republican party is largely under the power of prejudice against color. While gratefully recognizing a vast difference in our favor in the character and composition of the Republican party, . . . the Democratic party . . . is our bitterest enemy, and is positively and actively reactionary, the Republican party is negatively and passively so in its tendency. What we have to fear from these two parties . . . is, alas! only too obvious.41 To escape the calamities in the offing from these agents and friends, the NERL Address demanded that they wanted: “the elective franchise in all the States now in the Union, and the same in all such States as may come into the Union hereafter. . . . Whether the right to vote is a natural right or not, we are not here to determine . . . we claim to have fully earned the elective franchise; and that you, the American people, have virtually contracted an obligation to grant it.”42 Here, in clear and unmistaken terms, the NERL made their concerns known, and the only means of addressing them: African Americans receiving the ballot. The NERL Address sought to leave some intellectual food for reflection and thought to northerners: Are we good enough to use bullets, and not good enough to use ballots? May we defend rights in time of war, and yet be denied the exercise of those rights in time of peace? Are we citizens when the nation is in peril, and aliens when the nation is in safety? May we shed our blood under the Star-Spangled Banner on the battlefield, and yet be debarred from marching under it to the ballot-box? Will the brave white soldiers, bronzed by the hardships and exposures of repeated campaigns, men who have fought by the side of black men, be ashamed to cast their ballots by the side of their companions-in-arms? May we give our lives, but not our votes, for the good of the republic? Shall we toil with you to win the prize of free government, while you alone shall monopolize all its valued privileges?43 However, with all of these justifications and insights about the need for the elective franchise, the NERL Address let it be



The National Equal Rights League 199 Map 11.2  States of the Founding Convention of the National Equal Rights League, 1864

Washington Territory

ME Montana Territory

OR

NH Dakota Territory

Idaho Territory

NV

VT MN

Utah Territory

CA

NY

WI

RI

MI

Colorado Territory

IL

KS

CT NJ

PA

IA

Nebraska Territory

MA

OH

IN

DE MD DC

WV VA

MO

KY NC

Arizona Territory

Oklahoma Territory

New Mexico Territory

TN SC

AR MS

TX

AL

GA

LA

0

100 200 miles

FL The Founding Convention of the National Equal Rights League, 1864 States Represented by Participating Delegates

Source: “Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men (Syracuse, NY: 1864),” in Howard Holman Bell (ed.), Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions: 1830–1864 (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969).

Figure 11.2  The Cover of a Model Constitution Pamphlet Used by Local Branches of the National Equal Rights League

known that this paramount request was not just for themselves, the Free-Colored-Men-and-Women in the northern states. The NERL Address before it ended raised this question: “Now what is the natural counterpoise against this Southern malign hostility? This it is: give the elective franchise to every colored man of the South who is of sane mind, and has arrived at the age of twentyone years, and you have at once four millions of friends who will guard with their vigilance . . . the ark of Federal Liberty from the treason and pollution of her enemies.”44 In sum, the NERL wanted the elective franchise extended to “colored people of the whole country,” and it appealed to the supporters of the Union cause by promising that these new voters would uphold that cause. Why did the NERL make the case for the elective franchise for their southern brethren? The NERL Address stated the reason thusly: By calling them to take part with you in the war to subdue their rebellious masters, and the fact that thousands of them have so, and thousands more would gladly do so, you have exposed them to special resentment and wrath; which, without the elective franchise, will descend upon them in unmitigated fury.45

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On this matter in particular, the NERL was prophetic. White southerners did “descend upon them in unmitigated fury” and by 1908, through a variety of voting restrictions and Jim Crow laws, did strip them of the elective franchise and the protections of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. But the thoughtful insights and prophetic words in the NERL’s Address were not simply that, words without deeds. The Convention was quite aware of the lukewarm reception that President Lincoln had given six months earlier to the two African American delegates bearing a petition from a city convention in New Orleans for the enfranchisement of “southern blacks”46 Lincoln’s only response to the petition of over one thousand signatures had been to write a private letter to Governor Hahn of Louisiana, dated March 13, 1864, and ask him not to express publicly an opinion on his suggestion. 47 Next, these two New Orleans delegates had met with a select group of congressmen, and on March 15, 1864, Massachusetts Republican senator Charles Sumner presented their petition to the United States Senate for consideration. Although the group of congressman promised consideration, nothing took place in this year of President Lincoln’s reelection. But these two delegates did receive action from the African American community.

The First Annual NERL Meeting, 1865 Meeting in Syracuse on October 4–7, 1864, about a month before the 1864 presidential election and some seven months since the two New Orleans delegates had presented their petition to both the president and Congress and nothing had happened, the National Convention of Colored Men made it a central item on their agenda. Not only had the New Orleans delegates raised this issue of suffrage rights in a big way, this issue had long been a chief aim and goal of the National Negro Convention Movement. The two delegates had brought to the Free-Men-and-Womenof-Color the matter of suffrage rights from the southern states in the Civil War region of the South. Hence, the Syracuse Convention merged the two issue agendas (northern Free suffrage and southern Freedmen suffrage) and reacted by founding the NERL. The impetus for this new organization was their inclusion of the southern freedmen in their protest for suffrage rights. And this new NERL organization could use this now-national issue to try to influence both the presidential and congressional agendas as well as that of the Republican Party. This October Convention’s organizational creativity appeared just one month prior to the 1864 presidential election. Of the necessity for this organizational innovation, historian Steven Hahn has commented that “the issue of black suffrage, at this stage, had to be carried by blacks themselves. . . . Among the delegates in Syracuse were five from the State of Tennessee, where a movement for political equality had been growing in Nashville and Memphis since the time of federal occupation.”48 The historical roots for this agitation and protest lay in the Free Coloreds having had the right to vote in Tennessee until 1834 and in North Carolina until 1835. Thus, the two delegates from North Carolina could have joined with those from Louisiana and elsewhere in ensuring the emergence of the NERL to assist in the restoration of their suffrage rights in the Civil War period if they could impact the agendas of the major

parties and their leaders in the presidency and both houses of Congress. The formative document at the Syracuse Convention, which created the NERL, allowed for an Executive Council to run the new organization between annual meetings. Although the first meeting of this council was to be held about a month after the NERL had been created on November 24, 1864, in Philadelphia, there were not enough members present; no quorum existed and the meeting was postponed. Nevertheless, after this initial postponement, a meeting of the Executive Council did take place on March 14, 1865, in Philadelphia; and another on September 20–21, 1865, in Cleveland. At most of these Executive Council meetings, plans and agendas were developed for the first annual meeting of the NERL. Also taking place during these meetings were the establishment of sundry organizational committees and reacting to their reports and requests. Diagram 11.1 shows us that by the time of the first annual meeting of the NERL, there were seven standing committees inside this new organization. The Committee on Nominations obtained officers and committee members for the organization while the Committee of Business dealt with the issues, agendas, and the substantive problems facing the NERL, such as amendments to the organization’s constitution, petitions from individuals and affiliated groups, and sites for the next annual convention. The Committee on Finance oversaw individual and branch dues and the raising and allocation of funds for proposed projects and programs. The Committee on Statistics kept a census of the organization and its branches through membership rolls. The Committee on Credentials kept track of approved delegates coming to annual meetings based on a list of members and approved delegates sent from each state branch, turning individuals away who were not regular dues-paying members in good standing. The Committee on Publications gathered each of the annual Proceedings of the NERL and had them printed.49 Hence, with this organizational structure in place and numerous state branches across the county, the NERL was set to help place on the national agenda, suffrage rights for the potential African American electorate. To undertake this opportunity to exert some influence on the different branches of the national government, the NERL elected not a protest leader such as Douglass, but one of a very few African American elective leaders prior to the Civil War, John Mercer Langston, who had been elected to a Township Clerk office in Ohio and was a member of the Ohio Bar as a practicing attorney. Table 11.4 lists the organizational positions in this new African American protest organization, those who were elected to these positions, and the states from which these leaders came. Of the six types of positions in the organization’s infrastructure, Pennsylvania delegates served in four of them. In fact, of the twenty-four official positions in the NERL , Pennsylvania delegates served in eight of them (33.3%). Besides Pennsylvania, Ohio delegates held three official positions (12.5%), while New York, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Virginia delegates each held two positions (8.3%), and the remainder of the states’ delegates held one (4.2%) position each. Map 11.3 (p. 202) provides a visual geopolitical



The National Equal Rights League 201 Diagram 11.1  The Standing Committees of the National Equal Rights League

National Equal Rights League

Executive Committee

Committee on Nominations

Committee on Business

Committee on Finance

Committee on Statistics

Committee on Credentials

Committee on Publications

Committee on Education

Source: Adapted from National Equal Rights League, Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of The National Equal Rights League (Philadelphia: E. C. Markley & Sons, 1865).

Table 11.4  Leadership and Organizational Structure of the National Equal Rights League at the First Annual Meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, October 19–21, 1865 Organization Position

Name

State

President

John M. Langston

Ohio

Vice Presidents

William Nesbit Frederick Douglass Arthur Young David Jenkins J. Henry Harris Robert W. Johnson Samuel G. Gould D. B. F. Price Abram J. Morrison (VACANT)

Pennsylvania New York Tennessee Ohio North Carolina Virginia New Jersey Illinois Connecticut Michigan

Recording Secretaries

St. George R. Taylor Octavius V. Cato

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania

Corresponding Secretary

George B. Vashon

Pennsylvania

Treasurer

Jermain W. Loguen

New York

Executive Committee

James McC. Crummill William D. Forten O. L. C. Hughes Elisha Weaver R. J. Robinson William Keeling John D. Richards Abram Smith Samuel G. Gould

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania Pennsylvania Pennsylvania Ohio Virginia Michigan Tennessee New Jersey

Source: National Equal Rights League, Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the National Equal Rights League, Held in Cleveland, Ohio on October 19–21, 1865, (Philadelphia: E. C. Markley and Sons, 1865), pp. 24–25.

perspective of these different states where branches of the NERL were located and the states where the delegates came from when it was first formed. In addition, given that the Civil War was now over, Map 11.3 shows that only four southern states—North Carolina, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia—had branches and delegates; and two border states, Kentucky and Maryland, had branches and delegates; whereas most of the other eastern and midwestern states did. Thus, the NERL within one year of its founding had a presence almost throughout the nation. In between the founding of the NERL at the Syracuse Convention in October 1864 and its first annual convention in October 1865, its President Langston almost singlehandedly created local and state chapters in the midwestern states of Ohio and Michigan; in the eastern states of New York and Pennsylvania; the border state of Missouri; and the southern states of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Louisiana. Thus, his voter rights activism leadership accounts for some eight of the seventeen states in Map 11.3.50 The NERL Executive Council issued the call for the formations of these state leagues on December 23, 1864.51

NERL’s Efforts from Late 1865 to the 1867 Military Reconstruction Acts Meanwhile, in November 1864, Abraham Lincoln had won both a popular and electoral vote victory, gaining a second term with endorsement and support from both the voting and non-voting African American community throughout the nation. But in the aftermath of this political success, President Lincoln did not publicly address the elective franchise for African Americans until April 11, 1865, three days before his assassination on April 14, 1865.

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Map 11.3  Branch States of the National Equal Rights League, 1865

Washington Territory

ME Montana Territory

VT

Idaho Territory

NV CA

MN

Dakota Territory

OR

WI

Arizona Territory

CT

MI

IN

MO

KS

Oklahoma Territory

KY

RI

DE MD DC

VA NC

TN SC

AR MS

TX

WV

MA

NJ

OH IL

Colorado Territory

New Mexico Territory

PA

IA

Nebraska Territory Utah Territory

NY

NH

AL

GA

0

LA

100 200 miles

FL

National Equal Rights League, 1865 States with NERL Branches Source: Adapted from “National Equal Rights League,” http://www.bookrags.com/tandf/national-equal-rights-league-tf/, accessed February 1, 2011; and National Equal Rights League, Proceedings of the First Annual Convention of the National Equal Rights League, Held in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 19–21, 1865 (Philadelphia: E. C. Markley and Sons, 1865), pp. 24–25.

“In his last public speech . . . Lincoln told a crowd at the White House that he would be pleased if Louisiana enfranchised at least its literate black citizens and those who had borne arms for the Union, but he refused to make this a condition for Louisiana’s readmission” to the Union.52 By implication, it would not be made a condition for the other former Confederate states’ readmission to the Union. Thus, in both his private letter to Governor Hahn and now in his first public speech on the topic, President Lincoln had a “whites-only ballot policy.”53 And with his death, the matter passed to his former vice president, Andrew Johnson. On April 18, 1865, NERL President Langston went to lobby the new president, who replaced President Lincoln on April 15. Langston asked President Johnson not only for suffrage rights for the freedmen but also for their civil rights. President Langston and the NERL were rebuffed. Various Republican congressional leaders also met with the new president on this matter of the elective franchise for all African Americans, and at first the signs seemed hopeful: President “Johnson listened attentively to radical pleas and

showed no sign of opposition.” But soon his true feelings and intentions became clear. President Johnson on May 29, 1865, a month and half after Lincoln’s death, “laid out for the southern states the minimum conditions they had to meet for readmission: the abolition of slavery, the nullification of secession, and the repudiation of all state debts incurred during the period of the Confederacy. He did not endorse black suffrage.”54 This can vividly be seen in Johnson’s “Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction”55 shown below in Document 11.2 and compared and contrasted with Lincoln’s “Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction” shown below in Document 11.1.56 Neither one of these presidents had in their plans for the reconstruction of the South any reference to either universal or partial suffrage that would have included the southern freedmen. And students of voting rights for the African American electorate can see both of the presidential documents and what these presidents actually did in the legal documents to reconstruct the South. In these two documents, each president had a “whites-only-ballot” policy.



The National Equal Rights League 203

Document 11.1 The Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction By the President of the United States of America: A Proclamation. WHEREAS, in and by the Constitution of the United States, it is provided that the President “shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offences against the United States, except in cases of impeachment;” and Whereas, a rebellion now exists whereby the loyal state governments of several states have for a long time been subverted, and many persons have committed, and are now guilty of, treason against the United States; and Whereas, with reference to said rebellion and treason, laws have been enacted by congress, declaring forfeitures and confiscation of property and liberation of slaves, all upon terms and conditions therein stated, also declaring that the President was thereby authorized at any time thereafter, by proclamation, to extend to persons who may have participated in the existing rebellion, in any state or part thereof, pardon and amnesty, with such exceptions and at such times and on such conditions as he may deem expedient for the public welfare; and Whereas, the congressional declaration for limited and conditional pardon accords with well established judicial exposition of the pardoning power; and Whereas, with reference to said rebellion, the President of the United States has issued several proclamations, with provisions in regard to the liberation of slaves; and Whereas, it is now desired by some persons heretofore engaged in said rebellion to resume their allegiance to the United States, and to reinaugurate loyal state governments within and for their respective states: Therefore— I, ABRAHAM LINCOLN, President of the United States, do proclaim, declare, and make known to all persons who have, directly or by implication, participated in the existing rebellion, except as hereinafter excepted, that a full pardon is hereby granted to them and each of them, with restoration of all rights of property, except as to slaves, and in property cases where rights of third parties shall have intervened, and upon the condition that every such person shall take and subscribe an oath, and thenceforward keep and maintain said oath inviolate; and which oath shall be registered for permanent preservation, and shall be of the tenor and effect following, to wit:— “I, _____ _____, do solemnly swear, in presence of Almighty God, that I will henceforth faithfully support, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Union of the States thereunder; and that I will, in like manner, abide by and faithfully support all acts of congress passed during the existing rebellion with reference to slaves, so long and so far as not repealed, modified, or held void by congress, or by a decision of the supreme court; and that I will, in like manner, abide by and faithfully support all proclamations of the President made during the existing rebellion having reference to slaves, so long and so far as not modified or declared void by decision of the supreme court. So help me God.” The persons excepted from the benefits of the foregoing provisions are all who are, or shall have been, civil or diplomatic officers or agents of the so-called Confederate government; all who have left judicial stations under the United States to aid the rebellion; all who are, or shall have been, military or naval officers of said so-called Confederate government above the rank of colonel in the army or of lieutenant in the navy; all who left seats in the United States congress to aid the rebellion; all who resigned commissions in the army or navy of the United States and afterwards aided the rebellion; and all who have engaged in any way in treating colored persons, or white persons in charge of such, otherwise than lawfully as prisoners of war, and which persons may have been found in the United States service as soldiers, seamen, or in any other capacity. And I do further proclaim, declare, and make known that whenever, in any of the States of Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and North Carolina, a number of persons, not less than one tenth in number of the votes cast in such state at the presidential election of the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty, each having taken the oath aforesaid, and not having since violated it, and being a qualified voter by the election law of the state existing immediately before the so-called act of secession, and excluding all others, shall reestablish a state government which shall be republican, and in nowise contravening said oath, such shall be recognized as the true government of the state, and the state shall receive thereunder the benefits of the constitutional provision which declares that “the United States shall guaranty to every state in this Union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on application of the legislature, or the executive, (when the legislature cannot be convened,) against domestic violence.” And I do further proclaim, declare, and make known that any provision which may be adopted by such state government in relation to freed people of such state, which shall recognize and declare their permanent freedom, provide for their education, and which may yet be consistent as a temporary arrangement with their present condition as laboring, landless, and homeless class, will not be objected to by the National Executive. And it is suggested as not improper that, in constructing a loyal state government in any state, the name of the state, the boundary, the subdivisions, the constitution, and the general code of laws, as before the rebellion, be maintained, subject only the modifications made necessary by the conditions herein­ before stated, and such others, if any, not contravening said conditions, and which may be deemed expedient by those framing the new state government. To avoid misunderstanding, it may be proper to say that this proclamation, so far as it relates to state governments, has no reference to states wherein loyal state governments have all the while been maintained. And, for the same reason, it may be proper to further say, that whether members sent to congress from any state shall be admitted to seats constitutionally rests exclusively with the respective houses, and not to any extent with the Executive. And still further, that this proclamation is intended to present the people of the states wherein the national authority has been suspended, (Continued)

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(Continued) and loyal state governments may be reestablished within said states, or in any of them; and while the mode presented is the best the Executive can suggest, with his present impressions, it must not be understood that no other possible mode would be acceptable. Given under my hand at the city of Washington the eighth day of December, A.D. one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the eighty-eighth. Abraham Lincoln. Source: Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings 1859–1865: Speeches, Letters, and Miscellaneous Writings, Presidential Messages and Proclamations (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1989).

Document 11.2 The Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction Whereas, the President of the United States, the 8th day of December, A.D. 1863, and on the 26th day of March, A.D. 1864, did, with the object to suppress the existing rebellion, to induce all persons to return to their loyalty, and to restore the authority of the United States, issue proclamations offering amnesty and pardon to certain persons who had, directly or by implication, participated in the said rebellion; and Whereas, many persons who had so engaged in said rebellion have, since the issuance of said proclamations, failed or neglected to take the benefits offered thereby; and Whereas, many persons who have been justly deprived of all claim to amnesty and pardon thereunder by reason of their participation, directly or by implication, in said rebellion and continued hostility to the Government of the United States since the date of said proclamations now desire to apply for and obtain amnesty and pardon. To the end, therefore, that the authority of the Government of the United States may be restored and that peace, order, and freedom may be established, I, Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, do proclaim and declare that I hereby grant to all persons who have, directly or indirectly, participated in the existing rebellion, except as hereinafter excepted, amnesty and pardon, with restoration of all rights of property, except as to slaves and except in cases where legal proceedings under the laws of the United States providing for the confiscation of property of persons engaged in rebellion have been instituted; but upon the condition, nevertheless, that every such person shall take and subscribe the following oath (or affirmation) and thenceforward keep and maintain said oath inviolate, and which oath shall be registered for permanent preservation and shall be of the tenor and effect following, to wit: I, ___________, do solemnly swear (or affirm), in presence of Almighty God, that I will henceforth faithfully support, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Union of the States thereunder, and that I will in like manner abide by and faithfully support all laws and proclamations which have been made during the existing rebellion with reference to the emancipation of slaves. So help me God. The following classes of persons are excepted from the benefits of this proclamation: First. All who are or shall have been pretended civil or diplomatic officers or otherwise domestic or foreign agents of the pretended Confederate government. Second. All who left judicial stations under the United States to aid the rebellion. Third. All who shall have been military or naval officers of said pretended Confederate government above the rank of colonel in the army or lieutenant in the navy. Fourth. All who left seats in the Congress of the United States to aid the rebellion. Fifth. All who resigned or tendered resignations of their commissions in the Army or Navy of the United States to evade duty in resisting the rebellion. Sixth. All who have engaged in any way in treating otherwise than lawfully as prisoners of war persons found in the United States service as officers, soldiers, seamen, or in other capacities. Seventh. All persons who have been or are absentees from the United States for the purpose of aiding the rebellion. Eighth. All military and naval officers in the rebel service who were educated by the Government in the Military Academy at West Point or the United States Naval Academy. Ninth. All persons who held the pretended offices of governors of States in insurrection against the United States.



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Tenth. All persons who left their homes within the jurisdiction and protection of the United States and passed beyond the Federal military lines into the pretended Confederate States for the purpose of aiding the rebellion. Eleventh. All persons who have been engaged in the destruction of the commerce of the United States upon the high seas and all persons who have made raids into the United States from Canada or been engaged in destroying the commerce of the United States upon the lakes and rivers that separate the British Provinces from the United States. Twelfth. All persons who, at the time when they seek to obtain the benefits hereof by taking the oath herein prescribed, are in military, naval, or civil confinement or custody, or under bonds of the civil, military, or naval authorities or agents of the United States as prisoners of war, or persons detained for offenses of any kind, either before or after conviction. Thirteenth. All persons who have voluntarily participated in said rebellion and the estimated value of whose taxable property is over $20,000. Fourteenth. All persons who have taken the oath of amnesty as prescribed in the President’s proclamation of December 8, A.D. 1863, or an oath of allegiance to the Government of the United States since the date of said proclamation and who have not thenceforward kept and maintained the same inviolate. Provided, That special application may be made to the President for pardon by any person belonging to the excepted classes, and such clemency will be liberally extended as may be consistent with the facts of the case and the peace and dignity of the United States. The Secretary of State will establish rules and regulations for administering and recording the said amnesty oath, so as to insure its benefit to the people and guard the Government against fraud. In testimony whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed. Done at the city of Washington, the 29th day of May, A.D. 1865, and of the Independence of the United States the eighty-ninth. Andrew Johnson Source: John Savage, The Life and Public Services of Andrew Johnson Including His State Papers, Speeches, and Addresses (New York: Derby & Miller, 1866).

Later, in his first annual message to Congress in December 1865, President Johnson told them “he had no right to impose black suffrage on the South, although he held out the prospect of future state action to expand suffrage.”57 When his approach became publicly clear “on February 7, 1866, a NERL delegation led by Douglass called on President Johnson to express their hope that Negroes would soon obtain full enfranchisement. But the President rejected the idea, insisting that the states, not Congress or the President, should decide who could vote. And finally, Johnson argued the solution to the Negroes’ problems lay not in the ballot but in the emigration of Negroes from the South.”58 Upon hearing these negative comments, the Douglass delegation “left the White House and met with a group of Radical Republican Congressmen, who gave the idea of Negro enfranchisement a sympathetic hearing.”59 Nine months later, the Senate acted on this matter on December 13, 1866, by passing the “District of Columbia Suffrage bill . . . with a strict partisan vote. . . . The next day, the House passed the bill again by a strict partisan vote of 188 to 46.”60 However, “President Andrew Johnson vetoed the bill on January 7, 1867. . . . Republican congressman retaliated by overriding the presidential veto on January 8, 1867.”61 With such an overwhelming Republican majority, NERL lobbying of the presidency was unnecessary because lobbying Congress had proven successful, and the federal government was on its way to granting the elective franchise to its new African American citizens. The final tactic of the NERL, merging with the women suffragettes in May, 1866, to form “the American Equal Rights Association [AERA], whose chief objective was extension of

suffrage to Negroes and to all women,” did not survive long enough to see suffrage rights given to African American men with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in March, 1870.62 Although Douglass after the merger was made one of the vice presidents of the AERA, “women suffragettes raised the question of whose rights came first. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton insisted that women were being neglected. The showdown between supporters and opponents of the 15th Amendment came at the annual meeting of the American Equal Rights Association in New York City early in May, 1869.”63 At this meeting, the merger collapsed, and white women suffragettes decided to go their separate ways. The delegates refused to endorse ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment and virtually expelled Frederick Douglass and all supporters of the Amendment. The Association disbanded and two rival women’s groups were set up to fight each other on behalf of women’s suffrage. Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton organized the National Women Suffrage Association, soon announcing that Negroes should not vote until women did, that impartial not universal suffrage should be endorsed, and that opposition to the Amendment and co-operation with the Democrats should be encouraged. Lucy Stone, who had fought Negro suffrage before, organized a rival group, the American Woman’s Suffrage Association, which would not compromise its principle of expanded impartial suffrage by opposition to Negro suffrage and pre-occupation with women’s suffrage alone.64

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Despite the loss of this ally, the NERL, its rising number of state affiliates, and strong individual national leaders like Douglass, Truth, and Langston continued to lobby the Congress as well as state and local leaders for the elective franchise. In fact, prior to the departure of the women suffragettes, the NERL had acquired a group of Republican congressional sponsors, both radicals and moderates, who were motivated by reformism, abolitionism, partisanship, idealism and power, and who began to sponsor legislation that would give the federal government a role and function in extending the elective franchise.65 The legislation giving Free-Men-of-Color the ballot in the District of Columbia was just a harbinger of things to come. Despite all of these organizational and leadership efforts of the NERL, the current extant literature on this national organization is the 1865 Proceedings. Thus, due to this lack of historical information on the national organization, one must follow it through the extant literature on some of its state chapters and branches between 1865 and its re-creation in 1869.66 For example, the history of the Pennsylvania Equal Rights League includes the fate of one of the founding members of the NERL at the Syracuse Convention, college graduate Octavius V. Catto. Catto offered such energetic voter rights activism and leadership in trying to get Pennsylvania to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment, which it did on March 25, 1869, that he was later publicly murdered “on Election Day, October 10, 1871” by a white Democrat, Frank Kelley, who did not want African Americans voting in the city of Philadelphia elections. An all white jury set Kelley free.67 In the 1870 census, the estimated number of African American voters, using the scholarly consensus of one-fifth of the African American population, stood at 13,059.68 These voters owed their franchise to a series of unprecedented actions by Congress in the preceding years, which emerged in part from the lobbying and protest activities of the NERL and the Convention Movement leaders.

The NERL, Congress, and the Elective Franchise for Southern Freedmen: The Four Military Reconstruction Acts of 1867 The NERL’s founding request in its first Address to “give the elective franchise to every colored man of the South” became a political possibility due to the Republican party’s gain of 37 congressional seats in the midterm elections of 1866, while the Democrats lost 40 seats—37 to the Republicans and 3 to other parties.69 In the prior congressional session Republicans had maintained a 56.3% majority in the House of Representatives, but with their victory in 1866 they had gained a 75.5% majority, allowing greater room to make and experiment with new legislative initiatives and enabling them to override a presidential veto if necessary (which it was in the case of African American suffrage). They had this increase not only in the House of Representatives but in the U.S. Senate as well. In the prior Senate session, the Republicans had 40 seats to the Democrats’ 11. After the 1866 midterm elections the Republicans had 57 seats to the Democrats’ 9, a whopping 86.4% majority. And these new congressional majorities allowed them to pass the innovative District of Columbia Suffrage bill after a suffrage referendum in the District

failed by a very wide margin to give Free-Men-of-Color the right to vote. The idea behind this legislation was that the federal government had the right and power to grant suffrage rights in territories under federal control. Another set of factors driving the Republican congressional leaders to innovate, according to Professor John Hope Franklin, was Congress’s frustration with President Johnson’s veto of two of their bills. “President Johnson vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau bill on the grounds that it was unconstitutional and proposed to do more for blacks than had ever been done for whites. The attempt to override the veto failed.” Next, the president “vetoed the civil rights bill and declared that blacks were not ready for the privileges and equalities of citizens.” Thus, from Professor Franklin’s evidence, “Johnson’s veto of these two bills, his condemnation of the proposed Fourteenth Amendment, and his attack on Stevens, Sumner, and other Northern leaders, put Congress in an angry mood. Consequently, on April 9, 1866, it passed the civil rights bill over his veto,” with these enlarged majorities.70 Therefore, with this new suffrage bill for the District of Columbia and the shown ability to override President Johnson’s veto, Congress moved to pass legislation giving Free-Men-ofColor the elective franchise in other federal territories. Thus, two days after having passed the District of Columbia suffrage bill, the Senate on January 10, 1867, passed legislation enfranchising Free-Men-of-Color in all of the federal territories. “On the same day it was supported by the House, President Johnson, apparently in a state of resignation after the District of Columbia defeat, acquiesced, and Negroes after January 31, 1867, had the formal right to vote in federal territories” such as Colorado and Dakota.71 Just prior to this territorial action, Congress made as a condition of the Nebraska Territory becoming a state that it must enfranchise Free-Men-of-Color. “On January 30, 1867, President Johnson vetoed the measure, but Congress again ignored presidential opposition and overrode the veto on February 9. Strongly Republican, the Nebraska legislature accepted Negro suffrage and Nebraska was admitted into the Union as the thirtyseventh state. Although the Nebraska and Colorado admission bills were passed separately, both had a suffrage requirement, but the Senate failed to override President Johnson’s veto on the Colorado.”72 Thus, “in one month all the territorial subdivisions under the direct control of Congress had received Negro suffrage.”73 The lobby action of the NERL was important in transforming the political landscape and setting the stage for the elective franchise for southern blacks. These innovative legislative suffrage acts “established a precedent for national enactment of black suffrage, at least in the federal territories,” as well as for the admission of new states to the Union.74 Hence, the legislative principles and federal power conveyed by these laws suggested that such actions could be applied to the question of the readmission of the Confederate states back to the Union. Thus, it should come as no surprise that on February 6 the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867 was introduced, requiring African American suffrage in the former Confederate states. After a host of changes, modifications, and substitutes, “on March 2, 1867, despite Johnson’s veto, the bill became law, finally making black suffrage the indispensable

constitutional requirement for Reconstruction.”75 Under this bill, the First Reconstruction Act of March 2, 1867, “Congress now required Negro suffrage as a condition for readmitting the former Confederate states to the Union and seating their Representatives in Congress.”76 There was now universal suffrage for the freedmen in the South. The NERL had seen one of its two major demands on the elective franchise come to fruition, thanks in part to the farsighted vision of its leadership on the national, state, and local levels. Ironically, African American voters in the South and territories had garnered the right to vote before their northern counterparts, who had been struggling for this right since the Colonial Era. The key congressman was Thaddeus Stevens, Republican from Pennsylvania, who initially opposed full suffrage rights for the freedmen even though he received strong lobbying from the Convention Movement, the NERL, and civil rights leaders like Douglass. Once President Johnson’s reconstruction policy so strongly favored the South and the Confederate leaders, Congressmen Stevens reversed himself and became a “radical” Republican on the subject and supported full suffrage rights. Without extensive readings of diaries and papers of the radical Republicans, as well as the papers of NERL leader like Langston and the parent organization leader Douglass, it is not possible to assess how much of the victory should be credited to them. But both leaders of NERL and others from the organization did meet with the congressional Republicans who were sympathetic to their cause. Very few books, monographs, and articles adequately acknowledge the “agency” and “voice” of African Americans in the budding voter rights legislations process. The old story—the role of the Radical Republicans, President Grant, and the ineptitude of southern leadership, or some combination of these—is incomplete. Finally, this elective franchise for southern and territorial African Americans set the stage for the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in March 1870, which would provide universal suffrage for African American males in the entire nation. After the success of the Military Reconstruction Acts in enfranchising southern freedmen, President Langston had moved on to legal academia, and NERL ceased to be active at the national level and was active only sporadically on the state and local level. But there was so much opposition to this new proposed Amendment from the Democratic Party leadership in both the Congress and all of the state governments that African Americans once again decided to revive the NERL. Hence, this new possibility for the franchise outside of the South led to a rebirth of the organization.

The Rebirth and Recreation of the NERL: The 1869 National Convention of the Colored Men of America The call to hold another National Convention of Colored Men began: “On the 4th and 5th of August, 1868, a Convention of Delegates from the ‘Border States’ was held at Baltimore, Md.” It proposed that the next convention “be held in the City of Washington, D.C., at 12 o’clock . . . on the second Wednesday, 13th day of January, 1869.”77 To this confab, African American male delegates were invited from other states, and representatives arrived from twenty-one states and the District of Columbia. The conference was also notable for including an African American

The National Equal Rights League 207 female delegate, Miss H. C. Johnson of Alleghany County (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania, and two white governors who attended as observers. Johnson, only the second woman delegate at such a convention (Mrs. Mary Shadd in 1855 being the first), had been accepted and approved by the Committee, on Credentials on the first day of the Convention. But on the second day of the Convention when the Chairman of the Committee, Mr. George B. Vashon, again mentioned her name in his additional report, objections arouse in the following manner: Mr. F[ields] Cook [delegate of Virginia] objected to admitting women, as he understood the call for this convention to be expressly for colored men. Mr. H. J. Brown, [delegate] of Maryland, was in favor of admitting Miss Johnson, the learned and accomplished lady of Alleghany. He wanted them to know that this was a progressive age, and that women would yet have a vote. Mr. [George] Mabson [delegate of North Carolina and one of the twenty Vice Presidents of the Convention] arose, when the Chair [of the Credentials Committee] stated that he wished to announce the names of the committees. Mr. [Reverend Henry Highland] Garnett [delegate of Pennsylvania] insisted on having the question of admitting Miss Johnson settled immediately. The Chair called the gentleman to order. The Chair then announced the following committees.78 Despite the action of the Chair to avoid the question of accepting Miss Johnson as an approved delegate, after the membership of the Business, Rules, and Finance committees had been announced and this report of the Credentials Committee had been adopted, Vice President Mabson once again raised his objection. He argued thusly: Mr. Mabson insisted that while the men had the helm in their own hands they should retain it, and moved that the report be adopted, excepting the name of Miss Johnson. Dr. Brown moved to lay the motion on the table. Mr. [D. B.] Bowers, [delegate] of Pennsylvania, agreed with Mr. Mabson. Mr. [George T.] Downing [delegate of Rhode Island] cautioned them as to how they acted in regard to admitting or rejecting the lady. He was sorry that she had presented herself, but could not vote against admitting her to a seat. Mr. Brown, of Pennsylvania, said that as a Delegate, he owed his election to 50 ladies of Philadelphia, and hoped the lady would be admitted. Mr. J. M. Simms [delegate of Georgia] called their attention to the fact that on Wednesday they had passed a resolution admitting all duly elected Delegates. Mr. I.C. Weir [delegate of Pennsylvania] stood here as an advocate of woman’s suffrage, and to exclude them from seats in this Convention would be too much like

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the actions of the occupants of the White House, who had excluded the colored race for two hundred years. Rev. J. Sella Martin, [delegate] of New York, hoped the Convention would throw all prejudices aside and admit the lady, as a Delegate to the Convention. They were not tied down to any conventionalities [sic]—they had no right to exclude any Delegate, as it was a Convention of men, and the term ”men” in the Bible meant men and women. Mr. Alexander Clark [delegate of Iowa] favored the admission of Miss Johnson or any other lady. Mr. Weir called for the previous question, and it was put and carried.79 Despite the fact that Miss Johnson had now been fully accepted as a delegate, one member of the Louisiana delegation who didn’t arrive until the third day, Friday, January 15, 1869, John Willis Menard, one of the first African Americans to be elected to Congress (although his election had been rejected by the House of Representatives),80 brought up the matter of Miss Johnson again in the evening session. “Mr. J. W. Menard, of [the Louisiana] Delegation, was introduced by J. M. Langston, and said that he was sorry to find himself disappointed in the material of the Convention. . . . He regretted to find them so disorderly, and that they were saying nothing about woman suffrage. He regretted that he had not been here to vote for the admission of Miss Johnson, of Pennsylvania. He thought the greatest lever in their way was in themselves. All wanted to be big men.”81 Obviously, Mr. Menard was not aware of the Convention’s earlier action accepting Ms. Johnson. Moreover, here we not only learn how the dynamic within this Convention of males played out in accepting Miss Johnson but also gain some sense and perspective on how African American males responded to this matter of gender inclusion in their national organizations with linkages to voting rights activism both before and after the Civil War. Governor Samuel Merrill of Iowa sent his Governor’s Proclamation about the results of the recent statewide referendum that gave the African American electorate in the state the right to vote by deleting the word “white” from the state constitution. The U.S. senator from Iowa James Harlan “made a brief but interesting speech” about the Proclamation “and closed with a recital of the closing acts to the grand victory, in the State of Iowa, amidst enthusiastic applause and his name was enrolled.”82 Delegate Clark of Iowa gave the Convention a copy for their records and official published Proceedings.83 The governor of Mississippi, after it was announced that he was in attendance, was “invited” to come “forward, but the Governor made an apology for his inability to make a speech on this occasion.”84 The Convention voted the whites in attendance—these Governors, a U.S. Senator, several members of the House of Representatives, and some other whites who had been abolitionists—as Honorary Members of the Convention.85 Also present were Frederick Douglass, Jr., and some African American elected officials from Louisiana and Georgia. Table 11.5 gives the different regions from which the 183 delegates came as well as the twenty-one states and the District of Columbia. The largest number of delegates came from the

Table 11.5  Delegate States and Number of Delegates to the National Convention of Colored Men of America, 1869 Number of Convention Delegates

Percent of All Delegates

Region

State

Border

Delaware

5

Kentucky

1

0.5%

Maryland

33

18.0%

3

1.6%

Subtotal—4 states

42

23.0%

Mean

10.5

5.7%

Median

4.0

2.2%

Alabama

6

3.3%

Florida

1

0.5%

Georgia

3

1.6%

11

6.0%

Mississippi

1

0.5%

North Carolina

4

2.2%

Tennessee

3

1.6%

Virginia

11

6.0%

Subtotal—8 states

40

21.9%

West Virginia

Southern

Louisiana

Other

Mean

5.0

2.7%

Median

3.5

1.9%

District of Columbia Illinois Iowa Kansas Massachusetts New Jersey New York Ohio Pennsylvania Rhode Island

19 2 1 1 3 8 12 6 44 5

10.4% 1.1% 0.5% 0.5% 1.6% 4.4% 6.6% 3.3% 24.0% 2.7%

Subtotal—10 states

101

55.2%

Mean Median Nation

2.7% 

Total—22 states

10.1

5.5%

5.5

3.0%

183

100%

Mean

8.3

4.5%

Median

4.5

2.5%

Source: Adapted from National Convention of Colored Men of America, Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men of America, Held in Washington, DC on January 13–16, 1869, pp. 6–8. Calculations by the authors.

regions (Other) beyond the South and the Border states. There were 101 delegates from these regions and they accounted for 55.2% of the total. The Border states, which made the call for this 1869 Convention, sent 42 delegates for 23%, and the South sent 40 delegates for 21.9%. At the state level, Pennsylvania sent 44 delegates (43 men and 1 female), followed by Maryland with 33 delegates, the District of Columbia with 19 delegates, New York with 12, and Louisiana and Virginia with 11 each. Nationally, this works out to a mean percentage of 4.5% and a median of 2.5% of delegates from each attending state.



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Map 11.4 shows the locations of the twenty-one states and the District of Columbia that sent delegates to the 1869 Convention, as well as the number of delegates sent from each of the states and the District. Only four of the New England states were missing, even though three of the four (not Connecticut) had given the Free-Men-of-Color the right to vote. And in the South, Arkansas, South Carolina, and Texas did not send any delegates. Among the Border states there was no one from Missouri, nor from the midwestern states of Indiana and Michigan. Otherwise, there was almost complete representation from the East to the Midwest. Finally, Figure 11.3 (p. 210) ranks the states and the District of Columbia by number of delegates, running from the highest number of delegates, Pennsylvania with 44; to five states with only one delegate each; two southern states, Florida and Mississippi; one Border state, Kentucky; and two midwestern states, Iowa and Kansas. Beyond the political geography and the demographics of representation in the 1869 Convention, the call for this National Convention of Colored Men was motivated by the fact that “the

partial or total exclusion of colored citizens from the exercise of the elective franchise and other citizens rights, in so many States of the Union, especially demands, and ought to receive, the continued consideration of every colored man, and of the Congress of the nation”86 At this point in time, January 13–16, 1869, the freedmen in the South had been given the right to vote by the Military Reconstruction Acts, and most had not only participated in state and local elections but also in the 1868 presidential elections in most of the southern states. Besides these southern states, the traditional six northern states plus Iowa and Minnesota allowed African American suffrage. Elsewhere in the nation the African American electorate did not have the right to vote— hence, the need for the Fifteenth Amendment. Given the motivation and the need for acquiring suffrage rights for the African American electorate, and the fact that post–Civil War state referenda procedures had failed in many places, the NERL in its initial formation under the dynamic and aggressive leadership of President Langston had sought federal intervention on this new problem. Federal intervention had gained the vote first for the freedmen in the District of Columbia

Map 11.4  Delegate States and Number of Delegates to the National Convention of Colored Men of America, 1869

Washington Territory

OR

ME Montana Territory

Dakota Territory

Idaho Territory

NY (12)

MN WI MI

Wyoming Territory

Utah Territory

CA

Arizona Territory

Colorado Territory

NH CT

PA (44)

RI (5)

IL (2)

KS (1)

Oklahoma Territory

New Mexico Territory

IN

MO

KY (1)

AR AL (6)

DC (19)

1)

VA (1

NC (4)

TN (3)

MS (1)

NJ (8) DE (5) MD (33)

OH (6) WV (3)

SC GA (3)

TX LA (11) Delegate State

MA (3)

IA (1) NE

NV

VT

0 FL (1)

100 200 miles

Bubble Chart of Delegation State (Number of Delegates) 50 25 5 Source: Adapted from National Convention of Colored Men of America, Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men of America, Held in Washington, DC on January 13–16, 1869, pp. 6–8. Calculations by the authors.

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Figure 11.3  Number of Delegates to the National Convention of Colored Men by State, 1869 50 45

44

40

Number of Delegates

35

33

30 25 20 15 10 5

19

12

11

11 8

6

6

5

5

4

3

3

3

3

2

1

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1

Pe nn sy lva ni Di a M st ar ric t o yla nd fC ol um b Ne ia w Yo Lo rk ui sia na Vi rg in Ne ia w Je rs ey Al ab am a Oh De io la R h wa re od e Is No rth land Ca ro lin a G M e or as gi sa ch a us Te etts nn W ess es e tV e irg in ia Ill in oi s Flo rid a Io w a Ka ns Ke as nt uc M iss ky iss ip pi

0

Source: Table 11.5

and then for the federal territories and finally for the southern freedmen. Langston returned to the 1869 Convention when reviving the defunct national organization was being considered, and he took an active role. Langston attended meetings on all four days of the Convention, in committee formations, committee memberships, debates on finances, seeking honorary membership for whites like General O. O. Howard, the founder of Howard University, introducing speakers like John Willis Menard from Louisiana, recommending that delegates “remaining in the city, and citizens generally, meet at the Church [Israel Bethel Church], on Monday evening next, for the purpose of expressing their regard and esteem for the late Thaddeus Stevens,” the anti-slavery congressman from Pennsylvania,87 and making a motion to create a committee of nine members to meet with and congratulate incoming President-Elect Ulysses S. Grant and Vice President-Elect (and former Speaker of the House of Representatives) Schuyler Colfax.88 As chairman of this presidential congratulatory committee Langston held an interview with President-Elect Grant on Tuesday morning after the Convention at ten o’clock in the morning. Langston told Grant that they were speaking to him in the name of the “seven hundred thousand electors of African descent— electors who braved threats, . . . intimidations . . . assassination and murder . . . to secure . . . the elections of the nominees of the national Republican party to . . . high places.”89 Chairman Lang­ ston further stated that these voters looked to Grant to “execute

the laws already enacted and [those] to be enacted . . . to conserve and protect the life, the liberty, the rights . . . of the humblest subject,” the freedman.”90 President-Elect Grant in his response promised to do so. After being introduced individually to the president-elect, the Langston-led committee went over to the House of Representatives to hold an interview with Vice President-Elect Colfax. There Langston said to the former Speaker that “with full knowledge of the record which you have made by your efforts in favor of emancipation and enfranchisement of the people whom we represent, it is with profound satisfaction and pleasure that we bring you the congratulations, the sympathy and prayers of our people for the success of” your administration.91 In his response Colfax promised to do all that he could do which public sentiments would allow. After being introduced individually to the incoming vice president, the Langston-led group departed from Capitol Hill. Later Langston was a member of the Acting Board of the National Executive Committee of the Convention, which petitioned the U.S. Senate on February 1, 1869, “urging the passage of a constitutional amendment securing to all citizens in the States, without regard to their race, color, or previous condition, the right to vote, who have not by the commission of crime forfeited their right to do so.”92 Prior to this February 1st petition, “several members of the Committee . . . had conferences with Senators and Representatives, on these and other



The National Equal Rights League 211

subjects, effecting the interest of those they represented. They . . . had repeated interviews with delegations from the nonreconstructed States, and [were] pleased to urge their claims, to Congressmen.”93 Although Langston engaged in all of those convention and post–National Convention activities, he did not engage in the debates during the 1869 convention about whether the convention should re-establish the NERL. There was a continual debate reported in the Proceedings (1) that no new NERL should be established, (2) that no Convention linkage or connection should be made with the Republican party’s Union Leagues, an organization created after the 1864 National Union Party (the renamed Republican party) Convention to travel South and enroll the freedmen into the Republican party in time for the 1868 and 1872 elections, and (3) that no Convention of Colored Men should try to create an integrated league. Langston offered no remarks in these debates.94 However, once these debates had ended, Langston did make some remarks on the fourth and last day of the convention, January 16, 1869. The convention was on this day considering the need to develop an educational policy for the African American community. This issue had come up before in the National Convention Movement and here it was once again resurfacing: Mr. J. M. Langston, of Ohio, said, touching the subject of Education, they should coolly ask themselves what kind of an Educational enterprise they need? They should look to it that they go to any college or institution in the country and that no distinction should be made on account of race or color. He referred to the course of the people of the Northern States who were afraid or ashamed to go South and teach the colored people, and said such persons were unworthy of notice; and contended praise was due to those able men and women who had left their homes in the North and gone South to educate the oppressed of that section. The speaker did not approve of establishing negro schools or negro leagues, and spoke at length on the subject of education.95 Nowhere in the Proceedings does Langston come out for the re-establishment of the NERL, despite the fact that after the debate was over, the convention did recreate and set up a totally new NERL that had no association or relationship to its previous activist president, Langston. After Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Acts in 1867, giving suffrage rights to the southern freedmen, and in the same year chartered Howard University, Langston in 1868 moved to Washington D.C. to establish and become dean of Howard University Law School. Prior to that move he had been elected city councilman in Oberlin, Ohio, 1865–1867, and to the same city’s Board of Education, 1867–1868. Hence, by the time of the 1869 convention Langston had moved out of electoral politics and into education. Surely, this accounts for his speaking primarily about education and not devoting substantial remarks to the NERL and suffrage rights. Later in his career, Langston would move to Virginia in

1885 to serve as president of what is now Virginia State University, and finally to run for and win a seat in Congress in 1888.96 A little more than a month after the January meeting of the National Convention, and just about three weeks after the National Executive Committee had petitioned the Senate, “on February 25, 1869, after receiving the necessary two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress, the Fifteenth Amendment was submitted to the state legislatures.”97 Such swift action left the new NERL in an almost stillborn situation simply because the need for national action had already passed, and the focus point for this proposed Fifteenth Amendment now shifted from Congress to the sundry state legislatures where ratification had to occur. With this shift the need for support for this issue moved out of the national government to any existing state NERL organizations. And in the very next year, on March 30, 1870, “President Ulysses S. Grant proclaimed the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment.”98 And in this swift moving political stream, the Fifteenth Amendment surged forth seemingly before the new NERL could become fully organized and functioning as it had in 1865. In addition, there is a lack of extant literature on the 1869 recreated organization. It simply faded into the shadow of the explosion of African American elected officials during the decade of Black Reconstruction.

The Final Incarnation of NERL, 1908–1921 In fact, the next time that another organization with the name NERL resurfaced was in 1908 in Boston, Massachusetts. The African American founder and publisher of the Boston Guardian weekly newspaper, a classmate of W.E.B. DuBois at Harvard, and one of the founders of the Niagara Movement, William Monroe Trotter became the founder also of this new National Equal Rights League. This occurred after the Niagara Movement had collapsed and the DuBois-Trotter friendship had fallen apart. Trotter’s quick temper rendered it difficult for him to work well with others in the civil rights movement, leading him to create his own protest organization and to appropriate the name of the NERL. This personal vehicle of Trotter existed from 1908 to 1921. In that time it protested segregation in Boston, vigorously attacked Booker T. Washington, and actively worked for the election of Democratic Governor Woodrow Wilson for president. As a consequence, the Trotter-led NERL was permitted a meeting with President Wilson in which Trotter lobbied the president for equality for African Americans and against segregation in such harsh language that he was banned from the White House during the president’s term, 1913–1921. Washington’s death in 1915 removed the main target of the Trotter-led NERL. Besides the death of Washington, the second force which set into motion the decline and collapse of the Trotter-led NERL was the rise of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), particularly its 1915 victory in Guinn v United States, which eliminated the grandfather clause that helped disenfranchise African American voters in the South. The clause had demanded proof from African Americans who tried to register to vote and could not pass a literacy test that they show that their grandfather had voted or was entitled to vote on January 1, 1866, or had

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“resided in a foreign country on that date.”99 With its removal, the onerous poll taxes and literacy requirements enacted by southern states fell not only upon African Americans but also on poor whites, who now lacked the protective mechanism of the grandfather clause. Hence, this case removed a pretense for denying African Americans suffrage and created a climate in which some whites began to seek the removal of the other voting barriers. This initial victory against the disenfranchisement of the African American electorate coupled with the NAACP’s legal victories against the “residential segregation laws that spread across the South between 1910 and 1916”100 caused a rapid decline in the membership of the Trotter-led NERL and a rapid increase in the membership in the NAACP. The NERL’s last major public protest lobbying efforts came before Congress in a joint effort with the NAACP. On January 4, 1921, in the House of Representatives, the Committee on the Census held “Hearings on the Apportionment of Representatives” as required by the U.S. Constitution for the decade of the 1920s. At this hearing, Trotter, in his capacity as the secretary of the NERL, joined with five members of the NAACP and others in urging the committee to recommend the enforcement of Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment that requires the reduction of southern membership in the House of Representatives if these southern states suppressed and reduced the African American vote. To support his contention, Secretary Trotter provided tabular evidence showing disenfranchisement in all of the southern states except Tennessee. In addition to this regional data, Secretary Trotter offered evidence from Georgia drawn from the testimony of African American attorney Henry Lincoln

Johnson that had been given to the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections on July 8, 1920. At the Senate hearing Attorney Johnson told them: “There is about 85 per cent of the Negro vote in Georgia outrageously suppressed and disfranchised, not under the forms of law, but by means of brutal force and intimidation.”101 Trotter brought Johnson’s testimony directly from the Senate hearing and gave it to the House hearing and had it inserted into the committee records. And while Secretary Trotter’s testimony focused upon African American male disenfranchisement in the South and Georgia, the NAACP testimony focused upon Florida and both male and female disenfranchisement. Hence, Trotter’s NERL went out fighting for suffrage rights. The collapse of the third re-incarnation of the NERL came in a competitive political environment where the leadership of the biracial NAACP proved more effective than the leadership of the uni-racial NERL during the struggle to protect the rights of the African American electorate. Collectively, the three different manifestations of the NERL—in 1864–1865, 1869, and 1915—provide us with an understanding of how an organization designed to lobby and protest for the suffrage rights of free African Americans both north and south rose and declined based on factors and forces in the political process as well as in the African American community. In the first two of the three manifestations, the National Convention of Colored Men of America created and founded the organization. The third birth came from the political entrepreneurship of an African American newspaperman, William Monroe Trotter. Diagram 11.2 displays the rise, evolution, and demise of the three occurrences of the NERL.

Diagram 11.2  The Rise, Evolution, and Demise of the Three Different National Equal Rights Leagues, 1864–1915

1864

1869

The National Convention of the Colored Men of America Held in Syracuse, New York, on October 4, 5, 6, and 7, 1864 Creates the NERL

The National Convention of the Colored Men of America Held in Washington, D.C., on January 13, 14, 15, and 16, 1869 Recreates the NERL

1908–1915 William Monroe Trotter in 1908 Recreates The NERL in Boston, Massachusetts, and maintains it as a Protest Organization until 1915

First Annual Meeting of The National Equal Rights League Held in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 19, 20, and 21, 1865

No Annual Meeting is Held The National Equal Rights League Exist Mainly on Paper

Source: Adapted from the 1864, 1865, and 1869 extant Proceedings of these National Conventions. Broken Line = indirect relationship       Solid Arrow = direct relationship

It also shows that the National Convention of Colored Men were the originators of two of the NERL organizations, while the third one was organized by African American newspaper man Trotter. And finally, the diagram reflects that the extant literature only documents one annual meeting of the first NERL but not a second one. Seemingly, it was planned, but political events swept by it so fast that the planned annual meeting was not needed. Moreover, the president of the initial NERL, Langston, had moved on into the field of legal and college education leadership. First, in at least its original manifestation under President Langston, NERL had laid groundwork and carried out political agitation and lobbying that helped, along with the national Republican Party and especially the congressional Republicans, to bring about suffrage rights for the southern freedmen with the passage of the four Military Reconstruction Acts. In the second manifestation the parent organization of the NERL saw the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, again through the congressional Republicans. In the third manifestation, the Trotter-led NERL, lobbying in conjunction with the NAACP, could not get the Democratic president nor Congress to enforce the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment to halt southern disenfranchisement. The same fate had befallen the suffrage activism of the National Afro-American Council (NAAC) that predated the Trotter led organization.102 Finally, in at least two of these manifestations, for the very first time in African American history, we have shown the birth and evolution of a pioneering national African American voting rights organization. In Colonial and Revolutionary America, FreeMen-and-Women-of-Color had struggled with colonial and state governments to get suffrage rights. Next, they struggled inside the National Convention Movements, where voting rights were joined with numerous other rights and concerns. But during the waning years of the Civil War, African American leaders, with one female included, separated out the matters of voting rights and developed an organization designed specifically to address voting rights. Here is the first national voting rights organization, and its creation indicates what a priority African American leaders placed on this particular right vis-à-vis other rights. Voting rights were a central demand and agenda item for African American interest groups. The stage had been set, and this topic would continue to be of the utmost importance through the rest of African American political history.

Summary and Conclusions on the National Equal Rights League Born as a consequence of an expulsion crisis of Free-Men-andWomen-of-Color out of Ohio, the resultant National Convention Movement slowly and gradually began protesting and lobbying the federal government, the president, and Congress for suffrage rights. Prior to the emergence of this organization, pressure from the African American community for this paramount right had focused essentially upon the state governments. To be sure, petitions, memorials, letters, and prayers were sent to Congress long before the emergence of this convention movement organization, but these protest techniques and procedures sought freedom and liberation from slavery and protection from racial

The National Equal Rights League 213 discrimination. But with the appearance of this national organization came a demand that the federal government get involved in the struggle for the right to vote, something it had not done except in the Northwest territories. With the appearance of this National Convention Movement, the protest for the elective franchise became both insistent and persistent. And that movement organization created a separate and distinct new organization, the NERL, just at the right moment; when the southern states had left the Union and were losing their war of secession, and the Union was considering how to reorganize and reconstruct them for re-entering the Union. For all of the limitations of the National Conventions and the NERL organizations, the latter was able to place two major suffrage questions before Presidents Lincoln and Johnson and the Republican-led Congress. They were (1) the elective franchise for African Americans in the Union, and (2) the elective franchise for African Americans in the South. This was the right organization with the right interest at the propitious moment in time. Initially, during the decade of the 1830s, the National Convention Movement did not address, directly or indirectly, the matter of the elective franchise, but it did so increasingly in the 1840s with the rise of the anti-slavery third parties, and in the 1850s with new disabilities falling upon the community, and by 1864, in the midst of the Civil War, the Convention Movement did so with heightened and increasing frequency.103 Priorities for the Convention Movement changed with the changing political context. Part of what underlay the rising determined posture of the National Convention Movement on calling for an elective franchise was the heightened intensity and leadership of state affiliates and their struggles in the numerous state referenda campaigns taking place across the nation for suffrage rights. Extant literature which surveyed these states’ conventions have noted that “the state conventions of this period generally followed the same format,” structure, and procedural apparatus of the national conventions.104 And once these state conventions were developed, they sent their petitions to three different groups. One was “directed to the state legislature, another to the white people of the state, and a third to the blacks.”105 A dominant issue in their petitions was the request for the right to vote. The first such petitions were taken by two Free-Men-of-Color from New Orleans, Louisiana, in March 1864, to President Lincoln and Congress. By 1865, even the southern state conventions of Freedmen in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia petitioned for the right of the elective franchise.106 Such political petitions and protests along with the “continued disfranchisement of black Americans in many Northern states, coupled with the widespread” failure of one suffrage referendum after another, finally focused this matter into a rising consensual force at the founding of the NERL in the October 1864 meeting. And this consensual focus moved into the void that President Lincoln had helped create due to his lack of a well-articulated elective franchise public policy for the freedmen. President Lincoln’s death further exacerbated the empty void and lack of a public policy, and President Johnson’s eventual refusal to grant such a public policy ended up not only generating a greater resoluteness in the heightened African American consensus on having the elective franchise but also stimulating

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his fellow partisans in Congress to push through legislation to grant it. Eventually, the confluence of these forces created the elective franchise for freedmen in the District of Columbia and the federal territories, followed by the application of this approach/experiment to the ten former Confederate states to be readmitted to the Union with the First and Second Reconstruction Acts of 1867. They established the elective franchise for southern freedmen. And these congressional statutes became the legal bases for the Fifteenth Amendment. One of the pioneering scholarly articles on this matter, the “Origins of Negro Suffrage during the Civil War” period, attributes the beginnings of this issue to the activism of Free-Menof-Color in New Orleans, who initially “petitioned the Military Governor George F. Shepley for voting rights in November, 1863.”107 Rebuffed by Shepley, they then appealed later to his replacement, General Nathaniel Banks, who simply refused them. They then took the next step of sending a delegation to Washington, D.C., to give President Lincoln their petition for this right. After meeting with this delegation, President Lincoln, as we noted earlier, privately asked the Governor of Louisiana, Michael Hahn, to consider limited suffrage rights for certain classes of African Americans. In a meeting with African American leader Frederick Douglass, President Lincoln told him about this action. Although the new reconstructed government in Louisiana did not grant suffrage rights to either the Free-Men-of-Color or the freed slave, the Free Coloreds set up a state affiliate of the NERL to continue to advocate for suffrage rights for both of these two groups. Yet neither the reconstructed state nor Lincoln’s presidential reconstruction plan for the state ever achieved even limited suffrage rights for the freedmen in Louisiana. Hence, to accord the “Origins of Negro Suffrage” with the suffrage protest efforts in Louisiana is an incomplete approach, because it does not relate to either the historical evidence and the political context nor the empirical evidence arising from other states where suffrage referenda occurred— the suffrage protests and demands of the National Convention Movement, the African American soldiers’ votes in the Civil War, or the National Convention creation of a totally new organization, the National Equal Rights League. Free Coloreds in New Orleans were not the only group of African Americans active in the struggle for suffrage either during the Civil War or in post–Civil War America.108 The innovative efforts of the National Conventions of the Colored Men of America made sure of that reality. The NERL became the first national African American suffrage rights organization and, like the preceding National Convention Movement, it had an uneven and erratic existence—but one not without major legislative consequences in 1867 and 1870.

Notes   1. Phyllis Field, The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 59.   2. Ibid.    3. Ibid., p. 125.

   4. Hanes Walton, Jr., “Protest Politics,” in Minion K. C. Morrison (ed.), African Americans and Political Participation: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003), pp. 75 and 77.    5. Ibid., p. 81.    6. Ibid., p. 82.    7. Bella Gross, “The First National Negro Convention,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 31 (October 1946), pp. 435–443, and her “The Roots of the National Negro Convention Movement,” Negro History Bulletin Vol. 10 (November 1946), pp. 435–443. See also Howard Bell, “The Negro Convention Movement, 1830–1860: New Perspectives,” Negro History Bulletin Vol. 14 (February 1951), pp. 103–105, 114.    8. John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom, 7th Edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), p. 178.   9. Ibid.   10. Ibid., p. 181.   11. Margaret Washington, Sojourner Truth’s America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), p. 313. See also Philip Foner (ed.), Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992).   12. Franklin and Moss, p. 181.   13. “The First Colored Convention,” The Anglo-American Magazine Vol. 1 (October 1859), p. 3, in Howard Bell (ed.), Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions, 1830–1864 (New York: Arno Press, 1969). This compilation of all of the Proceedings of the twelve different National Negro Conventions has not been numbered continuously. Each of the Proceedings is numbered differently. Moreover, the two Bell studies failed to uncover any information on the 1836 National Convention. Recent research brought it to light; see Bella Gross, Clarion Call: The History and Development of the Negro Convention Movement in the United States from 1817 to 1840 (New York: privately printed, 1947), p. 32. However, this pamphlet only uncovered the “Call” for the 1836 convention; there is no reference in the Gross pamphlet, nor did our research turn up a copy of the minutes or proceedings of the National Convention of 1836. This suggests that maybe this convention never actually took place or, if it did, there is no official record of it like there is of the others. Bell and Gross both are silent on this matter. And a “Call” should not equate with the actual existence of such a convention. Our narrative treats the “Call” as simply a possibility and not as a fact because we have no data for this convention.   14. Bell, p. 3.   15. Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), p. 121.   16. “1830—Philadelphia Constitution of the American Society of Free Persons of Colour and the Proceedings of the Convention” in Bell, pp. iii–12.   17. Philip Foner and George Walker (eds.), Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840–1865, Vols. 1 and 2 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979 and 1980), pp. xi–xviii.   18. “1855—Philadelphia Proceedings of the Colored National Convention” in Bell, p. 7. See also Jason Silverman, “Mary Ann Shadd and the Search for Equality,” in Leon Litwack and August Meier (eds.), Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 87–94.   19. Litwack and Meier, p. 87.   20. Donald Nieman, Promises to Keep: African-Americans and the Constitutional Order, 1776 to the Present (New York; Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 19.  21. Ibid.   22. Ibid., p. 20.   23. John Hope Franklin and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 9th Edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011), p. 161.   24. Ibid., p. 165.   25. Ibid, p. 132.   26. Ibid., p. 187.   27. Nieman, p. 42.   28. For recent research on the American Moral Reform Society see Robert Weems, Jr., “The American Moral Reform Society and the Origins

of Black Conservative Ideology,” in Gayle Tate and Lewis Randolph (eds.), Dimensions of Black Conservatism in the United States (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 31–42.   29. Yanek Mieczkowski, The Routledge Historical Atlas of Presidential Elections (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 55.   30. Ibid., p. 56.   31. Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (Boston: Little Brown, 1953 ), p. 258.  32. Ibid.   33. Ibid., p. 259.  34. Ibid.   35. Harding, pp. 265–266.   36. Franklin and Moss, p. 224. See also James McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), pp. 277–285.   37. “1864—Syracuse Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men,” in Bell, pp. 8–9.   38. Ibid., pp. 44–45.   39. Ibid., pp. 47–48.   40. Ibid., p. 48.   41. Ibid., p. 49.   42. Ibid., p. 57.   43. Ibid., p. 58.   44. Ibid., p.61.  45. Ibid.   46. Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860–1910 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), p. 19.   47. McPherson, p. 278.   48. Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 105–107.   49. National Equal Rights League, Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the National Equal Rights League Held in Cleveland, Ohio, October 19, 20, and 21, 1865 (Philadelphia: E. C. Markley and Sons, 1865), p. 29. Only after a systematic and comprehensive search did this extant manuscript turn up. Few copies seem to have survived, and past historical scholars writing about and developing compendia on the Proceedings of African American conventions missed this one. Therefore, all of the basic organization and structural data presented in this section comes from this extant volume. Little else exists except for brief passages.   50. For a book of President Langston’s speeches, some of which deal with the suffrage question, see John M. Langston, Freedom and Citizenship: Selected Lectures and Addresses (Washington, DC: Mnemosyne Publishing, 1883).   51. Herbert Aptheker, “Appeal from Executive Board National Equal Rights League, 1864” in Herbert Aptheker (ed.), A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States (New York: Citadel Press, 1959), p. 526.   52. Wang, p. 19.   53. Ibid., p. 15.   54. Ibid., p. 20.   55. Andrew Johnson, “Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction,” May 29, 1865, in A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897, Vol. 6, James D. Richardson, ed., 1920, pp. 310–312. Available online at TeachingAmericanHistory.org, http:// teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=1919.   56. Lincoln, Abraham, “The Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction,” December 8, 1863, in United States, Statutes at Large, Treaties, and Proclamations of the United States of America, Vol. 13 (Boston, 1866), pp. 737–739. Available online at Freedmen & Southern Society Project, University of Maryland, http://www.history.umd.edu/Freedmen/procamn .htm.   57. Wang, p. 20.   58. Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Political Parties (New York: Free Press, 1972), p. 45.   59. Ibid., pp. 45–46.   60. Wang, p. 41.

The National Equal Rights League 215   61. William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), p. 30.  62. Walton, Black Political Parties, pp. 46–48.   63. Gillette, p. 118.  64. Ibid.   65. Lawanda and John Cox, “Negro Suffrage and Republican Politics: The Problem of Motivation in Reconstruction Historiography,” Journal of Southern History Vol. 38 (August 1967), pp. 303–330.   66. Foner and Walker, Vol. II.   67. V. Chapman Smith, “The Triumph and Tragedy of Octavius V. Catto,” Independence Hall Association: Philadelphia, PA. Published online at http://www.ushistory.org/people/catto.htm. See also Hugh Davis, “The Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League and the Northern Black Struggle for Legal Equality, 1864–1877,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography Vol. 26, No. 4 (October 2002), pp. 611–634.   68. William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), p. 82, Table 1.   69. Jerrold Rusk, A Statistical History of the American Electorate (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2001), p. 215.   70. Franklin and Moss, p. 226.   71. Gillette, p. 30.   72. Wang, p. 34.   73. Gillette, p. 31.   74. Wang, p. 35.   75. Ibid., p. 37.   76. Gillette, p. 31.   77. National Convention of the Colored Men of America, 1869, Proceedings of the National Convention of the Colored Men of American Held in Washington, DC, on January 13, 14, 15, and 16, 1869 (Washington, DC: Great Republic Book and Job Printing Establishment, February 25, 1869), p. 1.   78. Ibid., pp. 11–12.   79. Ibid., p. 12.   80. Chester Rowell, A Historical and Legal Digest of All the Contested Election Cases in the House of Representatives of the United States from the First to the Fifty-Sixth Congress, 1789–1901 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), pp. 226–229.   81. National Convention of Colored Men of America, p. 28.   82. Ibid., p. 30.   83. Ibid., p. 32.   84. Ibid., p. 12.   85. Ibid., p. 9, 16, 17, 29–30.   86. Ibid., p. 2.   87. Ibid., p. 42.   88. Ibid., p. 41.   89. Ibid., Appendix IX.  90. Ibid.   91. Ibid., Appendix, p. X.   92. Ibid., Appendix, p. XII.  93. Ibid.   94. For these debates see ibid., pp. 29–32.   95. Ibid., pp. 35–36.   96. See his autobiography, John M. Langston, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol (New York: Arno Press, 1894) and his biography William Cheek and Aimee L. Cheek, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). See also J. Clay Smith, Jr., Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, 1844–1944 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 42–45.  97. Foner, Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights, p 32. See also Benjamin Quarles, “Frederick Douglass and the Woman’s Rights Movement,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 25 (January 1940), pp. 35–44.   98. Ibid., p. 37.

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  99. Nieman, p. 127. 100. Ibid., p. 128. 101. U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Census, Apportionment of Representatives, Hearings on HR 14498, HR15021, HR 15158, and HR 15217, 66th Congress, 3rd Session (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921), p. 117. 102. Only recently has new academic scholarship on the NAAC been published. See Benjamin Justesen, Broken Brotherhood: The Rise and Fall of the National Afro-American Council (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008). For a detailed study of this organization in one state see R. Volney Riser, Defying Disfranchisement: Black Voting Rights

Activism in the Jim Crow South, 1890–1908 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010). 103. Howard Bell, A Survey of the Negro Convention Movement, 1830–1861 (New York: Arno Press, 1969), pp. 262–274. This survey missed the 1836 National Convention. 104. Foner and Walker, Vol. 1, p. xvi. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid., Vol. II, p. 262 for Virginia and p. 301 for South Carolina. 107. Herman Belz, “Origins of Negro Suffrage During the Civil War,” Southern Studies Vol. 17 (Summer 1978), p. 121. 108. Ibid., pp. 115–130.

CHAPTER 12

The Civil War Election and the African American Soldiers’ Vote, 1864 The Partisan and Political Debates over Soldiers Voting

218

The Demography and Deployment of African American Soldiers in the Civil War

220

Table 12.1 Civil War African American Troops as Percent of Total Union Troops by State

221

African American Soldiers’ Field Voting Behavior in the 1864 Presidential Election

222

Table 12.2 Reported Soldiers’ Field Vote in the 1864 Presidential Election, Ranked in Order of the Number of Votes for Lincoln-Johnson by State

222

Map 12.1 The Reported Soldiers’ Field Vote in the 1864 Presidential Election for Lincoln vs. McClellan 223 Figure 12.1 Reported Soldiers’ Field Vote in the 1864 Presidential Election for Lincoln vs. McClellan 224 Table 12.3 African American Soldiers’ Field Vote in the 1864 Presidential Election

224

Map 12.2 The African American Soldiers’ Vote in the 1864 Presidential Election 225 Table 12.4 Comparing the Number of the African American Troops to the Difference in Popular Votes between Candidates of the 1864 Presidential Election by State

226

Figure 12.2 African American Soldiers’ Field Vote in the 1864 Presidential Election 227 Table 12.5 Popular Vote, Soldiers’ Vote, and Electoral Vote in the Presidential Election of 1864

228

Summary and Conclusions on the African American Soldiers’ Vote

229

Notes 230

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n the midst of the Civil War, African American leaders and their national and state organizations struggled to get President Lincoln, congressional Republicans, and Republican governors to extend to some and grant to others voting rights. During this period, the issue of voting surfaced in an unexpected way around soldiers’ right to vote in the 1864 presidential election. Initially, given the huge battlefield casualties and great setbacks for the Union Army, “[s]ome people suggested postponing or suspending elections during the crisis.” But in response to this idea, President Lincoln declared: “We cannot have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forgo, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.”1 Thus, with these words, the 1864 presidential and congressional elections were on, and the state and federal governments had to decide how to effectuate the soldiers’ vote. In fact, some of the eleven southern states of the Confederacy led the way on this issue before the states of the Union did. Former Union soldier Josiah Benton wrote a pioneering work on this subject matter, Voting in the Field; A Forgotten Chapter of the Civil War. In it he wrote: “Of the eleven Southern States which made up the Confederacy, seven passed soldiers’ voting laws in 1861.”2 In the North, “[a]t the outbreak of the war, only Pennsylvania permitted soldiers to vote away from home.”3 And despite southern leaders addressing this issue of soldiers’ suffrage, both the federal government and all twenty-five of the northern, border, and western states in the Union considered and debated this matter. Several of these states approved legislation and/or state constitutional amendments to permit soldiers to vote in these 1864 presidential and congressional elections. The purpose of this chapter is simply to discern as far as the extant literature will permit whether African American Union troops voted in these 1864 presidential and congressional elections. To date, this has never been explored or analyzed by historians, political scientists, sociologists, or Black Studies specialists. Since we have uncovered in previous chapters all of the states that allowed Free-Men-of-Color to vote by the time of the Civil War and have some reliable data on the partisanship of these African American voters, we can now proceed to match these data with African American Union troop data to get a composite portrait of the voting behavior of this group of soldiers in this election. As for this troop data, we have acquired from extant military records the number of African American Union troops by region—North and South—and in each state in these two regions, so it is now possible to answer our research question with heretofore unknown and under-explored empirical data. And these matched data will allow us to discern where the vote of the African American soldiers could have played a balanceof-power role—that is, shifting the state’s popular and thereby electoral vote either to the incumbent, President Lincoln, or to the Democratic challenger, Major General George B. McClellan.4 But before we can make the matchup of the relevant data, it is necessary to provide the reader with some background information on the partisan debates which swirled around the two major constitutional issues surrounding the possibility of soldiers voting. Simply put, the first issue was who would set the criteria for whether

soldiers would vote—states or the federal government—while the second issue was the mechanism/procedure for casting the ballot— in the field or back at home. The importance of these issues can be seen in the fact that several state legislatures became hopelessly deadlocked and could not resolve them before the election. Some others became bogged down with these issues and resolved them so late that when the soldiers’ votes did arrive back at the state, it was too late to count them. Hence, these deadlocked and delayed states reduced the final number of states where soldiers actually voted during the 1864 elections. Beyond these partisan debates over constitutional issues, there were partisan debates over political advantage. The Republicans held power in both the presidency and Congress, while the Democrats wanted to regain power in both of these branches of government. Since the war was not going well for the Union, the Democrats nominated a Union general, McClellan, who asserted himself as a “Peace” candidate and declared the war a failure. Even President Lincoln told his cabinet a few months before the election that he might not get reelected given the way the war was going. Hence, some Democrats tended to see the soldiers’ vote as a device intended to defeat them, while a few others thought that they could win the soldiers’ vote. Republican leaders felt that the soldiers’ vote might help them hold onto their political power. And this political debate, when joined with the constitutional one, became very debilitating.

The Partisan and Political Debates over Soldiers Voting On the issue of federal vs. states rights over voting, a leading scholar of American suffrage rights, Alexander Keyssar, wrote: “The Constitution adopted in 1787 left the federal government without any clear power or mechanism, other than through constitutional amendment, to institute a national conception of voting rights, to express a national vision of democracy.”5 This meant that “the franchise in national elections [was] dependent on state suffrage laws” and not the federal government.6 Nevertheless, Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of New York introduced a bill, H.R. 9, in the first session of the 38th Congress in 1863, to authorize the federal government to allow soldiers to vote in federal elections. Representative Stevens felt that “‘Congress can authorize’ soldiers to vote in federal elections, establish residence of soldiers, ‘wherever they are’ and regulate ‘the mode’ of elections.”7 But this bill never came up for a vote. Others, who sought the intervention of the federal government on the issue, held that “soldiers deserved to vote by virtue of their service in the Union army, not merely as a protection or extension of their state-conferred rights.”8 If this was the case, the argument asserted that the War Department should have jurisdiction over soldier voting. But this cogent argument, like those of Representative Stevens, did not hold sway nor establish a federal government role or position in regulating the soldiers’ vote. It remained a state-based right and regulation. Therefore, Congress ended up not setting any criteria or regulation for soldier voting at the state level. Only for the Nevada Territory did Congress pass a legislative act, 13 Statute 30–33, in 1864, which allowed soldiers in that territory to vote. This act also provided



The Civil War Election and the African American Soldiers’ Vote, 1864 219

for the admission of Nevada to the Union. Nevada was admitted on October 31, 1864, and soldiers did vote in the November election. What that vote was did not get recorded. Once this issue of federal vs. states rights was resolved, the second issue arose of the mechanism or procedure to be used. This debate was rooted in the fact that state constitutions and the laws of the each state defined and regulated the place and time of elections and the residency of the voters. Thus, “[w]hen the war broke out there was no legislation under which a soldier or sailor, having the right to vote in an election district of any State could vote anywhere outside of his district.”9 Hence, each one of the twenty-five states in the North, East, Midwest, and West had to reconsider their laws about how soldiers would be permitted to vote, with the exception of Pennsylvania, which already allowed soldiers to vote in the field. The reason for state reconsideration was that the only existing method to allow soldiers to vote was simply to furlough troops from the field to their home electoral districts. Given the limited roads and railway systems in the nation at the time, this requirement would have meant a lot of troops shifting from the war front and scrambling home. Such furloughing of troops meant that for transportation reasons troops would invariably need extended leaves. Furthermore, military generals and officers felt that this information would be found out or leaked to spies, which would undercut victories or successes in the field. Lines of defense would be weakened and possible advances would have to be postponed. “Prominent coverage of the homeward movement of Federal soldier voters by Northern newspapers prompted General Ulysses Grant to complain from Virginia that such press reports would ‘get through to the enemy within an hour of reaching our lines.’”10 Therefore, states had to remake their requirements because furloughing would not work very effectively for a host of reasons. In seeking a solution to this state-based constitutional issue, “[t]wo methods for soldiers voting in the field were employed; one, which took the ballot box to the soldier in the field and permitted him to cast his ballot into it.” The second “method was what is known as ‘proxy voting.’ The ballot box was not taken to the soldier, but he was authorized to prepare his ballot in the field and sent it to some one, as his proxy, to cast into the ballot box in his voting precinct at home.”11 Although both of these methods were simply different forms of “absentee voting,” both of them engendered widespread debates from supporters and opponents. In addition, each procedure had both strengths and weaknesses. The first and second methods or procedures shared the difficulty of locating the soldier on the battlefield. But the battlefield was only one place. Union troops could be on warships, at sundry military installations, or in numerous hospitals. Each one of these four locations had to be surveyed and canvassed so that troops from each state could be contacted and given a ballot. Next there was the matter of getting each soldier a ballot so that he could vote directly or by proxy. And at this time in history, ballot making and distribution was conducted and implemented by political parties, particularly the national committees. Therefore, with the parties in charge of ballots, their distribution, canvassing, and determining the location of each soldier,

political advantage and power shifted to the Republicans because they were the incumbents. States with Republican governors and legislatures sent letters to President Lincoln, the Secretary of War, the War Department, and the Republican generals and officers in the field requesting “aid in locating the troops and collecting their ballots.”12 Not being in power, Democratic governors and state legislatures “from across the nation appealed to their party machinery in New York” (the Democratic National Committee was headquartered here) for political paraphernalia, pamphlets, and ballots but had to request help from federal governmental agencies and bureaucracies as well as from Democratic generals and officers to locate their troops.”13 Being in such a dependent position led Democratic officeholders in the governorship and state legislatures to oppose in each and every state voting in the field, either directly or by proxy. Here is how one scholar assessed the Democratic reaction to their political disadvantage: Democrats . . . were wary of taking elections to the battlefield, where it would be difficult to protect the ballot box from fraud and where soldiers might be uninformed on current political issues. . . . Thus, despite the risk of appearing unfriendly to the soldiers, Democrats held firm against legislation permitting them to vote in the field. Soldiers, Democrats argued, should only be allowed to vote at home, in their own election districts.14 Commenting on this situation, the soldier scholar who wrote the only book on the subject says: “Upon a review of this legislation one is impressed with the fact that the soldiers’ voting bills were uniformly supported by the Republicans and uniformly opposed by the Democrats.” He continues: “The Democrats constantly and persistently opposed any legislation to give the soldiers a right to vote in the field.”15 However, while incumbency disadvantaged the Democrats, during its 1864 convention the party adopted a platform and selected nominees that sent a contradictory message to the potential Democratic electorate. Adding to this electoral disadvantage was that of internal factionalism. At their national convention was Chicago that August, the Democrats “proclaimed the war a failure, demanded an immediate cessation of hostilities, and called for the restoration of the Union by means of a negotiated peace.”16 Then, they nominated “a war candidate, Major General George B. McClellan, on a peace platform with a Peace Democrat, George H. Pendleton, as the nominee for vice president.”17 The reason for these contradictory actions at the convention was that prior to it, the Democrats had split into two different factions, Peace Democrats and War Democrats, and they could not find common ground or reconcile themselves at the convention. Hence, each faction got something in terms of the nominees and the platform. However, this action sent mixed messages to the electorate. The Peace Democrats felt that the war could not cause the restoration of the Union, and they sought a negotiated peace with the Confederacy, while the War Democrats supported the Union war effort. But neither factions’ position offered any

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“military strategies for waging and winning the war.”18 Essentially, “[t]he Democrats hoped to capitalize on the war weariness of the North to turn Lincoln out of office.”19 This contradictory and rather inflexible position was taken before the fortunes of war changed in the Republicans’ favor. By September, “Admiral David Farragut captured Mobile Bay, General William T. Sherman took Atlanta . . . Ulysses S. Grant began making progress at Petersburg, and General Philip Sheridan routed Jubal Early’s troops from the valleys of Virginia.”20 These victories not only boosted morale in the Union states, they also aided the Republican advantage for Lincoln’s reelection. These military victories were not the only forces working to give the Republicans an advantage. First, instead of holding a Republican National Convention, President Lincoln’s party manager, who believed he was going to lose the election, held on June 7, in Baltimore, “the National Union Convention representing both Republican and War Democrats. . . . Republican leaders desired to appeal to Union sentiment and do away with partisan influence as much as possible. The use of the Republican name was carefully avoided.”21 However, the Baltimore convention of the National Union Convention did not stop there. They “chose Andrew Johnson as the vice presidential candidate. Johnson was a life-long Democrat and a former senator from the slave state of Tennessee. As a War Democrat, Johnson . . . symbolized the coalition character of the National Union Party.” The strategy of choosing Johnson attracted the War Democrats from the Democratic Party to Lincoln’s reelection bid. But the use of their national convention to enrich their political advantage was not their only political strategy. After the convention, the party, unlike the Democrats, moved to deal with their internal factionalism. Prior to the convention, the Republican Party had a radical wing and a moderate wing, led by President Lincoln. On May 31, in Cleveland, Radical Republicans met one week before the National Union Convention and nominated Union General John C. Fremont (the initial 1856 presidential nominee) for president, and they named their party Radical Democracy. The platform of these Radicals called for “confiscation of Confederate owned lands for redistribution among the freedmen.”22 Abolitionists’ pressures eventually forced Fremont to withdraw some six weeks before the election. And while this action sealed the party split and ended the Radical wing, another one opened up. Before the election took place, Lincoln dismissed Secretary of Treasury Salmon P. Chase. Ever ambitious, Chase combined with the editor of the New York Tribune newspaper, Horace Greeley, and began a drumbeat that President Lincoln could not possibly win reelection. Eventually, they were joined by a number of other well-known Republicans like Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. Said group of party elites publicly asked Lincoln to resign in order to save the party, and they suggested a number of replacement candidates. But the change in the party’s fortunes with Union victories led them to drop their efforts and to rejoin the party with a vengeance. The healing of the second split maintained the Republican Party advantage. Yet the Republicans did not stop with these two strategies to win the 1864 presidential election. They sought and got Nevada,

which had a strong Republican majority, admitted to the Union as a free state. Finally, they added the Union soldiers. Here, the Democrats had effectively shot themselves in the foot because they were asking soldiers to vote for a presidential candidate who had declared the war a failure, and by November the Union was now literally winning the war. The end result was President Lincoln’s winning twenty-two of the twenty-five states in the Union. He only lost Delaware, Kentucky, and Democratic nominee McClellan’s home state of New Jersey. Lincoln’s victory supposedly included some 80% of the soldiers’ vote. In sum, during the 1864 presidential election, the Democrats developed several electoral and political strategies that further disadvantaged them beyond not being the incumbent party in this election, while the Republicans enhanced and enriched their political advantages beyond their being the incumbent party. One of the contextual variables that worked for them in this election was the soldiers’ vote. We are now ready to explore whether African American soldiers voted in this election and, if so, for whom.

The Demography and Deployment of African American Soldiers in the Civil War Table 12.1 shows that there were some 178,975 African American troops in the Union Army and Navy during the Civil War. Collectively, they accounted for 7.2% of all of the Union troops. Regionally, the majority of the African American troops came from the eleven states of the Confederacy: 93,346 military personnel from the South, versus 79,733 from the North. There was a difference of 13,613 troops between the two regions. Soldiers from the eleven Southern states were actively opposing the governments of those states which had formed the Confederacy, and they could not have voted for U.S. president simply because none of the states of the Confederacy participated in the Union election. In addition, none of those states had allowed African Americans to vote prior to the War. (Georgia did legally allow it, but there is no corroborating evidence that indicates that this lack of restriction enabled any African Americans to actually vote.) This table also shows that at the regional level, the reverse of our findings was true for the white soldiers. The largest number of white Union troops came from the North and only a modest number from the southern states, with none at all from Georgia, South Carolina, or Virginia. The difference between the two regions was 2,386,314 troops; in fact, there were 39,207 more African American Union soldiers from the South than southern whites who joined the Union cause. Needless to say, both groups faced serious danger if they were captured by Confederate troops. Moving from the regional to the state level, the table shows that Kentucky, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Missouri produced, in ranked order, the largest number of African American troops in the North. Three of these four states—Kentucky, Maryland, and Pennsylvania—had once allowed Free-Men-of-Color to vote, but eventually rescinded this right to vote in the decades before the Civil War. In a recent analysis of the Border States soldiers’ vote, especially in Missouri and Kentucky, the historian Richard Bensel did not find any evidence of African American soldiers voting in the 1864 Civil War election, although white soldiers did



The Civil War Election and the African American Soldiers’ Vote, 1864 221

Table 12.1  Civil War African American Troops as Percentage of Total Union Troops by State

State/Territory (by Civil War Region)

Number of African American Union Troops

Number of White Union Troops

African American Percent of Union Troop Total

Union / North Connecticut

1,764

51,937

3.3% 1.9%

Colorado

95

4,903

Delaware

954

11,236

7.8%

District of Columbia

3,269

11,912

21.5%

Illinois

1,811

255,057

0.7%

Indiana

1,537

193,748

0.8%

440

75,797

0.6%

Iowa Kansas Kentucky Maine

2,080

18,069

10.3%

23,703

51,743

31.4%

104

64,973

0.2%

8,718

33,995

20.4%

Massachusetts

3,966

122,781

3.1%

Michigan

1,387

85,479

1.6%

Maryland

Minnesota

104

23,913

0.4%

8,344

100,616

7.7%

125

32,930

0.4%

1,185

67,500

1.7%

New York

4,125

409,561

1.0%

Ohio

5,092

304,814

1.6%

Pennsylvania

8,612

315,017

2.7%

Rhode Island

1,837

19,521

8.6% 0.4%

Missouri New Hampshire New Jersey

Vermont

120

32,549

West Virginia

196

31,872

0.6%

Wisconsin

165

91,029

0.2%

 

29,501

 

79,733

2,440,453

3.2%

Other States/Territories Union Subtotal

Confederate / South Alabama

4,969

2,578

65.8% 40.0%

Arkansas

5,526

8,289

Florida

1,044

1,290

44.7%

Georgia

3,486

 

100.0%

Louisiana

24,052

5,224

82.2%

Mississippi

97.0%

17,869

545

North Carolina

5,035

3,156

61.5%

South Carolina

5,462

 

100.0%

20,133

31,092

39.3%

47

1,965

Tennessee Texas Virginia Confederate Subtotal Enlisted at Large Total

5,723 93,346

2.3% 100.0%

54,139

63.3%

2,494,592

7.2%

5,896 178,975

Source: Adapted from George Washington Williams, A History of Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion (New York: Bergman Publishers, 1968), pp. 139–140. Calculations by the authors.

vote if they signed a loyalty oath, which was required because of the Confederate sympathizers and guerrilla bands attacking in Missouri.23 In the South, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee produced the largest number of troops while Texas produced by far the fewest number, North or South. Of these states, only Tennessee until 1834 and one parish in Louisiana, Rapides, allowed Free-Men-of-Color to vote until the Civil War. And African American voting in that parish was never officially legal under Louisiana state law, although it was not prevented. From Table 12.1, we see that African Americans troops came from twenty-two of the twenty-five Union states, one territory (Colorado), and the District of Columbia. This table does not indicate any African American or white troops from the far western states of California, Nevada, or Oregon. However, in a later and pioneering study of these twenty-five states the Union soldier and author Benton found that some Union soldiers did come from these three states (even though Oregon kept its 1,810 soldiers at home and in the Pacific region), and each of these three states provided for a soldiers’ vote in the 1864 election. However, only California kept and reported its soldiers’ vote separately from the home vote and the total vote. Finally, this table provides empirical data and thereby evidence that African American troops came from all of the states of the Union with the exception of the three far western states of California, Nevada, and Oregon. Their presence in the twentytwo states means that where they had been permitted to vote prior to the Civil War, they could, like their white counterparts, cast ballots in this 1864 presidential and congressional election. At this point we want to alert the reader about why we used the pioneering Benton data instead of a later study by Oscar Winther that appeared as an article: “The Soldier Vote in the Election of 1864,” New York History Vol. 25 (1944).24 The Winther study offers two tables: “Soldier Vote of the Army of the Potomac (1864)” and “Comparison of Soldier and Home Votes.” But there are problems with both tables. The initial table reports only army voting data, and not that of the sailors and marines. Second, the data reported are for different regimental units but not for all of them. Third, of the thirteen states that permitted soldiers to vote in the field, the initial table covers only eleven, plus a non-state category labeled “U.S. Sharpshooters.” One needs to know the states because presidential votes are reported only by state. Finally, the initial table reports votes for New York, and yet the New York state legislature did not pass a law allowing soldiers to vote in the field, and troops voting in this state had to be “furloughed permitting them to come home and vote.”25 In addition, the New York system of soldiers voting at home did not permit them to separate the soldiers’ vote from the home vote. Hence, the tabulated vote here is combined, which makes it difficult to separate the soldiers’ vote from the normal home vote. And the soldiers’ vote totals in this table are less than those reported by Benton because the vote includes only the army. Furthermore, in the second table in the Winther article, none of the grand totals or any of the individual party totals agree with any of those found in the leading atlas on presidential elections. Benton’s totals, on the other hand, are mostly in agreement. And finally, the second Winther table does not report data for all of the

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thirteen states that allowed and separately reported soldier and home voting totals. Therefore, instead of using this questionable and incomplete data, we have relied upon Benton and crossreference his totals with the best atlases that are available.

Table 12.2  Reported Soldiers’ Field Vote in the 1864 Presidential Election, Ranked in Order of the Number of Votes for Lincoln-Johnson by State

Soldiers’ Vote

African American Soldiers’ Field Voting Behavior in the 1864 Presidential Election

State

The only reference to African American soldiers voting in the field in the extant literature is found in the initial work on soldiers’ voting: Benton, Voting in the Field. He wrote: “The total number of soldiers enlisted was 2,859,132, which included 93,441 colored troops, some of whom were probably voters at home.”26 In his twenty-five state-by-state analyses (a chapter devoted to each of the twenty-five states), he only once referenced African American soldiers, and that was in the state of Maryland. Again, he wrote “that Maryland put into the United States service . . . 48,855 men, including 2,217 sailors. Of these troops, 8,718 were colored.”27 Thus, his two references in this 332-page volume give us the total number of African American Union troops and the number of Union troops in a single Border State. And in giving us the total number he suggested that some of these troops might have voted in their particular state but gave no indication that they could have voted in the field.

Table 12.2 uses the Benton empirical voting data on the soldiers’ field voting to delineate the thirteen states whose laws permitted soldiers and sailors to vote in the field. This table provides for these thirteen states the soldiers’ vote for the Republican and the Democratic presidential tickets, as well as the total soldiers’ field vote in each state. And the last column in the table shows what percentage of soldiers cast their votes for the Lincoln-Johnson ticket. This is the first time that a composite portrait of soldiers’ field voting has appeared in tabular format. Map 12.1 provides a visual of the thirteen states where soldiers field voting occurred in relationship to the other twenty-five states in the Union at this presidential election. Given that the soldiers’ field voting in Table 12.2 is rankordered from the highest to lowest number of votes for the Lincoln-led Republican ticket, we see that soldiers from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Wisconsin provided double-digit support. The states ordered differently for the McClellan-led Democrats, whose greatest soldiers’ vote came from Pennsylvania, followed by Ohio, dropping off significantly until Kentucky and Michigan. While Republicans won all of their highest-supporting states, Democrats won only one of theirs. As noted above, the Democrats did not fare well at all among the soldiers voting in the field for several reasons. Further empirical evidence about how the Democrats fared vis-à-vis the Republicans can be seen in the total for both parties in Table 12.2. Despite having a Major General heading their presidential ticket who had been popular with his troops, the Democrats simply did not come close to mobilizing the soldiers in the field to vote for their party and its military candidate. On the other hand, the Republicans did much in the way of mobilizing their supporters, and as discussed previously, the military

McClellanPendleton

State Total

Percent of Soldiers’ Vote for Lincoln-Johnson

Ohio

41,146

9,757

50,903

80.8%

Pennsylvania

26,712

12,349

39,061

68.4%

Iowa

17,310

1,921

19,231

90.0%

Wisconsin

11,372

2,458

13,830

82.2%

Michigan

9,402

2,595

11,997

78.4%

Maine

4,174

741

4,915

84.9%

Kansas

2,867

543

3,410

84.1%

California

2,600

237

2,837

91.6%

New Hampshire

2,066

690

2,756

75.0%

Kentucky

1,194

2,823

4,017

29.7%

Maryland

1,160

268

1,428

81.2%

Vermont

243

49

292

83.2%

Rhode Island

225

40

265

84.9%

120,471

34,471

154,942

Totals

The Total Soldiers’ Vote

LincolnJohnson

a

Mean = 77.8%

Source: Adapted from Josiah Benton, Voting in the Field: A Forgotten Chapter of the Civil War (Boston: privately printed, 1915), pp. 52–247. Calculations by the authors. Rhode Island required that all of its voters pay a voter registration tax. Of the 885 initial votes that were cast, 632 were votes for Lincoln and 253 for McClellan. Because many of the soldiers had not paid the registration tax, 407 votes were taken from Lincoln’s initial total and 213 from McClellan. The totals reported here represent the voters who paid their tax. See Benton, p. 187. a

victories in September obviously worked to the Republican Party’s advantage. Figure 12.1 (p. 224) offers a visual of the votes for the two partisan tickets in each of the thirteen states. Except for the three states that McClellan won, the Democratic ticket at the state level was at quite a disadvantage.

The African American Soldiers’ Vote To determine how African American soldiers voted in this war election, we must find if any of the thirteen states from Table 12.2, which held field voting, allowed Free-Men-of-Color to vote. Table 12.3 (p. 224) reveals that of the thirteen states, four states did permit Free-Men-of-Color to vote. An additional two states, New York and Massachusetts, allowed at least some African Americans to vote, but New York only allowed “proxy” voting for the troops—not field voting—while Massachusetts never passed any legislation on this matter at all. Therefore, the data in this table come from the four states that did allow African Americans to vote and vote in the field. In addition to listing the states that allowed both African Americans to vote and field voting, this table lists the total soldiers’ field vote for the Republican and Democratic candidates. Maine and New Hampshire provided both parties with their largest number of votes while the small states of Rhode Island and Vermont provided both parties with their smallest votes. However, there is a special circumstance that lowered Rhode Island’s soldiers’ vote.



The Civil War Election and the African American Soldiers’ Vote, 1864 223 Map 12.1  The Reported Soldiers’ Field Vote in the 1864 Presidential Election for Lincoln vs. McClellan

Washington Territory

Montana Territory Dakota Territory

Idaho Territory

Utah Territory

Arizona Territory

Nebraska Territory Colorado Territory

VA

Oklahoma Territory

New Mexico Territory

SC

AR MS

TX

NC

TN

AL

GA

LA

0

100 200 miles

FL Presidential Election, 1864 (legend displayed as map layers) Reported votes of soldiers in the field Won by Lincoln Won by McClellan

Sources: Adapted from Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), p. 181; Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 104–105; and Josiah Benton, Voting in the Field: A Forgotten Chapter of the Civil War (Boston: privately printed, 1915).

The state constitution required that all voters pay a registration tax in order to be eligible to vote. Benton wrote: A large number of the soldiers who voted were never qualified voters in the State. They imagined that the Constitution gave them a vote under any circumstances. A good many others had been voters previously and their names were found on the lists of voters, but as they had not paid their registration tax, they were not qualified voters at the time of the election.28 Hence, the total number of soldiers voting for each presidential candidate was reduced due to some of them failing to pay their registration tax so as to be eligible. Nevertheless, a small number of soldiers’ field votes were valid and were counted because they had paid the registration tax. Thus, even with these special circumstances in Rhode Island, we now know that

African American soldiers’ field voting could have taken place in four states during the Civil War. Relying upon Benton’s quantitative approach to the soldiers’ field voting data so that our analysis will be consistent with the historical record, we have taken the total number of African American soldiers in each of the four states and reduced that number by 30% to estimate the number who would be of voting age (21 years of age). Next, we reduced the remaining number by 10% for “soldiers who were in hospitals and camps in their own states.” Finally, to avoid having counted some soldiers twice (due to our twofold categorizations), we further reduced the number by 25%. Following these steps we arrived at our statistical estimates of how many African American soldiers in each of the four states potentially voted in the field.29 Those numbers can be found in the final column in Table 12.3. The information for these four states is a breakthrough in terms of knowledge about African American voting behavior during the Civil War.

224

Chapter 12

Figure 12.1  Reported Soldiers’ Field Vote in the 1864 Presidential Election for Lincoln vs. McClellan

41

,14

6

45,000 40,000 35,000

26 25,000

,31

0

20,000

17 ,34

9

15,000

22 5 40 Is e

od Rh

Ve

rm

la

on

nd

t

6 26 0 8 nd

yla ar M

uc nt Ke

24 3 49

23 1,1

ky

1,1

94 2,8

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2,0

Ne

w

Ha

m

lif

ps

or

hi

ni

re

a

as ns

ne ai M

hi

Ka

Ca

W

M

ic

isc

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on

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a w

a nn

sy

lva

Oh

ni

io

0

Pe

69

7 23

54

74

3

1

2,6

2,8

00

67

4,1

95 2,5

1,9

2,4

21

5,000

58

74

9,4

9,7

10,000

02

57

11

,37

12

2

Number of Votes

,71

2

30,000

State Lincoln

McClellan

Source: Table 12.2.

Table 12.3  African American Soldiers’ Field Vote in the 1864 Presidential Election

States Allowing African Americans the Right to Vote

All Soldiers’ Field Votes

Estimated African American Soldiers’ Votea

Abraham Lincoln

George McClellan

Difference (Lincoln – McClellan)

Maine

4,174

741

3,433

36

New Hampshire

2,066

690

1,376

44

Vermont

243

49

194

42

Rhode Island

225

40

185

643

Massachusetts

n/a

n/a

n/a

1,388

b

New York

b

Totals

n/a

n/a

n/a

1,444

6,708

1,520

5,188

3,597

Source: Adapted from Josiah Benton, Voting in the Field: A Forgotten Chapter in the Civil War (Boston: privately printed, 1915). a Estimated at 35 percent of African American troop total. See Table 12.1. b These states did not allow voting by soldiers in the field.

But this is not the entire portrait of African American soldiers’ voting. In the state of New York, where only “proxy” voting was allowed, it was impossible to make a separate soldiers’ voting count. The proxy was probably voted by some civilian back at home. Thus, the election counter once he or she got the ballots had no way of knowing and did not keep records. We know from earlier chapters that New York allowed Free-Men-ofColor to vote and that they had been quite politically active in the anti-slavery movement and the Republican Party. So under this proxy system, African American soldiers’ voting could not have been discerned, but the historical evidence suggests that they more than likely did vote via proxy. Massachusetts, while it did not provide for either field or proxy voting, did permit Free-Men-of-Color to vote in person, and if African American soldiers got furloughs home so that they could vote, they may have done so without being detected. The Free Colored community in Massachusetts, like the one in New York, was very active in political participation, and that knowledge allows one to reliably assume that some soldiers in this state voted using furloughs.



The Civil War Election and the African American Soldiers’ Vote, 1864 225

Map 12.2 shows those four states in this election that allowed African American soldiers to vote in the field as well as the two states that allowed them to vote only at home. What stands out from this map is the fact that all of the states are clustered in the New England area. The six states allowing FreeMen-of-Color to vote in this election were clearly isolated from the other nineteen states in the Union, to say nothing of the Confederate South.

The Presidential Vote Differences in the 1864 Civil War Election How did the number of soldiers and our estimate for the African American soldiers’ vote compare to the total voting that went on in this election? Table 12.4 (p. 226) offers the actual number of votes received by the Lincoln-Johnson ticket and the McClellan-Pendleton ticket, as well as the differences in the total number of votes. The Lincoln-Johnson ticket captured 2,160,331 votes to the McClellanPendleton ticket with 1,794,197 votes, for a difference of 366,134 votes.

In the South, only the state of Tennessee cast votes for the Republican and Democratic tickets because the eastern part of the state had been under Union control since 1862. Since this was the home state of Andrew Johnson, it should come as no surprise that the Lincoln-Johnson ticket received 15,617 votes to the McClellanPendleton ticket’s 108 votes. The difference here was 15,509 votes. However, neither the popular votes nor the potential electoral votes from Tennessee have ever been accredited to the LincolnJohnson ticket in any presidential election atlas. All of the atlases merely show Tennessee as a part of the Confederacy and no votes could be accrued from these states to the Union precisely because they had left the Union and Tennessee had not by 1864 been readmitted to the Union. It was only re-admitted to the Union on July 24, 1866. Hence, these Tennessee votes were never recorded for the incumbent president. They have been simply ignored. The overall popular vote outcome translated into 212 electoral votes, or 91%, for the Lincoln-Johnson ticket and 21 electoral votes, or just 9% for the McClellan-Pendleton ticket. Disaggregating from the regional to the state level we notice

Map 12.2  The African American Soldiers’ Vote in the 1864 Presidential Election

ME

VT

Washington Territory

Montana Territory

OR

Dakota Territory

Idaho Territory

NV

Utah Territory

CA

Arizona Territory

NH MA

MN NY

WI

RI*

MI

CT

PA Nebraska Territory

IL

Colorado Territory

New Mexico Territory

IA

KS

Oklahoma Territory

MO

Presidential Election, 1864 (legend displayed as map layers)

IN

DE WV

MD

VA

KY

NC

TN SC

AR MS

TX

NJ

OH

AL

GA

LA

0

100 200 miles

FL

Permitted African American Suffrage Did not allow voting by soldiers in the field Won by Lincoln Won by McClellan * Rhode Island (RI) required eligible voters to pay a registraation tax to vote. Sources: Adapted from Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), p. 181; Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 104–105; and Josiah Benton, Voting in the Field: A Forgotten Chapter of the Civil War (Boston: privately printed, 1915).

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Chapter 12

Table 12.4  Comparing the Number of the African American Troops to the Difference in Popular Votes between Candidates of the 1864 Presidential Election by State Popular Vote of the 1864 Presidential Election State/Territory (by Civil War Region)

Number of Union African American Troops

Estimated African American Troop Votea

Abraham Lincoln (Republican)

Popular Vote Difference (Lincoln–McClellan)

George McClellan (Democrat)

Number

Percent of Total Voteb

Union/North Connecticut

1,764

 

44,658

42,293

2,365

Colorado

95

 

 

 

 

 

Delaware

954

 

8,154

8,765

-611

-3.6%

District of Columbia

3,269

 

 

 

 

 

Illinois

1,811

 

189,451

158,683

30,768

8.8%

Indiana

1,537

 

149,847

130,179

19,668

7.0%

440

 

71,618

47,596

24,022

20.2%

Iowa Kansas Kentucky Maine

2.7%

2,080

 

14,203

3,787

10,416

57.9%

23,703

 

26,545

61,428

-34,883

-39.7%

104

36

63,616

46,253

17,363

15.8%

Maryland

8,718

 

40,158

32,734

7,424

10.2%

Massachusetts

3,966

1,388

126,727

48,752

77,975

44.4%

Michigan

1,387

 

81,746

71,260

10,486

6.9%

104

 

25,015

17,353

7,662

18.1%

8,344

 

72,690

31,559

41,131

39.5%

Minnesota Missouri New Hampshire

125

44

36,593

33,027

3,566

5.1%

New Jersey

1,185

 

60,711

68,012

-7,301

-5.7%

New York

4,125

1,444

368,570

361,944

6,626

0.9%

Ohio

5,092

 

265,608

205,588

60,020

12.7%

Pennsylvania

8,612

 

296,232

277,438

18,794

3.3%

Rhode Island

1,837

643

13,689

8,468

5,221

23.6%

Vermont

120

42

42,411

13,315

29,096

52.2%

West Virginia

196

 

23,782

11,066

12,716

36.5%

Wisconsin

165

 

68,860

62,550

6,310

4.8%

 

 

69,447

52,147

17,300

14.2%

79,733

3,597

2,160,331

1,794,197

366,134

9.3%

Alabama

4,969

 

 

 

Arkansas

5,526

 

Florida

1,044

 

Georgia

3,486

 

Louisiana

24,052

 

Mississippi

17,869

 

North Carolina

5,035

 

South Carolina

5,462

 

20,133

 

47

 

5,723

 

93,346

 

(Other States/Territories) Union Subtotal

Confederate / South

Tennessee Texas Virginia Confederate Subtotal Enlisted at Large Total

5,896

 

178,975

3,597

 

  2,160,331

 

  1,794,197

  366,134

  9.3%

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer file] ICPSR ed. Http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), accessed December 2002; George Washington Williams, A History of Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion (New York: Bergman Publishers, 1968), pp. 139–140; and Josiah Benton, Voting in the Field: A Forgotten Chapter in the Civil War (Boston: privately printed, 1915), pp. 52–247. Calculations by the authors. a

This column includes only the votes from states that permitted African Americans the right to vote; votes estimated at 35% of the African American troop totals.

b

Total vote equals the sum of the popular votes (Lincoln + McClellan).



The Civil War Election and the African American Soldiers’ Vote, 1864 227

in Table 12.4 that three states—Delaware, Kentucky, and New Jersey—went to the McClellan-Pendleton ticket. Two of these three states had only a small margin of victory for the Democrats: Delaware with 611 votes and New Jersey with 7,662 votes. On the other hand, Kentucky gave the McClellan-Pendleton ticket more than 61,000 votes, over 34,000 votes more than it gave the Lincoln-Johnson ticket. The Democrats took about 70% of the total Kentucky vote, easily the largest vote percentage from any of the states voting for the McClellan-Pendleton ticket. In the final analysis, the populous state of New York cast the highest number of popular votes for both tickets, while the lowest number of votes for the Republicans came from Delaware, and Kansas produced the lowest popular vote for the Democrats. Benton writes that “about 230,000 to 235,000 soldiers only cast votes, either in the field or by proxy, which were counted in the elections at home.” Considering the size of the rest of the popular vote, the soldiers’ vote did not have much significance, impact, or influence that would have shifted the outcome of the election.30 All evidence shows that the soldiers’ vote went nearly 80% for the Lincoln-Johnson ticket and about 20% for the McClellan-Pendleton ticket. But not only was President Lincoln reelected, the National Union Party victory extended to the congressional level, as the party captured a preponderant majority in both houses of Congress. One can compare these overall numbers in Table 12.4 to the earlier tables but also to Figure 12.2, which is a visual

representation of the estimated African American soldiers’ field vote in this election against the total soldiers’ votes. In the four small New England states the probable vote cast by African American soldiers in the field was correspondently small, given the small African American populations in these states. But in the larger states of New York and Massachusetts, where African American soldiers and sailors could only vote at home, the votes are large vis-à-vis the small states. While none of these votes could have changed the outcome in any of these six states, they nevertheless carried on a historic tradition of demonstrating that the ballot was quite important to this group of Americans. Perhaps it was summarized best by Canadian historian Joseph Frank when he wrote: The 1864 U.S. presidential election crystallized issues for the Northern troops. It sharpened the Union troops’ political awareness by tying decisions at home to the outcome of the war at the front, which enhanced the citizen-soldiers’ political perspicacity. The election pointed out the tie between political and military affairs in a people’s war and brought the realization that the troops’ [sic] were playing a decisive role in the conflict both at home and at the front; armed with ballot and bayonet, they believed that they were expanding freedom and democracy.31

Figure 12.2  African American Soldiers’ Field Vote in the 1864 Presidential Election 4,500 4,174 4,000 3,500

Number of Votes

3,000 2,500 2,066 2,000 1,388

1,500 1,000

741

690

643

500

243 36

0 Maine

1,444

44 New Hampshire

49

225

42

40

Vermont

Rhode Island

Massachusetts

New York

State Reported Soldiers’ Vote for Lincoln

Reported Soldiers’ Vote for McClellan

Estimated African American Soldiers’ Vote

Source: Table 12.3 Note: Rhode Island required payment of a registration tax for voting. New York and Massachusetts did not permit the votes of soldiers in the field.

228

Chapter 12

Historian Harold Hyman offers yet another compilation of Civil War soldiers’ voting behavior, one that does not include estimations of how African American soldiers voted, as provided by Table 12.4, but is an accounting of the state origination of all soldiers’ votes in the election of 1864. Whereas Table 12.4 lists the numbers of African American soldiers from the various states and estimates the votes of African American soldiers from states that had suffrage rights for African Americans, Table 12.5 reports the states with votes officially counted from soldiers in the field. Comparing the two tables, in Table 12.4 only Maine (36), New Hampshire (44), and Vermont (42) have estimated African American soldiers’ votes; and in Table 12.5 these states officially counted soldiers’ votes. In these states the estimated African American

votes are only 1.5% of the official total. The states of the greatest estimated African American soldiers’ votes (in Table 12.4)— Massachusetts (1,388), New York (1,444), and Rhode Island (643)—are not shown in Table 12.5 to have votes counted from soldiers in the field. The midwestern states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Michigan have the highest numbers of soldiers’ votes counted in the election. Each has a total of more than 12,000 votes cast, together constituting 8.2% of their states’ total votes (or 132,697 of 1,608,868 votes), but none has an estimate of African American votes. Of the eleven states reported by Hyman to have official soldiers’ votes, including California with 2,837, the estimated African American total is only 0.08% of all soldiers’ votes or 122 in the national total of 150,635 soldiers’ votes.

Table 12.5  Popular Vote, Soldiers’ Vote, and Electoral Vote in the Presidential Election of 1864 Popular Vote (Union) Republican Party

State

Votes

Percent of Total Votes

Soldiers’ Vote

Democratic Party

Votes

Percent of Total Votes

(Union) Republican Party

Democratic Party

Percent of Total Votes

Percent of Total Votes

Votes

California

62,134

57.1%

43,841

40.3%

Connecticut

44,693

51.4%

42,288

48.6%

 

8,155

48.2%

8,767

51.8%

 

Illinois

189,487

54.5%

158,349

45.5%

 

Indiana

Delaware

150,422

53.6%

130,233

46.4%

Iowa

87,331

57.0%

49,260

32.2%

Kansas

14,228

78.6%

3,871

21.4%

Kentucky

27,786

28.9%

64,301

Maine

72,278

57.9%

Maryland

40,153

52.8%

126,742

Michigan Minnesota

Electoral Vote

2,600

2.4%

 

Votes 237

0.2%

Total Votes (Popular + Soldiers’)

(Union) Republican Party

Democratic Party

108,812

5

0

 

86,981

6

0

 

16,922

0

3

 

347,836

16

0

280,655

13

0

153,133

8

0

 

15,178

9.9%

18,099

3

0

66.9%

1,194

1.2%

2,823

3.1%

96,104

0

11

47,736

38.2%

4,174

3.3%

741

0.6%

124,929

7

0

32,739

43.1%

2,800

3.7%

321

0.4%

76,013

7

0

72.2%

48,745

27.8%

175,487

12

0

85,352

51.7%

67,370

40.8%

165,083

8

0

25,060

59.1%

17,375

40.9%

 

 

42,435

4

0

Missouri

72,991

70.2%

31,026

29.8%

 

 

104,017

11

0

Nevada

9,826

59.8%

6,594

40.2%

 

 

16,420

2

0

36,595

50.6%

33,034

45.6%

72,385

5

0

Massachusetts

New Hampshire New Jersey

 

  9,402

2,066

5.7%

2.9%

1,364

1.0%

 

  2,959

690

1.9%

1.0%

a

60,723

47.2%

68,014

52.8%

 

 

128,737

0

7

New York

368,726

50.5%

361,986

49.5%

 

 

730,712

33

0

Ohio

265,154

50.8%

205,568

39.4%

521,625

21

0

9,888

53.9%

8,457

46.1%

18,345

4

0

Pennsylvania

296,389

48.4%

276,308

45.2%

611,758

26

0

Rhode Island

14,343

62.2%

8,718

37.8%

Vermont

42,422

75.7%

13,325

23.8%

West Virginia

23,223

69.0%

10,457

31.0%

Wisconsin

79,564

50.6%

63,875

U.S. Totals

2,213,665

53.1%

1,802,237

Oregon

41,146 26,712

7.9%

9,757

 

 

 

12,349

 

 

243

0.4%

49

40.6%

11,372

7.2%

43.3%

116,887

2.8%

 

2.1% 2.2%

23,061

4

0

0.1%

56,039

5

0

33,680

5

0

2,458

1.7%

157,269

8

0

33,748

0.8%

4,166,537

212

21

 

a

Source: Adapted from Harold M. Hyman, “Election of 1864,” in Arthur M Schlesinger, Jr., Fred L. Israel, and William P. Hansen (eds.), History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968 Vol. 2, (New York: Chelsea House, 1971), p. 1244. Calculations by the authors. a

As Hyman notes, one of the three electors in Nevada died before the election. Also, the votes of soldiers from Kansas and Minnesota arrived too late to be counted.



The Civil War Election and the African American Soldiers’ Vote, 1864 229

As Table 12.1 showed, of the nearly 180,000 African American soldiers who fought in the Union army, more than half came from the southern states in rebellion during the Civil War. None of these southern states participated in the 1864 election and barring the outcome of the Civil War none gave the opportunity to vote to more than very few, if to any at all, of their large African American populations. Table 12.5 shows that while several midwestern states had significant numbers of votes cast by their soldiers in the field, and that the five largest cast 38.6% of all soldiers’ votes in the presidential election of 1864, none permitted African American suffrage rights. So, within the Union army the meaning and opportunity afforded by the right to vote while at war could not have been more different for the African American and white troops.32

Summary and Conclusions on the African American Soldiers’ Vote Of Lincoln’s reelection and African American soldiers’ voting for him, African American historian Benjamin Quarles wrote: “Negro support for his re-election, already overwhelming, became practically 100 percent when the Democrats named George B. McClellan as their standard-bearer. Faced by the alternative of a general who had returned fugitive slaves and who had taken a dim view of the Negro as a soldier, the colored voters rallied even more strongly to the banner of ‘the Great Emancipator.’”33 For a host of reasons, including the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, Free-Men-of-Color soldiers had moved their party partisanship out of the anti-slavery parties to the Republican Party. Quarles’ statement highlights this fact. Quarles continued: “When John C. Fremont withdrew from the race late in September, the campaign as far as Negroes were concerned was reduced to its least common denominator.” In his book, Quarles quoted from a letter of an African American soldier to explain: “‘We are all for Old Abe. I hope he will be elected,’ wrote Sergeant James Ruffin from Folly Island [South Carolina] on October 16, 1864, to his sister-in-law. ‘Let the colored men at home do their duty.’”34 For this African American soldier, their duty was the reelection of the incumbent president. And Quarles closed with this comment: “The election of 1864 marked the cementing of the staunch affiliation of the colored man with the Republican Party, a political fellowship destined to last for three-quarters of a century.”35 Another Civil War historian, James McPherson, writing about the same situation, found that “[n]early every Northern Negro who possessed the franchise cast his ballot in November for Abraham Lincoln. If Southern Negroes could have voted, they would have done the same. Black men in Nashville held a mock election in November, and the result was: Lincoln, 3,193 votes; McClellan, 1 vote.”36 He added further insights about the partisanship of African Americans, citizens and soldiers, by quoting from the pre-eminent leader of the times, Frederick Douglass: I now look upon the election of Mr. Lincoln as settled. When there was any shadow of a hope that a man of more decided anti-slavery convictions and policy could be elected, I was not for Mr. Lincoln, but as soon as the

Chicago convention, my mind was made up, and it is made up still. All dates changed with the nomination of Mr. McClellan.37 Besides the endorsement of Douglass and his newspaper, numerous others leaders and newspapers urged the African American community and its soldiers to cast their votes for Abraham Lincoln’s reelection. Moreover, the empirical data from the white soldiers voting in the field show that the majority of them voted for the Lincoln-Johnson ticket. And it is no leap of faith to understand that these comrades in arms did also canvass the African American soldiers to vote similarly. Having established in this chapter that African American voters and African American soldiers in the field voted heavily for the incumbent president both from home and in the field, it bears asking: how vital were these votes, particularly the soldiers’ votes in the field, to determining the outcome of the 1864 presidential election? Table 12.3 shows that by the time of the 1864 Civil War election, the number of states allowing Free-Men-of-Color to vote had shrunk to six states, and each of these states had very small Free Colored communities. Then, when the limitation of field voting is applied, that number drops to four New England states with even smaller populations, when compared to large states like New York or Pennsylvania. Thus, the total number of African American males from these states who served in the Army and Navy would be even smaller. Finally, due to the registration tax in Rhode Island, the numbers drop to only double-digits. In sum, the number of potential African American voters who were able to vote in the field or at home (by proxy or furlough) were too small to turn the electoral outcome in any of the contests. None of these four or six states had presidential contests so close that the small number of voting African American soldiers could have tipped the scale or acted like a balance of power. But as the historical record shows (documented by Quarles and McPherson), this did not deter African American soldiers and sailors from voting or from supporting the Lincoln-Johnson presidential ticket. The will, motivation, and interest were there in the national, state, and battlefield contexts to have balloting occur. Our best estimate of numbers of these voters is found in Table 12.3. Although there is no empirical evidence to declare that the African American field soldiers influenced the electoral outcome in the national presidential election, there is evidence on the state level that soldiers’ voting did have one significant impact on the African American community. Professor Benton forthrightly addressed this issue of impact and influence of the soldiers voting in the field. He found that: Examination of the votes cast in the field in all the States shows that except in the State of Maryland, soldiers’ votes had substantially no effect in the election. They had no effect upon the election of Governor and other officers voted for upon the general State ticket. A few minor State officers, such as Judges of Probate, Prosecuting Attorneys, etc., are known to have been elected by the soldiers’ vote, and one Judge of the Supreme Court was thus elected. A solitary

230

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Congressman was elected in Michigan by the soldiers’ vote, and was seated by Congress. With these unimportant exceptions there was no result. . . . 38 Soldiers’ voting in Maryland, he discovered, “caused the [state] Constitution itself to be adopted by the popular vote by a majority of 475, which was wholly found in the soldiers’ vote in the field out of the State. And this Constitution abolished slavery.”39 When Maryland, one of the four Border States, entered on the side of the Union, it had slaves, as did Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri. During the war, its state legislature passed a new state constitution that “provided for the abolition of slavery, for soldiers’ voting in the field, for an oath of paramount allegiance to the United States, and for various other important changes in the old Constitution.”40 Eventually, the people of the state voted in a referendum on this new state constitution. “The result of the election was that 30,174 votes were cast for the Constitution, and 29,799 votes against it, making a majority of 375 for the Constitution. But in these votes were 2633 votes cast by soldiers in the field out of the State for the Constitution, and 263 cast by soldiers in the field against the Constitution.”41 Hence, without the soldiers’ votes the state constitution would have failed, and slavery would not have been abolished in Maryland before the Thirteenth Amendment. All of the soldiers voting in the field from Maryland were white, as Maryland had long since refused the right of suffrage to African Americans. Also in Michigan, where a congressman was elected with the soldiers’ vote, African Americans did not have the right to vote. It is not known whether the white soldiers in these states were influenced by serving alongside African American regiments in the war. But nevertheless, though African Americans soldiers’ voting did not swing the election, the African American cause was assisted at least on the state level and indirectly on the national level with Lincoln’s reelection. In conclusion, there were not enough African American soldiers voting in the field to make a difference in the Civil War election of 1864, but the few soldiers who did vote continued the struggle of African Americans to exercise their suffrage rights during one of the greatest crises in the nation’s history. Not only was Lincoln reelected, but the National Union party’s “success at the polls swept into office a preponderant party majority in both houses” of Congress.42

Notes   1. Paul Boller, Jr., Presidential Campaigns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 115.   2. Josiah Benton, Voting in the Field: A Forgotten Chapter of the Civil War (Boston: privately printed, 1915), p. 27.   3. Jonathan White, “Canvassing the Troops: The Federal Government and the Soldiers’ Right to Vote,” Civil War History Vol. 50 (September 2004), pp. 291, and his “Citizens and Soldiers: Party Competition and the Debate in Pennsylvania over permitting Soldiers to Vote, 1861–64,” American Nineteenth Century History Vol. 5 (Summer 2004).   4. Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), Chapter 21.

  5. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 24.  6. Ibid.   7. White, p. 316.   8. Ibid., p. 317.   9. Benton, p. 5. 10. Samuel McSeveney, “Re-electing Lincoln: The Union Party Campaign and the Military Vote in Connecticut,” Civil War History Vol. 32 (June 1986), p. 148. See also his “Winning the Vote for Connecticut Soldiers in the Field, 1862–1864: A Research Note and Historiographical Comment,” Connecticut History Vol. 26 (November 1985), pp. 115–124. 11. Benton, p. 15. 12. White, p. 293. 13. Ibid., pp. 292–293. 14. Ibid., p. 294. 15. Benton, p. 306. 16. Boller, p. 116. 17. White, p. 312. 18. Ibid. 19. Yanek Mieczkowski, The Routledge Historical Atlas of Presidential Elections (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 55. 20. Boller, p. 117. 21. Fred Israel, Student’s Atlas of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1996 (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1997), p. 62. 22. Ibid. 23. Richard F. Bensel, The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 217–285. 24. Oscar Winther, “The Soldier Vote in the Election of 1864,” New York History Vol. 25 (1944), pp. 440–458. 25. William Burcher, “A History of Soldier Voting in the State of New York,” New York History Vol. 25 (1944), p. 463 (459–481). This article appeared in the same volume as Professor Winther’s article and made precisely this point. And this was the same point made by Benton and by Professor White’s article in footnote 3. 26. Benton, p. 311. 27. Ibid., p. 225. 28. Ibid., p. 187. 29. Ibid., p. 311. 30. Ibid., p. 313. 31. Joseph Frank, With Ballot and Bayonet: The Political Socialization of American Civil War Soldiers (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), p. 117. For more on the socialization wrought by the army see Dudley Cornish, “The Union Army as a School for Negroes,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 37 (October 1952), pp. 368–382. 32. Harold Hyman, “Election of 1864,” in Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (ed.), History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968 Vol. 2 (New York; Chelsea House, 1971), pp. 1155–1244. 33. Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953), p. 255. For the first work on this matter by an African American soldier who participated in that conflict and who is considered the father of African American history, see George Washington Williams, A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1865 (New York: Bergman Publishers, 1968). 34. Quarles, p. 255. 35. Ibid., p. 257. 36. James McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted During the War for the Union (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), p. 307. See also Hondon Hargrove, Black Union Soldiers in the Civil War (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1988), pp. 206–219, for extensive information on African American Union troops. 37. McPherson, p. 306. 38. Benton, p. 313 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., p. 243. 41. Ibid., p. 246. 42. Quarles p. 259.

CHAPTER 13

African American Voter Registration and Turnout in 1867 Southern State Elections The First, Second, Third, and Fourth Military Reconstruction Acts The Four Military Reconstruction Acts: An Overview

233

Table 13.1 Nature, Scope, and Power of the Four Military Reconstructions Acts

233

The Sources of Political Antagonism and Tension: Southern States Legislatures’ Votes on the Fourteenth Amendment

234

Table 13.2 Voting of Southern White State Legislators For and Against the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, 1866–1867

235

State Constitutional Conventions in the South: Voter Registration in 1867 and Delegates

237

Table 13.3 Number and Percent of African American and White Registered Voters in the South, 1867 (Original Senate Report)

239

Figure 13.1 Percent of Registered Voters, African American and White, in States of the South in 1867 (Original Senate Report)

239

Table 13.4 Number and Percent of African Americans and Whites Voting For State Constitutional Conventions in the South, 1867

240

Figure 13.2 Percent of Voters for Constitutional Conventions, African Americans and Whites, in States of the South, 1867

241

Table 13.5 Number and Percent of African American and White Voters against State Constitutional Conventions in the South, 1867

242

Figure 13.3 Percent of Voters against Constitutional Conventions, African Americans and Whites, in States of the South, 1867

242

Table 13.6 Number and Percent of African American and White Registered Non-Voters on State Constitutional Conventions in the South, 1867

243

Figure 13.4 Percent of Non-Voters, African Americans and Whites, in Elections for State Constitutional Conventions in the South, 1867

243

Table 13.7 Number and Percentage of African American and White Voters Disenfranchised by the Military Reconstruction Acts

244

Figure 13.5 Percent of African American and White Voters Disenfranchised by the Military Reconstruction Acts

244

232

Chapter 13

Table 13.8 Number and Percentage of Registered and Disenfranchised Voters by Race, Southern State Constitutional Convention Referenda, 1867

245

Table 13.9 Number and Percent of African American and White Registered Voters in the South, 1867–1869 (Senate Report Revised and Updated with New Scholarship)

246

Map 13.1 States in the South Differentiated by Median Percentage of African American Registered Voters, 1867

247

Figure 13.6 Percent of Registered Voters, African American and White, in States of the South, 1867 (Updated Senate Report)

247

Table 13.10 Initial and Supplemental Registrations: The Increase in New Voters

248

The Relationship between the Initial Freedmen Voters and the Number of Freedmen Elected as Delegates to the State Constitutional Conventions, 1867–1868

248

Table 13.11 Number and Percentage of Freedmen and Whites at the State Constitutional Conventions, 1867–1868 Table 13.12 African American Shares of Registered Voters and State Convention Delegations in the South, 1867–1869

248 249

The First African American Federal Registrars: The Case of Georgia

249

Table 13.13 Demographic Characteristics of African American Registrars in Georgia, 1867–1868

250

Map 13.2 Geographic Distribution by County of Residence of African American Federal Reistrars for Georgia, 1867

250

Summary and Conclusions on African American Voters of 1867

251

Table 13.14 Composite Table of Total Voters Ranked by Percent of Registered Voters

252

Table 13.15 Voters by Race in the Electorate of the Reconstructed South

252

Figure 13.7 Total Voters by Race in States of the Reconstructed South, 1867–1868

253

Notes 253



African American Voter Registration and Turnout in 1867 Southern State Elections 233

C

ongressional passage of the Military Reconstruction Acts established suffrage rights for all African American freedmen to vote in ten of the eleven southern states of the old Confederacy.1 The exempted state was Tennessee, which had been liberated since 1862 and where reconstruction was considered to be going well by the time that these four Acts, in 1867 and 1868, were implemented.2 Predating this new effort to grant suffrage rights to the freedmen was congressional granting of suffrage rights to the freedmen in the District of Columbia (where slavery had been abolished in 1862) and the other federal territories. And before these congressionally initiated Military Reconstruction Acts emerged and went into effect, both President Johnson and the leaders of the southern governments failed to provide for or implement universal male suffrage rights in any shape, form, or fashion. Suffrage rights after the Civil War were simply returned back to southern whites only, including most of the leaders, military and electoral, of the old Confederacy. These four congressional Acts required that the freedmen share electoral power with their former slave masters, and that this be written into the new state constitutions of these governments before they could be readmitted to the Union. The purpose of this chapter is to collect, describe, and explain the nature, scope, and significance of these brand new voters in terms of their registration, their voter turnout in voting for or against these new state constitutions, as well as their nonvoting behavior in these initial elections. Such election data for both freedmen and whites provide the rare baseline information on the electorate in these states, and will permit the crafting of a holistic empirical portrait of both electorates as this region began its move into the Reconstruction (1867–1877) and later the Disenfranchisement (1888–1908) eras of American political history. Second, this chapter will provide invaluable and original insights into how new voters who had previously been barred

and suppressed from political participation in the electoral system developed and shaped their electoral behavior. Literally, these voters had to politically socialize and orient themselves instantly and in the midst of immediate political participatory events.3 And the same is true for the whites, because they had to re-orient and re-socialize themselves and possibly form coalitions, alliances, and cliques with citizens whom they had long held to be beneath them and incapable of the electoral duties, responsibilities, and opportunities of citizenship. Research studies on political socialization have never addressed this challenge. The electoral data resulting from these four congressional reconstruction acts offer a preview of the situation in the entire nation when universal male suffrage arrived three years later with the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment on February 3, 1870, and even later when universal adult suffrage appeared with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment on August 18, 1920.

The Four Military Reconstruction Acts: An Overview Table 13.1 offers a summary overview of these Acts: the powers granted by these Acts, those empowered by the Acts, the congressional sessions in which the Acts were passed, and the date of the passage of these Acts. And one should note that President Lincoln began the process of southern reconstruction prior to the passage of these Acts, and, following Lincoln’s assassination, President Johnson adopted his own reconstruction policy before the passage of these Acts. Both presidents implemented their own policies for the re-admission of the states of the old Confederacy back into the Union. Tennessee had been readmitted back in 1862, while the other ten states were re-admitted under Lincoln and Johnson only to be thrown out again by Congress. Hence, all four of these Military Reconstruction Acts applied

Table 13.1  Nature, Scope, and Power of the Four Military Reconstructions Acts

Military Reconstruction Act First Reconstruction Act

Congressional Record Description

Session

Date of Passage

• Created 5 military districts for 10 former Confederate states

39th, No. 2

March 2, 1867

40th, No. 1

March 23, 1867

40th, No. 1

July 19, 1867

40th, No. 2

March 11, 1868

• Required each of these states to become reconstructed through the creation of a new state constitution • Required universal manhood suffrage, including for African Americans • Ordered creation of new state constitution by convention of delegates elected by expanded electorate • Required ratification of new constitution by majority of registered voters • Required ratification of Fourteenth Amendment by new state legislature • Required approval of new state constitution by U.S. Congress

Second Reconstruction Act

• Empowered military commanders to register voters and conduct elections of convention delegates

Third Reconstruction Act

• Empowered military commanders to remove civilian and military personnel from office

Fourth Reconstruction Act

• Changed ratification of state constitution from majority of registered voters to majority of voters who voted

• Empowered military commanders to secure ratification of new state constitutions • Empowered military commanders to disqualify registered voters

Source: Adapted from James McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1982), pp. 520–522, 524, 528, and 538.

234

Chapter 13

only to the ten states, not Tennessee. And each of these Acts emerged because of political and personal rivalries and hostilities that arose (1) between President Johnson and Congress and (2) between a Republican-dominated Congress and the ten former Confederate States after they had begun readmission in 1866. The tensions in the first group also led to the impeachment of President Johnson, and the second led to the expulsion of the ten southern states with a new set of rules for re-admission. But before we discuss the tensions within these two groups, let us look at the four Acts summarized in Table 13.1. The first Act, passed on March 2, 1867, in the 39th Congress, 2nd Session, is the major act, while the other three are “supplementary” acts, designed to enhance and update the initial Act because of Supreme Court decisions that changed or modified it or gross misunderstandings occurring in the implementation of the Acts. The initial Act suspended the power and authority of the all white southern civilian state governments, placed them into five military districts, and put them under the military authority of the United States. The First Military District had one state, Virginia; the Second Military District had two states, North Carolina and South Carolina; the Third Military District had three states, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia; the Fourth Military District had two states, Arkansas and Mississippi; and the Fifth Military District had two states, Louisiana and Texas.4 Thus, three of the five districts had two states, one had one, and one had three. A general was put in charge of each district, and they were to report to the General of the Army. Besides being required to keep the peace and good order, the military commanders could jail violators but not put them to death. States in these military districts were required to register all males of twenty-one years of age regardless of color, to permit them to vote for delegates to a state constitutional convention, and to let that convention design a new state constitution which provided for universal manhood suffrage. Once the new constitution was drawn up, the Act permitted the people of the state to vote for ratification. A majority of the registered voters had to vote for the constitution’s passage before it would be acceptable to Congress. And the newly elected state legislature had to vote to adopt the Fourteenth Amendment (equal protection) before the state could be approved for re-admission to the Union. This Act gave the power to the ten white state governments to undertake this electoral and political process. Angry that they would have to give suffrage rights to African Americans, neither the white state government leaders nor President Johnson responded to this Act. Both groups simply refused to abide by the law. After three weeks with no action, Congress passed the Second Military Reconstruction Act on March 23, 1867, which empowered the military commanders to implement voter registration and give loyalty oaths, to conduct the state elections for the state constitutional convention delegates, and to hold the state constitutional conventions and the ratification elections for the new state constitutions. The state electoral power with this Act passed into the hands of the military commanders because of the inaction of the president, the governors, and state legislatures in the ten southern states.

On July 19, 1867, Congress passed the Third Military Reconstruction Act, which gave power to the military commanders of each district to suspend, remove, or stop both civilian and military personnel who interfered with or tried to obstruct registration, election, voting, or political participation in the state constitutional process. This Act arose because two states, Georgia and Mississippi, sued in court for a federal injunction to prevent “federal officials from enforcing the Reconstruction Acts.”5 The U.S. Supreme Court in their 1866 Milligan decision had declared that “military trials of civilians in nonwar zones were unconstitutional”6 and took into consideration the ex parte McCardle case that involved the jailing of a white Mississippian who had been denied a writ of habeas corpus for publishing inflammatory articles against Reconstruction. Also working its way through the court system was the Texas v. White case, where the state argued that the reconstruction process was a constitutional issue instead of a political one. The Supreme Court decided in 1869 that it was a political not a constitutional issue. This Third Act resolved these potentially troubling matters by asserting that military commanders had discretionary removal and suspension powers over civilian and military personnel in the ten states. Finally, the Fourth Act was enacted on March 11, 1868, and it changed the requirement for the ratification of the state constitution from a majority of the registered voters in each state to a majority of those who simply voted. Again, this matter arose because southern white leaders and voters either tried to vote against the newly developed state constitution or did not participate in the process so as to deny a majority. This time, as in each of the previous times, when Congress was faced with these stalling and non-participatory strategies and tactics of southern white leaders and officials to cause universal manhood suffrage to fail, they enacted these supplementary laws to prevent them from succeeding. And the consequence of the first three Military Reconstruction Acts was that beginning shortly after the passage of the Second Act, the registration of freedmen and white voters started and was completed in the ten southern states by September 1867. Some supplementary registration took place in some of the ten states in October. For African Americans in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Rapides Parish, Louisiana, where Free-Men-of-Color were permitted to vote in a limited time frame prior to the Civil War, this was a return of a right that they had lost, but for all of the other freedmen in the seven other states and the other parishes of Louisiana this was their first chance to go to the ballot box.

The Sources of Political Antagonism and Tension: Southern States Legislatures’ Votes on the Fourteenth Amendment The four Military Reconstruction Acts that eventually transferred power and authority for the reconstruction of the South from the presidency to Congress emerged from sundry tensions and antagonisms that developed not only within these two branches of government but also from the southern states as well. It should be noted that Andrew Johnson, a former Democratic senator from Tennessee who favored unionism over secession, was appointed on March 4, 1862, by President Lincoln to serve as the military governor of Tennessee. During his



African American Voter Registration and Turnout in 1867 Southern State Elections 235

three-year tenure he reconstructed the state with only whites but did not give the freedman any suffrage rights. He served until March 3, 1865, the day before he became President Lincoln’s new vice president. Lincoln and the Republican delegates chose Johnson not only because he was the only southern senator to remain loyal to the Union but also because he was a political symbol for the National Union Party, i.e., the Republican Party in the 1864 presidential election. The party was seeking Union and War Democrats during the election, and Johnson was a War Democrat. He was adamantly opposed to African American suffrage and said so in some of his veto messages once he had become president, setting him in opposition to many of the Republicans from northern states and African American suffrage activists.7 Johnson favored whites being in charge of the new southern governments. This too caused tensions and antagonisms. These attitudes that determined his policies, programs, and political behavior helped lead to impeachment proceedings, which ended with his acquittal by one vote, but a strong Republican majority in 1866 meant that he lost control over the reconstruction process. As to the southern states, during President Johnson’s leadership of Reconstruction, as soon as these states were re-admitted in 1866, they enacted the “Black Codes.” These were laws “adopted by Southern states in 1865–1866 . . . to regulate the new status of blacks. . . . [T]he codes excluded blacks from juries and prohibited racial intermarriage. Some of them required segregation in public accommodations.”8 And they also required different and more severe punishment for blacks than whites for the

same crime. Since such laws existed in the northern states, they did not cause much of an outcry in the northern states when they were enacted. But other parts of the Black Codes did cause uproar, serious tensions, and antagonisms. “The provisions of the black codes relating to vagrancy, apprenticeship, labor, and land, however, provoked Republican accusations of an intent to create a new slavery.”9 These types of race-based laws did not exist in any wholesale manner in the northern states. Letters from these northern constituencies and African Americans led to demands from Republican congressmen for repeals and revisions, which both the president and southern white leaders simply ignored. The Black Codes were not revised until after the Reconstruction Acts. Beside the problems with the Black Codes, Congress bristled at the rejection of the proposed Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution by all of the old Confederate states except Tennessee. Table 13.2 shows how the houses and senates in each of the eleven southern states voted in 1866 and 1867 on the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. All of these state legislatures at these dates, 1866 and 1867, were white. None of the ten southern states besides Tennessee even came close to ratifying this amendment. Both houses of the Louisiana legislature voted unanimously against passage, and Virginia found only one vote for the amendment out of its two houses. And two states, Texas and South Carolina, saw their state senates not even concerned enough to vote on the measure. Florida and Mississippi recorded their votes but were also unanimous against it.

Table 13.2  Voting of Southern White State Legislators For and Against the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, 1866–1867 State House State

State Senate

For

%

Against

%

Arkansas

8

10.4%

69

Alabama

2

2.9%

Florida

0

0.0%

Georgia

2

1.5%

Louisianab Mississippi

For

%

89.6%

2

68

97.1%

49

100%

131

 

Against

%

Date(s)a

6.9%

27

93.1%

December 7, 1866

1

4.0%

24

96.0%

December 17 & 15, 1866

0

0.0%

20

100%

December 1 & 3, 1866

98.5%

0

0.0%

36

100%

November 9, 1866

100%

 

100%

February 6 & 5, 1867

0

0.0%

88

100%

0

0.0%

27

100%

January 25 & 30, 1867

North Carolina

10

9.7%

93

90.3%

1

2.2%

44

97.8%

December 13, 1866

South Carolinac

1

1.0%

95

99.0%

43

79.6%

11

20.4%

5

6.9%

67

93.1%

1

?

72

9.6%

Tennessee Texasc Virginia

d

Total

No senate vote 15

90.4%

6

28.6%

No senate vote

Unspecified “against” vote 671

71.4%

December 20, 1866 July 12 & 11, 1866 October 13, 1866

 

 

 

100%

January 9, 1867

19

9.4%

184

Mean

7.2

74.6

2.7

Median

2

69

1

 

90.6%

 

26.3

 

 

27

 

 

Source: Adapted from Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States of America During the Period of Reconstruction, April 15, 1865–July 15, 1870 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), p. 194. a

Where there are two dates instead of one, the first is when the state house voted and the second is when the state senate voted. Where there is only a single date, both houses voted on the same date.

b

In Louisiana, the entire state legislature voted unanimously against the Fourteenth Amendment in numbers not specified by the source.

c

In South Carolina and Texas, there was not a vote in the state senate on the Fourteenth Amendment.

d

The source specifies that votes in the Virginia state house and state senate were cast unanimously against the Amendment except one in the state house.

236

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Finally, the table shows the timing of these rejections. Three southern states, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia, did not vote until 1867 after a string of seven other southern states in 1866 had voted in consecutive order against the measure. These three states simply followed the actions of their sister states and rejected the measure. Though Tennessee led the way during the previous summer by voting to accept the amendment, Texas and Georgia followed in the fall of 1866 and voted to reject this amendment. Before the year ended, the Texas and Georgia votes begat five more “no” votes from the legislatures of Florida, Alabama, North Carolina, Arkansas, and South Carolina, all in the month of December 1866. Looking at the votes and percentages, both houses in all but one of the states with recorded votes voted nearly 90% or more against the adoption of this amendment. With the sole exception of Tennessee, none of the states’ “yes” votes surpassed even the 15% level. This type of wholesale negative and oppositional voting behavior in the region sent the signal that the region would continue to defy at least one branch of the federal government, Congress, which increased tensions and provided Congress with a set of pressures and incentives to respond with the four Military Reconstruction Acts.

The Special Case: Tennessee Of the eleven states of the Confederacy, Tennessee was the only one to be exempted from the four Military Reconstructions Acts passed by Congress. The reasons are twofold. East Tennessee, from the beginning of the Civil War, was awash in Unionist sentiment and support. In fact, this support was so strong that government leaders there asked the Confederate government to be permitted to secede and become an independent state, as West Virginia did from Virginia, but its request was denied. Secondly, the numerous military defeats and reverses of the Confederates “laid bare much of Tennessee to Federal occupation. General Ulysses S. Grant issued an order on February 22, 1862, forbidding the courts to act under state authority and declaring martial law. Lincoln then gave Andrew Johnson the rank of general and appointed him military governor of Tennessee.”10 Tennessee was now out of the Confederacy and literally became the first southern state to undergo presidential reconstruction. And when Johnson became president, he in effect used his three years of federal administration to pioneer reconstruction in Tennessee as a model for the other southern states. That model was politically and racially flawed, but Johnson was wedded to it. Hence, Congress would use his original model but in modified and revised form. After appointing Johnson as military governor on March 4, 1862, even President Lincoln used Johnson’s original model to craft his own presidential reconstruction proclamation via an Executive Order on December 8, 1863. In point of fact, between Johnson’s appointment in March and the issuance of Lincoln’s own presidential reconstruction order, some eight months had transpired and in this period Johnson took some drastic and unauthorized actions. Upon arriving in Tennessee, Johnson not only ousted the mayor and city council of Nashville but issued warrants and had them arrested. He then appointed a new mayor and city council, which then removed “all other municipal officers, including the schoolteachers.”11 And when the city elected its first circuit judge who was disloyal to the Union, Johnson had

him arrested and jailed, and appointed his election opponent to the seat. Later, Johnson developed his own loyalty oath test which was “more stringent than Lincoln’s proclamation required. This test oath prevented all honest Confederate citizens from voting.”12 Next, he held a presidential election in 1864 where his loyal followers voted for President Lincoln over Democratic presidential candidate General George McClellan. But Congress rejected the outcome of the election and its electoral votes because Tennessee had not been readmitted to the Union in November 1864. Next, Johnson’s Union loyalists held a convention in Nashville, where they “proposed two amendments to the State Constitution. One abolished slavery; the other forbade the legislature to make any laws recognizing the right of property in man.”13 In addition to these two amendments, the Convention appended a schedule which abolished section 31 of the State Constitution prohibiting the passage of laws emancipating slaves without the consent of their owners; declaring unconstitutional, null and void the ordinance of secession; and repudiated acts of the State government enacted after May 6, 1861.14 Finally, this convention authorized that these amendments and appended schedule be ratified by the people in a referendum election to be held on February 22, 1865. And if they were approved and adopted, then an election for a governor and state legislature would be held in April. Less than three weeks after the Nashville Convention took this action, Military Governor Johnson on “January 26, 1865 . . . issued a proclamation formally authorizing the elections of February 22 and March 4 as provided by the convention.”15 Thus, on February 22, these actions were ratified “by the overwhelming vote of 25,293 to 48. As this vote exceeded ten per cent of the vote of the State in 1860, the loyalists [Unionists] regarded this election as complying with President Lincoln’s proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction issued on December 3, 1863.”16 Three days later, on February 25, “the military governor, Andrew Johnson, issued a proclamation officially declaring the ratification of the amendments of the State Constitution.”17 Then, as approved by Johnson, the statewide elections for governor and the state legislature took place on March 4, 1865. But the Nashville Convention, despite getting a petition from a State Convention of African Americans on January 9, 1865, praying “specifically for the right to vote and for protection in the courts,” did not extend suffrage rights to the freedmen.18 Only whites were permitted to vote in the March 4 statewide elections. And Military Governor Johnson had not sought to change or modify this restriction in his proclamation issued on January 26, 1865. African American suffrage was not a component part of this original model of presidential southern military reconstruction. And that would not change when the new state government was elected on March 4, 1865. The new Tennessee legislature convened on April 3, and on April 4 it ratified the Thirteenth Amendment. Speaking to the new state legislature after his inauguration on April 5, Governor



African American Voter Registration and Turnout in 1867 Southern State Elections 237

William Brownlow urged the body to be careful and cautious in revising the article on the franchise in the state constitution and to be sure to limit the elective franchise because it might hold up the state’s readmission to the Union. When the state legislature’s Joint Judiciary Committee on the Franchise reported, it proposed a bill that “restricted suffrage to white men.”19 Only Confederates “were disfranchised for five years while the leaders were disfranchised for fifteen years.”20 The resulting bill passed both houses. Having now established a new state constitution and state government, which then restricted the election franchise, in August 1865 the state held elections for Congress. The elected members to Congress from Tennessee presented their “credentials at the opening of the Thirty-ninth Congress in December of 1865.”21 Immediately, a struggle ensued in Congress over who had the power to re-admit states into the Union, the president or Congress, and this struggle delayed Tennessee’s re-admission for nearly eight months. To aid itself in this struggle to be readmitted to the Union, the Tennessee state legislature ratified the Fourteenth Amendment on July 19, 1866. When the news reached Congress, they passed a resolution asserting that Congress had the power to re-admit “Rebel States” to the Union. President Johnson vigorously protested this congressional resolution but wanted his home state back into the Union, and so he signed it. However, the president did not protest the fact that the state did not grant suffrage rights to African Americans and that they had been denied the right to vote for this state’s new congressional delegation. And no African Americans had been offered a nomination by the so-called radical Unionists. This original model of military reconstruction had not been modified by Johnson either as governor or president. Therefore, upon having its congressional representatives seated and being re-admitted to the Union, “the state was thereafter considered competent to manage its own affairs, and it was not included in the military government established for the other ex-confederate states by Congress.”22 After Tennessee had been re-admitted to the Union in July 1866, the second session of the Tennessee legislature, which convened on November 5, 1866, took up the question of African American suffrage, simply because under the Fourteenth Amendment, the state’s new congressional representation in the House could be reduced to six from the current eight. Faced with this loss of national power in both the House of Representatives (two seats) and in subsequent president elections (two electoral votes), the state legislature set up a Joint Committee to consider the question of African American suffrage. A bill was introduced in January 1867, and it became law on February 27, 1867. (There was opposition to this law in both houses of the legislature: the state house passed it 38 to 25 and the state senate 14 to 7.) Although it provided African Americans the right to vote in the state, “section sixteen [of the law] provided that this act should not be construed so as to allow Negro men to hold office or sit on juries.”23 After its passage, several white citizens sued and took the matter to the state supreme court, which on March 21, 1867, “unanimously sustained the constitutionality of the franchise law.”24 It should be noted that the bill became law just three days before the U.S. Congress passed the First Military Reconstruction Act on March 2, 1867. Tennessee’s legislators had been forced to act by the possible consequences of the Fourteenth

Amendment, and the fact that had they not enfranchised the freedmen, because the U.S. Congress was literally within days of doing it themselves. And it might have been better for the freedmen to wait, for the Tennessee action gave the franchise but took away the right of office holding, which the Military Reconstruction Acts did not do. Thus, such a state should not have served as a model for southern reconstruction, but it did because Johnson implemented it not only as military governor but later as president. Ultimately, Tennessee supplanted Louisiana as the model for reconstructing state government in the South. President Lincoln had initially tried to re-organize Louisiana, and he suggested to incoming governor Michael Hahn that he should consider providing limited suffrage to two groups of freedman: (1) those who were educated and (2) those who had served as soldiers in the Civil War. The state’s leaders as well as Military Governor Banks failed to achieve this limited suffrage idea, and before he could effectuate such a policy President Lincoln was assassinated, on April 14, 1865, ending this embryonic approach. Thus, Louisiana’s opportunity to become the “model” state died stillborn. Other than having been publicly verbalized by the president in his last public message, it never became actualized either by the president’s Republican Party in Congress or by his presidential successor, Andrew Johnson. Johnson chose his own home state as the “model.” Historian Herman Belz has contended that President Lincoln’s verbal proposal would have made the “best” model of the two but neither so-called “model” provided for universal manhood suffrage.25 He argued that President Lincoln’s proposal was a “moderate solution” because of its “apparent reasonableness.” He added: “It seems plain in retrospect that the more circumspect approach to Negro suffrage . . . had advantages over the course eventually taken. It gave president and Congress a reasonable basis for agreement, and it would have weakened the force of the radicals’ main objection that presidential reconstruction did not recognize black political rights.”26 Clearly, for both the freedman and the freed slaves, this proposal was too “modest” and not “reasonable” enough for the human cost and struggle that they had paid for their arrival at their new citizenship status.

State Constitutional Conventions in the South: Voter Registration in 1867 and Delegates Shortly after the first three of the Military Reconstruction Acts had been implemented, Senator Peter G. Van Winkle of West Virginia proposed and got passed a Senate Resolution, which required the General of the Army, Ulysses S. Grant, to obtain a statement of the following: (1) the number of white and colored voters registered in each of the states subject to the reconstruction acts of Congress; (2) the number of white and colored voters voting for and against the calling of a state constitutional convention; (3) the number of white and colored voters who failed to vote either for or against the calling of a convention; (4) the number of white and colored persons disfranchised and rendered incompetent by the reconstruction acts to vote for a convention; and (5) the number of white persons entitled to be registered but who did not apply for registration.27 This Senate

238

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Resolution of December 5, 1867, was transmitted to General Grant for implementation. Grant sent a request to the military commanders in charge of the five military districts which now constituted the South to collect these five categories of election data. These data were collected and sent back to General Grant, who transmitted the data to the president of the senate, Senator Benjamin Franklin Wade (R-OH), on May 7, 1868, nearly six months later.28 The data were then printed up and referred to the Committee on Military Affairs and Militia. Said report became the official government report on political participation and voting behavior of African Americans and whites in the ten southern states in 1867.29 Analyzing General Grant’s report, one finds that four of the five military commanders tried to comply with the Senate Resolution request. The military commander of the Fourth Military District, comprised of Arkansas and Mississippi, Major General Alvan C. Gillem, attached an explanation to his part of the report describing why his report did not fully comply on the racial breakdown request. He wrote: It was deemed best by my predecessor in command of the district to ignore, in every way possible, all distinctions as to race or color in registering the legal voters under the reconstruction laws, and also to pursue the same course when it came to voting on the question of convention. The main object intended to be attained by so ignoring distinctions was to prevent persecutions hereafter on account of political sentiments entertained. There was no record kept of persons applying for registry who were refused as disfranchised. Persons who were so refused had their appeal to the commanding general; but so far as known the number so appealing was inconsiderable, and no appeal was held to be sustained. There is no record that any colored man in the district was refused registry for participation in, or giving aid and comfort to the rebellion. There exists no means of ascertaining the number of white males in the district who were entitled to be registered but failed to apply therefor.30 In addition to this attached explanation, Major General Hancock of the Fifth Military District, comprised of Louisiana and Texas, noted that only partial racial breakdown data existed for the state of Louisiana. He also wrote these footnotes to the Louisiana tabular data: * It is impracticable to give the number of whites and blacks, respectively, who voted on the question of a convention, as the order did not specify that this should be done. † Registration having been closed prior to the receipt of the act of Congress, . . . it is impracticable to comply with the requirements of said clause, only a partial list having been kept in six of the parishes, and no record in three of the parishes, of the number of persons disfranchised.31

Overall, from these two exceptions, the breakdown of the racial data from Arkansas and Mississippi is missing, as explained by Major General Gillem, while some of the racial data for Louisiana is missing due primarily to the fact that the Senate Resolution request came after the registration and voting had taken place. Hence, the official data are incomplete for three of the ten southern states, but they are complete for the other seven states. And the Report is complete for all ten of the southern states in terms of the grand total of registered voters in those states in 1867. In terms of actual numbers, as seen in Table 13.3, more African Americans registered than whites, 609,022 to 548,097, for a difference of 60,925 individuals in eight of the ten reporting states. This actual number difference is also evident in the mean and median voter registration numbers and the actual percentages at the bottom of this table. And these actual numbers and percentages show that coming out of a system of slavery and quasi-slavery (i.e., southern Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color), African Americans truly hastened to register to vote in the state constitutional elections and subsequently for congressional, statewide, and local public officials. Whites were not as eager to do so simply because it meant that such registration and voting would enable African Americans to permanently vote and possibly be elected to public office. Overall, this Official Senate Report provided the baseline political parameters of the southern states, and Congress had given them the chance and opportunity to undertake this task prior to Congress and the military commanders doing it. And African Americans had petitioned and lobbied these same state governments to undertake this same task even before Congress urged them to do so. Figure 13.1, which is based on the data in Table 13.3, allows us to compare and contrast in a visual manner the differences in African American and white voter registration in the eight southern states that broke down registration data by race. African Americans out-registered whites in Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama, and Florida, while whites out-registered African Americans in Georgia, Virginia, Texas, and North Carolina. Only in Georgia did the two races register in nearly equal numbers, with whites representing 50.3% of the registered voters to 49.7% for African Americans. The narrative in many books on Reconstruction is that the anger and unhappiness of whites resulted in a fullscale refusal to vote and participate, but that picture is simply not true. Had these sources made use of this Official Senate Report, they would have seen that local factors within the states caused variations in state registration behavior and that these factors mediated both freedmen and particularly white voter registration behavior under the Military Reconstruction Acts. But the Senate Report was only one of the official governmental documents on this matter; there was also the House Report.

The House Executive Document; 40th Congress, 2nd Session, Number 342 While the Senate took action on December 5, 1867, to determine the impact of the first three Military Reconstruction Acts, the House of Representatives passed their own resolution on February 3, 1868, which requested that the Secretary of War,



African American Voter Registration and Turnout in 1867 Southern State Elections 239

Table 13.3  Number and Percentage of African American and White Registered Voters in the South, 1867 (Original Senate Report) Registered Voters African American

Voting Age Male Populations by Census

White

1860a

Number

Percent of Total RVs

Total Number of Registered Voters

African American

1870b

State 

Number

Percent of Total RVs

White

Total

Virginia

105,832

46.8%

120,101

53.2%

225,933

123,613

246,016

266,680

Alabama

104,518

63.0%

61,295

37.0%

165,813

96,458

118,589

202,046

Georgia

95,168

49.7%

96,333

50.3%

191,501

97,092

132,509

234,919

Louisiana

84,436

65.1%

45,218

34.9%

129,654

98,981

101,499

159,001

South Carolina

80,550

63.2%

46,882

36.8%

127,432

87,681

68,154

146,614

North Carolina

72,932

40.6%

106,721

59.4%

179,653

74,346

143,443

214,224

Texas

49,497

45.4%

59,633

54.6%

109,130

38,230

109,625

169,258

Florida

16,089

57.5%

11,914

42.5%

28,003

14,178

19,243

38,854

85,838

169,737 100,403

Mississippi

 

 

139,690

104,010

Arkansas

 

 

66,831

24,844

73,993

Tennessee

 

 

56,770

189,470

259,016

816,203

1,288,379

1,960,752

Total

609,022c

52.6%

548,097c

47.4%

1,363,640d

Mean

76,127.8c

68,512.1c

136,364.0d

74,200.3

117,125.4

178,250.2

Median

82,493c

60,464c

134,672d

87,681

109,625

169,737

Sources: Adapted from U.S. Senate, “Letter of The General of the Army of the United States, Communicating, In Compliance with a resolution of the Senate of December 5, 1867, a statement of the number of white and colored voters registered in each of the States subject to the reconstruction acts of Congress, with other statistics relative to the same subject.” U.S. Senate, 40th Congress, 2nd Session, Executive Document Number 53 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1868), pp. 1–12. For similar tabular data on registered voters see Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States of America During the Period of Reconstruction, April 15, 1865–July 15, 1870 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), p. 374. For census information see Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896, downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors. a Male populations of age 20 years and older. b Male populations of age 21 years and older. c The summary statistics of this column and the percentage in the column to the right exclude Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee. d This statistic includes Arkansas and Mississippi but excludes Tennessee.

Figure 13.1  Percentage of Registered Voters, African American and White, in States of the South in 1867 (Original Senate Report) 70%

65.1%

63.2%

63.0%

Percent of Registered Voters

60%

59.4%

57.5% 49.7% 50.3%

50%

46.8%

42.5% 40%

34.9%

36.8%

54.6%

53.2% 45.4%

40.6%

37.0%

30%

20%

10%

0% Louisiana

South Carolina

Alabama

Florida

Georgia

African American Registered Voters Source: Table 13.3.

Virginia

Texas

White Registered Voters

North Carolina

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Edwin Stanton, gather all of the copies of “General and Special Orders . . . issued by the several commanders (or by any of their subordinate officers) of the five military districts of the south, for the execution of the reconstruction laws.”32 Once copies of all orders had been gathered and compiled, they were to be printed and made available to the House of Representatives; whereas the resultant report to the Senate was 12 pages, the resultant House of Representative report was 208 pages. Although this House report had no table of contents, it was organized starting with the state in the First Military District, Virginia, and then proceeding through each district and the states therein through the Fifth Military District with Texas. And while the orders are not always in numerical order, they are in calendar order starting with March 13, 1867, in Virginia, proceeding through all of the other southern states, and ending with Mississippi on January 27, 1868. Embedded in this rather lengthy document is the numerical voting data both “For” and “Against” holding a state constitutional convention, as well as the specific number of delegates that each state could elect to their state constitutional convention. Using this total number that could be elected, the report then showed how many delegates in each county or parish could be elected and sent to the state constitutional convention. Moreover, the report listed by county or parish the names of each delegate elected from that area. But despite this detail, there is no racial breakdown in this data, only the sub and grand totals. However, what is unique in this House report’s numerical data that is not available in the Senate report is the data on African Americans registrars. Military commanders in the First Military District (Virginia) and Third Military District (Alabama, Florida, and Georgia) specifically addressed in their General Orders that the boards of registration in these four states had to have a certain number of African American registrars. None of the military commanders in the other six states bothered to do so. And this arose from the fact that these orders varied considerably from military district to military district. Clearly, Districts One and Three differed from Two, Four, and Five on this matter of African American registrars. In Virginia, the House report indicates that the assistant adjutant general wrote: “it will be required that the ballots of the white and colored voters be taken separately[;] six persons, instead of three, will be appointed in districts or wards where there are more than five hundred voters[—]three to receive the ballots of the whites voters, and three to receive the ballots of the colored voters.”33 Then, in Alabama and Georgia, General Orders No. 20, written by Captain G.K. Sanderson of the 33d U.S. Infantry, required that “a board of registration is herein appointed for each district . . . to consist of two white registers and one colored register.” Then he made an exception for the state of Georgia, by noting that there, “where only the two white registers are designated in this order, it is directed that these white registers in each district immediately select, and cause to be duly qualified, a competent colored man to complete the board of registration, and report his name and post office address without delay, to Colonel C.C. Sibley, commanding district of Georgia, at Macon, Georgia.”34 This exception for Georgia was to allow white registrars there to select the African American registrar,

while in Alabama he was appointed by the military commanding officer. And while Florida was also in this Third Military District, nothing was said about the process there for selecting or appointing the African American registrars. Here again there was more variation in the rulemaking in the House document. Overall, the use of African American registrars at this time was crucial to the enfranchisement process, and, as we see, it was not undertaken in any uniform and systematic manner.

Results of the Official Senate Report The Senate Resolution from Senator Peter G. Van Winkle of West Virginia required more than racial breakdown data in terms of voter registration; it also sought a similar breakdown of those who voted for state constitutional conventions in 1867. Using the data from the Official Senate Report, Table 13.4 provides that information except for the three missing states (Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi) plus the exempted state of Tennessee. This table shows that the registered African Americans represented the lion’s share of the state constitutions’ support compared with

Table 13.4  Number and Percentage of African Americans and Whites Voting for State Constitutional Conventions in the South, 1867

State Virginia

African Americans Voting For State Constitutional Conventions 92,507

Whites Voting For State Percent Constitutional of Total Conventions

Total Voting For State Percent Constitutional of Total Conventions

86.2%

14,835

13.8%

107,342

Alabama

71,730

79.5%

18,533

20.5%

90,263

Georgia

70,283

68.7%

32,000

31.3%

102,283

South Carolina

66,418

96.6%

2,350

3.4%

68,768

North Carolina

61,722

66.4%

31,284

33.6%

93,006

Texas

36,932

82.6%

7,757

17.4%

44,689

Florida

13,080

91.5%

1,220

8.5%

14,300

Louisiana

 

 

 

75,083

Mississippi

 

 

 

69,739

Arkansas

 

 

 

27,576

Tennessee

 

 

 

Total

412,672a

79.3%

107,979a

20.7%

693,049b

Mean

58,953.1a

15,425.6a

69,304.9b

Median

66,418

14,835

72,411b

a

a

Source: Adapted from U.S. Senate, “Letter of The General of the Army of the United States, Communicating, In Compliance with a resolution of the Senate of December 5, 1867, a statement of the number of white and colored voters registered in each of the States subject to the reconstruction acts of Congress, with other statistics relative to the same subject.” U.S. Senate, 40th Congress, 2nd Session, Executive Document Number 53 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1868), pp. 1–12. Calculations by the authors. The total number, mean, and median of this column exclude Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee. The percentage in the column to the right is based on this same exclusion of states without specific data. a

The total number, mean, and median of this column include Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. b



African American Voter Registration and Turnout in 1867 Southern State Elections 241

whites. The difference in support between the two races is stark: 412,672 to 107,979 across the seven states with data, yielding a 304,693 vote difference. Likewise, the difference in the median vote between the two races is itself stark. In addition, in none of the seven states did the white vote for these state constitutions exceed that of the African American registered voters. Figure 13.2, with its comparison and contrast mode, presents the empirical evidence that in four states—South Carolina, Florida, Virginia, and Texas—African American voters cast more than 80% of the votes that went in favor of these state constitutional conventions, and that in the other three states—Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina—African Americans represented more than 60% of the support for these constitutional conventions. Only in Georgia and North Carolina did the white vote account for more than 30% of the support for the state constitution. In Alabama white support reached just over 20%. In the other four of the seven southern states for which we have data, whites accounted for less than 20% of the votes supporting these required state constitutional conventions. Again, even on this matter there is quite some variation. Table 13.5 (p. 242) provides an empirical answer to another request in the Senate Resolution: which races voted against having state constitutional conventions? Registered white voters overwhelmingly constituted the opposition to holding state constitutional conventions to write new state constitutions with universal manhood suffrage clauses. African Americans cast opposition

votes in only three of the seven reporting states—Texas, Virginia, and Georgia—whereas at least some white opposition votes were reported in all seven states. There was no recorded opposition among African Americans in the four states of Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The data in Table 13.5 corroborate the results presented previously in Table 13.4, namely that the freedmen in each of the ten states provided huge voter support for the referenda demanding that state constitutional conventions be held. Hence, these two tables confirm that more freedmen than whites voted in favor of these state conventions. Figure 13.3 (p. 242), offering comparison and contrast, visually emphasizes that whites accounted for 100% of the opposition to state constitutional conventions in four of these seven reporting southern states. Whites also made up more than 90% of the opposition against these new political entities in the remaining three states. Next, the Senate Resolution asked for racial breakdown data on non-voters. Table 13.6 (p. 243) indicates that the largest number of registered voters who failed to vote came from the white community. Nearly three quarters (71.6%) of the registered voters who failed to vote for or against the state constitutional conventions were white, while less than a third (28.4%) of registered voters who failed to vote for or against the state constitutional conventions were African American. The large median non-vote difference between the two races in this table suggests the disparity was indeed one-sided.

Figure 13.2  Percentage of Voters for Constitutional Conventions, African Americans and Whites, in States of the South, 1867 100%

96.6% 91.5%

90%

86.2%

82.6%

79.5%

Percent of Voters for Conventions

80%

68.7%

70%

66.4%

60% 50% 40% 31.3%

33.6%

30% 20% 10% 0%

13.8%

17.4%

8.5% 3.4% South Carolina

Florida

Virginia

Texas

African Americans For Conventions Source: Table 13.4.

20.5%

Alabama

Georgia

Whites For Conventions

North Carolina

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Table 13.5  Number and Percentage of African American and White Voters against State Constitutional Conventions in the South, 1867 African Americans Voting Against Whites Voting State Against State Constitutional Percent Constitutional Conventions of Total Conventions

State

Total Voting Against State Percent Constitutional of Total Conventions

Texas

818

7.2%

10,622

92.8%

11,440

Virginia

638

1.0%

61,249

99.0%

61,887

Georgia

127

3.1%

4,000

96.9%

4,127

Florida

0

0%

203

100%

203

South Carolina

0

0%

2,278

100%

2,278

Alabama

0

0%

5,583

100%

5,583

North Carolina

0

0%

32,961

100%

32,961

Arkansas

 

 

 

13,558

Mississippi

 

 

 

6,277

Louisiana

 

 

 

4,006

Tennessee

 

 

 

Total

1,583a

Mean

1.3%

Median

116,896a

98.7%

142,320b

226.1

16,699.4

14,232.0b

0

5,583

5,930b

a

a

a

a

Source: Adapted from U.S. Senate, “Letter of The General of the Army of the United States, Communicating, In Compliance with a resolution of the Senate of December 5, 1867, a statement of the number of white and colored voters registered in each of the States subject to the reconstruction acts of Congress, with other statistics relative to the same subject.” U.S. Senate, 40th Congress, 2nd Session, Executive Document Number 53 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1868), pp. 1–12. Calculations by the authors. The summary statistics of this column and the percentage in the column to the right exclude Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee. a

b

The total, mean, and median of this column include Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

Visually, Figure 13.4 notes the disparities in the seven states between African American and white non-voters. Over 70% of the non-voters came from the white population in six of the seven states. Alabama is unique in this tabular data in that its African American and white non-voters nearly equal each other. The last request made by the Senate Resolution called for the number of African Americans and whites disfranchised by the Military Reconstruction Acts. The Official Senate Report did report this data, and later the Military Commander, Major General J. M. Schofield of the First Military District, which was made up of only Virginia, gave said information to the author of the Political History handbook, Edward McPherson, and their data corroborate each other.35 Table 13.7 (p. 244) provides that data for both African Americans and whites. It offers racial disfranchisement data for whites in five of the ten states and for African Americans in three of the ten states. Clearly, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida had the largest number of white disfranchised voters in that order, while South Carolina, North Carolina, and Florida had the largest number of African American disfranchised voters in that order. Many more whites were disenfranchised in these five states than African Americans were in their three states. Both presidential and later congressional Reconstruction policies wanted Confederate military leaders and, later, those who failed to sign loyalty oaths to be prevented from participating in the new state and local government until some five years into the future. Figure 13.5 (p. 244) displays the differences between the races in terms of disfranchisement percentages. The largest number of disfranchised voters in each of the five reporting states were by far whites. Whites who were disfranchised in Virginia could have had this occur as a consequence of “any cause,” while those freedmen disfranchised in South Carolina had this occur due “chiefly for

Figure 13.3  Percentage of Voters against Constitutional Conventions, African Americans and Whites, in States of the South, 1867 100%

99.0%

96.9%

100%

100%

100%

100%

92.8%

Percent of Voters Against Conventions

90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

7.2% 3.1%

1.0%

0% Texas

Georgia

Virginia

0% North Carolina

African Americans Against Conventions Source: Table 13.5.

0% Alabama

0% South Carolina

Whites Against Conventions

0% Florida



African American Voter Registration and Turnout in 1867 Southern State Elections 243 Table 13.6  Number and Percentage of African American and White Registered Non-Voters on State Constitutional Conventions in the South, 1867

African American Non-Voters

Percent of Total NonVoters

Percent of Total NonVoters

Total Registered Voters Not Voting

Alabama

32,788

46.9%

Georgia

24,758

29.1%

37,159

53.1%

69,947

60,333

70.9%

South Carolina

14,132

85,091

25.0%

42,354

75.0%

56,486

Virginia Texas

12,687

22.4%

44,017

77.6%

56,704

11,730

22.1%

41,234

77.9%

52,964

North Carolina

11,210

20.9%

42,476

79.1%

53,686

Florida

3,009

22.3%

10,491

State

White Non-Voters

77.7%

13,500

Mississippi

 

 

 

63,674

Louisiana

 

 

 

50,480

Arkansas

 

 

 

25,697

Tennessee

 

 

 

Total

110,314a

28.4%

278,064a

71.6%

528,229b

Mean

15,759.1a

39,723.4a

52,822.9b

Median

12,687a

42,354a

55,086b

Source: Adapted from U.S. Senate, “Letter of The General of the Army of the United States, Communicating, In Compliance with a resolution of the Senate of December 5, 1867, a statement of the number of white and colored voters registered in each of the States subject to the reconstruction acts of Congress, with other statistics relative to the same subject.” U.S. Senate, 40th Congress, 2nd Session, Executive Document Number 53 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1868), pp. 1–12; and Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States of America During the Period of Reconstruction, April 15, 1865–July 15, 1870 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), p. 374. Calculations by the authors. The summary statistics of this column and the percentage in the column to the right exclude states without specific data, namely Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee. a

b

The statistics of this column include Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas.

felony” reasons.36 No details were provided in the Official Senate Report as to why freedmen and whites were disfranchised. But the dominant reason for whites was their past participation in the Civil War as Confederate military leaders and/or their refusal to sign a loyalty oath. In Georgia and Virginia whites constituted 100% of the disfranchised voters; while in South Carolina and North Carolina whites constituted over 90% of the disfranchised voters. Only in Florida did the number of freedmen constitute a substantial number of total disfranchised voters. Clearly, Florida is the outlier in this Official Senate data. Table 13.8 (p. 245) combines data from Tables 13.3, 13.4, 13.5, 13.6, and 13.7. It compares and shows the extent to which registered voters among African Americans and whites failed to vote in the constitutional convention referenda. The mean turnout among African Americans in the states was 79%; however, among whites a majority of those registered, or 55.3%, did not vote. Only in the states of Virginia and North Carolina did white majorities turn out to vote in the referenda. In both of these states whites out-numbered African Americans among registered voters; but in Virginia whites mustered just over a majority (51.0%) in their opposition to holding a constitutional convention; and in North Carolina not even a third (30.9%) of their number voted to oppose a convention. Florida and South Carolina, in particular, illustrate the passivity of whites in these referenda; approximately 90% of white registered voters in each state did not vote (88.1% and 90.3%, respectively). Collectively, when the Senate and House reports are used in conjunction with one another, they afford a more holistic portrait of the freedmen’s voter registration state by state and their voter behavior in the state convention elections, the state elections, as well as the congressional elections. But more importantly, they provide any student of the African American

Figure 13.4  Percentage of Non-Voters, African Americans and Whites, in Elections for State Constitutional Conventions in the South, 1867 90% 80% 70.9%

Percent of Non-Voters

70% 60% 50%

79.1%

77.9%

77.7%

77.6%

75.0%

53.1% 46.9%

40% 29.1%

30%

25.0%

22.4%

22.3%

22.1%

20%

20.9%

10% 0% Alabama

Georgia

South Carolina

Virginia

African Americans Non-Voters Source: Table 13.6.

Florida White Non-Voters

Texas

North Carolina

244

Chapter 13

Table 13.7  Number and Percentage of African American and White Voters Disenfranchised by the Military Reconstruction Acts African Americans Disenfranchised

State

Percent of Total

Whites Disenfranchised

Percent of Total

Total Disenfranchised

South Carolina

625

7.0%

8,244

93.0%

8,869

North Carolina

493

4.0%

11,688

96.0%

12,181

Florida

200

36.4%

350

63.6%

550

Georgia

0

0%

10,500

100%

10,500

Virginia

0

0%

16,343

100%

16,343

Alabama

0

0

0

Arkansas

0

0

0

Louisiana

 

 

 

Mississippia

 

 

 

a

Texas

 

 

Totalb

1,318

2.7%

a

Mean

  47,125

263.6

b

Median

9,425.0

200

b

97.3%

48,443 6,920.4

10,500

8,869

Source: Adapted from Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States of America During the Period of Reconstruction, April 15, 1865–July 15, 1870 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), p. 374. Calculations by the authors. a

The military commanders of districts that included these states did not report data for this category.

b

The summary statistics and percentages of these rows are based on data reported by the military commanders. This data excludes Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.

Figure 13.5  Percentage of African American and White Voters Disenfranchised by the Military Reconstruction Acts 100%

96%

100%

100%

93%

90%

Percent of Disenfranchised Voters

80% 70%

63.6%

60% 50% 40%

36.4%

30% 20% 7%

10%

4%

0% Florida

South Carolina

North Carolina

0%

0%

Georgia

Virginia

African Americans Disenfranchised Source: Table 13.7.

Alabama

Whites Disenfranchised

Arkansas



African American Voter Registration and Turnout in 1867 Southern State Elections 245 Table 13.8  Number and Percentage of Registered and Disenfranchised Voters by Race, Southern State Constitutional Convention Referenda, 1867

White

African American

Race

Registered Voters Not Voting

Statea

Number of Registered Voters Reported by Sourcesb

Total Number of Registered and Disenfranchised Voters (RDV)

Number

Percent of RDV

Number

Percent of RDV

Number

Virginia

105,832

105,832

92,507

87.4%

638

0.6%

12,687

Alabama

104,518

104,518

71,730

68.6%

0

0.0%

32,788

Georgia

95,168

95,168

70,283

73.9%

127

0.1%

South Carolina

80,550

81,175

66,418

81.8%

0

North Carolina

72,932

73,425

61,722

84.1%

0

Texas

49,497

49,480

36,932

74.6%

Florida

16,089

16,289

13,080

80.3%

Total

524,586

525,887

412,672

78.5%

Virginia

120,101

136,444

14,835

10.9%

Alabama

61,295

61,275

18,533

30.2%

Georgia

96,333

106,833

32,000

South Carolina

46,882

55,226

2,350

North Carolina

Voting in Favor

Voting Against

Percent of RDV

Disenfranchised Voters Number

Percent of RDV

12.0%

0

0.0% 

31.4%

0

0.0% 

24,758

26.0%

0

0.0% 

0.0%

14,132

17.4%

625

0.8% 

0.0%

11,210

15.3%

493

0.7% 

818

1.7%

11,730

23.7%

 

0.0% 

0

0.0%

3,009

18.5%

200

1.2% 

1,583

0.3%

110,314

21.0%

1,318

0.3% 

61,249

44.9%

44,017

32.3%

16,343

12.0% 

5,583

9.1%

37,159

60.6%

0

0.0% 

30.0%

4,000

3.7%

60,333

56.5%

10,500

9.8% 

4.3%

2,278

4.1%

42,354

76.7%

8,244

14.9% 

106,721

118,409

31,284

26.4%

32,961

27.8%

42,476

35.9%

11,688

9.9% 

Texas

59,633

59,613

7,757

13.0%

10,622

17.8%

41,234

69.2%

 

0.0% 

Florida

11,914

12,264

1,220

9.9%

203

1.7%

10,491

85.5%

350

2.9% 

502,879

550,064

107,979

19.6%

116,896

21.3%

278,064

50.6%

47,125

8.6% 

Total

Sources: Tables 13.3, 13.4, 13.5, 13.6, and 13.7. a

The table includes the states for which voting data by race is available. The states not included are Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee.

The number of registered voters for each state is the number that is reported by military and congressional documents, and is approximately equal to the sum of registered voters that voted for holding a constitutional convention, that voted against a constitutional convention, and that did not vote. The difference for several states is the number of disenfranchised voters, leading the authors to conclude that the discrepancies are likely understated or unreported numbers of disenfranchised voters. b

electorate official baseline voter registration data that have rarely surfaced. We will use this data later to assess and evaluate the impact and influence of the disenfranchisement laws that emerged between 1888 and 1908.

The Official Senate Report: Missing Data After viewing Tables 13.3 to 13.7, the reader is aware that there is missing data in each and every one. The reason, as noted earlier, is that the military commanders of the Fourth Military District, which encompassed Arkansas and Mississippi, and of the Fifth Military District, which encompassed Louisiana, simply did not collect the racial breakdown data, yet we were able to collect voter registration data by race from other scholarly sources. However, these same scholarly and quasi-official sources did not collect and report the other four sources of data as requested by the Senate Resolution. And where a bit of this data was collected, it is not always corroborated by other sources. Hence, rather than simply plug in this scattered data, we chose to report only those data which were provided in the Official Senate Report and to inform the reader as to why we omitted the rest. Enough data from outside the Senate Report exist to give a valuable and significant portrait of the new southern electorate in 1867 and 1868, a portrait that does not exist elsewhere.

Table 13.9 (p. 246) presents a revised and updated tabulation based on the Official Senate Report, incorporating data from the acknowledged scholarly monographs and cross-referencing them with the key encyclopedia of that period (American Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events) and the major political handbook on that period (Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States of America During the Period of Reconstruction, 1865–1870). This creates for the very first time a holistic report of registered voters in the South in 1867. With the complete picture filled in, the freedmen registered to vote still outnumber registered whites, 772,850 to 727,424, for a difference of 45,426 individuals; in percentages, the freedmen only out-registered whites by a mere 3.0 percentage points, significantly less than the 5.2 percentage point difference suggested by the original report. The number of freedmen registrants is actually quite small in the grand total of just over 1.5 million registered voters in the South in 1867. One also sees that the freedmen median number is substantially higher than the median number for whites, indicating that there were more states with large numbers of African American registered voters, whereas white voters were concentrated in two states, Virginia and North Carolina. Map 13.1 (p. 247) allows the reader to see the geographical locations of the five states above the median in terms of the percentage of African American

246

Chapter 13

Table 13.9  Number and Percentage of African American and White Registered Voters in the South, 1867–1869 (Senate Report Revised and Updated with New Scholarship)

Statea

African American Registered Voters

Percent of Total Registered Voters

White Registered Voters

Percent of Total Registered Voters

Virginia

105,832

46.8%

120,101

53.2%

225,933

Alabama

104,518

63.0%

61,295

37.0%

165,813

Georgia

95,168

49.7%

96,333

50.3%

191,501

Louisiana

84,436

65.1%

45,218

34.9%

129,654

South Carolina

80,550

63.2%

46,882

36.8%

127,432

North Carolina

72,932

40.6%

106,721

59.4%

179,653

Mississippib

60,167

56.3%

46,636

43.7%

106,803

Mississippic

100,682

56.9%

76,110

43.1%

176,792

Texas

49,497 

45.4%

59,633

54.6%

109,130

Tennessee

40,000 

40.0%

60,000

60.0%

100,000

Arkansas

23,146 

34.9%

43,217

65.1%

66,363

Florida

16,089

57.5%

11,914

42.5%

28,003

Totald

772,850

51.5%

727,424

48.5%

1,500,274

Meand

70,259.1

Mediand

80,550

66,129.5 62.1%

60,000

Total Number of Registered Voters

136,388.5 46.3%

129,654

Source: Revised and updated from The Annual Cyclopaedia of Independent Events of the Year 1869 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1969), p. 53 for Arkansas; Vernon Lane Wharton, The Negro in Mississippi, 1865–1890 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), p. 146 for Mississippi. The first registrations and election results were thrown out and a second registration of voters was required. These data and results can be found in Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States of America During the Period of Reconstruction April 15, 1865–July 15, 1870 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), p. 260. For adaptation of the other data, see A. A. Taylor, The Negro in Tennessee, 1865–1880 (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1941), p. 55 for Tennessee; and U.S. Senate, “Letter of The General of the Army of the United States, Communicating, In Compliance with a resolution of the Senate of December 5, 1867, a statement of the number of white and colored voters registered in each of the States subject to the reconstruction acts of Congress, with other statistics relative to the same subject.” U.S. Senate, 40th Congress, 2nd Session, Executive Document Number 53 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1868), pp. 1–12. Calculations by the authors. a

1867 is the year for all of the referenda except for that of Mississippi’s second attempt in 1869.

Voter registrations for the first referendum on holding a state constitution convention in Mississippi (November 5, 1867). b

Voter registrations for Mississippi’s second referendum on a state constitutional convention (November 30–December 1, 1869). c

Statistics exclude voter registration numbers for Mississippi’s first referendum on the state constitution convention. d

voters and the five states below the median, as well as the median state, Georgia, and how they are located in relationship to each other. Four of the states above the median are geographically connected in the Deep South, while the five states below the median are connected around the periphery of the Old South. Figure 13.6 permits a visual comparison of the percentage information for these states. This time the number of median registered voters in Georgia puts it in the middle of the figure; five states lie above it in African American voter registration— Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi— while five states fall below Georgia in African American voter registration—Virginia, Texas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Of the three states missing from the Official Senate Report, one, Mississippi, falls above the median and two fall below, Tennessee and Arkansas. Ultimately, this revised and updated report confirms the findings from the Official Report:

local factors inside each state enabled variations in racial voter registration to occur. Figure 13.6 is symmetrical like Figure 13.1, which showed data from the original Senate Report, further highlighting the degree of variation in racial voter registration. One reason for the wide variations in voter registration is that both processes, registration and voting, were dynamic, not static and permanent. The crude and limited communication and transportation systems then in the South hampered new registrants and voters from always arriving on the posted deadlines, which also accounts for missing data. Hence, supplementary and revised registration totals grew, thereby increasing the voting total for both groups and in each of the ten states. We know this because political, legislative, judicial, and election data were collected by Edward McPherson, a Clerk of the House of Representatives, and published by him from 1865 to the turn of the century. McPherson reported that between the initial voter registration data and the vote on the ratification of the new state constitutions in Arkansas, Florida, and North Carolina there was an increase of 27,668 voters (10.1%).37 And this number increased the grand total for the entire region. Table 13.10 (p. 248) reveals the supplemental increases in each of the three states plus Mississippi during this short time frame. The largest percentage increase in voter registrations came in Florida and the smallest in North Carolina, while Arkansas saw the median increase. And these three states represented roughly one-third of the ten Confederate states. Mississippi joined this group not because there was a simple increase in voters, but, as we shall see later, because whites on the first vote to ratify its new state constitution opposed it and voted it down. Recent scholarship using a statistical technique known as Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) discerns that it was outright white fraudulent practices and not non-voting that caused the defeat in Mississippi.38 Thus, the state had to start all over again from the beginning of the process with re-registration. What one sees from this Table 13.10 is that the Senate Resolution only asked for the collection of this registration and voting data at one point in time, making such data collection static and unable to capture ongoing revisions and changes. Although this Senate Resolution resulted in the gathering of this extremely invaluable initial registration and voting data, the static nature of the request ensured that it would by its very nature “miss” some of the pertinent data on the reconstructed electorate in the South. The other “missing data” from the Official Senate Report resulted from the failure of the Senate Resolution to ask for the ratification vote by each state’s new black and white electorate. If states failed for one reason or another to ratify these new state constitutions, providing for universal manhood suffrage, their readmission to the Union would be delayed or postponed. This happened to Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia because they were not restored to the Union until 1870, two years after the other seven had been restored and four years after Tennessee. The restored southern states had an opportunity to participate in the presidential election of 1868, but these delayed states did not. Mississippi stands out among these three states in that it held its first vote on its new state constitution on June 22, 1868, and it was defeated. It took another year and five months before a new state constitution ratification vote was held on November 30 to December 1, 1869. In this year-and-five-months period, new



African American Voter Registration and Turnout in 1867 Southern State Elections 247 Map 13.1  States in the South Differentiated by Median Percentage of African American Registered Voters, 1867

Washington Territory

ME Montana Territory

VT

Idaho Territory

Utah Territory

Arizona Territory

MI PA

Colorado Territory

CA

NY

WI

Dakota Territory IA

NE NV

NH MA CT

MN

OR

IL

IN

NJ

OH

DE MD

WV

MO

KS

RI

KY

Oklahoma Territory

New Mexico Territory

0

100 200 miles

(5) States above the median (1) State equal to the median (Georgia, 49.7%) (5) States below the median Source: Table 13.9.

Figure 13.6  Percentage of Registered Voters, African American and White, in States of the South, 1867 (Updated Senate Report) 70%

65.1%

63.2%

65.1%

63.0%

Percent of Registered Voters

60%

57.5%

50% 42.5% 40%

34.9%

36.8%

60.0%

59.4%

56.3%

43.7%

53.2% 49.7% 50.3% 46.8%

54.6% 45.4% 40.6%

37.0%

40.0% 34.9%

30% 20% 10% 0%

Louisiana

South Carolina

Alabama

Florida

Mississippi

Georgia

African American Registered Voters Source: Table 13.9.

Virginia

Texas

North Carolina

White Registered Voters

Tennessee Arkansas

248

Chapter 13

Table 13.10  Initial and Supplemental Registrations: The Increase in New Voters

Initial Registration

Supplemental Registration

Increase in New Voters

Mississippi

106,803

176,792a

69,989a

65.5% 

North Carolina

179,653

196,873

17,220

9.6% 

Arkansas

66,831

73,784

6,953

10.4% 

Florida

28,003

31,498

3,495

12.5% 

State

Percent Increase in New Voters

Sources: Adapted from Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States of America During the Period of Reconstruction, April 15, 1865–July 15, 1870 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), page 374 for the data on Arkansas, Florida, and North Carolina. For data on Mississippi’s second election see page 260. For the initial election registration data see Vernon Lane Wharton, The Negro in Mississippi, 1865–1890 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), p. 146. This initial registration data in Mississippi was thrown out by the military commanders. Calculations by the authors. Mississippi’s supplemental registration is delineated by race with 100,682 freedmen and 76,110 whites. This represents an increase in new voters of 40,515 freedmen and 29,474 whites. a

voter registration was held and the total number of registered voters increased by 69,989. Mississippi’s voter registration occurred because its initial ratification vote failed, and a new start was required if they were to go forward with their re-admission effort. Therefore, Table 13.10 shows not only the limitations inherent in the Official Senate Report, but it provides empirical evidence on (1) how the freedmen continued to register and vote well beyond the original registration phase as permitted by the First Military Reconstruction Act and well into 1869, and (2) how southern whites mainly opted out of each state’s new electoral process to defeat political equality but reentered the electoral process when they noticed how their initial tactic of non-electoral participation failed. And finally, this resurgence of the white electorate was a harbinger of things to come, the socalled white “redemption” of southern governments.

The Relationship between the Initial Freedmen Voters and the Number of Freedmen Elected as Delegates to the State Constitutional Conventions, 1867–1868 Did the freedmen gain delegate political power commensurate with their voting power at the state constitutional conventions? Data in Table 13.11 reveal both the number and percentage of freedmen delegates as well as whites. Richard Hume and Jerry B. Gough, authors of a pioneering and massive study, commented: “Contrary to legend, . . . southern whites actually enjoyed delegate majorities in seven of the conventions (the only exceptions being Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina); in contradiction to the caricature suggested by the moniker ‘Black and Tan,’ blacks were underrepresented, often substantially, in eight of the conventions.”39 They added that the data which they collected for this table represent “the first and only definitive count by group of the delegates who occupied those seats: the 574 southern whites, 268 blacks, 164 outside whites, and 12 unclassified whites (southern-or outside-white status unknown) who actually took part in the ten conventions.”40 Collectively, whites had three-fourths (73.7%) to the freedmen’s one-fourth (26.3%). Although not reflected in Table 13.11, freedmen actually enjoyed a plurality in Florida; this was due to the whites in the Florida convention splitting into two factions while the freedmen delegates tended to vote as a single group. Table 13.12 juxtaposes the percentage of freedmen registered voters in each state with the percentage of freedmen delegates from each state. The table shows that the freedmen had the majority of voters in five states—Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi—and very nearly half the voters in Georgia, but that they got a majority of delegates only in two states, Louisiana and South Carolina (and a plurality in Florida). Overall, the freedmen made up 52.3% of the voters in these states, but they got only 26.3% of the delegates at the state constitutional conventions.

Table 13.11  Number and Percentage of Freedmen and Whites at the State Constitutional Conventions, 1867–1868 African Americans Convention

Number

Percent of State Total

Southern Whites Number

Percent of State Total

Outside Whites Number

Percent of State Total

Unclassified Whites Number

Percent of State Total

State Totals

South Carolina

72

59.5%

34

28.1%

15

12.4%

0

0.0%

121

Louisiana

50

51.5%

31

32.0%

14

14.4%

2

2.1%

97

Florida

19

38.0%

17

34.0%

13

26.0%

1

2.0%

50

Virginia

24

23.1%

60

57.7%

20

19.2%

0

0.0%

104

Georgia

37

22.6%

114

69.5%

12

7.3%

1

0.6%

164

Mississippi

17

17.7%

54

56.3%

21

21.9%

4

4.2%

96

Alabama

17

17.2%

56

56.6%

24

24.2%

2

2.0%

99

North Carolina

14

11.5%

90

73.8%

18

14.8%

0

0.0%

122

8

11.0%

48

65.8%

17

23.3%

0

0.0%

73

Texas

10

10.9%

70

76.1%

10

10.9%

2

2.2%

92

Total

268

26.3%

574

56.4%

164

16.1%

12

1.2%

1,018

Arkansas

Source: Adapted from Richard Hume and Jerry Gough, Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags: The Constitutional Conventions of Radical Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), p. 24. Total percentage calculations by the authors.



African American Voter Registration and Turnout in 1867 Southern State Elections 249 Table 13.12  African American Shares of Registered Voters and State Convention Delegations in the South, 1867–1869

State Louisiana South Carolina Alabama Florida

African American Percent of Total Registered Voters

Number of African American State Convention Delegates

African American Percent of Total State Convention Delegates

84,436

65.1%

50

51.5%

Number of African American Registered Voters 80,550

63.2%

72

59.5%

104,518

63.0%

17

17.2%

16,089

57.5%

19

38.0%

100,682

56.9%

17

17.7%

Georgia

95,168

49.7%

37

22.6%

Virginia

Mississippi a

105,832

46.8%

24

23.1%

Texas

49,497

45.4%

10

10.9%

North Carolina

72,932

40.6%

14

11.5%

Arkansas

23,146

34.9%

8

11.0%

Total

732,850

52.3%

268

26.3%

Mean

73,285

52.3%

26.8

26.3%

Median

82,493

53.3%

18

20.1%

Sources: Tables 13.9 and 13.11. a

Voter registrations of Mississippi’s second referendum on a state constitutional convention.

Simply put, using these two percentages, the freedmen did not get proportional representation in terms of delegates. On this matter, Hume and Gough found that “both black and carpetbag delegates . . . were not numerous enough to control the conventions” and that the loss in representative parity eventuated into a loss of political power and influence inside the conventions.41 “Even in the conventions in which their percentages of delegates were the greatest, black delegates possessed only marginal institutional power.” Such institutional power adhered to (1) convention presidents, (2) chairmanships of important standing committees, and (3) chairmanships of subcommittees or special committees. At this level, the study found a “relative absence in leadership positions” for freedmen in the state conventions.42 In all of the ten state constitutional conventions, the freedmen chaired only five committees. “The five key black chairmanships were held by Charles Pearce (both the Executive and Education Committees in the radical Florida convention), Robert DeLarge (Franchise in South Carolina), James Ingraham (Bill of Rights in Louisiana), and Francis Cardozo (Education in South Carolina).”43 Thus, they got chairmanships in only three states, each of which had either a black majority or plurality. But they failed to get institutional power in the other seven states wherein they held majorities or near majorities. Whites kept the institutional power for themselves in the state constitutional conventions. Thus, in the final analysis, there is only a modest relationship between the number of African American registered voters in the states and the number of their delegates at the state constitutional conventions. And there is even less of a relationship between their presence in these state conventions and genuine

institutional power. Hence, they had little power and influence to shape the legal outcomes in these conventions. Because of this marginalization, it was essential that Congress mandate in the Four Military Reconstruction Acts that these state constitutions grant universal manhood suffrage rights.

The First African American Federal Registrars: The Case of Georgia In his breakthrough study of African American officeholders in the period of Reconstruction, historian Eric Foner was able to identify only eighty-two black registrars in all of the eleven states because this group of county and local public officials has been one of the least studied groups of African American political and electoral leaders in the Reconstruction period.44 This group of public leaders was given political birth with the First Military Reconstruction Act of March 1867 alongside the suffrage rights for African American men. Said Act empowered the military commanders of each of the five military districts to set up a board of registration and a superintendent of registration to supervise the board throughout each state in his district. General John Pope, who oversaw the Third Military District that consisted of Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, appointed a superintendent for Georgia in May 1867. “Pope divided Georgia into forty-four districts corresponding to the state’s senatorial districts. Each district, containing three counties, was provided with a board of registrars, composed of three members. Five districts with large urban areas (Atlanta, Augusta, Columbus, Macon, and Savannah) were awarded an additional board for these cities, making a total of forty-nine boards.”45 Of the three members mandated for each board of registration there were to be two whites and one black. The two white members would, according to the order of General Pope (which was written by his sub-commander, Captain G. K. Sanderson), “select ‘a competent colored man to complete the board’ and report their choice to . . . [the] head of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Georgia.”46 Therefore, Georgia, in 1867 and 1868, had a total of fifty-two black federal registrars to assist in enrolling the first African American voters on the state registration rolls. Historian Edmund Drago’s pioneering work on this topic provided a chart at the end of the article, listing all of the names, birthplaces, election districts, counties, occupations, and values of their personal and real estate property for these black federal registrars (where such information existed). No such article or study currently exists on this category of public officials in the other nine states. But this one reveals the role played by freedmen in enrolling the initial freedmen voters. Table 13.13 (p. 250) offers a summary profile of these fifty-two freedmen federal registrars in Georgia during this period. These data reveal the personal characteristics of these federal registrars and demonstrates their socio-economic status as well as the quality of their education. How qualified were these freedmen to be federal registrars and to assist in voter registration? According to this tabular data, thirty of the thirty-six individuals whose education levels are known could read—fully four-fifths of those for whom we have data were literate. This suggests that, at least in Georgia, these freedmen were prepared to handle their tasks and duties as federal registrars. Map 13.2 (p. 250) displays the sundry counties in Georgia where these freedman federal registrars resided during 1867–1868.

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Table 13.13  Demographic Characteristics of African American Registrars in Georgia, 1867–1868 Yes

No

Number

Percent of Raw Total

Born in Georgia

20

Literate

30

Number

Percent of Raw Total

Number

Percent of Raw Total

Total Number of Registrars

38.5%

16

30.8%

16

30.8%

52

57.7%

 6

11.5%

16

30.8%

52

19

36.5%

13

25.0%

20

38.5%

52

19

36.5%

13

25.0%

20

38.5%

52

25

48.1%

 7

13.5%

20

38.5%

52

Registrar Charactistic

Mulatto Owned Real Property (1870)

a

Owned Personal Property (1870)

a

Unknown

Source: Adapted from Edmund L. Drago, “Georgia’s First Black Voter Registrars During Reconstruction,” Georgia Historical Quarterly Vol. 78, No. 4 (Winter 1994), p. 790. Calculations by the authors. a

The 1870 Census took place closest to the years of service for these registrars (1867–1868). That census contained data on 32 of the total 52 voter registrars found by the source in the manuscript version.

Map 13.2  Geographic Distribution by County of Residence of African American Federal Registrars for Georgia, 1867

Tennessee

0

100 miles

South Carolina

Alabama

0

25

miles

Florida

African American Federal Registrars State of Georgia, 1867 County of Residence Selected City Source: Adapted from Edmund L. Drago, “Georgia’s First Black Voter Registrars During Reconstruction,” Georgia Historical Quarterly Vol. 78, No. 4 (Winter 1994), p. 790.

50

200



African American Voter Registration and Turnout in 1867 Southern State Elections 251

Basically, they came from nearly every section and part of the state except the southeastern part of the state below Montgomery, Emanuel, and Burke counties from the South Carolina border all the way to the Florida state line. It so happens these blank/clear counties constitute the portion of the state known as the “Black Belt” where large freedmen populations resided. In fact, more freedmen federal registrars resided in the area north of Atlanta and Athens—where few freedmen had lived—than in the southeastern part where the majority of the freedmen population lived. Besides registering the freedmen, the federal registrars were to instruct and “inform the Negroes of their political rights and the importance of exercising them.”47 Drago described their tasks and duties in vivid detail: After taking the so-called “Iron Clad Oath,” pledging that they had never voluntarily aided the Confederacy, as well as an oath of office, they had to visit “each and every precinct in each and every county” in their districts. After administering an oath to each eligible voter and having him sign an affidavit in an oath book, the registrars entered into a duplicate set of registration books the name, color, and residence of the applicant as well as the date of registry. They had to record how long the person had resided in the precinct, county, and state. If the citizen was not born in the United States, they had to confirm when, where and how the person was naturalized.48 Not only were they to register both black and white males, “the registrars made up alphabetical lists which were sent to the Bureau of Registration in” each of the state capitals.49 Next, these lists would be printed up and used on Election Day to ensure that the proper individuals had already registered and were qualified to vote. Finally, “they were responsible for revising the registration lists in mid-October . . . and for the subsequent election” for state officials.50 If they had been re-admitted to the Union, they could also vote for the 1868 congressional and presidential candidates. Finally, for their work, the freedmen and white registrars were to be paid as follows for their registration tasks and duties: Each board was compensated fifteen cents for each person registered in the cities and forty cents per voter “in the most sparsely settled counties. . . . The compensation (was to) be graduated between these limits, according to the density of the population and the facilities of communication.” In addition, “ten cents per mile (was) allowed for transportation of registers off the lines of railroads or steamboats, and five cents per mile when travel (was) done on railroads and steamboats.” The compensation was relatively modest ranging between sixty to five hundred dollars per registrar.51 As noted earlier, this detailed information and findings about the freedmen registrars currently exists only for the state of Georgia, but some scattered and incomplete information also exists for Alabama. This state was also in the Third Military District, and General Pope was in charge here as well as in Florida. Alabama, somewhat like Georgia, began its voter registration

process a bit earlier, on May 21, 1867, and it was “completed by the end of July, 1867. However, General Pope set the official deadline for completion on August 31, the date originally stipulated in the Supplementary Reconstruction Act, but it was later extended to October 1.”52 Eventually, the Fourth (and final) Military Reconstruction Act further extended the deadline by noting that fourteen days prior to any election, the members of the board of registration could revise any registration lists by dropping or adding new registrants. In Alabama General Pope appointed the freedman to the board, as opposed to later in Georgia, where he allowed the two white members of the board to select the freedmen. He changed his tactic simply because whites strenuously objected to his appointment procedure as well as to the idea of freedmen officeholders. Thus, the problem which evolved in Alabama was modified by the time that General Pope launched the voter registration process in Georgia. Alabama “was divided into forty-two [later forty-four] registration districts, and . . . a Board of Registration was appointed for each district.”53 Later, “forty-one of the counties were combined into twenty registration districts” but the number of freedmen registrars that emerged in Alabama was never made clear because the number ranged “from 14 to 20.”54 And this is as far as the story of the freedmen federal registrars has gotten at this writing. Overall, the detailed and comprehensive data from Georgia and very limited data on Alabama on the first freedmen registrars reveal that they played a major and integral role in enrolling the large number of first-time freedmen voters in each state. Both states had very strong opposition to granting the elective franchise to people of color as well as to office holding, and they used several delaying tactics to defeat these new political efforts. Many would not even let the freedmen registrars put them on the new voting rolls. On the other side, there were white registrars who sought to prevent, slow down, or frighten freedmen from voting, but the presence and assistance from many of their own race enabled them to register to vote for the first time in their lives. Thus, in the final analysis, the existence of these first federal registrars of color helped to make the implementation of the four Military Reconstruction Acts effective and to accomplish their objectives. The freedmen registrars were a vital link in this reconstruction process. Hence, this single case study is indeed instructive and informative about the electoral process in 1867 and 1868, and it effectively demonstrates how the four Military Reconstruction Acts were implemented in the other nine states of the reconstructed South.

Summary and Conclusions on African American Voters of 1867 Before closing we would like to remind the reader that it was the Senate Resolution that called for and attained from the General of the Army, Ulysses S. Grant, the Official Senate data report that we have been describing and explaining in this chapter along with the Official House of Representatives data report that came from Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. These empirical data allow one to see how the four Military Reconstruction Acts were implemented in the ten southern states of the old Confederacy. Thus, reading the data in these reports one does not have to speculate or surmise about these important events.

252

Chapter 13

Therefore, by way of summarizing the detailed empirical data in this chapter, Table 13.14 offers the first comprehensive and systematic composite portrait of this data for all eleven of the southern states. It also provides the grand totals, as well as the mean and median totals and percentages. It is a thorough overview of the Official Senate and House reports, including our updated and revised Senate Report, and it can be inspected by readers for specific information as well as for comparisons and contrasts.

This summary composite state-level table is followed by a similar one on race in Table 13.15, which offers a comprehensive and systematic overview of how the freedmen and whites reacted to the requests embedded in the First Military Reconstruction Act. Again, readers can inspect this tabular data for specific information as well as for an overview of the relationships between the two races in the South in 1867 and 1868.

Table 13.14  Composite Table of Total Voters Ranked by Percentage of Registered Voters

Table 13.3: Registered Voters (Original Senate Report)

Table 13.9: Registered Voters (Updated and Revised Senate Report)

Percent of Column Total

Table 13.6: Not Voting in Referenda on Constitutional Conventions

Table 13.5: Voters Against Constitutional Conventions

Table 13.7: Disenfranchised Voters

State

Total

Total

Percent of Column Total

Total

Percent of Column Total

Total

Percent of Column Total

Total

Percent of Column Total

Virginia

225,933

16.6%

225,933

15.1%

107,342

15.5%

61,887

43.5%

56,704

10.7%

16,343

33.7%

Georgia

191,501

14.0%

191,501

12.8%

102,283

14.8%

4,127

2.9%

85,091

16.1%

10,500

21.7%

North Carolina

179,653

13.2%

179,653

12.0%

93,006

13.4%

32,961

23.2%

53,686

10.2%

12,181

25.1%

Alabama

165,813

12.2%

165,813

11.1%

90,263

13.0%

5,583

3.9%

69,947

13.2%

0

0.0%

Mississippia

139,690

10.2%

176,792

11.8%

69,739

10.1%

6,277

4.4%

63,674

12.1%

 

 

Louisiana

129,654

9.5%

129,654

8.6%

75,083

10.8%

4,006

2.8%

50,480

9.6%

 

 

South Carolina

127,432

9.3%

127,432

8.5%

68,768

9.9%

2,278

1.6%

56,486

10.7%

8,869

18.3%

Texas

Total

Percent of Column Total

Table 13.4: Voters For Constitutional Conventions

109,130

8.0%

109,130

7.3%

44,689

6.4%

11,440

8.0%

52,964

10.0%

 

 

Arkansas

66,831

4.9%

66,363

4.4%

27,576

4.0%

13,558

9.5%

25,697

4.9%

0

0.0%

Florida

28,003

2.1%

28,003

1.9%

14,300

2.1%

203

0.1%

13,500

2.6%

550

1.1%

 

 

100,000

6.7%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Total

1,363,640

100%

1,500,274

100%

693,049

100%

142,320

100%

528,229

100%

48,443

100%

Mean

136,364

69,305

 

14,232

6,920

 

Median

134,672

72,411

 

5,930

8,869

 

Tennessee

136,389  

129,654

 

52,823  

55,086

 

Sources: Tables 13.3, 13.4, 13.5, 13.6, 13.7, and 13.9. For data on Mississippi’s second election see Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States of America During the Period of Reconstruction, April 15, 1865–July 15, 1870 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), p. 260. a

Table 13.15  Voters by Race in the Electorate of the Reconstructed South Table 13.9 Registered Voters Electorate of the Reconstructed South by Race

Numbera

African Americans Whites Total

Percent of Column Total

772,850

51.5%

727,424 1,500,274

Table 13.4 In Favor of Conventions

Number

Percent of Column Total

412,672

79.3%

48.5%

107,979

100%

 520,651b

Table 13.5 Against Conventions

Table 13.6 Not Voting

Table 13.7 Disenfranchised Voters

Number

Percent of Column Total

Number

Percent of Column Total

  1,583

1.3%

110,314

28.4%

1,318

 2.7%

20.7%

116,896

98.7%

278,064

71.6%

47,125

97.3%

100%

 118,479b

100%

 388,378b

100%

48,443

100%

Sources: Tables 13.4, 13.5, 13.6, 13.7, and 13.9. a

See revised and updated registration numbers for Mississippi, especially for its second election, in Table 13.9.

b

Total in original table is higher because it includes data from states that did not differentiate by race.

Number

Percent of Column Total



African American Voter Registration and Turnout in 1867 Southern State Elections 253

Finally, Figure 13.7 offers a visual comparison and contrast of freedmen and white data via three categories: (1) registered voters, (2) non-voters, and (3) disenfranchised voters. For registered voters, this figure portrays how both freedmen and whites voted: (1) for the state constitution conventions and (2) against

the state constitutional conventions. This figure allows the reader to see at a glance a portrait of the initial freedmen voters in the southern states, exercising their right for the first time since they lost that right in Tennessee in 1834, in North Carolina in 1835, and in Rapides Parish in Louisiana in 1860.

Figure 13.7  Total Voters by Race in States of the Reconstructed South, 1867–1868 800,000

772,850 727,424

700,000

Number of Voters

600,000

500,000 412,672 400,000 278,064

300,000

200,000 116,896

107,979

100,000

110,314 47,125

1,583

0 Registered Voters

In Favor of Conventions

1,318

Against Conventions African Americans

Not Voting

Disenfranchised Voters

Whites

Source: Table 13.14. Note: Figure represents only states which collected data by race on each category

Notes   1. Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860–1910 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), pp. 28–39; James McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1982), pp. 520–524, 527–528, and 538; and Richard Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 31–43.   2. See A. A. Taylor, The Negro in Tennessee, 1865–1880 (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1941) and Thomas Alexander, Political Reconstruction in Tennessee (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1950).   3. For an overview analysis of this topic see Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 116–159. For a similar analysis during Black Reconstruction see Elsa Barkley Brown, “To Catch the Vision of Freedom: Reconstructing Southern Black Women’s Political History, 1865–1880,” in Ann Gordon, et al. (eds.), African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), pp. 66–99; and her, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture Vol. 7 (Fall 1994), pp. 107–146.   4. Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States of America During the Period of Reconstruction, April 15, 1865–July 15, 1870 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), p. 191.

  5. McPherson, p. 534.   6. Ibid., p. 533.   7. Ibid., pp. 44–84 and 143–181.   8. Ibid., pp. 511–512.   9. Ibid., p. 512. 10. Alexander, p. 14. 11. Ibid., p. 15. 12. Ibid., pp. 15–16. 13. Taylor, p. 1. 14. Ibid. 15. Alexander, p. 31. 16. Taylor, p. 2. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., p. 2. 19. Ibid., p. 4. 20. Alexander, p. 74. 21. Ibid., p. 112. 22. Ibid., p. 121. 23. Taylor, p. 24. 24. McPherson, p. 257. 25. Herman Belz, “Origins of Negro Suffrage During the Civil War,” Southern Studies (Summer 1978), pp. 122–123, 128–129. 26. Belz, p. 129.

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27. U.S. Senate, “Letter of The General of the Army of the United States, Communicating, in compliance with a resolution of the Senate of December 5, 1867, a statement of the number of white and colored voters registered in each of the States subject to the reconstruction acts of Congress, with other statistics relative to the same subject,” 40th Congress 2nd Session, Executive Document Number 53 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1868), pp. 1–12. 28. Ibid., p. 1. 29. The lone scholar who pioneered the use of this Official Senate Report to great empirical effect was Richard Hume, “Negro Delegates to the State Constitutional Conventions of 1867–1869,” in Howard Rabinowitz (ed.), Southern Black Leaders of the Reconstruction Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), pp. 134–135 and footnote 10. He has continued to use this official data source to good effect—see endnote 39 below. And the senior author of the present study, Hanes Walton, Jr., spent some fifteen years researching this Official Report at the National Archives in Washington, DC, long before he read Professor Hume’s scholarly article and subsequent pioneering book on the state convention delegates, in 2008. 30. U.S. Senate, “Letter of The General of the Army of the United States . . . ,” p. 10. 31. Ibid., p. 11. 32. U.S. House of Representatives, “General Orders—Reconstruction: Letter from The Secretary of War in answer to a Resolution of the House of February 3, 1868, Communicating Copies of all General and Special Orders promulgated by the several Commanders of the Military Districts of the south for the execution of the Reconstruction laws,” 40th Congress, 2nd Session, Executive Document Number 342 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1868), p. 1. 33. Ibid., p. 22. 34. Ibid., p. 102. 35. McPherson, p. 374. 36. Ibid.

37. Ibid. 38. Lawrence Powell, “Correcting for Fraud: A Quantitative Reassessment of the Mississippi Ratification Election of 1868,” Journal of Southern History Vol. 55 (November 1989), pp. 633–658. For another study with estimated registration data for African Americans in Mississippi which we did not use see James Currie, “The Beginning of Congressional Reconstruction in Mississippi,” Journal of Mississippi History Vol. 35 (August 1973), pp. 276–286. 39. Richard Hume and Jerry B. Gough, Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags: The Constitutional Conventions of Radical Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), p. 13. 40. Ibid., p. 12. 41. Ibid., p. 9. 42. Ibid., p. 21. 43. Ibid., p. 413, footnote 21. 44. Edmund Drago, “Georgia’s First Black Voter Registrars During Reconstruction,” Georgia Historical Quarterly Vol. 78 (Winter 1994), p. 761. See also his Black Politicians and Reconstruction Georgia: A Splendid Failure (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992). 45. Ibid., p. 763. 46. U.S House of Representatives, p. 102. 47. Robert Rhodes, “The Registration of Voters and the Election of Delegates to the Reconstruction Convention in Alabama,” Alabama Review Vol. 8 (April 1955), p. 126. 48. Drago, pp. 775–776. 49. Rhodes, p. 138. 50. Drago, p. 776. 51. Ibid. 52. Rhodes, pp. 133–134. 53. Ibid., p. 124. 54. Ibid., pp. 124 and 119, footnote 3. See also Peter Kolchin, First Freedom: The Responses of Alabama’s Blacks to Emancipation and Reconstruction (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972), pp. 160–163.

CHAPTER 14

African American Voting Behavior in the First Presidential and Congressional Elections after the Abolition of Slavery in the South, 1868 and 1872 The African American 1868 Presidential Vote in Seven Southern States

257

Map 14.1 Majority African American Counties in the Southern States of the 1868 Presidential Election

258

Figure 14.1 Number of Southern Counties by Census Racial Majorities, 1860–2000

258

Table 14.1 Number of Southern Counties by Census Racial Majorities, 1860–2000

259

Table 14.2 Number of Majority African American Counties by Census, 1860–2000

259

Table 14.3 Number and Percentage of African American Majority Counties in the Seven Southern States of the 1868 Presidential and Congressional Elections: A Rank Ordering

260

Table 14.4 Popular and Electoral Votes in the Seven Southern States, 1868 Presidential Election

260

Table 14.5 Gain and Loss of Majority African American Counties Voting for the Republican Party in the South in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections

261

Table 14.6 Gain and Loss of Majority White Counties Voting for the Republican Party in the South in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections

262

Table 14.7 Gain and Loss of Votes in Majority African American Counties Voting for the Republican Party in the South in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections

262

Table 14.8 Gain and Loss of Votes in Majority White Counties Voting for the Republican Party in the South in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections

263

Figure 14.2 Percent of Racial Majority Counties in the South Voting for the Republican Party in the 1868 Presidential Election

264

The African American 1872 Presidential Vote in the Eleven Southern States

264

Map 14.2 Majority African American Counties in the Southern States of the 1872 Presidential Election

265

Table 14.9 Comparing the Vote of the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections in the South for the Major Political Parties

266

Figure 14.3 Percent of Racial Majority Counties in the South Voting for the Republican Party in the 1872 Presidential Election

268

The Democratic Presidential Vote in the African American and White Majority Counties in 1868 and 1872

268

Figure 14.4 Percent of Racial Majority Counties in the South Voting for the Democratic Party in the 1868 Presidential Election

269

Figure 14.5 Percent of Racial Majority Counties in the South Voting for the Democratic Party in the 1872 Presidential Election

270

The Comparative Portrait of Party Voting in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections

270



256

Chapter 14

Table 14.10 Gain and Loss of Counties Voting for the Republican Party in Majority African American Counties of the Original Seven Southern States in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections

271

Table 14.11 Gain and Loss of Counties Voting for the Republican Party in Majority White Counties of the Original Seven Southern States in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections

272

Table 14.12 Gain and Loss of Votes in Majority African American Counties Voting for the Republican Party in the Original Seven Southern States in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections

272

Table 14.13 Gain and Loss of Votes in Majority White Counties Voting for the Republican Party in the Original Seven Southern States in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections

273

The African American Congressional Vote in the 1868, 1869, 1870, and 1872 Elections

273

Table 14.14 Vote for African American Republican Congressional Candidates, 1868, 1869, 1870, and 1872

274

Summary and Conclusions on African American Voting Behavior in 1868 and 1872

275

Figure 14.6 Scatter Plot of Republican Party Percentage of Vote and African American Percentage of Population in the South for the 1868 Presidential Election

276

Figure 14.7 Scatter Plot of Republican Party Percentage of Vote and African American Percentage of Population in the South for the 1872 Presidential Election

277

Notes 277



T

he Four Military Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and 1868 passed by a predominantly Republican Congress caused two things to happen concurrently: first, they brought the right to vote for the majority of southern African American males, and second, they shaped the political partisanship of African Americans in the 1868 and 1872 presidential and congressional elections. There is a wealth of published data on African American votes for congressional and presidential candidates in this period. Numerous historical studies on Reconstruction have told about the host of offices to which African Americans were elected on the state and local levels and how many congressional seats they won.1 But rarely has this historical and political science literature shown via maps, tables, and figures the nature, scope, and significance of this voting behavior vis-à-vis African American voter registration. Nor has this literature shown the patterns and trends that evolved from this first experience of African Americans with federal elections. Thus, the purpose of this chapter is to capture—as far as possible, given the vagaries of the election return data—a portrait of these first-time voters in this electoral democracy. However, before we begin our empirical investigation of the 1868 and 1872 presidential and congressional elections, we want to alert the reader that in the presidential election of 1868 only eight southern states had been readmitted to the Union: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida2. Three states, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia, would only be readmitted afterwards, meaning that their voters would have to wait until 1872 to vote in a presidential election. And for the presidential election of 1868, Florida did not have popular voting for president; rather, the state legislature cast the state’s three electoral votes.3 Only in the 1872 election would Florida once again return to the popular voting method in presidential elections. Thus, it is essential that our analysis for 1868 focus upon the seven states that had popular voting for the presidential nominees and, for the 1872 election, focus upon all eleven states of the old Confederacy. In terms of the congressional elections, we will focus on the African Americans running for seats in the House of Representatives in those seven states and on those running in all of the eleven states for the 1872 election.4 There is no need to focus on African American candidates for the Senate because those officeholders were selected by state legislatures until just prior to ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1913.5 We also need to alert the reader to how this racially based presidential and congressional election data will be acquired and organized. For the presidential and congressional elections in both 1868 and 1872, we will begin with the county as our data unit of analysis: specifically those counties where African Americans had the voter registration or the population majorities. Next, obtaining the election data from the specific congressional districts where African American candidates ran, we will where possible match up the African American majority counties to the county and/or multiple counties within these congressional districts. Where such congressional districts are made up of partial counties, the reader will be alerted to any modifications we make to our majoritarian county approach. This homogenous county approach is a well-known, well-received, and widely used

African American Voting Behavior, 1868 and 1872

257

technique in voting behavior studies when voter registration data are not readily available. However, the one well-documented limitation of this approach is that the resulting analysis takes place at the group, and not the individual, level. Therefore, our findings will be for African Americans as a group of voters and not as individual voters, simply because our unit of analysis is the county, which aggregates individuals into a political unit. And this is at the moment the very best and most reliable way to attain voting behavior of this period, in the absence of reliable survey and polling data and voter registration by race for each state and county. In addition to using African American majoritarian counties, we will also use election return data from the white majoritarian counties in the state as empirical context for our findings. These additional data also include not just the county-level trends and patterns in each state, but the total voting behavior portrait at the state level as well. Hence, with such data one can see African American voting patterns and trends within the entire electorate in the state.

The African American 1868 Presidential Vote in Seven Southern States Map 14.1 (p. 258) provides an overview of the states and counties of the old Confederacy that participated in the 1868 election. Figure 14.1 extends to all of the eleven states and shows (1) the number of the total that were white majoritarian counties, and (2) those that were African American majoritarian counties (all counties fit in these two categories). Figure 14.1 (p. 258) shows a trend and pattern. The total number of southern counties beginning in 1860 stood at 865, with 240 of them having African American majorities (27.7%) and whites as a majority in 625 of them (72.3%). The 1870 numbers had changed very little. The total number of southern counties had fallen by only 4, to 861, of which African Americans had a slightly larger minority in 250 (29.0%) and whites had a slightly smaller majority in 611 (71.0%). This census year data comes in between the 1868 and 1872 presidential and congressional elections and suggests that the initial African American voters began with population majorities in only a few more counties than they had prior to the Civil War. And these few additional counties arose due to a combination of Confederate war casualties and the movement of African American slaves and freed persons with the Union armies. Table 14.1 (p. 259) provides the exact number of majority counties underlying Figure 14.1, as well as the percentages for each decade from 1860 through 2000. This table shows that the total number of counties in the South declined slightly in the decade, of the Civil War and its aftermath, 1860–1870, but rose in the following decade, 1870–1880, and continued its rise to the decade of the 1930s, where it essentially reached a plateau that was maintained through the year 2000. Movement and dynamism during this period, 1860–2000, did occur in the number and percentages of African American and white counties. The number and percentage of African American counties rose in the decades of 1870 and 1880, where they peaked and began a steady and significant decline that continued until 1980. The number of white majority counties declined in the decades of 1870 and

258

Chapter 14

Map 14.1  Majority African American Counties in the Southern States of the 1868 Presidential Election

VA MO

KY

0 100 200 miles

North Carolina Tennessee

South Carolina

Arkansas

Alabama

Georgia

MS Louisiana TX

0

100

200

miles FL

Source: Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), Map 23.2, and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi. org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009.

Figure 14.1  Number of Southern Counties by Census Racial Majorities, 1860–2000 1,400 1,200 Number of Counties

1,000 800 600 400 200

20 19 30 19 40 19 50 19 60 19 70 19 80 19 90 20 00

10

19

00

19

90

19

80

18

70

18

18

60

0

18

1880, and began a steady rise in the 1890s that only plateaued around 1980. In fact, the number of white majority counties has grown from a low of 69.8% in 1880 to above 90.0% since 1970. However, movement and dynamism as seen region-wide in both Figure 14.1 and Table 14.1 do not reflect the same realities at the state level. Table 14.2 provides the exact number of African American population majority counties not only in each of the eleven states of the old Confederacy but in three of the Border States and the District of Columbia over the same time frame, 1860–2000. States like Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, and Alabama had the largest number of African American majority counties. In addition, we see that in Georgia the number of these counties grew and peaked in 1900 and then began a slow decline. By 2000 it still had some 17 such counties. Other states like Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Mississippi grew and declined slowly but at different rates, while states like Alabama and Virginia followed an almost linear decline. And of all of these states in 2000, Mississippi had the largest number of such counties with 25, followed by Georgia with 17, South Carolina with 12, and Alabama and Virginia with 10. The point here is that the trends and patterns seen in the holistic portraits do not and did not prevail for all of the states. Simply put, there was

Census Year Majority White Majority African American Total Number of Southern Counties Source: Table 14.1.

a more diverse pattern at the state level—with different starting points and rates for the decline—than at the regional level.



African American Voting Behavior, 1868 and 1872

259

Table 14.1  Number of Southern Counties by Census Racial Majorities, 1860–2000 Majority African American Southern Counties

Total Number of Southern Counties

Number

Percent of Southern Counties

Number

Percent of Southern Counties

1860

240

27.7%

625

72.3%

865

1870

250

29.0%

611

71.0%

861

1880

297

30.2%

686

69.8%

983

1890

280

27.2%

748

72.8%

1,028

1900

284

27.0%

766

73.0%

1,050

1910

262

24.4%

811

75.6%

1,073

1920

220

19.8%

890

80.2%

1,110

1930

191

16.8%

944

83.2%

1,135

1940

180

15.9%

953

84.1%

1,133

Census Year

1950

156

Majority African American Southern Counties

Majority White Southern Counties

13.7%

980

86.3%

Majority White Southern Counties

Total Number of Southern Counties

Number

Percent of Southern Counties

Number

Percent of Southern Counties

1960

134

11.8%

1,005

88.2%

1,139

1970

103

 9.0%

1,040

91.0%

1,143

a

1980

 88

 7.7%

1,057

92.3%

1,145

1990b

 86

 7.5%

1,059

92.5%

1,145

2000

 91

 8.0%

1,053

92.0%

1,144

Census Year

a

Sources: United States Bureau of the Census, Negro Population in the United States, 1790–1915 (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1968), pp. 776–797; United States Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the United States, 1920–1932 (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969), pp. 683–845; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, Michigan: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. a

All southern states have at least one majority African American county except Texas.

Of all southern states, only Tennessee and Texas do not have at least one majority African American county. b

1,136

Table 14.2  Number of Majority African American Counties by Census, 1860–2000

Louisiana

Mississippi

North Carolina

South Carolina

Tennessee

Texas

Virginia

Kentucky

Maryland

Missouri

Washington, DC

GA

LA

MS

NC

SC

TN

TX

VA

KY

MD

MO

DC

Total

 6

44

33

31

20

20

3

13

44

1

5

0

0

246

 8

54

32

32

17

21

2

12

42

0

3

0

0

253

13

 9

63

36

40

21

25

5

15

46

0

3

0

0

300

20

15

10

63

33

39

16

26

3

16

39

0

2

0

0

282

1900

22

15

12

67

31

38

18

30

3

12

36

0

2

0

0

286

1910

21

14

10

66

25

38

14

33

2

 8

31

0

1

0

0

263

1920

18

11

 5

58

22

34

12

32

2

 4

23

0

0

0

0

221

1930

18

 9

 4

48

16

35

 9

25

2

 4

21

0

0

0

0

191

1940

18

 9

 3

46

15

35

 9

22

2

 3

18

0

0

0

0

180

1950

14

 6

 2

40

12

31

 9

21

2

 4

15

0

0

0

0

156

1960

12

 5

 2

34

10

28

 8

15

2

 3

15

0

0

0

1

135

1970

10

 3

 2

23

 8

25

 5

12

2

 1

12

0

0

0

1

104

1980

10

 3

 1

19

 6

21

 6

12

2

 0

 8

0

1

0

1

 90

1990

10

 3

 1

17

 6

24

 5

12

0

 0

 8

0

2

0

1

 89

2000

10

 3

 1

17

 6

25

 6

12

1

 0

10

0

2

1

1

 95

Arkansas

FL

Alabama

Georgia

Border States

Florida

Southern States

AL

AR

1860

20

 6

1870

22

 8

1880

24

1890

Census Year

Sources: United States Bureau of the Census, Negro Population in the United States, 1790–1915 (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1968), pp. 776–797; United States Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the United States, 1920–1932 (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969), pp. 683–845; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009.

With our county-level unit of analysis for the 1868 and 1872 presidential and congressional elections, when there were a high number of African American majority counties, we will be able to see more of the voting and participation than in the years that followed. Turning our attention to the seven states that

participated in the 1868 election, Table 14.3 (p. 260) rank-orders these seven states by number of African American majority counties and offers the percentage that these counties represented of the total counties in that particular state. The range in terms of the number of majority African American counties runs

260

Chapter 14

Table 14.3  Number and Percentage of African American Majority Counties in the Seven Southern States of the 1868 Presidential and Congressional Elections: A Rank Ordering

Table 14.4  Popular and Electoral Votes in the Seven Southern States, 1868 Presidential Election Presidential Candidates

Number of African American Majority Counties

State Total Number of Counties

Percent of State Total

Georgia

 54

132

40.9%

Louisiana

 29

 53

54.7%

Alabama

 22

 65

33.8%

South Carolina

 20

 31

64.5%

North Carolina

 17

 90

18.9%

Arkansas

  7

 61

11.5%

Tennessee

  2

 85

 2.4%

Total

151

517

29.2%

State

Sources: Adapted from Table 3.2. Counties are matched with election results from Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), Map 23.2. Calculations by the authors.

from a high in Georgia with 54 to a low in Tennessee of 2, with the median standing at 20 in South Carolina. The range in terms of percentages runs from a high of 64.5%—indicating that the African American counties represented nearly two-thirds of all of South Carolina counties in this 1868 election—to where they represented a low of 2.4% of all of Tennessee’s counties. Overall, the African American majority counties average a little less than one-third (29.2%) of the total number of counties in these seven states. And in two states, South Carolina and Louisiana, the African American majority represented the clear-cut majority. Yet the 1868 Republican nominee, Ulysses S. Grant, only won in South Carolina and not in Louisiana. However, before we begin our county-level data analysis of the 1868 presidential election, we want to provide a statelevel data analysis so that the reader will know what happened statewide first and can then put the county-level analysis into its proper electoral context. Table 14.4 identifies the political party whose presidential candidate won in each of the seven southern states. Popular and electoral votes for both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates are also provided. In their first national election in which African American freedmen voted, the Republican Ulysses S. Grant won five of the seven southern states with popular voting (71.4%), for 38 electoral votes, while Democrat Horatio Seymour won two states (28.6%) and 16 electoral votes. Nevertheless, Democrat Seymour won the popular vote in the region due to the huge margins of victory with which he won in Georgia and Louisiana, where he received more than double the vote that Republican Grant won. In addition, we know that in Georgia, African Americans had a near voter registration majority (in terms of counties), while in Louisiana they had a majority, but in neither state were the Republicans able to win. The African American voters, who owed the franchise to the Republicans, were suppressed or simply did not turn out to vote in enough numbers to enter into a coalition with some white voters to gain a Republican victory. Seemingly, the Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s march through

Ulysses S. Grant Republican

Horatio Seymour Democrat

State

Popular Votes

Electoral Votes

Popular Votes

Electoral Votes

Alabama

 76,216

 8

 71,705

 

Arkansas

 22,113

 5

 19,077

 

Georgia

 57,165

 

103,168

 9

Louisiana

 33,277

 

 80,211

 7

North Carolina

 96,938

 9

 84,558

 

South Carolina

 62,301

 6

 45,237

 

Tennessee

 56,636

10

 26,131

 

Total

404,646

38

430,087

16

Source: Adapted from Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), Map 23.2 and Map 23.3.

Georgia, from Atlanta to Savannah, and the Union Army actions in New Orleans generated bitter attitudes and sentiments that eventuated in a “white backlash” against the fledging Republican Party with its core of freed African American supporters, activists, and voters. No other states reacted so strongly against the fledging Republican Party as did the white voters in these two states. For Georgia the trigger for this backlash might have been events of the Civil War, while in New Orleans the backlash might have emerged from the length of the Union Army occupation rather than a specific military event. Grant’s popular vote ran from a high of 96,938 votes in North Carolina to a low of 22,113 in Arkansas, with the median vote in Tennessee at 56,636. Clearly, in this initial electoral outing in the seven states of the Old Confederacy, the Republican Party had created a state-level base—winning five popular vote states as well as Florida, where the state legislature decided the outcome in their favor. Hence, six states out of the eight was not a bad beginning, but the failure to win in two states with such large numbers of African American registered voters indicated problems that would loom into the future. And this electoral outcome in Georgia and Louisiana should have suggested to Republican leaders that they had a significant challenge ahead to recapture and hold these two states. And in other states where the vote between the two parties was very close, like in Alabama and Arkansas, the Republican victory was a precarious one that also offered a challenge in terms of party building for subsequent presidential and congressional elections. Overall, the Republican Party had fashioned a state-level base in the region, but it had also run into strong and determined opposition that could become an obstacle to party recruitment and partisan identification in the future, both in terms of maintaining party voters and members of a biracial coalition. The victorious Republican Party captured 404,646 (48.5%) votes to the Democrats’ 430,077 votes (51.5%). Thus, the Democrats won the popular vote in the South but lost most of the electoral votes. The difference in



African American Voting Behavior, 1868 and 1872

the two parties’ vote totals was a mere 25,431 more votes for the Democrats over the Republicans. Having shown the overall results of this election, we can now turn to the roles that freedmen and white voters played in the state-level victories of the Republicans and Democrats in the 1868 presidential election. Our county-level methodological approach will permit the reader to see how the African American majority counties in each of the seven states voted for the Republicans and the Democrats and how the white majority counties in each of the seven states voted for these major parties. Shifting from the state-level votes to the vote in the black majority counties in each of the seven states, the reader will find in Table 14.5, first column (a), the number of African American majority counties in each former Confederate state that had popular voting in the 1868 presidential election. There were 151 such counties in these seven states that could be matched to election results (5 counties in the 1870 Census did not exist in 1868) and the median among the states stood at 20. The second column (b) shows the number of the African American majority counties that gave the Republicans the majority of their votes. North Carolina and Tennessee had 17 and 2 majority counties, respectively, and the Republicans won every one of these. The third column (c) shows the percentage of the total number of majority counties in that state in which the Republicans won. For instance, of the 7 African American majority counties in Arkansas, the

261

Republicans gained victory in 5, or 71.4% of those counties. In 2 counties, the African American majority failed to turn out or was intimidated and/or suppressed in casting their votes for the Republican Party. The worst offender shown by the table was Georgia, where despite our earlier empirical evidence on the existence of black federal registrars, less than one-fourth (24.1%) of the African American counties actually gave the Republicans a victory. Thus, these African Americans, too, either failed to turn out or were intimidated and/or suppressed in three-fourths of the state’s counties. Table 14.6 (p. 262) provides the same data for the white majority counties and how these counties voted in the 1868 presidential election. There were 10 such counties in South Carolina and none of these white counties gave the Republicans a victory. The state with the highest number of such counties was Tennessee, with 80, and in 61, or more than three-fourths of the majority white counties, the Republicans swept to victory. Of these white majority counties in the South, there were 333 in total and 122 of them (36.6%) gave the Republicans victory. The median state was Alabama with 7 of these counties, which represented 18.4% of Alabama’s counties. Shown in Table 14.7 (p. 262) are the percentages of Republican votes out of the total votes cast in the African American majority counties. Therefore, in the third column (c) of the table the reader can see the total number of votes cast by the African American majority counties that chose the

Table 14.5  Gain and Loss of Majority African American Counties Voting for the Republican Party in the South in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections Majority African American Counties in the South 1868 Presidential Election

1872 Presidential Election (d) Number of Counties

(e) Number of Counties Voting Republicana

(f) Percent of Counties Voting Republican

Gain or Loss in Number of Counties Voting Republican (column e-column b)

68.2%

22

17

77.3%

2

71.4%

8

8

100%

3

(a) Number of Counties

(b) Number of Counties Voting Republican

(c) Percent of Counties Voting Republican

Alabama

22

15

Arkansas

7

5

State

Florida

 

 

 

8

8

100%

8

Georgia

54

13

24.1%

54

23

42.6%

10

Louisiana

29

14

48.3%

31

27

87.1%

13

 

 

 

32

30

93.8%

30

North Carolina

17

17

100%

17

17

100%

0

South Carolina

20

15

75.0%

21

20

95.2%

5

2

2

100%

2

2

100%

0

Texas

 

 

 

12

11

91.7%

11

Virginia

 

 

 

40

34

85.0%

34

151

81

53.6%

247

197

79.8%

116

Mississippi

Tennessee

Total Mean

21.6

11.6

53.6%

22.5

17.9

79.8%

10.5

Median

20

14

71.4%

21

17

93.8%

8

Sources: Adapted from Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), Map 23.2 and Map 24.2; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors. a

Number of counties excludes Culpeper County, Virginia, with the same number of votes for Democrats and Republicans.

262

Chapter 14

Table 14.6  Gain and Loss of Majority White Counties Voting for the Republican Party in the South in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections Majority White Counties in the South 1868 Presidential Election

State

(a) Number of Counties

(b) Number of Counties Voting Republican

1872 Presidential Election

(c) Percent of Counties Voting Republican

(d) Number of Counties

(e) Number of Counties Voting Republicana

(f) Percent of Counties Voting Republican

Gain or Loss in Number of Counties Voting Republican (column e – column b)

Alabama

38

7

18.4%

41

10

24.4%

3

Arkansas

38

19

50.0%

49

20

40.8%

1

 

 

 

30

4

13.3%

4

Georgia

77

5

6.5%

78

18

23.1%

13

Louisiana

18

1

5.6%

 

 

North Carolina

72

South Carolina

10

Tennessee

Florida

21

9

42.9%

8

 

33

10

30.3%

10

29

40.3%

71

44

62.0%

15

0

0.0%

10

9

90.0%

9

80

61

76.3%

83

33

39.8%

-28

Texas

 

 

 

117

15

12.8%

15

Virginia

 

 

 

54

10

18.5%

10

333

122

36.6%

587

182

31.0%

60

Mississippi

Total Mean

47.6

Median

38

17.4

36.6%

53.4

16.5

31.0%

5.5

7

18.4%

49

10

30.3%

9

Sources: Adapted from Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), Map 23.2 and Map 24.2; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors. a Number excludes three counties with the same number of votes for Democrats and Republicans: Colquitt, Georgia; Davidson, Tennessee; and Loudoun, Virginia.

Table 14.7  Gain and Loss of Votes in Majority African American Counties Voting for the Republican Party in the South in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections Majority African American Counties in the South 1868 Presidential Election

(a) Number of Counties

(b) Number of Republican Votes of Counties Voting Republican

Alabama

22

Arkansas

1872 Presidential Election (g) Number of Total Votes of Counties Voting Republican

(h) Republican Votes as % of Total of Counties Voting Republican

Gain or Loss Republican Votes as % of Total of Counties Voting Republican (column h – column d)

55,212

81,247

68.0%

-1.5%

8

13,698

18,314

74.8%

-0.5%

8

12,434

18,357

67.7%

67.7%

61.5%

54

21,018

34,592

60.8%

-0.7%

67.4%

31

40,467

55,357

73.1%

5.7%

32

61,683

84,837

72.7%

72.7%

62.2%

17

31,836

47,653

66.8%

4.6%

70.5%

21

58,410

73,154

79.8%

9.3%

59.8%

2

6,335

9,104

69.6%

9.8%

 

12

12,205

18,735

65.1%

65.1%

 

40

34,635

56,535

61.3%

61.3%

247

347,933

497,885

69.9%

2.5%

(c) Number of Total Votes of Counties Voting Republican

(d) Republican Votes as % of Total of Counties Voting Republican

48,523

69,910

7

6,921

9,188

 

 

Georgia

54

14,050

22,855

Louisiana

29

21,183

31,419

 

 

North Carolina

17

31,448

50,542

South Carolina

20

48,949

69,415

2

2,203

3,686

Texas

 

 

Virginia

 

 

151

173,277

257,015

State

Florida

Mississippi

Tennessee

Total

(e) Number of Countiesa

(f) Number of Republican Votes of Counties Voting Republicana

69.4%

22

75.3%

67.4%

Mean

21.6

24,753.9

36,716.4

67.4%

22.5

31,630.3

45,262.3

69.9%

2.5%

Median

20

21,183

31,419

67.4%

21

31,836

47,653

68.0%

9.3%

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved November 2006; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/ Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors. a

Number of counties excludes Culpeper County, Virginia, with the same number of votes for Democrats and Republicans.



African American Voting Behavior, 1868 and 1872

Republicans in 1868 and in the fourth column (d) the percentage of this total vote that was cast for the Republican Party. (The table does not include Republican voting percentages for African American majority counties that did not choose the Republicans.) In the seven majority counties of Arkansas some 9,188 votes were cast and 75.3% of this vote was for the Republican Party. Such was the highest percentage, whereas in Tennessee’s two majority counties 59.8% of the vote favored the Republicans. The median state total vote for African American majority counties voting Republican in 1868 stood at 31,419 and the median percentage was 67.4%. Similar data from 1868 can be found for the white majority counties in Table 14.8. Some 77.6% of the total vote among Tennessee’s white majority counties rendered the Republican victory, while the same party among similar counties in Louisiana could only win 54.3%. The median state total vote and Republican percentage in Table 14.8 were 8,178 and 56.8%, respectively. Clearly, in state-level aggregations, the white majority counties gave less support to the Republicans than did the African American majority counties in 1868. Overall, the voting data from the 1868 presidential election demonstrate that the African American electorate in the majority

263

African American counties turned out in large enough numbers in five states to give the fledging Republican Party enough votes to win these states and enough electoral votes for General Grant to win the presidency over the Democratic challenger, who carried only two of the southern states, Georgia and Louisiana. And Figure 14.2 (p. 264) compares and contrasts voting behavior percentages of the African American majority counties in each of the seven states with those of the southern white majority county electorates who also voted for the Republicans in this presidential election. It shows a truly dramatic difference in the two electorates. In two states, North Carolina and Tennessee, all of the African American majority counties gave the Republicans a win. Only in Tennessee did the white majority counties come close to this feat, contributing 76% of the vote in these counties to the Republican victory. More importantly, the reader should recall that the Free-Men-of-Color had possessed the right to vote in Tennessee until 1834 and in North Carolina until 1835. And the same was true at the county level in Rapides Parish in Louisiana. The Republicans carried Rapides Parish with 57.3% of the vote to the Democrats’ 42.7%. These findings suggest that the past voting legacy of these predominantly African American counties was carried over 34 and 33 years later, given a new and greatly enhanced opportunity by the Four Military Reconstruction Acts.

Table 14.8  Gain and Loss of Votes in Majority White Counties Voting for the Republican Party in the South in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections

Majority White Counties in the South 1868 Presidential Election

State

(a) Number of Counties

(b) Number of Republican Votes of Counties Voting Republican

(c) Number of Total Votes of Counties Voting Republican

1872 Presidential Election (d) Republican Votes as % of Total of Counties Voting Republican

(e) Number of Counties

(f) Number of Republican Votes of Counties Voting Republicana

(g) Number of Total Votes of Counties Voting Republican

(h) Republican Votes as % of Total of Counties Voting Republican

Gain or Loss Republican Votes % of Total of Counties Voting Republican (column h – column d)

Alabama

38

3,863

6,927

55.8%

41

8,380

15,482

54.1%

-1.6%

Arkansas

38

10,667

15,617

68.3%

49

16,021

26,358

60.8%

-7.5%

 

 

 

 

30

2,041

3,819

53.4%

53.4%

Georgia

77

4,515

8,178

55.2%

78

11,703

20,668

56.6%

1.4%

Louisiana

18

1,540

2,837

54.3%

21

9,167

16,499

55.6%

1.3%

 

 

 

 

33

8,106

14,877

54.5%

54.5%

North Carolina

72

32,942

56,923

57.9%

71

45,484

77,779

58.5%

0.6%

South Carolina

10

0

0

 

10

8,870

13,824

64.2%

64.2%

Tennessee

80

49,869

64,305

77.6%

83

42,113

68,496

61.5%

-16.1%

Texas

 

 

 

 

117

7,878

14,906

52.9%

52.9%

Virginia

 

 

 

 

54

7,592

13,840

54.9%

54.9%

333

103,396

154,787

66.8%

587

167,355

286,548

Florida

Mississippi

Total Mean

47.6

Median

38

14,770.9

22,112.4

66.8%

53.4

4,515

8,178

56.8%

49

15,214.1 8,870

58.4%

-8.4%

26,049.8

58.4%

-8.4%

15,482

55.6%

1.4%

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved November 2006; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/ Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors. a

Number excludes three counties with the same number of votes for Democrats and Republicans: Colquitt, Georgia; Davidson, Tennessee; and Loudoun, Virginia.

264

Chapter 14

Figure 14.2  Percentage of Racial Majority Counties in the South Voting for the Republican Party in the 1868 Presidential Election

Percent of Counties Voting for the Republican Party

100%

100%

100%

90% 80%

76%

75%

71%

70%

68%

60% 50%

50% 40%

48%

40%

30%

24% 18%

20% 10%

6%

6%

Louisiana

Georgia

0%

0% North Carolina

Tennessee

South Carolina

Arkansas

Majority African American Counties

Alabama

Majority White Counties

Sources: Adapted from Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), Map 23.2; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi .org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

Beyond the total Republican voting behavior of the aforementioned majority counties in North Carolina and Tennessee, substantial majorities of these African American majority counties supported Republicans in South Carolina (75%), Arkansas (71%) and Alabama (68%). Only in the two states that the Democrats won, Louisiana and Georgia, did the African American majority county percentage drop under the 50% mark. Moreover, in South Carolina none of the white majority counties voted for the Republicans. Thus, in this state with its African American population majority, the Republicans won because of the African American electorate. The data also suggest that this was nearly the case in Alabama. Only in Tennessee and Arkansas did the white majority counties strongly support the Republicans. Therefore, in the 1868 presidential election, the empirical voting evidence from both the state and county levels confirms the common perception that the freed African American electorate provided the foundation and core base for the fledging Republican Party in all of the popular voting southern states except Tennessee and Arkansas. The Republican victory in five of the seven states rested firmly on the vote of the freedmen, while almost all of the counties where the Republicans were competitive in Louisiana and Georgia were primarily African American. Lastly, we see that these new freedmen aligned their party partisanship with the Republicans, no doubt due in large part to the issues that the Republican Party championed on their behalf during the Civil War and in Congressional Reconstruction that eventuated in the three Civil War Amendments—the Thirteenth,

Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, as well as the Four Military Reconstruction Acts.

The African American 1872 Presidential Vote in the Eleven Southern States Four years later, not only had the three southern states excluded from the 1868 presidential election—Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia—returned, but Congress had passed on February 3, 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment that permitted Free-Men-ofColor in the northern states to also vote in the 1872 presidential election. Hence, African Americans could now vote in all of the eleven southern states as well as all of the others. Thus, for the very first time the African American electorate was now national instead of regional, complete instead of piecemeal. Therefore, the 1872 presidential election represents a major turning point in the country’s political history. This milestone in suffrage rights came to pass due to the political and lobbying pressures of suffrage activists (African American and white), the efforts of the Republican elected leadership, and in response to the opposition of southern and northern state governments to the ideal and legal realities of “universal manhood suffrage.” While it disappointed proponents of women’s suffrage, who had briefly allied with the African American suffrage movement, it nevertheless became stage one of an evolutionary process on its way to universal adult suffrage. Map 14.2 shows the southern states and majority African American counties that participated in the 1872 presidential election.



African American Voting Behavior, 1868 and 1872

265

Map 14.2  Majority African American Counties in the Southern States of the 1872 Presidential Election

W NJ

PA MD

IA

0

100

IL

200

miles

KS

DE

OH WV

IN

Virginia KY

MO

North Carolina Tennessee

OK

South Carolina

Arkansas Mississippi

NM

Alabama

Texas

Georgia

0

Louisiana

100

200

miles

Florida

Source: Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), Map 24.2, and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi. org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009.

Table 14.9 (p. 266) shows that in those original seven southern states with popular voting in the 1868 presidential election, the Republicans won five states and lost two. Georgia voted against the Republicans in 1868 and continued this voting pattern in the 1872 election, although at a much lower level. It was joined in 1872 by Tennessee, which switched its alignment to the Democratic Party from apparently strong Republican support among the white majority counties in 1868. Louisiana, on the other hand, reversed from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party presidential candidate in 1872. Thus, in winning five of seven states the Republican Party received 518,313 votes (54.2%) to the Democrats 437,329 votes (45.8%). Clearly, within four years the Republican Party had improved its performance in the original seven southern states that participated in the 1868 presidential election. However, the four newly participating states—Florida (which adopted popular voting beginning with the 1872 presidential election), Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia—were split by the Republicans and the Democratic Party. Florida, which had given its electoral votes via its state legislature to the Republicans

in 1868, reaffirmed its support this time by popular vote for the incumbent Republican, President Grant. Mississippi with its huge African American population also supported the incumbent Republican. On the other hand, Texas and Virginia supported the Democrats. Overall, in 1872 the Republicans captured seven of the eleven states of the old Confederacy to four states for the Democrats. Both parties had an increase of two states over their 1868 positions, giving the Republicans nearly two-thirds of the states. And in the four new states the Republicans received 241,368 votes to the Democrats’ 221,981, for a difference of 19,387 votes. Table 14.5 in the previous section (p. 261) shows the number of African American majority counties in each of the eleven southern states in the 1872 presidential election (column d), while in the column to the right (e) the table reveals how many of those counties gave a victory to the Republicans. The number of counties giving the Republicans a victory runs from a high of 34 out of 40 in Virginia to a low of 2 out of 2 in Tennessee, with the median standing at 17 in Alabama. Thus, 197 of the 247 African American majority counties gave the Republicans a win, or 79.8%

R

R

D

D

R

R

R

 

 

 

 

 

 

State

Alabama

Arkansas

Georgia

Louisiana

North Carolina

South Carolina

Tennessee

Southern States of 1868 Subtotal

Florida

Mississippi

Texas

Virginia

Southern States of 1872 Total

 

 

 

 

 

834,206

82,757

107,538

181,496

113,488

159,816

41,190

147,921

Total Number of Votes

 

 

 

 

 

429,618

26,121

45,237

84,558

80,211

102,709

19,077

71,705

Number of Democratic Party Votes

Election 1868

 

 

 

 

 

404,588

56,636

62,301

96,938

33,277

57,107

22,113

76,216

Number of Republican Party Votes

 

D

D

R

R

 

D

R

R

R

D

R

R

1,419,900

185,201

115,698

129,463

33,190

956,348

180,047

95,440

164,491

128,692

140,234

79,300

168,144

Total Number of Votesc

Presidential Election Votes

659,310

91,640

67,671

47,246

15,424

437,329

94,378

22,703

69,784

57,033

77,112

37,924

78,395

Number of Democratic Party Votes

759,681

93,471

47,914

82,217

17,766

518,313

85,669

72,278

94,460

71,659

63,122

41,376

89,749

Number of Republican Party Votes

Election 1872

909

90

113

0

0

706

0

459

247

0

0

0

0

Number of Minor Party Votes

 

 

 

 

 

51.5%

31.6%

42.1%

46.6%

70.7%

64.3%

46.3%

48.5%

Percent of Votes for Democratic Party

 

 

 

 

 

48.5%

68.4%

57.9%

53.4%

29.3%

35.7%

53.7%

51.5%

Percent of Votes for Republican Party

Election 1868

46.4%

49.5%

58.5%

36.5%

46.5%

45.7%

52.4%

23.8%

42.4%

44.3%

55.0%

47.8%

46.6%

53.5%

50.5%

41.4%

63.5%

53.5%

54.2%

47.6%

75.7%

57.4%

55.7%

45.0%

52.2%

53.4%

Percent of Votes for Republican Party

Election 1872

Percent of Votes for Democratic Party

Percent of Votes

 

-5.8%

 

 

 

 

 

5.7%

-20.9%

4.0% 17.8%

-4.2% -18.3% 20.9%

9.3% 26.4%

-9.3% -26.4%

-1.5%

1.9%

-1.9% 1.5%

Gain or Loss Percent of Votes for Republican Party

Gain or Loss Percent of Votes for Democratic Party

Gain or Loss: Percent of Votes (Election 1872 – Election 1868)

The number of votes is calculated using the available source data: the total votes of each county divided by the party vote percentages, given by the source to nearest tenth of a percent. The resulting county votes are summed to yield the total votes for each state.

“D” indicates state won by the Democratic Party; “R” indicates a Republican Party state victory.

The total votes of North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia in 1872 include minor party votes.

a

b

c

Source: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved November 2006. Calculations by the authors.

Party Winb

Table 14.9 Comparing the Vote of the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections in the South for the Major Political Partiesa

Party Winb

of these counties. The median state was Alabama, where the percentage was 93.8%. This was a solid improvement over the 1868 performance. And before we shift to the white majority counties, a word should be said about Rapides Parish, because it permitted Free-Men-of-Color to vote from the late 1830s until Louisiana left the Union and joined the Confederacy in 1861. This county gave a majority of its votes (57.3%) in the 1868 presidential election to the Republican Party. In the 1872 election it gave an even higher majority of its votes (64.7%) to the Republicans. And this increase came, as we shall see later, in spite of the intimidation and violence that the freed African American voters faced in the state. Data in Table 14.6 in the previous section (p. 262) provide similar information for the southern white majority counties. The table shows that in 1872 there were 587 such counties and the Republicans won 182 of them for 31.0%, nearly a third. The range ran from a high of 44 of these counties in North Carolina to a low of 4 such counties in Florida. The median and mode number of counties stood at 10 in three states: Alabama, Mississippi, and Virginia. Although the number of white majority counties that supported the Republicans went up in the 1872 presidential election, the percentage went down. The state with the highest percentage of counties supporting the Republicans was South Carolina with 90.0%. This was a remarkable turnaround from the 1868 election, where not a single white majority county in South Carolina gave the Republicans a victory. Another turnaround state was Tennessee, which gave the Republicans 76.3% of its white counties in 1868 but only 39.8% in 1872. Table 14.7 in the previous section (p. 262) shows the actual number of votes cast in this election by the African American majority counties in these eleven states of the old Confederacy. In African American counties won by the Republicans, some 347,933 votes were cast for the Republicans, accounting for 69.9% of the total vote; and the median Republican vote in these Republican-victorious counties was North Carolina’s 31,836. The total vote for the Republicans in these counties ranged from a high of 61,683 votes in Mississippi to a low of 6,335 votes in Tennessee. The Republican share of the vote in these counties ran from a high of 79.8% to a low of 60.8% in Georgia and a median of 68.0% in Alabama. Again, there was an increase in the performance of the African American majority counties for the Republicans in the 1872 presidential election. Next, Table 14.8 in the previous section (p. 263) provides a portrait of the vote in the white majority counties in the 1872 election. In the counties won by the Republicans there was an aggregate of 167,355 votes (58.4%) for the Republicans as compared to the total vote of 286,548 votes in these counties. The percentage of the vote for the Republican Party ranges from a high of 64.2% in South Carolina down through a median of 55.6%, represented by Louisiana, to a low of 52.9% in Texas. The support in the white majority counties for the Republicans in the eleven southern states had declined over the previous four years, with Tennessee experiencing the largest decline (–16.1%). When the county-level data are taken collectively from Tables 14.5–14.8 for the 1872 election, one sees empirically a similar picture to the 1868 county-level data: the freed African American voters turned out at a much higher level and voted for the Republicans to a much greater extent, not only in the states

African American Voting Behavior, 1868 and 1872

267

won by the Republicans but in those won by the Democratic Party as well. South Carolina alone saw a large Republican increase in the white majority counties. The total numbers suggest that the electorate in the white majority counties had started to surge toward the Democrats, but in reality, most of the decline came in Arkansas and Tennessee. Other states saw only small changes from 1868. North Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia all had slightly increased percentages of white counties going Republican and relatively even margins of victory in Republican counties. Overall, the numbers still indicate that the freed African American voter further institutionalized the Republican Party base in the old South through the first two presidential elections after the Civil War. Visually these findings are summarized in Figure 14.3 (p. 268). In the 1872 presidential election, 100% of the African American majority counties in four states—Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee—gave the Republicans election victories. Only in two states, South Carolina and North Carolina, did the white majority counties come anywhere near such levels, or even climb above the 50% mark. South Carolina’s white majority counties nearly paralleled the African American majority counties in this election, giving the Republicans their largest shares of the vote, while white majority counties in Florida and Texas provided the Republicans with their lowest levels of majority support. But the states with 100% Republican victories in African American majority counties are followed by three others—South Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas—where more than 90% of the African American majority counties gave the Republican Party victories. This level of partisanship is followed by two states, Louisiana and Virginia, where more than 80% of the African American majority counties gave the Republicans victories; then by Alabama, where the Republicans won in 77% of the majority county electorates. Only in Georgia did fewer than 50% of the African American majority counties give the Republicans a victory. By contrast, in nine of the eleven states, fewer than 50% of the combined white majority counties rendered victories to the Republicans. Clearly, by the time of the second presidential election in the reconstructed South, the Republicans were getting much greater voter support from the African American majority counties than they were from the white majority counties, and this support had grown since the election in 1868. Even in Georgia, where the county-level support fell under 25%, the percent of white majority counties voting Republican had more than tripled in the four years since the 1868 presidential election. But one cannot leave Figure 14.3 without looking at the near region-wide similarity of Republican Party voting behavior of the African American electorate in these African American majority counties. And with only two exceptions, North Carolina and South Carolina, there is nearly complete region-wide similarity in the white majority counties against the Republicans and stark differences in their party voting behavior from the African American electorate. Nevertheless, Figure 14.3 does tell us that there was some possibility for a biracial Republican electorate in all of the eleven states of the old Confederacy. It was stronger in some states than in others. No state by the 1872 presidential election showed it to be an impossibility, as several of the states in the 1868 election had seemed to do.

268

Chapter 14

Percent of Counties Voting for the Republican Party

Figure 14.3  Percentage of Racial Majority Counties in the South Voting for the Republican Party in the 1872 Presidential Election

100%

100%

The Republican Party won all states shown except Georgia and Tennessee.

95% 90%

90%

94%

92%

87%

85% 77%

80% 70%

62%

60% 50% 40%

41%

43%

40%

43%

30%

30% 20%

13%

19%

13%

24%

23%

10% 0% Arkansas

Florida

North Carolina

Tennessee

South Carolina

Mississippi

Majority African American Counties

Texas

Louisiana

Virginia

Alabama

Georgia

Majority White Counties

Sources: Adapted from Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), Map 24.2, and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi .org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

The Democratic Presidential Vote in the African American and White Majority Counties in 1868 and 1872 The vote from the African American and white majority counties for the Democratic Party in 1868 are a mirror image of those counties’ votes for the Republican Party. Figure 14.4 provides a comprehensive and systematic visual picture of that portion of the vote. In the 1868 presidential election, the white majority counties in South Carolina voted 100% for the Democratic Party; in Louisiana and Georgia 94% of those counties voted for the Democrats; Alabama white majority counties voted 82% for the Democrats; in North Carolina, 60%; and in Arkansas, 50%. Only in Tennessee did fewer than 50% of the white majority counties vote for the Democrats. The portrait for the African American majority counties was the opposite. In two states, North Carolina and Tennessee, none of these counties gave the Democratic Party a majority. In fact, only in two other states, Georgia and Louisiana, both of which the Democrats won, did the African American majority counties give the Democrats victories. Why? Historian James M. McPherson, in a highly praised work, declared: During the 1868 campaign, the Klan and similar organizations were most active in Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas and Tennessee. Although Republicans managed to carry the last two states, they did so at a great cost. More than two hundred political murders were reported in Arkansas. . . . The death toll in Georgia was lower, but the incidence of threats and beatings

higher. These tactics kept thousands of Republicans from the polls. In the state as a whole, a Republican majority of 58 percent in April was transformed into a Democratic majority of 71 percent in November.6 Next, Professor McPherson turned to Louisiana, to explain why the Democrats won in that state. He stated: Even worse was Louisiana, where according to the subsequent report of a congressional committee, more than a thousand persons, mostly blacks, were killed between April and November 1868. Two riots near Shreveport left more than one hundred dead, and a major outbreak at Opelousas, in St. Landry Parish, produced an estimated death toll of two hundred. . . . In the state as a whole, a Republican majority of 58 percent in April [state elections] was transformed into a Democratic majority of 71 percent in November.7 Thus, such brazen and violent action suppressed the vote of African Americans for the Republican presidential candidate, and the result was a Republican loss in these two states, but not in the states of Arkansas and Tennessee. In both of the latter states, numerous white majority counties gave the Republicans their vote, and when these were combined with the African American majority counties, the Republicans carried these states. Hence, in the 1868 election, the tactics used by some white Democrats enabled their party to carry some of the African American majority counties and two states. It was not done



African American Voting Behavior, 1868 and 1872

269

Percent of Counties Voting for the Democratic Party

Figure 14.4  Percentage of Racial Majority Counties in the South Voting for the Democratic Party in the 1868 Presidential Election 100%

100%

94%

94%

90% 80%

The Democratic Party lost all states shown except Georgia and Louisiana.

82%

76%

70% 60%

60%

52%

50%

50%

40% 30%

32%

29%

25%

24%

20% 10% 0%

0% South Carolina

Louisiana

Georgia

Alabama

Majority African American Counties

North Carolina

0% Arkansas

Tennessee

Majority White Counties

Sources: Adapted from Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), Map 23.2, and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi .org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

because the freed African Americans of their own accord voted for the Democratic Party. Prior to the 1872 presidential election, “in several states, the Klan and Klan-like organizations grew bolder during 1870. The death toll mounted into the hundreds. . . . On May 31, 1870, Congress passed an enforcement act that made interference with voting rights a federal offense punishable in federal courts. . . . But during the first year of the law’s existence, President Grant and Attorney General Hoar did little to enforce it.”8 Given the inaction by the president and the attorney general, Congress on February 28, 1871, passed a second and more stringent enforcement act. But even with these two laws on the books, President Grant restrained himself and the Justice Department. The internal disagreement over this issue led in part to a split in the Republican Party ranks and the rise of the Liberal Republican Party, a third-party movement, which was endorsed, backed, and adopted by the Democratic National Convention in 1872. Figure 14.5 shows how all of the eleven southern states at the county level supported the Democratic Party, which included candidates of the Liberal Republicans whom they had endorsed. More than 80% of the white majority counties in three southern states—Texas, Florida, and Virginia—gave the Democratic Party victories. Three other southern states—Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi—saw 70% or more of their white majority counties back the Democrats, while 60% of white majority counties in Tennessee went to the Democrats. Two states—Arkansas and Louisiana—saw more than 50% of their white majority counties give victories to the Democratic Party. Only in North Carolina and South Carolina did the number of white counties won by the Democratic Party fall well under the 50% mark. Therefore, with

this type of hardcore support from the white majority counties and voter suppression and intimidation in the African American counties in the 1872 election, the Democrats won in four states, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. Clearly, the Democratic Party was “redeeming” the number of southern states under their control. On the other hand, four states—Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas—saw none of their African American majority counties give a single Democratic victory. Three additional states—North Carolina, Louisiana, and Texas—gave fewer than 10% of their African American counties to the Democratic Party; and three states—Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida— had less than a quarter of those counties in the Democratic victory column. In the four states where the Democrats won, the range of African American county victories went from a high of 23% in Georgia to no victories (0%) in Tennessee. Yet with this very small level of African American support, the Democrats still won simply because of the heavy support flowing from the white majority counties. Tennessee and South Carolina in this 1872 election reversed themselves from their record in 1868. Tennessee, where the number of majority African American counties was small, switched back to the Democratic Party this time due to the fact that more than twenty white majority counties switched from voting Republican to voting Democratic. In South Carolina, the white majority counties went from refusing to acknowledge Republicans as a political choice to voting Republican almost exclusively in 1872. Furthermore, African American counties were not nearly so monolithic in voting against Democrats in 1868 as they would seem to become in 1872.

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Chapter 14

Figure 14.5  Percentage of Racial Majority Counties in the South Voting for the Democratic Party in the 1872 Presidential Election

Percent of Counties Voting for the Democratic Party

100% 87%

90%

The Democratic Party lost all states in the South except Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.

87% 81%

77%

80%

76% 70%

70%

60%

57%

60%

59%

57%

50% 38%

40% 30%

23%

20% 10%

15%

13% 6%

5% 0%

0% Texas

Florida

Virginia

Georgia

0%

0%

10%

0%

Alabama Mississippi Tennessee Arkansas

Majority African American Counties

8%

Louisiana

North Carolina

South Carolina

Majority White Counties

Sources: Adapted from Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), Map 24.2, and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi .org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

The Comparative Portrait of Party Voting in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections Up to this point in the analysis, our empirically based sug­ gestions, insights, and findings were generated from focusing primarily upon one presidential election at a time so as to give the reader greater detail and specificity. Having done that, it is now possible to analyze them collectively through comparisons and contrasts for even greater empirical insights and findings. Once again, we can return to Table 14.9 (p. 266), where one can see differences in votes between these two post–Civil War elections in both voter statistics and voter percentages. The third category in the table shows the total vote differences for each state as well as the vote differences for the two major parties in every state. Finally, the fourth category presents percentage differences for the same states and parties. Beginning with the vote differences, in the four years between these two presidential elections, the total vote went up in four of the seven states—Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee—and down in the other three—Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. In terms of party support, there was a Democratic Party vote decline in four states—Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina—and an increase in three states—Tennessee, Arkansas, and Alabama. Although the votes for the Democratic Party in these seven states fluctuated between these two elections, there was

consistently a solid increase for the Republican Party in all of the seven states except in North Carolina. While these increases differed from state to state, the greatest increase came in Louisiana with 38,382 votes and the least increase in Georgia with 6,015 votes. The total increase of 7,711 for the Democrats versus 113,725 for the Republicans translated into 106,014 more votes for the Republicans. Thus, at the voter level the Republicans garnered more votes in the four years between these presidential elections. Turning to the percentage difference data in the last category in Table 14.9, one finds that there were four states—Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee—which saw increases in the total number of votes, and three states—Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina—which experienced declines in their total votes. This worked out to a 14.6% overall increase. Looking at the parties and their percentage margins of victory, the overall decline for the Democratic Party of 5.7% was offset by a gain of 5.8% for the Republicans between the two elections in the seven states that participated in the 1868 election. This finding of increasing and declining shares of the vote between the parties in these two elections, 1868 and 1872, reveals that the Republican Party simply out-performed the Democrats. Support for the Republican Party grew at a greater pace than for the Democratic Party. And when the four southern states that only participated in 1872 election are included, the Republicans received 759,681 votes (53.5%) to the Democrats’ 659,310 votes (46.4%).



African American Voting Behavior, 1868 and 1872

Taking into account the data presented in Tables 14.5–14.9 and Figures 14.2–14.5, this collective comparative analysis of the vote and percentage levels reveals much greater electoral support for the Republicans by African Americans and whites than accrued in the 1868 election, but an even greater decline in support for Democrats among whites when compared to that previous election. The white electorate showed both a smaller overall alignment but a larger realignment from 1868 to 1872, while the freed African Americans showed essentially an increasing alignment from one election to the next. The white electorate seemed more uncertain about their partisan moorings than did the African American electorate. Table 14.10, which shows the changes in the seven states that participated in both elections, demonstrates that support for Republicans increased by 33 African American majority counties overall, an increase in share of these counties to 73.5% in 1872 from 53.6% in 1868. The greatest gains in counties were in states lost by the Republican Party in the 1868 election, a net of 13 more in Louisiana and 10 in Georgia. The median percentage for the counties stood at 95.2%, up from 71.4% in 1868, and the median increase in number of counties was 3. Table 14.11 (p. 272) provides the same empirical data for the white majority counties. The net increase in white majority counties that supported the Republicans in 1872 was 21 counties (17.2%), which is significantly fewer than the gain of 33 African American counties (40.7%), especially considering that the total number of white majority counties was over twice the number of

271

African American counties in both 1868 and 1872. The median gain in white majority counties in favor of the Republicans for the seven states was represented by Louisiana with 8, and the median percentage of counties voting Republican in 1872 was Arkansas’s 40.8%. The state of Tennessee lost 28 of its white majority Republican counties to the Democrats in the four years between the two elections, causing it to flip from the Republicans in 1868 to the Democrats in 1872. Tables 14.12 and 14.13 move from differences in the number of counties to the actual number of votes in counties that voted for the Republicans. Table 14.12 (p. 272) provides the number of votes cast in the African American majority counties that voted for the Republicans, and the very last column shows that there was an overall gain in the percentage of the vote for the Republicans of 3.6 percentage points. Table 14.13 (p. 273), which focuses upon the white majority counties that voted for the Republicans, reveals in its last column an overall loss of Republican votes of 7.5 percentage points. Thus, in these seven states over these two elections, the aggregate of the white majority counties went directly in the opposite direction from the party voting behavior of the African American electorate, although, as Table 14.13 makes clear, the downward trend was almost entirely due to Tennessee and Arkansas. The median percentage of Republican support among these counties actually rose in 1872. Substantial change in party alignments and realignments for both races was underway in these two post–Civil War presidential elections in the seven and eleven states of the Reconstructed South.

Table 14.10  Gain and Loss of Counties Voting for the Republican Party in Majority African American Counties of the Original Seven Southern States in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections Majority African American Counties in the South 1868 Presidential Election

State

(a) Number of Counties

1872 Presidential Election

(b) Number of Counties Voting Republican

(c) Percent of Counties Voting Republican

(d) Number of Counties

(e) Number of Counties Voting Republican

(f) Percent of Counties Voting Republican

Gain or Loss in Number of Counties Voting Republican (column e – column b)

Net Percentage Gain or Loss in Number of Counties Voting Republican ((e) – (b))/ (b)

Alabama

22

15

68.2%

22

17

77.3%

2

13.3%

Arkansas

7

5

71.4%

8

8

100%

3

60.0%

Georgia

54

13

24.1%

54

23

42.6%

10

76.9%

Louisiana

29

14

48.3%

31

27

87.1%

13

92.9%

North Carolina

17

17

100%

17

17

100%

0

0.0%

South Carolina

20

15

75.0%

21

20

95.2%

5

33.3%

2

2

100%

2

2

100%

0

0.0%

151

155

114

73.5%

33

40.7%

Tennessee Total

81

53.6%

Mean

21.6

11.6

53.6%

22.1

16.3

73.5%

4.7

40.7%

Median

20

14

71.4%

21

17

95.2%

3

33.3%

Sources: Adapted from Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), Map 23.2 and Map 24.2, and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

272

Chapter 14

Table 14.11  Gain and Loss of Counties Voting for the Republican Party in Majority White Counties of the Original Seven Southern States in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections Majority White Counties in the South 1868 Presidential Election

State

(a) Number of Counties

(b) Number of Counties Voting Republican

1872 Presidential Election

(c) Percent of Counties Voting Republican

(d) Number of Counties

(e) Number of Counties Voting Republicana

(f) Percent of Counties Voting Republican

Gain or Loss in Number of Counties Voting Republican (column e – column b)

Net Percentage Gain or Loss in Number of Counties Voting Republican ((e) – (b))/ (b)

Alabama

38

7

18.4%

41

10

24.4%

3

Arkansas

38

19

50.0%

49

20

40.8%

1

5.3%

Georgia

77

5

6.5%

78

18

23.1%

13

260.0%

Louisiana

18

1

5.6%

21

9

42.9%

8

800.0%

North Carolina

72

29

40.3%

71

44

62.0%

15

51.7%

South Carolina

10

0

0.0%

10

9

90.0%

9

 

80

61

76.3%

83

33

39.8%

-28

-45.9%

333

122

36.6%

353

143

40.5%

21

17.2%

Tennessee Total Mean

47.6

Median

38

42.9%

17.4

36.6%

50.4

20.4

40.5%

3.0

17.2%

7

18.4%

49

18

40.8%

8

47.3%

Sources: Adapted from Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), Map 23.2 and Map 24.2, and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors. a

Number excludes two counties with the same number of votes for Democrats and Republicans: Colquitt, Georgia, and Davidson, Tennessee.

Table 14.12  Gain and Loss of Votes in Majority African American Counties Voting for the Republican Party in the Original Seven Southern States in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections Majority African American Counties in the South 1868 Presidential Election

State

(a) Number of Counties

(b) Number of Republican Votes of Counties Voting Republican

(c) Number of Total Votes of Counties Voting Republican

1872 Presidential Election

(d) Republican Votes as % of Total of Counties Voting Republican

(e) Number of Counties

(f) Number of Republican Votes of Counties Voting Republican

(g) Number of Total Votes of Counties Voting Republican

(h) Republican Votes as % of Total of Counties Voting Republican

Gain or Loss: Republican Votes as % of Total of Counties Voting Republican (column h – column d)

Alabama

22

48,523

69,910

69.4%

22

55,212

81,247

68.0%

-1.5%

Arkansas

7

6,921

9,188

75.3%

8

13,698

18,314

74.8%

-0.5%

Georgia

54

14,050

22,855

61.5%

54

21,018

34,592

60.8%

-0.7%

Louisiana

29

21,183

31,419

67.4%

31

40,467

55,357

73.1%

5.7%

North Carolina

17

31,448

50,542

62.2%

17

31,836

47,653

66.8%

4.6%

South Carolina

20

48,949

69,415

70.5%

21

58,410

73,154

79.8%

9.3%

Tennessee Total

2

2,203

3,686

59.8%

2

6,335

9,104

69.6%

9.8%

151

173,277

257,015

67.4%

155

226,976

319,421

71.1%

3.6%

Mean

21.6

24,753.9

36,716.4

67.4%

22.1

32,425.1

45,631.6

71.1%

3.6%

Median

20

21,183

31,419

67.4%

21

31,836

47,653

69.6%

2.2%

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved November 2006; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/ Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors. a

The median of the percentages rather than a percentage calculated from median numbers as in the row above.



African American Voting Behavior, 1868 and 1872

273

Table 14.13  Gain and Loss of Votes in Majority White Counties Voting for the Republican Party in the Original Seven Southern States in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections Majority White Counties in the South 1868 Presidential Election

State

(a) Number of Counties

(b) Number of Republican Votes of Counties Voting Republican

(c) Number of Total Votes of Counties Voting Republican

1872 Presidential Election

(d) Republican Votes as % of Total of Counties Voting Republican

(e) Number of Counties

(f) Number of Republican Votes of Counties Voting Republican a

(g) Number of Total Votes of Counties Voting Republican

(h) Republican Votes as % of Total of Counties Voting Republican

Gain or Loss: Republican Votes % of Total of Counties Voting Republican (column h – column d)

Alabama

38

3,863

6,927

55.8%

41

8,380

15,482

54.1%

-1.6%

Arkansas

38

10,667

15,617

68.3%

49

16,021

26,358

60.8%

-7.5%

Georgia

77

4,515

8,178

55.2%

78

11,703

20,668

56.6%

1.4%

Louisiana

18

1,540

2,837

54.3%

21

9,167

16,499

55.6%

1.3%

North Carolina

72

32,942

56,923

57.9%

71

45,484

77,779

58.5%

0.6%

South Carolina

10

0

0

0.0%

10

8,870

13,824

64.2%

64.2%

Tennessee

80

49,869

64,305

77.6%

83

42,113

68,496

61.5%

-16.1%

333

103,396

154,787

66.8%

353

141,738

239,106

59.3%

-7.5%

Total Mean

47.6

Median

38

14,770.9

22,112.4

66.8%

50.4

20,248.3

34,158.0

59.3%

-7.5%

4,515

8,178

55.8%

49

11,703

20,668

58.5%

0.6%

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved November 2006; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/ Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors. a

Number excludes two counties with the same number of votes for Democrats and Republicans: Colquitt, Georgia, and Davidson, Tennessee.

The African American Congressional Vote in the 1868, 1869, 1870, and 1872 Elections The second dimension of the African American electorate from 1868 to 1872 to consider involves the four congressional elections that took place in this same time frame—1868, 1869, 1870, and 1872. Table 14.14 (p. 274) brings these four elections together. All told there were eighteen African American candidates for Congress hailing from six different southern states in these four elections. Two candidates from Louisiana lost, J. Willis Menard and Pinckney B. S. Pinchback,9 while Benjamin Turner lost his reelection bid in Alabama and A. A. Bradley lost in Georgia, for a grand total of four losses. A total of ten different candidates won. South Carolina had candidates in three different time periods, while Louisiana had candidates in two different time periods. This table also shows that white Democrats and Republicans made legal challenges against victorious African American congressional candidates during these four elections, and in some instances the final outcome had to be made by the Committee on Elections in the House of Representatives.10 Two of the four challenges resulted in the African American congressional candidate not being seated. Both of these rejected candidates came from Louisiana. The congressional contests including African American candidates began in 1868, one year after the Four Military

Reconstruction Acts had enfranchised the freedmen. A candidate stepped forward from Georgia and another from Louisiana to go to the House of Representatives. Jefferson Long’s election permitted him to finish out the term of a white congressman. J. Menard from Louisiana ran in a three way contest (he faced a white Republican and a white Democrat and came in third) and challenged the white Republican’s victory on the basis of fraud in the New Orleans precincts. Though the Committee on Elections refused the seat to both of Menard’s opponents, they also did not seat Menard, declaring that it was too early to have African Americans in Congress. In the regular midterm elections of 1870 six new candidates appeared from four states, including one from Georgia but none from Louisiana. South Carolina had three. The candidate from Florida, Josiah T. Walls, had to run statewide because his state had too few people to satisfy the numerical requirement to establish congressional districts. Nevertheless, he won with 51.3% of the vote. African American Republican Party activist A. A. Bradley ran as an Independent Republican after the Republican Party in Georgia nominated a white Republican in his district. Bradley gained only 12.1% of the vote in the three-way contest, but it was enough to split the Republican vote so that the white Democrat took the election. In South Carolina’s 2nd Congressional District the African American candidate, Robert De Large, similarly ran as an Independent Republican, but he won with 51.5% of the vote.

274

Chapter 14

Table 14.14  Vote for African American Republican Congressional Candidates, 1868, 1869, 1870, and 1872 Election  

African American Congressional Candidate

Year

Type

1868

Presidential Year Election

1

Louisiana

1869

Special

1 2 1 2

1870

1872

Mid-term

Presidential Year Election

No.

State

CDa

Name

Partyc

Votes

Opposition

 

Vote %

Partyc

Votes

Vote %

Outcome

2

b

J. Willis Menard

R

8,615

26.0%

D, R

24,524

74.0%

Not Seated

Georgia

??

Jefferson F. Long

R

12,857

53.0%

D

11,401

47.0%

Won

South Carolina

1

Joseph H. Rainey

R

20,221

63.5%

D

11,628

36.5%

Won

Alabama

1

Benjamin Turner

R

18,226

57.5%

D

13,466

42.5%

Won

Florida

AL

Josiah T. Wallsb

R

12,439

51.3%

D

11,810

48.7%

Won

3

Georgia

1

A. A. Bradley

IR

2,142

7.8%

D, Rd

25,243

92.2%

Lost

4

South Carolina

2

Robert C. De Largeb

IR

16,686

51.5%

R

15,700

48.5%

Won

5

South Carolina

3

Robert B. Elliott

R

20,664

59.6%

D

13,994

40.4%

Won

6

South Carolina

1

Joseph H. Rainey

R

20,385

86.5%

D

3,192

13.5%

Won

1

Alabama

1

Benjamin Turner

R

13,174

45.8%

LR

15,607

54.2%

Lost

2

Alabama

2

James T. Rapier

R

19,397

54.5%

LR

16,221

45.5%

Won

3

Florida

AL

Josiah T. Walls

R

17,503

26.2%

R, D, Dd

49,229

73.8%

Won

4

Louisiana

AL

P. B. S. Pinchbackb

R

53,011

44.9%

D

64,975

55.1%

Not Seated

5

Mississippi

6

John R. Lynch

R

15,101

64.0%

LR

8,509

36.0%

Won

6

South Carolina

AL

Richard Cain

R

68,825

72.3%

ID

26,394

27.7%

Won

7

South Carolina

2

Alonzo J. Ransier

R

20,061

75.4%

D

6,549

24.6%

Won

8

South Carolina

1

Joseph H. Rainey

R

19,765

100.0%

none

0

0.0%

Won

9

South Carolina

3

Robert B. Elliott

R

21,627

92.8%

none given

1678

7.2%

Won

303,757

61.5%

 

189,771

38.5%

[14]

76,942

37.1%

 

130,349

62.9%

[4]

380,699

54.3%

 

320,120

45.7%

[18]

Won Lost / Not Seated Total

d

Sources: Adapted from Eric Freedman and Stephen Jones (eds.), African Americans in Congress: A Documentary History (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2008), pp. 286–288, and 550; Chester Rowell (ed.), A History and Legal Digest of All the Contested Election Cases in the House of Representatives of the United States, 1789–1901 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1976), pp. 226–228, 282–283, and 293–297; Committee on House Administration, United States House of Representatives, Black Americans in Congress, 1870–2007 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2008), pp. 17–151; and Committee on House Administration, United States House of Representatives, “Black Americans in Congress - Jefferson Franklin Long, Representative from Georgia,” http://baic.house.gov/memberprofiles/profile.html?intID=7, retrieved November 11, 2011. Calculations by the authors. a

The numerical congressional district contested. “AL” indicates an “at large” congressional seat.

b

The election of this candidate was challenged by white Democrats or Republicans and the outcome was decided by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Elections.

c

Political parties: R-Republican, D-Democrat, IR-Independent Republican, LR-Liberal Republican, ID-Independent Democrat.

d

“X,Y,Z” indicates multiple opponents and their political affiliations, in descending order of the number of votes that each received.

Finally, in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, Joseph Rainey first ran in a special election in 1869, which he won; then he had to run in the regular election in 1870, which he won again. Overall, five of the six African American Republicans won in the 1870 midterm election. When the 1872 presidential-year election came, these numbers increased to nine candidates running for Congress and seven winning seats. In this congressional election, all of the African Americans were regular Republicans, while three of their opponents were white Liberal Republicans and one was an Independent Democrat. African American candidates faced off against only four regular Democrats. Alabama’s only African American incumbent, Benjamin Turner, lost to the Liberal Republican, while Josiah Walls of Florida, that state’s only African American incumbent, won re-election as one of two representatives from a newly drawn district. And former

Lt. Governor and Acting Governor P.B.S. Pinchback lost to a regular Democrat in Louisiana. The white Democrat attacked Pinchback by asserting that while serving as acting governor Pinchback had signed his own certification showing that he won the election. The Democratic candidate claimed that this was illegal. Collectively, the tabular data reveal that while more and more African Americans were running for Congress and more and more were winning, the increase came primarily from South Carolina where African Americans had a population majority. Second, the table shows that African Americans were running from the same congressional districts. The historical record shows that these districts were drawn to have African American population majorities and to encompass one or more African American majority counties. The four exceptions were Florida in 1870 and 1872, Louisiana in 1872, and South Carolina in 1872.

Of these four at-large elections African Americans were able to win in three: Josiah T. Walls in 1870 and 1872 in Florida and Richard Cain in 1872 in South Carolina. Third, all of the African American winners were regular Republicans except Robert De Large in South Carolina in 1870, who was an Independent Republican. Fourth, the winners and losers shown in the table got their votes from the Republican electorate, which the historical record shows essentially came from the freedmen electorate in the majority counties that made up the congressional districts.11 The lone exception here was Walls, who had at-large victories in Florida in 1870 and 1872. And the reason that the at-large victory in South Carolina in 1872 is not an exception is that the state had an African American population majority during this election. African Americans could win in these at-large elections only if they had either a population majority or a voter registration one. And a final conclusion from the table is that African Americans were a very small number and percentage of all of the candidates winning seats in Congress from the eleven states of the old Confederacy during these four election years.12 Five of the eleven states did not have any African American candidates, and in each election with African American candidates the opposition often included another white Republican as well as white Democrats. The small numbers of African Americans running for Congress in this time frame meant that many white Republicans got a lot of crossover voting from African American Republicans in districts that included African American majority counties. In the next chapter we will have more empirical data on this phenomenon known as crossover voting.

Summary and Conclusions on African American Voting Behavior in 1868 and 1872 This quantitative analysis sheds light on elections that are too often overshadowed by the momentous events that followed in 1876. Having considered this analysis in detail, it will help the reader to understand how these two historic and precedentsetting elections in African American history came to be overlooked or underanalyzed. The dean of the African American historical experience, Professor John Hope Franklin, provided a vivid portrait and narrative of the political context for the election and how the newly freed African Americans enabled the Republicans to win eight of the eleven southern states and win the presidency for Union General Ulysses S. Grant. What is missing from his account is the detailed quantitative analysis of those victories. Franklin noted how the national Republican leaders in Congress moved after Andrew Johnson succeeded to the presidency and re-admitted all of the southern states almost immediately, doing virtually nothing to restrict these old Confederates from returning to power at the local and state levels and permitting these southern states to enact very elaborate “Black Codes.” These laws with “stringent rules and regulations, which treated the freedmen as a distinct and secondary category of citizens with limited civil rights” took effect.13 Professor Franklin shows that initially President Johnson gave the appearance of supporting the moderate wing of the

African American Voting Behavior, 1868 and 1872

275

party (those who favored limited suffrage rights for the freedmen instead of the radical wing, which sought universal suffrage). Later when Johnson’s true position became clear—he was adamantly opposed to any kind of suffrage rights for the freedmen—congressional Republicans not only split with him but took control of the Reconstruction by forcing ten of the eleven southern states back out of the Union and establishing in the Four Military Reconstruction Acts several preconditions for re-admission. Finally, Franklin indicates that President Johnson politically embraced his native South and sought to minimize the impact and influence of the Four Military Reconstruction Acts on those states.14 His opposition to these congressional acts led both to his near impeachment and the denial of the party’s re-nomination of him for the 1868 presidential election. John Hope Franklin’s colleague Professor C. Vann Woodard, himself the dean of southern history and southern historians, did not specifically isolate and write about these two unique and historical elections either. He did detail the reaction and opposition to the rising biracial electoral South that this fearful opposition forecast and projected as the future. Then he focused on how the reaction and opposition eventuated in the rise of a “White Supremacy” counterrevolution that turned the 1876 presidential election into a disaster, stalled the promise of the 1868 and 1872 elections, and ended the “Black Reconstruction.” This ideology gave birth to the “one-party south” and resulted in the “Compromise of 1877” that forced the national Republican Party to take a permanent “Let Alone” policy and political stance toward the South.15 Herein, argued Professor Woodward, was the “Burden of Southern History.”16 Woodard did not provide a detailed quantitative account of the 1868 and 1872 elections, and moreover, his focus on the “Compromise of 1877” did elevate and heighten the 1876 presidential election so much so that the unique and historic 1868 and 1872 elections would be forever relegated to the historical shadows of the 1876 presidential election and its consequential political compromise. However, Professor Woodward became one of the very first southern historians to incorporate at the conceptual level the role that registered African American voters played in this “New South” by showing in his works in a tabulated format the number of registered African American voters in Louisiana, the only state to have kept such records continuously from 1867 onward. 17 And Professor Woodward used this continuous tabular data to show students, academics, and scholars who studied Reconstruction the importance of the “Compromise of 1877” and the Era of Disenfranchisement, as well as their impact and consequences in the emergence of the “New South.” Each of these southern events played a fundamental role in undercutting and eroding the suffrage-granting empowerment of the Four Military Reconstruction Acts and the Fifteenth Amendment. Once these laws and the constitutional amendment were no longer enforced and emptied of their power in the eleven states of the South, the “New South” gave birth to the devastating social systems of Jim and Jane Crow and racial segregation.18 The freed African Americans became primarily non-voters, non-political participants, and second-class citizens.

276

Chapter 14

In the long run, despite the best efforts of Professor Franklin to demonstrate the importance of the 1868 presidential election and of Professor Woodward to suggest the importance of African American Republican voters during this time frame, the absence of reliable voter registration and voting data from the other ten southern states led to the 1876 presidential election consequences becoming pivotal and center stage because of the resultant “Compromise of 1877.” For those who were more quantitatively inclined, they sought to generate a solution to the absence of registration and voting data by turning to the use of a statistical regression analysis technique known as OLS.19 Such a procedure, if properly used, could produce numerical estimates of freed African American voters in different presidential elections in the ten southern states. Two historians have used this technique to generate estimated voting data for African Americans: Lawrence Powell for Mississippi and J. Morgan Kousser for the southern region (but with Kousser’s book length study on the region only starting in 1880, it is not relevant to the 1868 and 1872 elections).20 Powell’s article on Mississippi uses the technique to estimate the number of the newly freed African American voters in the ratification of the 1868 state constitution. The vote on Mississippi’s first new state constitution was rejected. And in this second vote, using this estimated vote, the author finds that the ratification and adoption was a direct result and a consequence of the African American voters because whites voted once again to reject it.21 However, there is a major problem with this regression estimation technique. It can exceed its scale of 100% as well as go below zero to a negative projection. One leading methodologist writes: “Linear ecological regression . . . has a well-known weakness. All too often, the estimated loyalty rate exceeds 100%, or

the estimated defection rate is negative, or both.” He continues: “Logically impossible estimates in ecological regression are not flukes. They are encountered perhaps half the time, and more often as the statistical fit improves. Ecological regression fails, not occasionally, but chronically.”22 Even when great precautions are taken, the estimates are not endowed with solid reliability. This is the reason that this study has instead used election return data from homogenous and near homogenous county-level districts that need no statistical manipulation. Hence, the Mississippi case study that used the estimated data are not, as the author indicates to the reader, without problems. Therefore, avoiding the problems involved in using linear regression estimates to determine African American voting at the county level, this analysis examined each of these elections individually but not in isolation from one another. These elections show dynamics unique to the South that need to be examined first apart from the 1876 election, because by that time, the promise of a rising biracial electorate breaks down systematically, and the African American electorate in the South begins a downward spiral from which it does not recover for nearly another century. To conclude this chapter, we offer a final comparison of the two elections for the two sets of racial majority counties in Figures 14.6 and 14.7. These two scatter plots have as their horizontal scale the percent of total population that was African American and as their vertical scale the percent of the vote that was cast for the Republican presidential candidate. For the 1868 election the linear trend line slopes downward, depicting less favorability for the Republican candidate with increasing share of the electorate that was African American. Using a quadratic trend line, Figure 14.6 provides a far more descriptive rendering

Figure 14.6  Scatter Plot of Republican Party Percentage of Vote and African American Percentage of Population in the South for the 1868 Presidential Election

African Americans < 50%

y = 2.2316x² − 1.7946x + 0.6912 R² = 0.1768

African Americans > 50%

Percent of Vote for Republican Party

100%

50%

0% 0% n = 484, R = 0.4205, p = 0.01

50% African American Percentage of Population

100%

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved November 2006; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/ Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.



African American Voting Behavior, 1868 and 1872

277

Figure 14.7  Scatter Plot of Republican Party Percentage of Vote and African American Percentage of Population in the South for the 1872 Presidential Election African Americans < 50%

African Americans > 50%

Percent of Vote for Republican Party

100%

50%

y = 0.5441x + 0.2691 R² = 0.3278

0% 0% n = 834, R = 0.5725, p = 0.01

50%

100%

African American Percentage of Population

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved November 2006; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/ Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

of the 1868 election, one in which the Republican candidate is shown to have received the greatest support in counties with low or high proportions of African American population but to have done less well in counties with nearly equal populations of African Americans and whites. The influence of majority white counties was far more overwhelming in this election than in 1872, as shown by Figure 14.7. The upward sloping trend line in this figure indicates the influence of increasing percentage of African American population is more pronounced in favor of the Republicans than was the case for the 1868 election. Although our county unit of analysis does not tell us what individual freed African American voters did in these two presidential and eighteen congressional elections, we do now know how this group voted in these two different types of federal elections. And knowing voting behavior in the South at the group level in empirical terms is no small achievement. The next chapter looks at empirical evidence on this same matter throughout the country for the very first time.

Notes   1. Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).   2. Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming).  3. Ibid.   4. In order to build a comprehensive and systematic listing that includes both successful and unsuccessful candidates, we used the following two sources: Eric Freedman and Stephen Jones (eds.), African Americans in Congress: A Documentary History (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2008), pp. 286–288, and 550; and Chester Rowell (ed.), A Historical and

Legal Digest of All the Contested Election Cases in the House of Representatives of the United States, 1789–1901 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), pp. 226–228, 282–283, and 293–297.   5. Hanes Walton, Jr., and Robert C. Starks, “The Early Electoral Contests of Senator Barack Obama: A Longitudinal Analysis,” National Political Science Review Vol. 12 (2009), p. 123.   6. James McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1982), p. 544.  7. Ibid.   8. Ibid., p. 566.   9. John Willis Menard, Lays in Summer Lands (Tampa, FL: University of Tampa Press, 2002); and Edith Menard, “John Willis Menard: First Negro Elected to the U.S. Congress,” Negro History Bulletin Vol. 28 (December 1964), pp. 53–54. The first popularly elected African American senator, Edward Brooke, notes in his autobiography that he attended Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., with Menard’s great-granddaughter Edith Menard. See Edward Brooke, Bridging the Divide: My Life: Senator Edward W. Brooke (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), pp. 147–148; James Haskins, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback (New York: Macmillan, 1973); and Freedman and Jones, pp. 104–107. 10. Rowell, pp. 226–228. See also Freedman and Jones, pp. 285–288. 11. See Michael Dubin, United States Congressional Elections, 1788–1997: The Official Results of Elections of the 1st through 105th Congress (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1998); and Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to U.S. Elections 5th Edition (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2005). 12. Ibid. 13. Deskins, Walton, and Puckett, Chapter 23. 14. John Hope Franklin, “Election of 1868,” in Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Fred Israel, and William Hansen (eds.), History of American Presidential Elections, Vol. II, 1848–1896 (New York: Chelsea House, 1971), pp. 1247–1300. 15. Rayford Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York: Collier Books, 1965), pp. 23–47: Chapter Two, “The ‘Let Alone’ Policy of Hayes.” 16. C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History, 3rd Edition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008). See also Hanes

278

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Walton, Jr., Josephine A.V. Allen, Sherman C. Puckett, and Donald R. Deskins, Jr., “Beyond the Second Reconstruction: C. Vann Woodward’s Concept of the Third Reconstruction in the South,” American Review of Politics Vol. 32 (Summer 2011), pp. 105–130. 17. C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), pp. 342–343. 18. See Michael Lee Benedict, “Southern Democrats in the Crisis of 1876–1877: A Reconsideration of Reunion and Reaction,” Journal of Southern History Vol. 46 (November 1980), pp. 489–524. 19. For a comment on the helpful nature of a statistical approach to southern Reconstruction history given the lack of reliable data, see

Thomas Pressly, “Racial Attitudes, Scholarship, and Reconstruction: A Review Essay,” Journal of Southern History Vol. 32 (February 1966), pp. 88–93. 20. See J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). 21. Lawrence Powell, “Correcting for Fraud: A Quantitative Reassessment of the Mississippi Ratification Election of 1868,” Journal of Southern History Vol. 55 (November 1989), pp. 633–658. 22. Christopher Achen and W. Phillips Shively, Cross-Level Inference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 73 and 75.

CHAPTER 15

African American Voting Behavior in the First Presidential and Congressional Elections after the Abolition of Slavery in the Border, Midwest, and Far West States, 1868 and 1872 The African American Presidential Vote in the Border States, 1868 and 1872

280

Map 15.1 Border States, Midwest States, and Far West States with Noteworthy African American Voting Behavior, 1868, 1872, and Beyond

281

Map 15.2 Majority African American Counties in the Border States, 1860 Census

282

Table 15.1 Comparing the Vote of the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections in the Border States for the Major Political Parties

282

Table 15.2 Comparing the Vote of the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections in Border State Counties with Majority African American Populations

283

Table 15.3 Ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in the Border States

283

Table 15.4 Border States and the Potential African American Vote, 1868

283

Figure 15.1 Comparing the Republican Party Percentage of the Vote in Majority African American Counties of the Border States in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections 285 Figure 15.2 Comparing the Democratic Party Percentage of the Vote in Majority African American Counties of the Border States in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections 286 Figure 15.3 Comparing Votes and Percent of Votes for the Democratic Party Presidential Candidate in Majority African American Counties of the Border States in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections 286 Table 15.5 Counties of West Virginia Ranked by Number of African American Registered Voters, 1870

287

Table 15.6 Partial Correlations between African American Registered Voters in West Virginia, 1870, and the Percent of Votes for the Major Political Parties in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections

289

A Comparative Regional Portrait of the African American Voter in the Southern and Border State Regions

290

The African American Vote and Partisanship in the Midwest and Far West: The Historical Evidence

291

Summary and Conclusions on African American Voting in 1868 and 1872 outside the South

293

Notes 294

280

Chapter 15

T

he voluminous literature on African American voting and party behavior in the first federal elections after the abolition of slavery has focused almost solely and completely upon the South. To be sure, there is some scholarly work on the Border State region during Reconstruction but never in terms of the comparison and contrast from a regional perspective and analysis.1 The typical singular regional portrait is simply onedimensional due to the failure to conceptualize the problem outside of the South. Yet slavery and its plantation system also existed outside of the South. The white racial attitudes prevailing in the Border State region have at times dropped into the intellectual shadows, but the five states in this region (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and West Virginia) had not by the time of the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment on February 3, 1870, given suffrage rights to the African American freedmen in their midst. While they might have freed their slaves during the Civil War period, the Border States had granted full suffrage rights to neither the Free-Men-of-Color nor the freed slaves. Indeed, none of the Border States had extended suffrage rights on a continual basis to their Free and freed population. Once the Fifteenth Amendment became implemented, these voters were equally as new to the franchise as those in the South and faced some of the same challenges—the question is whether they responded in the same way.

The African American Presidential Vote in the Border States, 1868 and 1872 As with our previous analysis of African American voting in the 1868 and 1872 presidential elections in the South, we use the county as the unit of analysis. Table 14.2 included the numbers of African American majority counties in three of the five states that are defined within the Border region during the period from 1860 to 2000. The presence of such counties in the Border State region provides us with a unique chance to compare and contrast these two regions in regard to the party and voting behavior of such African American and white counties. Whatever we find empirically will be an intellectual breakthrough regarding the matter of voting and partisanship following the constitutional amendment. Even though slavery and plantations existed in the Border State region of the nation, they were not as numerous and extensive as in the South. The same demographic reality about county populations pertains. However, with these limitations in mind, there were African American majority counties in this region of the country. The census of 1860 had recorded that there were five such counties in Maryland and one such county in Kentucky. The small state of Delaware did have slaves, as did the moderate size state of Missouri. However, neither Delaware nor West Virginia has ever had a county with an African American majority at any time, and Missouri did not have one during this nineteenth-century period, though it did acquire one in the 20th century. Thus, our county-level analysis of the Border State region will focus on the two states in the region that did have African American majority counties, Maryland and Kentucky. Map 15.1 shows the locations of three regions that had noteworthy African American voting behavior in the period of

the 1868 and 1872 presidential elections: (1) the Border States of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and West Virginia; (2) the Midwest States of Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin; and (3) the Far West States of California, Nevada, and Oregon. Map 15.2 (p. 282) shows the locations of the majority African American counties of the two Border States, Maryland and Kentucky, based on the 1860 Census.

The African American 1868 Presidential Vote in the Border States Although there are five states in the Border State region, only two of those states had African American majority counties. Table 15.1 (p. 282) provides the total votes for the major parties in each of the five states for both elections. Overall, in the 1868 presidential election the Democratic Party won the largest number of votes in this region with 275,134 votes (58.7%) to the Republican Party’s 193,491 votes (41.3%) for a difference of 81,643 votes. The Democratic Party won three of the states and lost two, Missouri and West Virginia. But the three Democratic Party state victories came before the Free-Men-of-Color and the freed male slaves had the right to vote. Not a single one of these five states had granted suffrage rights to either of the two African American groups. Hence, what Republican votes there were in these states came from their white electorates. Table 15.2 (p. 283) shows how very few Republican votes there were in the 1868 presidential election in the five African American majority counties in Maryland and the one such county in Kentucky. The range of the votes in these six counties runs from a high of 344 Republican votes in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, to a low of 35 votes in Charles County, Maryland.2 The total Republican vote in these six counties was 721 votes (9.3%) to the Democratic Party vote of 7,041 (90.7%). The Democrats received 9 out of every 10 votes in these six counties in 1868. Here, there was an unquestionably strong Democratic base of core supporters. And this was also true of the states where these counties were situated. Of this Democratic partisanship and voting behavior in the Border State region, historian William Gillette wrote: “The border states were generally Democratic, extremely conservative, and violently opposed to Negro suffrage. Border state Democrats had reason to oppose it [Fifteenth Amendment], because Negro voting might change the balance of power in some states.”3 Table 15.3 (p. 283) gives empirical proof of the extent of the opposition to African American suffrage rights and the adoption and ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. Specifically, this table shows that in the five states under analysis, two of them, Kentucky and Delaware, rejected the Fifteenth Amendment before three-quarters of the states, including Missouri and West Virginia, eventually ratified it. However, after ratification of the amendment into law, Maryland’s State House of Representatives still voted the next day to reject it, and three weeks later the Maryland State Senate also voted to reject it. Delaware did not revisit the issue and ratify the Amendment until 1901; Maryland and Kentucky waited until 1973 and 1976, respectively, after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the renewal of that legislation in 1970. These very



African American Voting Behavior, 1868 and 1872 281 Map 15.1  Border States, Midwest States, and Far West States with Noteworthy African American Voting Behavior, 1868, 1872, and Beyond

ME

WA MT

Minnesota

ND

Oregon ID

VT NY

Wisconsin

SD

MI

WY NE

Nevada

PA

Iowa IL

UT

CO

KS

California

Missouri

IN

OK

West Virginia VA

Kentucky

RI

NJ

Maryland

NC SC

AR

NM

MA CT

Delaware

OH

TN AZ

NH

MS

AL

GA

LA

TX

FL

Far West States (California, Nevada, Oregon) Midwest States (Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin) Border States (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, West Virginia) Sources: William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), p. 105; Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File] ICPSR ed. http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009; and Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), Map 23.2 and Map 24.2.

long ratification time frames speak volumes about the enduring bitterness and dislike for enfranchising African Americans in certain sectors of the democracy. According to Professor Gillette the real basis for this sustained opposition was concern with the balance of power between the political parties in these states. To prove his point he calculated the potential African American vote in the Border State region. Table 15.4 (p. 283) provides the potential African American vote data for 1868, which shows in ranked order that Maryland had the largest percentage of these voters, and West Virginia had the lowest percentage. Although West Virginia ratified the Fifteenth Amendment in 1869, the freedmen in the state did not get a chance to register to vote until August 1870. Of initial freedmen voting in West Virginia, historian Charles Ambler writes: “In the Clarksburg and Weston municipal elections of 1870, the first negro votes were cast, and the incident caused many Union men to stay away from the polls.”4 Thus, the freedmen of West Virginia could not participate in the 1868 presidential election, only in the 1872 one. Again, we know this

because of the state’s official racial voting records. Based on the potential vote data shown in Table 15.4, the African American vote could have changed the balance of power in all five of these states in 1868. It potentially could have kept the Republicans in power in both Missouri and West Virginia and helped to switch and realign the Democratic Border States of Delaware, Kentucky, and Maryland to the Republican presidential candidates. Although this balance of power information explains some of the immediate opposition, alone it does not fully explain the enduring opposition to African American enfranchisement. Before the voting pattern and partisanship would change in these states, federal intervention would be necessary in the form of the Fifteenth Amendment. Thus, the voting pattern would change in the upcoming 1872 presidential election. The Democratic leaders and voters in Delaware, Kentucky, and Maryland—along with Republican allies in these states who joined them out of fear of voter reprisals—were ultimately outmaneuvered by the Republicans in the U.S. Congress. The reason was simple: national Republicans knew from the outset

282

Chapter 15

Map 15.2  Majority African American Counties in the Border States, 1860 Census

CT NY

MI PA

0 100 200 miles

NJ

DE OH WV

IN

Maryland VA

IL Kentucky NC TN Source: United States Bureau of the Census, Negro Population in the United States, 1790–1915 (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1968), pp. 776–797.

Table 15.1  Comparing the Vote of the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections in the Border States for the Major Political Parties

Republican Party Percent of Votes

Republican Party Percent of Votes

Gain/ Loss in Total Votes

Democratic Party Gain/ Loss in Votes

Republican Party Gain/ Loss in Votes

Republican Party Gain/ Loss in Percentage Points

Number of Votes

Number of Democratic Party Votes

Number of Republican Party Votes

R

 21,824

 10,200

 11,135

51.0%

  3,253

-757

3,521

10.0%

Party Wina

Number of Republican Party Votes

Vote Gain/Loss Difference Statistics (Election 1872 – Election 1868)

1872 Presidential Election Party Wina

1868 Presidential Election

Number of Votes

Delaware

D

 18,571

Kentucky

D

155,455

115,887

39,568

25.5%

D

191,119

 99,987

 88,757

46.4%

 35,664

-15,900

49,189

21.0%

Maryland

D

 92,795

 62,349

30,446

32.8%

D

134,447

 67,687

 66,760

49.7%

 41,652

5,338

36,314

16.8%

Missouri

R

152,488

 65,636

86,852

57.0%

D

270,630

151,409

119,221

44.1%

118,142

85,773

32,369

-12.9%

West Virginia

R

 49,316

 20,305

29,011

58.8%

R

 62,465

 29,532

 32,319

51.7%

 13,149

9,227

3,308

-7.1%

Totals, Percentages

 

468,625

275,134

193,491

41.3%

 

680,485

358,815

318,192

46.8%

211,860

83,681

124,701

5.5%

State

Number of Democratic Party Votes  10,957

7,614

41.0%

Source: Adapted from Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), Table 23.1 and Table 24.1. Calculations by the authors. a

“D” indicates state won by the Democratic Party; “R” indicates a Republican Party state victory.



African American Voting Behavior, 1868 and 1872 283

Table 15.2  Comparing the Vote of the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections in Border State Counties with Majority African American Populations Vote Gain/Loss Difference Statistics (Election 1872 – Election 1868)

1872 Presidential Election

Number of Republican Party Votes

Republican Party Percent of Votes

1,670

344

17.1%

Number of Republican Party Votes

Republican Party Percent of Votes

Gain/ Loss in Total Votes

Democratic Party Gain/Loss in Votes

Republican Party Gain/Loss in Votes

Republican Party Gain/ Loss in Percentage Points

Number of Votes

Number of Democratic Party Votes

R

 4,795

2,249

2,546

53.1%

 2,781

579

2,202

36.0%

Party Winb

Number of Democratic Party Votes

Party Win b

1868 Presidential Election

Number of Votes

Anne Arundel, MD

D

2,014

Calvert, MD

D

693

626

 67

 9.7%

R

 1,762

692

1,070

60.7%

 1,069

66

1,003

51.1%

Charles, MD

D

1,159

1,124

 35

 3.0%

R

 2,791

1,200

1,591

57.0%

 1,632

76

1,556

54.0%

Prince George’s, MD

D

1,828

1,663

165

 9.0%

R

 3,895

1,632

2,263

58.1%

 2,067

-31

2,098

49.1%

St. Mary’s, MD

D

1,028

989

 39

 3.8%

R

 2,675

1,140

1,535

57.4%

 1,647

151

1,496

53.6%

Woodford, KY

D

1,040

969

 71

 6.8%

R

 2,117

1,046

1,065

50.3%

 1,077

77

994

43.5%

Totals, Differences, Percentages

 

7,762

7,041

721

 9.3%

 

18,035

7,959

10,070

55.8%

10,273

918

9,349

46.5%

Countya

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611, downloaded December 2002; United States Bureau of the Census, Negro Population in the United States, 1790–1915 (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1968), pp. 776–797; United States Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the United States, 1920–1932 (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969), pp. 683–845; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File] ICPSR ed. http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR, 2004), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors. a The census of 1860 found these six counties in the Border States to have a majority African American population. The census of 1870 found that the counties of Anne Arundel and St. Mary’s in Maryland and Woodford County, Kentucky, no longer had African American majorities. b ”D” indicates that the Democratic Party presidential candidate received most of the county votes; “R” indicates a county victory for the Republican Party.

Table 15.3  Ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in the Border States

State

State House Date

State Senate Date

Outcome

Kentucky

March 11, 1869

March 12, 1869

Rejected

Delaware

March 17, 1869

March 18, 1869

Rejected

West Virginia

March 2, 1869

March 3, 1869

Ratified

Missouri

January 7, 1870

January 7, 1870

Ratified

Table 15.4  Border States and the Potential African American Vote, 1868

State

State Resolutions after Ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment Occurred on February 3, 1870 Maryland

February 4, 1870

February 25, 1870

Rejected

State Resolutions after Proclamation of Ratification on March 30, 1870 Delaware

March 12, 1901

March 12, 1901

Ratified

Maryland

March 7, 1973

March 7, 1973

Ratified

Kentucky

March 18, 1976

March 18, 1976

Ratified

Source: Adapted from William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), Table 2, pp. 84 and 85.

how the Fifteenth Amendment would strengthen both the party and themselves. They also knew that the state-by-state approach via referenda to enfranchising African Americans would not work given the failure of such previous efforts. National legislation was needed, and it had to be adroitly passed and adopted if it was to succeed. Gillette says: “In short, the politics of the Fifteenth Amendment represented the needs of the Republican Party. The primary object of the Amendment was to get the Negro vote in the

African American Population Percentage

African American Population

Potential African American Vote

(Democratic – Republican) Political Party Majoritya

Electoral Vote

Maryland

22.5%

175,391

 33,078

31,919

D

7

Delaware

18.2%

 22,794

  4,559

3,257

D

3

Kentucky

16.8%

222,210

 44,442

76,313

D

11

Missouri

 6.9%

118,071

 23,614

-25,883

R

11

West Virginia

 4.1%

 17,980

  3,596

-8,719

R

5

Total

13.7%

556,446

109,289

76,887

 

37

Mean

13.7%

111,289

 21,858

15,377

Median

16.8%

118,071

 23,614

3,257

7.4  

7

Sources: Adapted from William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), p. 105; Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File] ICPSR ed. http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009; and Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), http:// dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611, downloaded December 2002. Calculations by the authors. “D” indicates victory in the state by the Democratic Party presidential candidate and “R” by the Republican candidate. a

North, not, as other writers have insisted, to keep Negro suffrage in the South, which was an important secondary objective.”5 He adds: “if Negro suffrage, the fundamental condition of

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Reconstruction, was short-lived in the South, it became permanent in the North,” and the Border State region. With the Amendment’s implementation, Free-Men-of-Color and freed male slaves could now “vote in the North [and Border States], and the Republicans benefited from a solid Negro vote in the close elections of the 1870’s,”6 1880’s, and later. After the Fifteenth Amendment was implemented in 1870, just before the mid-term congressional elections, the Border State African American majority counties had nearly two years to organize, register, and prepare to vote in the 1872 presidential election, which they did.

The African American 1872 Presidential Vote in the Border States The outcome of the November 1872 presidential election in the Border States, as shown in Table 15.1 (p. 282), was that two of the five states, Delaware and West Virginia, voted Republican. This was a repeat of the 1868 result for West Virginia, but Delaware had switched parties, from supporting the Democrats in the 1868 election to choosing the Republicans in the 1872 election. And in both of these two states the Republican Party vote increased. However, two of the other three states in the region, Kentucky and Maryland, continued with their past partisanship behavior and supported the Democrats, while Missouri switched its alignment from the Republicans to the Democrats. In Maryland and substantially in Missouri, the popular vote for the Democratic Party went up over the 1868 election. In Kentucky there was a considerable drop in the popular vote for the Democrats and a slight drop in Delaware. The overall vote total for both the Democrats and Republicans increased, and the Republican Party vote increased in all five of the states. Moving from the state level to the county level, Table 15.2 (p. 283) demonstrates that all of the counties that had African American majorities in 1860 realigned in the 1872 election to the Republican Party. The Democratic vote totals in these counties rose only slightly, a net gain of a mere 918 votes, while the county-level Republican vote skyrocketed by 9,349 votes, a gain of nearly 1,300%. The Democrats’ increase was less than the Republicans’, by some 8,431 votes. The Democrats did not lose votes—they gained some—but they were overwhelmed by a rising tide of new Republican voters, largely consisting of newly enfranchised African Americans. The Republican Party was truly a beneficiary of the Fifteenth Amendment intervention in Border State African American majority counties. Although the African American Republican vote could not switch or realign the two states for which we have county-level data—Maryland and Kentucky—the overall Republican vote in Kentucky became competitive by more than doubling what it was in 1868, and it similarly doubled in Maryland’s African American majority counties. Even in the absence of voter registration records, the empirical evidence, at least in these majority counties, clearly suggests that African American voter registration went up substantially and that the African American vote also turned out and their Republican partisanship became quite evident. Here was a substantial increase for Republicans across the board: (1) voter registration, (2) turnout, (3) voting, and (4) party affiliation. And this occurred in just one election.

The Comparative Portrait of Party Voting in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Election in the Border States Figure 15.1 provides a comparative visual analysis of the two political parties in the 1868 and 1872 presidential elections in the counties that had African American majorities in the 1860 Census. In 1868, the Republican Party percentages in these counties rose above the 10% level only in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. In each of the other four African American majority counties in Maryland, the Republicans got much less than 10% and achieved only 3% and 4% in two of these counties. And in Kentucky, Republican candidate Ulysses S. Grant got only 7% of the vote in this single majority county. All of this occurred before federal intervention. After the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, the Republican vote in 1872 in the Maryland counties that had African American majorities in the 1860 Census increased to above 50% in four counties and by more than 60% in one county. This means that in 1872 the Grant ticket won all of the African American majority counties in Maryland, whereas he had lost all of these counties in the 1868 election. In Kentucky in 1872, Grant won that single majority county with just over 50% of the vote. Hence, in 1872 the party won all six of these counties that had African American majorities in the 1860 Census. This was a complete reversal in partisanship and voting during the four years between these two elections. The Fifteenth Amendment seems the only logical explanation. Having examined the data on the Republican Party vote percentage, what about the Democratic Party vote percentage in these six counties for these two elections? Figure 15.2 (p. 286) offers an empirical comparative answer for that research question. Because there was no strong third party, it is essentially the mirror image of the Republican vote percentage before and after the federal amendment intervention. In the 1868 presidential election, Maryland had four African American majority counties that the Democrats carried with over 90% of the vote and one county which the Democrats carried with over 80% of the vote. Thus, the Democrats won all of Maryland’s five counties with substantial majorities. And this is also true of the county in Kentucky, which the Democratic Party won with over 90% of the vote. Such a staggering sweep of all of the majority African American counties in Maryland and Kentucky must have given the leaders of the state and local Democratic Party a sense of security, empowerment, and a rigidity against expanding African American suffrage rights. Figure 15.2 indicates that the Democratic vote in these majority counties decreased substantially in 1872. In 1870 when the Fifteenth Amendment gave the African American electorate the vote, “of the 39,000 eligible Black voters in Maryland in 1870, 35,000 were registered to vote. Approximately 1,500 of these voters were residents of Prince George’s County. Statewide Black men were fifty percent of the Republican Party’s membership.”7 In none of the counties shown for these two states did the Democratic Party win in 1872, as they had in the previous election. Only in Woodford County, Kentucky, did the Democratic vote come close to repeating the victory it had achieved in the 1868 election.



African American Voting Behavior, 1868 and 1872 285

Figure 15.1  Comparing the Republican Party Percentage of the Vote in Majority African American Counties of the Border States in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections 70% 61%

58%

60%

57%

57%

Republican Party Percent of Vote

53% 50%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

17% 10%

9%

7% 4%

3%

0% Calvert, MD

Prince George’s, MD

St. Mary’s, MD

Charles, MD

1868 Election

Anne Arundel, MD

Woodford, KY

1872 Election

Source: Table 15.3.

However, the reader needs to realize that the Democrats did not lose votes in these African American majority counties between 1868 and 1872. On the contrary, as Figure 15.3 (p. 286) shows, the Democrats had a net loss in the number of votes in only one county (Prince George’s County, Maryland). In the other five counties, the Democrats gained more votes in 1872 than in 1868—but these votes were beaten in 1872 by an even higher number of Republican votes. While population growth might be part of the reason for the difference, it seems fair to say that new voters from the Fifteenth Amendment were probably the main difference. In these counties African American voters were a factor in tilting the balance of power toward the Republicans in the 1872 election. And this means that the African American vote in these six counties served as a force to check the Democrats.

A Case Study: The Freedmen Voters in West Virginia in 1870 and in the 1872 Presidential Election West Virginia stands out among the Border States because it published in its 1870 State Auditor’s Report the number of African American freedmen registered voters in each county in the state. In 1920, another state agency would publish a similar list when African American women acquired the right to vote. These two official state reports set West Virginia apart from the other four Border States, which failed to collect such data. We

will examine the 1870 Report in regard to the 1872 presidential election. Professor Charles Ambler, who analyzed the initial Report in 1905, found that “[a]fter March 31, 1870, when the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment was officially declared, negro suffrage became a real issue in West Virginia,” both between the two major political parties and inside the white community in the state.8 The state’s leadership reacted to this congressional legislation by arguing that a state law “on the subject was necessary before the fundamental law could be carried into execution.”9 However, what hastened the state response was that the U.S. Congress shortly afterward “enacted the ‘Enforcement Act’ of May 31, 1870, which pronounced fine and imprisonment against all attempts to hinder or interfere with the exercise of franchise by the negroes, or with the counting of votes cast by them; the courts of the United States were given cognizance of all offences under the Act.”10 The Republican-dominated state house responded by passing the Flick Amendment to the West Virginia state constitution that would omit the word “white” from the original state constitution of 1863. But before the Flick Amendment got to the state senate, the Democrats responded by declaring themselves to be the “white man’s party” and completely opposed to omitting the word “white” from the state constitution. Moreover, they declared that “negro suffrage” meant “negro

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Figure 15.2  Comparing the Democratic Party Percentage of the Vote in Majority African American Counties of the Border States in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections 100%

96.2%

97.0%

93.2%

91.0%

90.3%

90%

82.9%

Democratic Party Percent of Vote

80% 70% 60% 49.4%

50% 43.0%

46.9%

42.6%

41.9%

39.3%

40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Charles, MD

St. Mary’s, MD

Woodford, KY

1868 Election

Prince George’s, MD

Calvert, MD

Anne Arundel, MD

1872 Election

Source: Table 15.3.

Figure 15.3  Comparing Votes and Percent of Votes for the Democratic Party Presidential Candidate in Majority African American Counties of the Border States in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections 2,500

Votes for Democratic Party Presidential Candidate

2,249 2,000 1,670

1,663 1,632

1,500 1,124

1,200

1,140 989

1,000

969

1,046

626

692

500

0 Anne Arundel, MD

Prince George’s, MD

Charles, MD

1868 (Votes for Democratic Party) Source: Table 15.3.

St. Mary’s, MD

Woodford, KY

1872 (Votes for Democratic Party)

Calvert, MD



African American Voting Behavior, 1868 and 1872 287

rule.” Thanks largely to this response, the Democrats in the 1870 state election became the majority party in both the state house and senate. The Republicans, once the dominant party, now became the minority party in West Virginia. Here is how Professor Ambler described the situation in West Virginia after the party realignment in the state: “The Democrats appealed to the popular prejudice against the negro and won the campaign of 1870. They took no steps, however, when in power, to reverse the State’s action in ratifying the Fifteenth Amendment.”11 In addition, the liberal wing of the majority Democrats, as opposed to the radical wing, merged with the liberal wing of the Republicans and passed the Flick Amendment to the state constitution. Part of the reason for this merger and electoral alliance was that the Democrats wanted ex-Confederate whites to have the ballot, while some Republicans were opposed. But in the final analysis the ratification of the Flick Amendment allowed both groups to have suffrage rights in the state. And the other part of the reason for this merger and political alliance was that during voter registration, which began in August 1870, some

ex-Confederates and Democrats were denied, fined, or jailed. But with the final adoption and passage of the Flick Amendment, both groups, freedmen and former Confederate soldiers, had been give the legal right to vote in the state. Table 15.5 provides in rank-order the initial number of African American registered voters in each county in West Virginia, the vote for and against ratification of the Flick Amendment by county, and the vote by county for the Republican presidential candidate in the 1872 election. (As noted above, at the time of the 1868 presidential election African Americans had not been given the right to vote in West Virginia.) As shown in this table there were 2,849 actual registered African American voters in the state. This is 747 less than the estimated 3,596 African American voters given in Professor Gillette’s pioneering book.12 Using the official number of registered African American voters, the mean number of voters per county in West Virginia stood at 55, while the median number of voters amounted to 21. And African American registered voters made up 3.1% of the total number of males of voting age in the state.

Table 15.5  Counties of West Virginia Ranked by Number of African American Registered Voters, 1870

County

Number of Black Registered Voters (1870)

Male Citizens, Age 21 and Over (1870 Census)

Percent Black Registered Voters of Male Citizens

Vote for Ratification (1871)

Vote Against Ratification (1871)

Vote for Republican Presidential Candidate (1872)

Jefferson

581

3,183

18.3%

438

215

986

Kanawha

363

5,067

7.2%

1,164

24

1,637

Berkeley

253

3,343

7.6%

975

28

1,310

Greenbrier

147

2,429

6.1%

1,044

108

407

Wood

136

4,223

3.2%

1,494

167

1,793

Monroe

128

2,318

5.5%

618

101

347

Hardy

108

1,182

9.1%

58

336

119

Mason

85

3,378

2.5%

702

281

1,379

Ohio

82

6,100

1.3%

434

368

2,467

Hampshire

78

1,750

4.5%

521

61

221

Harrison

70

3,529

2.0%

485

709

1,447

Mercer

68

1,375

4.9%

313

3

130

Taylor

66

2,058

3.2%

364

349

944

Mineral

66

1,382

4.8%

248

35

528

Wirt

55

1,110

5.0%

381

13

350

Pocahontas

50

926

5.4%

349

57

178

Grant

47

963

4.9%

304

329

443

Barbour

42

2,137

2.0%

483

220

728

Monongalia

38

2,929

1.3%

756

186

1,531

Putnam

35

1,641

2.1%

380

48

453

Upshur

31

1,698

1.8%

327

318

835

Lewis

29

2,137

1.4%

913

79

657

Boone

28

896

3.1%

209

17

154

Marion

22

2,505

0.9%

1,114

117

1,248 (Continued)

288

Chapter 15

Table 15.5 (Continued)

County

Number of Black Registered Voters (1870)

Male Citizens, Age 21 and Over (1870 Census)

Percent Black Registered Voters of Male Citizens

Vote for Ratification (1871)

Vote Against Ratification (1871)

Vote for Republican Presidential Candidate (1872)

Morgan

21

955

2.2%

189

79

400

Pendleton

21

1,312

1.6%

324

161

247

Fayette

20

1,316

1.5%

316

18

340

Marshall

19

3,139

0.6%

385

587

1,530

Brooke

17

1,191

1.4%

320

38

465

Logan

15

1,006

1.5%

a

Cabell

14

1,372

1.0%

431

9

477

Ritchie

13

1,879

0.7%

626

98

863

Braxton

12

1,265

0.9%

524

3

260

Wyoming

10

583

1.7%

110

8

153

Nicholas

10

905

1.1%

362

26

183

Preston

9

3,057

0.3%

863

38

1,721

Hancock

8

982

0.8%

181

77

453

Randolph

8

1,199

0.7%

380

30

229

Doddridge

7

1,389

0.5%

218

231

627

Jackson

6

2,101

0.3%

570

144

739

Tucker

6

391

1.5%

123

9

89

Wayne

5

1,537

0.3%

608

1

297

Raleigh

4

696

0.6%

166

59

139

Gilmer

3

850

0.4%

303

2

194

Tyler

3

1,606

0.2%

330

160

790

Calhoun

3

573

0.5%

266

10

123

Roane

3

1,362

0.2%

505

33

392

Pleasants

3

662

0.5%

211

73

314

Wetzel

1

1,777

0.1%

386

94

447

Webster

0

345

0.0%

124

0

21

Clay

0

391

0.0%

127

3

89

Lincoln

0

983

0.0%

559

15

190

Summers

a

a

a

255

10

206

Total

2,849

93,083

23,836

6,185

32,319

Mean

55

1,790.1

3.1%

458.4

Median

21

1,378.5

1.5%

380

3.1%

49

a

118.9 60

609.8 407

Sources: Charles H. Ambler, “Disfranchisement in West Virginia, Part I,” Yale Review, Vol. 14 (May, 1905), pp. 38–59; Charles H. Ambler, “Disfranchisement in West Virginia, Part II,” Yale Review, Vol. 14 (August, 1905), pp. 155–180; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, Michigan: ICPSR), http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896, downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors a

No data available from these sources.

Overall, this very rare racial data in West Virginia compare well with the official southern state racial data in Louisiana, Texas, North Carolina, and a few others. But there can be no comparison with the other Border States because the West Virginia data are the only extant racial data available for this region of the country. And finally in terms of its rarity, none of the West Virginia data on either freedmen and African American women has surfaced in either of the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives executive

documents that covered the initial registration of African Americans in the southern states; nor have this data appeared in any of the sundry reports and publications issued by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. These voting data simply fell through the cracks. But resurrection of these data here enables a more complete portrait of the African American electorate in America. Since West Virginia did not have any African American majority counties, it became difficult to determine with any



African American Voting Behavior, 1868 and 1872 289

degree of certainty the freedmen party affiliation and voting in the 1872 presidential election. Therefore, we took the official freedmen voter registration data by county and used them in a statistical procedure known as a correlational analysis to determine if there was a statistical relationship and association between the percentage of freedmen registered voters in each county and the percentage of the vote in each county for either the Republican or Democratic parties. Finding a positive or a negative relationship would have suggested that the freedmen voted for one party or another. But we were not quite prepared for what we found empirically. The historical record in West Virginia reveals that not only did the Fifteenth Amendment and the Enforcement Act fractionate the two major parties in the state, but “[m]any Democrats hesitated to concede negro suffrage and some Republicans were as reluctant to concede ex-Confederate suffrage.”13 One wing of the Democratic party wanted all of the ex-Confederates to have their voting rights restored, while a wing of the Republican party wanted the freedmen to have the right to vote. At the state legislative level, the Flick Amendment to the state constitution merged these two divergent issues and provided suffrage rights for both the freedmen and former Confederate soldiers. It was introduced by a Liberal Republican, William H. H. Flick from Pendleton County, and initially passed the Republican-dominated state house; later, when the Democrats gained majorities in both houses of the West Virginia legislature, they got the Amendment through both houses. And the Amendment went to the people for ratification on April 17, 1871. In this election both parties urged adoption, and it passed with a vote of 23,836 for and 6,185 against.14 Hence, the newly freed African American political neophytes saw both Republicans and Democrats at the state and local level working to grant them their suffrage rights. This was quite unusual, as historian Ambler comments:

Table 15.6  Partial Correlations between African American Registered Voters in West Virginia, 1870, and the Percentage of Votes for the Major Political Parties in the 1868 and 1872 Presidential Elections

Model No. 1      

Number of Counties

Political Party

Correlation

Significance Level

1868a 1872

51

All

0.3129

0.036

51

Democratic Party

0.4895

0.001

1872

51

Republican Party

0.4601

0.001

Variables controlled: Percent Voting for President (1868), Percent for Republican gubernatorial candidate (1870), Percent for Democratic gubernatorial candidate (1870), Percent for Republican presidential candidate (1872), Percent for Democratic presidential candidate (1872), Percent for Flick Amendment (1871), Percent Estimated African American Registered Voters of Male Citizens Age 21 and Over (Gillette/5), and Percent Estimated African American Registered Voters of Male Citizens Age 21 and Over (Gillette/6). 2    

1868a

51

All

0.3220

0.033

1872

51

Democratic Party

0.3982

0.007

1872

51

Republican Party

0.3451

0.022

Variables controlled: Percent Voting for President (1868), Percent for Republican gubernatorial candidate (1870), Percent for Democratic gubernatorial candidate (1870), Percent for Republican presidential candidate (1872), Percent for Democratic presidential candidate (1872), Percent for Flick Amendment (1871), Percent of African Americans in population (1870), Percent Estimated African American Registered Voters of Male Citizens Age 21 and Over (Gillette/5), and Percent Estimated African American Registered Voters of Male Citizens Age 21 and Over (Gillette/6).

In the work of re-enfranchisement, West Virginia occupies a peculiar place. She accomplished through two parties what in other States has been accomplished by but one party, that is, a complete removal of suffrage disabilities imposed on account of participation in the secession movement against the United States. This work, instituted by one party, was carried to completion by the other, and West Virginia, true to the tradition of all mountainous countries for slowness to adopt reforms, closed the re-enfranchisement struggle in the United States.15 The results of our correlational analysis, displayed in Table 15.6, reflect some of this historical reality. This study ran nearly a dozen different models, each one with a different array of variables; the three models listed in the table are statistically significant. In the first stage of linear correlations, no relationships or associations were found to be statistically significant. However, the second stage of partial correlations allows one to control for variables in the model while testing one particular pair. The three models given in Table 15.6 were found to have statistically significant relationships. Each of these three models

Year

3      

1868a

51

All

0.2816

0.058

1872

51

Democratic Party

0.4629

0.001

1872

51

Republican Party

0.4250

0.003

Variables controlled: Percent Voting for President (1868), Percent for Republican gubernatorial candidate (1870), Percent for Democratic gubernatorial candidate (1870), Percent for Republican presidential candidate (1872), Percent for Democratic presidential candidate (1872), Percent for Flick Amendment (1871), and Percent of African Americans in population (1870). Sources: Charles H. Ambler, “Disfranchisement in West Virginia, Part I,” Yale Review, Vol. 14 (May 1905), pp. 38–59; Charles H. Ambler, “Disfranchisement in West Virginia, Part II,” Yale Review, Vol. 14 (August 1905), pp. 155–180; William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), pp. 82–83; Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), http:// dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611, downloaded December 2002; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), http:// dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896, downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors. a

African Americans were not permitted to vote in West Virginia before 1870.

290

Chapter 15

uncovered a relationship between the official registered percentage of freedmen in each county and the percentages of party votes in each county. And when the effects of the other variables are controlled, a modest relationship and association is found with both of the political parties. This is unusual, for when this was done for the southern states, the relationship patterns tended to be strong support for one party, the Republican Party over the Democratic one. Dual party affiliations of freedmen voters seem to have occurred in this Border State.

A Comparative Regional Portrait of the African American Voter in the Southern and Border State Regions Over the years, with the heavy focus of the voluminous literature being almost exclusively on the South, writers have been quick to suggest that the South was peculiar, if not unique, and therefore different from the other regions in the nation. Thus, the phrase the “Peculiar South” has taken on a political life of its own, and it has come to overshadow the similarities and commonalities in the African American responses to this “Peculiar South.” Using the empirical insights and renderings from the Border State region and those from the southern region one sees a remarkable and persistent pattern. African American voters in their majority counties in these two regions became very involved in the political system immediately after governmental intervention. They registered in quite high numbers, they turned out in high numbers provided they were not intimidated and suppressed, and they voted in great unison. During that time there were no major national media and communication institutions promoting active voter participation. One must remember that these two presidential elections were the very first for most African Americans in the South and the Border States. Such elections had to socialize them as well as mobilize them into electoral participation. These findings suggest that the role of the “Union Leagues” in promoting voter turnout should be re-examined. Although much has been written about the role and function of the Union Leagues in recruiting and mobilizing the freedmen for the Republican Party, the extant literature tells us that many of the Leagues’ activities took place in the South. None of these works tell us about the legacy of voting that the Free-Menof-Color left not only in the southern states but in the Border States like Maryland and Kentucky. Secondly, no one includes in their measureable variables the role that organizations like the National Equal Rights League played. Thirdly, there is the influence of African American and white Abolitionist leadership, particularity individuals such as Frederick Douglass, John Langston, and Sojourner Truth, who traveled around the northern and Border States giving rousing speeches and offering remarks about the need for the ballot and the exercise of that ballot in an unfettered manner. Fourthly, there is the role of the anti-slavery third parties, who became quite instrumental through their presidential candidates and campaigns and campaign literature in spreading the word about suffrage rights and the need for the ballot. Almost all of the books on Civil War, southern, African American, and Reconstruction history place

the Abolitionists in the Radical category and use their demands to differentiate them from the moderates and conservative Republicans. Despite this, the Abolitionists are rarely if ever mentioned as activists in shaping the partisanship and voting behavior of the African Americans who became the foot soldiers in the rise and emergence of African American Republicanism in the first two post–Civil War presidential elections. But once these measureable variables are taken into account, the uniformity and near uniformity of African American political participation, voter registration, voting, and political party affiliation in such a very short time frame (1867–1872), in two different regions of the country, clearly becomes quite possible as a consequence of these intervening variables. There are two more powerful variables in this enormous uniformity—the actions of the parties themselves. Beginning with the Democratic Party variable first, the reader must understand that this party became the political instrument and vehicle for the maintenance of white power and influence in both regions after the Civil War, if not before. Historian Rayford Logan has written: “So determined were most white Southerners to maintain their own way of life, that they resorted to fraud, intimidation and murder, in order to reestablish their own control of the state governments.”16 And to assist the Democratic Party in accomplishing this “White Supremacy” goal and objective and to assist the party in this task, white Democrats created quasi-military organizations to intimidate and suppress both African American and white Republicans. On this point of the quasi-militia organizations created, Logan writes: Regulators, Jayhawkers, the Black Horse Cavalry, the Knights of the White Camellia, the Constitutional Union Guards, the Pale Faces, the White Brotherhood, the Council of Safety, the ’76 Association, the Rifle Clubs of South Carolina, and above all, the Ku-Klux Klan terrorized, maimed and killed a large number of Negroes. Not even the presence of federal troops was able to prevent the achievement, by force, of “home rule.”17 Although Border States did not field as many quasi-militia organizations or rely so strongly upon them, they were just as vigorous and as determined to deny the freedmen their suffrage rights. Gillette made the point: Unlike southern Democrats, who had to live with Negro voters, border state Democrats could fight the Fifteenth Amendment in order to prevent Negroes from becoming voters. They were cohesive in their voting against ratification. Unlike middle Atlantic Democrats, they openly questioned the desirability of Negro suffrage, and the Negro inferiority issue was proclaimed. The Amendment, declared Delaware Democrats, would establish an unnatural equality between the races. Negroes were inferior and could not be allowed to vote, argued the Governor of Maryland. The issue of state rights was also rehearsed. Though such arguments were believed, underlying them all was perhaps the fear of losing [political] power.18

Thus, “[w]orrying about the future of Negro voting, Democrats rejected the Fifteenth Amendment in the border state legislatures they controlled,”19 as shown in Table 15.3 (p. 283). And in the final analysis, if Democrats in the two regions acted at all differently given any differences in political contexts and circumstances, both regional Democratic parties arrived at the very same position regarding the complete denial of suffrage rights for the freed African Americans. And this is why the Democratic reaction is such an important variable in the evolution of the partisanship and voting consensus of the African American Republicans in these two presidential elections. If the Democrats represented a negative unifying variable, the Republican Party’s actions represented a much more positive variable. The Republican Party policies began first with the Emancipation Proclamation, second with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, third with voting rights in the District of Columbia and the federal territories, fourth with the Four Military Reconstruction Acts, fifth with the two subsequent Enforcement Acts, and, finally, sixth with the 1875 Civil Rights Act. When combined, these national public policies completely transformed the political context for African Americans, north and south, and for Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color and slaves. These public policies unified the dual African American populations that began when the first indentured servants who arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 were given their freedom in 1626. This unification can be seen in the Census reports beginning in 1870. With this national census the practice of separating the FreeColor and slave populations that began with the very first Census in 1790 was discontinued. Clearly, such cataclysmic changes in the individual African American’s life chances and circumstances led inexorably to political affiliation and alignment. These issues, which the Republican Party advanced, led to the birth of African American political partisanship for the Republicans, given that in nearly every case the Democratic Party stood in opposition to these issues and national public policies. This variable, like the Democratic Party one, engendered consensus and uniformity inside the African American community. The empirical evidence of the response emanates from the African American majority counties in two regions of the nation in the 1868 and 1872 presidential and congressional elections.

The African American Vote and Partisanship in the Midwest and Far West: The Historical Evidence Although our county-level unit of analysis will not work in sundry states due to the population dispersal of African Americans in those states, if one uses another less precise methodological technique like historical evidence, it is possible to find enough case study examples to develop testable propositions. Hence, using the historical evidence technique that can produce case-study data, we will analyze what type of political partisanship and voting behavior the new African American electorate took on in the midwestern and far western states after the Fifteenth Amendment granted them voting rights. And this will allow a limited perspective beyond the South and the Border States. Such an effort has not heretofore been made.

African American Voting Behavior, 1868 and 1872 291 Recent research on three Midwest States (Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin), when coupled with older research on the Midwest and the Far West with small but quite active African American populations during and after the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, can provide a set of case-study portraits to supplement the empirical portraits from the South and Border States for a broad-based portrait of the freedmen party and voting behavior.20 Of the suffrage issue in these three Midwest States, Professor Leslie Schwalm wrote: “Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa were among the few northern states to enfranchise African American men prior to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. The path to black empowerment followed different trajectories in each of these three states bordering the upper Mississippi River.”21 She added: “Wisconsin was one of the first northern states to enfranchise African American men after the war. . . . In both Minnesota and Iowa, African American men obtained the franchise through approval of referenda submitted to the white voters of each state in 1868.”22 However, in the other two Midwest States of Indiana and Ohio, enfranchisement came with the Fifteenth Amendment. However, “with this enfranchisement, black men anticipated playing an active role in Republican Party conventions [and politics]. . . . African American Iowans attended the state Republican convention for the first time in 1869, when five counties sent black delegates. Among them was Alexander Clark . . . [who] stumped for Republicans that fall.”23 Eventually, after having acquired a Republican Party affiliation, several of the leaders of the new freedmen voters began nominating members of their own race for political offices. Here is how it occurred in the three Midwest States. This drive for elective office came with the election of Minnesota’s first black state legislator, John Wheaton, in 1898, and Wisconsin’s first African American legislator, Lucien Palmer, in 1906. White Iowans proved even more resistant to naming African Americans to government posts; in fact, until 1880, the state constitution prohibited black men from holding elective office. Although black Republicans nominated first John Priestly (in 1885), then George H. Woodson (in 1899 and 1912), and Manson L. James (in 1944) to serve in the Iowa General Assembly, it would be 1964 before black and white voters saw fit to send an African American to the state legislature.24 Thus, it is quite clear from these findings that the freedmen in these three states quickly thereafter acquired a Republican partisanship, voted for Republican candidates, and eventually themselves ran and won office as Republicans. In this respect, they were like their southern and Border State freedmen, except for their small population. Professor Schwalm found that “black voters in the upper Midwest would exercise little influence—let alone power—over regional politics. In contrast to the states of the former Confederacy, where concentrated black populations could and did elect black officials during Reconstruction, Midwestern black voters and candidates were unable to garner support from the white electorate.”25

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Nevertheless, there was one main reality that this region had in common with the South and the Border States. “Democrats in all three states campaigned in opposition, heavily exploiting the threat that black enfranchisement posed to white supremacy and predicting massive black migration to any state that granted equal political rights to African American men.”26 This staunch Democratic Party opposition in the long run had to concede that the African American population in these states was too small to affect the electoral outcome in elections. However, a different and yet similar situation prevailed in Indiana and Ohio, where African American voting rights came as a consequence of the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. In Indiana and Ohio elections were closely contested, and an enfranchised African American electorate could change the election outcome. The 1868 election in Indiana saw the governorship won “by a majority of only 961 in a total vote of 342,189. President Grant carried Indiana in the same year by the slim margin of 9,572.”27 And in the state there was “a potential Negro vote of 6,000 to 8,000 out of a Negro population of 24,560. Indiana Negroes let Republican politicians know that once they were given the ballot, they would become good Republicans.”28 Therefore, when the Democrats in the state Senate and House resigned and left to keep the Republicans from having a quorum to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment, the Republican Party soon changed the rules and ratified the Amendment anyway. “Like Indiana, the potential Negro vote was important in Ohio. Republican state majorities were usually less than 7,000 votes and an additional 10,600 Negro votes would help.”29 Therefore, the Republican governor and future president Rutherford B. Hayes requested help from the party leadership in Washington, and President Grant and the Republican National Committee dispatched leading white Republicans to charge up and mobilize the party members in the state legislature. With no legislators absent when the vote came up in the state Senate on January 14, 1870, they “voted to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment by a strict party vote of nineteen to eighteen.”30 And when it came up for a vote in the state House, with no legislators absent, they voted to ratify “by a vote of fifty-seven to fifty-five. All Republicans voted in favor and all Democrats voted against.”31 Now with the vote finally in their hands, African Americans moved to acquire a party affiliation and vote. Professor Gillette found that [w]ithin a week of the proclamation, Negroes voted in elections in Cincinnati. There was no opposition to them, and they voted almost solidly Republican. . . . In both the short and the long run, Republicans and Negroes benefited from their partnership: Negroes were elected to the legislature and Republicans got muchneeded Negro votes.32 Again, what one sees in Indiana and Ohio is that the African American electorate had a Republican partisanship and vote and that some African American Republicans held office. Thus, despite that fact that the vote came as a consequence of the national amendment instead of statewide referenda, as in

the other three midwestern states, it still had the same electoral outcome and party behavior. These different case studies show that the Midwest bore a great similarity to the Border States and the South. In the Far West states (California, Nevada, and Oregon), there is a limited amount of historical case study evidence. Again there were even fewer African Americans in these states than in the Midwest. In California, “the Chinese question dominated politics, and the Democrats linked the issue to the question of the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. . . . Republicans in California, Oregon, and Nevada tried hard to dissociate the Chinese question from the Fifteenth Amendment.”33 During this debate over ratification, the Democrats “argued, a NegroChinese voting combination would degrade public life.”34 Professor Gillette concluded by saying: “After the feverish election campaign, which probably generated more violent antiNegro rhetoric than anywhere else in the country, the Democrats captured control of the legislature with a landslide victory. The new legislature rejected the Fifteenth Amendment in January, 1870.”35 However, the case study data do reveal that “[t]here were 1,330 Negroes in San Francisco County. In the 1868 Presidential election the Democratic ticket carried the county by 1,399 votes. But in 1872 the Republican ticket carried the county by a slim 714 votes. Assuming that one-seventh of the Negroes were eligible and voted Republican, a Negro vote of 200 would probably make an important contribution to the result.”36 Like California, one finds that Oregon, where the Democrats controlled the legislature, rejected the Fifteenth Amendment six months after it had been ratified nationally. Nevada was the only Far Western state to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment and did so in March 1869. And in all of these states the historical evidence suggests a Republican partisanship and voting among the newly freed African Americans.37 Overall, the historical case studies from the Midwest and Far West states strongly suggest as well as provide clues and hints that the freedmen in these states were quite similar to their southern and Border States freedmen in both their partisanship and voting behavior. Although they did not have the political influence and office-holding capacity due to their small population size, this did not stop their political participation in local and state politics and in party convention politics as delegates to state and national Republican conventions. Eventually, they did make it to state legislatures and other local offices. Therefore, when one combines both the empirical data findings with the historical evidence flowing from the sundry extant case studies, for the very first time a near holistic portrait emerges almost all across the county. This shows that from 1868 to 1872, and beyond, the Republican party policies of (1) Emancipation, (2) Four Military Reconstruction Acts, (3) Thirteenth Amendment, (4) Fourteenth Amendment, (5) Fifteenth Amendment, (6) three Enforcement Acts, and (7) Civil Rights Bill, to say nothing of the Civil War and President Lincoln, created nationwide African American political partisanship and Republican party voting behavior and

officeholders. This finding about the almost instantaneous birth and evolution of African American party partisanship challenges the current conventional wisdom that party partisanship arises out of political socialization of agents over a longer period, starting with childhood and maturing by the time individuals are young adults. That process did not happen for African Americans in the post–Civil War era.

Summary and Conclusions on African American Voting in 1868 and 1872 outside the South Our county-level unit of analysis, focusing on majority African American counties, does not identify the trends and patterns of African American partisanship and voting in other regions of the nation simply because there were no African American majority counties outside of the southern and Border State regions. However, the historical record shows that two African American state Republican legislators were elected in Massachusetts in 1866, and in the 1870s African Americans Republicans were elected to the state legislatures in Illinois (1876) and Ohio (1880).38 While the limited and scattered election data in the East and Midwest States are not substantial enough to confirm our findings from the South and Border States, the list of pioneering African American elected officials in the immediate post–Civil War period are the only available northern data for this time period. And like the voting data from the majority counties, they are the most reliable and accurate at the moment. Collectively, the empirical county-level data on the Border States, together with the same data from the South, dramatically demonstrate the Republican and Democratic votes in these two regions. These findings should be read together so that the focus on the South (where the data are more plentiful) will not lead to the conclusion that what one often finds is somehow “peculiar to the South.” The presidential voting of the neophyte freedmen was quite similar in these two regions of the nation. The recruitment, acquisition, and voting partisanship of this group of new voters not only arose instantly in nearly their first election, but in a period of four years it had grown immensely and is unmistakable. The other major empirical findings from these analyses are the partisanship and votes from the white majority counties for the Democratic and Republican parties. They also show the change and realignment between the two elections, as well as demonstrating how states like Georgia stayed with the Democrats through both presidential elections. With a few exceptions, one sees the fluctuations in the voting and partisanship between these two presidential elections. The states of South Carolina and Tennessee show quite remarkable alignment changes. And such sudden and startling shifts can be seen in the Maryland and Kentucky counties between 1868 and 1872. Both stability and fluidity can be seen in the white majority counties for the Democrats. Finally, one sees from our comparative analyses that there was a possibility in both regions for a biracial electoral coalition in these first two elections. In some states and counties it was more pronounced than in others, and between these

African American Voting Behavior, 1868 and 1872 293 two elections it grew in some places and declined in others. Political management and targeting by leaders in both political parties where such measures existed might have increased these possibilities as surely as these party leaders did the opposite by eliminating the biracial electoral coalitions. Such seemingly positive prospects became fleeting and began to fade with each ensuing presidential election. This is the portrait using empirically based evidence. In the absence of the county-level unit of analysis outside the South and Border States, we switched to historical evidence based on extant case studies data to extend our geographical coverage to the Midwest and Far West States. And the extant data arising from those two regions corroborate the empirical findings in the South and the Border States. The Republicans had built partisanship not only in the two regions of the nation with large African American populations but also in all four regions of the nation—and nearly simultaneously. Such had never been seen before due to the heavy scholarly and academic focus upon the southern and occasionally the Border region. But although the Republicans had seemingly institutionalized their party in the South and Border States, they did not sustain these party-building efforts in these regions after the 1876 presidential election.39 After the “Compromise of 1877” the Republican Party launched their party-building efforts elsewhere. Political scientist Richard Valelly in his work on the Reconstruction Era describes this party-building effort that began during the first Reconstruction and led to the abandonment of African American Republican voters in the South. Professor Valelly found that the Republicans looked to the western region both during and after the Civil War, where they brought “West Virginia, Nebraska, Nevada, and Colorado into the Union,” which immediately benefited them in terms of increased congressional representation and consequent Republican Party numbers of electoral votes for their presidential victories.40 This success, wrote Valelly, later developed into a party-building policy in the western states. Therefore, during the presidency of Benjamin Harrison, “six new states, the largest number ever to be admitted in any presidency and several pro-Republican, joined the Union: North and South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming.”41 The end result, noted Valelly, was “owing to electoral growth in both old and new states, Republicans no longer needed black southerners’ votes. . . . African Americans in the South became expendable.”42 There was no need for party building of a biracial coalition in the South. Thus, from internal politics in the South, Democratic Party rebuilding, and national Republican Party western policy, the emerging biracial coalition that our empirical analysis has uncovered died stillborn.

Methodological Note Before closing our discussion, we need to bring to the reader’s attention the matter of utilizing an alternative to the regression statistical technique to estimate the African American voter registration in Kentucky. The regression model has been used to fix the problems inherent in other statistical models for deriving individual-level data from aggregate election return data and racial voter registration data at the county level from “275

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counties in four Southern U.S. States: Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina.”43 Since the counties studied by this model provide valid and accurate information on African American voting registration, the political methodologist Professor Gary King needed to find a state where full information on African American voter registration was missing. Hence, Kentucky was chosen because it “is a Southern state with only about 8% African Americans of voting age. Moreover, this black population is concentrated in a relatively small fraction of the 118 counties. For example, only 9 counties have over 10% African American populations. The average county is only 3.7% black, even though 6.7% of the population in the state is black. In addition, about 75% of Kentucky’s voting-age population was registered in 1988, the year from which these data were collected.”44 Given this reality about the African American demography in the state (i.e., the absence of African American majority), King could use the Kentucky data to test and evaluate his model “by comparing the estimates (which the model could generate) to the true values” inherent in Kentucky race-based registration reports. Here is how he described the importance of the Kentucky data: Because so few blacks are submerged in a sea of white voters—in the state as a whole and in a few huge counties—it should be difficult for any method of ecological inference to learn much about black registration from only aggregate data.45 Professor King concluded from his analysis of the Kentucky data that his estimated findings are not good approximations of the true values. He says: “Existing methods give impossible results in these data. Yet, in spite of all of this, [this] method is able to generate trustworthy inferences.”46 Maybe. Several scholars have shown that King’s new method has some serious weaknesses and flaws that result in many unreliable findings.47 Nevertheless, Professor King has made his new statistical model, “EI: A Program for Ecological Inference,” available at his site on the World Wide Web at http://gking.harvard.edu/ publications/types/software. Another version is also available: “EzI: A(n easy) Program for Ecological Inference,” which students, academics, and scholars can download for free and use.48 Several scholars have used this program despite its problems and the unreliable findings that it generates. For this chapter, King’s 1988 use of the data from the Border State of Kentucky is not relevant. However, just as we made the reader aware of how various social scientists have employed other statistical models and software programs on registration and voting data in the eleven states of the old Confederacy, we likewise want to bring to the reader’s attention a similar but quite different use of another statistical software program for dealing with the Border States. And we want the reader to note how the estimated data generated from these quantitative models tend to differ from the true values that existed in the registration and voting data. Hence, we have used county-level population and election result data, which are different in that they are the actual data and not estimated, as well as providing the determination of who won and lost presidential and congressional elections.

Finally, where African Americans do not constitute a majority in a county, we cannot and have not used those counties in Chapter 14 or in this chapter. The same thing is true for the white majority counties. But in the election years under analysis, 1868 and 1872, we use counties defined as either majority white or majority black. This allows the study to make the greatest use of this available county-level information. (At the moment, federal courts in sundry voting rights cases have allowed both defendants and plaintiffs to use a statistical method known as double regression analysis to generate estimates about African American voter registration and voting as acceptable evidence, despite the reliability problems inherent in the technique.) And when these county-level data are not available we have used historical case studies evidence for our analysis.

Notes   1. See, Richard Curry (ed.), Radicalism, Racism, and Party Realignment: The Border States During Reconstruction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969); Amy Hiller, “The Disfranchisement of Delaware Negroes in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Delaware History Vol. 13 (October 1968), pp. 124–154; John Munroe, “The Negro in Delaware,” South Atlantic Quarterly Vol. 56 (Autumn 1957), pp. 428–444; Charles Ambler, “Disfranchisement in West Virginia: I & II,” Yale Review Vol. 14 (May and August 1905), pp. 38–59, 155–180; Clarence Mohr (ed.), Radical Republicans in the North: State Politics during Reconstruction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Edward Gambill, Conservative Ordeal: Northern Democrats and Reconstruction, 1865–1868 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1981).   2. For a comprehensive and systematic analysis of African American electoral empowerment in Prince George’s County, Maryland, see Alvin Thornton and Karen Williams Gooden, Like a Phoenix I’ll Rise: An Illustrated History of African Americans in Prince George’s County, Maryland, 1696–1996 (Upper Marlboro, MD: Pyramid Visions, 1997), pp. 158–197. See also Margaret Callcott, The Negro in Maryland Politics, 1870–1912 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969) and Marion Orr, Black Social Capital: The Politics of School Reform in Baltimore, 1986–1998 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990).   3. William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), p. 105.   4. Charles Ambler, “Disfranchisement in West Virginia: I,” Yale Review, Vol. 14 (May 1905), p. 56.   5. Gillette, p. 165.  6. Ibid.   7. Thornton and Gooden, p. 160.   8. Charles Ambler, “Disfranchisement in West Virginia: II,” Yale Review, Vol. 14 (August 1905), p. 160.  9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid, p. 174. 12. Gillette, p. 82. 13. Ambler, Disfranchisement II, p. 178. 14. http://www.wvencyclopedia.org/print/Article/2195. 15. Ambler, Disfranchisement II, p. 180. 16. Rayford Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York: Collier Books, 1965), p. 21. 17. Ibid. 18. Gillette, p. 110. 19. Ibid. 20. For the recent research on the three Midwest States, see Leslie Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). The older research can be found in the book by Professor William Gillette in endnote two.

21. Schwalm, p. 181. 22. Ibid., p. 182–183. 23. Ibid., p. 188. Parentheses in the original. 24. Ibid., p. 189. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., p. 182. 27. Gillette, p. 133. 28. Ibid., pp. 133–139. 29. Ibid., p. 139. 30. Ibid., p. 143. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., pp. 144–145. 33. Ibid., p. 153–154. 34. Ibid., p. 154. 35. Ibid., p. 156. 36. Ibid. 37. For some other historical data on California and the Far West, see Brainerd Dyer, “One Hundred Years of Negro Suffrage,” Pacific Historical Review Vol. 42 (February 1968), pp. 1–20; Jeffry Elliot, “The Dynamics of Black Local Politics: An Interview with Gilbert Lindsay,” Negro History Bulletin Vol. 40 (July–August 1977), pp. 719–720; Beeman Patterson, “Political Action of Negroes in Los Angeles: A Case Study in the Attainment of Councilmanic Representation,” Phylon Vol. 30 (Fall 1969), pp. 170–183; Harry Scoble, Negro Politics in Los Angeles: The Quest for Power (Los Angeles: Institute of Government and Public Affairs, 1967); William Hanchett, “Yankee Law and the Negro in Nevada, 1861–1869,” Western Humanities Review Vol. 10 (Summer 1956), pp. 241–249; “Roberts, Frederick M. (1879–1952),” http://www .blackpast.org/?q=aaw/roberts-frederick-m-1879-1952, accessed November 25, 2011; and Delilah L. Beasley, Negro Trail Blazers of California: A

African American Voting Behavior, 1868 and 1872 295 Compilation of Records from the California Archives in the Bancroft Library (Los Angeles: R and E Research Associates, 1919) , pp. 40 and 137. 38. On Illinois see David Joens, “John W.E. Thomas and the Election of the First African American to the Illinois House of Representatives,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society Vol. 94 (Summer 2001), pp. 200–216; for Ohio, see Freddie C. Colston, “The Influence of the Black Legislators in the Ohio House of Representatives” (Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1972), p. 41; and lists of early, post– Civil War, African American state legislators in Tables 19.1 and 19.2 of this volume. 39. For an analysis of the Republican party-building failures in the region of the South as well as the Democratic party-rebuilding efforts there, see Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1984). Such a work does not exist on the other three regions (Border, Midwest, Far West) during this same time period. 40. Richard Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Empowerment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 138. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Gary King, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem: Reconstructing Individual Behavior from Aggregate Data (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 199–200. 44. Ibid., p. 226. 45. Ibid., pp. 226–227. 46. Ibid., p. 234. 47. See Christopher Achen and W. Philips Shively, Cross-Level Inference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 48. King, p. xix.

CHAPTER 16

African American Voting Behavior in Subsequent Elections through Disenfranchisement, 1868–1920 Map 16.1 Electoral Vote by State, Presidential Election of 1876

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The 1876 Presidential Vote of African Americans in the South and the Border States

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Table 16.1 1876 Presidential Election Results and 1870 Census Information for the African American Majority Counties of the Border and Southern States

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Table 16.2 1876 Presidential Election Results and 1870 Census Information for the White Majority Counties of the Border and Southern States

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Figure 16.1 Support of Racial Majority Counties for the Republican Party in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina Presidential Elections of 1868, 1872, and 1876

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Figure 16.2 Support of Racial Majority Counties for the Democratic Party in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina Presidential Elections of 1868, 1872, and 1876

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Table 16.3 Election Results for Rapides Parish, Louisiana, 1868–1920

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Figure 16.3 Support for the Democratic Party and the Republican Party in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, Presidential Elections of 1868–1920

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Figure 16.4 Support of Racial Majority Counties for the Republican Party in the Border States Presidential Elections of 1868, 1872, and 1876

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Figure 16.5 Support of Racial Majority Counties for the Democratic Party in the Border States Presidential Elections of 1868, 1872, and 1876

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The Voting Behavior of African Americans in Presidential Elections from 1868–1920 in the Southern and Border States

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Figure 16.6 Mean Support for Democratic and Republican Parties in African American Majority Counties of the South, 1868–1920

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Figure 16.7 Mean Support for Democratic and Republican Parties in Majority White Counties of the South, 1868–1920

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Figure 16.8 Mean Support for Democratic and Republican Parties in Racial Majority Counties of the South, 1868–1920

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Figure 16.9 Mean Support for Democratic and Republican Parties in Racial Majority Counties of the Border States, 1868–1920

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County-Level Analysis for 1868–1920 Southern and Border States Elections

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Table 16.4 Counties with the Largest Black Majorities in Each State of the South, 1860–1920 Censuses

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Figure 16.10 Mean Support for the Democratic and Republican Parties in Largest Majority African American Counties of the South, Presidential Elections, 1868–1920

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Table 16.5 Counties with the Largest White Majorities in Each State of the South, 1860–1920 Censuses

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Figure 16.11 Mean Support for the Democratic and Republican Parties in Largest Majority White Counties of the South, Presidential Elections, 1868–1920

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Table 16.6 Number of All-White Counties in the South and Border States, 1860–1920

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Table 16.7 Counties with the Largest Black Majorities in Each of the Border States, 1860–1920 Censuses

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Table 16.8 Counties with the Largest White Majorities in Each of the Border States, 1860–1920 Censuses

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Summary and Conclusions Concerning African American Voting from 1868–1920

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Figure 16.12 Mean Support for the Democratic and Republican Parties, by Race, in Largest Majority Counties of the Border States, Presidential Elections, 1868–1920

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Figure 16.13 Support for the Democratic Party in the Southern States, 1868–1920

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Figure 16.14 Support for the Republican Party in the Southern States, 1868–1920

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Figure 16.15 Support for the Democratic Party in the Border States, 1868–1920

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Figure 16.16 Support for the Republican Party in the Border States, 1868–1920

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Notes 319



C

onsensus abounds among historians, political scientists, sociologists, and scholars working in the new area of American Political Development that the third presidential election after the Civil War, 1876, became the moment, at least nationally, when the suffrage rights for the freedmen voters in the South started to fade. In fact, the events of the 1876 presidential election sounded the death knell for “Black Reconstruction,” as well as for federal protection of the suffrage rights that the freedmen acquired through the Four Military Reconstruction Acts, the Fifteenth Amendment, and the three “Enforcement Acts.”1 The resultant political solution to the crisis wrought by this election, the “Compromise of 1877,” ensured the abandonment of these fledging voters to the whims of White Supremacy Democrats in the region. And left to this partisan group, the fate of these voters was sealed. Such is the conventional wisdom in the historical and political science literature on this period. A recent historical analysis of this election is Professor Michael Holt’s book By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876, which is part of the series called “American Presidential Elections.” In the preface to Professor Holt’s book, the series editors write: “For a very long time, most standard accounts of Reconstruction have identified the election of 1876 as the occasion that brought this era to an end. . . . Historians have generally agreed that the nation at last turned its eyes away from the aims of the Civil War and toward the less divisive political issues . . . of the Gilded Age.”2 Professor Holt focuses on two different factors that previous scholars either overlooked or dismissed, concluding that “within the South, . . . blacks continued to vote heavily Republican until they began to be disfranchised in the 1880s and 1890s.”3 Holt then adds: “Once Democrats regained control of southern state legislatures and returning boards, however, they negated black voting power except in a few municipalities and state legislative and congressional districts.”4 Therefore, to get beyond the narrower perspective hidden in the conventional wisdom, we hope our county-level approach and recent findings of voter registration data and African American agencies will offer a much more balanced and empirical portrait. The 1876 presidential election ended in dispute simply because there were two different certified election returns from three southern states: Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina (see Map 16.1). Both Democratic and Republican “returning boards,” that is, state-appointed boards that were “responsible for canvassing the accuracy and fairness of the [election] returns,” certified their own party’s nominee as the winner of that particular state.5 Overall, the Democratic nominee, Samuel J. Tilden, won 4,288,546 votes, for 51.0% of the popular vote, to Republican nominee Rutherford B. Hayes’ 4,034, 311 votes, for 48.0%, with the rest of the popular votes going to third parties. Hence, Tilden had 254,235 more popular votes than Hayes. And these popular votes translated into 184 electoral votes for Tilden, which was still one short of the majority needed to win the election outright over Hayes, who had 165 undisputed votes, some 20 electoral votes short. Tilden needed only one electoral vote while Hayes needed all 20 remaining. The three southern states had 19, and there was one electoral vote in Oregon that had not been cast. And with two sets of returns from each state, Congress threw

African American Voting Behavior, 1868–1920 299 out the results from all three states until they could investigate the matter. Eventually, Congress set up a Joint Federal Electoral Commission to solve this dispute, and President Ulysses S. Grant “signed the bill creating the commission on January 29, 1877.”6 According to Civil War historian James McPherson, this Joint Committee “was to contain fifteen members: five senators (three Republicans and two Democrats); five representatives (three Democrats and two Republicans); and five Supreme Court justices . . . with two . . . Democrats, two Republicans, and the fifth was to be . . . an independent.”7 However, one of the justices accepted a Senate appointment from the Illinois state legislature, and this left a vacancy. Thus, the fifth spot was filled with an independent-leaning Republican, Justice Joseph Bradley, because there were no more Democrats on the Court. Once on the commission, Justice Bradley dropped all pretenses about being an independent and voted with the Republican Party. Hence, the Republicans had an 8 to 7 majority. And on each one of the state cases, the Commission voted to accept the Republican returns and deny the Democratic returns. Contained in both versions of certified election returns from each of these three states were examples of fraud, intimidation, bribery, and perjury. “The Louisiana returning board converted an apparent Tilden majority of 7,500 into a Hayes majority of 4,500 and certified the election of a Republican governor and legislature by throwing out or modifying the returns from several bulldozed parishes.”8 But the Democrats in the state were just as guilty because their “shadow governor whom the party claimed to have elected in 1872 signed the certificate transmitting alternate returns to Washington.”9 The explosive electoral situation in the state of South Carolina was no better. Democrats in the state had elected Wade Hampton governor and a Democratic-controlled legislature with majorities in both state houses.10 However, the Republican-led “South Carolina board ratified the victory of the Hayes electors and also invalidated enough Democratic votes to certify Governor Daniel Chamberlain’s reelection with a Republican legislative majority.”11 Finally, the two parties in Florida were equally as guilty as the parties in South Carolina and Louisiana. “In Florida, the returning board changed an apparent Tilden victory into a Hayes victory but failed to overturn the Democratic capture of the governorship and legislature. . . . Democrats cried fraud and challenged the results. In South Carolina and Florida they obtained court orders to certify the transmission to the Electoral College of returns showing a Tilden victory. . . . Democrats and Republicans in Louisiana and South Carolina each inaugurated their own governors and legislatures.”12 Therefore, on February 9, 1877, after the congressional Federal Electoral Commission had heard the Florida case, it decided to give Florida’s electoral votes to Republican nominee Hayes. On February 16, following the precedent set in the Florida case, the Commission gave Louisiana’s electoral votes to Hayes. Then, on February 28, the Commission gave South Carolina’s electoral vote to Hayes. And although the Commission, voting strictly along political party lines, gave all the electoral votes to Hayes, there was still one missing electoral vote—which the governor of Oregon also gave to Hayes.13 Hayes now had enough electoral

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Map 16.1  Electoral Vote by State, Presidential Election of 1876

VT - 5

OR - 3 *

MN - 5

NY - 35

WI-10 MI - 11

NV - 3

IA - 11

OH - 22 IL - 21 IN - 15

CO - 3 CA - 6

KS - 5

MO - 15

WV- 5 VA - 11

KY - 12

NC - 10

TN - 12

SC - 7 *

AR - 6 MS - 8 TX - 8

NH - 5 MA - 13 RI - 4 CT - 6 NJ - 9 DE - 3 MD - 8

PA - 29 NE - 3

ME - 7

AL - 10

GA - 11 0

LA - 8 *

100 200 miles

FL - 4 * Grouping of states by electoral votes Republican - Hayes 21 to 35 (3) 11 to 21 (3) 7 to 11 (4) 3 to 7 (11)

Democrat - Tilden 21 to 35 (1) 11 to 21 (6) 7 to 11 (6) 3 to 7 (4)

Source: Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), Map 25.1. * Election results were disputed in these states where in each the eventual award of electoral votes was determined by the Electoral Commission.

votes to claim the presidency, but opposition arose from Democrats in the House of Representatives as to whether they would accept the results and recommendations of the Commission. To avoid the consequences of this promised opposition, Hayes’ campaigners worked out a deal with the leading southern Democrats for their acceptance of the results and the commission recommendations. Republican negotiators promised these southern political leaders that Hayes would (1) serve only one term, (2) appoint a southerner to his Cabinet, (3) remove federal troops out of the South, particularly from South Carolina and Louisiana, (4) provide support for several internal improvement appropriations inside the South, (5) give southern Democrats access to patronage, and (6) let the South alone to solve its race problem.14 The potential presidential winner Hayes agreed to all of these pledges if the South would promise “fair treatment of the freedmen and respect for their rights.”15 Once they made this promise to Hayes’ negotiators, the “Compromise of 1877” was a done deal. However, this Compromise was not written down or recorded in any formalized manner. It was “a series of unwritten

‘understandings’’’ that were seemingly accepted by both sides but had no method of enforcement.16 In the most recent historical analysis, Professor Holt did not deny that these political negotiations took place but simply indicated that they were “preliminary negotiations” which occurred prior to the establishment of the Federal Electoral Commission.17 President Hayes’ southern policy was to expect “honorable and influential Southern whites” to lead the efforts to ensure African American suffrage and civil liberty rights. Of this policy, historian Rayford Logan wrote: “He had kept his part of the bargain, but had been unable to hold the other parties to theirs. White supremacy was more securely entrenched in the South when he left the White House than it had been when he had entered it.”18 At this point, the question arises as to why the white Democrats had pushed so hard to regain control of the three states of Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina in the 1876 presidential election. According to Professor Logan, the answer lies in the fact that “[w]hite rule was restored in Tennessee in 1869; in Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, in 1870; in Alabama, Arkansas,



African American Voting Behavior, 1868–1920 301

and Texas, in 1874; and in Mississippi, in 1875. Thus, only South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida remained to be ‘redeemed’ in 1876.”19 Political scientist Richard Valelly added: “By 1875 Democrats had acquired control of the state governments of Tennessee, Georgia, Texas, Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi, as well as the North Carolina legislature. They relied on force and intimidation. . . . By 1876 . . . [o]nly Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina remained under the control of the great [biracial] coalition of 1867–1868.”20 Thus, white Democrats in these three states had failed to that point to secure these states for “White Supremacy.” The Compromise of 1877 accomplished their purpose more thoroughly than their counterparts elsewhere in the region had. President Hayes did not simply give political “Redemption” and restoration to whites in these three states, he also “redeemed” the entire South because he gave the southern Democratic Party national recognition and a place inside the president’s Cabinet. It set a precedent that southern Democrats could force nationally elected officials to bow and respond to political protest from the South, even though such protests might advance values and beliefs that were illegal and in violation of the nation’s Constitution. President Hayes made these protesters regional heroes. And perhaps worst of all, here was a new road to power, completely ignoring the U.S. Constitution in favor of regional biases and prejudices. The “redeemer” or “Redemption” movement as it was called ended in success when the Compromise of 1877 went into effect.

The 1876 Presidential Vote of African Americans in the South and the Border States The 1876 presidential election was a pivotal moment and a “critical election” for the African American electorate due to the Compromise of 1877. Whatever had transpired before the 1876 election was transformed immediately thereafter. African American voting in presidential elections would move from being essentially a national exercise to being a regional one, basically one that occurred in the Border, North, and Midwest states. In the South it would take the appearance, implementation, and enforcement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and its several renewals to make African American presidential voting a national exercise once again. And it is the purpose of this chapter to show with the very best empirical data the impact, influence, and reshaping effect that this “critical election” set in motion. Before the Era of Disenfranchisement (1888–1908) effectively nullified the Fifteenth Amendment extension of voting rights to African Americans and legally halted African American presidential and congressional voting in the South, the 1876 election had already launched the process. On examining Table 16.1, one does not immediately see the cataclysmic changes which this 1876 presidential election was about to generate. The table demonstrates that in nine of the eleven states, the African American majority counties gave the

Table 16.1  1876 Presidential Election Results and 1870 Census Information for the African American Majority Counties of the Border and Southern States

State (by Region)

Number of Black Majority Counties

1870 Census Total Population

African American Population

%

1876 Election Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Other Parties

Votes

Votes

%

Votes

%

%

Border Maryland

3

40,547

22,577

55.7%

8,353

4,145

49.6%

4,208

50.4%

0

0.0%

Border Black Majority County Subtotals

3

40,547

22,577

55.7%

8,353

4,145

49.6%

4,208

50.4%

0

0.0%

Alabama

22

498,598

337,507

67.7%

84,711

41,791

49.3%

42,920

50.7%

0

0.0%

Arkansas

8

68,918

43,818

63.6%

15,473

4,505

29.1%

10,968

70.9%

0

0.0%

Florida

8

99,138

67,617

68.2%

23,800

8,270

34.7%

15,530

65.3%

0

0.0%

Georgia

54

612,682

378,178

61.7%

81,924

54,923

67.0%

27,001

33.0%

0

0.0%

Louisiana

29

333,898

222,450

66.6%

66,162

23,365

35.3%

42,797

64.7%

0

0.0%

Mississippi

32

531,301

348,678

65.6%

94,858

60,998

64.3%

33,860

35.7%

0

0.0%

North Carolina

17

253,058

147,832

58.4%

54,655

22,080

40.4%

32,575

59.6%

0

0.0%

South Carolina

21

544,166

356,976

65.6%

138,289

60,850

44.0%

77,439

56.0%

0

0.0%

2

51,239

30,819

60.1%

10,207

4,475

43.8%

5,732

56.2%

0

0.0%

South

Tennessee Texas

11

98,106

60,069

61.2%

16,864

6,234

37.0%

10,630

63.0%

0

0.0%

Virginia

40

489,833

286,143

58.4%

88,848

43,677

49.2%

45,171

50.8%

0

0.0%

Southern Black Majority County Subtotals

244

3,580,937

2,280,087

63.7%

675,791

331,168

49.0%

344,623

51.0%

0

0.0%

Overall Black Majority County Totals

247

3,621,484

2,302,664

63.6%

684,144

335,313

49.0%

348,831

51.0%

0

0.0%

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611, downloaded November 2006; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: the United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

302

Chapter 16

Republican Party the majority of their votes. Only in two states, Georgia and Mississippi, did such counties give the Democratic Party the majority of their votes. Such Democratic victories in the African American majority counties of these two states began to raise a red flag. While Georgia’s African American majority counties had gone to the Democrats in 1868 and 1872, it was a new development in Mississippi. Table 16.1 also reports on the voting in the African American majority counties in Maryland. It was the only Border State to still have some counties with African American population majorities at the time of the 1876 presidential election. What one sees here is a higher vote for the Republicans, at 50.4%, than for the Democrats, 49.6%. In sum, the Republican Party won these counties but only barely. The white Democrats missed by a very small number of votes and percentage points. No third parties showed up in any of these African American majority counties and therefore did not influence the outcome.

But the voting behavior of the majority African American counties is only half of the political story. The other half of the story is to be found in Table 16.2, which provides the election return data for the white majority counties in this 1876 election. The Republican Party did not win the combined vote of the white majority counties in a single Border State. The highest Republican vote percentage in this group was in Maryland’s counties with 44.7% and the lowest was in Kentucky’s counties with 37.4%. The mean was 40.7%. Hence, the white majority counties in the Border States gave the Democratic Party consistent support and a victory in every state in the region. The mean vote percentage for the Democrats in these states’ counties stood at 58.3%. In the southern states, the white majority counties gave an even higher percentage of their votes to the Democratic Party, 66.5% overall, and a lower percentage of their votes to the Republican Party, 33.5%. The highest Democratic vote percentage came

Table 16.2  1876 Presidential Election Results and 1870 Census Information for the White Majority Counties of the Border and Southern States

State (by Region)

Number of White Majority Counties

1870 Census Total Population

White Population

%

1876 Election Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

Other Parties Votes

%

Border Delaware

3

125,015

102,221

81.8%

24,133

13,380

55.4%

10,753

44.6%

0

0.0%

Kentucky

115

1,321,011

1,098,801

83.2%

260,298

159,969

61.5%

97,333

37.4%

2,996

1.2%

Maryland

19

740,347

587,533

79.4%

99,987

55,273

55.3%

44,714

44.7%

0

0.0%

Missouri

113

1,712,911

1,595,271

93.1%

348,961

200,938

57.6%

144,504

41.4%

3,519

1.0%

53

442,014

424,034

95.9%

98,287

55,677

56.6%

41,502

42.2%

1,108

1.1%

303

4,341,298

3,807,860

87.7%

831,666

485,237

58.3%

338,806

40.7%

7,623

0.9%

Alabama

42

489,501

353,061

72.1%

85,593

60,006

70.1%

25,584

29.9%

3

0.0%

Arkansas

53

415,553

337,202

81.1%

66,552

44,068

66.2%

22,332

33.6%

152

0.2%

Florida

30

86,679

62,695

72.3%

22,976

14,661

63.8%

8,315

36.2%

0

0.0%

Georgia

78

571,427

404,463

70.8%

95,689

73,056

76.3%

22,633

23.7%

0

0.0%

Louisiana

21

364,891

242,656

66.5%

72,223

44,149

61.1%

28,074

38.9%

0

0.0%

Mississippi

33

296,621

201,098

67.8%

54,018

41,042

76.0%

12,976

24.0%

0

0.0%

North Carolina

73

818,303

574,485

70.2%

175,122

101,028

57.7%

74,094

42.3%

0

0.0%

South Carolina

10

161,440

102,602

63.6%

39,275

27,147

69.1%

12,128

30.9%

0

0.0%

Tennessee

83

1,207,281

915,769

75.9%

207,011

125,512

60.6%

81,499

39.4%

0

0.0%

124

718,182

525,174

73.1%

128,894

96,223

74.7%

32,625

25.3%

46

0.0%

56

717,082

500,809

69.8%

112,711

77,703

68.9%

35,008

31.1%

0

0.0%

Southern White County Subtotals

603

5,846,960

4,220,014

72.2%

1,060,064

704,595

66.5%

355,268

33.5%

201

0.0%

Overall White Majority County Totals

906

10,188,258

8,027,874

78.8%

1,891,730

1,189,832

62.9%

694,074

36.7%

7,824

0.4%

West Virginia Border White County Subtotals

South

Texas Virginia

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611, downloaded November 2006; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: the United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.



African American Voting Behavior, 1868–1920 303

in Georgia with 76.3% and the lowest in North Carolina with 57.7%. Although third parties appeared in both regions, in neither region were they a factor in the final outcome. Thus, the upshot of this analysis is that the white counties in the southern and Border states voted for the Democratic Party, while in the African American majority counties they voted for the Republican Party. And of these two different racial party voting behaviors, by far the strongest shift was from whites to the Democratic Party. However, the key empirical finding shown in these two tables is that in the 1876 election the African American vote had been able to make the Republican Party victorious in the African American majority counties in nine out of the eleven southern states, as well as in the majority counties of the Border State Maryland. But in most cases the African American majority counties supporting the Republicans could not overcome the white majority counties supporting the Democrats, and the Democratic Party won the popular vote in all but three of the southern and Border states in the 1876 election. The African American electorate in Maryland, where we have the empirical data, was not able to put the state and its electoral votes in the Republican victory column in this election. It turned some counties to this party but not enough for the Republican Party to win the state. This suggests that African American Republican voting in the Border States might have been important at the county and maybe the state level but not at the national level. Only in nine southern states did the freedmen have the potential for influence

and impact in national elections, and that was questionable given the surging white Democratic vote in these nine states. Thus, this vote analysis provides a holistic portrait of the entire South and the Border States. But as we learned from the Compromise of 1877, the central problem in the 1876 presidential election was with three states: Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Thus, we need to analyze these three “problem states” not only in reference to each other as well as the African American and white electorates in these problem states but in relationship to the two previous presidential elections, 1868 and 1872, to acquire some empirical perspective in regard to the nature of the problem in 1876. Figure 16.1 offers a visual rendering of an empirical test for the sought-after “Redemption.” The figure shows the popular vote percentages for each of the three problem states in both the African American and white majority counties over three presidential elections. Florida did not hold a popular vote election in 1868, so it has data only for 1872 and 1876. What stands out in the African American majority counties is that the vote for the Republican Party peaks in the 1872 presidential election and declines in the 1876 election across all three states. Historians have given the “Redemption” Movement as the reason. The white majority counties show a lower peak in 1872 and then a decline in the 1876 election, except in Florida where the vote remains roughly the same across these two elections. This decline in Republican support is thus found in both the African

Figure 16.1  Support of Racial Majority Counties for the Republican Party in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina Presidential Elections of 1868, 1872, and 1876 90% 78.6%

Percent of Vote for Republican Party

80% 67.7%

70%

70.2% 65.3%

64.7%

63.8%

61.9%

60%

56.0%

50%

44.1%

41.3%

35.9% 36.2%

40%

38.9%

35.5% 30.9%

30% 20% 11.0%

10% 0%

0% * Florida (Black Counties)

0% * Louisiana (Black Counties)

South Carolina (Black Counties) 1868

Florida (White Counties) 1872

Louisiana (White Counties)

South Carolina (White Counties)

1876

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611, downloaded November 2006; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors. * Florida did not employ popular voting to choose presidential candidates in 1868. Instead, the state legislature decided how to award Florida’s electoral votes. Due to third-party votes, South Carolina percentages in Figures 16.1 and 16.2 do not sum to 100% for 1872.

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American and white counties. The outlier in both the African American and white majority counties is South Carolina. Both sets of counties saw a huge increase in the vote percentage for the Republican Party in 1872, followed by a precipitous decline in 1876. About half of the voters in the white majority counties of South Carolina who supported the Republican Party in 1872 abandoned it in 1876, while over one-fourth of the those voters in African American counties abandoned the Republican Party. Some of the decline may be attributable to white voters’ shifting allegiance, but much of it must be attributed to efforts to stymie the African American voters—not only in counties where they represented a majority, but also anywhere they represented a significant and perhaps influential minority. Empirically, Figure 16.1 confirms that something significant happened in all three of these problem states because there is a decline in all of the counties, except in Florida (and even in Florida there was a stall in the voting). Something happened in order for this dual decline to occur in the white vote and the African American vote simultaneously. And all of the historical narratives as well as the Congressional Investigation into the matter declare that it was the violence of the Redemption effort.21 Figure 16.2 shows the other side of the picture: the Democratic Party vote. The two parties’ votes sum to 100% for each population and each state. Collectively, Figures 16.1 and 16.2 offer empirical evidence that in the three problem states in the 1876 presidential election, the vote in both the African American and white majority

counties underwent a simultaneous change favoring the Democratic Party. And these 1876 findings suggest that with the Compromise of 1877, which called for the removal of federal troops from the problem states, these trends toward more Democratic victories might continue unabated. Before telling that story, we will probe some specific individual counties in each state to see if there is corroboration of the statewide findings concerning the 1876 presidential election. First, we will isolate Rapides Parish, Louisiana, because it is in one of the three problem states, and it was a county that allowed Free-Men-of-Color to vote for more than two decades prior to the Civil War. This is the only county in any of these three states where African Americans had voted before the 1868 election. Second, we will take one county from each of the southern states, including Louisiana, and focus on their voting patterns from 1868 until 1920 to examine the nature and scope of patterns more closely. Such empirical data analysis will permit the reader to see beyond the limitations of a summary statistical measure like the mean that sometimes submerges shifts and changes. Table 16.3 offers a look at both the election return data for the political parties in presidential elections from 1868 to 1920 in Rapides Parish and also demographic data on the African Americans in the county. In addition, this tabular presentation provides the grand totals over time as well as the mean and median numbers of votes and demography. Beginning with the Republican Party vote column, by 1876 the party vote had clearly begun to decline, as had its vote percentage. In the very

Figure 16.2  Support of Racial Majority Counties for the Democratic Party in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina Presidential Elections of 1868, 1872, and 1876 100% 89.0%

Percent of Vote for Democratic Party

90% 80% 70%

64.1% 63.8%

60%

58.7%

55.9%

50% 40%

61.1%

69.1%

64.5%

44.0% 32.3%

35.3%

34.7%

30%

37.7%

36.2%

29.8% 20.9%

20% 10% 0%

0% * Florida (Black Counties)

0% * Louisiana (Black Counties)

South Carolina (Black Counties) 1868

Florida (White Counties) 1872

Louisiana (White Counties)

South Carolina (White Counties)

1876

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611, downloaded November 2006; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors. * Florida did not employ popular voting to choose presidential candidates in 1868. Instead, the state legislature decided how to award Florida’s electoral votes. Due to third-party votes, South Carolina percentages in Figures 16.1 and 16.2 do not sum to 100% for 1872.



African American Voting Behavior, 1868–1920 305

next election, 1880, there was a huge increase in the percent of Democratic voters and a huge decline in both the percent and number of Republican voters. Notably, the total vote declined by over 1,000, seemingly all Republicans. Finally, the last demographic column shows that freedmen had a population majority in this county until the 1910 Census, or eleven of these fourteen elections. However, the Republican Party only won the first three of these fourteen presidential elections, 1868, 1872, and 1876. Figure 16.3 (p. 306) shows visually the same drop in voter support for the Republican Party in 1876 and a rapid decline thereafter; eventually the percentage hovers at or below the 10% level. The critical drop is after the 1876 election, but the decline begins in this African American majority county in the 1876 presidential election, just as the state-level data did. Later in this analysis we will explore this matter in a single non-legacy county in each of the eleven southern states to see if they were affected in the same way as this legacy county. Figure 16.3 also shows the Democratic Party vote, the rise of which is the mirror of the Republican vote, although the percentages do not always equal 100% due to the occasional presence of a third party. Having thoroughly analyzed how the 1876 presidential election became a critical one for freedmen in the South, we can now turn our attention to the Border States. Was the 1876 election in these Border States just as impactful and influential as in the South, or was it simply a single regional occurrence?22 Figure 16.4 (p. 306) offers an empirical portrait of voting in support of the

Republican Party both in the African American majority counties in Maryland and the white majority counties in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and West Virginia. In 1868 the freedmen had not gotten the right to vote and had to await the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in February 1870. Thus, the 4.9% of the vote cast for the Republican Party in Maryland’s majority African American counties had to come not from the freedmen but from the white electorate in these counties. Such a finding clearly shows that there was not much white support in these counties for the Republican Party; however, over one-third of the electorate in Maryland’s white majority counties voted for the Republican candidate. Hence, white voters in white majority counties were much more willing to vote for the Republican Party than white voters in African American majority counties— but in both, the support was far below a winning percentage. The highest support for the Republican Party in 1868 from white majority Border State counties came in West Virginia, with its 58.8%, and the lowest support came in Kentucky, with 25.5%. But all of this electoral support for the Republican Party was much greater than the minuscule support given the party by the white electorate in the African American majority counties of Maryland. From the middle election of 1872 to the 1876 election, there is a decrease in the Republican Party vote percentage in the African American majority counties as well as in the white majority counties. Where the Democratic Party had won three of the five states in 1868 (Delaware, Kentucky, and Maryland) and

Table 16.3  Election Results for Rapides Parish, Louisiana, 1868–1920

Election Year

Democratic Party

Total Votes

Votes

1868

3,799

1872

2,969

1876

Republican Party

Other Parties

African American

Census

Total Population

Population

% of Total

1860

25,360

15,649

61.7%

1870

18,015

10,267

57.0%

1880

23,563

13,942

59.2%

1890

27,642

15,800

57.2%

1900

39,578

21,210

53.6%

1910

44,545

21,445

48.1%

0.0%

1920

59,444

24,992

42.0%

416

1.1%

 

 

 

 

25.7%

30

1.1%

34,021

17,615

51.8%

12.8%

4

0.1%

27,642

15,800

57.0%

%

Votes

%

Votes

%

1,622

42.7%

2,177

57.3%

0

0.0%

1,048

35.3%

1,921

64.7%

0

0.0%

3,375

1,620

48.0%

1,755

52.0%

0

0.0%

1880

2,328

1,748

75.1%

580

24.9%

0

0.0%

1884

2,632

1,748

66.4%

879

33.4%

5

0.2%

1888

3,802

3,395

89.3%

403

10.6%

4

0.1%

1892

3,912

3,447

88.1%

465

11.9%

0

0.0%

1896

2,779

2,601

93.6%

142

5.1%

36

1.3%

1900

1,740

1,419

81.6%

318

18.3%

3

0.2%

1904

945

828

87.6%

107

11.3%

10

1.1%

1908

1,504

1,302

86.6%

159

10.6%

43

2.9%

1912

1,673

1,334

79.7%

47

2.8%

292

17.5%

1916

2,341

2,185

93.3%

133

5.7%

23

1.0%

1920

3,209

2,766

86.2%

443

13.8%

0

Total

37,008

27,063

73.1%

9,529

25.7%

Mean

2,643

1,933

73.1%

681

Median

2,706

1,685

83.9%

423

 

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611, downloaded November 2006 and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: the United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

306

Chapter 16

Figure 16.3  Support for the Democratic Party and the Republican Party in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, Presidential Elections of 1868–1920 100% 90% Percent of Vote for Democratic or Republican Party

93.6%

89.3%

93.3%

88.1%

87.6%

86.6%

81.6% 80%

75.1%

70% 60%

86.2% 79.7%

66.4%

64.7% 57.3% 52.0%

50%

48.0% 42.7%

40%

35.3%

33.4%

30%

24.9% 18.3%

20% 10.6%

10% 0%

11.9%

11.3% 5.1%

1868

1872

1876

1880

1884

1888

1892

1896

13.8%

10.6% 2.8%

1900

1904

1908

5.7%

1912

1916

1920

Presidential Election Years Republican Party

Democratic Party

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611, downloaded November 2006; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

Figure 16.4  Support of Racial Majority Counties for the Republican Party in the Border States Presidential Elections of 1868, 1872, and 1876 70%

58.1%

Percent of Vote for Republican Party

60%

51.9%

51.0%

50.4%

50%

58.8%

57.1%

46.4%

44.6%

51.8% 44.7%

41.0% 40%

37.4%

30%

44.1% 41.4%

42.2%

35.9%

25.5%

20%

10%

0%

4.9%

Maryland (Black Counties)

Delaware (White Counties)

Kentucky (White Counties) 1868

Maryland (White Counties) 1872

Missouri (White Counties)

West Virginia (White Counties)

1876

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611, downloaded November 2006; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.



African American Voting Behavior, 1868–1920 307

1872 (Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri), they won all of the five states in the 1876 presidential election. And the main reason given in the historical narratives about the Democratic Party victories and the Republican Party losses is the scandals in President Grant’s two administrations and the need for reform. Another factor is the drive for white “Redemption” which also drove the southern states. Figure 16.5 fills out the picture, with the Democratic percentages in both African American and white majority counties in the Border States.23 Although the Republican and Democratic percentages do not always total to 100%, it is close to a mirror image of Figure 16.4, with increases for the Democrats where there were decreases for Republicans. Although the history books tell us that the Border States did not have the violence which emerged in the South, nevertheless, the white Democrats in these states resorted to voter manipulation and fraud to suppress the African American vote. And obviously they succeeded due to the fact that the party won all five states in the 1876 election. Therefore, the empirical data from the Border States are quite similar to the southern states in terms of what happened in this pivotal election. And the story is that the crisis that occurred in the 1876 election was present in both regions. The presence and the participation of the freedmen voters in the 1868 and 1872 elections set off a “white racial backlash” during the 1876 presidential election that would have severe repercussions for these voters themselves as well as for future presidential elections

in these two regions. The Republican Party became a short-term beneficiary and the Democratic Party a long-term beneficiary. Elsewhere in the nation, the voting rights granted by the Fifteenth Amendment did not disappear as they did in the South after 1876.

The Voting Behavior of African Americans in Presidential Elections from 1868–1920 in the Southern and Border States In the aftermath of the 1876 presidential election and its resultant Compromise of 1877 that eroded federal protection and enforcement of African American suffrage, the South saw support for Republicans erode and support for Democrats grow.24 In Figure 16.6 (p. 308) one can see as well as compare and contrast the mean support for both political parties in the African American majority counties in the South from 1868 to 1920. 1876 is the pivotal year when the decline in Republican support began, and for the next eleven presidential elections there was a steady decline, with a few modest increases in 1884, 1896, 1908, 1916, and 1920. The Republican vote after the 1876 election in these African American majority counties vote fell under the 50% level and never recovered. By 1888 mean support fell below 40%; it continued below 30% in 1892; then fell below 20% in 1904. Republican support bottomed out below 10% in 1912 when the Progressive Party captured a significant portion of the

Figure 16.5  Support of Racial Majority Counties for the Democratic Party in the Border States Presidential Elections of 1868, 1872, and 1876 100%

95.1%

90%

Percent of Vote for Democratic Party

80%

74.5%

70% 61.5%

59.0%

60% 49.6%

50%

55.4% 46.7%

64.1% 55.3%

52.4%

55.9% 57.6%

56.6% 47.2%

48.1% 42.9%

41.9%

41.2%

40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Maryland (Black Counties)

Delaware (White Counties)

Kentucky (White Counties) 1868

Maryland (White Counties) 1872

Missouri (White Counties)

West Virginia (White Counties)

1876

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611, downloaded November 2006; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

308

Chapter 16

Republican Party vote in the region, and bounced back somewhat by the 1920 election when African American women joined with the remnants of the freedmen voters.25 But this rebound did not even reach the 20% level. Based on historical accounts, the reason for this decline was not that African Americans shifted allegiances to the Democrats, a party that still sought their disenfranchisement, but that the white electorate flocked to the Democratic Party as well as the party “Redemption” movement. The absolute opposite voting reality was occurring for the Democratic Party in these African American majority counties, as Figure 16.6 also shows. Shortly before the institutionalization of the Era of Disfranchisement, 1890–1908, the Democratic vote went over the mean of 60% and climbed steadily higher thereafter. With each ensuing presidential election, the gap between the votes for each political party grew wider and wider. Nothing closed the gap significantly, not even the arrival of the African American and white women voters. Needless to say there was an increase in 1920 for the Republicans and a corresponding decrease for the Democrats, but the gap was simply too wide to make up. The same portrait for both political parties, this time in white majority counties, is shown in Figure 16.7. The mean Republican vote in these white counties never got beyond the 45% level in the 1872 presidential election and from that point on went downhill, albeit not as steeply or steadily as in the African American majority counties. There were some short surges of voter support in 1884, the year of Democrat Grover Cleveland’s victory, and

1900, the year of the Republican President William McKinley’s reelection victory. The next rise for Republicans came in 1908 and 1920—both years with Republican presidential victories, William Howard Taft and Warren Harding, respectively. The low points on the graph occur in 1892, the year that Democrat Grover Cleveland won reelection, and 1912, the year that Woodrow Wilson won reelection. At best, the Republican Party mean vote percentage in white majority counties was erratic, and it only occasionally got above the mean of 35%. Even Republican presidential victories could not elevate the party mean vote in this region of the nation. But once African Americans were no longer significant voters in the region, there is some rebound. However, the fluctuating voting pattern of the white majority counties for the Republican Party that one sees in Figure 16.7 is not repeated in the mean vote of these counties for the Democratic Party, as shown in the same figure. Out of the fourteen presidential elections in this time frame, only in six elections did the vote percentage of the white majority counties drop below the mean percentage of the vote for the Democratic Party in the South (60.3%). While the Democrats had steady support, the Republicans had lost significant votes to strong third parties in 1892 and 1912. In 1876 the mean Democratic vote percentage climbed over the 60% mark; it would rise again in 1904 and significantly in 1916 for the reelection of Democratic President Wilson. Over time in the South, the Democratic Party was clearly the winner in the aftermath of the 1876 election and its Compromise of 1877.

Figure 16.6  Mean Support for Democratic and Republican Parties in African American Majority Counties of the South, 1868–1920 90% 80% 70%

Percent of Vote

60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

1868

1872

1876

1880

1884

1888

1892

1896

1900

1904

1908

1912

1916

1920

Presidential Election Years African American majority counties for Republicans

African American majority counties for Democrats

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611, downloaded November 2006 and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.



African American Voting Behavior, 1868–1920 309

Figure 16.7  Mean Support for Democratic and Republican Parties in Majority White Counties of the South, 1868–1920 80% 70% 60%

Percent of Vote

50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 1868

1872

1876

1880

1884

1888

1892

1896

1900

1904

1908

1912

1916

1920

Presidential Election Years White majority counties for Republicans

White majority counties for Democrats

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611, downloaded November 2006; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

The dual pattern and trend visualized here differs greatly from the African American majority counties. The vote for the Democratic Party in the white majority counties is quite steady and consistent, while the vote for the Republican Party in these counties is far less stable, much lower in terms of voter support, and a vote that is in flux with an almost up and down tendency. Once the freedmen’s votes were suppressed and denied, the Republican Party found a modest degree of white support in these counties. It was slightly more than one-third (36.9%) of the total vote in these counties compared to 33.7% of the vote for Republicans in white majority counties of the South. Support for Republicans did not simply disappear with the denial of the freedmen’s vote; it simply became a minimalist vote in the white counties. But this minimalist vote in the white counties turned out to be higher than the Republican vote in the African American majority counties. Finally, Figures 16.8 and 16.9 analyze all four of the trends and patterns over time, in the southern and Border states, respectively, in order to show their relationships. First, in these figures, the pivot point of the 1876 election can be seen. (The 1872 election was the high water mark for the freedmen electorate, but 1876 was the election where the decline took place, hence the pivot point.) Second, of particular note in the southern states shown by Figure 16.8 (p. 310), the mean support in the African American majority counties for the Democratic Party became even greater than that of the white majority counties starting in the 1888 presidential

election. In fact, the gap grows wider with almost every ensuing election. This finding supports political scientist V.O. Key, Jr.’s, narrative in his classic Southern Politics in State and Nation that the whites in the majority African American counties became the most ardent supporters of the white supremacist Democratic regime. Historian C. Vann Woodward made the same claim in his classic The Burden of Southern History.26 And this became the most enduring theme about the Democratic Party in southern politics, i.e., it was controlled by white elites in the African American majority counties. Although both men advanced this thesis, they never provided the empirical proof for it. Figure 16.8 (p. 310) also illustrates the parallels in the Republican Party vote between the African American and white majority counties beginning with the 1872 presidential election, with the percentages of the vote for Republicans declining for both racial majority counties up to the election of 1912 before rising again together up to the 1920 election. In the period from 1892 through 1920 white voters replaced African American voters as the main base and supporters of the Republican Party in the South.27 And this has continued since then up until the present time. This too is an unusual finding, and one that is rarely discussed in political party works.28 Republican Party support in the Border States between African American majority counties and white majority counties is shown in Figure 16.9 (p. 310). Overall, beginning with the

310

Chapter 16

Figure 16.8  Mean Support for Democratic and Republican Parties in Racial Majority Counties of the South, 1868–1920 90% 80% 70%

Percent of Vote

60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

1868

1872

1876

1880

1884

1888

1892

1896

1900

1904

1908

1912

1916

1920

Presidential Election Years African American majority counties for Democrats White majority counties for Democrats

African American majority counties for Republicans White majority counties for Republicans

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611, downloaded November 2006; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

Figure 16.9  Mean Support for Democratic and Republican Parties in Racial Majority Counties of the Border States, 1868–1920 100% 90% 80%

Percent of Vote

70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 1868

1872

1876

1880

1884

1888

1892

1896

1900

1904

1908

1912

1916

1920

Presidential Election Years African American majority counties for Republicans White majority counties for Republicans

African American majority counties for Democrats White majority counties for Democrats

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611, downloaded November 2006; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.



African American Voting Behavior, 1868–1920 311

election of 1872 in these states the vote between the major parties is more competitive than in the South. Still, from the election of 1880 through the election of 1912 the Republican Party obtained vote majorities in African American majority counties, while from 1868 to 1892, Republicans received less than vote majorities in white majority counties. From 1896 to 1908, Republicans were competitive with Democrats in white majority counties—but they received considerably fewer votes in the election of 1912.

County-Level Analysis for 1868–1920 Southern and Border States Elections An alternative view from a longitudinal perspective is obtained by looking in depth at the counties with the largest African American majority in each state. Listed in Table 16.4, from each state and decadal census from 1860 to 1920, we identify the county with the greatest majority of African Americans to

Table 16.4  Counties with the Largest Black Majorities in Each State of the South, 1860–1920 Censuses

Census 1860

County Marengo

State Alabama

Percent Black Population 78.3%

Chicot

Arkansas

81.4%

7,512

Leon

Florida

74.1%

9,149

Camden

Georgia

76.5%

4,144

Concordia

Louisiana

91.0%

12,563

Issaquena

Mississippi

92.5%

Warren

North Carolina

68.7%

Georgetown

South Carolina

85.9%

Total Black Population 24,410

Census 1890 (Continued)

Percent Black Population 92.1%

Total Black Population 31,421

County Beaufort

State South Carolina

Fayette

Tennessee

71.0%

20,492

Fort Bend

Texas

84.8%

8,981

Charles City

Virginia

73.4%

3,717

1900

Lowndes

Alabama

86.6%

30,889

7,244

 

Chicot

Arkansas

87.1%

12,650

10,803

 

Leon

Florida

80.5%

15,999

18,292

 

Lee

Georgia

85.4%

8,837 17,839

Fayette

Tennessee

63.7%

15,501

 

Tensas

Louisiana

93.5%

Wharton

Texas

80.9%

2,734

 

Issaquena

Mississippi

94.0%

9,771

Nottoway

Virginia

74.3%

6,566

 

Warren

North Carolina

68.2%

13,069

1870

Lowndes

Alabama

80.2%

20,633

 

Beaufort

South Carolina

90.5%

32,137

 

Chicot

Arkansas

74.8%

5,393

 

Fayette

Tennessee

73.0%

21,682

 

Leon

Florida

81.0%

12,341

 

Harrison

Texas

68.1%

21,697

 

Dougherty

Georgia

81.8%

9,424

Warwick

Virginia

76.3%

3,729

 

Concordia

Louisiana

92.8%

9,257

1910

Lowndes

Alabama

88.2%

28,125

 

Issaquena

Mississippi

89.2%

6,146

 

Crittenden

Arkansas

84.6%

19,000

 

Warren

North Carolina

70.3%

12,492

 

Jefferson

Florida

76.2%

13,114

 

Beaufort

South Carolina

84.6%

29,050

 

Lee

Georgia

85.6%

9,992

 

Fayette

Tennessee

65.0%

16,987

 

Tensas

Louisiana

91.5%

15,613

 

Wharton

Texas

84.9%

2,910

 

Issaquena

Mississippi

94.2%

9,946

Nottoway

Virginia

75.9%

7,050

 

Warren

North Carolina

65.2%

13,207

1880

Greene

Alabama

82.8%

18,165

 

Beaufort

South Carolina

86.9%

26,376

 

Chicot

Arkansas

84.0%

8,495

 

Fayette

Tennessee

75.0%

22,702

 

Leon

Florida

85.7%

16,840

 

Marion

Texas

64.2%

6,725

 

Dougherty

Georgia

84.5%

10,670

 

Warwick

Virginia

71.7%

4,334

 

East Carroll

Louisiana

91.4%

11,090

1920

Lowndes

Alabama

86.7%

22,016

 

Issaquena

Mississippi

91.7%

9,174

 

Crittenden

Arkansas

84.1%

24,650

 

Warren

North Carolina

71.8%

16,233

 

Jefferson

Florida

72.6%

10,521

 

Beaufort

South Carolina

91.9%

27,732

 

Lee

Georgia

82.3%

8,977

 

Fayette

Tennessee

69.8%

22,238

 

East Carroll

Louisiana

86.4%

9,701

 

Fort Bend

Texas

80.0%

7,508

 

Issaquena

Mississippi

90.8%

6,915

Nottoway

Virginia

73.0%

8,144

 

Warren

North Carolina

64.0%

13,821

Lowndes

Alabama

85.5%

26,985

 

Beaufort

South Carolina

78.4%

17,454

Chicot

Arkansas

87.8%

10,023

 

Fayette

Tennessee

74.7%

23,526

 

Harrison

Texas

61.7%

26,858

Charles City

Virginia

75.2%

3,603

1890

Leon

Florida

82.4%

14,631

Lee

Georgia

84.2%

7,642

Madison

Louisiana

93.4%

13,204

Issaquena

Mississippi

94.0%

11,579

Warren

North Carolina

69.6%

13,480

Source: Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

312

Chapter 16

represent the state. The mean Republican and Democratic vote was then calculated for all of these counties for each presidential election of the period and presented in Figure 16.10. The mean vote from the selected counties in these eleven states so represented over time presents a slightly altered portrait of African American behavior. And in these counties the critical election is not 1876 but 1888 (the beginning of the Era of Disenfranchisement), the divergent gap between these votes for the party is a bit greater, and in 1920, while the Democratic vote percentage declines, the Republican vote appears stable and continuous from 1916. The point of these findings is that our previous summary statistics that averaged many different counties do not accurately record the diversity and flux, to say nothing of the stability that existed in the different counties under analysis. Put otherwise, not every county in the African American majority group behaved similarly. Table 16.5 and Figure 16.11 (p. 314) provide a similar portrait for the representative white majority counties we selected for the South over this time period. Table 16.6 (p. 314), which covers the six decades (1860–1920) from the enfranchisement of African American males to that of African American females, shows the total number of counties in both the southern and Border States that were 100% white. The table also provides the mean white population in these counties as well as the total population in the most populous of these all-white counties. Immediately, one sees that the state of Texas had several such

counties in every census, with the range running from a low of 3 such counties in 1870 to a high of 36 in 1900, for a mean of 22.7 all-white counties per census over these six decades. And in the Border States, Missouri led the way with 15 such counties in six decades for a mean of 2.5 counties. Many of these exclusively white counties repeat from one decade to the next. Overall in the period of 1860–1920, the South had five states with these counties while there were two Border States. For any given census in Tables 16.4–16.5 and 16.7–16.8 and for any state with multiple all-white counties, the county that is selected to represent the state as having the largest majority of the racial group is the one also with the greatest population. There was never an all-black county in any of these states during the period. Moving our analysis from the regional and state totals to the county level, once again one sees a different set of trends and patterns in these few counties than when one uses the mean of all of the white majority counties throughout the South. Disregarding the anomalous elections in 1868 and 1872, the vote for the Democratic Party in these single counties actually peaks at about 70% of the vote in 1876–1884, then declines until 1892— at which time it basically levels off at just below the 60% level, before declining substantially in 1920. Overall the single counties approach shows the dominance of the Democratic Party in the white counties that is similar to what was shown for all white majority counties. Thus, despite the diversity and stability in the different counties, both methodological approaches, all of the

Figure 16.10  Mean Support for the Democratic and Republican Parties in Largest Majority African American Counties of the South, Presidential Elections, 1868–1920 100% 90% 80%

Percent of Vote

70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

1868

1872

1876

1880

1884

1888

1892

Democratic Party

1896

1900

1904

1908

1912

1916

1920

Republican Party

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611, downloaded November 2006; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.



African American Voting Behavior, 1868–1920 313 Table 16.5  Counties with the Largest White Majorities in Each State of the South, 1860–1920 Censuses Percent White Population

Total White Population

Census

County

State

1860

Winston/ Hancock

Alabama

96.6%

3,454

 

Newton

Arkansas

99.3%

3,369

 

Dade

Florida

96.4%

80

 

Gilmer

Georgia

97.5%

6,554

 

Orleans

Louisiana

85.4%

149,068

 

Jones

Mississippi

87.8%

2,916

 

Watauga

North Carolina

96.3%

4,772

Pickens

South Carolina

78.1%

15,335

Scott

Tennessee

97.9%

3,446

Webb

Texas

100.0%

McDowell

Virginia

Winston/ Hancock

Alabama

 

Newton

Arkansas

 

Brevard/St. Lucie

Florida

Gilmer

Percent White Population

Total White Population

Census

County

State

1890 (Continued)

Pickens

South Carolina

74.8%

12,253

Pickett

Tennessee

99.8%

4,724

Zapata

Texas

100.0%

3,562

Buchanan

Virginia

99.6%

5,843

Winston/ Hancock

Alabama

99.9%

9,547

   

Baxter

Arkansas

100.0%

9,293

 

Lee

Florida

93.9%

2,883

 

Gilmer

Georgia

99.2%

10,121

 

Vernon

Louisiana

87.6%

9,048

1,397

 

Itawamba

Mississippi

90.1%

12,202

100.0%

1,535

 

North Carolina

99.4%

4,317

4,134

 

Graham

99.5%

Pickens

South Carolina

75.2%

14,574

4,365

Pickett

Tennessee

99.8%

5,355

98.4%

1,197

Comanche

Texas

100.0%

23,009

Dickenson

Virginia

100.0%

7,747

Georgia

98.2%

6,527

1910

Alabama

99.6%

12,801

Winn

Louisiana

81.7%

4,045

 

Winston/ Hancock

 

Jones

Mississippi

90.7%

3,005

 

Marion

Arkansas

100.0%

10,203

 

Cherokee

North Carolina

96.3%

7,779

 

Holmes

Florida

89.7%

10,363

 

Oconee

South Carolina

77.0%

8,114

 

Towns

Georgia

99.6%

3,917

4,015

 

Cameron

Louisiana

87.5%

3,750

 

Itawamba

Mississippi

91.8%

13,328

Graham

North Carolina

100.0%

4,749

Pickens

South Carolina

78.6%

19,992

Pickett

Tennessee

99.8%

5,076

Childress

Texas

100.0%

9,538

Buchanan

Virginia

100.0%

12,330

Winston/ Hancock

Alabama

99.4%

14,297

100.0%

10,154

 

     

1870  

     

Scott

1880

1900

 

Tennessee

Zapata

Texas

Buchanan

Virginia

99.8%

99.0% 100.0%

1,488

98.8%

3,730

   

Winston/ Hancock

Alabama

99.6%

4,236

 

Newton

Arkansas

99.9%

6,115

 

Manatee

Florida

96.2%

3,409

 

Gilmer

Georgia

98.5%

8,260

 

Vernon

Louisiana

92.7%

4,783

 

Jones

Mississippi

90.6%

3,469

Marion

Arkansas

 

Graham

North Carolina

99.0%

2,312

Holmes

Florida

92.0%

11,816

Pickens

South Carolina

74.2%

10,673

Dawson

Georgia

100.0%

4,204

Cumberland

Tennessee

Livingston

Louisiana

85.7%

9,976

Oldham

Texas

Buchanan

 

   

1890

 

1920

99.1%

4,496

100.0%

287

Tishomingo

Mississippi

94.0%

14,181

Virginia

99.4%

5,661

Graham

North Carolina

99.9%

4,867

Cullman

Alabama

99.7%

13,401

Pickens

South Carolina

82.6%

23,398

Newton

Arkansas

99.9%

9,944

Unicoi

Tennessee

100.0%

10,116

De Soto

Florida

97.2%

4,805

Mills

Texas

100.0%

9,019

Gilmer

Georgia

99.2%

9,005

Buchanan

Virginia

100.0%

15,441

Vernon

Louisiana

90.9%

5,363

Itawamba

Mississippi

91.6%

10,723

Graham

North Carolina

99.3%

3,288

Source: Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

314

Chapter 16

Figure 16.11  Mean Support for the Democratic and Republican Parties in Largest Majority White Counties of the South, Presidential Elections, 1868–1920 100% 90% 80%

Percent of Vote

70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 1868

1872

1876

1880

1884

1888

1892

1896

Democratic Party

1900

1904

1908

1912

1916

1920

Republican Party

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611, downloaded November 2006; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

Table 16.6  Number of All-White Counties in the South and Border States, 1860–1920

Number of All-White Counties

Mean Population of AllWhite Counties

Population of Most Populous All-White County

Census

Region

State

1860

Border

Missouri

1

2,414.0

2,414

South

Texas

8

432.8

1,397

South

Virginia

1

1,535.0

1,535

Border

Missouri

1

5,004.0

5,004

Border

West Virginia

2

1,841.0

1,952

South

Texas

3

662.3

1,488

Border

Missouri

1

3,441.0

3,441

Border

West Virginia

1

3,460.0

3,460

South

Texas

22

55.0

287

Border

West Virginia

1

4,659.0

4,659

South

Texas

Border

Missouri

South

Texas

South

Virginia

1870

1880

1890

1900

32

371.2

3,562

2

9,500.5

10,840

36

1,387.7

23,009

1

7,747.0

7,747

Number of All-White Counties

Mean Population of AllWhite Counties

Population of Most Populous All-White County

Census

Region

State

1910

Border

Missouri

2

9,725.0

11,443

South

Arkansas

1

10,203.0

10,203

South

North Carolina

1

4,749.0

4,749

South

Texas

28

2,270.6

9,538

Border

Missouri

8

11,580.8

15,436

Border

West Virginia

1

11,562.0

11,562

South

Arkansas

1

10,154.0

10,154

South

Georgia

2

4,070.5

4,204

South

Texas

30

2,181.5

9,019

South

Virginia

1

15,441.0

15,441

1920

Source: Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.



African American Voting Behavior, 1868–1920 315

counties and/or just a single county, reach a near consensus of the power and influence of the Democratic Party in the region and the lessening influence of the African American voter and their party affiliate, the Republican Party. Therefore, in conclusion, the impact of the 1876 presidential election and its resultant Compromise of 1877 was manifold: it shifted party control in the South from Republicans to the Democrats; it placed a specific faction of the Democratic Party in control and in a leadership position of southern politics, i.e., the whites in the African American majorities counties; and it transferred the base of the Republican Party from African Americans Table 16.7  Counties with the Largest Black Majorities in Each of the Border States, 1860–1920 Censuses Percent Black Population

Total Black Population

Delaware

26.9%

Kentucky

53.0%

Charles

Maryland

Howard Kent

Census

County

State

1860

Kent

 

Woodford

 

to whites. Thus, in this region of the nation, whites ended up in the decades following the presidential election of 1876 in the leadership position in both political parties. And this meant the near-complete marginalization of the African American voter. The only party faction in several of the southern states that permitted them some small degree of control and leadership was the ‘Black and Tan’ Republican Party.29 Turning to the Border States and analyzing the four different types of voting behavior in the African American and white majority counties, we find a completely different type of voting behavior. Tables 16.7 and 16.8 list these counties of the largest Table 16.8  Counties with the Largest White Majorities in Each of the Border States, 1860–1920 Censuses Percent Black Population

Total Black Population

Census

County

State

7,474

1860

New Castle

Delaware

84.6%

5,943

 

Johnson

Kentucky

99.1%

5,260

64.9%

10,721

 

Allegany

Maryland

96.0%

27,215

Missouri

37.4%

5,960

Delaware

24.0%

7,164

Fayette

Kentucky

46.9%

Charles

Maryland

59.2%

Howard

Missouri

30.1%

Jefferson

West Virginia

26.4%

Kent

Delaware

24.7%

8,114

Woodford

Kentucky

47.8%

Charles

Maryland

58.5%

Howard

Missouri

28.4%

Jefferson

West Virginia

27.0%

Kent

Delaware

24.6%

8,036

Christian

Kentucky

44.6%

15,231

Charles

Maryland

53.6%

8,136

Howard

Missouri

26.2%

Jefferson

West Virginia

26.5%

1900

Kent

Delaware

23.6%

7,738

 

Christian

Kentucky

43.7%

 

Charles

Maryland

 

Howard

Missouri

 

McDowell

1910  

46,355

Douglas

Missouri

100.0%

2,414

1870

New Castle

Delaware

84.0%

53,323

12,513

 

Johnson

Kentucky

99.5%

7,457

9,318

 

Allegany

Maryland

97.0%

37,370

5,193

Worth

Missouri

100.0%

5,004

3,488

McDowell

West Virginia

100.0%

1,952

Sussex

Delaware

84.2%

30,326

5,642

Morgan

Kentucky

99.6%

8,422

10,848

Garrett

Maryland

99.1%

12,063

5,231

Shannon

Missouri

100.0%

3,441

4,045

Clay

West Virginia

100.0%

3,460

1890

New Castle

Delaware

85.2%

82,817

 

Elliott

Kentucky

99.7%

9,187

 

Garrett

Maryland

98.7%

14,028

4,544

Worth

Missouri

100.0%

8,737

4,116

Clay

West Virginia

100.0%

4,659

1900

New Castle

Delaware

85.2%

93,500

16,597

 

Johnson

Kentucky

100.0%

13,729

54.6%

9,648

 

Garrett

Maryland

99.3%

17,575

22.8%

4,182

 

Schuyler

Missouri

100.0%

10,840

West Virginia

31.8%

5,969

 

Pleasants

West Virginia

99.9%

9,339

Kent

Delaware

23.1%

7,561

1910

New Castle

Delaware

87.3%

107,506

Christian

Kentucky

41.1%

15,956

 

Elliott

Kentucky

100.0%

9,813

 

Charles

Maryland

52.3%

8,572

 

Garrett

Maryland

99.5%

19,998

 

Howard

Missouri

20.1%

3,152

 

Shannon

Missouri

100.0%

11,443

McDowell

West Virginia

30.7%

14,667

Clay

West Virginia

100.0%

10,228

Kent

Delaware

21.8%

6,753

New Castle

Delaware

89.0%

131,914

Christian

Kentucky

36.0%

12,911

Martin

Kentucky

100.0%

7,653

Calvert

Maryland

49.2%

4,789

Garrett

Maryland

99.8%

19,633

Howard

Missouri

15.5%

2,166

Douglas

Missouri

100.0%

15,436

McDowell

West Virginia

26.5%

18,157

Webster

West Virginia

100.0%

11,562

1870

1880

1890

1920

Source: Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

1880

1920

Source: Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

316

Chapter 16

majorities of African American and white populations in the period. The longitudinal patterns and trends in the Border States simply do not correspond to those found in the southern states. Figure 16.12 starts in 1868, a year that the freedmen in the Border States did not have the vote; hence, 1872 is the actual starting point of the freedmen vote. The critical 1876 presidential election immediately reveals itself as the turning point election in the South, but things change thereafter in quite a different direction. Voting behavior in the election of 1896 in the white counties shows support for the Republican Party that exceeds that for the Democratic Party. Republicans received support from the representative white counties in every election from this point to 1920 except for election of 1912. In the representative African American counties the Democratic Party was dominant over Republicans in all of the elections until 1900. Though the Border States were more competitive between the major parties than in the South, they were less so than we found with simple majority African American counties, all of which had disappeared in the Border States by 1920. The presence of African Americans in their representative counties of the region appears to have influenced election outcomes more favorable to the Democratic Party than to Republicans until 1900, when thereafter Republicans are favored. The Republican Party vote in the representative white counties diverged initially from the Democratic Party vote

in these Border States but rebounded to become the dominant vote in these states from 1896 through 1908; it lost its lead to the Democratic Party because of the Progressive Party in 1912, but in 1916 and 1920 the Republican Party rebounded. Finally, note that both parties’ votes stayed within the 40% to 60% voting range, except for the 1868 election and the 1912 election for Republicans. Simply put, the effect of the Compromise of 1877 in the Border States did not endure. Here, the Republican Party stayed both active and competitive, and support in representative white counties kept the Republican Party in the victory column or at least very competitive. In the white majority counties of the Border States, both parties traded dominant positions rather than establishing an enduring one. Thus, while both regions saw 1876 as a pivotal, critical election, the long term impact and influence of the Compromise of 1877 happened in the southern states and not in the Border States. And the eventual outcomes in both regions were quite different in terms of party control and leadership.

Summary and Conclusions Concerning African American Voting from 1868–1920 In concluding, we want to bring to the reader’s attention and understanding that the eleven states of the South were not

Figure 16.12  Mean Support for the Democratic and Republican Parties, by Race, in Largest Majority Counties of the Border States, Presidential Elections, 1868–1920 90% 80% 70%

Percent of Vote

60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 1868

1872

1876

1880

1884

1888

1892

African American counties for Republicans White counties for Republicans

1896

1900

1904

1908

1912

1916

1920

African American counties for Democrats White counties for Democrats

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611, downloaded November 2006 and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.



African American Voting Behavior, 1868–1920 317

monolithic in their response to the 1876 election and the Compromise of 1877. Although all of the states ended up as strong supporters of the Democratic Party and minor supporters of the Republican Party, none of them had moved in unison to this point by 1920. There were great differences and diversity in each state during this long period of fourteen presidential elections. We saw this in looking at single counties. However, Figure 16.13 shows this diversity visually by graphing the Democratic Party support in the South for each of the eleven states for all of the fourteen elections. In that first post–Civil War 1868 election, the highest support for the Democratic Party in the South was in Louisiana and the lowest was in Tennessee. But by 1920 the highest level of support for the Democratic Party was in South Carolina, while the lowest continued to be in Tennessee. And in between these two elections were shifts, changes, rises, and declines. In 1920 only Tennessee was slightly below the 50% mark, but it was well above that level over many of these elections. In Figure 16.14 (p. 318) we see support for the Republican Party by state over time. It starts in 1868 with the highest vote percentage level in Tennessee and the lowest vote percentage in

Louisiana. And it ends in 1920 with the highest vote percentage level in Tennessee and the lowest vote percentage level in South Carolina. Once again there was lots of diversity in the levels of support in each state in every one of these fourteen presidential elections. And in 1912, the Progressive Party affected the Republican Party vote very strongly in all of the southern states. Third parties had a similar impact on the Republican Party in the region in 1892. Visually Figure 16.15 (p. 318) reveals that the Border States support for the Democratic Party did not have the great differences and diversity in fluctuations that occurred in the South, nor did the support reach the high levels seen in the southern states. In fact, there were great differences in the 1868 election before the freedmen obtained the right to vote. But once that right was extended, the freedmen became a force that served to moderate the extreme fluctuations in the Democratic vote, as these states voted tightly together. And by 1920 there was only one state where the Democratic Party remained at the 50% level. Moving to the support for the Republican Party in the Border States, shown in Figure 16.16 (p. 319), one sees as with the Democrats great diversity and differences in the 1868 presidential

Figure 16.13  Support for the Democratic Party in the Southern States, 1868–1920 100% 90%

Percent of Vote for Democratic Party

80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

1868

1872

1876

1880

1884

1888

1892

1896

1900

1904

1908

1912

1916

1920

Election Year Alabama North Carolina

Arkansas South Carolina

Florida

Georgia Tennessee

Louisiana Texas

Mississippi Virginia

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611, downloaded November 2006; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

318

Chapter 16

Figure 16.14  Support for the Republican Party in the Southern States, 1868–1920 80%

Percent of Vote for Republican Party

70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

1868

1872

1876

1880

1884

1888

1892

1896

1900

1904

1908

1912

1916

1920

Election Year Alabama

Arkansas

North Carolina

Florida

South Carolina

Georgia Tennessee

Louisiana Texas

Mississippi Virginia

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611, downloaded November 2006 and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

Figure 16.15  Support for the Democratic Party in the Border States, 1868–1920 100%

Percent of Vote for Democratic Party

90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

1868

1872

1876

1880

1884

1888

1892

1896

1900

1904

1908

1912

1916

1920

Election Year Delaware

Kentucky

Maryland

Missouri

West Virginia

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611, downloaded November 2006 and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.



African American Voting Behavior, 1868–1920 319

Figure 16.16  Support for the Republican Party in the Border States, 1868–1920 70%

Percent of Vote for Republican Party

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0% 1868

1872

1876

1880

Delaware

1884

1888

1892 1896 Election Year

Kentucky

Maryland

1900

1904

Missouri

1908

1912

1916

1920

West Virginia

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611, downloaded November 2006 and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

election due to the freedmen being unable to vote. But at the 1872 election, patterns and trends in Republican voting in each of the five states started to tighten considerably. While no particular Border state voting record was a mirror image of any other Border state, there was a greater degree of similarity and parallelism than within the South. Moreover, the greatest similarity between the two regions came in 1912 when the Progressive Party cut into the Republican vote in all five states at almost an equal level. And by the 1920 election there was near consensus and unity in the voting behavior in four of the five Border States. Only Kentucky fell below the 50% level of support for Republicans. Therefore, one cannot help but conclude that there was a difference and diversity in the long road to disenfranchisement, especially among the southern states.30 But there were also significant regional similarities, but as noted in the previous chapters the differences were greater then the similarities. The Border States had a much more unified pattern and set of trends than was evident in the southern states. And this eventually manifested itself in the fact that once this end point (enfranchisement of women, including African American women) was reached, there was a different percentage of African American registered voters in each one of the eleven southern states. While a singular goal of eliminating the

freedmen from the ballot box was the guiding mantra, a regional pattern persisted and different states arrived at mixed results in terms of the numbers of registered African American voters. Differences and diversity appeared in each one of the elections, and a residuum was left on the voter registration books to carry the suffrage struggle onto the new plateau that came with the enfranchisement of African American women in 1920, with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Notes   1. Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860–1910 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), p. 57.   2. Michael Nelson and John McCardell, Jr., “Editors’ Foreword,” in Michael Holt, By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), p. ix.   3. Holt, p. 248.  4. Ibid.   5. James McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1982) p. 599.   6. Ibid., p. 601.  7. Ibid.   8. Ibid., p. 599.   9. Ibid., p. 600.

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10. On this matter see Ronald King, “Counting the Votes: South Carolina’s Stolen Election of 1876,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History Vol. 32 (Autumn 2001), pp. 169–191, and D.D. Wallace, “The Question of the Withdrawal of the Democratic Presidential Electors in South Carolina in 1876,” Journal of Southern History Vol. 8 (August 1942), pp. 374–385. For information on the other two states see Jerrell Shofner, “Fraud and Intimidation in the Florida Election of 1876,” Florida Historical Quarterly Vol. 42 (April 1964), pp. 321–330, and his “Florida in the Balance: The Electoral Count of 1876,” Florida Historical Quarterly Vol. 48 (October 1968), pp. 122–150; and T. B. Tunnell, Jr., “The Negro, the Republican Party, and the Election of 1876 in Louisiana,” Louisiana History Vol. 7 (Spring 1966), pp. 101–116. For a discussion of the disputed vote in Oregon see Philip Kennedy, “Oregon and the Disputed Election of 1876,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly Vol. 60 (July 1969), pp. 135–144. 11. McPherson, p. 599. 12. Ibid., pp. 599–600. 13. Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), p. 210. 14. Rayford Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York: Collier Books, 1965), pp. 23–47. 15. McPherson, p. 603. 16. Ibid. Several historians have challenged C. Vann Woodward’s influential thesis and asserted that there was no Compromise. See Allan Peskin, “Was There a Compromise of 1877?” in John Herbert Roper, C. Vann Woodward: A Southern Historian and His Critics (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), pp. 150–164; and the reply, C. Vann Woodward, “Communication: Yes, There Was a Compromise of 1877,” Journal of American History Vol. 60 (1973), pp. 63–75. 17. Holt, pp. 239–240. 18. Logan, p. 45. 19. Ibid., p. 21. 20. Richard Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 47. 21. Paul Haworth, The Hayes-Tilden Disputed Presidential Election of 1876 (Massachusetts: General Books, 2009), pp. 35–46; and Keith Ian Polakoff, The Politics of Inertia: The Election of 1876 and the End of Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973). 22. Historians argue that a variant of the Redemption Movement was at work in the Border States just as in the South but using different techniques. See Richard Curry (ed.), Radicalism, Racism, and Party Realignment: The Border States During Reconstruction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969); and John Mohr, Radical Republicans in the North: State Politics during Reconstruction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). For comparison of African American voting behavior in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, in this period and in the twentyyear period before the Civil War, see chapter 7. 23. William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), pp. 105–112.

24. William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979). See also Everette Swinney, “Enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment, 1870–1877,” Journal of Southern History Vol. 28 (May 1962), pp. 202–218. 25. On this point see Ann Gordon, Bettye Collier Thomas, John Bracey, Ariene Avakian, and Joyce Borkman (eds.), African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997). 26. See V.O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics: In State and Nation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984); and C. Vann Woodward, The Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951) and his Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951). 27. Eventually, this base of white Republican supporters would be displaced by one in the African American majority counties; see Louis Seagull, Southern Republicanism (New York: Halsted Press, 1975). 28. On this point see Richard Scher, Politics in the New South: Republicanism, Race, and Leadership in the Twentieth Century, Second Edition (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1997). For a work that does not even acknowledge these realities see Earl and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). 29. Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Republicans: The Politics of the Black and Tans (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1975), pp. 45–150. This study of the “Black and Tan” Republicans is a comprehensive and systematic attempt. However, there are two studies on the “Lily-White” Republicans that offer further insight into the “Black and Tans”: see Thomas Cripps, “The Lily-White Republicans: The Negro, the Party, and the South in the Progressive Era (College Park: PhD Dissertation at University of Maryland, 1967), which covers the movement from 1889 to 1920; and David Lisio, Hoover, Blacks, and Lily-Whites: A Study of Southern Strategies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), which covers the period from Hoover’s 1927 appointment to head up the Special Mississippi Flood Committee through his presidential reelection effort in 1932. This revisionist account seeks to absolve President Hoover of any racism in his repeated efforts to eliminate the “Black and Tan” Republicans in each of the eleven southern states and to send their leaders to jail, in order to leave all of the southern parties completely in the leadership of the Lily-Whites. Partial studies of these intraparty factions in the South can be found in Key, Chapter 13, and Ralph Bunche, The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR, Edited and with an Introduction by Dewey Grantham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), Chapter 16; and in Paul Lewinson, Race, Class, and Party: A History of Negro Suffrage and White Politics in the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932), Chapter 8. 30. For a study on this topic see Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

CHAPTER 17

African American Voting and Non-Voting Behavior in the Era of Disenfranchisement (1888–1908) and Beyond The Literature on the Redemption Movement: A New Linkage to the Era of Disenfranchisement

325

Figure 17.1 Passage of Separate-Coach Laws in the Redeemed Southern States

326

Table 17.1 Elapsed Years from Southern Redemption to New State Constitutions

327

The Era of Disenfranchisement: Elimination of Freedmen Voting Rights

327

Map 17.1 Southern and Border States by Category of Disenfranchisement, 1888–1908

328

Table 17.2 Enactment Years of the Poll Tax, Literacy Test, Grandfather Clause, and Segregation Laws in the South and Border States

329

Table 17.3 Characteristics of Poll Tax Laws in the South, 1890–1918

330

Table 17.4 Characteristics of Literacy Test Laws and Their Alternatives in the South, 1890–1918

331

Table 17.5 Classification of Southern and Border States Grouped by the Stringency of Disenfranchisement Laws, 1890–1920

332

Table 17.6 Presidential Election Turnout Means of Non-Poll Tax and Poll Tax Counties for the South and Border States

332

Figure 17.2 Impact of the Poll Tax in Racial Majority Counties of the Southern and Border States, 1892–1920

333

Table 17.7 Presidential Election Turnout Means of Non-Literacy Test and Literacy Test Counties for the Southern and Border States

333

Figure 17.3 Impact of Literacy Tests in Racial Majority Counties of the South and Border States, 1892–1920

334

Table 17.8 Presidential Election Turnout Means of Non-Grandfather Clause and Grandfather Clause Counties for the South and Border States

334

Figure 17.4 Impact of the Grandfather Clause in Racial Majority Counties of the South and Border States, 1892–1920

335

Table 17.9 Presidential Election Voter Turnout in Non-Poll Tax and Poll Tax Black Counties of the South and Border States, 1892–1920

335

Figure 17.5 Presidential Election Turnout Means of Non-Poll Tax and Poll Tax Black Counties in the South and Border States

336

Table 17.10 Presidential Election Voter Turnout in Non-Literacy Test and Literacy Test Black Counties of the South and Border States, 1892–1920

336

Figure 17.6 Presidential Election Turnout Means of Non-Literacy Test and Literacy Test Black Counties in the South and Border States

337

Table 17.11 Presidential Election Voter Turnout in Non-Grandfather Clause and Grandfather Clause Black Counties of the South and Border States, 1892–1920

337

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Figure 17.7 Presidential Election Turnout Means of Non-Grandfather Clause and Grandfather Clause Black Counties in the South and Border States

338

Table 17.12 Voter Turnout in Southern Counties Imposing the Poll Tax, Literacy Tests, and the Grandfather Clause, 1892–1920

339

Figure 17.8 Comparing the Effects of the Poll Tax, Literacy Tests, and the Grandfather Clause on Voter Turnout in Southern Counties, 1892 –1920

340

Figure 17.9 African American and White Voter Registration in Louisiana, 1867–1964

341

Figure 17.10 African Americans as Percent of Registered Voters in Louisiana, 1900–1948

341

Table 17.13 Longitudinal Analyses of African American Disfranchisement in Louisiana, 1867–1964

342

Table 17.14 Effect of Understanding Clause on Voters in White Majority Counties of Mississippi, 1892

344

Figure 17.11 Understanding Clause Effect on Registering Black and White Voters in Black and White Majority Counties of Mississippi, 1892

345

Maintaining the Era of Disenfranchisement: The White Primaries and Run-Off Primaries in the South

345

Table 17.15 Effect of Understanding Clause on Voters in African American Majority Counties of Mississippi, 1892

346

Table 17.16 Enactment Years of the Direct and White Primaries in the South and Border States, 1888–1915

347

Table 17.17 Year of Run-Off Primary Law Adoption in the South

347

Map 17.2 Southern States that Implemented the White Primary, 1888–1915

348

Rare Data in Georgia, North Carolina, and Oklahoma

349

Table 17.18 Results of Disenfranchisement Referendum in North Carolina by County and Racial Majority, 1900

350

Figure 17.12 Number of Counties by Racial Majority Voting For or Against Disenfranchisement Referendum in North Carolina, 1900

351

Figure 17.13 Percent of Counties by Racial Majority Voting For or Against Disenfranchisement Referendum in North Carolina, 1900

351

Map 17.3 Racial Majority Counties of North Carolina, 1990

352

Figure 17.14 Number of Counties by Racial Majority Voting For or Against Disenfranchisement Referendum in Georgia, 1908

354

Figure 17.15 Percent of Counties by Racial Majority Voting For or Against Disenfranchisement Referendum in Georgia, 1908

354

Table 17.19 Results of Disenfranchisement Referendum in Georgia by County and Racial Majority, 1908

355

Map 17.4 Racial Majority Counties of Georgia, 1908

357

Summary and Conclusions on the Era of Disenfranchisement

359

Table 17.20 Gain or Loss in Number of African American Registered Voters in the South from 1867 to after Disenfranchisement (1888–1908)

360

Figure 17.16 Loss in Number of African American Registered Voters in the South from 1867 to after Disenfranchisement

360

Notes 360



African American Voting and Non-Voting Behavior, 1888–1908 and Beyond 323

L

egal elimination from voting was forced upon the African American electorate during the Era of Disenfranchisement (1888–1908). Historian Michael Perman, writing in the most recent, comprehensive and systematic single “exhaustive study of disfranchisement in its entirety” stated: “The campaign for disfranchisement at the turn of the century was quite possibly one of the most dramatic and decisive episodes in American history. One by one, over a period of two decades, each state in the former Confederacy set in motion complicated and hazardous electoral movements aimed at removing large numbers of its eligible voters.”1 He continued: “These ruthless acts of political surgery preoccupied the region’s citizenry and dominated its political life as constitutional conventions were summoned into existence and constitutional amendments were formulated and then ratified.”2 And he noted that this process of disenfranchisement occurred simultaneously with the rise, implementation, and imposition of segregation, also known as Jim and Jane Crow. Although African American suffrage restrictions can be clearly seen at the end of Reconstruction in the 1876 presidential election—as we have shown previously—this period of disenfranchisement is neither synonymous with nor chronologically continuous with the later disenfranchisement process. Professor Perman insisted that a distinction must be made and understood. His pioneering historical investigation found that: In actuality, the period should be divided into two phases. In the first phase, the vote was manipulated by election laws of various levels of ingenuity and Democratic election officials of varying degrees of criminality. The stage, which was characterized by manipulation of the vote, lasted from 1880 through the early 1890s. In the second phase, the vote was eliminated by constitutional means rather than being manipulated and controlled as before. Disfranchisement, as this phase spanning the early 1890s through 1908 is accurately designated, marked the final stage of a campaign for suffrage reduction aimed primarily at African Americans that had begun at the end of Reconstruction. To distinguish it from the preceding phase of “vote manipulation,” disfranchisement can be described as “voter elimination.”3 Why make this careful distinction between voter restriction and disenfranchisement? Perman hammered away at this point because “historians have assumed that suffrage restriction encompassed deprivation of the vote by violence and statute as well as by constitutional revision.”4 He added further: Finally, little or no distinction has been made between denying the ability to vote at elections and removing the right to vote at registration. In effect, disfranchisement and suffrage restrictions have often been considered virtually interchangeable, or disfranchisement has been regarded as merely another method of restricting the vote. Yet in fact disfranchisement superseded suffrage restriction. It moved the campaign against black voting to a more radical stage in which elimination of the black vote rather than its manipulation or limitation was the objective.5

And the final purpose of this Era of Disenfranchisement was “to ensure the subordination of African Americans and the dominance of the political and economic elite of the Democratic Party.”6 This final phase of elimination legally and effectively implemented permanent non-voting as a feature and characteristic of African American citizenry in the South. Professor Perman’s comprehensive and peerless study provides for new insights and findings about the Era of Disenfranchisement that had not surfaced in the previous voluminous scholarly literature on the subject. It offers (1) a sound and solid definition for the concept of disenfranchisement, (2) a clear and convincing distinction between two separate and distinct stages in the removal of the African American voter from the political process, (3) evidence that these stages are neither continuous nor mirror images of each other, and most importantly, (4) diversity of the disenfranchisement process among the different southern states. Four of the eleven states used limited techniques to disenfranchise. However, despite the breakthrough nature of this work, there are some additional factors and characteristics of this Era that need greater coverage and emphasis, particularly in regard to the African American electorate. In many instances, these factors and characteristics have come to the surface as a consequence of our empirical analysis in Chapter 16, the findings and insights in the Perman book, and some of the recent revisions to the empirically based findings and theories of the Era of Disenfranchisement initially advanced by the late Professor V.O. Key, Jr. Prior to Professor Perman’s important study, Professor Key’s empirical findings and the theories of disenfranchisement generated from those findings advanced in his classic Southern Politics in State and Nation dominated the intellectual stream about disenfranchisement in the disciplines of history, political science, and sociology. Key’s dominance arose with the publication of his classic work in 1949 and continued through subsequent publications that updated and extended his theories, until his death in 1963.7 While the mainstream followed Key’s thinking, slowly and gradually scholars with better measurement techniques and new case-study data began to test sundry aspects of his theories of disenfranchisement and found them inadequate, incomplete, and inaccurate. Another pioneer in this area was historian C. Vann Woodward, whose 1951 publication Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 also “interjected into the study of disfranchisement several interpretative notions that have affected all subsequent approaches to the subject.”8 But, because Professor Woodward’s theories never reached the expansive influence that Key’s did, we will focus on the theories of Professor Key and their revisions over the years. Key’s theory, known as “fait accompli,” claimed that the Era of Disenfranchisement merely legalized a process that had already been accomplished by “violence, intimidation, and vote fraud, and so on.”9 He had a number of supporting hypotheses, including the unimportance of poll taxes. Key declared that “the fiction has prevailed that the poll tax deters Negro participation, but the tax has counted for little in comparison with other restraints.”10 In effect, according to Key’s theory, there was simply nothing to the disenfranchisement process for everything had already been accomplished. But, as Perman argued, such a

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theoretical position that erases “the distinction between legal and nonlegal methods of restricting the vote overlooks another difference—that between statutory and constitutional law.”11 Thus, This difference has to be recognized when trying to understand disfranchisement, for disfranchisement always involved constitutional revision, unlike reducing the vote through laws governing how elections are conducted, which are acts of legislation and therefore statutory in form. Furthermore, disfranchisement around 1900 was aimed specifically at redefining the qualifications for voting and taking away the right to vote, both of which occur in and through constitutions, not statutes.12 The first to challenge Key’s theory was Professor Philip Converse, who did so in an indirect manner when he wrote in 1972 that the Era of Disenfranchisement, which he called the period “from 1890 to 1910,” was primarily a reform era that was fighting fraud and corruption in American elections. Its suffrage restrictions and elimination of the African American and white electorates in the South, he concluded, were simply the “unintended consequences” of these election reforms.13 According to Converse, there was no desire on the part of southern whites to strip African Americans of their voting rights. This first challenge was little more than an apology for the race-based political discrimination of the region, one which flew directly in the face of the facts of southern history while simultaneously absolving southern whites of negative purpose and motives. In the end, Converse’s arguments did not constitute a serious critical assessment of Key’s or Woodward’s disenfranchisement theories. The second, more substantial critique came from one of Woodward’s doctoral students. Historian J. Morgan Kousser, writing in 1973 in the Political Science Quarterly, did a detailed case study of the state of Tennessee, combining archival analyses, to determine when the Tennessee state legislature passed restrictive suffrage laws with a quantitative analysis of election return as well as aggregate census data. He thus generated (1) socio-economic estimates and (2) voter turnout estimates for both the African American and white populations in the state from 1880 to 1908. Professor Kousser’s resultant empirical findings effectively undermined Key’s fait accompli theory. Furthermore, Kousser’s Tennessee case study found that none of Key’s supporting hypotheses—that all whites favored suffrage limitation, that lower-class whites provided the chief impetus and support for it, that the “ins” sought to rob the “outs” of potential black votes, and that a patrician counter-elite unintentionally curtailed turnout—gained much support from the Tennessee example.14 Tennessee passed four restrictive suffrage laws: (1) in the cities, voter registration was required twenty days before elections; (2) a two-box law required separate ballot boxes “for federal and state elections in order to prevent federal supervisors from overseeing state elections”;15 (3) secret ballot law, i.e. the Australian Ballot; and (4) poll tax. All were passed when the Democratic Party took control of both houses of the state legislature in 1889. Therefore, with the passage of these four laws “black turnout declined dramatically in 1890 and remained

very low thereafter. . . . Estimates of Negro turnout after 1896 are approximately zero.”16 And one year later (1974), Kousser’s book The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restrictions and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910, extended his approach to multiple southern states and generated even more findings that eroded Key’s theories of disenfranchisement. This careful two-prong critique of Key by Kousser led to others joining the intellectual upheaval against Key’s theories of disenfranchisement. In 1978, historians Jerrold Rusk and John Stucker used four different statistical tests to evaluate and assess Key’s theories of disenfranchisement. Their study used “four separate analytic tests to determine the influence these laws [restrictive southern election laws] had on the voting rates of each of the southern states.” They added that “the study cover[ed] both presidential and congressional races for every election year in this time period [1880–1918,] investigate[d] the separate effects of each legal change, . . . control[led] for the problem of ‘unique election year stimuli’. . . [and] control[led] for trends in electoral participation caused by factors other than election laws.”17 Therefore, after their four empirical tests they found “very little room for doubt that V.O. Key’s theory of the laws being more ‘form’ than ‘reality’ is decidedly lacking.”18 From their empirical analyses they found that: The southern system of poll tax and literacy test laws was shown . . . to have major effects in influencing and shaping the declining voter turnout curves of the South between 1890 and 1918. The effects of these laws were both immediate and extended over time, with large initial effects coming shortly after the laws were introduced, establishing a lower plateau of voter participation in the years to come. The laws were shown to have effects in both the presidential and congressional races. And it was discovered that, in general, states passing both laws experienced larger declines in voting participation than states passing only one of the laws in the southern system. Of the two laws, the poll tax was shown to have the larger effects. . . . The laws had effects in widely varying situations—in both competitive and noncompetitive states, in both Solid South and Border States. . . . Most states experienced large declines in voter turnout (15 percent to 50 percent).19 Although this work all but shattered Key’s theories of disenfranchisement, these authors did inform the readers that “we have no racial data in our analysis, nor any estimates for such data.”20 This major weakness and limitation, not found in Key and Kousser, left open a serious research avenue. Subsequently, three new works came in quick succession, each of which dealt with Key’s theory of one-party factionalism in the eleven southern states. Yet none of these articles reflected on how these revisions of Key’s theory of southern party factionalism impacted and/or influenced his theories of disenfranchisement. The first work appeared in 1976 on the nature and scope of Florida’s party factionalism. In 1978 a second article tested Key’s theory across the South, and a third work on the entire South appeared in 1983.



African American Voting and Non-Voting Behavior, 1888–1908 and Beyond 325

Finally, a recent work has analyzed all twenty-one of President William Jefferson Clinton’s elections in Arkansas to discern the nature, scope, and significance of his electoral coalitions in that state. It found that Key’s theory about the impact of poll taxes—that they did not really impact African Americans voters—simply did not hold up under several empirical tests. (This was the very first time that the extant racial Arkansas poll tax data, 1957–1964, had been empirically tested. These data simply had gone unnoticed before.) Rather, these taxes were one of the techniques by which states lowered and suppressed African American voting. The Arkansas State Auditor started in 1957 to keep poll tax records by race, and an empirical analysis of that data revealed that “it was not the economic character of the poll tax that hindered African American registration and voting but its temporal character.”21 The chief problem with this time element in the Arkansas poll tax was that “if African Americans did not pay their poll taxes one year before the state primary elections were held, they could not be motivated by the promises and stances of the state’s demagogues and segregationists. It would be too late after the political season started to pay one’s poll taxes.”22 Arkansas poll tax law required payment on October 1 in the year before the scheduling of primary elections. This was long before politicians announced their candidacy and platforms and took issue positions. Hence, the temporal element was a racial disadvantage. Overall, when one combines the findings from the revisionist literature on Key’s theories as well as Perman’s new findings, it is now possible to develop a much more accurate political portrait of this Era of Disenfranchisement and its impact and influence on the African American electorate in the South and Border States. But this new political portrait must also be put into the political context of the Redemption Movement literature, which predates the literature by Key and its revisions as well as the Perman book. Neither Key, nor his revisionists, nor the Perman volume incorporates the data from the Redemption Movement into their empirical analyses.

The Literature on the Redemption Movement: A New Linkage to the Era of Disenfranchisement The two groups of literature we covered in our introduction had limitations: (1) absence of racial data (except some limited estimated data) and (2) absence of the Redemption Movement data. These absences have resulted in epistemological problems at the definitional, conceptual, analytical, and interpretive levels. The value of the scholarship of Key and Woodward, their successors, and Professor Perman notwithstanding, there is more to learn about this Era and the plight of the African American electorate in this period and beyond. The literature on the Redemption Movement is itself quite thin and limited and was essentially generated by historians. It was designed to inform the scholarly community about the decline and collapse of the Reconstruction period and why this promising period for a biracial democracy in the South and Border States ended within a very short period of time, lasting from 1867 to 1877. This Redemption Movement literature merely generated empirical findings about the dates, usually the year, when

each Southern State was “redeemed” from the biracial electoral coalitions of freedmen, scalawags, and carpetbaggers. Historians would find and pinpoint when the indigenous whites—those who supported secession, the Confederacy and its military efforts in the Civil War—retook political control of their states. Thus, each state would be declared “redeemed” in the year in which the former confederates took the governor’s office and had a majority in both houses of the state legislature. Thus, as more and more states were redeemed, it was simply a matter of time before the electoral power of the freedmen would be nullified. But these calendar dates were not used to provide insights into the evolving road to the Era of Disenfranchisement simply because the national date, the “Compromise of 1877,” completely overshadowed the state dates of redemption, which were obscured from the larger intellectual narrative. The long shadow of 1877 obfuscated several pertinent facts. First, the state dates of redemption translated into the requisite legislative power to enact restrictive suffrage legislation to suppress the freedmen’s new voting rights. Failure to use these states’ redemption dates impacted the research strategy used by Kousser as well as Rusk and Stucker, all of whom started their analyses with the 1880 presidential election. But the 1880 date hides the power and the use of the redeemed state legislatures to engender suffrage restrictions many years before the 1880 election. Only the last three southern states to be “redeemed”—Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina—experienced this white takeover after the 1877 Compromise. Moreover, nothing actually happened in 1880 of substance legislatively either at the state or the national levels. Thus, it is a false beginning, because it suggests that with the federal troops gone the states now had legislative power to do what they wanted. But this is not true because even the presence of federal troops did not stop these redeemed state legislatures from making public policy. Professor Frank Williams, Jr., in his 1952 study of the poll tax, made a remark that has been taken almost at face value: “From the end of Reconstruction to 1890 there had been no legal restrictions upon universal manhood suffrage in any of the southern states except Georgia and, for a brief period, Virginia.”23 Professor Kousser’s first critical article proved that this was not true for Tennessee and Florida, in addition to the two different examples that Professor Williams himself found. Kousser has written: “the restrictive devices which Florida and Tennessee employed actually preceded the Mississippi convention, and although not as complex, were almost as effective as the Magnolia state’s regulations in curtailing Negro voting. . . . The drive for restriction in Tennessee was typical of the largely neglected, but extremely significant acts of legislative suffrage contractions.”24 Beyond these four states that enacted restrictive suffrage legislation well before the beginning of 1890, one must also consider “South Carolina’s eight-box law of 1882” that became the model for “Florida’s multi-box election law of 1884.”25 All of this restrictive suffrage legislation came after the states’ southern white political leadership regained political control of the states’ political process. Thirdly, Redemption did not merely include restrictive election laws. There were reapportionment, redistricting, and gerrymandering laws, which were just as devastating and

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detrimental to the freedman’s vote as the restrictive election laws. Legal means for manipulating the freedmen’s vote included packing the freedmen voters into a single congressional district or dispersing their concentrations into multiple white congressional districts. Either way, the processes legally reduced the number of African American congressmen. On this matter Professor Perman found that in South Carolina, those heavily African American populated areas of the state “were gerrymandered into a Seventh Congressional District” that only allowed the election of one African American congressman at a time. A similar gerrymander occurred in North Carolina’s “Second Congressional District” and in the “notorious . . . ‘Shoestring Sixth’ District in the Mississippi Delta.”26 This clever redistricting gave whites all of the congressional seats in each state except one. It basically continued until the arrival of the Era of Disenfranchisement when even the last one in North Carolina disappeared and merged into a white congressional district. At this point, the freedmen voters had no more descriptive representation in Congress. Finally, Redemption allowed the recaptured state legislatures and state governors to pass and implement restrictive civil rights laws. These laws became known as segregation or Jim and Jane Crow laws. Professor Perman, one of the few scholars to treat this restriction in conjunction with disenfranchisement since the two things occurred almost simultaneously, writes that “segregation emerged and was implemented in a very different manner” than disenfranchisement. “It occurred gradually over several decades following emancipation. . . . The characteristics of the emerging system were so imprecise and its ultimate form was so dimly perceived that people at the time had no term at hand to describe

it. ‘Separation’ was not generally employed.”27 All of this started with the “enactment of these separate-coach laws” and then it expanded into “waiting rooms at railroad stations, steamboats, and street railway cars,” eventually to “public parks, restrooms, and ticket offices,” and finally into “elevators, movie theaters, and drinking foundations,” houses, residential areas, cemeteries, and all walks of life.28 Passage of such restrictive civil rights laws after Redemption occurred in two distinct waves. “The first group appeared around 1890 and the second around 1900. The initial cluster consisted of Florida (1887); Mississippi (1888); Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Tennessee (1890); and Arkansas (1891). In the second grouping were South Carolina (1898), North Carolina (1899), Virginia (1900), and Maryland (1904).”29 Analyzing the patterns that emerged from these two groupings, Perman noted that “[a] ll except the Deep South states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and perhaps Mississippi enacted separate-coach laws in close relation to their drive for disfranchisement. . . . Despite developing independently at other times, social segregation and suffrage restrictions converged with the enactment of separate-coach laws and constitutional disfranchisement.”30 Figure 17.1 provides a way to visualize over time when these redeemed Southern and Border States launched their system of segregation and Jim and Jane Crow. This process clearly began before the constitutional disenfranchisement process, continued when it started, and stopped just before the constitutional process itself halted. Significantly, the figure shows that in Mississippi, which is believed to have initiated the state-based constitutional system of disenfranchisement, the state legislature passed its restrictive civil rights law first—before it passed

Figure 17.1  Passage of Separate-Coach Laws in the Redeemed Southern States 5

Alabama Georgia Louisiana Tennessee

Number of Separate-Coach Laws

4

3

2 North Carolina

Florida Mississippi

1

Virginia

South Carolina

Arkansas

Maryland

0 1887

1888

1889

1890

First Wave

1891

1892

1893

1894

1895

1896

Year

1897

1898

1899

1900

1901

1902

Second Wave

Sources: Adapted from Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 247–248.

1903

1904



African American Voting and Non-Voting Behavior, 1888–1908 and Beyond 327

its restrictive suffrage law. In fact, most of the states in this time period followed the very same path. Hence, for analysts— whether political scientists, historians, or sociologists—not to factor civil rights restriction into their evaluation and assessment of disenfranchisement at the logical and/or quantitative level significantly weakens their data findings and scholarly interpretations. The Redemption Movement variable is necessary to properly describe and explain the Era of Disenfranchisement, even though the two eras are distinct, as Perman explains. Table 17.1 offers a good example of how vital it is to factor in the Redemption variable to the Era of Disenfranchisement. The table shows the years when each of the southern states were “redeemed” and the years when the southern whites in control of these governments and state legislatures rewrote and adopted new state constitutions. The initial southern state constitutions mandated by the Four Military Reconstruction Acts of 1867 to 1868 and approved by the region’s biracial electorates were simply set aside. Among those six states that took this step, the length of time that it took to abandon these biracial state constitutions ran from a high of seven years in Georgia to less than one year in Arkansas, with a mean of 2.7 years. More importantly, southern whites in many states immediately decided that they would not live or be governed by any legal document which they themselves did not author and create without federal oversight or the input of other races (even though the freedmen had been a minority at the Reconstruction conventions). This nearly instant action suggested or at least provided a clue that more drastic

Table 17.1  Elapsed Years from Southern Redemption to New State Constitutions

Year of Redemption

Year New State Constitution Adopted

Elapsed Years

Tennessee

1869

1870

1

Georgia

1870

1877

7

North Carolina

1870

1875

5

Virginia

1870

*

 

Alabama

1874

1875

1

Arkansas

1874

1874

0

Texas

1874

*

 

Mississippi

1875

*

 

Florida

1877

*

 

Louisiana

1877

1879

2

South Carolina

1877

*

 

State

Mean number of years from redemption to new state constitution

2.7

Sources: Adapted from Rayford Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York: Collier Books, 1965), p. 21; Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 70–71; and Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 337–402. * These states did not immediately create new state constitutions but instead passed some type of restrictive suffrage legislation, including the multi–ballot box laws of Florida and South Carolina in the 1880s.

political and legal restrictions were in the offing in the region’s future. These came in the Era of Disenfranchisement. Therefore, Professor Williams’ declaration that “from the end of Reconstruction to 1890 there had been no legal restriction upon universal manhood suffrage in any of the southern states except Georgia and, for a brief period, Virginia”31 is simply historically inaccurate and dangerously misleading. At its best, this assertion is an overemphasis and overstatement, and at its worst it is simply wishful thinking and an apology for the illegal political behavior and legislation of southern states. In 1952 when he wrote this statement, the works of both V.O. Key, Jr., and C. Vann Woodward had already been published but neither of their works is noted in his footnotes, suggesting that Williams was either surprisingly ignorant of this field of study or deliberately selective in the facts on which he based his claims. And the fact that he equated one aspect of disenfranchisement, the poll tax, with disenfranchisement in its entirety should have suggested caution to those who were persuaded by his assertion. Yet long afterward he was still quoted.

The Era of Disenfranchisement: Elimination of Freedmen Voting Rights The Redemption Movement, which put southern whites back in control of southern governments, began at different times in different states. The elimination of African American elected officials at all levels of southern governments—congressional, state, county, and local—also empowered whites at those same levels. Such actions also made it unnecessary for some of the eleven southern states to institutionalize disenfranchisement. Thus, while there was an “Era of Disenfranchisement,” a specific time period when voting restrictions were written into state constitutional law, all of the eleven southern states did not take the same actions. Only in seven of the eleven southern states did constitutional disenfranchisement occur. Suffrage restrictions came into existence in the other four southern states but not via state constitutions. Professor Kousser commented in his very first article on this subject matter that “[s]cholars have almost universally followed the contemporary pattern by concentrating on these seven states in their analyses of suffrage restriction. They have paid considerably less attention to the four Southern states which adopted simpler, mainly statutory limits on the electorate—Arkansas, Texas, Florida, and Tennessee.”32 Map 17.1 indicates the three different levels of voter disenfranchisement employed in the Southern and Border States during the period when the elimination of freedmen voters was occurring. Four of the states, as we have noted, used statutes passed in the state legislatures to curtail and depress freedmen voting, and this method worked so well that they never used the more complex constitutional procedure. Seven states, a nearly two-thirds majority, used the more complex procedure, which required calling a constitutional convention, writing the new state constitution, and then (in some cases) getting it ratified by the citizens. However, this Map also shows that the Border States did not use either of the two methods of restriction undertaken by the Southern States. The Democratic Party in Maryland on

328

Chapter 17

Map 17.1  Southern and Border States by Category of Disenfranchisement, 1888–1908

MN

NY WI

SD

MI

WY 0

100

NE

OH

IN

IL Missouri

KS

NJ

PA

IA

200

miles

CO

VT NH MA CT RI

ND

MT

West Virginia

Delaware Virginia

Maryland

Kentucky North Carolina Tennessee

OK

South Carolina

Arkansas

NM

Georgia Alabama Texas

0

100

200

miles

Mississippi

Florida

Louisiana Southern and Border States by Category of Disenfranchisement No Statutory Limitations (5) State Constitution (7) Statutory Limitation (4) Sources: Adapted from J. Morgan Kousser, “Post-Reconstruction Suffrage Restrictions in Tennessee: A New Look at the V. O. Key Thesis,” in Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 68 (December 1973), pp. 655–656; and Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 322. Note: Disenfranchisement restrictions consisted of poll taxes and literacy tests, with some states having grandfather clauses. These restrictions were implemented through state constitutional conventions and by the less complex route of legislative statutes.

several occasion tried vigorously to disenfranchise its freedmen. Perman has written that “Maryland is rarely discussed in the context of the southern disfranchisement campaigns, yet the state’s political life was completely preoccupied with the question of suffrage throughout the first decade of the twentieth century.” He added: In 1905, the Poe amendment was submitted for ratification. After that effort failed, two more attempts were made, in 1909 and in 1911 when the Straus and Digges amendments, respectively, were formulated, although they too were defeated. In no other state was the struggle for constitutional disfranchisement so protracted or so disastrous for its proponents.33 Thus, Map 17.1 allows us to see where disenfranchisement took place as well as the two different levels of restriction used in the southern region. Our next concern then must be with the different means whereby the disenfranchisement process was implemented. Put otherwise, exactly what constituted disenfranchisement, i.e. the means to eliminate freedmen voters?

Table 17.2 shows the three main devices used to strip the freedmen of their voting rights. The first was a poll tax, and every state in the South used this device. The tax was a levy placed upon every citizen before he or she could vote. This device had both exceptions and different degrees of severity. For instance, some states merely required a single payment; other states required a cumulative payment when a person had missed paying at an earlier election. The four states that did not use a new state constitution put the poll tax device in place legislatively. The second device, the literacy test, was adopted by the same seven states that used the state constitution procedure. The four states that used state statutes did not require the literacy test. Again, there were different types of literacy tests and different types of options. Finally, the “grandfather clause” was the third device; it sought to accomplish a two-fold objective: (1) preventing the eligible pool of voting age freedmen from registering to vote and (2) providing an alternative for voting age whites to register. As a disenfranchising tool it was severe upon the freedmen and quite successful in allowing voting age whites to register. This clause required the voter to prove that before some particular



African American Voting and Non-Voting Behavior, 1888–1908 and Beyond 329 Table 17.2  Enactment Years of the Poll Tax, Literacy Test, Grandfather Clause, and Segregation Laws in the South and Border States

State

Poll Tax

Literacy Test

Grandfather Clause

Segregation Laws*

1908

1890

South Georgia

1802

1908

Florida

1890

Mississippi

1890

Tennessee

1890

Arkansas

1894

South Carolina

1896

1896

Louisiana

1898

1898

1898

1890

North Carolina

1900

1902

1902

1899

Alabama

1902

1902

1902

1890

Texas

1904

Virginia

1904

1887 1892

1888 1890 1891 1898

1907 1902

1902

1900

Border States Kentucky

 

Delaware

 

Maryland

1904

Missouri

 

West Virginia

 

 

 

 

Sources: Adapted from Jerrold G. Rusk and John J. Stucker, “The Effect of the Southern System of Election Laws on Voting Participation: A Reply to V. O. Key, Jr.,” in Joel H. Silbey, Allan Bogue, and William H. Flanigan (eds.), The History of American Electoral Behavior (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), Table 6.1, p. 209; and Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 231–234. * Segregation laws are not of themselves a disenfranchising device.

date—such as 1866—their parents or grandparents had voted. The date was in every case prior to freedmen suffrage, thereby excluding African Americans from utilizing it. Because this device did not mention race specifically, it skirted the Fifteenth Amendment, even though it disenfranchised all of the freedmen and granted nearly all whites (excluding recent immigrants) the right to vote. Moreover, how one proved that his relatives voted before 1866 was left up to the local white registrar. Five states used this device. Again, the four states that used only legislative statutes did not employ this device, and neither did Mississippi or South Carolina. Collectively, these three devices were the dominant procedures that constituted disenfranchisement. Four states only used one of these devices, while two states, Mississippi and South Carolina, used two devices. Five states, slightly less than a majority, used all three of these devices. Before assessing the effectiveness of these different packages of exclusion, we need to further describe the specific characteristics and features of these three devices. The final column in Table 17.2 lists the years that southern states also enacted different types of laws that segregated African

Americans from whites. This timeline for segregation laws will allow us to see if there is a relationship between disenfranchisement and segregation laws, i.e., Jim and Jane Crow. The pioneering historian of this comparative analysis is Professor Perman, who wrote: “disfranchisement . . . had a beginning and an end. . . . Segregation emerged and was implemented in a very different manner. It occurred gradually over several decades following emancipation.”34 He added: “because they arose from a pervasive unease rather than a particular episode, these state laws were not enacted simultaneously. Nevertheless, the incidence of their passage was not random because they emerged in two distinct waves. The first group appeared around 1890 and the second around 1900.”35 And when one analyzes the tabular data, although initially “this chronology [may appear] rather jumbled and random, there was in fact a pattern.” This time linked pattern and relationship that emerges show that: All except the Deep South states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and perhaps Mississippi enacted separatecoach laws in close relation to their drive for disfranchisement. Usually, they were passed in the same legislature that issued the call for a convention or formulated an amendment [to disenfranchise]. In those cases where this did not happen, the connection with disfranchisement was nevertheless quite explicit.36 Analyzing the relationship and connection in Georgia, legal scholar Laughlin McDonald found that: In an ongoing effort to draw racial distinctions with ever-increasing rigidity, the legislature passed laws in 1891 requiring all railroads doing business in the state to provide Jim Crow, or segregated, cars for whites and colored passengers. Violations were a misdemeanor. Streetcar conductors were also required to separate white and colored passengers “as much as practicable” and were given police power to enforce segregation.37 Thus, while the states’ segregation laws in the Deep South did not come at the same time as their disenfranchisement laws, the majority of southern state laws did. In states like Georgia, whose segregation laws predated their disenfranchisement laws, the first laws helped to lay the groundwork for their forthcoming disenfranchisement laws.38 Hence, in the final analysis there was a co-relative relationship, in varying degrees depending on the state, between the Jim and Jane Crow laws and disenfranchisement. And these two groups of laws influenced each other, with the end result being a second-class citizenship for the African American electorate. Table 17.3 (p. 330) gives us these characteristics for each of the eleven southern states. The two columns titled “Age Liability” show the time span over which an individual was liable to pay the tax. A prospective freedmen voter in Mississippi was required to pay the tax beginning at his 21st birthday and pay it through his 60th birthday. In Alabama the freedmen voter would pay the poll tax over a much shorter period of time, from his 21st birthday to

330

Chapter 17

Table 17.3  Characteristics of Poll Tax Laws in the South, 1890–1918 Age Liabilitya

Proof of Tax Payment

Payment Dates

$4.00

Voter

By Feb. 1 before election

Entire period of liability

$36.00

State

Oct. 1–Feb. 1 before election

None

None

Voter

By Feb. 1 before election

$1.50

Three years preceding election

$4.50

State

At least six months before election

$1.29

None

None

Unknown

By Mar. 1 before election

 

$1.00

None

None

Voter

Jan. 1–Jul. 1 of year prior to election

21

 

$1.00

Two years preceding election

$2.00

Unknown

At least 30 days before election

21

60

$1.00

Entire period of liability

None

Unknown

By Apr. 1 before election

Louisiana

21

60

$1.00

Two years preceding election

$2.00

Voter

By Dec. 31 before election

South Carolinad

21

60

$1.00

None

None

Voter

At least six months before election

Tennessee

21

 

$1.00

None

None

State or Voter

At least 30 days before election

State

Over

Under

Annual Rate

Mississippi

21

60

$2.00

Two years preceding election

Alabama

21

45

$1.50

Texas

21

60

$1.50

Virginia

21

 

North Carolina

21

50

Arkansas

21

c

Florida

Georgia

b

Maximum State Cumulation

Cumulative Provision

Sources: Adapted from Jerrold G. Rusk and John J. Stucker, “The Effect of the Southern System of Election Laws on Voting Participation: A Reply to V. O. Key, Jr.,” in Joel H. Silbey, Allan Bogue, and William H. Flanigan (eds.), The History of American Electoral Behavior (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), Table 6.2, p. 213. a

The “age liability” category refers only to males since women’s suffrage was not enacted in the South until 1920.

b

Arkansas’s poll tax was inoperative in the 1906 and 1908 elections.

c

Florida changed to a noncumulative law in 1896. It defined the age liability as males over 21 and under 55.

d

The law listed for South Carolina was the one used in the 1898–1918 period. In 1896, South Carolina had a slightly different law, defining the age liability as males over 21 and under 55.

his 45th birthday. The fourth column indicates the amount that each person had to pay each year. The amount ranged from $2.00 in Mississippi to only $1.00 in Arkansas and five other states. Thus, the majority of states required only $1.00 payment. The fifth and sixth columns tell about the cumulative provision, which required that the individual pay for previous years’ missed poll taxes in addition to the tax for the upcoming election. Alabama had the most burdensome cost where the maximum amount that the state could collect stood at $36.00. The lowest amount fell in those six states—Texas, North Carolina, Arkansas, Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee—that did not have a cumulative provision. The majority of southern states did not have a cumulative provision, but those that had it thereby ensured that missing the vote one year made it harder to vote the next. The seventh column addresses who should provide proof of the payment of the poll tax, the individual or the state. Five states required the individual freedman voter to bring his poll tax receipt with him as proof. The burden was on the individual, and since many freedmen did not have a habit of keeping records or receipts, they would lose them in the long interval between the tax and the election and could not vote. Two states would provide proof. The state auditor or tax collector would “prepare lists of voters who had paid the tax to the election registrar,” and if the freedman’s name appeared on the list he was eligible to vote. Arkansas did not prepare separate lists broken down by the race of the poll tax receipts until 1957 and continued that practice until 1964. Before then, both black and white poll tax payers were put on the very same list, mostly because Arkansas and Texas never compiled voter registration lists. In both states, the poll tax list served as the voter registration list. Finally, in the state of Tennessee either the state or the individual could offer

proof. And there were three states where the law was completely ambiguous about who was responsible for providing proof, leaving the matter up to the white registrar. The final column shows the dates for each state when the poll tax payment was due. On this matter V.O. Key, Jr., found that “in most states the payment date was deliberately fixed far in advance of the voting to reduce the number of voters.” At the high end were Arkansas and Louisiana, which required payment a full year in advance, while at the lower end were Florida and Tennessee that “allowed payment up to thirty days before the election.”39 Table 17.4 provides the characteristics and features for the literacy test laws and the alternatives that could be used by voters unable to satisfy this test. Seven states required a literacy test, and six of these seven states in two different time periods developed and refined this law. Only Mississippi did not modify their test after a time, and only Mississippi lacked a writing component in the final form of their law. The “understanding alternative”— found originally in four states, though later dropped by South Carolina and Virginia—was a loophole allowed by local white registrars to have the voter verbally explain the clause of the Constitution to their satisfaction. Somehow the freedmen voters could not quite provide a satisfactory verbal answer. Another loophole option permitted potential voters to use the “grandfather clause” to get around the literacy test. Five of the seven states allowed this second option to get around the literacy test requirement. And if the first two options were not feasible, a third option in the form of a property requirement (i.e., owning about $300 of property) allowed the individual to vote without taking the literacy test. Some three of the seven states allowed this third loophole alternative to the literacy test.



African American Voting and Non-Voting Behavior, 1888–1908 and Beyond 331

Table 17.4  Characteristics of Literacy Test Laws and Their Alternatives in the South, 1890–1918

Southern States

Understanding Reading Writing Alternative

Grandfather Clause Property Alternative Alternative

Alabama 1902 1904–1918

  X X

  X X

     

  X  

  X X

Georgiaa 1908–1914 1916–1918

  X X

  X X

  X X

  X  

  X X

Louisiana 1898 1900–1918

  X X

  X X

     

  X  

     

Mississippi

X

 

X

 

 

North Carolina 1902–1908 1910–1918

  X X

  X X

     

  X  

     

South Carolina 1896 1898–1918

  X X

    X

  X  

     

    X

Virginia 1902 1904–1918

  X  

    X

  X  

  X  

     

Counts of Qualifications

12

10

5

5

5

Sources: Adapted from Jerrold G. Rusk and John J. Stucker, “The Effect of the Southern System of Election Laws on Voting Participation: A Reply to V. O. Key, Jr.,” in Joel H. Silbey, Allan Bogue, and William H. Flanigan (eds.), The History of American Electoral Behavior (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), Tables 6.1 and 6.3, pp. 209 and 216. Georgia, unique among the states in its application of understanding alternatives, allowed only people unable to read and write because of physical disability to use the understanding alternative. However, Georgia also provided a loophole which stated that anyone understanding the duties and obligations of citizenship under a republican form of government and being of good character could also qualify for the vote even if they were not physically disabled. a

Finally, although not shown in Table 17.4, was a fourth option: available in a few states was the “good character” clause, which had to be determined by the local registrar.40 This last clause left a huge amount of discretion to local white registrars. Such powers clearly disadvantaged the freedmen voters given the biases and prejudices of the local southern white public officials. Having now covered all three aspects of the disenfranchisement laws, as well as their key features and characteristics, we can turn to the stringency of these laws. Table 17.5 (p. 332) shows that three of the Border States (Kentucky, Maryland, and West Virginia) were the only non-stringent states, i.e., states with no disenfranchisement devices. (The source did not provide information on Delaware or Missouri.) This table also shows the percentage of the African American population in these states in 1890; the mean for these Border States stood at 14.1%. States in the South where there was only one disenfranchisement device implemented included Arkansas, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas. African Americans made up 25.2% of the population of these low stringent states. Then, in the moderately stringent states, i.e., states with two devices, one finds the Carolinas, North Carolina and South Carolina, with African Americans at

45.1% of their combined populations. Finally, in the five highly stringent states—those with three or more disenfranchisement devices—the overall African American population rose to almost half (46.7%). This group of states included Mississippi (57.6%) and Louisiana (50.4%), following South Carolina (59.8%), with the second and third largest percentages of African Americans, respectively. Thus, there is a correspondence in the number of disenfranchisement devices that were implemented in the southern states and the proportion of African American population. The greater the share of African Americans in a southern state’s population, the greater was the number of disenfranchisement devices implemented to suppress African American suffrage. On the nature, scope, and severity of these disenfranchisement laws, Rusk and Stucker, after empirically testing the laws, declared that “states passing both laws [literacy and poll tax] experienced larger declines in voting participation than states passing only one of the laws in the southern system. Of the two laws, the poll tax was shown to have the larger effects, although both laws had sizable effects in their own right when viewed separately.”41 Thus, the poll tax requirement was effective, contrary to Key’s theory, and just about as effective as the other devices. For the freedmen voters, both the economic cost to people just out of slavery as well as the temporal element significantly strained their ability to pay, keep receipts, and adjust to the delay between payment and voting. The Era of Disenfranchisement effectively took away the suffrage rights granted by the Four Military Reconstruction Acts and the Fifteenth Amendment.

The Impact of the Three Disenfranchisement Devices on Freedmen Voting in Presidential Elections Beginning with the 1892 presidential election, the first in which some of the southern states had their poll tax device in place, Table 17.6 (p. 332) covers the eight elections through 1920. The table displays voter turnout percentages for all the southern and Border States counties, broken down by whether they charged a poll tax, and shows the differences in voter turnout between the two categories of poll tax usage. In addition, the table provides the actual number of counties in each of the two categories as well as the grand total of counties in both regions. These data are without any racial breakdown. The trend across the non-poll tax and poll tax counties was an ever-widening gap over these eight presidential elections. Non-poll tax counties had a higher mean turnout than the poll tax counties. In these counties, the trend was nearly a straight linear decline with each ensuing presidential election. The apparent overall decline in southern and Border States turnout was almost entirely due to these poll tax counties. Figure 17.2 (p. 333) provides a visual presentation of the impact that one disenfranchisement device, the poll tax, had in counties of the southern states differentiated by their racial majorities. Both lines of the figure run nearly parallel to one another and show declining voter participation in both African American majority counties and white majority counties. Voter participation declined by half in white majority counties, declining from 55.4% of eligible registered voters in 1892 down to 27.1% in 1920. There was an even steeper decline in African American majority counties, where the percentage of voters participating dropped

332

Chapter 17

Table 17.5  Classification of Southern and Border States Grouped by the Stringency of Disenfranchisement Laws, 1890–1920

Non-Stringent States (0 devices)

African American Percent of Population 1890

Kentucky

Low Stringent States (1 device)

African American Percent of Population 1890

Moderately Stringent States (2 devices)

African American Percent of Population 1890

Highly Stringent States (3+ devices)

African American Percent of Population 1890

14.4%

Arkansas

27.4%

North Carolina

34.7%

Alabama

44.8%

Maryland

20.7%

Florida

42.5%

South Carolina

59.8%

Georgia

46.7%

West Virginia

 4.3%

Tennessee

24.4%

 

Louisiana

50.4%

 

Texas

21.8%

 

Mississippi

57.6%

 

 

 

 

Virginia

38.4%

5 States

46.9%

3 States

14.1%

4 States

25.2%

2 States

45.1%

Sources: Adapted from Jerrold Rusk and John Stucker, “The Effect of the Southern System of Election Laws on Voting Participation: A Reply to V. O. Key, Jr.,” in Joel Silbey, Allan Bogue, and William Flanigan (eds.), The History of American Electoral Behavior (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 219 and 246; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer file] ICPSR ed., http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), accessed June 14, 2009.

Table 17.6  Presidential Election Turnout Means of Non-Poll Tax and Poll Tax Counties for the South and Border States Election Years Poll Tax Status South and Border State Counties

1892

1896

1900

1904

1908

1912

1916

1920

67.3%

71.9%

58.9%

43.7%

46.3%

42.7%

47.3%

38.9%

Non-Poll Tax Counties

73.9%

87.5%

78.3%

89.8%

78.4%

87.4%

95.2%

83.4%

Poll Tax Counties

46.7%

43.2%

36.7%

27.8%

30.1%

27.3%

31.3%

23.5%

Difference Values

27.3%

44.3%

41.6%

62.1%

48.3%

60.1%

63.9%

59.9%

1,322

1,332

1,325

1,346

1,373

1,387

1,402

1,412

Total Number of Counties Number of Non-Poll Tax Counties

973

869

705

316

391

317

317

317

Number of Poll Tax Counties

349

463

620

1,030

982

1,070

1,085

1,095

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer file] ICPSR ed. Http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), accessed December 2002; Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer file] ICPSR ed., http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), accessed June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

from 33.8% to just 10.0%. Implementation of the poll tax device in the southern states is strongly associated with a depression in the overall mean in the South and Border States. Overall, while the poll tax brought down voter participation in both racial majority communities, the effect was more severe in African American majority counties than in white majority counties. Table 17.7 provides the voter turnout mean and percentage differences for counties with and without literacy tests in the South and Border States in each of eight presidential elections. Here, one sees a general decline in voter turnout for presidential elections from 1892 to 1920. The mean of the turnout began with the election of 1892 at 67.3%, rose in the next election to 71.9%, before concluding an undulating decline with a turnout of 38.9% in the election of 1920. Thus, the tabular finding here is that literacy tests depressed the mean turnout in presidential elections not much in 1892 and 1896 but clearly in each successive election. Figure 17.3 (p. 334) further differentiates the impact of literacy tests in the southern and Border State regions by showing voter turnout percentages in African American and

white majority counties. Between 1892 and 1920 voter turnout in both groups of racial majority counties dropped slightly, in white majority counties from 26.9% to 23.0% and in African American majority counties from 14.2% to 9.1%. In between the elections of 1892 and 1920 there were nearly parallel rises and dips in voter turnout in the two racial majority groups of counties. Voter turnout in counties with literacy tests began and was maintained below the 50% level in both sets of counties, whereas in counties that imposed the poll tax voter turnout declined significantly, having started out above 50% in white majority counties. Finally Table 17.8 (p. 334) indicates how the grandfather clause impacted the turnout mean in the South and Border States. In 1915 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Guinn and Beals vs. the United States that the grandfather clause was discriminatory in terms of the registration of African American voters. The Court found that the grandfather clause served to enfranchise white voters while it was set aside in opportunities to register African American voters. Hence, there is a need to assess



African American Voting and Non-Voting Behavior, 1888–1908 and Beyond 333

Figure 17.2  Impact of the Poll Tax in Racial Majority Counties of the Southern and Border States, 1892–1920 60%

Presidential Election Votes as Percent of Registered Voters

55.4%

54.6%

50%

46.0%

40%

33.1%

27.3%

30%

34.6%

34.3%

33.8%

31.2%

27.1%

22.0% 17.9%

20%

16.4%

17.4%

15.5%

10%

10.0%

0% 1892

1896

1900

1904

1908

1912

1916

1920

Election Year African American Majority Counties

White Majority Counties

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer file] ICPSR ed. http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), accessed December 2002; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical , Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer file] ICPSR ed., http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), accessed June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

Table 17.7  Presidential Election Turnout Means of Non-Literacy Test and Literacy Test Counties for the Southern and Border States Election Years Literacy Test Status

1892

1896

1900

1904

1908

1912

1916

1920

South and Border State Counties

67.3%

71.9%

58.9%

43.7%

46.3%

42.7%

47.3%

38.9%

Non-Literacy Test Counties

70.3%

77.5%

66.4%

53.4%

61.7%

57.8%

63.3%

58.0%

Literacy Test Counties

18.3%

24.3%

18.6%

25.5%

26.4%

24.0%

27.4%

19.0%

Difference Values

51.9%

53.2%

47.9%

27.9%

35.3%

33.9%

35.9%

39.0%

1,322

1,332

1,325

1,346

1,373

1,387

1,402

1,412

1,247

1,221

1,152

892

772

778

787

787

75

111

173

454

601

609

615

625

Total Number of Counties Number of Non-Literacy Test Counties Number of Literacy Test Counties

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer file] ICPSR ed. Http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), accessed December 2002. Calculations by the authors.

and evaluate this tool of disenfranchisement. The grandfather clause was not in use in the first two elections, 1892 and 1896. States began using this device by the time of the 1900 presidential election, and it had an immediate impact. Voter turnout went

downhill quickly but reached a plateau and remained there over the next four presidential elections. This device, like the literacy test, simply stabilized at or about a specific level and kept voter registration about this level.

334

Chapter 17

Figure 17.3  Impact of Literacy Tests in Racial Majority Counties of the South and Border States, 1892–1920 35%

32.4%

31.7%

31.8%

31.5%

Presidential Election Votes as Percent of Registered Voters

30% 29.1% 25%

26.9%

23.0%

24.6%

20.7%

20%

17.4%

16.7%

14.7%

15%

16.0%

14.2%

14.8%

10%

9.1%

5% 0% 1892

1896

1900

1904

1908

1912

1916

1920

Election Year African American Majority Counties

White Majority Counties

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer file] ICPSR ed. http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), accessed December 2002; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer file] ICPSR ed., http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), accessed June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

Table 17.8  Presidential Election Turnout Means of Non-Grandfather Clause and Grandfather Clause Counties for the South and Border States Election Years Grandfather Clause Status

1892

1896

1900

1904

1908

1912

1916

1920

South and Border State Counties

67.3%

71.9%

58.9%

43.7%

46.3%

42.7%

47.3%

38.9%

Non-Grandfather Clause Counties

67.3%

71.9%

61.0%

48.7%

55.2%

51.2%

56.7%

49.4%

20.9%

28.9%

28.6%

26.6%

29.7%

21.8%

a

a

Grandfather Clause Counties Difference Values Total Number of Counties Number of Non-Grandfather Clause Counties

67.3%

71.9%

40.1%

19.8%

26.6%

24.6%

27.1%

27.6%

1,322

1,332

1,325

1,346

1,373

1,387

1,402

1,412

1,322

1,332

1,267

1,009

892

901

912

915

58

337

481

486

490

497

Number of Grandfather Clause Counties

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer file] ICPSR ed. Http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), accessed December 2002. Calculations by the authors. a

‘Grandfather clause’ laws were not enacted before 1900.

As the table shows, voter turnout in counties that employed the grandfather clause remained below 30%. Imposition of the grandfather clause began with the election of 1900, but only 58 counties used it. Voter turnout in these counties was more than 40 percentage points lower than in counties that did not use this device. The number of grandfather clause counties rose to 337 in the 1904 election, and the comparison with non-grandfather clause counties narrowed significantly to a difference of just less than 20 percentage points. In the elections from 1908 to 1920, the comparative difference in voter turnout between grandfather clause counties and non-grandfather clause counties remained

around 25 percentage points. By the time of the 1920 election nearly 500 counties had imposed the grandfather clause. Differentiation of the grandfather clause impact on voter turnout in African American majority counties and white majority counties is shown in Figure 17.4. Here one sees only a modest decline in voter turnout among the two sets of counties at the end point election years of 1892 and 1920. In the elections between these years in both sets of counties there were increased voter turnout levels. The introduction of racial data in the analysis of these eight presidential elections changes the holistic picture. Table 17.9 offers data on the mean turnout in the African American majority counties



African American Voting and Non-Voting Behavior, 1888–1908 and Beyond 335

Figure 17.4  Impact of the Grandfather Clause in Racial Majority Counties of the South and Border States, 1892–1920 40%

Presidential Election Votes as Percent of Registered Voters

35%

33.4%

32.7%

30%

32.9% 30.4%

25%

24.8%

26.4%

20%

18.3% 17.6%

14.4%

15%

17.9% 16.5% 10.7%

10% 5% 0% 1892

1896

1900

1904

1908

1912

1916

1920

Election Year African American Majority Counties

White Majority Counties

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer file] ICPSR ed. http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), accessed December 2002; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer file] ICPSR ed., http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), accessed June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

Table 17.9  Presidential Election Voter Turnout in Non-Poll Tax and Poll Tax Black Counties of the South and Border States, 1892–1920 Election Years Poll Tax Status

1892

1896

1900

1904

1908

1912

1916

1920

South and Border States, Black Counties

17.4%

10.0%

44.1%

38.9%

26.5%

16.6%

18.7%

15.7%

Non-Poll Tax, Black Counties

51.4%

59.0%

43.0%

69.7%

29.3%

65.3%

Poll Tax, Black Counties

33.8%

27.3%

22.0%

16.4%

17.9%

15.5%

17.4%

10.0%

Difference Values

17.6%

31.7%

21.1%

53.3%

11.3%

49.8%

-17.4%

-10.0%

276

277

280

282

258

259

216

219

Number of Non-Poll Tax Black Counties

161

115

67

2

15

1

Number of Poll Tax Black Counties

115

162

213

280

243

258

216

219

Total Number of Black Counties

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer file] ICPSR ed. Http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), accessed December 2002; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical , Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer file] ICPSR ed., http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), accessed June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

with and without the poll tax. The poll tax had an immediate impact in the very first election and then pushed the mean downward. In the non-poll tax counties the turnout mean has surges and declines, but the poll tax counties have steady and low turnout. Visually Figure 17.5 (p. 336) indicates that in the poll tax counties there was not only a straight decline but that all of the regional counties merged with the poll tax counties and they both fell under a 20% mean turnout and stayed there from the 1904 to the 1920 presidential elections. Quite at odds with these

trends was the turnout in the non-poll tax counties. Truly one sees here both surges and declines but at different presidential election years than for the other groups. As the non-poll tax African American counties were saddled with poll taxes, their historically high turnout rates were dragged down with the rest, which strongly suggests that it was the poll tax, not some other social or cultural factor, that depressed turnout so consistently. Table 17.10 (p. 336) shows the impact of literacy tests on the mean turnout in these majority African American counties. The

336

Chapter 17

Figure 17.5  Presidential Election Turnout Means of Non-Poll Tax and Poll Tax Black Counties in the South and Border States 80% 69.7%

Presidential Election Votes as Percent of Registered Voters

70%

65.3% 59.0%

60% 51.4% 50%

44.1% 38.9%

40% 30%

43.0% 29.3%

26.5%

33.8% 27.3%

20%

18.7%

16.6%

22.0%

17.9%

16.4%

10%

17.4%

15.7%

17.4%

15.5%

10.0% 10.0%

0% 1892

1896

1900

1904

1908

All Southern and Border States, Black Counties

1912

1916

Poll Tax, Black Counties

1920

Non-Poll Tax, Black Counties

Source: Table 17.9

Table 17.10  Presidential Election Voter Turnout in Non-Literacy Test and Literacy Test Black Counties of the South and Border States, 1892–1920 Election Years Literacy Test Status

1892

1896

1900

1904

1908

1912

1916

1920

South and Border States, Black Counties

44.1%

38.9%

26.5%

16.6%

18.7%

15.7%

17.4%

10.0%

Non-Literacy Test, Black Counties

49.9%

47.2%

34.9%

17.3%

26.6%

21.4%

22.6%

16.8%

Literacy Test, Black Counties

14.2%

20.7%

14.7%

16.0%

17.4%

14.8%

16.7%

9.1%

Difference Values

35.7%

26.5%

20.3%

1.3%

9.2%

6.6%

6.0%

7.6%

276

277

280

282

258

259

216

219

237

212

182

111

35

35

22

22

39

65

98

171

223

224

194

197

Total Number of Black Counties Number of Non-Literacy Test Black Counties Number of Literacy Test Black Counties

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer file] ICPSR ed. Http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), accessed December 2002; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical , Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer file] ICPSR ed., http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), accessed June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

difference values show a striking result: the difference between African American majority counties without a literacy test and those with a literacy test drops from 35.7 percentage points in 1892, to 20.3 in 1900, to only 1.3 in 1904. In 1904, there was hardly any difference between African American counties based on the literacy test, suggesting that the reduction in turnout that year was due to something else (probably the poll tax). While it rebounded, it still never got above 10 percentage points again. The mean voter turnout for African American majority counties with the literacy test peaked at 20.7% in 1896 and continued down to 9.1% by 1920. A visual representation of the literacy test data in Figure 17.6 shows how all of these categories converged in the

1904 presidential election. The reason may be, as Table 17.9 shows, all of the African American majority counties in the South except two had a poll tax by 1904, making all of these counties more alike than the literacy test might make them different. This is not to say that the literacy test had no impact—in every year in the graph, counties with literacy tests had lower turnout, and the difference was especially large at the beginning of this period, when poll taxes were less widespread. Separately or together these devices never failed to reduce the mean voter turnout in subsequent presidential elections. And the major reason for this decline was the number of freedmen and white voters who were not able to register as a consequence of these laws.



African American Voting and Non-Voting Behavior, 1888–1908 and Beyond 337

Figure 17.6  Presidential Election Turnout Means of Non-Literacy Test and Literacy Test Black Counties in the South and Border States 49.9% 50%

Presidential Election Votes as Percent of Registered Voters

45%

47.2% 44.1% 38.9%

40%

34.9% 35% 30%

26.6%

26.5%

25% 20%

18.7%

16.6%

20.7%

15% 10%

21.4%

17.3%

14.7%

14.2%

15.7% 17.4%

16.0%

14.8%

22.6% 17.4%

16.8%

16.7%

10.0% 9.1%

5% 0% 1892

1896

1900

1904

1908

1912

All Southern and Border States, Black Counties

1916

1920

Literacy Test, Black Counties

Non-Literacy Test, Black Counties Source: Table 17.10

Now we turn to the final device in the disenfranchisement toolbox, the grandfather clause. Table 17.11 suggests that this device created a difference in turnout in 1900, the first presidential election in which this device was used. Although the Border State counties did not have this device, a significant number of the southern state counties adopted it. From 1904 to 1920, there was a negative difference across four of the five presidential elections. Such differences indicate that the other tools in the disenfranchisement armament were more effective in lowering the mean

turnout in presidential elections in the African American majority counties. Use of the grandfather clause was correlated with the inhibition of freedmen from registering to vote in these counties, and the turnout simply dropped as time passed. That suggests that many African Americans may not even have been registered voters in these counties, only whites who resided in them. Figure 17.7 (p. 338) comparing black counties with and without the grandfather clause shows the categories converged after 1900 and remained close across the five presidential elections

Table 17.11  Presidential Election Voter Turnout in Non-Grandfather Clause and Grandfather Clause Black Counties of the South and Border States, 1892–1920 Election Years Grandfather Clause Status

1892

1896

1900

1904

1908

1912

1916

1920

All Southern and Border States, Black Counties

44.1%

38.9%

26.5%

16.6%

18.7%

15.7%

17.4%

10.0%

44.1%

38.9%

27.9%

16.2%

19.0%

14.8%

16.8%

9.2%

14.4%

17.6%

18.3%

16.5%

17.9%

10.7%

44.1%

38.9%

13.5%

-1.5%

0.7%

-1.6%

-1.1%

-1.5%

276

277

280

282

258

259

216

219

276

277

250

179

105

106

85

88

30

103

153

153

131

131

Non-Grandfather Clause, Black Counties Grandfather Clause, Black Counties Difference Values Total Number of Black Counties Number of Non-Grandfather Clause Black Counties Number of Grandfather Clause Black Counties

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer file] ICPSR ed. Http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), accessed December 2002; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer file] ICPSR ed., http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), accessed June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors. The Border States include Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and West Virginia. The Southern States are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. a

338

Chapter 17

Figure 17.7  Presidential Election Turnout Means of Non-Grandfather Clause and Grandfather Clause Black Counties in the South and Border States 50% 45%

44.1%

Presidential Election Votes as Percent of Registered Voters

40%

38.9%

35% 30% 27.9% 25%

26.5%

20%

17.6%

15% 14.4%

16.2%

16.6%

19.0% 18.7%

16.5%

18.3% 14.8% 15.7%

17.9% 17.4% 16.8% 10.7%

10% 9.2%

10.0%

5% 0% 1892

1896

1900

1904

1908

All Southern and Border States, Black Counties

1912

1916

1920

Grandfather Clause, Black Counties

Non-Grandfather Clause, Black Counties Source: Table 17.11

from 1904 to 1920. The figure lets the reader know immediately that there was no real difference between the two categories of counties and the counties in the two different regions under analysis. Moreover, this device kept the mean turnout below the 20% mark across the six elections. But 1904 was as important for the grandfather clause as it was for the other two devices. With all three devices, that election year was the turning point. Table 17.12 and Figure 17.8 (p. 340) summarize the view of the disenfranchisement levels by comparing voter turnout from 1892 to 1920 in the southern counties where poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses were implemented. In four presidential elections during this period (1892, 1896, 1900, and 1908), some southern states did not impose qualifications on voting. Just four southern states had imposed the poll tax on voter registration in 1892, but by 1920 all eleven of the southern states had implemented it. Figure 17.8 shows that voter turnout in counties with the poll tax was comparatively less than in counties that had no restrictions on voting. Literacy tests were an add-on qualification to the poll tax. Voter turnout in southern counties that also had the literacy test was considerably more dampened than in counties that had no registration qualifications or just the poll tax. Finally, the grandfather clause is another qualification layer that can be seen to have eased the severity of the poll tax-literacy test combination. Recall that Figure 17.4 (p. 335) revealed that the grandfather clause offered a greater benefit to white majority counties than to

African American majority counties because it permitted higher levels of voter turnout in the white majority counties. In conclusion, the effect of all three of these devices can be seen from the African American majority counties, where mean turnout declined because African Americans were unable to register. The percent of voters voting must of necessity fall due to the simple fact that an entire group of people is barred from voter registration. And once these inhibitions were put into place in the electoral process, there was little chance that African Americans could change their political fortunes in any dramatic, or for that matter even in a limited, manner. Even in the 1920 presidential election, when African American women entered the electorate, all of the turnout figures show a continued decline.

Measuring Disenfranchisement on Voter Registration: The Louisiana Longitudinal Data and Mississippi Partial Data Unlike the restrictive suffrage legislation, which impacted voting behavior, the disenfranchisement techniques were designed to eliminate voters. The devices of poll taxes and literacy tests (sometimes coupled with grandfather clauses) stopped potential voters before they could register. If voters could not register, it was not possible for them to cast a ballot. The drastic decline that was shown in the previous section emanated from the inability of



African American Voting and Non-Voting Behavior, 1888–1908 and Beyond 339 Table 17.12  Voter Turnout in Southern Counties Imposing the Poll Tax, Literacy Tests, and the Grandfather Clause, 1892–1920

Election Year

Poll Tax

Literacy Test

Grandfather Clause

1892

Yes

Yes

No

75

52,376

285,786

18.3%

Yes

No

No

274

521,591

944,371

55.2%

No

No

No Totals

1896

2,412,809

64.1%

2,119,426

3,642,966

58.2%

111

138,528

569,296

24.3%

No

352

681,287

1,328,293

51.3%

No

No

No

554

1,446,236

1,934,375

74.8%

1,017

2,266,051

3,831,964

59.1%

Yes

Yes

Yes

58

67,846

323,955

20.9%

Yes

Yes

No

115

109,598

631,422

17.4%

Yes

No

No

447

856,926

1,863,826

46.0%

No

No

No

389

840,500

1,542,769

54.5%

1,009

1,874,870

4,361,972

43.0%

Yes

Yes

Yes

337

497,053

1,722,302

28.9%

Yes

Yes

No

117

114,146

670,877

17.0%

Yes

No

No

576

807,362

2,717,413

29.7%

1,030

1,418,561

5,110,592

27.8%

Yes

Yes

Yes

481

697,938

2,438,238

28.6%

Yes

Yes

No

120

133,277

714,718

18.6%

Yes

No

No

381

613,178

1,652,988

37.1%

No

No

No

75

151,859

379,467

40.0%

1,057

1,596,252

5,185,411

30.8%

Yes

Yes

Yes

486

695,077

2,614,152

26.6%

Yes

Yes

No

123

113,597

762,222

14.9%

Yes

No

No

461

728,832

2,253,617

32.3%

1,070

1,537,506

5,629,991

27.3%

Yes

Yes

Yes

490

832,444

2,804,041

29.7%

Yes

Yes

No

125

150,259

776,574

19.3%

Yes

No

No

470

896,312

2,426,838

36.9%

1,085

1,879,015

6,007,453

31.3%

Yes

Yes

Yes

497

1,266,177

5,800,869

21.8%

Yes

Yes

No

128

149,235

1,651,116

9.0%

Yes

No

No

470

1,243,751

3,871,158

32.1%

1,095

2,659,163

11,323,143

23.5%

Totals 1920

1,545,459

No

Totals 1916

659 1,008

No

Totals 1912

Percent Turnouta

Yes

Totals 1908

Registered Voters

Yes

Totals 1904

Total Votes

Yes

Totals 1900

Number of Counties

Totals

Sources: Adapted from Jerrold G. Rusk and John J. Stucker, “The Effect of the Southern System of Election Laws on Voting Participation: A Reply to V. O. Key, Jr.,” in Joel H. Silbey, Allan Bogue, and William H. Flanigan (eds.), The History of American Electoral Behavior (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer file] ICPSR ed., http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), accessed December 2002. Calculations by the authors. a

Total votes/number of registered voters.

potential voters to register. To show that the decline did indeed stem from registration, it is necessary to show the decline and drop-off in voting behavior. That story must be combined with and related to the patterns and trends in voter registration after the implementation of the disenfranchisement laws. And this has been the hardest story to tell simply because extant data on this aspect of disenfranchisement are so rare and difficult to find and gather. Literally much of the data has disappeared.

At the moment only one state, Louisiana has consistently kept official longitudinal voter registration data by race from the Reconstruction period to the present. Other states have kept partial data. In Mississippi, for instance, the records were kept by newspapers instead of the state, making such data basically unofficial. Beyond these two states, researchers seeking to analyze this vital aspect of the Era of Disenfranchisement either must estimate such data with statistical techniques, despite their

340

Chapter 17

Figure 17.8  Comparing the Effects of the Poll Tax, Literacy Tests, and the Grandfather Clause on Voter Turnout in Southern Counties, 1892–1920 80% 70%

Percent Voter Turnout

60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 1892

1896

1900

1904

1908

1912

1916

1920

Election Year No Qualifications on Voting

Poll Tax Only

Poll Tax and Literacy Test

Poll Tax, Literacy Test, and Grandfather Clause

Source: Table 17.12

limitations and/or weaknesses, or must sort through a variety of unofficial sources with different dates and quite different aggregate election return totals. Our approach is to use these two reliable state sources and then prepare a comprehensive and systematic summary of the initial African American voter registration and compare it to registration after the disenfranchisement laws went into effect. This widely accepted social science measuring technique will be reliable enough to demonstrate in empirical terms the impact and influence of disenfranchisement laws on African American voter registration in the South. The data in Table 17.13 (p. 342) are drawn from several sources and arranged in a composite fashion so as to provide as many data points as possible for this forthcoming longitudinal analysis. The table combines a selected number of years of extant voter registration data reported in Perry Howard’s book Political Tendencies in Louisiana, data points from a scholarly article in the academic journal Louisiana Studies, as well as data we uncovered from a Senate Report to create a composite of fortyseven data points. These data points range from 1867, when the freedmen in the state initially registered under the Four Military Reconstruction Acts, through 1964, the last year before the Voting Rights Act was implemented. These forty-seven data points cover ninety-seven years that include forty-four congressional elections, nineteen of them midterm elections, and twenty-five presidential elections. (There are three additional dates where neither congressional nor presidential election years occurred.)

Visual representation of this longitudinal data can be seen in Figure 17.9. In 1867 eligible freedmen made up 65.1% of the state’s registered voters. In 1879, little more than a decade later, fewer than half of the eligible voters were African Americans. The percentage stabilized until 1898 when it declined to 14.8%, then declined again to 4.1% in 1900 and 4.0% in 1902. From 1904 to 1946, African Americans made up less than 2% of Louisiana’s registered voters. Thus, at the time that Louisiana was “redeemed” in 1877 and rewrote its state constitution in 1879, freedmen made up about half of registered voters. The three disenfranchisement laws enacted in 1898 reduced freedmen to an insignificant percentage of registered voters in less than a decade. To get a better picture of the percentage numbers below 4% one has to reference Figure 17.10. Between the presidential election of 1900 and 1904 there was a steep decline to 1.6%. Fluctuations then ensued from 1906 to 1946, but within a range between 1.1% and 0.1%. These two figures provide stunning empirical evidence of the impact of these extremely stringent laws. And despite strenuous efforts on the part of African Americans to rally back by increasing their efforts to register, they were never able to raise the numbers or percentages much above the 1.0% level. The one major increase occurred in 1920 when African American women were given the right to vote. Even in the New Deal era African American voter registration continued to decline. Recovery came only with the Supreme Court’s Smith v. Albright decision in 1944 that outlawed the White Primaries in the region.



African American Voting and Non-Voting Behavior, 1888–1908 and Beyond 341

Figure 17.9  African American and White Voter Registration in Louisiana, 1867–1964 100%

Percent of Registered Voters

90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

58 19

51 19

44 19

37 19

30 19

23 19

16 19

09 19

02 19

95 18

88 18

81 18

74 18

18

67

0% Year % White Registered Voters

% Black Registered Voters

Source: Adapted from Perry H. Howard, Political Tendencies in Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), Appendixes Table 2, pp. 419–422; Riley Baker, “Negro Voter Registration in Louisiana, 1879–1964,” Louisiana Studies Vol. 4 (Winter 1965), pp. 336, 338–339; and Table 17.13 in this book.

Figure 17.10  African Americans as Percentage of Registered Voters in Louisiana, 1900–1948 4.5%

Percent of Registered Voters

4.0% 3.5% 3.0% 2.5% 2.0% 1.5% 1.0% 0.5%

8

19 4

6

4

19 4

19 4

2

0

19 4

8

19 4

6

19 3

4

19 3

19 3

2

0

19 3

19 3

8

6

19 2

19 2

4

2

19 2

19 2

0

8

19 2

6

19 1

19 1

4

2

19 1

19 1

0

8

19 1

19 0

6

4

19 0

19 0

2

19 0

19 0

0

0.0%

Year Source: Adapted from Perry H. Howard, Political Tendencies in Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), Appendixes Table 2, pp. 419–422; Riley Baker, “Negro Voter Registration in Louisiana, 1879–1964,” Louisiana Studies Vol. 4 (Winter 1965), pp. 336, 338–339; and Table 17.13 in this book.

If the Louisiana voter registration data provide a detailed empirical portrait of what happened to freedmen registration in the state over time when all three devices were employed, the one-year data from Mississippi allow the reader to see what happened to freedmen and white registration when one device, the Mississippi “Understanding Clause,” was employed. This disenfranchisement law went into effect in 1892 and required

voters who had already registered that year to do so again. Table 17.14 (p. 344) provides voter registration data that were collected in majority white counties before and after the Understanding Clause qualification. The subtotals at the bottom of the table reveal the impact of the Understanding Clause on both African American and white voters in the white majority counties. Even though slightly more white voters were disqualified statewide

114,889

101,046

 

 

67,906

 

53,908

1892

1896

1897

1898

1900

1902

1904

 

79,248

 

92,974

 

126,236

 

121,951

 

215,815

1910

1912

1914

1916

1918

1920

1922

1924

1926

1928

 

 

1890

75,117

115,891

1888

1908

109,399

1884

1906

 

104,462

1880

145,823

1876

1879

 

128,692

1872

1868

1870

 

113,488

1867

Total

Year

 

164,651

 

93,230

 

87,338

 

79,864

 

60,865

 

63,574

 

47,716

 

53,676

 

 

77,174

87,918

 

85,038

62,593

65,053

 

70,509

57,033

 

80,211

Vote  

76.3%

 

76.4%

 

69.2%

 

85.9%

 

76.8%

 

84.6%

 

88.5%

 

79.0%

 

 

76.4%

76.5%

 

73.4%

57.2%

62.3%

 

48.4%

44.3%

 

70.7%

%

Democrats

 

51,164

 

24,698

 

38,552

 

6,450

 

3,820

 

8,946

 

5,211

 

14,226

 

 

22,028

26,971

 

30,661

46,344

38,970

 

75,314

71,659

 

33,277

Vote  

23.7%

 

20.3%

 

30.5%

 

6.9%

 

4.8%

 

11.9%

 

9.7%

 

20.9%

 

 

21.8%

23.5%

 

26.5%

42.4%

37.3%

 

51.6%

55.7%

 

29.3%

%

Republicans

Presidential Vote

61.2%

 

37.7%

 

48.4%

 

49.6%

 

51.2%

 

48.7%

 

49.9%

 

51.9%

 

 

36.1%

43.0%

 

45.5%

50.0%

60.2%

 

77.2%

72.0%

 

77.5%

 

Turnout

352,704

274,917

323,555

191,789

260,815

144,832

187,312

153,332

154,828

117,993

154,142

107,731

108,079

109,254

130,725

87,035

294,432

280,018

267,000

 

254,807

218,906

173,475

172,943

188,836

178,861

 

146,398

129,654

Total RV

2,279

988

955

598

3,533

735

1,979

1,193

1,684

730

1,743

1,201

1,718

4,329

5,320

12,902

130,344

126,849

127,000

 

127,923

110,262

88,024

84,965

 

 

 

 

84,436

Total

0.6%

0.4%

0.3%

0.3%

1.4%

0.5%

1.1%

0.8%

1.1%

0.6%

1.1%

1.1%

1.6%

4.0%

4.1%

14.8%

44.3%

45.3%

47.6%

 

50.2%

50.4%

50.7%

49.1%

 

 

 

 

65.1%

%

Black RV

350,425

273,927

322,600

191,191

257,282

144,095

185,313

148,914

153,044

116,349

152,142

106,514

106,360

104,849

125,437

74,133

164,088

153,169

140,000

 

126,884

108,644

85,451

87,978

 

 

 

 

45,218

%

99.4%

99.6%

99.7%

99.7%

98.6%

99.5%

98.9%

97.1%

98.8%

98.6%

98.7%

98.9%

98.4%

96.0%

96.0%

85.2%

55.7%

54.7%

52.4%

 

49.8%

49.6%

49.3%

50.9%

 

 

 

 

34.9%

White RV Total

Voter Registration

Table 17.13  Longitudinal Analyses of African American Disfranchisement in Louisiana, 1867–1964

 

 

 

 

1,798,509

 

 

 

 

1,656,386

 

 

 

 

1,381,625

 

 

 

 

1,118,588

 

 

940,263

 

 

 

729,915

 

 

Total Population

 

 

 

 

924,184

 

 

 

 

414,919

 

 

 

 

325,943

 

 

 

 

250,553

 

 

216,787

 

 

 

 

 

 

Total VAP

 

 

 

 

28.2%

 

 

 

 

28.4%

 

 

 

 

40.1%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

80.0%

 

 

 

 

 

 

RV/VAP

 

 

 

 

360,167

 

 

 

 

174,918

 

 

 

 

148,065

 

 

 

 

119,815

 

 

107,977

 

 

 

 

 

 

VA Black

 

 

 

 

1.0%

 

 

 

 

0.4%

 

 

 

 

3.6%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

81.5%

 

 

 

 

 

 

BRV/VAB

Voting Age Population

Census

 

 

 

 

564,017

 

 

 

 

240,001

 

 

 

 

177,878

 

 

 

 

130,748

 

 

108,810

 

 

 

 

 

 

VA White

 

 

 

 

45.6%

 

 

 

 

48.5%

 

 

 

 

70.5%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

78.5%

 

 

 

 

 

 

WRV/VAW

372,305

 

349,377

 

416,336

1938

1940

1942

1944

1946

1948

 

807,891

 

896,298

1956

1958

1960

1962

1964

 

387,037

 

407,302

 

243,949

 

345,011

 

136,293

 

281,535

 

319,736

 

292,785

 

249,444

Vote  

43.2%

 

50.4%

 

39.5%

 

52.9%

 

32.7%

 

80.6%

 

85.9%

 

88.8%

 

92.8%

%  

509,185

 

230,953

 

329,017

 

306,888

 

72,705

 

67,790

 

52,389

 

36,721

 

18,911

Vote  

56.8%

 

28.6%

 

53.3%

 

47.1%

 

17.5%

 

19.4%

 

14.1%

 

11.1%

 

7.0%

%

Republicans

74.6%

 

70.1%

 

58.4%

 

61.7%

 

45.0%

 

48.3%

 

53.0%

 

51.2%

 

48.1%

 

Turnout

1,202,056

1,091,808

1,152,398

938,942

1,057,687

871,635

1,056,720

818,031

924,705

770,121

722,715

606,298

702,545

527,059

643,632

481,997

559,233

352,701

Total RV

164,717

150,840

159,812

129,506

152,073

118,183

107,844

61,675

28,177

7,561

1,672

957

886

1,123

2,043

1,591

1,559

2,279

Total

13.7%

13.8%

13.9%

13.8%

14.4%

13.6%

10.2%

7.5%

3.0%

1.0%

0.2%

0.2%

0.1%

0.2%

0.3%

0.3%

0.3%

0.6%

%

Black RV

1,037,339

940,968

992,586

809,436

905,614

753,333

845,038

756,356

896,417

762,560

721,043

605,341

701,659

525,936

641,589

480,406

557,674

350,422

%

86.3%

86.2%

86.1%

86.2%

85.6%

86.4%

80.0%

92.5%

96.9%

99.0%

99.8%

99.8%

99.9%

99.8%

99.7%

99.7%

99.7%

99.4%

White RV Total

Voter Registration

 

 

3,257,022

 

 

 

 

2,683,516

 

 

 

 

2,363,880

 

 

 

 

2,101,593

Total Population

1,930,871

 

1,803,805

 

 

 

 

1,587,145

 

 

 

 

1,374,947

 

 

 

 

1,134,852

Total VAP

62.3%

 

63.9%

 

 

 

 

51.5%

 

 

 

 

51.1%

 

 

 

 

31.1%

RV/VAP

561,016

 

514,589

 

 

 

 

481,284

 

 

 

 

474,987

 

 

 

 

431,613

VA Black

29.4%

 

31.1%

 

 

 

 

12.8%

 

 

 

 

0.2%

 

 

 

 

0.5%

BRV/VAB

Voting Age Population

Census

1,369,855

 

1,289,216

 

 

 

 

1,105,861

 

 

 

 

899,960

 

 

 

 

703,239

VA White

75.7%

 

77.0%

 

 

 

 

68.4%

 

 

 

 

78.0%

 

 

 

 

49.8%

WRV/VAW

Sources: Adapted from Perry H. Howard, Political Tendencies in Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), Appendixes Table 2, pp. 419–422; Riley Baker, “Negro Voter Registration in Louisiana, 1879–1964,” Louisiana Studies Vol. 4 (Winter 1965), pp. 336, 338–339; Table 12.3; Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming); Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer file] ICPSR ed. Http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, MI: Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research), accessed December 2002; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer file] ICPSR ed., http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), accessed June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

 

617,544

1954

 

 

1936

651,952

329,592

1934

1952

 

1932

1950

 

268,805

1930

Total

Year

Democrats

Presidential Vote

344

Chapter 17

Table 17.14  Effect of Understanding Clause on Voters in White Majority Counties of Mississippi, 1892

Black Voters White Counties

Total

Understanding Clause Black Voters

White Voters

Percent of Total Voters

Total

Percent of Total Voters

Total Voters

Total

5.8%

1,046

94.2%

1,110

3

Alcorn

64

Attala

151

8.4%

1,650

91.6%

1,801

Benton

188

22.8%

637

77.2%

825

Calhoun

62

4.8%

1,235

95.2%

Choctaw

93

8.1%

1,055

Covington

70

12.0%

513

Franklin

52

7.7%

Greene

29

8.2%

Hancock

50

11.1%

Harrison

64

Itawamba

51

Jackson Jasper Jones

Percent of Black Voters

Understanding Clause White Voters Total

Percent of White Voters

4.7%

14

1.3%

10

6.6%

28

1.7%

34

18.1%

17

2.7%

1,297

5

8.1%

16

1.3%

91.9%

1,148

21

22.6%

31

2.9%

88.0%

583

18

25.7%

3

0.6%

620

92.3%

672

12

23.1%

21

3.4%

326

91.8%

355

13

44.8%

23

7.1%

399

88.9%

449

1

2.0%

10

2.5%

10.0%

575

90.0%

639

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

3.3%

1,493

96.7%

1,544

11

21.6%

62

4.2%

234

23.3%

770

76.7%

1,004

64

27.4%

51

6.6%

45

4.4%

974

95.6%

1,019

7

15.6%

11

1.1%

7

1.0%

682

99.0%

689

0

0.0%

9

1.3%

Lafayette

333

18.0%

1,517

82.0%

1,850

47

14.1%

15

1.0%

Lawrence

201

20.9%

763

79.1%

964

90

44.8%

8

1.0%

Leake

185

11.6%

1,406

88.4%

1,591

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

88

6.0%

1,388

94.0%

1,476

3

3.4%

10

0.7%

Lincoln

139

13.4%

899

86.6%

1,038

4

2.9%

3

0.3%

Marion

109

14.6%

639

85.4%

748

5

4.6%

12

1.9%

Montgomery

80

6.9%

1,076

93.1%

1,156

4

5.0%

2

0.2%

Neshoba

35

3.3%

1,039

96.7%

1,074

14

40.0%

13

1.3%

Newton

29

2.5%

1,117

97.5%

1,146

2

6.9%

18

1.6%

Pearl River

15

6.5%

215

93.5%

230

3

20.0%

4

1.9%

Perry

86

16.7%

429

83.3%

515

44

51.2%

21

4.9%

Pontotoc

316

17.4%

1,499

82.6%

1,815

100

31.6%

18

1.2%

Prentiss

138

10.0%

1,241

90.0%

1,379

61

44.2%

58

4.7%

Scott

119

12.7%

819

87.3%

938

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

26

4.0%

620

96.0%

646

0

0.0%

39

6.3%

 

 

 

 

 

 

151

10.7%

1,263

89.3%

1,414

42

27.8%

31

2.5%

85

7.5%

1,046

92.5%

1,131

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

Union

191

10.9%

1,562

89.1%

1,753

61

31.9%

56

3.6%

Wayne

161

20.5%

626

79.5%

787

46

28.6%

28

4.5%

Webster

38

3.4%

1,080

96.6%

1,118

1

2.6%

14

1.3%

Lee

Simpson Smith Tippah Tishomingo

Winston

 

89

9.9%

807

90.1%

896

17

19.1%

17

2.1%

White Counties Subtotal

3,774

10.3%

33,026

89.7%

36,800

743

19.7%

663

2.0%

State Totals

8,922

11.4%

69,641

88.6%

78,563

1,058

11.9%

1,084

1.6%

Source: James Stone, “A Note on Voter Registration Under the Mississippi Understanding Clause, 1892,” Journal of Southern History Vol. 38 (May 1972), pp. 295–296.



African American Voting and Non-Voting Behavior, 1888–1908 and Beyond 345

than African American voters (1,084 to 1,058), the Clause had a greater effect on African American voters in these communities than it had on white voters. Statewide, these numbers represented 1.6% and 11.9% of white and African American voters, respectively. The numbers within white majority counties (663 to 743) represented 2.0% and 19.7% of white and African American voters, respectively. Thus, all voters could be challenged on their understanding of the new state constitution, but they were more likely to be challenged in white majority counties. The story in the African American majority counties was very low registration once again, with a greater percentage of white voters registered to vote in these communities than in white majority counties. Another difference in African American majority counties was that more whites were impacted by the Understanding Clause than African Americans. Table 17.15 (p. 346) reveals that the impact of the Understanding Clause was just the reverse of what it was in the white majority counties. White voters outnumbered African American voters in being subjected to these challenges, 421 to 315. For whites, the number represented just 1.1% of their original registrations, a lower percentage than they experienced in white majority counties. The percentage for African American voters was also lower in these African American majority counties, 6.1% compared to 19.7% in the white majority counties. Thus, the empirical portrait in Mississippi is that both groups were impacted, but African American more so, by the Understanding Clause, at least initially. Historical narratives suggest that the pattern of this one moment was repeated across time. Whites in the state prevailed over the freedmen and, as happened in Louisiana, eventually removed them almost completely from the voting registration rolls. Both states ended up at the same place, with freedmen out of the electoral political process. Figure 17.11 provides a visual presentation of the Mississippi voter registration data before and after the Understanding Clause. The first two bars provide the percentage of freedmen registered voters who were challenged in African American

Percent of Registered Voters in Racial Group

Figure 17.11  Understanding Clause Effect on Registering Black and White Voters in Black and White Majority Counties of Mississippi, 1892 25% 19.7%

20% 15% 10% 5%

6.1% 1.1%

0% African American Registered Voters Impacted by Understanding Clause Black Majority Counties

2.0%

White Registered Voters Impacted by Understanding Clause White Majority Counties

Source: James Stone, “A Note on Voter Registration Under the Mississippi Understanding Clause, 1892,” Journal of Southern History Vol. 38 (May 1972), pp. 295–296.

majority counties and the percentage of freedmen registered voters who were challenged in white majority counties. The second set of bars reveals the percentage of white registered voters who were challenged in African American majority counties and the percentage of white registered voters who were challenged in white majority counties. The higher percentages for African Americans suggest that a great deal of disenfranchisement had already occurred. However, after the Understanding Clause went into effect, the impact on final voter qualifications was tremendous for African Americans and negligible for whites. And for both groups more were challenged in white counties than in African American ones. The visual empirical evidence is quite startling! Freedmen voter registration was reduced more severely than white voter registration in 1892. Collectively, the longitudinal and the partial data tell very vivid stories about disenfranchisement laws. The longitudinal data tell us that over the long haul whites did not suffer the same fate as the freedmen. The Era of Disenfranchisement gave them complete electoral and political control over the state of Louisiana for more than a half a century. The partial data say that in some cases whites suffered just as badly as did the freedmen, at least for one year as a result of one attempt to restrict voting. In fact, one could say that the whites suffered due to the loss of their majority position in that year. In addition, the partial data show that the Understanding Clause had a horrendous impact alone and by itself. It decimated voters and offered the possibility that no other device or means was necessary. Alone it would lower voter registration in a staggering manner. By prohibiting individuals from voting, especially African Americans, the political party that the African American electorate supported and voted for would lose significant electoral strength and power in the states and the region. The Republican Party in both states nearly disappeared as a competitive organization. And we have seen that previously, in terms of the votes from the African American majority counties, long before the onset of the Era of Disenfranchisement.

Maintaining the Era of Disenfranchisement: The White Primaries and Run-Off Primaries in the South After these disenfranchisement laws were in place, either by constitutional or statutory legislation, and the Era of Disenfranchisement had run its course, the South did not stop. On this point, Professor Perman found that “the first southern state to institute the [white] primary in a thoroughgoing fashion was Mississippi, with its Noel law of 1902. Ever the innovator in devising mechanisms for subverting and overturning black suffrage, Mississippi may well have been the first state in the nation to establish a mandatory direct primary.”42 He continues with his findings with the remark that “the Magnolia State broke new ground when the Noel law provided for a uniform primary election, held on the same day throughout the state, to select all of the party’s nominees. Only voters who had voted Democratic during the previous two years could participate, and the party officers ran the election. The party’s executive committee also decided in June 1903 to require that a registrant be white as a further qualification for voting.”43

346

Chapter 17

Table 17.15  Effect of Understanding Clause on Voters in African American Majority Counties of Mississippi, 1892

Black Voters Black Majority Counties Adams

Total 342

Understanding Clause Black Voters

White Voters

Percent of Total Voters

Total

Percent of Total Voters

Total Voters

Total

Percent of Black Voters

Understanding Clause White Voters Total

Percent of White Voters

33.4%

682

66.6%

1,024

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

Amite

91

8.6%

973

91.4%

1,064

3

3.3%

12

1.2%

Bolivar

373

49.1%

386

50.9%

759

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

Carroll

170

12.2%

1,227

87.8%

1,397

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

Chickasaw

123

9.5%

1,170

90.5%

1,293

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

Claiborne

125

14.7%

728

85.3%

853

3

2.4%

3

0.4%

Clarke

27

2.7%

987

97.3%

1,014

2

7.4%

71

7.2%

Clay

28

3.4%

789

96.6%

817

0

0.0%

8

1.0%

Coahoma

348

47.9%

378

52.1%

726

26

7.5%

0

0.0%

Copiah

170

8.0%

1,966

92.0%

2,136

48

28.2%

46

2.3%

De Soto

75

9.0%

755

91.0%

830

3

4.0%

5

0.7%

Grenada

130

18.8%

563

81.2%

693

3

2.3%

6

1.1%

Hinds

101

5.4%

1,764

94.6%

1,865

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

Holmes

220

17.7%

1,023

82.3%

1,243

10

4.5%

8

0.8%

Issaquena

116

41.6%

163

58.4%

279

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

Jefferson

89

13.5%

569

86.5%

658

6

6.7%

14

2.5%

Kemper

91

7.1%

1,186

92.9%

1,277

2

2.2%

16

1.3%

163

5.7%

2,693

94.3%

2,856

47

28.8%

4

0.1%

Leflore

28

5.7%

462

94.3%

490

3

10.7%

2

0.4%

Lowndes

19

2.1%

878

97.9%

897

0

0.0%

13

1.5%

Madison

75

6.4%

1,091

93.6%

1,166

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

Marshall

353

17.1%

1,714

82.9%

2,067

0

0.0%

50

2.9%

Monroe

92

5.1%

1,721

94.9%

1,813

4

4.3%

53

3.1%

Noxubee

4

0.6%

641

99.4%

645

0

0.0%

9

1.4%

Oktibbeha

34

3.8%

860

96.2%

894

11

32.4%

3

0.3%

Panola

170

11.5%

1,312

88.5%

1,482

6

3.5%

6

0.5%

Pike

118

8.5%

1,275

91.5%

1,393

10

8.5%

3

0.2%

Quitman

142

53.4%

124

46.6%

266

23

16.2%

2

1.6%

Rankin

231

17.3%

1,101

82.7%

1,332

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

Sharkey

74

26.4%

206

73.6%

280

1

1.4%

1

0.5%

Sunflower

42

11.8%

313

88.2%

355

0

0.0%

3

1.0%

Tallahatchie

52

6.9%

702

93.1%

754

25

48.1%

10

1.4%

Tate

235

14.6%

1,372

85.4%

1,607

28

11.9%

19

1.4%

Tunica

103

35.2%

190

64.8%

293

0

0.0%

1

0.5%

Warren

149

12.3%

1,061

87.7%

1,210

4

2.7%

9

0.8%

Washington

132

13.4%

853

86.6%

985

24

18.2%

1

0.1%

Wilkinson

153

21.8%

550

78.2%

703

6

3.9%

26

4.7%

Yalobusha

151

11.7%

1,139

88.3%

1,290

17

11.3%

17

1.5%

Lauderdale

Yazoo

9

0.9%

1,048

99.1%

1,057

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

Subtotal

5,148

12.3%

36,615

87.7%

41,763

315

6.1%

421

1.1%

State Totals

8,922

11.4%

69,641

88.6%

78,563

1,058

11.9%

1,084

1.6%

Source: James Stone, “A Note on Voter Registration Under the Mississippi Understanding Clause, 1892,” Journal of Southern History Vol. 38 (May 1972), pp. 295–296.



African American Voting and Non-Voting Behavior, 1888–1908 and Beyond 347

Once Mississippi set the precedent, other southern states instituted White Primaries in quick succession. “Under the Terrell laws of 1903 and 1905 Texas created a uniform primary system, and Arkansas through its Democratic state executive committee made the primary election mandatory and statewide. A little earlier, Democrats in Alabama and Virginia had proposed a direct primary in the wake of their disfranchising conventions of 1901 and 1901–1902, respectively.”44 Now the march was on, and most of the other southern states followed in lockstep. Table 17.16 provides the dates when these southern states adopted the White Primary device as an additional protective tool to ensure the other disenfranchising laws, and Map 17.2 (p. 348) shows the locations of the southern states that adopted the White Primary. The White Primary device was designed to provide a bulwark against those African American voters who got over the hurdles and barriers created by the poll tax, the literacy test, and the grandfather clause and registered as voters. The White Primary eliminated these surviving voters from having any influence in the southern electoral system. The major systemic consequence of the Era of Disenfranchisement is that it eventuated a “one-party system” in the South simply because the African American–supported Republican Party collapsed as a viable competitive party in the southern states. Thus, if a Democratic Party nominee made it to a general election in these southern states, there would rarely be a Republican opponent, due to the fact that the latter party did not nominate anyone, or no one would take the Republican nominee seriously because they knew that they were going to lose. Obviously, there were Republican Table 17.16  Enactment Years of the Direct and White Primaries in the South and Border States, 1888–1915 Region

State

Year

South

Alabama

1901, 1902

Arkansas

1891, 1906

a

Florida

1913

Georgia

1908

Louisiana

1904, 1906, 1916

Mississippi

1902, 1903

North Carolinaa

1901, 1915

South Carolina Tennessee

Border States

Table 17.17  Year of Run-Off Primary Law Adoption in the South

1888, 1896, 1900, 1915

Run-Off Primary Adoption

State

None

Yes

Year of Run-Off Primary Law Adoption

Number of Years Until Next State’s Adoption

Mississippi

1902

 1

1903

 1

Texas

1903, 1905

Texas

Virginia

1905

North Carolina

1915

12

Delaware

None

South Carolina

1915

 0

Kentucky

None

Georgia

1917

 2

Maryland

None

Louisiana

1922

 5

Missouri

None

Florida

1929

 7

West Virginia

None

Alabama

1931

 2

Arkansas

1933, 1939

 2

Sources: Adapted from Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1898–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 305–306; Hanes Walton, Jr., Reelection: William J. Clinton as a Native Son Presidential Candidate (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); and Leo Alilunas, “The Rise of the ‘White Primary’ Movement as a Means of Barring the Negro From The Polls,” Journal of Negro History, Vol. 25, No. 2 (April 1940), pp. 161–172. a

presidential candidates since they were nominated nationally, but they had little chance of winning the electoral votes of southern states. Hence, in the general elections Democratic nominees won by default for they had little or no serious opposition/challengers. Therefore, the real political decision for the voter took place in the Democratic Party primary. And since only whites could participate, except in very rare cases, African American voter survivors could only vote in the meaningless general election. And in so doing they ratified the nominee decided upon by white voters in the Democratic primaries. Thus, this final tool ensured that African Americans voters would have no impact or influence on the final outcome. But this was not the very last political prop to cement the racially exclusionary electoral system. The one-party southern system, while it had numerous strengths, also had one obvious weakness. All politically ambitious individuals had no other choice but to jump into the Democratic primary if they wanted to win an office. The independent candidacy and/or third-party candidacy were at their very best long shots (with some occasional victories as in the Populist era). And a write-in candidate was indeed an even longer shot. Thus, the dominant viable alternative was the Democratic Party primary. Hence, these primaries were quite crowded. With so many individuals seeking elective office in one primary, often none of the candidates would win a majority, only a plurality. This conundrum led nine of the southern states to create a “Run-Off Primary” to be held between the two top vote-getters. Table 17.17 shows that Tennessee and Virginia were the only two southern states that did not adopt a run-off primary law. The years that the nine other states adopted the run-off primary are shown in the table, as are the number of years until the next state adopted this procedure. The first adoption came in 1902 and the last one in 1939. This device impacted African American candidates when they ran in these over-crowded Democratic primaries and garnered one of the top two spots because the white electorate was so widely dispersed among so many challengers. But the runoff would then allow white voters to coalesce around the white

The primary rules of these states did not bar the African American electorate.

No

Tennessee Virginia

Source: Adapted from V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation, A New Edition (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), p. 417, footnote 18.

348

Chapter 17

Map 17.2  Southern States that Implemented the White Primary, 1888–1915

VT NH MA CT RI

ND

MT

MN

NY WI

SD

MI

WY 0

100

NE IL CO

Missouri

KS

NJ

PA

IA

200

miles

Maryland

OH

IN

West Virginia

Delaware Virginia

Kentucky North Carolina Tennessee

OK

South Carolina

Arkansas

NM

Georgia Alabama Texas

0

Louisiana

100 200 miles

Mississippi Florida

White Primary States Sources: Adapted from Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1988–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 305–306; Hanes Walton, Jr., Reelection: William J. Clinton as a Native Son Presidential Candidate (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); and Leo Alilunas, “The Rise of the ‘White Primary’ Movement as a Means of Barring the Negro from The Polls,” Journal of Negro History, Vol. 25, No. 2 (April 1940), pp. 161–172.

candidate and thereby defeat the African American candidate. Many African American winners lost in the second round. Collectively, these two primary devices were the hidden tools that prevented African Americans from having any meaningful impact or influence on the electoral outcome and/ or winning an electoral office themselves. These were the devices that bolstered the effectiveness of the disenfranchising laws. Until the Supreme Court began to reverse these measures, the white stranglehold on voting in the South was complete.

Black Democrats in White Primaries: South Carolina, the One Lone Exception If Booker T. Washington was one of a very few African Americans to whom the segregation laws of the region did not apply, White Primary laws did not keep all African American Democrats from voting in primaries. One of the first scholars to write about this was Professor Paul Lewinson in 1932.45 Four states— two Border States, Kentucky and West Virginia, and two southern states, North Carolina and Tennessee—“had no State-wide

party rule barring Negroes from the Democratic primary. Elsewhere, breaches in the White Primary were due to obscure local anomalies and exceptions made in favor of individuals.”46 The one exception among the eleven southern states was South Carolina. Of the Black Democrats in South Carolina who were still voting in the Democratic White Primary during the 1930s, Professor Lewinson said: “In South Carolina there were in 1930 a straggling few ‘Hampton Negroes’ to be found at the primary polls, admitted under the qualification, supported by statements from ten white men, that they had voted for Wade Hampton in the ‘Redemption’ election of 1876 and had been Democratic ever since.”47 Historian Edmund Drago—using select county election return data from the 1876 gubernatorial election, actual photos of African American Democrats that supported White Supremacist Wade Hampton and his Red Shirt Redemptionists, congressional hearing testimonies of African American Democrats, and slave testimonies along with numerous interviews—developed a Profile of Black Red Shirts and a Chart of Hampton’s Black Red Shirts and in 1998 published the first detailed monograph on this group of individual Black Democrats who voted continually in the state’s White



African American Voting and Non-Voting Behavior, 1888–1908 and Beyond 349

Primary.48 On their beginning, Drago wrote: “Most Democratic Party leaders realized that to defeat Republican governor Chamberlain on November 7 [1876], they had to come to grips with the black majority. . . . After Wade Hampton secured the Democratic Party’s gubernatorial nomination in August 1876,” he would have to persuade and induce some African American Republicans to cross over and vote for him.49 He did. Professor Drago explained: A dual strategy evolved. Wade Hampton took the high road, wooing black voters with a pledge to protect their hard-won rights. His chief lieutenant, Martin Gary, followed the low road, the so-called Edgefield or Shotgun policy, which had proved so effective in redeeming Mississippi in 1875. While Hampton had a genuine paternalistic regard for blacks, while Gary had a real disgust for them, the difference between the two men was probably not so clear-cut. Hampton needed Gary and the threat of force he wielded, while Gary needed the kinder and gentler Hampton, whose appeal might make inroads into the black Republican majority and forestall Federal intervention.50 Since Hampton had been a Confederate general, Gary developed a campaign strategy that looked like a battle plan, and Hampton’s chief advisors were all “former Confederate generals.” Soon his campaign workers, volunteers, and supporters began to wear red shirts and his African American supporters also began showing up at rallies in red shirts and on horseback. The “Red Shirt” movement for Hampton was now underway with African American supporters. In Professor Drago’s book, the first chapter, “Wade Hampton’s Black Red Shirts,” shows “that hundreds of ex-slaves, mostly from the Upcountry, participated in the Redemption campaign of 1876. . . . Their war experiences as well as their slave experiences shaped their political responses as freedmen.”51 According to Professor Drago, “the slave experiences of some of the black Red Shirts predisposed them to join the Democrats. It proves that paternalism remained a powerful force that continued to shape the Southern experience.”52 Moreover, these Black Democrats who voted in the White Primaries did not just appear in South Carolina. “In Birmingham, Alabama, a very few Negroes voted in the primary who were variously described as ‘Uncle Toms’ by those who did not, and as ‘leading colored citizens’ by themselves.”53 And in some states and/or large urban areas where there was strong two-party (or bifactional) rivalry, breaches were permitted. However, there was a fatal weakness with these political breaches. They occurred in full sight of the excluded African American electorate, who filed legal suits so that they could also participate like their other privileged brethrens. The legal suits, as we show in later chapters, eventually prevailed.

Rare Data in Georgia, North Carolina, and Oklahoma As we indicate in the first chapter and the concluding chapter, as well as in several others, the heavy reliance on the technique of

only estimating the parameters of the African American electorate eliminates the need to search for official racial voter registration and voting data. Hence, such data are presumed to be lost and no search is implemented. Thus, the existence of such rare election data for two states that kept such data, North Carolina in 1900 and Georgia in 1908, have literally disappeared from most studies or have been used only sparingly in historical studies on the topic.54 Yet such data existed but only surfaced in a limited fashion in the disenfranchisement of the African American electorates in these two states. Another oft-overlooked source of data in the Era of Disenfranchisement is Oklahoma. Oklahoma was not a state either during the Civil War or the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, and only became one at the end of the Era of Disenfranchisement, on November 16, 1907. Therefore, this issue of freedmen’s suffrage rights should have not become an issue for the state as it did in the South and the Border States. Yet it did.

Referenda on State Disenfranchisement Amendments in North Carolina (1900) and in Georgia (1908) Professor Key tells us that the journey to disenfranchisement in North Carolina began when in the “bitter white-supremacy campaigns the Democrats recovered control of the legislature in 1898 and the governorship in 1900. . . . The campaigns of 1898 and 1900 had been fought on a pledge to remove the Negro from politics. The [Democratic] legislature proposed and in 1900 the people approved” in a statewide referendum these new qualifications that included a reading and writing clause and a grandfather clause.55 Of the leading Democrat who set this in motion, senatorial candidate Furnifold Simmons in 1900, Professor Perman wrote: “Simmons unleashed an election campaign of extraordinary belligerence and intensity. Race was not just an issue; it was the essence of the Democratic attack.”56 Table 17.18 (p. 350) demonstrates that not a single African American majority county voted against the disenfranchisement provision, while thirty-two white majority counties did. But when one looks at the tabular data in each county, one finds that there were significant numbers of votes within each of the African American majority counties opposing this state-supported disenfranchising legislation. Caswell County showed the greatest opposition to it with 47.1%, followed by Chowan with 44.6%, Warren with 42.9%, and Vance with 40.5%. At the lower end, New Hanover registered only 0.1% against and Scotland had 0.4%. Despite the low overall level of opposition in the African American counties in North Carolina to this state legislative enactment, 15,017 votes (26.5%) were cast against it, and the historical record tells us that most of those votes came from the African American electorate. Figure 17.12 (p. 351) offers a visual rendering of the tabular data that shows the actual number of counties with African American majorities and white majorities that voted for or against the referendum. The white majority counties show the greatest number of counties for the new qualification tests as well as the greatest number against, while African American majority counties only voted for the referendum. Figure 17.13 (p. 351)

350

Chapter 17

Table 17.18  Results of Disenfranchisement Referendum in North Carolina by County and Racial Majority, 1900

County (by Racial Majority)

Percent African American (Census of 1900)

Disenfranchisement Referendum of 1900 Yes

Votes

No Percent of Total Votes

Votes

Percent of Total Votes

Total Votes

County (by Racial Majority)

Percent African American (Census of 1900)

Disenfranchisement Referendum of 1900 Yes

Votes

No Percent of Total Votes

Votes

Percent of Total Votes

Total Votes

White Majority Counties (continued)

African American Majority Counties Warren

68.2%

1,807

57.1%

1,356

42.9%

3,163

Cumberland

43.0%

2,713

60.5%

1,768

39.5%

4,481

Halifax

64.1%

6,280

87.5%

899

12.5%

7,179

Beaufort

42.9%

3,012

67.4%

1,456

32.6%

4,468

Edgecombe

62.4%

3,781

91.0%

374

9.0%

4,155

Wayne

42.8%

3,838

67.9%

1,816

32.1%

5,654

42.1%

1,658

57.6%

1,221

42.4%

2,879

Craven

60.2%

2,662

73.6%

955

26.4%

3,617

Person

Hertford

58.7%

1,407

78.0%

397

22.0%

1,804

Wilson

42.0%

2,855

66.4%

1,443

33.6%

4,298

Robeson

41.9%

4,015

85.1%

704

14.9%

4,719

Nash

41.7%

2,996

69.2%

1,336

30.8%

4,332

Camden

40.0%

551

50.0%

552

50.0%

1,103

Brunswick

39.9%

849

46.1%

992

53.9%

1,841

Duplin

38.1%

2,072

60.4%

1,361

39.6%

3,433

Durham

37.2%

2,689

54.9%

2,212

45.1%

4,901

Orange

35.8%

1,406

48.5%

1,493

51.5%

2,899

Vance

58.5%

1,343

59.5%

913

40.5%

2,256

Bertie

57.6%

2,649

73.7%

944

26.3%

3,593

Northampton

57.3%

2,469

69.3%

1,095

30.7%

3,564

Chowan

57.0%

1,138

55.4%

917

44.6%

2,055

Caswell

54.6%

1,437

52.9%

1 ,277

47.1%

2,714

Scotland

53.5%

1,803

99.6%

7

0.4%

1,810

Anson

53.4%

2,124

81.1%

496

18.9%

2,620

Rockingham

35.0%

2,898

58.6%

2,045

41.4%

4,943

Pender

51.6%

1,255

81.0%

294

19.0%

1,549

Chatham

34.9%

1,708

46.4%

1,976

53.6%

3,684

Pasquotank

51.4%

1,542

63.4%

892

36.6%

2,434

Sampson

34.6%

1,302

38.7%

2,061

61.3%

3,363

Granville

51.1%

2,459

60.4%

1,610

39.6%

4,069

Moore

33.2%

1,840

49.5%

1,876

50.5%

3,716

New Hanover

50.8%

2,967

99.9%

2

0.1%

2,969

Pamlico

32.8%

569

53.7%

491

46.3%

1,060

Washington

50.6%

1,037

65.5%

547

34.5%

1,584

Harnett

31.6%

1,466

51.4%

1,387

48.6%

2,853

Pitt

50.2%

3,414

62.6%

2,042

37.4%

5,456

Columbus

30.4%

2,231

64.4%

1,234

35.6%

3,465

Onslow

30.2%

1,531

69.5%

671

30.5%

2,202

Black Counties Total

56.5%

41,574

73.5%

15,017

26.5%

56,591

Forsythe

29.9%

2,810

52.3%

2,561

47.7%

5,371

Union

29.5%

2,396

74.5%

822

25.5%

3,218

Black Counties Mean

56.5%

Tyrrell

29.4%

632

61.2%

400

38.8%

1,032

Guilford

28.4%

3,941

54.0%

3,358

46.0%

7,299

Black Counties Median

55.8%

Currituck

27.2%

1,012

71.0%

413

29.0%

1,425

Cabarrus

27.2%

1,893

54.5%

1,578

45.5%

3,471

Alamance

26.2%

2,353

49.6%

2,388

50.4%

4,741

Rowan

26.1%

3,067

64.1%

1,716

35.9%

4,783

1,643

Gaston

26.0%

2,482

61.1%

1,581

38.9%

4,063

4,806

Montgomery

25.9%

1,329

60.4%

870

39.6%

2,199

Johnston

25.3%

3,853

68.8%

1,749

31.2%

5,602

Iredell

25.2%

2,683

53.1%

2,373

46.9%

5,056

Davie

21.7%

938

40.5%

1,378

59.5%

2,316

Cleveland

19.2%

2,701

69.5%

1,185

30.5%

3,886

Lincoln

19.1%

1,255

48.8%

1,315

51.2%

2,570

Buncombe

18.3%

4,170

52.9%

3,707

47.1%

7,877

Carteret

18.0%

1,332

59.5%

908

40.5%

2,240

2,309.7

1,966

73.5%

71.4%

834.3

906

26.5%

28.6%

3,144

2,842

White Majority Counties Perquimans Franklin

49.6% 49.5%

964 2,970

58.7% 61.8%

679 1,836

41.3% 38.2%

Richmond

49.0%

1,636

89.4%

193

10.6%

1,829

Greene

48.0%

1,571

70.2%

666

29.8%

2,237

Martin

47.6%

1,889

65.5%

993

34.5%

2,882

Bladen

46.5%

1,430

54.0%

1,220

46.0%

2,650

Gates

46.1%

1,215

67.1%

596

32.9%

1,811

Jones

45.7%

941

58.6%

665

41.4%

1,606

Wake

44.6%

5,668

55.9%

4,478

44.1%

10,146

Rutherford

17.7%

2,304

52.3%

2,103

47.7%

4,407

Hyde

43.3%

976

53.6%

844

46.4%

1,820

Polk

17.2%

542

46.0%

636

54.0%

1,178

Mecklenburg

43.2%

5,110

76.6%

1,557

23.4%

6,667

Burke

15.1%

1,507

56.3%

1,170

43.7%

2,677

Lenoir

43.2%

2,122

68.8%

961

31.2%

3,083

McDowell

15.1%

1,124

51.5%

1,059

48.5%

2,183



African American Voting and Non-Voting Behavior, 1888–1908 and Beyond 351

County (by Racial Majority)

Percent African American (Census of 1900)

Disenfranchisement Referendum of 1900 Yes

Votes

No Percent of Total Votes

Votes

Percent of Total Votes

Total Votes

County (by Racial Majority)

Percent African American (Census of 1900)

White Majority Counties (continued)

Disenfranchisement Referendum of 1900 Yes

Votes

No Percent of Total Votes

Votes

Percent of Total Votes

Total Votes

White Majority Counties (continued)

Stokes

15.1%

1,406

41.6%

1,977

58.4%

3,383

Watauga

2.9%

919

39.0%

1,436

61.0%

2,355

Davidson

13.6%

2,235

49.5%

2,278

50.5%

4,513

Madison

2.7%

970

28.0%

2,497

72.0%

3,467

Catawba

13.5%

1,928

50.4%

1,896

49.6%

3,824

Yancey

2.5%

751

39.0%

1,173

61.0%

1,924

Randolph

13.0%

2,318

48.0%

2,509

52.0%

4,827

Swain

2.1%

449

34.4%

858

65.6%

1,307

Henderson

12.5%

1,202

46.4%

1,389

53.6%

2,591

Caldwell

12.3%

1,128

45.4%

1,354

54.6%

2,482

Graham

0.6%

356

48.8%

374

51.2%

730

Dare

12.1%

531

58.3%

380

41.7%

911

27.6%

141,278

55.5%

113,268

44.5%

254,546

Stanly

11.8%

1,417

62.3%

858

37.7%

2,275

White Counties Total

Surry

11.4%

2,013

43.2%

2,643

56.8%

4,656

White Counties Mean

27.6%

1,788.3

55.5%

1,433.8

44.5%

3,222.1

White Counties Median

26.1%

1,466

53.6%

1,354

46.4%

2,879

128,285

46.4%

311,137

Transylvania

9.3%

596

49.0%

620

51.0%

1,216

Wilkes

9.1%

1,351

37.6%

2,240

62.4%

3,591

Yadkin

8.4%

968

34.4%

1,843

65.6%

2,811

Alexander

7.8%

826

44.2%

1,042

55.8%

1,868

Alleghany

6.0%

717

53.9%

614

46.1%

1,331

Macon

5.6%

913

44.8%

1,127

55.2%

2,040

Total

33.0%

Jackson

5.0%

1,019

48.9%

1,064

51.1%

2,083

Mean

33.0%

1,885.1

53.6%

1,322.5

46.4%

3,207.6

Median

30.4%

1,531

55.5%

1,220

44.5%

2,879

3.8%

1,281

45.3%

1,549

54.7%

2,830

Cherokee

3.6%

707

39.1%

1,103

60.9%

1,810

Mitchell

3.5%

477

19.6%

1,954

80.4%

2,431

Ashe

3.5%

1,483

42.8%

1,983

57.2%

3,466

Clay

3.0%

302

39.9%

454

60.1%

756

Number of Counties

Figure 17.12  Number of Counties by Racial Majority Voting For or Against Disenfranchisement Referendum in North Carolina, 1900 50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

47

32 18

0 Voted For Disenfranchisement

African American majority counties

Voted Against Disenfranchisement White majority counties

Source: Table 17.18.

182,852

53.6%

Sources: Adapted from Alexander Heard and Donald S. Strong, Southern Primaries and General Election Data, 1920–1949 [Computer file], ICPSR ed. (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [producer and distributor], 1992), http://dx.doi:10.3886/ICPSR00071, accessed April 16, 2011; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer file] ICPSR ed., http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), accessed June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

Figure 17.13  Percent of Counties by Racial Majority Voting For or Against Disenfranchisement Referendum in North Carolina, 1900

Percent of Racial Majority Counties

Haywood

All Counties

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

100%

59.5% 40.5%

0% Voted For Disenfranchisement

African American majority counties

Voted Against Disenfranchisement White majority counties

Source: Table 17.18.

reveals that 100% of the African American counties voted for the disenfranchisement Amendment while only 59.5% of the white majority counties did so. And this would leave one with the simplistic impression that the African American electorate voted for their own disenfranchisement. To find out what actually happened, one has to look at the tabular data for each of the African

American majority counties to see how many votes and their percentages opposed these voting restrictions. And this is one of the major benefits of this rare and hardly seen empirical data. Finally, there are the maps which will help orient the reader to the location of these two groups of counties. Map 17.3 (p. 352) shows that all of the African American majority counties

Tennessee

100 miles

200

South Carolina

West Virginia

North Carolina

Virginia

0

25 miles

50

Source: Adapted from Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer file] ICPSR ed., http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), accessed June 14, 2009.

White majority county

African American majority county

Georgia

Kentucky

0

Map 17.3  Racial Majority Counties of North Carolina, 1900



African American Voting and Non-Voting Behavior, 1888–1908 and Beyond 353

were located essentially on the eastern side of the state, with one or two on the Atlantic Ocean. Despite this location all of these counties voted for the disenfranchisement. The map also shows those white majority counties that voted for and against disenfranchisement. Those white counties voting for disenfranchisement were spread throughout the state, while those voting against the disenfranchisement referendum were concentrated in the western portion of the state, but a few, essentially two counties, were located in the eastern part of the state where the African American majority counties were located. This suggests that not all of the whites in the state voted out of fear of the African American population. Yet in the final analysis when those African American majority counties—where a black population majority existed but whites controlled the political process and electoral offices—were combined with the white majority counties that voted for Disenfranchisement (47 + 18 = 65), the disenfranchising referendum passed with the support of two-thirds of the counties in the state and thereby went into effect. Georgia followed North Carolina eight years later and nearly the same procedure took place. Legal scholar Laughlin McDonald has written: “Hoke Smith, in his successful campaign for governor in 1905–1906, made the total elimination of blacks from state government a major issue in his campaign. He supported the use of educational qualifications for voting because, he said, ‘[t]he negro is inferior mentally to the white man.’”57 Although Texas and Georgia were the last two southern states to disenfranchise the African American electorate, “Georgia’s Democrats had managed to reduce black involvement to a low level comparable to that in Texas through institutional devices no other southern state had yet contrived—the cumulative poll tax and the white primary.”58 In addition to these two obstacles, “[t] he virtual disappearance of the black voter was partly attributable to the weakness of the Republican Party in Georgia.”59 Once the Democratic Party had “redeemed” the state, the Republican Party found that after 1871 it could not recover and re-emerge in Georgia politics. Hence, the African American electorate had no party organization other than the brief linkage with the Populist Party to use as a main organizational opposition force. Eventually, the Thomas Watson–led Populist Party turned against its erstwhile party allies and sought to disenfranchise African Americans in the 1908 canvas. Governor Smith, Watson, and others of the segregationist ilk combined forces in the 1908 state legislature and passed the “Disfranchising Act,” which was “specifically designed to prevent Negroes from voting.” 60 They submitted it to Georgia’s voters via a statewide referendum, and this new amendment to the state constitution was approved by the white electorate on October 7, 1908. Nevertheless, the African American community fought against this disenfranchising referendum. First, “a memorial to the legislature in 1899 from twentyfour professors at Atlanta University, led by John Hope and W. E. B. DuBois, along with separate protests against the proposed amendment from Booker T. Washington and Bishop Henry McNeal Turner,” did not extinguish the ever rising disenfranchisement public sentiment in the state among the Democratic leadership.61 And when it broke forth during the Hoke Smith campaign, African American leaders throughout the state

sought to mobilize African Americans to vote against the amendment in the upcoming referendum. The African American editor of the Savannah Tribune newspaper continually called upon the African American electorate not only in Chatham but throughout the southeastern counties to oppose the amendment. In addition to the Tribune call, and knowing that they could not rely upon the Republican Party, “[i]n 1906, W. E. B. DuBois, John Hope, Judson Lyons, who was the register of the treasury and the highest-ranking African American federal official, and others had founded the Equal Rights League to publicize black opposition to disfranchisement.”62 And in June 1907 as the referendum election moved closer, African Americans in the state sought to improve their chances of defeating the amendment by organizing the “Georgia Suffrage League, . . . establishing clubs in dozens of counties, and ministers from many churches, teachers, and businessmen launched a registration drive.”63 Clearly, there was statewide African American opposition to this disenfranchisement amendment in 1908. Table 17.19 indicates how the African American and white majority counties voted in the referendum. In African American majority counties, 18,488 (37.0%) voted against the amendment, but in these same African American majority counties 31,399 (63.0%) voted for the adoption of the amendment. In white majority counties, there were 48,928 (69.1%) for and 21,835 (30.9%) against the amendment. And the votes from the African American majority counties combined with those from the white majority counties resulted in a grand total of 130,309 votes for, 62,619 against. Thus, the disenfranchising procedures went into effect. Figure 17.14 (p. 354) shows the number of counties of both racial majorities that voted for and against the amendment referendum; Figure 17.15 (p. 354) translates these numbers into percentages. Unlike North Carolina, not all of the African American majority counties voted for the amendment. Although the majority of these counties (52 or 80.0%) did vote in favor of the amendment, one-fifth (13 or 20.0%) voted against it. On the other hand, a majority of the white majority counties (73 or 91.2%) voted for it, while less than one-tenth (7 or 8.8%) of these counties voted against it. The figure shows that the opposition came not only from the Black Belt counties but also from the white majority counties, and both sources of opposition were needed in order for the referendum to pass. Opposition to enfranchising African Americans in the Black Belt counties was not quite as high as it was in the white majority counties. The presence of the small numbers of African American voters still a part of the electorate in white majority counties also kept the opposition from being a perfect 100%. Map 17.4 (p. 357) shows the locations of the African American majority counties that voted “For” and “Against” disenfranchisement. Some of these counties were adjacent to each other and others were separated. That African American majority counties voted for disenfranchisement suggests that whites had come to control the African American electorate and/or strongly suppressed them. Said counties ran completely across the middle of the entire state of Georgia, with a few at the bottom of the state and a few on the coastal plain.

Chapter 17

Figure 17.14  Number of Counties by Racial Majority Voting For or Against Disenfranchisement Referendum in Georgia, 1908 80

73

Number of Counties

70 60

52

50 40 30 20

13

10 0

Voted For Disenfranchisement

African American majority counties

7

Figure 17.15  Percent of Counties by Racial Majority Voting For or Against Disenfranchisement Referendum in Georgia, 1908

Percent of Racial Majority Counties

354

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

Source: Table 17.19.

Map 17.4 also reveals that the opposition in the white majority counties was at the top of the state where few African Americans resided and at the bottom of the state, which was below the Black Belt. The white counties in the north of the state that opposed the amendment were clustered, while the ones in the southern part of the state were not clustered, but scattered. Thus, in the south these counties did not influence each other as they might have in the north. Overall, the counties for the amendment were connected, as were many of those voting against it. Summing up the overall outcome for the African American electorate after disenfranchisement, historian John Dittmer found that “[d]isfranchisement did not eliminate the black vote altogether. Figures vary, but during the decade after disfranchisement from ten to fifteen thousand blacks were registered, mostly in the urban areas.”64 And it was from this numerical insight that we developed our approach, which can be found in Table 17.20 near the conclusion of this chapter (p. 360). However, some of the unusual features in Table 17.19 also speak to this insight. Chatham County cast 2,260 votes against the referendum, which suggests that the mobilization effort in this county was effective. In fact, the opposition in Chatham County was stronger than that in Fulton County (1,579 votes), where some four African American colleges existed. But not only do these rare data show such previously unknown insights, they further indicate that there was a strong determination in the African American community to register and to vote, and that this continued even though at a lower level well past the 1930s (as shown in Chapter 23). Collectively, this rare electoral referenda data reveal that not all of these eleven states submitted their disenfranchising state constitutions or amendments to their citizens for approval and enactment. Second, when considering the voting in these two referenda, one needs to get beyond the statewide and county-level results and see the pattern within each county and understand from the extant historical narratives that the African American electorate was mobilized to try to defeat these revised state

20.0% 8.8% Voted For Disenfranchisement

Voted Against Disenfranchisement White majority counties

91.2% 80.0%

African American majority counties

Voted Against Disenfranchisement White majority counties

Source: Table 17.19.

constitutions and amendments.65 And most of the votes in the African American majority counties cast against the referenda were those of the African American voters, because the historical record shows that the Black Belt whites led the drive to disenfranchise African Americans even though they were not much of a numerical threat in this 1908 time period. Third, here are two examples of African American voter activists operating in dire circumstances, fighting electorally for their political rights and lives. In Georgia, “William H. Rogers, from McIntosh County, was the sole black left in the general assembly by 1908. He opposed the Disfranchising Act and, after it was passed, resigned from office. No black would serve in the legislature until Leroy Johnson was elected to the senate from Fulton County almost a half century later [1962].”66 And finally, the results from these referenda reveal the existence of a biracial electorate who found common ground for whatever reason to oppose the limiting of suffrage rights in their respective states. In forthcoming chapters we will have more to say about this interesting electoral coalition.

The State of Oklahoma as a Disenfranchiser: The Outlier Even though Oklahoma was not a traditional southern or even Border state, only joining the Union in 1907, the very first case which the fledging NAACP took to the Supreme Court on voting rights was Oklahoma’s grandfather clause. And one of the last cases which the NAACP took to the Supreme Court on voting rights before its victory in the 1944 White Primary case was the Oklahoma case that limited the time in which African Americans could register to vote. Rarely will one find a discussion of Oklahoma’s disenfranchising efforts and techniques simply because it was not a part of the old Confederacy and it was not covered by the Four Military Reconstruction Acts, only the Fifteenth Amendment. Sometimes, when historians are covering the South, they will add Oklahoma simply because of its use of the grandfather clause device. In his study of “Negro Politics,” for



African American Voting and Non-Voting Behavior, 1888–1908 and Beyond 355

Table 17.19  Results of Disenfranchisement Referendum in Georgia by County and Racial Majority, 1908

County (by Racial Majority)

Percent African American (Census of 1900)

Disenfranchisement Referendum of 1908 Yes

Votes

No Percent of Total Votes

Votes

Percent of Total Votes

Total Votes

County (by Racial Majority)

African American Majority Counties

Percent African American (Census of 1900)

Disenfranchisement Referendum of 1908 Yes

Votes

No Percent of Total Votes

Votes

Percent of Total Votes

Total Votes

African American Majority Counties (continued)

Lee

85.6%

150

19.9%

603

80.1%

753

Baldwin

60.0%

486

81.1%

113

18.9%

599

Burke

82.4%

326

41.6%

457

58.4%

783

Lincoln

59.4%

397

99.3%

3

0.8%

400

59.2%

276

72.6%

104

27.4%

380

Quitman

78.1%

129

76.3%

40

23.7%

169

Crawford

McIntosh

77.3%

191

37.2%

322

62.8%

513

Pulaski

59.1%

606

72.6%

229

27.4%

835

710

Brooks

59.1%

560

56.1%

439

43.9%

999

58.8%

489

59.3%

335

40.7%

824

Stewart

77.3%

349

49.2%

361

50.8%

Terrell

75.5%

479

66.2%

245

33.8%

724

Thomas

Dougherty

75.1%

207

40.4%

306

59.6%

513

Troup

58.7%

906

98.6%

13

1.4%

919

58.6%

274

63.7%

156

36.3%

430 1,018

Columbia

74.6%

248

89.5%

29

10.5%

277

Marion

Hancock

74.4%

531

88.9%

66

11.1%

597

Meriwether

58.5%

765

75.1%

253

24.9%

Calhoun

73.8%

229

65.2%

122

34.8%

351

McDuffie a

58.0%

30

100.0%

 

 

30

Houston

73.6%

544

78.7%

147

21.3%

691

Decatur

57.6%

600

56.4%

463

43.6%

1,063

Taliaferro

73.6%

359

52.9%

320

47.1%

679

Coweta

56.5%

984

83.2%

198

16.8%

1,182

Putnam

73.3%

359

95.2%

18

4.8%

377

Chatham

55.2%

998

30.6%

2,260

69.4%

3,258

Clay

73.3%

306

61.3%

193

38.7%

499

Upson

54.9%

527

87.0%

79

13.0%

606

Sumter

73.0%

764

52.9%

681

47.1%

1,445

Lowndes

53.0%

562

51.5%

529

48.5%

1,091

Harris

71.9%

603

84.3%

112

15.7%

715

Butts

52.8%

440

71.2%

178

28.8%

618

Baker

71.7%

104

25.4%

305

74.6%

409

Mitchell

52.7%

477

61.5%

299

38.5%

776

Jones

70.9%

274

33.0%

556

67.0%

830

Crisp

52.5%

299

47.7%

328

52.3%

627

Wilkes

70.8%

665

95.4%

32

4.6%

697

Pike

52.1%

606

73.1%

223

26.9%

829

Macon

70.5%

225

74.0%

79

26.0%

304

Newton

51.3%

725

67.9%

342

32.1%

1,067

Wilkinson

51.2%

368

78.5%

101

21.5%

469

Talbot

70.4%

360

67.4%

174

32.6%

534

Henry

51.1%

632

72.6%

238

27.4%

870

Jasper

69.4%

528

72.7%

198

27.3%

726

Spalding

51.0%

760

90.8%

77

9.2%

837

Chattahoochee

69.2%

146

42.8%

195

57.2%

341

Clarke

50.6%

616

59.6%

418

40.4%

1,034

Randolph

68.9%

562

61.2%

357

38.8%

919

Elbert

50.1%

1,122

88.1%

152

11.9%

1,274

Twiggs

68.9%

216

47.4%

240

52.6%

456

62.9%

31,399

63.0%

18,448

37.0%

49,847

Warren

68.6%

382

67.1%

187

32.9%

569

Black Counties Total

Morgan

68.0%

540

62.3%

327

37.7%

867

62.9%

475.7

62.6%

283.8

37.4%

755

Webster

68.0%

178

48.6%

188

51.4%

366

Black Counties Mean

483

65.7%

229

34.8%

710

66.8%

716

73.1%

263

26.9%

979

Black Counties Median

63.0%

Monroe Camden

66.5%

271

49.7%

274

50.3%

545 49.8%

227

35.1%

419

64.9%

646

White Majority Counties

Liberty

64.6%

562

53.3%

493

46.7%

1,055

Bryan

Jenkins

63.3%

195

79.3%

51

20.7%

246

Worth

49.7%

469

62.9%

277

37.1%

746

Taylor

49.6%

337

68.6%

154

31.4%

491

Laurens

49.4%

1,304

69.1%

582

30.9%

1,886

48.5%

1,050

53.3%

921

46.7%

1,971

Schley

63.1%

290

57.8%

212

42.2%

502

Greene

62.9%

760

52.1%

700

47.9%

1,460

Early

62.2%

499

70.3%

211

29.7%

710

Bibb

Glynn

62.2%

322

64.7%

176

35.3%

498

Richmond

48.2%

844

74.8%

285

25.2%

1,129

Irwin

47.0%

293

49.7%

296

50.3%

589

Oconee

46.5%

318

54.0%

271

46.0%

589

46.2%

1,340

82.8%

279

17.2%

1,619

Dooly

61.9%

552

58.4%

393

41.6%

945

Washington

61.7%

1,087

79.6%

278

20.4%

1,365

Jefferson

60.7%

564

63.1%

330

36.9%

894

Muscogee

Oglethorpe

60.7%

449

76.6%

137

23.4%

586

Clayton

44.3%

445

70.2%

189

29.8%

634

Screven

60.2%

673

55.5%

540

44.5%

1,213

Johnson

43.1%

320

73.9%

113

26.1%

433 (Continued)

356

Chapter 17

Table 17.19 (Continued)

County (by Racial Majority)

Percent African American (Census of 1900)

Disenfranchisement Referendum of 1908 Yes

Votes

No Percent of Total Votes

Votes

Percent of Total Votes

County (by Racial Majority)

Total Votes

Percent African American (Census of 1900)

White Majority Counties (continued)

Disenfranchisement Referendum of 1908 Yes

Votes

No Percent of Total Votes

Votes

Percent of Total Votes

Total Votes

White Majority Counties (continued)

Effingham

42.9%

197

50.6%

192

49.4%

389

Stephens

22.8%

594

81.6%

134

18.4%

728

Dodge

42.0%

467

55.4%

376

44.6%

843

Franklin

22.2%

849

93.8%

56

6.2%

905

Ben Hill

41.3%

436

82.7%

91

17.3%

527

Carroll

20.7%

1,180

87.2%

173

12.8%

1,353

Wilcox

40.8%

386

60.5%

252

39.5%

638

Banks

20.6%

381

56.4%

294

43.6%

675

Miller

40.8%

196

52.5%

177

47.5%

373

Chattooga

18.0%

423

52.1%

389

47.9%

812

Rockdale

40.3%

364

70.5%

152

29.5%

516

Hall

15.7%

886

72.7%

332

27.3%

1,218

Grady

40.1%

351

61.0%

224

39.0%

575

Gwinnett

15.4%

1,289

74.3%

445

25.7%

1,734

Clinch

40.1%

250

63.8%

142

36.2%

392

Haralson

15.0%

577

65.4%

305

34.6%

882

Bulloch

40.0%

772

87.1%

114

12.9%

886

Walker

13.1%

438

60.4%

287

39.6%

725

Turner

39.9%

386

73.1%

142

26.9%

528

Paulding

11.2%

796

56.8%

605

43.2%

1,401

Emanuel

39.7%

640

52.4%

582

47.6%

1,222

Whitfield

10.8%

1,145

76.8%

345

23.2%

1,490

Walton

39.7%

748

56.6%

574

43.4%

1,322

Milton

9.9%

322

95.8%

14

4.2%

336

Ware

38.8%

760

84.9%

135

15.1%

895

Forsyth

9.2%

518

78.8%

139

21.2%

657

Montgomery

37.2%

766

67.4%

370

32.6%

1,136

Gordon

8.5%

724

82.1%

158

17.9%

882

Telfair

35.8%

771

74.7%

261

25.3%

1,032

White

7.8%

383

59.2%

264

40.8%

647

Coffee

35.2%

531

57.3%

395

42.7%

926

Dade

7.0%

131

33.4%

261

66.6%

392

Fayette

34.8%

313

63.2%

182

36.8%

495

Habersham

7.0%

378

85.5%

64

14.5%

442

Heard

33.6%

421

93.1%

31

6.9%

452

Cherokee

7.0%

1,239

78.6%

338

21.4%

1,577

Campbell

33.3%

365

68.1%

171

31.9%

536

Catoosa

6.6%

419

67.6%

201

32.4%

620

Tift

32.9%

416

83.4%

83

16.6%

499

Lumpkin

5.9%

62

14.5%

365

85.5%

427

Fulton

32.6%

5,605

78.0%

1,579

22.0%

7,184

Pickens

4.9%

168

54.5%

140

45.5%

308

Glascock

32.3%

276

71.5%

110

28.5%

386

Murray

4.1%

1,001

84.2%

188

15.8%

1,189

Tattnall

31.5%

801

72.6%

303

27.4%

1,104

Dawson

3.2%

181

42.7%

243

57.3%

424

Hart

31.3%

744

86.5%

116

13.5%

860

Rabun

2.8%

230

86.1%

37

13.9%

267

1.3%

306

67.0%

151

33.0%

457

Madison

30.6%

628

67.1%

308

32.9%

936

Fannin

Toombs

30.4%

246

51.6%

231

48.4%

477

Union

0.9%

439

62.3%

266

37.7%

705

0.8%

615

46.6%

705

53.4%

1,320

0.4%

146

60.1%

97

39.9%

243

White Counties Total

30.7%

48,928

69.1%

21,835

30.9%

70,763

White Counties Mean

30.7%

611.6

69.1%

272.9

30.9%

884.5

White Counties Median

28.5%

442

67.5%

229

32.5%

683

Total

39.9%

130,309

62,619

32.2%

192,940

Mean

39.9%

874.6

68.1%

423.1

31.9%

1,294.9

Median

46.2%

466

67.4%

230

32.7%

705

DeKalb

30.0%

863

73.3%

314

26.7%

1,177

Gilmer

Echols

29.9%

121

89.0%

15

11.0%

136

Towns

Jackson

28.5%

960

80.1%

238

19.9%

1,198

Floyd

28.5%

1,051

65.9%

544

34.1%

1,595

Polk

28.2%

466

56.6%

358

43.4%

824

Berrien

27.5%

625

77.2%

185

22.8%

810

Jeff Davis

26.3%

180

52.6%

162

47.4%

342

Cobb

26.1%

1,134

66.0%

584

34.0%

1,718

Pierce

25.5%

309

68.1%

145

31.9%

454

Wayne

25.3%

343

67.0%

169

33.0%

512

Charlton

25.2%

63

38.0%

103

62.0%

166

Bartow/Cass

25.0%

800

61.1%

509

38.9%

1,309

Douglas

24.2%

426

72.3%

163

27.7%

589

Colquitt

23.3%

520

92.0%

45

8.0%

565

Appling

23.2%

464

67.2%

226

32.8%

690

All Counties 67.8%

Sources: Adapted from Alexander Heard and Donald S. Strong, Southern Primaries and General Election Data, 1920–1949 [Computer file], ICPSR ed. (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [producer and distributor], 1992), http://dx.doi:10.3886/ICPSR00071, accessed April 16, 2011; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer file] ICPSR ed., http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), accessed June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors. a

The “No” votes of this county are reported by the sources as missing.



African American Voting and Non-Voting Behavior, 1888–1908 and Beyond 357 Map 17.4  Racial Majority Counties of Georgia, 1908

North Carolina 0 100 200 miles

0

50

100

miles South Carolina

Alabama

Georgia

African American majority county

Florida

White majority county Source: Adapted from Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer file] ICPSR ed., http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), accessed June 14, 2009.

358

Chapter 17

example, Professor Ralph Bunche treated the state as a part of the “Outer South.” And legal scholars will discuss the state when they are analyzing the sundry legal cases in which the Supreme Court decisions eliminated the different techniques that implemented racial disenfranchisement. We offer our analysis not only because of the two major Supreme Court cases but also because Oklahoma continued to implement disenfranchisement via its state constitution long after the process had been considered finished in the South. Moreover, this was a state without a large African American population. Nevertheless, the process did occur there, which is evidence of the ever-spreading ideology of White Supremacy. African Americans from the South began their trek to the West, including Oklahoma, during the Exodus of 1879, caused by the racial violence and mayhem visited upon the African American communities during the presidential election of 1876 and in the aftermath of the “Compromise of 1877.” When the remaining federal troops pulled out of the South, the matter of race relations turned violent in the hands of whites.67 Remarking on this exodus to Oklahoma, Professor Rayford Logan told this story: “Less well known than the Exodus of 1879 is the attempt of a colored man, Edwin P. McCabe, to create a Negro state out of the Oklahoma Territory. . . . McCabe, who had been state auditor of Kansas, is reported to have sent 300 colored families from North Carolina and 500 from South Carolina. Arrangements were said to have been made for 5,000 families to migrate to Oklahoma. But the federal government provided no aid to this project. . . . This movement failed not only because of the lack of federal support and private financial assistance but also because of the hostility of both Indians and whites.”68 This hostility and racism was reflected in the all-white state legislature shortly after the territory became a state in 1907. Professor Richard Valelly wrote: “In 1910, the state’s legislature revised the 1907 [state] constitution to insert both a good understanding clause (meant to block black voting) and a grandfather clause (meant to exempt white voters from the good understanding provision).”69 He added: The 1910 amendment held that “[n]o person shall be registered . . . or be allowed to vote . . . unless he be able to read and write any section of the Constitution of the state of Oklahoma; but no person who was, on January 1, 1866, or at any time prior thereto, entitled to vote under any form of government . . . and no lineal descendant of such person, shall be denied the right to register and vote because of his inability to so read and write sections of such Constitution.”70 After quoting from the new amendment to the Oklahoma state constitution, Professor Valelly discussed the reasons for these amendments. “To get the requisite white votes for poll taxes and literacy tests, the disenfranchisers [in Oklahoma] promised these exemptions. These laws accorded special treatment to whites. Military service during the Civil War or descent from someone who had served would warrant registry without a literacy test.”71 Overall, “[t]he grandfather clause was a clever legal device that many Southern states [and Oklahoma] enacted to disfranchise blacks but not unqualified whites. In Guinn v. United

States, 238 U.S. 347 (1915), the clause was challenged and met its waterloo. . . . Guinn was the first case in which the NAACP participated” and won in the area of voting rights.72 But when this disenfranchising device did not work, Oklahoma’s state legislature, like most of the southern states, quickly devised another. In 1916 the Oklahoma legislature, in response to the Court’s decision in Guinn, enacted a new scheme for registration as a prerequisite to voting. The new scheme provided that all citizens who were qualified to vote in 1916 and who failed to register between April 30 and May 11, 1916, would be perpetually disenfranchised except those who voted in 1914.73 What did this new Oklahoma law offer to further prevent the freedmen from exercising their Fifteenth Amendment rights in the state? According to legal scholars Abraham L. Davis and Barbara Luck Graham: The effect of the legislation was that whites who were on the voter lists in 1914 could vote, whereas blacks who were kept from registering because of the grandfather clause would remain forever disenfranchised unless they registered during the 12-day period. In its second case before the high court, the NAACP challenged the constitutionality of the law. In Lane v. Wilson, 307 U.S. 268 (1939), the Court . . . held that the Court had jurisdiction in the case. On the merits, Justice [Felix] Frankfurter found that the Fifteenth Amendment “nullifies sophisticated as well as simple-minded modes of discrimination. It hits onerous procedural requirements which effectively handicap exercise of the franchise by the colored race although the abstract right to vote may remain unrestricted as to race.”74 Of the outcome in Oklahoma’s Lane case, Professor Valelly observed that “new registrants were required to register in a special twelve-day period or forfeit the franchise. Oklahoma thus disenfranchised black Oklahomans by setting an impossible condition for their acquisition of registered status.”75 Although the Supreme Court did not outlaw this twelve-day registration device until 1939, African American political scientist Ralph Bunche, in interviewing numerous individuals about African American politics in the state in March 1940 for the Gunnar Myrdal Study, found that one year before the high Court’s decision (1938), the African American electorate in the urban areas of the state had already become a participant in the municipal election in Oklahoma City and the Democratic party primary there. And in each of these elections the African American vote had helped determine the outcome.76 The point here is that not just the South disenfranchised the African American electorate: at least one non-southern state, Oklahoma, had joined the parade to strip African Americans of their Fifteenth Amendment voting rights. In the process, Oklahoma engendered two major Supreme Court victories for the fledging NAACP, victories that gave African Americans hope that they might be re-enfranchised in the future.



African American Voting and Non-Voting Behavior, 1888–1908 and Beyond 359

Summary and Conclusions on the Era of Disenfranchisement In the Era of Disenfranchisement, the white southern establishment cut off the African American electorate not only at the ballot box but also at the voter registration office. Moreover, the early success in the South helped induce a non-southern state, Oklahoma, to attempt to employ similar means. These efforts eliminated African Americans from becoming voters and differed from the earlier restrictive legislation that had sought to manipulate African Americans when they cast their ballots. These new laws put African Africans outside of the electoral system in this region of the country, the Fifteenth Amendment notwithstanding, and gave them the status of perpetual nonvoters. We have seen in an empirical fashion the disastrous consequences that this time period had upon the voter registration and voting behavior of African Americans and even whites to a degree in certain places. These trends and patterns in the data make it very clear that the laws either in combination or singly were immensely effective. In Louisiana through most of the first half of the twentieth century the freedmen electorate was reduced to less than 1.0% of the total registered voters. The Republican Party in the South went into a significant decline. But this loss of a base in the region did not keep the Republican Party from winning the White House. When it began to lose its southern base, the party shifted regions and captured a new base in the western states instead, thereby prolonging its hold on the White House. Only the economic crisis of the Great Depression dislodged Republicans from the White House in 1932. The creation of a “New South” came when southern leaders took advantage of two major reform movements: (1) the drive for a secret ballot and (2) direct primaries. Southern leaders effectively turned these reform impulses sweeping the nation into devices to erect White Supremacy and place political control in the hands of the Democratic Party in the South. The Era of Disenfranchisement accomplished all of this in tandem with the social system of segregation and Jim and Jane Crow. These two systems came into place during this same time frame and reduced African Americans to second-class citizens. There is one final observation which can be shown in Table 17.20 (p. 360) with a before and after presentation of the most reliable empirical data on African American voter registration and voting in the redeemed and remade South. Shown in this table for the very first time is the actual number of registered freedmen voters in each of the eleven states of the South before the implementation of disenfranchisement. (The registration data for Georgia and Mississippi, as well as the voting against the biracial state constitution, were revised and updated later because of problems in the field.) As noted in an earlier chapter, the U.S. Senate Executive Document No. 53 that required each of the military commanders to make a racial count did not initially collect racial voting data. Later, revisions were made to that effect. Column two of Table 17.20 provides the most reliable voter registration data after the implementation of disenfranchisement. From nearly a thirty-year search of state-based case studies, recently uncovered state and newspaper data, scholarly monographs, theses, and dissertations, book chapters, and articles, and re-analysis of electoral data, here is the first empirical comprehensive and systematic portrait of the impact and

influence of disenfranchisement on the newly enfranchised African American male voters. Prior to this presentation the most reliable data were from only one state—Louisiana, as we have seen—plus one effort made to estimate the impact in a selected rather than a longitudinal manner.77 But scattered through numerous historical narratives and documents were these rare tidbits of empirical registration which we tracked down, sought validation for, and included in this table. When no data existed or only inexact data existed, we used surrogate election data taken from the African American majority counties in referenda votes in Georgia and North Carolina and from the Republican vote in presidential elections that came after disenfranchisement. And in the case of Mississippi we found official data for three very closely related dates in this time frame of disenfranchisement. The initial 1890 data represented the number of freedmen that the state Suffrage Committee agreed to register after the revised state constitution went into effect. The second 1892 data represented the number of registered freedmen voters disqualified after the implementation of the 1892 “Understanding Clause.” And the last data from 1900 were uncovered in the scholarly monograph Blacks in Mississippi Politics, 1865–1900.78 At the bottom of Table 17.20, one sees that before the Era of Disenfranchisement nearly three-quarters of a million (732,335) freedmen were registered to vote. The eleven southern states’ sundry disenfranchisement techniques and procedures removed almost 85% of these voters (619,056), leaving only 113,279 African Americans on the registration rolls in the New South. On average, that is a little more than 10,000 such voters per each of the eleven states in the region. Figure 17.16 (p. 360) reveals visually the number of freedmen registered before and after the Era of Disenfranchisement. Disenfranchisement removed nearly 8.5 out of every ten registered freedmen. And as we have indicated the “White Primaries” and “run-off elections” were in place to nullify the few remaining freedmen voters in each and every one of the eleven states of the old South. But the White Primaries were from time to time politically breached by selected and privileged black Democrats, and these breaches helped to undermine them. In closing, we want to bring to our readers’ attention one major observation about Table 17.20 and Figure 17.16. For much of this chapter, we have limited our empirical analysis of the initial voter registration data, which began in 1867, to two states, Louisiana and Mississippi, simply because only Louisiana kept official racial voter registration data over time and Mississippi kept the data for a single year. Louisiana’s longitudinal data allow us to see changes, surges, declines, and stability, while Mississippi’s single year data allow a detailed case study analysis. Since our comprehensive and systematic data include many states, they do not allow us to see perfectly parallel changes through time in freedmen voter registration from state to state. Hence, we have only two data points and not multiple ones. Thus, our empirical findings about the impact and influence of disenfranchisement tend toward the conservative side, although the actual number of disenfranchised was probably much higher and greater than we have the ability to show with these two data points. Just one of the reasons that the continual Louisiana data are so valuable is that they capture precisely the dynamism in freedmen voter registration and voting. We will always have to come back to the Louisiana data to understand that dimension of the African American electorate during the Era of Disenfranchisement.

360

Chapter 17

Table 17.20  Gain or Loss in Number of African American Registered Voters in the South from 1867 to after Disenfranchisement (1888–1908) African American Registered Voters 1867

African American Registered Voters at Disenfranchisement

Gain/Loss in Number of African American Registered Voters

State

Number

Percent of All RVs

Year

Number

Percent of All RVs a

Number

Years Since 1867

Alabama

104,518

63.0

1901

2,980

0.7

-101,538

34

1908

3,742

0.8

-100,776

41

Arkansas

23,146

34.9

1892

9,061b

3.4

  -14,085

25

Florida

16,089

57.5

1889

1,265c

1.5

  -14,824

22

Georgia

95,168

49.7

1908

18,448b

3.2

  -76,720

41

Louisiana

84,436

65.1

1900

5,320

1.6

  -79,116

33

Mississippi

60,167

56.3

1890

66,000

25.2

      5,833

23

1892

8,965

3.1

  51,202

25

1900

1,264

0.4

  -58,903

33

North Carolina

72,932

40.6

1900

15,017b

3.6

  -57,915

33

South Carolina

80,550

63.2

1894

7,185c

3.0

  -73,365

27

Tennessee

40,000

40.0

1890

c

3,122

0.8

  -36,878

23

Texas

49,497

45.4

1902

4,090b

0.6

  -45,407

35

Virginia

105,832

46.8

1902

21,000

4.7

  -84,832

35

Total

732,335

51.2

 

113,279d

2.2

-619,056d

 

Mean

66,576

 

11,961

3.2

  -56,409

30.7

Median

72,932

 

6,253

2.3

  -58,409

33

49.7

Sources: Revised and updated from The Annual Cyclopaedia of Independent Events of the Year, 1869 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1969), p. 53 for Arkansas, 1867; Vernon Lane Wharton, The Negro in Mississippi, 1865–1890 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), p. 146 for Mississippi, 1867; A. A. Taylor, The Negro in Tennessee, 1865–1880 (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1941), p. 55 for Tennessee, 1867; and U.S. Senate, “Letter of The General of the Army of the United States, Communicating, In Compliance with a resolution of the Senate of December 5, 1867, a statement of the number of white and colored voters registered in each of the States subject to the reconstruction acts of Congress, with other statistics relative to the same subject.” U.S. Senate, 40th Congress, 2nd Session, Executive Document Number 53 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1868), pp. 1–12. See Table 12.4. Data for registrations at Disenfranchisement are adapted from Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Alexander Heard and Donald S. Strong, Southern Primaries and General Election Data, 1920-1949 [Computer file], ICPSR ed., http://dx.doi:10.3886/ICPSR00071 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [producer and distributor], 1992), accessed April 16, 2011, for Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas; Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer file], ICPSR ed., http://dx.doi:10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), accessed September 26, 2010, for Florida, South Carolina, and Tennessee; Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer file], ICPSR ed., http:// dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), accessed June 14, 2009; Paul Lewinson, Race, Class, and Party: A History of Negro Suffrage and White Politics in the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932), p. 217 for Alabama in 1908; and Buford Satcher, Blacks in Mississippi, 1865–1900 (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1978), p. 209. Calculations by the authors. a

The total number of registered voters is given by ICPSR Study No. 8611 for the presidential election preceding the year of disenfranchisement or in the year of disenfranchisement.

b

This data is taken from referenda information and 15 African American majority counties in Arkansas per Perman and from Heard and Strong for Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas.

Extracting data from ICPSR Study No. 8611, the votes of African American majority counties in the election of 1892 for the Populist Party presidential candidate in Florida and for both the Republican Party candidate and the Populist candidate in Tennessee, and for the Republican Party candidate in the 1896 election for South Carolina are surrogate numbers for African American registered voters. c

d

Sum of the averages of the registered voters for Alabama and Mississippi plus the available numbers of registered voters for the other states.

Figure 17.16  Loss in Number of African American Registered Voters in the South from 1867 to after Disenfranchisement

African American Registered Voters

800,000

732,335

700,000 600,000 Loss of ~619,056 African American registered voters or a 84.5% decline from the number in 1867.

500,000 400,000 300,000 200,000

113,279

100,000 0 1867

Source: Table 17.20.

After Disenfranchisement (1888–1908)

Notes   1. Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1988–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 8.   2. Ibid., p. 1.   3. Ibid., p. 6.   4. Ibid., p. 17.   5. Ibid., p. 18.   6. Ibid., p. 7.   7. Andrew Lucker, V. O. Key, Jr.: The Quintessential Political Scientist (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), pp. 252–253.   8. Perman, p. 2.   9. Ibid., p. 5. 10. Quoted in Hanes Walton, Jr., Reelection: William Jefferson Clinton as a Native-Son Presidential Candidate (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 112. 11. Perman, p. 5. 12. Ibid. 13. Philip Converse, “Change in the American Electorate,” in Angus Campbell and Philip Converse (eds.), The Human Meaning of Social Change (New York: Russell Sage, 1972), pp. 297–298.



African American Voting and Non-Voting Behavior, 1888–1908 and Beyond 361

14. J. Morgan Kousser, “Post-Reconstruction Suffrage Restrictions in Tennessee: A New Look at the V.O. Key Thesis,” Political Science Quarterly Vol. 88 (December 1973), pp. 655–656. 15. Ibid., p. 665. 16. Ibid., p.680. 17. Jerrold Rusk and John Stucker, “The Effects of the Southern System of Election Laws on Voting Participation: A Reply to V.O. Key, Jr.” in Joel Silbey, Allan Bogue, and William Flanigan (eds.), The History of American Electoral Behavior (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 201. 18. Ibid., p. 248. 19. Ibid., pp. 247–248. 20. Ibid., p. 202. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., p. 113. 23. Frank Williams, Jr., “The Poll Tax as a Suffrage Requirement in the South,” Journal of Southern History Vol. 18 (November 1952), p. 471. 24. Kousser, p. 656. 25. Perman, p. 68. 26. Ibid., pp. 92, 152, and 225. 27. Ibid., p. 246. 28. Ibid., pp. 246–247. 29. Ibid., p. 248. 30. Ibid. 31. Williams, pp. 470–471. 32. Kousser, pp. 655–666. 33. Perman, p. 231. 34. Ibid., p. 245. 35. Ibid., p. 247. 36. Ibid., p. 248. 37. Laughlin McDonald, A Voting Rights Odyssey: Black Enfranchisement in Georgia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 38–39. 38. See Dewey Grantham, Jr., “Georgia Politics and the Disfranchisement of the Negro,” Georgia Historical Quarterly Vol. 32 (March 1948), pp. 1–21. 39. Rusk and Stucker, p. 212. 40. Ibid., pp. 217–218. 41. Ibid., p. 248. 42. Perman, p. 305. 43. Ibid., pp. 305–306. 44. Ibid., p. 306. 45. Paul Lewinson, Race, Class, and Party: A History of Negro Suffrage and White Politics in the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932), pp. 153–156. 46. Ibid., p. 153. 47. Ibid., pp. 153–154. 48. Edmund Drago, Hurrah for Hampton: Black Red Shirts in South Carolina During Reconstruction (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1998). 49. Ibid., p. 8. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., p. xiv. 52. Ibid., p. xv. 53. Lewinson, p. 154. 54. For Georgia see McDonald, A Voting Rights Odyssey: Black Enfranchisement in Georgia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For North Carolina see Helen Edmonds, The Negro and Fusion

Politics in North Carolina, 1894–1901 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1951), pp. 198–217; and Eric Anderson, Race and Politics in North Carolina, 1872–1901: The Black Second (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981). 55. V.O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation, A New Edition (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), pp. 208–209. 56. Perman, p. 158. 57. McDonald, p. 40. 58. Perman, p. 271. 59. Ibid., p. 281. 60. McDonald, p. 41. 61. Perman, pp. 285–286. 62. Ibid., p. 296. 63. Ibid. 64. John Dittmer, Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), pp. 102–103. For other historical evidence see Clarence Bacote, “The Negro in Georgia Politics, 1880–1908,” (PhD Dissertation: University of Chicago, 1955); his “The Negro in Atlanta Politics,” Phylon Vol. 16 (Fourth Quarter 1955), pp. 333–350; his “Negro Officeholders in Georgia under President McKinley,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 44. (July 1959), pp. 217–239. 65. For an analysis that failed to get beyond the county-level referenda data see Edmonds, p. 210. Using the county-level data holistically she wrote: “There were eighteen ‘black counties’ in 1900 and not one defeated the amendment.” This is the exact error that Professor V.O. Key in his classic Southern Politics urged scholars to avoid, the equating of the county-level vote with the African American electorate voting against its own self-interest. By looking inside each county-level result and separating those who voted for the amendment from those who voted against it, she would have avoided such a poor and wrong interpretation of the empirical data. 66. McDonald, pp. 41–42. 67. Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York: 1976); and U.S. Senate, Report and Testimony of the Select Committee of the United States Senate to Investigate the Causes of the Removal of Negroes from the Southern States to the Northern States, Senate Report Number 693, 46th Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880). 68. Logan, p. 143. 69. Richard Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 141. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid. 72. Abraham L. Davis and Barbara Luck Graham, The Supreme Court, Race, and Civil Rights (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1995), pp. 60–61. 73. Ibid., p. 61. 74. Ibid. 75. Valelly, p. 141. 76. Ralph Bunche, The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR, Edited and with an Introduction by Dewey Grantham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 469–472. 77. See Kent Redding and David James, “Estimating Levels and Modeling Determinants of Black and White Voter Turnout in the South, 1880 to 1912,” Historical Methods Vol. 34.4 (2001), pp. 141–158. 78. Buford Satcher, Blacks in Mississippi Politics, 1865–1900 (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1978), p. 209, Appendix D “Mississippi Voters and Population From 1860–1900.”

CHAPTER 18

The Lodge Bill and Beyond

Proposed Federal Supervision of Federal Elections in the South, 1861–1921 Political Parties, Congress, and the Legislation before the Lodge Bill

364

Figure 18.1 Republican and Democratic Party Majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1860–1920 Figure 18.2 Republican and Democratic Party Majorities in the U.S. Senate, 1860–1920 Figure 18.3 Republican and Democratic Party Majorities in the U.S. Congress, 1860–1920 Table 18.1 Political Party in Control of the Presidency and Congress, 1860–1920

365 366 367 367

Republicans, Democrats, and the Politics of Enforcement of Suffrage Rights

368

Figure 18.4 Number of Convictions under the Enforcement Acts by Region and Year, 1870–1894 Figure 18.5 Number of Dismissals under the Enforcement Acts by Region and Year, 1870–1894 Figure 18.6 Number of Criminal Prosecutions under the Enforcement Acts in the South, 1870–1894 Figure 18.7 Number of Criminal Prosecutions under the Enforcement Acts in the Border States, 1870–1894 Table 18.2 Number of Criminal Cases in the Enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment in the South and Border States, 1870–1877 Figure 18.8 Number of Enforcement Cases for the Fifteenth Amendment in Southern States, 1870–1877 Figure 18.9 Number of Enforcement Cases for the Fifteenth Amendment in Border States, 1870–1877 Figure 18.10 Percent of Enforcement Cases for the Fifteenth Amendment in Southern and Border States, 1870–1877

368 369 370 370

The Republican Party’s Lodge Bill: The Failure to Pass the New Enforcement Act

373

Figure 18.11 House of Representatives Vote of the Major Political Parties in the 51st Congress for H.R. 11045 (the Lodge Bill), 1890 Figure 18.12 Senate Vote of the Major Political Parties in the 51st Congress for Wolcott’s Motion (1891) Figure 18.13 Republican and Democratic Party Majorities in the U.S. Congress During the Administrations of President Grover Cleveland, 1885–1889 and 1893–1897

371 371 372 372

374 375 376

The Senate Popular Election Bill and the Women’s Suffrage Bill: The Republican Party’s New Political Opportunities

376

Table 18.3 House of Representatives Vote for Congressional Investigations of Suffrage Restrictions (The Burleigh Bill), 56th Congress, 1st Session, 1900 Figure 18.14 Number of Repealed Sections from the Enforcement Acts by Year and Political Party in Control of Congress

378 379

Summary and Conclusions on the Lodge Bill and Beyond

380

Diagram 18.1 The Lodge Bill in the Political Context of the Era of Disenfranchisement, 1877–1920 Table 18.4 Historical Composition of the United States Congress by Session, 1861–1921 Table 18.5 Criminal Prosecutions Under the Enforcement Acts, by Region and Year, 1870–1894 Map 18.1 Fifteenth Amendment Enforcement Cases in the South and Border States, 1870–1877

381 381 383 384

Notes 384

364

P

Chapter 18

olitical events in the South both before and after the “Compromise of 1877” that settled the disputed 1876 presidential election created the demand and need for new federal legislation. The “Redemption Movement,” which sought to “redeem” political control of the southern states from the alliance of African Americans and Republicans, perpetrated unprecedented violence and fraud in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina during the 1876 presidential and congressional elections. These states, the last to be “redeemed” to white Democratic control, became the focal point of the disputed election results. Congressional Republican leaders had seen this rising tide of white backlash in the South and tried to halt it with federal enforcement legislation restraining the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the early 1870s, but these laws proved less than effective. Of the first three enforcement acts, historian Everette Swinney wrote: “In the face of these cumulative threats to Republican ascendancy, Congress moved expeditiously, passing within a twelve-month period in 1870–1871 three laws designed to protect the Negro in the enjoyment of his newly won political and civil rights.”1 Recent historical research describes a linkage not recognized in some of the earlier historical works. Historian Xi Wang wrote: “Between May 1870 and June 1872, the Republicancontrolled Congress passed five laws directly relating to the legal application of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Three of these laws were known as the ‘enforcement acts’ or ‘force acts.’ Two of the three enforcement acts were related specifically to enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment. The other enforcement act, or the ‘Ku Klux Force Act,’ and two other federal laws dealt with enforcing the Fourteenth Amendment, amending naturalization laws, and appropriations, but they nonetheless contained provisions concerning enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment.”2 Professor Wang’s findings and chronological narrative demonstrate that these five different enforcement acts not only protected those suffrage rights extended to the freedmen by the Military Reconstruction Acts but also protected those rights extended by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Professor Wang’s expanded list of enforcement laws came from extending his analysis over two years (instead of the single year used by Swinney) and found more enforcement laws: “The Naturalization Act of 1870, the second of the voting rights enforcement laws between 1870 and 1872, has generally been overlooked in the study of black suffrage legislation, but the law was an important logical connection between the enforcement laws of May 31, 1870, and February 28, 1871. As its primary goal was to amend the existing system of naturalization, the bill seemingly had nothing to do with the Fifteenth Amendment.”3 The political context of the law was significant anti-Chinese violence in the western states. The Naturalization Act focused on questions of naturalization, national citizenship, and suffrage rights, but it also offered protection for African American suffrage rights. After analyzing all five enforcement acts in specific detail, Professor Wang concluded: “the enforcement bill, known as the Enforcement Act of May 31, 1870, was the first and most important congressional legislation to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment. The four enforcement laws passed thereafter either were a derivation or extension of this act or were aimed at other

subjects with suffrage enforcement included as a rider.”4 Most importantly, the initial enforcement “act defined the extent to which voting rights would be exercised and protected under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. It gave substance to the Fifteenth Amendment and identified the connection between civil and political rights.”5 The original Enforcement Act and its extensions were designed to mete out punishment to those individuals who used violent means against freedmen or created mayhem as a way of preventing the exercise of their suffrage rights. The southern Redemption Movement involved several coalitions of individuals, such as the KKK and the like, working conspiratorially to intimidate and assault freedmen as they cast their ballots. To reiterate, these enforcement acts were aimed at protecting suffrage, the political and civil rights granted by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, not those granted by the Military Reconstruction Acts alone. But all of these efforts were eventually undercut by a number of factors: the success of the Redemption Movement, which led to the adoption of new state constitutions in seven southern states, once racist whites had regained power; the Compromise of 1877; the reorganization of the Democratic Party; the split presidency of Democrat Grover Cleveland beginning in 1881; and the onset of the Era of Disenfranchisement. When Republicans regained a majority in Congress and the presidency in 1889, they responded to all of these trends with new Republican enforcement legislation—namely, the Lodge Bill.

Political Parties, Congress, and the Legislation before the Lodge Bill During the period in which the Republicans passed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the subsequent enforcement acts, their party had a dominant majority in both houses of Congress. The Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives, however, in a decisive victory in 1875. The Republicans’ return to a slim majority in 1881 set the stage for the attempt to revive federal enforcement of voting rights with the Lodge Bill. Figure 18.1 shows in percentages the size of the Republican and Democratic majorities in each session of the U.S. House of Representatives from the 37th Congress elected in 1860 through the 66th Congress elected in 1918, a total of thirty congressional sessions lasting sixty years. Republicans had control in nineteen sessions (63.3%), to eleven sessions (36.7%) for the Democrats. The Republican majorities lasted from 1861 through 1875 for a total of seven uninterrupted sessions and from 1895 through 1911 for more uninterrupted sessions. Aside from these lengthy continuous runs, the Republicans had single-session majorities in 1881–1883 and 1889–1891, and one double-session majority in 1917–1921. Democrats’ majorities lasted from 1875 through 1881, from 1883 through 1889, from 1891 through 1895, and from 1911 through 1917. In terms of the lengths of their majorities, the Democrats had three three-session periods of control, 1875–1881, 1883–1889, and 1911–1917, and one two-session



The Lodge Bill and Beyond 365 Figure 18.1  Republican and Democratic Party Majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1860–1920 60%

Republican Party Majorities

50%

Democratic –% Republican +%

40% 30% 20% 10% 0% −10% −20% −30% −40% −50%

19

17

19

19

13

15

19

19

09

11

19

19

19

03

05

19

19

99

01

19

97

18

18

93

95

18

18

89

91

18

18

85

87

18

83

18

18

79

81

18

18

75

77

18

73

18

18

69

71

18

18

65

67

18

63

18

61

18

18

07

Democratic Party Majorities

−60%

Congressional Session (Starting Year) Sources: Adapted from “Party Division in the Senate (1789–Present),” http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/history/one_item_and_teasers/partydiv.htm, accessed January 11, 2010; and “Party Divisions in the House of Representatives (1789 to Present),” http://clerk.house.gov/art_history/house_history/partyDiv.html, accessed January 11, 2010.

period 1891–1895. Thus, comparatively speaking the Democrats had much shorter periods of control of the House of Representatives. Most of the sessions in which the Democrats tended to have majorities came during periods with Democratic presidents, the two separate terms of Democratic President Grover Cleveland (1885–1889 and 1893–1897) and the two undivided terms of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson (1913–1921). Republican majorities in the House of Representative came not only during Republican presidential terms but also at times when a Democrat controlled the White House. Further analysis of Figure 18.1 reveals that there was a difference in party majorities. The Republicans had majorities of less than 10% only six times during their nineteen congressional sessions over this period, while the Democratic Party majorities fell below the 10% mark four times out of eleven sessions in control. The Republican majority twice surpassed the 50% mark while the Democratic majority only exceeded 40% once in the period. The mean majority in Republican-controlled sessions was 22.3% against a mean majority of 19.3% for Democrat-controlled sessions. Figure 18.2 (p. 366) reveals a different portrait over the same period in the Senate. Republicans dominated the U.S. Senate over these sixty years with only very limited periods of Democratic control. Republican control of the Senate ran from 1861 through 1879 for nine Senate sessions; 1883 through 1893 for five Senate sessions; and from 1895 through 1913 for another nine Senate sessions. The 1881–1883 session was a special case. The Republicans and Democrats held the same number of Senate seats, thirty-seven each. There were

two independents, one who voted with the Republicans and the other who voted with the Democrats. The U.S. Constitution requires that when a tie vote occurs in the Senate, the vice president exercises the deciding vote. The Republican vice president Chester Arthur voted with his party, initially giving the Republicans control of this session. However, on May 16, 1881, the two Republican New York senators resigned in protest over a presidential appointment, temporarily giving the Democrats control. New York elected two replacement Republican senators on July 22, but by that time President James Garfield had been shot. Procedural stalling tactics essentially prevented the Republicans from exercising control. Garfield died on September 19, 1881, and after Arthur ascended to the presidency on September 20, he did not appoint a new vice president, leaving Senate control split between the two parties.6 Finally, the Republicans had control in a single session of the Senate, 1919–1921. The twenty-four (80.0%) sessions that the Republicans controlled contrast sharply with the five sessions (16.7%) that the Democrats controlled. Democrats controlled during this time frame two one-session periods, 1879–1881 and 1893–1895, the latter session coming during the second term of Democrat Grover Cleveland’s presidency, as well as one threesession Senate period, 1913–1919, during the term of Democratic president Woodrow Wilson. The Republican Senate majorities were also more sizeable than the Democrats’ few majority sessions. The Republicans had two sessions where the margin of their Senate majorities went over 60%, while only seven of their twenty-four majorities had a margin of less than 10%. Democrats, on the other

366

Chapter 18

Figure 18.2  Republican and Democratic Party Majorities in the U.S. Senate, 1860–1920 80% 70% Republican Party Majorities

Democratic –% Republican +%

60% Republicans and Democrats each held 37 seats in the Senate of the 47th session (1881–1883). There were two third-party senators.

50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% −10%

Democratic Party Majorities

93 18 95 18 97 18 99 19 01 19 03 19 05 19 07 19 09 19 11 19 13 19 15 19 17 19 19

18

89

91

18

18

85

87

18

83

18

18

79

81

18

18

75

77

18

73

18

18

69

71

18

18

65

67

18

18

61

18

18

63

−20%

Congressional Session (Starting Year) Sources: Adapted from “Party Division in the Senate (1789–Present),” http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/history/one_item_and_teasers/partydiv.htm, accessed January 11, 2010; and “Party Divisions in the House of Representatives (1789 to Present),” http://clerk.house.gov/art_history/house_history/partyDiv.html, accessed January 11, 2010.

hand, saw only three of their five majorities reach above the 10% mark. The greater Republican dominance in the Senate reflects several factors. Because each state has two representatives, regardless of size, Republican strength in less populous states in the North and West translated to a greater margin of support in the Senate than in the House. Moreover, state legislatures selected members of the U.S. Senate prior to the Seventeenth Amendment mandate for popular voting. The practice of nonbinding popular voting arose in some states at the turn of the twentieth century, with state legislatures increasingly ratifying the public decision. Only a handful of states instituted popular voting in 1912 (for the 1913–1915 session of Congress) because the amendment, passed in 1912, was only ratified in 1913. Essentially, one-third of the U.S. Senate in 1915 was popularly elected, another third in 1917, and the final third in 1919. Thus, from 1861 to 1911, Figure 18.2 reflects the strength of the Republican Party at the state and local levels. The Democrats gained control for more than one Senate session at a time only from 1913 to 1919 once popular voting had begun. By combining the party majorities in both houses of Congress and tracing them over the entire time frame, Figure 18.3 shows when each party had majorities in both houses of Congress simultaneously as well as when they had split majorities, i.e., majorities in one house but not the other. For instance, the Republicans had dual majorities from 1861 through 1875, from 1895 through 1911, and in 1919–1921. Democrats had dual

majorities in 1879–1881, 1893–1895, and from 1913 through 1917. Turning to Table 18.1, we see that Republicans had unified control of Congress during the Lincoln/Johnson terms, the first six years of Grant’s two terms, the first two years of Harrison’s term, the last two years of Cleveland’s second term, McKinley’s two terms, Theodore Roosevelt’s two terms, the first two years of Taft’s term, and the last two years of Wilson’s second term. Democrats had unified control of both houses of Congress in the last two years of Hayes’ presidency and in the first two years of Democratic Grover Cleveland’s second term. The Democratic Party achieved unified control of Congress in consecutive sessions for the first time after the Civil War during Wilson’s first term in office. Table 18.1 also shows that from the 44th through the 52nd sessions of Congress the major parties each controlled both chambers of Congress only once. These sessions ran from 1875, two years preceding the Compromise of 1877, to 1893.7 Clearly, over the extended time frame from 1860 to 1920 the Republicans had unified control longer and more often than the Democrats. In fact, they not only had unified control at the time of the Lodge Bill (1890), they had it from 1895 until 1911, just beyond the end of the Era of the Disenfranchisement (1888–1908). Figure 18.3 shows that the largest joint Republican majorities in both the House and Senate came from 1865 to 1869, when the party had an over 50% margin in both houses. One of the smallest joint Republican majorities was from 1889 to 1891, the



The Lodge Bill and Beyond 367 Figure 18.3  Republican and Democratic Party Majorities in the U.S. Congress, 1860–1920 80% Republicans and Democrats each held 37 seats in the Senate of the 47th session (1881–1883). There were two third-party senators.

70%

Democratic –% Republican +%

60% 50%

Republican Party Majorities

40% 30% 20% 10% 0% −10% −20% −30% −40%

Democratic Party Majorities

18

61 18 63 18 65 18 67 18 69 18 71 18 73 18 75 18 77 18 79 18 81 18 83 18 85 18 87 18 89 18 91 18 93 18 95 18 97 18 99 19 01 19 03 19 05 19 07 19 09 19 11 19 13 19 15 19 17 19 19

−50% Congressional Session (Starting Year) House of Representatives

Senate

Sources: Adapted from “Party Division in the Senate (1789-Present),” http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/history/one_item_and_teasers/partydiv.htm, accessed January 11, 2010; and “Party Divisions in the House of Representatives (1789 to Present),” http://clerk.house.gov/art_history/house_history/partyDiv.html, accessed January 11, 2010.

Table 18.1  Political Party in Control of the Presidency and Congress, 1860–1920 Congress

Congress

House of Representatives

  President

  Pres. Party

Session

Session Years

Congress Partya

  Pres. and Congress Partyb

Abraham Lincoln

Rep.

37

1861–1863

Rep.

Abraham Lincoln

Rep.

38

1863–1865

Rep.

Abraham Lincoln/ Andrew Johnson

Union

39

1865–1867

Rep.

Andrew Johnson

Union

40

1867–1869

Rep.

Ulysses S. Grant

Rep.

41

1869–1871

Rep.

Ulysses S. Grant

Rep.

42

1871–1873

Ulysses S. Grant

Rep.

43

Ulysses S. Grant

Rep.

Rutherford B. Hayes

House of Representatives

  Pres. and Congress Partyb

  President

  Pres. Party

Session

Session Years

Rep.

Benjamin Harrison

Rep.

51

1889–1891

Rep.

Rep.

Rep.

Benjamin Harrison

Rep.

52

1891–1893

None

None

None

Grover Cleveland

Dem.

53

1893–1895

Dem.

Dem.

Grover Cleveland

Dem.

54

1895–1897

Rep.

None

None

William T. McKinley

Rep.

55

1897–1899

Rep.

Rep.

Rep.

William T. McKinley

Rep.

56

1899–1901

Rep.

Rep.

Rep.

Rep.

McKinley/T. Roosevelt

Rep.

57

1901–1903

Rep.

Rep.

1873–1875

Rep.

Rep.

Theodore Roosevelt

Rep.

58

1903–1905

Rep.

Rep.

44

1875–1877

None

None

Theodore Roosevelt

Rep.

59

1905–1907

Rep.

Rep.

Rep.

45

1877–1879

None

None

Theodore Roosevelt

Rep.

60

1907–1909

Rep.

Rep.

Rutherford B. Hayes

Rep.

46

1879–1881

Dem.

None

William Taft

Rep.

61

1909–1911

Rep.

Rep.

James Garfield/ Chester Arthurc

Rep.

47

1881–1883

None

None

William Taft

Rep.

62

1911–1913

None

None

Woodrow Wilson

Dem.

63

1913–1915

Dem.

Dem.

Chester Arthur

Rep.

48

1883–1885

None

None

Woodrow Wilson

Dem.

64

1915–1917

Dem.

Dem.

Grover Cleveland

Dem.

49

1885–1887

None

None

Woodrow Wilson

Dem.

65

1917–1919

None

None

Grover Cleveland

Dem.

50

1887–1889

None

None

Woodrow Wilson

Dem.

66

1919–1921

Rep.

None

Congress Partya

Sources: Adapted from “Party Division in the Senate (1789–Present),” http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/history/one_item_and_teasers/partydiv.htm, accessed January 11, 2010; and “Party Divisions in the House of Representatives (1789 to Present),” http://clerk.house.gov/art_history/house_history/partyDiv.html, accessed January 11, 2010. a Party controlling both chambers of Congress (House and Senate). b Party controlling presidency and both chambers of Congress. c Chester Arthur, a Stalwart Republican, ascended to the presidency upon the assassination of President James Garfield but did not appoint a vice president. During the first congressional session of his term in office, the Senate was under Democratic control but then, without a vice president, deadlocked with an equal number of seats between the two major parties. Garfield handled the tense situation by choosing Rep. David Davis (IL), a former Supreme Court justice and a true independent, as President pro tempore and next in line to the presidency. Davis had once been Abraham Lincoln’s campaign manager, but by 1876 he caucused with the Democrats. Republicans were made the chairs of Senate committees, but Democrats received a share of patronage. Republicans gained a two-seat majority in the next congressional session when Davis did not run for reelection and was succeeded by a Republican and Virginia’s Democratic senator was succeeded by a third-party Readjuster. After controlling the House of Representatives during the first session of Arthur’s term, Republicans lost control of this chamber to the Democrats in the second session. See http://www.senate.gov/history, http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/senate/ PROTEM/AQuestion.pdf, and http://lugar.senate.gov/services/pdf_crs/The_President_Pro_Tempore_of_the_Senate.pdf.

368

Chapter 18

Congress in which the Lodge Bill arose. Although the combined Republican majorities in both houses of Congress were much higher in the years during and after the Civil War, 1861 through 1875, they were also quite substantial in the years 1895 through 1911. Through both of those long stretches of Republican control of both houses, there were also Republican presidents in the White House. Thus, legislative failures to protect the African American electorate had to be rooted not only in the Congress but also in the presidency, and not just when held by the Democrats.

the Confederate army.”9 His second southern appointment was “Augustus Garland of Arkansas to be Attorney General, [whose appointment] incurred greater protest than Lamar’s.”10 Both men, like all of President Cleveland’s cabinet officers, “were given broad latitude in running their departments, with the tacit understanding that as loyal lieutenants they would conform with the overall policies the President set for the executive branch and would avoid intramural dissension.”11 These political payoffs to the South arose from the fact that these states supported Cleveland in both of his presidential elections and each time enabled his presidential election victory. Thus, when the state of Mississippi started the Era of Disenfranchisement in 1890, Cleveland, upon taking office in 1892, went out of his way and “praised Isaiah T. Montgomery [the only African American at the 1890 State Constitutional Convention] for accepting a subordinate position for Negro voters in Mississippi.”12 Nor did Cleveland voice any disapproval “when South Carolina in 1895, adopted an amendment similar to Mississippi’s and when it became evident that Louisiana was also planning the ‘legal’ disfranchisement of most Negroes.”13 But the failure of enforcement that occurred under President Cleveland in his first term had been launched in the South shortly after 1874, and Cleveland and later the Republicans merely continued it. Figure 18.4 provides the total number of convictions under the enforcement acts, by region and year from 1870 to 1894 when

Republicans, Democrats, and the Politics of Enforcement of Suffrage Rights Historian Perman tells us that “[e]ven when the Democrats won control of the executive branch under Grover Cleveland between 1884 and 1888, no attempt was made to undermine the system [of federal oversight created by the enforcement acts], although its administration was certainly less vigorous.”8 This lack of enforcement was due partly to the fact that President Cleveland appointed two southerners to his cabinet. These two appointments, his most controversial, were for the departments of the Interior and Justice. “Here he selected men who had served in the late Confederate government. His choice for Interior, Lucius Q. C. Lamar of Mississippi, had drafted that state’s Ordinance of Secession in 1861 and served two years in

Figure 18.4  Number of Convictions under the Enforcement Acts by Region and Year, 1870–1894 500 450 400

Number of Convictions

350 300 250 200 150 100 50

94

93

18

92

18

18

91

90

18

18

89

88

18

18

87

86

18

18

85

84

18

18

83

82

18

18

81

80

18

18

79

78

18

18

77

76

18

18

75

74

18

18

73

72

18

71

18

18

18

70

0 Year Border

Union

South

Source: Adapted from Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860–1910 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), Appendix 7, pp. 300–301. Calculations by the authors. Note: Southern states exclude Tennessee, which is included among the Border States by the source.



The Lodge Bill and Beyond 369

the majority of sections of these laws were effectively repealed by the second Cleveland administration. Convictions peaked in 1873, began a great decline in 1874, and had minor recovery peaks some eight times in this time frame. Except for 1881, convictions in the South remained low after 1874. And Border State convictions had a brief surge, 1888–1891, but were low throughout the rest of this time frame. These surges and declines testify to the inconsistency in enforcement. Another aspect of the failure of enforcement was the number of dismissals. Dismissals were those individuals prosecuted for violating freedmen’s voting rights but set free. A higher number of dismissals indicates less vigilance in enforcing the laws and undoubtedly a higher number of actual crimes, since prosecutors were known to let off guilty parties. Figure 18.5 shows that the number of dismissals peaked in 1874 and declined until they bottomed out in 1878; they surged until they peaked again in 1883, then declined until 1886; they surged once more in 1889–1890, then basically declined to the end of the time frame. Border state dismissals fluctuated greatly across the entire time frame. The fluctuations speak to the problems in the lack of consistency in the enforcement of protecting the suffrage rights of freedmen. Figure 18.6 (p. 370) shows the total number of prosecutions, broken down by the number of dismissals and the number of convictions, in just the southern states from 1870 to 1894. Except for a few years, the number of dismissals was always higher than

the number of convictions; violators of the freedmen’s suffrage rights were simply let go time and time again. Looking at the data in the figure, one sees basically two surges in convictions— during the federal troop occupation from 1871 to 1873 and a much smaller increase in 1881. Otherwise, the number of convictions stayed steadily low and were at times nearly non-existent. The same data for Border States, shown in Figure 18.7 (p. 370), reveal a quite different portrait of the total prosecutions, again broken down by convictions and dismissals. Dismissals outnumbered convictions over this same time frame, but there was more variation in this region. The smaller scale for Figure 18.7 reveals more clearly the fluctuations in this region. Most importantly, the number of convictions did not bottom out as in the South but reached its zenith between 1888 and 1891. In the Border States, convictions were still occurring just before the Democratic Cleveland administration wiped the voter protection sections off the federal statute books. Hence, the enforcement acts, which were originally aimed at the South, became important for prosecutions and convictions in the Border States after they had nearly stopped being important in the South. Shifting from a regional look at enforcement to a state-level portrait one can see in Table 18.2 and Figure 18.8 (p. 371) the actual number of enforcement cases filed to protect Fifteenth Amendment rights in the southern states from 1870 to 1877. By rank ordering the states by number of cases, the greatest number

Figure 18.5  Number of Dismissals under the Enforcement Acts by Region and Year, 1870–1894 900 800

Number of Dismissals

700 600 500 400 300 200 100

94 18

93

92

18

91

18

90

18

89

18

88

18

87

18

86

18

85

18

84

18

83

18

18

82

81

18

80

18

79

18

78

18

77

18

76

18

75

18

18

74

73

18

72

18

18

71 18

18

70

0 Year Border

Union

South

Source: Adapted from Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860–1910 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), Appendix 7, pp. 300–301. Calculations by the authors. Note: Southern states exclude Tennessee, which is included among the Border States by the source.

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Chapter 18

Figure 18.6  Number of Criminal Prosecutions under the Enforcement Acts in the South, 1870–1894 1,200

1,000

Number

800

600

400

200

94

93

18

92

18

91

18

90

18

89

18

88

18

87

18

86

18

85

18

84

18

83

18

82

18

81

18

18

80

79

18

78

18

77

18

76

18

75

18

74

18

73

18

72

18

71

18

18

18

70

0 Year Convictions

Dismissals

Source: Adapted from Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860–1910 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), Appendix 7, pp. 300–301. Calculations by the authors. Note: Southern states exclude Tennessee, which is included among the Border States by the source.

Figure 18.7  Number of Criminal Prosecutions under the Enforcement Acts in the Border States, 1870–1894 300

250

Number

200

150

100

50

Convictions

4

18 9

3

18 9

2

18 9

1

18 9

0 18 9

9

18 8

88

18

7

18 8

86

18

4

5 18 8

18 8

3

18 8

2

18 8

1

18 8

0 18 8

9

8

18 7

7

18 7

18 7

6

5

18 7

4

18 7

3

18 7

2

18 7

1

18 7

18 7

18 7

0

0

Dismissals

Year Source: Adapted from Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860–1910 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), Appendix 7, pp. 300–301. Calculations by the authors. Note: The source includes Tennessee among the Border States.



The Lodge Bill and Beyond 371 Table 18.2  Number of Criminal Cases in the Enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment in the South and Border States, 1870–1877

Number of Cases

Percent of Region

Percent of South and Border Regions

Percent of Region

Percent of South and Border Regions

Region

State

Border

Kentucky

116

57.4%

3.0%

Maryland

56

27.7%

1.5%

West Virginia

27

13.4%

0.7%

Missouri

3

1.5%

0.1%

Delaware

0

0.0%

0.0%

Border Subtotal

202

100%

5.3%

Number of Cases

Region

State

South

South Carolina

1,387

38.2%

36.1%

Mississippi

1,175

32.3%

30.6%

North Carolina

559

15.4%

14.6%

Tennessee

214

5.9%

5.6%

Alabama

134

3.7%

3.5%

Georgia

73

2.0%

1.9%

Florida

41

1.1%

1.1%

Texas

29

0.8%

0.8%

Border Average

40

20.0%

1.1%

Virginia

16

0.4%

0.4%

Border Median

27

13.4%

0.7%

Louisiana

4

0.1%

0.1%

Arkansas

3

0.1%

0.1%

South Subtotal

3,635

100%

94.7%

South Average

330

9.1%

8.6%

South Median

73

2.0%

1.9%

South and Border

Grand Total

3,837

100%

Average

240

6.3%

Median

49

1.3%

Source: Adapted from Everette Swinney, “Enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment, 1870–1877,” Journal of Southern History, Vol. 28, No. 2 (May 1962), p. 218. Calculations by the authors.

Figure 18.8  Number of Enforcement Cases for the Fifteenth Amendment in Southern States, 1870–1877 1,600

1,400

1,387

1,175

1,200

Number of Cases

1,000

800

559

600

400 214 200

134 73

0

Source: Table 18.2.

South Carolina

Mississippi

North Carolina

Tennessee

Alabama

Georgia

41

29

16

4

3

Florida

Texas

Virginia

Louisiana

Arkansas

Chapter 18 Figure 18.9  Number of Enforcement Cases for the Fifteenth Amendment in Border States, 1870–1877 140 116

120 100 80

56

60 40

27

20 3

0

De

la w

ar e

ri ou M

tV W es

M

iss

nd ar yla

ky nt uc

irg in ia

0

Ke

of cases came in South Carolina, Mississippi, and North Carolina, while the fewest number occurred in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Virginia. Georgia had the median number of cases (73), and the mean for the South stood at 330 cases per state. The wide difference between the mean and median reflects the fact that the majority of the cases came in a few states. Figure 18.9 reveals the data for the same information on the Border States in the same period. Kentucky had the largest number of cases under the Fifteenth Amendment, and Delaware had the lowest with not a single case. Thus, the number of cases in West Virginia, 27, becomes the median. The mean number of cases per state stood at 40. And these findings for the Border States suggest that there was more acceptance of the Fifteenth Amendment in this region than in the southern region, or simply fewer freedmen voters. Finally, Figure 18.10 again offers the regional percentages for the number of cases in each state. Two states—South Carolina and Mississippi—accounted for 70.5% of all of the enforcement cases in the South. North Carolina accounted for 15.4% of the South’s cases, and the other eight states combined for the remaining 14.1%. The historical narratives on South Carolina and Mississippi support the empirical evidence suggesting that violations of the suffrage rights of the freedmen occurred with great frequency and intensity in these two states. The only two Border States with at least one African American majority county following the Civil War, Kentucky and Maryland, had a whopping 85.1% of all of the enforcement cases in the Border States. West Virginia’s 13.4% accounted for most of the remainder of the enforcement cases in this region. Thus, enforcement in the Border States took place in only four of the five states, and the process was quite unbalanced. By both indicators, the actual numbers and the percentages, the South had more trouble

Number of Cases

372

Source: Table 18.2.

adapting to the Fifteenth Amendment than did the Border region by far. Allowing the freedmen to cast ballots was quite bitterly resented in the South. In summary, these ten figures show the limitations, weaknesses, and gross inconsistencies across time and place. First, as shown in Figures 18.1–18.3 (pp. 365–367), the political parties were not consistent in their support of these Acts. Although the Republicans passed these Acts and tried to support them with additional legislation, their loss of power across this time frame allowed the Democrats to capture split governments as well as unified government victories, which led to limited enforcement and eventually to the removal of these enforcement laws. In addition, internal cleavages

Figure 18.10  Percentage of Enforcement Cases for the Fifteenth Amendment in Southern and Border States, 1870–1877 Border States

Southern States Tennessee Alabama North 134 214 Carolina 3.7% 5.9% 559 Florida 15.4% 41 Georgia 1.1% 73 2.0% Texas 29 0.8% Mississippi 1,175 32.3%

South Carolina 1,387 38.2%

West Virginia 27 13.4% Maryland 56 27.7%

Missouri 3 1.5% Delaware 0 0.0%

Virginia 16 0.4%

Kentucky 116 57.4%

Louisiana 4 0.1% Arkansas 3 0.1%

South Carolina Tennessee Florida Louisiana Source: Table 18.2.

Mississippi Alabama Texas Arkansas

North Carolina Georgia Virginia

Kentucky West Virginia

Maryland Missouri

Delaware

and dissensions in the Republican unified power coalitions led to disagreements and failures of full and enhanced support for these laws as well as their eventual removal. And the Republicans themselves were instrumental in removing some of their own legislative protections. Therefore, to permit the reader to perform and undertake their own empirical analyses of this period, at the end of this chapter are three data tables covering the information that have been presented in all of the figures in this chapter.

The Republican Party’s Lodge Bill: The Failure to Pass the New Enforcement Act Enforcement of both the enforcement acts and the Fifteenth Amendment was lax, infrequent, inadequate, and ineffective. Thus, demands and protests for the national government to do something to solve the problem so as to have a “Free Ballot and a Fair Count” in the South pushed the Republican Party to address the situation as soon as it won control of a unified government. The first political opportunity came after the 1888 presidential and congressional elections. Of this unique political moment for the Republicans, historian Charles Calhoun noted: “In the November balloting, Harrison took New York and Indiana and defeated Cleveland, but he carried none of the former slave states.”14 He added: “But the party did win majorities in both houses of Congress, and in the House of Representatives, Republican inroads in the upper South made the difference in the party’s attaining control. Republicans won twenty-five seats in the old slave states, nine more than in the previous Congress, and nearly all came from the upper South.”15 Therefore, after the 1888 elections, “[f]or the first time since 1875, the Republicans would control the presidency, the House and the Senate.”16 Historian Xi Wang marks the moment thusly: “Republicans won the 1888 election. . . . Among southern states, only West Virginia went Republican. . . . While Cleveland won several southern states by a small margin, Harrison received more southern ballots than any Republican presidential candidate since the end of Reconstruction.”17 In fact, in this particular election, “Republicans from southern and border states increased their seats in the House, giving the party a majority. Together with the holdover majority in the Senate and on the Supreme Court, the Republican party, for the first time since 1875, would control every branch of the national government.”18As a result, the party was in its best position in fifteen years to address the problem that so many had brought to the attention of party elites. Republicans in the House of Representatives had 179 seats to the Democrats’ 152, for a 27-seat majority (and there was a single third party congressman, Independent Union Laborite Lewis P. Featherstone of Arkansas); and in the Senate, Republicans had 51 seats to the Democrats’ 37 for a 14-seat majority.19 The legislation designed to restore free and fair elections, which became known as the Lodge Bill, originated in the U.S. Senate when it was introduced by Senators George F. Hoar (R–Massachusetts) and John C. Spooner (R–Wisconsin) in the spring of 1890. The political calculations surrounding the bill were influenced by the fact that the U.S. Senate was not popularly elected. Senators were then elected by each state legislature.

The Lodge Bill and Beyond 373 Hence, this new legislation would be essentially focused upon protecting elections to the U.S. House of Representatives. In that legislative body, Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge (R–Mass) introduced his own version of the Hoar and Spooner bill, which eventually became with some modifications and changes H.R. 11045, entitled: “A Bill to Amend and Supplement the Election Laws of the United States and to Provide for the More Efficient Enforcement of Such Laws.” Congressman Lodge’s bill provided that: . . . upon petition of 100 or more citizens from a particular congressional district, a circuit court was empowered to appoint federal supervisors representing each major party to scrutinize and report on registration and the election. In case of any dispute about the conduct or outcome of the election, the federal circuit court was given authority to investigate and make determinations. Three features of the proposal were innovative: the expansion of the role of the supervisors, the centrality of the federal courts rather than state election officials in the voting proceedings, and the creation of a three-man board of canvassers to tabulate and report the election returns. Although it enhanced the scope of federal supervision, the measure made no provision for the assignment of federal troops or marshals to police the polls, despite the unwarranted but successful efforts of the bill’s opponents to label it a “force” bill.20 On this same point, historian Charles Calhoun declared: The supervisors would observe all phases of registration, voting, and counting in congressional elections. They would report any irregularities and make their own return of vote totals in addition to the tally made by state officials. Indeed, despite their rhetoric about a return to bayonet rule, southern Democrats were most disturbed by the prospect of losing the power of certification in congressional elections to federal canvassers or a judge appointed by a Republican president. This was the real heart of the bill, which threatened to work a fundamental reordering of power.21 But when all of the discussions and debates were over, and the Democratic and Republican opposition had rendered all of their best arguments, the Republicans in the House of Representatives relied on their majority in numbers. On July 2, 1890, a vote was taken on the Lodge Bill, and it passed 155 for, 149 against, and 24 not voting at all. Among those Republicans voting for the Lodge Bill was the African American Republican congressman Henry P. Cheatham of the 2nd Congressional District in North Carolina. Although two other African Americans were elected to this 51st Congress, John M. Langston of Virginia and Thomas Miller of South Carolina, their elections were contested and they were not seated until after the vote on the Lodge Bill was over. Thus, only Cheatham had an opportunity to vote for it.

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Breaking this vote down along party lines, Figure 18.11 reveals that of the total of 172 Republicans, 154 voted yes, 2 voted no, and 16 did not vote. As for the 155 Democrats, none of them voted yes, 147 voted no, and 8 did not vote. And the one Independent Union Laborite Congressman, Lewis Featherstone of Arkansas, voted yes with the Republicans. After the Lodge bill had passed the House of Representatives, “the bill was sent to the Senate on July 7,” 1890, and “[t]he Mississippi [disenfranchising] Constitutional Convention assembled six weeks later, on August 12, 1890.”22 However, on the very same day that the Mississippi disenfranchising state constitutional convention met, Republican Senator Matt Quay of Pennsylvania “introduced a resolution postponing consideration of the Lodge bill until the next session and providing that the debate on the McKinley Tariff bill be limited to the end of August. . . . Quay’s resolution did not come to a vote, but, by tacit agreement, the Federal Elections bill was sidetracked by the Senate so that the tariff duties could be raised at that session.”23 In fact, after the Quay proposal, “the Republicans caucused and agreed to delay the Lodge measure until after the campaign, when it would be given precedence.”24 To further ensure party unity around the election bill, Republican senators met on the evening of August 21, 1890, “informally at the house of their colleague James McMillan of Michigan and at last reached an understanding. Quay would not press his resolution, and Republicans would pledge themselves to begin consideration of the elections bill on the first day of the next session of Congress [less than four months away], to the exclusion of other matters until it was settled by a vote.”25 Then to ensure fidelity to this informal agreement, the original senate sponsors of the bill, Hoar and Spooner, after the meeting at Senator McMillan’s house, “secured the signatures of nearly all the Republicans to an explicit pledge to begin consideration of the election bill on the first day of the second session and to support a rule change to secure the vote.”26 Supposedly, with these formal and informal agreement safeguards in place, the Senate on September 10, 1890, passed

the McKinley Tariff bill. But even with this bill passed, this first congressional session did not end until October 1, barely five weeks before the midterm congressional elections on November 1890. Meanwhile, three weeks after the first session of Congress adjourned, the advocates of white supremacy in Mississippi acted on “October 22, 1890, [when] the convention adopted a report of the state judiciary committee that it was unnecessary to submit the proposed changes to the people,” of Mississippi. “The convention approved the new constitution on November 1. It imposed a poll tax of two dollars, excluded voters convicted of certain crimes, and barred from voting all those who could not read a section of the state constitution, or understand it when read, or give a reasonable interpretation of it.”27 The effect of the state’s action was to bar almost all African American voters while avoiding the Fifteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. At the midterm congressional elections on November 4, 1890, the Republicans lost their majority in the House of Representatives; the Democrats now had 238 seats to the Republicans’ 87 for a majority of 151 seats. But in the Senate the Republicans only lost 4 seats and as a consequence kept their majority. In this 52nd Congress they had 47 senate seats to the Democrats’ 39, for a majority of 8 seats. Since the Lodge bill had already passed the House of Representatives and the second session of the old 51st Congress still convened on December 1, 1890, and went through March 3, 1891, they still had enough votes, if party unity prevailed, to pass the Lodge bill. Not only had they seen what had happened in Mississippi, which presaged things to come in the midterm elections in the South, “Republicans saw their congressional representation from the old slave states fall from twentyfive to four seats.”28 African American representatives in this congressional election went from three to one. Only Congressman Cheatham of North Carolina was reelected, while Langston of Virginia and Miller of South Carolina were not reelected. So now the signals from everywhere were indicating that the time to take action had arrived.

Figure 18.11  House of Representatives Vote of the Major Political Parties in the 51st Congress for H.R. 11045 (the Lodge Bill), 1890 Republican Party

Democratic Party

9.3%

1.2%

5.2% 0.0%

94.8%

89.5% 154 Yeas

2 Nays

Source: Congressional Record, 51st Congress, 1st Session, pp. 6940–6941.

16 Not Voting

0 Yeas

147 Nays

8 Not Voting



The Lodge Bill and Beyond 375

Therefore, “when the second session of the 51st Congress began in December, 1890 . . . Hoar, who had taken the responsibility for securing approval, won a vote of 41 to 30 on December 2, to consider the bill.”29 The Democrats caucused the next day and issued a statement that they “would resist the bill at every point, but that there would be no filibuster.”30 Nevertheless, they did launch a filibuster. And “it was all the easier to engage in a filibuster since there was no Senate rule governing it until 1917.”31 On January 5, 1891, the Democratic opposition, although in the minority, got Republican support from the Republican senator from Nevada who made a motion to have the Senate take up “a pending free coinage bill,” instead of the election vote. In the ensuing vote on this motion, “a coalition of Democrats and silver Republicans won the day, 34 to 29. But once the silver bill had passed, January 14, the contest on the elections bill still had to be resolved. Hoar’s motion to consider it resulted in a tie vote, 33 to 33, which Vice President Morton broke with an affirmative vote.”32 With the Senate once again turning its attention to the Lodge bill, the Democrats restarted their filibuster. Finally, on January 20, 1891, the Republicans took some action to halt the filibuster: Senator [Nelson] Aldrich, Republican from Rhode Island, moved to invoke cloture. While the Democrats were seeking frantically to prevent it, [J. Donald] Cameron, a Republican from Pennsylvania, and several silver Republicans rescued them. Two days later, the silverite [Edward O.] Wolcott moved to consider an apportionment bill. Needless to say, it contained no reference to the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment.33 Therefore, “when the managers of the election bill moved to table Wolcott’s proposal, the Senate rejected that request by

a vote of 34 to 35, with 19 abstaining. A few minutes later, the Senate accepted Wolcott’s motion by a reversed vote of 35 to 34, with the same 19 not voting.”34 Figure 18.12 offers an analysis of the Senate vote, which accepted Wolcott’s motion to consider a bill besides the Lodge bill. Republicans cast 6 yes votes to accept the motion, along with 29 Democrats, for a total of 35 votes to accept the Wolcott motion. Thus, the Republican Senate majority split and enough of them joined with the minority Democrats to set aside the Lodge bill for the final time. It was never again brought up in the Senate. The six Republican Senators who joined with the Democrats in this instance—John P. Jones and William M. Stewart of Nevada, Henry M. Teller and Wolcott of Colorado, William Washburn of Minnesota, and Cameron of Pennsylvania—included four from the silver states. In appraising this failure, African American historian Rayford Logan wrote: “The responsibility of the Republicans, and especially those from the silver states, for the laying aside of the Lodge bill is beyond dispute.”35 And W.E.B. DuBois, at the time of the failure of the Lodge bill, wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Age, an African American newspaper, saying: “When you have the right sort of black voters, you will need no election laws. The battle of my people must be a moral one, not a legal or physical one.”36 In Congress, the recently seated African American congressman from Virginia, John Langston, saw the bill languishing in the Senate and cried out against the Republicans for letting it do so and encouraged them to pass the legislation. Neither this protest from an African American in Congress nor that coming from the African American community achieved Republican Party unity in passing it. In the 1892 presidential and congressional elections, former Democratic president Grover Cleveland won the White House for a second, non-consecutive term, and the Democrats also won back the Senate, giving them a unified government. Figure 18.13 (p. 376) shows the nature and scope of congressional control

Figure 18.12  Senate Vote of the Major Political Parties in the 51st Congress for Wolcott’s Motion (1891) Republican Party

Democratic Party 21.6%

21.6% 11.8%

0.0%

66.7% 6 Yeas

78.4% 34 Nays

Source: Congressional Record, 51st Congress, 1st Session, pp. 1740.

11 Not Voting

29 Yeas

0 Nays

8 Not Voting

376

Chapter 18

Figure 18.13  Republican and Democratic Party Majorities in the U.S. Congress during the Administrations of President Grover Cleveland, 1885–1889 and 1893–1897 50%

Republican Party Majorities

45.1%

40%

Democratic –% Republican +%

30% 20% 10.5%

10%

4.4%

2.6%

0%

−20%

−4.5%

−4.6%

−10% −12.6%

−30%

−26.4%

−40%

Democratic Party Majorities

−50% 1885–1887

1887–1889

1893–1895

1895–1897

Congressional Session (Years) House of Representatives

Senate

Sources: Adapted from “Party Division in the Senate (1789–Present),” http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/history/one_item_and_teasers/partydiv.htm, accessed January 11, 2010; and “Party Divisions in the House of Representatives (1789 to Present),” http://clerk.house.gov/art_history/house_history/partyDiv.html, accessed January 11, 2010.

during the Democratic presidency of Grover Cleveland’s split terms. This figure shows us that of the four congressional sessions of his split presidential terms, only during the first session of President Cleveland’s second term was there unified control. In this period, 1893–1895, a financial panic occurred “in the spring of 1893,” and in response Democratic President Cleveland “called Congress into a special session in August to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act” because he wanted to return the nation to a gold standard. “Although the purpose of the session was to deal with the currency, House Democrats seized the opportunity to launch an effort to repeal the election laws. On September 11, [1893, a Virginia Democrat] introduced a bill to eliminate nearly forty sections from the Revised Statutes” of the United States Code. “Originating in the enforcement legislation of 1870, 1871, and 1872, these sections dealt with federal election supervisors and deputy marshals and set penalties for violating the right to vote.”37 In this debate of the special session, the Democratic House members who had a majority claimed that “these statutes were unconstitutional, trampled on the rightful powers of the states, and unfairly benefitted the Republican Party.” The House passed the bill before the end of the special session, and the Democrat-controlled Senate passed it in December during the regular session. And when it reached President Cleveland’s desk, he promptly signed it. Despite the fact that the leading historians decry the Lodge bill as the last bill that Republicans supported on behalf of African American suffrage, the reality is that the Republicans had the political reasons and opportunities several times after the failure of the Lodge bill to try to get federal regulation of

congressional elections. In the midterm elections of 1894, the Republicans recaptured both the House and Senate and held them until 1911. Moreover, in 1896 the Republicans won the presidency and held a unified government until 1911. And in this new time frame, new political opportunities and political reasons arose.

The Senate Popular Election Bill and the Women’s Suffrage Bill: The Republican Party’s New Political Opportunities One of the interesting and defining features of the congressional debates over the Lodge bill and the subsequent Democratic repeal of the enforcement acts was the manner in which many Republicans argued their support and opposition. Although race and the race issue permeated the congressional debates, few Republicans touched upon the subject. Instead, they offered defense and opposition with arguments about the virtues of republicanism. Beginning with the 1888 presidential and congressional elections, “the Republicans contrived in their platform of 1888, the plank that was to be [their] battle cry for a number of years. More eloquent, pungent and specific that any previous pronouncement, it reaffirmed the party’s ‘unswerving devotion’”38 to a free ballot and fair count. This principle became the basis of the party battle mantra with the Democrats, and not the African Americans’ loss of suffrage rights nor their loss of life and property in trying to exercise this constitutional right. Lodge and President William Henry Harrison did speak for these civil rights issues, but most Republicans sidetracked or minimized



The Lodge Bill and Beyond 377

racial violence and conflicts in these suffrage debates as if they did not matter. With republican principles and virtues essential to Republicans, coupled with the public avoidance of discussing racial political discrimination in voting rights debates, two other voting rights public policies came to the foreground: the popular election of U.S. Senators and the right to vote for women. When these two major voting rights issues came to Congress they were not embedded in either racial issues or southern politics, simply because the South’s disenfranchisement movement had almost completely eliminated African Americans from the political scene. In fact, after the Democrats under their unified government repealed the forty sections of the enforcements from the statutes, the disenfranchisement movement “between 1895 and 1910” saw seven southern states follow “the Mississippi scheme to enhance their suffrage restrictions or invent new ones to reduce and eliminate black votes.”39 Nonetheless, it took time, effort, and much political maneuvering to accomplish this task of state-level constitutional disenfranchisement. Political scientist Richard Valelly on this point found that “[i]ts backers could not and did not do all of what they wanted right away. It took effort and political organization for them to exploit democratic processes for the purpose of building new institutional foundations for white supremacy. This matters for the simple reason that there was plenty of time to stop disenfranchisement if anyone cared to.”40 Then he added: “But one vital force capable of stopping it, the northern wing of the Republican Party, chose not to.”41 Reacting to the very same data and time frame historian Wang comments: Once again, Republicans controlled Congress and the presidency in March, 1897, when the Fifty-fifth Congress convened. And this Republican dominance of the national power would continue until 1910, when Democrats finally regained control of the House. But this fourteen-year Republican restoration to federal power brought no major Republican policies intending to restore to black men the right to vote.42 Many scholars of this period point to the Supreme Court decision in the Plessy v. Ferguson case that “accepted the doctrine of ‘separate but equal accommodations’ as constitutional”43 or the rise of African American spokesperson Booker T. Washington at the 1895 Atlanta Cotton Exposition, where he embraced the denial of African American political and social equality and pleaded to his race to accommodate to segregation.44 Others tell how President William McKinley saw this drastic change taking place in race relations in the South, and not only encouraged it but vigorously promoted it, abandoning the Republican fight for suffrage rights and enforcement. Historian Calhoun declares: “McKinley’s administration sealed the Republicans’ effective abandonment of blacks’ rights. His inaugural address indicated that the new president would give a much higher priority to sectional reconciliation. . . . To foster that sentiment, McKinley set off early in his term on the first of several goodwill tours. . . . From Atlanta [where he praised the region to the white

Georgia legislature], McKinley went to Washington’s Tuskegee Institute.”45 Speaking to the students there, McKinley praised Washington and urged them to acquire self-control, moderation, and great patience. Two days later, in Savannah, Georgia, he urged the African American community to seek industry and skills, suggesting that these would enable them to solve their own problems. Thus, they would not need the federal government to intervene on their behalf. He kept pushing these ideas and themes as he entered his second term but was felled shortly thereafter by an assassin’s bullet. The Republican leadership mantle passed to McKinley’s vice president, Theodore Roosevelt. This Republican president, whose administration ran from 1901 to 1909, promised action but never took any positive action to restore African American suffrage rights, even when it arose in his Republican-dominated Congress. When the House of Representatives in January 1901 sought to deal with the question of the reapportionment of the House after the 1900 Census, two Republicans, “Albert J. Hopkins of Illinois, and Edward Burleigh of Maine” introduced a bill to effectuate this required constitutional process in terms of the size of the House of Representatives. “But Republican representatives, Marlin E. Olmsted of Pennsylvania and Edgar D. Crumpacker of Indiana, sought to direct attention to the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment because of the disfranchisement of Negroes in Southern states.”46 Since this second section requires a reduction in a state congressional representation where the suppression of the vote occurs, Representative “Olmsted, on January 3, 1901, introduced a resolution authorizing the appointment by the Committee on Census of a committee to investigate the alleged abridgment in Mississippi, South Carolina and Louisiana.”47 Opposition arose from Democrats Oscar W. Underwood of Alabama and John Sharp Williams of Mississippi, who had the resolution returned to the Committee on Census because the proposed resolution could not determine who were denied the vote due to educational requirements or the poll tax requirement.48 The bill died in committee. Following this failure, Representative Crumpacker offered on January 7, 1901, an amendment to Representative Burleigh’s reapportionment bill, which “provided for the loss of three seats each by Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana and North Carolina.”49 This reduction that Crumpacker sought was due to the disenfranchisement in these southern states. “Only three of the 356 members of the House spoke in support of Crumpacker’s amendment[:] Republican representative Charles H. Grosvenor of Ohio . . . John F. Fitzgerald, a Massachusetts Democrat . . . [and] George H. White, the only Negro in Congress.”50 There were no remarks, public or private, made by President McKinley or Vice President Theodore Roosevelt, then or later on this matter. Congressman George White, in his remarks, “regretted that only two or three Congressmen had risen to the defense of Negroes. The maligners had asserted that they could ‘manage’ the Negroes. ‘Can they manage us like oxen?’ he queried.”51 Despite this limited opposition, “[n]o vote was taken on Crum­packer’s amendment. But when he moved to recommit Burleigh’s bill to the Committee on Census with his amendment included, his

378

Chapter 18

motion was rejected, 110 to 130.”52 This vote was never recorded individually, and it is therefore impossible to determine the nature and scope of partisan support and opposition. However, when Representative Burleigh’s bill came up for a vote without the Crumpacker amendment, it “was passed by a vote of 166 to 102. Eighty-eight Republicans, 74 Democrats and 4 Populists voted yea; 52 Republicans, 49 Democrats and 1 Populist voted nay. On January 11, [1900,] Republican Senator Thomas H. Carter of Montana obtained unanimous consent for the approval of the Burleigh bill which President McKinley signed on January 16,” with no objections from Vice President Theodore Roosevelt.53 Table 18.3 shows the vote totals. In 1902, when Roosevelt had become president, both Crumpacker and another Republican, Charles Dick of Ohio, introduced legislation calling for congressional investigations into suffrage restrictions, but no support came from Roosevelt on these pieces of legislation. Then, in 1904, Republican Congressman Edward de V. Morrell of Pennsylvania made a speech on the floor of the House defending the Fifteenth Amendment, but no support arose from President Roosevelt. In 1909 the Republican president and unified Congress participated in repealing other sections of the enforcement acts that the Democrats did not repeal in 1894. Therefore, African American suffrage rights continued to receive no federal enforcement or protection. On December 7, 1904, President Roosevelt, who by now had had several chances to move out from the shadow of President McKinley and assert himself on the question of African American suffrage rights, received yet another legislative opportunity. Republican Senator Thomas Platt of New York “introduced a bill implementing the platform plank,” from the Republican Party platform in 1904 which Roosevelt ran on, which required reduction in the representation in the House of Representatives of those states that had disenfranchised African Americans, as authorized by the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment. This time, as before, President Roosevelt felt that this enforcement legislation was unwise and “opposed the platform plank on the ground that it would weaken his presidency and divide the party.”54 Upon taking this action, Henry Cabot Lodge, who was now in the U.S. Senate, wrote the president a letter supporting his refusal to

take action, and President Roosevelt wrote back that he would be unable to carry it through a unified Congress. Thus, given Roosevelt’s background behavior in these efforts, the question is whether the operative word is unwilling instead of unable? On March 4, 1909, President Roosevelt’s handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, took the oath of office as the next Republican president. In his inaugural address, the new president “explicitly accepted the claim that the southern poll tax and literacy test were valid conditions of good government. In doing that, he made his peace with black disenfranchisement.”55 But these failed Republican presidential involvements did not vitiate all of the Republican political reasons and opportunities to assist in the enforcement of or protection for African American suffrage and voting rights. In fact, the repeal of the other sections of the enforcement acts from the revised statutes in the U.S. Code occurred during 1909 and 1911. In 1909 the Republicans had unified control, and in 1911 the Republicans had the presidency and the Senate, and the Democrats had the House of Representatives. Thus, instead of using their power to return the enforcement powers, Republicans continued the process started by the Democrats to repeal all of the remaining acts, except for three from the statute books, the Era of Disenfranchisement notwithstanding.56 And this reality which is rarely mentioned in the history books made the Republicans culpable in the political process of removing the very same rights which they had worked to grant to the freedmen. One political scientist, Richard Valelly, who wrote on this matter in 2004, did mention it.57 And the reason that he gave for this gross abandonment of the freedmen’s suffrage rights was the Republican Party’s exchange of coalition partners. Valelly wrote: “The black-white North-South coalition of 1867–1868 was supplanted by a new white-white North-West coalition. In a sense, the northern wing was compensated for the loss of its investment in southern party building. The enormous and rapid growth of the Republican Party in the late 1890s outside of the South substituted for lost black voters at the margins” in the South.58 President Taft received his chance to redeem himself through a political issue vital to the Republican strongholds in the West, when in 1910 Republican Senator William Borah of Idaho introduced a resolution for the direct election of U.S.

Table 18.3  House of Representatives Vote for Congressional Investigations of Suffrage Restrictions (the Burleigh Bill), 56th Congress, 1st Session, 1900 Yeas   Party Democrats

Nays

Not Voting

Total Votes

Votes

% of Yea Votesa

% of Party Votesb

Votes

% of Nay Votesa

% of Party Votesb

Votes

% of Votes N. V.a

% of Party Votesb

Number

Percent

 74

44.6%

46.0%

 49

48.0%

30.4%

38

42.7%

23.6%

161

45.1%

Republicans

 88

53.0%

46.3%

 52

51.0%

27.4%

50

56.2%

26.3%

190

53.2%

Populists

  4

 2.4%

66.7%

  1

1.0%

16.7%

 1

1.1%

16.7%

  6

1.7%

Vote Totals and Percentages

166

100%

46.5%

102

100%

28.6%

 89

100%

28.6%

357

100%

c

c

c

Sources: Adapted from Rayford Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson, Enlarged Edition (New York: Collier Books, 1965), pp. 102–104; and “Party Divisions in the House of Representatives (1789 to Present),” http://clerk.house.gov/art_history/house_history/partyDiv.html (accessed January 11, 2010). Calculations by the authors. a

This column of percentages adds up to 100% and indicates the distribution among the parties that cast the same vote.

b

These percentages sum to 100% across each party’s row and indicate the distribution of votes by the same party.

c

These three percentages sum to 100 percent and indicate the percent of the total vote for each type of vote.



The Lodge Bill and Beyond 379

Senators and provided for exclusive state regulation of these elections. This provision for exclusive state control over Senate elections was the requirement that the southern states demanded now that their disenfranchisement movement had essentially eliminated the majority of African American voters. They assumed that if these senate elections were put under federal control, African Americans could re-enter the electoral process in these southern states. When this demand for state control was met with very strong opposition from numerous Republicans in favor of federal government control, President Taft never surfaced to support the Fifteenth Amendment and Article I, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution, which gives Congress the power to regulate federal elections. Not only did southerners hold up this popular election of Senators movement, they added amendments that came to be known as “racial riders” to all bills that called for the popular election of Senators.59 President Taft stood silent. To break the impasse between the southerners and the essential western movement for the direct election of Senators, “compromise language emerged in the Senate that mooted the division between federal-control and state-regulation of senate elections. This was the cryptic Article I, Section 2 language today emblazoned on the Seventeenth Amendment, which stipulates that federal voting qualifications equal those for the larger house in each state legislature.”60 Remarking on the hidden element in the Republicans’ support in 1912 of the popular vote for senators, Valelly tells us: During the administrations of Presidents Roosevelt and Taft (1905–1909; 1909–1913), there were additional repeals of Reconstruction-era elections statutes— principally the Ku Klux Act of April 20, 1871, but also

the elements of the first Enforcement Act that Democrats left unrepealed during the Fifty-third Congress. By 1911, only a minor provision or two and two criminal conspiracy sections originally in the Ku Klux Act were left. The northern wing of the Republican Party thus played a major role in finishing what the Democrats began during the second Cleveland administration.61 For the exact number of Republican repealed enforcement sections see Figure 18.14 and compare it to the number repealed by the Democrats in 1894. But the key here is that the Republicans were repealing the laws they had passed in the first place and then sought to protect via the failed Lodge bill. Ultimately, these actions made it even more difficult for African Americans to protect their suffrage rights against the disenfranchisement movement. Besides this hidden and quiet assistance to the southern Democrats’ disenfranchisement movement, none of the scholars on senate elections notes that the Seventeenth Amendment’s ambiguous language permitted the southern states to keep their disenfranchisement of African Americans in place and deny participation in the popular election of U.S. Senators as well as elections for members of the House of Representatives. Since May 1912 when the southerners relented and accepted this compromise language, President Taft did not object to this informal mechanism to continue African American voter suppression. Next to come was the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. It was ratified on August 18, 1920. On this date, the Republicans no longer had a unified government. Democrats had a unified government

Number of Repealed Sections from the Enforcement Acts

Figure 18.14  Number of Repealed Sections from the Enforcement Acts by Year and Political Party in Control of Congress 45 40

40 (48.2%) 33 (39.8%)

35 30 25 20 15

10 (12.0%)

10 5 0 1894 Democrats

1909 Republicans

1911 Democrats (House) Republicans (Senate)

Sources: United States, Revised Statutes at Large (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1875), pp. 348–352, 353–361, 1073–1078; Second Edition of Revised Statutes of the United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1878), in Statutes at Large 18, pr. 1 (1878): 347–357, 1067–1072, 1146–1157, 1085; Statutes at Large 28, pt. 1 (1894): 36–37; ibid., 35, pt. 1 (1909); 1092–1093, 1153–1159; ibid., 36 (1911): 1168–1169; United States, United States Code 1988 Edition (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1989), 16: 340–344; United States, United States Code of 1994 Edition (Washington, D. C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995), 9: 69; United States, Library of Congress, Index to the Federal Statutes, 1874–1931; General and Permanent Law Contained in the Revised Statutes of 1874 and Volumes 18–46 of the Statutes at Large, ed. Walter H. McClenon and Wilfred C. Gilbert (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1933), 165–169, 367–369, 1222–1223, 1264–1265.

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from 1913 to 1917. In the 1916 elections (for the 1917–1919 Congress), Republicans captured 215 seats in the House of Representatives to the Democrats’ 214 seats, for a one-vote majority; and there were 6 third party seats, including one that was an Independent Republican. In the 1918 midterm elections (for the 1919–1921 Congress), the Republicans captured both the House of Representatives and the Senate. In the House of Representatives the Republicans had 240 seats to the Democrats’ 192, third parties held two seats, and there was one vacancy. Thus, the Republican majority now stood at 48 seats. In the Senate, the Republicans had 49 seats to the Democrats’ 47 seats for a two-seat majority. Thus, in the last two years of Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and had this control when both houses of Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment in the summer of 1919. The Republican majorities enabled passage in both houses. The last Republican president in this cycle was Taft. In 1910 he addressed the annual convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) where he endorsed their “cause in remarkably opaque and ambivalent prose,”62 and none of his remarks spoke about the racial issue or the possibility of African American women receiving the right to vote with white women. Numerous other leading Republicans in the Congress did announce their support of women’s suffrage, so strongly in fact that the major women’s suffrage movement dropped their nonpartisanship and endorsed the Republican candidates in the 1918 midterm elections, helping the Republican Party to regain control of both houses. One of the few congressional Republicans who opposed women’s suffrage and refused to vote for the Amendment was Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Nevertheless, despite some strong southern and northern movements to exclude African American women from the right to vote, they received it anyway. And in reaction, the southern states refused to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, but four of the five Border States did ratify it, and it passed into constitutional law. Overall, what our longitudinal analyses reveal is that if anything the Republicans, beginning with the Lodge bill and thereafter, were inconsistent in their support for protection of African American suffrage rights via federal regulation of congressional elections. Since 1871 the federal government had provided such protection in northern congressional elections, and the Supreme Court had issued decisions in three cases upholding Congress’s constitutional authority to do so. These court cases were: (1) Ex parte Seibold in 1879, (2) Ex parte Clarke in 1879, and (3) Ex parte Yarbrough in 1884. “Through these [three] opinions, the Supreme Court had upheld the preeminent authority of the U.S. government to enforce its own laws ensuring citizens’ rights to vote in congressional elections, which was protected by the Fifteenth Amendment.”63 And yet the Republicans failed to legislate such protection in the South despite numerous opportunities to do so. In the end they assisted in eroding what protection that did exist. And despite the numerous reasons given by historians and social scientists as to why they failed to do so, the end result was that their failure enabled the institutionalization of the southern disenfranchisement system at the state level.

Summary and Conclusions on the Lodge Bill and Beyond The Republicans had developed legal techniques and procedures for federal regulation of congressional elections in the northern and eastern states because of fraud and corruption emanating from the huge flow of European immigrants into that region, but their attempt to transfer these processes to the southern states via the Lodge bill was a systemic failure.64 The failure of the bill not only engendered the practical nullification of the Fifteenth Amendment for African American males but also the subsequent practical nullification of the Nineteenth Amendment for African American women, as well as the elimination of a new democratic suffrage right granted to everyone in the Seventeenth Amendment. Few scholars, academics, and laypersons have taken notice. The collapse of the Lodge bill robbed southern African Americans of three of their major individual and democratic constitutional rights for nearly three-quarters of a century. Diagram 18.1 places the Lodge bill in the political context of the times. Here, one sees the earliest states (Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee) that legally enacted different types of disenfranchisement measures like the poll taxes in Georgia and Florida and Tennessee and the multi-ballot boxes in South Carolina. Then two states enacted disenfranchising measures that overlap with the Lodge bill’s legislative journey in Congress, Arkansas and Mississippi. These two overlapping states began their efforts just before the rising of the Lodge bill, continued their disenfranchising efforts during the Lodge bill’s journey, and concluded their efforts after its demise. Although most historians, beginning with Professor C. Vann Woodward, 65 have considered that the Era of Disenfranchisement began with the so-called “Mississippi Plan” launched between August and November 1890, recent outstanding state-by-state research has revealed these early states and the dates of the following states. It has also uncovered the dates of enactments of disenfranchising techniques and procedures in the southern states that followed the Mississippi Plan. Finally, Diagram 18.1 displays the evidence that Georgia and South Carolina had legislated disenfranchisement measures before the emergence of the Lodge bill or the Mississippi Plan but returned after these events and the repeal of forty sections of the enforcement acts to add new disenfranchising laws and techniques. Moreover, since the diagram includes congressional as well as state-level action, it permits the reader to see that five new states and two old states made their move to disenfranchise after the Cleveland unified government repealed the majority of the enforcement sections. Hence, a combination of negative and positive congressional actions coupled not only with the Mississippi Plan but also with the actions of the early disenfranchising states. State and federal action and inaction enabled the Era of Disenfranchisement and its success. Thus, one can conclude from all of this new empirical evidence that the Lodge bill was just one part of a complex of forces and that the Republicans as well as the Democrats were responsible for the Era of Disenfranchisement and its success. To help readers investigate the matter further, we offer several aids. Table 18.4 shows the composition of the U.S. Congress



The Lodge Bill and Beyond 381 Diagram 18.1  The Lodge Bill in the Political Context of the Era of Disenfranchisement, 1877–1920*

Lodge Bill Passed H.R. July 2, 1890 Failed Senate January 1891 Earliest Disenfranchisement States GA 1877

SC 1882

FL 1884

TN 1890

Democratic Congress Repealed 40 Sections 1894

Overlapping Disenfranchisement States AR 1889–1891

Democratic and Republican Congress Repealed 33 Sections 1911

Republican Congress Repealed 10 Sections 1909

Later Disenfranchisement States

MS 1890

SC LA NC AL VA TX GA 1895 1898 1900 1901 1902 1902 1908

Before Lodge

After Lodge

Time Line 1877

1920

Source: Adapted from Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disenfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). * The years of the Era of Disenfranchisement have been expanded from the years given in the chapter in order to include the earliest states, as described in the Perman book.

Table 18.4  Historical Composition of the United States Congress by Session, 1861–1921 President’s Political Party

Year

Cong. Session

1861

Senate

Major Opposition Political Party House

a

Senate

b

Third Parties/Vacant

House

Senate

House

President

Party

#

%

S

#

%

H

Party

#

%

#

%

#

%

#

%

37

Abraham Lincoln

Republican

31

62.0%



108

59.0%



Democratic

15

30.0%

 44

24.0%

4

8.0%

31

16.9%

1863

38

Abraham Lincoln

Republican

33

63.5%



 85

46.2%



Democratic

10

19.2%

 72

39.1%

9

17.3%

27

14.7%

1865

39

Abraham Lincoln/ Andrew Johnson

Republican

39

72.2%



136

70.5%



Democratic

11

20.4%

 38

19.7%

4

7.4%

19

9.8%

1867

40

Andrew Johnson

Republican

57

86.4%



173

76.5%



Democratic

 9

13.6%

 47

20.8%

0

0.0%

 6

2.7%

1869

41

Ulysses S. Grant

Republican

62

83.8%



171

70.4%



Democratic

12

16.2%

 67

27.6%

0

0.0%

 5

2.1%

1871

42

Ulysses S. Grant

Republican

56

75.7%



136

56.0%



Democratic

17

23.0%

104

42.8%

1

1.4%

 3

1.2%

1873

43

Ulysses S. Grant

Republican

47

63.5%



199

68.2%



Democratic

19

25.7%

 88

30.1%

8

10.8%

 5

1.7%

1875

44

Ulysses S. Grant

Republican

46

60.5%



103

35.6%



Democratic

28

36.8%

182

63.0%

2

2.6%

 4

1.4%

1877

45

Rutherford Hayes

Republican

40

52.6%



136

46.4%



Democratic

35

46.1%

155

52.9%

1

1.3%

 2

0.7%

1879

46

Rutherford Hayes

Republican

33

43.4%



132

45.2%



Democratic

42

55.3%

141

48.3%

1

1.3%

19

6.5%

1881

47

James A. Garfield/ Chester Arthur

Republican

37

48.7%



151

51.5%



Democratic

37

48.7%

128

43.7%

2

2.6%

14

4.8%

1883

48

Chester Arthur

Republican

38

50.0%



117

36.0%



Democratic

36

47.4%

196

60.3%

2

2.6%

12

3.7%

1885

49

Grover Cleveland

Democratic

34

44.7%



182

56.0%



Republican

42

55.3%

141

43.4%

0

0.0%

 2

0.6%

1887

50

Grover Cleveland

Democratic

37

48.7%



167

51.4%



Republican

39

51.3%

152

46.8%

0

0.0%

 6

1.8%

1889

51

Benjamin Harrison

Republican

51

58.0%



179

53.9%



Democratic

37

42.0%

152

45.8%

0

0.0%

 1

0.3%

1891

52

Benjamin Harrison

Republican

47

53.4%



 86

25.9%



Democratic

39

44.3%

238

71.7%

2

2.3%

 8

2.4%

(Continued)

382

Chapter 18

Table 18.4 (Continued) President’s Political Party Year

Cong. Session

1893

Senatea

Major Opposition Political Party Houseb

Senate

Third Parties/Vacant

House

Senate

House

President

Party

#

%

S

#

%

H

Party

#

%

#

%

#

%

#

%

53

Grover Cleveland

Democratic

44

50.0%



218

61.2%



Republican

40

45.5%

124

34.8%

4

4.5%

14

3.9%

1895

54

Grover Cleveland

Democratic

40

44.4%



 93

26.1%



Republican

44

48.9%

254

71.1%

6

6.7%

10

2.8%

1897

55

William McKinley

Republican

44

48.9%



206

57.7%



Democratic

34

37.8%

124

34.7%

12

13.3%

27

7.6%

1899

56

William McKinley

Republican

53

58.9%



187

52.4%



Democratic

26

28.9%

161

45.1%

11

12.2%

 9

2.5%

1901

57

McKinley/ T. Roosevelt

Republican

56

62.2%



200

56.0%



Democratic

32

35.6%

151

42.3%

2

2.2%

 6

1.7%

1903

58

Theodore Roosevelt

Republican

57

63.3%



207

53.6%



Democratic

33

36.7%

176

45.6%

0

0.0%

 3

0.8%

1905

59

Theodore Roosevelt

Republican

58

64.4%



251

65.0%



Democratic

32

35.6%

135

35.0%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

1907

60

Theodore Roosevelt

Republican

61

66.3%



223

57.0%



Democratic

31

33.7%

167

42.7%

0

0.0%

1

0.3%

1909

61

William Taft

Republican

60

65.2%



219

56.0%



Democratic

32

34.8%

172

44.0%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

1911

62

William Taft

Republican

52

54.2%



162

41.1%



Democratic

44

45.8%

230

58.4%

0

0.0%

2

0.5%

1913

63

Woodrow Wilson

Democratic

51

53.1%



291

66.9%



Republican

44

45.8%

134

30.8%

1

1.0%

10

2.3%

1915

64

Woodrow Wilson

Democratic

56

58.3%



230

52.9%



Republican

40

41.7%

196

45.1%

0

0.0%

9

2.1%

1917

65

Woodrow Wilson

Democratic

54

56.3%



214

49.2%



Republican

42

43.8%

215

49.4%

0

0.0%

6

1.4%

1919

66

Woodrow Wilson

Democratic

47

49.0%



192

44.1%



Republican

49

51.0%

240

55.2%

0

0.0%

3

0.7%

Sources: Adapted from “Party Division in the Senate: 1789–Present,” http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/history/one_item_and_teasers/partydiv.htm (accessed January 11, 2010); and “Party Divisions in the House of Representatives: (1789 to Present),” http://clerk.house.gov/art_history/house_history/partyDiv.html (accessed January 11, 2010). Calculations by the authors. a

“S” column checkmark indicates a Senate majority for the political party of the president or the opposition in this session; “#” is the number of party members; and “%” the percent of all Senate members.

“H” column checkmark indicates a majority in the House of Representatives for the political party of the president or the opposition in this session; “#” is the number of party members; and “%” is the percent of House members. b

(Republican, Democratic, and third party) from 1861 through 1921 (seated in 1919). Collected in this table are the actual numbers and percentages for the two major and several minor political parties during and after Reconstruction and the Era of Disenfranchisement. Table 18.5 offers the reader full data on the criminal prosecutions under the enforcement acts by region and year. The table shows data for three different regions—the South, Border States, Union States—as well as the national totals. Finally, Table 18.2, which appears earlier (p. 371), provides the enforcement data on the Fifteenth Amendment violations in the

South and Border State regions. Once again the numbers and percentages for each of the regions are included. Map 18.1 (p. 384) shows the states of the regions and differentiates them by the number of Fifteenth Amendment enforcement cases, 1870– 1877. These tables and map provide the reader with easy access to the best and most recent scholarship on this matter. And our last endnote, together with the previously cited sources, provides bibliographic information on current writings on these aspects of African American suffrage rights in Reconstruction and the Era of Disenfranchisement.66

1

0

0

1

11

8

0

1

0

0

1885

1886

1887

1888

1889

1890

1891

1892

1893

1894

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

8.3%

0.0%

19.0%

50.0%

7.1%

0.0%

0.0%

0.9%

10.6%

6.0%

14.9%

53.7%

0.0%

15.1%

0.0%

4.5%

1.9%

7.4%

10.9%

40.6%

74.3%

52.4%

25

17

11

19

34

11

13

2

8

106

143

189

131

82

53

79

23

127

106

200

793

682

155

98

16

100.0%

100.0%

91.7%

100.0%

81.0%

50.0%

92.9%

100.0%

100.0%

99.1%

89.4%

94.0%

85.1%

46.3%

100.0%

84.9%

100.0%

95.5%

98.1%

92.6%

89.1%

59.4%

25.7%

47.6%

100.0%

25

17

12

19

42

22

14

2

8

107

160

201

154

177

53

93

23

133

108

216

890

1,148

603

206

16

20

40

10

23

15

60

4

34

1

79

2

32

3

69

0

9

0

26

1

0

4

2

6

11

15

45.5%

33.3%

10.0%

28.8%

29.4%

23.4%

21.1%

54.8%

3.3%

45.7%

25.0%

48.5%

4.2%

52.3%

0.0%

60.0%

0.0%

65.0%

100.0%

0.0%

33.3%

6.1%

22.2%

40.7%

100.0%

24

80

90

57

36

196

15

28

29

94

6

34

69

63

1

6

1

14

0

4

8

31

21

16

0

54.5%

66.7%

90.0%

71.3%

70.6%

76.6%

78.9%

45.2%

96.7%

54.3%

75.0%

51.5%

95.8%

47.7%

100.0%

40.0%

100.0%

35.0%

0.0%

100.0%

66.7%

93.9%

77.8%

59.3%

0.0%

Convictions Dismissals Total Cases Number Percentd Number Percentd

Union Statesb

44

120

100

80

51

256

19

62

30

173

8

66

72

132

1

15

1

40

1

4

12

33

27

27

15

1

10

2

23

67

55

20

11

5

1

7

6

6

8

1

17

0

6

0

2

1

1

2

9

17

7.1%

12.3%

9.1%

24.0%

23.9%

40.4%

20.4%

34.4%

55.6%

33.3%

31.8%

31.6%

19.4%

24.2%

6.3%

44.7%

0.0%

9.8%

0.0%

14.3%

1.6%

0.8%

0.9%

11.1%

60.7%

13

71

20

73

213

81

78

21

4

2

15

13

25

25

15

21

2

55

43

12

63

122

224

72

11

92.9%

87.7%

90.9%

76.0%

76.1%

59.6%

79.6%

65.6%

44.4%

66.7%

68.2%

68.4%

80.6%

75.8%

93.8%

55.3%

100.0%

90.2%

100.0%

85.7%

98.4%

99.2%

99.1%

88.9%

39.3%

Convictions Dismissals Total Cases Number Percentd Number Percentd

Border Statesc

Nation

14

81

22

96

280

136

98

32

9

3

22

19

31

33

16

38

2

61

43

14

64

123

226

81

28

21

50

13

46

90

126

25

45

6

81

26

50

32

172

1

40

0

38

3

18

102

469

456

128

32

The Union states include California, Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and the Idaho Territory.

b

27

62

168

121

149

283

288

106

51

41

202

164

236

225

170

69

106

26

196

149

216

864

835

400

186

74.7%

77.1%

90.3%

76.4%

75.9%

69.6%

80.9%

53.1%

87.2%

71.4%

86.3%

82.5%

87.5%

49.7%

98.6%

72.6%

100.0%

83.8%

98.0%

92.3%

89.4%

64.0%

46.7%

59.2%

45.8%

83

218

134

195

373

414

131

96

47

283

190

286

257

342

70

146

26

234

152

234

966

1,304

856

314

59

Total Cases

Percent of the total number of cases for the region.

Percent of the total number of cases for the nation.

d

e

c

The Border states include Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee, West Virginia, federal territories, and the new states of Colorado, the Dakotas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and the District of Columbia.

Includes the ten southern states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia.

a

25.3%

22.9%

9.7%

23.6%

24.1%

30.4%

19.1%

46.9%

12.8%

28.6%

13.7%

17.5%

12.5%

50.3%

1.4%

27.4%

0.0%

16.2%

2.0%

7.7%

10.6%

36.0%

53.3%

40.8%

54.2%

Convictions Dismissals Total Cases Number Percente Number Percente

Source: Adapted from Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860–1910 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), Appendix 7, pp. 300–301. Calculations by the authors.

17

1879

1884

14

1878

12

0

1877

23

6

1876

1883

2

1875

1882

16

1874

0

97

1873

95

466

1872

1881

448

1871

1880

0

108

1870

Southa   Convictions Dismissals   Year Number Percentd Number Percentd

Table 18.5  Criminal Prosecutions under the Enforcement Acts, by Region and Year, 1870–1894

384

Chapter 18

Map 18.1  Fifteenth Amendment Enforcement Cases in the South and Border States, 1870–1877 VT

ND MT MN

NY WI

SD

CT

PA 100

200

miles

RI

MI

WY 0

NH MA

NJ

IA

NE

OH IL

IN

CO KS

OK NM

0

100

200

miles

Number of Enforcement Cases (Number of States) 250 and Over (3) 100 to 249 (3) 0 to 99 (10)

Source: Adapted from Everette Swinney, “Enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment, 1870–1877,” The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 28, No. 2 (May, 1962), p. 218.

Notes   1. Everette Swinney, “Enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment, 1870–1877,” Journal of Southern History Vol. 48 (May 1962), p. 202.   2. Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage & Northern Republicans, 1860–1910 (Athens: University of Georgia, 1997), p. 57.   3. Ibid., p. 69.   4. Ibid., p. 67.  5. Ibid.   6. Senate Historical Office, “March 18, 1881: A Dramatic Tiebreaker,” “May 16, 1881: Both New York Senators Resign,” and “September 20, 1881: President’s Death Eases Senate Deadlock,” in Historical Minutes: Origins of the Modern Senate, 1878–1920, http://www.senate.gov/ pagelayout/history/b_three_sections_with_teasers/essays.htm.   7. Major party contention in this period is contrary to the assertion of continuous control of the Senate by the Republican Party. See Richard M. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 65.   8. Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 38.   9. Alyn Brodsky, Grover Cleveland: A Study in Character (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), p. 115. This entire biography of Cleveland does not discuss African Americans at all during either one of President

Cleveland’s two terms, but in Appendix I Brodsky devotes five pages to Cleveland’s racist opinions and attitudes. 10. Ibid., p. 116. 11. Ibid. 12. Rayford Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson, Enlarged Edition (New York: Collier Books, 1965), p. 69. 13. Ibid., p. 89. 14. Charles Calhoun, Conceiving a New Republic: The Republican Party and the Southern Question, 1869–1900 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), p. 225. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Wang, p. 227. 18. Ibid. 19. “Party Division in the Senate: 1789–Present,” http://www.senate .gov/pagelayout/history/one_item_and_teasers/partydiv.htm (accessed January 11, 2010); and “Party Divisions in the House of Representatives (1789 to Present),” http://clerk.house.gov/art_history/house_history/ partyDiv.html (accessed January 11, 2010). 20. Perman, p. 39. 21. Calhoun, p. 240. 22. Logan, p. 74. 23. Ibid., p. 75.

24. Perman, p. 40. 25. Calhoun, p. 251. 26. Ibid. 27. Logan, p. 76. 28. Calhoun, p. 252. 29. Logan, p. 76. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., p. 80. 33. Ibid., pp. 80–81. 34. Wang, p. 249. 35. Logan, p. 81. 36. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. DuBois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), pp. 119–120. 37. Calhoun, pp. 270–271. 38. Logan, pp. 62–63. 39. Wang, p. 260. 40. Richard Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 130–131. 41. Ibid. 42. Wang, p. 261. 43. Logan, p. 119. 44. Bess Beatty, A Revolution Gone Backward: The Black Response to National Politics, 1876–1896 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), pp. 159–160. 45. Calhoun, pp. 280–283. 46. Logan, p. 102. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., p. 103. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid.

The Lodge Bill and Beyond 385 51. Ibid., p. 104. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Valelly, p. 132. 55. Ibid., p. 133. 56. Wang, Appendix 6, pp. 294–299. 57. Valelly, p. 134. 58. Ibid. 59. Fred R. Harris, Deadlock or Decision: The U.S. Senate and the Rise of National Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 60. Valelly, pp. 133–134. 61. Ibid., p. 134. 62. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 207. 63. Perman, p. 38. 64. Robert Horn, “National Control of Congressional Elections,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Politics, Princeton University, 1942, and Albie Burke, “Federal Regulation of Congressional Elections in Northern Cities, 1871–1894,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1968. 65. C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951). 66. See Robert Goldman, “A Free Ballot and a Fair Count”: The Department of Justice and the Enforcement of Voting Rights in the South, 1877–1893 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990); William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1879–1879 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979); and Everette Swinney, Suppressing the Ku Klux Klan: The Enforcement of the Reconstruction Amendments, 1870–1877 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987). For an interesting case study of how the Lodge bill helped to set disenfranchising into motion in a single southern state see J. Morgan Kousser, “Post-Reconstruction Suffrage Restrictions in Tennessee: A New Look at the V.O. Key Thesis,” Political Science Quarterly Vol. 88 (December 1973), pp. 663–665.

CHAPTER 19

African American Voters and Electoral Empowerment in the North, 1876–1944 A Mobilizer of the Re-enfranchisement Drive in the South The 1876 Chicago, Illinois, Electoral Symbol for African American Electoral Empowerment: North and South

389

Table 19.1 Illinois Legislature Election Outcomes with African American Candidates, 1868–1944

392

Beyond Illinois: Pioneer African American Multistate Legislative Empowerment in the North: An Additional Mobilizer

394

Figure 19.1 Votes for African American State Legislative Candidates in Illinois, 1876–1944

395

Figure 19.2 Number of African Americans Running for and Elected to the Illinois State Legislature, 1876–1944

395

Table 19.2 Early Elections of African American State Legislators, 1868–1944 397 Map 19.1 African American State Legislators, 1868–1944

401

Table 19.3 Pioneering African American Women State Legislative Candidates, 1868–1944

401

Map 19.2 African American Women State Legislative Candidates, 1868–1944

402

Beyond State Legislative Empowerment—Pioneer African American Congressional Empowerment in the North: A New Mobilizer

402

Table 19.4 Election Results Statistics for the First Congressional District of Illinois, 1920–1944

404

Figure 19.3 Votes for Democratic and Republican Candidates in the First Congressional District of Illinois, 1920–1944

405

Figure 19.4 Percent of the Vote for Democratic and Republican Candidates in the First Congressional District of Illinois, 1920–1944

405

The Roots and Rising of the Northern African American Electorate in Presidential Elections: Another Mobilizer

406

Figure 19.5 Percent of African American Voters Voting Democratic for President in Selected Wards of Chicago and Philadelphia, 1932–1960

407

Summary and Conclusions on African American Voters and Electoral Empowerment in the North

407

Notes 409

388

Chapter 19

P

assage and eventual ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment on February 3, 1870, secured its goal, as stated by historian William Gillette: “The primary object of the Amendment was to get the Negro vote in the North, not, as other writers have insisted, to keep Negro suffrage in the South, which was an important secondary objective.”1 He elaborated: During the nineteenth century the practical effect of the Amendment was to bring the ballot to the Northern Negro and power to the Republicans. The Negro was started along the road to first-class citizenship. He could vote in the North, and the Republicans benefited from a solid Negro vote in the close elections of the 1870’s, 1880’s, and later.2 Six years after the ratification, the 1876 presidential election ended in an electoral vote impasse between the Democratic candidate Samuel J. Tilden and the Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes, which led to a political compromise to resolve the outcome. Two major electoral signals were forthcoming.3 First, the African American Reconstruction came to an end, due to the fact that the White Supremacy Democrats and their “Redemption Movement” had recaptured all of the eleven southern state governments from the white and African American Republicans and their political allies. Secondly, the death knell for the southern African American electorate began to sound and disenfranchisement would begin shortly. Professor Gillette wrote that “if Negro suffrage, the fundamental condition of Reconstruction, was short-lived in the South, it became permanent in the North.”4 The African American electorate in the North had, like their southern counterparts, gained the right to vote. Although opposition to the Fifteenth Amendment rose during its passage in the Congress and during its ratification stage in the northern, midwestern, and western states, this opposition was essentially partisan in nature, and it never became regional and institutionalized as it did in the eleven states of the South. Professor Gillette explained: The Democracy never fashioned a suitable alternative to the Fifteenth Amendment, such as support for qualified Negro suffrage by state action alone; instead, Democrats lost their heads. Their record on the Fifteenth Amendment and their platform of 1868 together brought the war issues to the surface and generated a solid Republican and staunchly Unionist response. Retention of the strong cohesive power of a Reconstruction issue was just what Republicans needed. The Democrats provided Republicans with suitable occasion to unfurl the bloody shirt and helped to relegate the potentially powerful party of 1868 to a demoralized and divided minority in 1872.5 Concluding from his findings and observations, Professor Gillette wrote: “If the Fifteenth Amendment divided Republicans during the fight for passage in Congress and then united them during the ratification fight, the opposite pattern plagued Democrats.”6 Therefore, initially the Democrats simultaneously

wooed and bullied the African American electorate, both North and South. This dual policy of “alternate bullying and wooing of the Negro voter by Democrats suggested shrewd maneuvering and acute schizophrenia. The need for power was strong, but so too was the compulsion of prejudice.”7 In the final analysis, for white southern Democrats this dual policy ceased after they centralized and concentrated electoral and political power in their own hands and gained control of the state governments, while in the North Democratic politicians sought self-preservation and grudgingly accepted, save in the state of Maryland, the new suffrage rights granted to the African American electorate in the North and West. When the Compromise of 1877 set in motion the eventual disenfranchisement of African Americans, the African American electorate in the North continued to vote, and slowly and gradually this led to their empowerment. Scholars, however, have rarely linked or related this continual African American voting and electoral empowerment in the North, Midwest, and West when discussing African American voter activists, voter activism, and the embryonic African American voting rights movement fighting disenfranchisement in the South. Indeed, African American voting outside the South is the missing variable in the southern African American voting rights struggle from the Era of Disenfranchisement until the present. Nevertheless, the northern, midwestern, and western African American voters and elected officials were there every step of the way, motivating, stimulating, and serving as an important example of the nation’s unfinished business in the realm of voting rights for African Americans in the South. It seems that almost all books, book chapters, articles, and essays on African American suffrage and voting rights; Supreme Court cases on voting rights, voter activism, and movements; and the 1965 Voting Rights Act and its amendments focus completely and only upon the South. Rarely if ever is there any mention, discussion, or analysis of the African American electorate in the North after the Era of Reconstruction. One of the few exceptions is the work of historian Leslie H. Fishel, Jr.: his doctoral dissertation entitled “The North and the Negro, 1865–1900: A Study in Race Discrimination,” which he followed with several historical articles drawn from this work: (1) “Northern Prejudice and Negro Suffrage, 1865–1870,” (2) “The Negro in Northern Politics, 1870– 1900,” (3) “Wisconsin and Negro Suffrage,” and (4) “The Negro in the New Deal Era.” Other examples of this rare approach include Lawrence Grossman, The Democratic Party and the Negro: Northern and National Politics, 1868–92, and August Meier, “The Negro and the Democratic Party, 1875–1915.” Besides these studies, there is one notable city-level study and one notable state-level study: (1) Harold Gosnell, Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago, and his three articles, “Chicago Black-Belt as a Political Battleground,” “The Negro Vote in Northern Cities,” and with his African American doctoral student Robert Martin, “The Negro as Voter and Officeholder”; and (2) Margaret Calcott, The Negro in Maryland Politics, 1870–1912. Besides these major exceptions, there were these pioneering works on the northern states by African American scholars: William Nowlin, The Negro in American National Politics, Elbert Tatum, The Changed Political Thought of the Negro, 1915–1940, as well as his article “The Changed Political Thought of the Negroes in the United States.”



African American Voters and Electoral Empowerment in the North, 1876–1944 389

Although these works, particularly Professor Gosnell’s, are quite insightful and highly informative, none of them provide much information on the key African American electoral event of the later nineteenth century: the 1876 state representative elections in Chicago. It was in that election that the signal event for African American electoral empowerment took place: the election of John W. E. Thomas to the Illinois state legislature. His election would serve as a stimulus, motivator, and political symbol of electoral hope for the southern African American electorate to attain re-enfranchisement when they had been disenfranchised by the eleven southern states plus Oklahoma, abandoned by the Republican and Democratic parties and the liberal northern press, and undermined by their own national leadership in the person of Booker T. Washington and his southern disciples. With the Atlanta Compromise of Washington and the coming of the “Color Line”—including the rise of “Jim and Jane Crow” and racial segregation, underpinned by the ideology of White Supremacy—voting behavior and voter rights activism slipped into the political shadows.8 But the rise of African American voters and their subsequent electoral empowerment in the northern states became a shining ray of light and hope, albeit a distant one, to instruct the southern African American voting rights leadership that what they had lost in disenfranchisement could be regained because African American voting was still constitutional and legal, despite the restrictions that the white South had imposed. This political symbol said loud and clear that what the eleven southern states had imposed was itself both unconstitutional and illegal.

The 1876 Chicago, Illinois, Electoral Symbol for African American Electoral Empowerment: North and South In analyzing the First Reconstruction period in the South (1865–1877), historian C. Vann Woodward declared that “the Northern Negro did not enjoy a fraction of the political success the Southern Negro enjoyed, as modest as that was.”9 He was obviously referring to the large number of electoral offices won by southern freedmen after they were given the right to vote by the Four Military Reconstruction Acts in 1867 and 1868. After the Fifteenth Amendment, northern and midwestern and western African Americans obtained suffrage rights, but their first and only post-Reconstruction electoral victory would come in Chicago, Illinois, during the 1876 presidential election.10 To be sure, Professor Gosnell did mention this breakthrough electoral empowerment and listed in his Appendix in Table XVIII each and every one of the African American legislators in the state house (but not the state senate) from 1876 through 1934.11 Gosnell described this breakthrough election: “As far back as 1876, when the colored people comprised only 1 per cent of the total population of the city, one of them, John W. E. Thomas, was sent as their representative to the capitol at Springfield by the Republican voters of the Second Senatorial District in Chicago.”12 After serving his first term of two years, Republican State “Representative Thomas was not re-elected until 1882” and then served two additional terms.13 Representative Thomas was in the Illinois State Legislature for a total of six years, three two-year

terms. And since Representative Thomas’ reelection in 1882 “there has never been a session of the Illinois General Assembly which has lacked a colored representative.”14 Professor Gosnell concluded that the last single African American state representative served in 1911–1912, and in the 1912 elections, “two colored representatives were . . . sent to Springfield.” Six years later in 1918 three African Americans were elected to the Illinois state legislature, and the number has continued to rise. By 1918 in the South all of the African American state legislators and congressmen were gone as well as most of the African American voters. Yet like most of their southern brethren, all of these African American Illinois legislators were Republicans until 1934, when the first Democrat was elected. In 2011, there were a grand total of 30 African Americans in the Illinois state legislature—20 in its general assembly (house) and 10 in the senate—with 177 total seats (118 in the house and 59 in the senate).15 In the most detailed research on the pioneering election of State Representative Thomas, historian David Joens, director of the Illinois State Archives, explained that it was Thomas who electrified and stirred the African American community and became the “opening gun for the emergence of black politics in Chicago,” even though the first African American who was elected in Chicago was John Jones in 1871 to the Cook County Commission.16 Joens wrote: “It would be Thomas’s 1876 campaign for the legislature where Chicago would confront race for the first time on the electoral field.”17 And he concluded that Thomas’s “election marked a high point in post Civil War Illinois, when the promises of equality and full citizenship for African Americans seemed possible. It also marked a unity among the African American community in Chicago, a unity which would not be seen again until well into the 20th century.”18 According to Joens, Thomas’s nomination won widespread support in the small African American community of Chicago. He says: The Thomas nomination caused an immediate stir in Chicago. The African American community was elated. A large crowd of African Americans had attended the convention and erupted into cheers when Thomas won the nomination. The crowd promised to bring 1,500 votes to the ticket. The colored voters of the Second Ward later held at least one, if not two, ratification meetings at Olivet Church.19 Olivet Baptist Church was the most influential and prestigious African American church in Chicago at the time: “In 1870, Olivet had a membership of 443. By 1876, when Thomas first ran for the legislature, its membership had risen to 621. . . . Many of Chicago’s African American elite attended services at Olivet, including John Jones,” the first African American officeholder in the city.20 Although Republicans nominated Thomas in 1876 and helped to elect him, the same “Second District Republicans did not renominate Thomas in 1878 or 1880.” But several things happened to put Thomas back into the state legislature. First, “following legislative redistricting, Thomas was nominated and elected in both 1882 and 1884.” And secondly, “by this time,

390

Chapter 19

African Americans, as the most loyal segment of the Republican Party, had the political strength to demand that an African American be nominated for the legislature.”21 Specifically, this political strength came from the African American migrants who left the South because of its rabid segregation and White Supremacy policies and programs. As each year brought more and more African American southern migrants, Chicago’s African American population and electorate increased, and as a consequence of this increase there were “two colored representatives [in] Springfield [in] 1912.”22 But shortly thereafter, Professor Gosnell tells us that “[t]he delegation of colored representatives in Springfield was increased to three in 1918. The larger stream of migration following the World War was in part responsible for this result.”23 But it did not stop there. Beyond the ever-rising increase in the number of African Americans in the Illinois house, “[i]n 1924, for the first time in the history of the state, a man of African descent was elected to the state Senate. . . . Adelbert H. Roberts, who had served three terms in the Illinois House of Representatives, was the unanimous choice of the Third Ward organization for the position.” He not only won the election but also “served for ten years in the state Senate.”24 However, during the Republican primary in 1934, he was defeated by another African American state representative, William E. King, who became the next African American state senator. This type of bold and innovative electoral empowerment of the African American electorate was happening nowhere else in the country, and it became an important topic in most newspapers and magazines for the African American community. For instance, it was featured prominently in every issue of W. E. B. DuBois’s Crisis magazine from 1911 through 1934, when DuBois was forced to resign from the organization over his advocacy of self-segregation as a means of outlasting the Great Depression.25 All of the information about these elected officials during the era when disenfranchisement in the South was at its zenith was collected, organized by years, and presented as a table in the study of Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, by African American political scientist Ralph Bunche.26 The number of African American legislators in Illinois had increased to three in the state house in 1918—then to one in the state senate and four in the house in 1924. In 1930, the number in the Illinois house rose to five, with one remaining in the senate, for a total of six. This continuing and rapid electoral empowerment in Illinois made it a giant political symbol and motivator for re-enfranchisement in the South and electoral empowerment in other northern states. It coincided with a southern movement, specifically in Texas, in which African American voter activists pursued a legal assault on the Democratic White Primaries, poll taxes, and numerous voter registration barriers. Chicago was a symbol of hope that they were on the right track, despite discouragement from their setbacks and meager to non-existent victories. In addition to DuBois’s Crisis magazine, Monroe Work reported the successes in his Negro Year Book. The coverage in these volumes, well-read particularly by the African American middle classes, North and South, was further enhanced and extended by the African American newspapers—the two dailies and numerous weeklies. The information got to the southern

African American electorate as well as to those in the North and West through these publications and also by word of mouth. Although DuBois and Work listed these victories in a forthright and factual manner, neither of them organized these findings into thematic, inferential, and projective analyses to demonstrate that these northern electoral victories were in the process of becoming tools of political socialization for mobilizing African American voter rights activists in the South. To be sure, DuBois did use the rising number of voters in the northern African American communities to bargain with presidential candidates and political parties in every presidential election from 1912 to 1932 and beyond, but he did not see the northern state legislative victories as a stimulus for later local, city, and county ones.27 Nor did his Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, historian David Levering Lewis, find or notice any writings that laid bare this relationship between the African American experiences in the different regions of America. Nevertheless, DuBois did come close and was one of the very few of his race’s leaders to see the importance of this migration to the North and its politicization. Writing in the Crisis magazine in January, 1921, shortly after the enfranchisement of African American women, DuBois stated: “In the last presidential election [1920], black folk put 13 members of their race into the legislatures of the Northern States,” and thereby suggested that this adroit use of the northern ballot would eventually lead to the “Political Rebirth” of the race.28 This was as close as DuBois came to using the northern electoral victories as an exemplar, at least in his writings. Inherent in his observation and comment is the idea that the ever-increasing number of blacks in the northern state legislatures would lead somehow to electoral and political empowerment of African Americans at the city council and national congressional levels.29 But there was a great difference between the message of the printed word, led by DuBois and Work, and that of the spoken word, led by the victorious candidates who visited the South. These elected candidates came south to speak at numerous African American churches on Men’s Day, Women’s Day, Children’s Day, and for the celebration of Emancipation Proclamation Day, all of which were major event days in southern African American churches. The politicians’ speeches and remarks were filled with stories about their electoral achievements and conclusions that their electoral successes were signs that African Americans were making progress. They argued it was also possible for the southern African American electorate and voter activists to make similar progress. These recently elected African American state legislators also came to the South to speak at the African American private and state colleges and universities as commencement speakers, Founder’s Day speakers, and visiting lecturers to social science and political science classes. In these talks they described how they campaigned and won these seats and how such possibilities could and would occur for southern African Americans soon. They were speaking to the future African American middle class. This is what they could achieve with the vote. And at these southern and Border State African American colleges these elected officials also spoke during the annual



African American Voters and Electoral Empowerment in the North, 1876–1944 391

“Negro History Week” that always came in February. If these elected officials were too busy to appear themselves, and most could not due to numerous such invitations, someone else would appear to tell their stories. These victorious candidates were the visible signs of racial progress. Their successes were the embodiment of the goals of “Negro History Week” because each of these individual men and women were history makers themselves in that they were the first of their race to accomplish these feats. Like Jack Johnson and Joe Louis in boxing, Jackie Robinson in baseball, and Jessie Owens in the Olympics, here were the trailblazers in government and politics. These individuals became the agents and tools of political socialization in the African American community. To the growing list of state legislators were added African American U.S. congressmen Oscar DePriest from Illinois in 1928 and Adam Clayton Powell from New York in 1944, both men outspoken “race men.” Professor Harold Gosnell, who was not only a contemporary but was in Chicago when DePriest won his congressional seat, says: “The eyes of all the colored citizens were focused upon their single spokesman in the national law-making body [DePriest]. He was in constant demand as a public speaker in all parts of the country, and his actions were followed closely by the colored newspapers,” in all parts of the nation.30 One of the final connections of African American empowerment in the North to the southern African American suffrage struggle was in the sit-in movement in the South, launched in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960. Most of the participants had heard about these distant electoral victories while in high school and had seen some of these legislative winners (and others) speak in churches or during “Negro History Week” while in high school. When they got to college they heard even more. But those who were in college in the South could not see this type of electoral progress near home, even as late as 1960. Thus, it was now time to do something to effectuate that sort of voting and electoral progress where they stood and in their own southern political context. Hence, the sit-in participation was not only about “lunch counters” but also about voting rights and political participation. And in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia the voter registration campaigns shared the same source of inspiration. Therefore, the impact and influence of these pioneering electoral events in the North had led to the legal victory over the White Primary in 1944; and by 1960 the impact spread to mass participation to achieve the African American electoral empowerment that people had been hearing about since the turn of the century from these state legislators and now congressmen. And although we have so far spoken of these African American electoral victories in qualitative and narrative terms, it is now possible to discuss these victories in quantitative and statistical terms, in that we have collected the election return data for these African American legislators in Illinois from 1876 to 1944. And this continual electoral presence and empowerment of more than six decades in the Illinois legislature by African Americans laid the groundwork and mobilization for the African American electorate elsewhere in the North and for re-enfranchisement in the South. No other state had such a tradition and pattern of legislative empowerment.

Table 19.1 provides a comprehensive and systematic listing of African American state house and senate candidates from 1876 to 1944 in Illinois. In addition to the names of these African American candidates the table shows the general election data for the house and senate districts, the opposition candidates and their political party affiliation. Overall, in this nearly seventy-year period, from 1876 to 1944, 33 African Americans were elected to the Illinois legislature, 27 Republicans and 6 Democrats. Of these, 27 Republicans and 4 Democrats were candidates for the state house, 2 Republicans and 2 Democrats for the state senate (this includes Republicans Roberts and King who won office in both the state house and senate). In the period from 1876 to 1944, 1920 is the first year that African American candidates for Illinois legislative office, taken as a group, received more than 34,000 votes. Figure 19.1 (p. 395) shows that this level of voting for African American candidates more than doubled the peak of the period up to 1920, reaching nearly 73,000 votes. This was the year of the first presidential election after women, including African American women, gained the right to vote through the Nineteenth Amendment. After dipping at the next election in 1922, voting for African American candidates rose again to nearly 150,000 votes, very likely spurred by the presidential election of 1924. Then, there was a steep decline in 1926, followed by another peak of just over 150,000 votes with the presidential election of 1928. The pattern of the previous eight years repeated over the next presidential election cycle. African American candidates for the Illinois legislature received just over 200,000 votes in 1932, the highest number of votes to that point. Although the graph shows steep declines in voting thereafter in 1936, another presidential election year, and in 1942, the latter can be explained by the lack of available data concerning the actual number of votes received by candidates in that year. Voting rebounded to its highest point in 1944 when African American state legislative candidates received nearly 250,000 votes. African American candidates were also winning office. Figure 19.2 (p. 395) compares the number of African American candidates with the number of those candidates elected to the Illinois legislature in each year from 1876 to 1944. The success of African Americans at winning office in Illinois during this period was due in part to the state constitution, which allowed the fracturing of votes for general assembly (or state house) district seats. Each district elected three representatives. Each voter had three votes to distribute to no more than three candidates, and they could split their three votes evenly between two candidates (oneand-a-half for each); the top three candidates by votes received were elected to represent a general assembly district. (The state senate used the typical one vote, one senator system.) Thus, as shown in Table 19.1 (pp. 392–394), when there were only three candidates, as in each of the general assembly elections from 1876 to 1908, to win office an African American candidate only had to be one of them. In 1910 there were more than five candidates competing for the top three slots, and an African American, Edward D. Green, received the third-highest number of votes and was elected. It was not until 1924 that an African American candidate in a general assembly district failed to place among the top three finishers. Once into the general election, African Americans

392

Chapter 19

Table 19.1  Illinois Legislature Election Outcomes with African American Candidates, 1868–1944 Election Year and Chamber

District

AAa

House 1876

Cook 2

 

 

House 1882

Cook 3

  House 1884

Cook 3

Candidate

Partyb

Votesc

Wonc

 

Joseph E. Smith

 

15,489.0

X

X

John W. E. Thomas

Rep.

11,532.0

 

Solomon P. Hopkins

 

11,237.0

X

John W. E. Thomas

Rep.

 

James B. Bradwell

  X

Election Year and Chamber

District

AAa

Candidate

Partyb

Votesc

Wonc

Cook 1

 

John Griffin

Dem.

18,803.0

X

X

House 1908

 

Francis P. Brady

Rep.

14,741.5

X

X

 

 

X

Alexander Lane

Rep.

13,743.0

X

Cook 1

 

John Griffin

Dem.

16,929.0

X

6,373.0

X

House 1910

 

Noble B. Judah, Jr.

Rep.

9,018.0

X

 

6,065.5

X

 

X

Edward D. Green

Rep.

8,044.5

X

Thomas McNally

 

611.0

X

 

 

Axel Gustafson

Soc.

1,251.0

 

John W. E. Thomas

Rep.

10,691.5

X

 

 

George D. Koontz

Proh.

264.0

 

 

Abner Taylor

 

10,136.0

X

 

 

Scattering

 

 

John Griffin

House 1912

 

 

 

George M. Cass

 

7,951.0

X

House 1886

Cook 3

X

George F. Ecton

Rep.

5,263.5

X

 

Francis A. Brohaskin

 

5,032.0

X

 

Thomas J. Moraw

 

4,688.0

X

 

  House 1888

Cook 3

  House 1890

  House 1894

Rep.

9,418.0

X

 

Maurice J. Clark

Rep.

6,454.0

X

X

Ernest D. Green

Rep.

5,923.0

X

Cook 3

 

John O. Walsh

Dem.

11,080.0

X

 

William Ostrow

Rep.

9,498.5

X

X

 

 

X

Robert R. Jackson

Rep.

9,059.0

X

House 1914

Cook 1

 

John Griffin

Dem.

12,596.0

X

 

William M. Brinkman

Rep.

6,975.5

X

   

 

8,912.0

X

 

 

William Buckley

 

8,703.0

X

Cook 1

X

Edward H. Morris

Rep.

4,798.0

X

 

X

Sheadrick B. Turner

Rep.

6,659.5

X

 

William R. Harris

 

4,491.0

X

 

 

John H. Taylor

Prog.

2,726.5

 

X

 

 

Lester Phillips

Soc.

752.5

 

10,144.5

X

 

 

Edward M. Santry

Dem.

10,372.0

X

9,910.0

X

 

X

Robert R. Jackson

Rep.

10,107.0

X

X

 

 

John P. Walsh

Dem.

9,201.0

X

 

William Ostrom

Rep.

9,162.0

   

  Cook 3   Cook 5

Cook 5

 

  Cook 5

  House 1900

Cook 5

  House 1902

Lloyd G. Spencer

 

 

William H. King

 

X

James E. Bish

Rep.

 

Solomon Van Prasg

 

51.0

 

X

John C. Buckner

Rep.

24,697.0

X

 

Milroy H. Gibson

 

24,240.5

X

 

 

Francis H. Clark

Prog.

3,623.0

X

 

 

Arthur E. Halm

Soc.

1,027.0

 

House 1916

 

John Griffin

Dem.

19,085.0

X

 

William M. Brinkman

Rep.

10,989.0

X

X

Benjamin H. Lucas

Rep.

9,839.0

X

X

Robert R. Jackson

Rep.

16,909.5

X

Angeline F. Cella

 

18,625.5

Cook 1

X

John C. Buckner

Rep.

24,956.5

X

 

William O. LaMonte

 

23,422.5

X

 

Frank R. Kain

 

22,351.5

X

 

X

 

 

Herman E. Schultz

Rep.

16,080.5

X

 

Robert Redfield

 

24,601.0

Cook 3

 

Linn H. Young

 

23,799.0

X

 

X

William L. Martin

Rep.

23,303.0

X

 

 

John P. Walsh

Dem.

13,142.0

X

X

 

 

Edward M. Santry

Dem.

11,672.5

 

 

 

 

Clifford A. Stanfield

Soc.

1,027.0

 

House 1918

Cook 1

 

John Griffin

Dem.

14,820.5

X

 

William M. Brinkman

Rep.

6,375.5

X

 

X

Sheadrick B. Turner

Rep.

5,978.0

X

 

 

C. W. Howorth

Soc.

305.0

 

 

George G. Noonan

Dem.

14,897.5

X

 

X

Adelbert H. Roberts Rep.

11,509.5

X

X

Warren B. Douglas

Rep.

10,358.5

X

 

H. S. Smith

Soc.

610.0

 

 

Hamlin M. Spiegel

Rep.

34,438.5

X

John G. Jones

Rep.

33,609.0

X

 

 

George E. Lapsley

Dem.

31,625.5

X

Cook 1

 

Jacob Boll

Rep.

11,128.0

X

X

Edward H. Morris

Rep.

10,716.5

X

 

Samuel W. Arrand

Dem.

X

Edward D. Green

Rep.

18,401.5

X

 

Francis P. Brady

Rep.

16,431.0

X

 

Cook 3

 

 

House 1896

X

House 1904

Cook 1

 

 

 

Samuel W. Arrand

Dem.

13,729.0

X

House 1906

Cook 1

 

Thomas J. McNally

Dem.

14,334.0

X

 

14,357.0

Francis A. Brohaskin

 

House 1898

George F. Ecton

 

Dem.

 

  House 1891

X

Cook 1

6.0

 

 

Francis P. Brady

Rep.

10,950.0

X

 

X

Alexander Lane

Rep.

9,439.5

X

 

Cook 3



African American Voters and Electoral Empowerment in the North, 1876–1944 393 Election Year and Chamber House 1920

District

AAa

Cook 1

   

Cook 3

Election Year and Chamber

Candidate

Partyb

Votesc

Wonc

X

Sheadrick B. Turner

Rep.

18,950.0

X

 

William M. Brinkman

Rep.

18,856.0

X

House 1928 (Continued)

 

John Griffin

Dem.

16,397.0

X

House 1930

X

Warren B. Douglas

Rep.

27,577.5

X

 

X

Adelbert H. Roberts

Rep.

26,437.0

X

 

 

George G. Noonan

Dem.

25,812.5

X

 

 

Morrie Lewis

 

25,419.0

 

1,172.5

 

District  

Candidate

Partyb

 

William J. Healy

 

653.0

 

 

Thomas J. Healy

 

219.5

 

John Griffin

Dem.

25,721.0

X

George W. Blackwell

Rep.

10,633.0

X

 

X

Harris B. Gaines

Rep.

10,030.0

X

 

 

Arthur Bellamy

 

X

William E. King

 

X

Cook 3

67.0

 

Rep.

22,212.0

X

Charles J. Jenkins

Rep.

20,834.5

X

20,792.5

X

 

 

George E. Moody

 

House 1922

Cook 1

 

John Griffin

Dem.

23,956.0

X

 

 

George G. Noonan

Dem.

X

Sheadrick B. Turner

Rep.

10,494.0

X

 

 

Harriett Richter

 

 

 

William M. Brinkman

Rep.

10,202.0

X

 

 

Michael L. Igoe

 

 

James McNulty

Soc.

450.0

 

 

 

George G. Noonan

Dem.

23,428.0

X

 

 

X

Adelbert H. Roberts

Rep.

21,682.0

X

 

X

George T. Kersey

Rep.

21,589.0

 

 

Mary Jurgelonis

Soc.

House 1924

Cook 3

216.5

 

Dem.

58,669.0

X

X

William J. Warfield Rep.

54,949.5

X

 

Josephine Perry

Rep.

49,942.5

X

 

 

Ralph McAllister

 

684.5

 

 

 

Mary Hawrylick

 

71.5

 

X

 

 

John P. Nutall

 

68.0

 

611.0

 

Senate 1930

X

Adelbert H. Robertsb

Rep.

15,791.0

X

 

Joseph Kemmerling

Dem.

8,143.0

 

 

W. G. Anderson

 

2.0

 

 

Harry L. Williams

Dem.

37,200.0

X

X

Harris B. Gaines

Rep.

13,640.5

X

 

Arthur T. Broche

Rep.

11,549.5

X

 

George G. Noonan

Dem.

39,228.5

X

X

William E. King

Rep.

34,830.0

X

X

Charles J. Jenkins

Rep.

31,910.0

X

 

Joe Jackson

 

1,875.5

 

 

John Griffin

Dem.

24,727.0

X

X

Sheadrick B. Turner

Rep.

19,362.5

X

 

X

Charles A. Griffin

Rep.

17,986.5

X

 

 

James McNulty

Soc.

228.5

 

 

George G. Noonan

Dem.

30,750.0

X

 

X

Warren B. Douglas

Rep.

29,702.5

X

 

X

William E. King

Rep.

26,978.5

X

 

X

George T. Kersey

Rep.

24,751.5

 

Cook 3

X

Adelbert H. Robertsd

Rep.

28,401.0

X

 

 

Sidney H. Seelo

Dem.

6,850.0

 

 

Senate 1924 House 1926

Cook 1

Cook 3

Cook 1

   

 

John Griffin

Dem.

21,537.0

X

X

Sheadrick B. Turner

Rep.

11,411.5

X

X

Charles A. Griffin

Rep.

11,147.5

X

X

George T. Kersey

Rep.

22,690.5

X

 

X

Warren B. Douglas

Rep.

21,775.5

X

 

 

George G. Noonan

Dem.

18,519.5

X

X

Adelbert H. Robertsb

Rep.

15,995.0

X

 

Joseph A. Kelly

Dem.

 

 

W. G. Anderson

 

  X

Senate 1926

Cook 3

Cook 3

Wonc

 

 

 

Votesc

X

 

Cook 1

AAa

Cook 5

Cook 3

  House 1932                  

House 1934

Cook 1

Cook 3

  Cook 5

 

Bernard J. Kewin

Dem.

90,392.5

X

X

William J. Warfield Rep.

87,422.0

X

 

Josephine Perry

Rep.

80,709.0

X

 

X

Claude Lightfoot

 

33,337.5

 

Cook 1

 

Harry L. Williams

Dem.

34,174.0

X

X

Harris B. Gaines

Rep.

8,914.5

X

 

Arthur T. Broche

Rep.

8,400.0

X

 

George Noonan

Dem.

45,470.5

X

X

Warren B. Douglas

Rep.

27,450.0

X

   

Cook 3

6,368.0

 

 

 

14.0

 

 

 

X

Charles J. Jenkins

Rep.

26,577.5

X

Richard E. Parker

 

1.0

 

 

Cook 5

X

William J. Warfield Rep.

62,442.0

X

George W. Blackwell

Rep.

11,783.5

X

 

 

Louis G. Berman

Dem.

58,599.5

X

X

Harris B. Gaines

Rep.

10,763.5

X

 

 

Bernard J. Kewin

Dem.

54,975.5

X

 

 

Josephine Perry

Rep.

52,594.0

 

 

John Griffin

Dem.

7,529.5

X

 

 

Frank Holten,

Dem.

44,416.0

X

 

George G. Noonan

Dem.

27,175.5

X

 

 

Calvin D. Johnson

Rep.

39,822.0

X

 

X

William E. King

Rep.

26,432.0

X

 

X

George T. Kersey

Rep.

24,742.0

X

X

X

William J. Warfield

Rep.

79,563.0

X

 

 

Flora S. Cheney

Rep.

76,503.5

X

 

 

Michael L. Igoe

Dem.

75,424.0

X

House 1928

Cook 1

   

 

Cook 3

Cook 5

St. Clair 49

 

X

Aubrey H. Smith

Dem.

38,062.5

 

 

 

R. H. Huschle

Rep.

33,228.5

 

Senate 1934

Cook 1

X

William E. Kingb

Rep.

17,384.0

X

 

Bryant A. Hammond

Dem.

17,004.0

 

(Continued)

394

Chapter 19

Table 19.1 (Continued) Election Year and Chamber House 1936

District Cook 1

   

Cook 3

 

AAa

Candidate

Partyb

Votesc

Wonc

 

Harry L. Williams

Dem.

33,623.5

X

X

Ernest A. Greene

Rep.

10,204.5

X

 

Arthur T. Broche

Rep.

9,628.5

X

 

George G. Noonan

Dem.

65,059.5

X

Election Year and Chamber

District

AAa

House 1942

Cook 1

Senate 1942

X

Charles J. Jenkins

Rep.

30,758.5

X

 

 

X

Richard A. Harewood

Rep.

28,591.5

X

House 1938

Cook 1

 

Daniel M. Flanigan

Dem.

32,038.5

X

X

Ernest A. Greene

Rep.

8,966.5

X

 

Arthur T. Broche

Rep.

8,709.5

X

 

George G. Noonan

Dem.

56,010.0

X

X

Charles J. Jenkins

Rep.

28,760.5

X

   

   

Cook 3

   

 

X

Andrew A. Torrence

Rep.

26,489.5

X

 

Cook 5

 

James W. Linn

Dem.

86,019.5

X

 

 

Louis G. Berman

Dem.

73,349.0

X

 

X

William J. Warfield

Rep.

71,685.5

X

 

 

Matilda Fenberg

Rep.

61,332.5

 

Cook 3

X

William A. Wallace

Dem.

20,721.0

X

 

X

William E. Kingb

Rep.

19,775.0

 

House 1940

Cook 1

 

Daniel M. Flanigan

Dem.

24,491.5

X

X

Ernest A. Greene

Rep.

12,741.0

X

 

Arthur T. Broche

Rep.

11,668.0

X

 

George G. Noonan

Dem.

70,956.0

X

 

X

Charles J. Jenkins

Rep.

33,233.5

X

 

X

Dudley S. Martin

Rep.

30,131.0

X

37.5

 

 

Cook 3

 

 

 

Scattering

 

 

Cook 5

 

Louis G. Berman

Dem.

90,289.0

X

 

X

William J. Warfield

Rep.

89,707.0

X

 

 

Noble W. Lee

Rep.

86,215.0

X

 

Stillman M. Frankland

Dem.

85,945.0

 

 

 

Partyb

X

Corneal A. Davis

Dem.

Cook 3

X

Fred J. Smith

Dem.

Cook 3

X

Christopher C. Wimbush

Dem.

19,403.0

X

 

Benjamin G. Clanton

Rep.

16,569.0

 

X

Edward A. Welters

Rep.

18,088.0

X

Cook 1

failed to win office in Illinois a total of five times from 1924 to 1944. Communist Claude Lightfoot received 33,337.5 votes but came in fourth among candidates for the general assembly seats of the Fifth District in 1932.31 In 1938, William King was defeated in the state senate Third District by another African American, William Wallace. Ernest Greene and Dudley Martin each finished with fewer votes than the top three candidates in the general assembly contests of 1944 for the First and Third Districts, respectively. Overall, African Americans won 82 of the 87 chamber seats (94.25%) that they sought during the period from 1876 to 1944.

Beyond Illinois: Pioneer African American Multistate Legislative Empowerment in the North: An Additional Mobilizer Clearly Illinois was an exceptional standout in the North in electing African Americans to its state legislature. Writing about three other midwestern states—Iowa, Minnesota, and

Votesc

Wonc X

 

X

 

Daniel M. Flanigan

Dem.

17,841.5

X

 

X

Corneal A. Davis

Dem.

17,418.0

X

 

X

Ernest A. Greene

Rep.

4,380.5

 

Cook 3

 

Senate 1938

 

House 1944

Candidate

 

 

 

Cook 5

 

George G. Noonan

Dem.

45,924.5

X

X

Fred J. Smith

Dem.

44,290.0

X

X

Charles J. Jenkins

Rep.

29,577.5

X

X

Dudley S. Martin

Rep.

26,631.0

 

 

Louis G. Berman

Dem.

112,499.5

X

 

X

Charles M. Skyles

Dem.

104,643.0

X

 

 

Noble W. Lee

Rep.

78,161.0

X

 

William A. Booker

Rep.

71,121.0

 

 

 

Sources: Adapted from Harold F. Gosnell, Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politicians in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 375–376; Illinois General Assembly Legislative Research Unit, “African American Legislators in Illinois, 1876–2005,” First Reading Vol. 19, No. 3 (February 2006), pp. 6–9; and Secretary of State, Illinois Blue Book, 1876–1944 (Springfield: Illinois Secretary of State, 1876–1944), with the assistance of David Joens, director of the Illinois state archives, and Brent Walton. a

An X in this column indicates the candidate was an African American.

Parties: Dem. = Democratic; Rep. = Republican; Soc. = Socialist; Proh. = Prohibition; Prog. = Progressive b

Until 1980 the Illinois state constitution allowed the distribution of fractured votes and stipulated the election to office of the top three candidates by votes received in contests for House seats. c

The four-year term of office for the state senate began for odd-numbered districts, e.g., district 3, in 1926. Prior to that, in 1924, Roberts was elected as the third district state senator for a twoyear term. Thus, he served one two-year term and two four-year terms as state senator for the third district. King was Roberts’ successor, elected to one four-year term in 1934 and defeated by Wallace when attempting reelection to a second term in 1938. d

Wisconsin—Professor Leslie Schwalm, noted that they “were among the few northern states to enfranchise African American men prior to the Fifteenth Amendment,” in 1870 but much slower in electing African Americans to their state legislatures.32 Professor Schwalm found that this came after Illinois’ 1876 election, “with Minnesota’s first black state legislator, John Wheaton, in 1898, and Wisconsin’s first African American legislator, Lucien Palmer, in 1906.”33 But Iowa was even later. He wrote: White Iowans proved even more resistant to naming African Americans to government posts; in fact, until 1880, the state constitution prohibited black men from holding elective office. Although black Republicans nominated first John Priestly (in 1885), then George Woodson (in 1899 and 1912), and Manson L. James (in 1944) to serve in the Iowa General Assembly, it would be 1964 before black and white voters saw fit to send an African American to the state legislature.34



African American Voters and Electoral Empowerment in the North, 1876–1944 395

Figure 19.1  Votes for African American State Legislative Candidates in Illinois, 1876–1944

Sum of Votes for African American Candidates (in thousands)

250

200

150

100

50

18

76 18 78 18 80 18 82 18 84 18 86 18 88 18 90 18 92 18 94 18 96 18 98 19 90 19 02 19 04 19 06 19 08 19 10 19 12 19 14 19 16 19 18 19 20 19 22 19 24 19 26 19 28 19 30 19 32 19 34 19 36 19 38 19 40 19 42 19 44

0 Legislature Election Year Source: Adapted from Harold F. Gosnell, Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politicians in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 375–376; Illinois General Assembly Legislative Research Unit, "African American Legislators in Illinois, 1876–2005," First Reading Vol. 19, No. 3 (February 2006), pp. 6–9; and Secretary of State, Illinois Blue Book, 1876–1944 (Springfield: Illinois Secretary of State, 1876–1944), with the assistance of David Joens, director of the Illinois state archives, and Brent Walton.

Figure 19.2  Number of African Americans Running for and Elected to the Illinois State Legislature, 1876–1944 8 African American candidate defeats. 7 6

Number

5 4 3 No African American candidate in 1878 and 1880.

2 1

44

42

19

40

19

38

19

36

19

34

19

32

19

30

19

28

19

26

19

24

19

22

19

20

19

18

19

16

19

14

19

12

19

10

19

08

19

06

19

04

19

02

19

00

19

98

19

96

18

94

18

92

18

90

18

88

18

86

18

84

18

82

18

80

18

78

18

18

18

76

0

Legislature Election Year Black Candidates Running

Black Candidates Elected

Source: Adapted from Harold F. Gosnell, Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politicians in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 375–376; Illinois General Assembly Legislative Research Unit, "African American Legislators in Illinois, 1876–2005," First Reading Vol. 19, No. 3 (February 2006), pp. 6–9; and Secretary of State, Illinois Blue Book, 1876–1944 (Springfield: Illinois Secretary of State, 1876–1944), with the assistance of David Joens, director of the Illinois state archives, and Brent Walton.

396

Chapter 19

Although the electoral context and situation varied from one northern state to the other, African Americans did in the period from 1876 to 1944 get elected to numerous state legislatures and eventually to the U.S. Congress (from New York). And as each one of these northern states empowered African Americans by sending them to their state legislature, each election became a cue and symbol and mobilizer for empowerment and re-enfranchisement in the North and South, respectively. Thus, each election became an agent of and for political socialization in the African American community. Table 19.2 provides a first-of-its kind-list of African American state legislators in some nineteen states outside of the South, excluding Illinois. It covers a slightly expanded time frame (1868– 1944), beginning just six years earlier than Table 19.1 for Illinois (1876–1944). Table 19.2 reveals for these years that in these nineteen states there were 132 African Americans elected to these state legislatures. Of these 132 state legislators, 91 were Republicans, 32 were Democrats, and 1 was an Independent. And in terms of legislative chambers, some 129 won election to state houses while 4 won election to state senates. Map 19.1 (p. 401) shows all of the states, including Illinois, where African Americans served in state legislatures during the 1868–1944 period. Among the legislators listed by Table 19.2 are the two first African American women state legislators. In West Virginia, the governor appointed Mrs. Minnie Buckingham Harper on January 10, 1928, to serve out the time remaining in the term of her husband, E. Howard Harper, due to his death less than a month earlier.35 This was the very first time that a governor of any state, Border or otherwise, had appointed an African American woman to the legislature. Secondly, this appointment made Mrs. Harper the first African American woman to serve in a state legislature in this time period. And shortly afterward, Mrs. Crystal Bird Fauset became the first African American female to be elected to a state legislature. Several other African American women had run earlier for legislative office, including Mrs. W. L. Presto of Seattle, Washington, who ran for the state senate in the Thirty-Seventh District in 1918 and received 460 votes to the winner’s 1,205 votes.36 Table 19.3 (p. 401) lists the African American female candidates and legislative officeholders in the 1868–1944 period. The data reveal that seven women over a twenty-year period, most with major party affiliations, ran for or were appointed to the state legislature in seven western, northern, and Border states. Map 19.2 (p. 402) shows the locations of these states. Of these seven female candidates, four ran for the state house and two for the state senate; one was appointed to the state house. Two served in state houses. Thus, despite Illinois’ historic uniqueness (including the fact that the state in 1913 extended suffrage rights to all women, including African American women)37, the electorate there did not elect any African American females in the 1868–1944 time frame. Rather, the states of West Virginia and Pennsylvania have the historical honor of being the first to bring African American women into their state legislatures. Therefore, not only did the southern African American males become motivated, but because of these female state legislators, so did the African American female electorate and voter activists. Females now had their breakthrough electoral symbols.

Finally, another historically unique feature of Table 19.2, besides the pioneering women, is the huge number of African Americans elected to the state legislature in Pennsylvania. Once African Americans were elected to the legislature in that state in 1910, the pace increased and twelve different members were elected to the legislature by 1934, a number greater than that of any other state during the period except Illinois. Although over time this number would decline some, Pennsylvania still remained one of the very few states with a significantly large delegation of African Americans in the state legislature. At the very least, Pennsylvania, after it began the electoral empowerment of African Americans in the state legislature, seemingly kept pace with Illinois in terms of African Americans in the house. It thus became a second symbol and beacon to the other northern and southern states. Moreover, Table 19.2 disaggregates these northern states into two regions outside the South: Border States and other states. And looking at the Border States, one sees that African Americans were elected to the state legislatures just prior to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. First to vote African Americans into the legislature was West Virginia, followed by Missouri and later Kentucky. Delaware and Maryland did not elect any African Americans to their state legislatures until well after the 1868–1944 time frame. Of Maryland, African American political scientist Marion Orr has written: “In the 1954 state legislative elections, black leaders in West Baltimore challenged the [White Political Boss James] Pollack’s Fourth District [political machine] organization. . . . Three black candidates challenged Pollack-backed incumbents . . . [and] Pollack failed to take the challenge seriously and the three blacks won. From 1955 to 1958, for the first time in Maryland’s history, there were African Americans in the state legislature.”38 Thus, despite the fact that two of the five Border States were late in electoral empowerment of their African American electorates, three of these states did empower their African American electorates and joined with the other northern states as signals and symbols to the southern re-enfranchisement movement leaders in the African American community. The key here is that Illinois, though the most exceptional over time, was not alone in its pioneering and continuing efforts to place African Americans in its state legislative bodies. Nineteen other states, including the three Border States in close proximity, joined with Illinois for a total of twenty states with African American legislators. The newspapers, magazines, and journals, such as the popular Crisis magazine, spread the word of these significant elections and reelections, and each furthered political socialization. And they had a cumulative impact and influence, particularly in the South, where the African American community and its electorate were constrained by law and custom from politics, which was viewed as “white folks’ business.” Thus, the elections in these other states and Illinois became additional mobilizers. And soon thereafter, the African American electorate would attain an even higher electoral plateau than the state legislative level. Their next achievement was at the national congressional level, and here too Illinois led the way.



African American Voters and Electoral Empowerment in the North, 1876–1944 397 Table 19.2  Early Elections of African American State Legislators, 1868–1944

Region Northeastern, Midwestern, and Western States, Excluding Illinois                                                                            

First Election Year

Years Serveda

State

Legislator

Political Party

Represented Place/District

Chamber

1868

1868–1869

Massachusetts

John J. Smith

Republican

Boston

House

1870

1870–1871

Massachusetts

George L. Ruffin

Republican

Boston

House

1872

 

Massachusetts

John J. Smith

Republican

Boston

House

1873

 

Massachusetts

Lewis Hayden

 

Boston

House

 

1873–1874

Massachusetts

Joshua B. Smith

Republican

Cambridge

House

1878

1878–1879

Massachusetts

George W. Lowther

Republican

Boston

House

1879

1880–1882

Ohio

George W. Williams

Republican

Hamilton Co.

House

1881

 

Indiana

James S. Hinton

Republican

Indianapolis

House

 

1882–1884

Ohio

John P. Green

Republican

Cleveland

House

1883

1883–1886

Massachusetts

Julius C. Chappelle

Republican

Boston

House

1885

1886–1888

Ohio

Benjamin W. Arnett

Republican

Greene Co.

House

1886–1890

Ohio

Jere A. Brown

Republican

Cuyahoga Co.

House

 

1886–1888

Ohio

Robert Harlan

Republican

Hamilton Co.

House

1887

1887–1888

Massachusetts

William O. Armstrong

Republican

Boston

House

 

1888–1890

Ohio

William H. Copeland

Republican

Hamilton Co.

House

1889

 

Kansas

Alfred Fairfax

Republican

Chautauqua

House

 

1889–1890

Massachusetts

Andrew B. Lattimore

Republican

Boston

House

1891

1892–1894

Ohio

George H. Jackson

Republican

Hamilton Co.

House

1892

1892–1893

Massachusetts

Charles E. Harris

Republican

Boston

House

 

 

Ohio

John P. Green

Republican

Cleveland

Senate

1893

1893–1896

Michigan

William W. Ferguson

Republican

Wayne 1

House

1893–1897

Nebraska

Matthew O. Ricketts

Republican

Omaha

House

1894–1900

Ohio

William H. Clifford

Republican

Cuyahoga Co.

House

b

a

1894–1896

Ohio

Samuel B. Hill

Republican

Hamilton Co.

House

 

1894–1898

Ohio

Harry C. Smith

Republican

Cuyahoga Co.

House

1894

1894-1895

Massachusetts

Robert T. Teamoh

Republican

Boston

House

1895

1896–1898

Ohio

William H. Parham

Republican

Hamilton Co.

House

 

1896–1900

Ohio

William R. Stewart

Republican

Mahoning Co.

House

1896

1896–1897

Massachusetts

William L. Reed

Republican

Boston

House

1897

1897–1900

Michigan

Joseph H. Dickinson

Republican

Wayne 1

House

 

 

Ohio

George A. Myers

Republican

Cleveland

House

1898

1898–1900

Minnesota

John F. Wheaton

Republican

Hennipen Co. 42

House

1899

1900–1902

Ohio

Harry C. Smith

Republican

Cuyahoga Co.

House

1901

1901–1902

Michigan

James W. Ames

Republican

Wayne 1

House

 

1902–1906

Ohio

George W. Hays

Republican

Hamilton Co.

House

1902

 

Massachusetts

William H. Lewis

Republican

Cambridge

House

1903

1904–1906

Ohio

H. T. Eubanks

Republican

Cuyahogo Co.

House

1906

 

Wisconsin

Lucian H. Palmer

Republican

Milwaukee

House

1908

1909–1911

Ohio

H. T. Eubanks

Republican

Cuyahogo Co.

House

 

 

Oklahoma

Albert C. Hamlin

Republican

Logan Co. 3

House

1910

1911–1915

Pennsylvania

Harry W. Bass

Republican

Philadelphia 17

House

1917

 

New York

Edward A. Johnson

Republican

New York Co.

House

1918

1918–1933

California

Frederick M. Roberts

Republican

Los Angeles

House

1919–1921

New York

John C. Hawkins

Republican

New York Co.

House

 

1919–1921

Ohio

A. Lee Beaty

Republican

Hamilton Co.

House

1919

 

Ohio

Henry Higgins

 

 

House

 

Washington

J. H. Ryan

 

 

House (Continued)

398

Chapter 19

Table 19.2 (Continued)

Region Northeastern, Midwestern, and Western States, Excluding Illinois (Continued)

First Election Year

Years Serveda

State

Legislator

Political Party

Represented Place/District

Chamber

1920

1921–1929

Ohio

Harry E. Davis

Republican

Cuyahoga Co.

House

1921–1924

Pennsylvania

John C. Asbury

Republican

Philadelphia 7

House

 

1921–1924

Pennsylvania

Andrew F. Stephens

Republican

Philadelphia

House

1921

1921–1922

New Jersey

Walter G. Alexander

Republican

Essex Co.

House

1922

1922–1924

New Jersey

Oliver Randolph

Republican

Essex Co.

House

 

1923–1924

New York

Henri W. Shields

Democratic

New York Co.

House

1924

 

Nebraska

T. L. Barnett

 

 

House

 

Nebraska

A. A. McMillan

 

 

House

 

Ohio

E. W. B. Curry

 

 

House

1925–1932

Pennsylvania

William H. Fuller

Republican

Philadelphia 7

House

 

1925–1935

Pennsylvania

Samuel B. Hart

Republican

Philadelphia 6

House

1925

 

New York

Pope B. Billups

 

New York Co.

House

1927

1927–1929

Nebraska

John Andrew Singleton

Republican

Omaha

House

 

1927–1929

New Jersey

James L. Baxter

Republican

Essex Co.

House

1928

1929–1931

Ohio

Perry B. Jackson

Republican

Cuyahoga Co.

House

1929

1929–1930

Kansas

W. M. Blount

Republican

Wyandotte 8

House

1930

1931–1932

Michigan

Charles Roxborough

Republican

Wayne 3

Senate

1930–1931

New Jersey

Frank S. Hargrave

Republican

Essex Co.

House

 

New York

Lamar Perkins

 

New York Co.

House

 

New York

Francis E. Rivers

Republican

New York Co.

House

1931–1935

New York

James E. Stevens

Democratic

New York Co.

House

 

1931–1932

Pennsylvania

Walter E. Tucker

Republican

Allegheny 1

House

1932  

 

Indiana

Harry J. Richardson

Democratic

Indianapolis

House

 

Indiana

Robert V. Stanton

Democratic

East Chicago

House

 

Indiana

Marshall A. Talley

Democratic

 

House

 

New Jersey

Frank S. Hargrave

Republican

Essex Co.

House

1933–1935

Ohio

Chester K. Gillespie

Republican

Cuyahoga Co.

House

1933–1934

Pennsylvania

John W. Harris

Republican

Philadelphia 7

House

1933

1933–1936

Kansas

W. M. Blount

Republican

Wyandotte 8

House

1933

1933–1935

Nebraska

John Owen

Democratic

Omaha

House

 

 

New Jersey

J. Mercer Burrell

Republican

Essex Co.

House

1934

1934–1960

California

Augustus F. Hawkins

Democratic

Los Angeles

House

 

New Jersey

Frank S. Hargrave

Republican

Essex Co.

House

1935–1948

New York

William T. Andrews

Democratic

New York Co.

House

1935–1937

Ohio

Richard P. McClain

Republican

Hamilton Co.

House

1935–1949

Pennsylvania

Homer S. Brown

Independent

Allegheny 1

House

1935–1936

Pennsylvania

Richard A. Cooper

Republican

Philadelphia 6

House

1935–1938

Pennsylvania

Walter K. Jackson

Republican

Philadelphia 7

House

1935–1936

Pennsylvania

Hobson R. Reynolds

Republican

Philadelphia 21

House

1935–1938

Pennsylvania

Marshall L. Shepard

Democratic

Philadelphia 18

1935–1937

Nebraska

John Adams, Jr.

Republican

Omaha

House

 

New Jersey

J. Mercer Burrell

Republican

Essex Co.

House

1936–1938

New York

Robert W. Justice

Democratic

New York Co.

House

1937–1939

Kansas

William H. Towers

Republican

Wyandotte 8

House

1937–1944

Michigan

Charles C. Diggs, Sr.

Democratic

Wayne 3

Senate

New Jersey

Frank S. Hargrave

Republican

Essex Co.

House

1937–1942

Pennsylvania

William A. Allmond

Democratic

Philadelphia 7

House

1937–1938

Pennsylvania

John H. Brigerman

Democratic

Philadelphia 21

House

1935

1936  



African American Voters and Electoral Empowerment in the North, 1876–1944 399

Region Northeastern, Midwestern, and Western States, Excluding Illinois (Continued)

Border States

First Election Year

Represented Place/District

Chamber

Democratic

Philadelphia 6

House

Democratic

Philadelphia 13

House

John Adams, Jr.

Republican

Omaha

Unicameral

Guy R. Moorehead

Republican

Essex Co.

House

New Jersey

Frank S. Hargrave

Republican

Essex Co.

House

1939–1944

New York

Daniel Burrows

Democratic

New York Co.

House

1939–1940

Pennsylvania

Crystal Bird Fausetc

Democratic

Philadelphia 13

House

Years Serveda

State

Legislator

Political Party

1936 (continued) 

1937–1938

Pennsylvania

Samuel D. Holmes

1937–1944, 1947–1948, 1951–1952

Pennsylvania

Edwin F. Thompson

1937

1937–1943

Nebraska

 

 

New Jersey

1938

1938–1942

1939–1940

Pennsylvania

Hobson R. Reynolds

Democratic

Philadelphia 21

House

 

1939–1940

Pennsylvania

E. Washington Rhodes

Republican

Philadelphia 6

House

1940

 

Indiana

Robert Brokenburr

Republican

Indianapolis

Senate

 

Indiana

James S. Hunter

Democratic

East Chicago

House

1941–1942

Michigan

Horace A. White

Democratic

Wayne 1

House

1941–1953

New York

Hulan E. Jack

Democratic

New York Co.

House

1941–1949

Ohio

David D. Turpeau

Republican

Hamilton Co.

House

1941–1942

Pennsylvania

Ralph T. Jefferson

Democratic

Philadelphia 21

House

1941–1942

Pennsylvania

Marshall L. Shepard

Democratic

Philadelphia 18

House

 

1941–1942

Pennsylvania

Edward C. Young

Democratic

Philadelphia 6

House

1941

1941–1947

Kansas

William H. Towers

Republican

Wyandotte 8

House

1942

 

Indiana

Jesse L. Dickinson

Republican

South Bend

House

 

Indiana

Wilbur H. Grant

Republican

Indianapolis

House

 

Indiana

James S. Hunter

Democratic

East Chicago

House

1943–1945

Ohio

Chester K. Gillespie

Republican

Cuyahoga Co.

House

1943–1945

Ohio

Sandy F. Ray

Republican

Franklin Co.

House

1943–1944

Pennsylvania

John H. Brigerman

Democratic

Philadelphia 21

House

1943–1946, 1949–1954

Pennsylvania

Dennie W. Hoggard

Democratic

Philadelphia 18

House

1943–1944, 1947–1952

Pennsylvania

Lewis W. Mintess

Republican

Philadelphia 6

House

1943–1946, 1950–1951

Pennsylvania

Thomas P. Trent

Democratic

Philadelphia 7

House

 

 

Wisconsin

Cleveland M. Colbert

Republican

 

House

1943

 

Colorado

Edward W. Mann

 

 

House

 

1943–1947

New Jersey

James Otto Hill

Republican

Essex Co.

House

1944

 

Indiana

Robert Brokenburr

Republican

Indianapolis

Senate

 

Indiana

Jesse L. Dickinson

Democratic

South Bend

House

1945–1948

New York

William E. Prince

Democratic

New York Co.

House

1945–1947

Ohio

Jacob Ashburn, Sr.

Republican

Franklin Co.

House

1945–1946

Pennsylvania

Lee P. Myhan

Democratic

Philadelphia 13

House

1945–1946, 1949–1956

Pennsylvania

J. Thompson Pettigrew

Democratic

Philadelphia 21

House

 

Vermont

William J. Anderson

Republican

Shoreham

House

 

Wisconsin

Leroy J. Simmons

Democratic

Milwaukee

House

1896

 

West Virginia

Christopher Payne

Republican

Fayette Co.

House

1902

 

West Virginia

James Ellis

Republican

Fayette Co.

House

1904

 

West Virginia

James Ellis

Republican

Fayette Co.

House

West Virginia

Howard Railey

Republican

Fayette Co.

House (Continued)

400

Chapter 19

Table 19.2 (Continued)

Region Border States (Continued)

Border States

First Election Year

Years Serveda

State

Legislator

Political Party

Represented Place/District

Chamber

1906

 

West Virginia

James Ellis

Republican

Fayette Co.

House

1918

 

West Virginia

Harry J. Capehart

Republican

McDowell Co.

House

 

West Virginia

John V. Coleman

Republican

Fayette Co.

House

 

 

West Virginia

Thomas G. Nutter

Republican

Kanawha Co.

House

1919

 

Missouri

Walthall M. Moore

Republican

St. Louis 6, 3

House

1920

 

Missouri

Walthall M. Moore

Republican

St. Louis 6, 3

House

 

West Virginia

Harry J. Capehart

Republican

McDowell Co.

House

 

 

West Virginia

Thomas G. Nutter

Republican

Kanawha Co.

House

1922

 

West Virginia

Harry J. Capehart

Republican

McDowell Co.

House

1924

1924–1930

Missouri

Walthall M. Moore

Republican

St. Louis 6, 3

House

 

 

West Virginia

Harry J. Capehart

Republican

McDowell Co.

House

1926

 

Missouri

John A. Davis

 

St. Louis 3

House

 

 

West Virginia

E. Howard Harper

Republican

McDowell Co.

House

1927

 

West Virginia

(Mrs.) E. Howard Harperd

Republican

McDowell Co.

House

1928

 

Missouri

Graves M. Allen

Republican

St. Louis 3

House

 

Missouri

L. Amasa Knox

Republican

Jackson Co. 4

House

 

 

West Virginia

T. Edward Hill

Republican

McDowell Co.

House

1930

 

Missouri

Frank W. Clegg

Republican

St. Louis 3

House

 

 

West Virginia

Stewart A. Calhoun

Republican

McDowell Co.

House

1932

 

West Virginia

Stewart A. Calhoun

Republican

McDowell Co.

House

1934

 

West Virginia

Fleming A. Jones

Democratic

McDowell Co.

House

1936

1936–1946

Kentucky

Charles W. Anderson, Jr.

Republican

Louisville

House

 

 

West Virginia

Fleming A. Jones

Democratic

McDowell Co.

House

1938

 

West Virginia

Fleming A. Jones

Democratic

McDowell Co.

House

1940

 

West Virginia

Fleming A. Jones

Democratic

McDowell Co.

House

1942

 

Missouri

Edwin F. Kenswil

Democratic

St. Louis 4

House

 

 

West Virginia

Fleming A. Jones

Democratic

McDowell Co.

House

1944

 

West Virginia

Fleming A. Jones

Democratic

McDowell Co.

House

Number of States by Region

Summary Statistics Othere 16

Number of Places/Districts

Border

Totalf

 3

19

Number of Legislators by Partyg Dem.

Rep.

Other

32

91

 1

 41

Membership by Chamber House

Senate

Unicameral

129

4

1

Number of Legislators

   

132

 

 

 

Sources: Adapted from Monroe N. Work, Negro Year Book, 1916–1917 (Tuskegee Institute, AL: Negro Year Book Publishing Company, 1917), pp. 34–35, 164–165; Negro Year Book, 1918–1919, p. 55; Negro Year Book, 1921–1922, p. 47; Negro Year Book, 1925–1926, pp. 64, 244; Negro Year Book, 1931–1932, p. 84; Negro Year Book, 1937–1938, p. 97; Negro Year Book, 1941–1946, pp. 286–287; and Freddie C. Colston, “The Influence of the Black Legislators in the Ohio House of Representatives” (Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1972), pp. 41–44. Professor Freddie Colston, an expert on the early history of African Americans in the Ohio Legislature, sent the authors the information about George Washington Williams. Additional data were taken from Ralph Bunche, The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 579, 586, 592, and 596–597; Mattie McKinney, Black Legislators in Pennsylvania, 1911–2010 (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Legislative Black Caucus, 2010), pp. 13–20; Clerk of the State Senate, West Virginia Legislative Hand Book and Manual and Official Register, 1919 (Charleston: Tribune Printing Company, 1919), pp. 305–346; Secretary of State, State of West Virginia Official Returns of the General Election, November, 1952 (Charleston: West Virginia Secretary of State Office, 1952); and Lawrence Kestenbaum, “The Political Graveyard,” http://politicalgraveyard.com, accessed November 5, 2010. The authors are also grateful for the assistance and information provided by these sources: California Legislative Black Caucus; Kansas Legislative Research Department, Kansas State Historical Society; Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives; Maryland State Archives Reference Services Department; State Library of Massachusetts; State of Missouri Legislative Research Unit; Nebraska State Historical Society; New Jersey Office of Legislative Services Library; New York State Library; Ohio Historical Society; Pennsylvania Legislative Black Caucus via the office of the Honorable Ronald G. Walters, House of Representatives, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania; and Wisconsin Historical Society. Calculations by the authors. a

Information on “Years Served” as indicated from available sources.

b

Data from Bunche.

c

Crystal Bird Fauset was the first African American woman to be elected a state legislator.

d

Mrs. Harper was appointed to fill the seat of her husband when he died, making her the first African American woman seated in a state legislature.

e

Includes states in the Northeast, Midwest, and West, but excludes Illinois.

f

Includes states in the Northeast, Midwest, and West, and excludes Illinois and states of the South.

g

Blanks are not counted. Party affiliations as indicated by sources: “Dem.” - Democratic; “Rep.” - Republican.



African American Voters and Electoral Empowerment in the North, 1876–1944 401 Map 19.1  African American State Legislators, 1868–1944

WA (1)

ME ND

MT OR ID

(3)

UT

AZ

CO (1)

MI (6)

IA

NE (6)

NV

NY (12)

WI

SD

WY

CA (2)

VT (1)

MN (1)

IL (34)

KS (3)

OH (24)

IN (8) KY (1)

MO (6)

NJ (7)

RI CT

DE WV (11)

MD

VA NC

TN

OK (1)

SC

AR

NM AL

MS Bar Chart 33

PA (25)

NH MA (12)

GA

LA

TX

0

100 200 miles

FL

(Number of Legislators)

States with African American State Legislators (1868–1944) Sources: Table 19.1 and Table 19.2.

Table 19.3  Pioneering African American Women State Legislative Candidates, 1868–1944 Year

State

Candidate

Party

District

Selection

1918

Washington

Mrs. W. L. Presto

Democratic

Seattle 37th

Lost

460

Senate

1922

Minnesota

Helen White

Republican

Duluth

Lost

 

Senate

Pennsylvania

Laura A. Brown

Republican

Pittsburgh

Lost

 

House

New Jersey

Margaret Edwards

Republican

Atlantic City

Lost

 

House

1924

Votes

Chamber

New York

Julia E. Coleman

  

New York City

Lost

 

House

1927

West Virginia

Minnie B. Harpera

 

McDowell Co.

Appointed

 

House

1938

Pennsylvania

Philadelphia

Elected

 

House

Summary Statistics

Crystal Bird Fauset

Democratic

States

Candidates

Demc

Rep

Places

Seated

Lost

House

Senate

6

7

2

3

7

2

5

5

2

b

Sources: Adapted from “First Negro Women Candidate for a State Legislature,” in Monroe N. Work, Negro Year Book, 1918–1919 (Tuskegee Institute, AL: Negro Year Book Publishing Company, 1919), p. 56, and “The Negro Woman and Politics,” in Monroe N. Work, Negro Year Book, 1922–1924 (Tuskegee Institute, AL: Negro Year Book Publishing Company, 1924), pp. 70–71; “Women in Politics,” in Monroe N. Work, Negro Year Book, 1931–1932 (Tuskegee Institute, AL: Negro Year Book Publishing Company, 1932), p. 84; and Mattie McKinney, Black Legislators in Pennsylvania, 1911–2010 (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Legislative Black Caucus of the Pennsylvania General Assembly, 2010), p. 18. Minnie Buckingham Harper was appointed by the governor of West Virginia on January 10, 1928, to fill the seat vacated upon the death of her husband, E. Howard Harper, on December 21, 1927. She was the first African American woman to serve as a state legislator. a

b

Crystal Bird Fauset was the first African American woman to be elected a state legislator.

c

Blanks are not counted.

402

Chapter 19

Map 19.2  African American Women State Legislative Candidates, 1868–1944

WA (1, 0)

ME VT

ND

MT

MN (1, 0)

OR ID

WI

SD

WY

MI IA

UT CA

CO

IL KS

PA (2, 1) OH

NE

NV

NH

NY (1, 0)

MO

IN

MA

NJ (1, 0)

RI CT

DE WV (1, 1)

MD

VA

KY NC TN

OK AZ

SC

AR

NM MS TX

Bar Chart

AL

GA

LA

0 FL

2

100 200 miles

Number of Candidates Number of Elected or Appointed Legislators States with African American Women State Legislative Candidates and Officers (1868–1944) Source: Table 19.3.

Beyond State Legislative Empowerment— Pioneer African American Congressional Empowerment in the North: A New Mobilizer As noted above, W. E. B. DuBois used the ever-rising number of African American state legislators in the northern states to forecast the arrival of African Americans in the U.S. Congress. Of this particular type of electoral empowerment he wrote: “Congressional districts in Missouri, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York will put black men in Congress before 1925.”39 Prior to making this prediction as a result of the African American legislative victories, DuBois declared in February 1918: “We have not a single congressman, thanks to oligarchy and mob violence in the South and gerrymandering in the North. With the recent migration, however, careful and unselfish political leadership can soon send black men to Congress from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois.”40 He concluded: “With five representatives from such states we could then attack the rotten democracies in Border States like Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, and finally the Solid South. Here lies our line of march, comrades! To the work.”41

The African American electorate had long since taken up DuBois’s challenge and was working apace at it simply because the number of African American state legislators continued to climb well beyond the thirteen that he noticed in 1921. And given this work, these ever-rising numbers of state legislators were eclipsed in 1928 in Illinois by the electoral capture of a national congressional seat. And despite a party change in 1934 from an African American Republican to an African American Democrat,42 the African American electorate held this single seat from 1928 until 1944, when African Americans in Harlem in New York City elected the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., raising the number to two northern African Americans members of Congress. These two congressmen were the highest visible symbols of electoral empowerment in the nation for African Americans since the collapse of Black Reconstruction.43 Powell was unlike two previous African American Democratic congressmen—Arthur Mitchell (1935–1943) and William Dawson (1943–1970)—and more like Republican Oscar DePriest, (1929–1935), in being an outspoken “race man” (race hero), which Harold Gosnell explained in these terms: “The Negro estimate of the [race] man is based on his services to the



African American Voters and Electoral Empowerment in the North, 1876–1944 403

race rather than to the party.”44 DePriest, Professor Gosnell found, was regarded as a “race man,” in part because he “felt his obligations to his race cannot be denied. His seat in Congress represented a symbol of Negro achievement. It stood for the recapturing of a banished hope,” the loss of suffrage rights in the South.45 Democrat Powell, who began his congressional campaign sixteen years after Congressman De Priest, also took on the mantle, attributes, and characteristics of a “race man.” One of Powell’s biographers, African American journalist Wil Haygood, described his initial congressional campaign in 1944: “Powell’s campaigning style was full-throttle, and because he had announced so early, he had to create his own opposition. That opposition consisted of Hitler, the foes of democracy, southern Democrats, and Uncle Tom blacks.”46 And then to show how Powell’s congressional campaign was linked to the African American voter activists and movement in the South, Haygood added: “Months after his announcement, Powell was running in New York by crisscrossing America. For grand effect he gave his tour a title, ‘The Conflicting Forces of the New Negro and Southernism.’”47 And then journalist Haygood did not do what other biographers of Powell did; these other writers overlooked the key historical fact of who joined Powell in his initial congressional campaign: “Oscar DePriest, the old, grayhaired, defeated black Chicago Congressmen, came to Harlem to campaign for Powell.”48 These two “race men” had linked up in the very same campaign and were now projecting courage and strength for the New Negro. And this energized Powell to do more, and he reached out further. Haygood wrote: Powell waged his campaign in the streets of New York and the boot camps of southern military bases, traveling back and forth between the two, making every effort to be in Abyssinian pulpit on Sundays, because the pulpit provided such a wonderful campaign forum, and on Sunday mornings there was no better, more exciting place in Harlem. To Powell, the twenty-second district race was not merely for a Harlem seat; it was a national campaign.49 As a consequence, Powell crushed his African American female challenger, Attorney Sara Pelham Speaks, who opposed him in both the Democratic and Republican primaries. African American political scientist Charles V. Hamilton analyzed this unique primary election: “Powell won both the Democratic and Republican primaries. He beat Sara Speaks on the Democratic ticket—3,358 to 734, and in her own party he triumphed 1,397 to 1,038. Thus he had the nomination of the three parties— including the uncontested American Labor Party designation.”50 This sweeping primary victory had such an aura of inevitability about it that Powell entered the November 7, 1944, general election without any opposition. He became the second “race man” in Congress and continued the political socialization process that encouraged re-enfranchisement, as well as becoming a political symbol who shot forth from the African American state legislators and from the first African American Congressman De Priest. Professor Hamilton described Powell as a much needed “race man” in Congress for the times. “The value and expectation of an

Adam Clayton Powell in Congress at that time related more to ‘spokesmanship.’ Here was a person who would at least ‘speak out,’ who would provide a voice—very likely a loud and eloquent one— in the very visible corridors of Congress. That would be different.” What Professor Hamilton meant by this assessment is that: He could counter in words, at least, the frequent congressional speeches made—and as often unanswered— by Southern segregationists. Many Negroes were angry that no Northern liberals would get up on the floor of Congress and challenge the segregationists—even in words, not to mention with effective proposed legislation. Powell certainly promised to do that. . . . This is the role Powell promised to play, and it was certainly one his constituents wanted of him. . . . This was missing, and this Powell would supply.51 According to Hamilton, the political context and mood, both in Harlem and the South, was such in 1944 that: Negroes did not need a quiet bargainer in Congress. Others would do the trading and the compromising. Those times called for an outspoken, almost intransigent advocate out front, not behind closed doors, one who would not lose her [his] job if she [he] spoke out, or who could be punished in countless ways known to Negroes who were considered “uppity” or “militant” or “radical.” They [African Americans] would protect such a leader with their votes and approval through reelection term after term.52 Truly, here was another source of motivation for acquiring and exercising the ballot North and South. With the ballot, the African American electorate could change their leadership and simultaneously empower such leaders. These two African American congressman, DePriest and Powell, offered a prime example of what else could be attained with re-enfranchisement. These “race men” became the South’s worst fears because they stood up to the southern segregationists at their peak, and the region could not retaliate because in these African American congressional districts voting power was literally in the hands of the people of color. As a consequence of these “race men,” white southerners and some northerners embraced other African American congressmen, like Mitchell and Dawson, non-protest leaders who avoided the demands of the times. In an instant, African Americans could see the dichotomy in their electoral leaders and hence developed strategies for selection. Such exposure set the stage for Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and his lieutenant Jesse Jackson. And this was a sign of things to come at both the electoral empowerment and leadership levels. Table 19.4 (p. 404) provides a two-and-one-half-decade (1920–1944) overview of Republican and Democratic voting in the First Congressional District in Illinois. It covers the time period when the first African American candidates were elected to Congress in the North. This table shows the votes and percentages for the incumbent white congressman, Republican

404

Chapter 19

Table 19.4  Election Results Statistics for the First Congressional District of Illinois, 1920–1944 Republican Party Candidate

Election Year

Name

1920

Democratic Party Candidate AAa

Votes

Percent

Elected

Total Votesb

James A. Gorman

 

12,398

22.5%

 

54,305

x

George Mayer

 

15,999

39.6%

 

39,894

73.1%

x

James F. Doyle

 

13,623

22.8%

 

57,284

26,559

68.2%

x

James F. Doyle

 

12,283

31.5%

 

38,842

x

24,479

47.8%

x

Harry Baker

 

20,664

40.3%

 

51,004

Oscar De Priest

x

23,719

58.4%

x

Harry Baker

 

16,747

41.2%

 

40,466

1932

Oscar De Priest

x

33,672

54.8%

x

Harry Baker

 

26,659

43.9%

 

60,331

1934

Oscar De Priest

x

24,829

47.0%

 

Arthur W. Mitchell

x

27,963

53.0%

x

52,792

1936

Oscar De Priest

x

28,640

44.6%

 

Arthur W. Mitchell

x

35,376

55.1%

x

64,016

1938

William L. Dawson

x

26,396

46.6%

 

Arthur W. Mitchell

x

30,207

53.4%

x

56,603

1940

William E. King

x

30,698

47.0%

 

Arthur W. Mitchell

x

34,641

53.0%

x

65,339

1942

William E. King

x

23,537

47.3%

 

William L. Dawson

x

26,280

52.8%

x

49,817

1944

William E. King

x

26,204

38.0%

 

William L. Dawson

x

42,713

62.0%

x

68,917

 

29,092.0

54.4%

 

Overall Averages

24,273.3

43.9%

 

53,816.2

34,005.5

62.5%

 

(1920–1932) Averages

16,910.4

34.5%

 

26,908.2

47.9%

 

(1934–1944) Averages

32,863.3

54.9%

 

 

26,396

47.8%

 

26,280

43.9%

 

54,305

34,233

70.7%

 

(1920–1932) Mediansd

15,999

39.6%

 

 

26,204

47.0%

 

(1934–1944) Medians

32,424

53.2%

 

 

AA

Votes

Percent

Elected

Martin B. Madden

 

41,907

75.9%

x

1922

Martin B. Madden

 

23,895

59.1%

1924

Martin B. Madden

 

43,661

1926

Martin B. Madden

 

1928

Oscar De Priest

1930

c

a

Overall Averages (1920–1926) Averages

d

(1928–1944) Averages Overall Medians

 

(1920–1926) Mediansd (1928–1944) Medians

 

Name

d

Overall Medians 

 

Source: Adapted from Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to U.S. Elections, 5th Edition Vol. 2 (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2005), pp. 1066–1129. Calculations by the authors. a

African American candidate.

b

Excluding the votes of some third-party candidates. Candidate votes and vote percentages are from Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to U.S. Elections.

c

The election of 1928 also included independent candidate William Harrison with 5,861 votes (11.4% of the total votes).

d

Covering elections without an African American candidate.

Martin B. Madden (1905–1928), and his challengers before the initial election of the African American candidate, Republican Oscar De Priest (1929–1935). In addition, it includes the political party transition in 1934 from an African American Republican to the first African American Democratic Congressman, Arthur W. Mitchell (1935–1943); and later the choice of another Democrat, William L. Dawson (1943–1970). Table 19.4 offers the votes that these candidates received in the years that they ran for office and allows one to compare and contrast the voting behavior when there were white incumbents and challengers with those periods when there were African American incumbents and challengers. These data can be compared in terms of the mean and median for both time periods in Illinois’ First Congressional District. One fact that stands out from this table is the transition of the African American electorate in this district from voting for Republican Party candidates to Democratic Party candidates. And this vote peaked in 1944 at a much higher level than ever before. These tabular data are shown in a graph in Figure 19.3. The figure offers a perspective that from 1920 to 1924, when a white

Republican candidate was winning the congressional seat, the electorate, then dominated primarily by white voters, voted in very high numbers and percentages for the Republicans. Then by 1926 and 1928, the number of Republican votes started to decline and the number of Democratic votes started to increase. And the two horizontal lines on the figure show the differences in the mean vote from 1928 to 1944 and that the Democratic mean is higher than the Republican mean. The African American Democratic electorate blossomed with the arrival of an African American Democratic candidate in 1934. Figure 19.4 provides the same coverage but uses percentages of votes instead of numbers of votes. The pattern and trend in the percentages is quite similar to the data using the numbers of votes. Again, the Democratic mean stands higher at 54.9% than the Republican mean of 47.9%, a difference of 7.0 percentage points. The African American electorate supported the Democratic Party on average at a much higher vote and percentage level. Further empirical evidence about the African American electorate in Illinois’ First Congressional District can be seen in



African American Voters and Electoral Empowerment in the North, 1876–1944 405

Figure 19.3  Votes for Democratic and Republican Candidates in the First Congressional District of Illinois, 1920–1944 50 Election of first African American Republican, Oscar De Priest, in 1928. 45

Number of Votes (in thousands)

40 35 30 25 20 15 Election of first African American Democrat, Arthur W. Mitchell, in 1934. 10 5 0 1920

1922

1924

1926

1928

1930

1932

1934

1936

1938

1940

1942

1944

Congressional Election Year Democratic Vote, 1920–1944

Republican Vote, 1920–1944

Average Democratic Vote, 1934–1944

Average Republican Vote, 1928–1944

Source: Adapted from Congressional Quarterly, Congressional Quarterly's Guide to U.S. Elections 5th Edition Vol. 2 (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2005), pp. 1066–1129.

Figure 19.4  Percentage of the Vote for Democratic and Republican Candidates in the First Congressional District of Illinois, 1920–1944 80%

Election of first African American Republican, Oscar De Priest, in 1928. Election of first African American Democrat, Arthur W. Mitchell, in 1934.

70%

Percent of the Total Vote

60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 1920

1922

1924

1926

1928

1930

1932

1934

1936

1938

1940

1942

1944

Congressional Election Year Democrats, 1920–1944

Republicans, 1920–1944

Democratic Average Percent, 1934–1944

Republican Average Percent, 1928–1944

Source: Adapted from Congressional Quarterly, Congressional Quarterly's Guide to U.S. Elections 5th Edition Vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2005), pp. 1066–1129.

406

Chapter 19

Figure 19.4. In this figure one can see the dynamics during these two-and-one-half decades. Standing out in this figure are the two Republican vote percentage peaks in 1920 and 1924 and the steep decline of the Republican vote in 1928, the year in which the first African American, Oscar De Priest, was elected. After his election the Republican vote in this congressional district rebounded in 1930 but started another decline thereafter until it was surpassed by the Democratic vote in the midterm election of 1934, when the district elected the first African American Democratic Congressman, Arthur W. Mitchell, who defeated the incumbent Republican De Priest. From 1934 to 1942 the voting percentages, now favoring the Democratic Party candidate, reached an electoral plateau, finally diverging at the time of the 1944 presidential election when support for the Democratic candidate went above the 60% level. And in this period, 1920 to 1944, Illinois’ First District African American voters made history in that they had elected two new African American congressmen, first a Republican and then a Democrat. These two leaders became noteworthy not only as political symbols to the southern African American voter activists and civil rights leaders but as a beacon of hope in their efforts to re-enfranchise themselves. Finally, in 1944 the Harlem African American electorate sent the outspoken and daring Adam Clayton Powell to Congress, and he went South on every possible occasion and demanded civil rights for African Americans. Congressman Powell, like De Priest, inveighed against segregation, congressional segregationist leaders, and the failure of the South to grant African Americans the right to vote in the region. Both Powell and De Priest made themselves seen and heard on this issue and did not stop protesting the matter. The southern African American electorate finally had a voice that spoke out on its behalf not only to the media but also to other members of Congress. The erstwhile political leadership among white politicians, Republican and Democrat, had been silent on this issue. Moreover, Congress at this time was considering national legislation to abolish the poll tax, and legal cases were going forward in the courts to end the White Primaries in the South. The voice of Congressman Powell helped to erode support for disenfranchisement in the South and simultaneously rekindled African American voter mobilization efforts in the region. Thus, when the new congressman was elected, and was joined by African American state legislators in a seemingly rising tide, the re-enfranchisement struggle gained new life and vigor and the essential civil rights leadership. Hence, the failure to see the role and function of this empowerment in the North omits a very important political socialization agent that helped to spark the surge of voter activism within the southern African American community.

The Roots and Rising of the Northern African American Electorate in Presidential Elections: Another Mobilizer Extant ward and precinct election return data for the large cities of Chicago and Philadelphia reveal that the African American electorate was not only having an impact and influence at the municipal, state legislative, and congressional levels but on the national level as well. This rising electorate also had a national organization, the NAACP, led in part by W. E. B. DuBois and the Crisis magazine, which had been bargaining with Democratic

and Republican presidential candidates and nominees since the presidential election of 1912.53 The growth of this vote was due primarily to the migration of voteless African American southerners to the urban centers of the nation. On this matter, Professor Gosnell has written: In the north and border states the Negro vote was found largely in the metropolitan centers of the following eight states: New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Maryland, Indiana, and Missouri. With the exception of Maryland these were states where the vote was very close and a relatively small switch might have changed the result. Two of these states were carried by [Wendell] Willkie— Michigan and Indiana. If he had carried the other six he would have received 153 more votes in the electoral college or nearly enough to have defeated Roosevelt.54 Given this competitive, two-party situation in seven of these eight states, “[b]efore the 1940 presidential election there was a good deal of speculation as to how Negroes in northern cities would vote. . . . In the October issue of the Atlantic Monthly [there were] . . . a number of guesses regarding the Negro vote which were 100 percent wrong.”55 However, the empirical data from some nine African American wards from 1932 to 1940 show the percentage of the African American vote for the Democratic presidential candidate FDR, and with each election that vote grew, reaching 52% in 1940, as shown in the Figure 19.5. Later, Professor Gosnell joined with one of his doctoral students and collected similar ward-level data for Philadelphia over the four presidential elections in 1948, 1952, 1956, and 1960. Professor Gosnell and Robert Martin wrote: “in the 1948 election, . . . [President] Truman won around two-thirds of the major party vote in areas inhabited largely by Negroes. . . . In this close election, t hree large states—California, Illinois, and Ohio—may well have provided the margin of victory. In these states the Negro vote for Truman was several times larger than his plurality.”56 This empirical data can be found in the second part of Figure 19.5. By the time of the 1952 presidential election in Philadelphia, the figure shows that “the swing of the Negro vote to the Democratic side was even more pronounced than it had been in the famous Truman re-election.”57 But this partisan alignment would change during “President Eisenhower’s second bid [1956] for the presidency[, which] brought a shift in the partisan attitudes of many Negro voters.”58 The figure reveals a slight decline in the African American Democratic percentage in 1956, but there is a significant rebound in the 1960 presidential election back to the Democratic candidate. Professors Gosnell and Martin say that in 1960 “as compared with 1956, the switch of 7 or so percent of the Negro votes back to the Democratic Party made the difference between success or failure in the key industrial states.”59 And this realignment of the African American electorate to the Democratic party allowed Mrs. Vel Phillips of Milwaukee in 1960 to become “the first Negro woman to be elected to the Democratic National Committee.”60 Therefore, with these new political achievements through their votes in presidential elections, the northern African



African American Voters and Electoral Empowerment in the North, 1876–1944 407

Figure 19.5  Percentage of African American Voters Voting Democratic for President in Selected Wards of Chicago and Philadelphia, 1932–1960 90% 82.0%

Percent of African American Votes

80%

73.5%

70% Philadelphiab

60% 48.9%

50%

71.5%

58.0%

52.0%

Chicagoa

40% 30% 20%

23.4%

10% 0% 1932

1936

1940

1944

1948

1952

1956

1960

Presidential Election Year Source: Harold F. Gosnell, "The Negro Vote in Northern Cities," National Municipal Review, Vol. 30, No. 5 (May 1941), pp. 264–267, 278; and Harold F. Gosnell, "The Negro as Voter and Officeholder," The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Autumn , 1963), pp. 415–425. Notes: a

Selected wards of Chicago: 1–6, 19, 20 and 28.

b

The midpoint of the percentage range in three “heavily” Negro wards of Philadelphia.

American electorate was a further stimulus and mobilizer to the disenfranchised southern African American electorate. It was not only because the northern electorate began to meet with both Democratic and Republican presidents and party elites but because of a very important but overlooked factor: higher job employment status, which only Professor Gosnell has discovered. Drawing from his Chicago study, he found that “[w]e might state it as a generalization that where the Negroes have had an opportunity to join the industrial proletariat they have swung more rapidly to the Democratic fold than in those sections [the South] where they have been confined largely to the field of domestic employment.”61 Thus, one of the lessons, albeit indirect, that could be drawn from the rising presidential vote in the northern states was the centrality of better and higher-status jobs. And this linkage could be seen clearly seen one year later in 1941 when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, under pressure and prodding from African American Civil Rights leader A. Philip Randolph, created via Executive Order 8802 the Federal Employment Practice Commission (FEPC) that enabled African Americans to get jobs and employment opportunities within the defense industries with federal government contracts.62

Summary and Conclusions on African American Voters and Electoral Empowerment in the North At the very moment in time when the eleven southern states began their Era of Disenfranchisement, African Americans with the Fifteenth Amendment had begun to electorally empower themselves in the northern, midwestern, and western states in

the nation. In fact, in the year 1876—the presidential election that would foreclose “Black Reconstruction,” with the White Supremacy Democrats finally recapturing all of the southern state governments, sealing the deal for the Compromise of 1877 and setting in motion what led to the Era of Disenfranchisement—the Illinois electorate would send its first African American to the state legislature. In this election year, 1876, this small electoral breakthrough in a single northern state, though vastly overshadowed by all of the other national events and political occurrences, nevertheless sowed a seed that would eventually politically germinate and help stimulate and motivate African Americans in the South to re-enfranchise their community. Obviously, it took time, and prior to the end of World War II nineteen other states would join Illinois and place African Americans in their state legislatures. Thus, the northern African American electoral empowerment efforts would proceed until it became a political force helping to undermine the southern Era of Disenfranchisement. In the 1876 election in Illinois both a mobilizing and political socializing force was born that would activate and sustain a regional re-enfranchising movement. Few inside or outside of the African American community saw it, and when opponents did recognize it they had no tactic or strategy as to how to stop it. Although the African American electorates in the West, North, Midwest, and the Border States elected members of their community to state legislatures, to Congress, and eventually to positions of influence impacting presidential electoral outcomes, they also elected them to other levels of government, to municipal, county, and party organizational positions and offices. We have not reported all of that empirical data due to their extremely

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scattered and fugitive existence. Particularly, much of this local data (especially the election return data) is locked up in county warehouses where it is no longer accessible or easily retrievable. Hence, we have reported the less difficult and better recorded Illinois data, even as we found that for the early years some of the data was handwritten (in ink) and in some instances barely legible. For the most part, we were fortunate to obtain access to election return data for the state legislative and congressional candidates. Nevertheless, the reader should keep in mind that simultaneous with the state and congressional electoral empowerment of African Americans in these states outside of the South was the growing electoral empowerment at the municipal, county, and party organization levels. This ever-evolving African American political news from the non-southern states was continually reported in DuBois’s Crisis magazine and the rest of the African American press, nationally and locally. Though events of political socialization never ceased, the reaction of southern white leaders generally was to ignore it. Whether or not these events were ignored by the southern white leadership, they were frequent enough to encourage the southern African Americans voter rights activists and civil rights leaders in their struggle to re-enfranchise themselves. These African American successes provided continual sparks of hope as to what African Americans could accomplish electorally and politically even when the federal government (in all of its branches) and the eleven southern state governments curtailed, circumscribed, denied, or were silent about their Fifteenth Amendment rights. In a word, this assistance, which was at once both symbolic and psychological, came from within the African American community and the sundry but at times limited allies outside of the community. Perhaps even more important to this spark of reenfranchisement was the geographical and economic nature of the political enclaves that sent these pioneering state legislators and congressmen to their elective offices. In a word, they were called “ghettoes”—segregated, densely populated neighborhoods, such as the “Southside” in Chicago, and Harlem in New York. Both of the African American congressmen and the vast majority of the state legislative districts represented by African Americans were located in inner-city, urban areas. These African American majority areas had the numbers to provide the electoral victories. Secondly, these overcrowded “slum” areas were clearly the source for the electoral empowerment at all levels in these states and, as a consequence, they have been labeled by political scientists as being controlled earlier by white political bosses and machines and therefore of little political consequence for the African American community. One of the first academic works to advance this thesis and proposition was James Q. Wilson’s Negro Politics: The Search For Leadership. In this work the author wrote: . . . the Negro leadership does not—cannot—live apart from the Negro masses. There are Negro “suburbs” in Chicago, but most Negro civic leaders and all Negro politicians live within the “Black Belt.” . . . For the Negro leader it is difficult to retreat physically from the life of the ghetto and contact with the Negro masses; they are everywhere about him, visible and numerous. With a few exceptions, escape from the ghetto can only

be psychological, reinforced by a style of life in decaying neighborhoods. Even psychological escape is difficult and anxious when physical escape is almost impossible, and the resulting tensions are reflected in the often bitter comments of Negro leaders about the quality of the Negro masses which everywhere and in everything seem to follow and engulf them.63 Professor Wilson concluded his study by noting how these African American elected state legislators and congressmen are caught up in the dictates of the political bosses and machinery. Professor Wilson determined that “[t]he most important single conclusion that emerges from a survey of Negro politics in large northern cities is that, in all cases, the structure and style of Negro politics reflect the politics of the city as a whole. . . . Negro politics cannot be understood apart from the city in which it is found. . . . The Negro political organization is created and shaped by the political organization of the city.”64 And within the confines of each city’s particular politics, the only goals obtainable via Negro elective officials are welfare ones, small tangible ones in the form of personal patronage.65 For a recent advancement of this thesis about the tight control of the political bosses and machines, particularly in Chicago, over African American elective officials and the limiting of their politics within the confines of the city, see William J. Grimshaw’s Bitter Fruit: Black Politics and the Chicago Machine, 1931–1991. Professor Grimshaw, who was a strong supporter of Chicago’s first African American mayor, Harold Washington, found that during the era of Mayor Richard J. Daley (1955–1976) and his political machine, African American elected officials had little power and even less influence. These ghetto elected officials did the bidding of the machines and bosses rather than respond to the plight of their constituency, the African American community. However, neither of these two works analyzes beyond the city or region. Since there was little forthcoming to the African American community from their electoral empowerment, there was no obvious reason to look beyond the city for impact and influence beyond. Wilson’s book does not even mention or index the South, disenfranchisement, re-enfranchisement, or suffrage rights, much less explain any relationship or linkage, although one was occurring at the very moment that he was researching and writing the book.66 And Professor Grimshaw, while not much more aware than Wilson, did discuss and describe how African American Democratic Congressman William Dawson (D. Ill) in the 1948 presidential election went South to campaign for President Truman in African American communities there. He observed that Congressman Dawson “was particularly effective in the southern states, where he rallied black voters, many of whom were still deeply attached to the party of Lincoln and appalled by the racist excesses of the southern white Democratic Party.”67 But even though Professor Grimshaw observed that an African American congressman from Illinois could go South and mobilize a higher voter turnout in the African American community, Grimshaw failed to recognize that the same politician and others stimulated voter interest, voter activism, and greater African American voter registration beyond the presidential election event. Somehow in the work of both Wilson and



African American Voters and Electoral Empowerment in the North, 1876–1944 409

Grimshaw, this important and very crucial question seemingly never arose about how even in these ghettoes and slums the electoral and political power acquired by African Americans had some significant impact and influence far beyond the boundaries of cities such as Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Charleston, West Virginia, and beyond the presidential contest. Now we know that they did. Finally, there is one other main insight that is embedded in the electoral and political empowerment efforts in the Border, western, northern, and midwestern states that is not readily evident from the empirical electoral return data: political coordination and linkage. Although we indicate in the narrative and give examples of how many of the African American state legislators and congressmen came South and interacted face-toface with African Americans in their churches, colleges, mass meetings, and social organization events and socials, we have not mentioned that many of these African American state legislators and all of the congressmen became delegates to the two major party conventions, first the Republican national conventions and later the Democratic national conventions. From 1868 to 1944 African Americans attended all of the national Republican Party conventions, which had African American delegates from both the North and the South, and African American delegates attended every convention of the Democratic Party from 1934 to 1944.68 Although at the latter these Democratic delegates were only from the northern states, there were nonetheless observers and visitors from the South. At these conventions, delegates met and discussed their political experiences and attainments. African American political elites and hopefuls met face-to-face. Hence, this political socialization and mobilization was not simply at the mass level but also at the elite level. And while this political story has yet to be told in detail, the analysis elsewhere in this book shows much about the African American “Black and Tan” delegations from the South, along with others like those in the South Carolina Progressive Democratic Party and observers and participants surrounding these party groupings and other independent efforts. Therefore, in conclusion, the political and electoral empowerment of African Americans in non-southern regions of the nation linked up and played a role and function in the reenfranchisement effort in the South when there were seemingly no other allies to extract “Jim and Jane Crow” disenfranchisement tactics and strategies from the realm of possibilities within this American democracy. Clearly, these electoral empowerment achievements in the non-south region of the nation helped and succeeded. In a recent book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, African American professor Isabel Wilkerson captures for the first time how one of those southern migrants, Ida Mae Brandon Gladney (and her husband George) of Mississippi, became a first-time voter on the south side of Chicago, Illinois, and voted in the 1940 presidential election for African American state legislators and Congressman William Dawson. Wilkerson described the experience: Ida Mae didn’t know what was at stake, but suddenly everyone around her was talking about something she’d never heard of back in Mississippi. The precinct captain

for her area, a Mr. Tibbs, had been out in the neighborhood rousing the people to register for the upcoming election. Back home, no one dared talk about such things. She couldn’t vote in Mississippi. She never knew where the polls were in Chickasaw County. . . . So she never thought about her senator or congressman or state representative or about Theodore Bilbo, an admitted Klansman and a famous Mississippi governor . . . [and] an incendiary segregationist. . . . Now it was 1940 and she was in Chicago. . . . Chicago was a Democratic town, and the Democrats had the means to make the most of this gift to party. They were counting on the goodwill Roosevelt had engendered among colored people with his New Deal initiatives. On election day, Ida Mae walked up to the fire station around the corner from her flat at Thirty-sixth and Wabash to vote for the first time in her life. . . . She walked in, and a lady came over and directed her to where she should go. Ida Mae stepped inside a polling booth for the first time in her life . . . [and punched] in her choices for president of the United States and other political offices. . . . She had seen for herself the difference it could make the first time she had stepped inside a voting booth. Ida Mae’s first vote and George’s first vote and those of tens of thousands of other colored migrants new to the North were among the 2,149,934 votes cast for President Roosevelt in Illinois that day in 1940. . . . The ballots cast by Ida Mae and other colored migrants up from the South were enough to help give Roose­ velt the two percent margin of victory he needed to carry the state of Illinois and, by extension, the United States—to return him to the White House.69 Thus, from this southern African American migrant’s account, it would be a major intellectual mistake to presume that the impact of southern migrants would only be felt in the cities and states and regions to which these African Americans migrated and not also upon the region where they had lost their right to vote. Ultimately, this was the effect despite the fact that these votes came from the ghettoes and slums where these migrants were segregated. Along with these votes came new congressional voices advocating voting rights in national party conventions, in presidential chambers, and in the legislative halls themselves.

Notes   1. William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), p. 165.  2. Ibid.   3. Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming).   4. Gillette, p. 163.   5. Ibid., p. 161.   6. Ibid., p. 160.  7. Ibid.

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  8. On this southern darkness that eclipsed the African American voting rights and its subsequent electoral empowerment see Rayford Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson, Enlarged Edition (New York: Collier Books, 1965), pp. 165–393; and C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955).   9. C. Vann Woodward, “The Political Legacy of the First Reconstruction,” in C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History, Updated 3rd Edition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), p. 106. 10. David Joens, “John W.E. Thomas and the Election of the First African American to the Illinois House of Representatives,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society Vol. 94 (Summer 2001), pp. 200 and 212. 11. Harold Gosnell, Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 375–376. 12. Ibid., pp. 65–66. 13. Ibid., p. 66. 14. Ibid. 15. Erma Brooks Williams, Political Empowerment of Illinois’ African-American State Lawmakers from 1877 to 2005 (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 2008), p. 15. For an enumeration of Illinois legislators in 2011 and identification of black legislators, please see “Illinois House Legislative Black Caucus Homepage,” http://www.housedem.state .il.us/constituents/blackcaucus.htm, accessed December 14, 2011; “Illinois State Representatives, 97th General Assembly,” http://www .ilga.gov/house/default.asp, accessed December 14, 2011; and “Illinois State Senators, 97th General Assembly,” http://www.ilga.gov/senate/, accessed December 14, 2011. 16. Joens, p. 202. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., p. 200. 19. Ibid., p. 207. 20. Ibid., p. 203. See also Charles Gliozzo, “John Jones: A Study of a Black Chicagoan,” Illinois Historical Journal Vol. 80.3 (Autumn 1987), pp. 177–188. 21. Ibid., p. 213. 22. Gosnell, Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago, p. 67. 23. Ibid., p. 68. 24. Ibid., pp. 70–71. 25. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. DuBois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), pp. 334–348. 26. Ralph Bunche, The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 97, footnote 8. 27. For insights into the way that DuBois used this data, look at his editorials in each of the Crisis magazines during each presidential election year or see his overview article: W. E. B. DuBois, “From McKinley to Wallace, My Fifty Years as an Independent,” Masses & Mainstream Vol. 1 (August 1948), pp. 3–14. 28. W. E. B. DuBois, “Political Rebirth and the Office Seeker,” The Crisis Vol. 21 (January 1921), p. 104. 29. Ibid. 30. Gosnell, Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago, p. 184. 31. Lightfoot’s half-vote arose because the state of Illinois at that time allowed casting of multiple ballots in some districts. 32. Leslie Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), p. 181. 33. Ibid., p. 189. 34. Ibid. 35. Monroe Work, ed., “The Negro and Politics,” Negro Year Book, 1931–1932 (Tuskegee, Alabama: Negro Year Book Publishing Company, 1932), p. 84. 36. Monroe Work, ed., “Negro Women in Politics,” Negro Year Book, 1918–1919 (Tuskegee, Alabama: Negro Year Book Publishing Company, 1919), pp. 56–57.

37. For an analysis of the African American women voters in Illinois after 1913 see Lisa Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). We discuss this in greater detail in Chapter 20, on African American women suffragists. 38. For an excellent discussion of African American politics in this Border State, see Marion Orr, Black Social Capital: The Politics of School Reform in Baltimore, 1986–1998 (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1999), p. 50. 39. DuBois, “Political Rebirth and the Office Seeker,” p. 104. 40. W. E. B. DuBois, “A Colored Congressman,” The Crisis Vol. 15 (February 1918), p. 163. 41. Ibid. 42. Dennis Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman: A Life of Arthur Wergs Mitchell (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), pp. 87–138. 43. See Wil Haygood, King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), pp. 94–105; see also Charles V. Hamilton, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma (New York: Atheneum, 1991), pp. 139–162. 44. Gosnell, Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago, p. 162. 45. Ibid., p. 195. 46. Haygood, p. 94. 47. Ibid., p. 98. 48. Ibid., p. 99. 49. Ibid., p. 101. 50. Hamilton, p. 156. 51. Ibid., p. 155. 52. Ibid. 53. Douglas Strange, “The Making of a President 1912: The Northern Negroes View,” Negro History Bulletin Vol. 31 (November 1968), pp. 19–21; and Hanes Walton, Jr., “The Democrats and African Americans: The American Idea,” in Peter Kovler, ed., Democrats and the American Idea: A Bicentennial Appraisal (Washington, D.C.: Center for National Policy Press, 1992), pp. 339–340. 54. Harold Gosnell, “The Negro Vote in Northern Cities,” National Municipal Review Vol. 30 (May 1941), p. 264. 55. Ibid., p. 267. 56. Harold Gosnell and Robert E. Martin, “The Negro as Voter and Officeholder,” Journal of Negro Education Vol. 32 (Autumn 1963), p. 419. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., p. 421. 60. Ibid., p. 423. 61. Gosnell, “The Negro Vote in Northern Cities,” p. 278. 62. Paul Burstein, Discrimination, Jobs, and Politics: The Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity in the United States Since the New Deal, with a New Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 63. James Q. Wilson, Negro Politics: The Search for Leadership (New York: Free Press, 1960), p. 13. 64. Ibid., pp. 22–23. 65. Ibid., p. 310. 66. For more on the limitation of Wilson’s works see Hanes Walton, Jr., et al., “The Problem of Preconceived Perceptions in Black Urban Politics: The Harold F. Gosnell–James Q. Wilson Legacy,” National Political Science Review Vol. 3 (1992), pp. 217–229. 67. William Grimshaw, Bitter Fruit: Black Politics and the Chicago Machine, 1931–1991 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 81. 68. For a quantitative analysis of the African American Republican delegates from the southern states see Monroe Work, ed., “Representation Negroes in National Republican Convention Cut Down,” in Negro Year Book, 1918–1919 (Tuskegee, Alabama: Negro Year Book Publishing Company, 1919), p. 61. For a listing of some of the names of these delegates see Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Republicans: The Politics of the Black and Tans (New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1975), pp. 170–176, Table 1. 69. Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010), pp. 303–305.

CHAPTER 20

The Enfranchisement of African American Women, 1669–1921 Long before the Women Suffrage Movement: Free Women of Color Voting in Colonial, Revolutionary, and Antebellum America

412

Table 20.1 Inferred and Actual Female Populations in Colonial Virginia Including Years of African American Suffrage Denials

414

Table 20.2 Inferred and Actual Female Populations in Revolutionary and Early Antebellum New Jersey Including Years of Federal Censuses, Presidential Elections, and the Denial of African American and Women Suffrage

415

Table 20.3 Potential African American Female Voters in Colonial Virginia and Revolutionary/Antebellum New Jersey

416

The Struggle for the Re-Acquisition of Voting Rights for African American Women

416

Table 20.4 Potential Women Voters in States and Territories Fully Enfranchising Women prior to the Nineteenth Amendment

420

Table 20.5 Potential Women Voters in States Enfranchising Women for Votes in Municipal Elections or on Tax and Bond Issues prior to the Nineteenth Amendment (Exclusive of States Granting Full Suffrage to Women)

421

Table 20.6 Potential Women Voters in States Enfranchising Women to Vote in Elections Dealing with Schools prior to the Nineteenth Amendment (Exclusive of States Granting Full Suffrage to Women)

422

The Nineteenth Amendment: African American Women Suffrage Granted and Restricted in the South

424

Map 20.1 States and Territories that Fully Enfranchised Women prior to the Nineteenth Amendment

425

Table 20.7 Potential Women Voters in States that Enacted Statutes Permitting Women to Vote in Presidential Elections before the Nineteenth Amendment

426

Table 20.8 Distribution of African American Voters by Region and State, Census of 1910

427

Figure 20.1 Distribution of Eligible African American Women Voters by Region, 1910–1930

429

Table 20.9 Distribution of African American Voters by Region and State, Census of 1920

430

Table 20.10 Distribution of African American Voters by Region and State, Census of 1930

431

Table 20.11 Number and Percentage of African American Women Disenfranchised in the 1920 Presidential Election—The NAACP Investigations

434

Map 20.2 States and Cities in which the NAACP Investigated Disenfranchisement of African American Women in the 1920 Presidential Election

435

Table 20.12 1920 Voter Registration of African American Women (and Men) in Selected Cities of North Carolina

435

Table 20.13 African American Registered Voters in Jacksonville, Florida, by Gender, Marital Status, and Occupation: Paul Ortiz Data, 1920 437 Table 20.14 Summary of Election Results by County and Racial Majority for Superintendent of Public Instruction in Virginia, 1921

438

Summary and Conclusions on the Enfranchisement of African American Women

438

Notes 439

412

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ong before the passage and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, women’s struggle to acquire this right began prior to the Civil War and the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. In fact, the latter amendment, which granted suffrage rights to African American males, became a spur to the female movement for this right. Although numerous states and federal territories had by August 18, 1920, because of the women’s suffrage movement granted this suffrage right to women, numerous other states had not. Thus, this action of the federal government made the right uniform and institutionalized universal female suffrage rights in this evolving democratic system. By the time the federal government with Republican majorities in Congress was granting this right, they along with the Democrats had practically nullified the Fifteenth Amendment right to African American males in the South. Likewise, the states of the old Confederacy, their Democratic elected leaders, and numerous groups within the women suffrage movement North and South tried to fix the Nineteenth Amendment so that it would exclude this right from African American women but proved unable to do so. As initially implemented this new suffrage amendment included the right to vote for African American women, but as the leading African American female historian on African American women suffrage, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, found: “In spite of these efforts to implement their political rights, black women in the South were disfranchised in less than a decade after the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchised them in 1920.” Terborg-Penn added, “and black women outside of the South lost the political clout they had acquired.”1 However, recent scholarly research has shown that African American women outside of the South did not lose their political clout but expanded it nationally, especially via the Republican National Committee (RNC) and tried with the Democratic National Committee (DNC).2 None of the Republicans in the congressional majorities in either the House of Representatives or in the popularly elected Senate crafted the Nineteenth Amendment so that it would offer special protection to the female half of the African American voting community. By taking no action, the Republicans left these newly enfranchised members of the African American community to the mercies of the successful southern disenfranchising white Democrats, males and females. Clearly, the Republicans knew what was about to happen to this new group for they had seen what had happened to their counterparts, the freedmen voters who had inadequate voter support and protection. They had a new political opportunity to include some types of protections but came up short. And the reason that we know this is that, as Rayford Logan reports, in January 1901, “Republican representatives Marlin E. Olmsted of Pennsylvania and Edgar D. Crumpacker of Indiana sought to direct attention to the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment because of the disfranchisement of Negroes in Southern states.”3 They wanted the Committee on the Census to create a committee to investigate disenfranchisement in the southern states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. And if the findings were valid, they called for the activation of Section Two of the Fourteenth Amendment that required the reduction of congressional seats in these three states. Southern congressmen killed this resolution. But Congressman

Crumpacker tried again on January 7, 1901, via an amendment. However, “[o]nly three of the 356 members of the House spoke in support of Crumpacker’s amendment.”4 In response to these three speakers, “George H. White [R-NC], the only Negro in Congress, regretted that only two or three Congressmen had risen to the defense of Negroes . . . [who] claimed ‘the right of the American Citizen and the right to vote.’”5 Therefore, since these few Republicans seemingly could not protect the African American males’ right to vote, there was a futility in trying to do it for these women. According, to historian Logan: “One of the most effective arguments used by the opposition was the fact that Crumpacker was the only member of the Committee on [the] Census, composed of eight Republicans, three Northern Democrats, and two other Democrats, who favored his amendment.”6 Nevertheless, this same strategy was tried again after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment by the fledging NAACP, Congressman George H. Tinkham (R-MA), and the Chairman of the Committee on the Census, Congressman Isaac Siegel (R-NY) in January 1921.7 Their efforts also failed. Thus, it would all be left to the African American women themselves from the outset.

Long before the Women Suffrage Movement: Free Women of Color Voting in Colonial, Revolutionary, and Antebellum America Historian Alexander Keyssar found: “The movement to enfranchise women in the United States had its legendary beginnings at a convention held in July 1848, in the small town of Seneca Falls, New York.”8 Historian Ann Gordon fixed another beginning date for the Free-Women-of-Color suffrage movement: 1837. She wrote that this starting date “differ[s] from those generally used to highlight the turning point of political history for white women in the United States. [This] early date marks the first Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, an interracial gathering of women held in New York City to define their roles independent of men in the crucial struggles of that era. . . .”9 However, before either the 1837 or 1848 date, Free-Womenof-Color had already voted in colonial Virginia, as well as in Colonial, Revolutionary, and Antebellum New Jersey. FreeWomen-of-Color in both of these colonies exercised the vote right alongside Free-Men-of-Color. Although this was unusual, it nevertheless occurred. In Virginia this right to vote was exercised by Free-Womenand-Men-of-Color for elections to the colony’s House of Burgesses. Historian John Gilman Kolp recently discovered this new historical information in a set of colonial Virginia documents called poll books, i.e., official records of individual adult males who voted in the legislative elections. Further information was teased out of the colony’s enactment of suffrage laws. And in looking at these laws, Kolp discovered that the colony of “Virginia began with no specific franchise and gradually developed a set of requirements based upon the stake-in-society concept. [This concept held that voters should have some land, freehold, or eventually leased land before they were given the right to vote]. The law did not specifically exclude women from voting until 1699.”10 To this finding, Kolp added: “specific disfranchisement of free [male] Negroes, mulattos, and Indians occurred in



The Enfranchisement of African American Women, 1669–1921 413

1723.”11 Thus, using this historical data, we see that Free-Men-ofColor voted in Virginia for candidates to the legislative assembly some twenty-four years longer than Free-Women-of-Color. And at this writing, these are the first extant legal data to surface about the right of Free-Women-of-Color to vote in colonial America. The other such data on Free-Women-of-Color voting come not from Colonial but from Revolutionary and early Antebellum New Jersey. Professor Keyssar wrote that “[o]ne of the earliest acts of suffrage restriction—or retraction—was the disfranchisement of women in New Jersey in 1807. Both the state’s constitution of 1776 and an election law passed in 1790 granted the right to vote to all ‘inhabitants’ who otherwise were qualified: this was interpreted locally to mean that property-owning women could vote.” And Keyssar continued: New Jersey’s policy was exceptional—although throughout the new nation there were individuals who followed the logic of ‘stake in society’ arguments across the customary border of gender and concluded that women (such as widows) should be enfranchised if they possessed property and were not legally dependent on men. Why the state of New Jersey embraced this minority view is unclear, but the enfranchisement of women was definitely not inadvertent and appears to have been grounded at least in part in factional politics.12 New Jersey gave voting rights to Free-Women-of-Color for thirty-one years (1776–1807) in Revolutionary and Antebellum America, long before the accepted beginning dates for the African American and white women suffrage movement. African American historian Marion Thompson Wright was one of the very first researchers to offer some specific and detailed coverage of the New Jersey situation. She wrote that the New Jersey state constitutional convention appointed its committee “on June 24 (1776) and reported its first draft on June 26. The basic charter was discussed on June 27 and adopted on July 2 without further consideration.”13 And the way to confirm that these FreeWomen-and-Men-of-Color exercised this right and voted during this period, according to Wright, is that when these two groups voted in “hotly contested elections” where these two groups of voters proved to be the “balance-of-power” and determined the outcome, it generated great controversy reported by the local and state New Jersey press.14 Hence, her analyses of these reported electoral conflicts validate and provide insight into the existence of African American women pioneering voting rights. In Wright’s first use of this approach she wrote: “During an election in 1794 which constituted a lively contest between John Condict of Newark and William Crane of Elizabeth, seventy-five women’s votes were cast. In the presidential election of 1800, women, especially where the Society of Friends was in strength, voted in considerable numbers throughout the state. . . . [A]t first only single women voted. Later married women joined them at the polls, Negro as well as white.”15 Of state legislative and gubernatorial elections, Wright added: “In Hunterdon County, a citizen was chosen to the Legislature by a majority of two or three votes which had been cast by colored females. Governor Pennington is said to have escorted a ‘strapping negress to the

polls where he joined her in the ballot.’”16 On these legislative and gubernatorial elections Wright continued with a finding that in the 1802 election in Hunterdon County, “the vote of a negro slave, herself the property of another slave, elected one of the Hunterdon members on that occasion, produced an equality of parties in the legislature, and deprived the state of a governor for a year.”17 Sometimes these electoral conflicts went beyond simply being local matters, for at times they even reached the New Jersey state legislature, and this too became the source of more newspaper coverage. Describing one such event, Wright indicated: “In 1802, a petition to the Legislature to set aside an election in Trenton included among its charges that Negroes and actual slaves, aliens, persons not worth fifty pounds, and married women voted. The election was not set aside.”18 Finally, newspaper coverage occurred not only because of local conflict or legislative petitions but also because of political party conflict. Writing of one of these instances, Wright described that “in another election in which the Federalists of Essex County were accused of receiving among other votes known to be illegal those of ‘negro wenches,’ the complaint was that they were ‘negresses supported by charity.’”19 Nothing was made of the matter simply because at that time Free-Women-ofColor were allowed to vote in the state of New Jersey and for any party for which they wanted to vote. However, it was because of these “hotly contested elections” and their partisan outcomes that both Free-Women-and-Menof-Color lost their voting rights in New Jersey in 1807 after thirty-one years. Wright reports that because several of the white politicians lost their elections as a consequence of the votes from these women and men the New Jersey assembly reversed that right in 1807. “A restrictive law was passed by a vote of thirty-one to five in an assembly dominated by Democrats. But it was not a party measure as leading Federalists for it from Burlington and Middlesex Counties gave their support. . . . With the adoption of this law passed an interesting era in the history of Negroes in the United States and the State of New Jersey.”20 But the law did not stop African American women suffragists for “[i]n 1868 the women suffragists of Vineland, New Jersey, set up voting tables across from the platform where the election officials were accepting male ballots. . . . On that election day, 172 women cast mock ballots. Of this group, four were black.”21 The state did not return this right to the freedmen until January 18, 1871, and to women to vote in school board elections only in 1887. However, the state supreme court took that latter right away in 1895 in Landis v Ashworth, 31 A. 1017. Later that same year the court approved of a right to vote in school appropriations elections only in the case State v. Board of Education of Cranbury Township, 31 A. 1033. Nevertheless, the African American women suffragists in Vineland stayed active because at a statewide suffrage referendum they served not only as poll watchers but some 300 of them voted for the referendum. But there were consequences. Upon seeing African American women in these positions, “[w]hite voters were heard to have said that they changed their minds about supporting the amendment when they saw so many Black women campaigning for it.”22 Thus, women in the state that pioneered women enfranchisement lost that right within thirty-one years of first gaining it and had to await the passage of the Nineteenth

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Amendment in order to regain it. And between 1807 and its restoration in 1920, some 113 years, sundry African American women’s groups and individuals protested for the reversal of the state’s “white male only” suffrage rights.23 Thus, long before the formal black and white women suffrage movements were launched, Free-Women-of-Color had and exercised their suffrage rights in colonial Virginia and in Revolutionary and Antebellum New Jersey. Moreover, they had in fact attained, exercised, and lost these suffrage rights before the women suffrage organizations had been founded. Census, archival legislative petitions, historical case studies, and sundry newspaper accounts all attest to these legal realities and their electoral manifestations. There is one major drawback in these scholarly documents: the lack of official or semi-official voter registration and election return data. However, there are state-level census data in the Colonial and Revolutionary eras and federal Census data for Antebellum America. Using this empirical demography data and a well-known statistical population technique known as interpolation, we can arrive at an estimate of the number of potential Free-Women-of-Color voters in both colonial Virginia and Revolutionary and Antebellum New Jersey. Table 20.1 provides actual and estimated populations of black females and white females for selected years, including those in which they could vote, in early Virginia. Using two different extant state-level censuses for colonial Virginia we have interpolated and offered conservative population inferences. The population numbers in most of these cells are merely suggestive ones instead of verifiable official or semiofficial census data. And we want readers to know that these interpolations are surrogates instead of actual data because such data were not gathered and kept officially by the colonial government. Said data suggest that black women simply outnumbered white women in the population in these periods in colonial Virginia and might have on occasion voted in near comparable or less comparable numbers with their white female counterparts.

Seemingly to us, it would have been the latter because the white females of the population would have more resources than Free-Women-of-Color and could have therefore easily met the property qualification of a stake-in-society requirement. But the colonial House of Burgesses rescinded suffrage rights entirely for Free-Women-of-Color in 1699 and for Free-Men-of-Color in 1723. Female suffrage rights in colonial Virginia were gone long before the colony of New Jersey became a state with a new constitution, drafted in 1776, that provided suffrage rights for both Free-Women-and-Men-of-Color. The U.S. Constitution as drafted by the founding fathers in 1787 and ratified by 1788 provided for two houses of Congress. The House of Representatives was based on population—the larger the state’s population, the more seats that that state got in the House of Representatives. In the Senate, each state had equality, two seats each no matter the size or population. The Constitution also provided for a Census every ten years so that the House of Representatives could be reapportioned to match population shifts and changes. These Census reports began in 1790 and have been produced every ten years. The U.S. Census becomes the data source for the information that we interpolate for the two decades under analysis for the state of New Jersey in Table 20.2. Thus, the U.S. Census provides empirical data for 1790, 1800, and 1810. Interpolation allows us to make inferential data for the presidential elections of 1792, 1796, 1804, and for the non-presidential year 1807 when the state legislature restricted voting to white male taxpayers. Using these data and analytical techniques, Table 20.2 allows a full portrait of the potential population of black and white females as well as the total population, both black and white, in four presidential elections—1792, 1796, 1800, and 1804—and the last year of full suffrage, 1807. This empirical data offer a base and foundation about how many women might have cast votes in these local, state, and national elections in Maryland. And finally, these data show the rising population in the state of Maryland.

Table 20.1  Inferred and Actual Female Populations in Colonial Virginia Including Years of African American Suffrage Denials Females African American Year

Number

Percent

White Number

Total African American Population

All Percent

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

Total White Population Number

Percent

Total Population

1624a

11

 0.9%

269

21.8%

280

22.7%

23

 1.9%

1,209

98.1%

1,232

1699b

15,462c

26.3%

11,277c

19.2%

26,739

45.5%

34,347

58.5%

24,382

41.5%

58,729

1723d

20,406e

26.4%

14,800e

19.1%

35,206

45.5%

45,335

58.5%

32,099

41.5%

77,434

1755

27,000

26.1%

19,498

18.9%

46,498

45.0%

59,999

58.1%

43,329

41.9%

103,328

f

g

g

Source: Adapted from Evarts B. Green and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), pp. 144, 150–151. Calculations by the authors. a

Population data from the Virginia census of 1624.

b

Year that suffrage was denied to African American women.

c

Interpolated population inference: the ratio of ((1699–1624)/(1755–1624)), times the difference in populations between 1755 and 1624, added to the 1624 population.

d

Year that suffrage was denied to African American men.

e

Interpolated population inference: the ratio of ((1723–1624)/(1755–1624)), times the difference in populations between 1755 and 1624, added to the 1624 population.

f

Population data taken or derived from the Virginia census of 1755.

g

African American female population inferred to be 45% of total African American population; white female population inferred as 45% of total white population.



The Enfranchisement of African American Women, 1669–1921 415 Table 20.2  Inferred and Actual Female Populations in Revolutionary and Early Antebellum New Jersey Including Years of Federal Censuses, Presidential Elections, and the Denial of African American and Women Suffrage Females African American

White

Total African American Population

All

Total White Population

Year

Number

Percent

Number 

Percent

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

Total Population

1790a

6,383b

3.5%

83,287

45.2%

89,670

48.7%

14,185

7.7%

169,954

92.3%

184,139

1792

e

6,620

3.5%

e

85,749

45.2%

92,369

48.7%

14,711

7.8%

174,827

92.2%

189,538

1794d

6,857f

3.5%

88,212f

45.3%

95,069

48.8%

15,238

7.8%

179,702

92.2%

194,940

1796

g

7,095

3.5%

g

90,674

45.3%

97,769

48.8%

15,767

7.9%

184,575

92.1%

200,342

1798d

7,332h

3.6%

93,137h

45.5%

100,469

49.0%

15,423

7.5%

189,450

92.5%

204,873

1800

b

7,570

3.6%

95,600

45.3%

103,170

48.9%

16,824

8.0%

194,325

92.0%

211,149

1802d

7,738j

3.5%

99,582j

45.5%

107,320

49.0%

17,196

7.9%

201,633

92.1%

218,829

1804

7,906

3.5%

103,564

45.7%

111,470

49.2%

17,570

7.8%

208,941

92.2%

226,511

1806

m

8,075

3.4%

m

107,546

45.9%

115,621

49.4%

17,944

7.7%

216,250

92.3%

234,194

1807n

8,159p

3.4%

109,537p

46.0%

117,696

49.4%

18,131

7.6%

219,904

92.4%

238,035

1810

8,412

3.4%

115,511

47.0%

123,923

50.5%

18,694

7.6%

226,868

92.4%

245,562

c,d

c,d

a,c,d

c,d d

a

k

b

k

Source: Adapted from Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors. Population data taken or derived from the U.S. Censuses of 1790, 1800, and 1810.

a b

African American female population inferred to be 45 percent of total African American population.

c

Years of presidential elections in New Jersey before denial of suffrage for Free-Men-of-Color and all women.

d

Years of congressional elections in New Jersey before denial of suffrage for Free-Men-of-Color and all women.

e

Interpolated population inference: the ratio of ((1792–1790)/(1800–1790)), times the difference in populations between 1800 and 1790, added to the 1790 population.

f

Interpolated population inference: the ratio of ((1794–1790)/(1800–1790)), times the difference in populations between 1800 and 1790, added to the 1790 population.

g

Interpolated population inference: the ratio of ((1796–1790)/(1800–1790)), times the difference in populations between 1800 and 1790, added to the 1790 population.

h

Interpolated population inference: the ratio of ((1798–1790)/(1800–1790)), times the difference in populations between 1800 and 1790, added to the 1790 population.

j

Interpolated population inference: the ratio of ((1802–1800)/(1810–1800)), times the difference in populations between 1810 and 1800, added to the 1800 population.

k

Interpolated population inference: the ratio of ((1804–1800)/(1810–1800)), times the difference in populations between 1810 and 1800, added to the 1800 population.

m

Interpolated population inference: the ratio of ((1806–1800)/(1810–1800)), times the difference in populations between 1810 and 1800, added to the 1800 population.

n

Year that New Jersey denied suffrage to Free-Men-of-Color and all women.

p

Interpolated population inference: the ratio of ((1807–1800)/(1810–1800)), times the difference in populations between 1810 and 1800, added to the 1800 population.

These two tables provide a holistic population portrait of potential women voters. Table 20.3 (p. 416) uses a consensus percentage accepted by leading historians of this period and before about how many individuals in the population voted in Antebellum America—5%—and infers the possible number of female voters to acquire some working numbers for the population. This table includes the population data from both states as well as the number and types of elections that occurred in the time that Free-Women-of-Color had the right to vote. Beginning with Virginia in 1624, the year of its first census, we can see that these women had the right to vote in the House of Burgesses elections. But in using our 5% consensus we infer that only one Free-Woman-of-Color might have voted. We have strong reasons to believe that this is not accurate because African Americans did not arrive in Jamestown until 1619, and since they were swapped for “foodstuff,” they would have had to serve seven years as indentured servants, and they would not have been free until 1626. Thus, only in 1626 would any have become Free-Women-of-Color and then have had the right to vote in the House of Burgesses elections. Hence, for each year from that

date until 1699, a period of 73 years, they could have voted in the annual House of Burgesses elections. And the initial inferred number would change as the free population continued to grow with newly liberated former servants (although our empiricallybased inferences are just approximations). In Revolutionary and Antebellum New Jersey, with census data provided by the national government rather than the colonial government of Virginia, there is a longer time frame and a much larger population with which to work. Using the same consensus percentage (5%), it is possible to cover more national, state, and local elections in terms of making our inferences. The number of Free-Women-of-Color was much smaller in New Jersey, and even though the number slowly grew in each election cycle they constituted less than 0.5%. Here the range moves from a low of 319 potential votes in 1790 to a high of 408 in 1807, when women and African Americans were disenfranchised in the state of New Jersey. But these small numbers must be understood in the context of a very small voting electorate in this state and elsewhere, due to the prevailing electoral philosophy of a stake-in-society as a qualification to become a voter in the original thirteen states.

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Table 20.3  Potential African American Female Voters in Colonial Virginia and Revolutionary/Antebellum New Jersey

Type of Election Eligibilitya

Disfranchised

Year

Census

1624

X

H of B

None

1699

 

H of B

Afr. Am. Women

1723

 

H of B

1755

X

H of B

1790

X

local, state, cong.

None

1792

 

pres., cong.

1794

 

local, state, cong.

1796

 

1798

 

1800 1802

Potential Afr. Am. Female Votersb

Percent of Total Population

and ended in Virginia and New Jersey long before the national women suffrage movement began in 1848.

The Struggle for the Re-Acquisition of Voting Rights for African American Women Total Population

Virginia (Colony) 1

0.1%

1,232

773

1.3%

58,729

All Afr. Am.

1,020

1.3%

77,434

All Afr. Am.

1,350

1.3%

103,328

319

0.2%

184,139

None

331

0.2%

189,538

None

343

0.2%

194,940

pres., cong.

None

355

0.2%

200,342

local, state, cong.

None

367

0.2%

204,873

X

pres., cong.

None

379

0.2%

211,149

 

local, state, cong.

None

387

0.2%

218,829

1804

 

pres., cong.

None

395

0.2%

226,511

1806

 

local, state, cong.

None

404

0.2%

234,194

1807

 

 

Women & Afr. Am.

408

0.2%

238,035

1810

X

local, state, cong.

Women & Afr. Am.

421

0.2%

245,562

New Jersey (State)

Abbreviations: H of B signifies House of Burgesses; pres. signifies presidential; cong. signifies congressional. b The number of potential African American female voters calculated as 5% of African American female population, as given in Tables 20.1 and 20.2. a

Although we may never know the actual numbers of women voters in colonial Virginia and Antebellum New Jersey, we know that the law existed for these rights, and the historical newspaper and archival evidence assures us that some of this group of women did go to the polls in this period 1776–1807 and cast their ballots. Our inferential empirical data provide a valuable supplement to those historical accounts. Finally, with the legal, documentary, and inferential evidence, it is quite clear that both Free-Women-of-Color and white women voted in Colonial, Revolutionary, and Antebellum America. We also know that they voted in a variety of the new nation’s elections as well as in legislative elections in colonial Virginia. The House of Burgesses was organized in the Royal Colony of Virginia in 1619 and continued to meet until the colony became a state. Poll book data have recently surfaced that provide a list of voters beginning in the 1700s and continuing through the 1770s. If such a poll book surfaced for the 1600s, one would have concrete instead of inferential voting data. And the empirical information would move further research from possible and potential information to accurate and factual information. But until then, it is factually correct to understand that women suffrage began

With the disappearance of the Free-Women-of-Color suffrage rights in Virginia and New Jersey completely by 1807, the struggle for retention of these rights had now to turn to a total strategy of acquisition because in none of the states of the Union did these women have the right to vote. A re-acquisition effort was impossible due to the fact that both Virginia and New Jersey had by 1807 also disenfranchised Free-Men-of-Color. Furthermore, none of the five New England states plus New York that permitted free black males to vote allowed any women to vote. Hence, a comprehensive strategy of acquisition was required. Two major reform movements began to emerge in the 1830s. These offered some of the few possibilities for this issue of Free-Women-of-Color suffrage rights to be reborn and then targeted to the public, public opinion and sentiment, and the nation’s political institutions like Congress and state governments. These two reform groups were the National Negro Convention Movement, with state and local auxiliaries, and the emerging Anti-Slavery Societies. Both movements and their subsequent national organizations were focused on problems facing the African American community, i.e., the slaves and the free people of color. Thus, the suffrage rights struggle would soon become embedded in these two movements and their organizations, and one of these two movements had white members, males and females. Hence, there was a chance with the AntiSlavery Societies to form a potentially viable interracial coalition to acquire these elusive suffrage rights. African American female activists soon began to participate in the National Negro Convention Movement annual meetings, and at the 1852 convention an African American woman named Mary Shadd participated as a full delegate. The National Negro Convention by that point was on record as advocating suffrage rights.

The American Equal Rights Association: The Beginning of a Rift between African American and White Suffragists Arising in the abolitionist movement and addressing the women suffrage issue was none other than Sojourner Truth. Of her initial involvement on this issue Professor Terborg-Penn found that: “[i]n 1850 the first Massachusetts women’s rights convention met at Worcester, and Sojourner Truth attended. Throughout the formative years of the movement, Truth attended women’s rights conventions held in the North” and in the process became a suffragist.24 African American historian Margaret Washington, in the most distinguished biography yet of Sojourner Truth, noted that when the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), which was organized in the spring of 1866, held an anniversary meeting in 1867, “Sojourner Truth was probably the most popular woman at the 1867 AERA meeting and certainly dominated the platform. . . . Sojourner applauded the new ruling giving black men voting rights in the District of Columbia. But female suffrage would render black women independent.”25 Eventually,



The Enfranchisement of African American Women, 1669–1921 417

this organization would disappear, but Professor Terborg-Penn found that “during the 1860s, approximately 9 percent of the American Equal Rights Association leadership was Black, and observers noted that a sizable number of African American women attended the proceedings.” She added: “As group members, Blacks engaged in the petitioning of federal and state governments on behalf of woman suffrage and actively campaigned for woman suffrage referendums and amendments.”26 Preceding Truth in this organization were African Americans Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Harriet Purvis, two of the founding members of AERA in 1866. Harper spoke to the initial convention on behalf of women’s suffrage and later went out and lectured about universal suffrage.27 Eventually, these pioneers would be joined by a host of other African American women in this organization and struggle for their suffrage rights. But the political dynamism of the post–Civil War period, with its rise and demise of Presidential Reconstruction and the evolution of Congressional Reconstruction, significantly impacted this interracial coalition and undermined its internal cohesion. As ideas about suffrage rights started to focus upon the freedmen, the interracial cohesion started to split. “A dispute occasioned by proposals for the Fourteenth and the Fifteenth Amendments prompted several male abolitionists to call for a moratorium on demands for women suffrage until ‘Negro suffrage’ was achieved.”28 White women suffragist leaders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy Stone balked at this proposal and soon started to take a stand against it and against the AERA for seemingly supporting it. This opening rift in the movement was widened by the next event, the defeat of a clause for women’s suffrage at the state constitutional convention in New York, the home state of Stanton and Anthony, despite the best efforts of these suffrage leaders. Of the impact of this event in furthering the rift, Professor Washington wrote: “Anthony and Stanton, smarting over their New York State Constitutional defeat, made Kansas another test case.”29 In 1867 several states including Kansas decided to put both women suffrage and “Negro suffrage” on separate referenda and submit them to the electorate. Seeing this as a possible strategy for success, “[t]he AERA’s acceptance of an invitation to campaign in Kansas created an open breach in the universal suffrage movement. Lucy Stone and her husband, Henry Blackwell, left first and began courting Democrats. Later Anthony, Stanton, and Olympia Brown joined them.”30 Once there in Kansas, “[t]he suffragists canvassed the entire state, locking horns with black and white Republicans. Stone and Blackwell left Kansas as soon as Stanton, Anthony, and Brown wooed and won a particularly notorious copperhead [group of notorious anti-Negro individuals] named George Francis Train.”31 This racist had decided to use the women suffrage issue and these women leaders to achieve his racist goals. Thus, “Train devoted energy and money to women suffrage and agreed to finance a newspaper, the Revolution,” for them. “Stanton and Parker Pillsbury began publishing the Revolution in January 1868. Although it advocated educated suffrage irrespective of sex or color, Train also condemned the Freedmen’s Bureau, freed men, and the Republicans.”32 And in the 1868 presidential election, the African American suffragists— Truth, Harper, and others—campaigned for universal suffrage

as did the Republican candidate, Ulysses S. Grant; the white suffragist leaders campaigned for “educated suffrage,” while the Democratic presidential candidate Horatio Seymour and especially his vice presidential candidate Francis P. Blair used racist statements and invectives throughout the campaign to disparage the qualifications of African Americans to vote at all.33 In fact, “Anthony was a woman’s suffrage delegate to the Democratic National Convention, but was not allowed to speak. A man read her letter praising the Democrats as the suffrage party fighting ‘most valiantly’ for ‘all white men.’”34 With the widening rift in the AERA out in the public sphere, one more event split the AERA completely apart and set the African American women suffragists on a quite different course. According to Professor Keyssar: “With the passage and ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1869 and 1870, the causes of black (male) and women’s suffrage were decisively severed.”35 The Fifteenth Amendment had given the vote to the freedmen over white women, and this defeat was a bit more than Anthony and Stanton could take given their long efforts at mobilization. And this matter surfaced at the 1869 annual convention of the AERA. Professor Washington found that at this convention Anthony and Stanton sought to turn the organization into a women’s suffrage organization, and some African American women suffragists along with Frederick Douglass “proposed a resolution endorsing the Fifteenth Amendment. Stanton, Anthony, and Paulina Wright responded with a wave of racist comments. . . . The convention adjourned without settling anything.”36 These white suffragists went back to their office in Brooklyn, New York, and held a second meeting in the Revolution office with some sixty selected individuals. There, “Stanton and Anthony formed [a new] women’s suffrage organization . . . called . . . National Woman’s Suffrage Association (NWSA).”37 By “November 1869 Lucy Stone and Henry Ward Beecher had founded another group, the American Woman Suffrage Association [AWSA], in opposition to the political views and strategies of the NWSA. The larger of the two groups, the AWSA . . . attempted to keep the woman suffrage issue from interfering with the Republican Party–supported ‘Negro suffrage’ cause.”38 Thus, at its founding meeting in Cleveland, this new organization endorsed the Fifteenth Amendment. “Through state suffrage societies, the AWSA would pursue whatever gains could be had from state legislatures,” as well as lobbying local municipal governments for “partial suffrage rights” that would allow women to vote in school board, referendum, and bond elections.39 Summarizing, the results of these dual actions beyond their destruction of the AERA, African American historian Bettye Collier-Thomas indicated that “[t]he national woman suffrage leadership split over the black suffrage issue. In 1869, following the AERA meeting, two women suffrage associations were created, the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) and the American Woman Suffrage Association.”40 Each of the organizations had a different strategy to attain suffrage rights, and one of them had a very strong racist ideology. It was this latter ideology that caused a dilemma for the African American women suffragists in terms of their organization membership. And this was resolved in a variety of ways.

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Professor Terborg-Penn described the different reactions thusly: The response of veteran Black female suffragists to the split varied. Frances Harper became a founding member of the AWSA and apparently did not attend NWSA meetings. On the other hand, Harriet and Hattie Purvis continued to participate with their old friend Susan B. Anthony in the NWSA, with Hattie in later years becoming the first African American woman to be elected vice president of the association. . . . Sojourner Truth frequented AWSA and also attended some NWSA meetings, whereas Sarah Redmond appeared to be disillusioned by it all and became an expatriate in Florence, Italy, where she studied medicine.41 The split between the AWSA and NWSA was just the first major dilemma for the African Americans in the suffrage rights movement. “In 1890, when Negro suffrage was under attack and after other differences were reconciled, the two associations merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)”42 but this new organization said next to nothing about the protection of the Fifteenth Amendment rights for the freedmen or the rising segregation and racial discrimination in the white women’s club movement. Although the African American women would in 1896 form their own National Association of Colored Women (NACW), it “was formed as a result of the merger of the National League of Colored Women and the National Federation of Afro-American Women. The NACW reported a membership of fifty clubs and 500 persons representing many states.”43 Of this new national organization, the NACW, African American historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham stated: “Even more important to the political activism of black women leaders was the organizational network already in place on the eve of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. The National Association of Colored Women (NACW) had stood at the forefront of the suffragist cause among black women and became the logical springboard for future political work.”44 While many African American suffragists worked through this organization, others simply stopped attending meetings of organizations that barely permitted them to be included. Still others simply plowed on despite the prevalence of racial prejudice. The struggle simply continued but via different organizational venues. Now that these different organizations had come into existence, awaiting them was the original Sixteenth Amendment which proposed to enfranchise women.

African American Women Suffrage and the Proposed Sixteenth Constitutional Amendment Republican Congressman George W. Julian of Indiana, prior to the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, introduced on March 15, 1869, in the House of Representatives the proposed Sixteenth Amendment. This bill was “the first woman suffrage amendment to the Constitution. Stronger than the Fifteenth Amendment because it linked voting rights (constitutionally the

states’ domain) to citizenship (a national right in the Fourteenth Amendment).”45 Using this constitutional approach, Representative Julian’s bill read: “The Right of Suffrage in the United States shall be based on citizenship, and shall be regulated by Congress; and all citizens of the United States, whether native or naturalized, shall enjoy this right equally without any distinction or discrimination whatever founded on sex.”46 Since Stanton and Anthony’s new organization NWSA was formed on May 15, 1869, they took as their major political goal the coordination of support for this legislation and the subsequent passage of this Sixteenth Amendment. Professor Keyssar observed: “NWSA’s strategy was to pressure the federal government to offer women the same constitutional protections given to the freedmen in the Fifteenth Amendment.”47 However, in both the shadow and wake of the ratification effort for the Fifteenth Amendment, “this initial version of the Sixteenth Amendment . . . made little headway.”48 And African American women suffragists participated in the celebrations of the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in February 1870. Professor Washington described the celebratory moment: Sojourner was in Washington on March 30, 1870, when Secretary of state Hamilton Fish certified the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified. African Americans held a jubilee in every state and territory, giving “thanks to Almighty God and the good people he used as his instruments in bringing about this glorious event.” A New York City procession featured portraits of Doug­ lass, Grant, Lincoln, John Brown, and black Senator Hiram Revels. Detroit’s “grand celebration” was among the biggest. . . . In Baltimore, ten thousand blacks marched in a procession. . . . Ten thousand more . . . lined the sidewalks.49 Therefore, the failed effort to pass the initial Sixteenth Amendment got swept aside in the African American community in their national celebration over the success of the Fifteenth Amendment. But Anthony and Stanton and their NWSA didn’t give up. In the 1872 presidential election year, “Susan B. Anthony . . . attended all three conventions—Liberal Republicans, Republican, and Democratic—but only the Republicans agreed to include a reference to their ‘obligations to the loyal women of America’ in their platform. It was the first woman’s plank in a national platform. . . .”50 As a consequence of this Republican response, “Anthony decided to support Grant for President and go out on the stump for the Republican ticket—and for woman suffrage. She also decided to vote, along with several other women, on election day.”51 This protest vote not only landed Anthony in jail, it eventually led to a Supreme Court case and decision, United States v. Susan B. Anthony, 1873, which she lost. And the Grant Administration did not support the initial Sixteenth Amendment. Undaunted, “[t]he NWSA launched a second campaign for a sixteenth amendment in 1876. California’s [Republican] Senator Aaron A. Sargent introduced the measure on January 10, 1878, petitions flooded Congress annually, activists lobbied national



The Enfranchisement of African American Women, 1669–1921 419

political parties for a woman suffrage plank in their platforms of 1880. . . .”52 In response to this huge lobbying effort: In 1882, both houses of Congress appointed select committees on women’s suffrage, each of which recommended passage of an amendment. Four years later, thanks in part to the energetic support of Republican Henry Blair of New Hampshire, the amendment was finally brought to a vote on the Senate floor, where, to the great disappointment of suffragists seated in the galleries, it was decisively defeated in January 1887 by a margin of thirty-four to sixteen (with twenty-six abstentions), a far cry from the two-thirds positive vote required for passage.53 In the voting on the Senate floor another problem surfaced. Not a single “southern senator voted in favor of the amendment, while twenty-two voted against it.”54 The NWSA pressed on after this new defeat, and their allies in Congress re-introduced the Anthony bill each and every year, but the stall was on. “For another half dozen years, Congress continued to grapple with the issue, but after 1893, no congressional committee reported it favorably until late in the Progressive era.”55 Another women’s suffrage scholar wrote on this point: “After 1896 in the Senate and 1894 in the House, Congress did not even bother to report the measure out of committee until 1913. Thus, while the South undermined the Fifteenth Amendment, the woman suffrage movement stopped agitating about the question of federal responsibility for voting rights altogether. To gain ground in the white South, the NAWSA affirmed its belief in the South’s prerogative to legislate white supremacy.”56 When the Lodge Bill failed to provide protection for the freedmen voters and the Era of Disenfranchisement had begun, the Stanton and Anthony–led suffragists stopped their protest and demand activities and watched the freedmen lose their Fifteenth Amendment right to vote. Summing up the defeat and demise of the proposed Sixteenth Amendment, the Democratic Congress in 1894 repealed forty sections of the Enforcement Acts, and the southern states launched their second disenfranchisement efforts in 1895. The two major white women suffrage associations merged, and this new merged organization abandoned at least temporarily their national protests, moved to the sidelines out of the political fray, and sought “partial suffrage rights” at the local, municipal, and county levels. By 1902, this strategy had paid off because in some twenty-six states women had gained the right to vote in some form or another in school elections. And most importantly, this abandonment led to the new national white women suffrage organization embracing both the South and its public policy of white supremacy.

African American Women Suffrage: The Movement for State and Municipal Suffrage Rights The drives for the proposed and failed Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the later successful drive for the Nineteenth were led under the aegis of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) and later the National

American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Meanwhile, the distinctive approach of the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA)—along with a more amorphous group of collaborators—sought state-by-state suffrage legislation and “partial suffrage rights” on school issues, prohibition issues, and municipal matters. African American suffragists were visible and quite involved in these local efforts and organized to make things happen. When, on the state level, there were a few victories in places like Idaho and Utah, the number of African American women involved was very few because they made up small percentages of these states’ populations. When breakthroughs were made at the school board and municipal levels, African Americans were involved despite their limited presence in the states’ populations. However, the participation in these state and “partial suffrage rights” movements did not build to a crescendo and immediately set off a national amendment as hoped for. The disconnect between the state and local efforts and the national effort was due in part to the limited and highly scattered successes and a string of defeats on the state and local levels. Table 20.4 (p. 420) lists the states where full enfranchisement for women occurred prior to the Nineteenth Amendment. Table 20.5 (p. 421) reveals the very few states that otherwise allowed women to vote at the local levels. There were no such states in the Border States region and only two such states in the South, Florida and Louisiana. But in the other regions of the nation there were ten states (not counting Michigan and New York twice) which permitted this type of “partial suffrage.” For African American women suffragists, the greatest potential was in Louisiana, followed by Florida, and a minor potential in Kansas, Illinois, and Indiana. Little opportunity existed in the other seven states due to low population levels, similar to the states listed in Table 20.4. (The reader should note some overlap as states first granted local and later full enfranchisement). Finally, Table 20.6 (p. 422) provides the potential vote data for those states and territories that allowed women to vote in school board elections and other types of municipal elections prior to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. In the Border States, Kentucky and Delaware permitted this type of “partial suffrage” while in the South, Mississippi embraced this type of election. Outside of the Border and Southern regions, some twenty-one states and three territories also permitted these types of partial elections to occur. Some of these states wrote this into their state constitutions and others simply enacted them via legislative statutes. And in these twenty-four different states and territories, potential African American female voters made up more than 0.1% of the population only in New Jersey and Oklahoma. All of these states, like those that had fully enfranchised women prior to the Nineteenth Amendment, had exceedingly small African American female populations. Collectively, these three tables demonstrate that African American women before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment had the greatest potential in the Border and southern regions. The efforts of mobilization by DuBois and other African American suffragist leaders were based on a clearly perceived problem and need because the “partial suffrage” states and even the fully enfranchising states would end up

420

Chapter 20

Table 20.4  Potential Women Voters in States and Territories Fully Enfranchising Women prior to the Nineteenth Amendment Women African American

White

Potential Voters State (by Region)

Date Enacted

Date Effective

Populationa

Numberb

Percent of Total Population

Potential Voters

Populationa

Numberb

Percent of Total Population

Total Populationa

Border States (none) South (none) Other Regions Territory of Wyoming

1869

1869

62

3

0.037%

2,884

144

1.8%

8,206

Territory of Utah

1870c

1870

68

3

0.003%

44,446

2,222

2.6%

86,786

Territory of Washington

1883d

1883

230

11

0.007%

57,496

2,874

1.8%

157,398

Territory of Montana

1887

1887

352

17

0.016%

33,320

1,666

1.6%

104,259

Wyoming

1889

1890

270

13

0.021%

21,069

1,053

1.7%

60,705

Colorado

1893

1893

3,058

152

0.034%

186,823

9,341

2.1%

450,448

Utah

1895

1896

209

10

0.004%

118,913

5,945

2.4%

249,211

Idaho

1896

1896

109

5

0.004%

52,761

2,638

2.0%

130,817

Arizona

1910

1912

1,193

59

0.026%

82,898

4,144

1.8%

230,315

Washington

1910

1910

2,322

116

0.010%

473,615

23,680

2.1%

1,141,990

California

1911

1911

11,200

560

0.023%

1,079,462

53,973

2.2%

2,482,480

Kansas

1912

1912

26,490

1,324

0.078%

788,483

39,424

2.3%

1,706,610

Oregon

1912

1912

657

32

0.005%

300,193

15,009

2.2%

694,889

Territory of Alaska

1913

1913

46

2

0.003%

10,422

521

0.8%

61,560

Illinois

1913

1916

63,029

3,151

0.053%

2,799,671

139,983

2.4%

5,892,597

Montana

1914

1914

744

37

0.008%

182,843

9,142

2.1%

445,187

Nevada

1914

1914

210

10

0.012%

27,186

1,359

1.7%

80,087

New York

1917

1917

180,250

9,012

0.090%

4,900,082

245,004

2.4%

10,003,743

Michigan

1918

1918

22,288

1,114

0.032%

1,637,882

81,894

2.3%

3,496,764

Oklahoma

1918

1918

71,626

3,581

0.183%

829,354

41,467

2.1%

1,954,057

South Dakota

1918

1918

355

17

0.003%

284,123

14,206

2.3%

626,015

 

 

384,768

19,238

0.064%

13,913,926

695,696

2.3%

30,064,124

Totals

Sources: Adapted from Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 402; for a discussion of the 5% figure for the Negro vote see: William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), p. 105 Table 5, note "c"; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negro Population in the United States, 1790–1915 (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968), p. 155; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the United States, 1920–32 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1935), p. 82; Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http:// dx.doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009; and Lisa Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), pp. 16, 20, 41, and 58. Calculations by the authors. a

Interpolated (between censuses) population.

b

Potential female voters estimated at 5% of population group in this period.

c

Annulled by U.S. Congress in 1887.

d

Declared unconstitutional by the territory supreme court in 1887.



The Enfranchisement of African American Women, 1669–1921 421 Table 20.5  Potential Women Voters in States Enfranchising Women for Votes in Municipal Elections or on Tax and Bond Issues prior to the Nineteenth Amendment (Exclusive of States Granting Full Suffrage to Women)

Property Owners/ Taxpayers

Tax/Bond Issues

Municipal Elections

Date Enacted

Statute

State (by Region)

Constitution

Women African American

White

Potential Voters

Populationa

Percent of Total Population

Numberb

Potential Voters

Populationa

Numberb

Percent of Total Population

Total Populationa

Border States (none) South Louisiana

1898

X

Florida

1915

 

X X

X

 

318,923

15,946

1.200%

342,150

17,107

1.3%

1,329,017

 

154,819

7,740

0.899%

260,799

13,039

1.5%

860,544

23,687

1.082%

602,949

30,147

1.4%

2,189,561

Southern Subtotal

473,742

Other Regions Kansas

1887

 

Montana

1889

X

X

X

 

 

23,409

1,170

0.090%

586,590

29,329

2.3%

1,297,796

 

X

 

408

20

0.016%

40,022

2,001

1.6%

Michigan

c

122,859

1893

 

X

X

Iowa

1894

 

X

X

7,344

367

0.017%

1,042,956

52,147

2.4%

2,192,016

X

 

5,311

265

0.013%

975,064

48,753

2.4%

2,039,878

New York

1906

 

X

X

X

63,139

3,156

0.038%

4,112,816

205,640

2.5%

8,375,726

Michigan

1909

 

X

New York

1910

 

X

 

X

X

8,056

402

0.015%

1,325,715

66,285

2.4%

2,771,253

X

X

70,157

3,507

0.038%

4,455,518

222,775

2.4%

9,113,614

Illinois

1913

 

X

Indiana

1917d

 

X

X

 

63,029

3,151

0.053%

2,799,671

139,983

2.4%

5,892,597

X

 

36,077

1,803

0.063%

1,368,022

68,401

2.4%

2,861,535

North Dakota

1917

 

X

X

 

204

10

0.002%

288,147

14,407

2.3%

625,927

Nebraska

1917

Vermont

1917

 

X

X

 

5,182

259

0.020%

598,967

29,948

2.4%

1,265,124

 

X

X

X

310

15

0.004%

173,196

8,659

2.4%

353,486

Other Regions Subtotal

282,626

14,131

0.038%

17,766,684

888,334

2.4%

36,911,811

Grand Total

756,368

37,818

0.097%

18,369,633

918,481

2.3%

39,101,372

Sources: Adapted from Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 400; for a discussion of the 5% figure for the Negro vote see: William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), p. 105 Table 5, note “c”; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negro Population in the United States, 1790–1915 (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968), p. 155; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the United States, 1920–32 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1935), p. 82; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http:// dx.doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors. a

Interpolated (between censuses) population.

b

Potential female voters estimated at 5% of population group in this period.

c

Declared unconstitutional by Michigan supreme court in 1893.

d

Declared unconstitutional by Indiana supreme court in 1917.

bringing too few African American women to the ballot box, due to the fact that these states had very limited African American women populations. And these state and local efforts generated the growth of serious opposition. Thus, in the end, these three different approaches or strategies did not really complement each other. It was the national strategy that eventually overcame opposition at the state and local level and attained uniformity. Here, the end result is quite similar to the African American strategy. The statelevel efforts of African American males during both the Antebellum and post–Civil War periods ended in more states denying suffrage rights to the group via referenda defeats than referenda

successes. Thus, it took the four Military Reconstruction Acts to attain uniform suffrage laws in the South and the Fifteenth Amendment to attain it nationally and overcome state-level barriers. Hence, the women’s suffrage movement followed the pattern established by the freedmen struggle.

Prelude to the Nineteenth Amendment: Illinois’ African American Women Vote in Municipal, State, and Presidential Elections As was noted in Chapter 19, African American males first won election to the Illinois state legislature in 1876 and have continued

422

Chapter 20

Property Owners/ Taxpayers

Women Literate Women

Widows and unmarried women

Heads of families

“Patrons” of schools

Statute

State (by Region)

Date Enacted

Constitution

Table 20.6  Potential Women Voters in States Enfranchising Women to Vote in Elections Dealing with Schools prior to the Nineteenth Amendment (Exclusive of States Granting Full Suffrage to Women)

African American

White

Potential Voters

Populationa

Numberb

Percent of Total Population

Potential Voters

Populationa

Numberb

Percent of Total Population

Total Populationa

Border States Kentucky

1838

 

X

Kentucky

1893

 

X

 

 

Delaware

1898

 

X

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Border Subtotal

X

 

X

92,881

4,644

0.610%

278,076

13,903

1.8%

761,445

X

 

X

136,956

6,847

0.352%

821,203

41,060

2.1%

1,945,196

 

X

14,851

742

0.409%

74,190

3,709

2.0%

181,486

 

 

244,688

12,234

0.424%

1,173,469

58,673

2.0%

2,888,127

316,371

15,818

1.477%

229,317

11,465

1.1%

1,070,862

327,332

16,366

1.446%

236,172

11,808

1.0%

1,131,597

643,703

32,185

1.461%

465,489

23,274

1.1%

2,202,459

2,192

109

0.019%

267,371

13,368

2.3%

573,383

 

South Mississippi

1878

 

X

X

Mississippi

1880

 

X

X

X

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Southern Subtotal 

Other Regions Michigan

1855

 

X

 

 

Kansas Colorado

1861

 

X

1876

1,371

68

0.051%

67,108

3,355

2.5%

132,925

X

 

 

803

40

0.030%

51,583

2,579

1.9%

Minnesota

132,541

1878

X

 

 

606

30

0.004%

331,597

16,579

2.3%

712,559

New Hampshire

1878

 

X

333

16

0.005%

175,084

8,754

2.6%

341,252

Massachusetts

1879

 

X

 

9,422

471

0.027%

900,524

45,026

2.6%

1,750,511

New York

1880

 

X

X

 

 

34,252

1,712

0.034%

2,542,901

127,145

2.5%

5,082,871

Vermont

1880

 

X

X

 

 

491

24

0.007%

164,906

8,245

2.5%

332,286

Oregon

1882

 

X

X

 

 

262

13

0.006%

82,226

4,111

2.0%

202,567

Territory of Dakota

1883

 

X

X

 

 

176

8

0.004%

80,767

4,038

2.1%

193,266

Nebraska

1883

 

X

 

 

 

 

1,863

93

0.015%

285,664

14,283

2.3%

634,354

Wisconsin

1886

 

X

 

 

 

 

1,121

56

0.004%

738,495

36,924

2.4%

1,538,326

Territory of Arizona

1887

 

X

 

 

 

 

144

7

0.013%

18,703

935

1.7%

53,866

New Jersey

1887d

 

X

 

 

 

 

31,614

1,580

0.117%

655,233

32,761

2.4%

1,350,787

Idaho

1889

X

 

 

 

 

76

3

0.004%

30,627

1,531

1.9%

79,207

Montana

1889

X

 

 

 

 

408

20

0.016%

40,022

2,001

1.6%

122,859

North Dakota

1889

X

 

 

 

 

138

6

0.004%

72,786

3,639

2.2%

164,447

Territory of Oklahoma

1890

 

X

 

 

 

 

9,954

497

0.804%

25,736

1,286

2.1%

61,834

Washington

1890

 

X

 

 

 

 

498

24

0.007%

129,387

6,469

1.9%

349,390

Illinois

1891

 

X

 

 

 

 

28,187

1,409

0.036%

1,875,262

93,763

2.4%

3,925,870

Connecticut

1893

 

X

 

 

 

 

6,854

342

0.043%

392,976

19,648

2.5%

794,906

Ohio

1894

 

X

 

 

 

 

43,988

2,199

0.057%

1,867,858

93,392

2.4%

3,866,407

Iowa

1895

 

X

 

 

 

X

5,395

269

0.013%

990,720

49,536

2.4%

2,071,874

New Mexico

1910

X

 

 

 

 

737

36

0.011%

141,152

7,057

2.2%

327,301

Other Regions Subtotal

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

180,885

9,044

0.036%

11,928,688

596,434

2.4%

24,795,589

Grand Total

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1,069,276

53,463

0.179%

13,567,646

678,382

2.3%

29,886,175

c

 

 

 

Sources: Adapted from Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 400; for a discussion of the 5% figure for the Negro vote see: William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), p. 105 Table 5, note “c”; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negro Population in the United States, 1790–1915 (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968), p. 155; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the United States, 1920–32 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1935), p. 82; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http:// dx.doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors. a

Interpolated (between censuses) population.

b

Potential female voters estimated at 5% of population group in this period.

c

Enfranchisement of women declared unconstitutional by Kansas supreme court in 1875.

d

Women suffrage restricted by two New Jersey supreme court cases in 1895 to voting only on school appropriations, and not for officers.



The Enfranchisement of African American Women, 1669–1921 423

to do so in every election since 1882. African American women in Illinois gradually electorally empowered themselves in three stages—1891, 1913, and 1920—largely because African American state legislators helped them do so.57 In the initial stage that began in 1891, “the state legislature passed . . . the Woman’s Suffrage Bill, which legalized women’s voting for school-related offices and matters in rural areas and unincorporated cites.”58 This bill allowed African American women to organize and register, and when 1894 presented them with an opportunity to vote for a female trustee to the University of Illinois Trustee Board, they could canvass and mobilize. For the presidential election of 1896 these African American women voters once again registered and mobilized. Helping them to mobilize was the political context in the nation. Professor Materson wrote: So it was in this context—the defeat of the Federal Election Bill, the “legalized” disfranchisement of black men in Mississippi, similar pending legislation in South Carolina, Democratic domination of the federal government, and the Democratic elimination of the last vestiges of Reconstruction legislation—that black women in Illinois were going to the polls for the first time.59 Thus, as a consequence of the political context at that time, African American women became loyal Republican partisans. Professor Materson found that “[a]t the local level in Chicago, members of both the Ida B. Wells Club and the Phyllis Wheatley Woman’s Club joined more than 4,000 marchers who participated in a torchlight parade and a mass black Republican rally for the [William] McKinley ticket two days before the election.”60 And the Chicago African American women who formed these two political clubs spent their time after the rally canvassing their communities, stumping for Republican nominee McKinley, and mobilizing their male counterparts to vote for this candidate.61 During the second stage of women suffrage rights in Illinois, which began in 1913, there was an expansion of these activities. “In June 1913 the state legislature passed the Presidential and Municipal Suffrage Bill, which, as its name suggests, granted women residents of Illinois the right to vote in presidential elections and for many municipal offices. . . . Four other states where large numbers of southern blacks relocated also extended the presidential franchise to women during the 1910s: Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and New York.”62 (But to date, the only extant state case study is on Illinois.) And with these voting rights, 1916 became the very first presidential election that African American women voters could participate in. As to what this new law meant to the African American electorate in Illinois, Professor Harold Gosnell discovered: “The huge increment in the absolute number of the estimated eligible colored voters between 1910 and 1920 was due largely to the adoption of woman suffrage in 1913 and to the flood of newcomers after 1914.”63 To this point, Professor Materson adds: “The women of Illinois . . . were among the estimated 60,000 black women across the nation who were entitled to vote for president in the fall. In campaigning for the Republican presidential candidate in 1916, politically active black women in Chicago established a unity of purpose that eluded them in local Republican politics.”64

In the 1916 presidential election, the Republican nominees were the Supreme Court Justice and former governor Charles Evans Hughes for president and Theodore Roosevelt’s former vice president, Charles W. Fairbanks, for vice president. The Democrats had incumbent President Woodrow Wilson and Vice President Thomas Marshall. Whereas President Wilson had segregated the federal bureaucracy, Supreme Court Justice Hughes had greater specific appeal to the African American electorate because he had written “the court’s 1911 Bailey v. Alabama decision declaring Alabama’s peonage laws in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition of slavery.”65 Hughes’ second significant action came in 1915 when he was one of the “concurring justices in the 1915 Guinn v. United States case that ruled that the grandfather clauses in the Oklahoma and Maryland state constitutions violated the Fifteenth Amendment.”66 Despite these progressive actions of Justice Hughes, in 1914 he wrote the Supreme Court’s majority opinion upholding the separate coach car law of Oklahoma and supporting segregation in transportation. To help the Hughes-Fairbanks ticket in the 1916 presidential race, “[t]he Republican National Committee appointed several African American women in Harlem and Chicago to conduct the Hughes campaign among these 60,000” new African American women voters.67 With this help, Hughes carried both Illinois and New York in the 1916 presidential election, but the WilsonMarshall Democratic ticket won reelection.68 Evaluating the impact and influence of African American women voters in the 1916 presidential election, Professor Materson wrote: . . . the Republican Party benefited from this enmity for Democrats that was sown in the minds of young girls and women across the South at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Migrant women often cast their ballots and canvassed for Republican candidates not only for themselves but also for the families and communities they had left behind in the South. They used the voting rights they had acquired to defeat Democratic candidates. They also attempted to use their ballot and organizational strength to reform the Republican Party from within.69 Finally, at the third stage in 1920: “Just over two months before Americans headed to the polls in November 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment fully enfranchising American women became part of the U.S. Constitution.”70 The Republican Party managers at the Republican National Committee, who were extremely knowledgeable about the terrific canvassing role of African American women in Chicago and Harlem, “continued this practice of recruiting leading race women by asking one of the most nationally respected women in black reform circles to stump for Harding, incoming NACW President Hallie Quinn Brown.”71 This time, instead of just asking African American women in two cities to run the campaign as they did in 1916, the RNC reached out to the leader of the national organization to run their “Colored Women’s Department, . . . Hallie Quinn Brown ultimately accepted a position on the National Speakers

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Bureau and made no less than fifty-two speeches (forty-two in her home state of Ohio and ten additional ones in other parts of the country).”72 In terms of the African American women in Chicago, their role in this election (besides canvassing as before) was to raise funds because the RNC put no funds into the Colored Women’s Department to help with the outreach effort. They merely wanted Brown to give them “a list of the clubs affiliated with the NACW, along with the names and addresses of club officers” due to the fact that the number of enfranchised African American women voters had mushroomed to more than 2.8 million voters over the 60,000 in 1916. The Chicago women during this campaign helped to raise more than $1,000 to help with the outreach effort. And the end result was that the HardingCoolidge Republican ticket defeated the Democratic CoxRoosevelt ticket in both Illinois and New York as well as nationwide. After the bad experience that African American women had with the Colored Women’s Department of the RNC, many of the African American leaders created their own independent Republican organization, the Negro Women’s Republican League (NWRL), to allow them to work outside of the RNC structure but along with it. Overall, this unique and pioneering case study of African American women’s voting behavior in the 1916 and 1920 presidential elections demonstrates several things: how these women, political neophytes, acquired their Republican partisanship; some of the forces that motivated this behavior on the eve of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment; how their partisanship continued in the 1920 election; but also how this growing party attachment faced some strains and difficulties even in the midwestern state and home of former President Abraham Lincoln.

The Nineteenth Amendment: African American Women Suffrage Granted and Restricted in the South Resurfacing on the national level in a major way in 1913, the merged National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) had new leadership and a mass following. It also had competitor organizations like the Alice Paul–led Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (later renamed the National Woman’s Party) and Carrie Chapman Catt’s League of Women Voters, both of which acted in coalition with southern whites and their ideology of white supremacy. This coalition with the South would reset and determine these organizations’ relationships with African American suffragists, who now had new and different leadership, their own national women’s organization, and two new civil rights organizations, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League. The coalition with the South manifested itself in either excluding African American women or forcing them into segregated units and seating at conventions and affairs. W. E. B. DuBois at the NAACP’s crusading Crisis magazine along with one of the new African American suffrage leaders, Mary Church Terrell, continually urged African Americans to participate in these exclusionary white women suffrage organizations despite their use of this new color line known as segregation. They opined that women suffrage was too important to leave solely

to white women. And to help in this process, DuBois launched a special issue of Crisis magazine in 1915 devoted completely to women suffrage and called for articles in order to highlight the issues and generate support among the African American leadership cadre and the wider community for women suffrage as an important political agenda item. Table 20.4 (p. 420) revealed in quantitative terms why it was so important for DuBois and Terrell to push so hard to get African American women engaged in the struggle for the Nineteenth Amendment. As shown in Map 20.1, none of the states in the Border region or the South enfranchised women, but they were fully enfranchised in many states and territories in the Midwest, West, and Far West. The only eastern state was New York. However, the most dramatic evidence for African American women in Table 20.4 is that only in three of these states and territories— Kansas, New York, and Oklahoma—did the percentage of African American women with the potential for the vote approach or exceed 0.1%. Of these states Oklahoma stands out because the level there almost reached 0.2%. None of the other states and territories with potential African American women voters rose to even these minuscule percentages. In terms of raw numbers, only in New York did the actual number almost reach 10,000, with its 9,012. Besides New York, only in four other states— Kansas, Illinois, Michigan, and Oklahoma—did the actual number rise above 1,000. Hence, in the sixteen states and five territories that had fully enfranchised women before the Nineteenth Amendment, the African American female electorate was a small portion of the overall electorate. African American women lived throughout the nation, not just in these select states. Clearly, the suffragists’ struggle had to continue if the majority of African American women were to be enfranchised. When the white women suffrage organizations held a march in Washington, D.C., during the inauguration of Democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1913, at first African American women were excluded, but after protesting, they were allowed to march at the rear of the procession. This incident showed the political coalition with the South and the battle lines for the African American women suffragists with their white counterparts. President Wilson did not immediately respond to this march, but the Republicans placed women suffrage in their 1916 party platform. As a consequence, these white suffragist organizations dropped their non-partisan stance, and endorsed and worked against the Democrats, the president and his congressional allies. The Democrats won despite this women’s opposition. But after reelection President Wilson changed his mind, and in January 1918 he made a speech in support of the federal suffrage amendment. Shortly thereafter the Nineteenth Amendment passed the House of Representatives with about 80% of the Republicans voting for it but only about 50% of the Democrats. And in the Senate, the Democrats, particularly the southern Democrats, held it up and refused to let the Nineteenth Amendment pass. This Democratic opposition led the white women suffragists to declare for the Republicans in the midterm elections of 1918 and to traverse the country campaigning for them. Their campaign proved successful because the Republicans both recaptured the House of Representatives and increased their margin in the Senate. Upon taking office in 1919, the Republicans in



The Enfranchisement of African American Women, 1669–1921 425 Map 20.1  States and Territories that Fully Enfranchised Women prior to the Nineteenth Amendment

Washington (1910) ---1883--Oregon (1912)

Nevada (1914)

ME Montana (1914) ---1887--Idaho (1896)

Utah (1896) ---1870---

California (1911)

Wyoming (1890) ---1869---

ND MN WI

South Dakota (1918) IA

NE Colorado (1893)

New York (1917)

Kansas (1912)

Michigan (1918)

Illinois (1916) MO

WV

NM

Oklahoma (1918)

DE MD

VA NC SC

AR MS

TX

NJ

KY TN

Arizona (1912)

NH MA RI CT

PA

OH

IN

VT

AL

GA

LA

0 FL

100 200 miles

Alaska ---1913--Territory ---Year Effective--State (Year Effective)

Source: Table 20.4.

Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, and it was ratified on August 18, 1920. Table 20.7 (p. 426) shows that, in addition to the states that fully enfranchised women, there were thirteen other states which permitted women to vote in presidential elections by 1918. One of those states was in the Border Region—Missouri—three were in the Southern Region—Arkansas, Tennessee and Texas—and the other nine were in other regions of the nation. Illinois and Michigan initially enacted statutes limited to presidential elections, but both offered full enfranchisement prior to the Nineteenth Amendment. Voter participation for women was growing across the nation. Beyond the expansion at the state level, Tables 20.4 and 20.7 demonstrate that the actual number of new potential voters was likewise expanding. And amongst this group of voters were a modest number of African American women voters. At the percentage level, the greatest potential for African American women to affect elections was in the South, where the range went from a low of 0.405% of the total population in Texas, to 0.495% in Tennessee, to 0.679% in Arkansas. In fact, of the twenty-two states outside the South that permitted women to

vote in presidential elections (combining Table 20.7 with Table 20.4 to include states that fully enfranchised women), only in seven states—the Midwest states of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Missouri; the eastern state of New York; and the Great Plains states Kansas and Oklahoma—did African American women approach 0.1% of the total population. In the other fifteen states (68.2%), African American women did not have enough of a population to become noticeable as potential voters. Therefore, it was the potential voters in the South and other states with noticeable African American female populations that DuBois and Terrell tried to mobilize to register to vote. In these states they might have a chance, albeit a small one, to have an impact and some influence. But there was the problem of the coalition between the white suffragists within the South with which to contend. The white women suffragists’ coalition with the South nearly undermined the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. First, in the House of Representatives most of the southerners voted against the bill, and in the Senate southern Senators did all they could to halt the legislation. “In the hope of wooing southern votes, some politicians, such as Jeannette Rankin, as

426

Chapter 20

Table 20.7  Potential Women Voters in States that Enacted Statutes Permitting Women to Vote in Presidential Elections before the Nineteenth Amendment Women African American

White

Potential Voters

State

Date Enacted

Populationa

Numberb

Potential Voters

Percent of Total Population

Populationa

Numberb

Percent of Total Population

Total Populationa

Border States Missouri

1919

Border Subtotal

86,221

4,311

0.127%

1,586,849

79,342

2.3%

3,392,983

86,221

4,311

0.127%

1,586,849

79,342

2.3%

3,392,983

South Arkansas

c

1917

230,597

11,529

0.679%

598,493

29,924

1.8%

1,698,877

Texas

1918d

365,197

18,259

0.405%

1,812,799

90,639

2.0%

4,509,890

Tennessee

1919

230,144

11,507

0.495%

925,473

46,273

2.0%

2,322,575

825,938

41,296

0.484%

3,336,765

166,838

2.0%

8,531,342

Southern Subtotal

Other Regions Illinois

1913

63,029

3,151

0.053%

2,799,671

139,983

2.4%

5,892,597

Indiana

a

1917

36,077

1,803

0.063%

1,368,022

68,401

2.4%

2,861,535

Michigan

1917

20,515

1,025

0.030%

1,601,143

80,057

2.3%

3,410,940

Nebraska

1917

5,182

259

0.020%

598,967

29,948

2.4%

1,265,124

North Dakota

1917

204

10

0.002%

288,147

14,407

2.3%

625,927

Rhode Island

1917

4,923

246

0.042%

291,469

14,573

2.5%

585,860

Ohio

f

1917

76,256

3,812

0.070%

2,585,704

129,285

2.4%

5,461,712

Indiana

1919

38,021

1,901

0.065%

1,390,838

69,541

2.4%

2,907,438

Iowa

1919

8,680

434

0.018%

1,155,880

57,794

2.4%

2,386,096

Maine

1919

600

30

0.004%

376,838

18,841

2.5%

765,449

Minnesota

1919

3,852

192

0.008%

1,115,867

55,793

2.4%

2,355,983

Ohio

1919

82,770

4,138

0.073%

2,673,387

133,669

2.4%

5,660,166

Wisconsin

1919

2,154

107

0.004%

1,253,467

62,673

2.4%

2,602,246

342,263

17,113

0.047%

17,499,400

874,970

2.4%

36,781,073

1,254,422

62,721

0.129%

22,423,014

1,121,150

2.3%

48,705,398

Other Regions Subtotal Grand Total

 

Sources: Adapted from Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 401; for a discussion of the 5% figure for the Negro vote see Michael R. Haines, William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), p. 105 Table 5, note "c"; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negro Population in the United States, 1790–1915 (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968), p. 155; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the United States, 1920–32 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1935), Michael R. Haines, p. 82; Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009; and Lisa Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), pp. 16, 20, 41, and 58. Calculations by the authors. a

Interpolated (between censuses) population.

b

Potential female voters estimated at 5% of population group in this period.

c

Statute also permitted voting in primary elections.

d

Statute only permitted voting by women in primary elections and at nominating conventions. Though initially exempt women were required to pay poll tax in 1919.

e

Statute declared unconstitutional by the Indiana supreme court.

f

Statute suspended by referendum petition and then defeated at the polls on November 6, 1917.

well as activists such as Catt and Paul, tried to reassure southerners that the amendment did not threaten white supremacy (it meant ‘the removal of the sex restriction, nothing more, nothing less’); and NAWSA opportunistically distanced itself from black suffragists.”73 In the end, the southerners were not persuaded by these reassurances, from either the elected male officials or the

white women suffragists in the region.74 Thus, the Nineteenth Amendment passed not because of the promises but because the Republicans had majorities and some of the Democrats split with the southerners and voted with the Republicans. But once the Amendment had passed Congress in 1919, the southerners employed their second strategy, which was to keep it



The Enfranchisement of African American Women, 1669–1921 427

from being ratified. Three southern states voted for ratification— Arkansas, Tennessee, and Texas—while one Border State— Kentucky—joined them. In fact, the southern state of Tennessee, whose state legislature passed the Amendment by one vote, became the thirty-sixth state to do so, thereby finally ratifying the Nineteenth Amendment. And in this massive struggle going on with the South, African American suffragists, although continually segregated and betrayed by their white counterparts, fought the opponents of women’s suffrage throughout the seven years that the Nineteenth Amendment was in the throes of being passed.75 They were unrelenting.

African American Women Voters: The Potential and Promise of the Nineteenth Amendment Table 20.8 shows the number and percentage of potential African American women voters throughout the country in 1910, a full decade prior to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. The data in this table offer clues about this group of potential voters. Looking first at the inferred voting age population in the three different regions, it becomes quite clear that these women voters were located primarily in the southern and Border State regions of the nation. In all of the other regions these women only made up 0.6% of the electorate. Such a concentration of the

population, while indirectly apparent in the four earlier tables, dramatically stands out in this table. The vast African American migration out of the South to the rest of the nation did not really take off until World War I, and it does not readily show up in the population numbers of states outside of the southern region until much later in the decade. The presence of slavery in these two regions of the nation had the effect of concentrating African American women voters, and that concentration was still largely in effect when women got the right to vote in 1920. But the South was the same region where the Fifteenth Amendment had been undermined, and that possibility loomed large for the new potential African American voters in the region. They, like their male counterparts, could just as easily be undermined simply because the Nineteenth Amendment did not carry any racial safeguards. While this lack of enforcement safeguards posed no problems for the white female voters, it would be the death knell for voting by African American women. The same combination of poll taxes and literacy tests that affected their male counterparts would disenfranchise them because of the color of their skin. This process of disenfranchising would began shortly before the November 1920 presidential election and continue thereafter. Figure 20.1 (p. 429) shows how African American women of voting age were distributed across the three regions of the nation in 1910, 1920, and 1930. Slightly more than three-fourths (76.7%)

Table 20.8  Distribution of African American Voters by Region and State, Census of 1910 Voting Age African American Population Women State (by Region)

Number

Men

Percent of Total Population

Total

Percent of Total Population

Number

Number

Percent of Total Population

Total Population

South Georgia

273,732

10.5%

266,814

10.2%

540,546

20.7%

2,609,121

Mississippi

234,025

13.0%

233,701

13.0%

467,726

26.0%

1,797,114

Alabama

221,243

10.3%

213,923

10.0%

435,166

20.4%

2,138,093

South Carolina

177,758

11.7%

169,155

11.2%

346,913

22.9%

1,515,400

Louisiana

176,102

10.6%

174,211

10.5%

350,313

21.1%

1,656,388

Virginia

163,473

7.9%

159,593

7.7%

323,066

15.7%

2,061,612

Texas

161,644

4.1%

166,398

4.3%

328,042

8.4%

3,896,542

North Carolina

155,752

7.1%

146,752

6.7%

302,504

13.7%

2,206,287

Tennessee

121,906

5.6%

119,142

5.5%

241,048

11.0%

2,184,789

Arkansas

105,452

6.7%

111,365

7.1%

216,817

13.8%

1,574,449

Florida

79,099

10.5%

89,659

11.9%

168,758

22.4%

752,619

1,870,186

8.4%

1,850,713

8.3%

3,720,899

16.6%

22,392,414

Kentucky

74,140

3.2%

75,694

3.3%

149,834

6.5%

2,289,905

Maryland

62,817

4.8%

63,963

4.9%

126,780

9.8%

1,295,346

Missouri

49,675

1.5%

52,921

1.6%

102,596

3.1%

3,293,335

West Virginia

15,735

1.3%

22,757

1.9%

38,492

3.2%

1,221,119

8,284

4.1%

9,050

4.5%

17,334

8.6%

202,322

210,651

2.5%

224,385

2.7%

435,036

5.2%

8,302,027

South Subtotal

Border States

Delaware Border Subtotal

(Continued)

428

Chapter 20

Table 20.8 (Continued) Voting Age African American Population Women State (by Region)

Number

Men

Percent of Total Population

Number

Total

Percent of Total Population

Number

Percent of Total Population

Total Population

Other Regions Pennsylvania

57,168

0.7%

64,272

0.8%

121,440

1.6%

7,665,111

New York

49,530

0.5%

45,877

0.5%

95,407

1.0%

9,113,614

Illinois

34,648

0.6%

39,983

0.7%

74,631

1.3%

5,638,591

Oklahoma

33,972

2.1%

36,841

2.2%

70,813

4.3%

1,657,155

District Of Columbia

33,769

10.2%

27,621

8.3%

61,390

18.5%

331,069

Ohio

32,949

0.7%

39,188

0.8%

72,137

1.5%

4,767,121

New Jersey

29,423

1.2%

28,601

1.1%

58,024

2.3%

2,537,167

Indiana

18,307

0.7%

20,651

0.8%

38,958

1.4%

2,700,876

Kansas

16,022

0.9%

17,588

1.0%

33,610

2.0%

1,690,949

Massachusetts

12,418

0.4%

12,591

0.4%

25,009

0.7%

3,366,416

California

7,306

0.3%

8,143

0.3%

15,449

0.6%

2,377,549

Michigan

4,896

0.2%

6,266

0.2%

11,162

0.4%

2,810,173

Connecticut

4,677

0.4%

4,765

0.4%

9,442

0.8%

1,114,756

Iowa

4,343

0.2%

5,443

0.2%

9,786

0.4%

2,224,771

Colorado

3,800

0.5%

4,283

0.5%

8,083

1.0%

799,024

Rhode Island

3,137

0.6%

3,067

0.6%

6,204

1.1%

542,610

Nebraska

2,482

0.2%

3,225

0.3%

5,707

0.5%

1,192,214

Minnesota

2,397

0.1%

3,390

0.2%

5,787

0.3%

2,075,708

Washington

1,881

0.2%

3,120

0.3%

5,001

0.4%

1,141,990

Wisconsin

756

0.0%

1,082

0.0%

1,838

0.1%

2,333,860

Vermont

723

0.2%

975

0.3%

1,698

0.5%

355,956

Wyoming

646

0.4%

1,325

0.9%

1,971

1.4%

145,965

Montana

549

0.1%

851

0.2%

1,400

0.4%

376,053

Oregon

494

0.1%

766

0.1%

1,260

0.2%

672,765

Maine

401

0.1%

476

0.1%

877

0.1%

742,371

Utah

316

0.1%

568

0.2%

884

0.2%

373,351

Arizona

227

0.1%

764

0.4%

991

0.5%

204,354

South Dakota

219

0.0%

341

0.1%

560

0.1%

583,888

New Mexico

212

0.1%

644

0.2%

856

0.3%

327,301

Idaho

193

0.1%

328

0.1%

521

0.2%

325,594

North Dakota

176

0.0%

311

0.1%

487

0.1%

577,056

New Hampshire

165

0.0%

200

0.0%

365

0.1%

430,572

Nevada

145

0.2%

229

0.3%

374

0.5%

81,875

Alaska

 

0.0%

133

0.2%

133

0.2%

64,356

Hawaii

 

0.0%

 

0.0%

0.0%

191,909

358,347

0.6%

383,908

0.6%

742,255

1.2%

61,534,090

2,439,184

2.6%

2,459,006

2.7%

4,898,190

5.3%

92,228,531

Other Regions Subtotal Grand Total

Source: Adapted from Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.



The Enfranchisement of African American Women, 1669–1921 429

Figure 20.1  Distribution of Eligible African American Women Voters by Region, 1910–1930

1910 Census 8.6%

14.7%

76.7%

1920 Census 8.3%

18.9%

72.8%

1930 Census

8.7%

27.1% 64.2%

Southern States

Other Regions

Border States

Source: Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR, 2004), downloaded June 14, 2009. Note: For these years, age of eligibility for voting was 21 years for both men and women.

of all of the voting age African American women in 1910 lived in the South, less than one-tenth (8.6%) lived in the Border States region, while little more than one-seventh (14.7%) lived in all of the other parts of the nation outside of the South and the Border States. The South and the Border States combined accounted for 85.3% of all of the African American women of voting age in the entire nation. Potential African American women voters were still concentrated in two regions spanning sixteen states in 1910. But according to the U.S. Census in 1920, there was a slight shift of African Americans of voting age, both men and women, and the dominance of the South declined a bit from 1910. Table 20.9 (p. 430) shows that during the 1920 presidential election there were nearly 4 million African Americans eligible to vote in the South alone. There were around a half-million in the Border States region and slightly over a million eligible African American voters in other parts of the nation outside of the South and the Border States. Once again, the two regions of the South and the Border states held most of the African Americans of voting age in the nation. But with the decline in the South and increase in other regions, the concentration of African Americans of voting age was spreading to other parts of the nation. Figure 20.1 puts the 1920 census data in full perspective in that the data show that the southern states had 72.8% of the African American women of voting age. The regions outside of the South and the Border States had risen to 18.9% while the Border State region maintained its share at 8.3%. Still, if African American women were going to have an impact on the presidential election of 1920 they would have to do so in the South. But in this region, there was no federal law to protect their right to vote, which portended problems for this electorate. The failure to pass the Lodge Bill in the 1890s undermined not only the Fifteenth Amendment but the promise and potential of the Nineteenth Amendment for African American women. The census data for 1930 presented in Table 20.10 allow the reader to see that the decline in the concentration of voting age African American women in the South and the rise in other parts of the nation was continuing. The table shows that despite the fact that the voting age African American population grew in the South and Border States, it grew more substantially in the other regions of the nation. The population shift was seemingly occurring from the South to the parts of the nation outside of the South and the Border States. And if World War I had become a force of dispersal just prior to 1920, the data for 1930 in this table show that the trend continued long after the war was over. Hence, perhaps the opportunity to escape segregation itself was influencing African American women to migrate out of the region. Looking again at Figure 20.1, the concentration of voting age African American women in the southern states had further declined by 1930. The South then had less than two-thirds (64.2%) of this voting age population, and the other regions of the nation outside of the South and the Border States had increased to more than one-fourth (27.1%) of these female voters, while the Border States region had rebounded to just slightly more than the share of black female potential voters it had in 1910.

430

Chapter 20

Table 20.9  Distribution of African American Voters by Region and State, Census of 1920 Voting Age African American Population Women State (by Region)

Number

Men

Percent of Total Population

Total

Percent of Total Population

Number

Number

Percent of Total Population

Total Population

South Georgia

292,551

10.1%

282,779

9.8% 

575,330

19.9%

2,895,832

Mississippi

227,963

12.7%

225,700

12.6% 

453,663

25.3%

1,790,618

Alabama

225,215

9.6%

215,915

9.2% 

441,130

18.8%

2,348,174

South Carolina

193,456

11.5%

183,474

10.9% 

376,930

22.4%

1,683,724

Texas

188,373

4.0%

196,055

4.2% 

384,428

8.2%

4,663,228

Louisiana

180,628

10.0%

178,623

9.9% 

359,251

20.0%

1,798,509

North Carolina

175,516

6.9%

167,240

6.5% 

342,756

13.4%

2,559,123

Virginia

175,195

7.6%

176,036

7.6% 

351,231

15.2%

2,309,187

Tennessee

124,448

5.3%

120,947

5.2% 

245,395

10.5%

2,337,885

Arkansas

118,295

6.8%

123,939

7.1% 

242,234

13.8%

1,752,204

85,916

8.9%

95,092

9.8% 

181,008

18.7%

968,470

1,987,556

7.9%

1,965,800

7.8% 

3,953,356

15.7%

25,106,954

Florida South Subtotal

Border States Kentucky

70,790

2.9%

73,091

3.0% 

143,881

6.0%

2,416,630

Maryland

68,905

4.8%

73,086

5.0% 

141,991

9.8%

1,449,661

Missouri

57,876

1.7%

63,452

1.9% 

121,328

3.6%

3,404,055

West Virginia

21,319

1.5%

29,826

2.0% 

51,145

3.5%

1,463,701

8,456

3.8%

9,657

4.3% 

18,113

8.1%

223,003

227,346

2.5%

249,112

2.8% 

476,458

5.3%

8,957,050

Delaware Border Subtotal

Other Regions Pennsylvania

88,089

1.0%

103,137

1.2% 

191,226

2.2%

8,720,017

New York

73,285

0.7%

69,259

0.7% 

142,544

1.4%

10,385,227

Illinois

60,604

0.9%

67,846

1.0% 

128,450

2.0%

6,485,280

Ohio

56,087

1.0%

70,853

1.2% 

126,940

2.2%

5,759,394

District Of Columbia

39,626

9.1%

33,822

7.7% 

73,448

16.8%

437,571

New Jersey

38,160

1.2%

37,511

1.2% 

75,671

2.4%

3,155,900

Oklahoma

36,221

1.8%

40,110

2.0% 

76,331

3.8%

2,028,283

Indiana

25,284

0.9%

28,651

1.0% 

53,935

1.8%

2,930,390

Michigan

17,520

0.5%

25,887

0.7% 

43,407

1.2%

3,668,412

Kansas

17,448

1.0%

19,562

1.1% 

37,010

2.1%

1,769,257

Massachusetts

14,862

0.4%

15,550

0.4% 

30,412

0.8%

3,852,356

California

13,146

0.4%

14,393

0.4% 

27,539

0.8%

3,426,861

Connecticut

6,480

0.5%

7,263

0.5% 

13,743

1.0%

1,380,631

Iowa

5,629

0.2%

6,939

0.3% 

12,568

0.5%

2,404,021

Nebraska

4,059

0.3%

5,378

0.4% 

9,437

0.7%

1,296,372

Colorado

3,869

0.4%

4,237

0.5% 

8,106

0.9%

939,629

Rhode Island

3,158

0.5%

3,396

0.6% 

6,554

1.1%

604,397

Minnesota

2,828

0.1%

3,838

0.2% 

6,666

0.3%

2,387,125

Washington

2,103

0.2%

3,105

0.2% 

5,208

0.4%

1,356,621



The Enfranchisement of African American Women, 1669–1921 431

Voting Age African American Population Women State (by Region)

Number

Men

Percent of Total Population

Total

Percent of Total Population

Number

Number

Percent of Total Population

Total Population

Arizona

1,484

0.4%

5,075

1.5% 

6,559

2.0%

334,162

Wisconsin

1,465

0.1%

2,144

0.1% 

3,609

0.1%

2,632,067

New Mexico

763

0.2%

4,046

1.1% 

4,809

1.3%

360,350

Oregon

683

0.1%

937

0.1% 

1,620

0.2%

783,389

Montana

508

0.1%

754

0.1% 

1,262

0.2%

548,889

Utah

452

0.1%

652

0.1% 

1,104

0.2%

449,396

Wyoming

387

0.2%

678

0.3% 

1,065

0.5%

194,402

Maine

384

0.0%

492

0.1% 

876

0.1%

768,014

Idaho

236

0.1%

463

0.1% 

699

0.2%

431,866

South Dakota

205

0.0%

315

0.0% 

520

0.1%

636,547

New Hampshire

159

0.0%

229

0.1% 

388

0.1%

443,083

Vermont

144

0.0%

198

0.1% 

342

0.1%

352,428

North Dakota

129

0.0%

207

0.0% 

336

0.1%

646,872

Nevada

110

0.1%

167

0.2% 

277

0.4%

77,407

Alaska

 

0.0%

 

0.0% 

0.0%

55,036

Hawaii

 

0.0%

 

0.0% 

0.0%

255,881

515,567

0.7%

577,094

0.8% 

1,092,661

1.5%

71,957,533

2,730,469

2.6%

2,792,006

2.6% 

5,522,475

5.2%

106,021,537

Other Regions Subtotal Grand Total

Source: Adapted from Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

Table 20.10  Distribution of African American Voters by Region and State, Census of 1930 Voting Age African American Population Women State (by Region)

Number

Men

Percent of Total Population

Total

Percent of Total Population

Number

Number

Percent of Total Population

Total Population

South Georgia

248,683

8.6%

279,404

9.6%

528,087

18.2%

2,908,506

Mississippi

251,349

12.5%

258,279

12.9%

509,628

25.4%

2,009,821

Alabama

229,903

8.7%

250,047

9.4%

479,950

18.1%

2,646,248

Texas

234,459

4.0%

235,178

4.0%

469,637

8.1%

5,824,715

North Carolina

200,355

6.3%

218,620

6.9%

418,975

13.2%

3,170,276

Louisiana

203,259

9.7%

211,788

10.1%

415,047

19.7%

2,101,593

South Carolina

159,190

9.2%

184,598

10.6%

343,788

19.8%

1,738,765

Virginia

162,285

6.7%

166,935

6.9%

329,220

13.6%

2,421,851

Tennessee

131,776

5.0%

140,198

5.4%

271,974

10.4%

2,616,556

Arkansas

128,795

6.9%

128,335

6.9%

257,130

13.9%

1,854,482

Florida

127,988

8.7%

123,037

8.4%

251,025

17.1%

1,468,211

2,078,042

7.2%

2,196,419

7.6%

4,274,461

14.9%

28,761,024

South Subtotal

(Continued)

432

Chapter 20

Table 20.10 (Continued) Voting Age African American Population Women State (by Region)

Number

Men

Percent of Total Population

Number

Total

Percent of Total Population

Number

Percent of Total Population

Total Population

Border States Maryland

84,881

5.2%

78,583

4.8%

163,464

10.0%

1,631,526

Missouri

75,937

2.1%

74,520

2.1%

150,457

4.1%

3,629,367

Kentucky

71,020

2.7%

69,483

2.7%

140,503

5.4%

2,614,589

West Virginia

37,731

2.2%

29,424

1.7%

67,155

3.9%

1,729,205

Delaware

10,669

4.5%

9,270

3.9%

19,939

8.4%

238,380

Border Subtotal

280,238

2.8%

261,280

2.7%

541,518

5.5%

9,843,067

New York

140,078

1.1%

146,988

1.2%

287,066

2.3%

12,588,066

Pennsylvania

144,324

1.5%

133,031

1.4%

277,355

2.9%

9,631,350

Illinois

115,261

1.5%

111,431

1.5%

226,692

3.0%

7,630,654

Ohio

Other Regions

105,736

1.6%

93,555

1.4%

199,291

3.0%

6,646,697

New Jersey

65,750

1.6%

66,146

1.6%

131,896

3.3%

4,041,334

Michigan

62,139

1.3%

52,207

1.1%

114,346

2.4%

4,842,325

District Of Columbia

41,584

8.5%

46,804

9.6%

88,388

18.2%

486,869

Oklahoma

48,364

2.0%

45,798

1.9%

94,162

3.9%

2,396,040

Indiana

38,250

1.2%

35,392

1.1%

73,642

2.3%

3,238,503

California

28,628

0.5%

28,932

0.5%

57,560

1.0%

5,677,251

Kansas

22,477

1.2%

20,487

1.1%

42,964

2.3%

1,880,999

Massachusetts

16,406

0.4%

16,492

0.4%

32,898

0.8%

4,249,614

Connecticut

9,255

0.6%

9,067

0.6%

18,322

1.1%

1,606,903

Iowa

6,010

0.2%

5,320

0.2%

11,330

0.5%

2,470,939

Nebraska

4,967

0.4%

4,554

0.3%

9,521

0.7%

1,377,963

Colorado

4,189

0.4%

4,381

0.4%

8,570

0.8%

1,035,791

Wisconsin

4,133

0.1%

3,132

0.1%

7,265

0.2%

2,939,006

Minnesota

3,690

0.1%

3,115

0.1%

6,805

0.3%

2,563,953

Rhode Island

2,937

0.4%

3,015

0.4%

5,952

0.9%

687,497

Arizona

4,591

1.1%

2,816

0.6%

7,407

1.7%

435,573

Washington

2,895

0.2%

2,166

0.1%

5,061

0.3%

1,563,396

New Mexico

981

0.2%

787

0.2%

1,768

0.4%

423,317

Oregon

978

0.1%

739

0.1%

1,717

0.2%

953,786

Montana

559

0.1%

402

0.1%

961

0.2%

537,606

Wyoming

560

0.2%

402

0.2%

962

0.4%

225,565

Utah

454

0.1%

352

0.1%

806

0.2%

507,847

Maine

391

0.0%

322

0.0%

713

0.1%

797,423

Idaho

310

0.1%

208

0.0%

518

0.1%

445,032

Nevada

242

0.3%

197

0.2%

439

0.5%

91,058

South Dakota

239

0.0%

181

0.0%

420

0.1%

692,849

New Hampshire

409

0.1%

157

0.0%

566

0.1%

465,293

Vermont

197

0.1%

122

0.0%

319

0.1%

359,611

North Dakota

177

0.0%

101

0.0%

278

0.0%

680,845

Alaska

 

0.0%

 

0.0%

0.0%

59,278

Hawaii

 

0.0%

 

0.0%

 

0.0%

368,336

877,161

1.0%

838,799

1.0%

1,715,960

2.0%

84,598,569

3,235,441

2.6%

3,296,498

2.7%

6,531,939

5.3%

123,202,660

Other Regions Subtotal Total

Source: Adapted from Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.



The Enfranchisement of African American Women, 1669–1921 433

African American Women Voters and the 1920 Presidential Election: Influence or Disenfranchisement The 1920 and 1930 censuses show that African American women of the voting age population were leaving the South for other regions of the country. They were no doubt in search of better jobs and economic opportunities, but could they also have been seeking better electoral and political opportunities? In order to answer that question, if only partly, one needs to analyze the voting impact of African American women and their influence in the 1920 presidential and congressional elections. In the aftermath of the failure of the passage of the Lodge Bill in 1890–1891, southern states finished implementing their procedures and techniques popularized by the “Mississippi Plan” to completely undermine the Fifteenth Amendment and eliminate from voting those freedmen that the Amendment had enfranchised. According to one woman suffragists scholar, Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, “[b]y 1910, as there had been no attempts to overturn the barriers to black suffrage they had erected, Southern Democrats assumed that most Americans now agreed with them that the Fifteenth Amendment had been a mistake and that the South should have been allowed to handle the crucial matter of suffrage without federal interference.”76 Therefore, when faced with the fact that African American women would be enfranchised with the Nineteenth Amendment, southern Democratic leaders, both male and female, “regarded a federal woman suffrage amendment as ‘an extension of the Fifteenth Amendment,’ as it had the same ‘Force Clause’ giving the Congress the power to ‘enforce this article by appropriate legislation.’”77 They could effectively undermine this legislation and inhibit African American females just as they had done to their male counterparts. And when they could not stop the proposed Nineteenth Amendment’s passage in the House of Representatives or in the Senate or keep it from being ratified, they simply returned to the procedures and techniques that they had used in the previous two decades to undermine the Fifteenth Amendment. Thus, undermining began just as the Nineteenth Amendment was passed. Sensing that southern whites were preparing to undermine African American women who intended to register and cast their newly won votes, the NAACP and its Crisis magazine’s editor W.E.B. DuBois called upon African American women to get ready to face opposition and strong resistance. The civil rights organization also readied itself for a regional counterattack on this new enfranchising effort despite its constitutionality. Knowing that no enforcement provision existed, the NAACP launched an effort to watch and investigate the attempts of women and men to register and cast their votes by asking members of the NAACP around the country to write letters and send them back to the national headquarters describing what went on in their locale on election day. Besides asking members to send in letters, the organization also collected newspaper clippings about problems in different states. The association also sent Walter White to Florida to observe and report as well as William Pickens. While Pickens wrote up his investigation in The Nation, the NAACP produced a pamphlet to which both DuBois and White

contributed that revealed the numerous efforts of southern whites to disenfranchise African American women and a few men on that historic election day of November 2, 1920. Although the Republican candidate Warren G. Harding won in a landslide with 60.2% of the vote, the NAACP investigation-based pamphlet showed that African American women had been frequently disenfranchised in the southern states. Table 20.11 (p. 434) is based on the data in the NAACP’s pamphlet describing the findings drawn from participant observations from the South, newspaper clippings, and letters from members. The table tells us that very few African American women were able to exercise their newly acquired right to vote. The information comes from six states—Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia—and primarily from several of the large urban areas in these states (see Map 20.2, p. 435). Despite the fact that the pamphlet data are scattered, piecemeal, and incomplete, these data are enough to suggest that only a few of the African American women who attempted to register actually succeeded. This was not true for white women as indicated in the NAACP pamphlet and in the Hearing before the Committee of the Census in 1920, as described later in this chapter. Secondly, African American women succeeded as well as failed. In the eleven wards in the City of Atlanta, African American women out-registered white women, 2,049 to 1,727. However, when the local white registrar saw what occurred in the Sixth Ward, where 593 African American women registered (versus 319 white women), he had all of the African American women registrations in this ward thrown out. In Americus, Georgia, 250 women tried to register but none of them succeeded. Only 4 of the 600 in Shreveport, Louisiana, made it through the process. Everywhere the success rate was very low or zero. White resistance and opposition were there on day one. According to the NAACP pamphlet, Democrats everywhere resisted while the Republicans supported the registration efforts of African American women, but when Democratic officials challenged the Republican poll officials for assisting, the latter quickly backed down. Beyond the overview of women election data gathered by the NAACP, recent scholarship from Professor Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore has turned up data on African American women voter registration and voting in the state of North Carolina in five of its cities and in a special school tax election in a single African American precinct in the state capital, Raleigh. In this pioneering monograph on African American women politics in North Carolina, the election information is embedded in the historical narrative. Table 20.12 (p. 435) presents the table clearly so that the reader can see how African American women responded to the political opportunity made available with the implementation of the Nineteenth Amendment in the state. Gilmore’s historical detective work reveals in empirical terms some sense of the determination and grit with which these women faced and in some cases overcame difficulties in trying to register in these cities. Professor Gilmore first described how African American women prepared for this voter enfranchising day: The state Association of Colored Women’s Clubs and the NAACP coordinated a registration drive for black women in the Piedmont and the west that took the

434

Chapter 20

Table 20.11  Number and Percentage of African American Women Disenfranchised in the 1920 Presidential Election—The NAACP Investigations Disposition of Women Voter Registrations African American Women Attempted City (by State)

Ward

Number

Registered Number

%

% of Total Registered

White Women Reversed

Registered

Number

%

Number

%

% of Total Registered

Total Number of Registrations

Alabama Birmingham Montgomery

 

Alabama Subtotal

4,500

100

2.2%

 

 

 

 

 

 

700

35

5.0%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5,200

135

2.6%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Florida Jacksonville

6th

 

1,569

 

 

 

 

Georgia Americus Atlanta

 

250

0

0.0%

 

 

 

1st

 

8

 2.7%

 

286

97.3%

294

2nd

 

321

78.5%

 

88

21.5%

409

3rd

 

88

37.8%

 

145

62.2%

233

4th

 

57

24.5%

 

176

75.5%

233

5th

 

160

61.3%

 

101

38.7%

261

6th

 

593

65.0%

593

319

35.0%

912

7th

 

387

90.2%

 

42

9.8%

429

8th

 

256

79.8%

 

65

20.2%

321

9th

 

21

13.2%

 

138

86.8%

159

10th

 

13

4.2%

 

300

95.8%

313

11th

 

Atlanta, Georgia, Subtotal

145 2,049

 

68.4%

 

54.3%

593

100%

28.9%

67

 

31.6%

212

1,727

 

45.7%

3,776

Jackson

 

320

17.1%

 

1,550

82.9%

1,870

Savannah

 

1,049

43.4%

 

1,369

 

56.6%

2,418

Georgia Subtotal

 

3,418

42.4%

593

4,646

 

57.6%

8,064

New Orleans

 

12

600

4

5,000

 

~87%

5,700–5,800

 

 

 

 

 

17.3%

Louisiana Shreveport

0.7%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

Mississippi Natchez

 

26

Hampton

85

50

Richmond

1,000

Virginia Subtotal

1,085

  Virginia 58.8%

 

 

700–800

~75%

~13%

 

750–850

~74%

 

 

 

Source: Adapted from National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Disfranchisement of Colored Americans in the Presidential Election of 1920 (New York: NAACP Pamphlet, n.d.), pp. 1–22. Calculations by the authors.

Democrats by surprise, even as they cried wolf about large numbers of black women registering in the east. . . . [Leader] Charlotte Hawkins Brown . . . [b]y the end of September, . . . ordered masses of literature from the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs to be distributed in every city. Then, she proceeded to mastermind black women’s registration through the

state association, working closely with chapters of the NAACP, by now established in North Carolina’s urban areas.78 Gilmore found that these pre-organizational efforts were both essential and paramount because while whites had not believed Negro women wanted to register to vote, when faced



The Enfranchisement of African American Women, 1669–1921 435 Map 20.2  States and Cities in which the NAACP Investigated Disenfranchisement of African American Women in the 1920 Presidential Election

PA

IA IN IL 0

100

NJ

MD

OH

DE Richmond, VA

WV

Hampton, VA

200

miles

Virginia

KY MO

NC TN AR

OK

Atlanta, GA Birmingham, AL

NM Shreveport, LA

Georgia

Alabama

Natchez, MS

Montgomery, AL Mississippi

TX

SC

Jackson, GA

Savannah, GA

Americus, GA

Jacksonville, FL 0

Louisiana

100

200

miles

New Orleans, LA Florida

Source: Table 20.11.

Table 20.12  1920 Voter Registration of African American Women (and Men) in Selected Cities of North Carolina

Women

City Ashville Charlotte Greensboro Salisbury

Number 75a

Percent of Registered African Americans

Number

Percent of Registered African Americans

Total Registered African Americans

 

 

 

   

 

32.7%

189

67.3%

281

1,735

 

 

 

119b

 

City Number

Wilson

62

33.7%

122

66.3%

184

 819

Actual Total

685

 

 

 

465

2,554

 

 

Author’s Total

1,000

African American Women

Men

337 92

Special School Tax Election September, 1920

White Women

African American

 

Raleigh

Number of Precincts 1

Registered

Voted

Number

Number

Percent of Registered Black Women

19

17

89.5%

Source: Adapted from Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 220–224, 308–310. a The number actually registered out of 600 African American women who attempted to register. b The reported number of registered African American women, but the registration books indicate only nine (9) were actually registered.

436

Chapter 20

with this effort, they responded with their white supremacy techniques and procedures. Professor Gilmore writes: “On the next to the last Saturday of the registration period, African American women across the state marched together to the registrars. White Democrats, who had manipulated so cavalierly the threat of black women voters, stood by incredulously on that day as black women passed the literacy test and entered their names on the books.”79 However, as the voter registration period continued the very surprised and “caught off guard” White Democrats vigorously and bitterly reacted. Professor Gilmore vividly describes this white counterattack: The registrars, Democratic (and occasionally Republican) functionaries at the lowest level, apparently had not been forewarned about how to handle such an occasion. Without a plan, they pulled out the little-used literacy tests; the black women read them and registered. But by the next week—the fourth and last Saturday—the state Democratic Executive Committee had issued marching orders to the registrars. They made whites and African Americans form separate lines, took everyone in the white line first, spent inordinate amounts of time quizzing the black women, failed them whenever possible, and then turned away the hundreds left in line at the end of the day.80 Finally, “[o]n the last Saturday, the registrars [in Ashville] must have applied the test more deviously; in one precinct alone, more than 100 black women applied but only 2 passed.”81 Thus, all of the pre-registration preparation by Ms. Brown enabled some of the African American women in the urban cities to prevail and become registered voters, as Table 20.12 (p. 435) shows. Moreover, the table reveals that the herculean efforts made by the newly enfranchised African American women energized African American men, and that they successfully registered in two of the North Carolina cities. Professor Gilmore closes her book by noting that “[e]xisting registration books reveal a scattered few African American voters in 1918, but they record hundreds by 1928.”82 But in addition to the NAACP and Gilmore studies, Professor Paul Ortiz has also analyzed African American women and men voter registration in Florida in 1920.83 Using the Gilmore study as a guide, Professor Ortiz revealed how he went about data gathering in Florida: I have been able to identify the names, ages, and occupations of over 1,500 African Americans who registered to vote for the 1920 presidential election. While this represents a fraction of those who registered, it does give a general idea of the scope of this campaign. These figures are taken from six counties: Duval, Marion, Columbia, Putnam, Palm Beach, and Dade. Due to the paucity of election records in Florida, this sample is far from being complete. It does, however, give a good cross-section of urban (Jacksonville), small-town (Palatka), and rural (Citra and McIntosh) communities.84

Professor Ortiz agreed to share his voter registration data on Jacksonville with us for this project. Of the Jacksonville data he wrote: “I have compiled this voting list by cross-referencing affidavits presented to the U.S. Congress with Jacksonville city directories.”85 Based on Professor Ortiz’s Jacksonville data, we constructed Table 20.13, which shows a grand total of 1,364 African Americans he identified as registered in the city, 786 women and 578 males, or 57.6% and 42.4%, respectively. Beyond the gender breakdown in the 1920 voter registration, there is marital status information as well as occupational information. The majority of those who registered in the city in 1920 were married individuals, and the vast majority of these registrars were in the “working class or non-professional” class. Thus, one can conclude that in this sample, the African American professional-based middle class did not step forward in the initial voter registration lines in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1920. And this finding conflicts with conventional wisdom that says the higher one’s socioeconomic status, the more likely it is that the person will register and vote. The finding here about Jacksonville corroborates similar findings in Chapter 24 (Rare Data) for Savannah, Georgia. But this should not come as any great surprise given that the African American community had a very small professional class by 1920 and had to rely upon its lower classes to generate its registered voters. The Paul Ortiz data are of particular benefit because they show the occupational status of registrants, not merely their numbers. Thus, these three studies—the overview study of the NAACP, the case study of North Carolina, and that of Florida— provide empirical evidence of African American women trying to exercise their Nineteenth Amendment voting rights, the difficulties they faced, and how some of them prevailed against the same type of odds faced by their earlier and contemporary male counterparts, as well as the occupational status of some of these first African American women voter registrants in 1920. There is very limited empirical information on the relationship of different types of employment in the African American community to voting behavior. Nevertheless, the struggles of these lower class women laid the foundation for an even larger and wider struggle. After the November 2, 1920, election was over, “[t]he NAACP presented evidence of discrimination against Black female voters to Congress in 1920. Several African Americans on the NAACP board of directors joined in the fight to end discrimination against the women. They were vice presidents Archibald Grimke, Mary B. Talbert, and executive officers James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, Addie Hunton, and William Pickens.”86 Professor Terborg-Penn added: “They gave testimony at the congressional hearing in connection with the proposed Tinkham Bill to reduce representation in Congress from states where women were restricted from voting.”87 This congressional hearing, which was held by the Committee on the Census, dealt with the apportionment of Representatives for the House as required by the U.S. Constitution every ten years. Unlike the earlier effort to use the Committee on the Census to reduce the southern congressional delegations as required under the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was focused on African American males, this hearing on congressional reapportionment



The Enfranchisement of African American Women, 1669–1921 437 Table 20.13  African American Registered Voters in Jacksonville, Florida, by Gender, Marital Status, and Occupation: Paul Ortiz Data, 1920 Category

Number

Percent of Total

Gender Male Female

578

42.4% 

786

57.6% 

Marital Status Married

788

Widowed Other/Not Given

57.8% 

90

6.6% 

486

35.6% 

Occupation Laborer

220

16.1% 

Laundry Worker

139

10.2% 

Porter

39

2.9% 

Maid

28

2.1% 

Carpenter

24

1.8% 

Cook

22

1.6% 

Letter Carrier

20

1.5% 

Domestic Worker

19

1.4% 

Dressmaker

15

1.1% 

Teacher

15

1.1% 

Grocer

12

0.9% 

Driver

11

0.8% 

“Furnished Rooms”/Boarders

11

0.8% 

Barber

10

0.7% 

Tailor

10

0.7% 

Clerk

8

0.6% 

Cigar Maker

8

0.6% 

Drayman

8

0.6% 

Chauffeur

7

0.5% 

Pastor

7

0.5% 

153

11.2% 

578

42.4% 

Other (Frequency < = 6) Not Given

a

Total Number of Enumerated Voters = 1,364 Source: Paul Ortiz, emailed data to Hanes Walton, Jr., January 7, 2011. Calculations by the authors. a

Other occupations, each of frequency equal to 6 or less.

was focused on data presented by the NAACP that included a list of 971 African American women and men who had registered in Florida and had received certificates with numbers but nevertheless were not permitted to vote when they arrived at the polls. The list had the names, street addresses, and voter registration certificate numbers for each of the 971 voters in Florida.88 At this hearing were NAACP lobbyists and officers William Pickens (Full Secretary), James Weldon Johnson (Secretary), Walter White (Assistant Secretary), and James Cobb (NAACP Legal Council Washington, D.C.). Also present was William Monroe Trotter of the National Equal Rights League (NERL) in Boston

who presented to the Committee on the Census a list of the estimated number of African Americans disenfranchised in ten of the southern states (excluding Tennessee).89 The third African American suffrage lobbying group at the Committee on the Census hearings was the Colored American Council (CAC), located in Washington, D.C., represented by its general counsel, Atty. George H. Murray. The purpose of the CAC was to examine and study any such “legislation as may come up which will in any way affect the welfare of the colored people.”90 Murray argued that federal elections should be separated from state elections and that corrupt practices that led to African American disenfranchisement should be removed from the federal process. And as noted earlier, both the Committee Chairman Siegel and Congressman Tinkham strongly sided with the different African American lobbyists. But all of these investigations and testimonies came to nothing due to the southern congressmen persuading their colleagues that no discrimination took place because African American women did not really want to vote. Hence, the discrimination continued. At this point, African American women went to the 1921 national convention of the League of Women Voters, which had in 1920 changed its name from NAWSA, and asked their help with this disenfranchisement problem. Southern white women threatened to walk out of the convention. A compromise was arrived at which allowed the African American women to speak, but the organization took no action on their presentation. Next came entreaties to the National Woman’s Party organization, but these African American women “were totally rebuffed.”91 Thus, requests for investigations and support for additional congressional investigations fell on deaf ears, and the process of undermining their vote in the South proceeded apace. Therefore, the leading historian of the African American women suffragist movement in America concluded by remarking: “Unlike Black men, who had been disfranchised within twenty years after the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, Black women had lost the vote within less than a decade.”92 Nevertheless, the few surviving voters carried the struggle onward, and finally the Martin Luther King, Jr., drive for the 1965 Voting Rights Act restored both Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendment rights to African American men and women. When the Nineteenth Amendment conveyed upon southern African American women their suffrage rights in 1920, women in the South began seeking not just the vote but public office. Virginia’s statewide election of 1921 featured prominent African American businesswoman Maggie L. Walker in the campaign for the Superintendent of Public Instruction. In 1903 Walker had become the first woman to preside over a bank in the United States with the founding of St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond, one of the oldest black financial institutions in the country that continues today as Consolidated Bank and Trust Company. Walker joined African American newspaperman John Mitchell, Jr., on the Lily-Black Republican ticket. (This party was normally called the Black and Tan Republicans, but since the white Republicans had called their ticket the Lily-White Republicans, Mitchell, who was running for governor, responded in kind.) Table 20.14 offers a summary

438

Chapter 20 from the northern states, the African American vote was primarily found in the big urban centers, and these data reveal that a similar pattern was also occurring in the South. However, there was a rural presence to the African American electorate reflected in this 1920s data, especially in the African American majority counties. Clearly there was an imbalance, but the African American electorate by the 1920s could be found in both the urban and rural areas of the nation. These data could lead one to believe that the African American electorate supported the white supremacy candidates, Democrat Hart and Lily-White Republican Otey, more strongly than they supported the African American female candidate and pioneer banker, Walker. Nothing could be further from the truth. Virginia had disenfranchised the African American (male) electorate by means of a literacy test (with a property exemption) in its state constitution in 1901. Thus, the few votes that Walker received came from bold and courageous African American female voters and the few male voters who registered and then turned out to vote in this first state election where women were now a part of the electorate.93

of this election return data based on African American majority counties, white majority counties, and white majority countyequivalent cities (there were no such African American majority independent cities in the state). This table reveals for the very first time the level of electoral support garnered by all of the candidates for superintendent of public instruction (for full countyby-county results, see the Appendix). In the twenty-three African American majority counties, banker Walker finished third with 692 votes (4.3%), Elizabeth Otey came in second with 1,950 votes (12.0%), and Democrat Harris Hart won the vote in these counties with 13,564 (83.7%). In the seventy-seven white majority counties the rank order stayed the same but Walker received 2,610 votes (or 1.9% of the votes in these counties), Otey received 48,488 votes (35.5%), and 85,530 votes (62.6%) went for Democrat Hart. In the twenty-three independent cities, all with white majorities, Walker got 3,689 votes and 6.6%—her highest number of votes and percentage—while Otey got 8,972 (16.0%), and Democrat Hart attained 43,381 (77.4%). Overall, Democrat Hart won the election and all three county/city categories with 142,475 votes (68.2%). Otey was a distant second with 59,410 votes (28.4%), and Walker finished third with 6,991 votes (6.6%). Table 20.14 (which also appears in a fuller version in the Appendix) also tells us that in the twenty-three African American majority counties only 692 voters turned out for Walker, while in the seventy-seven white majority counties she received 2,610 votes, and eventually from the twenty-three independent cities Walker received her largest number of votes, over half of her total vote. Thus, these results show the sizable urban nature and scope of the African American electorate following the enfranchisement of African American women. In the voting data

Summary and Conclusions on the Enfranchisement of African American Women The seeds of the failure of the Nineteenth Amendment for African American women were already planted in its lack of an effective enforcement procedure. Congress, which had seen the Fifteenth Amendment fail in the South because of the removal of effective enforcement mechanisms, also rendered the Nineteenth Amendment ineffective for African American women at its conception.

County/City County Citya

White

County

African American

Racial Majority

Table 20.14  Summary of Election Results by County and Racial Majority for Superintendent of Public Instruction in Virginia, 1921

Statistic

Elizabeth L. Otey

Harris Hart

Black & Tan Republican

Lily White Republican

Democrat

Votes

Percent

Votes

Percent

Votes

Percent

Total Votes

Total

692

4.3%

1,950

12.0%

13,564

83.7%

16,206

Mean

30

4.3%

85

12.0%

590

83.7%

705

Median

24

4.0%

70

14.3%

520

82.8%

628

Total

2,610

1.9%

48,488

35.5%

85,530

62.6%

136,628

Mean

34

1.9%

630

35.5%

1,111

62.6%

1,774

Median

24

1.7%

378

28.5%

907

68.8%

1,476

Total

3,689

6.6%

8,972

16.0%

43,381

77.4%

56,042

Mean

160

6.6%

390

16.0%

1,886

77.4%

2,437

Median Commonwealth of Virginia

Maggie L. Walker

93

5.4%

236

16.7%

883

76.0%

1,287

Total

6,991

3.3%

59,410

28.4%

142,475

68.2%

208,876

Mean

57

3.3%

483

28.4%

1,158

68.2%

1,698

Median

28

2.3%

243

20.3%

843

74.3%

1,118

Sources: Adapted from Secretary of the Commonwealth, Annual Report to the Governor and General Assembly of Virginia (Richmond, Virginia: Davis Bottom, 1922), pp. 423–424; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors. a

County-equivalent city.



The Enfranchisement of African American Women, 1669–1921 439

Although the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment for equal rights called for the reduction of a state’s congressional representation as a consequence for using its powers to discriminate, that provision, while the focus of several pieces of congressional legislation, simply could not pass Congress. Both the African American female and male suffrage struggle against southern disenfranchisement would see an effort via the House of Representatives’ Committee of the Census to use the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment to halt the southern states’ racial disenfranchisement. Although these two major efforts in 1901 and 1920–1921 failed, the legislative outcome for African American women was quite different. After the 1920–1921 committee hearing, “the United States Congress failed to reapportion the House of Representatives. In fact, no reapportionment occurred between 1911 and the 1930 census.”94 This was the very first time in the nation’s history that constitutionally mandated reapportionment for the House of Representatives did not take place. And in the sole scholarly study on this matter, historian Charles Eagles noted that “the right of southern blacks to vote” while a complicated issue, had little impact on Congress’s failure to pass a reapportionment bill for an entire decade (1920s). Professor Eagles has written: “In the three previous reapportionments, Congress had passed legislation within nine months of receiving the new census data,” but in this case the urban-rural conflict simply kept it from occurring.95 Thus, race appears to have had nothing to do with it. Be that as it may, after the congressional hearing, Congress never passed a reapportionment bill in the decade. But it was these types of failed limited Republican legislative efforts that socialized particularly African American women into their initial political partisanship and mobilized them to help create an African American Women’s Division in the Republican National Committee. Essentially, any objection mustered by southern congressmen was acceptable as legitimate enough to allow the disenfranchisement first of freedmen and later of African American women to continue. Even when the question was raised of the legal right of the federal government to regulate federal elections, supporters proved unable to dispatch and dispel the old “states’ rights” argument. Thus, in the final analysis, women suffrage rights as proclaimed by the Nineteenth Amendment meant in the South white women suffrage rights from the day that it was implemented. And with a few and scattered exceptions, this arrangement became accepted by the nation that passed the Amendment for the next forty-five years. The political party that gave the nation these suffrage innovations and expansions, the Republican Party, originator of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, had long since moved its base of support out of the South and abandoned the enforcement of these constitutional provisions. The Nineteenth Amendment provided no change to this pattern of malign neglect.

Notes   1. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “African American Women and the Vote: An Overview,” in Ann Gordon, Bettye Collier-Thomas, John Bracey, Ariene Avakian, and Joyce Borkman, eds. African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), p. 19.

  2. See Lisa Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), pp. 108–148.   3. Rayford Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York: Collier Books, 1965), p. 102.   4. Ibid., p. 103.   5. Ibid., p. 104.  6. Ibid.   7. U.S. Congress, House Committee on the Census, Apportionment of Representatives, Hearings on HR 14498, HR 15021, HR 15158, and HR 15217. 66th Congress, 3rd Session, 1920 and 1921 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1921).   8. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 173.   9. Terborg-Penn, p. 2. 10. John Gilman Kolp, Gentlemen and Freeholders: Electoral Politics in Colonial Virginia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 41. For another pioneering use of poll books to study voting in two counties in colonial Maryland, Frederick and Kent, see David Bohmer, “The Maryland Electorate and the Concept of a Party System in the Early National Period,” in Joel Silbey, Allan Bogue, and William Flanigan, (eds.) The History of American Electoral Behavior (Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 150. The author writes: “In Frederick and Kent Counties, a series of poll books have survived for eight elections held between 1796 and 1802.” Ibid. 11. Kolp, p. 41. 12. Keyssar, p. 54. 13. Marion Thompson Wright, “Negro Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1875,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 33 (April 1948), p. 172. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., p. 173. 16. Ibid. 17. Quoted in ibid., 175. 18. Ibid., pp. 173–174. 19. Ibid., p. 174. 20. Ibid. 176. 21. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 37. 22. Ibid., p. 121. 23. Wright, pp. 213–224. 24. Terborg-Penn, “African American Women and the Vote,” p. 15. 25. Margaret Washington, Sojourner Truth’s America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), pp. 337–338. 26. Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, p. 162. 27. Washington, p. 336. 28. Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, p. 26. 29. Washington, p. 341. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., p. 342. 33. Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor; University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), pp. 189–190. 34. Washington, p. 346. 35. Keyssar, p. 179. 36. Washington, p. 348. 37. Ibid. 38. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, p. 34. 39. Ann D. Gordon, “Woman Suffrage (Not Universal Suffrage) by Federal Amendment,” in Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, ed. Votes for Women! The Woman Suffrage Movement in Tennessee, the South, and the Nation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), p. 7.

440

Chapter 20

40. Bettye Collier-Thomas, “Francis Ellen Watkins Harper: Abolitionist and Feminist Reformer, 1825–1911,” in Gordon, Collier-Thomas, Bracey, Avakian, and Berkman, p. 51. 41. Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, p. 34. 42. Collier-Thomas, p. 51. 43. Cynthia Neverdon-Morton, “Advancement of the Race through African American Women’s Organizations in the South, 1895–1925,” in Gordon, Collier-Thomas, Bracey, Avakian, and Berkman, p. 125. 44. Evelyn Brook Higginbotham, “Club Women and Electoral Politics in the 1920s,” ibid., p. 140. 45. Gordon, “Woman Suffrage by Federal Amendment,” p. 6. 46. Ibid. 47. Keyssar, p. 185. 48. Ibid. 49. Washington, pp. 351–352. 50. Paul Boller, Jr., Presidential Campaigns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 131. 51. Ibid. 52. Gordon, “Woman Suffrage by Federal Amendment,” p. 8. 53. Keyssar, p. 185. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., p. 186. 56. Gordon, “Woman Suffrage by Federal Amendment,” p. 15. 57. Materson, p. 16. 58. Ibid., p. 20. 59. Ibid., p. 41. 60. Ibid., p. 58. 61. Ibid. See also Ellen Carol DuBois, “Taking the Law into Their Own Hands: Voting Women during Reconstruction,” in Donald Rogers, Voting and the Spirit of American Democracy: Essays on the History of Voting and Voting Rights in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), pp. 67–82. 62. Materson, p. 60. 63. Quoted in Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “Clubwomen and Electoral Politics in the 1920s,” in Gordon, p. 138. 64. Materson, p. 99. 65. Ibid., p. 105. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid., p. 99. 68. Deskins, Walton, and Puckett, pp. 306–315. 69. Materson, p. 106. 70. Ibid., p. 108. 71. Ibid., p. 100. 72. Ibid., pp. 100, 114. 73. Keyssar, p. 217. 74. For a detailed and systematic study of how southerners and particularly southern women responded see Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New

Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 75. For a comprehensive analysis of this struggle see Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “The Politics of the Anti-Woman Suffrage Agenda: African Americans Respond to Conservatism,” in Tate and Randolph, pp. 69–84. 76. Wheeler, New Women of the New South, p. 19. 77. Ibid. 78. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 218. 79. Ibid., p. 219. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid., p. 221. 82. Ibid., p. 224. 83. Paul Ortiz, “‘Eat Your Bread without Butter, But Pay Your Poll Tax!’ Roots of the Florida Voter Registration Movement, 1919–1920,” in Charles Payne and Adam Green (eds.) Time Longer than Rope: A Century of African American Activism (New York: New York University Press, 2003), pp. 196–229. 84. Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 315–316, footnote 21. 85. Ibid., p. 317, footnote 46. 86. Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, p. 154. 87. Ibid. 88. House, Hearings, 1920 and 1921, pp. 61–67 for the complete list. Professor Paul Ortiz took the names on the list and used city directories, deeds, and other sources to check the degree of accuracy in the list. 89. Ibid., p. 117. 90. Ibid., p. 28. 91. Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, p. 155. 92. Ibid., p. 156. 93. The election return data for Maggie L. Walker does not appear in the Alexander Heard and Donald Strong, eds., Southern Primaries and Elections, 1920–1949 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1950), pp. 192–206 compendium simply because it collected data only for governor, lieutenant governor, senator, the 1948 presidential election, and selected statewide referenda. Hence, to get the Walker data one had to get it from the state archives. Therefore, this data has rarely been seen in its entirety at the county and independent city levels. 94. Charles Eagles, Democracy Delayed: Congressional Reapportionment and Urban-Rural Conflict in the 1920s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), p. ix. 95. Ibid., p. 51.

CHAPTER 21

The Electoral Revolt of African American Voters in 1920–1921 and Beyond Motives and Strategies for African American Satellite Parties

442

The Roots and Rising of the Black and Tan Republicans

443

The African American Electoral Revolt in the 1920 Elections: State and National Elections

445

Table 21.1 Votes and Percentages for the Black and Tan Republican Candidates and Opposition Parties in Arkansas, Florida, Texas, and Virginia, 1920–1928

447

Table 21.2 Votes and Percentages for the Black and Tan Republican Candidates and Opposition Parties in Black and White Majority Counties, 1920–1921

448

The Longitudinal Voting Behavior of the Black and Tan Republicans: Mississippi and South Carolina

449

Table 21.3 Comparing the Republican Vote of the Black and Tans vs. Lily-Whites in Racial Majority Counties, 1920–1921

450

Table 21.4 Total and Factional Republican Vote in Mississippi for the Presidential Elections of 1928–1956

451

Figure 21.1 Black and Tan vs. Lily-White Vote Percentages for Republican Presidential Candidates in Mississippi, 1928–1956

452

Figure 21.2 Black and Tan vs. Lily-White Vote Percentages for Republican Presidential Candidates in African American Majority Counties of Mississippi, 1928–1956

452

Figure 21.3 Black and Tan vs. Lily-White Vote Percentages for Republican Presidential Candidates in White Majority Counties of Mississippi, 1928–1956

453

Figure 21.4 Black and Tan Vote Percentages for Republican Presidential Candidates in African American vs. White Majority Counties of Mississippi, 1928–1956

453

Table 21.5 Vote of Republican Factions in South Carolina for Selected Presidential, Senatorial, and Gubernatorial Elections, 1920–1952

454

Figure 21.5 Percentages of Republican Presidential Votes for Black and Tans vs. Lily-Whites in South Carolina, 1920, 1936, 1940, 1944, and 1952

455

Summary and Conclusions on the Electoral Revolt of the Black and Tan Republicans

456

Map 21.1 States with Black and Tan Gubernatorial and Senatorial Candidates in the African American Electoral Revolt of 1920–1921

457

Notes 457

442

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Chapter 21

nfranchisement of African American women with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 led to a coalition with the few remaining African American males enfranchised by the Fifteenth Amendment, those who had not been disenfranchised by the southern states’ new techniques. This coalition in six of the eleven southern states openly rebelled against their state Republican parties and the national Republican Party as well. This African American voter rebellion until recently received little attention in major scholarly works, the sole exceptions being V.O. Key, Jr.’s, classic Southern Politics in State and Nation1 and Alexander Heard and Donald Strong (eds.) Southern Primaries and Elections, 1920–1949, which recorded this coalition’s national-, state-, and county-level votes.2 However, several recent studies in African American politics have uncovered and reexamined these 1920 and 1921 electoral revolts in which the African American electorate refused to be excluded from participation and voting in the American political process.3 And at least two of these electoral rebellions continued throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Therefore, this chapter will present for the very first time a comprehensive and systematic portrait of how the African American electorate, men and women, used the Black and Tan Republican satellite (or parallel) parties in 1920 and beyond to rebel against (1) the disenfranchisement that their national Republican allies permitted, (2) the state Republican parties’ purging them from their ranks and renaming themselves the Lily-White Republicans in order to become more attractive to southern white voters, and (3) the use of Republican National Committee state patronage to rebuild the Republican party in the South not as a biracial organization but as one committed to White Supremacy. Had such efforts gone unchallenged, the South would have had essentially a two-party system in which both of the major political parties embraced White Supremacy. The presence and participation of the Black and Tan Republicans continually stalled and delayed this possibility. The Black and Tans limited the region to one white supremacist party (Democratic). And in time, these African American satellite Republican partisans, even though without clearly planning it, eventually gave birth to a movement that indirectly undermined and eroded the Democratic party’s White Supremacy stance, its supporters, and thereby, the political ideology. The 1967 doctoral dissertation of Professor Thomas Cripps, The Lily White Republicans: The Negro, The Party, and The South in the Progressive Era, describes and explains the rising factionalism inherent in the southern Republican parties in the states of the old Confederacy during the period from the election of William McKinley in 1896 through the end of Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s two terms in 1921. The eight years of this Democratic administration left the two southern factions, the Lily-Whites and the Black and Tans, without a federal patronage base and little political support to survive. Hence, the treatment that the Black and Tans had to endure during this period of disenfranchisement and segregation set the groundwork for revolts that would come in 1920 and beyond. Although Cripps’s work is the only one on this period and this budding factionalism, there are two other works that cover this period: Richard Sherman, The Republican Party and Black Americans from McKinley to Hoover,

1896–1933, which covers national matters and African Americans as participants in these events and their relationships with presidents; and Vincent DeSantis, Republicans Face the Southern Question—The New Departure, 1877–1897, which deals with how Republican presidents from Rutherford B. Hayes to McKinley tried to rebuild and re-organize the southern Republican Party at the expense of African Americans so that it would appeal to southern whites to take leadership positions. Embedded in this book is a continuing discussion of how the national policies of these presidents generated the seeds of party antagonisms that led to a racial break in the Texas Republican Party in 1889, a break that eventually covered all of the states of the South and launched the racial factionalism that would continue into the Progressive Era. To be sure, both works mention these two racial factions, but their main focus is on national policies, Republican presidents, and the Republican National Committee and conventions. When read together, these two books and the doctoral dissertation offer a near-comprehensive portrait that is systematic in nature. Left out of this narrative portrait are the empirical data that these factions generated, and our study provides this extant but rarely used election data as these two southern factions competed with each other beginning in the 1920s and continuing into the 1950s. It is essential that the reader understand that our analysis is organized into two major categories. First, we explore the Black and Tan factions in the 1920 state and national elections. The 1920 election revolt was a non-recurring one for the majority of states where the Black and Tans rebelled. Second, we look at the continuing/longitudinal state and national elections, i.e. those that recurred over time. And then we close with a summary perspective on these two different types of Black and Tan revolts for a collective portrait of this factional party behavior, in order to understand empirically some the voting patterns of the African American electorate in this time frame.

Motives and Strategies for African American Satellite Parties The tool used by the African American women and men voters to make their revolt was a satellite political party, the Black and Tan Republicans. A satellite political party is a partisan organization follower or orbiter of one of the major parties—in this case Democrat or Republican—at the state or local levels. This type of political party takes as its name a portion of the national party with which it identifies, e.g., the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), the Black and Tan Republican, or the Lily-White Republican Party.4 Such parties have emerged at least in the African American political community as a consequence of intraparty factionalism over the issue of race or the failure of one of the state political parties to allow the full inclusion and involvement of African Americans in their decision making, leadership, or support for elective office. In many instances, the leaders of these satellite parties in the African American community have longstanding grievances about being voters and party workers but being barred from all but minor political offices and positions as well as influence on public policies and platform positions. Usually, these minor party and elective positions require little more than the mobilization of members within their own



The Electoral Revolt of African American Voters in 1920–1921 and Beyond 443

communities to vote on election day. Once the state-level party splits, the two different groups tend to try and build an electoral and political base within their own racial communities. And after they create a political base, these fledging political groups attend national political conventions during presidential election cycles and seek political recognition and approval of the national party organization with the goal of being designated the official state party. Such recognition would make them the recipients and dispensers of the national party’s patronage for that particular state. By definition the African American satellite (or parallel) political “party is a twofold quest for national party acceptance and for the acquisition of power, whereas the black separate party is primarily concerned with a single goal, the acquisition of power. To be sure, both types of parties seek to be accepted by the voters.”5 Acceptance by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) or the Republican National Committee (RNC) would be conveyed by the Credential Committee at the party’s national convention. If necessary, the Credential Committee’s report or recommendation can be placed before the entire national convention for a final vote. That vote is always final and there is no way to appeal the national convention’s decision. The electoral base of the satellite (or parallel) party is not as important as that of a separate, independent political party because the satellite party lives and dies off of supporting and endorsing the major party candidate that eventually gets the nomination (whether presidential, senatorial, congressional, or statewide). The successful selection of the winning nominee prior to the national convention’s selection ensures the party leaders of the satellite organization all of the state patronage for the next four years. Separate political parties, on the other hand, begin without an established voter base and must develop one within a few years, or they will cease to exist as early supporters desert it. Satellite parties also require some carefully honed persuasive tactics at the national party conventions. Satellite party leaders who are delegates to these conventions must provide evidence: (1) that the currently recognized state party is disloyal to the national party, that is, in the forthcoming election that the currently recognized state party has planned to vote for the candidate of another political party; (2) that the state party is not representative of all the people in the state, usually that African Americans are forbidden legally or otherwise from party participation; (3) that the state party uses its powers and candidates to deny certain groups equality and representative government; (4) that the current state party refuses to abide by the national party’s constitutional principles, and therefore refuses to stop repression of a particular groups; and (5) that this newly created satellite party is legally, morally, and electorally superior to the existing one. Satellite parties, particularly those organized and created within the African American community, are both moral and legal political organizations. They seek empowerment out of a sense of injustice and moral corruption. And in the end, their thrust is toward reform and political elevation in American society, not simply power for power’s sake. Thus, the political strategies used by satellite parties to attain their objectives are: (1) delegate seating challenges at national Republican and Democratic conventions before their Credential Committees, (2) congressional seating challenges in the House

of Representatives or Senate, (3) electoral challenges to unseat incumbents in state and local elections, and (4) expulsion of elected state officials from the national political party. And the satellite party can use one or all of these strategies and use them in one election after another. Failure simply means that they can try again, four years hence. Finally, there is partisanship difference between Democratic and Republican satellite parties, particularly inside the African American community. The African American Democratic satellite parties varied over the years, including (to name three major examples): (1) South Carolina Progressive Democratic Party (SCPDP), (2) Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), and the (3) National Democratic Party of Alabama (NDPA). The Republican satellite parties were all called the Black and Tan Republican Party and their opposition simply the Lily-White Republican Party, across all of the eleven southern states of the Old Confederacy year after year. In fact, this stable and continuous existence of the Black and Tans made them easier than satellite Democrats to track with electoral data. On the other hand, scholarly books and articles have discussed and analyzed information and electoral outcomes for the MFDP but never mention the SCPDP, which predated the MFDP by twenty years, or they compare it with the later NDPA. Hence, it becomes difficult to see patterns and trends in party behavior in different states in the South. Nor can one develop a collective portrait of both types of satellite parties and see their larger impact on the American party system. In fact, because of this narrow focus on the MFDP, such crucial conceptualization as continuity and linkage is even more difficult to arrive at.

The Roots and Rising of the Black and Tan Republicans The initial racial split in the Republican Party occurred in Texas in 1889, but its roots stretch to the birth of the Republican Party in the South in 1867 and 1868 when the freedmen acquired the right to vote in the region.6 Tensions, strife, annoyances, antagonisms, rivalries, jealousies, and group bitterness gradually emerged as white Republicans gave themselves all of the nominations for the top electoral positions and then relegated all of the minor and limited term positions to the freedmen. Initially and then thereafter, at the presidential level, a few freedmen were selected as delegates to the Republican National Conventions, but never made up a majority of delegates even from states in which freedmen were the majority of voters.7 At the congressional level, freedmen like Hiram Revels in Mississippi were occasionally nominated to serve out unfinished terms of U.S. Senators. Of Revels’ senatorial seat, African American historian Buford Satcher has written: “Historians have recorded that Revels was elected to fill the vacant seat of Jefferson Davis [President of the Confederate States of America] but that is contrary to historical fact, for both of the Mississippi seats in the United States Senate were vacant.”8 Another example is Georgia Congressman Jefferson Long who served a brief unfinished term in the House of Representatives.9 At the state level, the same fate befell Republican freedmen. Rarely, if ever, were they nominated for gubernatorial positions, and only occasionally for the lieutenant gubernatorial positions

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and other statewide positions on the Republican ticket.10 Even at the local level, nearly all of the lucrative and powerful positions evaded them and fell into the hands of whites, even when the whites were from outside of the entire region, i.e. scalawags. This was also true even in congressional districts, counties, and cities where freedmen held population or voting majorities.11 Historian Michael Perman addressed this point: The increasing influence of the party’s blacks was also considerably accounted for by the persistent and increasingly successful efforts of black politicians to force the party’s white leadership to yield its monopoly on place and power. After initially assuming a low profile because of political inexperience and uncertainty about how black participation in the political process would be received, leading black Republicans took action to remedy the imbalance between what blacks gave to the party with their votes and what they received in return in the form of beneficial legislation, influence within the party, and access to office.12 In sum, the freedmen could serve the Republicans as voters, even the bulk of voters, but little else. This type of political office rationing for freedmen increased when the political “redemption” of each of the states by white supremacist Democrats reduced the number of offices for Republicans.13 With more and more white Democrats in these elective and appointive offices, there were fewer and fewer available for white Republicans and even fewer for freedmen. The tensions and bitterness escalated. And when the Compromise of 1877 eliminated federal protection for freedmen’s voting rights, the number of elective and appointive positions for the freedmen went into a galloping decline from which they never recovered. The white Republicans saw the handwriting on the political wall. Soon there would be no political positions for anyone who was a Republican, black or white. Nationally, successful Republican presidents appointed freedmen to typical “Negro posts” in Africa, South America, and Washington, D.C. At this point, southern white Republicans, seeing that they could not get the national Republicans either in the White House or in Congress to step in and halt the politically surging Democrats in the South, decided to act on their own. Ideologically, the politically “redeemed” eleven states of the South were controlled by the resurgent Democratic Party, which had adopted a political belief system known as “White Supremacy.” This ideology became a powerful recruitment tool for the party simply because it promised the salvation of the region. Thus, the dwindling white Republican officeholders felt that if their party adopted such an ideology it might win back these in-flight, shifting white voters. Hence, they adopted the political tactic of squeezing (known at the time as “bulldozing”) the freedmen out of the Republican party in varying degrees in different states. And such action led to a formal split in Texas. Initially, “Texas was one of two southern states to send a delegation to the second Republican National Convention in 1860. This German-American led delegation came out of the

Houston area. This large group of immigrants to the state who had courageously fought ‘against slavery and opposed . . . secession . . . became the organizing force for [the] Republican Party in Texas.’”14 But this initial formation of the party was abruptly short-circuited by the arrival of the Civil War one year after the 1860 Republican National Convention. “Therefore, the Texas Republican party was reborn in 1868 and sent a delegation to that national convention which contained an African American, George T. Ruby. His presence and leadership was joined by that of Norris Wright Cuney, H. C. Ferguson, Matt Gaines and a host of others. . . . These men were drawn into the party when the Loyal League came south and on July 4, 1867, reorganized the party in Houston where it had originally started.”15 The reborn party immediately emerged with two wings, one a conservative one and the other a radical one. The radical wing was led by E. J. Davis and J. P. Newcomb, and in 1869 this wing of the party “won the gubernatorial post, and ‘captured control of both houses of the state legislature.’”16 The freedmen joined the radical wing, and when that wing scored its big wins, “eleven Black Republicans were elected to the state legislature. This was the smallest number to be elected in the southern state.”17 However, the re-born party due to ideological reasons soon split in 1872 and then merged with the reconstituted Democratic Party that year and captured “both houses of the state legislature and the gubernatorial post in 1874. Two years later, in 1876, the conservative wing of the Republican Party realigned and merged with the Democrats. This left the African American electorate as the dominant majority in the party.”18 This merger was quickly followed by a change in African American party leadership. Ruby moved to New Orleans and on February 7, 1883, Davis died, and Norris Wright Cuney took over the leadership of the Texas Republican Party.19 Within a few years, the few remaining white Republicans established themselves as a completely separate entity. “Early in 1888, whites began organizing white Republican clubs to oppose Cuney’s leadership. This leadership struggle eventually led to a racial split in the party in 1889, and Cuney dubbed the white Republican clubs the ‘Lily-White Republicans.’”20 Specifically: The term Lily-White Republican was coined by a Black Republican leader, Norris Wright Cuney, in Texas after a riot occurred at the State Republican Convention on September 20, 1888. The riot grew out of a clash between Black and White Republicans when the latter group attempted to wrest control of the Party organization from a Black, Cuney. In addition to the fight for party control, there was also fighting “between the colored and white factions . . . over placing a ticket in the field.”21 Not only did the label stick in Texas, but it caught on throughout the ten other states in the old Confederate South.22 While an African American named the “Lily-Whites,” it was the white newspapers that coined the phrase “Black and Tan” Republicans.23



The Electoral Revolt of African American Voters in 1920–1921 and Beyond 445

Historical research about the origins of the phrase did not turn up a specific individual or group, as with the Lily-Whites, but found that: The use and perpetuation of the phrase “Black and Tan” Republican can be linked to numerous Southern newspapers. In Louisiana the term “Black and Tans” was applied to the regular state organization after the Lily-Whites had withdrawn. This name was applied to this group by newspapers and by general popular use and was never officially recognized by the regular organization itself. Louisiana served as a model for other states: in state after state whites withdrew from the regular party organization which was dominated by Blacks and formed their own Lily-White groups or clubs. Once the Lily-White group had become a reality, the regular organization was then generally referred to by all the newspapers and public media as the “Black and Tan” group.24 Although not born simultaneously, these two monikers were the descriptive references that identified these two Republican factions in southern Republican politics. Moreover, and most importantly, these were the names which were placed on the ballots of the southern states, and voting data were recorded using them as the two factions competed in local, statewide, congressional, and presidential elections at least from 1889 until the 1956 presidential elections. And these names and their recorded votes can be used to track the African American electorate, men and women, in the South and the Border State of Maryland during the Post-Disenfranchisement Era, 1920 to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Actually, historian Thomas Cripps’ doctoral dissertation on the Lily-Whites tracks them nationally and in five southern states (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia) from 1889 through the Progressive Era in 1920. The other studies used in this chapter take the history of these two southern factional Republican parties through 1956. Thus, in this PostDisenfranchisement Era one can actually see in reliable empirical terms what the African American electorate tried to do alone to maintain, expand, and attract allies to restore their Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendment voting rights. Given the absence of reliable voter registration data by race, the voting behavior of the Black and Tans is the best surrogate currently available. Finally, before we turn to our analysis of the 1920 electoral revolt in four states, and later two states where the revolt continued until the 1956 presidential and congressional elections, the reader must understand that these two factions represented two different ideologies and belief systems. The Lily-Whites embraced White Supremacy, inequality, and political exclusion of African Americans (including the suppression of Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendment voting rights), while the Black and Tans promoted inclusion and equality of the races. Both factions sought to attain political patronage from the national conventions for themselves and not for the broader masses and community from which they emerged. In fact, several historical accounts of these groups have wrongly written off these groups and the

votes they received because the organizations practiced this selfserving “rotten borough” politics. No less than famed political scientist V. O. Key, Jr. wrote this dismissal about the groups: “Lily-white and black-and-tan factional politics, of course, has no particular interest for most Negroes; it concerns only those who would like to be convention delegates, party functionaries, or patronage farmers. . . . The loss of the Negro vote is of no real concern to the Republican organizations since they are not votegetting organizations. . . .”25 Following Key, one of his researchers on Southern Politics noted: The miasma of southern Republicanism was infected by acknowledged corruption. The blame was laid by whites at the door of the politically immature Negro. Negroes, and with cause, laid the blame at another door [whites]. . . . Nevertheless, the party was corrupt, and because it was corrupt under Negro leadership, the whites who sought to win control of the state organizations received encouragement and sometimes active aid from the outside.26 Likely because of Key’s and Heard’s remarks, the votes received by these two party factions never really emerged in any meaningful studies. No one really saw the story that these party factions, especially the Black and Tans, told the academic and lay communities about the voting behavior of African American males and females in the Post-Disenfranchisement Era.

The African American Electoral Revolt in the 1920 Elections: State and National Elections The Era of Disenfranchisement (1888–1908) had nearly eliminated African American southern male voters by 1920 despite their rights under the Fifteenth Amendment. The Nineteenth Amendment enfranchised African American females, but they immediately faced stalling, delaying, and refusal tactics in the 1920 elections when they tried to register and vote. With no help coming from either the national or state governments, or either major political party, the African American electorate in the South had to become self-reliant. They faced not only disenfranchisement but maltreatment, exclusion, and political discrimination even in the Republican Party via the Lily-White clubs, associations, and parties. Having seen the Democratic party in each of the southern states successfully thwart the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendment rights of the African American electorate, the Lily-White Republicans became publicly vocal during the 1920 elections about how they felt not just about the Black and Tans, but about African Americans in general. North Carolina’s 1920 Republican gubernatorial candidate, John J. Parker, ran on a platform that “advocated continued disfranchisement of black citizens and favored poll taxes and the grandfather clause.”27 In the campaign, Parker openly declared: “The Negro as a class does not desire to enter politics. The Republican party of North Carolina does not desire him to do so.”28 Down in Texas, “in the 1920 campaign the Lily-White Republican gubernatorial nominee, James Culberson, referred to black political activists . . . as odorous beasts with

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charcoal complexions . . . [and said that he] believed in white supremacy, advocated it and preached that all African Americans were inferior beings.”29 Virginia’s Lily-White convention in 1921, which was the year for statewide elections, turned down a delegation of forty-five African Americans who came seeking reconciliation. Only three of the African Americans were allowed to attend, but only to observe.30 In Mississippi, in the 1920 elections, the Lily-White Republicans announced that they stood “four-square with their Democratic brethren on the race question.”31 And in Arkansas, at the Republican State Convention on April 20, 1920, the Lily-White delegations were seated from the African American majority counties of Pulaski, Hempstead, and Phillips instead of the Black and Tans. Hence, the black delegations bolted from the Arkansas convention, “held their own Black and Tan convention . . . and nominated a complete state ticket headed up by a Black, J.H. Blount, as their gubernatorial candidate.”32 Therefore, these haughty attitudes and party behaviors on the part of the Lily-Whites sparked in several of the southern states an African American electoral revolt in which African American political and party leaders placed their own full slates of all African American candidates for statewide offices rather than support the Lily-Whites or the Democrats or some third party. Extant data on the voter support of these slates allow us to give an empirical reading of the African American electorate during this unique 1920 election at the state, congressional, and presidential levels.

Composite Portrait of the African American Electorate in 1920–1921 Table 21.1 offers a composite portrait of the nature, scope, and electoral significance of the 1920–1921 election revolt. The African American electorate reacted against the Lily-White Republicans and White Supremacy by running African American candidates (in Florida it was white candidates) against the status quo initially in four southern states, Arkansas, Florida, Texas, and Virginia, and would later expand to six states and include Mississippi and South Carolina. In Texas, the Black and Tans revolt had the most comprehensive slate of candidates, including presidential electors, a gubernatorial candidate, and six candidates for statewide offices—every major office except Secretary of Agriculture. The second-most comprehensive group of candidates came in Virginia, which did not hold statewide elections until 1921, although in 1920 in a Special Election, the Black and Tan group, which referred to themselves as Lily-Blacks, ran a candidate for the U.S. Senate. They then fielded in 1921 a gubernatorial candidate and a candidate for superintendent for public instruction.33 In Florida, the Black and Tans backed white candidates for U.S. Senate and governor. Finally, there was one gubernatorial candidate in Arkansas’s revolt. The enfranchisement of African American women with the Nineteenth Amendment not only mobilized and activated them to register and vote, particularly in the South and the Border States, but also to run for statewide, county, and local elective offices. Simultaneous with this activism and mobilization of African American women was the remobilization and activism of the African American males who had been demobilized and

disenfranchised in the Era of Disenfranchisement. Thus, this combined gender mobilization can be seen in Table 21.1. Of the two statewide Black and Tan Republican candidates running in Virginia elections in 1921, one was the wealthy banker and businesswoman Maggie L. Walker, who joined the electoral revolt led by African American newspaperman John Mitchell, Jr. Despite Mitchell’s popularity, Walker outshone him in collecting votes. Banker Walker received 6,991 voters to Mitchell’s 5,036, for a difference of 1,955 votes. Moreover, at the percentage level Walker got 3.3% of the vote compared to Mitchell’s 2.4%, for a difference of almost a full percentage point. One explanation for the difference might be that Walker’s candidacy energized far more women voters than did the Mitchell campaign. This result says much about the way a first-time African American female candidate influenced African American voting behavior in the early years of African American women registration and voter turnout as compared to what had been previously recorded and seen. Simply put, Walker’s pioneering candidacy highly energized the southern African American female voter in this off-year election. For the African American candidates, the Texas electoral revolt showed a great cohesiveness and unity across the board for all of its candidates. There was little roll-off between the candidates at the top of the ticket and those at the bottom of the ticket, which is usually the case. This was not the case in Virginia where in 1920 the vote for the African American senatorial candidate J.R. Pollard was 17,576 (8.7% of the total vote) but in the 1921 off-year election the African American gubernatorial candidate, newspaperman John Mitchell, Jr., received only 5,036 votes (2.4%) for a difference of 12,540 votes. The consensus in political science is that there will be a decline in voter turnout in off-year elections, but this was a large drop. This composite table also shows how the Black and Tans’ electoral revolt compared with not only the Lily-White opponents but with the Democrats and other third parties in these 1920 and 1921 elections. It is quite clear that African American females’ getting the right to vote had helped to energize and mobilize the African American male voters. Despite all of the limitations and opposition they faced in trying to vote, they nevertheless together made a statement, a political expression of their electoral strength, as well as a protest vote against both the Democrats and Republicans. Table 21.2 (p. 448) offers the votes and percentages for all political parties, including the Black and Tans and Lily-Whites, broken down into the African American and white majority counties. The Black and Tans received their strongest support in the African American counties, with three exceptions: the two Florida races (in which the Black and Tan candidates were actually white) and the presidential electors in Texas. In Arkansas, the gubernatorial candidate Blount got 21.0%—one in every five votes from these counties—while in the white majority counties the party received only 7.4%. A similar pattern was found in Virginia with both the senatorial and gubernatorial races. The converse was true for the Lily-White candidates; they received more voter support in the white majority counties than in the African American counties. But both groups did receive support from the white majority counties.



The Electoral Revolt of African American Voters in 1920–1921 and Beyond 447

State

Year

Office

Arkansas

Table 21.1  Votes and Percentages for the Black and Tan Republican Candidates and Opposition Parties in Arkansas, Florida, Texas, and Virginia, 1920–1928

1920

Governor

J. H. Blount

Wallace Townsend

Negro Independent

Lily-White Republican

15,627 1920

Florida

Contestant/Party/Number of Votes/Percent of Total Vote

Governor

8.2%

Senator

1920

Presidential Electors Governor

Democrat 123,604

4,543

2.4%

W. L. Van Duzer

Cary E. Hardee

F. C. Whitaker

Lily-White Republican

Democrat

Socialist

17.9%

 2,654

2.0%

103,407

77.9%

2,823

J. M. Cheney

G. A. Klock

D. U. Fletcher

M. J. Martin

Lily-White Republican

Democrat

Socialist

 2,847

2.0%

98,957

69.5%

 

2.1%

Black and Tan Republican 26.0%

 

Socialist

65.0%

George E. Gay

37,065 1920

24.4%

Sam Butler

Black and Tan Republican 23,788 1920

46,339

T. C. McRae

3,525

   

2.5%

18 Electors 27,309

5.6%

H. Capers

James G. Culbertson

Pat M. Neff

L. L. Rhodes

T. H. McGregor

Black and Tan Republican

Lily-White Republican

Democrat

Socialist

American

26,091

5.7%

90,217

19.5%

269,188

58.3%

6,796

1.5%

69,380

15.0%

Black and Tan Republican 1920

Lt. Governor

S. E. Starns 26,404

Texas

1920

Comptroller

A. McCampbell 27,041

1920

Treasurer

1920

Land Commissioner

1920

Attorney General

1920

Superintendent of Instruction

5.6%

C. T. Cimbri 26,640

1928 1920

Presidential Electors Senator

 

5.5%

 

5.5%

L. L. Boyd 26,308

5.4%

G. Burkitt, Jr. 26,910

 

5.5%

J. Washington 26,897

5.6%  

27,201 J R. Pollard

   

Black and Tan Republican

Virginia

17,576 1921

Governor

Superintendent of Public Instruction

Democrat

8.7%

184,646

91.3%

John Mitchell, Jr.

Henry W. Anderson

E. Lee Trinkle

Black and Tan Republican

Lily-White Republican

Democrat

 5,036 1921

Carter Glass

2.4%

65,933

31.3%

Maggie L. Walker

Elizabeth L. Otey

Black and Tan Republican

Lily-White Republican

 6,991

3.3%

59,410

28.4%

139,416

66.1%

Harris Hart Democrat 142,475

John F. Goodman

Mrs. George Curtis  

  227

0.1%

  251

 0.1%

   

68.2% 

Sources: Adapted from Alexander Heard and Donald S. Strong, Southern Primaries and Elections: 1920–1949 (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1950), pp. 23, 38, 45, 134, 193–194, 198–199; Hanes Walton, Jr., Sharon D. Wright, and Frank Pryor, “Texas African American Republicans: The Electoral Revolt in the 1920 Presidential and Gubernatorial Elections,” National Conference of Black Political Scientists Newsletter (Spring/Summer 2002), pp. 8–12; and Secretary of the Commonwealth, Annual Report to the Governor and General Assembly of Virginia (Richmond, VA: Davis Bottom, 1922), pp. 423–424. Calculations by the authors.

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Table 21.2  Votes and Percentages for the Black and Tan Republican Candidates and Opposition Parties in Black and White Majority Counties, 1920–1921 Office

Year

State

Contestant / Party / Number of Votes / Percent of Total Vote Gubernatorial Candidates in Black Majority Counties

Governor

1920

Arkansas

J. H. Blount

Wallace Townsend

T. C. McRae

Negro Independent Republican

Lily-White Republican

Democrat

4,799 Florida

21.0%

14,653

Socialist

64.1%

201

0.9%

George E. Gay

W. L. Van Duzer

Cary E. Hardee

F. C. Whitaker

Lily-White Republican

Democrat

Socialist

1,253

13.9%

88

1.0%

7,643

84.5%

61

John G. Culbertson

Pat M. Neff

L. L. Rhodes

Black and Tan Republican

Lily-White Republican

Democrat

Socialist

16.1%

1,018

16.1%

3,511

55.7%

John Mitchell, Jr.

Henry W. Anderson

E. Lee Trinkle

Black and Tan Republican

Lily-White Republican

Democrat

536

3.4%

2,555

16.1%

12,786

 

0.7%

H. Capers 1,018

Virginia

14.0%

Black and Tan Republican Texas

1921

3,190

Sam Butler

18

T. H. McGregor American

0.3%

744

John F. Goodman

11.8%

Mrs. George Curtis  

80.4%

20

0.1%

15

0.1%

U. S. Senatorial Candidates in Black Majority Counties Senator

1920

Florida

J. M. Cheney

G. A. Klock

D. U. Fletcher

M. J. Martin

Black and Tan Republican

Lily-White Republican

Democrat

Socialist

1,069 Virginiaa

12.2%

86

1.0%

J R. Pollard

   

Black and Tan Republican 1,535

7,486

85.6%

106

Carter Glass Democrat

9.6%

14,484

1.2%    

   

90.4%

Black and Tan Presidential Electors in Black Majority Counties 18 Electors 

1920

Texas

Black and Tan Republican 958

 

0.2% Gubernatorial Offices in White Majority Counties

Governor

1920

Arkansas

J. H. Blount

Wallace Townsend

Negro Independent Republican 12,441 Florida

7.4%

Democrat 108,685

Socialist

64.9%

4,264

2.5%

W. L. Van Duzer

Cary E. Hardee

F. C. Whitaker

Black and Tan Republican

Lily-White Republican

Democrat

Socialist

20,345

17.6% H. Capers

2,520

2.2%

John G. Culbertson

Black and Tan Republican 25,097 Virginia

25.2%

Sam Butler

George E. Gay

Texas

1921

Lily-White Republican 42,138

T. C. McRae

5.3%

John Mitchell, Jr. Black and Tan Republican 4,447

2.3%

Lily-White Republican 89,199

18.8%

Henry W. Anderson Lily-White Republican 63,016

32.6%

90,221

78.0%

Pat M. Neff

2.3%

L. L. Rhodes

Democrat 285,677

2,623

 

T. H. McGregor

Socialist

60.1%

E. Lee Trinkle

6,808

American

1.4%

68,717

John F. Goodman

Democrat 125,163

14.5%

Mrs. George Curtis  

64.8%

206

0.1%

234

0.1%

U. S. Senatorial Candidates in White Majority Counties Senator

1920

Florida

J. M. Cheney

G. A. Klock

D. U. Fletcher

Black and Tan Republican

Lily-White Republican

Democrat

24,628 Virginiaa

21.0%

J R. Pollard Black and Tan Republican 15,905

8.6%

2,742

2.3%    

86,506

Socialist

73.9%

Carter Glass

3,174

2.7%    

Democrat 168,980

M. J. Martin

91.4%

Black and Tan Presidential Electors in White Majority Counties 18 Electors 

1920

Texas

Black and Tan Republican 25,960

 

5.3%

Sources: Adapted from Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009; Alexander Heard and Donald S. Strong, Southern Primaries and Elections: 1920–1949 (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1950), pp. 23, 38, 45, 134, 193–194, 198–199; and Hanes Walton, Jr., Sharon D. Wright, and Frank Pryor, “Texas African American Republicans: The Electoral Revolt in the 1920 Presidential and Gubernatorial Elections,” National Conference of Black Political Scientists Newsletter (Spring/Summer 2002), pp. 8–12. Calculations by the authors. a

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The Electoral Revolt of African American Voters in 1920–1921 and Beyond 449

Two Party Analysis: Lily-Whites versus Black and Tans The racial pattern of support is further confirmed when the focus is narrowed to just the Black and Tans and the Lily-White Republicans in each of these elections in the African American and white majority counties. In Table 21.3 (p. 450), we see that the strongest percentages of electoral support for the Black and Tans came from the African American majority counties, while the converse was true for the Lily-Whites in the white majority counties. The largest number of raw votes for the Black and Tans came in the white majority counties because there were so many more of them, and possibly because (as we discuss elsewhere) African American voters in black majority counties were more likely to be prevented from voting. The bulk of the actual votes for the Lily-White candidates also came from white majority counties. The Lily-Whites ended up with a huge advantage overall in most cases because the raw numbers of Republican voters in white majority counties were so much higher. In a few races the Black and Tan Republicans had no Lily-White opposition. The central reality that emerges from this two-party analysis is this: the African American electorate in the 1920–1921 electoral revolt was aggressive in turnout and voter support in both the African American and the white majority counties in each of these four states. Another observation concerns the biracial coalition in Florida, where white Republican candidates ran on the Black and Tan party ballot. In a word, the Florida Black and Tan candidates were far more successful than the candidates in other states. They were the only candidates to finish ahead of the LilyWhites, and the only candidates to garner more than 10% of the overall vote. This instance of a biracial political alliance at least for one election merits further study and scholarly concern. But the revolt did not continue in Florida, nor in Texas, even though Texas was the historical origin of the Black and Tans and even though the state had a full candidate slate in 1920 for presidential and statewide offices. But there were two other states, Mississippi and South Carolina, where the voter revolt by the African American electorate, men and women, did continue into the 1950s. The satellite Republican parties in both those states were successful in getting recognition from the national Republican Party during the period of their activity.

The Longitudinal Voting Behavior of the Black and Tan Republicans: Mississippi and South Carolina In two states of the South, Mississippi and South Carolina, the Black and Tans continued getting at least their presidential electors and candidates on the state ballot during presidential elections and saw voters support these candidates in each presidential-year election. Thus, the satellite parties lasted long after the initial revolt of 1920, and the state archives have records of the votes. In the case of Mississippi, these votes were recorded at the county and state level. Extant literature for South Carolina recorded their votes, essentially though not completely, for the state level. Professor Heard wrote about the success of these parties: “When the shouting was over whites controlled the party in most states, Negroes controlled it in Mississippi, and there

was mixed leadership in a few.” He continued: “In Mississippi, an all-Negro faction, smaller than its lily-white rival, continued to gain recognition from the national party, and supplied the only Negroes on the Republican National Committee. . . . In . . . South Carolina, whites predominated, but shared their leadership with Negroes to a larger extent than in the other states.”34 The leadership of these two groups not only sent delegations to the Republican National Conventions, but they usually got seated over the Lily-Whites. When they returned to their states they put up lists of Republican presidential electors to garner votes for the national nominees, president, and vice president. In Mississippi, their votes were recorded for each presidential election from 1928 to 1956—eight different presidential elections.

The Mississippi Black and Tan Republicans Table 21.4 (p. 451) is a composite of the data available from two different sources that provide voting data on both the Black and Tans and Lily-Whites broken down by race. The range of the Black and Tan vote goes from a low of 524 votes in 1928 to its highest of 112,966 in 1952, whereas the Lily-White vote ranges from zero in 1952 to a high of 56,362 in 1956. And while the mean vote for the Black and Tans is higher than for the LilyWhites, the median vote for the Lily-Whites is higher than for the Black and Tans, showing that the Lily-Whites garnered more votes more consistently, but the Black and Tans garnered more overall. These numbers are greatly affected by the 1952 election, in which voters united around the popular Republican candidate Dwight Eisenhower and the Lily-Whites did not field any candidates or receive a single vote. In the other seven elections, the Lily-Whites garnered 84.5% of the vote, although the Black and Tans did bring more voters to the polls than the Lily-Whites in 1936 and 1948. And all of this occurred in the state of Mississippi, which violently opposed “negro suffrage.” Figure 21.1 (p. 452) uses the percentages of the overall vote to illustrate the electoral competition between these two factions. With only three exceptions, in the years of 1928, 1952, and 1956, the combined percentage of votes received by the two factions fell under the 7% level. The Black and Tans were first recognized at the 1924 national convention, and by the time of the next presidential election in 1928, African American Republicans made up 0.4% of voters in Mississippi who supported Republican nominee Herbert Hoover. By 1932, that percentage more than tripled to 1.3%. Simultaneously, the Lily-White vote percentage had dropped precipitously under the 5% level and would not recover from that position until 1956. One of the data compendiums used in this chapter, Mississippi Election Statistics, 1900–1967, reports election return data for the Black and Tans and Lily-Whites at the county level for seven of the eight presidential elections under analysis in this section. A digital data source for all eight elections is the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research Study Number 1. Figure 21.2 (p. 452) provides the vote percentages for the candidates of each of these factional Republican groups in the African American majority counties in Mississippi. The Lily-White Republicans gathered more votes in these African American majority counties than the Black and Tans in five of the eight elections—1928, 1932, 1940, 1944, and 1956. Black and Tan

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Table 21.3  Comparing the Republican Vote of the Black and Tans vs. Lily-Whites in Racial Majority Counties, 1920–1921 Office

Year

State

Contestants-Party-Vote-Percent of the Total Vote Gubernatorial Candidates in Black Majority Counties

Governor

1920

Arkansas

J. H. Blount

Wallace Townsend

Negro Independent Republican

Lily-White Republican

4,799 Florida

60.1% George E. Gay

W. L. Van Duzer Lily-White Republican

Texas

93.4%

 

39.9%

Black and Tan Republican 1,253

7,989  

88

  6.6%

1,341

H. Capers

John G. Culbertson

 

Black and Tan Republican

Lily-White Republican

 

1,018 1921

3,190

All Republicans

Virginia

50.0%

1,018

50.0%

John Mitchell, Jr.

Henry W. Anderson

Black and Tan Republican

Lily-White Republican

536

17.3%

2,555

2,036    

82.7%

3,091

U. S. Senatorial Candidates in Black Majority Counties Senator

1920

Florida

J. M. Cheney

G. A. Klock

Black and Tan Republican

Lily-White Republican

1,069 Virginiaa

92.6%

86

  7.4%

J R. Pollard

1,155

   

Black and Tan Republican 1,535

All Republicans

   

100.0%

1,535

Black and Tan Presidential Electors in Black Majority Counties 18 Electors

1920

Texas

Black and Tan Republican 958

 

All Republicans

100.0%

958

Statewide Offices in White Majority Counties Governor

1920

Arkansas

J. H. Blount

Wallace Townsend

Negro Independent Republican 12,441 Florida

22.8%

Lily-White Republican 42,138

77.2%

George E. Gay

W. L. Van Duzer

Black and Tan Republican

Lily-White Republican

20,345 Texas

89.0%

2,520

22.0%

 

Lily-White Republican 89,199

78.0%

John Mitchell, Jr.

Henry W. Anderson

Black and Tan Republican

Lily-White Republican

4,447

  22,865

John G. Culbertson

Black and Tan Republican Virginia

  54,579  

11.0%

H. Capers 25,097

1921

All Republicans

6.6%

63,016

  114,296  

93.4%

  67,463

U.S. Senatorial Candidates in White Majority Counties Senator 

1920

Florida

J. M. Cheney

G. A. Klock

Black and Tan Republican

Lily-White Republican

24,628 Virginiaa

90.0% J R. Pollard

Black and Tan Republican 15,905

2,742

All Republicans 10.0%

   

100.0%

  27,370     15,905

Black and Tan Presidential Electors in White Majority Counties 18 Electors

1920

Texas

Black and Tan Republican 25,960

100.0%

 

All Republicans 25,960

Sources: Adapted from Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009; Alexander Heard and Donald S. Strong, Southern Primaries and Elections: 1920–1949 (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1950), pp. 23, 38, 45, 134, 193–194, 198–199; and Hanes Walton, Jr., Sharon D. Wright, and Frank Pryor, “Texas African American Republicans: The Electoral Revolt in the 1920 Presidential and Gubernatorial Elections,” National Conference of Black Political Scientists Newsletter (Spring/Summer 2002), pp. 8–12. Calculations by the authors. a

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The Electoral Revolt of African American Voters in 1920–1921 and Beyond 451

Table 21.4  Total and Factional Republican Vote in Mississippi for the Presidential Elections of 1928–1956

Black and Tan Republicans

Year

Racial Majority Counties

1928

Black

132 

2.4% 

5,428 

97.6% 

5,560 

White

412 

1.9%

20,736

98.1%

21,148 

All

524 

2.0% 

26,164 

98.0% 

26,688 

Black

813 

39.3% 

1,254 

60.7% 

2,067 

White

1,157 

37.3%

1,946

62.7%

3,103 

All

1,970 

38.1% 

3,200 

61.9% 

5,170 

Black

978 

69.2% 

436 

30.8% 

1,414 

White

1,777 

59.1%

1,229

40.9%

3,006 

All

2,755 

62.3% 

1,665 

37.7% 

4,420 

Black

983 

33.5% 

1,955 

66.5% 

2,938 

White

1,831 

41.4%

2,594

58.6%

4,425 

All

2,814 

38.2% 

4,549 

61.8% 

7,363 

Black

1,267 

24.7% 

3,870 

75.3% 

5,137

White

2,472 

38.3%

3,990

61.7%

6,462

All

3,739 

32.2% 

7,860 

67.8% 

11,599

Black

1,164 

54.1% 

987 

45.9% 

2,151

White

1,431 

49.5%

1,461

50.5%

2,892

All

2,595 

51.5% 

2,448 

48.5% 

5,043

Black

34,300 

100% 

0 

0.0% 

34,300

White

78,666 

100%

0

0.0%

78,666

112,966 

100% 

0 

0.0% 

112,966

Black

1,222 

8.5% 

13,120 

91.5% 

14,342

White

3,089 

6.7%

43,242

93.3%

46,331

All

4,311 

7.1% 

56,362 

92.9% 

60,673

All Elections—Black

40,859 

60.2% 

27,050 

39.8% 

67,909

All Elections—White

90,835 

54.7% 

75,198 

45.3% 

166,033

Total

131,674 

56.3% 

102,248 

43.7% 

233,922

Mean

16,459 

56.3%

12,781 

43.7%

29,240

2,785 

29.4% 

3,875 

40.9% 

9,481

1932

1936

1940

1944

1948

1952

All 1956

Median

Votes

Percent of Republican Vote

Lily-White Republicans

Votes

Percent of Republican Vote

All Republicans Vote Total

Sources: Adapted from ICPSR Study No. 1, United States Historical Election Returns, 1824–1968 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR00001 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), downloaded February 14, 2010; Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009; F. Glenn Abney, Mississippi Election Statistics, 1900–1967 (University, MS: Bureau of Governmental Research, 1968), pp. 1–26; and Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Republicans: The Politics of the Black and Tans (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1975), Table 3, p. 178. Calculations by the authors.

Republicans garnered more votes in three presidential elections—1936, 1948, and 1952. One of the possible reasons for the Lily-Whites’ strong showing in the African American majority counties is that this group included a few Negro delegates to the Republican National Convention. Of this phenomena Professor Key found that: “[t]he intricacies of Mississippi Republican politics illustrate the uses of the southern Negro for the national Republicans. . . . [A] lily-white group led by George L. Sheldon, onetime Republican governor of Nebraska . . . [who] moved to Mississippi. . . . He and his associates held their convention . . . which elected a delegation to the national convention including two Negroes as a gesture toward the sentiments of the national party.”35 And another reason was the distaste and antipathy which some African American voters even in Mississippi had toward the Black and Tans’ electoral politics.36 Mississippi allowed this African American Republicanism because it wanted to keep African Americans out of Democratic party politics where the actual power in the state resided. And this “rotten borough” politics thus mobilized other African Americans who understood their exclusion from the state Democratic Party and was the dominant reason that they pushed so hard to be included in the Democratic Party and that whites worked equally hard to keep them out. Any way you look at it, this is in part the politics of the absurd. Figure 21.3 (p. 453) displays the percentages in the white majority counties. There are some differences here as well as similarities. In these white majority counties, the Lily-Whites out-performed the Black and Tans in five of the eight elections—1928, 1932, 1940, 1944, and 1956—the same years that they outperformed the Black and Tans in the African American majority counties. On the other hand, Black and Tans outperformed the Lily-Whites in only two presidential elections in the white majority counties, 1936 and 1952, and tied the Lily-Whites in 1948. In 1948 both party groups won 1.3% of the vote in the white majority counties. That year the Dixiecrat party (States Rights Party) won the state with Governor Fielding Wright on the ticket as a vice presidential candidate. This possibly caused a drop in votes for the Lily-White Republicans vis-à-vis the Dixiecrats. Another possible reason for the support for the Black and Tans ticket in the white majority counties was that most of the African American controlled state patronage went to white Democrats, permitting some of them to possibly support the Black and Tan ticket of presidential electors. The reason for this was that in Mississippi, whenever the Dixiecrats won the state, the Democratic National Committee stripped white Democrats of party patronage, meaning that they would lose federal jobs in the state, such as postmaster positions, federal positions at the ports, and those inside federal courthouses. Since African American Republicans could not hold offices in Mississippi, even federal offices, they sold these positions to white Democrats. Thus, one way that some Dixiecrats covered themselves—because they knew that they were going to lose their Democratic patronage—was to help the Black and Tans and hope that the Republicans would win nationally and that the Black and Tan patronage would pass to them. The strategy backfired because the Democrat, President Truman, was reelected. And for the very first time ever, our county-level analysis allows one to see the effects of this strategy. Figure 21.4 (p. 453) offers a comparative portrait of the Black and Tan performances between the African American

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Figure 21.1  Black and Tan vs. Lily-White Vote Percentages for Republican Presidential Candidates in Mississippi, 1928–1956 45% 39.6%

40%

Percent of Total Votes

35% 30% 25%

22.7%

20%

17.3%

15% 10% 5%

0.4%

1.3% 2.2%

1.7% 1.0%

1.6% 2.6%

1932

1936

1940

2.1%

4.4% 1.4% 1.3%

0.0%

0% 1928

1944

Black and Tans

1948

1952

1.7% 1956

Lily‐Whites

Sources: Adapted from F. Glenn Abney, Mississippi Election Statistics, 1900–1967 (University, MS: Bureau of Governmental Research, 1968), pp. 1–26; and Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Republicans: The Politics of the Black and Tans (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1975), Table 3, p. 178. Calculations by the authors.

Figure 21.2  Black and Tan vs. Lily-White Vote Percentages for Republican Presidential Candidates in African American Majority Counties of Mississippi, 1928–1956 43.9%

45% 40%

Percent of Total Votes

35% 30% 25% 19.6%

20% 15% 9.2%

10% 5% 0%

0.2% 1928

1.5% 2.3%

1.5% 0.7%

1932

1936

1.4%

5.5%

2.8%

1.8%

1940

1.5% 1.3%

1944

Black and Tans

1948

0.0% 1952

1.8% 1956

Lily–Whites

Sources: Adapted from Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009; F. Glenn Abney, Mississippi Election Statistics, 1900–1967 (University, MS: Bureau of Governmental Research, 1968), pp. 1–26; and Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Republicans: The Politics of the Black and Tans (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1975), Table 3, p. 178. Calculations by the authors.

and white majority counties over eight presidential elections. The Black and Tans did better in the African American majority counties in four of the eight presidential elections—1932, 1948, 1952, and 1956. The range of the Black and Tans percentage in the white majority counties ran from a low of 0.4% in the presidential election of 1928 to a high of 37.9% in the 1952 contest. In

African American majority counties, the percentage ranged from 0.2% in 1928 to 43.9% in 1952. Overall, with the sole exception of 1952, the Black and Tan vote percentage stayed remarkably even over these eight presidential elections in both types of counties. The Lily-White delegation did not get seated at the Republican national convention from 1928 to 1956, only the Black and



The Electoral Revolt of African American Voters in 1920–1921 and Beyond 453 Figure 21.3  Black and Tan vs. Lily-White Vote Percentages for Republican Presidential Candidates in White Majority Counties of Mississippi, 1928–1956 45% 37.9%

40%

Percent of Total Votes

35% 30% 25%

23.9%

22.5%

20% 15% 10% 5% 0%

0.4% 1928

1.3% 2.1%

1.8% 1.3%

1.7% 2.5%

1932

1936

1940

2.3%

3.7%

1.3% 1.3%

1944

Black and Tans

1948

0.0% 1952

1.7% 1956

Lily–Whites

Sources: Adapted from Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009; F. Glenn Abney, Mississippi Election Statistics, 1900–1967 (University, MS: Bureau of Governmental Research, 1968), pp. 1–26; and Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Republicans: The Politics of the Black and Tans (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1975), Table 3, p. 178. Calculations by the authors.

Figure 21.4  Black and Tan Vote Percentages for Republican Presidential Candidates in African American vs. White Majority Counties of Mississippi, 1928–1956 43.9%

45%

37.9%

40%

Percent of Total Votes

35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0%

0.2% 0.4%

1.5% 1.3%

1.5% 1.8%

1.4% 1.7%

1.8% 2.3%

1.5% 1.3%

1928

1932

1936

1940

1944

1948

Black and Tans in Black Counties

1.8% 1.7% 1952

1956

Black and Tans in White Counties

Sources: Adapted from Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009; F. Glenn Abney, Mississippi Election Statistics, 1900–1967 (University, MS: Bureau of Governmental Research, 1968), pp. 1–26; and Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Republicans: The Politics of the Black and Tans (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1975), Table 3, p. 178. Calculations by the authors.

Tan delegation. The criterion for seating was not the number of votes cast in the state by the two factions but another consideration. Professor Key wrote: “To seat a Mississippi Republican delegation committed to Negro disfranchisement and to white supremacy would, so the reasoning goes, damage the Republican cause in the northern states. For decades the Republican Party operated on the theory that all it had to do to retain Negro support in the North was to give a few seats in the national conventions to southern Negroes.”37

Looking back to Table 21.4 (p. 451) the reader will see that if we treat 1952 as an aberration, then the African American electorate of men and women registered and voted in increasing numbers in the state of Mississippi in presidential elections except for a dip in 1948 election. In Mississippi, a small and determined group of the African American electorate continued to go to the polls and vote in general elections at each presidential election cycle. And not all of these voters were mere beneficiaries of the Republican patronage in the state. Clearly there was some other motivation involved in this electoral effort.

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The South Carolina Black and Tan Republicans Besides Mississippi, South Carolina is the other southern state where the Black and Tans participated in multiple presidential elections, senatorial elections, and at least one statewide election. Republicanism had started on the South Carolina Sea Islands in 1862 shortly after the Union Navy captured them. African Americans in Charleston as early as 1865 held their own state convention and sent appeal petitions to Congress asking for the right to vote. Both the Sea Islands and mainland freedmen came together at the first Republican Party state convention in March 1867, held in Charleston, and participated in the state constitutional convention and later in the formation of the new government in the state. In the state election of 1870 the newly formed Republican Party placed a freedman in a significant but subordinate position: they gave a freedman the lieutenant gubernatorial post. Then, in the election of 1872, whites in the party went their separate way, and the freedmen struggled on as the regular Republican Party in the state. For the next four years, the two groups would fuse in some of the elections or pursue separate paths when each nominated their own tickets and contested against each other. But once the Democrats took over state government in 1876 and the Compromise of 1877 let them retain control, the Republicans found themselves in a no-win situation. For the freedmen voters things went from bad to worse simply because at a new state constitutional convention on September 10, 1882, the Democrats proposed new measures to disenfranchise the freedmen voters who had been enfranchised by the Four Military Reconstruction Acts. Prior to 1895 South Carolina was part of a group of six southern states that put into law disenfranchisement measures to cripple the freedmen’s suffrage rights. South Carolina passed the multi-ballot box law in 1882 that severely reduced the freedmen electorate; and after the Lodge Bill failed in 1891 and the Democratic Congress and President Grover Cleveland repealed forty sections of the enforcement acts, South Carolina came back and put into state law new disenfranchisement measures.38 And when the new measures went into effect both the number of freedmen voters and freedmen elected officials drastically declined. And with their passing went the Republican Party’s fortunes in the state.39 Beginning in 1900, “a white man, Joseph W. Tolbert (nicknamed Tireless Joe or Fighting Joe—because he was a delegate or a contestant for a seat at every Republican national convention from 1900 to 1944) rebuilt the Republican party in the state, organizing it into a unit which ‘consisted of himself, a few other whites and several handpicked Negroes over the state.’”40 After seeing the success of the Tolbert-led Black and Tans, another white, Joe Hambright of Rock Hill, organized his own group of Republicans but excluded African Americans. These two tightly composed groups challenged each other in elections and via seating contests at the Republican National Convention every four years. In the process, they became something of a national joke. Thus, in 1938 a wealthy businessman in the state, J. Bates Gerald, organized his own group of Republicans to oppose both the Black and Tans and the Lily-Whites. “Gerald, understanding the importance of delegation composition, got three white‘approved’ and well known Blacks and two unknown Blacks, all from the middle class to dispose of Tolbert’s main arguments at the national convention—that of racial composition. This group

was seated in 1940 instead of Tireless Joe’s group.”41 After “Tireless Joe” died in 1946, his leadership was replaced by another white man, B.L. Hendrix, and an African American, I.S. Leevy of Columbia. These opposed the Gerald group through the midfifties. By 1952, the “Gerald-led Republicans, formally ousted the three prominent Negro Republicans,” for alleged disciplinary reasons and once again became the Lily-Whites.42 Table 21.5 provides the extant election return data dealing with the irregular electioneering competition between the two groups. It covers five presidential elections, three won by the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt—1936, 1940, and 1944—and two won by Republican candidates Warren G. Harding (1920) and Table 21.5  Vote of Republican Factions in South Carolina for Selected Presidential, Senatorial, and Gubernatorial Elections, 1920–1952 Black and Tan Republicans Year (by Office)

Racial Majority Counties

Votes

% of Rep. Vote

1920

Black

261

17.3%

White

105

All

366

Black

480

White All

Lily-White Republicans

Votes

% of Rep. Vote

All Rep. Votes

President

1936

1940

1,252

82.7%

1,513

9.6%

992

90.4%

1,097

14.0%

2,244

86.0%

2,610

59.3%

330

40.7%

810

473

56.6%

363

43.4%

836

953

57.9%

693

42.1%

1,646

Black

34

12.2%

245

87.8%

279

White

103

6.5%

1,482

93.5%

1,585

All

137

7.3%

1,727

92.7%

1,864

1944

All

63

1.4%

4,547

98.6%

4,610

1952

All

9,793

5.8%

158,289

94.2%

168,082

Total

11,312

6.3%

167,500

93.7%

178,812

Mean

2,262

6.3%

33,500

93.7%

35,762

366

7.3%

2,244

92.7%

2,610

102

 9.6%

1,063

Median

Senator 1936

All

961

90.4%

1944

Black

58

7.6%

709

92.4%

767

White

83

2.6%

3,098

97.4%

3,181

141

3.6%

3,807

96.4%

3,948

Total

All

1,102

22.0%

3,909

78.0%

5,011

Mean

551

22.0%

1,955

78.0%

2,506

Median

551

47.0%

1,955

53.0%

2,506

0

0.0%

283

Governor 1938

All

283

100%

Sources: Adapted from ICPSR Study No. 1, United States Historical Election Returns, 1824–1968 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR00001 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), downloaded February 14, 2010; Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009; F. Glenn Abney, Mississippi Election Statistics, 1900–1967 (University, MS: Bureau of Governmental Research, 1968), p. 111; and Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Republicans: The Politics of the Black and Tans (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1975), Table 2, p. 177. Calculations by the authors.



The Electoral Revolt of African American Voters in 1920–1921 and Beyond 455

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1952). Overall, the Black and Tan group only garnered 6.2% of the total Republican vote to the Lily-Whites 93.8%. Yet in one of the five presidential elections, 1936, the Black and Tans out-polled the Lily-Whites. But clearly, the Lily-Whites were much stronger at the ballot box than the Black and Tans in South Carolina. And in 1944 African American voters in the state formed their own party, the South Carolina Progressive Democratic Party (SCPDP), a Democratic satellite party. The SCPDP put up its own African American candidate for the Senate and captured a sizable vote from the African American community for him. But some of those voters switched back to the Black and Tan Republicans after 1944 and 1948, when the SCPDP was rebuffed by the National Democratic Convention and its leading African American delegates, Congressman William Dawson (D-IL) and Attorney Thurgood Marshall, therefore were not seated. (Although the SCPDP stopped being a party in 1948, it continued political activities until 1956.) Thus, after the decline in the 1944 presidential vote, the Black and Tan vote did rise significantly in the 1952 presidential election, helped also by Eisenhower’s popularity. Table 21.5 also shows that the Black and Tans ran “Tireless Joe” for the U.S. Senate in 1936 and 1944, with the 1944 showing dropping just as the presidential vote level did. The emergence of the SCPDP apparently had an effect on this voter decline. Finally, the table shows that in 1938 the Black and Tans had a gubernatorial candidate, “Tireless Joe” once again. In this election there was no opposition from the Lily-White Republicans, which ensured that the candidate grabbed 100% of the (rather small) Republican vote in this statewide election. Table 21.5 breaks down the support for these two parties in the African American and white majority counties for some of

the presidential and senatorial elections. The Black and Tans had more votes in the 1936 presidential and senatorial elections and the 1938 gubernatorial election, but in the rest the greatest vote percentage went to the Lily-Whites. That is five elections for the Lily-Whites to three for the Black and Tans. And in 1952, when the Lily-Whites had put their few African American members completely out of the party, the Lily-Whites’ electoral support exploded, although this was largely an effect of Eisenhower’s popularity. But so too did the African American electorate simply because in 1944 the Supreme Court in the White Primary case of Smith v Allwright declared that state law barring the African American electorate, women and men, from primary voting was unconstitutional.43 Although “South Carolina tried to nullify the Allwright decision . . . [by repealing] some 150 statutes which mentioned, authorized, or regulated primaries, . . . [a] federal district court . . . held that South Carolina could not wash its hands of governing elections because the democratic primary remained . . . the only effective agency for selecting public officials. The Supreme Court upheld the lower court decision.”44 With these formidable election barriers removed, the African American electorate expanded significantly in the state and in 1952 more than nine thousand (9,793) of these newly enfranchised voters cast a ballot for the once fading Black and Tan Republicans. But this new infusion of voter support was not enough because the Republican National Convention had designated the Lily-Whites as the official Republican Party in the state. As a consequence, the Black and Tans disappeared in the state and at Republican National Conventions. Figure 21.5 offers a comparative analysis of the vote percentage of the Black and Tans and the Lily-Whites over their five

Figure 21.5  Percentages of Republican Presidential Votes for Black and Tans vs. Lily-Whites in South Carolina, 1920, 1936, 1940, 1944, and 1952 98.6%

100% 90% Percent of Republican Presidential Votes

94.2%

92.7% 86.0%

80% 70% 57.9%

60% 50%

42.1%

40% 30% 20%

14.0% 7.3%

10%

1.4%

5.8%

0% 1920

1936

1940 Black and Tans

1944

1952

Lily-Whites

Sources: Adapted from ICPSR Study No. 1, United States Historical Election Returns, 1824–1968 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR00001 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), downloaded February 14, 2010; and Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Republicans: The Politics of the Black and Tans (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1975), Table 2, p. 177. Calculations by the authors.

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presidential elections. Of the five elections, the Black and Tans were strongest in 1936, while the Lily-Whites captured more than 90% of all of the votes cast for the two parties in the 1940, 1944, and 1952 elections. However, in the 1944 election, if supporters of the SCPDP had cast all of their votes (estimated at 4,500) for the Black and Tans, then the latter would have had a slightly higher vote percentage than the Lily-Whites.45 Although the Black and Tan party in South Carolina was not as long-lived as the Mississippi one, it did facilitate voting for some African Americans in that state in three presidential elections. Unfortunately for the party, just when the state political context allowed this vote to expand, the Republican National Convention ruled that the officially recognized party for the state would be the Black and Tans’ nemesis, the Lily-White Republicans. Nevertheless, the Black and Tans provided an important political avenue, as did the SCPDP, for the African American electorate to protest both their disenfranchisement and the political party discrimination they endured in the state of South Carolina.

Summary and Conclusions on the Electoral Revolt of the Black and Tan Republicans Together, the protest votes that continued in the South in the two states of South Carolina and Mississippi, even after the initial voter protest in 1920–1921, became not only an educational tool for other African American voter rebellions throughout the South but a visible reminder that registered African American voters could vote in general elections despite the failures of the national government to enforce the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments and the failures of their supposed allies, the Republican Party, to assist the African American electorate in exercising their suffrage rights. Although most southern states allowed the remaining African American electorate, men and women, to vote in general and special elections, the tools of disenfranchisement allowed few to qualify to register and vote. And even if and when these voters took part on a limited basis, the White Primary eliminated the general and, to a lesser extent, the special elections as really meaningful voter decision-making exercises. Map 21.1 provides a portrait of all of the six southern states where the African American electorate, male and female, revolted in the 1920 and 1921 elections and continued that rebellion over time. Represented on this map are the Deep South states of Mississippi and South Carolina as well as the peripheral South states of Arkansas, Virginia, Florida, and Texas. Even in one of the cities of a Border State, Louisville, Kentucky, in 1929, the voter rebellion occurred in the municipal elections of 1929. In that year, because of political discrimination in the regular Republican Party, African American Republicans organized the Lincoln Independent Party (Black and Tans), “put up a full Black Slate for the local election and waged a heated campaign. But it all came to nothing,” because all of these candidates lost.46 Thus whether they were in the southern states or in a Border State, the African American electorate, both in single office elections or in multiple office elections, demonstrated that they were not satisfied with their political and electoral circumstances. They waged electoral contests as they had done initially when Black

Reconstruction started in 1867 and 1868 and had not been able to do much since then. And they did this knowing that they were facing certain electoral defeat. These protest elections were designed to declare to the nation that there were African American communities inside the South that still wanted to vote, despite the outcry from white southern leaders and even some scholars that African Americans did not want to vote anymore. Second, these elections in the six southern states demonstrated that the African American electorate knew how to vote and participate. The rebellion’s leaders went to the Secretary of State offices and filled out the proper forms to become separate political organizations, then got the party and its candidates listed on the statewide ballots. In order to get on the ballot, these fledging parties followed state procedures and regulations by the book in holding state party conventions and local meetings. Following the required national procedures set by the Republican National Committee allowed the Black and Tans to send competing delegations to the national conventions and to challenge the opposing Lily-White delegations for seats at these national conventions, as well as to win the Credential Committee approval as the recognized party in a state more than once. Finally, the African American electorate, men and women, passed and spread the word to other African American communities both within and across states who found themselves in similar situations about tactics and strategies that allowed disenfranchised African Americans to reclaim, re-acquire, and where possible retain their Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendment voting rights. A prime example of the role of African American satellite political parties like the Black and Tans was the formation “on May 24, [1944] of the SCPDP [at] . . . its first convention. In attendance were 172 delegates along with observers from Florida, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina.”47 These African American and liberal white observers from seven other southern states were looking at this new political experiment, the creation of a political innovation, an African American political party, and how it might be used in their political contexts to enhance and enlarge the African American electorate in their states.48 Few scholars have looked beyond the supposedly “corrupt” Black and Tans and have seen their political socialization effects or understood that these satellite political parties were one of the few political vehicles open to the African American electorate to fight back within a hostile political environment. These parties made it possible for African Americans to expand their participation or at least to retain as much of it as possible in the absence of enforcement of the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments. The Black and Tan votes also provide us with some empirical indication of the size of the African American electorate in these southern states since disenfranchisement. Before closing this chapter on the African American revolt in the southern and Border states in the 1920s, we would like to alert the reader to a second, related revolt that occurred from 1930 to 1936 and has recently been presented and analyzed by Professor Simon Topping. This second revolt was a result of President Hoover’s southern strategy of privileging the LilyWhites over the Black and Tans, which caused northern African American Republicans to realign with the Democratic party by



The Electoral Revolt of African American Voters in 1920–1921 and Beyond 457 Map 21.1  States with Black and Tan Gubernatorial and Senatorial Candidates in the African American Electoral Revolt of 1920–1921

WI

SD

MI

WY

PA

IA NE 0

CO

OH

IN

100 200 miles

DE WV

IL

Virginia

MO

KS

NJ MD

KY NC TN

OK

South Carolina Arkansas

NM

Mississippi

Texas

AL

GA

LA

0

100 miles

200

Florida States of the African American Electoral Revolt States with Black and Tan Republican Activity, 1920 and After States of the 1920 Electoral Revolt

Source: Tables 21.1, 21.2, 21.3, 21.4, and 21.5.

the 1936 presidential election. According to Professor Topping: “By 1931, Hoover had tried to appoint an avowed segregationist to the Supreme Court, offended the mothers of dead African American soldiers, failed to prevent the effective disbandment of the country’s famous black regiments, and, of course, launched his fundamentally flawed southern strategy, all of which happened against the background of the worst depression in American history.”49 And the consequence of this double-cross and betrayal was an electoral realignment in the 1934 midterm elections, at least in Chicago. In 1928 this city had elected Oscar DePriest, the first African American Republican congressman since the end of the Disenfranchisement Era in the South, 1888–1908. But in the 1934 midterm elections, as a result of African American disgust with Hoover, the southside of Chicago elected African American Democrat Arthur Mitchell to replace three-term incumbent Republican Congressman DePriest.50 Seemingly, both strategies coalesced to hasten the African American electorate’s departure from the Republican Party. And at the moment, no scholarly research has uncovered any African American leadership, organizations, or groups that coordinated or combined these two revolts in the 1920s and 1930s. Nor could one have predicted that the southern revolts would enable a

northern revolt that would cause a party realignment, as well as provide empirical data on the African American efforts to re-enfranchise. Eventually, this realignment would result in the Democratic Party becoming a leader of the African American suffrage movement as the Republican Party had done in its rise to power in Antebellum and Reconstruction America. Although the Republican Party was concerned about this departure, even commissioning a study from Professor Ralph Bunche, then Chairman of the newly created political science department at Howard University in Washington, DC, the party was unable to prevent it. Here are the seeds of the eventual drive to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. After the realignment the African American voting rights activists merely gravitated to the Democratic Party. To be sure, a few African American Republicans tried to refocus their party toward the rising African American electorate, first in Chicago and later nationwide, but they were unsuccessful.51

Notes   1. V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), pp. 286–291.   2. Alexander Heard and Donald Strong, eds., Southern Primaries and Elections, 1920–1949 (University: University of Alabama Press, 1950),

458

Chapter 21

pp. 21, 37, 78, 105, 132, and 192. See also Alexander Heard, A Two-Party South? (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952).   3. Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Republicans: The Politics of the Black and Tans (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1972), pp. 45–141; Hanes Walton, Jr., Sharon Wright, and Frank Pryor, “Texas African American Republicans: The Electoral Revolt in the 1920 Presidential and Gubernatorial Election,” National Conference of Black Political Scientists Newsletter Vol. 16 (Spring 2002), pp. 1–6; and Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Political Parties (New York: Free Press, 1972), pp. 64–69.   4. For previous scholarly analyses of these satellite organizations in national and state Republican party politics see Donald Lisio, Hoover, Blacks, and Lily-Whites: A Study of Southern Strategies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); David Ginzl, “Lily-Whites versus Black-and-Tans: Mississippi Republicans During the Hoover Administration,” Journal of Mississippi History (August 1980), pp. 194–211; Frederick Dumas, “The Black and Tan Faction of the Republican Party in Louisiana, 1908–1936” (New Orleans: Xavier University, M.A. Thesis, 1943); and Thomas Cripps, “The Lily-White Republicans: The Negro, the Party, and the South in the Progressive Era” (College Park, MD: Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, 1967).   5. Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Political Parties: An Historical and Political Analysis (New York: Free Press, 1972), p. 183.  6. Walton, Black Republicans: The Politics of the Black and Tans, pp. 1–25.   7. Ibid., pp. 170–176, 179.   8. Buford Satcher, Blacks in Mississippi Politics, 1865–1900 (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1978), p. 90.   9. See Matthew Wasniewski, Black Americans in Congress, 1870– 2007 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2007), pp. 68–71. 10. For the actual numbers see Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction, Revised Edition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), Table 6, p. xvi. 11. See Richard Hume and Jerry Gough, Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags: The Constitutional Conventions of Radical Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), the most recent pioneering work on the number of African American delegates vis-à-vis regional whites and non-regional whites at the 1867 and 1868 state constitutional conventions. For numerical data on the African American elected officials during Reconstruction after the state constitutional conventions see Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Dictionary of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction Rev. ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996). 12. Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869–1879 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), p. 137. 13. Ibid., pp.135–177. 14. Walton, Wright, and Pryor, p. 10. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Walton, Black Republicans, p. 49. 22. Ibid. 23. “Negro Republicans in Three States,” New York Times (April 29, 1920), p. 2. This article notes that Negro Republicans would not support

the white Republicans in the presidential election of that year, going their own separate way. 24. Walton, Black Republicans, p. 45. 25. Key, pp. 290–291. 26. Heard, A Two-Party South?, pp. 223–224. 27. Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Politics: A Theoretical and Structural Analysis (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1972), p. 148. 28. Quoted in ibid. 29. Walton, Wright, and Pryor, p. 10. 30. Walton, Black Republicans, p. 97. 31. Key, p. 289. 32. Walton, Black Republicans, p. 127. 33. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 151. 34. Heard, p. 225. 35. Key, pp. 286–287. 36. Heard, pp. 223–224. 37. Key, p. 288. 38. Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 91–94. 39. See Thomas Holt, Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977). 40. Walton, Black Republicans, p. 114. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Abraham Davis and Barbara Luck Graham, The Supreme Court, Race, and Civil Rights (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995), pp. 65–67. 44. Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Politics: A Theoretical and Structural Analysis (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1972), p. 39. 45. The vote for the SCPDP’s senatorial candidate in 1944, Osceola McKaine, was 4,500 votes: Walton, Black Political Parties, p. 74. The Heard and Strong volume lists the votes as 3,214. Heard and Strong, p. 111. Recent scholarly research on the founder of the SCPDP suggests that the vote for the party’s senatorial candidate in 1944 was “just over 3,200 votes.” See Wim Roefs, “Leading the Civil Rights Vanguard in South Carolina: John McCray and the Lighthouse and Informer, 1939–1954,” in Charles Payne and Adam Green (eds.), Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850–1950 (New York: New York University Press, 2003), p. 476. 46. Walton, Black Republicans, p. 140. 47. Walton, Black Political Parties, p. 73. 48. For a discussion of some of the liberal whites who were at this meeting and later took the SCPDP organizational song as the title for their book without acknowledging it, see Pat Watters and Reese Cleghorn, Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: The Arrival of Negroes in Southern Politics (New York: Harcourt, 1967). 49. Ibid. 50. See Dennis Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman: A Life of Arthur Wergs Mitchell (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997). 51. Two African Methodist Episcopal ministers, a father and son, attempted to revive the Republican–African American alliance. See Dennis Dickerson, African American Preachers and Politics: The Careys of Chicago (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010).

CHAPTER 22

African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1920–1944 Legal Battles for African American Voting Rights

460

African American Voters in the Urban Areas of the South, 1920–1940s

461

Table 22.1 First Generation Voting Rights Cases

462

Table 22.2 Total Votes and Percentages for Candidates in Three San Antonio Mayoral Elections, 1939–1941

464

Table 22.3 African American Votes and Percentages in the Mayoral Election of San Antonio, Texas, 1939

465

Table 22.4 African American Votes and Percentages in the Mayoral Election of San Antonio, Texas, 1941

465

Table 22.5 African American Votes and Percentages in the Mayoral Run-Off Election of San Antonio, Texas, 1941

465

Figure 22.1 African American and Other Votes in San Antonio, Texas, Mayoral Elections, 1939–1941

466

Table 22.6 Comparing Literate Voting-Age Black Population and Estimated Black Voting Population in Selected Cities and Counties of the Southern States, 1920

467

Table 22.7 Summary of Voting-Age Blacks and Voting Black Populations in Selected Cities and Counties of the Southern States, 1920

468

Table 22.8 Official Louisiana Voter Registration for the State by Race and for New Orleans African Americans, 1896–1928

468

Figure 22.2 Registered Black Voters in New Orleans as a Percent of Registered Black Voters in Louisiana, 1896–1928

469

Changing the Rules: The Elimination of the Poll Tax by Southern States

469

Map 22.1 Southern Cities and Urban Areas that Allowed the African American Electorate to Vote, 1896–1930

470

Table 22.9 Southern States that Voted For or Against Repeal or Reduction of the Poll Tax, 1920–1963

471

Federal Elimination of the Poll Tax: Causes and Effects

473

Map 22.2 Southern States For and Against Repeal of the Poll Tax, 1920–1963

474

Figure 22.3 Results of State Referenda to Repeal or Reduce the Poll Tax, 1920–1963

475

Table 22.10 Analysis of the Vote in the House of Representatives on Final Passage of the Anti-Poll Tax Bills

475

Table 22.11 Analysis of the Vote in the Senate on Cloture Applicable to the Anti-Poll Tax Bills

476

Table 22.12 Ratification of the Twenty-Fourth Amendment by the Southern and Border States

476

Table 22.13 African American Voting-Age Population in the Southern States by Poll Tax Repeal, 1920s–1950s

478

Figure 22.4 African American Voting-Age Population in Southern States by Repeal of the Poll Tax, 1920s–1950s

478

Summary and Conclusions on African American Registration and Voting, 1920–1944

479

Notes 479

460

Chapter 22

T

he African American electorate in the South, men and women, made numerous efforts to re-enfranchise themselves after the Era of Disenfranchisement had stripped their Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendment suffrage rights. In 1920–1921, reinvigorated by the influx of African American women voters, they formed satellite Republican parties, the Black and Tan Republicans, in six states in a revolt against their suppression by the Democrats and abandonment by the Republicans. These protest votes, while significant, did not lead to a re-building of the biracial coalition in the Republican Party that had existed during Reconstruction. But African Americans also undertook a continual voter registration effort—even in the long shadow of the Era of Disenfranchisement—which sowed the seeds for the successes of the civil rights and voting rights movement. This effort was spearheaded by the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The rise of the NAACP and its legal victories against some of the disenfranchising techniques, as well as the creation of organizations like the political and civic voting leagues, gave birth to leadership that mobilized and prepared individuals in African American communities to become voters. Then, there were continual voting opportunities in certain types of elections in these southern states and cities. And finally, some of the disenfranchisement laws were repealed. Taken together, all of these factors worked to expand the African American electorate beyond those prospects provided by the Black and Tan Republicans. This expansion is the focus of this chapter and its analysis. Thus, some in the African American electorate made the most of these cracks and breaks in the barriers erected by the South’s evasion of the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments.

Legal Battles for African American Voting Rights As early as 1890, African American leaders and organizations had tried legal means to turn back the ever rising disenfranchisement tide. A scholarly work that was published in 2010, Defying Disfranchisement: Black Voting Rights Activism in the Jim Crow South, 1890–1908, by R. Volney Riser, describes and analyzes the African American initiated court cases that predated the work of the NAACP. With the advent of the disenfranchising 1890 Mississippi state constitution, African American voting rights “[a]ctivists launched [a series of] antidisfranchisement cases to force the federal government’s hand, hoping that it would bring southern disfranchisers to heel. . . . Yet they did not stem disfranchisement’s advance.”1 Professor Riser added: “The heyday of antidisfranchisement activity came between 1894 and 1904,” and it had run its course by 1908 when the last case was decided.2 “Whether the various groups of antidisfranchisement activists intended for judges to rectify things or whether they thought suits might provoke some congressional rescue of blacks’ voting rights was often unclear. They sometimes apparently sought both and in other instances seemed unconcerned which came first.”3 Nevertheless, the African Americans in this period, 1890–1908, had only one option—the federal court—and this became their favored technique. Hence, some “[s]even antidisfranchisement cases had reached the nation’s high court by the autumn of 1903. The three Mississippi cases (Smith, Gibson, and Williams) . . . had little bearing upon” the South disenfranchisement system.4

The fourth case, “Mills v. Green, the first disfranchisement case the Court reviewed, [served to remind] litigators of the Political Questions Doctrine,”5 a doctrine that declared to African American activists that voting rights discrimination was a political question and being such could not be resolved by the Courts. “The two antidisfranchisement cases that mattered most . . . were Wiley v. Sinkler and Swafford v. Templeton, each of which had affirmed the federal courts’ jurisdiction over voting rights claims.” And the Giles v. Harris case, which declared that African American claimants who won had a right to collect damages from the southern states, “illumined a path for plaintiffs to make disfranchisement harder and costlier for states.”6 But the African American activists never received their damages. Therefore, after a comprehensive analysis of these African American–led court cases in the period 1894–1908, Professor Riser concluded: The false starts, halting progress, and bewildering strategic miscues that these first antidisfranchisement crusaders made are at once maddening and entirely understandable. . . . [T]hese initiatives were state centered and inward looking. There was no attempt to mobilize black southerners in general, and the only external support the principals cultivated was that of national Republican Party leaders.7 But Professor Riser’s criticism of these African American voting rights activists in the pre-NAACP years did not simply stop with his critique of their strategy and options. He also criticized their negative outcomes and losses as dependent in part on their legal preparation and presentation before the Supreme Court. He wrote: “Disputatious, disorganized, and underfunded, the antidisfranchisement activists of 1890–1908 lost, and badly, for their repeated and infuriating defeats did not leave the status quo in place but actually made things worse.”8 And in arriving at these conclusions Professor Riser showed that the various organizations created to carry this legal work forward such as the National African American Council (NAAC), the Colored Men’s Suffrage Association of Alabama (CMSAA), the National Negro Suffrage League (NNSL), and the Women’s Negro Franchise Association of New Jersey (WNFANJ) were short-lived, with factional leadership and personal squabbles.9 These factors might have been some of the limitations and weaknesses for this group of African American antidisfranchisement activists and their strategy of legal action, but they had nevertheless set the groundwork for the NAACP and its legal strategy, which succeeded where they had failed. The NAACP’s similar approach would challenge these court rulings as well as others, including the grandfather clause, that effectively exempted whites from onerous voting requirements.

The Impact and Influence of an African American Voting Rights Pressure Group: The NAACP Voting Cases With no help coming from the federal government or from either of the major political parties, and with the failure of previous efforts, a biracial coalition of African Americans and



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1920–1944 461

liberal whites, many of them Jewish, decided on a legal strategy to undermine the second-class citizenship imposed on African Americans after the Era of Disenfranchisement and rise of segregation. “Organized in 1910 from a coalition of black intellectuals and white liberals, the NAACP set out to acquire for all black citizens the rights and privileges enumerated in the Constitution. . . . The organization decided to rely chiefly upon legal proceedings in order to make the courts declare that blacks were entitled to enjoy all those rights spelled out in the Constitution and especially in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth [and later Nineteenth] amendments.”10 Eventually, the NAACP would institute test cases against many of the state constitutional clauses that denied African Americans their voting rights. Although leaders of this organization knew that “[f]rom Reconstruction to World War I the Supreme Court showed more ingenuity in voiding voting rights actions than in upholding them,” they believed that the changes that the war had engendered in the nation’s political and electoral context might lead the Court to reconsider earlier rulings like Giles v. Harris, which “legitimated the widespread disfranchisement of Southern blacks during this era.”11 In that case, Jackson W. Giles, an African American male, had “attempted to register to vote in March 1902 but was refused on account of his color, as were other blacks statewide.” Thus, Giles instituted a class action suit against Alabama for himself and “more than 5,000 black citizens of Montgomery, Alabama, against the board of registrars in that county.”12 According to legal scholars Abraham Davis and Barbara Luck Graham: He challenged the constitutional validity of several provisions of Alabama’s Constitution that provided that persons who registered before January 1, 1903, remained electors for life unless disqualified by certain crimes. After January 1, 1903, persons attempting to register to vote had to undertake more severe tests for voting: good character tests, poll taxes, literacy tests, and various property qualifications.13 The Supreme Court on hearing the case ruled in a 6–3 decision that “the federal courts lacked jurisdiction to hear the case,” simply because this case involved a “political question” and issue and that the federal courts had no remedy for cases with “political questions” and issues. Thus, the disenfranchising Alabama state constitution and those like it in other southern states had not violated the U.S. Constitution. A previous case, Williams v. Mississippi, had upheld the Mississippi state constitution of 1890, which helped in part to launch the Era of Disenfranchisement. In this case, the Supreme Court had ruled that although this new state constitution “mandated that only qualified voters were eligible for jury service,” thereby eliminating African Americans from jury service, this dual loss of rights, voting and jury duty, did not discriminate against African Americans. The Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in this case laid the groundwork for permitting the southern states to enact new disenfranchising state constitutions. Again, denial of voting rights was a “political question” for which the Supreme Court had no remedy. These citizens’ Fifteenth Amendment suffrage rights could not get protection from the highest federal court.

In the 1920–1944 period, the NAACP began filing voting rights test cases, and a few of the disenfranchising techniques and procedures were declared unconstitutional. This allowed potential African American voters to acquire the ballot without the full weight and burden of the southern states’ disenfranchisement laws to circumscribe them. Table 22.1 (p. 462) lists the Federal District Court, Federal Court of Appeals, and Supreme Court cases that either advanced or laid the legal groundwork for further opportunities of the African American electorate in the eleven southern states to exercise their Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendment voting rights. Along with the name of each of these thirteen cases, the table shows how these federal courts voted and summarizes the court ruling. Of particular importance during this time frame (1915–1953) are the ten cases that declared unconstitutional (1) the grandfather clause, (2) some of the White Primary regulations, and (3) limited voter registration periods. The courts also upheld the poll tax requirement in both local and state elections and in congressional (national) elections. Hence, the courts eliminated some of the disenfranchising techniques while supporting the poll tax. In addition to the pioneering legal efforts of the NAACP, individual voting rights activists such as Dr. L. A. Nixon and some Black Democrats acted on their own to re-enfranchise themselves in Texas and elsewhere. And most significantly, the NAACP worked in the states of the old South to ensure that its legal test cases would be highly relevant in dismantling the techniques and procedures placed in the southern states’ new constitutions to deny African Americans their Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendment rights.

African American Voters in the Urban Areas of the South, 1920–1940s Abandoned by the federal government, circumscribed by the state governments, the African American electorate, men and women, would try to find, workable “political alliances at the local level.” Given the uneven application of segregation and Jane and Jim Crow laws, some rural and urban governments, particularly the latter, became political locales where new voting opportunities flourished in the South for African Americans. Certain southern cities became legendary in a very short period of time as oases of voting opportunity in the midst of a desert region of systematic disenfranchisement. These cities included Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama; Atlanta, Athens, Augusta, and Savannah, Georgia; Charlotte, Durham, Greensboro, Raleigh, Salisbury, and High Point, North Carolina; Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee; Vicksburg, Mississippi; Charleston, Columbia, and Orangeburg, South Carolina; Austin, Galveston, Houston, San Antonio, and Forth Worth, Texas; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Hampton, Portsmouth, Newport News, Norfolk, Richmond, and Roanoke, Virginia. These cities became sources of urban myths about African American voting. Of these southern municipalities, Paul Lewinson has written: . . . most of the Negroes who did vote, voted in the cities. It was in the cities that Negro suffrage was most discussed, whether privately, or publicly through the medium of newspapers, interracial bodies, and Negro welfare organizations. It was in the cities . . . that

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Table 22.1  First Generation Voting Rights Cases Case

Vote

Ruling

Guinn v. United States, 238 U.S. 347 (1915)

9–0

Chief Justice White declared the grandfather clause unconstitutional on Fifteenth Amendment grounds.

Newberry v. United States, 256 U.S. 232 (1921)

9–0

Justice McReynolds declared that Congress lacked authority, under Article 1, § 4 of the Constitution, to regulate primary elections.

Love v. Griffith, 266 U.S. 32 (1924)

9–0

Justice Holmes upheld a Texas court ruling that blacks could not challenge a White Primary law because the election had been held; therefore, blacks’ Fifteenth Amendment rights were not violated.

Nixon v. Herndon, 273 U.S. 536 (1927)

9–0

Justice Holmes declared the Texas White Primary law unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Nixon v. Condon, 286 U.S. 73 (1932)

5–4

Justice Cardozo struck down a Texas law that gave the State Executive Committee power to prescribe voting qualifications, which it limited to white Democrats, under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Grovey v. Townsend, 295 U.S. 45 (1935)

9–0

Justice Roberts declared that it is constitutional for a political party to restrict voting to whites in primaries so long as state action was not present.

Breedlove v. Suttles, 302 U.S. 277 (1937)

9–0

Justice Butler upheld a Georgia poll tax requirement that exempted women under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Lane v. Wilson, 307 U.S. 268 (1939)

6–2

Justice Frankfurter invalidated a new scheme enacted by the Oklahoma legislature to disfranchise black voters under the Fifteenth Amendment.

United States v. Classic, 313 U.S. 299 (1941)

5–3

Justice Stone overruled Newberry v. United States (1921) and declared that Congress had the authority to regulate primary elections.

Pirtle v. Brown, 118 F (2D) 218 (1941), 314 U.S. 621 (1941)

3–0

Supreme Court upheld a Court of Appeals decision that a Tennessee poll tax requirement in general elections for members of Congress was valid.

Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944)

8–1

Justice Reed overruled Grovey v. Townsend (1935) under the Fifteenth Amendment.

Elmore v. Rice, 72 F. Supp. 516 (1947)

1–0

Federal Court of Appeals ruled that a South Carolina law turning over primary elections to the Democratic Party as a private club that discriminated on the basis of race was invalid. Supreme Court allowed the lower court ruling to stand.

Terry v. Adams, 345 U.S. 461 (1953)

8–1

Justice Black held that the Jaybird Association, a voluntary club that limited its membership to white voters, violated blacks’ Fifteenth Amendment rights by excluding their participation in primaries.

Sources: Adapted from Abraham L. Davis and Barbara Luck Graham, The Supreme Court, Race, and Civil Rights (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995), p. 67; Frederic D. Ogden, The Poll Tax in the South (University: University of Alabama Press, 1958), pp. 272–273; and V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1949), p. 628.

elections occurred in which Negro votes were more or less openly solicited; it was in cities that stories arose, sometimes verifiable, sometimes, not, of an occasional Negro balance of power.14 In addition to municipal elections, the African American electorate in the Post-Disenfranchisement Era voted in referenda, special, nonpartisan, and general elections in the South because most of these elections did not require a White Primary. Such elections afforded opportunities for African Americans to cast ballots in the period from 1920 through 1944. And because of these voting possibilities and the strong distaste for the politics of the Black and Tans among much of the African American electorate, a variety of African American organizations emerged to prepare members of the community’s electorate for registering and voting in numerous states and urban areas. Lewinson discovered: “In a surprisingly large number of Southern cities, the years following the enactment of the disfranchising constitutions witnessed the growth of Civic Leagues and Forums for the discussion of public questions affecting the race, of NonPartisan Leagues which coached Negroes to pass registration examinations,” as well as mobilizing them to register to vote.15 Although these “gonna register” campaigns were never successful in registering masses of African American voters, they were successful in registering some members of the community. And

these additional voters set the stage for even greater and stronger efforts toward re-enfranchisement. African American voting rights activists in the NAACP and other voting leagues were quite involved in urban reenfranchisement struggles, forming coalitions and alliances with local political leaders and political machines and bosses to institute further breaches in the wall of disenfranchisement. Professor Lewinson remarked on the importance of the urban area and the correlation between the “urban conditions and a— comparatively—large Negro vote,” noting: The Negro urban vote was due in part to certain structural and functional features of municipal government; the form of city government, the frequency of municipal elections, an unwonted bipartisanship in city politics, the city-dweller’s concern with referenda on tax and bond matters, etc., where no personal issue or question of “supremacy” is involved. Underlying these phenomena of municipal politics were certain cultural aspects of city life, common to all sections of the country, but of special significance for the South’s special problem. . . . The cities, therefore—not all of them, but they more than the little town and the country— provided for Negro suffrage a background of white apathy and Negro anonymity.16



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1920–1944 463

Although the pioneering collection of voter registration data on the African American electorate in the cities in the 1930s was made in the South by Professor Lewinson and by Harold Gosnell in Chicago, not much other literature with good voter registration data exists except in scattered, sketchy, and piecemeal fashion. For a long time, the lone exceptions were the master’s thesis of Ralph Wardlaw on Georgia, and African American political scientist Ralph Bunche’s data collection memorandum, “The Political Status of the Negro” for Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma.17 The edited and published version of the Bunche memorandum is highly circumscribed and does not include many of his tables, charts, and statistical computations from the original work, and therefore is not as valuable and useful in giving African American voter registration data on the urban areas in the South as is the original work.18 But even less well-known and appreciated is an exceptional 1987 article by Judith Kaaz Doyle on San Antonio, Texas, covering the period 1938–1941, which presented highly reliable voter registration and voting data.

The African American Voter in the Mayoral Elections in San Antonio, Texas: The 1931 and 1941 Mayoral Elections and the 1941 Run-Off Election Many factors make San Antonio an interesting case study for urban African American voting prior to Smith v. Allwright. First, San Antonio was a city where “municipal elections were nonpartisan, so white primary directives did not apply to them. Second, during the 1920s the U.S. congressional district that included San Antonio contained the strongest Republican party organizations in the state”; and here the very active African American Republicans continued to vote for white Republican Congressman Harry M. Wurzbach until 1934 when he lost his seat.19 Third, San Antonio was a city with a political machine and bosses, including a black sub-machine and political boss.20 Professor Lewinson was the first to write about this unusual situation in the 1930s, noting: “In the five largest cities of Texas, the campaign for Negro votes in municipal elections was quite open. In San Antonio, there had long been ‘peculiar (and favorable) local conditions with respect to the colored people’ as testified by the congressman from the district,” Representative Carlos Bee, before a House of Representatives Hearing held by the Committee on the Census.21 Professor V.O. Key, Jr., remarked about this reality in his classic Southern Politics, as did his research assistant later.22 Doyle explained it in this way: A strong machine had long operated in the city. Since the late 1910s San Antonio blacks had participated in city government through this machine. At that time a black man named Charles Bellinger became an aide to a prominent member of the machine. Bellinger realized that the city’s black preachers were the key to an organized black vote. Working through these preachers Bellinger built up a strong bloc of black voters. In the 1930s Bellinger was reputedly able to deliver five thousand to eight thousand votes to the machine. . . . Bellinger’s bloc of organized, reliable black voters made

up as much as 25 percent of the total in some city and county elections, despite the fact that blacks made up only about 8 percent of the city’s population.23 The fourth factor that makes San Antonio an interesting case study is that the African American electorate, men and women, voted not only in municipal elections but also in the Democratic white primaries in Bexar County, the home of San Antonio. They were able to do so partly because “Bexar County Democratic Officials” were part and parcel of the political machine and partly because the African American electorate was so used to voting in the white primaries in the county that when they were rejected they filed suit. On July 10, 1932, C.A. Booker, a black San Antonian represented by white machine lawyer Carl Wright Johnson, filed for an injunction to force party officials to allow him to vote in the July 23 primary. When the federal district court in San Antonio granted Booker’s injunction the day before the primary, [Maury] Maverick and a fellow reform candidate sprang into action to get the injunction overturned. They eventually succeeded, but not before approximately one thousand blacks voted in the primary on election day.24 Finally, the city had a nationally known liberal New Dealer, former Congressman Maury Maverick, who ran three times for mayor against the candidate of the political machine. Maverick was elected to Congress in 1934 and 1936 but lost a reelection bid in 1938. His “stand in favor of anti-lynching legislation marked him as an ultraliberal on racial issues. No southerner other than Maverick voted for the Gavagan Anti-Lynch Bill in 1937.” In addition, he publicly advocated for “equal pay for equal work, opportunities for blacks to participate in organized labor, and assurances of equal access to jobs and education,” and strongly supported FDR’s New Deal legislation.25 The president singled him out for high praise. But this did not help Maverick’s support in Texas. “The immediate and sweeping praise Maverick received from black leaders for his anti-lynching stand embarrassed him. . . . He stressed that he was not supporting the bill in order to gain black votes,” let alone their wholehearted adulation.26 Maverick had then come out for the white primaries, social inequality, and against those African Americans who praised him for his anti-lynching stand. Still, he later blamed his 1938 congressional reelection defeat upon his anti-lynching stand and African Americans’ embrace of his political stance. Upon losing in 1938, he decided to run for the mayoral position as a progressive and good government reformer against the machine candidate and its African American boss and supporters. Once in the 1939 mayoral contest, Maverick continued to distance himself from the African American community and its leaders. He did hope that his liberal reputation would garner him support inside the African American community without having to make promises and deals with and for the community. Indeed, during the election, “his congressional fame as a racial liberal . . . gained him endorsements by black weekly newspapers in Houston, Dallas, and Waco. . . . [In San Antonio] the

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Bexar County Educational League, a local group opposed to the machine, endorsed Maverick. The National Negro Congress (NNC) collected money for Maverick’s campaign through its San Antonio branch. The NNC’s national office sent word of its official endorsement of Maverick to thousands of local blacks.”27 While national African American organizations fully embraced and endorsed Maverick, several local leaders and the Bellinger sub-machine did not embrace him. “Although Charles Bellinger had died two years earlier, the machine hoped that his son, Harvard-educated Valmo Bellinger would be able to continue the black bloc [vote] tradition” in this 1939 mayoral election.28 It supported the incumbent machine mayor, Charles Kennon (C.K.) Quin, despite the fact that in December 1938 “a grand jury indicted Mayor Quin for misapplication of public funds,” which he evaded. The east side of San Antonio, where most of the African American electorate resided, voted for the incumbent mayor over Maverick, but nearly 35% of the African American electorate voted for Maverick. He would later claim that it was only 21%, which as we shall see was incorrect. Nevertheless, on May 9, 1939, Maverick was elected mayor. During Mayor Maverick’s “administration the number of blacks on the city payroll increased from thirty-one to ninety-one but the number holding white-collar positions decreased. While the Maverick administration hired black garbage collectors, janitors, and maids, it removed black health inspectors, librarians, and nurses. In doing so, Maverick angered the most politically active elements in the black community.”29 If Mayor Maverick had reformed members of the African American electorate out of their patronage jobs during the Depression, worse was yet to come. Next Mayor Maverick created a committee to undertake city charter revisions that would create a council-manager form of city government, but he placed no African Americans on the committee. This planned revision would make it impossible for the political machine to dominate city elections and would “create a situation in which no political candidate, machine and otherwise, could gain much by courting blacks. In other words, the destruction of black political power was . . . [Mayor] Maverick’s” new goal.30 This proposal unified the African American electorate for the forthcoming mayoral election in 1941. The resultant contest needed two elections to resolve, the regular one and then a runoff election. Table 22.2 provides the total vote and percentage for each of the mayoral candidates in all three elections. Maverick won the 1939 election with 3,501 more votes than the incumbent Quin, who was facing corruption charges. In the first 1941 election, Quin returned to beat the incumbent Maverick by 1,233 votes. Then, in the subsequent run-off election, Quin beat Maverick by 1,183 votes. The results of African American electorate voting in these three elections can be seen in the tabular election return data in Tables 22.3, 22.4, and 22.5. To determine this vote in each of the three mayoral contests, Professor Doyle isolated fifteen African American precincts in 1939 and thirteen such precincts in the two 1941 elections. However, author Doyle alerts the reader to the fact that “the voting precincts were redrawn and renumbered between 1939 and 1941, and therefore a direct comparison between the two years is not possible,” in terms of

Table 22.2  Total Votes and Percentages for Candidates in Three San Antonio Mayoral Elections, 1939–1941 Candidate

Vote

Percent

1939 Mayoral Election Maury Maverick

18,375

40.9%

C. K. Quin

14,874

33.1%

LeRoy Jeffers

11,503

25.6%

Maude Pridgen Butler

65

0.1%

Charles E. Hummel

45

0.1%

S. M. Esler

11

0.02%

44,873

100%

Total

1941 Mayoral Election C. K. Quin

17,435

48.7%

Maury Maverick

16,202

45.3%

Norman Brock

1,104

3.1%

Bob Menefee

506

1.4%

W. B. Ling

317

0.9%

H. L. Summerville Total

230

0.6%

35,794

100%

1941 Mayoral Run-Off Election C. K. Quin

20,982

51.5%

Maury Maverick

19,799

48.5%

Total 

40,781

100%

Source: Adapted from Judith Kaaz Doyle, “Maury Maverick and Racial Politics in San Antonio, Texas, 1938–1941,” Journal of Southern History Vol. 53 No. 2 (May 1987), p. 207, footnote 46; p. 219 footnote 78; and p. 220. Calculations by the authors.

precinct-to-precinct comparisons.31 Nevertheless, these are some of the most reliable data to be found in the extant literature. Table 22.3 shows that of the three leading mayoral candidates, the machine candidate and incumbent mayor Quin got the majority of the African American electorate vote with 1,665 votes (53.4%) to Maverick’s 1,107 votes (35.5%) and to Jeffers’ 347 votes (11.1%). The African Americans provided one-third of their vote for Maverick, who had taken a national stance on the anti-lynching bill despite his negative stand on local matters like the white primary and social inequality. In this May 9th election 3,119 votes came out of the African American precincts and some additional votes came out of the white precincts in the city. The median vote in these precincts was 200 and the mean was 208 votes. And given Maverick’s 3000+ margin of victory in this election, his African American votes supplied him with a more comfortable margin to win but losing them would not have cost him the election. Table 22.4, however, tells a very different story about the 1941 mayoral outcome. First, more African Americans voted in this election. Quin got a much higher number of votes this time vis-à-vis the last election (2,024, for an increase of 359) and a greater percentage (58.1%, a 4.7 percentage point increase), while Maverick also got more votes this time (1,320, up 213) and a higher percentage (37.9%, up 2.4 percentage points). However,



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1920–1944 465 Table 22.3  African American Votes and Percentages in the Mayoral Election of San Antonio, Texas, 1939

Table 22.4  African American Votes and Percentages in the Mayoral Election of San Antonio, Texas, 1941 Mayoral Candidates

Mayoral Candidates African American Precinct 63 66

LeRoy Jeffers Votes 5 6

Percent 4.5% 3.4%

Maury Maverick Votes 52 87

Percent 46.4% 49.4%

C.K. Quin Votes 55 83

Percent 49.1% 47.2%

Total Votes

African American Precinct

Maury Maverick Votes

C.K. Quin

Percent

Votes

Others

Percent

Votes

Total Votes

Percent

112

33

157

51.1%

144

46.9%

6

2.0%

307

176

44

108

41.9%

137

53.1%

13

5.0%

258

45

112

33.8%

207

62.5%

12

3.6%

331

88

105

46.1%

107

46.9%

16

7.0%

228

90

77

28.0%

192

69.8%

6

2.2%

275

92

69

32.9%

131

62.4%

10

4.8%

210

93

151

47.9%

150

47.6%

14

4.4%

315

94

103

37.2%

168

60.6%

6

2.2%

277

96

64

47.8%

65

48.5%

5

3.7%

134

67

16

5.8%

88

31.8%

173

62.5%

277

68

10

8.4%

69

58.0%

40

33.6%

119

69

14

10.0%

47

33.6%

79

56.4%

140

125

117

34.3%

125

36.7%

99

29.0%

341

134

36

24.8%

71

49.0%

38

26.2%

145

138

14

7.0%

65

32.5%

121

60.5%

200

139

23

9.0%

35

13.7%

197

77.3%

255

103

118

37.2%

187

59.0%

12

3.8%

317

150

16

5.7%

133

47.0%

134

47.3%

283

105

71

35.7%

116

58.3%

12

6.0%

199

151

20

9.2%

73

33.6%

124

57.1%

217

109

98

24.5%

285

71.3%

17

4.3%

400

152

27

15.0%

64

35.6%

89

49.4%

180

110

87

37.8%

135

58.7%

8

3.5%

230

154

9

12.2%

19

25.7%

46

62.2%

74

Total

1,320

37.9%

2,024

58.1%

137

3.9%

3,481

155

16

4.3%

92

24.5%

268

71.3%

376

Mean

102

37.9%

156

58.1%

11

3.9%

268

156

18

8.0%

87

38.8%

119

53.1%

224

Median

103

37.5%

144

52.4%

12

4.4%

275

Total

347

11.1%

1,107

35.5%

1,665

53.4%

3,119

Mean

23

11.1%

74

35.5%

111

53.4%

208

Median

16

8.0%

71

35.5%

99

49.5%

200

Source: Adapted from Judith Kaaz Doyle, “Maury Maverick and Racial Politics in San Antonio, Texas, 1938–1941,” Journal of Southern History Vol. 53 No. 2 (May 1987), pp. 194–224. Calculations by the authors.

Source: Adapted from Judith Kaaz Doyle, “Maury Maverick and Racial Politics in San Antonio, Texas, 1938–1941,” Journal of Southern History Vol. 53 No. 2 (May 1987), pp. 194–224. Calculations by the authors.

Table 22.5  African American Votes and Percentages in the Mayoral Run-Off Election of San Antonio, Texas, 1941

neither of these increases from the African American electorate was enough to enable Mayor Maverick to keep his seat or Quin to win the election outright. The stage was now set for a run-off election. Table 22.5 indicates that 496 more African Americans turned out in the run-off election, Quin gained 539 African Americans votes compared with the general election, and Maverick gained only 94 more votes. In the run-off election, Quin’s overall margin of victory was 1,233 votes, while his margin of victory among African Americans was 1,149 votes. Clearly, almost all (93%) of his total margin of victory came from the African American electorate. These tables show that in both of the 1941 elections, the African American electorate did not turn against incumbent Mayor Maverick in large numbers despite his white supremacist attitudes; indeed, they increased their votes in both of these elections for him. But the higher turnout for Quin (especially in the run-off) played a key part in Maverick’s defeat. Thus, even though the numbers of African American voters were small in the 1941 run-off election, they proved to be the balanceof-power and helped to determine the outcome. Figure 22.1 (p. 466) allows a visual comparison of the African American vote in these three elections. The African American vote for Mayor Maverick started at about 1,100 votes in the

African American Precinct

Mayoral Candidates Maury Maverick Votes

Percent

C.K. Quin Votes

Percent

Total Votes

33

167

46.9%

189

53.1%

356

44

128

44.3%

161

55.7%

289

45

123

32.8%

252

67.2%

375

88

140

52.2%

128

47.8%

268

90

87

26.0%

248

74.0%

335

92

74

31.6%

160

68.4%

234

93

175

47.0%

197

53.0%

372

94

99

30.7%

223

69.3%

322

96

66

42.9%

88

57.1%

154

103

122

34.4%

233

65.6%

355

105

75

32.9%

153

67.1%

228

109

90

20.1%

358

79.9%

448

110

68

28.2%

173

71.8%

241

Total

1,414

35.6%

2,563

64.4%

3,977

Mean

109

35.6%

197

64.4%

306

99

34.4%

189

65.6%

288

Median

Source: Adapted from Judith Kaaz Doyle, “Maury Maverick and Racial Politics in San Antonio, Texas, 1938–1941,” Journal of Southern History Vol. 53 No. 2 (May 1987), pp. 194–224. Calculations by the authors.

466

Chapter 22

Figure 22.1  African American and Other Votes in San Antonio, Texas, Mayoral Elections, 1939–1941 25,000

20,000

1,414

2,563

Number of Votes

1,107 2,024

1,320

15,000

1,665

10,000 17,268 13,209

14,882

15,411

Maverick

Quin

18,385

18,419

Maverick

Quin

5,000

0 Maverick

Quin

1939 Mayoral Election

1941 Mayoral Election

African American votes

1941 Mayoral Run-Off Election

Other votes

Source: Table 22.2.

initial election but rose to just over 1,300 in the second election in 1941, and continued to rise to just over 1,400 votes in the runoff election in 1941, despite his white supremacist racial attitude. However, the African American vote for mayoral challenger Quin started at 1,665 in the 1939 election, rose to over 2,000 votes in the 1941 election, and went to over 2,500 in the 1941 run-off election. Thus, in the final analysis, the African American electorate voted for both the flawed political boss as well as for the political reformer in the city of San Antonio, Texas. And in contrast the African American electorate in this southern urban area may have voted more heavily for the political boss and machine as a consequence of city patronage jobs. Reform was important but not as important as jobs and employment Arising from this detailed case study of African American voting in a southern urban area are findings that suggest some testable characteristics about this voting behavior: (1) About one-third of the African American group vote was for a reform candidate espousing progressive ideas, (2) about one-half to twothirds of the group voted for a machine candidate, (3) over the three elections the number of African American voters increased, (4) the African American electorate in this city or someone in the machine paid their poll taxes, (5) there was an interest in voting despite the risks and obstacles, and (6) national issues could trump local ones. Overall, the African American urban voter was

not just machine-controlled; issues and individuals were important determinants of their voting behavior.

Voter Registration in Other Urban Areas: New Orleans from 1896 to 1928 Would the case study findings hold in other southern urban cities for the African American electorate? The extant data on southern cities and counties are not as detailed and systematic as the San Antonio data. However, Professor Lewinson assembled African American voter registration data, both official and estimated, for southern urban cities and counties in all of the eleven states for his 1932 book. He collected data for a total of 85 sites in these eleven states, which breaks down into 43 cities and 41 urban counties. He covered 23 sites in Mississippi, 14 sites in Virginia, 12 in Alabama, 8 in Georgia, 6 each in North Carolina and South Carolina, 5 in Louisiana, 4 in Texas, 3 in Tennessee, and 2 each in Arkansas and Florida. Table 22.6 displays Lewinson’s estimated and actual data for the cities and counties of the South. Only two states, Louisiana and Alabama, had official voter registration data for the African American electorate. Louisiana had continuous data, while Alabama had official data only for 1908. For the other nine states Lewinson used the 1920 Census to estimate the number of African Americans



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1920–1944 467

Table 22.6  Comparing Literate Voting-Age Black Population and Estimated Black Voting Population in Selected Cities and Counties of the Southern States, 1920

Literate VotingAge Blacks

Estimated Black Voters

Estimated Black Voters as Percent of Literate Voting-Age Blacks

State

Location

County or City

Alabama                    

Birmingham

City

33,645

400

1.2%

Mobile

City

11,344

193

1.7%

Montgomery

City

8,140

50

0.6%

Cherokee

County

570

5

0.9%

Chilton

County

1,345

3

0.2%

Clay

County

914

1

0.1%

Covington

County

2,393

2

0.1%

Cullman

County

163

2

1.2%

DeKalb

County

252

0

0.0%

Macon

County

5,396

65

1.2%

Walker

County

3,169

12

0.4%

Washington

County

1,472

30

2.0%

Hot Springs

City

1,764

1,100

62.4%

Little Rock

City

10,196

4,000

39.2%

Daytona Beach

City

 

1,000

 

Jacksonville

City

 

1,200

 

Atlanta

City

31,943

500

1.6%

Augusta

City

31,943

500

1.6%

Macon

City

10,595

1,000

9.4%

Savannah

City

19,672

800

4.1%

Chatham

County

22,678

900

4.0%

Clarke

County

4,299

179

4.2%

Floyd

County

3,016

274

9.1%

Fulton

County

34,306

7,341

21.4%

New Orleans

City

 

2,599

 

Cameron

County

110

0

0.0%

East Caroll

County

3,151

2

0.1%

Livingston

County

484

2

0.4%

Tensas

County

1,954

0

0.0%

Greenwood

City

1,896

6

0.3%

Jackson

City

4,182

100

2.4%

Natchez

City

2,821

100

3.5%

Vicksburg

City

3,774

100

2.6%

Adams

County

5,206

38

0.7%

Copiah

County

4,390

1

0.0%

Forrest

County

2,824

10

0.4%

Hinds

County

12,154

60

0.5%

Holmes

County

8,608

30

Humphreys

County

5,095

0

Lauderdale

County

6,013

140

2.3%

LeFlore

County

9,782

50

0.5%

Lincoln

County

2,577

5

0.2%

Madison

County

6,402

12

0.2%

Arkansas Florida Georgia

Louisiana

Mississippi

County or City

Literate VotingAge Blacks

Estimated Black Voters

Estimated Black Voters as Percent of Literate Voting-Age Blacks

State

Location

Mississippi (Continued)

Marshall Rankin Scott Sharkey Simpson Sunflower Warren Washington Yazoo

County County County County County County County County

5,565 2,964 1,873 3,745 1,781 11,432 8,278 14,583

40 0 25 0 75 20 185 148

0.7% 0.0% 1.3% 0.0% 4.2% 0.2% 2.2% 1.0%

County

8,582

6

0.1%

Asheville Durham Greensboro Raleigh Shelby

City City City City City

3,360 3,105 2,678 3,897 139

200 700 700 582 6

6.0% 22.5% 26.1% 14.9% 4.3%

Winston-Salem

City

9,452

326

3.4%

Charleston Columbia Edgefield Greenville Orangeburg

City City City City City

6,587 14,199   3,448 1,303

800 700 11 45 70

12.1% 4.9%   1.3% 5.4%

Spartanburg

City

3,331

200

6.0%

Memphis Fayette

City

4,943

40

0.8%

County

6,399

50

0.8%

Haywood

County

34,336

4,500

13.1%

Texas

Dallas Fort Worth Houston San Antonio

City City City City

14,239 9,861 19,829 8,597

1,600 3,500 5,000 5,000

11.2% 35.5% 25.2% 58.2%

Virginia

0.3%

Abingdon Bristol Charlottesville Danville Hampton Newport News Norfolk Petersburg Portsmouth Richmond Roanoke Elizabeth City Henrico

City City City City City City City City City City City County County

207 496 1,360 2,164 1,063 7,760 23,746 5,895 10,651 28,009 4,398 4,033 2,208

50 100 30 300 75 900 700 119 761 1,000 1,000 365 460

24.2% 20.2% 2.2% 13.9% 7.1% 11.6% 2.9% 2.0% 7.1% 3.6% 22.7% 9.1% 20.8%

0.0%

Princess Anne

County

2,049

18

0.9%

North Carolina

South Carolina

Tennessee

Source: Adapted from Paul Lewinson, Race, Class, and Party: A History of Negro Suffrage and White Politics in the South (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), pp. 216–217. Calculations by the authors. Note: For the Black VAP figures Lewinson used official voter registration data for Alabama and Louisiana; for the other nine states he created estimates based on the 1920 Census. Lewinson estimated the number of black voters based on reports from newspapers, poll tax lists, registrars, and African American experts.

468

Chapter 22

who were literate and had attained the voting age. The table’s last column shows the percentage of the literate voting-age black population who could be potential voters. Lewinson gathered this data from several knowledgeable sources in the cities, including newspapers, poll tax lists, white registrars, probate judges, as well as African American sources like Monroe Work of the Negro Year Book and W. E. B. DuBois at Crisis magazine. Table 22.7 provides a summary of the data in the previous table, showing the city and county and totals for each state. The Table 22.7  Summary of Voting-Age Blacks and Voting Black Populations in Selected Cities and Counties of the Southern States, 1920

  State

Number of Selected Cities and Counties

Literate Voting-Age Blacks

Estimated Black Voters

Estimated Black Voters as % of Literate Voting-Age Blacks

Alabama    

3 Cities

53,129

643

1.2%

9 Counties

15,674

120

0.8%

Total

68,803

763

1.1%

Arkansas  

2 Cities

11,960

5,100

42.6%

Total

11,960

5,100

42.6%

Florida  

2 Cities

 

2,200

 

 

2,200

 

Georgia    

4 Cities

94,153

2,800

3.0%

Louisiana    

1 City

Mississippi    

4 Cities

North Carolina  South Carolina 

Total 4 Counties Total

64,299

8,694

13.5%

158,452

11,494

7.3%

 

2,599

 

4 Counties

5,699

4

0.1%

Total

5,699

2,603

45.7%

12,673

306

2.4%

19 Counties

121,854

845

0.7%

Total

134,527

1,151

0.9%

6 Cities

22,631

2,514

11.1%

Total

22,631

2,514

11.1%

6 Cities

28,868

1,826

6.3%

Total

28,868

1,826

Black

Percenta

1896

164,088

130,344 

14,153

10.9%

6.3%

1900

125,437

5,320 

1,482

27.9%

106,360

1,718

660

38.4%

4,550

11.2%

1908

154,669

1,885 

480

25.5%

4,590

10.0%

1912

165,082

1,704 

757

44.4%

52,526

15,100

28.7%

1916

201,745

1,772 

597

33.7%

52,526

15,100

28.7%

4 Cities Total

All Southern States 

Black

40,735

Texas  

Total

New Orleans Only

White

0.8%

45,678

3 Counties

Statewide Registration

40

Total

11 Cities

Presidential Election Years

4,943

1 City

Virginia    

Table 22.8  Official Louisiana Voter Registration for the State by Race and for New Orleans African Americans,1896–1928

1904

Tennessee    

2 Counties

numbers ranged from 763 voters possibly registered in Alabama (643 city, 120 county) to Texas where in four cities there were an estimated 15,100 African American voters. Overall, there were 38,163 African American urban voters and 15,056 county voters.32 Although Lewinson’s official data for the African American electorate in Alabama are only for 1908 and therefore static, his official data for Louisiana, including the city of New Orleans, are longitudinal and dynamic, making it possible to see how the African American vote in this city changed over time in relation to both presidential and congressional elections. While one cannot see the influence of this segment of voters in mayoral elections, these data make it possible to see their influence at the national level. And these data describe the African American vote and voter registration both before and after the enfranchisement of women. Table 22.8 presents the Louisiana and New Orleans data for the period 1896 through 1928. This time period covers nine presidential and three congressional elections for a total of twelve different data points and national elections. One can surmise based on the tendencies of the African American electorate in this city and state that most of these registered voters cast their ballots for Republican party candidates. Five of these elections occurred after the enfranchisement of African American women, and this table reveals that 1920 saw a huge surge in voter registration in both the state (2,798 more voters) and the city of New Orleans (2,179 more voters) that was not maintained. Clearly, African American women turned out to register in New Orleans as well as other places in the state that first year. In Figure 22.2 one can see how dominant the urban voting behavior was in relationship to the rest of the state. The upsurge of African American voter registration in New Orleans in 1920

Presidential and Congressional Election Years

85,749

5,035

5.9%

1918

144,095

735 

420

57.1%

8,290

843

10.2%

1920

257,282

3,533 

2,599

73.6%

94,039

5,878

6.3%

1922

191,191

598 

459

76.8%

317,136

955 

746

78.1%

44 Cities

366,632

38,163

10.4%

1924

41 Counties

256,551

15,056

5.9%

1926

274,532

988 

907

91.8%

8.5%

1928

363,057

1,960 

1,723

87.9%

All Southern States Totals

623,183

53,219

Source: Adapted from Paul Lewison, Race, Class, and Party: A History of Negro Suffrage and White Politics in the South (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), pp. 214–215, 218–220. Calculations by the authors.

Source: Adapted from Paul Lewinson, Race, Class, & Party: A History of Negro Suffrage and White Politics in the South (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 214. Calculations by the authors. a

New Orleans black registration as a percentage of statewide black registration.



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1920–1944 469

Figure 22.2  Registered Black Voters in New Orleans as a Percent of Registered Black Voters in Louisiana, 1896–1928 100% 1926, 91.8%

Percent of Louisiana Blacks Registered to Vote

90% 1928, 87.9%

1922, 76.8%

80%

1924, 78.1%

1920, 73.6%

70% 60%

1918, 57.1%

50% 1912, 44.4% 40%

1904, 38.4% 1916, 33.7%

30%

1900, 27.9%

1908, 25.5%

20% 10%

1896, 10.9%

0% 1896

1898

1900

1902

1904

1906

1908

1910

1912

1914

1916

1918

1920

1922

1924

1926

1928

Presidential and Congressional Election Years New Orleans Registered Black Voters Source: Table 22.8.

accounted for more that 70% of all of the registered voters in the state. In fact, by 1928 the number of African American registered voters in New Orleans accounted for nine out of every ten voters in the state. This empirical evidence tells us that New Orleans was the center of efforts by the African American electorate in the state to re-acquire their Fifteenth Amendment rights that were lost in the Era of Disenfranchisement (1890–1901) and thereafter. Thus, the finding here helps to confirm the suggestion that the urban areas of the southern states became a spawning ground for the re-acquisition of the vote. Map 22.1 (p. 470) shows all of the cities in which Professor Lewinson did field work and for which we have voter registration data. Although New Orleans is the only city that he has voter registration data for from Louisiana, he was able to collect voter registration data from at least two or more cities in each of the other ten states of the old Confederate South. Thus, his coverage of the region provides a robust portrait of the southern urban areas and their re-enfranchisement of the African American electorate in 1920, information that has not surfaced in other works to date.

Changing the Rules: The Elimination of the Poll Tax by Southern States Professor Lewinson found that “[a] southern Negro who wished to register and vote could do so under two conditions: if his white

neighbors were willing, or if they indifferent. If they were willing, this represented in the Southern background, a changed . . . attitude. Change . . . and indifference are both urban phenomena.”33 But this analysis excludes the facts that not all whites in the South were happy with the impact and influence of the disenfranchisement laws upon them and that they were in a position to change aspects of the law, like the poll tax. Of this particular technique, Professor Keyssar reported: “The poll tax, of course, had a class, as well as racial, thrust, and once white Democratic primaries had been instituted in the one-party region, some critics believed that the poll tax served primarily to keep poor whites out of politics. Consequently, opposition [to the poll tax] could be mounted that would not be fatally tarred with the brush of race.”34 Beginning with North Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida, decisions via referenda were made “to repeal their poll taxes.”35 Such actions by these state governments meant that poor, moderate, and liberal whites in different combinations eliminated a major barrier to African Americans voting in the South. This unexpected assistance came without the federal government intervening and was not really the result of the NAACP or the emergence of civic leagues and forums. Rather, it came because the grandfather and other escape clauses placed in the southern states’ constitutions to enable illiterate whites to vote did not work as promised or to the satisfaction of white supremacist leadership. Simply put, for many whites in these three states the poll tax was

470

Chapter 22

Map 22.1  Southern Cities and Urban Areas that Allowed the African American Electorate to Vote, 1896–1930

OH

NE

DE MD

IN

WV

IL

Roanoke KS

0

100

KY

200

miles

MO TN

AR

Little Rock

Hot Springs

Fort Worth Dallas

LA

TX

Greenwood

Birmingham

New Orleans Houston

Atlanta

AL

Vicksburg MS Jackson Natchez

Abingdon

Winston-Salem Greensboro NC Asheville Shelby

Memphis

OK

San Antonio

Bristol

VA

Charlottesville Richmond Petersburg Hampton Newport News Portsmouth Norfolk Danville Durham Raleigh

Spartanburg Greenville Columbia Edgefield

SC

Orangeburg Charleston Augusta Savannah

Macon GA

Montgomery Jacksonville 0 Mobile

FL

Daytona Beach

100 miles

200

Source: Adapted from Paul Lewinson, Race, Class, & Party: A History of Negro Suffrage and White Politics in the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932), Appendix II, pp. 214–221.

a barrier to their own participation in the southern electoral process, so they dismantled it, and this allowed more of the African American electorate to become re-enfranchised voters.

Southern States Reconsider the Poll Tax Table 22.9 provides a list of the southern states that voted to repeal their poll tax laws or reduced the tax as well as those that voted to retain the poll tax. As shown in the table, a total of six states repealed their poll tax, and one state, Alabama, reduced the cumulative period for its poll tax. In 1953 “the cumulative period was reduced from 24 to two years by adoption of a constitutional amendment.”36 Meanwhile, three states voted in referenda to retain the poll tax, and one state, Mississippi, never put the matter before voters. As Table 22.9 shows, the percentage of voters against repeal was higher from counties with an African American majority in Arkansas’ referendum and both referenda in Texas. This finding does not mean that African Americans were in favor of the poll tax—rather, it reflects the control of these counties by a white minority who feared the loss of power that might come if this barrier to the ballot box were removed for African Americans.

North Carolina Professor Key wrote: “In North Carolina in 1920, white voters from the west voted overwhelmingly to abolish the poll tax (and to lower the residency requirement), despite some opposition from [whites in] the eastern Black Belt.”37 With this successful repeal, North Carolina became the first southern state to drop this aspect of its disenfranchisement procedures. Moreover, “only North Carolina . . . admitted Negroes to the Democratic primary in any number, and this only in the group of western counties whose city Negro voters” were small in number but had a fair chance to register and vote.38 Both North Carolina and Tennessee of all of the eleven southern states “had no State-wide party rule barring Negroes from the Democratic primary. Elsewhere, breaches in the white primary were due to obscure local anomalies and exceptions made in the favor of individuals.”39 Although North Carolina was an exception regarding the white primary, the point here is that several southern states, because of pressures from the white electorate and white reform leaders, repealed their poll tax requirements while other southern states did not.



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1920–1944 471 Table 22.9  Southern States that Voted For or Against Repeal or Reduction of the Poll Tax, 1920–1963 Poll Tax Referenda

Voted For Repeal or Reduction of Poll Tax

Outcome of Referendum

Against Repeal

Year

State

1920

North Carolina

All

235,608

73.9%

83,366

26.1%

318,974

R

1934

Louisiana

Black

9,123

67.4%

4,420

32.6%

13,543

 

White

145,262

84.2%

27,299

15.8%

172,561

 

All

154,385

83.0%

31,719

17.0%

186,104

R

1937

Florida

1945

Georgia

1951

South Carolina

All

1953

Alabamab Tennessee

All For Repeal or Reduction of Poll Tax

1938

1949 Voted Against Repeal of Poll Tax

For Repeal

Racial Majority Counties

Arkansas

Virginia

Texas

1963  

Texas

Votes

Percent of Total

All Poll Tax Referenda

Percent of Total

Total Votes

Poll Tax Repealed by the State Legislature

Type of Processa

L

Poll Tax Repealed by the State Legislature

L

38,490

78.6%

10,460

21.4%

48,950

R

All

70,951

57.0%

53,532

43.0%

124,483

R

All

138,751

74.3%

48,079

25.7%

186,830

R

Black

9,123

67.4%

4,420

32.6%

13,543

 

White

145,262

84.2%

27,299

15.8%

172,561

All

638,185

73.7%

227,156

26.3%

865,341

Black

2,815

24.0%

8,893

76.0%

11,708

 

White

40,415

35.8%

72,399

64.2%

112,814

 

All

43,230

34.7%

81,292

65.3%

124,522

R

Black

3,617

23.9%

11,505

76.1%

15,122

 

White

52,260

21.4%

191,896

78.6%

244,156

 

All

55,877

21.6%

203,401

78.4%

259,278

R

Black

755

32.9%

1,543

67.1%

2,298

 

White

132,806

43.7%

170,791

56.3%

303,597

 

All

133,561

43.7%

172,334

56.3%

305,895

R

Black

799

37.6%

1,328

62.4%

2,127

 

White

242,321

43.4%

315,447

56.6%

557,768

 

All

243,120

43.4%

316,775

56.6%

559,895

R

Black

7,986

25.6%

23,269

74.4%

31,255

 

White

467,802

38.4%

750,533

61.6%

1,218,335

All

475,788

38.1%

773,802

61.9%

1,249,590

17,109

38.2%

27,689

61.8%

44,798

613,064

44.1%

777,832

55.9%

1,390,896

1,113,973

52.7%

1,000,958

47.3%

2,114,931

Mississippi All Against Repeal of Poll Tax

Votes

No Attempt to Repeal the Poll Tax Law

Black White All

 

Sources: Adapted from Alexander Heard and Donald S. Strong, Southern Primaries and Elections, 1920–1949 (University: University of Alabama Press, 1950), pp. 34, 76, 189–191, and 206; Frederic D. Ogden, The Poll Tax in the South (University: University of Alabama Press, 1958); and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, New York: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, Michigan: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors. a

“R” indicates repeal process by referendum; “L” indicates that repeal process was accomplished by the state legislature.

b

Referendum in Alabama concerned reducing the cumulative poll tax charge rather than repealing the law altogether.

Professor Frederic Ogden commented on North Carolina’s vote: “Support came from all sections. Slight opposition was registered primarily in the eastern half of the state, the area of Negro concentration.” He found that support for repeal was centered in “the western, mountainous, predominantly white section of the state.”40 This was the very same region of the state that most

strongly opposed the poll tax amendment in the referendum in 1900. Twenty years later, they prevailed.

Louisiana Louisiana, the next southern state to repeal the tax, did it thanks to the power and influence of Governor Huey “The Kingfish”

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Long. According to Professor Ogden, Long “favored repeal because he felt that it would redound to his advantage. Most of his support came from lower income groups, those who were most directly injured by a tax upon the suffrage.”41 His statewide political organization had to pay the tax for most of his followers, and its repeal would not only put more money back into the organizational coffers but also allow him to eliminate opposition from sheriffs of several parishes who also paid the poll tax for voters in their areas. Repealing the tax would let people get out from under these financial obligations that they owed the local sheriff and vote directly for the Kingfish. Professor Lewinson best describes class as a factor in the personality politics of Governor Long’s repeal. He states that Governor Long’s leadership stemmed from the “sentimental appeal of [his] humble origins, [his] long residence and wide acquaintance among the poor-white groups, . . . [his] forthright and old-fashioned oratorical abilities,” as well as his promise to have government help poor people against the rich ones in the state.42 Thus, in accord with Governor Long’s desire, the poll tax was repealed in Louisiana in 1934.

for repeal came from former governor Eugene Talmadge, nicknamed the “Wild Man from Sugar Creek.” Professor V. O. Key, Jr., described him: “Eugene Talmadge has been Georgia’s demagogue. . . . He led a cohesive, personal faction [until] his death in 1946. . . . The Talmadge personality and the vividness of his race and class appeals divided the Georgia electorate into two camps, whose struggles created a strong tendency toward bi-factionalism.”44 Talmadge gambled that the repeal of the poll tax would enfranchise more of his potential supporters among the poor white population. When Talmadge endorsed the repeal, the sitting governor Ellis Arnall, considered a New Dealer and something of a liberal in Georgia politics, fully endorsed it with help and support from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the state legislature repealed the poll tax in 1945.

Virginia

Three years later in 1937, Florida repealed its poll tax behind the leadership of a liberal New Dealer, Senator Claude Pepper. The new law “did not abolish the poll tax completely but merely repealed that part of the law which made its payment a voting requirement. . . . In 1941, the tax was completely repealed by legislative action. It could be restored at any time because the constitution was not amended to forbid the legislature from doing so.”43 As the decade of the 1930s came to a close, three southern states—North Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida—had abolished their poll tax requirements.

Virginia was the next state to take up the poll tax issue in a statewide referendum, and the movement to repeal went down to its most resounding defeat—78.4% of voters rejected the repeal in 1949. Virginia in its 1901 state constitution had disenfranchised the African American electorate and put in place several procedures and techniques such as the poll tax, White Primary, and others to keep African Americans from voting. Then came the Harry Byrd political machine (1925–1966), which came to dominate not only state politics but the state legislature as well. Professors Alexander Heard and Donald Strong wrote: “over a period of several years various groups and individuals agitated for repeal of the poll tax. They were identified for the most part as opponents of the state organization of Senator [Harry] Byrd.”45 Since the organization dominated the state legislature, they finally relented and provided for a referendum in 1949. But given the organization’s tight control of a very limited statewide electorate, the poll tax was not repealed.

Arkansas

Texas

Against this rising tide of poll tax repeals, Arkansas’s voters resoundingly affirmed their state’s poll tax in 1938. Almost twothirds of the voters in the state voted in the referendum not to repeal the poll tax law, which had been put into effect in 1893. Next, the state enacted a White Primary law. And since the state had no official voter registration process, Arkansas, like Texas, adopted its poll tax lists as the official state voter registration rolls. Thus, if a person’s name appeared on the poll tax rolls as having paid poll taxes, he or she could vote. The poll tax and the White Primary were the only disenfranchising barriers to African American voting in Arkansas. Therefore, when the movement in 1938 sought to repeal the main barrier, the poll tax, White Supremacy Democrats campaigned vigorously, telling the white electorate that if the poll tax were abolished there would be nothing to keep African Americans out of state and local politics. The campaign proved successful.

Texas also held a poll tax referendum in 1949. There the defeat was less resounding than in Virginia, but still 56.3% of voters refused to repeal the tax. Texas, like Arkansas, made the poll tax list its voter registration list. The 1903 Terrell Law established the poll tax. Later, Texas would become famous (or infamous) for its White Primary law, but the centerpiece of its disenfranchising barriers would be the poll tax, and the state’s electorate fought its repeal right into the 1960s. Texas would also later hold the last referendum, and the percentage of voters against repeal remained steady at 56.6%. Even after the passage of the Twenty-fourth Amendment abolishing the poll tax in federal elections and the Supreme Court ruling Harper v. Virginia State Board of Education et al. upholding the constitutionality of the Amendment, Texas persisted in requiring a poll tax payment in local and state elections.46

Georgia

When South Carolina took up the poll tax in a 1951 referendum, the last three states to vote on the issue (Arkansas, Virginia, and Texas) had all rejected the repeal, and no state had repealed the poll tax based on a popular vote since Louisiana in 1934. Despite these trends, the poll tax in South Carolina was repealed easily,

Florida

Next came perhaps the biggest surprise, when the Georgia state legislature repealed the poll tax one year after the 1944 Smith v. Allwright decision that did away with the White Primary disenfranchising procedure. Part of the surprise was that support

South Carolina



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1920–1944 473

as a stunning 78.6% of voters supported the repeal. Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman and his redcoats fastened disenfranchisement upon the state in the 1895 constitution. At that convention, there were 154 white Democrats and 6 black Republican delegates (3.8%), making the state the only one besides Mississippi to have black delegates at its disenfranchising convention. Although the black delegate in Mississippi supported the disenfranchising constitution, the six black delegates in South Carolina strongly opposed the disenfranchisement constitution. And South Carolina, like Texas, fought at the Supreme Court level numerous cases to keep its African American electorate disenfranchised. Therefore, by 1951, with one legal setback after another, the state electorate simply repealed their poll tax.

Tennessee The second southern state to repeal the poll tax in the PostWhite Primary period was Tennessee in 1953. Initially the tax was indirectly killed on February 28, 1951, and “finally, as a result of a limited constitutional convention, an amendment providing for elimination of the tax was adopted on November 3, 1953.”47 Initially, “in 1943 . . . the legislature repealed the tax only to have it restored in short order by the Tennessee Supreme Court” because state law required that the abolition be done by a state constitutional amendment. The voters approved the constitutional amendment with 138,751 for repeal to 48,079 against repeal. “[A] majority in 15 of the 95 counties voted against the repeal amendment. These counties were small, predominantly rural, and located in east and middle Tennessee.”48

Alabama Finally, Alabama in 1953 reduced its poll tax rather than repeal it. As in Tennessee and other repeal states, the anti-poll tax coalition was composed of “various civic, social, religious, and labor interests,” along with sundry women’s organizations.49 Thus, these “poll tax opponents aimed for outright repeal in 1953. Unable to get the legislature to agree, they compromised for reduction of the cumulative period.” Therefore, on December 15, 1953, the reduction poll tax amendment was “ratified by 70,951 to 53,532; 57 percent of those voting approved reducing the cumulative period. As expected, support came generally from North Alabama and from the urban areas while opposition was concentrated in the rural Black Belt region.”50 Commenting on the nature and scope of the opposition, Professor Ogden found that: Since the Black Belt is the area of heaviest Negro concentration, it is no surprise that counties with the largest non-white population turned down the poll tax change. Of 23 counties with a non-white population in excess of forty per cent as of 1950, only three counties gave an affirmative vote for the amendment. They were Lee, Macon, and Montgomery counties. The urbanism factor apparently influenced the results in Lee and Montgomery counties. Macon County is the home of Tuskegee Institute. The presence of this famed school with its educated Negro community helps to account for the vote in this county.51

The Poll Tax Divide: States that Did and Did Not Repeal Map 22.2 (p. 474) shows the geographical relationship of the states that repealed or reduced their poll tax to those states that refused to repeal or reduce their poll tax. Overall, of the six southern states that repealed the poll tax, three repealed before the nullification of the White Primaries and three repealed afterward (plus Alabama, which reduced but did not eliminate the tax). In North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee the leadership driving for this state-level reform was an anti-poll tax coalition and movement, while in Louisiana and Georgia it was a governor, and in Florida, a U.S. Senator. The leadership in Alabama was a coalition group. Of the six states plus Alabama that engaged in reform, five held statewide referenda for approval and ratification. Two states, Georgia and Florida, simply let the state legislature approve the repeals. Figure 22.3 (p. 475) shows the percentages of voters who supported the repeal of the poll tax and those who opposed the repeal in the statewide referenda in the South from 1920 through 1963. The greatest support for repeal came in Louisiana where the popular Governor Long and his political machine turned out the voters in a big way. Second was South Carolina, where a major coalition of anti-poll tax forces mobilized the electorate to repeal the law. Tennessee’s anti-poll tax coalition was nearly as successful as the one in South Carolina two years earlier. But in Alabama, also in 1953, the coalition lagged behind those in the other states and had to settle for a little more than a majority of the voters. However, the entire story must include the four southern states that did not repeal or reduce their poll taxes. Mississippi never got a commitment from its state legislature to repeal their poll tax law; hence, such legislation in the form of a referendum was never submitted to it statewide electorate (and the state does not appear in the figure). Figure 22.3 shows that the strongest opposition to the repeal of the poll tax came in Virginia (78.4%), followed by Arkansas (65.3%), and Texas (with 56.3% and 56.6%). Each of these three states is considered peripheral to the Deep South states. And two of these states, Arkansas and Texas, had no formal voter registration list except for the poll tax list,52 which accounts in part for the opposition to repealing the tax. Race is another variable that accounts for some of the opposition.

Federal Elimination of the Poll Tax: Causes and Effects The first three states—North Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida— repealed the poll tax by 1937, the same year as the Supreme Court’s decision in Breedlove v. Suttles. In this case, “a white male citizen of Georgia challenged the state requirement that citizens between ages 21 and 60 pay a poll tax of $1. Women were exempt from the poll tax requirement. He argued that the Georgia law violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Nineteenth Amendment.”53 After hearing the case, the Supreme Court ruled “unanimously [to uphold] Georgia’s poll tax qualification for state and local elections.”54 The first defeat of the repeal in a referendum came the following year—in 1938, in Arkansas. And a national anti-poll tax movement sprang up in 1939.

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Chapter 22

Map 22.2  Southern States For and Against Repeal of the Poll Tax, 1920–1963 C WI

SD

MI

WY

NJ

PA IA NE 100

WV

IL

200

miles

MO

Tennessee 1953 OK

Arkansas 1938

NM

Virginia 1949

KY

KS

Mississippi (No Vote) Texas 1949, 1963

DE

IN 0

CO

MD

OH

Alabama 1953

North Carolina 1920 South Carolina 1951 Georgia 1945

Louisiana 1934 0

100

200

miles

Florida 1937 State, Year of Vote on Poll Tax Repeal For Repeal or Reduction Against Repeal

Source: Adapted from Alexander Heard and Donald Strong, Southern Primaries and Elections, 1920–1949 (University: University of Alabama Press, 1950), pp. 34, 67, 76, 104, 190–191, and 204.

The second federal court case involved a Tennessee poll tax law that required payment of the tax to participate “in general elections for members of Congress. . . . In March, 1941, in an unanimous three-judge opinion, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the right to vote in a national election is conditioned on such terms as the state imposes.”55 Therefore in Pirtle v. Brown the federal Court of Appeals ruled that the poll tax was constitutional in national elections. The poll tax was judged by these two cases as constitutional and within the state’s powers in local, state, and national elections. After these decisions and Smith v. Allwright, Georgia repealed their poll tax laws, but Texas and Virginia both rejected a repeal in 1949 referenda. Even after South Carolina and Tennessee repealed their poll tax laws and Alabama reduced the poll tax, all in the early 1950s, the last four southern states had the Supreme Court’s rulings to buttress their intransigence. It also gave incentives to the national anti-poll tax movement to seek a national law abolishing the poll tax at least in national elections. In 1958 Professor Ogden observed: “Since 1939, every session of Congress has had before it at least one bill which would eliminate the poll tax as a voting requirement in national elections. The proposal has been aptly termed the ‘perennial anti-poll tax bill.’ The House of Representatives has passed

an anti-poll tax bill on five different occasions but, thanks to the filibuster, the Senate has not approved the measure.”56 Table 22.10 indicates the number and percentage of votes in the House of Representatives on the five major anti-poll tax bills, with a separate account of the votes by the delegations from all eleven of the southern states. The table shows the year of the bill, then the name of the congressman who sponsored the bill, then the total vote on final passage broken down by number and percent. Next comes the total number of southern members in the House of Representatives the specific year when the bill was up for final passage. Then, one sees the number and percentage of southern legislators who voted for and against each bill. The last column indicates how much of the support and opposition came from southern legislators. All five of these bills passed the House of Representatives by more than 70%. The southern members were clearly opposed to these bills. The mean “against” vote by the southern congressmen stood at 78.5%, with the range running from a high of 85.7% in 1947 to a low of 71.6% in 1942. In a word, southern opposition to a national anti-poll tax law was continual, consistent, and cohesive, and it represented the lion’s share of the total opposition, but was not nearly enough to defeat the bills.



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1920–1944 475

Figure 22.3  Results of State Referenda to Repeal or Reduce the Poll Tax, 1920–1963 Repealed or Reduced the Poll Tax

90%

Voted Against Repeal of the Poll Tax

83.0% 78.6%

80%

78.4% 74.3%

73.9%

Percent of Referendum Votes

70%

65.3%

60%

57.0%

56.6%

56.3%

50%

43.7%

43.0% 40%

43.4%

34.7%

30%

26.1%

25.7% 21.6%

21.4% 20%

17.0%

10% 0% North Carolina 1920

Louisiana 1934

South Carolina 1951

Tennessee 1953

Alabama 1953*

For Repeal

Arkansas 1938

Texas 1949

Virginia 1949

Texas 1963

Against Repeal

Source: Table 22.9. * Alabama voted for reduction of their poll tax rather than repeal of it.

Table 22.10  Analysis of the Vote in the House of Representatives on Final Passage of the Anti-Poll Tax Bills All House of Representative Votes

Year

Bill

Southern Members of House of Representatives

For

Percent For

Against

Percent Against

Total from South

Fora

Againsta

Percent of All Votes

Number

Percent of South

Number

Percent of South

For

Against

1942

Geyer

254

75.1%

 84

24.9%

102

9

8.8%

73

71.6%

3.5%

86.9%

1943

Marcantonio

265

70.7%

110

29.3%

105

5

4.8%

83

79.0%

1.9%

75.5%

1945

Marcantonio

251

70.5%

105

29.5%

105

5

4.8%

79

75.2%

2.0%

75.2%

1947

Bender

290

72.1%

112

27.9%

105

6

5.7%

90

85.7%

2.1%

80.4%

1949

Norton

273

70.2%

116

29.8%

105

7

6.7%

85

81.0%

2.6%

73.3%

Source: Adapted from Frederic D. Ogden, The Poll Tax in the South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1958), p. 253. Calculations by the authors. a

These columns reflect the numbers and percentages of the total delegation that voted.

Upon passage in the House of Representatives, three of the bills (those sponsored by Geyer and New York Communist Vito Marcantonio) were introduced directly into the Senate. The infamous southern filibuster met each of these bills. The twenty-two southern senators, organized and led by Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, stopped all civil rights legislation once it reached the Senate.57 Therefore, the votes shown in Table 22.11 (p. 476) are not the Senate votes on the bills themselves, but rather those on cloture, which is the procedure to stop a filibuster. Each time, the attempt to stop the filibuster fell short of the required two-thirds majority. In each of these three votes, only

the liberal Senator Claude Pepper of Florida voted for cloture. All other voting southern senators voted against stopping the filibuster. Their numbers alone were not quite enough to block the filibuster, but they were joined by more than enough other senators to succeed. Like their counterparts in the House of Representatives, the southern senators showed a united front, but in the Senate they had more allies. Of the fate of the 1948 bill sponsored by the Republican George Bender of Ohio, Professor Ogden wrote: In 1948, the question of applying cloture on the Bender bill was not brought to a vote. The bill was laid aside by

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Chapter 22

Table 22.11  Analysis of the Vote in the Senate on Cloture Applicable to the Anti-Poll Tax Bills Votes

Southern Members of the Senate Total from South

For

Againsta

a

Percent of All Votes

For

Percent For

Against

Percent Against

Number

Percent of South

Number

Percent of South

For

Against

1942

Geyer

37

47.4%

41

52.6%

22

1

4.5%

19

86.4%

2.7%

46.3%

1943

Marcantonio

36

45.0%

44

55.0%

22

1

4.5%

17

77.3%

2.8%

38.6%

1945

Marcantonio

39

54.2%

33

45.8%

22

1

4.5%

19

86.4%

2.6%

57.6%

Year

Bill

Source: Adapted from Frederic D. Ogden, The Poll Tax in the South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1958), p. 253. Calculations by the authors. a

These columns reflect the numbers and percentages of the total delegation that voted.

adjourning the Senate. When Republican leaders moved to adjourn, Administration Democrats, led by Senator Alben Barkley, forced a roll call vote so they could state in the 1948 election campaign that they opposed giving up on the issue. The vote was 69 to 16; 45 Republicans, 19 southern Democrats, and five non-southern Democrats voted for adjournment, while 15 non-southern Democrats and one southern Democrat [Pepper] voted against. . . . In 1950, the Norton bill died in committee.58

The Twenty-Fourth Amendment Repeals the Poll Tax Thus, with the legislative effort stalled, several congressmen began to call for a constitutional amendment repealing the poll tax. A group of southern congressmen in 1949 led by Democrat Brook Hays of Arkansas “sponsored a poll tax repeal amendment.”59 The essential difference between the amendment proposed by the southern congressmen and those from the other regions of the country was that “[t]he first proposals sought to abolish the tax requirement for both national and state elections. The later ones, sponsored by either the southern senators or by Representative Hays, would remove the tax only from national elections.”60 When neither version moved forward, the anti-poll tax coalition went to the presidency to see if they could get support. Previously, Franklin Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt spoke out against the poll tax on several occasions, but when some of his liberal New Dealers lost in the 1938 primaries, FDR backed off. President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights declared in their report To Secure These Rights that voter disenfranchisement of African Americans in the South was quite discriminatory, especially the poll tax. Yet nothing happened and the matter passed to the Eisenhower administration, which sidetracked it. Pressure from the Martin Luther King, Jr.–led civil rights movement helped spur the next president, John F. Kennedy, to action.61 Kennedy also owed political favors to both the King family for their support and to the African American vote.62 The 1960 presidential election was a very close election between Vice President Richard Nixon and Senator Kennedy, and the African American vote provided the balance of power that helped Kennedy to win by a wafer thin margin.63 Therefore, the president “supported what had become an uncontroversial constitutional amendment to ban poll taxes in federal elections.”64 Even though many people, including Professor Ogden, thought a constitutional amendment “extremely improbable,”65

shortly after taking office President Kennedy asked that the Twenty-fourth Amendment be sent to the states for ratification. This Amendment, which banned poll taxes in federal elections, was proposed on August 27, 1962, and was ratified on January 23, 1964. Table 22.12 provides the dates of ratification of the Twentyfourth Amendment in both the Border and southern states. Between February and June 1963 all of the Border States ratified it within a six-month period. This was not the case for the southern states. Mississippi rejected it the previous year. Two states—Tennessee and Florida—ratified it within the same period

Table 22.12  Ratification of the Twenty-Fourth Amendment by the Southern and Border States State

Date Ratified

Date Rejected

Did Not Ratify

Border States West Virginia

February 1, 1963

 

 

Maryland

February 6, 1963

 

 

Delaware

May 1, 1963

 

 

Missouri

May 13, 1963

 

 

Kentucky

June 27, 1963

 

 

Mississippi

 

December 20, 1962

X

Tennessee

March 21, 1963

 

 

Florida

April 18, 1963

 

 

Virginiaa

February 25, 1977

 

 

North Carolina

May 3, 1989

 

 

Alabamaa

2002b

 

 

Texas

May 22, 2009

 

 

Arkansas

 

 

X

Georgia

 

 

X

Louisiana

 

 

X

South Carolina

 

 

X

South

a

a

Sources: Adapted from Steve F. Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), and Frederic D. Ogden, The Poll Tax in the South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1958). These states ratified the Twenty-fourth Amendment after ratification was completed, with threefourths of all states approving the amendment, on January 23, 1964. a

b

No specific date found in available sources.



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1920–1944 477

as the Border States and, four more states—Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, and Texas—ratified it years or decades after it had become a constitutional amendment. Currently, five of the eleven southern states—Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina—have still not ratified the Twenty-fourth Amendment. However, the Supreme Court ruling in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections et al. in 1966 upheld the Twenty-Fourth Amendment that banned poll taxes in federal elections.

The Role of African American Activists and Voters in Fighting the Poll Tax While we have stressed other agents in the elimination of the poll tax, the African American electorate, men and women, and voting rights activists also played a key role. African American historian W. M. Brewer’s work identified the roles played by the community’s leaders and activists inside the state and national struggle. Professor Brewer noted: “The concern about colored people in the movement to repeal the Southern poll tax is a highly moot question which is absent or extremely negligible in the Lower South, but in the Border States and Northern States, this issue portends much in the balance of power where two parties or a third may function in determining national elections.”66 As proof, Professor Brewer quoted from the Harvard Law Review: “It is true that action which stems from local initiative in the South cannot yet be expected to enfranchise the Negro. But in so far as the poll tax is concerned, this consideration is unimportant, for abolition of the exclusionary device would enfranchise a great number of whites but few if any Negroes.”67 The implication is that because so few African Americans would be re-enfranchised via the abolition of the poll tax, the African American leaders and voting rights activists did not become engaged in the anti-poll tax struggle at the local and state levels in the South. Others have argued that because racial voting was such a volatile issue in the South, members of the African American electorate kept their distance from the movement. Involvement on their part could have derailed the reform movement’s progress. Finally, some have suggested that the congressional legislation sponsored by Communist Congressman Marcantonio was “red baited” by southern congressmen, especially Representative John Rankin of Mississippi, so that it frightened local, state, and national African American organizations and leaders from participating in the repeal movement.68 But at the national level Professor Brewer found this lack of participation to be a myth. African American membership in the National Committee to Repeal the Poll Tax included Mary McLeod Bethune of Bethune-Cookman College, Rufus Clement of Atlanta University, Mordecai W. Johnson of Howard University, A. Philip Randolph of the largest African American labor union (Brotherhood of the Sleeping Car Porters), and Channing Tobias of the Council of Churches. The African American organizations involved included the NAACP, National Urban League, National Negro Congress, Fraternal Council of Negro Churches, National Council of Negro Youth, and the Colored Voters’ League.69 At the congressional level, the Congressional Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax was joined by Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, though not the two African American congressmen from

Illinois.70 And Professor Brewer found that A. Philip Randolph was even a member of the Southern Electoral League.71 While the Brewer study did not describe members of the African American electorate engaged in the local and state antipoll tax struggles, Professor Ogden highlighted in detail the two court cases of “Dorothy Bentley Jones, a young Negro housewife, high school graduate and wife of a service man who was overseas,” who challenged in federal court the poll tax in Virginia.72 In a May 1944 case, Jones v. Settle, and in a September 1947 case, Jones did not prevail against the Virginia poll tax due to precedents of Breedlove v. Suttles and Pirtle v. Brown. In her second case of 1947, “her sponsors originally planned to appeal but decided against it after receiving assurances that Congress would pass an anti-poll tax bill.”73 But if Jones withdrew her second action against the poll tax, “Jessie Butler, a Negro woman of Arlington County [Virginia], brought suit against Mary A. Thompson, Central Registrar for Arlington County, and other election officials to compel them to register her and to permit her to vote without payment of poll taxes.”74 In the case of Butler v. Thompson, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals “dismissed the suit on February 19, 1951. . . . The Supreme Court affirmed the lower court decision in a per curiam opinion on May 28, 1951.” Both courts argued that “the evidence was insufficient to establish any discrimination against Negroes in the administration of the poll tax requirement” in Virginia.75 Therefore, the evidence does not support the argument that the African American electorate, men and women, were not involved in either the local and state effort or the national effort to attain congressional legislation to repeal the poll tax. Although African Americans may not have been at the leadership level of the repeal movement in the South, they were certainly present— particularly in the South—in the legal drive to re-enfranchise themselves.

Effect of the Poll Tax Abolition on the African American Electorate A combination of both state and national legislation eventually reformed the disenfranchisement wrought by the poll tax on the African American electorate in the South. Table 22.13 (p. 478) allows the reader to consider the importance of these repeals from the 1920s to the 1950s. The table offers empirical voting age population (VAP) evidence of the overall southern electorate and the African American southern electorate, broken down by gender and by states that repealed poll taxes and those that did not. Beginning with the decade of the 1920s, only one state repealed the poll tax, North Carolina, and this repeal opened up a potential African American electorate of some 342,756 voters. But in terms of comparisons and contrasts, the table shows that in the ten states where no repeal took place in the 1920s, the poll tax suppressed some 3.6 million potential voters. By the 1950s, almost 3.2 million potential voters had been relieved of the poll tax while about 1.7 million still faced it. Failure to completely abolish the poll tax still hindered a large part of the VAP of the African American electorate and demonstrated that the Twenty-fourth Amendment was essential. State-level repeal simply was not enough in and of itself. Figure 22.4 (p. 478)

478

Chapter 22

Table 22.13  African American Voting-Age Population in the Southern States by Poll Tax Repeal, 1920s–1950s

Decade

Repealed Poll Tax?

Number of States

Voting-Age Population (VAP) Total

Total Population

1920s

Yes

 1

2,559,123

1930s 1940s 1950s

African American Voting-Age Population Total

Total Male Voting-Age Population

Total Female Voting-Age Population

Male

Number

Percent of Total VAP

Female

Total Voting-Age Population

Number

Percent of Total AA VAP

Number

Percent of Total AA VAP

1,210,727

603,683

 607,044

 342,756

28.3%

 167,240

48.8%

 175,516

51.2%

No

10

22,547,831

11,401,924

5,826,240

5,575,684

3,610,600

31.7%

1,798,560

49.8%

1,812,040

50.2%

Yes

 3

6,740,080

3,543,175

1,764,200

1,778,975

1,085,047

30.6%

 531,602

49.0%

 553,445

51.0%

No

 8

22,020,944

11,606,047

5,812,723

5,793,324

3,189,414

27.5%

1,546,440

48.5%

1,642,974

51.5%

Yes

 4

10,956,640

6,295,594

3,093,090

3,202,504

1,864,128

29.6%

 895,737

48.1%

 968,391

51.9%

No

 7

20,874,386

11,995,655

5,961,576

6,034,079

2,954,170

24.6%

1,429,809

48.4%

1,524,361

51.6%

Yes

 7

21,431,816

12,607,731

6,111,829

6,495,902

3,189,723

25.3%

1,500,467

47.0%

1,689,256

53.0%

No

 4

15,118,299

9,083,453

4,500,781

4,582,672

1,735,159

19.1%

 839,076

48.4%

 896,083

51.6%

Sources: Adapted from Alexander Heard and Donald S. Strong, Southern Primaries and Elections, 1920–1949 (University: University of Alabama Press, 1950), pp. 34, 189–191, and 206; Frederic D. Ogden, The Poll Tax in the South (University: University of Alabama Press, 1958); Numan V. Bartley and Hugh D. Graham, Southern Elections: County and Precinct Data, 1950–1972 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), pp. 317–322; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http:// dx.doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, New York: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, Michigan: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

Figure 22.4  African American Voting-Age Population in Southern States by Repeal of the Poll Tax, 1920s–1950s 12

35

10

30 8

25

6

20 15

4

10 2

5

0

0 1920s

1930s

1940s

1950s

AA VAP in States that Repealed the Poll Tax

AA VAP in States with the Poll Tax

Number of States that Repealed the Poll Tax

Number of States with the Poll Tax

Source: Table 22.13. Note: AA VAP = African American Voting-Age Population.

Number of Southern States

African American Voting-Age Population (x 100,000)

40



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1920–1944 479

offers a final depiction of the transition for the African American voting age population in the southern states. The figure shows the change from a majority of states imposing the poll tax during the 1920s to a majority that had repealed the poll tax by the 1950s. It also shows how many African Americans of voting age were freed from the poll tax in this period.

Summary and Conclusions on African American Registration and Voting, 1920–1944 Collectively, the three forces operating in this period, 1920– 1944—(1) the NAACP test case victories, (2) urban African American registration and voting, and (3) state and national repeal and reduction poll tax legislation—allowed a very modest degree of re-enfranchisement and restoration of Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendment rights for the African American electorate. These modest successes kept the African American voting rights and civil rights activists committed, hopeful, and engaged to pressure more and lobby harder to re-acquire voting rights for the African American community. Perhaps the greatest success out of this limited and narrow start is that it put in place the legal foundation for the challenge to the White Primary, which severely curtailed the influence and impact of African American voting in states where the primary was usually the only meaningful election. Launched in Texas, and gaining some limited victories in Texas, voting rights activists there, along with the NAACP, kept trying to attain court rulings in order to establish a springboard for a full legal assault that would eventually wipe out this barrier in the Lone Star state and throughout the South. The other great victory emerging in this time frame (1920–1944) was at the attitudinal, behavioral, and participatory levels in the southern states. The cities and urban counties let African Americans register and vote. The political machines and reform organizations (which the corrupt machines and bosses engendered) created within the African American community the empowerment that comes with voting. Although it did not bring political offices to the African American community, urban voting “provided tangible benefits such as street paving, lighting, schools, police protection, and jobs” along with interaction with the white community and some of its influential leaders.76 This urban participation and work with progressive reformers and their organizations socialized the African American community, particularly some of its leaders, churches, and organizations, to the beneficial nature of voting. Tangible benefits indicated that practical politics had its rewards for the African American community. This changed negative attitudes toward voting that the disenfranchisement movement and its disciples had tried to implant. These community benefits told a completely different story in city services and responses.

Notes   1. R. Volney Riser, Defying Disfranchisement: Black Voting Rights Activism in the Jim Crow South, 1890–1908 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), p. 11.  2. Ibid.   3. Ibid., p. 19.

  4. Ibid., p. 232.   5. Ibid., p. 233.  6. Ibid.   7. Ibid., p. 19.   8. Ibid., p. 6.   9. For a pioneering and comprehensive study see Benjamin Justesen, Broken Brotherhood: The Rise and Fall of the National Afro-American Council (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008). It offers a detailed discussion of the merger of the National Suffrage League with the NAAC. For an earlier study see Emma Lou Thornbrough, “The National Afro-American League, 1887–1908,” Journal of Southern History Vol. 27 (November 1961), pp. 494–512. 10. Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Politics: A Theoretical and Structural Analysis (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1972), p. 147. 11. Abraham Davis and Barbara Luck Graham, The Supreme Court, Race, and Civil Rights (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995), p. 26. 12. Ibid., p. 25. 13. Ibid. 14. Paul Lewinson, Race, Class, and Party: A History of Negro Suffrage and White Politics in the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932), p. 132. 15. Ibid., p. 136. 16. Ibid., pp. 132–133, 137. 17. See Ralph Wardlaw, “Negro Suffrage in Georgia, 1865–1930” (Unpublished M.A. Thesis, University of Georgia, 1932) and a partial publication of these memoranda in Ralph Bunche, The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR, edited and with an introduction by Dewey Grantham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). 18. For a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the data limitations of the published version see Hanes Walton, Jr., “Black Southern Politics: The Influence of Bunche, Martin, and Key,” in Hanes Walton, Jr., ed., Black Politics and Black Political Behavior: A Linkage Analysis (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), pp. 19–38. 19. Judith Kaaz Doyle, “Maury Maverick and Racial Politics in San Antonio, Texas, 1938–1941,” Journal of Southern History Vol. 53 (May 1987), p. 200. 20. For a detailed discussion of African American sub-machines and lieutenant bosses see Walton, Black Politics, pp. 58–67. 21. Lewinson, pp. 147–148 and 268, footnotes 24 and 25. Similar situations prevailed in Dallas, Galveston, Fort Worth, and Houston. 22. Alexander Heard, A Two-Party South? (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952), p. 195. 23. Doyle, p. 199. 24. Ibid., p. 201. 25. Ibid., p. 198. 26. Ibid., p. 202. 27. Ibid., p. 206. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., p. 211. 30. Ibid., pp. 216–217. 31. Ibid., p. 218, Table 2. 32. Lewinson, pp. 214–217. 33. Ibid., p. 133. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Frederic Ogden, The Poll Tax in the South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1958), p. 230. 37. Ibid. 38. Lewinson, pp. 153 and 141. 39. Ibid., p. 153. 40. Ogden, p. 182. 41. Ibid., p. 180. 42. Lewinson, p. 191. 43. Ogden, p. 182. 44. V.O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation, A New Edition (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977), pp. 106–107.

480

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45. Alexander Heard and Donald Strong, Southern Primaries and Elections, 1920–1949 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1950), p. 192. 46. Dan Ninno and Clifton McCleskey, “Impact of the Poll Tax on Voter Participation: The Houston Metropolitan Area in 1966,” Journal of Politics Vol. 31 (August 1969), pp. 682–699. 47. Ogden, p. 193. 48. Ibid., p. 199. 49. Ibid., p. 232. 50. Ibid., p. 235. 51. Ibid., p. 236. 52. Hanes Walton, Jr., Reelection: William Jefferson Clinton as a Native-Son Presidential Candidate (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 111–114. 53. Davis and Graham, p. 63. 54. Keyssar, p. 237. 55. Ogden, p. 261. 56. Ibid., p. 243. 57. Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate (New York: Knopf, 2002), pp. 97–105. 58. Ogden, pp. 256–257, footnote 34. 59. Ibid., p. 270. 60. Ibid., p. 271.

61. Hanes Walton, Jr., The Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1971), Chapter 1. 62. Alex Poinsett, Walking with Presidents: Louis Martin and the Rise of Black Political Power (Lanham: Madison Books, 1997), pp. 59–124. 63. Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming). 64. Keyssar, p. 262. 65. Ogden, p. 272. 66. W.M. Brewer, “The Poll Tax and the Poll Taxers,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 29 (July 1944), p. 297. 67. Ibid., pp. 297–298. 68. Ogden, pp. 250–251; Keyssar, p. 455, footnote 51. 69. Brewer, pp. 276–277. 70. Wil Haygood, King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), p. 132. 71. Brewer, p. 275. 72. Ogden, p. 274. 73. Ibid., p. 277. 74. Ibid., p. 278. 75. Ibid., p. 279. 76. Doyle, p. 206.

CHAPTER 23

African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 The Legal Stages in Dismantling the Democratic Party’s White Primary on the Road to Re-enfranchisement

484

Diagram 23.1 The Legal Stages and Cases in Dismantling the Democratic Party’s White Primary: 1921–1953

485

The African American Electorate Before the 1965 Voting Rights Act: An Empirical Overview and Case Study Portrait

487

Table 23.1 Estimated Number of African Americans Registered to Vote in the South, 1940–1956

488

Figure 23.1 Percent Increase in African Americans Registered to Vote in the South, 1940–1956

488

Table 23.2 Estimated Number of African Americans Registered to Vote in the South before and after Smith v. Allwright, 1940–1947

489

Figure 23.2 Top Ten Counties of Alabama by Number of Registered African American Voters, 1956

489

Figure 23.3 Top Ten Counties of Alabama by Percent of Eligible Black Voters Registered to Vote, 1956

490

Figure 23.4 Percent of Black Voter Registrations in the Top Ten Counties of Alabama by Eligible Black Voter Population, 1956

490

Figure 23.5 Scatter Plot of Eligible Black Voters by Percent of Eligible Black Voters Registed to Vote in Counties of Alabama, 1956

491

Figure 23.6 Number of and Percent Change in African American Voter Registrations in Arkansas, 1930–1956

492

Figure 23.7 Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote in Arkansas and Alabama by African American Share of County Population, 1958

492

Table 23.3 African American Major Party Registration in Florida, 1944–1956 493 Figure 23.8 Major Party African American Voter Registration in Florida, 1944–1956

493

Table 23.4 Top and Bottom Ten Counties of Florida in Number of African American Registered Voters in 1956 and Change Since 1946 494 Figure 23.9 Top Ten Counties of Florida in Number of Registered African American Voters in 1956 and Change from 1946 to 1956

494

Figure 23.10 Bottom Ten Counties of Florida in Number of Registered African American Voters in 1956 and Change from 1946 to 1956

495

Table 23.5 Purged Voters and Hypothetical Impact of African American Voters in Georgia by County, 1946 Gubernatorial Primary

496

Map 23.1 Counties Won by Talmadge Where Registered and Purged African American Voters Exceeded His Margin of Victory, 1946 Georgia Gubernatorial Primary

498

Table 23.6 African American Voter Registration in the State of Georgia and in the Cities of Atlanta and Macon, 1920–1964

499

Figure 23.11 African American Voter Registration in the State of Georgia and in the Cities of Atlanta and Macon, 1920–1964

500

Figure 23.12 Votes in Predominantly African American Precincts Ranked by Percent Turnout, Atlanta, Georgia, Mayoral Primary Election, May 18, 1957

500

Figure 23.13 African American Voter Registration in Louisiana, March 1940–October 1956

501

Figure 23.14 Number of Louisiana Parishes by Percentage of Registered African American Voters, 1956

501

482

Chapter 23

Figure 23.15 Relation between African Americans in Parish Population and African American Voter Registration, Louisiana, 1956

502

Table 23.7 African American Voter Registration by Religio-Cultural Sections of Louisiana, 1956

502

Figure 23.16 African American Voting Behavior, Louisiana Democratic Primary, 1956

503

Figure 23.17 Percent of African American Vote for the Long Ticket Inside and Outside New Orleans, Louisiana Democratic Primary, 1956

504

Figure 23.18 Percent of African American Vote in New Orleans for the Long Ticket vs. Morrison Ticket, Louisiana Democratic Primary, 1956

504

Table 23.8 African American Voter Registration and Voting Behavior in Selected Counties of Mississippi, 1946 505 Table 23.9 African American Registration and Voting Behavior in African American Majority Counties of Mississippi, 1954

505

Table 23.10 African American Registration and Voting Behavior in White Majority Counties of Mississippi, 1954

506

Table 23.11 African American Voting Behavior in Selected Counties of Mississippi by Racial Majority, 1946–1954

507

Table 23.12 African American Voter Registration in North Carolina, 1940–1964

508

Table 23.13 Population, VAP, and African American Voter Registration in Sampled Counties of North Carolina, Grouped by Racial Majority, 1956–1958

508

Table 23.14 African American Voter Registration in Tuskegee, Alabama; Macon County, Alabama; Durham County, North Carolina; and Memphis, Tennessee, 1919–1966

510

Table 23.15 Votes for U.S. Senator in South Carolina by County, Ranked by the Progressive Democratic Party Vote, 1944

512

Table 23.16 African American Voter Registration in South Carolina, 1940–1964 514 Table 23.17 African American Voter Registration in South Carolina, by Racial Majority of the County, 1957–1958

515

Table 23.18 African American Voters in Tennessee, 1940–1962 516 Figure 23.19 Percent of African American Vote in New Orleans for the Long Ticket vs. Morrison Ticket, Louisiana Democratic Primary, 1956

517

Figure 23.20 Regional Distribution of African American Registered Voters in Texas, 1956

517

Figure 23.21 Percent of Registered African Americans in Texas Who Voted, by Urban Status, 1956

518

Figure 23.22 Percent of Registered African Americans Who Voted in Selected Urban Counties of Texas, 1956

518

Map 23.2 African American Voting and Poll Tax Payment in Selected Urban Counties of Texas, 1956

519

Table 23.19 African American Voter Registration in Sampled Counties of Texas, Grouped by Racial Majority Populations, 1956

520

Figure 23.23 Distribution of African American Registered Voters in Cities and Counties of Virginia, 1952 and 1956

521

Table 23.20 Comparison of African American Voter Registration with African American Population and Literacy, Virginia, 1920–1930 521 Table 23.21 African American Voter Registration in Sampled Counties of Virginia, Grouped by Racial Majority Populations, 1958

522

African American Voting Behavior in the 1952 and 1956 Presidential Elections

523

The Rise of Federal Election Statistics on African American Voters, 1959, 1961, 1963, and 1965

523

Table 23.22 Vote of African American Precincts in Southern Cities, Presidential Elections 1952 and 1956 524 Map 23.3 Non-White Population by County in the Southern and Border States, 1950 525 Map 23.4 Non-White Population in the Southern and Border States, 1950 526 Table 23.23 Attempted and Accepted African American Voter Registrations in Macon County, Alabama, 1951–1958 526 Table 23.24 African American Population and Voter Registration in African American Majority Counties of the Southern States, 1958 528 Figure 23.24 Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote Compared to African American Population in African American Majority Counties in the Southern States, 1958 528 Figure 23.25 Percent of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote Compared to African American Percent of Total Population in the Southern States, 1958 529 Figure 23.26 Number of African American Voter Registrations in the South by State, 1956 and 1962 530 Table 23.25 Voter Registration Statistics by County in Mississippi, 1962 and 1964 531



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 483

Using the Commission on Civil Rights Reports to Analyze the V. O. Key Thesis

532

Table 23.26 Percent of African Americans in County Populations of Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi Compared to Percent of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote, 1958

533

Figure 23.27 Percent of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote by Percent of African Americans in County Populations of Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi, 1958

534

Table 23.27 Percent of African Americans in County Populations of Florida and Georgia Compared to Percent of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote, 1958

534

Figure 23.28 Percent of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote by Percent of African Americans in County Populations of Florida and Georgia, 1958

535

Table 23.28 Percent of African Americans in County Populations of Louisiana and Texas Compared to Percent of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote, 1956, 1958, and 1959

536

Figure 23.29 Percent of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote by African American Share of County Populations, Louisiana (1956 and 1959) and Texas (1958)

536

Table 23.29 Percent of African Americans in County Populations of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia Compared to Percent of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote, 1958

537

Figure 23.30 Percent of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote by African American Share of County Populations in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, 1958

537

Map 23.5 African American Voting Behavior in Selected African American Majority Counties, 1950

538

Table 23.30 Voting Behavior of African Americans in Selected African American Majority Counties, 1950 539 Table 23.31 African American Voter Registration in Selected Louisiana Parishes, Using Permanent and Periodic Registrations, March 1956–November 1958

540

Conclusions on African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965

541

Notes 542

484

Chapter 23

T

his chapter analyzes in empirical terms the re-enfranchisement of the African American electorate after the Supreme Court decision Smith v. Allwright in 1944 outlawed the infamous “White Primary” technique. It considers the role and function of African American and white, individual and organizational voting rights activists; the ever evolving techniques and procedures of the different states and individual and organizational opposition within those southern states; as well as the role played by the different branches of the national government (presidency, Congress, the courts) and by the bureaucracy (the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and, after 1957, the United States Commission on Civil Rights). The other main purpose of this chapter is to collect and make available in one place the most reliable registration and voting data possible. A surge in African American voter registration took place after the Court’s decision, and it provoked a response among white supremacists in the South. The first part of this chapter covers the genesis of the Smith v. Allwright decision and the ultimately failed attempts of various states to counteract it. The white reaction deepened especially after the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education unleashed racial animosity, resentment, arbitrary violence, and “massive resistance.” But while the voting rights activism and mobilization might have crested, it did not stop. The second part of this chapter covers the continued activism and mobilization both through an overview analysis and detailed case studies for each one of the eleven southern states to show the differences and similarities of efforts at the state level in this 1944 to 1964 period. What emerges from this multi-dimensional presentation is a uniquely thorough and robust contextual portrait of the re-enfranchisement, including rich and recently uncovered registration and voting data. The rare and fugitive data provided in the third part of this chapter make it possible to discuss in empirical terms how this surge in voter registration manifested itself in the presidential elections of 1952 and 1956, when the African American electorate briefly realigned with the Republican Party. This section shows how the re-enfranchisement effort affected partisanship inside and outside the African American community. And the fourth part of the chapter describes the effect of the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts sponsored in a bipartisan manner by a Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower and a Democratic Congress led by Democratic Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson (D-TX), as both parties were vying for the African American voter for the 1960 presidential election.

The Legal Stages in Dismantling the Democratic Party’s White Primary on the Road to Re-enfranchisement On April 3, 1944, the NAACP victory in the Supreme Court case of Smith v. Allwright opened the floodgates for the African American electorate to further claim their Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendment suffrage rights. The lead attorney for the case, Thurgood Marshall (later a Supreme Court Justice), wrote: “This decision, one of the landmarks in constitutional history, leveled the greater barrier to Negro voting in the South.”1 Marshall added:

Of all the so-called “legal” devices for checking Negro participation in Southern politics perhaps the most effective, and on the surface the most legal was the white Democratic Party primary—the most effective because it disfranchised the Negro by excluding him from participating in the pre-elections which for all practical purposes were the elections in the one-party South, and the most “legal” because the Democratic Party, according to contemporary legal theory, was considered as being a voluntary association of citizens [and so] could discriminate on the basis of race and color or along any other line in the conduct of its private affairs without offending the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.2 Although most of the White Primary cases involved Texas, it was the U.S. v. Classic case, originating in Louisiana, in which the Supreme Court “unanimously agreed that Congress had the right to regulate primary elections . . . involving nominations for federal office.”3 Marshall noted its importance: “Because it was not a white primary case, Classic, of course, did not go behind the law and ferret out the trickery. However, it paved the way to the next milestone on the long road toward political equality.”4 The collapse and demise of the White Primary came in five different stages. Diagram 23.1 shows all of the pertinent cases involved in dismantling the Democratic Party’s White Primary barrier to the re-enfranchisement of African Americans in the eleven southern states. The legal struggle took over three decades (1921–1953). It began with a 1921 Supreme Court case, Newberry v. U.S., concerning charges of corruption in a Michigan Senate race. The Court ruled that Congress had no power to regulate primary elections.5 Shortly thereafter, two counties in Texas—Harris and Bexar—created Democratic primaries that legally excluded African Americans from registering and voting. Two cases in 1924— Love v. Griffin and Chandler v. Neff—upheld the legality of these primaries.6 Shortly thereafter an African American physician, Lawrence A. Nixon in El Paso, took legal action against his exclusion from the Democratic primary in Texas, and the Supreme Court granted him a unanimous victory in 1927 on Fourteenth Amendment (Equal Protection) grounds. As constitutional law scholars Abraham Davis and Barbara Luck Graham wrote, after the victory “the Texas legislature enacted a new statute that gave the State Executive Committee the power to prescribe voting qualifications of its own members. . . . Nixon was again refused the right to vote, and the NAACP challenged the constitutionality of the committee’s action in a second suit.”7 In Nixon v. Condon (1932), the Supreme Court declared that this case “was ruled by Herndon and that the committee’s action constituted discrimination under the Fourteenth Amendment.”8 Undeterred, Texas party leaders “refused to concede victory to blacks and devised a more sophisticated scheme to circumvent the decision. In 1932 the state convention of the Democratic Party passed a resolution that excluded blacks from participation in any of its activities. This scheme was different from what had occurred in Nixon v. Condon in that a state convention of the party had decided to exclude blacks.”9 The earlier exclusion had



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 485 Diagram 23.1  The Legal Stages and Cases in Dismantling the Democratic Party's White Primary: 1921–1953 Legal Stages

Year

States

Court Cases

Beginning

1921

Michigan

Newberry v. U.S.

Stage I

1924 1924

Love v. Griffin Chandler v. Neff

Harris County (Houston) Texas Bexar County (San Antonio) Texas

Stage II

1927

Nixon v. Hemdon

State of Texas

Stage III

1932

Nixon v. Condon

State of Texas

1935

Grovey v. Townsend

State of Texas

1937

Georgia

1941

Stage IV

1942

Stage V

1944

Breedlove v. Suttles

Hasqett v. Werner

Louisiana

Texas

State of Texas

U.S. v. Classic

Smith v. Allwright

State of Texas

Legal Cases After the Smith Case

1945 Florida Davis and Graham Cases Texas Terry v. Adams Case 1950 Texas Terry v. Adams Case 1952 Texas Terry v. Adams Case 1953

1946 Georgia King v. Chapman Cases

1947 South Carolina Elmore v. Rice Case 1948 South Carolina Elmore v. Rice Case 1947 Alabama Davis v. Schnell Case Source: Adapted from Darlene Clark Hine, Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003); Charles Zelden, The Battle for the Black Ballot: Smith v. Allwright and the Defeat of the Texes All-White Primary (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004); Abraham Davis and Barbara Luck Graham, The Supreme Court, Race and Civil Rights (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 1995), and Charles Farris, "The Re-enfranchisement of Negroes in Florida," Journal of Negro History Vol. 39 (October, 1954), pp. 259–283.

486

Chapter 23

been mandated by the party’s executive committee. Subsequently another Texan African American, William Grovey, sued after being refused a ballot to vote in the Democratic Party primary. In Grovey v. Townsend (1935), the Supreme Court upheld the exclusion from the party on the basis of race. The Court “declared that it was constitutional for a political party to restrict voting to whites in primaries as long as state law was not a requirement for such a restriction.”10 As Davis and Graham summed up: “The Grovey decision had neutralized the significance of the Fifteenth Amendment, and blacks were effectively excluded from voting in primary elections in the South.”11 Things became even worse for African Americans. In a Georgia case, Breedlove v. Suttles (1937) involving a white man, the Court declared a state could make the payment of poll taxes a prerequisite for voting in the Democratic Party primary. To overturn the Grovey decision, African Americans in Texas and the NAACP launched the Hasgett v. Werner case, but they dropped it after another Court decision changed the legal landscape. The Court ruled in a Louisiana case, United States v. Classic (1942), involving corruption in a race for the U.S. House of Representatives, that Congress could regulate a primary election in federal elections because primary elections were a vital and necessary part of the election process.12 Immediately, African Americans and the NAACP abandoned the Hasgett case, which they had already lost in the southern district court in Texas, and prepared a new one based on the Classic decision. Although “Black Texans had supported the Hasgett case enthusiastically; black churches, fraternities, women’s leagues, voting leagues, and business organizations had contributed generously to the campaign,” new monies and support had to be readied for another new test case.13 In Houston, Lonnie E. Smith filed suit against the White Primary on “behalf of himself and all other Negroes similarly qualified to vote yet denied the right to do so by the election judges.”14 The Smith v. Allwright (1944) Supreme Court decision nullified “the white primary practices in Texas,” as “the Stone Court, in an 8–1 opinion, argued here that ‘the party takes its character as a state agency’ and this violates the Fifteenth Amendment.”15 According to V. O. Key’s classic Southern Politics, “the states around the rim of the Deep South accepted the new order more or less as a matter of course. Diehards in Florida, Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia expressed dissent, chiefly, for the record, but these states made no institutional changes to offset the decision.”16 Even in Louisiana, “a state with a relatively large Negro population took no counteraction, perhaps because its existing ‘good character,’ ‘understanding,’ and literacy requirements for voting were felt to be adequate to cope with the situation.”17 On the other hand, several southern states, including Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and a county in Texas, tried to get around the ruling. Key wrote: “The first plan contrived to avoid the effects of the Supreme Court decision was the ‘South Carolina Plan.’ . . . The legislature repealed all state laws on the primary, and in November, 1944, the voters approved a constitutional amendment erasing all mention of it from the state constitution. After repeal of the primary laws the Democratic state convention met and adopted a new set of regulations . . . for the conduct of primaries.”18 The federal district court in Elmore v. Rice declared

this “new” technique unconstitutional. “Early in 1948 the [federal] Circuit Court affirmed Judge [J. Waites] Waring’s decision and the Supreme Court declined to review that action.”19 In Georgia, African Americans from Columbia (Muscogee County) challenged the state’s White Primary in King v. Chapman in October 1945, and the federal district court invalidated it. As a result, Georgia in 1945 became the only one of the Deep South states to lose both its poll tax and its White Primary almost simultaneously. A year later, 1946, the federal Fifth Circuit Court upheld the lower court decision.20 In 1947, “the legislature . . . enacted a white primary bill repealing all statutes linking the primary to the state in an attempt to remove the primary from state control and thus from federal judicial oversight. The bill was vetoed by Governor M.E. Thompson, who questioned the legality of the bill and said it was an invitation to fraud.”21 In Alabama, “the governor and legislature pushed through a state constitutional amendment drafted by Representative E .C. Boswell (dubbed the Boswell Amendment) that gave local registrars greater discretion to disqualify prospective voters.”22 Alabama, operating on a Supreme Court decision in Williams v. Mississippi (1898), which indicated that a reading and interpretation clause in voting registration procedures did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, enacted the “Boswell Amendment” in 1946. This amendment, which did not by its language discriminate against blacks, did require that prospective voters be able to “understand and explain” any part of the United States Constitution to the satisfaction of local registration officers.23 The federal district court in Davis v. Schnell “in January 1949, [found this state amendment] to be in violation of the Fifteenth Amendment.”24 In Arkansas, according to Professor Key, “reaction against the white primary decision produced another variant in methods of avoiding the decision, the double primary. A clumsy scheme, it was soon abandoned. . . . The initiative for the double primary came from a few counties in eastern Arkansas where Negroes are numerous. Legislators from the remainder of the state went along but without enthusiasm,”25 and this new procedure ended in disaster because it took several weeks to complete and cost the state money it did not have. Professor Key writes: “After the 1946 trial of the quadruple primary, it was agreed on all sides that the scheme was foolish, and in 1947 the legislature repealed the law with alacrity.”26 Arkansas developed a second scheme to circumvent the ruling, a “voter’s loyal oath,” a procedure also adopted by Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina. It consisted of a voter’s signed pledge that he or she believed in and would uphold states rights, segregation, the poll tax (in some of these states, White Supremacy), educational separation of the races, and support of white Democratic officials and would oppose the Fair Employment Practices Commission.27 The assumption behind the “voter’s loyal oath” was that no African American would sign such an oath, yet the president of the Mississippi Progressive Voters’ League urged all of his African American members to do so. Such schemes in the Deep South states, in the long run, did not effectively sidestep or circumvent the invalidation of the White Primaries.



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 487

In Texas, Fort Bend County adopted a “pre-primary” technique by a Lily-White organization known as the Jaybird association. This organization held its own private “pre-primary” with its own funds and election machinery. And each white candidate that won in the Jaybird “pre-primaries” always went on to win in the state primary and general elections. The Supreme Court’s 8–1 decision in Terry v. Adams in 1953 declared this “pre-primary” technique as unconstitutional. By 1953 all legal efforts eventually ended. With the legal dismantling of the White Primary, the African American suffrage movement began the process of re-enfranchising the community across the eleven southern states. This movement picked up more momentum with the passage of the 1957, 1960, and 1964 Civil Rights Acts. The 1957 Act focused solely on voting rights as did the 1960 Act. The 1964 Act carried a “Title” (section) devoted to diminishing race-based voter discrimination in the South. The 1957 Act “created a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and charged it with collecting information on voting rights violations and denials of equal protection. It also prohibited anyone, whether acting privately or under state law, from interfering with voting in federal elections, and it authorized the United States to bring suit to enforce the new law.”28 The Supreme Court did not uphold the constitutionality of this congressional legislation until 1960 in the United States v. Raines. The litigation approach provided for by the Act “proved to be time-consuming and largely ineffective” given the scope of disenfranchisement in the eleven southern states.29 The limitations and weaknesses of the 1957 Act moved Congress to pass the 1960 Act, which “authorized the court to ‘freeze’ the qualifications for registration and to appoint referees to sup­ ervise the registration process and register qualified voters. . . . However, the inertia and delay inherent in litigation remained, and plagued implementation of the new voting rights law.”30 For example, in Alabama in 1960, “local election officials delayed the litigation for months by resigning their offices, thereby leaving the government with no proper party to sue.”31 The 1964 Act required “that the same standards for registration be applied to all voters and that any error or omission in registration that was ‘not material’ be disregarded.”32 Of the remedies instituted by the 1957, 1960, and 1964 Civil Rights Acts to allow re-enfranchisement of the African American electorate, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in its 1963 Report noted that “case by case proceedings, helpful as they have been in isolated localities, have not provided a prompt or adequate remedy for widespread discriminatory denials of the right to vote.”33 Nevertheless, the African American electorate, who surged forth especially after the Supreme Court decisions in the White Primary cases, soldiered on just as they had long before the coming of the Smith v. Allwright decision.

The African American Electorate before the 1965 Voting Rights Act: An Empirical Overview and Case Study Portrait Extant official data along with data recently collected by scholars and reliable estimated voter registration and voting data on the African American electorate will allow this study to merge and integrate this data to provide the richest empirical portrait yet

to be published. Overall, the emerging empirical portrait will be a composite one, given the vagaries of the extant data sources. No centralized official body collected the data nor kept them consistently in a longitudinal fashion. Likewise, there was no standardization of the voter categories. But what our composite portrait will offer laypersons, researchers, and scholars alike is the first compendium of all of the most reliable registration and voting data in a single and accessible place. Currently, the extant data sources are not only elusive but also scattered throughout numerous fugitive and obscure sources. Therefore, this report will substantially minimize the effort needed to access this data. Data for this chapter come from three major collection sources generated just prior to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act: (1) Southern Regional Council (SRC); (2) a special yearbook issue of the Journal of Negro Education written by academics and scholars on the ground in most states, as well as journalists, lawyers, NAACP leaders, and other organizational leaders—whites as well as African Americans—all of whom had been involved in the suffrage rights struggle; and (3) the 1957 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. There is both overlap and commonality in these different data collections, which are presented together here for the first time. Researchers and readers can now map out their own analyses and interpretative inquires. SRC is a private research organization which surveyed suffrage rights discrimination in the South and published pamphlets and reports about their findings. Executive Director Harold C. Fleming, in 1957, described the organization: “Since 1944, when the courts affirmed the right of Negro citizens to participate in the decisive Democratic primaries, the [Southern Regional] Council has studied and reported on the growth of Negro suffrage in the region.”34 In 1962 the Kennedy administration worked with the SRC and other African American organizations to launch the Voter Education Project to “stimulate registration,” “to investigate and expose causes of disfranchisement,” and to delineate “the methods and techniques used by the organizations [to disenfranchise], the problems encountered, solutions developed, and the results of the program.”35 The Voter Education Project separated from the SRC in 1971 but continued its work until 1992. Table 23.1 (p. 488) offers the most reliable voter registration numbers for all of the southern states from 1940 to 1956. The last two columns give the increase over this sixteen-year period, in number and percentage, for each of the southern states. The greatest percentage increase in this period was Louisiana with just over a 7,500% increase, followed by South Carolina with over 3,200%, and Alabama with over 2,500%. Texas showed the greatest numeric increase with 184,000 new registered African American voters, followed by Louisiana with over 150,000 and Georgia with over 143,000. The voter mobilization effort, while quite varied and diverse across the South, expanded the African American electorate in each and every southern state. Figure 23.1 (p. 488) shows the percentage increase in African American voter registration in each of the eleven states of the South after the Supreme Court outlawed White Primaries in the 1944 Smith v. Allwright case. Louisiana had a 7,518.9% increase, followed by a 3,229.7% increase in South Carolina and a 2,568.3% increase in Alabama. After these huge increases, the figure shows there was a 900.0% increase in Mississippi, a 716.9% increase in

488

Chapter 23

Table 23.1  Estimated Number of African Americans Registered to Vote in the South, 1940–1956

1947

1950

1954

1956

25,596

49,377

53,366

% Increase (1940–1956)

1940

Alabama

2,000

6,000

Arkansas

21,888

37,155

 

61,413

67,851

Florida

18,000

49,000

116,145

120,919

128,329

Georgia

20,000

125,000

 

144,835

 

Louisiana

2,000

10,000

 

120,000

Mississippi

2,000

5,000

 

20,000

North Carolina

35,000

75,000

 

South Carolina

3,000

50,000

 

Tennessee

20,000

80,000

Texas

30,000

Virginia

15,000

Total Mean Median

18,000

49,000

90,716

85,000

69,742

99,890

96,890

664.1%

Maximum

35,000

125,000

116,145

181,916

128,329

214,000

184,000

7518.9%

Minimum

2,000

5,000

65,286

20,000

19,367

20,000

18,000

244.6%

 

1952

Increase (1940–1956)

State

51,366

2568.3%

75,431

53,543

244.6%

137,535

119,535

664.1%

163,389

143,389

716.9%

118,183

152,378

150,378

7518.9%

19,367

20,000

18,000

900.0%

100,000

 

135,000

100,000

285.7%

80,000

 

99,890

96,890

3229.7%

 

85,000

 

90,000

70,000

350.0%

100,000

 

181,916

 

214,000

184,000

613.3%

48,000

65,286

69,326

71,632

82,603

67,603

450.7%

168,888

585,155

181,431

1,009,005

454,739

1,223,592

1,054,704

624.5%

15,353

53,196

90,716

91,728

75,790

111,236

95,882

1594.8%

Figure 23.1  Percentage Increase in African Americans Registered to Vote in the South, 1940–1956 8000%

7518.9%

7000%

6000%

5000%

4000% 3229.7% 3000%

2568.3%

2000% 900.0%

1000%

716.9%

664.1%

613.3%

450.7%

350.0%

285.7%

244.6%

Virginia

Tennessee

North Carolina

Arkansas

0% Louisiana

South Carolina

Alabama

Mississippi

Georgia

Florida

Texas

Source: Table 23.1.

Georgia, a 664.1% increase in Florida, and a 613.3% increase in Texas. Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arkansas all had less than a 500% increase in African American voter registration. Overall, the mean stood at 1594.8% and the median at 664.1%.

Table 23.2 measures the voter turnout before and after the 1944 Smith v. Allwright case decision. The range of African American registered voters in 1940—from a low of 2,000 in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi to a high of 35,000 in North Carolina,



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 489 with a mean of 15,353 and a median of 18,000—describes the deplorable state of affairs in the eleven southern states. Seven years later the registered African American voters ranged from a low of 5,000 in Mississippi to a high of 125,000 in Georgia, with a mean of 53,196 and a median of 49,000. Clearly, the Court’s decision set in motion the mobilization of the African American community for re-enfranchisement. Only Arkansas (69.8%) had an increase of less than 100%, and South Carolina’s registered African American voters increased almost sixteen-fold. Collectively, the empirical portrait of African American voter registration after the Court’s 1944 decision is one of heightened activism in mobilizing the electorate, with varying degrees of success at voter registration. In addition, a strategy in some states was to run African American candidates so as to enhance and enrich the number of African American registrants. And along with rising registration and candidacies came rising African American voter turnout and voting behavior before the appearance of official voting statistics published by the 1957 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the 1960 Civil Rights Act (focused almost completely on voter registration), and the eventual 1965 Voting Rights Act. The special 1957 yearbook edition of the Journal of Negro Education provides the election data for the following state-by-state analyses. We also use a few academic monographs, master’s theses and doctoral dissertations for supplemental election data. These supplemental data enrich and enhance the 1957 yearbook data.

Table 23.2  Estimated Number of African Americans Registered to Vote in the South before and after Smith v. Allwright, 1940–1947

Before Smith v. Allwright 1940

State

Smith v. Allwright April 1944

After Smith v. Allwright Increase (1940–1947)

After Smith v. Allwright 1947

After Smith v. Allwright % Increase (1940–1947)

Alabama

2,000

 

6,000

4,000

200.0%

Arkansas

21,888

 

37,155

15,267

69.8%

Florida

18,000

 

49,000

31,000

172.2%

Georgia

20,000

 

125,000

105,000

525.0%

Louisiana

2,000

 

10,000

8,000

400.0%

Mississippi

2,000

 

5,000

3,000

150.0%

North Carolina

35,000

 

75,000

40,000

114.3%

South Carolina

3,000

 

50,000

47,000

1566.7%

Tennessee

20,000

 

80,000

60,000

300.0%

Texas

30,000

 

100,000

70,000

233.3%

Virginia

15,000

 

48,000

33,000

220.0%

Total

168,888

 

585,155

416,267

246.5%

Mean

15,353

 

53,196

37,842

359.2%

Median

18,000

 

49,000

33,000

220.0%

Maximum

35,000

 

125,000

105,000

1566.7%

Minimum

2,000

 

5,000

3,000

69.8%

Alabama Extant African American voter registration data in Alabama are displayed in Figure 23.2, which shows the top ten counties in 1956 in terms of numbers of African American registered voters;

Source: Adapted from Steven F. Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 134. Calculations by the authors.

Figure 23.2  Top Ten Counties of Alabama by Number of Registered African American Voters, 1956

100,000 80,000

3

60,000

79

45 ,49

34 ,0

40,000

3 ,33 1,5

00

10

5 1,6 06

5,4 2

Calhoun

1,7 00

Etowah

7,2 1

00

1

4 1,8

8,3 0

0 2,0 0

7,6 7

6 2,1 7

00

2,8

3,8 50

5,5

00

2

14

00 6,4

00 7,0

20,000

,15

7

Number of African American Voters

120,000

12

1,6

67

140,000

0 Jefferson

Mobile

Tuscaloosa

Walker

Montgomery

Houston

County Eligible Black Voters

Registered Black Voters

Source: C. G. Gomillion, "The Negro Voter in Alabama," Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 27, No. 3, The Negro Voter in the South (Spring 1957), pp. 281–286.

Escambia

Madison

490

Chapter 23

Figure 23.3, which shows the top ten counties in 1956 in terms of the percentage of the Black Voting Age Population (VAP) who registered; and Figure 23.4, which shows the percent registered in the top ten counties in terms of Black VAP. Conventional wisdom held that the larger the African American population, the smaller the percentage who would be registered. That position does not hold for these three graphs

in Alabama in 1956.36 At best, it is a mixed picture. In almost all these counties, fewer than 40% of eligible blacks registered to vote, and some were still in single-digit percentages. A scatter plot of all counties in the state, Figure 23.5, tells a different story from that found in the ten counties. The size of the eligible population has an influence on the number of registrants. Conventional wisdom does not hold for Alabama in 1956.37

Figure 23.3  Top Ten Counties of Alabama by Percent of Eligible Black Voters Registered to Vote, 1956

Percent of Eligible Black Population Registered to Vote

80% 72.7% 70% 60% 52.1% 50% 42.9% 38.9%

40%

34.0%

32.5%

31.7%

30%

29.6%

28.6%

Escambia (5,425)

Franklin (700)

26.1%

20% 10% 0% Walker (3,850)

Marion (384)

Randolph (2,728)

Tuscaloosa (14,157)

Cherokee (736)

Cullman (249)

St. Clair (2,363)

Etowah (7,672)

County (Number of Eligible Black Voters) Source: C. G. Gomillion, "The Negro Voter in Alabama," Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 27, No. 3, The Negro Voter in the South (Spring 1957), pp. 281–286.

Percent of Eligible Black Population Registered to Vote

Figure 23.4  Percentage of Black Voter Registrations in the Top Ten Counties of Alabama by Eligible Black Voter Population, 1956 45% 38.9%

40% 35% 30% 25% 20%

10%

14.5%

14.1%

15%

7.6%

6.4%

5.8%

5%

12.2% 5.5% 1.7%

1.5%

0% Jefferson 121,667

Mobile 45,493

Montgomery 34,079

Dallas 18,145

Macon 14,539

Tuscaloosa 14,157

Madison 10,333

Marengo 10,226

County Black Population Eligible to Vote Source: C. G. Gomillion, "The Negro Voter in Alabama," Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 27, No. 3, The Negro Voter in the South (Spring 1957), pp. 281–286.

Russell 10,135

Talladega 9,318



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 491

Figure 23.5  Scatter Plot of Eligible Black Voters by Percent of Eligible Black Voters Registed to Vote in Counties of Alabama, 1956 8,000 y = 2491.6x + 518.36 R2 = 0.0606

Voting-Age African American Population

7,000 6,000 5,000 4,000 3,000 2,000 1,000 0

0%

10%

20%

30% 40% 50% Percentage of Eligible Black Voters Registered to Vote

60%

70%

80%

Source: C. G. Gomillion, "The Negro Voter in Alabama," Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 27, No. 3, The Negro Voter in the South (Spring 1957), pp. 281–286. Note: Eligible voters are defined as persons of voting age.

Arkansas Extant data on Arkansas allow us in Figure 23.6 (p. 492) to display the percentage of change in registered African American voters over time. Thus, there was a huge increase in 1940 over 1930; large increases in 1947 over 1940 and 1952 over 1947; but smaller increases in 1955 over 1952 and 1956 over 1955, after large registration numbers had been achieved. Commenting on this data, two African American scholars in Arkansas wrote: “The present markedly low Negro registration represents tremendous improvement over the past. . . . [W]ithin the last two decades, the relative increase in Negro registration has been greater than white registration.”38 Therefore, “the recently removed legal barrier— the white primary—” generated this “subsequent emergence of political awareness of Arkansas Negroes.”39 We also know that African American voters in Arkansas had revolted in 1920 by running their own African American candidate for governor, J.H. Blount, and cast some 17,240 votes for him in that election year.40 These older extant data tell us that at least 17,240 African American voters existed in the state in 1920. By 1940 the number had only grown to 21,888 voters, as shown on Figure 23.6, despite the enfranchisement of African American women in the state. Professor V.O. Key famously hypothesized in Southern Politics that “as the African American population increased in a county their political participation decreased due to white political behavior” opposing such participation. Nevertheless, “the converse was also true. As their population decreased, political participation increased.”41 Figure 23.7 (p. 492) shows the percentage of African American voter registration in the counties

of Arkansas and Alabama in 1958 plotted against the counties’ percentage of African American population according to the 1950 Census. The counties are classified into five categories by African American population percentage: 0.1–9.9%, 10–19.9%, 20–29.9%, 30–39.9%, 40–49.9%, and 50%+. While Alabama fits Professor Key’s thesis, Arkansas is more ambiguous. Indeed, in Arkansas, counties with the lowest and highest percentages of African American population have the lowest registration rates, while the middle categories (20–29.9% and 40–49.9%) have the highest, which does not fit Key’s thesis well at all. “Arkansas whites in the Black Belt counties were more willing to permit African Americans to register to vote than were whites in Alabama. And seemingly more African Americans in these counties were activated to register to vote.” Still, the basic finding is that “in both states the number of African Americans permitted to register to vote remained very low” despite the best efforts of voting rights activists in the state.42 But even though slow going, African American registration in both states continued to expand a decade after the Court’s 1944 decision.

Florida Since the Smith v. Allwright decision the state of Florida has continually kept its voter registration data by race and partisanship. Table 23.3 (p. 493) shows the number and percentage of African American Democrats and Republicans, and the total number of major party registrants for the years 1944 to 1956. It shows a significant increase among African Americans in Democratic registration and a sharp decline in Republican registration between 1944 and 1948 which persisted into the 1950s, with slight deviations in 1950

492

Chapter 23

Figure 23.6  Number of and Percent Change in African American Voter Registrations in Arkansas, 1930–1956 75,431

329.2%

67,851

300%

61,413 60,000

250%

50,000 200% 40,000

37,155 150%

30,000 21,888

100%

20,000

65.3% 50%

5,100 11.2% 0%

1953

1952

1951

1950

1949

1948

1947

1946

1945

1944

1943

1942

1941

1940

1939

1938

1937

1936

1935

1934

1933

1932

1931

1930

1956

10.5%

0

1955

10,000

69.8%

1954

Number of African American Registered Voters

70,000

350%

Percent Change in African American Registered Voters

80,000

Year African American Registered Voters

Percent Change from Previous Reading

Source: Tillman C. Cothran and William M. Phillips, “Expansion of Negro Suffrage in Arkansas,” Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 27, No. 3, The Negro Voter in the South (Spring 1957), pp. 287–296.

Figure 23.7  Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote in Arkansas and Alabama by African American Share of County Population, 1958

Percent of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote

45% 40% 35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0% 0.1%+

10%+

20%+ 30%+ African American Share of County Population Arkansas

40%+

Alabama

Source: Hanes Walton, Jr., Re-election: William Jefferson Clinton as a Native-Son Presidential Candidate (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 99–100.

50%+



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 493 substantial margins in terms of actual numbers and percentages. Democratic presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt (reelected in 1944) and Harry Truman (elected in 1948) were both greatly admired within the African American community both for their economic policies and civil rights advances. Although in 1956 during Republican Dwight Eisenhower’s reelection there was a small increase in African American Republican voter registration, there was an even greater increase in African American Democratic voter registration. In Florida as in the other states the dynamism set loose by the Smith v. Allwright court case was still in motion a full decade after the decision. The data in this figure came from a highly reliable monograph.43 In the rest of the nation and the South, the African American electorate realigned from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party in 1936. But in Florida the African American electorate realigned on a different schedule. As Figure 23.8 shows, in 1944 all 20,000 African American registered voters were Republicans. Only after the White Primary was outlawed in 1944 did Florida’s African American voters begin to realign to the Democratic Party. However, with the data from the Journal of Negro Education, we can delineate Florida registration data at the county level. Using the data from the Journal, Table 23.4 (p. 494) provides African American voter registration data for the top ten and the bottom ten Florida counties in terms of African American voters registered in 1956, as well as the percent of change from 1946. Duval County (Jacksonville) had the highest number of registered African American voters, while Leon County (Tallahassee) had the lowest numbers. All of the top ten counties in 1956 had more than doubled their registrations over the decade.

Table 23.3  African American Major Party Registration in Florida, 1944–1956

African American Democrats

African American Republicans

Percent of Major Party Black Registration

Total Major Party African American Registration

Number

Percent of Major Party Black Registration

Number

Percent of 1950 Adult Black Population Registered

20,000

100.0%

 20,000

 5.5%

Year

Number

1944

0

 0.0%

1946

32,280

66.6%

15,877

32.8%

 48,457

13.1%

1948

53,368

83.4%

 8,647

13.5%

 64,015

16.9%

1950

106,420

91.6%

 9,725

8.4%

116,145

31.7%

1952

112,868

93.3%

 8,045

6.7%

120,913

33.0%

1954

119,975

93.5%

 8,354

6.5%

128,329

35.0%

1956

128,437

93.4%

 9,098

6.6%

137,535

37.5%

Source: Adpated from H. D. Price, The Negro and Southern Politics: A Chapter of Florida History (New York: New York University Press, 1957), p. 33. Calculations by the authors.

and 1956. Needless to say, the trend in Florida was not only a serious increase in each two-year interval but also a rapid one. Figure 23.8 compares the number and percentage of African American voters registered as Democrats or Republicans from 1944 to 1956. In 1944, all registered African American voters in Florida were Republicans. After the war (in 1946 and ever since), however, the Democrats received more African American registrants; in the 1940s and 1950s this party gained very Figure 23.8  Major Party African American Voter Registration in Florida, 1944–1956

93.4%

100.0%

93.3%

91.6% 86.1%

90%

112,868

80%

106,420 100,000

100%

128,437

119,975

120,000 Number of Registered African American Voters

93.5%

67.0%

70% 60%

80,000

50% 60,000

53,368

40%

33.0% 40,000

20,000

0

30%

32,280 20,000

0 0.0% 1944

20% 15,877

1946

13.9% 8,647

1948

9,725 8.4% 1950

8,045 6.7% 1952

8,354 6.5% 1954

Year #Democrats

#Republicans

%Democrats

Source: H. D. Price, The Negro and Southern Politics: a Chapter of Florida History (New York: New York University Press, 1957), p. 33.

%Republicans

9,098 6.6% 1956

10% 0%

Percent of Registered African American Voters

140,000

494

Chapter 23 Figure 23.9 shows graphically both the numerical and percentage changes in the top ten counties, while Figure 23.10 shows the same changes for the bottom ten counties. The greatest percentage increases among the top ten were in Broward County and in Leon County. Growth here was continuing. Some of the bottom counties doubled or more as well, but the numbers registered remained small by comparison. There was very modest growth in terms of overall numbers in the counties of Dixie, Hendry, Holmes, and Jefferson but a decrease in African American registered voters in Gadsden and no increases at all in Lafayette, Liberty, and Union. The state voter registration data for Florida suggest only strong growth and increases in voter registration, while examining the counties reveals that the growth was unevenly distributed throughout the state.

Table 23.4  Top and Bottom Ten Counties of Florida in Number of African American Registered Voters in 1956, and Change Since 1946

   

Number of African American Registered Voters County

1946

1956

Percent Change

Duval

12,420

27,368

120%

Dade

5,310

19,048

259%

Hillsborough

2,177

8,858

307%

685

6,958

916%

Escambia

2,467

6,733

173%

Palm Beach

2,416

6,520

170%

Volusia

2,847

5,761

102%

Polk

1,888

4,989

164%

Marion

Top Ten

Broward

1,379

4,322

213%

Leon

508

4,046

696%

Jefferson

147

183

24%

Bottom Ten

Dixie

58

181

212%

Hendry

2

135

6650%

Holmes

106

130

23%

Gilchrist

11

29

164%

Flagler

5

13

160%

32

5

-84%

Liberty

0

1

N/A

Lafayette

0

0

N/A

Union

0

0

N/A

Gadsden

Georgia The 1944 Supreme Court decision in the Smith v. Allwright case engendered significant increases in African American political mobilization in all of the eleven southern states, but it also triggered a sustained white counter-mobilization, even before the Court’s decision was rendered. It manifested itself in something caused “purges,” a technique used in the southern states to remove African Americans who had already registered. Joseph Bernd, a longtime student of Georgia suffrage rights at Emory University in Atlanta, analyzed this technique at the county level and provided the most reliable empirical data on the subject.44 Although this technique was employed throughout the South, the only systematic and comprehensive data to survive come from Georgia.

Source: Elston E. Roady, “The Expansion of Negro Suffrage in Florida,” Journal of Negro Education Vol. 26, No. 3, The Negro Voter in the South (Summer 1957), pp. 297–306.

Figure 23.9  Top Ten Counties of Florida in Number of Registered African American Voters in 1956 and Change from 1946 to 1956 1000%

30,000

800% 700%

20,000

600% 500%

15,000

400% 10,000

300% 200%

5,000

100%

Number of Black Registered Voters in 1946 Number of Black Registered Voters in 1956

on Le

n io M ar

Po lk

ia us Vo l

ch Be a lm Pa

Es

ca

m

bi

a

d ar w Br o

gh ou or Hi

lls b

Da d

va Du

e

0%

l

0

% Change in Black Registered Voters, 1946–1956

Source: Elston E. Roady, "The Expansion of Negro Suffrage in Florida," Journal of Negro Education Vol. 26, No. 3, The Negro Voter in the South (Summer 1957), pp. 297–306.

Percent Change, 1946 –1956

Number of African American Registered Voters

900% 25,000



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 495

Figure 23.10  Bottom Ten Counties of Florida in Number of Registered African American Voters in 1956 and Change from 1946 to 1956 200

7000% 6000%

160 5000% 140 4000%

120

3000%

100 80

2000%

60

Percent Change, 1946–1956

Number of African American Registered Voters

180

1000% 40 0%

20 0

Jefferson

Dixie

Hendry

Holmes

Gilchrist

Number of Black Registered Voters in 1946 Number of Black Registered Voters in 1956

Flagler

Gadsden

Liberty

Lafayette

Union

–1000%

% Change in Black Registered Voters, 1946–1956

Source: Elston E. Roady, “The Expansion of Negro Suffrage in Florida,” Journal of Negro Education Vol. 26, No. 3, The Negro Voter in the South (Summer 1957), pp. 297–306.

When “in March 1946, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a per curiam decision . . . upheld a lower court ruling which voided the white primary in Georgia,” the leading racial demagogue in the state and three-time former governor, Eugene Talmadge, announced that he would save the White Primary and with it White Supremacy in the state by “the purging of blacks from the registration rolls.”45 The Talmadge Plan, as it was called, relied upon “Section 34–605 of the Georgia Code [which] provided that any qualified voter in a county might challenge the right to vote of any registrant whom he thought not properly qualified. Each complaint had to specify the ground of the action, and the person challenged had to be given at least one day’s notice before his qualifications were examined.”46 Understanding that his rural constituents “could not read, write, or ‘figure,’ or correctly understand how to invoke Section 34–605 of the Georgia Code, Talmadge’s headquarters mailed hundreds of mimeographed challenge forms to supporters in the counties. Negro registrants in more than thirty counties [Georgia has 159] were challenged en masse, while few or no white registrants were challenged in any county.”47 But the Talmadge Plan did not rely on his white supporters alone. It was found that “the policies of many [local] registrars seemed to follow lines of factional partisanship: In several counties pro-Talmadge registrars purged Negroes in large numbers. Anti-Talmadgeites, equally partisan, used their discretion to favor the challenged persons in a dozen counties.”48 Thus, “in four counties, faulty application of the constitutional tests and other defects were cited in injunctive action by a U.S. District Court. The Court ordered a halt to discriminatory purging and restoration of the names of Negro registrants to the voting rolls. In one county where facts and law were in dispute, a temporary injunction restrained further

proceedings, but not until seventy percent of the Negro registrants had been purged. This action was allowed to stand.”49 Table 23.5 (pp. 498–499) examines the 1946 governor’s race between Talmadge and James Carmichael. For each Georgia county the table shows the number of African American and white registrants that were purged as well as the margin of victory that Talmadge won by in the county. Furthermore, it shows whether the number of purged voters was greater than Talmadge’s margin of victory, as well whether the combination of both purged and registered African Americans was larger. From these data one can see that there were a minimum of twelve and a maximum of twenty-one counties that gubernatorial candidate Talmadge would have lost if the African American registrants had not been purged from the voting rolls. Such conditions also prevailed in the other southern states, but the extant data do not provide as much detail as the Georgia data. Map 23.1 (p. 498) designates two types of counties in the 1946 gubernatorial campaign: (1) those counties where the number of purged African American voters exceeded the Talmadge margin of victory, and (2) those counties where the number purged plus the number of registered African American voters exceeded the Talmadge margin of victory. Although the location of these counties do not strongly correlate with the “Black Belt” (African American majority counties) in the state, all of these counties are rural counties, and most fall below the Atlanta (Fulton County) area, crossing the southwestern part of the state in a diagonal fashion. Eugene Talmadge garnered 242 countyunit votes, whereas his leading opponent James Carmichael won only 146 county-unit votes. This result was in spite of the popular vote, as Carmichael garnered 313,389 total votes to Talmadge’s

496

Chapter 23

Table 23.5  Purged Voters and Hypothetical Impact of African American Voters in Georgia by County, 1946 Gubernatorial Primary

Outcome of Gubernatorial Primary

County

Number of Black Voters Purged

Number of Registered Black Votersa

Number of White Voters Purged

Winner

Hypothetical Reversal of Talmadge Victory

Margin of Victory

by Number of Black Purges

by Number of Black Purges plus Black Registrations

Appling

7

613

0

Talmadge

1,208

 

 

Bacon

78

9

0

Talmadge

1,040

 

 

Baker

308

0

0

Talmadge

299

Yes

Yes

Baldwin

400

1,800

18

Carmichael

628

 

 

Ben Hill

788

62

Talmadge

375

Yes

Yes

Bleckley

86

64

0

Talmadge

1,219

 

 

Butts

283

133

0

Carmichael

141

 

 

Calhoun

390

66

0

Talmadge

226

Yes

Yes

Camden

226

474

0

Carmichael

19

 

 

Chattahoochee Clay Coffee

48

12

6

Talmadge

135

 

 

186

57

0

Talmadge

57

Yes

Yes

 

117

0

Talmadge

1,473

 

 

Colquitt

396

404

0

Talmadge

1,143

 

 

Crawford

274

66

3

Talmadge

803

 

 

Crisp

238

813

1

Talmadge

1,496

 

 

Decatur

679

852

0

Talmadge

717

 

Yes

Early

317

83

74

Talmadge

765

 

 

Fayette

 

0

0

Talmadge

566

 

 

Fulton

34

 

Carmichael

37,289

 

 

Greene

71

922

0

Carmichael

122

 

 

Hall

116

784

0

Carmichael

592

 

 

Hart

294

205

0

Talmadge

674

 

 

Houston

735

73

55

Talmadge

647

Yes

Yes

Irwin

432

368

0

Talmadge

706

 

Yes

Jasper

114

279

0

Carmichael

592

 

 

 

18

0

Talmadge

895

 

 

Jones

92

402

0

Talmadge

335

 

Yes

Lamar

221

207

0

Carmichael

266

 

 

Laurens

25

2,400

25

Talmadge

1,220

 

Yes

Macon

 

77

0

Talmadge

336

 

 

Marion

36

240

11

Talmadge

264

 

Yes

Mc Duffie

377

114

0

Talmadge

493

 

 

Meriwether

400

365

0

Talmadge

17

Yes

Yes

0

Talmadge

976

 

 

Talmadge

1,373

 

 

Jeff Davis

Miller

126

0

Mitchell

1,245

105

Monroe

455

309

7

Talmadge

640

 

Yes

Oglethorpe

122

250

2

Talmadge

1,010

 

 

Peach

500

403

0

Talmadge

171

Yes

Yes

Pierce

275

100

0

Talmadge

976

 

 

Putnam

44

150

1

Talmadge

134

 

Yes



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 497

Outcome of Gubernatorial Primary

County

Number of Black Voters Purged

Number of Registered Black Votersa

Number of White Voters Purged

Winner

Margin of Victory

Hypothetical Reversal of Talmadge Victory

by Number of Black Purges

by Number of Black Purges plus Black Registrations

Randolph

508

262

8

Talmadge

59

Yes

Yes

Schley

129

73

4

Talmadge

36

Yes

Yes

Seminole

288

56

0

Talmadge

234

Yes

Yes

Stewart

228

29

0

Talmadge

277

 

 

Sumter

687

91

195

Talmadge

295

Yes

Yes

Taylor

178

22

55

Talmadge

604

 

 

Telfair

 

76

0

Talmadge

2,499

 

 

Washington

591

799

0

Talmadge

1,243

 

Yes

Wilcox

548

60

1

Talmadge

779

 

 

Wilkes

628

799

0

Talmadge

30

Yes

Yes

Wilkinson

725

175

0

Talmadge

856

 

Yes

Worth

1,174

117

0

Talmadge

1,395

Total

16,102

15,955

466

 

 

 

 

12

21

Source: Adapted from Hanes Walton, Jr., “Black Voting Behavior in the Segregated Era: 1944–1964,” in Hanes Walton, Jr. (ed.), Black Politics and Black Political Behavior: A Linkage Analysis (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 1994), pp. 115–136 (see Table 10.4). Calculations by the authors. a

Number of African Americans who remained registered after the purge.

297,245; E. D. Rivers came in third place with 69,489.50 The 1917 Neill Primary Law had allocated a unit vote to each county, regardless of their size, advantaging a candidate like Talmadge who usually carried all of the small rural and moderate-sized counties. The Georgia state legislature in 1917 had designed the law to undermine the strength of the increasingly African American urban counties in the voting for statewide offices. The county unit vote technique was a method of vote dilution.51 Professor Bernd found that in the 1946 election “the Talmadge tactics had won”: The challenge-purges won him at least eight unit votes; the “slow-down” won six unit votes; other methods of barring Negroes from the ballot won at least ten unit votes. The support of local bosses and courthouse crowds secured some additional thirty unit votes.52 According to Professor Bernd’s findings, Talmadge would have lost 54 county unit votes resulting in a total of only 188 county unit votes (242 – 54 = 188) and an increase for Carmichael (146 + 54 = 200) resulting in a victory for Carmichael. For elections after the years of the voting purges, extant data on African American voter registration in Georgia come from two monograph studies: Joseph Bernd, Grass Roots Politics in Georgia53 and Numan Bartley, From Thurmond to Wallace: Political Tendencies in Georgia, 1948–1968.54 Both authors happened to be at several county offices and were able to collect voter registration and voting data for the state and for the city of Macon, Georgia, in Bibb County. These authors sent their unique and rare African American registration and voting data to one of the authors of

this book, Walton, who was conducting his own data collection and research on this group of voters.55 Another academic, Professor Jack Walker, collected data on the city of Atlanta for an article.56 These specific registration data allow us to include two of Georgia’s major cities as well as county- and state-level data. Table 23.6 (p. 499) provides the composite data on African American voter registration in the state of Georgia and in the cities of Atlanta and Macon from 1920 to 1964. Much of the data was collected in intervals of two years, from 1944 to 1954 on the state level and from 1948 to 1964 in the city of Macon; the data for Atlanta range from 1920 to 1962. In the state-level data, the raw numbers are placed alongside estimates taken from the scholarly sources. The need to estimate the number of voters is evident from 1952, when the whole state reports only 9,035 such voters, while the city of Atlanta alone had 22,300. The state estimates hit a high of 86,000 in 1948, just four years after the low of 10,000 in 1944, the year of the Smith v. Allwright Court decision. Yet the remaining totals for the 1950s actually drop below the 1948 level. While the table shows growth and expansion of the electorate, it also shows declines. Data for the city of Macon, Georgia, ran from a high of 5,311 voters in 1964 to a low of 594 registered voters in 1962, for a mean 2,829 registered voters and a median of 2,911 registered voters. These statistics indicate that the fluctuation found throughout the state was also present at the two different levels in Georgia after the Court decision in the King v. Chapman case. Professor Paul Lewinson provides data for Atlanta and the county of Fulton in both 1920 and 1930, while Professor Walker’s collection effort provides Atlanta data from 1945 through 1962. There is significant dynamism, especially for February and

498

Chapter 23

Map 23.1  Counties Won by Talmadge Where Registered and Purged African American Voters Exceeded His Margin of Victory, 1946 Georgia Gubernatorial Primary

North Carolina Tennessee

0

100 200 miles

Athens WILKES Augusta

Atlanta

South Carolina

PUTNAM JONES MONROE

MERIWETHER

WASHINGTON WILKINSON

PEACH Columbus

LAURENS

HOUSTON

MARION

Savannah

SCHLEY SUMTER Alabama

BEN HILL

RANDOLPH

IRWIN CLAY

CALHOUN BAKER

SEMINOLE DECATUR

Florida

City (at least 100,000 in population) County Number of Purged Black Voters Exceeded Talmadge Margin of Victory Total of Purged Black Voters Plus Black Registered Voters Exceeded Talmadge Margin of Victory Source: Table 23.5.



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 499 Table 23.6  African American Voter Registration in the State of Georgia and in the Cities of Atlanta and Macon, 1920–1964 State of Georgia

Atlanta, Georgia

Date

Estimated Number of Black Voters

Reported Number of Black Voters

Reported Number as Percent of Estimated Number

1920

 

 

 

1930

 

  unknown

Percent of Total Electorate

Reported Number of Black Voters

Percent of Total Electorate

2282b

 

 

 

7341b

 

 

 

1944

10,000a

1945

 

 

3000

   4%b

Feb. 1946

 

 

6,876

 8.3%

June 1946

 

 

21,244

27.2%

1946

85,000

10,871

12.8%

 

 

1948

86,000

6,864

8.0%

 

 

3,749

20.0%

1950

45,000

4,424

9.8%

 

 

2,154

13.0%

1952

60,000

9,035

15.1%

22,300

25.8%

2,991

14.0%

1954

60,000

7,021

11.7%

 

 

2,813

16.0%

1956

 

 

23,440

 27%

1,570

13.0%

1958

 

 

27,432

25.3%

3,372

15.0%

1960

 

 

34,393

29.5%

2,911

14.0%

1961

 

 

41,469

28.6%

1962

 

 

52000b

  34%b

594

8.0%

1964

unknown

Number of Registered Black Voters

Macon, Georgia

b

 

 

 

5,311

16.0%

Mean

57,667

7,643

13.3%

21,980

 

23.3%

2,829

14.3%

Median

60,000

7,021

11.7%

23,440

27.0%

2,911

14.0%

Sources: Adapted from Hanes Walton, Jr., “Black Voting Behavior in the Segregation Era: 1944–1964,” in Hanes Walton, Jr. (ed.), Black Politics and Black Political Behavior: A Linkage Analysis (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1994), pp. 123 and 131; Jack Walker, “Negro Voting in Atlanta,” Phylon Vol. 24 No. 4 (1964), Table 1, p. 380; and Paul Lewinson, Race, Class, and Party: A History of Negro Suffrage and White Politics in the South (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), p. 218. Calculations by the authors. a

Data found in Lewinson.

b

Approximate number provided by source. Data found in Walker.

June of 1946. Over three months plus (March, April, and May) a total of 14,368 new African Americans registered or about 4,789 per month. Historian Clarence Bacote of Atlanta University describes this mobilization effort, which included the Atlanta Negro Voters League and others: As a result of an intensive registration campaign in 1946 . . . 18,000 names were placed on the registration books during the last fifty-one days of the campaign. Thus success would have been impossible without a superb block-to-block organization by the NAACP and the Atlanta Urban League and excellent leadership. In addition, citizenship schools were conducted by the NAACP in every heavily populated Negro precinct to educate the new registrants on their responsibilities as voters.57 In the city of Atlanta, voter registration ran from a low of 2,282 in 1920 to a high of 52,000 registered in 1962. The empirical evidence here shows an ever-upward dynamism in this city. Figure 23.11 (p. 500) demonstrates this upward dynamism in a very clear-cut fashion, especially from 1945 to 1962.

Finally, Figure 23.12 (p. 500) provides empirical information on the turnout of the African American registrants in the mayoral primary election in Atlanta on May 18, 1957. Among these eight precincts, African American turnout ranged from 63.3% to 75.9%, for a mean of 66.3% and a median of 67.6%. Roughly two-thirds of the new African American voters in this city were turning out to vote in local elections, and all precincts participated at or near that level.

Louisiana Figure 23.13 (p. 501) gives us the number of African American voters that were registered in Louisiana from 1940 to 1956; it also shows an estimate of what percent of potential African American voters were registered. Professor John Fenton has noted: “After 1944, Negro registration in Louisiana swelled rapidly, reaching a level of 161,410 in March of 1956, or 30 per cent of the potential vote.”58 In the figure, the influence of the Court decision does not show up until March 1948, but once significant registration started to take place, it mushroomed rapidly. Figure 23.14 (p. 501) delineates this gross state-level voter registration data by showing the distribution of African American voter registration in the parishes (counties) of Louisiana in

500

Chapter 23

Figure 23.11  African American Voter Registration in the State of Georgia and in the Cities of Atlanta and Macon, 1920–1964 100,000

Number of African American Registered Voters

90,000

85,000

86,000

80,000 70,000 60,000

60,000

60,000 52,000

50,000

41,469

45,000

40,000

34,393

30,000 20,000 10,000

22,300

21,244 7,341 6,876

2,282

27,432 23,440

5,311

3,372 2,911 3,749 2,154 2,9912,813 1,570 594 3,000

0 1920 1922 1924 1926 1928 1930 1932 1934 1936 1938 1940 1942 1944 1946 1948 1950 1952 1954 1956 1958 1960 1962 1964 Year City of Atlanta

City of Macon

State of Georgia*

Source: Table 23.6. * Estimated.

Figure 23.12  Votes in Predominantly African American Precincts Ranked by Percent Turnout, Atlanta, Georgia, Mayoral Primary Election, May 18, 1957 78%

2,000 75.9%

76%

75.0% 73.6%

74%

1,600

72%

1,400

Votes for Mayor

70% 1,200

68.3% 66.8%

1,000

68% 66.1%

65.7%

800

66% 63.3%

600

62%

400

60%

200 0

64%

Percent of Registered African American Voters

1,800

58% 1,604

1,861

1,547

7D

3B

3H

1,342

1,552

7A 6H Ward-Precinct

838

1,254

488

3K

4I

3N

56%

Source: Adapted from C. A. Bacote, “The Negro Voter in Georgia Politics, Today,” Journal of Negro Education Vol. 26, No. 3, The Negro Voter in the South (Summer 1957), pp. 307–318. Calculations by the authors.



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 501

Figure 23.13  African American Voter Registration in Louisiana, March 1940–October 1956 180,000

35% 30.5% 28.8%

30%

140,000 25% 120,000 19.5%

100,000

20%

80,000

15%

60,000 10% 40,000 4.7%

5%

20,000 0.2% 0

803

March 1940

March 1944*

Percent of Estimated Potential African American Vote

Number of Registered African American Voters

160,000

22,576

97,101

161,410

152,378

March 1948

March 1952

March 1956

October 1956

0%

Source: John H. Fenton, “The Negro Voter in Louisiana,” Journal of Negro Education Vol. 26, No. 3 The Negro Voter in the South (Summer, 1957), pp. 319–328. * No data.

Figure 23.14  Number of Louisiana Parishes by Percentage of Registered African American Voters, 1956 14

13

12 10

Number of Parishes

10

8

9

7 6

6

6 5

4

3

3 2

2

0

Under 10%

10%–19%

20%–29%

30%–39% 40%–49% 50%–59% 60%–69% 70%–79% Percent of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote Number of Parishes

Source: John H. Fenton and Kenneth N. Vines, “Negro Registration in Louisiana,” American Political Science Review Vol. 51, No. 3 (September 1957), pp. 704–713.

80%–89%

90%–100%

502

Chapter 23

1956. Seven parishes had less than 10% of their eligible African American population registered, while two parishes had registered 90–100% of their African American population of voting age (VAP). The number of parishes in each category seems to decline steadily from ten parishes with a 10–19% level down to five parishes with a 40–49% level, but this trend is broken dramatically by the 50–59% level, which includes thirteen parishes. Figure 23.15 seems to confirm Professor V.O. Key’s thesis from his classic Southern Politics that the higher the African American population percentage in a parish, the lower the percentage of African Americans who are registered to vote. Thus, in those parishes where the African American population fell under 10%, some 94% of the African American potential voters registered, while in those parishes with a 50–59% African American population, only 37% of these potential voters successfully registered.

However, in analyzing the demographic features in the high registration counties, political scientists John Fenton and Kenneth Vines found that in 1956 religion was the causal factor. They empirically demonstrated that “[i]n southern FrenchCatholic parishes the percentages of Negroes registered is more than twice as great as in the northern Anglo-Saxon Protestant parishes.”59 They continue: “Permissive attitudes toward Negro registration in French-Catholic parishes seem expressive of the basic value that the Negro is spiritually equal in a Catholic society. . . . There is little evidence in the Protestant parishes of cultural values assigning the Negro a spiritually equal place in the community or of activity by the church itself toward these values.”60 Remarkably, Table 23.7, which groups the parishes of the state into two religious categories, effectively reveals that more African Americans were registered in the French-Catholic

Figure 23.15  Relation between African Americans in Parish Population and African American Voter Registration, Louisiana, 1956

Mean Percentage of Registered African American Voters

100%

94%

90% 80% 70% 62% 60% 52% 50% 40% 32%

37%

33%

30% 20% 10% 0%

0% under 10%

10%–19%

20%–29% 30%–39% 40%–49% Percent of African Americans in Parish Population

50%–59%

60% and over

Percent of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote Source: John H. Fenton and Kenneth N. Vines, “Negro Registration in Louisiana,” American Political Science Review Vol. 51, No. 3 (September 1957), pp. 704–713.

Table 23.7  African American Voter Registration by Religio-Cultural Sections of Louisiana, 1956 Mean Percentages of Parishes

Number of Registered Black Voters

Number of Eligible Black Voters

Percentage of Blacks Registered

Blacks in Total Population

Urbanism

Catholics among All Religions

French-Catholic Parishes

 70,488

138,000

51%

32%

30%

83%

Non-French-Catholic Parishes

 90,922

390,000

23%

38%

26%

12%

All Parishes

161,410

528,000

31%

36%

27%

33%

Religio-Cultural Sections

Source: Adpated from John H. Fenton and Kenneth N. Vines, “Negro Registration in Louisiana,” American Political Science Review Vol. 51, No. 3 (September 1957), pp. 704–713 (see Table 2). Calculations by the authors.



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 503

parishes than in the non-French-Catholic parishes, even though they were comparable in urbanism and the percentages of their African American populations. Some 51% of all the African Americans in the French-Catholic parishes in 1956 were registered, compared to 23% in the non-French-Catholic parishes. The difference here is very substantial and has proved quite instructive about how the political context within one of the southern states altered the electoral process, White Supremacy and disenfranchisement notwithstanding. Thus, the determination of registrants by religious-cultural demographic cleavages is reminiscent of political machines and bosses playing a similar role in other states.61 The French-Catholic parishes set Louisiana off from the rest of the southern states after the Court’s 1944 decision. The Journal offers some voting data for 1956 in the statewide Louisiana elections. Figure 23.16 shows the percent of registered African Americans who voted, the percent of registered African Americans who cast votes for various statewide offices, and the percent of registered African Americans who voted for African American candidate Earl J. Amedee for attorney general. Amedee received 52% of the African American vote, but 22% stayed home, so only 26% of registered African Americans voted for a different candidate for attorney general. Figures 23.17 and 23.18 examine the 1956 primary battles for governor, lieutenant governor, and commissioner of agriculture. Figure 23.17 (p. 504) shows how African American voters voted inside and outside the city of New Orleans for Earl K. Long, as well as for two other statewide candidates backed by the Long political machine. Figure 23.18 (p. 504) compares and

contrasts the African American vote between the two opposing tickets. The newly registered African American voters in this instance voted for the reform ticket of Morrison instead of the machine ticket of Long, whose family had run Louisiana politics since his brother Huey Long wielded power in the 1930s.

Mississippi The extant voter registration and voting data on Mississippi come from three different sources: (1) the Journal of Negro Education for the 1946 data, (2) a master’s thesis written at the University of Mississippi for data on 1951, 1952, 1954, and (3), historical files in the data archives held by the Inter-university Consortium on Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan. The data which appeared in the Journal were collected for a Senate hearing on the 1946 reelection race of Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo from eight counties in the state. Table 23.8 (p. 505) displays this unique data, which give us the African American population in each of these counties, the number of African American registered voters in these counties, and the number of the African Americans who were registered and actually voted. It contains the most reliable data on the reelection of this southern demagogue to date. During this race Bilbo was reported as telling his white segregationist audience, in the light of the Court decision to visit Negroes the night before the election in order to keep them from exercising their new right to vote in primary elections.62 Clearly, the intimidation worked, given that only 1,283 African Americans in these counties registered and even fewer bothered to turn out in Senator Bilbo’s racist reelection campaign. The highest number of African Americans

Figure 23.16  African American Voting Behavior, Louisiana Democratic Primary, 1956

90%

% of African American Registered Voters

80%

78%

% of African Americans Voting for Governor Who Voted for Other Statewide Offices 79%

76%

70%

% of African American Statewide Vote for Black Candidate

67%

60% 52% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

Turnout

Lt. Gov.

Att. Gen.

Comm. of Ag.

Source: John H. Fenton, “The Negro Voter in Louisiana,” Journal of Negro Education Vol. 26, No. 3 The Negro Voter in the South (Summer 1957), pp. 319–328.

Att. Gen. Amedee

504

Chapter 23

Figure 23.17  Percentage of African American Vote for the Long Ticket Inside and Outside New Orleans, Louisiana Democratic Primary, 1956 90% 80%

80%

77%

74%

Percent of African American Vote

70% 60% 50%

47%

47% 38%

40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

Gov. Long

Lt. Gov. Frazar Outside New Orleans

Comm. Of Ag. McCrary Inside New Orleans

Source: John H. Fenton, “The Negro Voter in Louisiana,” Journal of Negro Education Vol. 26, No. 3 The Negro Voter in the South (Summer 1957), pp. 319–328.

Figure 23.18  Percentage of African American Vote in New Orleans for the Long Ticket vs. Morrison Ticket, Louisiana Democratic Primary, 1956 60%

Percent of African American Vote in New Orleans

53% 50%

50%

50%

47 %

47%

38%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0% Governor Long vs. Morrison

Lt. Governor Frazar vs. Barham Long Ticket

Comm. Of Ag. McCrary vs. Pearce

Morrison Ticket

Source: John H. Fenton, “The Negro Voter in Louisiana,” Journal of Negro Education Vol. 26, No. 3 The Negro Voter in the South (Summer 1957), pp. 319–328.



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 505

registered was 414 in Hinds County (home of the capital city, Jackson), and the lowest was 17 registrants in Marshall County. The mean number of African Americans registered was 160.4, while the median was 136.5. We see that only 264 (20.6% of those registered) actually voted in this racist campaign, with three counties reporting no African American votes. The largest African American vote came from Hinds County, home of one of the largest historically African American universities in the state, Jackson State University. Omitting the counties with no votes, the mean vote was 52.8 while the median was 25 votes. A graduate student collected racial registration data for 1954 for all of the counties where possible and for select counties for 1951, 1952, and 1954. Table 23.9 presents the 1954 data for African American majority counties and reveals that there were 6,716 registered African American voters in these counties, representing only 2.4% of the potential African American voters. The range ran from no voters in six of the counties (Carroll, Issaquena, Jefferson, Noxubee, Tallahatchie, and Tate) to a high of more than 1,000 in four counties (Coahoma, Jefferson Davis, Warren, and Washington). The mean registered was 216.6, but the median was only 27 registrants. The last three columns in the table provide rare voting data in three different Mississippi elections in 1954. Table 23.10 (p. 506) provides similar registration and voting data for African Americans who lived in white majority counties. Some 12,671 registered African American voters resided in these counties, with the mean at 248.5 and the median at 38 registrants. They range from a low of no voters in eight counties (Chickasaw, Clarke, George, Lamar, Montgomery, Pearl River, Walthall, and Wayne) to a high of more than 1,000 in three counties (Hinds— 4,089, Harrison—1,569, and Lauderdale—1,059). The last three columns tell us how these registrants voted in three different elections in 1954.

Table 23.9  African American Registration and Voting Behavior in African American Majority Counties of Mississippi, 1954 Registered African American Voters County

African American Population

African American Registered Voters

African Americans Who Voted

Number

Percent of Total Electorate

Number

Percent of Registered African American Voters

County

Number

Percent of Total Population

Adams

16,885

62.0%

147

4.4%

  0

0.0%

Harrison

10,046

19.8%

340

3.1%

 12

3.5%

Hinds

55,445

51.7%

414

1.5%

195

47.1%

Lauderdale

22,810

39.2%

188

1.6%

 27

14.4%

Leflore

38,970

73.0%

 26

0.6%

  0

0.0%

Marshall

17,965

70.4%

 17

0.7%

  5

29.4%

Washington

48,831

72.5%

126

2.4%

 25

19.8%

Winston

 9,062

39.9%

 25

0.5%

  0

0.0%

Source: Adapted from Earl M. Lewis, “The Negro Voter in Mississippi,” Journal of Negro Education Vol. 26, No. 3, The Negro Voter in the South (Summer 1957), pp. 329–350. Calculations by the authors.

Percent of Eligibles

in August

in November

in December

Amite

3

0.07%

66.7%

0.0%

0.0%

Bolivar

511

2.34%

8.6%

5.7%

9.6%

Carroll

0

0.00%

 

 

 

111

2.35%

2.7%

8.1%

16.2%

12

0.24%

0.0%

8.3%

8.3%

1,070

5.59%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Copiah

16

0.20%

0.0%

6.3%

6.3%

De Soto

1

0.01%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Grenada

39

0.78%

33.3%

10.3%

17.9%

Holmes

45

0.39%

8.9%

11.1%

8.9%

Humphreys

37

0.48%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Issaquena

0

0.00%

 

 

 

Jasper

9

0.21%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Jefferson

0

0.00%

 

 

 

Jefferson Davis

1,038

26.46%

17.5%

24.7%

18.4%

Kemper

20

0.50%

0.0%

50.0%

0.0%

Leflore

297

1.66%

24.9%

22.6%

15.2%

Madison

431

3.72%

13.2%

8.6%

8.4%

Marshall

15

0.18%

46.7%

33.3%

6.7%

Noxubee

0

0.00%

 

 

 

Claiborne Clay Coahoma

Panola Table 23.8  African American Voter Registration and Voting Behavior in Selected Counties of Mississippi, 1946

Number

Percent of Registered African American Voters Who Voted*

1

0.01%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Quitman

234

2.98%

16.7%

3.4%

3.0%

Sharkey

1

0.02%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Sunflower

114

0.60%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Tallahatchie

0

0.00%

 

 

 

Tate

0

0.00%

 

 

 

Tunica

27

0.30%

3.7%

0.0%

0.0%

Warren

1,099

8.93%

16.7%

10.4%

8.6%

Washington

1,464

5.26%

16.2%

18.3%

17.5%

Wilkinson

40

0.88%

2.5%

0.0%

0.0%

Yazoo

81

0.73%

12.3%

13.6%

11.1%

6,716

2.41%

12.8%

12.3%

10.7%

216.6

2.41%

13.6%

13.1%

11.9%

27

0.39%

3.7%

6.3%

6.3%

Total Mean Median

Sources: Adapted from James Franklin Barnes, “Negro Voting in Mississippi” (master’s thesis, University of Mississippi, 1955), pp. 40–43; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR, 2004), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors. * Inexact vote numbers from Barnes such as “less than 600,” “about 10 votes,” and “few” have been dropped from these calculations.

506

Chapter 23

Table 23.10  African American Registration and Voting Behavior in White Majority Counties of Mississippi, 1954 Registered African American Voters County

Number

Percent of Registered African American Voters Who Voted*

Percent of Eligibles

in August

in November

in December

46.2%

40.6%

Adams

641

 6.9%

42.7%

Alcorn

78

 3.5%

24.4%

3.8%

3.8%

Attala

34

 0.7%

52.9%

29.4%

8.8%

Registered African American Voters County Montgomery

 

Neshoba

8

 0.3%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Newton

52

 1.4%

0.0%

3.8%

0.0%

128

 2.4%

20.3%

21.9%

17.2%

0.0%

8.6%

0.0%

Calhoun

6

 0.3%

16.7%

16.7%

16.7%

Pearl River

Choctaw Clarke Covington

 

 

19

 1.3%

0.0%

0.0%

5.3%

in December

 

 2.0%

 

in November

 

35

 0.0%

in August

 0.0%

Benton

0

Percent of Eligibles

0

Oktibbeha

Chickasaw

Number

Percent of Registered African American Voters Who Voted*

0

 0.0%

 

 

 

Perry

58

 5.1%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Pike

137

 1.8%

38.7%

27.0%

29.2%

6

 0.3%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0

 0.0%

 

 

 

Pontotoc

419

17.8%

23.2%

25.5%

4.1%

Prentiss

18

 1.5%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Rankin

33

 0.5%

6.1%

0.0%

0.0%

Scott

15

 0.3%

33.3%

0.0%

6.7%

Simpson

61

 1.8%

16.4%

6.6%

0.0%

Smith

6

 0.4%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Stone

25

 3.4%

0.0%

24.0%

20.0%

Tippah

Forrest

16

 0.2%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Franklin

70

 3.1%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

George

0

 0.0%

 

 

 

Greene

38

 5.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Hancock

449

39.7%

16.9%

6.7%

8.5%

Harrison

1,569

20.0%

16.5%

11.1%

19.2%

Hinds

4,089

11.7%

20.1%

16.6%

0.0%

42

 8.9%

33.3%

2.4%

2.4%

Jackson

900

24.0%

7.6%

8.3%

10.0%

Jones

872

10.8%

0.0%

40.7%

15.6%

Lafayette

105

 2.7%

5.7%

3.8%

0.0%

0

 0.0%

 

 

 

1,059

 8.2%

12.4%

11.9%

5.9%

268

12.0%

0.0%

15.7%

0.0%

Leake

66

 1.7%

18.2%

15.2%

10.6%

Lee

97

 1.8%

25.8%

17.5%

26.8%

Lincoln

516

11.4%

6.4%

7.9%

3.7%

Lowndes

117

 1.3%

17.9%

8.5%

0.0%

Marion

331

 8.1%

7.6%

5.7%

2.4%

Sources: Adapted from James Franklin Barnes, “Negro Voting in Mississippi” (master’s thesis, University of Mississippi, 1955), pp. 40–43 and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR, 2004), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

Monroe

18

 0.3%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

* Inexact vote numbers from Barnes such as “less than 600,” “about 10 votes,” and “few” have been dropped from these calculations.

Itawamba

Lamar Lauderdale Lawrence

Finally, Table 23.11 is a composite table across time of the select counties organized into two categories: (1) African American majority counties, and (2) white majority counties. This table shows how African Americans voted in Mississippi after the Court decision in the last major White Primary case; it covers eight different elections in three different years. The impression from this rare data is similar to that of the other states: African Americans mobilized to vote even in this state. The voter registration effort in the state was led by the: (1) the nonpartisan Mississippi Progressive Voters League, (2) NAACP, (3) Mississippi Negro Democrats Association, (4) Mississippi Regional Council of Negro Leadership, and (5) the returning Colored Soldiers led by the Evers brothers, Medgar and Charles. Many African Americans even testified before the Senate hearings against Senator Bilbo.63

144

 9.0%

10.4%

9.7%

5.6%

Tishomingo

17

 3.7%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Union

67

 3.5%

11.9%

7.5%

3.0%

Walthall

0

 0.0%

 

 

 

Wayne

0

 0.0%

 

 

 

Webster

3

 0.2%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Winston

30

 0.7%

40.0%

83.3%

0.0%

9

 0.3%

0.0%

11.1%

11.1%

12,671

Yalobusha Total Mean Median

 5.8%

16.1%

16.8%

8.3%

248.5

 5.8%

17.4%

17.8%

10.3%

38

 1.8%

7.6%

7.5%

2.4%

Unique to the voter registration mobilization effort in Mississippi was the lobbying and persuasion campaign during and after the 1946 midterm elections. The state’s African American voting rights leadership generated a Senate hearing concerning Senator Bilbo, who was arguably one of the U.S. Senate’s worst racist demagogues. This was the first such Senate hearing since one held in 1920 about African American women’s efforts to exercise their Nineteenth Amendment rights to register and vote. Neither of these Senate hearings was successful at the substantive legislation levels, but they were symbolically important simply because they suggested to the voting rights activists, African American and white, that some parts of the government could be interested in at least investigating the suppression of African American voting rights. These tentative first steps, though twenty-six years apart, laid the groundwork for more meaningful intervention in the future.



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 507

Racial Majority

Table 23.11  African American Voting Behavior in Selected Counties of Mississippi by Racial Majority, 1946–1954

1946

County

Black Vote

Black

August 26, 1951 August 26, 1952

November 4, 1952

 

 

Holmes

 

 

 

7

0.3%

12

Jefferson Davis

 

 

289

7.9%

291

8.4%

112

13.1%

254

0.0%

18

0.4%

24

0.5%

11

1.3%

36

 

 

 

 

 

 

0.2%

6

0.2%

4

0.1%

9

 

67

2.2%

68

2.2%

2

0.5%

517

8.5%

417

8.3%

4

0.1%

7

0.2%

0

Madison

 

Marshall

5

Quitman

 

Washington

25

Yazoo

 

August 24, 1954

November 1954

Percent Percent Percent Percent Percent Percent Percent of Total of Total of Total of Total of Total of Total of Total Black Black Black Black Black Black Black Black Black Black Black Black Black RV Vote RV Vote RV Vote RV Vote RV Vote RV Vote RV

Claiborne

Leflore

White

August 7, 1951

 

0

0.0%  

1  

0.1%  

6

1.3%

20

1.9%

9

1.7%

December 1954

Black Vote

Percent of Total Black RV

18

3.4%

3

0.2%

0.4%

4

0.2%

5

0.2%

4

0.2%

32.8%

182

9.7%

256

33.2%

191

24.8%

0.8%

74

2.0%

67

2.4%

45

1.6%

72

2.7%

57

3.0%

37

4.4%

36

4.3%

1.1%

10

2.5%

7

0.4%

5

1.4%

1

0.3%

0.2%

49

3.0%

39

3.4%

8

0.5%

7

0.4%

250

7.0%

705

11.9%

237

7.2%

268

9.4%

256

8.9%

10

0.3%

13

0.4%

10

0.4%

11

0.6%

9

0.5%

Total

30

0.3%

901

3.4%

812

3.2%

407

3.2%

1,171

5.1%

613

3.1%

666

4.7%

567

4.0%

Mean

10

0.3%

129

3.4%

116

3.2%

51

3.2%

130

5.1%

68

3.1%

74

4.7%

63

4.0%

Median

5

0.2%

18

0.4%

24

0.5%

10

1.2%

36

2.5%

39

2.0%

11

1.7%

18

1.6%

Adams

0

0.0%

33

0.8%

28

0.6%

58

2.3%

124

3.1%

274

8.9%

296

12.4%

260

10.9%

Calhoun

 

 

1

0.0%

1

0.0%

1

0.1%

1

0.1%

1

0.0%

1

0.2%

1

0.2%

Covington

 

 

1

0.0%

2

0.0%

6

 

40

1.7%

97

3.4%

107

11.1%

17

1.8%

Hancock

 

 

193

3.4%

192

4.0%

46

3.7%

155

7.3%

76

3.4%

30

 

38

 

Harrison

12

0.1%

214

1.4%

247

1.7%

97

1.3%

284

2.9%

259

2.6%

174

1.8%

302

3.2%

195

0.7%

729

3.3%

767

3.4%

555

3.1%

1,330

5.7%

820

4.5%

697

 

27

0.2%

142

1.1%

153

1.2%

104

1.4%

298

3.2%

131

1.7%

126

2.6%

63

1.3%

7

0.2%

13

0.4%

26

1.2%

28

2.3%

22

1.8%

 

 

 

12

 

25

 

0

 

703

3.6%

Hinds Lauderdale Oktibbeha

 

10

0.3%

12

0.3%

0

 

0.0%

 

 

 

 

234

Winston Total

 

0.4%

1,323

1.8%

1,402

1.9%

874

2.1%

2,245

4.0%

1,696

3.4%

1,484

7.6%

Mean

58.5

0.4%

165

1.8%

175

1.9%

109

1.9%

281

4.0%

188

3.0%

165

5.1%

87.9

2.7%

Median

19.5

0.2%

88

0.9%

91

0.9%

52

1.4%

140

3.0%

114

3.0%

117

2.5%

38

1.8%

Sources: Adapted from Earl M. Lewis, “The Negro Voter in Mississippi,” Journal of Negro Education Vol. 26, No. 3, The Negro Voter in the South (Summer 1957), pp. 329–350; James Franklin Barnes, “Negro Voting in Mississippi” (master’s thesis, University of Mississippi, 1955), Table 2, p. 47B; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

North Carolina The article on North Carolina in the Journal of Negro Education 1957 special issue has very spotty and highly circumscribed empirical data on African American voter registration and subsequent voting. It does mention the origins of African Americans running for and eventually getting elected to public office. Professor I. G. Newton writes that it was in 1942 when the first “negro candidate” appeared and that “The urban centers of Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and Fayetteville elected Negro candidates to public office in 1951; also in 1953, in addition to Durham, the cities of Chapel Hill, Gastonia, and Wilson were added to the list.”64 Therefore, we have resorted to two little known articles by African American political scientist Virgil Stroud65 and the quite useful work of Professor William Keech,

The Impact of Negro Voting: The Role of the Vote in the Quest for Equality.66 The latter work analyzes not only voter registration and voting in North Carolina but also the city of Durham, which it compares with findings in Tuskegee and Macon County, Alabama. The data in these sources and others allow us to construct a reliable portrait of African American voter registration in North Carolina both before and after the Court’s 1944 Smith v. Allwright decision. Table 23.12 (p. 508) provides reliable African American voter registration data in the state from 1940 through 1964. The last two columns in the table show an expansion of the number of registrants after the Court’s decision. By 1952, the number stood at 100,000, and on the eve of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that number reached over a quarter-of-a-million registered African Americans.

508

Chapter 23 Table 23.13 offers population demographics and African American voter registration from selected counties, grouped by racial majority, for 1956–1958. At the top of the table are data for the African American majority counties. The last two columns show the actual number of African American registrants, ranging from a low of 180 in Hertford County to a high of 6,389 in Robeson County. Percentage-wise the range went from a high of 29.0% in Robeson to a low of 2.9% in Hertford County, with the mean at 16.1% and the median at 11.0%. The middle of the table shows counties that had about the same or equal populations of blacks and whites (45–55% African American). The numbers ranged from a low of 150 registered African American voters in Gates County to a high of 1,500 in Franklin County, with the mean at 794 and the median at 770. The third section of the table shows counties with a white population majority. These counties ranged from Graham County with zero registered African Americans to Forsyth County with 12,730, but Transylvania had the highest percent registered with more than 100% (either the VAP or the registration data are not quite accurate in this case). Overall, in 1956–1958 the white counties had 91,370 African Americans registered (39.7% of eligible African Americans), African American counties had 11,068 registered (16.1%), and mixed counties had 7,943 registered (15.6%). This empirical portrait shows that African American voter registration was much higher in counties where they had a smaller population presence than where they had a larger population presence, which

Table 23.12  African American Voter Registration in North Carolina, 1940–1964 North Carolina Censusa

African Americans

  Year

Total Population

Total Black Population

Percent Black Population

1940

3,571,623

981,298

27.5%

35,000b, c

 

1946

3,865,807*

1,039,804*

26.0%

40,000

 

1947

3,914,837*

1,049,555*

26.0%

75,000b, c

 

1950

4,061,929

1,078,808

26.0%

 

 

1952

4,160,774*

1,086,251*

26.0%

b

100,000

 

1956

4,358,465*

1,101,136*

25.0%

135,000b

 

1960

4,556,155

1,116,021

24.0%

 

 

1962

4,661,336*

1,120,350*

1964

4,766,517*

1,124,678*

Registered Voters

Registrants as Percent of Eligibles

c

24.0%

b

210,450

35.8%

23.6%

258,000b

46.8%

Adapted from these sources: Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR, 2004), downloaded June 14, 2009. a

Steven F. Lawson, Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 134, 284 (Tables 1 and 2). b

c

Alexander Heard, A Two-Party South? (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1952), p. 302.

* Interpolated value.

Table 23.13  Population, VAP, and African American Voter Registration in Sampled Counties of North Carolina, Grouped by Racial Majority, 1956–1958 Eligible Voters (Age 21 years and over) Total Population

Total Black Population

White

Percent Black

Number

Percent of Eligibles

Racial Majoritya

County

Black

Bertie

26,439

15,811

7,016

6,464

52.0%

551

7.9%

Halifax

58,377

33,028

14,350

15,763

47.7%

1,537

10.7%

Hertford

21,453

12,862

6,210

5,347

53.7%

180

2.9%

Hoke

15,756

9,542

4,201

3,715

53.1%

727

17.3%

Northampton

28,432

18,250

8,206

6,467

55.9%

900

11.0%

Robeson

87,769

50,279

22,062

20,963

51.3%

6,389

29.0%

Warren

Black

Registered Black Voters

23,539

15,638

6,908

4,875

58.6%

784

11.3%

Black Majority Counties Total

261,765

155,410

68,953

63,594

52.0%

11,068

16.1%

Black Majority Counties Mean

37,395

22,201

9,850

9,085

52.0%

1,581

16.1%

Black Majority Counties Median

26,439

15,811

7,016

6,464

53.1%

784

11.0%

Equally Black and White

Anson

26,781

13,008

6,143

8,064

43.2%

700

11.4%

Caswell

20,870

9,928

4,383

6,020

42.1%

1,291

29.5%

Edgecombe

51,634

26,816

12,845

14,979

46.2%

839

6.5%

Franklin

31,341

14,297

6,643

10,167

39.5%

1,500

22.6%

Gates

9,555

5,023

2,344

2,876

44.9%

150

6.4%

Greene

18,024

8,390

3,690

5,133

41.8%

300

8.1%

Jones

11,004

4,993

2,238

3,296

40.4%

1,311

58.6%



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 509 Eligible Voters (Age 21 years and over) Total Population

Total Black Population

White

Percent Black

Number

Percent of Eligibles

Racial Majoritya

County

Equally Black and White (Continued)

Martin

27,938

14,080

6,117

7,758

44.1%

847

13.8%

Pender

18,423

8,900

4,180

5,339

43.9%

500

12.0%

9,602

4,588

2,290

3,130

42.3%

505

22.1%

Equal Counties Total

225,172

110,023

50,873

66,762

43.2%

7,943

15.6%

Equal Counties Mean

22,517

11,002

5,087

6,676

43.2%

794

15.6%

Equal Counties Median

19,647

9,414

4,282

5,680

42.7%

770

12.9%

White

Alamance

71,220

13,182

6,897

36,001

16.1%

3,750

54.4%

Brunswick

19,238

7,034

3,322

6,742

33.0%

800

24.1%

Buncombe

124,403

15,277

9,950

68,718

12.6%

5,804

58.3%

Chatham

25,392

8,141

3,936

10,512

27.2%

600

15.2%

Cumberland

96,006

26,875

14,275

39,762

26.4%

4,034

28.3%

Perquimans

Black

Registered Black Voters

Davidson

62,244

6,395

3,563

32,747

9.8%

1,784

50.1%

Durham

101,639

33,823

20,101

44,022

31.3%

12,209

60.7%

Forsyth

146,135

41,442

25,027

66,869

27.2%

12,730

50.9%

Graham

6,886

221

113

3,445

 3.2%

0

0.0%

Guilford

191,057

37,319

22,309

96,638

18.8%

7,755

34.8%

6,479

2,734

1,207

2,458

32.9%

110

9.1%

65,906

14,320

6,686

28,092

19.2%

2,244

33.6%

Hyde Johnston Lee

23,522

6,122

3,214

10,233

23.9%

693

21.6%

Mecklenburg

197,052

49,973

29,472

94,618

23.8%

10,013

34.0%

New Hanover

63,272

19,842

11,675

27,693

29.7%

6,330

54.2%

Onslow

42,047

6,682

3,316

17,679

15.8%

842

25.4%

Orange

34,435

8,656

4,385

16,052

21.5%

1,385

31.6%

Richmond

39,597

12,079

6,065

15,737

27.8%

1,696

28.0%

Rowan

75,410

12,872

7,080

38,510

15.5%

3,633

51.3%

Sampson

49,780

18,312

8,660

17,270

33.4%

5,206

60.1%

9,921

1,551

706

4,402

13.8%

571

80.9%

Swain Transylvania

15,194

752

385

7,926

4.6%

400

103.9%

Tyrrell

5,048

2,089

939

1,830

33.9%

256

27.3%

Wake

136,450

40,041

21,902

62,474

26.0%

5,369

24.5%

b

64,267

27,125

15,141

21,595

41.2%

3,156

20.8%

White Majority Counties Total

Wayne

1,672,600

412,859

230 ,326

772,025

23.0%

91,370

39.7%

White Majority Counties Mean

66,904

16,514

9,213

30,881

23.0%

3,655

39.7%

White Majority Counties Median

62,244

12,872

6,686

21,595

23.9%

2,244

33.6%

Overall Total

2,159,537

678,292

350,152

902,381

28.0%

110,381

31.5%

Overall Mean

51,418

16,150

8,337

21,485

28.0%

2,628

31.5%

Overall Median

29,887

12,940

6,177

10,373

33.0%

1,096

25.0%

Sources: Adapted from Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009; Virgil C. Stroud, “The Negro Voter in the South,” Quarterly Review of Higher Education Among Negroes, Vol. 29, No. 1 (January 1961), pp. 9–39 (see Tables 15–17); and Virgil C. Stroud, “Voter Registration in North Carolina,” Journal of Negro Education, Vol 30, No. 2 (Spring 1961), pp. 153–155 (see Table 1). Calculations by the authors. Stroud’s samples of counties with predominantly black populations included those in which blacks made up more than 55 percent of the total population. Counties regarded as equally black and white were those in which blacks made up between 45 and 55 percent of the total population. Predominantly white majority counties had populations less than 45 percent black. a

Due to the vagaries of the data, record keeping in some southern counties, and the recording of registered voters in 1956–1958 compared to the number of eligible voters enumerated in the 1950 census, anomalies occur in which the number of registered voters may exceed the number of eligible voters that was recorded years earlier. b

510

Chapter 23

fits Professor V.O. Key’s thesis. The overall percent registered in African American majority counties was just slightly higher than the mixed counties, though, suggesting some qualification. In North Carolina seemingly more African Americans were able to register in the African American majority counties than was the case in most other states in the South. Table 23.14 shows data from 1919 to 1966 for Durham County, North Carolina; Macon County, Alabama; and the cities of Tuskegee, Alabama, and Memphis, Tennessee. There was a rising number of registered African American voters over time. In each of the cities and in the city of Durham, a political boss and machine assisted the organized groups. Thus, from whatever perspective one views African American voter registration in North Carolina—from the state, county, or local level—one sees a continual effort of expanding and enlarging the number of African American registered voters from the Court’s 1944 decision forward to the eve of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In this way, the state of North Carolina was similar to most of the southern states in this critical time period, despite the existence of some unique differences.

South Carolina The article titled “The Negro Voter in South Carolina” in the Journal of Negro Education is not only the briefest (three pages) of the eleven articles but also offers the least voting registration data. The author, James McCain, wrote: “In the presidential election of 1956, 301,679 votes were cast. Of this number, 75,000 were cast by Negroes, and 226,679 by whites.” Thus 24.9% of the vote came from the African American electorate and 75.1% from the white electorate in the state. Hence, McCain surmised, “the major barriers and problems involved in the expansion of Negro suffrage in South Carolina . . . [include:] First, apathy and the lack of political consciousness restrict the use of the ballot by the Negro more than any other factor.”67 He arrived at this conclusion even though he first told the reader that voter registration requirements in the state consisted of: (1) a literacy test, (2) discretion of the white registration officials, (3) payment of property taxes, and (4) economic intimidations and dependency. Indeed, McCain described and explained the barriers in detail:

Table 23.14  African American Voter Registration in Tuskegee, Alabama; Macon County, Alabama; Durham County, North Carolina; and Memphis, Tennessee, 1919–1966 Tuskegee, Alabama

Year

Black Registered Voters

Total Registered Voters

Black Registered Voters

Blacks as Percent of Registered Voters

1919

 

 

 

 

1928

Durham County, North Carolina

Memphis, Tennessee

Black Registered Voters

Blacks as Percent of Eligible Black Voters

Blacks as Percent of Registered Voters

Black Registered Voters

 

 1,197

Macon County, Alabama

32

 

 

 

   50

 

 

 

 4,500

1920–1930

 

  69

 

1935

 

 

 1,000

 

1939

 

 

 3,000

26.5%

1940

29 (77)

 

 

 

 

1946

115

 

 

 

 

1950

514

 

 

 

10,000

1951

 

 

 

 

 7,000

1951

 

 

 

 

20,000

  13.1%

 

1952

 

1,612

 589

36.6%

 

 

 

1954

855

2,056

 810

39.4%

 

 

 

1955

 

 

 

35,000

1956

 

2,218

1,006

45.3%

 

 

 

1958

 

2,201

 947

43.0%

12,209

60.7%

1959

1,110

 

 

1960

 

2,296

1,060

46.6%

13,201

67.8%

1962

 

3,535

2,151

60.8%

 

 

 

1964

 

4,584

3,077

67.1%

 

 

 

1966

 

6,962

4,914

70.5%

 

 

 

 

23.7%

  50,000

22.2%

 

 

 

Sources: Adapted from Charles Hamilton, Minority Politics in the Black Belt (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960), p. 2; William R. Keech, The Impact of Negro Voting (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1968), pp. 26–27; Paul Lewinson, Race, Class, and Party: A History of Negro Suffrage and White Politics in the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932), p. 220; and William E. Wright, Memphis Politics: A Study in Racial Bloc Voting (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962), pp. 4, 6, 7.



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 511 As to discrimination in the registration of Negroes, . . . many discriminatory tactics have been used against the Negro in South Carolina, especially in those counties where the Negro is in the majority. Registration books have been moved from place to place in some counties to keep the Negro from getting a registration certificate and even if the Negro finds out where the books are located, he is given all kinds of literacy tests that have nothing to do with reading and writing the Constitution of the United States. If too many Negroes go together to secure registration certificates in some of the counties, the clerks will only pass one or two of them, and will tell the rest that the books are closed for today. . . . In a few counties in South Carolina, Negroes who have had registration certificates have been told to take their names off the registration books and this has been done.68

Yet even in the face of all of these circumscribed circumstances, McCain held that “even though discriminatory tactics are still being used . . . this plays only a minor role in keeping those who can qualify from getting registration certificates and voting.”69 In this article he never mentions the Smith v. Allwright decision or South Carolina’s extensive legislative efforts to circumvent the Court’s ruling. And last there was no discussion of the near continuous voting efforts of African American Republicans in the state, nor the unique example of African American voting activists who created their own satellite Democratic Party to vote for President Franklin Roosevelt within days of the Court’s 1944 decision outlawing the White Primary. Stephen Lawson’s 1976 study of African American registration and voting, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969, also failed even to mention this satellite Democratic organization or how its leaders moved out of South Carolina and conducted voter registrations in all of the other southern states.70 Patricia Sullivan does mention these facts in her 1996 Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal.71 Yet even she overlooked the previous scholarly writings on this new African American political party. African American political scientist Robert E. Martin happened to be conducting interviews for his doctoral dissertation in South Carolina during the formation of the party and talked to the leadership and followers and included some insights in the dissertation.72 Moreover, another African American political scientist, William P. Robinson, wrote a fulllength scholarly article on the fledging party, while one of this work’s co-authors, Walton, wrote a book-length study on Black Political Parties that placed the new party in the context of all such parties. And although the Days of Hope book made use of the then-recently-opened personal papers of the party’s founder, John McCray, and its senatorial candidate, Osceola McKaine, the most comprehensive and systematic analysis of these papers are in a 2003 book chapter by Wim Roefs, “Leading the Civil Rights Vanguard in South Carolina: John McCray and the Lighthouse and Informer, 1939–1954.”73 “On April 3, 1944, eight days after the first South Carolina Progressive Democratic Party (SCPDP) meeting, the Supreme

Court ruled in a Texas case (Smith v. Allwright) that ‘white primaries’ were unconstitutional. But before the new party could move to have the Court’s ruling implemented in South Carolina, Governor Olin D. Johnston called a special session of the legislature to circumvent the decision.”74 Simultaneously, the state legislature followed political commentary in the state trying keep President Roosevelt’s name off the state ballot in the 1944 presidential election. This rising movement spurred John McCray, a newspaper owner from Columbia, and his associates into their innovative political action.75 The groundwork started: On March 18, 1944, John H. McCray, member of the Negro Citizens Committee and publisher of the Lighthouse and Informer, announced editorially in his newspaper: “We have formed a plan by which every Negro so inclined in the State of South Carolina may be a Democrat and vote for his Democratic President (Roosevelt). . . .” The plan called for “formation of ‘Fourth-Term-for-Roosevelt Clubs’” throughout the state incorporated under the “South Carolina Colored Democratic Party.” In addition, the editorial declared, the proposed Party would hold its own convention, choose its own presidential electors, and be completely controlled by blacks.76 The rising number of responses to this editorial led to a second step: “On March 26, eight days after the publication of the editorial, members of the Negro Citizens Committee and interested friends met at McCray’s office to discuss the reactions to the editorial—mainly, that the proposed party be launched with McCray as its head. . . . Osceola E. McKaine, McCray’s associate editor on the Lighthouse staff, was elected acting secretary; and J. C. Artemius was elected acting treasurer.”77 McCray then served as the acting head of the SCPDP, sending a letter to the secretary of state on May 13 asking for permission to hold the party’s initial convention in the hall of the state House of Representatives. Since it was anticipated that the secretary of state would not respond favorably, McCray “four days later wrote to the 35 county organizations that the temporary party organization had established, calling on them to elect delegates to the first convention on May 24, 1944, . . . to convene in the old Masonic Hall in Columbia.”78 Professor Alexander Heard describes the initial statewide convention of the new satellite political party: “Until 1948, Negroes were barred from South Carolina Democratic primaries, so the editor of a Columbia newspaper, the Lighthouse and Informer, took the initiative in forming the ‘Progressive Democratic Party.’ To its first state convention, held in May of 1944, went 172 delegates from 39 of the state’s 46 counties. [In addition to the state delegates, there were both black and white observers from Arkansas, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia.] The convention adopted party rules closely akin to those of the state’s Democratic Party, even making provisions to hold primaries.”79 He adds further that besides county-level organizations “there were ‘district organizations’ in each of the Congressional districts,” and at the convention the SCPDP raised

512

Chapter 23

a budget of $5,166.89. Heard’s book provides a detailed budget for the organization.80 Finally, at this initial statewide convention, the delegates nominated Osceola McKaine as their candidate for the U.S. Senate. Historian Patricia Sullivan noted that “Osceola McKaine was the first black man to run for statewide office in South Carolina since Reconstruction. His candidacy challenged Governor Olin Johnston, the Democratic Party’s candidate for the Senate seat of ‘Cotton’ Ed Smith. From late summer through the fall, McKaine campaigned in nearly every county. He reminded his listeners of the critical importance of black political participation to democratic movements present and past.”81 The SCPDP printed up its own ballots and placed them at county precinct voting polls throughout the state. According to Professor Heard, the right of each party in South Carolina to print and distribute its own ballots had in fact evolved from the anti-Roosevelt sentiment. The anti-FDR Democrats had reconstituted themselves under the name “Southern Democrats” and favored “Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia for President.” Professor Heard wrote: “The law then existing in South Carolina provided for no general ballot, and therefore imposed no eligibility requirements on candidates for elector. Like the leaders of any political group, the Southern Democrats had merely to print their tickets and leave them at the polling places to be chosen by such voters as wished them.”82

Professor Sullivan is unsurpassed in her discussion of the SCPDP ballot in the November 1944 election: The PDP’s ambitious fall campaign was met by a variety of devices to deter black voter registration and by widespread fraud and intimidation on election day. McKaine’s supporters reported that the ballots the PDP had printed and distributed to polling places throughout the state were not available in many voting stations. In the only state that did not have a secret ballot, many first-time voters were simply handed the lily-white ticket or were not given any ballot at all. In Richland County, prospective voters had to beg for the PDP ticket. Others reported that the police assigned to precincts attempted to influence blacks to vote certain tickets or mark the PDP ballot in such a way as to invalidate it. In Greenville County, most of the PDP ballots were not counted. The actual votes McKaine might have received, or actually received, cannot be known.83 Table 23.15 reveals the official number of votes recorded by the state of South Carolina for all of the parties in the 1944 election. The SCPDP received votes in 35 of the state’s 46 counties (76.1%). The total for the party in these 35 counties was 3,214 votes, with a mean of 69.9 votes and a median of 27 votes.

Table 23.15  Votes for U.S. Senator in South Carolina by County, Ranked by the Progressive Democratic Party Vote, 1944 Democratic

Republican

County

Votes

Percent

Votes

Charleston

6,552

76.4%

Florence

3,074

87.8%

Richland

6,642

Sumter Georgetown

Progressive Democratic

Percent

Votes

1,010

11.8%

111

 3.2%

93.9%

120

2,048

85.8%

1,149

81.6%

Kershaw

1,795

Colleton

1,806

Orangeburg Beaufort

Unrecognized Republican

Percent

Votes

Percent

Total Votes

1,003

11.7%

14

0.2%

8,579

299

 8.5%

17

0.5%

3,501

 1.7%

277

 3.9%

37

0.5%

7,076

69

 2.9%

267

11.2%

4

0.2%

2,388

52

 3.7%

207

14.7%

0.0%

1,408

91.0%

21

 1.1%

156

 7.9%

0.0%

1,972

90.9%

38

 1.9%

143

 7.2%

0.0%

1,987

2,475

92.6%

58

 2.2%

123

 4.6%

18

0.7%

2,674

1

571

73.5%

102

 13.1%

103

13.3%

0.1%

777

Darlington

1,808

92.7%

43

 2.2%

99

 5.1%

0.0%

1,950

Dorchester

1,507

91.8%

51

 3.1%

83

 5.1%

0.0%

1,641

Greenville

7,406

93.2%

465

 5.8%

79

 1.0%

0.0%

7,950

Chesterfield

3,181

97.5%

14

 0.4%

66

 2.0%

0.0%

3,261

893

90.9%

33

 3.4%

55

 5.6%

1

0.1%

982

Aiken

2,554

96.7%

49

 1.9%

37

 1.4%

2

0.1%

2,642

Spartanburg

8,376

95.0%

402

 4.6%

37

 0.4%

0.0%

8,815

Cherokee

1,625

94.6%

58

 3.4%

35

 2.0%

0.0%

1,718

Clarendon

1,225

95.8%

27

 2.1%

27

 2.1%

0.0%

1,279

Dillon

1,006

96.3%

20

 1.9%

19

 1.8%

0.0%

1,045

674

95.5%

12

 1.7%

19

 2.7%

0.1%

706

2,572

95.4%

110

 4.1%

13

 0.5%

0.0%

2,695

Marlboro

Fairfield Horry

1



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 513 Democratic County Lee

Votes

Republican

Percent

Votes

Percent

Progressive Democratic Votes

Percent

Unrecognized Republican Votes

Percent

Total Votes

805

92.3%

50

 5.7%

10

 1.1%

7

0.8%

872

Newberry

1,878

95.8%

72

 3.7%

9

 0.5%

2

0.1%

1,961

Barnwell

1,387

99.4%

Calhoun

662

98.7%

Berkeley

671

Bamberg

929

Williamsburg

 0.0%

8

 0.6%

0.0%

1,395

1

 0.1%

8

 1.2%

0.0%

671

94.6%

31

 4.4%

7

 1.0%

0.0%

709

89.2%

106

10.2%

6

 0.6%

0.0%

1,041

1,256

97.6%

23

  1.8%

5

 0.4%

3

0.2%

1,287

Hampton

824

97.1%

6

 0.7%

3

 0.4%

16

1.9%

849

Anderson

2,899

97.1%

83

 2.8%

2

 0.1%

2

0.1%

2,986

Lexington

2,114

98.6%

28

 1.3%

2

 0.1%

0.0%

2,144

Pickens

1,745

92.5%

140

 7.4%

2

 0.1%

0.0%

1,887

Union

3,131

98.9%

30

 0.9%

2

 0.1%

3

0.1%

3,166

York

2,699

95.5%

123

 4.4%

2

 0.1%

3

0.1%

2,827

Oconee

1,362

93.0%

101

 6.9%

1

 0.1%

0.0%

1,464

Abbeville

800

97.7%

19

 2.3%

 

 0.0%

0.0%

819

Allendale

493

98.4%

1

 0.2%

 

 0.0%

1.4%

501

1,564

97.6%

38

 2.4%

 

 0.0%

0.0%

1,602

730

100%

 0.0%

 

 0.0%

0.0%

730

Chester Edgefield Greenwood

7

2,381

100%

 0.0%

 

 0.0%

0.0%

2,381

433

96.0%

18

 4.0%

 

 0.0%

0.0%

451

Lancaster

2,516

99.5%

13

 0.5%

 

 0.0%

0.0%

2,529

Laurens

2,021

98.1%

38

 1.8%

 

 0.0%

0.0%

2,060

349

99.7%

1

 0.3%

 

 0.0%

0.0%

350

Marion

911

99.0%

9

 1.0%

 

 0.0%

0.0%

920

Saluda

1,067

98.8%

11

 1.0%

 

 0.0%

2

0.2%

1,080

94,566

93.0%

3,807

 3.7%

3,214

 3.2%

141

0.1%

101,728

Jasper

McCormick

Total

1

Mean

2,055.8

93.0%

82.8

 3.7%

69.9

 3.2%

3.1

0.1%

2,211.5

Median

1,595

95.6%

38

 2.2%

27

 0.6%

3

0.0%

1,680

% of Counties with Votes

100%

93.5%

76.1%

41.3%

Source: Adapted from ICPSR Study No. 1, United States Historical Election Returns, 1824–1968 [Computer File], http://doi:10.3886/ICPSR00001 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, 1999), downloaded February 14, 2010.

The range went from a low of zero votes in eleven counties to a high of 1,003 votes in Charleston County (home of the city of Charleston). Overall, the party got more than 100 votes in 9 of the 35 counties. In Richland County, where Colombia served as the county seat and was also the headquarters and origin of the SCPDP, it received only 277 votes. The Black-and-Tan Republican party also nominated a white candidate for the U.S. Senate position, B. L. Hendrix, who received 141 votes across the state. Thus, the SCPDP came in third in a four-way race with 3.2% of the total votes cast, nearly matching the regular Republican Party U.S. senate candidate and far exceeding the Black-and-Tans. After the defeat in the 1944 campaign, both McCray and McKaine continued to mobilize other African Americans to become registered and vote. “Between 1940 and 1946 the Progressive Democrats increased the number of black voters on the rolls from 1,500 to 50,000. Despite Klan marches and cross

burnings, 35,000 black voters went to the polls in the 1948 primary.”84 Later, McCray and McKaine were joined by other voting rights activists such as “NAACP leader Reverend I. DeQuincey Newman, . . . Modjeska Simkins, . . . Esau Jenkins . . . and Septima Clark.” Eventually, McKaine became field secretary for the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) and managed their South-wide voter registration campaign beginning in January 1946. Professor Sullivan observed: “McKaine visited every southern state. . . . He organized his schedule around local voter-registration periods and primary elections. Before his arrival, he sent instructions to the secretaries of each state SCHW committee, advising them what needed to be done before his visit in order to facilitate his work.” Preparations included helping fledging African American political candidates.85 Both African American and white contemporaries remarked on how successful and effective McKaine was in expanding and mobilizing the

514

Chapter 23

African American electorate in the South in the period before the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The SCPDP made a precedent-setting challenge at the 1944 Democratic National Convention against the South Carolina “white Democrats” but failed based on a technicality. The party tried and failed again in 1948 and 1952. But this party, which has been consistently overlooked, laid the foundation for the convention challenges of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964 and 1968 and the National Democratic Party in Alabama in 1968. Thus, overall, the party was significant at both the state and national levels after the Supreme Court’s Smith v. Allwright decision. The extant voter registration data from South Carolina in Table 23.16 illustrate the apparent effectiveness of the SCPDP and its leadership in enlarging the number of African American voter registrants in the state. Even in a state where the empirical data are thin, the historical record shows the herculean struggle needed to achieve this modicum of success in a state where the White Primary technique did not die until 1948. Table 23.17 disaggregates this racial voter registration data for the years 1957–1958 and categorizes that data into African American majority counties, mixed counties, and white majority counties, which are summarized in the subtotal rows. In South Carolina in 1958 the white majority counties had 40,802 registered African American voters out of a total African American Table 23.16  African American Voter Registration in South Carolina, 1940–1964 Censusa

African Americans

Total Percent Black Black Population  Population

Registered Voters 

Registrants as Percent of Eligibles

Year

Total Population

1940

1,899,804

814,164

42.9%

3,000b, c

 

1944

1,986,693*

817,947*

41.2%

d

3,214

 

1946

2,030,138*

819,839*

40.4%

 

 

1947

2,051,860*

820,785*

40.0%

b, c

50,000

 

1950

2,117,027

823,622

38.9%

 

 

1952

2,170,140*

824,756*

38.0%

80,000

 

1956

2,276,367*

827,023*

36.3%

b

99,890

 

1960

2,382,594

829,291

34.8%

 

 

1962

2,424,178*

821,241*

1964

2,465,763*

813,191*

b

33.9%

b

90,901

22.9%

33.0%

139,000b

37.3%

Adapted from these sources: Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. a

Steven F. Lawson, Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 134, 284 (Tables 1 and 2). b

c

Alexander Heard, A Two-Party South? (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1952), p. 302.

The actual votes cast for the Progressive Democratic Party candidate in the 1944 election for U.S. Senator. See ICPSR Study No. 1, United States Historical Election Returns, 1824–1968 [Computer File], http://doi:10.3886/ICPSR00001 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, 1999), downloaded February 14, 2010; and Alexander Heard and Donald S. Strong, Southern Primaries and Elections, 1920–1949 (University: University of Alabama Press, 1960), p. 111. d

* Interpolated values.

population of 517,202; versus the 15,171 registered voters in the African American majority counties out of a total African American population of 401,865. Thus, both in absolute and relative terms, more African Americans could vote in white majority counties, a pattern that fits with Professor Key’s 1949 thesis that as the African American proportion of the population rose, the percentage of voters would fall. This result echoes the results in almost all of the states where we have analyzed this characteristic.

Tennessee The election registration data for Tennessee are quite limited and scattered in very fugitive sources. Paul Lewinson’s 1932 Race, Class, and Party: A History of Negro Suffrage and White Politics in the South covers the early years; an article from the special edition of the Journal of Negro Education covers 1956; and more data come from William Wright’s 1960 Memphis Politics: A Study in Racial Bloc Voting, a monograph on African American politics in Memphis as controlled by a political boss Edward Crump and his machine.86 African American leader Robert Church was once a leading Republican activist, but he eventually merged with Boss Crump “in the rock-ribbed Democracy of West Tennessee . . . [and there] worked for many years with Edward Crump of Memphis on behalf of the Crump machine’s city, county, and State candidates, in the Democratic primaries.”87 Thus, in 1928 in the mayoralty election in Memphis, African American voter registration reached its highest point. Besides Church, in the early 1930s another African American voting rights activist, Dr. J. E. Walker, founded a Negro Democratic organization, the Shelby County Democratic Club, and like Church worked with the Crump machine in municipal and state politics. These two alliances, one from African American Republicans and one from African American Democrats, led to a unique political situation in the city. Professor Lewinson wrote: “The only place in the South where the Negro had by 1930 made a real breach in the white primary system was Memphis . . . [due in part to the fact that Crump had] the Shelby County Democratic committeeman announce that there was no rule barring Negroes.”88 Table 23.18 (p. 516) lists African American voter registration data for Tennessee as well as the city of Memphis and the counties of Haywood and Fayette, where African Americans had a population majority during this time frame. African American voter registration and voting even in the Democratic White Primary was allowed by a political boss and his machine because their votes were so important to the boss’s political power. African American voting rights activists like Church and Walker took advantage of this breach in the system to continually register African Americans in the city. In addition, these activists, especially Walker, ran African American candidates so as to increase voter registration in the African American community. This political context and the results were similar to what occurred in San Antonio, Texas. Figure 23.19 (p. 517) offers a portrait of the registered voters in Tennessee in 1940, 1947, and 1952 as reported in the Journal. Even before the Court’s 1944 decision, there had



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 515 Table 23.17  African American Voter Registration in South Carolina, by Racial Majority of the County, 1957–1958 1957 Population County

Black

Allendale

13,211

9,507

3,704

72.0%

2,559

140

2,419

 5.5%

Bamberg

19,733

11,704

8,029

59.3%

3,660

393

3,267

10.7%

Barnwell

20,074

11,977

8,097

59.7%

5,317

531

4,786

10.0%

Beaufort

30,466

18,209

12,257

59.8%

4,141

1,286

2,855

31.1%

Berkeley

34,609

22,182

12,427

64.1%

7,060

1,913

5,147

27.1%

Calhoun

16,490

11,975

4,515

72.6%

1,773

74

1,699

 4.2%

Clarendon

37,376

27,004

10,372

72.2%

3,782

324

3,458

 8.6%

Colleton

31,684

17,279

14,405

54.5%

6,430

735

5,695

11.4%

Dorchester

25,514

14,361

11,153

56.3%

5,742

412

5,330

 7.2%

Edgefield

18,950

11,719

7,231

61.8%

3,537

270

3,267

 7.6%

Fairfield

24,824

15,132

8,692

61.0%

4,968

750

4,218

15.1%

Georgetown

37,160

20,033

17,127

53.9%

5,578

911

4,667

16.3%

Hampton

20,258

11,633

8,625

57.4%

3,460

250

3,210

 7.2%

Jasper

12,224

8,011

4,213

65.5%

2,464

489

1,975

19.8%

Lee

26,754

18,525

8,229

69.2%

4,908

742

4,166

15.1%

McCormick

10,859

6,992

3,867

64.4%

1,339

0

1,339

 0.0%

Marion

38,196

21,847

16,349

57.2%

6,252

972

5,280

15.5%

Marlboro

35,204

18,795

16,409

53.4%

7,411

395

7,016

5.3%

Orangeburg

78,513

50,603

27,910

64.5%

12,288

2,220

10,068

18.1%

Sumter

69,385

38,891

30,494

56.1%

9,704

2,130

7,574

21.9%

Williamsburg

51,222

35,486

15,736

69.3%

6,390

234

6,156

 3.7%

652,706

401,865

249,841

61.6%

108,763

15,171

93,592

13.9%

Black Majority Counties Total

Total

Black

White

1958 Registered Voters

Racial Majority

a

% Black

Total

Black

White

% Black

Black Majority Counties Mean

31,081.2

19,136.4

11,897.2

61.6%

5,179.2

722.4

4,456.8

13.9%

Black Majority Counties Median

26,754

17,279

10,372

61.0%

4,968

489

4,218

10.7%

Equal

Dillon

35,541

17,496

18,045

49.2%

5,740

816

4,924

14.2%

Kershaw

36,262

17,553

18,709

48.4%

9,790

1,084

8,706

11.1%

Equal Counties Total

71,803

35,049

36,754

48.8%

15,530

1,900

13,630

12.2%

Equal Counties Mean

35,901.5

17,524.5

18,377

48.8%

7,765

950

6,815

12.2%

Equal Counties Median

35,901.5

17,524.5

18,377

48.8%

7,765

950

6,815

12.6%

White

Abbeville

24,167

8,172

15,995

33.8%

5,538

118

5,420

 2.1%

Aiken

63,075

21,356

41,719

33.9%

20,216

1,762

18,454

 8.7%

Anderson

110,724

21,428

77,296

19.4%

25,048

1,624

23,424

 6.5%

Charleston

193,973

80,644

113,329

41.6%

40,136

7,277

32,859

18.1%

Cherokee

39,146

9,170

29,976

23.4%

11,276

644

10,612

 5.7%

Chester

36,716

15,914

20,802

43.3%

9,143

680

8,463

 7.4%

Chesterfield

40,417

16,071

24,346

39.8%

9,597

1,401

8,196

14.6%

Darlington

57,480

27,382

30,098

47.6%

12,635

2,444

10,191

19.3%

Florence

90,885

41,695

49,189

45.9%

17,953

1,863

16,090

10.4%

Greenville

193,720

36,544

157,176

18.9%

51,097

4,040

47,057

 7.9%

Greenwood

46,524

14,197

32,327

30.5%

11,682

838

10,844

 7.2%

Harry

69,224

19,532

49,692

28.2%

15,122

1,230

13,892

 8.1%

Lancaster

41,921

12,328

29,953

29.4%

12,977

893

12,084

 6.9% (Continued)

516

Chapter 23

Table 23.17 (Continued)  

1957 Population

Racial Majoritya

County

Total

White (Continued)

Laurens

51,396

16,408

Lexington

50,725

Newberry

34,392

Oconee Pickens Richland Saluda Spartanburg Union York White Majority Counties Total

Black

White

1958 Registered Voters % Black

Total

34,988

31.9%

11,033

Black 931

White 10,102

% Black  8.4%

10,892

39,833

21.5%

14,319

213

14,106

 1.5%

13,109

21,283

38.1%

8,480

496

7,984

 5.8%

43,441

5,222

38,219

12.0%

8,277

560

7,717

 6.8%

44,737

4,871

39,866

10.9%

10,734

299

10,435

 2.8%

165,882

59,196

106,686

35.7%

38,775

6,665

32,110

17.2%

17,679

7,727

9,952

43.7%

4,351

216

4,135

 5.0%

167,990

38,118

129,872

22.7%

45,084

3,170

41,914

 7.0%

34,687

11,279

23,408

32.5%

12,124

1,024

11,100

 8.4%

82,092

25,947

56,145

31.6%

18,966

2,414

16,552

12.7%

1,700,993

517,202

1,172,150

30.4%

414,563

40,802

373,741

 9.8%

White Majority Counties Mean

73,956.2

22,487.0

50,963.0

30.4%

18,024.5

1,774.0

16,249.6

 9.8%

White Majority Counties Median

50,725

16,071

38,219

31.9%

12,635

1,024

11,100

 7.4%

2,425,502

954,116

1,458,745

39.3%

538,856

57,873

480,963

10.7%

Overall Total Overall Mean

52,728.3

20,741.7

31,711.8

39.3%

11,714.3

1,258.1

10,455.7

10.7%

Overall Median

37,268

16,844

19,756

48.0%

8,379

783

7,646

 8.4%

Source: Adapted from Virgil C. Stroud, “The Negro Voter in the South,” Quarterly Review of Higher Education Among Negroes, Vol. 29, No. 1 (January 1961), pp. 9–39 (see Tables 18–20). Calculations by the authors. Stroud’s samples of counties with predominantly black populations included those in which blacks made up more than 55% of the total population. Counties regarded as equally black and white were those in which blacks made up between 45% and 55% of the total population. Predominantly white majority counties had populations less than 45% black. a

Table 23.18  African American Voters in Tennessee, 1940–1962

Place

Year

Potential Voters

Eligible Votersa

Registered Voters

Registered Voters as Percent of Eligible Voters

State of Tennessee

1940

309,456

50,000

 

 

1946

125,000

100,000

 

1947

 

80,000

 

1952

 

155,000

 

1950

 

 

1951

 

1951

 

1955 1959

Memphis, Tennessee

Fayette County, Tennessee Haywood County, Tennessee

10,000

 

 

7,000

 

 

20,000

 

 

 

35,000

 

 

 

50,000

 

1956

 

 

58

 0.7%

1958–1959

 

8,990

58

 0.6%

1962

 

 

2,800

40.8%

1956

 

 

0

 0.0%

1958–1959

 

7,921

0

 0.0%

1962

 

 

2,000

33.5%

Sources: Adapted from Preston Valien, “Expansion of Negro Suffrage in Tennessee,” Journal of Negro Education Vol. 26, No. 3, The Negro Voter in the South (Summer 1957), p. 364; William E. Wright, Memphis Politics: A Study in Racial Bloc Voting (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962), pp. 4, 6, 7; United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1963 Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1963), pp. 32–35; United States Commission on Civil Rights, Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1959 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959), pp. 63–65. a

Eligible voters were persons of voting age who had paid their poll taxes.

been some limited success in registering voters in the state, and not just in Memphis and Fayette County. By 1947, after the Court’s decision, voter registration had nearly doubled, and it continued to rise, once again nearly doubling by 1952. And this rising voter registration was accompanied by a steady rise in the number of African American candidates running for local, county, and state legislative positions. As in other southern states, African Americans were entering all phases of the political process.

Texas Figure 23.20 reveals both the number and percentage of registered African Americans in the state of Texas by three regional categories. East Texas, where most African Americans had lived since slavery, had the largest number and the highest percentage of registered voters. Beyond this region there was a considerable drop off: the counties in central Texas accounted for 22.8% of the state’s registered African Americans, with west Texas accounting for only 2.7%. Figure 23.21 (p. 518) compares the number and percentage of African American registered voters who actually voted in 1956 by urban and non-urban areas. Slightly more registered African American voters lived in the urban areas (108,673), led by Houston in East Texas, rather than in the rural and farming areas (101,224). Even in Marion County, a rural African American majority county in the east, voter registration went forward.89 However, a much higher percentage of urban African Americans actually voted in 1956. Finally, Figure 23.22 (p. 518) provides insight on African American voting in the major urban counties in 1956 by



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 517

Figure 23.19  Number of Eligible and Registered African American Voters in Tennessee, 1940–1952 350,000 310,077*

309,456

318,798*

100%

80%

African American Voters

250,000

163,798

200,000

230,077

259,456

60% 48.6%

150,000 40% 100,000

25.8% 155,000

16.2% 50,000

80,000

50,000 0

20%

Percent of Eligible African American Voters

300,000

1940

1947 Year

Eligible, Registered African American Voters

1952

0%

Percent of Eligible African American Voters

Eligible, Not Registered African American Voters Source: Table 23.18. * Number of potential voters is a calculated estimate.

Figure 23.20  Regional Distribution of African American Registered Voters in Texas, 1956 West (5,584) 2.7% Central (47,932) 22.8%

East (156,381) 74.5%

Region of Texas (Number of African American Registered Voters) Source: Adapted from Henry Allen Bullock, “The Expansion of Negro Suffrage in Texas,” in Charles Thompson (ed.), “The Negro Voter in the South,” Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Summer 1957), p. 375.

showing what percent of African Americans who were eligibile to vote based on poll tax payments actually cast their votes. The highest voter participation rate was in Tarrant County (70.0%), and the lowest was in Harris County (24.4%). Five of these seven urban counties had voter participation rates above the 50% level, while only two fell below the 40% level. Clearly, Texas with all of its voting rights activists, victories in several White Primaries, court decisions, and boss and machine city politics, ranked very high in African American voter registration in the South. Map 23.2 (p. 519) places in geographical context all of these major urban counties where significant African American voter registration and participation took place after the Court’s 1944 decision. The sole urban area in west Texas is the city of El Paso. The slave plantations and cotton fields had been in the counties of east Texas. Finally, in Table 23.19 (p. 520) Professor Stroud’s data allow us to see the African American voter registration data in the three different types of counties: (1) African American majority, (2) mixed population counties, and (3) white majority counties. As there was only one African American county and one mixed county, it is difficult to draw conclusions. However, the typical 1950s pattern does hold in that a higher percentage of African Americans were registered in white majority counties (37.4%) than in the others: Harrison (mixed—30.5%) and African American majority (Marion—29.6%). But that would change in the following years.

518

Chapter 23

Figure 23.21  Percentage of Registered African Americans in Texas Who Voted, by Urban Status, 1956 Urban

Non-Urban

24.7% 39.0% 42,414 Voted 66,259 Did Not Vote

61.0%

24,963 Voted 76,261 Did Not Vote 75.3%

Source: Adapted from Henry Allen Bullock, “The Expansion of Negro Suffrage in Texas,” in Charles Thompson (ed.), “The Negro Voter in the South,” Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Summer 1957), p. 376.

Figure 23.22  Percentage of Registered African Americans Who Voted in Selected Urban Counties of Texas, 1956

African American Votes as Percent of Poll Tax Payers

80% 70%

70.0% 60.8%

60%

54.9%

51.5%

50.8%

50% 40%

36.3%

30%

24.4%

20% 10% 0% Tarrant (8,571)

Bexar (15,497)

Galveston (6,490)

Travis (5,268)

Dallas (15,626)

Jefferson (10,567)

Harris (36,654)

County (Number of Poll Tax Payers) Source: Adapted from Henry Allen Bullock, “The Expansion of Negro Suffrage in Texas,” in Charles Thompson (ed.), “The Negro Voter in the South,” Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Summer 1957), p. 376.



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 519 Map 23.2  African American Voting and Poll Tax Payment in Selected Urban Counties of Texas, 1956

Colorado

Kansas Missouri

0

100 200 miles

Oklahoma DALLAS (7,931 / 15,626)

TARRANT (5,999 / 8,571) New Mexico

Plano

Arkansas

Garland Louisiana

Dallas

Fort Worth Arlington

EI Paso

TRAVIS (2,713 / 5,268)

BEXAR (9,422 / 15,497)

HARRIS (8,944 / 36,654)

Austin Houston

San Antonio JEFFERSON (3,840 / 10,567) Corpus Christi

GALVESTON (3,565 / 6,490)

0

50

100

miles

County (Number of Votes Cast by Blacks / Eligible Black Voters by Payment of Poll Taxes) City Source: Adapted from Henry Allen Bullock, “The Expansion of Negro Suffrage in Texas,” in Charles Thompson (ed.), “The Negro Voter in the South,” Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Summer, 1957), p. 376.

520

Chapter 23

Table 23.19  African American Voter Registration in Sampled Counties of Texas, Grouped by Racial Majority Populations, 1956 African Americans Population Percent of Total Population

Eligible (Age 21 Years+)

Percent of Population Eligible to Vote

County

Black

Marion

10,172

5,784

56.9%

3,086

53.4%

913

29.6%

Nearly Equal

Harrison

47,745

24,743

51.8%

12,840

51.9%

3,914

30.5%

White

Austin

14,663

3,019

20.6%

1642

54.4%

1,488

90.6%

Bexar

500,460

33,551

6.7%

22,310

66.5%

15,497

69.5%

c

Registered Votersb

Percent of Eligibles Registered to Vote

Racial Majoritya

Cherokee

Total Population

African American Population

Voters

38,694

10,648

27.5%

6,447

60.5%

986

15.3%

614,799

83,352

13.6%

54,332

65.2%

15,626

28.8%

De Witt

22,973

3,207

14.0%

1,975

61.6%

349

17.7%

El Paso

194,968

4,694

 2.4%

3,139

66.9%

1,433

45.7%

Dallas

Fort Bend

31,056

7,527

24.2%

4,437

58.9%

858

19.3%

Galveston

113,066

23,822

21.1%

15,520

65.1%

6,490

41.8%

Grimes

15,135

6,119

40.4%

3,427

56.0%

767

22.4%

Harris

806,701

150,452

18.7%

96,679

64.3%

36,654

37.9%

Hill

31,282

4,679

15.0%

2,445

52.3%

783

32.0%

Jefferson

195,083

44,225

22.7%

26,477

59.9%

10,567

39.9%

McLennan

130,194

22,381

17.2%

13,326

59.5%

6,038

45.3%

Polk

16,194

4,799

29.6%

2,624

54.7%

913

34.8%

Red River

21,851

5,233

23.9%

2,787

53.3%

533

19.1%

Smith

74,701

22,341

29.9%

12,599

56.4%

3,713

29.5%

Tarrant

361,253

39,898

11.0%

26,495

66.4%

8,571

32.3%

Williamson

38,853

5,874

15.1%

3,203

54.5%

813

25.4%

White Majority Counties Total

3,221,926

475,821

14.8%

299,864

63.0%

112,079

37.4%

White Majority Counties Mean

178,996

26,435

14.8%

16,659

63.0%

6,227

37.4%

White Majority Counties Median

56,777

9,088

19.6%

5,442

59.7%

1,461

26.8%

All Sampled Counties Total

3,279,843

506,348

15.4%

315,790

62.4%

116,906

37.0%

All Sampled Counties Mean

163,992

25,317

15.4%

15,790

62.4%

5,845

37.0%

43,299

9,088

20.8%

5,442

59.2%

1,461

26.8%

All Sampled Counties Median

Sources: Adapted from Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR, 2004), downloaded June 14, 2009; and Virgil C. Stroud, “The Negro Voter in the South,” Quarterly Review of Higher Education Among Negroes, Vol. 29, No. 1 (January 1961), pp. 9–39 (see Table 21). Calculations by the authors. Based on Census data of 1950 from ICPSR Study No. 2896. Counties are grouped according to use of criteria similar to Stroud’s: predominantly black populations include those in which blacks made up greater than 55% of the total population. Counties regarded as equally black and white were those in which blacks made up between 45% and 55% of the total population. Predominantly white majority counties had populations less than 45% black. a

b

African American registered voter data taken from Stroud.

ICPSR Study No. 2896 and Stroud are in agreement regarding eligible African American voters for all counties of Stroud’s sample except Austin. Stroud indicates a total of 5,323 eligible African American voters in Austin, exceeding the Census population total. c

Virginia Between the 1920 African American electoral revolt in Virginia and the 1944 Court decision, African American voting rights activists continued to slowly place a few registrants on the voting rolls of cities like Richmond, other independent cities, and several counties in the state. Professor Lewinson wrote: “Portsmouth and Newport News, Virginia, smaller than Memphis and Atlanta, lacking the outstanding leadership and contacts between the races which distinguished Raleigh and Durham, nevertheless have produced Negro Voters’ Leagues and Forums.”90 He found

that “[t]he normal Negro vote was 300 in Norfolk, 250 in Newport News, and 400 in Portsmouth, with a registered ‘reserve’ of voters that could on occasion double or more than double the Negro showing at a municipal election.”91 In nonpartisan municipal elections where African Americans could vote, these small numbers of registrants became quite important. Professor Lewinson explained: In Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Newport News, Virginia, the city commissioners were elected on a city-wide nonpartisan ticket, the three or five highest candidates on



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 521 the list taking office. This arrangement, which prevailed in other cities as well, made the Negro vote important, even when small. For candidates with only moderate strength, a few votes, in a warmly contested election, might mean the difference between fifth place—barely elected, and sixth place—barely defeated.92

This kind of electoral structure, together with Senator Harry Byrd’s political machine, allowed a trickle of new registrants to join the voting rolls of Virginia. This small coterie of voters in Richmond, Virginia waged “the battle against the white primary laws . . . in Virginia”93 from 1925 to 1945. And this small coterie also provided the bases of voters ready to participate when the Court decision outlawed the White Primary. Thus, its small size should not be mistaken for inaction and inactivity. It proved to be just the opposite. For Virginia, voter registration data were taken from the special edition of the Journal of Negro Education, which covered two elections during the Eisenhower administration. Figure 23.23

allows the reader to compare and contrast registration efforts not only between these two presidential election years but also between the independent (or county-equivalent) cities and counties in the state. In 1952 there were more African Americans registered in the counties than in the independent cities. Then in 1956 the situation reversed itself, with the independent cites having more African Americans registered than the counties. But overall, voter registration went up in both the independent cities and the counties in the four-year time span between the two elections. Table 23.20 shows some counties and independent cities in Virginia and how official voter registration stood between 1920 and 1930. Although these data do not show the same kind of activity as did Memphis—as well as the states—they do show the baseline data prior to the Court’s Smith v. Allwright decision and allow one to compare and put into context what happened after the decision. Professor Stroud’s data for Virginia are seen in Table 23.21 (p. 522). In the African American majority counties 14.3% of

Figure 23.23  Distribution of African American Registered Voters in Cities and Counties of Virginia, 1952 and 1956 1952

52.1%

1956*

Cities 47.9% (33,084)

47.9%

45.4%

Cities 54.6% (45,343)

54.6%

Counties 52.1% (35,980)

Counties 45.4% (37,646)

(Number of Registered Voters)

(Number of Registered Voters)

Source: Adapted from Henry J. McGuinn and Tinsley Lee Spraggins, “Negro in Politics in Virginia,” in Charles Thompson (ed.), “The Negro Voter in the South,” Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Summer 1957), p. 383. * Exclusive of King Williams County.

Table 23.20  Comparison of African American Voter Registration with African American Population and Literacy, Virginia, 1920–1930

Virginia

African Americans

Voters as Percent of Literate Eligibles

County/City

City?

Elizabeth City

 

4,033

365

9.05%

Henrico

 

2,208

330b

14.95%

Princess Anne

 

2,049

18

0.88%

207

50b

24.15%

Abingdon

Yes

Bristol

Yes

496

100

20.16%

Charlottesville

Yes

1,360

25b

1.84%

Danville

Yes

2,164

300

13.86%

Hampton

Yes

1,063

75

7.06%

Newport News

Yes

7,760

575b

7.41%

Norfolk

Yes

23,746

500b

2.11%

State

Registered Voters, 1920–1930

Virginia (Continued)

State

African Americans Eligiblea and Literate Voters, 1920

County/City

City?

Eligiblea and Literate Voters, 1920

Registered Voters, 1920–1930

Voters as Percent of Literate Eligibles

Petersburg

Yes

5,895

119

2.02%

Portsmouth

Yes

10,651

572b

5.37%

Richmond

Yes

Roanoke

Yes

Virginia state total

28,009

b

850

3.03%

4,398

750b

17.05%

248,347

15,000b

6.04%

Source: Adapted from Paul Lewinson, Race, Class, and Party: A History of Negro Suffrage and White Politics in the South (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), pp. 218–222. Calculations by the authors. a

Eligible voters are of age 21 years and over.

b

Midpoint of range estimate.

522

Chapter 23

Black

Racial Majority

Table 23.21  African American Voter Registration in Sampled Counties of Virginia, Grouped by Racial Majority Populations, 1958 (1950) Eligible Votersb

(1956) Populationsa

(1958) Registered Votersa

(Age 21 Years and Over) County

Total

Black

White

Black

White

Total

Black

White

Percent African American Of (1956) Population

Registered to Vote of Eligible to Votec

Of (1958) Registered Voters

Charles City

4,842

3,975

867

1,930

606

1,186

632

554

82.1%

32.7%

53.3%

Cumberland

6,966

4,098

2,868

1,996

1,953

1,775

300

1,475

58.8%

15.0%

16.9%

Dinwiddie

20,575

12,709

7,866

7,879

4,169

4,260

836

3,424

61.8%

10.6%

19.6%

Greensville

17,996

10,540

7,456

4,506

4,058

3,685

875

2,810

58.6%

19.4%

23.7%

Nansemond

28,554

18,473

10,081

8,931

5,441

4,247

1,338

2,909

64.7%

15.0%

31.5%

New Kent Southampton Surry

4,237

2,312

1,925

1,150

1,159

1,182

374

808

54.6%

32.5%

31.6%

27,038

15,877

11,161

7,972

6,661

4,155

525

3,630

58.7%

 6.6%

12.6%

6,662

4,271

2,391

1,941

1,598

1,340

265

1,075

64.1%

13.7%

19.8%

13,628

8,902

4,726

4,034

2,834

2,910

635

2,275

65.3%

15.7%

21.8%

Predominantly Black Total

130,498

81,157

49,341

40,339

28,479

24,740

5,780

18,960

62.2%

14.3%

23.4%

Predominantly Black Mean

14,500

9,017

5,482

4,482

3,164

2,749

642

2,107

62.2%

14.3%

23.4%

Predominantly Black Median

13,628

8,902

4,726

4,034

2,834

2,910

632

2,275

61.8%

15.0%

21.8%

Sussex

Nearly Equal

Amelia

8,299

4,171

4,128

1,999

2,390

2,582

607

1,975

50.3%

30.4%

23.5%

Buckingham

12,135

5,397

6,738

2,493

4,124

1,515

440

1,075

44.5%

17.6%

29.0%

Caroline

12,788

6,680

6,108

3,086

3,848

1,912

502

1,410

52.2%

16.3%

26.3%

Essex

6,666

3,170

3,496

1,594

2,203

1,070

225

845

47.6%

14.1%

21.0%

Goochland

9,280

4,768

4,512

2,515

2,968

2,625

675

1,950

51.4%

26.8%

25.7%

16,580

8,681

7,899

3,957

4,520

4,523

931

3,592

52.4%

23.5%

20.6%

7,370

3,333

4,037

1,590

2,247

1,465

342

1,123

45.2%

21.5%

23.3%

Isle of Wight James City

6,822

3,712

3,110

1,795

1,837

915

350

565

54.4%

19.5%

38.3%

Mecklenburg

33,810

16,590

17,220

7,655

10,479

5,880

630

5,250

49.1%

 8.2%

10.7%

Northampton

17,861

9,776

8,085

5,105

5,688

2,795

520

2,275

54.7%

10.2%

18.6%

Nottaway

15,964

7,043

8,921

3,607

5,665

3,220

565

2,655

44.1%

15.7%

17.5%

Westmoreland

10,825

5,001

5,824

2,285

3,644

3,543

366

3,177

46.2%

16.0%

10.3%

Nearly Equal Total

158,400

78,322

80,078

37,681

49,613

32,045

6,153

25,892

49.4%

16.3%

19.2%

Nearly Equal Mean

13,200

6,527

6,673

3,140

4,134

2,670

513

2,158

49.4%

16.3%

19.2%

Nearly Equal Median

White

King and Queen

11,480

5,199

5,966

2,504

3,746

2,604

511

1,963

49.7%

17.0%

22.2%

Accomack

33,923

11,829

22,094

6,591

15,382

4,962

493

4,469

34.9%

 7.5%

 9.9%

Albemarle

27,933

5,128

22,805

2,840

13,385

4,765

645

4,120

18.4%

22.7%

13.5%

Arlington

158,710

7,203

151,207

4,248

87,177

44,526

1,274

43,252

4.5%

30.0%

 2.9%

Augusta

35,107

1,785

33,322

956

18,925

7,446

175

7,271

5.1%

18.3%

 2.4%

Buchanan

38,650

14

38,636

6

15,744

11,625

0

11,625

0.0%

0.0%

 0.0%

Chesterfield

56,044

9,659

40,385

4,489

20,025

12,595

1,270

11,325

17.2%

28.3%

10.1%

176,371

12,102

164,269

6,563

52,907

48,580

1,074

47,506

6.9%

16.4%

 2.2%

Glouchester

11,351

3,409

7,942

1,960

4,588

3,596

647

2,949

30.0%

33.0%

18.0%

Grayson

16,887

1,018

15,869

462

12,010

6,501

71

6,430

 6.0%

15.4%

 1.1%

Henrico

86,821

6,045

80,776

3,253

33,337

30,813

855

29,958

 7.0%

26.3%

 2.8%

7,949

3,299

4,650

1,888

2,612

1,405

305

1,100

41.5%

16.2%

21.7%

Fairfax

King William Paige

15,550

507

15,043

313

8,698

6,010

110

5,900

 3.3%

35.1%

 1.8%

Prince Edward

15,993

6,734

9,259

3,468

5,238

3,450

700

2,750

42.1%

20.2%

20.3%

Princess Anne

77,104

12,666

64,438

5,724

20,306

16,573

1,415

15,158

16.4%

24.7%

 8.5%

African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 523

Racial Majority



(1950) Eligible Votersb

(1956) Populationsa

(1958) Registered Votersa

(Age 21 Years and Over) County

Total

Black

White

Black

White

Total

Black

White

Percent African American Of (1956) Population

Registered to Vote of Eligible to Votec

Of (1958) Registered Voters

6,136

2,251

3,885

1,077

2,642

1,255

285

970

36.7%

26.5%

22.7%

Roanoke

50,123

3,558

46,565

2,321

23,715

19,435

788

18,647

 7.1%

34.0%

 4.1%

Smyth

30,822

539

30,283

289

16,710

8,022

91

7,931

 1.7%

31.5%

 1.1%

Tazewell

49,395

2,588

46,807

1,667

23,244

7,487

347

7,140

 5.2%

20.8%

 4.6%

Washington

38,308

893

37,415

741

19,929

7,864

178

7,686

 2.3%

24.0%

 2.3%

Wythe

23,075

1,227

21,848

633

12,526

12,391

260

12,131

 5.3%

41.1%

 2.1%

York

18,635

4,274

14,361

1,699

5,309

3,235

520

2,715

22.9%

30.6%

16.1%

Predominantly White Total

974,887

96,728

871,859

51,188

414,409

262,536

11,503

251,033

 9.9%

22.5%

 4.4%

Predominantly White Mean

46,423

4,606

41,517

2,438

19,734

12,502

548

11,954

 9.9%

22.5%

 4.4%

Predominantly White Median

33,923

3,409

30,283

1,888

15,744

7,487

493

7,271

 7.0%

24.7%

 4.1%

Overall Total

1,263,785

256,207

1,001,278

129,208

492,501

319,321

23,436

295,885

20.3%

18.1%

 7.3%

Overall Mean

421,262

85,402

333,759

43,069

164,167

106,440

7,812

98,628

20.3%

18.1%

 7.3%

Overall Median

158,400

81,157

80,078

40,339

49,613

32,045

6,153

25,892

49.4%

16.3%

19.2%

White (Continued)

Richmond

Adapted from these sources: a

Virgil C. Stroud, “The Negro Voter In The South,” Quarterly Review of Higher Education Among Negroes, Vol. 29, No. 1 (January 1961), pp. 9–39 (see Tables 22–24).

Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. The number of eligible voters (persons of voting age) is determined from the Census of 1950. b

c

African American registered voters in 1958 as share of the African American population in 1950 that was eligible to vote.

Calculations by the authors.

the black Voting Age Population were registered; 16.3% were registered in the equal counties; and 22.5% were registered in the white majority counties. This typical pattern again confirms V. O. Key’s thesis in Southern Politics. A higher percentage of African Americans were permitted to register in counties where they were the minority than in those where they were the majority, even in 1958.

African American Voting Behavior in the 1952 and 1956 Presidential Elections In 1952, political scientist Alexander Heard dubbed the rising African American voter registration, numerous voting leagues, and candidates as “the New Negro Politics” and indicated that it would alter the one-party system in the South. He showed that since the Reconstruction Era, African Americans had acquired a Republican Party affiliation, but since the Era of Disenfranchisement the rising African American voter had become embarrassed by the “rottenborough politics” that had been permitted by the Republican Party.94 Thus, the disdain which this New Negro Politics felt for the old dysfunctional partisanship with Republicans led its leaders to seek out the very political party, the Democratic Party, that had been, and in the South still was, hell-bent on preventing them from exercising their Fifteenth Amendment rights. After the Smith v. Allwright Supreme Court decision opened the door in 1944, these registered African American voters entered the Democratic Party’s primaries and in the process became affiliated Democrats.95 But in the 1952 and 1956 elections this New Negro Politics would swing back to the Republican Party, which had now become mostly devoid of its rotten-borough politics, except in Mississippi.

Table 23.22 (p. 524) uses essentially precinct-level data from ten of the eleven southern states (no data were collected from Mississippi) to reveal how in 1956 the Republican Party received much greater African American support than in 1952. The last column in the table provides the percentage gain that Republican presidential incumbent Dwight Eisenhower received over his showing in the 1952 campaign. Thus, by 1956 the growing support for the Democrats among African American voters had not solidified to the point that it had become rigid and inflexible. Two southern states, Virginia and Georgia, saw more than a 50% increase in support for Eisenhower, while South Carolina saw a 40% increase, three states (North Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama) saw a 30% increase, and three other states (Arkansas, Florida, and Texas) saw a 20% increase. Tennessee saw the smallest increase, less than 20%. Seemingly, these new African American registrants were searching for the party with a strong stand on civil and voting rights. This would lead to a shift back to the Democrats in most of the southern states in the very next presidential election, in 1960.

The Rise of Federal Election Statistics on African American Voters, 1959, 1961, 1963, and 1965 There were no official sources at the local, state, or federal levels for collecting and disseminating registration and voting data by race, ethnicity, or gender in Colonial, Revolutionary, or Antebellum America. Hence, scholars have had to rely upon organizations (think tanks, universities, colleges, civil rights

524

Chapter 23

Table 23.22  Vote of African American Precincts in Southern Cities, Presidential Elections 1952 and 1956a 1952 Eisenhower (R)

Eisenhower Percent Gain (1956–1952)

1,129

47.0%

1,273

34.5%

558

649

73.4%

235

43.6%

1,460

1,778

54.1%

1,508

34.1%

1,366

862

48.2%

923

26.0%

15.7%

15,964

6,781

40.9%

9,783

25.2%

23.5%

970

791

43.8%

1,013

20.3%

3,671

16.7%

18,300

8,434

41.8%

11,719

25.1%

Alabama

Mobile

7

129

12.5%

Tuskegee

4 Boxes

237

29.8%

366

20.0%

389

22.2%

2,983 299

4

Florida

Jacksonville

20 Precincts

Tampa

11, 13

Florida Subtotal

Stevenson (D) Votes

Ward/Precinct(s)

Pine Bluff

Eisenhower (R) Percent

City

Arkansas

Stevenson (D)

Votes

State

Alabama Subtotal

1956

Votes

Percent

Votes 902

Georgia

Atlanta

11 Precincts

2,134

30.9%

4,764

9,565

85.3%

1,640

54.4%

Louisiana

New Orleans

21 Precincts in 1952; 32 Precincts in 1956

2,575

20.2%

10,148

9,204

55.1%

7,476

34.9%

North Carolina

Charlotte

7 Precincts

1,368

16.3%

6,975

2,105

38.5%

3,361

22.2%

Durham

Pearson Precinct

106

 8.3%

1,168

655

61.6%

407

53.3%

Durham

New in 1956: Whitted, Burton, Horners

 

1,649

52.9%

1,466

Greensboro

Precincts 5, 9

475

13.5%

3,037

1,437

61.6%

895

48.1%

Raleigh

3 Precincts

310

12.4%

2,177

1,136

63.1%

648

50.7%

Winston-Salem 3 Precincts

184

 3.3%

5,370

1,808

47.1%

2,028

43.8%

North Carolina Subtotal South Carolina

2,443

11.5%

18,727

8,790

50.0%

8,805

38.4%

284

39.2%

439

354

56.1%

234

16.9%

Columbia

Ward 9 (56 for Independents in 1956)

109

 8.0%

1,250

504

45.4%

551

37.4%

Darlington

4, 5

6

 0.1%

722

497

72.0%

193

71.9%

399

14.2%

2,411

1,355

58.1%

978

43.9%

Chattanooga

4 Wards plus 3 Precincts

769

20.5%

2,969

1,889

49.3%

1,943

28.8%

Knoxville

8 Precincts

1,254

29.7%

2,955

1,610

40.9%

2,322

11.2%

Memphis

50 Precincts

12,173

34.4%

26,020

 

54.0%

 

19.6%

Nashville

Ward 5, Precincts 1, 2, 3

564

23.0%

1,878

1,576

61.6%

982

38.6%

Oak Ridge

Scarboro, 4th District

19

 5.6%

319

128

59.5%

87

53.9%

14,779

30.2%

34,141

5,203

49.4%

5,334

19.2%

2,665

10.5%

22,589

8,278

34.8%

15,481

24.3%

240

14.2%

1,451

1,726

79.7%

439

65.5%

1,172

21.9%

4,165

3,495

73.0%

1,301

51.1%

1,412

20.1%

5,616

5,221

75.0%

1,740

54.9%

Texas

Houston

7 Wards

Virginia

Norfolk

6 Precincts

Richmond

1, 4, 5, 18, 19, 46, 55, 63, 64, 65

Virginia Subtotal All States

 

Ward 9 (43 votes for Independents in 1956)

Tennessee Subtotal

a

 

Charleston

South Carolina Subtotal Tennessee

 

Total

30,833

20.5%

119,522

58,690

51.4%

55,604

30.8%

Average

3,083

20.5%

11,952

5,869

51.4%

5,560

30.8%

Median

2,289

20.1%

7,882

6,750

52.0%

3,537

34.5%

Minimum

366

10.5%

1,366

862

34.8%

923

19.2%

Maximum

14,779

30.9%

34,141

9,565

85.3%

15,481

54.9%

Source: Adapted from Henry Lee Moon, “The Negro Vote in the Presidential Election of 1956,” Journal of Negro Education, The Negro Voter in the South Vol. 26 No. 3 (Summer 1957), p. 224, Table III. Calculations by the authors. a

Mississippi was not represented by the southern states selected in Moon’s analysis of the African American vote.



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 525

organizations, etc.), other scholars, special editions of academic journals, newspapers, magazines, and interested laypersons to collect, disseminate, and archive such information. This has made for incomplete and partial data sources, as we have noted throughout this volume. Despite the lasting importance of race in the nation’s electoral and political processes, the federal government did not get involved in keeping these statistics until the passage of the Four Military Reconstruction Acts (1867–1868) that enfranchised the freed slaves in ten of the eleven states of the South. (Tennessee was exempted because it had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment.) In these acts, Congress requested that the Secretary of the Army send to both houses of Congress a list of the number of freedmen registered to vote, voter turnout, and actual racial voting behavior data in each of the counties of the ten states.96 The next federal statistics on African American voter registration and voting came some 92 years later, in 1959. The 1957 Civil Rights Act created the United States Commission on Civil Rights (CCR) and empowered it to collect both historical and contemporary data on the African American electorate in the eleven states of the South. The CCR issued four reports with statistics on registration and voting in the South:

(1) The 1959 Hearings and Report focused on Macon County (city of Tuskegee and the home of Tuskegee Institute and University, which Booker T. Washington founded) because a few faculty members there kept meticulous records of African American registration efforts; (2) the 1961 Hearings and Report focused on Louisiana and provided statistics for 1958 and 1960 on the African American electorate in black majority parishes; (3) the 1963 Report contained voter registration data on the southern states; (4) the 1965 Report focused solely on Mississippi and provided registration and voting statistics for 34 of the 82 counties for 1962 and for 29 of the 82 counties for 1964. Map 23.3 shows the various counties in each of the eleven southern states that had significant populations of African Americans in the decade that the Commission was created and became operational. Map 23.4 (p. 526) further illuminates the southern political context with the statewide African American population percentage for each of the eleven southern states as well as for each of the five Border States. (Both maps portray non-white populations, which included Native Americans as well as African Americans.) Among the Border States, only Delaware and Maryland had African American population percentages in double digits.

Map 23.3  Non-White Population by County in the Southern and Border States, 1950

Maryland Delaware 0

100 200 miles

West Virginia Virginia Missouri

Kentucky North Carolina Tennessee

Arkansas South Carolina Alabama

Georgia

Mississippi

Texas

0

Louisiana

100

200

miles

Florida Non-whites by County Percent of Population (Number of Counties) 50% or more (157) 33 – 49.99% (215) 15 – 32.99% (278) 0 – 14.99% (457)

Source: Adapted from Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors. Note: The percentage of non-whites includes Native Americans.

526

Chapter 23

Map 23.4  Non-White Population in the Southern and Border States, 1950

Wisconsin

Michigan Pennsylvania

New Jersey

Iowa

0

100

West Virginia 5.7%

Illinois Colorado

Kansas

Missouri 7.6%

Kentucky 6.9%

New Mexico

South Carolina 38.9%

Ar kansas 22.4% Mississippi 45.4%

Texas 12.8%

Maryland 16.6%

Virginia 22.2%

North Carolina 26.6%

Tennessee 16.1% Oklahoma

Delaware 13.9%

Ohio

Indiana

200

miles

Georgia 30.9%

Alabama 32.1%

0

Louisiana 33.0%

100

200

miles

Florida 21.8% Border States Southern States

Source: Adapted from Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

Collectively, these four Commission Reports offered federal statistics on African American voter registration and voting that hardly appear elsewhere. First, they gave scholars and academics and lawyers some of the most reliable data on the subject. Secondly, these data allowed for the first time empirical portraits of the African American electorate that not only demonstrated the need and demand for re-enfranchisement but also offered insights into the nature, scope, and significance of the voting problem facing African Americans. Such federal statistics, although they were not complete, helped the American people get a sense of the unfinished problems facing this American experiment with democratic government. To repair, reform, and improve the system one needs to be able to see the problems that have existed in detail in order to get some sense of how to extend the democratic process to all American citizens.

Table 23.23  Attempted and Accepted African American Voter Registrations in Macon County, Alabama, 1951–1958 Year

Applications Taken

Certificates Issued

Percent

1951

161

23

14.3%

1952

225

52

23.1%

1953

182

28

15.4%

1954

456

167

36.6%

1955

258

119

46.1%

1956

23

8

34.8%

1957

78

26

33.3%

1958

202

87

43.1%

The 1959 Hearing and Report: Macon County (Tuskegee), Alabama

Total

1,585

510

32.2%

Mean

198.1

63.8

32.2%

The CCR released in 1959 a Hearing and a Report.97 The hearing—which took place in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 8–9, 1958, and January 9, 1959—provided the number

Median

192

40

34.1%

Source: United States Commission on Civil Rights, Voting: Hearings Held in Montgomery, Alabama (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959), p. 27.



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 527

of African Americans who applied for registration, the number who were given voter registration certifications, and their percentages in Macon County, Alabama (Tuskegee) from 1951 through 1958. The data are shown in Table 23.23. Of the 1,585 applications for registration certificates only 510 were accepted for a 32.2% acceptance rate.98 But these data in the table do not tell the entire story simply because, even after the Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Allwright was rendered in 1944, “[t]he Macon County Board of Registrars . . . historically endeavored to deprive Negroes of the right to vote by employing different kinds of delaying and evasive techniques in order to slow down the process of application for registration, which is an indispensable step to becoming a registered voter.”99 The Commission found in Macon County a systematic pattern had occurred: “throughout the years . . . when pressures on the part of Negroes have reduced the effectiveness of these tactics, invariably all or most of the members of the board of registrars would resign, rendering the board nonfunctional and ineffective.”100 The Commission observed: Macon County has been without a publicly functioning board of registrars on numerous occasions. All members of the Macon County Board of Registrars resigned in 1946, following a civil court suit against them. It was revealed in a news release appearing in the Montgomery Advertiser, April 14, 1948, that the Macon County Board of Registrars was reconstituted during the month of January 1948 for the first time since 1946 (18 months). Apparently, no public notice was made of the setup of this board.101 Not only did the African American community not hear about this new board and who constituted its personnel, but its location in Tuskegee, the county seat for Macon County, was hidden from African Americans. The board moved from different white businesses in the city and eventually to the vault in the city’s bank, which changed its hours appropriately. But “on April 19, 1948 . . . 18 Negroes appeared and were permitted to make applications. After the board’s location was determined by Negroes, the board did not function again publicly until January 17, 1949 (8 months later).”102 Once again the Commission describes the ensuing situation: The Macon County Board of Registrars became inoperative on January 16, 1956, and did not function again publicly until June 3, 1957 (16 months later). . . . All total, Macon County has been without a publicly functioning board of registrars for 3 years and 4 months during the past 12 years.103 Macon “county is divided into 10 voting districts or beats. The largest of these, beat 1, contains about 60 percent of the county’s population; 75 percent of the population of beat 1 is Negro. The City of Tuskegee is located in beat 1. . . . Less than 10 percent of the Negroes of voting age were registered; virtually all of the voting-age white persons in the county were registered.”104 Examining the CCR data shows that 97.6% of the white VAP

were registered voters compared to only 8.7% of the African American VAP.105 The “slowdown” technique had clearly cost the African American electorate and made them unable to elect anyone of their own race to office in Macon County. In the county seat, the city of Tuskegee, African American registered voters had the overwhelming majority. Nevertheless, whites with a very small population (4,400 in the entire county) ran all of the businesses, banks, and commercial establishments, as well as holding all of the elective and appointive political offices. Therefore, “[s]hortly after the hearing’s conclusion the Department of Justice filed suit under the Civil Rights Act of 1957 to compel registration of qualified Negroes in Macon County, including many of those who had testified at the Montgomery hearings. An appeal to the Supreme Court was necessary before the case could come to trial.”106 Hence, it was on “March 17, 1961, over 25 months after the suit was filed, the district court ordered the Macon County Board of Registrars to place 64 (later reduced to 57) named Negroes on the voting rolls forthwith” as well as all other qualified African Americans and to stop using the literacy test in a racially discriminatory fashion.107 African American voting rights activists in the city of Tuskegee focused on the federal courts and possible congressional legislation, via African American Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, to alter and transform the electoral context in the city. Meanwhile, whites went to the state legislature and asked for help to offset the rising electoral power of the African American electorate. “On July 15, 1957, the Alabama Legislature passed an act that gerrymandered the boundaries of the city. The town limits, previously forming a rectangle, now became a figure of 28 sides. The new boundaries excluded all but 10 of the 420 Negroes who formerly voted in city elections.”108 And to ensure the continuance of this power monopoly, the white state senator from Macon County offered legislation to abolish the county completely by splitting it up into the five counties surrounding it. Those counties refused to accept it, and so the legislative act prevailed. However, the African American voter registration organization in the city, the Tuskegee Civic Association, sued and won at the Supreme Court in the Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960) case.109 This legal victory laid the electoral foundations for a transfer of power in the city of Tuskegee. And the Commission’s federal voting statistics provide a highly reliable empirical portrait of the discriminatory procedures and techniques that arose after the Smith v. Allwright decision. In addition to inquiring into the local situation, the 1959 Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights gave a region-wide summary of the registration data found in 1958. First, Table 23.24 (p. 528) provides us with population and registration data from African American majority counties in each of the eleven southern states. The mean percentage of the African American VAP registered to vote for 1958 was 12.2%, with the range running from a low of 2.1% in Mississippi to a high of 41.4% in Texas. Figure 23.24 (p. 528) focuses on the African American majority counties. It permits a comparison and contrast by showing the percent of eligible African Americans who were registered vis-àvis the percent of African Americans living in African American majority counties in each state. Figure 23.25 (p. 529) expands to statewide data and allows a comparison and contrast of the

528

Chapter 23

Table 23.24  African American Population and Voter Registration in African American Majority Counties of the Southern States, 1958 African American Majority Counties Total Population (1950 Census)

State

Black Population in Black Majority Counties (1950 Census)

Black Percent of Total Population in Black Majority Counties

Number of Black Majority Counties

Black Mean Percent of Registered Voters in Black Majority Counties

Alabama

369,376

247,714

67.1%

 14

 3.1%

Arkansas

193,986

115,963

59.8%

  6

21.7%

46,870

26,981

57.6%

  2

 6.6%

Florida Georgia

448,738

265,455

59.2%

 40

18.8%

Louisiana*

198,049

114,236

57.7%

 12

13.7%

Mississippi

860,741

559,793

65.0%

 31

 2.1%

North Carolina

350,892

201,329

57.4%

 10

10.6%

South Carolina

568,575

344,588

60.6%

 21

 9.3%

Tennessee

53,747

35,668

66.4%

  2

 0.3%

Texas

77,050

40,623

52.7%

  4

41.4%

201,892

119,762

59.3%

 15

18.4%

3,369,916

2,072,112

61.5%

157

12.2%

Virginia Total

Source: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1959 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1959), pp. 559–591. Calculations by the authors. * Louisiana voter registrations in 1959.

Figure 23.24  Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote Compared to African American Population in African American Majority Counties in the Southern States, 1958 80%

70%

67.1% 59.8%

60%

59.2%

59.3%

57.7%

60.6%

65.0%

66.4%

57.6%

57.4%

52.7% 50% 41.4% 40%

30% 21.7% 20%

18.8%

18.4% 13.7%

10.6%

9.3%

10%

6.6% 3.1%

2.1%

Alabama

Mississippi Tennessee

0% Texas

Arkansas

Georgia

Virginia

Louisiana (1959)

North Carolina

Percent of Eligible Blacks Registered to Vote in Black Majority Counties

South Carolina

Florida

0.3%

Percent of Black Population in Black Majority Counties

Source: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1959 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959), pp. 559–591. Calculations by the authors.



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 529

Figure 23.25  Percentage of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote Compared to African American Percentage of Total Population in the Southern States, 1958 50% 45.4%

45% 40%

39.5%

38.9%

38.6%

36.7%

35%

33.0% 31.6%

30%

32.1%

30.3% 30.9%

26.6% 25%

23.4% 22.2%

21.8%

22.9%

22.4%

20.7%

20% 15%

12.9%

12.8%

10% 3.7%

5% 0%

Florida

North Carolina

Texas

Louisiana (1959)

Georgia

Virginia

Percent of Eligible Blacks Registered to Vote

Arkansas

Alabama

South Carolina

Mississippi

Blacks as Percent of Total Population

Source: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1959 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959), pp. 559–591. Calculations by the authors.

percent of eligible African Americans who were registered against the total population percentage of African Americans. In terms of the percent of African Americans eligible to vote, or ‘eligibles,’ who were registered in each of the ten southern states (excluding Tennessee, which was not covered by the VRA), Florida was on the high end and Mississippi once again was on the low end.

The 1960 Civil Rights Act Due to the limitations and shortcomings of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, Congress passed on May 6, 1960, “during the second Administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower . . . the Civil Rights Act of 1960.”110 It can be seen “as the federal government’s response to deliberate obstruction by local southern election officials intent on subverting the 1957 Civil Rights Act. The 1960 statute calls for the preservation of elections records and criminalizes willful destruction of such records. It also authorizes the federal courts to take over the registration of black voters.”111 Thus, if the 1957 Civil Rights Act began the process of collecting federal election statistics on African Americans voters, the 1960 Act legally required preserving and maintaining these records. Clearly, a new era had emerged in African American voting history, along with federal election statistics to capture that history and activism. Title III, named “Federal Election Records,” of the four titles in the 1960 Act, addressed the question of preservation with

Sections 301–306. Each one of the six sections spoke to a problem that resulted from the struggle to implement the 1957 Act.112 Essentially, these sections required that federal statistics on the African American electorate be kept for twenty-two months—one year and ten months—on federal elections that occurred in special, primary, and general elections. The federal courts in these districts were given power to enforce these requirements, and “officers of elections” who refused could be fined or sent to jail.113 Georgia Senator Richard Russell, the nemesis of civil rights legislation and head of the Southern Caucus, declared that the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts were his sweetest achievements because he had gutted the legislation and reduced the Commission to a simple fact-finding agency that would not alter or reform his region’s segregated way of life nor give African Americans any rights.114 However, this legislation did produce federal statistics on African American registration and voting data that were far superior to the data generated by the academic community up to that time.

The 1961 Commission on Civil Rights Report The second Commission Hearing and Report on Louisiana was delayed as southern politicians hoped that the federal courts would declare Title III unconstitutional. But in February 1960, the Supreme Court in the United States v. Raines upheld the constitutionality of the 1957 Act. Then on May 6, 1960, the Supreme

530

Chapter 23

Court rendered a decision on the Louisiana case, United States v. McElveen, which required the registrar in Washington Parish to restore “1,377 Negroes to the registration rolls” because of the racially discriminatory purge that had illegally removed them.115 The 1961 Report provided voter registration statistics at the county level for 1960 and census data for the same time period not only for all of the eleven southern states but for three of the Border States: Delaware, Maryland, and West Virginia. Moreover, the 1961 Report provided voter registration by race in all of the African American majority counties for the years 1958 and 1960. Since there were no African American majority counties in the Border States, Table 2 in the 1961 Report, which provided these data, had no such information on the Border States. Although there are some limitations to these data, they are still some of the most reliable data available. These extensive and detailed data are available in the Report’s Appendices A, B, and C, which appear in the electronic version of this work. Moreover, there are much useful empirical data for analyzing this period on the eve of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

forty pages and included “Table A: Voter Registration Statistics.” This table provided voter registration data for 1956, “the last year before the passage of legislation to secure the right to vote,”116 and 1962, two years since the passage of two civil rights acts and the “institution of 36 voting rights suits by the Department of Justice, and the operation of several private registration drives.”117And using the data for these six years, the 1963 Report sought to evaluate and assess the progress and accomplishments made by the legislation and the required governmental intervention. In the 1961 Report, the Commission had “found that substantial numbers of Negro citizens had been denied the right to vote in 100 counties of 8 Southern States.”118 The Commission’s 1963 Table A provided an empirical portrait of African American voter registration data before (1956) and after (1962). According to the Commission’s finding, in 1956 only “about 5 percent of the voting-age Negroes in the 100 counties were registered to vote,” while in 1962 “Negro registration in these counties has risen only to 8.3 percent. These most recent reliable statistics indicate that only 55,711 of the 668,082 voting-age Negroes in the 100 counties have access to the ballot.”119 And it is the differences between the before data and the after data which tell us how successful the Justice Department and private voter registration organizations were in the six year period of 1956–1962 in these 100 counties in the 8 Southern States. Figure 23.26 shows that in most of these eight states African American voter registration increased from 1956 to 1962. Taken together, in the 100 counties of these eight states the total number of African American registrants stood at 37,137, or 5.1% of

The 1963 Commission on Civil Rights Report In 1963, two years after the Commission released its 1961 Report, another Report was released which covered eight different areas: (1) voting, (2) education, (3) employment, (4) housing, (5) justice, (6) health facilities and services, (7) urban areas, and (8) “The Negro in the Armed Forces.” It also included a section on the State Advisory Civil Rights Committees. The first area, voting, covered

Figure 23.26  Number of African American Voter Registrations in the South by State, 1956 and 1962 30,000 26,411

African American Voter Registrations

25,000

20,000

15,000

13,591 11,421

10,000

8,001 6,489

5,234 5,000

4,800

3,740

3,251

2,267

2,550

76 512

0 Alabama

Florida

2,450

1,997 58

Georgia

Louisiana

1956 African American Voter Registrations

Mississippi

North Carolina

South Carolina

Tennessee

1962 African American Voter Registrations

Source: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1963 Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1963), pp. 32–35. Calculations by the authors.



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 531

the eligible African American voter population in 1956. Six years later the total stood at 55,711—an increase of 18,574—or only 8.3% of the eligible population. This meant that significant resistance and opposition continued to the exercise of the Fifteenth Amendment right in these 100 counties. Obviously, stronger measures and pressures were needed to significantly increase the number of African American registrants.

Williams began, which would test the constitutionality of the 1890 disenfranchising state constitution), 1899 (the year after the Supreme Court upheld the 1890 disenfranchising state constitution), and 1955. (Mississippi’s legislature met in January 1955 to implement a new reading and interpretation clause that had just been ratified by the electorate. They had rejected a similar one in 1952, but the 1954 Supreme Court decision had helped them reverse this earlier action.) The second table (Appendix B) provided 1962 voter registration data for 34 of the state’s 82 counties, and the third table (Appendix C) offered 1964 voter registration data for 29 of the state’s 82 counties. A summary comparison of that information is presented for the first time in our Table 23.25. For African American registered voters, the range of increase and decrease runs from a –9.5% decrease in Tunica County between 1962 and 1964 to a positive increase of 43,800% in Panola County. Simply

The 1965 Commission on Civil Rights Report The third Hearing of the Commission took place in Jackson, Mississippi, on February 16–20, 1965, and it generated a report in 1965 entitled Voting in Mississippi, which contained three voter registration tables. The first of these tables provided racial voter registration data for Mississippi for the years 1867 (the first year of African American voting), 1892 (the first year after disenfranchisement began), 1896 (the year the trial of Henry

Table 23.25  Voter Registration Statistics by County in Mississippi, 1962 and 1964 African Americans

County

Eligible to Vote (Age 21 & Over, 1960)

Whites

Registered to Vote in June 1962

Registered to Vote in January 1964

Number

Number

Percent

Amite

3,560

1

 0.0%

 

Benton

1,419

30

 2.1%

55

Chickasaw

3,054

 

 

1

Claiborne

3,969

15

 0.4%

2,998

1

14,004

1,061

Clarke Coahoma

Number

Percent

Registered to Vote in January 1964 Number

Percent

3,532

79.4%

 

 3.9%

83.3%

2,514

1,867

74.3%

2,226

88.5%

19.2%

 0.0%

 

6,388

 

 

4,548

71.2%

 

26

 0.7%

73.3%

1,688

1,440

85.3%

1,528

90.5%

6.1%

 0.0%

64

 2.1%

6300%

6,072

5,000

82.3%

4,829

79.5%

-3.4%

 7.6%

 

 

8,708

6,380

73.3%

 

 

 

0.0%

8,153

7,533

92.4%

7,533

92.4%

0.0%

 

5,329

4,773

89.6%

 

 

 

6,407

25

 0.4%

25

7,032

202

 2.9%

 

DeSoto

6,246

11

 0.2%

 

Forrest

7,495

22

 0.3%

236

Franklin

1,842

236

12.8%

 

George

580

10

 1.7%

14

Greene

859

43

 5.0%

 

   0.4%      3.1%    2.4%  

 

 

5,338

3,877

72.6%

 

 

 

972.7%

22,431

10,903

48.6%

13,253

59.1%

21.6%

 

3,403

3,731

100%

 

 

 

40.0%

5,276

3,752

71.1%

4,200

79.6%

11.9%

 

3,518

3,543

100%

 

 

 

4,323

135

 3.1%

 

 

5,792

3,884

67.1%

 

 

 

36,138

4,756

13.2%

5,616

15.5%

18.1%

67,836

56,363

83.1%

62,410

92.0%

10.7%

Holmes

8,757

8

 0.1%

20

 0.2%

150%

4,773

3,731

78.2%

4,800

100%

28.7%

Humphreys

5,561

 

 

0

 0.0%

 

3,344

 

 

2,538

75.9%

 

Issaquena

1,081

 

 

5

 0.5%

 

640

 

 

640

100%

 

Jasper

3,675

 

 

10

 0.3%

 

5,327

 

 

4,500

84.5%

 

Jefferson Davis

3,222

76

 2.4%

126

 3.9%

65.8%

3,629

3,229

89.0%

3,236

89.2%

0.2%

Kemper

3,221

30

 0.9%

 

 

 

3,113

2,769

88.9%

 

 

 

Lamar

1,071

0

 0.0%

0

 0.0%

 

6,489

5,042

77.7%

5,752

88.6%

14.1%

Hinds

Lauderdale

 

 

 

Percent Increase (1964 over 1962)

4,449

Covington

 

Eligible to Vote (Age 21 & Over, 1960)

Registered to Vote in June 1962

 

Copiah

Grenada

Percent

Percent Increase (1964 over 1962)

11,924

 

1,700

14.3%

 

27,806

 

 

1,800

6.5%

 

Leake

3,397

116

 3.4%

220

 6.5%

89.7%

6,754

3,796

56.2%

6,000

88.8%

58.1%

Leflore

13,657

268

 2.0%

281

 2.1%

4.9%

10,274

7,168

69.8%

7,348

71.5%

2.5% (Continued)

532

Chapter 23

Table 23.25 (Continued) African Americans

County

Eligible to Vote (Age 21 & Over, 1960)

Whites

Registered to Vote in June 1962

Registered to Vote in January 1964

Number

Number

Percent

Percent

Percent Increase (1964 over 1962)

Eligible to Vote (Age 21 & Over, 1960)

Registered to Vote in June 1962 Number

Percent

Registered to Vote in January 1964 Number

Percent

Percent Increase (1964 over 1962)

Lowndes

8,362

95

 1.1%

99

 1.2%

4.2%

16,460

8,312

50.5%

8,687

52.8%

4.5%

Madison

10,366

121

 1.2%

218

 2.1%

80.2%

5,622

5,458

97.1%

6,256

100%

14.6%

Marion

3,630

363

10.0%

383

10.6%

5.5%

8,997

9,540

100%

10,123

100%

6.1%

Marshall

7,168

57

 0.8%

177

 2.5%

210.5%

4,342

4,162

95.9%

4,229

97.4%

1.6%

Newton

3,018

104

 3.4%

 

 

8,014

5,700

71.1%

 

 

 

Oktibbeha

4,952

 

 

128

 2.6%

 

8,423

 

 

4,413

52.4%

 

Panola

7,250

2

 0.0%

878

12.1%

43800%

7,639

5,309

69.5%

5,922

77.5%

11.5%

Quitman

5,673

456

 8.0%

 

 

 

4,176

2,991

71.6%

 

 

 

Rankin

6,944

94

 1.4%

 

 

 

13,246

12,000

90.6%

 

 

 

Scott

3,752

 

 

7,742

 

 

5,400

69.7%

 

Sunflower

 

 

16

 0.4%

13,524

 

 

185

 1.4%

 

8,785

 

 

7,082

80.6%

 

Tallahatchie

6,483

5

 0.1%

17

 0.3%

240.0%

5,099

4,208

82.5%

4,464

87.5%

6.1%

Tunica

5,822

42

 0.7%

38

 0.7%

-9.5%

2,011

1,436

71.4%

1,407

70.0%

-2.0%

Walthall

2,490

2

 0.1%

4

 0.2%

100%

4,736

4,219

89.1%

4,536

95.8%

7.5%

Warren

10,726

 

2,433

22.7%

 

13,530

 

 

11,654

86.1%

 

Washington

20,619

1,762

 8.5%

 

 

 

19,387

10,838

55.9%

 

 

 

4,120

30

 0.7%

 

 

 

2,340

2,438

100%

 

 

 

8,179

256

 3.1%

 

288,570

10,435

 3.6%

12,975

Wilkinson Yazoo Total Mean

6,710.9

Median

5,561

 

 

7,598

7,130

93.8%

 

 

 

 4.5%

 

24.3%

377,191

226,054

59.9%

211,314

56.0%

-6.5%

306.9

 4.6%

447.4

 6.7%

45.8%

8,771.9

6,648.6

75.8%

7,286.7

83.1%

9.6%

50

 0.9%

64

 1.2%

28.0%

5,792

4,213.5

72.7%

4,800

82.9%

13.9%

Source: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, Voting in Mississippi: A Report of the United Commission on Civil Rights, 1965 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1965), Appendices B and C, pp. 70–71. Calculations by the authors.

put, there were so few registered African American voters in most counties in 1962 that even the small increases that occurred by 1964 in some cases create staggering percentage increases. In Walthall County in 1962, for instance, there were only two individuals registered, so the four individuals registered in 1964 marked a 100% increase. In the reporting Mississippi counties in 1962 the total number of African Americans registered was 10,435 and in 1964 some 12,975 registered, for an increase of 2,540 individuals in this two-year period. The Freedom Summer and the efforts of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) in their voter registration drives, as well as the 1963 Freedom Vote and the creation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party did succeed in placing African Americans on the voting rolls. Although some disappointing gaps in the data persist, this table allows one to see in empirical terms the impact and influence of these different voting rights activism efforts. These empirical findings from the 1965 Report point to two facts about Mississippi. First, the state had clearly suppressed African American voter registration even after the fall of the White Primary and the activism of both private organizations and the federal government. Second, a lot of data is missing. The

reason is that the state attorney general urged the county registrars not to provide the Commission with their voting records. Therefore, the 1962 data came from only 34 of the 82 counties (41.5%) and the 1964 data came from 29 of the 82 counties (35.4%). The majority of the county registrars in the state were simply hiding their records of African American voter registration from the Commission.120 What records do exist show a dismal empirical record of the exercise of the Fifteenth Amendment right in the state in this two-year time period.

Using the Commission on Civil Rights Reports to Analyze the V. O. Key Thesis Professor V. O. Key, Jr., in his 1949 classic Southern Politics, using state- and county-level data, developed the thesis that as the African American population percentage went down in a county or political unit, African American voter registration and political participation went up. This long-standing thesis was considered in the development of the 1959 Report by the CCR, and the voter registration data that the Commission collected and presented allowed a re-testing of this thesis in the later



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 533

1950s. Although the 1959 Report offered an empirical rendering of the thesis in a state-by-state narrative format, it did not offer an empirical portrait of the thesis a decade later because no quantitative data were offered in this volume. Hence, there was no way to measure the differences. Using the 1959 Report, the following tables present 1958 voter registration data for most of the eleven southern states, except for Mississippi which had 1955–1956 data, Texas which had 1956–1958 data, and Louisiana which had data for 1959. These tables will allow the reader to see how well Key’s thesis held in the late 1950s. In each state in the following tables, the counties are classified into six categories: 50%+ African American, 40%+ to 50%, 30%+ to 40%, 20%+ to 30%, 10%+ to 20%, 0.1%+ to 10%, and 0.0% to 0.1%. The tables give, from left to right, the total African American population in that group of counties, the percentage of the state’s African American population who lived in that group of counties, the number of counties falling in that range, and the percentage of eligible African Americans registered to vote.

the one found in the state of Alabama. The portrait here was clearly not a linear one but a fluctuating one that was bimodal in nature. At the very least, the African American voter registration percentage in Arkansas was not as determined by population size as it was in Alabama. Mississippi, meanwhile, had the lowest level of African American voter registration of all of the southern states. The graph shows that the trend generally followed Professor Key’s thesis, insofar as the 50%+ and 40%+ to 50% African American counties had the lowest registration levels, the 30%+ to 40% and 20%+ to 30% had the two middle levels, and the 10%+ to 20% and 0.1%+ to 10% had the two lowest levels. The suppression was simply consistently strong. No other state showed such a small degree of re-enfranchisement.

Florida and Georgia

Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi Often synonymous with the “Deep South,” Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi had three of the four lowest mean percentages of African American voter registration in 1958. Table 23.26 gives the data for these three states, while Figure 23.27 (p. 534) illustrates the trends of the same data. For Alabama, the mean percentage column shows a clear downward trend in African American registration percentages from counties with few African Americans to counties with many. In other words, as the population percentage declined the percentage of African Americans registered went up. Arkansas’s mean percentages provide a mixed portrait quite different from

In the southeast corner of the South, Florida and Georgia both had dramatic differences in African American voter registration in 1958 between counties with many and with few African Americans. Table 23.27 (p. 534) reveals Florida as having had the highest level of African American voter registration (39.5%) among all the southern states. The relationship that Key predicted generally held for Florida in 1958, although the voting percentage plateaus was roughly the same among the 20%+ to 30%, 10%+ to 20%, and 0.1%+ to 10% categories. Georgia had a middle range registration percentage overall (30.3%), while its counties showed the same basic pattern—that the higher the African American population percentage, the lower the African American registration percentage, except for an unexpectedly low number in the 20%+ to 30% range. Figure 23.28 (p. 535) shows that African American voter registration increased with declining share of African American population in the counties of both Florida and Georgia.

Table 23.26  Percentage of African Americans in County Populations of Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi Compared to Percentage of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote, 1958 Alabama

Arkansas

Total Black Population

Percent of Black Population in State

Number of Counties

Percent of Eligible Black Population Registered to Vote

50%+

247,714

25.2%

14

40%+ to 50%

157,564

16.0%

30%+ to 40%

365,100

37.2%

20%+ to 30%

124,770

10%+ to 20%

76,901

0.1%+ to 10%

10,103

0.0% to 0.1%

 

  Percent of County Population

Total

982,152

Mississippi (1955–1956)*

Total Black Population

Percent of Black Population in State

Number of Counties

Percent of Eligible Black Population Registered to Vote

 3.1%

115,963

27.1%

 6

 9

 9.2%

89,267

20.9%

10

18.4%

80,001

18.7%

12.7%

12

23.9%

105,968

7.8%

12

33.9%

17,333

1.0%

10

38.6%

19,439

4.5%

33

0.0%

427,971

100%

75

  100%

67

20.7%

Total Black Population

Percent of Black Population in State

Number of Counties

Percent of Eligible Black Population Registered to Vote

21.7%

559,793

56.5%

31

2.1%

 6

32.5%

219,168

22.1%

16

1.9%

11

26.3%

101,700

10.3%

12

5.6%

24.8%

 9

34.7%

70,495

7.1%

11

4.2%

4.1%

 5

24.9%

37,383

3.8%

10

8.3%

29

23.1%

1,743

0.2%

 2

6.3%

 9

 0.0%

 

 

22.9%

990,282

100%

  82

3.7%

Source: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1959 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959), pp. 559–591 (see Tables 25, 33, and 34). Calculations by the authors. * The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights used data from 1955–1956 for Mississippi as the most recent, reliable, and available for its 1959 report.

534

Chapter 23

Figure 23.27  Percentage of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote by Percentage of African Americans in County Populations of Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi, 1958

Percent of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote

45% 40% 35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0% 50%+

30%+ to 40% 20%+ to 30% Percent African American Population

40%+ to 50%

Alabama

Arkansas

10%+ to 20%

0.1%+ to 10%

Mississippi

Source: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1959 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959), pp. 559–591 (see Tables 25,33 and 25.34). Calculations by the authors.

Table 23.27  Percentage of African Americans in County Populations of Florida and Georgia Compared to Percentage of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote, 1958 Florida

Percent of County Population 50%+

Total Black Population 26,981

Georgia

Number of Counties

Percent of Eligible Black Population Registered to Vote

4.5%

 2

 6.6%

265,455

24.9%

 40

18.8%

Percent of Black Population in State

Total Black Population

Percent of Black Population in State

Number of Counties

Percent of Eligible Black Population Registered to Vote

40%+ to 50%

24,639

4.1%

 5

21.2%

150,423

14.1%

 20

25.0%

30%+ to 40%

128,434

21.2%

14

31.9%

434,366

40.8%

 33

30.5%

20%+ to 30%

245,181

40.5%

23

44.0%

119,807

11.3%

 23

27.1%

10%+ to 20%

174,207

28.8%

17

47.0%

75,289

7.1%

 20

38.8%

0.1%+ to 10%

5,812

1.0%

 6

45.1%

18,660

1.8%

 21

55.4%

100.0%

67

39.5%

1,064,001

0.0% to 0.1% Total

  605,254

 

1

  2 100.0%

159

30.3%

Source: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1959 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959), pp. 559–591 (see Tables 26 and 28). Calculations by the authors.



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 535

Figure 23.28  Percentage of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote by Percentage of African Americans in County Populations of Florida and Georgia, 1958

Percent of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0% 50%+

40%+ to 50%

30%+ to 40% 20%+ to 30% Percent African American Population Florida

10%+ to 20%

0.1%+ to 10%

Georgia

Source: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1959 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959), pp. 559–591 (see Tables 26 and 28). Calculations by the authors.

Louisiana and Texas

North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia

The southwestern-most states in the South, Louisiana and Texas, each have unique histories not entirely defined by belonging to the Confederacy, and they had among the highest mean African American registration percentages in the region. Because Louisiana was the only southern state to keep voter registration by race from day one, it boasts voter registration data for two years, 1956 and 1959, which can be seen in Table 23.28 (p. 536). The Louisiana data for 1956, with a small deviation, followed the pattern and trend found by Key in the 1940s. Its mean percentage in 1956 also tied with the highest found in the South in 1958: 39.5%. But three years later, in 1959, this quasi-linear relationship was broken by a sharp decline in registration, the 0.1%+ to 10% category. At the 10% population size and below, it became increasingly difficult for African Americans in these parishes to register to vote. Overall, the mean registration percentage across the state dropped to 31.6%. Texas, the home of the legal revolt against the White Primary, also had a relatively high African American registration rate of 34.7%, but it does not conform to Professor Key’s thesis at all. Indeed, while the line for Texas in 1958 in Figure 23.29 (p. 536) is relatively flat, the highest percentage of registration is found in the 40%+ to 50% range while the lowest is found in the 0.1%+ to 10% range. Change had come to Texas.

The easternmost portion of the South—the Carolinas and Virginia— includes the first state to secede during the Civil War and the Confederate capital. However, there were wide differences among this block of three states, as shown in Table 23.29 (p. 537). North Carolina, with a much longer tradition of allowing African Americans to register and vote going back to Colonial, Revolutionary, and Antebellum America, had one of the highest mean percentages of registration at 38.6%. Its pattern with a small exception, though, confirmed the thesis of Professor Key. South Carolina, on the other hand, had the second lowest overall mean percentage of African American voter registration (12.9%), higher only than Mississippi. It also had no counties with less than 10% of their population as African American. Generally, this state’s data also ultimately supported the thesis of Key. To be sure the data were not as linear as those of a state like Alabama, but they nonetheless mostly supported the idea that as population percentage declines, the voter registration rate rises. Virginia, despite its proximity to North Carolina and the Border States, had in 1958 the fifth-lowest mean percentage of African American voter registration, comparable to Alabama and Mississippi. The data in this state in 1958 basically conform to the relationship found by Professor Key in the late 1940s: the lowest registration percentage is found in counties with 50%+ African Americans, while the highest are found in counties with 10%+ to 20% and

536

Chapter 23

Table 23.28  Percentage of African Americans in County Populations of Louisiana and Texas Compared to Percentage of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote, 1956, 1958, and 1959 Louisiana

Texas

Number of Counties

Percent of Eligible Black Population Registered to Vote (1956)

Percent of Eligible Black Population Registered to Vote (1959)

Total Black Population

12.9%

12

19.1%

13.7%

40,623

132,061

14.9%

10

37.1%

22.7%

487,591

55.0%

18

30.6%

26.5%

20%+ to 30%

102,346

11.5%

13

50.7%

10%+ to 20%

50,016

5.6%

10

65.2%

0.1%+ to 10%

583

0.1%

 1

60.9%

0.0% to 0.1%

 

Total Black Population

Percent of Black Population in State

50%+

114,236

40%+ to 50% 30%+ to 40%

Percent of County Population

Total

886,833

  100.0%

Number of Counties

Percent of Eligible Black Population Registered to Vote (1958)

4.1%

  4

41.4%

20,653

2.1%

  3

47.7%

88,472

9.0%

 15

41.4%

45.4%

285,406

29.0%

 31

45.7%

53.9%

413,729

42.0%

 31

37.7%

27.2%

135,710

13.8%

 

64

39.5%

31.6%

Percent of Black Population in State

67 984,660

100.0%

153

34.7%

 17

30.1%

254

34.7%

Source: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1959 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959), pp. 559–591 (see Tables 29 and 35). Calculations by the authors.

Figure 23.29  Percentage of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote by African American Share of County Populations, Louisiana (1956 and 1959) and Texas (1958)

Percent of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0% 50%+

40%+ to 50%

30%+ to 40%

20%+ to 30%

10%+ to 20%

0.1%+ to 10%

0.0%+ to 0.1%

Percent African American Population Louisiana 1956

Louisiana 1959

Texas 1958

Source: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1959 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959), pp. 559–591 (see Tables 29 and 35). Calculations by the authors.



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 537

Table 23.29  Percentage of African Americans in County Populations of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia Compared to Percentage of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote, 1958 North Carolina

Percent of County Population

Total Black Population

Percent of Black Population in State

South Carolina

Number of Counties

Percent of Eligible Black Population Registered to Vote

Total Black Population

Percent of Black Population in State

Number of Counties

Virginia Percent of Eligible Black Population Registered to Vote

Total Black Population

Percent of Black Population in State

Number of Counties

Percent of Eligible Black Population Registered to Vote

50%+

201,329

18.7%

 10 

10.6%

344,588

41.8%

21

9.3%

119,762

16.2%

15

18.4%

40%+ to 50%

258,373

23.9%

 20

19.0%

178,578

21.7%

 7

14.4%

129,638

17.6%

18

21.8%

30%+ to 40%

186,864

17.3%

 15

32.5%

162,720

19.8%

 9

16.0%

191,281

25.9%

14

23.0%

20%+ to 30%

249,349

23.1%

 13

33.3%

96,971

11.8%

 6

15.3%

161,201

21.9%

20

22.1%

10%+ to 20%

147,887

13.7%

 16

58.2%

40,765

4.9%

 3

19.7%

78,442

10.6%

20

26.2%

0.1%+ to 10%

35,006

3.2%

 26

58.6%

 

 

 

56,791

7.7%

39

26.0%

 

 

100.0%

100

38.6%

823,622

100.0%

0.0%+ to 0.1% Total

  1,078,808

 

  46

12.9%

10

0.0%

1

0.0%

737,125

100.0%

127

23.4%

Source: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1959 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959), pp. 559–591 (see Tables 30, 31, and 32). Calculations by the authors.

Figure 23.30  Percent of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote by African American Share of County Populations in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, 1958

Percent of Eligible African Americans Registered to Vote

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0% 50%+

40%+ to 50%

30%+ to 40% 20%+ to 30% Percent African American Population North Carolina

South Carolina

10%+ to 20%

0.1%+ to 10%

Virginia

Source: Adapted from United States Commission of Civil Rights, Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1959 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959), pp. 559–591 (see Tables 30, 31, and 32). Calculations by the authors.

538

Chapter 23

0.1%+ to 10%. Figure 23.30 (p. 537) shows that the graph is relatively flat, with little difference from 40%+ to 50% to 20%+ to 30%.

Conclusion about V. O. Key’s Thesis as Tested by 1958 Data Overall, at the state level, the voter registration data that allowed Professor Key in 1949 to articulate this relationship between African American population size and their voter registration did not hold in their pure linear pattern in 1958 except in Alabama, with Florida and Georgia coming very close. Nevertheless, in eight of ten southern states we analyzed, the pattern held generally: the counties with the smallest African American population percentages had the largest registration percentages, and vice versa. In a cluster of four neighboring states—Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia—as well as in Mississippi, counties with 20%+ to 30% African American population performed unexpectedly poorly, although it is unclear if there was a systematic reason or if the result was just noise. And in a number of states (Mississippi, Louisiana in both 1956 and 1959, North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida), the 0.1%+ to 10% category did no better than the 10%+ to 20% category. In two states, the pattern was broken entirely—Arkansas and Texas. These two states on the western edge of the south

showed the clearest evidence of the dramatic surges in voter registration set into motion by the Court’s 1944 decision demolishing the White Primary and also the clearest evidence of the African American voting rights activism unleashed by this legal decision. A decade after the publication of Southern Politics, these two states provided an empirical challenge to Key’s thesis and proof that the situation could be reversed, while the other eight states showed that even when the thesis generally held, there were important fluctuations that it did not predict. Professor Key’s original thesis wrongly treated African American counties as monolithic in political behavior and the African American electorate as retiring and filled with fear and foreboding, which resulted in political apathy.

A Second Test: 1961 County-Level Data A unique feature of the 1961 Report data is that it delineated county-level data. Using its findings in the 1959 Report about the African American counties as a point of departure, the Commission in its 1961 Report sought answers raised by statistics from these counties. Two questions were raised about the statistics generated from the initial focus on the African American counties: “Why does such a large, identifiable segment of the population refrain from registering and voting?” and “What is

Map 23.5  African American Voting Behavior in Selected African American Majority Counties, 1950

Ohio Illinois

Indiana

West Virginia

CHARLES CITY Virginia

Missouri

HERTFORD

Kentucky

Kansas

North Carolina Tennessee

Oklahoma

FAYETTE DE SOTO TATE QUITMAN LEFLORE Alabama CARROLL

Arkansas

ISSAQUENA CLAIBORNE

Mississippi

TENSAS

South Carolina WILLIAMSBURG CALHOUN McCORMICK HANCOCK LIBERTY LEE GADSDEN

Georgia

GREENE MONROE

Texas

0

Louisiana

100 miles

Florida

ST JAMES "Nonvoting" Counties "Voting" Counties

Source: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, Voting: 1961 Commission on Civil Rights Report (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1961), pp. 144,145, and 160.

200

African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 539

Voting Behavior

Table 23.30  Voting Behavior of African Americans in Selected African American Majority Counties, 1950

African Americans Percent of Total Population

Percent of All Registered Eligible Voters

Hancock

72.8%

42.4%

State Georgia

“Voting”

the status of civil rights in a community where a white minority makes (and enforces) the laws for a silent Negro majority.”121 To answer these two questions the Commission decided to focus on 21 African American majority counties: 17 counties where the African American majority did not vote, i.e. less than 3% of the voting age population was registered, and 4 counties where there was substantial voting, i.e. where the range of voter registration ran from a high of 87.6% to a low of 36.5%. Map 23.5 shows where the 17 “nonvoting” and 4 “voting” counties were located in the eight states under analysis. With these selection criteria, the Commission dubbed 17 counties as “nonvoting” and the 4 counties as “voting” and attempted to see what accounted for the differences.122 This was the first time that this unique conceptualization and analysis had been used and sadly one of last times in federal voting statistics and in the voluminous literature on the so-called success of the Voting Rights Acts. Table 23.30 demonstrates that in the four “voting” counties the mean number of registered African Americans stood at 56.2%, with the range moving from a low of 36.5% to a high of 87.6%, whereas in the “nonvoting” counties the mean stood at 1.1% and the range ran from zero to a high of 3.0%. Here, one sees a huge difference between these two categories of counties. Thus, the empirical evidence of these 1950 data indicates that the African American majority counties should not be treated as if they were monolithic or uniform. There were exceptions to his theory even when Professor Key was writing, and as time passed the federal statistics show there were more exceptions due to the rising voting rights activism and the collapse of the White Primary. The Commission in trying to answer its two questions and generating these two categories of counties determined that the differences lay in the political context of these “voting” counties. The Commission found that in three of the “voting” counties (Hancock excluded) African Americans were not “subservient to the land and its major crop, most often cotton with its echoes of the old plantation system. . . . Negroes . . . are employed elsewhere than in agriculture . . . and . . . there is greater economic independence.”123 Overall, the Commission concluded that in “the voting counties . . . the fact that Negroes can make their weight felt, at least to some degree, and can see some fruits of their participation in the franchise, may also be not only the effect of that participation, but a cause of it.”124 The Commission found that past participation reduced the level of political apathy in these four counties and raised the level of participation and the election of African Americans to political office. Hence, “official discrimination and fear of physical or economic retaliation help to explain the very significant difference between the two groups of counties in terms of Negro registration.”125 Therefore, the Commission’s findings suggest that in those African American majority counties where there was economic independence, the absence of a plantation legacy, and African American leadership, there was more success for African American voter registration, voting, and successful political candidacy than in those counties where the political context was not quite so favorable. In addition, these “voting” counties break away from the unidimensional thesis and observation of Professor Key and the stereotype generated about African American voting rights activism.

County Liberty

61.2%

87.6%

Louisiana

St. James

50.0%

58.4%

Virginia

Charles City

81.0%

36.5%

“Voting” Counties Unweighted Mean

66.3%

56.2%

Alabama

Greene

83.0%

 2.6%

Monroe

51.1%

 2.7%

Florida

Gadsden

56.1%

 0.6%

Georgia

Lee

71.3%

 1.1%

Louisiana

Clairborne

51.7%

 0.2%

Tensas

64.8%

 0.0%

Carroll

57.0%

 0.0%

De Soto

67.2%

 0.01%

Issaquena

67.4%

 0.0%

Leflore

68.2%

 1.6%

Quitman

60.7%

 3.0%

Tate

57.6%

 0.0%

North Carolina

Hertford

60.0%

 2.9%

South Carolina

Calhoun

70.8%

 1.7%

McCormick

62.6%

 0.0%

Williamsburg

67.6%

 1.9%

Fayette

70.6%

 

“Nonvoting” Counties Unweighted Mean

64.0%

 1.1%

Overall Unweighted Mean

64.4%

12.2%

Mississippi

“Nonvoting” 



Tennessee

Source: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, Voting, 1961 Commission on Civil Rights Report (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1961), pp. 144–145. Calculations by the authors.

Another unique feature that the Commission highlighted was the impact of two different voter registration systems— permanent and periodic—on shaping African American voter registration prior to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The 1959 Report analyzed these two systems in Louisiana from March 1956, October 1956, May 1958, and November 1958, four different time periods in two different registration years, 1956 and 1958. Table 23.31 (p. 540) dramatically reveals how neither of these registration systems provided more African American registrants than the other. Simply put, both systems in both years saw significant decreases in African American registered voters. In southern states, a determination to curtail and circumscribe the Fifteenth Amendment rights of African Americans produced the same negative impact regardless of

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Table 23.31  African American Voter Registration in Selected Louisiana Parishes, Using Permanent and Periodic Registrations, March 1956–November 1958

1950 Census Populations Selected Parishes

Total

Eligible Black Voters

March 1956 Number

Percent

October 1956 Number

Percent

May 1958 Number

Percent

November 1958 Number

Percent

Increase or Decrease (Nov. 1958 over March 1956) Number

Percent

African American Voter Registrations, Using Permanent Registrations Bienville

19,105

4,478

587

13.1%

35

0.8%

28

 0.6%

28

 0.6%

-559

-95.2%

De Soto

24,398

6,859

762

11.1%

770

11.2%

489

 7.1%

493

 7.2%

-269

-35.3%

East Feliciana

19,133

6,235

1,361

21.8%

1,319

21.2%

1,224

19.6%

450

 7.2%

-911

-66.9%

Ouachita

74,713

14,532

5,782

39.8%

889

6.1%

799

 5.5%

776

 5.3%

-5,006

-86.6%

St. Landry

78,476

15,026

13,050

86.8%

13,060

86.9%

6,440

42.9%

7,181

47.8%

-5,869

-45.0%

Union

19,141

3,162

1,600

50.6%

1,099

34.8%

348

11.0%

368

11.6%

-1,232

-77.0%

Total

234,966

50,292

23,142

46.0%

17,172

34.1%

9,328

18.5%

9,296

18.5%

-13,846

-59.8%

Mean

39,161

8,382

3,857

46.0%

2,862

34.1%

1,555

18.5%

1,549

Median

21,770

6,547.0

1480.5

22.6%

994

15.2%

644

 9.8%

18.5%

-2,307.7

-59.8%

471.5

 7.2%

-1071.5

-72.4%

African American Voter Registrations, Using Periodic Registrations Caldwell

10,293

1,481

450

30.4%

124

8.4%

38

 2.6%

38

 2.6%

-412

-91.6%

Cameron

6,244

302

236

78.1%

184

60.9%

47

15.6%

76

25.2%

-160

-67.8%

Catahoula

11,834

2,186

330

15.1%

349

16.0%

183

 8.4%

187

 8.6%

-143

-43.3%

Concordia

14,398

4,641

587

12.6%

534

11.5%

121

 2.6%

176

 3.8%

-411

-70.0%

East Carroll

16,302

5,330

0

 0.0%

0

0.0%

0

 0.0%

0

 0.0%

0

Franklin

29,376

5,070

650

12.8%

649

12.8%

232

 4.6%

304

 6.0%

-346

-53.2%

Grant

14,263

1,757

864

49.2%

864

49.2%

376

21.4%

525

29.9%

-339

-39.2%

La Salle

12,717

813

742

91.3%

364

44.8%

96

11.8%

157

19.3%

-585

-78.8%

Lincoln

25,782

5,242

1,166

22.2%

1,101

21.0%

441

 8.4%

470

 9.0%

-696

-59.7%

Livingston

20,054

1,496

1,162

77.7%

1,252

83.7%

428

28.6%

564

37.7%

-598

-51.5%

Madison

17,451

6,332

0

 0.0%

0

0.0%

0

 0.0%

0

 0.0%

0

Morehouse

32,038

7,907

935

11.8%

947

12.0%

196

 2.5%

205

 2.6%

-730

-78.1%

Natchitoches

38,144

8,445

2,954

35.0%

2,993

35.4%

998

11.8%

1,396

16.5%

-1,558

-52.7%

Point Coupee

21,841

5,711

1,319

23.1%

1,326

23.2%

574

10.1%

635

11.1%

-684

-51.9%

Red River

12,113

2,917

1,512

51.8%

1,362

46.7%

15

 0.5%

15

 0.5%

-1,497

-99.0%

Richland

26,672

5,427

740

13.6%

742

13.7%

177

 3.3%

179

 3.3%

-561

-75.8%

St. Bernard

11,087

858

802

93.5%

802

93.5%

162

18.9%

340

39.6%

-462

-57.6%

St. Helena

9,013

2,085

1,694

81.2%

1,614

77.4%

851

40.8%

1,059

50.8%

-635

-37.5%

St. Mary

35,848

7,260

2,668

36.7%

2,670

36.8%

2,347

32.3%

2,659

36.6%

-9

  -0.3%

Tensas

13,209

4,592

0

 0.0%

0

0.0%

0

 0.0%

0

 0.0%

0

Vernon

18,974

1,312

891

67.9%

892

68.0%

588

44.8%

640

48.8%

-251

-28.2%

Webster

35,704

6,618

1,769

26.7%

1,773

26.8%

79

 1.2%

80

 1.2%

-1,689

-95.5%

West Baton Rouge

11,738

3,440

1,017

29.6%

1,036

30.1%

577

16.8%

615

17.9%

-402

-39.5%

West Carroll

17,248

1,531

292

19.1%

292

19.1%

69

 4.5%

70

 4.6%

-222

-76.0%

West Feliciana

10,169

4,076

0

 0.0%

0

0.0%

0

 0.0%

0

 0.0%

0

 

 

 

 

Winn

16,119

2,489

1,430

57.5%

1,442

57.9%

581

23.3%

665

26.7%

-765

-53.5%

Total

488,631

99,318

24,210

24.4%

23,312

23.5%

9,176

 9.2%

11,055

11.1%

-13,155

-54.3%

Mean

18,794

3,819.9

931.2

24.4%

896.6

23.5%

352.9

 9.2%

425.2

11.1%

-506.0

-54.3%

Median

16,211

3,758.0

833

22.2%

833

22.2%

180

 4.8%

196

 5.2%

-411.5

-49.4%

African American Voter Registrations, Summing Permanent and Periodic Registrations Total

723,597

149,610

Mean

38,089

7,891.8

Median

19,040

4,616.5

47,352 2,259.7 933.08

31.7% 28.6% 20.2%

40,484 2,027.1 894.31

27.1%

18,504

12.4%

20,351

13.6%

-27,001

-57.0%

25.7%

873.3

11.1%

991.4

12.6%

-1,261.2

-55.8%

19.4%

350.46

 7.6%

396.6

 8.6%

-560

-60.0%

Sources: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1959 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959), pp. 105–106 (Table 16) and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR, 2004), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 541

two different electoral processes. This insight is very clear in the last two columns in the table. And these data do not present a beautiful empirical portrait. In the 1950s in Louisiana, different registration systems had the same negative effect on voter registration of African Americans. Embedded in the federal statistics on African American registration and voting are a host of unique findings, insights, clues, and suggestions about the nature, scope, and significance of not only the drive in the African American community to re-enfranchise themselves but additional insights about the American political process, American political institutions, individual political behavior, and American Democracy that have not previously surfaced in works about the system. Hence, the value of these federal statistics on African American registration and voting to students of these issues cannot be underestimated.

Conclusions on African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 The road for the African American electorate was not smooth from the first legal challenges to the White Primary, through the NAACP success in Smith v. Allwright, to the United States Commission on Civil Rights and the eve of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In the detailed case study of Georgia earlier in this chapter, we discussed the technique used by southern states in this period known as purges, whereby African Americans were allowed to register and then eliminated from the voting rolls before or at the election. The application of this technique in Georgia had come under scholarly scrutiny, and the data and insights from that pioneer study show that the purges not only impacted the number or African American registered voters but influenced the outcome of the gubernatorial race. But Georgia was not the only state using this technique. The 1959 United States Commission on Civil Rights Report found in Louisiana that complaints from the state included “allegations of discrimination . . . in the purging of registration rolls.”126 The Commission Report found that “the Department of Justice . . . experience with a Federal Grand Jury in the western district of Louisiana in 1956–57 . . . not only returned no indictments when evidence was presented that 1,400 qualified Negro voters in 3 parishes were illegally purged, but also chose not to hear the evidence respecting similar purging of approximately 4,700 qualified Negro voters in 3 additional parishes.”127 The 1961 Commission Report found additional purges in Louisiana, this time emanating from the Association of Citizens Councils of Louisiana (ACCL) that was chartered in Louisiana in 1956. The Commission noted: “The citizens councils’ interest in voting was expressed not merely in pamphlets but in affirmative action to remove Negro voters from . . . the registration rolls in Bienville Parish . . . [and] a purge of Negro registrants in Ouachita Parish.”128 Of the purges in Ouachita Parish, the Commission wrote: “the white Citizens Council of Ouachita Parish challenged all 5,782 of the officially registered Negro voters . . . and of the 5,782 voters challenged, all but 595 of the original were stricken from the register roll.”129 This was a loss of 5,187 (a 89.7% decrease) African American registered voters in this single parish. Finally, this 1961 Report found that white candidates for elective office were also personally carrying out purges. The

white candidate for State Representative undertook the purge in Jackson Parish in the January 9, 1960, primary. He told the Commission at its hearing in Louisiana: I will always support segregation in all forms. The Negro has his rights; the white people need to regain theirs. I personally signed over 1,000 challenges in 1956 and removed them from voting rolls. There are now some 500 Negro voters on the rolls. . . . 130 Thus, the two Commission Reports on Louisiana as well as the scholarly study on Georgia currently stand as the two most detailed analyses of the impact and influence of the purge variable in the drop-off in African American voter registration and voting after the initial surge period following the collapse of the White Primary. But this empirical evidence about the role and function of the purge is not normally presented when interpretations are advanced about the decline and drop-off in African American registration and voting after the surge. Seemingly, it is simply ignored and not discussed. The 1963 Commission Report included in its voting registration statistics for the years 1956 and 1962 only the 100 counties in eight southern states where the most blatant and egregious forms of voting discrimination and suppression were taking place. No counties were included from Arkansas, Texas, or Virginia. These federal voting statistics offered reliable data only on the counties that the Commission had selected as violators and not the entire eleven states of the South. Hence, these 100 counties should have become the baseline empirical data (or at the very least part of the equation) for future analyses. Needless to say, they did not. The last Commission Report with federal statistics prior to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act was a 1965 Report that focused solely on the state of Mississippi entitled “Voting in Mississippi.” There were three major tables. The first table in the Report had no title but provided racial voting data for 1867, 1892, 1896, 1899, and 1955. Then the Report gave two Appendixes, B and C, with federal statistics for the years 1962 and 1964 for counties where registration data could be obtained. These data offered county-level data for one of the most recalcitrant states in the region. Overall, the federal statistics emanating from the Commission’s Reports of 1959, 1961, 1963, and 1965 are not as complete and as systematic as one would hope. Only the 1959 and 1961 Reports provide region-wide registration data. The 1961 Report also includes data on three of the five Border States—Delaware, Maryland, and West Virginia, but not Kentucky and Missouri. It is also important in that the 1961 Report provided registration data for years 1958 and 1960 in the African American majority counties. The 1963 Report provided federal statistics for the 100 problem counties in eight states, while the 1965 Report was a single-state analysis of those counties which were cooperative. Hence, by far the best Report then is the 1961 Report, but each of these four Reports offers invaluable and reliable empirical data not to be found elsewhere. Usually, students of this period in African American registration and voting history leave out most of the political context

542

Chapter 23

variables that were significant. There was the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–1957 that launched a new civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) that led the 1957 March on Washington for the Ballot. Next to come in 1957 was the racial incident at Central High School and the response of federal troops in Little Rock, Arkansas. There were the African American college student sit-ins and Freedom Rides in 1960 and 1961, the Freedom Summer in Mississippi, and the 1964 seating challenge at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Activism in the form of marches and demonstrations was everywhere. This caused both the president and Congress to respond along with the Supreme Court. And the surge in voter registration was of a piece with this freedom movement. Once the courts got involved in this freedom struggle, it became necessary to prove racial discrimination, and to do that in voting rights cases one needs voter registration and voting data. The 1959 Commission Report declared that its “study of voting revealed that information on voting turnout in the United States is incomplete. . . . The Commission finds that there is a general deficiency of information pertinent to the phenomenon of nonvoting.”131 Here is how the Commission put it: “There is a general lack of reliable information on voting according to race, color, or national origin, and there is no single repository of the fragmentary information available. The lack of this kind of information presents real difficulties in any undertaking such as this Commission’s.”132 Beyond the fragmentary data on registration and voting statistics, the Commission in terms of official records noted the “unavailability of voting records.” They discovered to their dismay that in the three states with the greatest number of complaints about voter registration—Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi—the elective officials refused to permit the Commission and its staff to inspect, examine, or copy the records. “These obstacles were erected upon existing State laws, or interpretations thereof, by State officials; they were at least partially effective as a deterrent to the Commission’s discharge of its duty.”133 Therefore, the failure of the states to respond to the Commission’s request led to the Commission’s first and second recommendations in its initial 1959 Report. Recommendation one called for the Bureau of the Census to gather in connection with the 1960 Census a “compilation of registration and voting statistics . . . by race, color, and national origin.” Recommendation two called on Congress to require “that all State registration and voting records . . . be public records and . . . be preserved for a period of 5 years.” These 1959 recommendations became Title III in the 1960 Civil Rights Act, and the Census Bureau began the process of data gathering in 1964, which it has continued ever since. Thus were born federal statistics on African American voter registration and voter turnout. Finally, the Commission’s 1965 Report focused on “Voting in Mississippi.” This document became a record of federal statistics on African American registration and voting before the Bureau of the Census got under way. And it was these four volumes of data that set the factual foundations for the constitutionality of the 1965 Voting Rights Acts. This empirical factual

foundation came into being because of the extremely recalcitrant behavior in the southern states. But despite the success of the Commission’s effort to collect and preserve federal statistics on voting, the Commission noted that this power embedded in Title III “is primarily an investigative tool and not, strictly speaking, a voting rights remedy,” one that would remove voter discrimination on the basis of race.134 Therefore, the Commission concluded that its most effective power lay elsewhere than Title III. The Commission stated that “[t]he most significant provision of the 1960 act, however, appears to lie in title VI, providing for Federal voting referees. . . . Title VI is a significant legislative breakthrough, but it is a long way from providing equal access to the ballot. The machinery for appointing a Federal referee is formidable.”135 And as a consequence, the Commission had to await the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act to acquire this power. Its gathering of data continued in various Hearings and Reports until Republican President Reagan reorganized the Commission along ideological lines, and the Commission stopped gathering federal election statistics on voter discrimination. Currently, the task is still performed by the Census Bureau.

Notes    1. Thurgood Marshall, “The Rise and Collapse of the White Primary,” in J. Clay Smith, Jr. (ed.), Supreme Justice: Speeches and Writings: Thurgood Marshall (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), p. 132. This article first appeared in the Journal of Negro Education Vol. 26 (Summer 1957), pp. 249–254.    2. Ibid., p 127.    3. Ibid., p. 131.   4. Ibid.    5. Darlene Clark Hine, Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas, New Edition (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), p. 93.    6. Ibid., pp. 95–103.    7. Abraham Davis and Barbara Luck Graham, The Supreme Court, Race, and Civil Rights (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995), p. 62.   8. Ibid.    9. Ibid., p. 63.   10. Ibid., p. 63.  11. Ibid.   12. Charles Zelden, The Battle for the Black Ballot: Smith v. Allwright and the Defeat of the Texas All-White Primary (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), pp. 81–83.   13. Hine, p. 229.   14. Marshall, p. 131.   15. Davis and Graham, p. 65.   16. V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation, A New Edition (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), pp. 625–626.   17. Ibid., p. 626.   18. Ibid., pp. 626–627.   19. Ibid., p. 628.   20. Zelden, pp. 113, 115–116.   21. Laughlin McDonald, Michael B. Binford, and Ken Johnson, “Georgia” in Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman, eds., Quiet Revolution in the South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 70.   22. Peyton McCrary, Jerome Gray, Edward Still, and Huey L. Perry, “Alabama” in ibid., p. 45.   23. Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Politics (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1972), p. 38.



African American Registration and Voting in the South, 1944–1965 543

  24. Ibid., pp. 38–39.   25. Key, p. 637.  26. Ibid.   27. Ibid., pp. 629–631, 638–641, and 642.   28. Laughlin McDonald, “Federal Oversight of Elections and Partisan Realignment,” in Richard Valelly (ed.), The Voting Rights Act: Securing the Ballot (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006), p. 163.   29. Ibid. For copies of the 1957 and 1960 Acts see Document 19 in Valelly, The Voting Rights Act, pp. 238–243.  30. Ibid.  31. Ibid.  32. Ibid.   33. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Civil Rights ’63: 1963 Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1963), p. 13.   34. “The Negro Voter in the South, September 1957,” in Valelly, p. 236.   35. Steven Lawson. Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 264–265.   36. Key, pp. 513–522.   37. This finding is only significant at the 0.10 level. The standard is 0.05.   38. Tilman Cothran and William Phillips, Jr., “Expansion of Negro Suffrage in Arkansas,” Journal of Negro Education Vol. 26 (Summer 1957), p. 290.  39. Ibid.   40. Alexander Heard and Donald Strong, Southern Primaries and Elections, 1920–1949 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1950), p. 23. For a county-level analysis of that vote see Hanes Walton, Jr., Reelection: William Jefferson Clinton as a Native-Son Presidential Candidate (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 96–99.  41. Walton, Reelection, p. 99.   42. Ibid., p. 100.   43. H. D. Price, The Negro and Southern Politics: A Chapter of Florida History (New York: New York University Press, 1957), 33. For a careful discussion of the legal background and challenges see Charles D. Farris, “The Re-Enfranchisement of Negroes in Florida,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 39 (October 1954), pp. 259–283.   44. Joseph Bernd, “White Supremacy and the Disfranchisement of Blacks in Georgia, 1946,” Georgia Historical Quarterly Vol. 66 (Winter 1982), pp. 492–513. For an early study of other efforts like this one see Joseph Bernd and Lynwood Holland, “Recent Restrictions upon Negro Suffrage: The Case of Georgia,” Journal of Politics Vol. 21 (August 1969), pp. 487–513.   45. Hanes Walton, Jr., “Black Voting Behavior in the Segregation Era, 1944–1964,” in Hanes Walton, Jr. (ed.), Black Politics and Black Political Behavior: A Linkage Analysis (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), pp. 115–134.   46. Joseph Bernd and Lynwood Holland, “Recent Restrictions upon Negro Suffrage: The Case of Georgia,” Journal of Politics, Vol. 21, no. 3 (August 1959), pp. 487–513.   47. Bernd and Holland, 489.  48. Ibid.  49. Ibid.   50. Walton, Jr., “Black Voting Behavior in the Segregation Era, 1944–1964,” p. 121.  51. Ibid.   52. Bernd and Holland, p. 509.   53. See Joseph Bernd, Grass Roots Politics in Georgia (Atlanta, GA: Emory University Research Committee, 1960).   54. Numan Bartley, From Thurmond to Wallace: Political Tendencies in Georgia, 1948–1968 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970).   55. Hanes Walton, Jr., “Black Voting Behavior in the Segregation Era: 1944–1964,” in Hanes Walton, Jr. (ed.), Black Politics and Black Political Behavior: A Linkage Analysis (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), pp. 115–134.

  56. Jack L. Walker, “Negro Voting in Atlanta, 1953–1961,” Phylon Vol. 24 (Number 4), p. 380.   57. Clarence Bacote, “The Negro Voter in Georgia Politics, Today,” in Charles Thompson (ed.), “The Negro Voter in the South,” Journal of Negro Education Vol. 26 (Summer 1957), p. 310.   58. John H. Fenton, “The Negro Voter in the South,” Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Summer 1957), pp. 319–328.   59. John H. Fenton and Kenneth N. Vines, “Negro Registration in Louisiana,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 51, No. 3 (September 1957), pp. 704–713, p. 712.   60. Ibid., p. 713.   61. For a detailed look at how the statewide political machine of Senator Harry Byrd played such a role in the city of Richmond, Virginia, see Gayle Tate and Lewis Randolph, “‘There is no refuge in conservatism’: A Case Study of Black Political Conservatism in Richmond, Virginia,” in Gayle Tate and Lewis Randolph (eds.), Dimensions of Black Conservatism in the United States (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 43–68.   62. Earl Lewis, “The Negro Voter in Mississippi,” Thompson, p. 332.   63. Ibid., p. 348.   64. I. G. Newton, “Expansion of Negro Suffrage in North Carolina,” Journal of Negro Education Vol. 26 (Summer 1957), p. 355.   65. See Virgil Stroud, “Voter Registration in North Carolina,” Journal of Negro Education Vol. 30 (Spring 1961), pp. 153–155; and his “The Negro Voter in the South,” Quarterly Review of Higher Education Among Negroes Vol. 29 (January 1961), pp. 9–39, Table 15.   66. See William Keech, The Impact of Negro Voting: The Role of the Vote in the Quest for Equality (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981) and William Keech and Michael Sistrom, “North Carolina,” in Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman (eds.), Quiet Revolution in the South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 155–190.   67. James T. McCain, “The Negro Voter in South Carolina,” Journal of Negro Education Vol. 26 (Summer 1957), pp. 359, 360.   68. Ibid., p. 360.  69. Ibid.   70. Steven Lawson. Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), Chapter 5: “The Suffrage Crusade in the South: The Early Phase,” pp. 116–139, and Chapter 9: “The Suffrage Crusade in the South: The Kennedy Phase,” pp. 250–287.   71. Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 189–191, 201.   72. Robert Martin, “Negro-White Participation in the A.A.A. Cotton and Tobacco Referenda in North and South Carolina: A Study in Differential Voting and Attitudes in Selected Areas” (Chicago: Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of Chicago, 1947), pp. 260–404.   73. Wim Roefs, “Leading the Civil Rights Vanguard in South Carolina: John McCray and the Lighthouse and Informer, 1939–1954,” in Charles Payne and Adam Green (eds.), Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850–1950 (New York: New York University Press, 2003), pp. 462–491.   74. Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Political Parties: An Historical and Political Analysis (New York: Free Press, 1972), p. 72.   75. Ibid., p. 71. For the pioneering study of this new political innovation see William P. Robinson, Sr., “Democratic Frontiers,” Journal of Human Relations Vol. 2 (Spring 1954), pp. 63–71.  76. Walton, Black Political Parties: An Historical and Political Analysis (New York: Free Press, 1972), p. 71.   77. Ibid., p. 72.   78. Ibid., p. 73.   79. Alexander Heard, A Two-Party South? (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1952), p. 192.   80. Ibid., p. 193.   81. Sullivan, p. 190.  82. Heard, A Two Party South?, p. 159.   83. Sullivan, pp. 190–191.

544

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  84. Orville Vernon Burton, Terence Finnegan, Peyton McCray, and James W. Loewen, “South Carolina,” in Davidson and Grofman, p. 197.   85. Sullivan, pp. 196–197.   86. William Wright, Memphis Politics: A Study in Racial Bloc Voting (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960). See also Harry Holloway, The Politics of the Southern Negro: From Exclusion to Big City Organization (New York: Random House, 1969) for it devotes one chapter (Chapter 4) to Fayette County, and another (Chapter 10) to Memphis; and see William Miller, Mr. Crump of Memphis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964) for an analysis of the political boss and his machine in the city of Memphis.   87. Paul Lewinson, Race, Class, and Party: A History of Negro Suffrage and White Politics in the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932), p. 139.   88. Ibid., pp. 140, 162.   89. Holloway, pp. 125–126.   90. Lewinson, p. 144.   91. Ibid., p. 147.  92. Ibid.   93. Ibid., p. 145.  94. Heard, A Two-Party South?, Chapter 8.   95. Ibid., pp. 200–235. See also Hanes Walton, Jr., Maxie Foster, and Thomas N. Walton, “The Arkansas Negro Democratic Association: Dr. J. M. Robinson’s Leadership of a Partisan Organization,” National Conference of Black Political Scientists Newsletter (Fall 2000), pp. 1–12, 15.   96. See House Executive Document 342, 40th Congress, 2nd Session, pp. 65–119, and Senate Executive Document 53, 40th Congress, 2nd Session, pp. 1–13. Rarely did any of the academics writing about Reconstruction make use of these invaluable documents, with the exception of Richard Hume and Jerry Gough, Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags: The Constitutional Conventions of Radical Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008) that appeared on the eve of the election of the nation’s first African American president, Barack Obama. Most of the books on these subjects employed instead of this empirical election data their hunches, anecdotal reflections, and/or biased interpretations. This invaluable information lay dormant or sidelined until very recently.   97. See United States Commission on Civil Rights, Hearings Before the United States Commission on Civil Rights: Voting (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959) and United States Commission on Civil Rights, Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights: 1959 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959), Part Two: Voting, pp. 19–145, and Appendix: Voting Statistics, pp. 559–591. For more on voter registration in Alabama see Donald Strong, Registration of Voters in Alabama (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1956).   98. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Hearings . . . Voting 1959, p. 28.   99. Ibid., p. 26. 100. Ibid. 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid., pp. 26–27. 103. Ibid., p. 27. 104. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Voting: 1961 Commission on Civil Rights Report Book I (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1961), p. 86.

105. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Report . . . 1959, p. 92. Calculations by the authors. 106. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Voting: 1961 . . . Report, p. 24. 107. Ibid. 108. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Report . . . 1959, p. 77. 109. For a work detailing the history, nature, and scope of the TCA see Charles V. Hamilton, Minority Politics in Black Belt Alabama (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960) and for a detailed study and discussion of the court case see Bernard Taper, Gomillion Versus Lightfoot (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962). 110. Richard Valelly (ed.), The Voting Rights Act: Securing the Ballot (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006), pp. 238, 240. 111. Ibid., p. 240. 112. Ibid., p. 241. 113. For scholarly analyses of how federal judges in the South used these new powers see Donald Strong, Negroes, Ballots, and Judges (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1968) and Charles V. Hamilton, The Bench and the Ballot: Southern Federal Judges and Black Voters (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 114. Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002). 115. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Voting . . . 1961, p. 83. 116. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Civil Rights ’63: 1963 Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1963), p. 14. 117. Ibid., pp. 14–15. 118. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Voting . . . 1961, p. 83. 119. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Civil Rights ’63, pp. 14–15. 120. For a comprehensive and systematic look at the grass roots voting rights activism in the state from a participant observer but also a political science scholar, see Leslie Burl McLemore, “The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party: A Case Study of Grassroots Politics” (Amherst: Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1971). 121. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Voting . . . 1961, p. 143. 122. Ibid., pp. 143–146. 123. Ibid., pp. 151–152. 124. Ibid., p. 169. 125. Ibid., p. 167. 126. United States Commission on Civil Rights , Report . . . 1959, p. 131. 127. Ibid. 128. Ibid., p. 46 and p. 221, footnote 44. 129. Ibid., pp. 221–22. 130. Ibid., p. 222, footnote 44. 131. Ibid., p. 136. 132. Ibid. 133. Ibid., p. 136. 134. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Voting . . . 1961, p. 99. 135. Ibid., p. 77.

CHAPTER 24

Rare African American Registration and Voting Data Episodic Events from the 1920s–1964 The Nature and Types of African American Electoral Events, 1915–1964

547

Table 24.1 Place and Type of Rare Electoral Events in the South and a Border State, 1896–1964

547

Map 24.1 States and Counties of Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1896–1964

548

Table 24.2 African American Statewide Voter Registration Organizations, 1940s–1960s

549

The Socio-Demographic Characteristics of African American Voters: Registrants in Savannah, Georgia: 1915–1916, 1920–1921, and 1924–1926

550

Document 24.1 Original “Oath of Voter” Documents from Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia

551

Document 24.2 Original “Oath of Voter” Documents from Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia

552

Table 24.3 African American Voter Registration by Gender in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1915–1926

553

Table 24.4 Oath of Voter Statistics for African American Voters in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1915–1926

554

Figure 24.1 Percentage Distribution of African American Registered Voters by Year and Gender in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1915–1926

555

Figure 24.2 Number of African American Registered Voters by District in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1920

556

Figure 24.3 Age Distribution of African American Voters Registered in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1915–1926

556

Table 24.5 Oath of Voter Statistics for African American Voters in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1915

557

Table 24.6 Oath of Voter Statistics for African American Voters in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1916

557

Table 24.7 Oath of Voter Statistics for African American Voters in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1920

558

Table 24.8 Oath of Voter Statistics for African American Voters in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1921

559

Table 24.9 Oath of Voter Statistics for African American Voters in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1924

559

Table 24.10 Oath of Voter Statistics for African American Voters in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1925

560

Table 24.11 Oath of Voter Statistics for African American Voters in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1926

561

Table 24.12 African American Voter Registrations and Presidential Election Results in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1916, 1920, and 1924

561

African American Farmers’ Voting Behavior in the Carolinas’ Cotton and Tobacco Referenda, 1938–1946

563

Table 24.13 States and Counties of the Cotton Control Program Referendum, 1938

564

Table 24.14 The States and Counties in which Ralph Bunche Field Investigator George Stoney Conducted Interviews on the 1938 AAA Cotton Referenda

566

Table 24.15 Regional and State Summary of Cotton Referendum Votes, March 12, 1938 567 Table 24.16 Voter Participation in the Cotton and Tobacco Referenda of North Carolina and South Carolina, 1938–1946 568

546

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Table 24.17 Populations of Wilson County, North Carolina, and Darlington County, South Carolina, 1940 568 Table 24.18 Distribution of Farm Operators by Race and Tenure in Wilson County, North Carolina, and Darlington County, South Carolina, 1940

568

Table 24.19 Numbers of Farm Operators and Interviewed Farmers in Wilson County, North Carolina, and Darlington County, South Carolina

569

Table 24.20 Participation in the AAA Referenda by Tenure and Race in Wilson County, North Carolina, and Darlington County, South Carolina

570

The African American Statewide Candidates in Louisiana’s 1952 and 1956 Elections

570

Table 24.21 Tabulation of Interview Responses to the Question of White Farmers’ Feelings About Black Farmers Voting

571

Table 24.22 Tabulation of Responses by White Farmers in Wilson County, North Carolina, and Darlington County, South Carolina

572

Table 24.23 Tabulation of Interview Responses Regarding African American Voting in Wilson County, North Carolina, and Darlington County, South Carolina

573

Table 24.24 Democratic Party Primary Election for Governor of Louisiana, January 15, 1952

575





Table 24.25 Democratic Party Primary Election for Attorney General of Louisiana, January 17, 1956

578

The Mississippi “Freedom Elections” for Governor, Congress, and the Presidency, 1963 and 1964

579

Table 24.26 Comparison of Votes for Parker and Amedee in the Louisiana Democratic Primaries and African American Voter Registrations in 1956

580

Table 24.27 Pioneering African American Congressional Candidates of Mississippi, 1962

582





Map 24.2 Counties of the 1st and 3rd Congressional Districts of Mississippi, 1962

583

Table 24.28 Freedom Vote of Mississippi Cities Cast with State Affidavits in the 1963 Democratic Primary

584



Table 24.29 Democratic Primary Election for Governor of Mississippi and the Freedom Vote, 1963

585

Table 24.30 Democratic Run-Off Election for Governor of Mississippi and the Freedom Vote, 1963

587





Table 24.31 Freedom Vote and Official Results of the 1963 Mississippi Gubernatorial Election, by Racial Majority Counties and Ranked by the Freedom Vote

589

Table 24.32 Comparing the Mississippi Freedom Vote of 1963 with African American Voter Registrations in 1962 and 1964

593

Table 24.33 Official Primary and Unofficial General Election Votes for Freedom Vote Candidates in Mississippi, 1964

595

Table 24.34 Unofficial Results for the Mississippi Freedom Vote in the 1964 Presidential Election

595

Rare Data in a Border State: West Virginia

596

Table 24.35 Counties of West Virginia Ranked by Number of African American Registered Voters, 1870

596

Table 24.36 Number of African American Eligible Voters by County in West Virginia, 1920

597

Table 24.37 Voting for African American Candidates to the West Virginia State Legislature, 1896–1952

599

Map 24.3 Counties of African American Candidates for the West Virginia State Legislature, 1896–1952

600

Summary and Conclusions on Rare African American Registration and Voting Data

601





Notes 542



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 547

A

lthough the United States Commission on Civil Rights began collecting federal voting statistics, including some historical data, with the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they overlooked several episodic events on the local (urban and rural) and state levels that generated registration and voting statistics. These events in the South included the Savannah, Georgia, voter registration, the Carolinas’ cotton and tobacco referenda, the Louisiana statewide elections, the Mississippi “Freedom Elections,” and the Border State of West Virginia. Likewise, the Bureau of the Census, which has collected federal election statistics from 1960 to the present, did not gather or recover data from the historical past. And with their own limited and circumscribed coverage of the African American electorate from Reconstruction to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the two empowered federal agencies never recovered data from the sundry efforts made by the African American electorate to become re-enfranchised from 1908 to the present. Existing data on these episodic events simply lingered in limbo. Moreover, the works of both academics and scholars also missed, omitted, or failed to collect and gather data on these episodic electoral events, especially if they were led and implemented by the African American voting and civil rights activists. At least three books—(1) Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: The Arrival of Negroes in Southern Politics, (2) Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era, and (3) Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969—did not include or analyze several of these African American voting rights activists’ inventive and imaginative political vehicles and institutions. Climbing Jacob’s Ladder focused instead on the Southern Regional Council and its subsequent Voter Education Project (VEP); Days of Hope stressed the work of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare as well as the work of southern liberals like Virginia and Clifford Durr; and Black Ballots examined all of these groups, organizations, and southern liberals. The role and function of African American agency received light coverage at best. The numerous episodic electoral events and personages that scholars ignored or overlooked include the first African American to be nominated as a presidential candidate in 1904; the electoral revolt in 1920; referenda voting in the 1930s and 1940s; the challenges brought

by southern African American independent and protest candidates in the 1940s, such as the 1944 race for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina, the 1952 Louisiana race for governor, and the Louisiana 1956 race for attorney general. And these missing episodic electoral events do not become empirical variables in their empirical portraits of voting rights activists, voter registration, and subsequent voter turnout. Clearly, it is time that they be included. Despite the fact that the Commission on Civil Rights never collected election data on rare and unique African American electoral events, these events had an immense impact on voter mobilization and political participation in the African American community. They also captured national and international attention, including the episodic Freedom Vote and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. This chapter presents and analyzes this rare data for the first time in one location and as part of an overall portrait of the African American electorate.

The Nature and Types of African American Electoral Events, 1915–1964 Table 24.1 lists the seven different episodic electoral events (plus the sustained data from West Virginia), the years in which they occurred, the nature of the election data source used for each of these events, and the states in which they took place. Countylevel events took place in three of the states, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia each had state-level events. Map 24.1 (p. 548) shows the states and counties of these events. While the West Virginia events reach back even into the Era of Disenfranchisement, the time frame of the episodic events spans roughly forty-four years, from the enfranchisement of African American women in the 1920s until the eve of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The first data come from African American voter registration in one urban county, Chatham County, Georgia, which includes the city of Savannah. Using the official Chatham County pollbooks for this year it is possible to determine how many African American males and females registered, where they

Table 24.1  Place and Type of Rare Electoral Events in the South and a Border State, 1896–1964 Region

Year(s)

Place

Type of Electoral Event

Data Source

South

1920s

Chatham County, Georgia

Profile of African American registered voters

Official

1944

Wilson County, North Carolina

Voting behavior of African American farmers in AAA* cotton and tobacco referenda

Official

Darlington County, South Carolina

Voting behavior of African American farmers in AAA* cotton and tobacco referenda

Official

1952

Louisiana

Votes for African American gubernatorial candidate

Official

1956

Louisiana

Votes for African American attorney general candidate

Official

1963

Mississippi

African American “Freedom Vote” in the 1963 primary and general elections

Unofficial

1964

Mississippi

Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party seating challenge at the 1964 Democratic National Convention

Unofficial

Voter registration and African American candidates elected to the state legislature

Official

Border State

1870–1952 West Virginia

Sources: Adapted from various county, state, dissertation, and newspaper documents. * Agriculture Adjustment Act (AAA) of the Department of Agriculture.

548

Chapter 24

Map 24.1  States and Counties of Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1870–1964 yy Iowa Iowa

Nebraska Nebraska

o o

Maryland Maryland

Ohio Ohio

ia

irg

tV

es

0

Kansas Kansas

100 miles

Delaware

in

Indiana Indiana

Illinois Illinois

New New Jersey Jersey

Virginia Virginia

W

200

Missouri Missouri Kentucky Kentucky

WILSON WILSON

North Carolina Carolina North Tennessee Tennessee DARLINGTON DARLINGTON

Oklahoma Oklahoma

South Carolina Carolina South

Arkansas Arkansas Georgia Georgia

o o

Alabama Alabama

Savannah CHATHAM CHATHAM

Texas Texas

Mississippi

0

50

100

miles

Louisiana Florida Florida

Source: Table 24.1.

lived, their occupations, and the months of their registration. These pollbooks were segregated in that registration books for white voters were recorded on white-colored paper while African American registered voters were in books with colored (nonwhite) paper, and the books for whites and African Americans were kept separate from each other. This gives us an accurate, reliable, and official portrait of the socio-demographics of individual African American voters in a southern urban area in this post–female suffrage period. Such registration activity was ultimately an individual act. The second set of data concern African American registration and voting in the rural elections of two southern states, Wilson County, North Carolina, and Darlington County, South Carolina. In a rare display of federal intervention in the South, in 1938 Congress enacted the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), which allowed white and African American farmers to vote in referenda on market quotas, committeemen, and crop levels in cotton and tobacco. African American political scientist Ralph Bunche wrote about these cotton referenda and the voting behavior of African American farmers in Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma.1 While this Bunche research memorandum

is the least known of the four he wrote and the least referenced, it did lead Bunche to suggest the topic to one of his M.A. candidates, Robert Martin, when Bunche served as the founding chairman of the Department of Government at Howard University. Martin used the suggestion as his Ph.D. dissertation topic at the University of Chicago and collected both registration and voting statistics as well as interviews in two cities in the Carolinas.2 Both men’s empirical data are used here to develop a portrait of the African American farmer (rural) electorate in the period before the Smith v. Allwright Supreme Court decision. The third set of extant data pertains to two African American statewide campaigns in Louisiana in the Democratic Party primary nominations for governor in 1952 and in 1956 for attorney general. Although the 1956 race has been covered in a limited manner, the 1952 campaign has been omitted from scholarly efforts. Professor John Fenton did write about the 1956 campaign: “Earl J. Amedee, Negro candidate for Attorney General . . . received little more than 50 per cent of the Negro vote . . . [because] many Negro voters were cross pressured between a race vote and an economic class vote, and many resolved the issue in favor of the class vote.”3 With official parish-level data on both



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 549

men a new empirical portrait can be fashioned, and more about African American voting rights activism and activists can be developed. The empirical data from these two elections will enable the reader to grasp the scope and significance of Louisiana’s vigorous denial and suppression of the African American electorate in the post–Smith v. Allwright period. Louisiana’s efforts became so harsh that the Commission devoted a full hearing to the truly problematic registration and voting situation in the state.4 The fourth set of rare extant data arises from the Freedom Vote in Mississippi in 1963. This innovative and eventually influential and transformative technique in perhaps the most intransigent Southern state has never been analyzed except in approximate reported total vote figures.5 The state never collected and published this unofficial election data and nor have the sundry theses, dissertations, articles, and books. And it was quite difficult to find this Freedom Vote data at the county level, but Professor John Dittmer observed in his pioneering and brilliant study on Mississippi Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994) that “[t]he freedom vote totals and the breakdown by county are found in the Mississippi Free Press, November 16, 1963.”6 This county-level election data opened a window for an empirical portrait of this unofficial vote in Mississippi. The Freedom Vote led to the fifth source of rare extant data: the Freedom Summer of 1964 and the eventual formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and its two seating challenges, the Democratic National Convention challenge to the seating of the regular Democratic Party in Mississippi and the congressional seating challenge to the Mississippi white Democratic congressmen in the House of Representatives. This latter event occurred in January 1965, and the House Committee on Administration released a report on the outcome of that challenge. At this writing, the best known and most covered of the two challenges is the former, the 1964 Democratic National Convention challenge, which is the focus of our empirical analysis here. These two challenges led to both state and national changes and reforms in the Democratic Party as well as a few modifications in the Republican Party. Finally, we uncovered a wealth of rare data from West Virginia that represent not simply a contained episode but span 1896 to 1952, as well as voting age population data from the 1920 election in that state. We show the geographic base of the African American electorate in this Border State and its success as recorded by the Negro Welfare and Statistical Bureau, created by the governor of West Virginia, which persisted from 1920 to 1952. And there are the 1870 voter registration data. Overall, these rare and unique African American electoral events cover nearly five decades in the nation’s political life. These experiences helped to transform both the group and national consciousness, to reform the American political process, to energize African American voting rights activism, and ultimately led to the re-enfranchisement of the African American electorate with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The statewide African American voter registration organizations that came into existence in the aftermath of the 1944 Court decision in many instances revitalized and reorganized

themselves in the 1950s and 1960s. These organizations continued the voting rights activism that had been in existence since the National Convention Movement of the 1830s, the National Equal Rights League of the 1860s, the National Afro-American Council of the 1890s, and the National Negro Suffrage League of the 1900s.7 Table 24.2 provides a listing of the different statewide organizations (1940s–1960s) that fought to increase African American voter registration. And where no truly functional statewide organization emerged, the voting rights activism struggle was continued via the efforts of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other civil rights organizations such as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Thus, despite the fact that no national African American suffrage organization survived very long, these statewide and local grass-roots groups and organizations continued the struggle. In these seemingly disconnected organizations is an underlying truth not readily apparent simply by analyzing them individually. First, with the absence of a national suffrage organization and any federal agency or institution concerned with the suffrage problem of the African American electorate, the suffrage movement in the African American community of necessity was carried on by state and local grass-roots suffrage organizations. Such efforts ranged from the state-centered efforts in Texas against the White Primary to the highly publicized but much ignored Freedom Vote in Mississippi. Linking these efforts and events can generate a comprehensive and systematic portrait of both the African American voting rights activists and the voting rights movement in America. Table 24.2  African American Statewide Voter Registration Organizations, 1940s–1960s State

Organization

Alabama

Alabama State Coordinating Committee for Registration National Democratic Party of Alabama

Arkansas

Arkansas Negro Association

Florida

Florida Voters League

Georgia

Georgia Negro Voters League Georgia Association of Citizens’ Democratic Clubs

Louisiana

Louisiana State Democratic Organization Louisiana State Committee on Civic Affairs

Mississippi

Mississippi Progressive Voters League Mississippi Regional Council of Negro Leadership Council of Federated Organizations Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party

South Carolina

Palmetto Voters Association South Carolina Progressive Democratic Party

Texas

Progressive Voters League Texas Club of Democratic Voters

Virginia

Virginia Voters League

Sources: Adapted from Florence B. Irving, “The Future of the Negro Voter in the South,” Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 26, No. 3, The Negro Voter in the South (Summer 1957), pp. 390–399; and Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Political Parties (New York: Free Press, 1972).

550

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The Socio-Demographic Characteristics of African American Voters: Registrants in Savannah, Georgia: 1915–1916, 1920–1921, and 1924–1926 African American voting rights activism existed at the local grass-roots level in the urban South long before the 1944 Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Allwright. Professor Paul Lewinson wrote about the African American electorate in the Savannah, Georgia, mayoral election in 1923: The most striking type of Negro participation in city politics . . . was in “reform” campaigns. Savannah, Georgia saw one such in 1923. The incumbent mayor, Stewart, ran in the Democratic primary against one Rogers, who represented a general reform—and especially a dry—group in the city. Although polling 4893 votes in the primary, Rogers was defeated—fraudulently, he claimed. . . . He handed on the mantle, however, to one Seabrooke, and a fierce campaign was waged to organize the Negro vote, which was thought to be about 2200. The Negro voters, in the hands of their ministers and of their womenfolk, who were in turn influenced by their white mistresses, were nearly solid behind the Seabrooke reform ticket.8 The campaign of incumbent Mayor Stewart “played the race card” by charging that Seabrooke was a “nigger-lover” and placed “crude posters . . . on Negro churches and lodge buildings, bearing the device, under a skull and crossbones: ‘This is a white man’s fight.’”9 Professor Lewinson continued: This called for action on the part of the Seabrooke organization. A force of vigilantes was organized to protect Negro voters at the polls, and a squadron of automobiles—some of white ownership—was gotten together to bring reform Negroes out to vote. The reformers won, by 6049 to 3952. As their first candidate, Rogers, had polled only 4893 at the primaries, all of which must have been white votes, they had increased their strength by 1156 by the time of the regular election. It is generally believed in Savannah that a great many of these votes were cast by Negroes.10 Later in his 1932 book Professor Lewinson wrote that besides voting in municipal elections, African Americans voted in referenda and in the 1928 presidential election. He described their partisanship: “There was a Negro Democratic organization in . . . Savannah” as well as in other southern urban areas where African Americans voted.11 Finally, he concluded his observations and analysis of the African American electorate in Savannah by implying that there were still some Black-and-Tan Republican voters, but they were few in number.12 And his Table III in Appendix II included the fact that between 1920 and 1930 Chatham County had some 900 Negro voters.13 Determining the number of African Americans who were registered in the 1920s required acquiring and analyzing the

pollbooks for Chatham County. Said books existed in the county’s storage facility and had not been organized nor publicized. Professor of History Gaye Hewitt of the Savannah State College faculty discovered these “Oath of Voters” books in the 1980s while analyzing turn-of-the-century county records. She shared this discovery with one of the co-authors of this study, Walton, who was then at Savannah State. Professor Hewitt eventually received permission from the county to undertake the arduous task of making photographic copies of these pollbooks (formally entitled “Oath of Voters: 1920–1921 A–L or K–Z Colored First— Eighth Districts”) from the county storage facility. These official local racial voter registration data were indeed a great surprise and unique historical find for a southern city. They are comparable to northern data used by Gerald Gamm in his study of the electoral coalition for President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the city of Boston, which included voter registration data for African American men and women by their independence and partisanship status every other year from 1920 through 1940.14 While Gamm’s Boston data cover more time, they are at the group level while the Savannah data are at the individual level. Subsequent comparable finds include historian Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore’s discovery of African American female voter registration in North Carolina during the years leading up to and including 192015 and Professor Paul Ortiz’s unearthing of a list of African Americans who voted in 1919 and 1920 in six Florida counties. 16 Unlike the Gilmore data, the Ortiz data are much more detailed and specific in their coverage. Both of their data analyses focus primarily though not exclusively on African American female voters, and the registration and voter data are presented in narrative rather than tabular form. Documents 24.1 and 24.2 (pp. 551–552) provide exact copies of original voter registration pages in these “Oath of Voters” books found in the Chatham County storage facility for three different year spans: 1915–1916, 1920–1921, and 1924–1926. These pages show that the Chatham County Voter Registration Office kept the same registration forms for the decade that are under analysis here. Only the year listing at the top of the page in the 1915–1916 form is discontinued in the later documents. The invaluable socio-economic-status data collected on each African American permitted to register to vote stayed the same over this decade time period. Each form collected every individual’s (1) name, (2) gender, (3) street address, (4) voting district, (5) age, (6) occupation, (7) the date on which the individual registered, and (8) a signature. Five of the eight variables can be quantified so that a unique and rare data-portrait of these early African American registrants can be made.

Missing Item: The Poll Tax One item missing from this “Oath of Voter” form is the amount of the poll tax paid by the individual. In 1908, Georgia added a disenfranchisement amendment to its state constitution, which established a literacy test and altered the tax-paying requirement. Since 1789 Georgia had required that voters must have paid all taxes levied in the year preceding the election. The 1908 amendment altered the tax provision to require that voters must pay all taxes for which they had been liable since the adoption of the state



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 551

Document 24.1  Original “Oath of Voter” Documents from Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia

Sources: Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1920–1921: Colored (Chatham County, Georgia: Chatham County, 1920–1921), 5 volumes; and Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1924–1926: Colored (Chatham County, Georgia: Chatham County, 1924–1926), 1 volume.

constitution of 1877, and this included the poll tax.17 As Savannah and Chatham County expert Professor Ralph Bunche wrote: In Chatham County, Georgia, no one is up “on digest” for poll taxes unless he has other taxes to pay; then the poll tax is added to the regular tax bill. Otherwise, the poll tax is issued on a separate receipt and never appears on the digest. Actually, therefore, it is not assessed. No one is charged the poll tax unless he owns property or is registered or both. . . . The tax collector of the county claims that all male property owners, Negro as well as white, are required to pay the tax.18 Professor Bunche observed that the Georgia poll tax could run from $1.00 to $47.00 but that there were exceptions in various counties like Chatham:

The poll tax is charged cumulatively from the time when a man becomes twenty-one or from the time a woman first registers. It has never been the custom in Chatham County to charge either feoffment costs or the extra penalty fee for late payment. . . . Poll taxes are cumulative in Savannah. If a man desired to register at age fifty, he would have to pay up poll taxes from age twenty-one. Women, however, are in a more favorable position, as they need not pay poll taxes until they first register. Following their registration, however, they are required to pay. Thus, there is no prior tax qualification for women.19 V. O. Key, Jr., attributed the extremely low turnout rates in Georgia as well as Alabama to this cumulative provision.20 Knowing the varying amounts of these cumulative taxes that each

552

Chapter 24

Document 24.2  Original “Oath of Voter” Documents from Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia

Sources: Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1915–1916: Colored (Chatham County, Georgia: Chatham County, 1915–1916), 1 volume; and Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1920–1921: Colored (Chatham County, Georgia: Chatham County, 1920–1921), 5 volumes.

African American had to pay would have highly enriched the quantitative portrait, but we do have some aggregate poll tax data from this county in this period. One uniform state requirement was that the poll “tax must be paid at a date which is determined by and is usually well in advance of the election . . . in Georgia, six months before the election.”21 Table 24.3 shows the number of African Americans who paid the poll tax, by gender, by the month for selected years from 1915 to 1926. In 1920, a relatively huge number and percentage of women paid the poll tax. The newly enfranchised women of 1920 not only greatly outnumbered the men who paid their poll taxes that year, but outnumbered the combined total of men across the seven years listed. Yet they were almost completely suppressed in 1921 and 1924, outnumbered by the paltry numbers of African American men paying the tax. Women’s

payments again outnumbered men in 1926 but still represented only one-thirtieth (3.3%) of the 1920 levels. Men rebounded in 1921, 1924, and 1925, but women would again become dominant in the registrations of 1926. Moreover, overall, even though men had been registered longer than women, women vastly outnumbered men in paying their poll taxes in Savannah and Chatham County, Georgia, whatever the amount of the poll tax was at the time. And this allowed them to vote in the 1923 mayoral election when they certainly must have been a factor in turning the tide.

A Portrait of Savannah’s African American Electorate, 1915–1926 The data set constructed from the “Oath of Voters” official pollbooks is presented in Table 24.4 (p. 554) in the five variables



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 553

Table 24.3  African American Voter Registration by Gender in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1915–1926 Gender Women Percent

Poll Tax Total

Month

Year

Number

Percent

November

1915

0

0.0%

  2

 0.1%

2

0.1%

January

1916

0

0.0%

  3

 0.2%

3

0.2%

March

1916

0

0.0%

 45

 2.4%

45

2.4%

April

1916

0

0.0%

 30

 1.6%

30

1.6%

May

1916

0

0.0%

 16

 0.8%

16

0.8%

0

0.0%

 94

 4.9%

94

4.9%

1

0.1%

  0

 0.0%

1

0.1%

Totals (1916)

Number

Men

Number

Percent

February

1920

August

1920

13

0.7%

  0

 0.0%

13

0.7%

September

1920

893

46.9%

  0

 0.0%

893

46.9%

October

1920

627

32.9%

 18

 0.9%

645

33.9%

November

1920

54

2.8%

 13

 0.7%

67

3.5%

1,588

83.4%

 31

 1.6%

1,619

85.0%

January

1921

1

0.1%

  1

 0.1%

2

0.1%

February

1921

1

0.1%

  2

 0.1%

3

0.2%

March

1921

2

0.1%

  2

 0.1%

4

0.2%

4

0.2%

  5

 0.3%

9

0.5%

Totals (1920)

Totals (1921) October

1924

0

0.0%

  3

 0.2%

3

0.2%

November

1924

1

0.1%

  6

 0.3%

7

0.4%

December

1924

0

0.0%

  5

 0.3%

5

0.3%

1

0.1%

 14

 0.7%

15

0.8%

Totals (1924) January

1925

0

0.0%

  1

 0.1%

1

0.1%

February

1925

3

0.2%

  8

 0.4%

11

0.6%

March

1925

6

0.3%

 12

 0.6%

18

0.9%

April

1925

4

0.2%

  1

 0.1%

5

0.3%

May

1925

0

0.0%

  1

 0.1%

1

0.1%

June

1925

1

0.1%

  0

 0.0%

1

0.1%

August

1925

0

0.0%

  1

 0.1%

1

0.1%

September

1925

0

0.0%

  1

 0.1%

1

0.1%

October

1925

2

0.1%

  3

 0.2%

5

0.3%

November

1925

2

0.1%

  6

 0.3%

8

0.4%

December

1925

17

0.9%

 18

 0.9%

35

1.8%

Totals (1925)

35

1.8%

 52

 2.7%

87

4.6%

January

1926

3

0.2%

  0

 0.0%

3

0.2%

February

1926

11

0.6%

  7

 0.4%

18

0.9%

March

1926

7

0.4%

  3

 0.2%

10

0.5%

April

1926

6

0.3%

  2

 0.1%

8

0.4%

May

1926

24

1.3%

 13

 0.7%

37

1.9%

June

1926

1

0.1%

  0

 0.0%

1

0.1%

December

1926

0.1%

1

0.1%

  1

 0.1%

2

Totals (1926)

53

2.8%

 26

 1.4%

79

4.1%

Grand Totals (1915–1926)

1,681

88.2%

224

11.8%

1,905

100%

Sources: Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1915–1916: Colored (Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1915–1916), 1 volume; Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1920–1921: Colored (Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1920–1921), 5 volumes; and Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1924–1926: Colored (Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1924–1926), 1 volume.

that allow frequency counts. Note that this table and the tables and figures that follow treat this data set as representative of the entire span of years 1915–1926, even though it lacks data for 1917–1919 and 1922–1923. The first column includes the gender statistics that tell us the numbers of African American women and men registered to vote, yielding a total of 1,938 records in the years covered by the oath books. Next, the age statistics show the range of registrant ages ran from 20 years to one individual at 95 years. (This man, a farmer named Henry Miller, was born in 1829, the year Democrat Andrew Jackson first took office, and he registered in 1924, the year after Republican Calvin Coolidge took office. In his lifetime, Miller had already witnessed twentythree presidential elections from 1832 to 1920.) And when the registrants are grouped, one sees immediately not only some who were probably former slaves—those over the age of 60 years—but also some who were born a decade or two later during Reconstruction, and the rest who were born during the Era of Disenfranchisement (1888–1908). Yet the youngest people—those in their 20s and 30s—registered in the greatest numbers, a cohort that current political science scholarship shows tend not to register, participate in elections, or vote in large numbers. The people portrayed by these data defy this current trend. The third statistical variable is the district identifier designating one of several different political units and residential parts of the city and county. There were nine districts, and the majority of the African American voter registrants came from the first and fourth districts of the city and county. African Americans resided in the nine districts represented in the table, with the range of numbers running from a low of 2 to a high of 953. (Because of instances of missing data the totals for the registrant ages, age groups, and districts do not match or reach the total of the gender statistics, the only variable without missing data.) Occupation is the fourth variable of the data, with nearly 130 different categories, ranging from several with only one practi­tioner to a high of 426 for the category “housewife.” The other great surprise here is the small number of religious leaders included in the categories of “minister” and “preacher,” for a total of six individuals in this occupational group. Clearly, this is far from the highly touted proportion of the community that would be supposed in modern times to provide leadership in the community. Professor Bunche, who surveyed African American voting and politics in Savannah and Chatham County in the 1930s, writes: Many Negroes in the Southern states, especially the younger ones, charge Negro preachers with a good deal of the responsibility for the lack of Negro political activity. The Negro preacher, it is declared, either counsels his flock to stay out of politics altogether or else to take a totally indifferent attitude toward the problem. There are individual exceptions, of course, and some black ministers have played active and influential parts in Negro voting campaigns.22 And by contrast, the group “teacher”—people who were then much maligned and supposedly fearful of political activism because of her or his vulnerable job—is the third largest group of the occupations indicated. To find empirical evidence of this

554

Chapter 24

Table 24.4  Oath of Voter Statistics for African American Voters in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1915–1926 Gender Statistics Gender

Count

Men

Age Statistics Top 20 Ages

Count

District Statistics

Age Group

Count

District

Count

Occupation Statistics Most Frequent Occupations (Counts >=4)

Date of Oath Statistics Month

Year

Housewife

426

November

1915

2

54

Laundry

168

January

1916

3

Teacher

160

March

1916

45

Dress maker

153

April

1916

30

120

May

1916

16

238

38

98

20s

633

 1

953

Women

1,700

30

97

30s

727

 2

Total

1,938

Count

Count

39

89

40s

401

 3

51

Mean

969.0

27

83

50s

116

 4

691

Median

969.0

40

82

60s

33

 5

92

Domestic

28

79

70s

5

 6

26

House worker

94

Total (1916)

21

77

80s

1

 7

16

Cook

82

February

1920

1

29

75

90s

1

 8

46

House keeper

64

August

1920

13

32

72

Total

1,917

2

Hair dresser

61

September

1920

893

35

72

Mean

239.6

Total

1,931

Seamstress

48

October

1920

645

24

68

Median

74.5

Mean

214.6

Nurse

39

November

1920

33

67

Median

51

Store keeper

36

Total (1920)

25

64

Clerk

30

January

1921

2

22

63

Maid

30

February

1921

3

34

63

Laborer

29

March

1921

4

26

62

None

26

Total (1921)

36

60

Porter

22

October

1924

3

23

58

Postal worker

22

November

1924

7

37

57

Farmer

21

December

1924

42

55

Carpenter

18

Total (1924)

31

52

Bookkeeper

14

January

1925

1

45

49

Huckster

13

February

1925

11

48

40

Servant

13

41

33

44

33

43

29

49

29

46

27

50

27

47

24

52

15

51

14

53

13

54

10

59

10

55

9

56

   

                                                           

16

94

67 1,619

9

5 15

March

1925

18

Factory worker

9

April

1925

5

Physician

9

May

1925

1

Driver

8

June

1925

1

Waitress

8

August

1925

1

Janitor

7

September

1925

1

Tailor

7

October

1925

5

Barber

6

November

1925

8

Insurance

6

December

1925

35

Brick layer

5

Total (1925)

Preacher

5

January

1926

3

Printer

5

February

1926

18

Waiter

5

March

1926

10

Cigar maker

4

April

1926

8

9

Fireman

4

May

1926

37

60

8

Insurance agent

4

June

1926

1

57

6

Real estate

4

December

1926

62

5

Shoe maker

4

Total (1926)

63

5

Stenographer

4

Total

20

4

Student

4

Mean

1,892

Subtotal

1,797

Subtotal Other

25

Total

1,917

Mean Age Median Age

Other Occupations Total

34.9

Mean

27

Median

117 1,914 15.1

87

2 79 1,905 56.0

Median

5

     

4

Sources: Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1915–1916: Colored (Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1915–1916), 1 volume; Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1920–1921: Colored (Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1920–1921), 5 volumes; and Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1924–1926: Colored (Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1924–1926), 1 volume.



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 555

hesitancy, the Commission on Civil Rights secured the services of two leading white political scientists at the University of North Carolina, Donald Matthews and James Prothro, to conduct a major survey of African American teachers in Mississippi. And embedded in the Commission’s 1965 Report Voting in Mississippi are numerous tables that reveal the hesitancy of African American teachers in the state to engage in voter registration and voting.23 Finally, there are the dates of registration, here given by month and year. The greatest period of registration took place in 1920 in the months of September and October, just in time for the registrants to participate in the presidential election in November. The year 1920 was the year that enfranchisement of African American women voters began due to the Nineteenth Amendment. For African American males their registration in 1916 also took place in the early months, in time to participate in the presidential election of that year. But these two initial patterns are not followed for the presidential election of 1924. At least 35 and possibly as many as 43 African Americans—close to half of that year’s total—registered after the 1924 election was over. Hence, two of the three presidential elections—1916 and 1920 but not 1924—seemingly helped to mobilize voter registration in the Savannah and Chatham County community. Figure 24.1 allows comparison and contrast of the years covered by the “Oath of Voters” books. The figure shows that 1920 was the year with the highest percentage of African American female voting rights activism and that 1916 was the year in which the highest activism by males occurred in Savannah and

Chatham County, Georgia. These data are consistent with our other findings in the chapter on African American women’s enfranchisement—that this population was swiftly enfranchised in 1920 along with some of the males who were enfranchised with the Fifteenth Amendment, but the disfranchising white establishment quickly moved to keep their registration percentages low in the subsequent years. Figure 24.2 (p. 556) focuses on 1920 and reveals the number of registrants in each of the nine city and county districts. The First and Fourth districts by far had the largest numbers of registered African American voters in Savannah and the county of Chatham. These numbers indicate that African Americans were segregated primarily into two districts of the city and that they had smaller population enclaves in the rest of the city and county. About half of the African American registered voters lived in the First District and roughly another third of the other voters were in the Fourth District. Combined, these two districts held over 85% of the county’s registered African American voters. The African American electorate in the city and county were heavily concentrated and possibly could have elected an African American candidate to the city council, had it not been for the state-enforced prohibitions against African Americans seeking political office. Finally, in Figure 24.3 (p. 556) one sees the African American registrations in 1920 in terms of age groups. It is dominated by young people. In fact, registrants in their 20s and 30s account for 70.9% of all of the African Americans registered to vote in the city and the county. And if one adds the 40s age group, the

Figure 24.1  Percentage Distribution of African American Registered Voters by Year and Gender in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1915–1926

Percent of African American Voters Registered, 1915–1926

90%

83.4%

80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

4.9% 0.0% 0.1% 1915

0.0% 1916

1.6% 1920

0.2% 0.3%

0.1% 0.7%

1921 Year

1924

Women

1.8% 2.7%

2.8% 1.4%

1925

1926

Men

Sources: Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1915–1916: Colored (Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1915–1916), 1 volume; Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1920–1921: Colored (Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1920–1921), 5 volumes; and Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1924–1926: Colored (Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1924–1926), 1 volume.

556

Chapter 24

Figure 24.2  Number of African American Registered Voters by District in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1920 900

Number of Registered African American Voters

800

811

700 600

564

500 400 300 200 83

100 0

1

4

47

5

43

2

36

3 District

8

17

12

0

6

7

16

Source: Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1920–1921: Colored (Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1920–1921), 5 volumes.

Figure 24.3  Age Distribution of African American Voters Registered in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1915–1926 40%

Percent of Registered African American Voters

35%

37.9% 33.0%

30% 25% 20.9% 20% 15% 10% 6.1% 5% 1.7% 0%

20–29

30–39

40–49

50–59

60–69

0.3%

0.1%

0.1%

70–79

80–89

90–99

Age Group Sources: Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1915–1916: Colored (Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1915–1916), 1 volume; Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1920–1921: Colored (Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1920–1921), 5 volumes; and Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1924–1926: Colored (Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1924–1926), 1 volume.



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 557

first three age groups amount to 91.8%. Hence, older registrants account for only 8.2%. In our modern times, it is just the opposite of what it was then. Young people stepped forward and, in this particular case, young women stepped forward to advance the civic consciousness and political power in their community. Such a reality should be readily understood as a result of the system that allowed African American women the opportunity to register and participate more so than did their male counterparts. Disaggregating the five summary variables into each year of the three time periods one can see in more detail the specifics for a particular year in the city and county. Each table shows the number of African Americans who registered, their ages, political districts, occupations, and the dates of registration. In Table 24.5

for 1915 only two males registered, one a physician and the other a porter, one young and the other one middle-aged, and both of them registering in November 1915. Table 24.6 offers summary data for the presidential election year 1916. There was a substantial increase in African American male voter registration in Savannah and Chatham County. The ages of these males ranged from 21 to 79. The age groups reveal the preponderance of young African American males that stepped up to register to vote in this southern urban city in 1916. It is a breakthrough insight. Following this information we see that the residential pattern remained quite stable with the First and Fourth Districts having the largest number of African American registered voters. And in this year, laborer and porter

Table 24.5  Oath of Voter Statistics for African American Voters in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1915 Gender Statistics Gender

Age Statistics

District Statistics

Occupation Statistics

Count

Age

Count

Age Group

Count

District

Count

Occupation

Men

2

38

1

30s

1

1

1

Physician

Women

0

57

1

50s

1

4

1

Total

2

Total

2

Total

2

Total

2

Date of Oath Statistics

Count

Month

Year

Count

1

November

1915

2

Porter

1

Total (1915)

Total

2

2

Source: Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1915–1916: Colored (Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1915–1916), 1 volume.

Table 24.6  Oath of Voter Statistics for African American Voters in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1916 Age Statistics

Gender Statistics

District Statistics

Occupation Statistics

Count

Most Freq. Ages

Count

Age Group

Count

District

Count

Men

94

21

10

20s

32

1

43

Women

 0

39

6

30s

27

3

2

Total

94

43

6

40s

22

4

37

Postal worker

22

5

50s

5

5

2

Driver

28

5

60s

6

6

2

31

5

70s

2

7

42

4

Total

94

8

45

4

Mean

15.7

23

3

Median

14

26

3

Median

29

3

32

3

33

3

38

3

Subtotal

63

Other

31

Total

94

Gender

       

Mean Median  

2.6 2

                       

Most Frequent Occupations (Count >= 2)

Date of Oath Statistics Count

Month

Year

Laborer

13

January

1916

3

Porter

11

March

1916

45

8

April

1916

30

5

May

1916

16

Barber

4

Total (1916)

94

1

Carpenter

4

Mean

23.5

7

Physician

4

Median

23

Total

94

Fireman

3

 

Mean

13.4

Lawyer

3

2

Printer

3

Shoe maker

3

Brick layer

2

Janitor

2

None

2

   

Tailor

2

Subtotal

69

Other Occupations

24

Total

93

Mean

2.4

Median

1

Source: Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1915–1916: Colored (Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1915–1916), 1 volume.

 

Count

558

Chapter 24

are the largest occupation categories while only one preacher/ minister registered to vote. All of these registrations took place in the early spring of the year to satisfy the six-month period of paying the poll tax before the November 1916 presidential election. Shifting from this presidential election year to 1920, Table 24.7 shows that this is the year that women got the vote, as evidenced by the number of African American women registrants. Few African American men tried to register, at least compared to the huge number of women that did. But also compared to 1916, male registration was down. The range of ages went from 20 years old to 78 years old. Unlike earlier years when young males seemed to out-register middle-aged and older individuals, this newly accorded suffrage right brought out huge numbers of African American women of nearly every age up through age 53 where the count dropped to single digits and rebounded again only at age 59 and then fell back again to the single digits. However, when the age data are seen in groupings, those registrants who fell into the ranges from 20 to 29 and from 30 to 39 included 1,171 individuals or 73.2% of all registrants. The other age groups accounted for 26.8%. Thus, the younger people once again registered in this county in large numbers. In the occupation area the largest number fell into the housewife group, followed by those working in laundries, then those who worked as dress makers. The domestics and teachers had equal numbers. Hence, when the right to vote arrived for African American women in Savannah and Chatham County, Georgia, women from all walks of life wanted to go to the polls. In this instance they applied to do so in the fall, in September and October with a few more in November, to be registered in time for the November 1920 presidential election.

Coming after the peak year of African American voter registration in 1920, the official pollbook for 1921 reveals that only nine African Americans registered—five men and four women—with ages ranging from 21 to 58, the median being 43 (see Table 24.8). There were three individuals from District One, five from District Four, and one from District Six. In terms of occupation groups, two were school teachers, one was a driver, one was a housewife, another a postal worker, another a seamstress, and one a railroad switchman. Two were not specified. And in terms of when they registered, two did so in January, three in February, and four in March. Hence, the 1920 presidential election did not motivate a large number of African Americans to go out the next year and register to vote. At the time of the next presidential election in 1924, Table 24.9 reveals that very few African Americans applied to vote and that males out-registered females, 14 to 1. The ages of registrants ranged from the 20s to the 90s, and this time the age group category indicates an almost perfect balance between the young voters (8) and the older ones (7). Moreover, although there are fewer occupational categories, one sees a single preacher/minister. And this seems to suggest a trend, namely that very few African American ministers in this city and county were taking either an activist or leadership role in registering to vote. Finally, in this presidential election year in which a greater number of males were mobilized to register than females, registration took place in late fall, and nearly half of these new voter aspirants registered after the presidential election had already occurred. This was a break with what had occurred in previous presidential election years. In the very next year, 1925, as shown in Table 24.10 (p. 560), more males and females registered to vote. Once again, more

Table 24.7  Oath of Voter Statistics for African American Voters in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1920 Gender Statistics

Age Statistics

District Statistics

Gender

Count

Most Freq. Ages

Men

  31

30

87

20s

545

1

811

Women

1,588

38

85

30s

626

2

Total

1,619

27

77

40s

320

3

Mean

 810

39

76

50s

84

4

Median

 810

40

71

60s

22

5

28

69

70s

2

29

67

Total

32

67

Mean

24

65

Median

34

57

Subtotal

721

   

Count

Other

878

Total

1,599

Mean Median

31.4 22

Age Group

Count

Count

Most Frequent Occupations (Count>=44)

Date of Oath Statistics Count

Month

Year

Count

Housewife

420

February

1920

1

47

Laundry

164

August

1920

13

43

Dress maker

140

September

1920

893

564

Domestic

119

October

1920

645

83

Teacher

119

November

1920

67

6

17

House worker

91

Total (1920)

1,599

7

12

Cook

75

Mean

267

8

36

House keeper

63

Median

Hair dresser

59

 

Seamstress

44

202              

District

Occupation Statistics

Total

1,613

Mean

201.6

Median

45    

Subtotal Other Occupations Total Mean Median

Source: Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1920–1921: Colored (Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1920–1921), 5 volumes.

1,294 305 1,599 18.6 1

1,619 324 67    



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 559 Table 24.8  Oath of Voter Statistics for African American Voters in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1921 Gender Statistics

Age Statistics

District Statistics

Count

Most Freq. Ages

Count

Age Group

Count

District

Count

Men

5

21

1

20s

1

1

3

Women

4

30

1

30s

2

2

 

Total

9

35

1

40s

4

3

 

Mean

4.5

40

1

50s

2

4

5

Median

4.5

43

1

60s

5

 

44

1

70s

6

1

49

1

Total

9

7

56

1

Mean

2.3

58

1

Median

Subtotal Other Total

9

Mean

1.0

Gender

   

Median

Date of Oath Statistics

Count

Month

Year

Count

Teacher

2

January

1921

2

None

2

February

1921

3

Driver

1

March

1921

4

Housewife

1

Total (1921)

9

Postal Worker

1

Mean

3.0

Seamstress

1

Median

3

 

Switchman

1

 

Subtotal

9

Total

9

Other Occupations

0

9

Mean

3.0

Total

9

0

Median

3

Mean

1.3

Median

1

2

8

Occupation Statistics Most Frequent Occupations

1

Source: Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1920–1921: Colored (Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1920–1921), 5 volumes.

Table 24.9  Oath of Voter Statistics for African American Voters in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1924 Gender Statistics Gender Men Women Total

Age Statistics

District Statistics

Occupation Statistics Occupation

Date of Oath Statistics

Count

Age

Count

Age Group

Count

District

Count

Count

14

22

1

20s

 4

1

 6

Brick layer

1

1

23

1

30s

 4

4

 7

Carpenter

15

25

1

40s

 5

8

 2

Month

Year

Count

October

1924

 3

1

November

1924

 7

Cook

1

December

1924

 5

Mean

7.5

28

1

50s

 1

Total

15

Farmer

1

Total (1924)

15

Median

7.5

30

1

90s

 1

Mean

 5

House keeper

1

Mean

 5

35

1

Total

15

Median

 6

Laborer

1

Median

 5

38

1

Mean

 3

Merchant

1

39

1

Median

 4

Messenger

1

41

2

Porter

3

42

1

Postal worker

1

43

1

Preacher

1

45

1

Railroad helper

1

56

1

Total

95

1

Mean

1.2

Total

15

Median

1

Mean Median

1.1 1

Source: Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1924–1926: Colored (Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1924–1926), 1 volume.

14

560

Chapter 24

Table 24.10  Oath of Voter Statistics for African American Voters in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1925 Gender Statistics

Age Statistics

District Statistics

Occupation Statistics

Count

Most Freq. Ages

Count

Age Group

Count

District

Count

Men

52

21

9

20s

18

1

37

Women

35

35

6

30s

35

2

3

Total

87

33

5

40s

19

3

5

Mean

43.5

39

5

50s

12

4

36

Median

43.5

29

4

60s

2

5

36

4

80s

1

6

40

4

Total

87

Total

45

4

Mean

14.5

Mean

50

4

Median

Median

4

Dress maker

54

4

Driver

Subtotal

49

Janitor

Other

38

Total

87

Gender

Mean Median

Most Frequent Occupations (Count>=2)

Date of Oath Statistics Count

Month

Year

14

January

1925

1

Postal worker

8

February

1925

11

Teacher

8

March

1925

18

Porter

4

April

1925

5

3

Insurance

3

May

1925

1

3

Preacher

3

June

1925

1

87

Bookkeeper

2

August

1925

1

14.5

Cook

2

September

1925

1

2

October

1925

5

2

November

1925

8

2

December

1925

35

Laborer

2

Total (1925)

Maid

2

Mean 

7.9

2.6

Real estate

2

Median

5

2

Seamstress

2

 

Sub-carrier

2

15

None

Waiter

2

Subtotal

62

Other Occupations

24

Total

86

Mean

2.1

Median

1

Count

87

Source: Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1924–1926: Colored (Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1924–1926), 1 volume.

males registered than females. The age range ran from 21 years to 82 years. Again, the younger people, in their 20s and 30s, out-registered the older people, but a few old people continued to trickle to the polls, with several of them probably having been former slaves. These registrants came from all kinds of occupations with the largest groups listing postal workers and teachers. The category of preacher/minister this time climbed up to a total of three individuals. Such a small rise suggests that a few ministers were slowly taking leadership and activist roles. Lastly, new registrants placed their names on the Oath of Voter books throughout 1925, but over half of them (48) registered later, in October through December. This is unusual when compared to other off-year periods. The last year in our dataset is 1926, shown in Table 24.11. African American females again out-registered their male counterparts, accounting for just more than double the number of males. Again, the younger generation and not the older generation registered in the greatest numbers, out of a range from 21 years of age to 72. The trickle of former slaves to the registration office continued. The residential district statistics continued to show the preponderance of registrations in the First and Fourth Districts. Teachers dominated in the occupational category followed by dress makers. Yet only one more preacher or minister

signed up to vote. They were outnumbered by laborers, laundry workers, and several other occupations. And finally the time of registrations returned to its old pattern. In this mid-term election period, voter registrations took place primarily in the early months of the year and only two in December.

Presidential Elections in 1916, 1920, and 1924 Before we close on this rare and unique urban registration data, it is possible to see the number of African American male and female registrants who could have voted in the three presidential elections. Table 24.12 allows this observation and offers the voter registration data by gender for the African American electorate. These tabular data tell us how many African Americans were of voting age in Chatham County by gender and how many actually registered. We do not know if the vast gap between those eligible to register and those who actually registered was due to the cost of the poll tax or to simple fear or apathy or to some combination of these systemic factors. But whatever the reason or reasons, with the arrival of enfranchisement of women, 10% of the eligible African American women stepped up and registered. And the potential vote from the African American electorate if



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 561 Table 24.11  Oath of Voter Statistics for African American Voters in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia, 1926 Gender Statistics

Age Statistics

District Statistics

Count

Most Freq. Ages

Count

Age Group

Count

District

Count

Men

26

35

7

20s

21

 1

33

Women

53

21

5

30s

22

 2

3

Total

79

46

5

40s

23

 3

1

Mean

39.5

42

4

50s

9

 4

Median

39.5

48

4

60s

3

24

3

70s

1

25

3

Total

27

3

Mean

36

3

Median

37

3

38

3

Mean

40

3

Median

53

3

Subtotal Other Total

Gender

Mean Median

Occupation Statistics Most Frequent Occupations (Count>=2)

Date of Oath Statistics Count

Month

Year

Count

26

January

1926

3

None

9

February

1926

18

Dress maker

6

March

1926

10

31

Laborer

5

April

1926

8

 5

4

Laundry

4

May

1926

37

 6

3

Carpenter

2

June

1926

1

79

 7

1

Farmer

2

December

1926

13.2

 8

1

Nurse

2

Total (1926)

79

16

2

Physician

2

Mean

11.3

Total

79

Porter

2

Median

8.8

Postal worker

2

3

Subtotal

62

Other Occupations

17

49

Total

79

30

Mean

2.8

79

Median

1

15

Teacher

2

8

2.3 2

Source: Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1924–1926: Colored (Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1924–1926), 1 volume.

Table 24.12  African American Voter Registrations and Presidential Election Results in Chatham County (Savannah), Georgia 1916, 1920, and 1924 African American Voters Presidential Candidates

Eligible

a

Registeredc

b

Year

Party

Candidate

Votes

Men

1916

Democratic

Woodrow Wilson

3,795

12,929

0

96

0

Republican

Charles E. Hughes

370

Socialist

Allan L. Benson

24

Prohibition

James F. Hanly

615 15,571

15,829

31

1,588

15,571

15,829

 9

1

Total Votes 1920

James M. Cox

Republican

Warren G. Harding

Women

4,241 997 96

Total Votes

5,334

Democratic

John W. Davis

6,162

Republican

Calvin Coolidge

1,798

Progressive

Robert M. La Follette, Sr.

Total Votes

Men

4,804

Democratic Other

1924

Women

855 8,815

Sources: Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File], http://dx.doi. org:10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved November 2006. a

Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, Michigan: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. b

Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1915–1916: Colored (Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1915–1916), 1 volume; Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1920–1921: Colored (Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1920–1921), 5 volumes; and Chatham County, Oath of Voters: 1924–1926: Colored (Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1924–1926), 1 volume. c

562

Chapter 24

they continued their past voting pattern for the Republican Party could have made 1920 a competitive election in this Georgia county. This was not true for the other two elections.

The Opening and Closing of Voter Rolls in Savannah to African Americans This rare data find in Savannah, Chatham County, Georgia, provides for the first time not only a detailed individual-level portrait of African American male and female voters in six years—1915, 1916, 1920, 1924, 1925, and 1926. It also reveals that in one urban city and county of the South the white political leadership: (1) permitted a few African American males to register, (2) saw African American women voters surge to the polls when they first acquired this right, (3) permitted female voting rights activism to mobilize a few more males to register that year, (4) allowed new voter registrants to come primarily from the younger generation with a trickle of former slaves and elderly people, (5) allowed registration from all of the city and county districts including the enclaves of African American concentrations in the First and Fourth Districts, (6) allowed African American teachers to make a political statement with their large number of registrations, and (7) allowed registration efforts in the spring but sometimes in fall of the year, less than six months before elections, generally held in November. Part of the reason for this continual voter registration was due to the presence of the first state college for African Americans, Savannah State College (founded in 1891) and of an African American bank in the city. Also, a crusading African American newspaper, The Savannah Tribune, and its editor maintained a drumbeat encouraging African Americans to register to vote. Thus, the key voter mobilizer here was the newspaper and its editor and not so much traditional religious leaders, though some did have a limited presence. But Chatham County in the 1920s was not just urban. In 1920, sixteen farmers registered, and there was at least one farmer registered in every year. This was a small number compared to the urban voters, but we learn that there were at least

some rural voters as well in this re-enfranchisement movement in the South. The reason that whites permitted even this small amount of African American voting rights activism to succeed is, as Professor Bunche and his field assistants found: “The political machine in Savannah is very real and has been active close to twenty-five years, though new men have come in to perpetuate it. . . . The political machine in Savannah and Chatham County politics is a combined city-county control group headed by John J. Bowen, city attorney and member of the firm of Abraham, Bowen and Atkinson.”24 Bunche described this southern political machine operation: “The Savannah Machine is supported by city and county employees, benefactors through purchases, and their families. This is estimated as a standing figure of about 2,000 votes. The machine always holds both primaries and general elections for city and county offices, whether or not there is opposition.”25 He concluded: “The machine seems to be handled with intelligence and with a thorough knowledge and understanding of the temper of the city.”26 But all of this came to an end in 1936 when the county got a new board of registrars. Bunche wrote: “In Chatham County, Georgia, the board of registrars cannot put names on the voting list. It can only take them off and this has been its chief function. When the present board of registrars took over in 1936, it found that the Chatham County ‘ring’ [political machine] had the voting list padded with hundreds of names of dead people and people who had moved away, for whom it was continuing to pay poll taxes and whose names were voted. This was all handled by the tax collector, who is the key man in the machine.”27 Thus, in this type of political context and atmosphere, “there has been no difficulty in registration for Negroes in Savannah, Georgia.”28 When this new board of registrars took over in 1936, everything had changed. The new challenges faced by African American voters at that time led to the organization of a Young Men Civic Club in November 1938. This club wrote a letter to the NAACP on March 18, 1939, to ask for its assistance against these obstacles:

My dear Sirs: The Young Men Civic Club of this city was organized for the sole purpose of getting more Negroes to become registered voters in this city. There were only 600 registered Negroes out of 45,000 at the time of the club’s inception; This was four months ago. Since we have been in operation, we have added some 400 individuals to the list of voters, but now we seemed to have reached a Stone Wall. Little or no questions were asked of our applicants in the beginning, as we carried them up for registration. But after we had succeeded in placing the first 100 names on the book we found that the book would be closed quite often. Then as we moved in and out about the closed books and were successful in placing 200 more names, the requirement for registration of the applicants became more difficult. They started doubting the age of applicants, and the registrar demanded such forms as birth certificates, insurance policies, and the old Family Bible. (Birth certificates have only been issued to Negroes about 17 years ago.) However we worked through these difficulties until we crossed the 300 mark. Since this could not impede our anxiety, they decided to pull another trick. This was found in the Georgia Codes of Laws, which says who shall vote? As we neared the 400 mark, the situation became more difficult. The qualifications became more exact, they wanted only birth certificates. However we found quite a few with certificates, but these in turn were not accepted, because they could not answer such questions as Who was the president of the U.S. in 1812? at the spur of the moment. Many questions referred back to the nineteenth century. . . . Please we ask sincerely, to write to us your experiences along these lines. . . . How did you combat such opposition. . . ? We feel . . . you have a remedy for the above complaints. Yours truly, The Young Men Civic Club.29



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 563

All of these challenges happened even though white candidates had previously organized African American voters in this city, had become used to them voting, and had provided protection so that they could vote. Simply put, earlier administrations in the city and county were permissive while the new one was seeking to restrain, if not eliminate, African American voter registration and voting in the city and county. Thus, the success of African American voting rights activism rested upon the whims, goodwill, or permissiveness of southern white administrators, state laws and the federal constitution notwithstanding.

African American Farmers’ Voting Behavior in the Carolinas’ Cotton and Tobacco Referenda, 1938–1946 Discussions of voting rights activism between the Era of Disenfranchisement (1888–1908) and the Civil Rights Act of 1965 often focus on urban activism. But now we turn to a little known and little analyzed instance of African American voting rights activism in the rural South, where the Department of Agriculture joined to assist and ensure African American voter participation. This federal intervention on behalf of African American rural voters took place throughout the South, but we have data from both of the Carolinas during the 1930s and 1940s. It is a little known forerunner to the voting rights bills of the 1950s and 1960s. The political intervention of the Department of Agriculture in 1938 came just before the creation of a civil rights unit within the Justice Department. In November 1938, Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace led his department to implement voting in the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) cotton and tobacco referenda. In the Justice Department, Attorney General Frank Murphy created a Civil Liberties Unit (soon renamed Civil Rights Section) on February 3, 1939.30 Thus, two men, Murphy and Wallace, in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s cabinet had the federal government intervene in southern politics. Such intervention contradicts and challenges the current historical orthodoxy that President Roosevelt sidestepped all civil rights issues simply because he needed the support of powerful and important southern congressional committee chairmen. Although these efforts from the bureaucracy and Roosevelt’s own executive order creating the Fair Employment Practice Commission resulted neither in legislation to abolish the poll tax nor in laws against lynching, it showed African American civil rights and voting rights activists that the federal government could be motivated to intervene against racial discrimination. Political scientist Ralph Bunche found from his field investigations that “there is no evidence of any direct political attack on the cotton control program because of the equal Negro participation in the referenda.”31 Even Senator “Cotton” Ed Smith, a staunch White Supremacist and racial demagogue who used race-baiting tactics to win elections, never opposed these AAA cotton and tobacco referenda. While this program first appeared in the scholarly literature in the work of Gunnar Myrdal, two African American political scientists, Bunche and his student Robert E. Martin, provided more thorough data and insightful analysis. The empirical portraits of the rural voting behavior of the African

American farmers emanating from the works of Bunche and Martin provided an unparalleled look at a federal voting rights program in the South before the Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Allwright in 1944. This electoral activity predated the reenfranchisement movement unleashed by that decision and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964. These are indeed rare electoral data and insights.

Gunnar Mydral’s Theories about the Referenda Professor Gunnar Myrdal wrote in his 1944 An American Dilemma about the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) and the African American farmers who voted in the program’s referenda: “There is one other type of election that is important to the Negro in the South. The Agricultural Adjustment Act requires that cotton [and tobacco] owner-operators, tenants, and sharecroppers vote to indicate whether they want the application of the crop restriction program. Negroes have participated in unrestricted numbers in these annual elections (since 1938) and have voted in perhaps even greater proportion than whites.”32 Professor Myrdal continues: “They vote at the same polling places as whites and at the same time. There is little physical opposition from the whites because the majority favors crop control, and they know that Negroes will vote in favor of it; they are told that if Negroes are prevented from voting, the election will be illegal. They also know that any irregularity would be observed by federal administrators and vigorously prosecuted in federal courts.”33 Hence, if white farmers actively suppressed the voting rights of the African American farmers, there were consequences and costs, so rural white farmers did not interfere with this referenda voting by African Americans. Professor Myrdal concluded: Although the unrestricted voting by Negroes in the A.A.A. referenda does not give them any political power, it, nevertheless, may be of great significance. It accustoms whites to the presence of Negroes at polling places and perhaps makes them think beyond the myth of black domination and consider the real issues involved in Negro voting. It provides the South with an example of elections based on significant issues and with less corruption than usual. It also gives the Negro a chance to vote and perhaps to discover the nature of the political process.34 But even after making these observations, Professor Myrdal discussed the African American voter in the South, especially in rural areas, stating that “it is true that the Negro is politically apathetic.” He added: [A] large proportion of poor Southern Negroes feel that “politics is white folks’ business.” This attitude is even spread by some “accommodating” Southern Negro leaders. Some of the political apathy is peculiar to the Negroes because the means of disfranchising them have been extraordinary: a tradition of nonvoting is built up that is difficult to break down even in free elections

564

Chapter 24

in the North. Too, there is a psychopathological form of apathy found in some Negroes: they have been so frightened by some experiences when attempting to vote that they swear never to try again.35 But such generalization—without attitudinal evidence that uses academic-size samples—risks essentially blaming the victim of southern politics for his and her own victimization. While acknowledging the southern systemic forces that legally and illegally inhibited voter registration and active participation, Myrdal failed to include empirical variables to account for them and to distinguish their effects from alleged “apathy.”

Ralph Bunche’s Memoranda on the Cotton Referenda A better source than Professor Myrdal for genuine empirical data concerning these referenda and the effects of federal intervention is his African American associate, political scientist Ralph Bunche. Bunche prepared a memoranda on the cotton referenda

entitled “Negro Voting in AAA Cotton Referenda” that Myrdal received but ignored. Bunche listed the number of votes cast in the cotton referenda in thirty-seven counties in nine states (including Oklahoma), as well as the percentage of African American illiteracy in these counties in 1938 when the program started. Table 24.13 is based on the Bunche tabular data but is augmented with additional data that show the number of African American and white farmers in those counties. In many cases, the total number of referenda votes is substantially higher than the number of white voters, demonstrating that a large number of African Americans must have voted, just as the historical record suggests. In order to find out about the actual voting behavior of the African American cotton farmers, Professor Bunche dispatched his white field investigator, George Stoney, to sixteen selected counties in four of the nine states noted in the Table 24.13. Stoney conducted interviews with key AAA officials and African American and white farmers in eight Alabama counties, five Georgia

Table 24.13  States and Counties of the Cotton Control Program Referendum, 1938

Alabama

State

Farmersb African American

Racial Majoritya

County

Number

Black

Dallas

6,146

88.7%

 

Wilcox

3,716

83.0%

White

Baldwin

437

 

Blount

106 10,405

Arkansas

State Totals

Florida

African American Illiteracy Percentagea

783

11.3%

3,801

33.7%

763

17.0%

3,431

36.2%

16.2%

2,261

83.8%

534

27.4%

 2.2%

4,606

97.8%

2,649

21.4%

55.3%

8,413

44.7%

10,415

26.2%

Jefferson

5,925

77.6%

1,712

22.4%

3,634

15.5%

 

St Francis

4,574

71.9%

1,784

28.1%

3,785

13.9%

White

Baxter

0

 0.0%

1,512

100.0%

143

 

Boone

0

 0.0%

2,085

100.0%

22

10,499

59.7%

7,093

40.3%

7,584

16.1%

 

Black

Leon

1,311

78.6%

356

21.4%

625

27.0%

White    

Jackson

1,156

32.8%

2,371

67.2%

949

34.8%

Suwannee

482

25.9%

1,382

74.1%

267

26.5%

Washington

188

15.6%

1,016

84.4%

163

22.7%

3,137

38.0%

5,125

62.0%

2,004

18.8%

State Totals

Georgia

1938 Referendum Votesb

Number

Black

State Totals

Black

Sumter

1,369

62.8%

812

37.2%

860

25.7%

 

Taliaferro

674

64.9%

365

35.1%

512

16.3%

White

Appling

170

12.2%

1,224

87.8%

482

19.6%

 

Brantley

50

6.5%

718

93.5%

17

18.9%

2,263

42.0%

3,119

58.0%

1,871

19.9%

3,162

70.0%

1,352

30.0%

3,077

18.1%

178

13.9%

1,107

86.1%

346

20.0%

5,552

79.7%

1,410

20.3%

2,889

17.2%

54

 4.5%

1,142

95.5%

6

30.0%

8,946

64.1%

5,011

35.9%

6,318

23.3%

State Totals

Louisiana

White Percent of County

Percent of County

Black

De Soto

White

Allen

 

Caddo

 

Lafourche

State Totals



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 565

Mississippi

State

Farmersb African American County

Number

Percent of County

Number

Percent of County

1938 Referendum Votesb

African American Illiteracy Percentagea

Black

Bolivar

10,309

84.0%

1,959

16.0%

8,179

27.1%

 

Leflore

6,942

88.7%

888

11.3%

3,231

24.1%

White

Forrest

229

19.3%

956

80.7%

392

17.7%

 

Harrison

84

 7.1%

1,095

92.9%

25

14.7%

17,564

78.2%

4,898

21.8%

11,827

23.2%

Bryan

249

 6.0%

3,888

94.0%

884

14.6%

Le Flore

288

38.0%

469

62.0%

692

15.3%

Okfuskee

1,181

33.6%

2,339

66.4%

927

11.0%

Okmulgee

1,330

37.6%

2,204

62.4%

796

 7.9%

3,048

25.5%

8,900

74.5%

3,299

 9.3%

Oklahoma

State Totals White      

South Carolina

State Totals Black

Beaufort

2,048

88.3%

271

11.7%

1,575

32.4%

 

Berkeley

2,233

71.8%

875

28.2%

1,206

27.2%

White

Greenville

1,739

23.0%

5,810

77.0%

2,421

18.6%

 

Horry

1,162

18.3%

5,177

81.7%

528

24.8%

State Totals

Texas

White

Racial Majoritya

7,182

37.2%

12,133

62.8%

5,730

26.9%

Black

Harrison

4,757

70.5%

1,992

29.5%

3,893

13.7%

 

Marion

1,027

64.3%

571

35.7%

924

15.5%

White

Limestone

933

20.4%

3,630

79.6%

1,786

11.8%

 

Live Oak

2

 0.2%

1,148

99.8%

330

 9.1%

 

Lubbock

25

 0.9%

2,629

99.1%

1,158

 7.3%

6,744

40.3%

9,970

59.7%

8,091

13.4%

State Totals

Sources: Adapted from (a) Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, Michigan: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009; (b) Ralph J. Bunche and Dewey W. Grantham, The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 508. Calculations by the authors.

counties, one Mississippi county, and two South Carolina counties. The interviews overlap with only two counties listed in Table 24.13, Bolivar County, Mississippi, and Beaufort County, South Carolina. Table 24.14 (p. 566) lists the counties where Stoney conducted interviews and adds the number of African American and white farmers in those counties. Stoney’s methodology of interviewing both blacks and whites was superior, for example, to that used by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights a quarter century later when it interviewed only African American school teachers regarding voting.36 The consensus from the interviews in the eight counties in Alabama is that African American farmers had great interest in these elections and high participation. In Lee (and Etowah) counties, Stoney found that “Negroes take a greater interest in the cotton elections than do whites. Over 60 percent of the Negro contract signers vote, while less than 40 percent of the whites do.”37 Most importantly, Stoney found that there were no objections from whites to the voting of the African American farmers. In Macon County, Alabama, the white county agent told Stoney that “[t]here has been no trouble thus far about Negro [tenant farmers’] participation in these cotton elections. This is probably because the landlords know that they must have a majority

vote to continue the program which they favor.”38 In Greene County, Georgia, the white county agent told Stoney: “There has been no objection to Negro voting in these elections since the little opposition at the beginning.”39 In Burke County, Georgia, the agent said to Stoney that “[t]here has been no protest made about this Negro participation” and in the other counties beyond the beginning once the county agents told white farmers that the vote outcome would not be legal if the African American farmers could not participate.40 Hence, in Georgia “Negroes vote freely and in large numbers.” Professor Bunche further reported that “in Bolivar County, Mississippi, there are about 11,000 producers, of whom some 9,000 are Negroes and 2,000 are white. In that county 9,000 votes were cast in the November 1938 referendum, and only some 20 of these votes were in the negative.”41 And finally, the interviews from the two counties in South Carolina were in agreement with those in the other states. Stoney found out that throughout the South almost none of the African Americans farmers were ever elected county committeemen even in African American majority counties or in meetings where the African American farmers were the majority of the voters. Both the white county agents and white farmers vigorously objected to them having any formal leadership positions.

566

Chapter 24

Table 24.14  The States and Counties in which Ralph Bunche Field Investigator George Stoney Conducted Interviews on the 1938 AAA Cotton Referenda Farmersa Percent of State

Percent of County

Cotton Control Program Countyc

385

3.1%

10.8%

 

80.1%

960

7.7%

19.9%

 

67.1%

978

7.9%

32.9%

 

83.8%

600

4.8%

16.2%

 

81.7%

1,189

9.5%

18.3%

 

34.3%

1,282

10.3%

65.7%

 

3.8%

17.5%

3,442

27.6%

82.5%

 

0.8%

 4.0%

3,621

29.1%

96.0%

 

African American State Alabama                

Racial Majoritya

Counties of the Bunche Interviewsb

Black        

White    

Total Number

Number

Percent of State

Percent of County

Greene

3,553

3,168

16.7%

89.2%

Hale

4,833

3,873

20.4%

Lee

2,970

1,992

10.5%

Macon

3,714

3,114

16.4%

Marengo

6,503

5,314

27.9%

Bibb

1,950

668

3.5%

Coffee

4,174

732

Etowah

3,773

152

State Totals Georgia          

Black       White

White Number

31,470

19,013

100%

 

12,457

100%

 

 

Burke

3,673

3,036

50.0%

82.7%

637

13.0%

17.3%

 

Greene

1,557

942

15.5%

60.5%

615

12.6%

39.5%

 

Macon

1,917

1,245

20.5%

64.9%

672

13.7%

35.1%

 

Putnam

984

632

10.4%

64.2%

352

7.2%

35.8%

 

Hall

State Totals

2,832

216

3.6%

 7.6%

2,616

53.5%

92.4%

 

10,963

6,071

100%

 

4,892

100%

 

 

Mississippi

Black

Bolivar

15,932

13,236

100%

83.1%

2,696

100%

16.9%

Yes

South Carolina    

Black

Beaufort

2,012

1,800

57.5%

89.5%

212

11.4%

10.5%

Yes

White

Saluda

2,987

1,332

42.5%

44.6%

1,655

88.6%

55.4%

 

4,999

3,132

100%

 

1,867

100%

 

 

State Totals

Number of Counties

16

Sources: Adapted from (a) Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, Michigan: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009; (b) Ralph J. Bunche and Dewey W. Grantham, The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 509–514; and (c) Ibid., p. 508. Calculations by the authors.

The exceptions were Hale County in Alabama and Beaufort County in South Carolina. Professor Bunche writes: “The only county where there are Negro committeemen in the AAA program in Alabama is Hale County. In that county three Negroes serve as committeemen, representing three separate communities. No Negroes are on the main county committee, however.”42 Professor Bunche thus observed the uniqueness of one majority–African American county in South Carolina: “In Beaufort County, South Carolina, Negroes serve as cotton committeemen. One Negro has been elected as committeeman in the Beaufort district, two alternative committeemen have been elected from another district, and all three of the committeemen from the St. Helena and Lady’s Island community are Negroes.”43 The protective machinery of the AAA federal intervention programs was strong enough to halt the denial of African American farmers voting in the referenda but not to halt the denial of elective leadership positions to African American farmers in the South. This rare evidence of African American voter participation in the rural south is a complement to the empirical portrait of the urban segment of the African American electorate offered by Professor Paul Lewinson’s book in 1932. The Bunche data

allow researchers to move beyond the arguments advanced by Professor Harry Holloway and others, based on Lewinson’s portrait, that the ruralism of the southern political context made potential African American rural voters apathetic and doomed to the control of the plantation owners and bosses.44 Rather, the findings from Bunche’s field investigator, George Stoney, and the findings in the resultant memorandum confirm the interest, political participation, and voting behavior of African American farmers in the rural South. If the political bosses and machines had provided entree to the urban African American electorate to re-enter southern politics in the big cities after the Era of Disenfranchisement had eliminated and excluded them, then the AAA federal intervention did something similar for the rural African American electorate of the South. Of the importance of this type of election Professor Bunche noted: This is significant in many ways. Not the least significant is the experience in voting practice obtained by Negroes in these elections and the fact that whites are not horrified into repressive action at the sight of large



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 567 numbers of Negroes casting ballots at the referenda polling booths. Moreover, the Negro who participates in these elections must inevitably develop a new perspective—he finds himself for the first time cast in an active role as a citizen in a democracy; he is permitted, even urged, to express his will on a matter of important government policy, with the knowledge that his vote will influence public policy as it relates to his own interest.45

Bunche added: The experience of voting and participating in the elections has been of considerable value to Negroes because it has made them aware of the fact that they are “independent farmers,” that they are not inevitably tied to one or another landlord. On the other hand, it has made whites aware of the fact that the Negroes have “few more rights. . . . ”46 In the final analysis, Professor Bunche was most profound about both the educational value and participation significance of this AAA program, but neither his employer Myrdal nor subsequent scholars undertook further intensive investigations or analyses of this program.

Robert E. Martin’s Doctoral Dissertation on the Cotton and Tobacco Referenda Eventually one of Bunche’s own students at Howard University, Robert E. Martin, did so nearly a decade after the appearance of the Bunche memorandum on the cotton referenda in the South. Martin’s doctoral dissertation showed how the rural African American electorate was still participating and voting in the AAA cotton referenda program in the mid-1940s during World War II. Martin’s research added an additional perspective to the rising empirical portrait of the rural African American electorate in the South with an analysis of the electoral behavior of African American tobacco farmers in the AAA tobacco referenda. Although Professor Bunche’s memorandum focused exclusively on cotton, the AAA regulations also extended to tobacco, a crop which had a sizable number of African American farmers in the rural South. This additional information increased the numerical coverage of the rural African American electorate as well as provided the chance to compare and contrast these two groups of African American farmers. Martin’s first step was to offer a comprehensive and systematic portrait of all of the states that took part in the initial AAA cotton referenda. Table 24.15 shows that all eleven southern states voted for cotton controls, and in an overwhelming fashion with the mean at 93.0% and the median at 93.1%. Only two of the five Border States participated with a mean of 92.9%, while the mean was only 70.9% in the other six states that participated. The other states’ participation was smaller compared to the South. Martin then focused in greater detail and scope on North and South Carolina. Table 24.16 (p. 568) presents the dates of the cotton and tobacco referenda, the number of votes for and

Table 24.15  Regional and State Summary of Cotton Referendum Votes, March 12, 1938

State (by Region)

Number of Votes Cast Yes

No

Total

Percent in Favor

South Alabama

213,525

9,329

222,854

95.8%

Arkansas

134,754

4,580

139,334

96.7%

Florida

6,921

1,433

8,354

82.8%

Georgia

121,272

22,706

143,978

84.2%

Louisiana

113,412

2,761

116,173

97.6%

Mississippi

226,556

7,232

233,788

96.9%

North Carolina

127,965

15,534

143,499

89.2%

South Carolina

109,666

3,894

113,560

96.6%

69,286

5,452

74,738

92.7%

217,425

28,666

246,091

88.4%

7,676

568

8,244

93.1%

1,348,458

102,155

1,450,613

93.0%

South Mean

122,587

9,287

131,874

93.0%

South Median

121,272

5,452

139,334

93.1%

Tennessee Texas Virginia South Subtotal

Border States Kentucky

1,842

387

2,229

82.6%

Missouri

12,731

724

13,455

94.6%

Border Subtotal

14,573

1,111

15,684

92.9%

Border Mean

7,287

556

7,842

92.9%

Border Median

7,287

556

7,842

88.6%

Other Regions Arizona

1,230

214

1,444

85.2%

Colorado

2,908

1,483

4,391

66.2%

238

20

258

92.2%

Illinois Kansas

28

1

29

96.6%

1,787

428

2,215

80.7%

Oklahoma

36,866

15,528

52,394

70.4%

Other Subtotal

43,057

17,674

60,731

70.9%

7,176

2,946

10,122

70.9%

New Mexico

Other Mean Other Median

1,509

321

1,830

82.9%

1,406,088

120,940

1,527,028

92.1%

Mean

74,005

6,365

80,370

92.1%

Median

36,866

2,761

52,394

92.2%

Grand Total

Source: Robert Earl Martin, “Negro-White Participation in the A. A. A. Cotton and Tobacco Referenda in North and South Carolina: A Study in Differential Voting and Attitudes in Selected Areas” (Ph.D. dissertation, Univerity of Chicago, 1947), p. 97. Calculations by the authors.

against cotton and tobacco controls, as well as the percent voting in favor. The six cotton referenda were held from 1938 to 1942, while the six tobacco ones were held from 1938 to 1946. Martin focused even more specifically on one rural county in each of these states: Wilson County, North Carolina, and Darlington County, South Carolina. Table 24.17 (p. 568) shows the racial

568

Chapter 24

Table 24.16  Voter Participation in the Cotton and Tobacco Referenda of North Carolina and South Carolina, 1938–1946 Cotton Referenda in the Carolinas, 1938–1942 No

Total

Percent in Favor

127,965

15,534

143,499

89.2%

109,666

 3,894

113,560

96.6%

December 10, 1938 North Carolina

75,957

40,853

116,810

65.0%

 

South Carolina

72,076

 9,833

 81,909

88.0%

December 9, 1939

North Carolina

50,737

 5,767

 56,504

89.8%

 

South Carolina

64,202

 2,490

 66,692

96.3%

December 7, 1940

North Carolina

55,937

 4,309

 60,246

92.8%

 

South Carolina

59,820

 2,932

 62,752

95.3%

December 13, 1941 North Carolina

69,756

 3,538

 73,294

95.2%

 

South Carolina

52,946

 1,810

 54,756

96.7%

December 12, 1942 North Carolina

65,902

 5,344

 71,246

92.5%

 

49,497

 4,412

 53,909

91.8%

Date

State

Yes

March 12, 1938  

North Carolina South Carolina

South Carolina

breakdown by numbers and percentages as well as the number of eligible voters in each of the counties in each state. In neither of the two counties did the African Americans have a population majority, although they came extremely close in Darlington County, South Carolina, with 49.9%. As shown in Table 24.18, Martin used 1940 data to determine that in Darlington County, South Carolina, African American farmers made up nearly half of all farmers, 49.1%, closely paralleling the general population distribution; while in Wilson County, North Carolina, African Americans only accounted for 27.7% of the farmers, much less than their 42.0% share of the county population. He was able to disaggregate these farmers further into the three main categories: (1) owners of farms, (2) sharecroppers, and (3) other tenant farmers. In both counties, the largest category for African American farmers was sharecroppers, followed by the other tenant farmers, and finally those who owned their farms. The last category of African Americans clearly had the greatest independence, but the AAA required that all three categories vote and counted the votes equally. Professor Martin interviewed farmers of both races in these two Carolina counties so that he could learn about their individual

Tobacco Referenda in the Carolinas, 1938–1946 March 12, 1938

North Carolina

151,503

17,340

168,843

89.7%

 

Table 24.18  Distribution of Farm Operators by Race and Tenure in Wilson County, North Carolina, and Darlington County, South Carolina, 1940

South Carolina

25,191

 2,905

 28,096

89.7%

December 10, 1938 North Carolina

88,222

65,853

154,075

57.3%

 

South Carolina

15,759

10,585

 26,344

59.8%

October 5, 1939

North Carolina

159,954

15,914

175,868

91.0%

Race

Number

 

South Carolina

21,341

 2,459

 23,800

89.7%

Black

1,140

27.7%

116

July 20, 1940

North Carolina

125,936

16,307

142,243

88.5%

White

2,978

72.3%

 

South Carolina

17,223

 1,639

 18,862

91.3%

Total

4,118

100.0%

July 24, 1943

North Carolina

96,956

 6,473

103,429

93.7%

 

South Carolina

8,886

 1,183

 10,069

88.3%

Race

Number

Percent

July 12, 1946

North Carolina

178,181

 2,075

180,256

98.8%

Black

1,024

24.9%

868

21.1%

156

 3.8%

 

South Carolina

27,091

  390

 27,481

98.6%

White

2,122

51.5%

1,535

37.2%

587

14.3%

Total

3,146

76.4%

2,403

58.4%

743

18.0%

Wilson County, North Carolina All Farm Operatorsa Percent

c

Owners Number

All Tenantsb

Source: Robert Earl Martin, “Negro-White Participation in the A. A. A. Cotton and Tobacco Referenda in North and South Carolina: A Study in Differential Voting and Attitudes in Selected Areas” (Ph.D. dissertation, Univerity of Chicago, 1947), pp. 130–131.

Race

Number

Percentc

Total

Black

White

Percent Black

North Carolina

Wilson

50,219

21,071

29,148

42.0%

26,260

South Carolina

Darlington

45,198

22,571

22,627

49.9%

22,701

24.9%

856

20.8%

2,122

51.5%

972

23.6%

3,146

76.4%

Percent

Other Tenants Number

Percent

Black

1,651

49.1%

White

1,709

Total

3,360

Owners

Tenants

Percentc

Number

Percentc

212

 6.3%

1,439

42.8%

50.9%

943

28.1%

766

22.8%

100.0%

1,155

34.4%

2,205

65.6%

Race

Number

Percentc

Croppers

Black

1,439

42.8%

White

 766

Total

2,205

Number

Percentc

766

22.8%

22.8%

234

65.6%

1,000

Other Tenants Number

Percentc

673

20.0%

 7.0%

532

15.8%

29.7%

1,205

35.9%

Source: Robert Earl Martin, “Negro-White Participation in the A. A. A. Cotton and Tobacco Referenda in North and South Carolina: A Study in Differential Voting and Attitudes in Selected Areas” (Ph.D. dissertation, Univerity of Chicago, 1947), pp. 157, 164. a

Source: Robert Earl Martin, “Negro-White Participation in the A. A. A. Cotton and Tobacco Referenda in North and South Carolina: A Study in Differential Voting and Attitudes in Selected Areas” (Ph.D. dissertation, Univerity of Chicago, 1947), pp. 140–141.

1,024

Number

All Tenants

County

 2.8%

Number

b

State

Percentc

Darlington County, South Carolina

Table 24.17  Populations of Wilson County, North Carolina, and Darlington County, South Carolina, 1940

Populaton

Number

Croppers

All Farm Operatorsa

Eligible Voters (21 Years and Over)

Percent

Tenants c

Farm operators include owners and tenants.

b

All tenants consist of croppers and other tenants.

c

Percentages show share of the total number of farm operators in the county.



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 569

attitudes and beliefs about the AAA program and their voting behavior and political participation in these referenda. The left half of Table 25.19 shows the total number of different kinds of farmers, while the right half shows the participants in the interviews. Both sections are divided into the three major categories of tenure—owners, sharecroppers, and other tenants—plus the wage hands who were interviewed. Because both sharecroppers and other tenants can be distinguished from owners, the subtotal of these two groups is also listed. In the left half of the table, the percentages are calculated from the total number of farmers in the county. By contrast, in the right half of the table, the percentages indicate the percentage of that specific group that was interviewed; for instance, 24 of the 116 Wilson County black farm owners were interviewed, which is 20.7%. Table 24.19 shows that Professor Martin interviewed a higher percentage of the African American owners than any other category, and this was essential if he wanted to find out how those who were economically independent participated vis-à-vis those that worked for white farmers. Skillfully using his interview data, Professor Martin tabulated how both races in each of the three categories, plus wage

hands, participated in the AAA referenda in these two counties in the Carolinas. Table 24.20 (p. 570) gives his results. In Wilson, North Carolina, African American farmer owners had the highest percentage participation rate, 100%, while in Darlington, South Carolina, it was the tenants with 85.2% followed by the farm owners at 68.6%. Overall, the African American farmers in Wilson County had the higher rate of participation with 76.3% to just 50.9% in Darlington County. Nevertheless, a majority of African American farmers in both counties participated in the AAA referenda. The levels of participation among whites were a bit higher and their non-participation rates were a bit lower overall. Martin’s work offered not only a sample-based self-reporting of voting behavior; it also provided attitudinal data about feelings and attitudes concerning biracial political participation and interracial electoral interaction. Table 24.21 (p. 571) lists the responses of both black and white farmers of each of the three tenure categories to the question “How did the white farmers seem to feel about the colored farmers voting?” Table 24.22 (p. 572) gives the answers to two questions posed to white farmers about their perception of “colored” voters in the referenda, while Table 24.23 (p. 573) provides biracial data

Table 24.19  Numbers of Farm Operators and Interviewed Farmers in Wilson County, North Carolina, and Darlington County, South Carolina Wilson County, North Carolina Farm Operatorsa Black Tenure

Number

Interviewed Farmersb

White

Percent

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

20.8%

972c

23.6%

 24

20.7%

 67

 7.8%

 91

 9.4%

Croppers

868

21.1%

1,535

37.3%

2,403

58.4%

 59

 6.8%

 95

 6.2%

154

 6.4%

Other Tenants

156

3.8%

587

14.3%

743

18.0%

 10

 6.4%

 26

 4.4%

 38

 5.1%

1,024

24.9%

2,122

51.5%

3,146

76.4%

 69

 6.7%

121

 5.7%

192

 6.1%

Wage Hands Totalse

Number

Total

856c

All Tenants

Percent

White

2.8%

d

Number

Black

116

Owners

Percent

Total

 

 

 

 

 

 

  7

 

  1

 

  8

 

1,140

27.7%

2,978

72.3%

4,118

100%

100

 8.7%

191

 6.4%

291

 7.1%

Darlington County, South Carolina Farm Operatorsa Black Tenure Owners

Number

White

Percent

Number

Black

White

Total

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

28.1%

1,155f

34.4%

 35

16.5%

 76

 8.1%

111

 9.6%

234

7.0%

1,000

29.8%

 98

12.8%

 43

18.4%

141

14.1%

532

15.8%

1,205

35.9%

 27

 4.0%

 32

 6.0%

 59

 4.9%

42.8%

766

22.8%

2,205

65.6%

125

 8.7%

 75

 9.8%

200

 9.1%

 

 

 

 

 

  1

 

  0

 

  1

 

49.1%

1,709

50.9%

3,360

100%

161

 9.8%

151

 8.8%

312

 9.3%

6.3%

943f

Croppers

766

22.8%

Other Tenants

673

20.0%

All Tenantsd

1,439

Wage Hands

  1,651

Totals

Total

Percent

212

e

Interviewed Farmersb

Source: Adapted from Robert Earl Martin, “Negro-White Participation in the A. A. A. Cotton and Tobacco Referenda in North and South Carolina: A Study in Differential Voting and Attitudes in Selected Areas” (Ph.D. dissertation, Univerity of Chicago, 1947), pp. 157, 164 (Tables 36, 37, 40, and 41). Calculations by the authors. Note: Percentages are given to explain the source material. a

Each percentage is calculated as the proportion of the total number of operators (i.e., owners and all tenants) in each county.

b

The percentage is calculated as the proportion of each racial farm operator and tenure group.

c

Number includes four managers.

d

“All tenants” are “croppers” plus “other tenants.” The tenure categories consist of “owners,” “all tenants,” and “wage hands,” but excludes the last of these from the operator totals.

e

Operator totals include owners and all tenants only. Interview totals include owners, all tenants, and wage hands.

f

Number includes nine managers.

570

Chapter 24

Table 24.20  Participation in the AAA Referenda by Tenure and Race in Wilson County, North Carolina, and Darlington County, South Carolina Wilson County, North Carolina Black Tenure

Total Interviewed

Participants

Owners

 24

 24

Tenants

 10

Croppers

 59

Wage Hands Total

White NonParticipants

Percent Participation

Total Interviewed

Participants

NonParticipants

Percent Participation

 

100.0%

 67

 64

 3

92.5%

  9

1

90.0%

 28

 23

 5

79.3%

 38

21

64.4%

 95

 89

 6

93.7%

  7

 

7

 

  1

  1

 

100.0%

100

 71

29

76.3%

191

177

14

92.7%

a

Darlington County, South Carolina Black Tenure

Total Interviewed

Owners

White

Participants

NonParticipants

Percent Participation

Total Interviewed

Participants

NonParticipants

Percent Participation

 35

 24

11

68.6%

 76

 57

19

75.0%

Tenants

 27

 23

4

85.2%

 32

 22

10

68.8%

Croppers

 98

 35

63

35.7%

 43

 20

23

46.3%

Wage Hands

  1

 

1

 

 

 

 

Total

161

 82

79

50.9%

151

 99

52

65.6%

Grand Total

261

153

108

58.6%

342

276

66

80.7%

 

Source: Adapted from Robert Earl Martin, “Negro-White Participation in the A. A. A. Cotton and Tobacco Referenda in North and South Carolina: A Study in Differential Voting and Attitudes in Selected Areas” (Ph.D. dissertation, Univerity of Chicago, 1947), pp. 181, 182. Calculations by the authors. a

The percentages of these seven wage workers were not included in the percentages of participation because they were not eligible to vote.

for two further questions on attitudes regarding African American political participation more generally. The overall responses indicate a great degree of similarity in the perceptions of the two racial groups, and the much greater opposition to African American voting in the South Carolina county as opposed to the North Carolina county. In both counties many more African American farmers think the “Negro” community has a good deal of interest in politics than white farmers, but still the answers converge on “a little.” Collectively, Tables 24.21–23 demonstrate the existence of a basis, at least in these two southern states in two rural counties, for biracial registration and voting.

The African American Statewide Candidates in Louisiana’s 1952 and 1956 Elections Louisiana saw an African American gubernatorial candidate, pharmacist Kermit Parker, in New Orleans in the 1952 Democratic primaries, and an African American attorney general candidate, Attorney Earl J. Amedee, in New Orleans in the 1956 Democratic primaries. Since Louisiana was the only one of the eleven southern states to keep voter registration data by race, and at times by party, from Reconstruction to the present, these rare official data will allow us to look at (1) African American voter turnout for these pioneering African American candidates, (2) statistical correlations between these two races to see the nature and significance of these early African American statewide electoral coalitions, and (3) whether these African American political campaigns increased and enhanced voter registration in the state.

In contrast with the Savannah, Georgia, or Carolina data, these Louisiana data are statewide, expanding our portrait to both urban and rural African American registered voters. The data also provide some empirical purchase on the political and electoral context in a southern state in the decade after the voting rights activism set into motion by the 1944 Smith v. Allwright Supreme Court decision outlawed the White Primary. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held lengthy hearings on Louisiana in 1960 and 1961 and described the political and electoral context there: Over a year ago a preliminary investigation uncovered information which led the Commission to unanimous agreement that a hearing should be scheduled for July 1959 to gather facts concerning the voting situation in several parishes in the State of Louisiana. . . . We were ready to proceed with the hearing but were enjoined from doing so by the Federal District Court for the Western District of Louisiana. Louisiana was not selected because of any predisposition on our part to single out this State for criticism or for censure. It was selected because the act under which we operate requires that we investigate valid voting complaints, and a large number of such complaints have come from Louisiana. These rules were attacked in the summer of 1959 by officials of the State of Louisiana. The Supreme Court of the United States held on June 20, 1960, that



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 571

Table 24.21  Tabulation of Interview Responses to the Question of White Farmers’ Feelings About Black Farmers Votinga “How did the white farmers seem to feel about the colored farmers voting?” Wilson County, North Carolina Black Owners Reply 

White

Tenants

Croppers

Owners

Totals

Tenants

Croppers

Black

White

Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent

Freely accepted 

100%

9

100%

36

Treated us fine

 

 

1

 11%

 

All right

 

 

 

 

Welcomed us

 

 

1

 11%

Heard no complaint

 

 

 

 

No objections

 

 

 

Wanted them to

 

 

2

Carried them

 

 

 

It’s their duty

 

 

 

Never heard it discussed

 

 

 

Indifferent

24

95%

58

91%

21

91%

83

93%

69

97%

162

92%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 1

 1%

 

 

 

 

 5

90%

 

 

 5

 6%

 

 

 10

 6%

 1

3%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 2

 3%

 

 

 

 

10

17%

 6

29%

39

47%

 

 

 55

34%

 

 

 

 7

12%

 

 

 

 

 

 

  7

 4%

 22%

 

 

 2

 3%

 

 

13

16%

 2

 3%

15

 9%

 

 

 

 1

 2%

 

 

 2

 2%

 

 

  3

 2%

 

 

 

 1

 2%

 

 

 

 

 

 

  1

 6%

 

 

 

 

 2

 3%

 

 

 2

 2%

 

 

  4

 3%

 

 

 

 1

3%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 1

 1%

 

 

Mixed

(for and against)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 2

 3%

 

 

 

 

 

 

  2

 1%

 

A few against all tenants

 1

4%

 

 

 

 

 1

 2%

 

 

 

 

 1

 1%

  1

 5%

 

Didn’t like it

 

 

 

 

 

 

 2

 3%

 

 

 

 

 

 

  2

 1%

 

 

 

 

 1

3%

 3

 5%

 2

 9%

 6

 

 1

 1%

 11

 6%

Don’t know 

Darlington County, South Carolina Black Owners

White

Tenants

Croppers

Owners

Totals

Tenants

Croppers

Black

White

Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent

Reply  Freely accepted 

96%

23

100%

35

100%

52

91%

19

86%

15

75%

81

99%

 86

Treated us fine

23  

 

1

 

 1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 2

 2%

 

87%  

All right

 

 

 

 

 

 

11

22%

 3

16%

 3

20%

 

 

 17

20%

Welcomed us

 

 

1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 1

 1%

 

 

Heard no complaint

 

 

 

 

 

 

21

42%

10

53%

 9

60%

 

 

 40

47%

No difference made

 1

4%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 1

 1%

 

 

Seem real satisfied

 1

100%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 1

 

 

 

Most for

 

 

 

 

 

 

2

4%

 2

11%

1

 

 

 

  5

 6%

They had to allow it ‘cause government said so

 

 

 

 

 1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 1

 1%

 

 

Wanted them to

 

 

 

 

 

 

10

20%

 4

21%

 2

 

 

 

 16

19%

Didn’t put us off to ourselves

 

 

 

 

 1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 1

 1%

 

 

It’s their duty

 

 

 

 

 

 

 1

 2%

 

 

 

 2%

 

 

  1

 1%

Indifferent

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mixed

(for and against)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 3

 5%

 3

14%

 2

10%

 

 

  8

 8%

 

Didn’t like it

 

 

 

 

 

 

 2

 4%

 

 

 2

10%

 

 

  4

 4%

 

Some anti all tenants

 

 

 

 

 

 

 1

50%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 1

 5%

 1

 1%

  1

 1%

Don’t know 

Source: Robert Earl Martin, “Negro-White Participation in the A. A. A. Cotton and Tobacco Referenda in North and South Carolina: A Study in Differential Voting and Attitudes in Selected Areas” (Ph.D. dissertation, Univerity of Chicago, 1947), pp. 244–245. a

Survey responses are reported as given by the source without augmentation, secondary calculations, or reorganization to determine the basis of the numbers and percentages.

572

Chapter 24

Table 24.22  Tabulation of Responses by White Farmers in Wilson County, North Carolina, and Darlington County, South Carolinaa Wilson County, North Carolina Owners Reply 

Tenants

Darlington County, South Carolina Croppers

Owners

Tenants

Totals

Croppers

Wilson County, NC

Darlington County, SC

Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent

“How do you feel about colored farmers taking part?” Favorable

62

97%

23

 1%

85

96%

51

90%

All right

31

50%

20

87%

39

46%

29

58%

They should

 

 

 

38

45%

Want them to

26

42%

 3

13%

 4

5%

12

24%

 5

26%

Got a right

12

19%

 

 

 

 

 5

10%

 1

 5%

They are farming

10

16%

 

 

Their duty

 5

8%

They pay taxes

 1

2%

 

They do the work

 5

8%

 

 2

3%

 

 

Mixed

 

 

 

 

Don’t know 

19

95%

170

97%

10

53%

15

74%

 90

53%

53

60%

 4

21%

  38

22%

 4

 4%

 4

 

 3

 6%

 4

21%

1%

 1

 2%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 4

 6

21%

 

They voted with bit farmers Makes ‘em biggety

86%

 1

32%

 1

  2%

 1

  5%

 

 

 4

  7%

 2

9%

 1

 5%

 

 1

25%

 

 

 

 

 

 1

25%

 

 

 

 

 

 1

25%

 

 

 

 

Unfavorable Against all tenants

19

 5%

89

90%

 33

19%

21

24%

  12

  8%

 6

 7%

  10

  7%

13

14%

  6

 4%

 1

 1%

  1

  8%

  5

  3%

  2

 1%

 2

  2%

 7

  7%

 

 

 1  1

 

 

  4

 2%

 1

"Do you think that taking part in the AAA voting has had any effect on the Negro's attitude toward the regular political elections?" Yes

21

88%

 8

89%

30

79%

20

83%

20

87%

31

89%

Feel freer

 2

10%

 1

13%

 1

3%

 

 

 

 

 

 

More interest

12

57%

 4

50%

14

47%

 9

45%

 7

35%

18

58%

 4

13%

 3

15%

 1

  5%

 1

50%

 2

10%

 1

More understanding One leads to other

 3

14%

 1

13%

Feel more independent

 59

83%

71

87%

 

  48%

  30

51%

34

  4

  7%

 4

 3%

  4

 7%

 4

 2

7%

 1

 5%

 1

  5%

 1

 3%

  2

 3%

 3

More encouragement

 4

20%

 2

25%

 3

10%

 2

10%

 2

10%

 3

 9%

  9

15%

 7

Think of your rights more

 1

5%

 1

13%

 3

10%

 3

15%

 4

20%

 2

 6%

  5

 9%

 9

Want more voice in regular elections

 2

7%

 8

40%

 5

25%

 4

13%

  2

 2%

17

Feel they should have more rights now

 2

7%

 4

20%

 4

20%

 5

16%

  2

 2%

13

 1

3%

  2

 3%

  1

 1%

 3

 4%

  9

13%

 8

 9%

Think so

 1

4%

No Don’t know

 1  2

8%

11%  7

18%

 2

  8%

 1

 4%

 2

  8%

 2

 9%

 4

11%

Source: Robert Earl Martin, “Negro-White Participation in the A. A. A. Cotton and Tobacco Referenda in North and South Carolina: A Study in Differential Voting and Attitudes in Selected Areas” (Ph.D. dissertation, Univerity of Chicago, 1947), pp. 249, 303. a

Survey responses are reported as given by the source without augmentation, secondary calculations, or reorganization to determine the basis of the numbers and percentages.



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 573

Table 24.23  Tabulation of Interview Responses Regarding African American Voting in Wilson County, North Carolina, and Darlington County, South Carolinaa “How do you think the white people in the community feel generally about colored people voting?” Wilson County, North Carolina Black Owners

White

Tenants

Croppers

Owners

Totals

Tenants

Croppers

Black

White

Reply

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

Against

 3

13%

 4

44%

 9

24%

17

27%

 5

22%

25

28%

16

23%

 47

27%

Don’t mind

18

75%

 5

56%

15

40%

31

48%

 9

39%

39

44%

38

54%

 79

45%

Some for and against

 3

13%

 

 

 7

18%

 6

 9%

 2

 9%

 9

 9%

10

14%

 16

 9%

Don’t know

 

 

 

 

 7

18%

10

16%

 7

30%

30

19%

 7

10%

 34

19%

Against

13

54%

18

78%

18

51%

36

63%

15

68%

12

60%

49

60%

 63

64%

Don’t mind

 5

21%

 2

 9%

 2

 6%

 6

10%

 1

 5%

 4

20%

 9

11%

 11

11%

Some for and against

 1

 4%

 1

 4%

 5

14%

 2

 6%

 1

 5%

 2

10%

 7

 9%

  5

 5%

Don’t know

 5

21%

 2

 9%

10

29%

13

13%

 5

23%

 2

10%

17

21%

 20

20%

Darlington County, South Carolina

“How much interest does the colored community show in politics?” Wilson County, North Carolina Black Owners

White

Tenants

Croppers

Owners

Totals

Tenants

Croppers

Black

White

Reply

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

None

 1

 4%

 

 

 1

 3%

 8

13%

 1

 4%

 6

 7%

 2

 3%

 15

 9%

A little

19

30%

 8

89%

19

50%

43

67%

18

78%

58

65%

46

65%

119

68%

Good deal

 4

17%

 1

11%

16

42%

10

16%

 3

13%

16

18%

21

30%

 29

17%

Don’t know

 

 

 

 

 2

 5%

 5

 5%

 1

 4%

 9

10%

 2

 3%

 13

 7%

None

 

 

 2

 9%

 1

 3%

 5

 9%

 5

23%

 4

20%

 3

 4%

 14

14%

A little

16

67%

13

57%

23

66%

45

79%

17

77%

14

70%

52

63%

 76

77%

Good deal

 8

33%

 7

31%

 8

23%

 4

 7%

 

 

 2

10%

23

28%

  6

 6%

Don’t know

 

 

 1

 4%

 5

 9%

 5

 5%

 

 

 

 

 4

 5%

  3

 3%

Darlington County, South Carolina

Source: Robert Earl Martin, “Negro-White Participation in the A. A. A. Cotton and Tobacco Referenda in North and South Carolina: A Study in Differential Voting and Attitudes in Selected Areas” (Ph.D. dissertation, Univerity of Chicago, 1947), pp. 340, 357. a

Survey responses are reported as given by the source without augmentation, secondary calculations, or reorganization to determine the basis of the numbers and percentages.

the Civil Rights Act of 1957 authorized the Commission on Civil Rights to adopt rules of procedure to govern the conduct of its hearings. The Court decided that the rules adopted by our Commission violate no constitutional right of any witness subpoenaed to testify at a Commission.47 The Hearings took place on September 27 and 28, 1960, and on May 5 and 6, 1961. The Appendix section of the subsequent Report provided tabular data on colored voter registration from

1888 through November 30, 1958. In the second table in the Report’s appendix, data are provided by parish for April 1959. And in the third table in the Report’s appendix, data are provided by parish for July 31, 1960. There are then, three tables, one by years and two by parishes. Although Louisiana did not react vigorously to the Smith v. Allwright decision in 1944, it did so to the Court’s May 1954 decision against segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. In July 1954 “the Louisiana Legislature established the Joint Legislative Committee with a mandate to ‘fight to maintain segregation

574

Chapter 24

of the races’ and ‘to provide ways and means whereby our existing social order shall be preserved and our institutions and ways of life . . . maintained.’”48 Two years after the formation of this Joint Legislative Committee, the White Citizens Council Movement that began in Mississippi in 1954 quickly spread to Louisiana, in various parishes initially but soon organized into a statewide association dubbed the “Association of Citizens Councils of Louisiana (ACCL) . . . in early 1956.”49 Not only did these two groups merge, the Joint Legislative Committee and the ACCL, but also state legislator “W. M. Rainach was the chairman of the Joint Legislative Committee: he was also a charter member of the ACCL and served on its first board of directors. He later became president of the [White] Citizens Council of America.”50 And their first combined action took place “between December 1958 and February 1959,” when they “sponsored a series of conferences jointly with the State Board of Registration.” They held “a conference . . . in each of the congressional districts of Louisiana with such persons as the registrars of voters, district attorneys, sheriffs, police jury presidents, and various private citizens. . . . The Attorney General of Louisiana participated in several of the conferences.”51 The objective of this gathering as announced by the chairman Rainach “was to reduce Negro registration in the State of Louisiana from 130,000 to 13,000.”52 The conference had been called so that a “uniform enforcement of Louisiana voter qualification laws” could be put into place. This planned rollback of the African American registered voters meant that potential newcomers had to be denied in large numbers, and Louisiana in the 1950s had a superb record of suppression of African American voter registration efforts. Of this illegal history the Commission noted: In summary, . . . during the entire period, namely, from 1898 until 1960—that is, a 62-year period—Negro registration has never exceed 28 percent of the potential voting age Negro population; that during 34 years of the 62-year period the percentage of Negroes age 21 and over registered to vote remained at approximately 1 percent.53

Kermit Parker for Louisiana Governor, 1952 To offset the unified voter disenfranchisement efforts of the elected state government as well as a highly mobilized grass roots effort by white segregationists, the African American community launched a counter re-enfranchisement effort via a single African American candidate for governor in 1952. This candidate, 40 year-old pharmacist Kermit Parker of the city of New Orleans, a graduate of Xavier University, announced for and ran in the January 15, 1952, Democratic primary for governor. The mere act of running made instant history because he became the first of his race to do so. No African American had campaigned for governor, although P. B. S. Pinchback held the post temporarily in the Reconstruction period, from “(December 1872 to midJanuary 1873) following the governor’s impeachment.”54 Candidate Parker told Jet Magazine that he was motivated by (1) injustices in the segregated and unequal schools in the state, (2) injustices and consequences of the previous all-white Democratic primary, and (3) incidents of white police brutality

in the state. As president of the Louisiana Democratic Civic Organization and chairman of the Louisiana State Committee on Civic Affairs, Parker was well placed in these state organizations to know, hear, and understand the numerous political and economic problems facing his constituency. He spoke also of the need to expand and re-enfranchise the African American electorate in his campaign for governor.55 According to local observers, there were 100,000 qualified Negro voters in the state in 1952. The official secretary of state list had some 97,101 African American registered voters that year, making the local observers’ estimation close but not quite accurate. During his pioneering gubernatorial campaign, in which Parker delivered 100 speeches and had some twenty campaign planks in his platform, he promised to pursue: 1. permanent, instead of periodic, voter registration by a constitutional amendment; 2. fire-proof school buildings in the state; 3. rehabilitation program for all penal institutions; 4. local commissions on human rights; and 5. a minimum monthly salary of $200 for all public employees.56 He further appeared at his own expense on the radio to reach a wider audience and to distinguish himself from the ten white candidates in the race. He took the opportunity to speak to biracial audiences when he accepted an invitation from the Lake Charles League of Women Voters to their political rallies. Finally, this campaign did not face racist violence but “several Negroes took messages to him from whites, urging him to get out of the race.”57 Incumbent Democratic Governor Earl K. Long, who could not be reelected, predicted that Parker would finish in seventh place in this eleven-candidate primary race. Table 24.24 provides a summary of the winner and losers in the January 15, 1952, Democratic primary where Parker did indeed come in seventh in a final field of nine candidates. He captured 5,470 votes for 0.7% of the total votes cast and finished ahead of the first female candidate, Lucille May Grace, and one other white candidate, Cliff Liles, who came in dead last. Parker’s highest number of votes was 1,768 in Orleans Parish (New Orleans). The mean per parish was 88.2 votes, the median was 26 votes and the mode was 4 votes. In no parish did he receive even 5% of the vote. Of Louisiana’s 64 parishes (counties), Parker received votes from 62 of them. In one of them, Madison County, the register in an interview in 1954 told an attorney for the disenfranchised African American electorate the following: Mrs. Ward told me she had been registrar of voters for Madison Parish at that time for 31 years; that there had been no Negroes on her books registered to vote during those 30 years; and that there were no Negroes registered to vote in Tensas, Madison, and East Carroll Parishes. She stated to me that she operated under orders from the sheriff and other public officials there, and that she had not seen fit at that time to permit any Negroes to register and vote. . . . 58

328

Allen

1,944

1,207

952

Iberia

Iberville

Jackson

895

236

915

Morehouse

Lincoln

Madison

416

1,331

La Salle

Livingston

1,868

Lafourche

795

2,574

Lafayette

Jefferson Davis

11,511

405

Jefferson

931

Grant

Concordia

Franklin

366

Claiborne

973

674

Catahoula

158

388

Cameron

Evangeline

382

Caldwell

East Feliciana

212

Calcasieu

387

4,499

Caddo

East Carroll

5,424

Bossier

586

1,108

Bienville

6,484

623

Beauregard

East Baton Rouge

802

Avoyelles

De Soto

705

2,359

Assumption

2,064

1,360

Acadia

Ascension

#

Parish

13.9%

8.9%

11.5%

22.0%

7.4%

13.3%

14.4%

8.6%

31.3%

16.2%

19.6%

16.8%

6.7%

13.0%

7.9%

6.6%

16.3%

16.1%

12.5%

11.7%

12.8%

10.9%

13.7%

6.0%

15.7%

17.7%

14.9%

12.5%

12.1%

19.7%

14.6%

26.3%

4.0%

7.7%

%

Hale Boggs

903

612

1,070

581

1,248

2,818

630

1,740

4,792

633

868

508

868

853

3,230

174

136

5,057

646

357

489

720

373

532

4,729

1,865

487

420

1,045

790

367

1,292

4,560

735

#

13.7%

23.2%

13.8%

 9.6%

22.1%

20.1%

 3.5%

18.9%

13.0%

10.8%

14.1%

 4.4%

14.3%

11.9%

26.1%

 7.3%

 5.7%

12.5%

13.8%

11.5%

 9.3%

20.2%

13.4%

15.0%

16.5%

 6.1%

 6.5%

 8.4%

15.7%

 6.6%

 7.6%

16.5%

55.8%

 4.2%

%

William J. Dodd

64

25

61

40

42

70

30

48

264

36

179

115

25

77

77

11

24

368

16

22

20

39

15

33

203

141

40

19

62

50

23

51

39

45

#

0.97%

0.95%

0.78%

0.66%

0.74%

0.50%

0.17%

0.52%

0.72%

0.61%

2.91%

0.99%

0.41%

1.07%

0.62%

0.46%

1.01%

0.91%

0.34%

0.71%

0.38%

1.09%

0.54%

0.93%

0.71%

0.46%

0.54%

0.38%

0.93%

0.42%

0.48%

0.65%

0.48%

0.26%

%

Lucille Grace

1,170

445

3,423

1,247

972

5,063

1,638

1,720

11,133

1,608

1,467

1,846

1,491

1,628

1,521

1,305

280

15,816

716

679

1,649

385

243

678

3,428

8,419

2,685

1,024

599

1,152

1,078

1,497

285

1,241

#

17.7%

16.9%

44.0%

20.6%

17.2%

36.1%

 9.1%

18.6%

30.3%

27.3%

23.9%

15.9%

24.6%

22.7%

12.3%

54.6%

11.8%

39.2%

15.3%

21.8%

31.2%

10.8%

 8.7%

19.2%

11.9%

27.5%

36.1%

20.6%

 9.0%

 9.6%

22.4%

19.1%

 3.5%

 7.1%

%

Robert F. Kennon

Table 24.24  Democratic Party Primary Election for Governor of Louisiana, January 15, 1952

299

123

267

113

251

365

5,929

2,360

1,604

161

114

3,390

355

272

3,046

23

183

240

115

354

97

266

845

494

4,168

475

283

195

707

1,464

416

253

719

7,009

#

 4.5%

 4.7%

 3.4%

 1.9%

 4.4%

 2.6%

33.1%

25.6%

 4.4%

 2.7%

 1.9%

29.2%

 5.9%

 3.8%

24.6%

 1.0%

 7.7%

 0.6%

 2.5%

11.4%

 1.8%

 7.5%

30.4%

14.0%

14.5%

 1.6%

 3.8%

 3.9%

10.7%

12.2%

 8.6%

 3.2%

 8.8%

39.9%

%

Dudley LeBlanc

5

2

4

2

2

5

12

6

52

6

7

12

5

11

20

2

4

26

5

1

 

7

23

2

367

31

9

1

14

13

11

 

9

20

#

0.1%

0.1%

0.1%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.1%

0.1%

0.1%

0.1%

0.1%

0.1%

0.1%

0.2%

0.2%

0.1%

0.2%

0.1%

0.1%

0.0%

 

0.2%

0.8%

0.1%

1.3%

0.1%

0.1%

0.0%

0.2%

0.1%

0.2%

 

0.1%

0.1%

%

Cliff Liles

1,930

894

196

1,514

1,199

667

3,806

1,282

3,387

531

388

1,974

750

1,475

858

251

797

4,289

1,600

598

1,503

955

314

327

6,877

10,940

1,799

1,113

1,100

2,631

330

523

493

2,112

#

29.2%

33.9%

 2.5%

25.0%

21.2%

 4.8%

21.2%

13.9%

 9.2%

 9.0%

 6.3%

17.0%

12.4%

20.6%

 6.9%

10.5%

33.6%

10.6%

34.2%

19.2%

28.5%

26.8%

11.3%

 9.2%

23.9%

35.8%

24.2%

22.3%

16.6%

22.0%

 6.9%

 6.7%

 6.0%

12.0%

%

James McLemore

28

 

18

18

15

58

143

40

325

60

25

25

14

20

4

4

2

206

13

17

6

7

30

5

615

543

4

15

34

28

27

55

50

33

#

0.4%

 

0.2%

0.3%

0.3%

0.4%

0.8%

0.4%

0.9%

1.0%

0.4%

0.2%

0.2%

0.3%

0.0%

0.2%

0.1%

0.5%

0.3%

0.5%

0.1%

0.2%

1.1%

0.1%

2.1%

1.8%

0.1%

0.3%

0.5%

0.2%

0.6%

0.7%

0.6%

0.2%

%

Kermit Parker

1,287

303

1,841

1,217

1,503

3,119

3,152

1,232

3,673

1,899

1,891

1,789

2,154

1,909

2,633

464

558

7,892

984

723

839

803

558

1,257

3,850

2,757

1,023

1,570

2,273

3,483

1,859

2,102

1,685

5,014

#

19.5%

11.5%

23.7%

20.1%

26.6%

22.2%

17.6%

13.4%

10.0%

32.3%

30.8%

15.4%

35.5%

26.6%

21.3%

19.4%

23.5%

19.5%

21.0%

23.2%

15.9%

22.5%

20.1%

35.5%

13.4%

 9.0%

13.8%

31.5%

34.3%

29.1%

38.6%

26.8%

20.6%

28.5%

%

Carlos Spaht

(Continued)

6,601

2,640

7,775

6,063

5,648

14,033

17,914

9,223

36,741

5,886

6,146

11,603

6,067

7,176

12,362

2,392

2,371

40,378

4,681

3,117

5,277

3,570

2,783

3,540

28,736

30,595

7,438

4,980

6,636

11,970

4,816

7,837

8,168

17,569

Total Votes

1,139

1,428

1,487

3,054

St. Martin

St. Mary

St. Tammany

Tangipahoa

4.0%

50.9%

13.6%

18.7%

18.7%

7.1%

5.5%

12.8%

23.5%

13.1%

15.7%

10.3%

4.0%

14.6%

17.0%

9.1%

19.8%

15.6%

16.8%

16.5%

13.8%

20.4%

50.9%

8.3%

24.3%

5.9%

13.5%

15.8%

15.7%

7.1%

19.7%

4.3%

10.0%

32.6%

10.9%

%

40

12,082

693

1,421

90,925

543

157

464

227

860

2,139

2,846

622

779

2,347

186

1,800

666

2,035

167

2,552

317

483

572

439

137

1,821

423

332

4,794

158

40

2,733

12,082

2,076

#

 1.1%

55.8%

11.7%

11.9%

11.9%

 8.7%

14.2%

 9.1%

 9.3%

 8.8%

16.5%

34.8%

 3.9%

11.8%

25.4%

 9.6%

11.7%

 7.0%

24.0%

 2.4%

13.6%

 5.5%

11.3%

23.6%

 7.7%

 3.6%

25.4%

 7.4%

10.1%

17.8%

 3.5%

 1.1%

13.0%

 7.3%

19.9%

%

William J. Dodd

3

930

44

76

4,832

34

8

53

3

45

108

87

50

52

87

14

153

114

77

19

48

41

29

26

54

8

29

40

15

98

12

9

161

930

54

#

0.12%

2.91%

0.66%

0.63%

0.63%

0.54%

0.72%

1.04%

0.12%

0.46%

0.83%

1.06%

0.32%

0.79%

0.94%

0.72%

0.99%

1.20%

0.91%

0.27%

0.26%

0.71%

0.68%

1.07%

0.95%

0.21%

0.41%

0.70%

0.46%

0.36%

0.27%

0.26%

0.77%

0.56%

0.52%

%

Lucille Grace

216

33,754

1,272

2,554

163,434

1,491

332

825

863

4,607

3,036

703

765

1,847

3,082

334

5,545

3,315

2,444

771

1,846

620

427

958

1,080

216

881

1,296

226

3,216

1,497

264

6,564

33,754

1,098

#

 3.5%

54.6%

19.1%

21.5%

21.5%

23.8%

30.0%

16.2%

35.5%

47.3%

23.5%

 8.6%

 4.8%

27.9%

33.3%

17.2%

35.9%

34.8%

28.8%

11.2%

 9.8%

10.7%

10.0%

39.5%

18.9%

5.7%

12.3%

22.6%

6.9%

11.9%

33.3%

7.6%

31.3%

20.3%

10.5%

%

Robert F. Kennon

4

7,907

341

983

62,906

303

4

328

39

169

465

749

7,907

544

283

50

654

446

830

1,600

3,748

119

78

62

166

46

429

413

101

1,201

60

55

1,354

3,067

681

#

 0.4%

49.9%

 4.5%

 8.3%

 8.3%

 4.8%

 0.4%

 6.5%

 1.6%

 1.7%

 3.6%

 9.2%

49.9%

 8.2%

 3.1%

 2.6%

 4.2%

 4.7%

 9.8%

23.2%

20.0%

 2.1%

 1.8%

 2.6%

 2.9%

 1.2%

 6.0%

 7.2%

 3.1%

 4.5%

 1.3%

 1.6%

 6.5%

 1.8%

 6.5%

%

Dudley LeBlanc 5

1

367

7

21

1,233

10

 

6

 

42

19

9

9

8

3

3

28

21

4

2

7

10

 

5

6

1

9

7

1

33

 

4

31

254

#

0.0%

1.3%

0.1%

0.2%

0.2%

0.2%

 

0.1%

 

0.4%

0.1%

0.1%

0.1%

0.1%

0.0%

0.2%

0.2%

0.2%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.2%

 

0.2%

0.1%

0.0%

0.1%

0.1%

0.0%

0.1%

0.0%

0.1%

0.1%

0.2%

0.0%

%

Cliff Liles

83

17,408

919

1,819

116,405

929

321

1,480

170

933

2,603

877

1,003

658

879

787

870

986

908

671

3,335

148

83

117

509

729

907

1,154

860

8,492

463

2,893

3,762

17,408

2,067

#

 1.9%

82.8%

13.3%

15.3%

15.3%

14.9%

29.0%

29.1%

 7.0%

 9.6%

20.1%

10.7%

 6.3%

10.0%

 9.5%

40.5%

 5.6%

10.4%

10.7%

 9.7%

17.8%

 2.6%

 1.9%

 4.8%

 8.9%

19.3%

12.7%

20.2%

26.2%

31.5%

10.3%

82.8%

17.9%

10.5%

19.8%

%

James McLemore

Source: Adapted from Louisiana Department of State, “Democratic Primary Election Returns, Elections Held January 15, 1952, and February 19, 1952” (Baton Rouge, 1952), p. 95. Calculations by the authors.

61

Minimum

942

Median

54,043

2,227

Mean

Maximum

446

142,542

61

West Feliciana

Total

652

West Carroll

Winn

572

1,274

West Baton Rouge

2,027

844

Vernon

Webster

635

Washington

967

Vermilion

1,574

Union

Terrebonne

176

2,581

St. Landry

Tensas

1,181

1,388

St. Charles

St. John the Baptist

221

St. Bernard

202

964

Sabine

2,176

905

Richland

St. James

515

Red River

St. Helena

1,900

Rapides

885

Pointe Coupee

Ouachita

150

2,093

Orleans

Plaquemines

1,140

54,043

Natchitoches

#

Parish

Hale Boggs

Table 24.24 (Continued)

1

1,768

26

88

5,470

40

1

13

2

142

53

12

32

67

31

2

28

65

10

3

15

166

30

4

250

 

24

22

12

60

4

4

81

1,768

42

#

0.0%

4.4%

0.3%

0.7%

0.7%

0.6%

0.1%

0.3%

0.1%

1.5%

0.4%

0.1%

0.2%

1.0%

0.3%

0.1%

0.2%

0.7%

0.1%

0.0%

0.1%

2.9%

0.7%

0.2%

4.4%

 

0.3%

0.4%

0.4%

0.2%

0.1%

0.1%

0.4%

1.1%

0.4%

%

Kermit Parker

75

42,723

1,826

2,719

173,987

2,456

222

1,260

554

1,675

2,489

2,052

4,820

1,690

972

389

3,301

2,425

751

2,539

4,614

3,190

973

477

1,810

2,419

2,093

1,467

1,222

7,150

1,413

75

4,185

42,723

3,285

#

 2.1%

64.0%

23.4%

22.8%

22.8%

39.3%

20.1%

24.8%

22.8%

17.2%

19.2%

25.1%

30.4%

25.6%

10.5%

20.0%

21.4%

25.5%

 8.8%

36.7%

24.6%

55.1%

22.7%

19.7%

31.7%

64.0%

29.2%

25.6%

37.2%

26.5%

31.5%

 2.1%

20.0%

25.7%

31.4%

%

Carlos Spaht

1,106

166,029

6,624

11,902

761,734

6,252

1,106

5,081

2,430

9,747

12,939

8,179

15,843

6,612

9,258

1,941

15,433

9,525

8,487

6,911

18,746

5,792

4,279

2,423

5,702

3,777

7,157

5,727

3,284

26,944

4,492

3,494

20,964

166,029

10,448

Total Votes



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 577

Hence, it was impossible for African Americans in Madison Parish to vote for the Parker candidacy.59 Two years after the 1952 race, African Americans filed suit against Mrs. Harris forcing her to resign, but she was able to transfer this public office to her daughter, Mrs. Katherine Ward. Thus, this mother-daughter duo in Madison Parish, in collusion with elected white officials, kept the African American electorate disenfranchised for some 37 years. Besides no votes from Madison Parish, none came to Parker from St. Bernard Parish. It was not a parish with an African American majority, but it did have some registered African American voters. Although there were no registered African American voters in the parish in 1948, there were 225 in 1954 (124 males and 101 females).60 Said data suggest that there were registered African American voters in St. Bernard Parish at the time of Parker’s pioneering campaign, but they simply did not vote for him. Moreover, none of the Commission Hearings or Reports cite any problems with African Americans voting in this particular parish. Overall, there was an immediate impact and influence flowing from this pioneering election in 1952 in the state: (1) the Parker candidacy brought additional Negro poll commissioners in this election; (2) there was better treatment of African Americans at voter registration offices and at polling places; (3) there was with this candidate a change in the all-white Democratic primaries; (4) African American voting rights activists were greatly mobilized; and (5) this candidacy built up the political socialization of the African American community in the state. Needless to say, this fledging campaign had two problems. First, African American political organizations and groups divided their support among all nine of the candidates, especially the candidates of the Long family political machine that began with Governor Huey Long in the 1930s. Thus, Parker received little support, backing, and endorsements from the African American political apparatus in the state.61 Second, partially as a result of this political isolation within his community, he had a lack of funds. Most of the monies for his pioneering campaign came from his personal funds. With little funds to get his message out and campaign planks discussed, Parker’s bold effort could not reach the African American voters, and racial segregation made the hope of a biracial coalition all but impossible. But as this campaign exited the political stage, it made possible another one four years later in 1956.

Earl J. Amedee for Attorney General, Louisiana, 1956 The second African American statewide candidate in Louisiana was Earl J. Amedee, who ran for state attorney general in 1956. Unlike the pharmacist Parker, Amedee was a Howard University Law School graduate and a political pioneer with several previous electoral campaigns under his belt.62 In 1950 he had run unsuccessfully for a school board seat and in 1954, again unsuccessfully, for a state legislative seat in New Orleans (Orleans Parish). Amedee followed in Parker’s political footsteps to seek a larger political venue knowing that he had an electoral base in his hometown.63 Table 24.25 (pp. 578–579) shows that in a field of six candidates, Amedee came in fourth with 60,543 votes for 8.5% of the

statewide vote. Unlike Parker, Amedee received votes from all 64 parishes, but like Parker, Amedee’s highest vote, 18,455, came from Orleans Parish (New Orleans), while his lowest vote, 19, came from Tensas Parish. As for the two parishes that failed to vote for Parker, Madison gave Amedee 31 votes and St. Bernard 382 votes. The mean vote was 946 while the median was 465.5. In contrast to Parker, Amadee won over 20% of the vote in several parishes. Clearly, there was a significant increase in the vote for an African American statewide candidate. However, official African American voter registration for October 1956 reveals that 481,264 were registered.64 Thus, Amedee’s vote was only the size of 12.5% of the registered African American voters. Amedee continued in state politics. After an unsuccessful election for a council-at-large seat in New Orleans, where he captured some 19,425 votes, he attracted the state Democratic party leaders, and the state attorney general, Richard Dowling, appointed Amedee to the state assistant district attorney position in 1958, making him the first African American in the post since Reconstruction. But Amedee resigned his position in 1960 and returned to running for local positions in Orleans parish.65 Thus, the impact and influence of Amedee’s elections at least temporarily changed the state’s Democratic Party patronage and appointment practices in 1958. Until that time the party had, like those in other southern states, a white-only policy of patronage and appointments.

Comparing the Parker and Amedee Results Table 24.26 (pp. 580–581) allows us to compare and contrast these two pioneering African American statewide campaigns using the three categories of parish-level racial populations. Both candidates, Parker and Amedee, received their highest number of votes and percentage of votes vis-à-vis the number of registered African American voters in the white majority parishes, while their second largest number and percentage of votes from the near equal category, and the lowest number and percentage of votes came from the African American majority parishes. These data confirm the thesis of professor V. O. Key, Jr.’s Southern Politics (1949): (1) it was easier to register and vote in counties (parishes) where the African American population was small and not a majority, and (2) where whites held permissive attitudes toward registration and voting it would occur without much difficulty. But the rise in votes from Parker to Amadee also suggests a large increase in registration and voting by African Americans between these two elections, which took place four years apart. At the very least, the increase supports the perception of a rising racial consciousness in the state. It is obvious in terms of total votes that the two campaigns were significantly different but the parish-by-parish analysis allows a more fine-tuned and detailed portrait showing where the two campaigns differed. The huge difference in total votes speaks to the voting rights activism and mobilization that occurred in Louisiana, where white activists vigorously sought to roll back the number of African American registered voters, and hence, the need for a parish-by-parish evaluation and assessment. And most importantly, the Parker and Amedee elections were a harbinger of things to come. Few political observers picked up on the cue that, in the future,

578

Chapter 24

Table 24.25  Democratic Party Primary Election for Attorney General of Louisiana, January 17, 1956 Earl Amedee Parish

#

Acadia Allen

Benjamin Bennett

Emile Carmouche

Jack Gremillion

J. Minos Simon %

Total Votes

375

2.8%

13,585

117

1.9%

6,124

19.5%

71

1.1%

6,340

27.3%

128

3.4%

3,739

1,491

13.8%

333

3.1%

10,786

48.2%

1,276

20.6%

206

3.3%

6,197

49.4%

1,314

30.5%

61

1.4%

4,310

%

#

%

#

%

839

 6.2%

1,116

 8.2%

1,128

8.3%

6,692

49.3%

3,435

25.3%

932

15.2%

579

 9.5%

173

2.8%

3,101

50.6%

1,222

20.0%

Ascension

832

13.1%

561

 8.8%

154

2.4%

3,485

55.0%

1,237

Assumption

459

12.3%

197

 5.3%

141

3.8%

1,795

48.0%

1,019

Avoyelles

458

 4.2%

2,561

23.7%

354

3.3%

5,589

51.8%

Beauregard

663

10.7%

843

13.6%

224

3.6%

2,985

Bienville

280

 6.5%

422

 9.8%

102

2.4%

2,131

Bossier

#

Fred LeBlanc

%

#

%

#

193

 2.7%

1,207

17.1%

214

3.0%

3,080

43.5%

2,263

32.0%

119

1.7%

7,076

Caddo

1,628

 4.9%

3,915

11.8%

1,759

5.3%

10,482

31.5%

14,968

44.9%

564

1.7%

33,316

Calcasieu

2,816

10.6%

4,137

15.6%

2,104

7.9%

10,468

39.5%

6,279

23.7%

695

2.6%

26,499

Caldwell

125

 4.4%

287

10.1%

52

1.8%

1,632

57.5%

643

22.6%

100

3.5%

2,839

Cameron

59

 3.3%

176

 9.9%

81

4.5%

746

41.8%

669

37.5%

55

3.1%

1,786

Catahoula

95

 3.2%

403

13.5%

89

3.0%

1,735

58.0%

535

17.9%

132

4.4%

2,989

Claiborne

95

 2.2%

586

13.7%

123

2.9%

1,407

32.9%

1,953

45.7%

111

2.6%

4,275

Concordia

74

 2.4%

369

11.8%

69

2.2%

1,698

54.2%

822

26.3%

99

3.2%

3,131

247

 4.8%

569

11.1%

106

2.1%

2,280

44.7%

1,812

35.5%

91

1.8%

5,105

East Baton Rouge

4,432

 9.8%

4,290

 9.5%

1,143

2.5%

15,986

35.4%

19,067

42.2%

287

0.6%

45,205

East Carroll

31

 1.5%

431

20.8%

71

3.4%

890

43.0%

571

27.6%

77

3.7%

2,071

East Feliciana

170

 6.2%

327

11.9%

58

2.1%

1,484

53.8%

701

25.4%

17

0.6%

2,757

Evangeline

637

 9.4%

973

14.4%

228

3.4%

3,255

48.1%

1,345

19.9%

333

4.9%

6,771

Franklin

205

 3.6%

768

13.4%

143

2.5%

2,737

47.6%

1,552

27.0%

341

5.9%

5,746

Grant

120

 2.5%

526

10.8%

130

2.7%

2,900

59.7%

997

20.5%

187

3.8%

4,860

Iberia

1,235

10.4%

997

 8.4%

415

3.5%

4,074

34.2%

3,745

31.4%

1,448

12.2%

11,914

De Soto

Iberville

891

14.1%

627

 9.9%

155

2.5%

2,943

46.7%

1,626

25.8%

64

1.0%

6,306

Jackson

276

 5.8%

468

 9.8%

90

1.9%

2,886

60.3%

895

18.7%

169

3.5%

4,784

Jefferson

3,784

 9.5%

5,233

13.1%

2,323

5.8%

13,623

34.2%

14,553

36.5%

363

0.9%

39,879

Jefferson Davis

1,153

15.3%

776

10.3%

412

5.5%

2,323

30.8%

2,681

35.5%

198

2.6%

7,543

Lafayette

1,145

 7.9%

1,208

 8.3%

590

4.0%

4,476

30.7%

5,419

37.2%

1,730

11.9%

14,568

Lafourche

481

 4.0%

1,293

10.7%

406

3.4%

5,397

44.6%

4,192

34.6%

340

2.8%

12,109

La Salle

145

 3.0%

883

18.5%

118

2.5%

2,500

52.4%

952

19.9%

177

3.7%

4,775

Lincoln

404

 7.0%

705

12.2%

117

2.0%

2,062

35.7%

2,238

38.8%

247

4.3%

5,773

Livingston

263

 4.0%

1,160

17.5%

186

2.8%

3,301

49.8%

1,618

24.4%

102

1.5%

6,630

Madison

31

 1.4%

326

14.4%

33

1.5%

970

42.8%

828

36.5%

79

3.5%

2,267

477

 7.6%

733

11.6%

158

2.5%

1,888

29.9%

2,689

42.6%

360

5.7%

6,305

Morehouse Natchitoches Orleans Ouachita Plaquemines

1,086

12.5%

1,305

15.0%

290

3.3%

3,820

43.9%

1,857

21.3%

352

4.0%

8,710

18,455

11.5%

9,876

 6.1%

4,477

2.8%

54,376

33.8%

73,243

45.5%

660

0.4%

161,087

548

 2.5%

2,191

10.2%

424

2.0%

9,780

45.4%

7,557

35.1%

1,044

4.8%

21,544

35

 1.0%

157

 4.7%

67

2.0%

303

9.0%

2,710

80.8%

81

2.4%

3,353

Pointe Coupee

411

10.3%

322

 8.1%

112

2.8%

1,835

45.9%

1,288

32.2%

26

0.7%

3,994

Rapides

428

 2.0%

2,874

13.4%

797

3.7%

10,376

48.5%

6,007

28.1%

909

4.2%

21,391

Red River

107

 3.4%

306

 9.8%

97

3.1%

2,073

66.3%

445

14.2%

98

3.1%

3,126



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 579 Earl Amedee %

Benjamin Bennett #

%

Emile Carmouche #

%

Jack Gremillion

Parish

#

#

%

Richland

258

 4.5%

707

12.3%

112

2.0%

2,685

46.9%

Sabine

451

 7.3%

697

11.2%

209

3.4%

3,799

St. Bernard

382

 4.7%

927

11.3%

236

2.9%

4,624

St. Charles

753

15.4%

578

11.9%

230

4.7%

St. Helena

488

19.8%

269

10.9%

67

2.7%

St. James

916

21.2%

278

 6.4%

100

St. John the Baptist

854

23.3%

292

 8.0%

Fred LeBlanc #

%

J. Minos Simon #

%

Total Votes

1,703

29.7%

263

4.6%

5,728

61.1%

908

14.6%

153

2.5%

6,217

56.6%

1,940

23.7%

67

0.8%

8,176

2,151

44.1%

1,116

22.9%

49

1.0%

4,877

1,195

48.5%

388

15.7%

57

2.3%

2,464

2.3%

2,220

51.5%

767

17.8%

31

0.7%

4,312

124

3.4%

1,684

45.9%

664

18.1%

51

1.4%

3,669

St. Landry

2,310

14.1%

2,368

14.5%

513

3.1%

6,840

41.9%

3,994

24.4%

313

1.9%

16,338

St. Martin

523

 8.7%

408

 6.8%

225

3.7%

2,771

46.0%

1,810

30.1%

283

4.7%

6,020

St. Mary

685

 8.1%

745

 8.8%

203

2.4%

3,507

41.4%

2,913

34.4%

420

5.0%

8,473

St. Tammany

789

 8.9%

1,017

11.5%

532

6.0%

3,936

44.6%

2,490

28.2%

66

0.7%

8,830

1,587

11.7%

1,980

14.6%

439

3.2%

5,570

41.1%

3,806

28.1%

170

1.3%

13,552

Tangipahoa Tensas

19

 1.5%

139

11.0%

25

2.0%

502

39.6%

534

42.1%

48

3.8%

1,267

Terrebonne

564

 5.7%

1,160

11.6%

424

4.3%

3,949

39.6%

3,498

35.1%

380

3.8%

9,975

Union

269

 5.0%

362

 6.7%

95

1.8%

2,374

44.2%

2,115

39.4%

150

2.8%

5,365

Vermilion

504

 4.4%

976

 8.5%

367

3.2%

5,172

45.0%

2,295

20.0%

2,177

18.9%

11,491

Vernon

370

 5.7%

1,222

18.7%

188

2.9%

3,451

52.8%

1,076

16.5%

225

3.4%

6,532

Washington

582

 5.3%

1,649

15.2%

412

3.8%

5,398

49.6%

2,711

24.9%

128

1.2%

10,880

Webster

472

 5.2%

902

 9.9%

219

2.4%

4,543

49.7%

2,857

31.3%

144

1.6%

9,137

West Baton Rouge

699

21.9%

269

 8.4%

100

3.1%

1,206

37.7%

907

28.4%

14

0.4%

3,195

West Carroll

104

 2.8%

582

15.5%

78

2.1%

1,772

47.1%

1,041

27.7%

182

4.8%

3,759

25

 2.5%

117

11.7%

26

2.6%

327

32.6%

502

50.0%

7

0.7%

1,004

Winn

194

 3.6%

577

10.8%

135

2.5%

3,360

63.1%

872

16.4%

190

3.6%

5,328

Total

60,543

 8.5%

74,904

10.6%

24,972

3.5%

288,600

40.8%

240,621

34.0%

18,514

2.6%

708,154

Mean

946

 8.5%

1,170

10.6%

390

3.5%

4,509

40.8%

3,760

34.0%

289

2.6%

11,065

West Feliciana

Median

466

 5.7%

706

11.2%

166

2.9%

2,922

45.9%

1,622

27.6%

161

2.8%

6,042

Maximum

18,455

23.3%

9,876

23.7%

4,477

8.3%

54,376

66.3%

73,243

80.8%

2,177

18.9%

162,604

Minimum

19

 1.0%

117

 4.7%

25

1.5%

303

9.0%

388

13.8%

7

0.4%

859

Source: Adapted from Louisiana Department of State, “Democratic Primary Election Returns, Election Held January 17, 1956” (Baton Rouge, 1956), p. 95. Calculations by the authors.

African Americans with and without full voting rights would be fully contesting and challenging the southern Democratic and Republican parties for not only local offices but statewide ones as well.

The Mississippi “Freedom Elections” for Governor, Congress, and the Presidency, 1963 and 1964 In 1920–1921, the African American community carried out an electoral revolt in the several southern states against the increasing accommodation of the southern Republican Party to racism and disenfranchisement. This revolt spearheaded the innovative tactic and strategy of running an African American candidate for a highly visible political office so as to mobilize the African

American electorate to both register and vote. This tactic was used again in several southern states at different times. It occurred in Mississippi’s neighboring state of Louisiana in 1952 and 1956, but it did not happen in Mississippi until the 1962 midterm congressional elections. In that election Robert L. T. Smith and Rev. Merrill Lindsay pioneered as the first African Americans running for Congress in the state of Mississippi since disenfranchisement in 1890.66 Smith was based in Jackson while the Lindsay campaign was based in Holly Springs.67 Both men belonged to the NAACP, and NAACP state leader Aaron Henry served as Lindsey’s campaign manager.68 Both of the candidates held campaign rallies not only to publicize their races but as fundraisers. Yet for some reason most books on the civil rights movement in the state overlook these two campaigns in much the same way that the two

580

Chapter 24

Black

Racial Majority*

Table 24.26  Comparison of Votes for Parker and Amedee in the Louisiana Democratic Primaries and African American Voter Registrations in 1956 Kermit Parker, 1952 Primary for Governor Parish

Nearly Equal

Percent

Votes

Percent

African American Voters 1956 Eligible

Percent Registered

White Voters 1956 Eligible

Percent Registered

West Feliciana

1

0.1%

25

 2.5%

4,076

0%

2,134

60.4%

Madison

0

0.0%

31

 1.4%

6,332

0%

3,372

90.7%

Tensas

2

0.1%

19

 1.5%

4,592

0%

2,587

79.4%

East Carroll

2

0.1%

31

 1.5%

5,330

0%

3,223

93.1%

Concordia

17

0.5%

74

 2.4%

4,641

11.5%

3,329

110%

East Feliciana

4

0.2%

170

 6.2%

6,235

21.2%

6,214

45.3%

13

0.3%

247

 4.8%

6,859

11.2%

6,644

85.7%

Pointe Coupee

4

0.1%

411

10.3%

5,711

23.2%

5,873

84.2%

West Baton Rouge

2

0.1%

699

21.9%

3,440

30.1%

3,158

96.5%

De Soto

St. Helena

4

0.2%

488

19.8%

2,085

77.4%

2,440

107%

Total

49

0.2%

2,195

 8.1%

49,301

13.4%

38,974

82.6%

Mean

5

 

220

 

4,930

 

3,897

 

Claiborne

6

0.1%

95

 2.2%

6,277

0.3%

7,748

75.8%

St. James

30

0.7%

916

21.2%

3,818

54.7%

4,288

95.4%

Red River

12

0.4%

107

 3.4%

2,917

46.7%

3,569

101%

166

2.9%

854

23.3%

3,745

65.4%

4,298

88.6%

Bienville

15

0.3%

280

 6.5%

4,478

0.8%

6,123

86.3%

Iberville

25

0.4%

891

14.1%

7,170

33.2%

8,160

83.4%

Morehouse

28

0.4%

477

 7.6%

7,907

12.0%

9,466

101%

Total

282

0.8%

3,620

11.2%

36,312

25.6%

43,652

89.4%

Mean

40

 

 

5,187

 

6,236

 

Natchitoches

42

0.4%

1,086

12.5%

8,445

35.4%

11,828

83.8%

St. Landry

15

0.1%

2,310

14.1%

15,026

86.9%

24,230

90.6%

Assumption

27

0.6%

459

12.3%

3,481

57.5%

5,751

82.2%

Richland

22

0.4%

258

 4.5%

5,427

13.7%

8,452

86.3%

Lincoln

18

0.3%

404

 7.0%

5,242

19.3%

9,297

82.2%

4

0.1%

35

 1.0%

2,642

1.9%

5,229

90.7%

St. John the Baptist

Plaquemines St. Mary Caddo White

Votes

Earl Amedee, 1956 Primary for Attorney General

St. Martin

517

10

0.1%

685

 8.1%

7,260

36.8%

12,680

84.2%

543

1.8%

1,628

 4.9%

37,772

9.6%

73,073

67.2%

3

0.0%

523

 8.7%

4,343

60.1%

9,101

83.1%

Franklin

20

0.3%

205

 3.6%

5,070

12.8%

9,870

83.7%

Webster

142

1.5%

472

 5.2%

6,618

26.8%

13,606

95.2%

Ascension

55

0.7%

832

13.1%

4,109

46.9%

8,172

90.7%

Catahoula

7

0.2%

95

 3.2%

2,186

16.0%

4,116

101%

Bossier

4

0.1%

193

 2.7%

6,974

7.2%

15,768

59.1%

Union

67

1.0%

269

 5.0%

3,162

34.8%

7,542

91.4%

60

0.2%

428

 2.0%

17,618

16.4%

37,185

72.9%

206

0.5%

4,432

 9.8%

30,455

29.5%

66,063

82.6%

Rapides East Baton Rouge

Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 581

Racial Majority*

Kermit Parker, 1952 Primary for Governor Parish

Votes

Percent

Ouachita

81

0.4%

St. Charles

250 25

Iberia Orleans

Percent Registered

White Voters 1956 Eligible

Percent Registered

Percent

Eligible

548

 2.5%

14,532

6.1%

4.4%

753

15.4%

2,254

79.1%

5,139

110%

0.2%

1,235

10.4%

6,704

63.5%

15,953

93.3%

31,381

74.8%

1,768

1.1%

18,455

11.5%

113,241

28.8%

271,421

66.4%

53

0.4%

582

 5.3%

6,155

30.7%

15,188

102%

Tangipahoa

28

0.2%

1,587

11.7%

8,696

43.3%

21,254

85.8%

Jackson

60

1.0%

276

 5.8%

2,299

7.3%

6,415

86.3%

St. Tammany

65

0.7%

789

 8.9%

4,155

49.0%

11,455

117%

5

0.1%

125

 4.4%

1,481

8.4%

4,309

89.6%

40

0.6%

194

 3.6%

2,489

57.9%

7,012

94.7%

Lafayette

143

0.8%

1,145

 7.9%

7,733

59.5%

25,103

86.3%

Avoyelles

28

0.2%

458

 4.2%

4,738

42.8%

16,223

84.4%

Terrebonne

31

0.3%

564

 5.7%

5,170

20.6%

17,440

80.9%

Grant

14

0.2%

120

 2.5%

1,757

49.2%

6,364

91.5%

Allen

50

0.6%

932

15.2%

2,353

77.4%

8,090

96.3%

Winn

White (Continued)

Votes

African American Voters 1956

Washington

Caldwell

Evangeline

4

0.0%

637

 9.4%

3,038

107%

13,972

94.3%

Calcasieu

615

2.1%

2,816

10.6%

11,408

52.9%

40,930

83.2%

Jefferson Davis

40

0.4%

1,153

15.3%

2,673

63.2%

11,705

81.0%

Sabine

24

0.3%

451

 7.3%

2,220

63.8%

9,272

82.1%

Acadia

33

0.2%

839

 6.2%

4,369

74.7%

21,237

85.0%

West Carroll

13

0.3%

104

 2.8%

1,531

19.1%

7,223

78.7%

Beauregard

34

0.5%

663

10.7%

1,734

61.6%

8,402

85.5%

Jefferson

325

0.9%

3,784

 9.5%

9,187

70.7%

52,836

104%

Livingston

18

0.2%

263

 4.0%

1,496

83.7%

9,185

110%

St. Bernard

0

0.0%

382

 4.7%

858

93.5%

5,594

203%

Lafourche

58

0.4%

481

 4.0%

2,820

58.9%

19,888

103%

Vermilion

32

0.2%

504

 4.4%

2,323

77.5%

18,892

86.3%

Vernon

12

0.1%

370

 5.7%

1,312

68.0%

9,536

101%

La Salle

15

0.3%

145

 3.0%

813

44.8%

6,615

105%

Cameron

30

1.1%

59

 3.3%

302

60.9%

3,238

91.2%

5,139

0.7%

54,728

 8.4%

395,671

34.6%

1,023,235

81.4%

Total

All

Earl Amedee, 1956 Primary for Attorney General

Mean

109

 

1,164

 

Total

5,470

0.7%

60,543

 8.5%

8,419

 

21,771

 

481,284

31.7%

1,105,861

81.7%

Mean

88

0.7%

946

Median

26

0.3%

465.5

 8.5%

7,520

31.7%

17,279

81.7%

 5.7%

4,423.5

36.1%

8,427

86.3%

Maximum

1,768

4.4%

Minimum

0

0.0%

18,455

23.3%

113,241

107%

271,421

203%

19

 1.0%

302

0%

2,134

45.3%

Sources: Adapted from Louisiana Department of State, “Democratic Primary Election Returns, Elections Held January 15, 1952 and February 19, 1952” (Baton Rouge, 1952), p. 95; Louisiana Department of State, “Democratic Primary Election Returns, Election Held January 17, 1956” (Baton Rouge, 1956), p. 95; United States Commission of Civil Rights, Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1959 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959), pp. 559–591 (see Table 29); and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR, 2004), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors. * The categorization of parishes by racial majority is based on the percentage of the total population that was African American according to the 1950 census. “Black” parishes had populations that were at least 52.5% African American. Parishes with “nearly equal” populations were those with populations from 47.5% to 52.5% African American. “White” parishes had populations less than 47.5% African American.

582

Chapter 24

campaigns in Louisiana are either overlooked or dismissed. Table 24.27, which provides the votes and percentages for these two pioneering African American candidates, shows that they ran in two of the state’s five congressional districts. (Following the 1960 Census, Mississippi was reduced from six to five districts; after the 2000 Census, it was reduced to four districts.) Map 24.2 locates these districts and differentiates the counties in each by their racial majorities. These two congressional candidates ran in the Democratic primaries on June 5, 1962, which took place before the 1963 Freedom Vote, the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and its Democratic National Convention seating challenge, and its five congressional seat challenge in 1965, and the presidential Freedom Vote for the JohnsonHumphrey Democratic party nominees in 1964. These two individual candidates, like the ones in Louisiana, simply wanted to mobilize their community to register and vote in the state. They set the foundations for community-created election alternatives for the few African American registered voters who otherwise would have to vote for white candidates who did not want them to vote. However, these two pioneering African American congressional campaigns did not engender the hoped for voter registration and voting mobilization in the community. A substantial part of the reason why is noted in several of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights’ Reports on the political context in the state. In its 1959 Report the Commission devoted a section on the thirtyone voting rights complaints evolving from some eight different counties in the state.69 Similar coverage was made in the 1961 and 1963 Reports of the Commission.70 And the 1965 Report of the Commission “Voting in Mississippi” was devoted entirely to registration and voting complaints and problems in the state. “In 1960 and 1961 the Commission’s staff conducted field investigations in Mississippi . . . and . . . in 1963. . . . During 1964 Commission staff conducted further investigations in Mississippi.”71 Finally, after four years of consecutive field investigations in the state, the Commission held hearings “in Jackson in February 1965 . . . beginning on February 16 and continuing through February 20, 1965.”72 Thus, in terms of voting rights complaints in the South the Commission devoted its most extensive work and probes to Mississippi and concluded that: Table 24.27  Pioneering African American Congressional Candidates of Mississippi, 1962 Congressional District 2       3    

Candidate

Votes

Percent

Jamie L. Whitten

34,322

60.3%

Frank E. Smith

21,257

37.4%

1,318

2.3%

Total

56,897

100%

John Bell Williams

40,811

93.5%

Robert L. T. Smith*

2,853

6.5%

43,664

100%

Merrill W. Lindsey*

Total

Source: Adapted from Richard Scammon, America Votes 5 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964), p. 220. Calculations by the authors. *African American candidate

The 15th amendment to the United States Constitution commands that no citizen shall be deprived of the right to vote by reason of race or color. This requirement of the Constitution which is binding in every State has, in substance, been repudiated and denied in Mississippi. Since 1875 Negroes in Mississippi have been systematically excluded from the franchise by legislative enactment, fraud and violence. For many years the Federal Government failed to take any action to enforce the 15th amendment in Mississippi or in other Southern States where similar practices existed. But since 1957 Congress has acted three times in an effort to eliminate discrimination in voting, and the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice has vigorously exercised the authority conferred by Congressional enactment. In Mississippi these efforts have proved largely unavailing and few Negroes have been registered to vote. The barriers of unjust tests and discriminatory administration have remained all but insurmountable while a deep-seated fear of economic or physical reprisal has acted as a significant deterrent for Negroes who would otherwise wish to register.73 The snail’s pace of reform came despite the pioneering congressional candidates, the efforts of well known individual voting rights activists such as Medgar, Myrlie, and Charles Evers, Aaron Henry, Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Jackson Gray, Leslie Burl McLemore, Frank Parker, as well as students such as Bob Moses, Diane Nash, James Bevel, Lester McKinne, Bernard Lafayette, and their statewide umbrella civil rights organization Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), and civil rights organizations such as the SNCC, VEP of Southern Regional Council, NAACP, CORE, and eventually SCLC, along with Justice Department Civil Rights lawyers. Even African American attorney Wiley Branton, Director of the Voter Education Project in the state, declared “less than two weeks before [President] Kennedy’s death, [that] the Voter Education Project . . . was cutting off funding to all registration projects in Mississippi. . . . Branton explained to Aaron Henry and Bob Moses that the $50,000 allocated to COFO in 1962 had added only 3,228 new voters to the rolls. In short, the Mississippi project was not cost effective.”74 Finally, the leadership of the voting rights activists decided to innovate beyond the “stimulant” and “mobilizing” African American candidates like Lindsey and Smith. These innovations were: (1) the Freedom Vote at the local, gubernatorial, congressional, and presidential levels, (2) formation of a satellite political party, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, (3) seating challenges at the Democratic National Convention and the House of Representatives, (4) the displacement of the regular state Democratic Party with the “Loyalist Democrats,” and (5) the James Meredith March from Memphis to Jackson with the civil rights leaders participating (named for a voting rights advocate who was ambushed). Although all of the southern states saw the use of a pioneering “stimulant” and “mobilizing” African American candidate, none but Mississippi had the Freedom Vote or combined all of these things together so they appeared as a coherent whole. And as a



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 583 Map 24.2  Counties of the 1st and 3rd Congressional Districts of Mississippi, 1962

Tennessee

BENTON

DE SOTO 0

100

200

miles

MARSHALL TATE

UNION

TUNICA PANOLA

COAHOMA

TIPPAH

LAFAYETTE

QUITMAN YALOBUSHA TALLAHATCHIE

1st District BOLIVAR

LEFLORE

MONTGOMERY CARROLL

SUNFLOWER

Arkansas

WASHINGTON

GRENADA

HUMPHREYS HOLMES

SHARKEY

Alabama

YAZOO

ISSAQUENA

Mississippi WARREN

African American majority county

HINDS

CLAIBORNE

Louisiana

White majority county

COPIAH

Mississippi 1st Congressional District

JEFFERSON

3rd District ADAMS

Mississippi 3rd Congressional District

LINCOLN

FRANKLIN PIKE

WILKINSON

0

50

AMITE

WALTHALL

100

miles

Source: Adapted from Richard Scammon, America Votes 5 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964), p. 220.

584

Chapter 24

consequence no other southern state was able to attain the national exposure, publicity, and impact that Mississippi did.

Freedom Vote in Mississippi Gubernatorial Elections The seeds of this innovative Freedom Vote tactic and strategy were sown during the voter registration drive in Mississippi in 1963. In the gubernatorial election that year, all of the white candidates were running on different degrees of segregation and white supremacy. It was discovered that a Mississippi state law (Mississippi Code #3114) could help “unregistered Negroes cast ballots in the August 6 Democratic Primary.”75 The newspaper Mississippi Free Press, which covered the registration and voting rights activities in the state, described the provisions of the law: This law states that when a citizen has been illegally denied the right to register and vote, he can give his ballot, together with a statement saying he has been discriminated against, to the person in charge of the polling place. According to the law, the person seeking to vote must sign the statement in front of the election manager; then the manager must sign it. The election manager then puts the ballot (or a paper with the voter’s choice of candidates written on it) and the affidavit in an envelope, seals it, and writes the name of the voter on it. When all the ballots are counted, the Democratic executive Committee must decide whether the ballot may be legally counted.76 This newspaper and the COFO organization and affiliates made voter affidavit forms available to the unregistered African Americans. However, in the Democratic primary of August 6, 1963, as Table 24.28 shows, this new election tactic yielded a little more than 700 unregistered voters, indicating that it, like all of the other previous voter registration efforts, had minimal success. The up-for-reelection State Attorney General Joe Patterson

Table 24.28  Freedom Vote of Mississippi Cities Cast with State Affidavits in the 1963 Democratic Primary Freedom Votes via Affidavits Filled-Out City

Submitted

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

30

3.0%

 30

4.1%

Greenwood

400

40.3%

400

54.6%

Itta Bena

150

15.1%

150

20.5%

Jackson

385*

38.8%

125

17.1%

Ruleville

28

2.8%

 28

3.8%

993

100%

733

100%

Canton

Total

Source: Adapted from “733 Votes for Freedom: Patterson Threatens $100 Fines, Jail Terms, but Greenwood Negroes Turn in 400 Ballots,” Mississippi Free Press (August 10, 1963), pp. 1, 4. Calculations by the authors. * According to reports, Jackson, Mississippi, provides the only documented case of affidavits that were not all submitted for votes. Some 385 African Americans filled out voter affidavits, but only 125 individuals actually turned them in.

had made a widely publicized warning “that citizens attempting to vote by affidavit would face a $100 fine and a one year jail sentence.”77 Such a threat was in and of itself illegal simply because the voting rights activists and potential voters were acting on a valid state law. This threat may account for the fact that three cites account for nearly all (92.1%) of the votes cast. In the Democratic primary on August 6 none of the three gubernatorial candidates won a majority and therefore a run-off election was to be held between the two top vote getters, Paul Johnson and J. P. Coleman, three weeks later. There were only 26,241 votes cast between the two top vote getters, Coleman and Johnson, so the African American electorate if permitted to vote had a golden chance to exercise the balance-of-power in this election. In preparations for this run-off election, the voting rights activists launched a “Vote for Freedom” campaign. In this campaign the unregistered voters would not have to use voter affidavits and risk jail terms. According to the voting rights activist leaders, “only unregistered Negroes over 21 or registered voters who have not paid their poll tax will be allowed to vote.”78 These unregistered individuals and poll tax delinquent registered voters “will mark their choice for governor on un-official ballots and put them in ballot boxes located in churches and other community centers.”79 The leaders explained the administration of Vote for Freedom elections: Three individuals will oversee the voting at each polling place—a general manager, an observer to distribute the ballots, and a recorder to make a list of the people voting. The list will be strictly confidential and will be used only as a check to keep people from voting more than once. The polling places will be marked by signs reading “Vote for Freedom Polling Place.”80 The purpose and objective of this Vote for Freedom held on August 6, 1963, was “to dramatize the denial of Negroes’ voting rights in Mississippi. Results of the election will show the political sentiments of unregistered Negroes. . . . Campaign leaders hope to make the U.S. Congress and state politicians aware of the rising bloc of politically interested Negroes in Mississippi.”81 Besides Congress and state leaders, this tactic was designed to also influence the president, Commission, and the bureaucracy that was supposed to implement the 1957, 1960, and 1964 Civil Rights Acts dealing with voting rights. In Table 24.29 one sees that the total number of votes cast in the initial Vote for Freedom regarding the gubernatorial election was only 733. The majority of those who responded to this campaign were unregistered or poll-tax-delinquent registered voters, and votes were only collected from five cities in the state. Such a small vote was not enough to have effectuated a different electoral outcome and winner. But if the full contingent of unregistered and poll-tax-delinquent registered voters had been allowed to participate that could have altered the electoral outcome. One can see this potential in the increased size of the Vote for Freedom in the 1963 run-off election, shown in the next table. Table 24.30 (p. 587) reveals that this time 27,689 voters showed up, a number greater than the vote difference between



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 585 Table 24.29  Democratic Primary Election for Governor of Mississippi and the Freedom Vote, 1963 1963 Mississippi Democratic Primary Election for Governor James Coleman Votes

Percent

Paul Johnson Votes

Percent

Charles Sullivan

County

The Freedom Vote

Votes

Percent

Total Votes

Adams

 

1,618

25.4%

2,011

31.6%

2,743

43.0%

6,372

Alcorn

 

2,699

29.9%

4,036

44.7%

2,289

25.4%

9,024

Amite

 

531

16.4%

1,973

61.1%

726

22.5%

3,230

Attala

 

2,622

50.4%

1,883

36.2%

698

13.4%

5,203

Benton

 

454

23.0%

995

50.5%

522

26.5%

1,971

Bolivar

 

1,898

34.4%

1,413

25.6%

2,207

40.0%

5,518

Calhoun

 

1,529

28.8%

2,608

49.1%

1,177

22.1%

5,314

Carroll

 

1,038

39.9%

991

38.1%

573

22.0%

2,602

Chickasaw

 

2,141

45.1%

1,605

33.8%

1,003

21.1%

4,749

Choctaw

 

2,388

75.8%

609

19.3%

154

 4.9%

3,151

Claiborne

 

406

28.5%

567

39.8%

452

31.7%

1,425

Clarke

 

895

20.6%

2,073

47.6%

1,383

31.8%

4,351

Clay

 

1,162

33.0%

1,520

43.2%

839

23.8%

3,521

Coahoma

 

1,204

23.7%

455

 9.0%

3,419

67.3%

5,078

Copiah

 

1,518

29.0%

2,600

49.7%

1,116

21.3%

5,234

Covington

 

1,319

29.0%

1,875

41.3%

1,347

29.7%

4,541

De Soto

 

1,227

30.8%

1,395

35.0%

1,368

34.3%

3,990

Forrest

 

2,449

22.5%

5,602

51.4%

2,838

26.1%

10,889

Franklin

 

474

17.9%

1,631

61.6%

544

20.5%

2,649

George

 

707

18.7%

1,950

51.5%

1,126

29.8%

3,783

Greene

 

577

16.2%

963

27.0%

2,032

56.9%

3,572

Grenada

 

1,264

31.6%

1,573

39.3%

1,164

29.1%

4,001

Hancock

 

1,542

27.9%

2,265

40.9%

1,725

31.2%

5,532

Harrison

 

6,914

30.8%

7,586

33.8%

7,943

35.4%

22,443

Hinds

 

13,598

38.3%

11,976

33.8%

9,886

27.9%

35,460

Holmes

 

1,307

36.0%

1,378

38.0%

945

26.0%

3,630

Humphreys

 

704

31.2%

910

40.3%

643

28.5%

2,257

Issaquena

 

198

31.1%

282

44.3%

157

24.6%

637

Itawamba

 

2,587

39.5%

2,805

42.9%

1,154

17.6%

6,546

Jackson

 

4,819

35.8%

5,635

41.8%

3,015

22.4%

13,469

Jasper

 

1,445

34.4%

1,615

38.4%

1,146

27.2%

4,206

Jefferson

 

375

25.1%

597

40.0%

522

34.9%

1,494

Jefferson Davis

 

1,082

33.3%

1,258

38.7%

913

28.1%

3,253

Jones

 

7,170

46.6%

4,635

30.1%

3,592

23.3%

15,397

Kemper

 

883

30.7%

1,311

45.5%

686

23.8%

2,880

Lafayette

 

1,845

39.9%

1,153

24.9%

1,628

35.2%

4,626

Lamar

 

1,092

22.2%

2,023

41.0%

1,814

36.8%

4,929

Lauderdale

 

4,300

29.7%

5,846

40.4%

4,338

30.0%

14,484

Lawrence

 

728

19.2%

2,098

55.3%

967

25.5%

3,793

Leake

 

1,191

24.3%

2,894

59.1%

809

16.5%

4,894

Lee

 

5,281

48.2%

2,823

25.8%

2,847

26.0%

10,951

Leflore

 

2,590

43.3%

1,255

21.0%

2,140

35.8%

5,985

Lincoln

 

1,727

22.2%

3,865

49.7%

2,184

28.1%

7,776

Lowndes

 

2,625

39.9%

2,225

33.8%

1,735

26.3%

6,585 (Continued)

586

Chapter 24

Table 24.29 (Continued) 1963 Mississippi Democratic Primary Election for Governor James Coleman Votes

Percent

Paul Johnson Votes

Percent

Charles Sullivan

County

The Freedom Vote

Madison

 

1,592

40.1%

1,426

35.9%

Votes 955

Percent 24.0%

Total Votes 3,973

Marion

 

1,868

27.0%

3,055

44.1%

2,006

29.0%

6,929

Marshall

 

1,130

31.6%

1,214

33.9%

1,236

34.5%

3,580

Monroe

 

2,815

35.4%

3,363

42.3%

1,768

22.3%

7,946

Montgomery

 

1,810

45.1%

1,319

32.9%

880

22.0%

4,009

Neshoba

 

2,455

36.3%

2,910

43.0%

1,397

20.7%

6,762

Newton

 

1,441

28.1%

2,177

42.4%

1,518

29.6%

5,136

Noxubee

 

609

26.0%

1,174

50.1%

558

23.8%

2,341

Oktibbeha

 

1,995

42.9%

1,652

35.6%

998

21.5%

4,645

Panola

 

1,413

29.2%

1,512

31.2%

1,915

39.6%

4,840

Pearl River

 

1,434

21.1%

2,982

44.0%

2,367

34.9%

6,783

Perry

 

662

20.8%

1,328

41.7%

1,198

37.6%

3,188

Pike

 

1,558

22.1%

3,534

50.2%

1,943

27.6%

7,035

Pontotoc

 

2,544

42.2%

1,838

30.5%

1,641

27.2%

6,023

Prentiss

 

2,279

35.2%

2,743

42.3%

1,460

22.5%

6,482

Quitman

 

882

27.6%

1,010

31.6%

1,308

40.9%

3,200

Rankin

 

1,961

22.8%

4,218

49.1%

2,413

28.1%

8,592

Scott

 

1,539

27.2%

2,814

49.8%

1,299

23.0%

5,652

Sharkey

 

416

28.0%

617

41.6%

451

30.4%

1,484

Simpson

 

1,399

23.2%

3,477

57.7%

1,153

19.1%

6,029

Smith

 

1,338

24.5%

2,623

48.1%

1,491

27.3%

5,452

Stone

 

552

22.1%

843

33.8%

1,100

44.1%

2,495

Sunflower

 

1,439

32.6%

1,453

32.9%

1,524

34.5%

4,416

Tallahatchie

 

1,309

31.4%

1,496

35.8%

1,369

32.8%

4,174

Tate

 

867

24.5%

1,482

41.8%

1,195

33.7%

3,544

Tippah

 

2,177

37.1%

2,799

47.7%

887

15.1%

5,863

Tishomingo

 

1,778

36.4%

1,767

36.2%

1,337

27.4%

4,882

Tunica

 

535

41.1%

167

12.8%

600

46.1%

1,302

Union

 

2,798

42.0%

2,512

37.7%

1,346

20.2%

6,656

Walthall

 

903

23.1%

1,907

48.9%

1,093

28.0%

3,903

Warren

 

3,337

39.8%

2,605

31.1%

2,432

29.0%

8,374

Washington

 

4,985

54.7%

1,619

17.8%

2,514

27.6%

9,118

Wayne

 

1,231

24.4%

2,181

43.2%

1,637

32.4%

5,049

Webster

 

1,851

43.7%

1,647

38.9%

733

17.3%

4,231

Wilkinson

 

328

18.0%

668

36.6%

827

45.4%

1,823

Winston

 

2,383

45.0%

2,154

40.7%

753

14.2%

5,290

Yalobusha

 

890

26.7%

1,288

38.7%

1,151

34.6%

3,329

Yazoo

 

1,673

32.0%

2,203

42.1%

1,359

26.0%

5,235

Total

733*

156,299

33.2%

182,540

38.7%

132,321

28.1%

471,160

Mean

 

1,906

33.2%

2,226

38.7%

1,614

28.1%

5,746

Median

 

1,443

30.7%

1,857

40.3%

1,304

27.6%

4,861

Maximum

 

13,598

75.8%

11,976

61.6%

9,886

67.3%

35,460

Minimum

 

198

16.2%

167

 9.0%

154

 4.9%

637

Source: Adapted from Numan V. Bartley and Hugh D. Graham, ICPSR Study No. 72, Southern Primary and General Election Data, 1946–1972 [Computer File] http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR00072 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), downloaded June 7, 2010. Calculations by the authors. * Unregistered Negroes voting with state affidavits, unable to affect the official vote total.



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 587 Table 24.30  Democratic Run-Off Election for Governor of Mississippi and the Freedom Vote, 1963 1963 Mississippi Democratic Run-Off Election for Governor

County

The Freedom Vote

Adams

 

2,487

39.9%

3,747

60.1%

Alcorn

 

2,894

35.1%

5,341

64.9%

Amite

 

732

24.6%

2,244

Attala

 

2,802

55.2%

2,273

James Coleman Votes

Percent

County

The Freedom Vote

6,234

Marion

 

2,235

31.8%

4,790

68.2%

7,025

8,235

Marshall

 

1,471

42.1%

2,024

57.9%

3,495

75.4%

2,976

Monroe

 

3,429

44.0%

4,368

56.0%

7,797

44.8%

5,075

Montgomery

 

2,001

52.1%

1,839

47.9%

3,840

 

2,786

43.8%

3,569

56.2%

6,355

Paul Johnson Votes

1963 Mississippi Democratic Run-Off Election for Governor

Percent

Total Votes

James Coleman Votes

Percent

Paul Johnson Votes

Percent

Total Votes

Benton

 

558

29.4%

1,339

70.6%

1,897

Neshoba

Bolivar

 

2,476

49.7%

2,509

50.3%

4,985

Newton

 

1,813

35.6%

3,286

64.4%

5,099

Calhoun

 

1,863

37.9%

3,049

62.1%

4,912

Noxubee

 

719

32.6%

1,489

67.4%

2,208

Carroll

 

1,180

46.7%

1,347

53.3%

2,527

Oktibbeha

 

2,259

51.8%

2,106

48.2%

4,365

4,513

Panola

 

2,149

46.6%

2,461

53.4%

4,610

 

2,008

31.0%

4,467

69.0%

6,475

Chickasaw

 

Choctaw

 

Claiborne Clarke Clay Coahoma

2,283

50.6%

711

23.0%

3,085

37.3%

873

62.7%

1,392

Perry

 

833

27.5%

2,199

72.5%

3,032

26.1%

3,116

73.9%

4,215

Pike

 

2,239

32.8%

4,596

67.2%

6,835

3,378

Pontotoc

 

2,968

49.8%

2,987

50.2%

5,955

4,467

Prentiss

 

2,521

40.0%

3,780

60.0%

6,301

 

1,355

42.8%

1,808

57.2%

3,163

77.0%

 

519

 

1,099

 

1,435 2,671

49.4%

Pearl River

2,374

 

2,230

42.5% 59.8%

1,943 1,796

57.5% 40.2%

Copiah

 

1,846

36.3%

3,243

63.7%

5,089

Quitman

Covington

 

1,611

37.2%

2,718

62.8%

4,329

Rankin

 

2,697

31.8%

5,771

68.2%

8,468

De Soto

 

1,701

43.8%

2,187

56.3%

3,888

Scott

 

1,836

33.6%

3,626

66.4%

5,462

Sharkey

 

572

39.6%

872

60.4%

1,444

Simpson

 

1,667

28.4%

4,206

71.6%

5,873

Smith

 

1,619

30.7%

3,650

69.3%

5,269

Stone

 

850

38.6%

1,351

61.4%

2,201

Sunflower

 

1,812

44.2%

2,287

55.8%

4,099

Tallahatchie

 

1,685

40.0%

2,524

60.0%

4,209

Tate

 

1,196

34.8%

2,242

65.2%

3,438

Tippah

 

2,420

42.3%

3,300

57.7%

5,720

Tishomingo

 

1,818

38.6%

2,895

61.4%

4,713

Tunica

 

614

62.0%

376

38.0%

990

Union

 

3,098

47.9%

3,376

52.1%

6,474

Walthall

 

1,238

32.0%

2,629

68.0%

3,867

Warren

 

4,080

50.3%

4,034

49.7%

8,114

Washington

 

6,060

67.6%

2,905

32.4%

8,965

Wayne

 

1,463

31.0%

3,263

69.0%

4,726

Webster

 

2,036

49.4%

2,088

50.6%

4,124

Wilkinson

 

582

34.2%

1,119

65.8%

1,701

Winston

 

2,717

52.0%

2,506

48.0%

5,223

Yalobusha

 

1,175

37.3%

1,978

62.7%

3,153

Forrest

 

3,489

32.4%

7,270

67.6%

10,759

Franklin

 

607

23.9%

1,934

76.1%

2,541

George

 

1,031

27.5%

2,720

72.5%

3,751

Greene

 

1,086

31.3%

2,387

68.7%

3,473

Grenada

 

1,674

43.4%

2,180

56.6%

3,854

Hancock

 

2,176

39.5%

3,327

60.5%

5,503

Harrison

 

10,262

47.0%

11,574

53.0%

21,836

Hinds

 

17,639

49.7%

17,838

50.3%

35,477

Holmes

 

1,463

43.7%

1,888

56.3%

3,351

Humphreys

 

925

41.0%

1,331

59.0%

2,256

Issaquena

 

227

38.3%

366

61.7%

593

Itawamba

 

2,876

45.3%

3,479

54.7%

6,355

Jackson

 

5,846

45.3%

7,073

54.7%

12,919

Jasper

 

1,706

41.4%

2,415

58.6%

4,121

Jefferson

 

430

33.1%

871

66.9%

1,301

Jefferson Davis

 

1,172

38.9%

1,838

61.1%

3,010

Jones

 

7,906

52.6%

7,136

47.4%

15,042

Kemper

 

1,005

36.7%

1,730

63.3%

2,735

Lafayette

 

2,459

55.3%

1,991

44.7%

4,450

Lamar

 

1,603

33.8%

3,146

66.2%

4,749

Lauderdale

 

5,454

38.4%

8,760

61.6%

14,214

Lawrence

 

952

27.4%

2,517

72.6%

3,469

Leake

 

1,364

29.0%

3,344

71.0%

4,708

Lee

 

6,185

57.5%

4,579

42.5%

10,764

Leflore

 

3,445

58.0%

2,492

42.0%

5,937

Lincoln

 

2,386

30.2%

5,504

69.8%

7,890

Lowndes

 

3,068

48.1%

3,317

51.9%

6,385

Madison

 

1,853

47.5%

2,051

52.5%

3,904

Yazoo

 

Total

27,689*

2,117

41.8%

2,952

58.2%

5,069

194,958

42.7%

261,443

57.3%

456,401

Mean Median

 

2,378

42.7%

3,188

57.3%

5,566

 

1,841

40.0%

2,521

60.0%

4,562

Maximum

 

17,639

77.0%

17,838

76.1%

35,477

Minimum

 

227

23.9%

366

23.0%

593

Source: Adapted from Numan V. Bartley and Hugh D. Graham, ICPSR Study No. 72, Southern Primary and General Election Data, 1946–1972 [Computer File] http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ ICPSR00072 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), downloaded June 7, 2010; and “Negroes Mount Massive Protest: 27,689 Cast Ballots Miss. Didn’t Want,” Mississippi Free Press (August 31, 1963), p. 1. Calculations by the authors. * Unofficial votes, not accepted as part of the official vote total.

588

Chapter 24

the two leading candidates in the primary of 26,241. It would not have been enough to affect the outcome in the run-off election where the difference was 66,485 votes. Thus, the activists needed to increase the registration and voter turnout if they were to show that the suppressed voters could have changed a result by the general election in November. Nevertheless there was dramatic growth in the Freedom Vote, spurred by the March on Washington, led by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had urged many at the Lincoln Memorial and those listening via the media to go back to Mississippi and turn it into a “Beloved” community.82 Hence, this march not only energized and re-invigorated individuals but helped to put this second Freedom Vote in the broader context of the heroic civil rights struggle. Thus, African American voting rights activist leaders and participants saw this vote as a “triumph.”83 The emboldened activists declared that “plans are underway to conduct the first election in Mississippi in which a massive number of Negroes will be allowed to vote. ‘We hope for between 150,000 and 200,000 Negroes to participate,’ said Bob Moses, one of the coordinators in the Vote for Freedom election planned for this November.”84 They described a remade tactic and strategy: “The Freedom Ballots will be cast for a special nominee for governor. . . . The November election will follow the pattern set by the August Vote For Freedom where over 27,000 unregistered Negroes of voting age cast special protest ballots. However, the coming campaign, with an early start on state-wide organization, should produce far greater results.”85 The organizers put forward an African American gubernatorial candidate with the “Vote For Freedom” election technique so as to “stimulate” and “mobilize” a larger number of African Americans to come out and participate in this unofficial election. Understanding that the African American electorate would not be that inclined to support either of two segregationist candidates (Democrat Paul Johnson or Republican Rubel Phillips) in the November 1963 election, COFO held its statewide nomination convention in Jackson at the Masonic Temple on Sunday, October 6th. The group elected a very popular statewide leader, Aaron Henry, 86 and “a week later Bob Moses asked Tougaloo [College] chaplain Ed King to be Henry’s running mate.”87 Although still recuperating from a car crash, King decided to accept, making the ticket a biracial one. Hence, it had the potential of attracting white audiences as well as white votes. As this campaign progressed, both COFO and the HenryKing ticket made it clear that this “protest vote” was not the typical campaign of candidates running against another candidate but one where they were running against segregation and discrimination. It was not a campaign running to win an elective office but one that would promote issues and democracy. During the campaign, the Henry-King ticket declared: “We shall vote for freedom.”88 By October 19 another COFO statewide convention with 600 delegates “unanimously elected Rev. R. Edward King to run for the office of Lieutenant Governor.”89 Reverend King in his campaign speeches and rhetoric, like Henry, carried the message of freedom to the potential Freedom Voters.90 The Henry-King ticket campaigned extensively, forcefully, and fearlessly. Meanwhile, their statewide organization COFO

developed a campaign apparatus for the “Vote For Freedom” movement and project: COFO workers set up a statewide “Vote For Freedom” office in Jackson. Campaign responsibilities were divided among a number of COFO officers and organizations. Bob Moses was selected to be campaign manager, CORE’S David Dennis was named policy committee chairman, and Henry Briggs from Tougaloo College was named public relations director. The NAACP was represented by two men in addition to Aaron Henry. Charles Evers was named speakers’ bureau chairman and Reverend R. L. T. Smith was finance chairman. Smith’s presence on the campaign’s executive committee was also an effort to reach the state’s black ministers. The SNCC-COFO congressional district leaders became campaign managers in their districts, and Annelle Ponder of SCLC was a second district manager for the Delta. The campaign’s last major position was filled by Al Lowenstein, who was named chairman of the advisory committee. Lowenstein’s main task was to line up out-ofstate support, including publicity and money for the campaign. Bob Moses had budgeted the Freedom Vote campaign at just over $20,000 and hoped that Lowenstein would be able to raise a substantial portion of the necessary Funds. The COFO staff realized that a significant portion of the success of the Freedom Vote depended on the amount of national attention it could gather. After two years in the field, most of the veteran SNCC staff had come to the conclusion that the federal government would not pay attention to anything in Mississippi unless it happened to someone white or unless it threatened a large number of people.91 North Carolina State University professor Allard K. Lowenstein, in Mississippi since July 1963, suggested to SNCCCOFO leaders that “he use his contacts at Stanford [where he had been assistant dean] and Yale [from which he had graduated law school] to bring down a number of students to assist in the canvass” to get out the “Vote For Freedom.”92 “On October 14, COFO representatives formally announced the Freedom Vote campaign and two days later Al Lowenstein arrived at Yale University. . . . Lowenstein had selected Yale and Stanford universities as the first two sources of white volunteers for COFO because he knew people on the campuses. . . . Dennis Sweeney, a Stanford sophomore who was a veteran of the August primary campaign and William Sloane Coffin, the chaplain at Yale . . . helped Lowenstein recruit students on their campuses. Lowenstein knew that students from prestigious universities would attract attention from the press and the federal government.”93 Later, he recruited students from the University of the Pacific, and soon all of the students arrived “at the Lynch Street Freedom Vote headquarters in Jackson.”94 Not only did they help with the Henry-King campaign, they raised monies on their three respective campuses, and they used campus newspapers to keep the story going about the



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 589

Vote for Freedom movement in the state.95 State leaders could not control this drive to influence public opinion elsewhere. These first white student volunteers—Freedom Fall White Student Volunteers—were the progenitors of the forthcoming 1964 Freedom Summer White Student Volunteers, precursors and a model pilot project in voter re-enfranchisement for future times as well as for other southern states. Although the first year the students stayed only a week at a time until the next wave of students arrived, they spread the word and appeal “to poop halls, fish fries, social clubs, and churches along with trips to cotton fields, plantations and rural hamlets.”96 In places too violent and volatile to go, mail ballots were made available, and “roving COFO ‘votemobiles’ served as mobile ballot boxes in the more violent parts of the state.”97 And finally, “the Freedom Vote election was planned for November 2 through 4, immediately preceding the regular election on November 5. Campaign workers hoped that the three-day voting period would enable them to reach more of the state’s 425,000 voting-age blacks.”98 To ensure that the results of the election got national attention and media coverage, several nationally known dignitaries were invited like “veteran Socialist activist and former presidential candidate Norman Thomas.” Thomas and the white student volunteers brought in the press from outside of the state.

Another ploy of the organizers to get media attention was to hold a victory celebration and rally “on the Monday night before the regular Tuesday election.” This way the unofficial vote tally would not be overshadowed by the official results that next Tuesday night. One of the problems with the media attention was that “most news stories centered on the Yale and Stanford volunteers rather than on the local people and veteran organizers. . . . But without the presence of the white students, however, the media would have paid less attention to Mississippi in the fall of 1963.”99 The Mississippi Free Press newspaper provided a county-bycounty breakdown and calculated the total as 83,463, but a correct tally should have been 86,930. And contrary to numerous reports, not all of the 82 counties listed in the newspaper report participated or had their votes recorded. We found that only 63 counties (76.8%) reported ballots, plus some 9,856 votes that were not associated with any one of the counties. But of these counties that were accorded votes the mean vote was 1,060, and the median was 165; the largest number of votes came from Coahoma County and the smallest number of votes came from Noxubee with one vote. The mode was 11 votes coming from three counties—Alcorn, Desoto, and Wayne. Table 24.31 places the Freedom Vote in context with the official electoral outcomes for the Democratic and Republican parties. The table is organized by the population majorities of the

Black

Racial Majoritya

Table 24.31  Freedom Vote and Official Results of the 1963 Mississippi Gubernatorial Election, by Racial Majority Counties and Ranked by the Freedom Vote Aaron Henry (Freedom Vote Candidate)

Paul Johnson (Democratic Candidate)

County

Votes

Percent

Votes

Percent

Coahoma

16,964

81.2%

1,680

 8.0%

Quitman

7,168

74.5%

1,618

16.8%

Panola

6,339

62.4%

1,982

Madison

3,518

52.0%

2,314

Washington

3,072

30.9%

Leflore

1,723

25.5%

Bolivar

1,723

Marshall Tunica

Rubel Phillips (Republican Candidate) Votes

Percent

Total Votes

2,251

10.8%

20,895

835

 8.7%

9,621

19.5%

1,843

18.1%

10,164

34.2%

931

13.8%

6,763

2,683

27.0%

4,190

42.1%

9,945

2,542

37.7%

2,481

36.8%

6,746

27.1%

2,578

40.5%

2,061

32.4%

6,362

1,261

33.4%

1,421

37.6%

1,099

29.1%

3,781

1,033

50.4%

526

25.7%

490

23.9%

2,049

Holmes

993

25.1%

1,991

50.4%

968

24.5%

3,952

Jefferson Davis

291

11.1%

1,731

66.0%

600

22.9%

2,622

Sunflower

279

6.4%

2,422

55.3%

1,678

38.3%

4,379

Tallahatchie

204

5.6%

2,211

60.9%

1,215

33.5%

3,630

Kemper

94

4.3%

1,697

77.5%

399

18.2%

2,190

Amite

79

3.1%

2,053

81.8%

379

15.1%

2,511

Sharkey

61

4.9%

783

63.4%

391

31.7%

1,235

Humphreys

46

2.4%

1,292

66.1%

616

31.5%

1,954

Yazoo

45

1.1%

2,779

67.8%

1,275

31.1%

4,099

Tate

22

0.9%

1,569

63.6%

877

35.5%

2,468

De Soto

11

0.4%

1,425

55.3%

1,139

44.2%

2,575 (Continued)

590

Chapter 24

Black (Continued)

Racial Majoritya

Table 24.31 (Continued) Aaron Henry (Freedom Vote Candidate) County

Votes

Percent

1

0.1%

1,212

66.1%

620

33.8%

Percent

Votes

Percent

Total Votes 1,833

Issaquena

 

 

275

63.2%

160

36.8%

435

Claiborne

 

 

888

75.2%

293

24.8%

1,181

Jefferson

 

 

922

82.9%

190

17.1%

1,112

Wilkinson

 

 

986

77.5%

286

22.5%

1,272

Carroll

 

 

1,372

70.0%

588

30.0%

1,960

Undetermined

9,856

100%

 

54,783

43.6%

42,952

34.2%

27,855

22.2%

125,590

2,107

43.6%

1,652

34.2%

1,071

22.2%

4,830

Adams

860

12.7%

3,237

47.9%

2,659

39.4%

6,756

Clay

131

4.3%

1,808

59.8%

1,084

35.9%

3,023

Black Counties Average Nearly Equal

Votes

Rubel Phillips (Republican Candidate)

Noxubee

Black Counties Total

 

 

 

9,856

Copiah

54

1.2%

3,329

75.9%

1,002

22.9%

4,385

Grenada

17

0.5%

2,031

63.4%

1,157

36.1%

3,205

Jasper Nearly Equal Counties Total Nearly Equal Counties Average

White

Paul Johnson (Democratic Candidate)

3

0.1%

2,010

65.2%

1,068

34.7%

3,081

1,065

5.2%

12,415

60.7%

6,970

34.1%

20,450

213

5.2%

2,483

60.7%

1,394

34.1%

4,090

Hinds

13,101

28.8%

17,883

39.4%

14,450

31.8%

45,434

Forrest

3,561

26.9%

6,132

46.4%

3,534

26.7%

13,227

Harrison

2,241

11.9%

7,804

41.4%

8,816

46.7%

18,861

Jackson

2,208

17.7%

5,371

43.0%

4,911

39.3%

12,490

Lauderdale

1,805

13.3%

7,188

53.1%

4,538

33.5%

13,531

Warren

1,515

19.1%

3,153

39.7%

3,284

41.3%

7,952

Lowndes

1,058

15.3%

2,747

39.6%

3,124

45.1%

6,929

Pike

869

13.0%

4,137

61.7%

1,703

25.4%

6,709

Lawrence

683

23.8%

1,808

63.0%

377

13.1%

2,868

Lee

610

6.5%

4,969

53.1%

3,781

40.4%

9,360

Jones

525

4.0%

6,294

47.5%

6,436

48.6%

13,255

Oktibbeha

491

10.6%

2,367

51.2%

1,764

38.2%

4,622

Newton

329

7.1%

3,011

65.4%

1,267

27.5%

4,607

Hancock

306

10.5%

1,729

59.1%

889

30.4%

2,924

Clarke

301

8.3%

2,476

68.7%

828

23.0%

3,605

Benton

185

12.3%

966

64.3%

352

23.4%

1,503

Walthall

165

5.7%

1,897

65.0%

858

29.4%

2,920

Marion

164

3.1%

3,874

74.2%

1,182

22.6%

5,220

Monroe

123

1.9%

3,596

56.7%

2,628

41.4%

6,347

Lincoln

117

1.6%

5,258

73.3%

1,798

25.1%

7,173

Simpson

107

2.0%

4,005

74.9%

1,237

23.1%

5,349

Perry

106

4.9%

1,484

68.8%

568

26.3%

2,158

Scott

93

2.0%

3,388

73.3%

1,144

24.7%

4,625

Lafayette

91

2.6%

1,812

52.2%

1,569

45.2%

3,472

Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 591

Racial Majoritya

Aaron Henry (Freedom Vote Candidate) Percent

Rankin

85

1.2%

5,321

74.8%

1,708

24.0%

7,114

Lamar

63

1.8%

2,099

60.0%

1,339

38.2%

3,501

Choctaw

47

2.1%

942

42.9%

1,206

54.9%

2,195

Prentiss

40

1.0%

2,885

69.5%

1,227

29.6%

4,152

Pearl River

26

0.7%

2,271

60.5%

1,455

38.8%

3,752

Chickasaw

21

0.6%

2,152

64.4%

1,168

35.0%

3,341

Wayne

11

0.3%

2,717

66.6%

1,353

33.2%

4,081

Alcorn

11

0.2%

3,677

55.2%

2,975

44.6%

6,663

Winston

7

0.2%

2,600

62.2%

1,570

37.6%

4,177

Stone

5

0.3%

859

51.8%

795

47.9%

1,659

Neshoba

5

0.1%

3,559

73.2%

1,297

26.7%

4,861

Covington

4

0.1%

2,274

73.7%

806

26.1%

3,084

Yalobusha

3

0.1%

1,691

65.9%

872

34.0%

2,566

Greene

 

 

1,371

74.8%

462

25.2%

1,833

George

 

 

1,733

70.4%

730

29.6%

2,463

Montgomery

 

 

1,842

60.7%

1,192

39.3%

3,034

Franklin

 

 

1,907

88.3%

252

11.7%

2,159

Webster

 

 

2,122

64.8%

1,154

35.2%

3,276

Tishomingo

 

 

2,204

64.9%

1,191

35.1%

3,395

Pontotoc

 

 

2,454

61.0%

1,568

39.0%

4,022

Tippah

 

 

2,458

64.4%

1,356

35.6%

3,814

Union

 

 

2,583

60.7%

1,674

39.3%

4,257

Attala

 

 

2,589

64.3%

1,435

35.7%

4,024

Calhoun

 

 

2,607

74.5%

891

25.5%

3,498

Leake

 

 

3,123

79.1%

824

20.9%

3,947

Smith

 

 

3,176

79.4%

826

20.6%

4,002

Itawamba

 

 

3,524

71.3%

1,416

28.7%

4,940

31,082

10.2%

170,089

55.8%

103,780

34.0%

304,951

634

10.2%

3,471

55.8%

2,118

34.0%

6,223

State Total

86,930

19.3%

225,456

50.0%

138,605

30.7%

450,991

Mississippi Free Pressb

83,463

20.3%

203,760

49.7%

122,917

30.0%

410,140

63

 

82

1,060

19.3%

2,749

50.0%

White Counties Total White Counties Average

Total Number of Counties with Votes State Average State Median

Votes

Percent

Rubel Phillips (Republican Candidate)

Votes

White (Continued)

County

Paul Johnson (Democratic Candidate)

 

Votes

82

Percent

 

1,690

30.7%

Total Votes

82 5,500

165

4.9%

2,273

63.4%

1,187

31.6%

3,947

State Maximum

16,964

 

17,883

 

14,450

 

45,434

State Minimum

1

 

275

 

160

 

435

Sources: Adapted from “Results From Governor’s Race,” Mississippi Free Press (November 16, 1963), p. 8; Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), downloaded June 14, 2009; and Numan V. Bartley and Hugh D. Graham, ICPSR Study No. 72, Southern Primary and General Election Data, 1946–1972 [Computer File] http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR00072 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), downloaded June 7, 2010. Calculations by the authors. Black majority counties defined as having had populations at least 52.5% black according to the 1960 Census. Nearly equal counties had populations between 47.5% and 52.5% black; and white majority counties had populations of less than 47.5% black. a

b

Total votes as reported by the Mississippi Free Press.

592

Chapter 24

counties. In Coahoma, Madison, Panola, Quitman, Tunica, and Washington counties the Freedom candidate generated a greater turnout and voter support than at least one of the two major parties. Hinds County with its city of Jackson nearly equaled these other counties in competing with them for the African American support and vote. The Freedom Vote candidate got the majority of his votes from the African American majority counties followed by the white majority counties, then the nearly equal ones. The Democratic winner Johnson got the majority of his votes from the white majority counties followed by the African American majority counties and then the nearly equal counties. His votes were the reverse of the votes for the Henry-King ticket. And the Republican candidate had the very same pattern found for the Democratic candidate Johnson. Unlike the other elections we have analyzed where the white establishment controlled the registration and voting process, the African American counties clearly dominated in this Freedom Vote. Table 24.32 places the 1963 Freedom Vote in the context of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 1965 Report which collected African American voter registration data and additional voting age population date (eligibles) in the state at the county level for 1962 and 1964. This table allows one to see the relationship of the Freedom Vote to the number of eligibles. For instance, the number of Freedom Voters in Coahoma and Quitman counties exceeded the number of those of the voting age population. But these two counties were the exceptions due to the fact that Coahoma was Henry’s home county and Quitman was the neighboring one, and the turnout and large vote support Professor V. O. Key, Jr.’s 1949 finding about the South known as “localism,” i.e., that the hometown boy does better in those counties than the challengers. It happened even in an unofficial protest election. This may be a small indication in the countylevel data that possibly some whites cast votes for the HenryKing ticket. Overall and in most counties many more African Americans participated in the Freedom Vote than there were registered African Americans voters. And in some counties like Carroll with small numbers of registered voters no one voted the Freedom ticket. In addition, there are small indications in the county-level data that possibly some whites cast votes for the Henry-King ticket. Overall, the number of Freedom Voters in the African American majority counties significantly outpolled the registered voters. Similarly, this occurred in the white majority counties and in the nearly equal counties. Clearly, the 1963 Freedom Vote outcome empirically makes the point for which it was undertaken. It should be mentioned that some fourteen Freedom candidates ran on a slate in Leflore County. Yet the turnout was far less than expected. Despite the euphoria and ebullient feelings that erupted during the election night celebration and the pickme-up that it sent through the workers, “white Mississippi was as intransigent as ever, and the new [Lyndon] Johnson administration gave no indication that it would abandon the Kennedy policy of Federalism [i.e., staying neutral in this political struggle between whites and blacks] in the Deep South.”100 One week after the Freedom Vote, COFO received word that the vote was essentially “partisan political activity” and therefore ineligible for

the grant money to conduct voter registration. Hence, the Voter Education Project cut off all of its funds to the COFO.

Freedom Votes in 1964 The loss of VEP funding forced COFO to once again innovate. Although the Freedom Vote itself did not significantly increase voter registration in the state in 1963, it did allow both SNCC and CORE workers along with the white volunteers to expand their base of operation and voter registration activity “in all five congressional districts . . . where they began holding monthly conventions to bring together local people from all parts of the state.”101 By expanding the scope of its reach, the Freedom Vote campaign had allowed COFO the chance to move from an individual and small coterie voter registration operation to a mass-based statewide voter registration operation. But now with no more funds from VEP, there was a need if not necessity of “putting together another statewide project to bring more outsiders into Mississippi, thus generating national publicity and badly needed financial support.”102 Thus was born two innovations: the 1964 Freedom Summer with more white student volunteers103 and a full-fledged satellite political party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP).104 The Freedom Vote continued with the 1964 congressional and presidential elections. In fact, COFO announced the coming of a “THIRD INDEPENDENT POLITICAL” party on November 16, 1963.105 In his pioneering article on the Freedom Vote, Professor Joseph Sinsheimer wrote: It was in the context of this collective assertion that the Freedom Vote campaign by its very scale and nature, laid the groundwork for the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party six months later and prepared blacks for the challenge to the all-white state Democratic Party at the Democratic national convention in Atlantic City in August 1964. The Freedom Vote Campaign served in many ways as a dress rehearsal for the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, three of the most important months in the history of the Mississippi movement.106 By the 1964 congressional elections there were Freedom Vote candidates in the Democratic primary seeking official votes for two House and one Senate seat. In this primary election there were two female candidates, Fannie Lou Hamer and Victoria J. Gray, and one male, James M. Houston. Table 24.33 (p. 595) shows us the official number and percentage of votes that these Freedom Vote Candidates received in the primary election. Suffice it to say that there were small turnouts for these three candidates. Congressional candidate Hamer had the lowest voter support, while Gray got the highest. But these losses did not dampen the spirit of challenge, and COFO announced that it would launch a congressional seating challenge for these contenders and hold another protest election at the November general election with some of the very same losing candidates. Looking at the section of the table that shows how the Freedom Vote candidates did in COFO’s parallel to the general election,



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 593

Black

Racial Majorityc

Table 24.32  Comparing the Mississippi Freedom Vote of 1963 with African American Voter Registrations in 1962 and 1964 African American Voter Registration Statistics 1962a Countyd

Nearly Equal

Registered Voters

African American Voter Registration Statistics 1964b

Percent Registered

Freedom Vote

Percentf 50.4%

1,407

38

 2.7%

 

3,969

26

 0.7%

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Tunica

5,822g

42

 0.7%

1,033

Claiborne

3,969

15

 0.4%

 

Jefferson

3,540

0

 0.0%

 

 

 

 

Holmes

8,757g

8

 0.1%

993

25.1%

8,757

20

 0.2%

Madison

10,366

121

 1.2%

3,518

52.0%

10,366

218

 2.1%

Noxubee

5,172

0

 0.0%

1

 0.1%

 

 

 

Wilkinson

4,120g

60

 1.5%

 

 

 

 

 

Marshall

7,168

57

 0.8%

1,261

33.4%

7,168

177

 2.5%

Humphreys

5,561

2

 0.0%

46

 2.4%

5,561

0

 0.0%

g

 

Sharkey

3,152

3

 0.1%

61

 4.9%

 

 

 

Coahoma

14,004

1,061

 7.6%

16,964

81.2%

 

 

 

Sunflower

13,524

114

 0.8%

279

 6.4%

13,524

185

Bolivar

15,939

612

 3.8%

1,723

27.1%

1,081

0

 0.0%

 

13,657g

268

 2.0%

Tallahatchie

6,483g

5

 0.1%

Quitman

5,673

Issaquena Leflore

 1.4%

 

 

 

 

1,081

5

 0.5%

1,723

25.5%

13,567

281

 2.1%

204

 5.6%

6,483

17

 0.3%

436

 7.7%

7,168

74.5%

 

 

 

De Soto

g

6,246

11

 0.2%

11

 0.4%

 

 

 

Yazoo

8,719g

256

 2.9%

45

 1.1%

 

 

 

Kemper

3,221

30

 0.9%

94

 4.3%

 

 

 

Carroll

2,704

3

 0.1%

 

 

 

 

 

Tate

4,326

0

 0.0%

22

 0.9%

 

 

Panola

7,250g

2

 0.0%

6,339

62.4%

7,250

878

20,619

1,762

 8.5%

3,072

30.9%

 

 

Jefferson Davis

3,222

76

 2.4%

291

11.1%

3,222

126

Amite

3,560g

1

 0.0%

79

 3.1%

 

 

Total

187,855

4,945

 2.6%

44,927

38.8%

82,355

1,971

 2.4%

Mean

7,225

190

 2.6%

2,139

48.1%

6,863

164

 2.4%

Copiah

6,407g

25

 0.4%

54

 1.2%

6,407

25

 0.4%

Clay

4,444

10

 0.2%

131

 4.3%

 

 

 

Jasper

3,675

6

 0.2%

3

 0.1%

3,675

10

 0.3%

Grenada

4,323g

135

 3.1%

17

 0.5%

 

 

 

Total

18,849

176

 0.9%

205

 1.5%

10,082

35

 0.3%

Mean

4,712

44

 0.9%

51

 1.5%

5,041.00

18

 0.3%

Benton

1,419

30

 2.1%

185

12.3%

1,419

55

 3.9%

Washington

Warren White

Eligible Voterse

Aaron Henry in the 1963 Gubernatorial Election

g

  12.1%    3.9%  

 

 

 

1,515

19.1%

10,726

2,433

22.7%

Walthall

2,490g

2

 0.1%

165

 5.7%

2,499

4

 0.2%

Montgomery

2,627

11

 0.4%

 

 

 

 

 

Attala

4,262

61

 1.4%

 

 

 

 

 

Yalobusha

2,441

7

 0.3%

3

 0.1%

 

 

  (Continued)

594

Chapter 24

Racial Majorityc

Table 24.32 (Continued) African American Voter Registration Statistics 1962a Countyd

Eligible Voterse

White (Continued)

Percent Registered

Freedom Vote

Percentf

African American Voter Registration Statistics 1964b Eligible Voters

6,936

150

 2.2%

869

13.0%

4,952

107

 2.2%

491

10.6%

4,952

128

Winston

3,611

57

 1.6%

7

 0.2%

 

 

Franklin

1,842

236

12.8%

 

 

 

 

Leake

3,397

116

 3.4%

 

 

3,397

220

Hinds

36,138

4,756

13.2%

13,101

28.8%

36,138

5,616

15.5%

Clarke

2,998g

1

 0.0%

301

 8.3%

3,998

64

 1.6%

Chickasaw

3,054

0

 0.0%

21

 0.6%

3,054

1

 0.0%

 

 

 

93

 2.0%

3,752

16

 0.4%

Lowndes

8,362

95

 1.1%

1,058

15.3%

8,362

99

 1.2%

Rankin

6,944

94

 1.4%

85

 1.2%

 

 

 

Wayne

2,556

0

 0.0%

11

 0.3%

 

 

 

Monroe

5,610

9

 0.2%

 

 

 

Covington

7,032

202

Marion

3,630

Newton

3,018

Forrest Greene

g

123

 1.9%

 

 

1,805

13.3%

11,924

1,700

 2.9%

4

 0.1%

 

 

363

10.0%

164

 3.1%

3,630

383

104

 3.4%

329

 7.1%

 

 

7,495

22

 0.3%

3,561

26.9%

7,494

236

859

43

 5.0%

 

 

 

1,071

0

 0.00%

63

580

10

 1.7%

 

123,324

6,476

 5.3%

23,954

13.9%

Lauderdale

Lamar

g

George Total

 

Percent Registered

Oktibbeha

g

 

Registered Voters

Pike

Scott

All

Registered Voters

Aaron Henry in the 1963 Gubernatorial Election

   1.8%  

   2.6%      6.5%

  14.3%   10.6%    3.1%  

1,071

0

 0.0%

580

14

 2.4%

102,996

10,969

10.6%

Mean

5,139

270

 5.3%

1,141

17.8%

6,866

731

10.6%

Total

330,028

11,597

 3.5%

69,086

22.9%

195,433

12,975

 6.6%

Mean

6,112

215

 3.5%

1,502

28.3%

6,739

447

 6.6%

Median

4,324.50

30

 0.8%

5.6%

4,952.0

175.0

64.0

 2.1%

Maximum

36,138

4,756

13.2%

16,964

81.2%

36,138

5,616

22.7%

Minimum

580

0

 0.0%

1

 0.1%

580

0

 0.0%

Sources: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, Voting in Mississippi: A Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1965 (Washington, DC: Government Printiing Office, 1965), pp. 70–71; United States Commission on Civil Rights, Civil Rights: Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights ‘63 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1963), p. 34; “Results From Governor’s Race,” Mississippi Free Press (November 16, 1963), p. 8; Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), downloaded June 14, 2009; and Numan V. Bartley and Hugh D. Graham, ICPSR Study No. 72, Southern Primary and General Election Data, 1946–1972 [Computer File] http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR00072 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), downloaded June 7, 2010. Calculations by the authors. a

From the Department of Justice in Voting in Mississippi and the United States Commission on Civil Rights in Civil Rights…’63.

b

From the Department of Justice in Voting in Mississippi.

Black majority counties were at least 52.5% African American in the 1960 Census; nearly equal counties were between 47.5% and 52.5% African American; and white majority counties were less than 47.5% African American. c

d

Ranked in descending order of percent African American in the 1960 Census population.

e

Data from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, except where noted.

f

Based on opponents’ votes taken from ICPSR Study No. 72.

g

Data from the Department of Justice.



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 595 Table 24.33  Official Primary and Unofficial General Election Votes for Freedom Vote Candidates in Mississippi, 1964

Table 24.34  Unofficial Results for the Mississippi Freedom Vote in the 1964 Presidential Election

Election Stage

Political Party

Candidates (President / Vice President)

Republican 

Barry M. Goldwater

Democratic Primary (Official)a

Congressional District 2

Candidates

Votes

Percent of Total

James L. Whitten

35,218

98.3%

Fannie Lou Hamer

3

621

1.7%

Total

35,839

100.0%

John Bell Williams

37,701

96.8%

James M. Houston

1,259

3.2%

38,960

100.0%

173,764

97.4%

4,703

2.6%

178,467

100.0%

Fannie Lou Hamer

33,009

99.8%

James L. Whitten

59

0.2%

Total

33,068

100.0%

James M. Houston

16,003

100.0%

Total Senate

John Stennis Victoria J. Gray Total

General Election (Unofficial)b

2

3

John Bell Williams

8

0.0%

16,011

100.0%

6,001

99.9%

4

0.1%

6,005

100.0%

Victoria J. Gray

10,138

99.9%

William Colmer

7

0.1%

Total

10,145

100.0%

Aaron Henry

61,044

99.8%

John Stennis

139

0.2%

61,183

100.0%

Total 4

Annie Devine William A. Winstead Total

5

Senate

Total

Sources: The official Democratic Party primary data was taken from Richard Scammon, America Votes 6 (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1966), p. 225. Unofficial general election “Freedom Vote” data was sent to the author (Walton) by Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party member and political scientist Leslie Burl McLemore and is listed in Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Political Parties (New York: Free Press, 1972), pp. 235–236. a

Official vote data provided by the State of Mississippi.

Unofficial vote data collected by COFO members, affiliated organizations, newspapers and individual activists, including professor of political science Leslie Burl McLemore of Jackson State University. b

all of these five candidates (three women House candidates, and two males, one a House candidate and one a Senate candidate) are shown to have won by whopping margins over the white representatives and senator. The Freedom Vote was a staggering rejection of all of the white politicians. In the end, the unofficial 1964 general election Freedom Vote was the complete reversal of the official Democratic primary vote for the Freedom candidates. Finally, in this 1964 general election there was a Freedom Vote cast for the Democratic Party nominees, President Lyndon B. Johnson and his vice presidential running mate, Hubert H. Humphrey. Table 24.34 indicates the statewide general election vote in 1964 for the Republican ticket, Goldwater-Miller, and the Democratic ticket, Johnson-Humphrey, as well as the Freedom Vote for the Democratic Ticket. The transformed Republican Party in the

William Miller Democratic  Freedom Vote 

Votes

Percent

356,528

75.4%

 

Lyndon B. Johnson

 52,618

Hubert H. Humphrey

 

Lyndon B. Johnson

 63,839

Hubert H. Humphrey

 

Total Vote

472,985

  11.1%   13.5%   100%

Sources: Adapted from the official vote for the Republican and Democratic parties in Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to U.S. Elections, 5th Edition, Vol. 1 (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2005), p. 709; and from the unofficial Freedom Vote in Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Political Parties (New York: Free Press, 1972), p. 236. This data was provided to the author by Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party member, voting rights activist, and professor of political science at Jackson State University, Dr. Leslie Burl McLemore. Calculations by the authors.

state, which displaced the longstanding and long running Blackand-Tan Republicans, had won the state away from the traditional Democratic party.107 Not only is the Freedom Vote larger with a greater percentage than the official Democratic vote by 11,221 votes and 2.4 percentage points, it ultimately shows greater interest and attachment to the national Democratic party than that shown by the regular Democrats. And this outcome would be a harbinger of the future because the regular white Democrats began in this election a realignment to the Republican party.

Seating Challenge at the Democratic National Convention The voting rights activists of Mississippi had an impact and influence on national-level politics via the Democratic National Convention. Fannie Lou Hamer, one of the candidates in the Freedom Elections of 1964, became a political icon and a symbol for every heroic individual and group struggle and for all of the fallen, beaten, abused, intimidated, harassed, and brutalized individuals and groups that summoned the courage and grit to work for the vote in the South. At the 1964 Democratic National Convention Hamer put the “Voting Rights Issue” before the national public as well as before the national elective officials in Congress and the presidency. When she finished her speech, she had catapulted the state problem in Mississippi into the national court of public opinion. These words of Hamer laid the groundwork. All that remained was the conversion of her groundwork into one of the most important national issues. Besides Hamer’s speech, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to which she belonged famously challenged the seating of regular Mississippi Democrats at the Democratic National Convention, claiming the true mantle of the national party. Although the MFDP initiative had been preceded by similar seating challenges by the South Carolina Progressive Democratic Party in 1944, 1948, and 1952, those seating challenges had been met each time by an African American delegation headed by African American Congressman William Dawson and attorney Thurgood Marshall and sent back home with glib promises and

596

Chapter 24

firm handshakes. On none of those three occasions had the seating challenge made it to the credential committee of the Democratic National Committee. Hence, it did not get media coverage and exposure, nor did this initial satellite party have a Fannie Lou Hamer–type delegate. Therefore, the South Carolina party had barely surfaced in either the media or national party politics. However, this obscurity was not the fate of the MFDP. When it was formed, there was no major competition for the media spotlight. The formation, structure, and implementation of its convention as well as the key players and organizers have been well covered in several major works. To simply summarize here, Johnson and the national Democrats tried to offer the MFDP two at-large seats as a compromise, but Aaron Henry and Ed King rejected the offer.108 The response and reaction to the two-seat compromise ultimately transformed one of the leaders of the MFDP (Hamer) into a national political icon with a new issue to be placed on the nation’s public policy agenda. Eventually, the MFDP would merge with other progressive groups in the state and by 1968 displace the “regular” state Democrats, who had since become the “Loyalist Democrats.”109

Rare Data in a Border State: West Virginia In the above four different case studies, rare African American election data were found in the southern states. However, our

pioneering study has also uncovered such rare election data in one of the five Border States. Embedded in West Virginia’s State Auditor’s Report for 1870 is a list of the initial African American freedmen registered in each county by the Fifteenth Amendment, which is comparable to the data list in the U.S. Senate and House Executive Reports for the freedmen registered by the Four Military Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and 1870. The only difference is that these freedmen registered themselves, without the military help that was given to the southern freedmen. Thus, in contrasting the two regions, one immediately see in Table 24.35 the differences between voter registration done by the U.S. Army and registration done by the freedmen community themselves. Beyond the 1870 voter registration and the 1870 state referendum data, there are similar official data for 1920. Therefore, one can compare and contrast the differences in this voter registration data fifty years later as we did earlier, by comparing the initial data in the South with what was left after the Era of Disenfranchisement in 1908. But, first, let’s look at the initial 1870 freedmen voter registration data. In Table 24.35, which is rank-ordered, the range runs from a high of 581 voters in Jefferson County to a low of zero in three counties—Webster, Clay, and Lincoln—while no data were reported for Summers county. Thus, the grand total of newly registered freedmen was 2,849, with a mean of 55 voters per county and a median of 21 voters. Finally, one sees that the freedmen make up

Table 24.35  Counties of West Virginia Ranked by Number of African American Registered Voters, 1870

County

Number of Black Registered Voters (1870)

Number of Male Citizens, Age 21 and Over (1870 Census)

Percent Black Registered Voters of Male Citizens

Vote for Ratification (1870)

Vote Against Ratification (1870)

Vote for Republican Presidential Candidate (1872)

Jefferson

581

3,183

18.3%

438

215

986

Kanawha

363

5,067

 7.2%

1,164

24

1,637

Berkeley

253

3,343

 7.6%

975

28

1,310

Greenbrier

147

2,429

 6.1%

1,044

108

407

Wood

136

4,223

 3.2%

1,494

167

1,793

Monroe

128

2,318

 5.5%

618

101

347

Hardy

108

1,182

 9.1%

58

336

119

Mason

85

3,378

 2.5%

702

281

1, 379

Ohio

82

6,100

 1.3%

434

368

2,467

Hampshire

78

1,750

 4.5%

521

61

221

Harrison

70

3,529

 2.0%

485

709

1,447

Mercer

68

1,375

 4.9%

313

3

130

Taylor

66

2,058

 3.2%

364

349

944

Mineral

66

1,382

 4.8%

248

35

528

Wirt

55

1,110

 5.0%

381

13

350

Pocahontas

50

926

 5.4%

349

57

178

Grant

47

963

 4.9%

304

329

443

Barbour

42

2,137

 2.0%

483

220

728

Monongalia

38

2,929

 1.3%

756

186

1,531

Putnam

35

1,641

 2.1%

380

48

453

Upshur

31

1,698

 1.8%

327

318

835

Lewis

29

2,137

 1.4%

913

79

657

Boone

28

896

 3.1%

209

17

154

Marion

22

2,505

 0.9%

1,114

117

1,248

Morgan

21

955

 2.2%

189

79

400



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 597

County

Number of Black Registered Voters (1870)

Number of Male Citizens, Age 21 and Over (1870 Census)

Percent Black Registered Voters of Male Citizens

Vote for Ratification (1870)

Vote for Republican Presidential Candidate (1872)

Vote Against Ratification (1870)

Pendleton

21

1,312

 1.6%

324

161

247

Fayette

20

1,316

 1.5%

316

18

340

Marshall

19

3,139

 0.6%

385

587

1,530

Brooke

17

1,191

 1.4%

320

38

465

Logan

15

1,006

 1.5%

Cabell

14

1,372

 1.0%

431

9

477

Ritchie

13

1,879

 0.7%

626

98

863

Braxton

12

1,265

 0.9%

524

3

260

Wyoming

10

583

 1.7%

110

8

153

Nicholas

10

905

 1.1%

362

26

183

Preston

9

3,057

 0.3%

863

38

1,721

Hancock

8

982

 0.8%

181

77

453

Randolph

8

1,199

 0.7%

380

30

229

Doddridge

7

1,389

 0.5%

218

231

627

Jackson

6

2,101

 0.3%

570

144

739

Tucker

6

391

 1.5%

123

9

89

Wayne

5

1,537

 0.3%

608

1

297

Raleigh

4

696

 0.6%

166

59

139

Gilmer

3

850

 0.4%

303

2

194

Tyler

3

1,606

 0.2%

330

160

790

Calhoun

3

573

 0.5%

266

10

123

Roane

3

1,362

 0.2%

505

33

392

Pleasants

3

662

 0.5%

211

73

314

Wetzel

1

1,777

 0.1%

386

94

447

Webster

0

345

 0.0%

124

0

21

Clay

0

391

 0.0%

127

3

89

Lincoln

0

983

 0.0%

559

15

190

255

10

206

Total

2,849

93,083

 3.1%

23,836

6,185

32,319

Mean

55

1,790.1

 3.1%

458.4

Median

21

1,378.5

 1.5%

380

49

Summers

118.9

609.8

60

407

Sources: Charles H. Ambler, “Disfranchisement in West Virginia, Part I,” Yale Review , Vol. 14 (May, 1905), pp. 38–59; Charles H. Ambler, “Disfranchisement in West Virginia, Part II,” Yale Review , Vol. 14 (August, 1905), pp. 155–180; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File] (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, Michigan: ICPSR), http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896, downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.

Table 24.36  Number of African American Eligible Voters by County in West Virginia, 1920 African American Eligible Voters (21 Years of Age & Over)

Census of 1920

County

Total Population

African American Male

Female

Total Black Population

Percent Black of Total Population

Male

Female

Total Eligibles

Barbour

18,028

436

384

820

 4.5%

207

160

367

Berkeley

24,554

902

914

1,816

 7.4%

526

515

1,041

Boone

15,319

420

339

759

 5.0%

266

160

426

Braxton

23,973

147

126

273

 1.1%

79

55

134

Brooke

16,527

284

210

494

 3.0%

193

117

310

Cabell

65,746

1,516

1,495

3,011

 4.6%

1,006

959

1,965

Calhoun

10,268

16

20

36

 0.4%

6

10

16

Clay

11,486

84

63

147

 1.3%

62

35

97

Doddridge

11,976

1

 

1

 

1

Fayette

60,377

5,397

3,342

2,164

5,506

1 4,239

9,636

16.0%

(Continued)

598

Chapter 24

Table 24.36 (Continued) African American Eligible Voters (21 Years of Age & Over)

Census of 1920

County

Total Population

African American Female

Percent Black of Total Population

Male

Female

Gilmer

10,668

21

17

38

 0.4%

13

9

22

Grant

8,993

123

109

232

 2.6%

64

47

111

Greenbrier

26,242

878

848

1,726

 6.6%

461

477

938

Hampshire

11,713

97

99

196

 1.7%

71

49

120

Hancock

19,975

404

169

573

 2.9%

303

74

377

Hardy

Male

Total Black Population

Total Eligibles

9,601

158

140

298

 3.1%

88

66

154

Harrison

74,793

1,331

1,218

2,549

 3.4%

876

728

1,604

Jackson

18,658

6

6

12

 0.1%

6

3

9

Jefferson

15,729

1,482

1,534

3,016

19.2%

820

805

1,625

Kanawha

119,650

4,655

4,274

8,929

 7.5%

3,030

2,518

5,548

Lewis

20,455

161

130

291

 1.4%

143

111

254

Lincoln

19,378

34

27

61

 0.3%

18

15

33

Logan

41,006

2,794

1,943

4,737

11.6%

1,974

1,116

3,090

McDowell

68,571

10,213

7,944

18,157

26.5%

6,442

4,033

10,475

Marion

54,571

1,339

1,115

2,454

 4.5%

897

660

1,557

Marshall

33,681

406

96

502

 1.5%

350

62

412

Mason

21,459

114

113

227

 1.1%

79

72

151

Mercer

49,558

3,314

3,113

6,427

13.0%

1,929

1,621

3,550

Mineral

19,849

350

291

641

 3.2%

202

162

364

Mingo

26,364

1,268

923

2,191

 8.3%

884

499

1,383

Monongalia

33,618

341

297

638

 1.9%

222

169

391

Monroe

13,141

259

300

559

 4.3%

153

156

309

Morgan

8,357

90

69

159

 1.9%

51

38

89

Nicholas

20,717

31

37

68

 0.3%

19

23

42

Ohio

62,892

857

806

1,663

 2.6%

636

582

1,218

Pendleton

9,652

56

56

112

 1.2%

29

25

54

Pleasants

7,379

3

4

7

 0.1%

2

4

6

Pocahontas

15,002

345

293

638

 4.3%

189

153

342

Preston

27,996

86

61

147

 0.5%

56

38

94

Putnam

17,531

186

211

397

 2.3%

108

100

208

Raleigh

42,482

3,650

2,743

6,393

15.0%

2,249

1,399

3,648

Randolph

26,804

220

211

431

 1.6%

108

97

205

Ritchie

16,506

5

8

13

 0.1%

3

6

9

Roane

20,129

10

2

12

 0.1%

8

 

8

Summers

19,092

574

546

1,120

 5.9%

342

291

633

Taylor

18,742

359

282

641

 3.4%

192

145

337

Tucker

16,791

113

97

210

 1.3%

71

50

121

Tyler

14,186

27

25

52

 0.4%

19

14

33

Upshur

17,851

94

102

196

 1.1%

63

53

116

Wayne

26,012

79

63

142

 0.5%

44

31

75

Webster

11,562

 

 

0

 

 

 

0

Wetzel

23,069

44

45

89

 0.4%

38

20

58

Wirt

7,536

20

15

35

 0.5%

15

9

24

Wood

42,306

374

409

783

 1.9%

256

278

534

Wyoming

15,180

955

635

1,590

10.5%

615

336

951

Total

1,463,701

47,129

39,216

86,345

 5.9%

29,826

21,319

51,145

Mean

26,613

873

740

1,570

 5.9%

552

410

930

Median

19,378

239.5

210

431

 2.3%

148

105.5

254

Sources: Adapted from Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009; and Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics, “The Negro in West Virginia,” Report of the Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics of the State of West Virginia to Governor Ephraim F. Morgan (Charleston: Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics, 1921–1922), p. 16. Calculations by the authors.



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 599 Table 24.37  Voting for African American Candidates to the West Virginia State Legislature, 1896–1952 Year

Candidates

Partya

County

City

Elected/Appointed

General Election Votes

1896

Christopher Payne

R

Fayette

Montgomery

Yes

b

1902

James Ellis

R

Fayette

Oak Hill

Yes

b

1904

James Ellis Howard Railey

R

Fayette

Oak Hill

Yes

b

R

Fayette

Montgomery

Yes

b

1906 1918

James Ellis

R

Fayette

Oak Hill

Yes

b

John Coleman

R

Fayette

Kimberly

Yes

 4,227

Thomas Nutter

R

Kanawha

Charleston

Yes

 8,181

Harry Capehart

R

McDowell

Keystone

Yes

 4,388

Thomas Nutter

R

Kanawha

Charleston

Yes

21,421

Harry Capehart

R

McDowell

Keystone

Yes

10,929

1922

Harry Capehart

R

McDowell

Keystone

Yes

 7,040

1926

E. Howard Harper

R

McDowell

Keystone

Yes

1927

Elizabeth Howard Harper

R

McDowell

Keystone

1928

T. Edward Hill

R

McDowell

Keystone

Dr. L. L. Belcher

D

McDowell

1930

Stewart Calhoun

R

McDowell

1932

Stewart Calhoun

R

1934

Fleming Jones, Jr.

D

Stewart Calhoun

1920

 9,049 Appointedc

Yes

13,821

Welch

No

 8,382

Keystone

Yes

12,272

McDowell

Keystone

Yes

15,420

McDowell

Welch

Yes

14,700

R

McDowell

Keystone

No

10,830

Fleming Jones, Jr.

D

McDowell

Welch

Yes

23,079

Stewart Calhoun

R

McDowell

Keystone

No

11,056

1938

Fleming Jones, Jr.

D

McDowell

Welch

Yes

14,529

1940

Fleming Jones, Jr.

D

McDowell

Welch

Yes

23,744

Lewis Cope

R

McDowell

Crumpler

No

13,784

1942

Fleming Jones, Jr.

D

McDowell

Welch

Yes

(d)

1944

Fleming Jones, Jr.

Yes

18,736

1936

1946

D

McDowell

Welch

Joe Brown

R

McDowell

Keystone

No

10,602

Fleming Jones, Jr.

D

McDowell

Welch

Yes

11,839

J. D. Arnold

R

McDowell

Maybeury

No

 8,093 17,789

No African American elected

1948 1950

Elizabeth Drewry

D

McDowell

Northfork

Yes

1952

Elizabeth Drewry

D

McDowell

Northfork

Yes

24,494

Dean Dupler

R

McDowell

Kimball

No

 9,530

Sources: Adapted from Clerk of the State Senate, West Virginia Legislative Hand Book and Manual and Official Register, 1919 (Charleston: Tribune Printing Company, 1919), pp. 305–346, through each election year until 1952; the Secretary of State, State of West Virginia Official Returns of the General Election, November, 1952 (Charleston: Secretary of State Office, 1952). a Political party affiliation: “R” denotes the Republican Party and “D” the Democratic Party. b The votes for these candidates can be found only in extant local newspapers. The state of West Virginia did not begin to collect official election return data until 1918. c Harper was appointed by the governor of West Virginia to fill out the term of her deceased husband. d Missing data.

three percent of the male registered voters in the state where they received their suffrage rights. In addition to this initial freedmen data, one finds the county-level vote on ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, as well as the vote for the Republican party incumbent president, U.S. Grant, with their mean and median summary statistics. The next official state data for 1920 are embedded in a state executive agency created specifically to gather statewide data on the state’s African American population.

In 1921 West Virginia created a Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics, an executive agency which reported to the governor on an annual basis that was charged with collecting official data from each state agency on the African American electorate. The bureau operated from 1921 through 1952. Among the data in each volume were some voting age population data as well as the name and locale (county and city) of the African American state legislators, members of city councils, as well as state judges and state party officials. These data have barely been referenced

600

Chapter 24

or used in conjunction with other voting rights and activism data from the South and the other Border states. Table 24.36 (pp. 597–598), which is taken from the initial 1921 report of the Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics, reveals that African Americans resided in fifty-four of the fifty-five counties in the state. Only Webster County had no African American population. Although several other counties—Doddridge, Jackson, Pleasants, and Roane—had a dozen African Americans or less, there were large counties—Fayette, Kanawha, McDowell, Mercer, and Raleigh—that had over 6,000 African Americans. And each of these large counties had a similarly large potential African American electorate. Corroborating this portrait of West Virginia’s African American electorate, Table 24.37 (p. 599) provides a systematic and comprehensive listing of the African American state legislators and their opposition from 1896 through 1952, when the last report was issued by the Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics. In this tabular presentation one can see the county and the city that each legislator was elected from in the state. Only three counties appear—Fayette, Kanawha, and McDowell—with the latter one having elected more African American state legislators than all of the other counties combined. Moreover, the largest

number of votes for one of these African American candidates came from McDowell County. The very first African American female to serve in a state legislature was Minnie Buckingham Harper, whose husband E. Howard Harper died during his term in office. The Governor appointed her in 1927 to serve out his term in office. Mrs. Harper’s tenure predates the election of Crystal Bird Fauset, who was elected to the Pennsylvania legislature in 1938, by nearly a decade. In 1950, West Virginia African Americans elected another female legislator directly, Elizabeth Drewry, a Democrat from McDowell County. At the partisanship level, all of the first and early African American state legislators were Republicans. Ten different Republican African Americans served during the period covered by this table, 1896–1952, and four more ran for office but lost. In 1934 the first African American Democrat, attorney Fleming Jones, Jr., was elected, and he served for more than a decade (from 1934 through 1947) in the West Virginia House of Delegates. He was succeeded, after one session (1950–1951) in which no African Americans served in West Virginia, by an African American female, Mrs. Elizabeth Drewry, another Democrat. In the final analysis, African American Democrats served nine terms to the Republicans’ fifteen terms.

Map 24.3  Counties of African American Candidates for the West Virginia State Legislature, 1896–1952

HANCOCK

Pennsylvania

BROOKE OHIO

BERKELEY MORGAN

MARSHALL MONONGALIA PRESTON MARION TAYLOR

WETZEL TYLER PLEASANTS

CALHOUN

JACKSON

UPSHUR

WEBSTER

CA

CLAY NICHOLAS

Virginia

GREENBRIER

LINCOLN

FAYETTE BOONE

LOGAN MINGO

Kentucky

BRAXTON

KANAWHA

WAYNE

PENDLETON

HO NT

PUTNAM CABELL

RANDOLPH

ROANE

MASON

TUCKER

LEW IS

GILMER

WIRT

JEFFERSON

HARDY BARBOUR

DODDRIDGE

PO

Ohio

HAMPSHIRE

GRANT

HARRISON

RITCHIE WOOD

MINERAL

AS

0 100 200 miles

Maryland

0

RALEIGH

25

50

mi les SUMMERS MONROE

WYOMING MERCER MCDOWELL

West Virginia Counties of African American candidates for WV state legislature, 1896–1952 West Virginia counties

Source: Table 24.37.



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 601

Finally, Map 24.3 (p. 600) shows the location of the three counties that sent African Americans to the state legislature and their geographical relationship to each other. Not only are two of these three counties contiguous but all three are in close proximity to each other. This made communications between them and their African American communities easy and possible. Thus, even in a state like West Virginia with very difficult geography to traverse and small populations, electoral empowerment was able to take political roots. For other border states besides West Virginia, some limited African American electoral and voting data appear in the appendix of Professor Margaret Callcott, The Negro in Maryland Politics, 1870–1912.110 And in the narrative of Chapter Nine in Professor Alvin Thornton and Karen Williams Gooden, Like A Phoenix I’ll Rise: An Illustrated History of African Americans in Prince George’s County, Maryland, 1696–1996, one can find some voter registration and election return data on African American electoral candidates.111

A Research Note on Other Rare Data Before closing on the matter of the existence of other rare election data on the African American electorate, one might want to look at the era just prior to the beginning of the Era of Disenfranchisement and shortly thereafter. In this era there was a great deal of independent and third-party activity and activism among the remaining African American electorate. This was the time when the African American electorate joined the Readjuster, Greenback, Prohibition, and Populist parties as well as several fusion political and labor movements in the South. For a quite thorough study and analysis of these new political alliances see Professor Omar Ali, In the Balance of Power: Independent Black Politics and Third-Party Movements in the United States and his more recent work, In the Lion’s Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886–1900.112 Prior to this work by Professor Ali, there was a study on Texas Populism with tabular data on the Black Populists by Professor Roscoe Martin, The People’s Party in Texas: A Study in Third Party Politics.113 Scattered in these books and a large number of articles, master’s theses, and doctoral dissertations are some very rare data on the African American electorate, but these piecemeal sources do not provide a holistic portrait, only some interesting and insightful information and a very limited perspective. For those looking to find additional rare data these sources on the party politics of this era might prove helpful. This area is still understudied and under analyzed. Hopefully, the work by Professor Ali will stimulate more interest and examination.

Summary and Conclusions on Rare African American Registration and Voting Data This chapter has provided five empirically based detailed case studies describing, explaining, and analyzing how the African American electorate invented or adopted numerous innovative ways and means to re-enfranchise themselves in five southern states—Georgia, North and South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi. In the case of Mississippi, the voting rights activists developed ways to capture national coverage and attention and to get the federal government re-involved

in helping to make the Fifteenth Amendment a viable and functional reality in the eleven southern states. Our coverage and analyses of these five states and five historical events brings out very rare official and unofficial voter registration and voting data for these states across a five decade time period. In terms of the intellectual stream about African American registration and voting behavior, these five rare empirical based cases studies are unique in that they add significantly to a little known and poorly interpreted category of the African American electorate, the rural registrants and voters in the South and a Border State. There had been an overemphasis and analysis of the urban voters in the African American community in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, the aftermath and shadow of the Era of Disenfranchisement. That was only one part of the story. Second, most scholars and academics examined the legal challenges, particularly the ones dealing with the White Primary cases, and missed the African American voting rights activism, their statewide and local grass-roots movements, and their efforts both before and after the Supreme Court Smith v. Allwright decision in 1944. A limited focus on the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond omits the role and function played by the prior activists. Thus, these five case studies give us new insights about the weaknesses and limitations of that intellectual stream. That stream is now expanded. Three of the ten Titles of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 spoke to and recognized the need for more federal assistance and support for African American voting rights. Title I “barred unequal application of voter registration requirements.” Title VIII “required compilation of voter-registration and voting data in geographic areas specified by the Commission on Civil Rights.” And Title IX “made it easier to move civil rights cases from state courts with segregationist judges and all-white juries to federal court. This was of crucial importance to civil rights activists who could not get a fair trial in state courts.” The case-by-case approach authorized by the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts in order to resolve voting rights complaints had proven exceedingly slow and cumbersome, to say nothing about continual defeats, generating the need for a better approach. However, these titles did not fix all of the problems facing the African American electorate. The case-by-case remedy was not eliminated nor were the various forms of intimidation— economic, physical, police, judicial, and extra-legal—nor the blatant racist discretionary acts of county registrars and sheriffs. Nor were the federal statistics on the African American electorate made comprehensive. Thus, each of these problems had to await another day. In the final analysis of these five rare historical events, the merger of the MFDP in 1968 with other like-minded groups into a new party, the Loyal Democrat Party, and the elevation of another political icon, Martin Luther King, Jr., set the stage for the next public policy legislation in the long struggle to fully implement the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, namely the Voting Rights Act.

Notes    1. R. J. Bunche, “Negro Voting in the AAA Cotton Referenda” (Unpublished manuscript in the Myrdal Study, deposited in the Schomburg Collection, The New York Public Library). However, the Myrdal

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book relied most heavily on two other memoranda on the subject, Gunnar Lange, “The Agricultural Adjustment Program and the Negro,” and T. J. Woofter, Jr., “The Negro and Agricultural Policy.” Although this Bunche research memorandum is not cited or referenced in Myrdal’s book, there are considerable citations and references to Lange and Woofter. For a comprehensive discussion of Myrdal’s actual use of Bunche’s other four memoranda for the book see Hanes Walton, Jr., “Black Southern Politics: The Influences of Bunche, Martin, and Key,” in Hanes Walton, Jr. (ed.), Black Politics and Black Political Behavior: A Linkage Analysis (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), pp. 19–38. For a published version of the “Negro Voting in the AAA Cotton Referenda” see Ralph Bunche, The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR, Edited and with an Introduction by Dewey Grantham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 505–515.    2. Robert E. Martin, “Negro-White Participation in the A. A. A. Cotton and Tobacco Referenda in North and South Carolina: A Study in Differential Voting and Attitudes in Selected Areas” (Unpublished Dissertation, University of Chicago, December, 1947), p. ii.    3. John Fenton, “The Negro Voter in Louisiana,” Journal of Negro Education Vol. 26 (Summer 1957), p. 327. For more on John Fenton’s work on this topic see John Fenton and Kenneth Vines, “Negro Registration in Louisiana,” American Political Science Review Vol. 51 (September 1957), pp. 703–713.    4. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Hearings Before the United States Commission on Civil Rights: Hearings Held in New Orleans, Louisiana, September 27 and 28, 1960, and May 5 and 6, 1961 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1961); and before this Hearing, the Commission published in its 1959 Report an entire Chapter VI on the state entitled “Louisiana Roadblock” to describe the resistance in the state to African American suffrage.    5. Joseph Sinsheimer, “The Freedom Vote of 1963: New Strategies of Racial Protest in Mississippi,” Journal of Southern History Vol. 55 (May 1989), pp. 217–244. This pioneering work contains no quantitative data beyond the state totals.   6. John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), pp. 474–475, footnote 26.    7. For limited coverage of the National Negro Suffrage League see R. Volney Riser, Defying Disfranchisement: Black Voting Rights Activism in the Jim Crow South, 1890–1908 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), pp. 196, 247, and 252.   8. Paul Lewinson, Race, Class, and Party: A History of Negro Suffrage and White Politics in the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932), p. 148.    9. Ibid., p. 149.  10. Ibid.   11. Ibid., p. 158.   12. Ibid., p. 174.   13. Ibid., p. 218.   14. Gerald Gamm, The Making of New Deal Democrats: Voting Behavior and Realignment in Boston, 1920–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 100, Table 4.3.   15. See Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 277. Also Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, “False Friends and Avowed Enemies: Southern African Americans and Party Allegiances in the 1920s,” in Jane Dailey, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, and Bryant Simon (eds.), Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics From Civil War to Civil Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 231 and 238, footnote 64.   16. Paul Ortiz, “Eat Your Bread without Butter, but Pay Your Poll Tax,” in Charles Payne and Adam Green (eds.), Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850–1950 (New York: New York University Press, 2003), p. 218, footnote 6. Also Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 315–316, footnote 21, and pp. 317–318, footnote 46 and 47, for discussion of collection of the polling data. We want to thank Professor Ortiz for responding to our

correspondence and sharing with us his data on Jacksonville and Duval county.   17. Frederic Odgen, The Poll Tax in the South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1958), p. 4.   18. Ralph Bunche, The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR , p. 371.   19. Ibid., p. 372.   20. Key, p. 582.  21. Bunche, The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR, p. 331.   22. Ibid, p. 85. For two major empirical portraits of post–Martin Luther King, Jr., era African American preachers/ministers see Frederick Harris, Something Within: Religion in African-Ameircan Political Activism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Eric McDaniel, Politics in the Pews: The Political Mobilization of Black Churches (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008).   23. See the entire Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Voting in Mississippi: A Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights 1965 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1965). See also the pioneering survey analysis of African Americans in the South in Donald Matthews and James Prothro, Negroes and the New Southern Politics (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1966).   24. Ibid., p. 124.   25. Ibid., p. 125.   26. Ibid., p. 126.   27. Ibid., p. 140.   28. Ibid., p. 301.   29. Quoted in Richard Valelly (ed.), The Voting Rights Act: Securing the Ballot (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006), p. 228.   30. Hanes Walton, Jr., When the Marching Stopped: The Politics of Civil Rights Regulatory Agencies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 6–7.  31. Bunche, The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR, p. 506.   32. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944), p. 488.   33. Ibid., pp. 488–489.   34. Ibid., p. 489.   35. Ibid., p. 490.   36. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Voting in Mississippi: A Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights 1965 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1965), p. 34.  37. Bunche, The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR , pp. 510–511.   38. Ibid., p. 510.   39. Ibid., p. 513.  40. Ibid.   41. Ibid., p. 505.   42. Ibid., p. 511.   43. Ibid., pp. 514–515.   44. For a summary discussion of the different psychological barriers that supposedly inhibited and differentiated the African American rural voter from the urban one see Harry Holloway, The Politics of the Southern Negro: From Exclusion to Big City Organization (New York: Random House, 1969). Professor Holloway draws his thesis from comparative politics literature which at the time was dominated by modernization theory describing how traditional or backward societies move into the future. He then applied it uncritically to an African American majority county in Texas and declared it valid. Yet African American farmers in Texas voted in these AAA Cotton Referenda. Something went strongly awry here. Prior to the appearance of the Holloway book, there was the book in 1966 by Donald Matthews and James Prothro, Negroes and the New Southern Politics (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1966). This work analyzed African American voter registration and political participation in four different counties in the South and claimed to have found this problem among rural voters but rejected the political culture thesis as an explanation for it. The results from both books as well as articles written on the subject by these authors help to elevate the theory that registration and voting only



Rare African American Registration and Voting Data, 1920s–1964 603

occurred in the urban areas of the African American community, with the result that this unique federal intervention fell out of sight and academic consideration.  45. Bunche, The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR, p. 515.   46. Ibid., p. 511.   47. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Hearings Before the United States Commission on Civil Rights: Hearings Held in New Orleans, Louisiana, 1960 and 1961 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1961), pp. 4, 5, and 6.   48. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Voting: 1961 Commission on Civil Rights Report (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1961), pp. 47 and 43.   49. Ibid., p. 45.   50. Ibid., p. 46.   51. Ibid., P. 43.   52. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights 1959 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1959), p. 101.   53. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Hearings 1960–61, p. 11.   54. Richard Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 78. See also Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).   55. “Negro Runs for Louisiana Governor,” Jet Magazine (January 17, 1952), p. 10. This article carries photos of the candidate, his campaigning, being on the radio, and crowd scenes. This is very rare coverage of this rare campaign. Walton, the senior author of this work, wants to extend his thanks to Professors Sanders Anderson and Franklin Jones, former graduate students but now in the Department of Political Science at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas, for bringing this information on Candidate Parker to his attention.   56. Ibid., p. 11.   57. Ibid., p. 12.   58. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Voting: 1961 Commission on Civil Rights Report, pp. 51–52.   59. However well the regime worked in these four counties, the findings in Table 24.23 show that in three of these four counties, Parker received votes: two votes in East Carroll, two in Tensas, and one vote in West Feliciana for a total of five votes. And if the African American electorate could not vote in these counties, this suggests that the Parker candidacy, at least in these counties, received some white votes.   60. Alexander Heard and Donald Strong, Southern Primaries and Elections, 1920–1949 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1950), p. 76 for the 1948 information; and the 1954 data came from “Statement of Registered Voters of the State of Louisiana on October 4, 1952.” However, despite its official title the columns indicated that it was data for October 2, 1954. Copy of the statement is in the author’s possession.  61. Jet Magazine, pp. 10–12.   62. “Negro Attorney to Run for New Orleans Council,” Jet Magazine (December 17, 1953), p. 7.   63. “Negro Loses Council Race in New Orleans,” Jet Magazine (February 20, 1958), p. 7. And “La. Negro Lawyer Seeks Dem. Governor’s Nomination” (April 11, 1963), p. 7. In 1963 Amedee merely announced but did not run.   64. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights 1959 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1959), p. 569.   65. “Name New Orleans Negro Assistant District Attorney,” Jet Magazine (May 29, 1958), p. 11. And “Negro Enters Sheriff’s Race in La. Primary,” Jet Magazine (September 23, 1965), p. 7.   66. See “2 Negroes on State Ballot: Smith, Lindsey are First to Make Race,” Mississippi Free Press (April 21, 1962), p. 1; and “June 5th Was Historic Day for Negroes: Two Candidates Try for U.S. Congress: Vote Showed Negro ‘Block’ Vote Just Does Not Exist,” Mississippi Free Press (June 30, 1962), p. 4.   67. See “Smith Announces for Congress: R. L. T. Smith Will be First Negro to Run in 20th Century,” Mississippi Free Press (December 16,

1961), p. 1; and “Rev. Merrill Winston Lindsey, Announces Candidacy for U.S. Congress,” Mississippi Free Press (April 7, 1962), pp. 1, 4.   68. “Lindsey for Congress: Rally Set for Sunday,” Mississippi Free Press (April 26, 1962), pp. 1, 4; “Smith’s Campaign Committee Sponsors Dinners,” Mississippi Free Press (April 28, 1962), p. 1.   69. U.S. Commission, Report . . . 1959, pp. 58–62.   70. U.S. Commission, Voting: 1961 . . . Report, pp. 31–32. And United States Commission on Civil Rights, Civil Rights: Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights ’63 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1963), pp. 19–20.   71. U.S. Commission, Voting . . . 1965, p. v.   72. Ibid., p. vi.   73. Ibid., p. 59.   74. Dittmer, p. 212.   75. “State Law Provides Way for Unregistered to Vote,” Mississippi Free Press (August 3, 1963), p. 4. And “Unregistered Negroes to Cast Protest Votes,” ibid., p. 1.  76. Ibid.   77. “733 Vote for Freedom: Patterson Threatens $100 Fines, Jail Terms, but Greenwood Negroes Turn in 400 Ballots,” Mississippi Free Press (August 10, 1963), pp. 1, 4. See also Pat Watters, “Encounter with the Future,” New South Vol. 20 (May. 1965), pp. 3–13.   78. “Negroes to File Freedom Votes,” Mississippi Free Press (August 24, 1963), p. 1.  79. Ibid.  80. Ibid.  81. Ibid.   82. Hanes Walton, Jr., The Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Greenwood, 1972).   83. “New Voters Find ‘Way to Freedom,’” Mississippi Free Press (August 31, 1963), pp. 1, 8.   84. “200,000 Negroes to Vote: Seek Four Times Total of Gov. Barnett in 1959,” Mississippi Free Press (September 21, 1963), p. 1.  85. Ibid.   86. “Negroes Pick Candidate: Convention to Set Off Mighty Freedom Vote,” Mississippi Free Press (October 5, 1963), pp. 1, 4.   87. Dittmer, p. 202.   88. “Governor Candidate Henry: ‘We Shall Vote for Freedom,’” Mississippi Free Press (October 12, 1963), pp. 1–2.   89. “COFO Team: Henry and King—‘We Will Be Free,’” Mississippi Free Press (October19, 1963), p. 1.   90. “Rev. King—Lt. Gov. Candidate: A Pulpit for Freedom,” Mississippi Free Press (October 26, 1963), p. 1. And “With Political Organization: Negroes Wield Ballot Power,” Mississippi Free Press (October 26, 1963), p. 1.   91. Joseph Sinsheimer, “The Freedom Vote of 1963: New Strategies of Racial Protest in Mississippi,” Journal of Southern History Vol. 55 (May 1989), p. 228. For additional coverage of this Vote for Freedom see Margaret Long, “The Mississipi Freedom Vote,” New South Vol. 18 (December 1963), pp. 10–13; Wiley Branton, “To Register to Vote in Mississippi,” New South Vol. 20 (February, 1965), pp. 10–15; “Make-Believe Vote,” Newsweek Vol. 62 (October 28, 1963), p. 23; Jeannine Herron, “Underground Election,” Nation Vol. CXCVII (December 7, 1963), pp. 387–389; Len Holt, “The Freedom Vote Triumphs Over Terror,” National Guardian (November 21, 1963), p. 7; Ivanhoe Donaldson, “Notes From Southern Diaries,” Freedomways Vol. 4 (Winter 1964), pp. 140–141.   92. Dittmer, p. 203.   93. Sinsheimer, pp. 229–230.   94. Ibid., p. 230.   95. For coverage of the amounts of monies raised see ibid., p. 233.   96. Ibid., p. 231.   97. Ibid., p. 241. See also “‘Underground Ballot’ Necessary as Henry Nears Election,” Mississippi Free Press (November 2, 1963), p. 1.   98. Sinsheimer, p. 240.   99. Dittmer, pp. 206–207. 100. Ibid., p. 212. For insights into the guarded celebration see “90,000 Vote for Henry: Johnson Refused Consent of Governed,” Mississippi Free Press (November 9, 1963), pp. 1, 4, 8. 101. Ibid., p. 207.

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102. Ibid. 103. See Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Len Holt, The Summer That Didn’t End (New York: Morrow, 1965). See also Sally Belfrage, Freedom Summer (New York: Viking, 1965). 104. For an excellent analysis of the MFDP from an African American voter activist as well as a brilliant political scientist see the master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation by Professor Leslie B. McLemore, “The Freedom Democratic Party and the Changing Political Status of the Negro in Mississippi” (Atlanta: Atlanta University, M.A. Thesis, 1965) and his “The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party: A Case Study of Grass-Roots Politics,” (Amherst: Ph.D Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1971). For comments and discussions of the MFDP from its chairman see Lawrence Guyot and Michael Thelwell, “Toward Independent Political Power,” Freedomways Vol. 6 (Summer Quarter, 1966), pp. 246–254 and their “The Politics of Necessity and Survival in Mississippi,” Freedomways (Spring 1966), pp. 120–132. For coverage of the MFDP since these pioneering academic works and in a time period when more data has surfaced see Dittmer, ibid., Chapter 12: “The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Atlantic City Challenge,” pp. 272–302. 105. “COFO Maps Future,” Mississippi Free Press (November 16, 1963), p. 8. 106. Sinsheimer, p. 244. 107. Samuel D. Cook, “Political Movements and Organizations,” Journal of Politics Vol. 26 (February 1964), pp. 130–153.

108. Beyond the books and articles already mentioned see Aaron Henry with Constance Curry, Aaron Henry: The Fire Ever Burning (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), pp. 180–205; Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Political Parties: An Historical and Political Analysis (New York: Free Press, 1972), pp. 88–113; Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power: A Political Biography (New York: New American Library, 1966), pp. 451–456. 109. William Simpson, “The Birth of the Mississippi ‘Loyalist Democrats’ (1965–1968),” Journal of Mississippi History Vol. 44 (February 1982), pp. 27–45. 110. Margaret Callcott, The Negro in Maryland Politics, 1870–1912 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969). 111. Alvin Thornton and Karen Williams Gooden, Like a Phoenix I’ll Rise: An Illustrated History of African Americans in Prince George’s County, Maryland, 1696–1996 (Maryland: Pyramid Visions, 1997), pp. 158–197. 112. See Omar H. Ali, In the Balance of Power: Independent Black Politics and Third-Party Movements in the United States (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008); and his In The Lion’s Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886–1900 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), pp. 119 and 134 for tabular data. See also Randall Woods, “C. H. J. Taylor and the Movement for Black Political Independence, 1882–1896,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 67 (Summer, 1982), pp. 122–135. 113. Roscoe Martin, The People’s Party in Texas: A Study of Third Party Politics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970).

CHAPTER 25

The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Expansions and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006 The Rise of the Voting Rights Issue to National Prominence

607

The Legislative Voting Behavior of Southern Members of Congress on Voting Rights Acts, 1957–2006

609

Table 25.1 Congressional Votes for the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964 and for the Voting Rights Acts of 1965, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006

610

Figure 25.1 Number of Northern and Southern Democrats Voting For and Against Civil Rights and Voting Rights Legislation in the House of Representatives, 1957–2006

612

Figure 25.2 Number of Northern and Southern Democrats Voting For and Against Civil Rights and Voting Rights Legislation in the Senate, 1957–2006

612

Figure 25.3 Number of Southern Democrats Voting For and Against Civil Rights and Voting Rights Legislation in the House and Senate, 1957–2006

613

Figure 25.4 Percent of Northern and Southern Democrats Voting For Civil Rights and Voting Rights Legislation in the House and Senate, 1957–2006

614

Figure 25.5 Number of Southern Republicans Voting For and Against Civil Rights and Voting Rights Legislation in the House and Senate, 1957–2006

614

Figure 25.6 Percent of Southern Republicans Voting For and Against Civil Rights and Voting Rights Legislation in the House and Senate, 1957–2006

615

Table 25.2 Presidents and Republican Party Strength During Passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006

615

Assessing the 1965 Voting Rights Act: Reports of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

616

Table 25.3 Commission on Civil Rights and Academic Studies and Reports on the Impact of the 1965 Voting Rights Act

616

Table 25.4 Comparing African American Voter Registrations in Counties Under Federal Examination for the Voting Rights Act with Nearby Counties Not Examined

617

Map 25.1 Counties Selected by the United States Commission on Civil Rights for Evaluation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965

618

Figure 25.7 Comparing African American Voter Registrations in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi Immediately After Passage of the Voting Rights Act

619

Table 25.5 Cumulative Totals of Federal Examinations for Voter Registration in Selected Southern States, by County, Following Passage of the Voting Rights Act, August 6–October 30, 1965

620

Figure 25.8 Cumulative Voter Registration Applicants Listed Under Voting Rights Examining by Race Immediately Following Passage of the Voting Rights Act

621

Figure 25.9 Cumulative Voter Registration Applicants Rejected Under Voting Rights Examining by Race Immediately Following Passage of the Voting Rights Act

621

Table 25.6 Voter Registration Totals in Selected Counties of Selected Southern States Following Passage of the Voting Rights Act, August 6–October 30, 1965

621

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Map 25.2 New Voters Registered by Race Following Implementation of the Voting Rights Act, August 6–October 30, 1965

622

Figure 25.10 Accepted Voter Registration Applications in Selected Southern States by Race Following Passage of the Voting Rights Act, 1965

622

Figure 25.11 Rejected Voter Registration Applications in Selected Southern States by Race Following Passage of the Voting Rights Act, 1965

623

Table 25.7 Gains in Ratio of Registered Voters to Eligible Voters by Race Before and After the Voting Rights Act of 1965

625

Figure 25.12 Percentage Point Gains in Ratio of Registered Voters to Eligible Voters in Examiner Counties by Race Before and After the Voting Rights Act of 1965

626

Figure 25.13 Percentage Point Gains in Ratio of African American Registered Voters to Eligible Voters Before and After the Voting Rights Act of 1965

627

Table 25.8 Impact of Federal Examiners for the Voting Rights Act of 1965: Comparison of Voter Registrations by State in Examiner and Non-Examiner Counties

627

Figure 25.14 Impact of the Voting Rights Act on African American Voter Registrations: A Comparison of Examined and Non-Examined Counties, 1965

628

Figure 25.15 Numbers of Counties with VRA Federal Examiners and Persons Listed for Registration, 1974

629

Table 25.9 Voter Turnout in the Presidential Elections of 1964, 1968, and 1972 in Southern States Covered by the Voting Rights Act 629 Figure 25.16 Percentage Point Changes in Voter Turnout for the Presidential Elections of 1964, 1968, and 1972 in Southern States Covered by the Voting Rights Act

630

Table 25.10 Estimated Gap in Voter Registration between Blacks and Whites in Southern States Covered by the Voting Rights Act, 1971–1972

630

Table 25.11 Voter Registration Shares by Race in Southern States Covered by the Voting Rights Act, 1971–1972

631

Figure 25.17 Percentage Point Difference in Voting Age Population Registered to Vote among Blacks and Whites in Southern States Covered by the Voting Rights Act, 1971–1972

631

The Long-Term Impact of the 1965 Voting Rights Act: The Fourth Report, 1981

631

Table 25.12 Counties Designated for Federal Examiners and Number of Persons Listed by Examiners, 1980

632

Table 25.13 Election Observation Assignments Under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 1966–1980

633

Table 25.14 Percentage of Voting Age Population Reported Registered to Vote in Jurisdictions Covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, by Race and Ethnicity, 1976

634

Table 25.15 Voting Age Population and Voter Registration in Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina, 1971–1980

634

The Major Literature on the 1965 Voting Rights Act and Renewals

635

Table 25.16 Categorization of the Major Literature on the 1965 Voting Rights Act

636

Summary and Conclusions on the Voting Rights Act and Its Renewals

643

Table 25.17 Counties in the 1963 Department of Justice Lawsuit, Examined and Observed under the Voting Rights Act, as of 1980

644

Notes 645



The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Expansions and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006 607

T

he 1965 Voting Rights Act didn’t just appear out of nowhere. For years the NAACP had been trying to put this issue on the national agenda. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had tried to do so in the 1957 March on Washington, as had numerous voting rights activists. But after the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts did not resolve the problem of full and uncontested voting rights for African Americans, not much headway was attained in getting it on the national agenda. Eventually, it took a major national event before this issue reached the national agenda in 1965. But before discussing this catalyzing event we’ll look at some of the results of this legislation. On August 6, 1965, a southern Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, signed into law the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Despite President Johnson’s well-known remark upon signing the Act that he had just handed the South over to the Republican Party, his action in fact made it possible for three subsequent Democratic Party presidential nominees, James “Jimmy” Carter, William J. “Bill” Clinton, and Barack H. Obama, to win the White House.1 Sumter County is both the birth as well as the resident county for President James “Jimmy” Carter. Professor David Garrow wrote: “[F]ront-page stories . . . informed readers that voter registration officials in Sumter County, Georgia had dropped their opposition to a black registration drive that had been going on for some two weeks, and that some three hundred new black voters had been registered in Sumter County on August 6 alone.”2 Professor Garrow continued: In 1965 few could have imagined that little more than a decade later a white former governor of Georgia from Sumter County would accept the presidential nomination of the Democratic party on a platform containing the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr. and Coretta Scott King, and to the strains of the civil rights movement’s favorite anthem, “We Shall Overcome.”3 There is no question about how the African American electorate in both Sumter County and Georgia voted for Carter in both his gubernatorial and presidential races.4 In the rise and evolution of William J. Clinton as governor of Arkansas and his capture of the presidency in 1992 and 1996, as well as the Democratic success in the midterm election of 1998, the African American electorate in both of Clinton’s home counties (birth and resident ones) as well as across the state were vital, especially in his 1982 comeback election to win the governor’s post for a second time.5 Subsequently in 2000, African Americans gave overwhelming support and backing to Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore, for both the Democratic nomination and in the general election. At the regional level, the African American electorate helped nominee Gore win the presidential primaries. He received even greater support in the general election but was defeated in the eleven southern states. 6 In the contested state of Florida, the disenfranchisement of a segment of the African American electorate cost Gore the presidency.7 Finally, in the 2008 election of the first African American president, Barack H. Obama, the southern African American

electorate not only secured for Obama his presidential primary election victories in the South, except Tennessee and Arkansas, but in this very competitive race with Senator and former First Lady Hillary Clinton, it allowed him after losses in New Hampshire and Nevada to recover his front-runner status and to maintain it until the primary race was over in June 2008.8 And once again with the presidential nomination it was the southern African American electorate that gave him victories in three southern states—Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia—that the Democratic Party had not carried in presidential years in more than two decades.9 Ever since 1948 when Journalist Henry Lee Moon penned his very important conceptual and strategic book about the role of the African American electorate in presidential elections, Balance of Power: The Negro Vote, focus and interest was on the northern and midwestern (non-South) and general election voters.10 Since the adoption and implementation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, southern African American voters almost unnoticeably have not only joined their non-southern voting counterparts but have helped to move their influence from the general presidential election to the presidential primaries also. And now one can see for the first time something of a unified national African American electorate that impacts and influences both primaries and caucuses as well as general elections. All of this has happened, beyond the rise of the Republican Party hegemony in the South at the presidential level, since President Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The Rise of the Voting Rights Issue to National Prominence While the sundry books on the voting rights struggle in the South do mention earlier actions and activists, with few exceptions, journalists, media commentators, academics, and scholars have chosen the 1965 Selma March as the starting point for the Voting Rights Act. Somehow they have failed to make the crucial link between Fannie Lou Hamer’s success at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, thereby becoming a political icon, for the voting rights movement. It was Hamer who turned the struggle for voting rights in Mississippi into a national “hot issue” suitable for the president’s and Congress’s agenda. But it is true that this grass-roots heroine did not have the organizational support, national contacts, and essential national leadership skills and talents to transform this newly salient issue into national public policy. Hamer had taken this new issue as far she could, and even though she went back into Mississippi and continued her grassroots voting rights activism—including her 1964 Freedom Vote candidacy for Congress and its resultant congressional seating challenge in 1965—this was her last national exposure with the voting rights issue.

Links between Two Icons: Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King, Jr. Few recognize that Martin Luther King, Jr., received the “baton” of the voting rights issue from Hamer after her 1964 performance at the Atlantic City Democratic National Convention. The transition was not done in any formal or ceremonial manner—this is

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Chapter 25

probably the reason why so many failed to see it—but it did happen nonetheless. King was able to secure this “salient” issue firmly on the national agenda and to attain the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Most authors fail to fully appreciate what Hamer achieved and overstate the role of King. Though King had called for voting rights in his initial March on Washington at the Lincoln Memorial on May 17, 1957 (the third anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education) and had influenced the 1957 Civil Rights bill, it had never become a “hot” or “salient” issue until Hamer’s actions. Although the academic and scholarly literature is sketchy and thin on this Hamer-King linkage, there are some data on a few important events and moments showing linkages. Professor Dittmer wrote that: “Martin Luther King had toured Mississippi in July [1964] to encourage blacks to sign up with FDP [the Freedom Democratic Party] and on August 19 sent a telegram to the president urging that FDP be seated ‘as the only democratically constituted delegation from Mississippi.’”11 The Mississippi Free Press newspaper in covering King’s tour described large enthusiastic crowds in Greenwood and Jackson, and that at all of his speaking sites he urged the African American electorate to register with the MFDP because it “provides the best way to break down the barriers to official registration of voters.”12 And Professor Garrow explained that after Hamer’s speech at the hearings before the credentials committee of the Democratic National Convention Dr. King also spoke in support of the MFDP and the need to recognize and seat it instead of the “regular” white state Democratic delegation. Finally, there is the eyewitness account of Professor Leslie Burl McLemore who was a participant observer when the negotiations began between the representatives of President Johnson and the MFDP leadership and delegates over the administration’s proposed “Two-Seat Compromise,” which would have seated just two of the MFDP leadership, Aaron Henry and Ed King.13 In his descriptions and discussion, McLemore showed that both Hamer and King crossed paths, and that she was disappointed with King’s pleas to them to accept the compromise. In fact, we learn from this account that King was so concerned that he left the convention even before the acceptance speeches of President Johnson and nominated vice president Hubert Humphrey, who led the negotiations for the President. Thus, one can cull from these accounts that King was influenced by the suffering as voiced by Hamer and other party members as well as by the President’s token compromise and the MFDP’s rejection of it. The civil rights leader thus saw the dramatic need to push the voting rights issue for African Americans as essential to making the American democracy work for them in Mississippi and elsewhere in the South. Garrow noted that during this time period “problems concerning the Mississippi Freedom Democrats’ convention challenge impinged upon King almost daily.”14

Protests Designed for a New Media Environment While Hamer made a stir at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, she lacked something vital to keeping the issue on the national agenda that King learned to court: national media exposure. Political scientist Barbara Sinclair wrote: “the civil

rights movement was instrumental in thrusting black civil rights [including voting] to the center of the [national] agenda in the late 1950s and early 1960s.”15 Changes in the media made a huge difference. “Until 1963,” she avers, “the television networks broadcast one fifteen-minute news show per day. . . . In 1963, the networks expanded their evening news shows to 30 minutes, and budgets were increased, thus immediately doubling the amount of coverage and beginning the process of making the newscasts visually compelling.”16 With this increase in media coverage and its national focus, the media in the 1960s became “an extremely useful tool for publicizing a previously unrecognized problem, for shaping debate on an issue, and for moving an issue up on the agenda and forcing it to a decision.” Professor Sinclair added: Civil rights [including voting rights] provide the most spectacular early example of television’s impact upon the political agenda. Because civil rights forces needed northern public support, their tactics were intentionally dramatic. . . . The high saliency of civil rights pressured decision makers to act.17 This ability to focus media attention on a problem was the skill that Hamer did not have but that King and SCLC had acquired during the 1963 Birmingham marches and demonstrations. King’s interest group tactics of mass demonstrations and protest distinguished him from the older NAACP and were quite suitable for moving the issue toward a national public policy. Thus, the voting rights baton had to pass from one political icon to another. Almost certainly, it was a necessary condition for overcoming the structural barriers, especially the Senate filibuster, that had prevented real policy change. Professor Garrow described the formal invitation to Reverend King to come to Selma: In late December [1964], a Committee of Fifteen, formed under the auspices of the Dallas County Voters’ League and representing all factions within the black community of Selma, issued a formal invitation to Dr. King to bring his SCLC staff to Selma to assist them in winning the right to register and vote. On December 28, after conferring with other civil rights leaders in Montgomery, the SCLC leadership announced that Dr. King would kick off the campaign with a speech in Selma on the evening of Saturday, January 2[, 1965].18 With King’s decision to go to Selma and to launch the drive for a voting rights bill, the entire southern voting rights struggle, previously highlighted by Mississippi, had been transferred to Alabama. All of those registration and voting struggles that had been going on prior to and after the Smith v. Allwright Supreme Court decision in 1944 were wrapped into one local struggle with national implications. The new movement was no longer to acquire local or state compliance with the Fifteenth Amendment or the relevant parts of the 1957, 1960, and 1964 Civil Rights Acts and the voting rights decisions of the federal district, appellate, and Supreme Court decisions. Rather, through dramatic public



The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Expansions and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006 609

action, King and the SCLC sought federal legislation that would allow the federal government to intervene in the region and assist at the voter registration and voting levels to attain the implementation of federal law, the states’ rights argument notwithstanding.

Changes in the U.S. Senate As Barbara Sinclair noted, the great barrier against civil rights legislation was the ability of U.S. senators from the South to use a filibuster against it. 19 She wrote: Civil rights for blacks, which had regained [national] agenda status in the late 1930s, was a continuing issue but one with little saliency beyond the participants and those directly affected. For decades, a small group of civil rights proponents consisting primarily of the congressional allies had waged a lonely and losing struggle against powerful southerners in the Congress. The hopelessness of breaking a Senate filibuster had, in fact, led proponents to shift their efforts away from the Congress.20 In addition to the external changes wrought by the civil and voting rights interest groups and the media, at this time there was a very significant internal change in the Senate. In the period from World War II to 1972, the Senate became a presidential and vice presidential incubator.21 A study found that “from 1944 to 1972, fully two-thirds of the vice-presidential nominees for both parties have come from senatorial ranks. . . . Throughout the nearly 200-year history of presidential nominating politics, no single government institution has so extensively dominated the recruitment process of both parties as has the Senate from 1960 through 1972.”22 These politically ambitious Senators competed with their colleagues on the nightly news and the Sunday talk shows by debating “hot” and “salient” issues like voting rights. King and the SCLC protests with the vicious response of voting rights opposition in Selma provided the opportunity for a new issue that senators could exploit. In a pioneering analysis of southern senators and civil and voting rights legislation, Delaying the Dream: Southern Senators and the Fight Against Civil Rights, 1938–1965, historian Keith Finley found that the essential reason for the failure of southern senators to defeat the 1964 Civil Rights Act as well as the 1965 Voting Rights Act was their loss of national and Senate public opinion.23 Hence, they could not “gut” the strength of these acts as they had done with the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Act. Finley concluded: For three decades southern senators had blocked all perceived assaults against the region’s racial order. By 1965, their ability to defend the status quo in Dixie had disappeared, and all of them recognized it. During the fight against the Voting Rights Act, [southern] caucus hard-liners engaged in one final battle in defense of white supremacy for constituent consumption. Their arguments, as in the past, downplayed the centrality of racism in their worldview. This time, as in 1964, the

effects of the grass-roots protest movement on public opinion stripped the [southern] caucus of its ability to sway its Senate colleagues. In 1965, southern senators never had a chance.24

The Legislative Voting Behavior of Southern Members of Congress on Voting Rights Acts, 1957–2006 The Senate’s role as the barrier to civil and voting rights for African Americans began during the attempted passage of the Lodge Bill, which provided for the “federal supervision of federal elections” on July 2, 1890. The bill passed the House of Representatives “by . . . 155 to 149, with 24 not voting. The bill was sent to the Senate on July 7,” 1890 where it was defeated.25 Table 25.1 (pp. 610–611) provides a comprehensive and systematic listing by partisanship and region for all of the voting rights bills from 1957 to 2006. The table allows the reader to see the continuity and eventual change of Senate opposition, especially among southern senators. Although the 1957 and 1960 Acts were called Civil Rights bills, they were essentially voting rights bills. We also included the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the table as a partial voting rights act, because three of its ten titles dealt with the previous Acts, i.e., the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Bills. The overwhelming support for these acts came from a political coalition comprised of northern Democrats, northern Republicans, and, later, southern Republicans. The opposition coalition came primarily from southern Democrats, but, later, from southern Republicans and occasionally northern Democrats, particularly in the House of Representatives. These coalitions were dynamic and changed over time, and by the time of the 2006 renewal of the Voting Rights Act, there was a bipartisan convergence in the Senate and nearly one in the House of Representatives, with a few notable exceptions. Southern Republicans replaced the southern Democrats with about one-fourth of them (24.0%) opposing the 2006 Voting Rights Act. Democratic partisan dominance had been reversed and Republican partisan dominance strengthened, but the new southern Republicans have adopted some of the old Democratic opposition to African American voting rights in the region. Figure 25.1 (p. 612) shows the numbers of southern and northern Democrats in the House of Representatives who voted on the nine voting rights acts that passed from 1957 to 2006. Although the number of northern Democrats approving the bills fluctuated throughout the nine passages, the number of “yea” votes stayed above the 115-vote mark, while the number of southern “yea” votes only exceeded the 50-member mark on two occasions, 1975 and 1982, and nearly reached it in 2006. In the three votes prior to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, southern House opposition twice measured 79 votes, with a high of 83 votes in 1964. However, in the five roll calls beginning with 1965 one sees the opposition decreasing, running from a high of 54 votes to zero “against” votes in the 2006 renewal effort approved by Republican President George W. Bush. The only deviation from this trend was an upswing to just 18 votes “against” in 1992, a year in which the inclusion of bilingual ballots probably explains

610

Chapter 25

Party

Members Voting

Yea Votes

Nay

Percent

Votes

Percent

Chamber

Chamber

Table 25.1  Congressional Votes for the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964 and for the Voting Rights Acts of 1965, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006

Party

Votes

Percent

210

128

 61%

 82

 39%

Democrats

 67

 46

 69%

 21

 31%

118

115

 97%

  3

  3%

Northern

 46

 45

 98%

  1

  2%

 92

 13

 14%

 79

 86%

Southern

 21

  1

  5%

 20

 95%

166

151

 91%

 15

  9%

Republicans

 33

 27

 82%

  6

 18%

Northern

160

150

 94%

 10

  6%

Northern

 32

 27

Southern

  6

  1

 17%

  5

 83%

Southern

  1

Other

  0

House Totals

376

279

 74%

 97

 26%

Democrats

 47

 29

 62%

 18

 38%

Northern

 25

 24

 96%

  1

  4%

Southern

 22

  5

 23%

 17

 77%

Republicans

 43

 43

100%

 0

  0%

Northern

 43

 43

100%

 0

  0%

Southern

  0

Other

  0

Senate Totals

 90

 72

 80%

 18

 20%

 82

 33%

Senate

Southern Republicans

Northern

247 161

165 158

 67%  98%

  3

Other

  0

Senate Totals

100

Democrats

272

 73

 84%

  5

 16%

  0%

  1

100%

73%

27

27%

 80%

 54

 20%

Voting Rights Act 1965

House

House Senate

Percent

Northern

Democrats

218

Northern

190

190

100%

  0

  0%

Southern

 82

 28

 34%

 54

 66%

Republicans

130

110

 85%

 20

 15%

Northern

115

106

 92%

  9

  8%

 15

  4

 27%

 11

 73%

  1

  1

100%  18%

Southern Other House Totals

403

329

 82%

 74

  2%

Democrats

 66

 49

 74%

 17

 26%

Northern

 46

 45

 98%

  1

  2%

 86

  7

  8%

 79

 92%

Republicans

135

123

 91%

 12

  9%

Southern

 20

  4

 20%

 16

 80%

Republicans

 31

 30

 97%

  1

  3%

Northern

 30

 30

100%

  0

  0%

Southern

  1

  1

100%

 18

19%

Northern

128

121

 95%

  7

  5%

Southern

  7

  2

 29%

  5

 71%

  1

100%

Other

  1

House Totals

383

288

 75%

 95

 25%

Democrats

 60

 42

 70%

 18

 30%

Northern

 38

 38

100%

  0

  0%

Southern

 22

  4

 18%

 18

 82%

Republicans

 29

 29

100%

  0

  0%

Northern

 29

 29

100%

  0

  0%

Southern

  0

Other

  0

Senate Totals

 89

 71

 80%

 18

 20%

Senate

Southern

Other

  0

Senate Totals

 97

Democrats

228

 79

 81%

Voting Rights Act 1970

House

House

Votes

Nay

Democrats

Civil Rights Act 1960

Senate

Yea

Civil Rights Act 1964a (Continued)

Civil Rights Act 1957

172

 75%

 56

 25%

Northern

152

145

 95%

  7

  5%

Southern

 76

 27

 36%

 49

 64%

Republicans

176

100

 57%

 76

 43%

Northern

152

 97

 64%

 55

 36%

Southern

 24

  3

 13%

 21

 88%  33%

Other

Civil Rights Act 1964a

  0

House Totals

404

272

 67%

132

Democrats

244

153

 63%

 91

 37%

Democrats

 42

 31

 74%

 11

 26%

Northern

153

145

 95%

  8

  5%

Northern

 29

 28

 97%

  1

  3%

Southern

 91

  8

  9%

 83

 91%

Southern

 13

  3

 23%

 10

 77%

Republicans

171

136

 80%

 35

 20%

Republicans

 34

 33

 97%

  1

  3%

Northern

160

136

 85%

 24

 15%

Northern

 32

 32

100%

  0

  0%

 11

  0

  0%

Southern

  2

  1

 50%

  1

 50%

 64

 84%

 12

 16%

Southern Other

  1

House Totals

416

289

 69%

Senate

House

Members Voting

 11

100%

  1

100%

Other

  0

127

 31%

Senate Totals

 76

Party

Members Voting

Yea Votes

Chamber

The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Expansions and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006 611

Chamber



Nay

Percent

Votes

Percent

Party

Senate

269

249

 93%

 20

  7%

Northern

195

194

 99%

  1

  1%

Southern

 74

 55

 74%

 19

 26%

Republicans

132

 96

 73%

 36

 27%

Northern

105

 86

 82%

 19

 18%

Southern

 27

 10

 37%

 17

 63%

House (Continued)

Democrats

Votes

Percent

Republicans

142

 45

 32%

 97

 68%

Northern

112

 40

 36%

 72

 64%

Southern

 30

  5

 17%

 25

 83%

  1

  1

100%

Other

362

237

 65%

125

 35%

Democrats

 54

 50

 93%

  4

  7%

 14%

Northern

 40

 38

 95%

  2

  5%

  0

House Totals

401

345

 86%

 56

Democrats

 54

 49

 91%

  5

 9%

Southern

 14

 12

 86%

  2

 14%

Northern

 40

 40

100%

  0

  0%

Republicans

 41

 25

 61%

 16

 39%

Southern

 14

  9

 64%

  5

 36%

Republicans

 33

 27

 82%

  6

 18%

Northern

 35

 22

 63%

 13

 37%

Northern

 27

 25

 93%

  2

  7%

Southern

  6

  3

 50%

  3

 50%

Southern

75

 79%

 20

 21%

Other

  0

Senate Totals

 95

  6

  2

 33%

  4

 67%

Other

  2

  1

 50%

  1

 50%

Senate Totals

 89

 77

 87%

 12

 13%

Democrats

234

227

 97%

  7

  3%

Northern

Northern

166

165

 99%

  1

  1%

Southern

Southern

 68

 62

 91%

  6

  9%

Republicans

178

161

 90%

 17

10%

Republicans

Northern

143

139

 97%

  4

  3%

Southern

 35

 22

 63%

 13

37%

  1

  1

100%

Voting Rights Act 2006 Democrats

House

197

100%

  0

  0%

148

148

100%

  0

  0%

 49

 49

100%

  0

  0%

225

192

 85%

 33

 15%

Northern

146

132

 90%

 14

 10%

Southern

 79

 60

 76%

 19

 24%

 1

  1

100%

Other

197

House Totals

413

389

 94%

 24

  6%

House Totals

423

390

 92%

 33

  8%

Democrats

 42

 42

100%

  0

  0%

Democrats

 44

 44

100%

  0

  0%

Northern

 31

 31

100%

  0

  0%

Northern

 40

 40

100%

  0

  0%

Southern

 11

 11

100%

  0

  0%

Southern

  4

  4

100%

  0

  0%

Republicans

 50

 43

 86%

  7

 14%

Northern

 40

 36

 90%

  4

 10%

Republicans

 53

 53

100%

  0

  0%

Southern

 10

  7

 70%

  3

 30%

Northern

 35

 35

100%

  0

  0%

  1

100%

  0

  0%

Other Senate Totals

  1 93

 85

 91%

  8

Senate

House

Percent

Other

Other

Senate

Votes

Nay

House Totals

Voting Rights Act 1982

Southern

  9%

Voting Rights Act 1992 House

Yea

Voting Rights Act 1992 (Continued)

Senate

House

Voting Rights Act 1975

Members Voting

Democrats

219

191

 87%

28

 13%

Northern

163

153

 94%

10

  6%

Southern

 56

 38

 68%

 18

 32%

the change. Overall, the number of opposition votes in the House of Representatives peaked in 1964, some of which were cast less against the voting sections and more against the sections for the integration of public accommodations. One can also see the declining number of southern Democrats in the House. Figure 25.2 (p. 612) shows the numbers of southern and northern Democrats in the Senate who voted on these same nine voting rights acts. The support of northern Democrats remained nearly unanimous, with the overall numbers fluctuating only

 18

 18

100%

Other

  1

1

100%

Senate Totals

 98

 98

100%

Source: Adapted from Keith T. Poole, “Roll Call Data (Congresses 1–110),” http://voteview.com/, downloaded June 17, 2010. Calculations by the authors. Three of ten titles in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 dealt with voting rights issues, namely Titles 1, 8, and 9. a

as Democrats gained or lost Senate seats. Southern Democratic opposition votes in the Senate peaked in 1964 at 20 and then declined in a linear fashion before bottoming out in 1982 and 2006, with only two votes against in 1992, the year in which bilingual ballots were part of the bill. As in the House of Representatives, the peak of opposition in 1964 suggests perhaps that opposition was strongest to other provisions of that Act than to those affecting voting rights. Figure 25.3 (p. 613) focuses on the southern Democrats, showing the numbers of House and Senate

612

Chapter 25

Figure 25.1  Number of Northern and Southern Democrats Voting For and Against Civil Rights and Voting Rights Legislation in the House of Representatives, 1957–2006 250 For Democratic Votes in the House of Representatives

194

190

200

165

158

145

150

153

145

148

115 100 62

55 50

28 13

8

7 –3

27

0

0 –3

−100

–1

–7

–8

–79

–79 CRA 1960

–83 CRA 1964*

Northern Democrats For

VRA 1965

–1

–6

–19

–10

–18

–49

–54

CRA 1957

0

0

−50 Against

49

38

VRA 1970

Northern Democrats Against

VRA 1975

VRA 1982

Southern Democrats For

VRA 1992

VRA 2006

Southern Democrats Against

Source: Table 25.1. * Titles 1, 8, and 9 in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, three of the ten in total, were concerned with voting rights issues.

Figure 25.2  Number of Northern and Southern Democrats Voting For and Against Civil Rights and Voting Rights Legislation in the Senate, 1957–2006 50

45

For

45 40

38

40

Democratic Votes in the Senate

31

28

30

40

38

24 20

10

5

4

0

4

1

0 –1

–1

4

3

–1

12

11

9 0

0

0

–1

–2

–5

–10

0

0

–2

–10 –20

–17

–18

Against –30

CRA 1957

CRA 1960

Northern Democrats For

–16 –20 CRA 1964*

VRA 1965

VRA 1970

Northern Democrats Against

VRA 1975

VRA 1982

Southern Democrats For

Source: Table 25.1. * Titles 1, 8, and 9 in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, three of the ten in total, were concerned with voting rights issues.

VRA 1992

VRA 2006

Southern Democrats Against



The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Expansions and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006 613 Figure 25.3  Number of Southern Democrats Voting For and Against Civil Rights and Voting Rights Legislation in the House and Senate, 1957–2006 80 For

Democratic Votes

28 13 5

7

8

4

–17

27

4

1

0 –20

49 38

40 20

62

55

60

–18

0

0 –5

–10

–16

–20

12

11

9

3

4

0

–2

–6 –18

–19

–40 –60 –80

–79 Against –100 CRA 1957

–49

–54

–79 CRA 1960

–83 CRA 1964*

VRA 1965

VRA 1970

VRA 1975

VRA 1982

Southern House Democrats For

Southern House Democrats Against

Southern Senate Democrats For

Southern Senate Democrats Against

VRA 1992

VRA 2006

Source: Table 25.1. * Titles 1, 8, and 9 in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, three of the ten in total, were concerned with voting rights issues.

southern Democrats who voted on the nine voting rights acts. Both Figure 25.1 and Figure 25.3 show that passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 garnered a significantly greater number of votes among the southern Democratic delegation of the House, jumping from just 8 votes in favor of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the House to 28 votes in support of the VRA in 1965. Switching from numbers of votes to percentages, one sees in Figure 25.4 (p. 614) that northern Democrats were nearly unanimous in their support for these nine pieces of legislation, with both houses fluctuating between 95% and 100%. In the House, the mean was 97.4% and the median was 98%. In the Senate, for northern Democrats the mean support was 98.2%; the median was 100%, as was the mode. Among southern Democrats in the House, the change was enormous, from a low of 8% in 1960 to a high of 100% in 2006. The mean for House Democrats was 48.2% and the median was 36%. Southern Democratic senators also leapt from a low of 5% support (or 95% opposition) to a high of 100% support on two occasions, 1982 and 2006. For these senators, the mean support was 48.8%, the median 23%, and the mode was 100%. Figure 25.4 offers a clear comparison and contrast over time between the levels of support (and therefore opposition) to civil rights legislation among Democrats in the U.S. House and Senate. Overall, this graph shows a clear pattern for both houses: widespread opposition by southern Democrats from 1957 to 1964, a larger minority of support by the same group in 1965 and 1970, a strong majority in favor by 1975, and largely approval in

1982 and 2006. The dip in 1992 occurred when, as noted above, a bilingual ballot provision was attached to the bill There was clearly strong and consistent majority opposition from the southern congressional elites from 1957 through 1970. It was relatively stronger in the House in 1957 and 1960, but in 1964, 1965, and 1970, the Senate had more opposition on a percentage basis. And because the southern states could see this opposition at the regional level, this legislative voting behavior sent cues to elective statewide, county, and local leaders to defy and likewise oppose the realization of Fifteenth Amendment constitutional rights for the African American electorate in their region. In fact, it took a full decade, until 1975, before this type of legislation acquired a majority of support from these southern congressional delegations. This opposition continued for a minority in at least one of the houses through 1992. These cues and suggestions from these elective elites sent the word to the southern white masses that they should continue to resist, defy, and oppose voting rights for their African American neighbors. Although Congress passed the legislation that reauthorized Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in 2006, Texas opposed it until it was upheld by the Supreme Court in June 2009 in its North Austin Municipal District v. Holder decision.26 Supporting Figure 25.5 (p. 614), Figure 25.6 (p. 615), and Table 25.2 (p. 615) reveal that until 1982 when the southern elites had completed their realignment away from the Democratic Party and to the Republican Party, majorities of southern Republicans in the Congress opposed voting rights legislation and civil

614

Chapter 25

Figure 25.4  Percentage of Northern and Southern Democrats Voting For Civil Rights and Voting Rights Legislation in the House and Senate, 1957–2006

100% 97.5% 96.0%

100.0% 98.1%

97.8% 94.8%

100.0%

97.8%

91.2%

90%

93.9% 95.0% 85.7%

80% Percent of Democratic Votes

100.0%

99.5% 100.0% 99.4% 100.0%

95.4% 96.6%

74.3%

70%

67.9%

64.3%

60% 50% 40%

35.5%

34.1%

30%

22.7%

20%

14.1%

8.8%

8.1%

10% 0%

CRA 1957

CRA 1960

23.1%

20.0%

18.2%

4.8%

CRA 1964*

VRA 1965

VRA 1970

VRA 1975

VRA 1982

Northern House Democrats

Southern House Democrats

Northern Senate Democrats

Southern Senate Democrats

VRA 1992

VRA 2006

Source: Table 25.1. * Titles 1, 8, and 9 in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, three of the ten in total, were concerned with voting rights issues.

Figure 25.5  Number of Southern Republicans Voting For and Against Civil Rights and Voting Rights Legislation in the House and Senate, 1957–2006 70 For

60

60 50

Republican Votes

40 30 22

18

20 10

10 1

0 0

0 –5

–10

2

0 0

0

4

0

0

–1

–5 –11

3

CRA 1957

1

–1

–1

–17

–21 CRA 1960

CRA 1964*

VRA 1965

5

VRA 1970

–3

–4

–11

–20 Against –30

7 2

VRA 1975

–13 –19 VRA 1982

–25 VRA 1992

Southern House Republicans Against

Southern Senate Republicans For

Southern Senate Republicans Against

* Titles 1, 8, and 9 in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, three of the ten in total, were concerned with voting rights issues.

0 –3

Southern House Republicans For Source: Table 25.1.

3

VRA 2006



The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Expansions and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006 615 Figure 25.6  Percentage of Southern Republicans Voting For and Against Civil Rights and Voting Rights Legislation in the House and Senate, 1957–2006 100.0%

100% For

75.9%

80%

70.0% 62.9%

60%

50.0% 37.0%

Percent of Republican Votes

40% 20%

50.0%

28.6% 16.7%

16.7%

12.5% 0.0%

0%

33.3%

26.7%

0.0%

0.0% 0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

–20%

–50.0%

–60% –80% Against –100%

–24.1%

–30.0% –37.1%

–40%

–83.3%

–63.0% –66.7%

–71.4%

–73.3%

CRA 1964*

CRA 1960

–83.3%

–87.5% –100.0%

–100.0%

CRA 1957

–50.0%

VRA 1970

VRA 1965

VRA 1975

VRA 1982

VRA 1992

Southern House Republicans For

Southern House Republicans Against

Southern Senate Republicans For

Southern Senate Republicans Against

VRA 2006

Source: Table 25.1. * Titles 1, 8, and 9 in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, three of the ten in total, were concerned with voting rights issues.

Table 25.2  Presidents and Republican Party Strength During Passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006 House of Representatives Republicans

Senate Republicans

Year

Act

President

President’s Party

Northern

Southern

Members Voting

Northern

Southern

Members Voting

1957

Civil Rights

Dwight Eisenhower

Republican

160

 6

376

43

 0

90

1960

Civil Rights

Dwight Eisenhower

Republican

128

 7

383

29

 0

89

1965

Voting Rights Act

Lyndon B. Johnson

Democrat

115

15

403

30

 1

97

1970

VRA Renewal

Richard Nixon

Republican

152

24

404

32

 2

76

1975

VRA Renewal

Richard Nixon

Republican

105

27

401

27

 6

89

1982

VRA Renewal

Ronald Reagan

Republican

143

35

413

40

10

93

1992

Language Assistance

George H. W. Bush

Republican

112

30

362

35

 6

95

2006

VRA Renewal

George W. Bush

Republican

146

79

423

35

18

98

Source: Table 25.1.

rights legislation that was significantly concerned with voting rights. Republican senators were virtually nonexistent in the South until 1964, and Republican members of the House from the South grew in numbers after 1964. From the end of Redemption until 1964 the South had been nearly the exclusive province of the Democratic Party, but passage of the VRA precipitated

its realignment to the Republican Party. Table 25.2 shows that the Democratic Party, in the instance of one administration, was associated with the enactment of voting rights, but all of the renewals and extensions, occasions that present the greatest opportunities since enactment for critique and repeal, have been authorized by Republican administrations.

616

Chapter 25

Assessing the 1965 Voting Rights Act: Reports of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights On August 6, 1965, a native-son president of the South, Lyndon B. Johnson, signed the Voting Rights Act. With that signature the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights moved quickly to determine how successful the Act would be by making their first appraisal and evaluation based on actual findings on September 25, 1965. Table 25.3 presents a comprehensive and systematic list of the five Commission on Civil Rights Reports that attempted to assess and evaluate the impact and influence of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Each of these five reports offered very useful federal statistics on the registration of the African American electorate as well as describing the different measuring procedures and techniques used by the Commission at different time intervals. Later, when the academic and scholarly communities began to appraise and evaluate the 1965 Voting Rights Act, many of the Commission techniques and procedures were telescoped into a single one: the rising number of African American elected officials. However, this one-dimensional measurement, which was adopted so quickly and uncritically because of its quantitative simplicity, did not receive a balanced appraisal in regard to its strengths and weaknesses. The second half of Table 25.3 shows the three leading histories of the Commission on Civil Rights. Two of the authors served on the Commission, Professor Mary Frances Berry as Chairperson, and Professor Abigail Thernstrom as Vice-Chairperson, and the other author was a distinguished historian. Each of these three authors in their historical studies also attempted to appraise the work of the Commission on voting rights, albeit in a limited manner. Collectively, the three historical studies offer one outsider and two insider perspectives, each from different ideological viewpoints. The combined portrait is quite illuminating and informative. Adding insights from these historical studies to the Commission’s own four evaluative reports will give us a valuable assessment of the impact and influence of the VRA.

The Commission’s work in the voting rights issue is our point of intellectual departure and conceptualization in determining the effectiveness of the Act.

Immediate Impact: August 6 to October 30, 1965 Table 25.4 analyzes what happened in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi from August 6, 1965, when President Johnson signed the VRA into law, to September 25, 1965. The table compares new registrations in selected counties with federal registrars to new registrations in selected neighboring counties that lacked federal registrars. The locations of the counties are shown in Map 25.1 (p. 618). The results are simple and clear-cut. The African American electorate grew significantly more in the counties with federal registrars than in the counties without federal registrars. (Attorneys within the Justice Department selected the 100 counties across the South that they wanted to focus on and selected the individuals who would serve as federal registrars and observers.) Thus, the immediate results were quite impressive. This Act’s main parallel was the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867. And furthermore, this attempt to compare and contrast the counties with federal examiners with neighboring counties without examiners harkens back to Professor V. O. Key, Jr.’s classic Southern Politics in 1949, where he discerned a pattern and trend in southern states called localism, i.e., “friends and neighbors” voting for candidates from adjoining counties.27 Although this dominant characteristic of southern white voting behavior does not apply to African American voter registration behavior in these three southern states, it is a very insightful analysis of the southern political culture. Professor Key’s localism provides a clue to the rising African American voter registration efforts after the Supreme Court case that declared the White Primary unconstitutional, and it tells us that the “friends and neighbors” tradition in the white community may have existed in the African American community. In addition, it suggests that some of the success of the African American voter registration effort

Table 25.3  Commission on Civil Rights and Academic Studies and Reports on the Impact of the 1965 Voting Rights Act

Year

Author

Elapsed Time Since VRA Passage

Title Commission Reports and Studies

1965

Commission

The Voting Rights Act: The First Months

1.5 Months

1968

Commission

Political Participation: A Study of the Participation by Negroes in the Electoral and Political Processes in 10 Southern States Since Passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 

3 Years

1975

Commission

The Voting Rights Act: Ten Years After

10 Years

1981

Commission

The Voting Rights Act: Unfulfilled Goals

16 Years

2001 

Commission 

Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election

36 Years 

Historical Studies of the Commission on Civil Rights 1968

Foster Rhea Dulles 

The Civil Rights Commission, 1957–1965 

3 Years 

2009

Mary Frances Berry

And Justice For All: United States Commission on Civil Rights and the Continuing Struggle for Freedom in America

44 Years 

2009

Abigail M. Thernstrom

Voting Rights—And Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections

44 Years 



The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Expansions and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006 617 Table 25.4  Comparing African American Voter Registrations in Counties Under Federal Examination for the Voting Rights Act with Nearby Counties Not Examined

Alabama

State

African Americans

Louisiana

1964 Registered Voters 

Listeda and/or Registeredb from Aug. 6 to Sept. 25, 1965

VRA Voters as Percent of 1964 Registered Voters 

Category of Counties

Counties

Examiner Counties

Dallas

15,115

320

6,789

2121.6%

Hale

 5,999

236

3,242

1373.7%

Lowndes

 5,122

0

1,496

 

Marengo

 7,791

295

4,257

1443.1%

Perry

 5,202

289

2,460

851.2%

Wilcox

 6,085

0

3,201

 

45,314

1,140

21,445

1881.1%c

Bullock

 4,450

1,200

292

24.3%

Butler

 4,820

248

334

134.7%

Choctaw

 3,982

252

217

86.1%

Clarke

 5,833

650

265

40.8%

Pickens

 4,373

438

66

15.1%

Pike

 5,259

273

1,453

532.2%

Sumter

61.1%

Examiner Counties Total Selected Non-Examiner Counties

 6,814

375

229

Non-Examiner Counties Total

35,531

3,436

2,856

83.1%

Examiner Counties

East Carroll

 4,183

136

2,487

1828.7%

East Feliciana

 6,081

182

1,972

1083.5%

Ouachita

16,377

1,744

5,200

298.2%

Plaquemines

 2,897

96

1,202

1252.1%

29,538

2,158

10,861

503.3%

Bienville

 4,077

584

879

150.5%

Claiborne

 5,032

96

587

611.5%

Madison

 5,181

294

1,819

618.7%

Morehouse

 7,208

491

252

51.3%

Tensas

 3,533

60

555

925.0%

Webster

 7,045

803

897

111.7%

West Carroll

 1,389

76

31

40.8%

West Feliciana

 4,553

85

383

450.6%

Non-Examiner Counties Total

38,018

2,489

5,403

217.1%

Examiner Counties

Jefferson Davis

 3,222

126

967

767.5%

Jones

 7,427

800

1,795

224.4%

Leflore

13,567

281

5,189

1846.6%

Madison

10,366

218

5,058

2320.2%

34,582

1,425

13,009

912.9%

Carroll

 2,704

5

167

3340.0%

Forrest

 7,495

236

310

131.4%

Holmes

 8,757

20

1,034

5170.0%

Rankin

 6,944

 

577

 

Sunflower

13,524

185

375

202.7%

Tunica

 5,822

38

217

571.1%

Washington

20,619

2,500

2,062

82.5%

Wilkinson

 4,120

 

153

 

Yazoo

 8,719

 

605

 

78,704

2,984

5,500

184.3%c

Examiner Counties Total Selected Non-Examiner Counties

Examiner Counties Total Mississippi

1960 Census Voting Age Population 

Selected Non-Examiner Counties

Non-Examiner Counties Total

Source: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, The Voting Rights Act: The First Months (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1965), pp. 37–39. Calculations by the authors. a

In “examiner” counties, this is the number of African Americans listed by the federal examiners as qualified for registration.

b

In “non-examiner” counties, this is the number of African Americans registered by state registrars.

c

The percentage excludes counties without registered African American voters in 1964.

618

Chapter 25

Map 25.1  Counties Selected by the United States Commission on Civil Rights for Evaluation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965

Georgia

Sunflower

Tunica

Al abama

Leflore 0

100

Mississippi

200

miles

Ar kansas

Webster

Bienville

Morehouse

Hale Sumter

Madison Madison

Perry Dallas Wilcox

Rankin

Tensas

Ouachita East Carroll West Carroll

50

Lowndes

Holmes

Yazoo

Claiborne

25

mi les

Pickens

Carroll Washington

0

Jefferson Davis

Clarke

Jones

Bullock Butler

Pike

Marengo

Choctaw Wilkinson

Florida

Louisiana

Forrest West Feliciana

East Feliciana

Texas Selected Counties Under Federal Examination Selected Nearby Non-examination Counties

(14) (24)

Plaquemines

Source: Table 25.4.

might be due to “friends and neighbors” talking to and motivating other African Americans in adjoining county communities. Thus, Key’s insight about this value and tradition in the southern political culture might in an indirect way allow one to see how this re-enfranchisement worked instead of relying upon the lessstructured concept of “hearing it through the grapevine” in the African American communities. Here is a possibly hidden variable that one rarely sees in these mobilization events and efforts. Figure 25.7 offers a visual of the total newly registered African Americans in the examiner counties juxtaposed against all of the other counties (as opposed to the few selected nonexaminer neighboring counties listed in Table 25.4, p. 617) in the state. Thus, in two of the three states, Mississippi and Louisiana, African Americans in the expanded base of non-examiner counties out-registered those African Americans in counties where federal registrars worked. The empirical findings in Chapter 22 on both Louisiana and Mississippi and their sundry techniques of running African American candidates to stimulate and motivate African Americans to register and vote seems to be a possible variable, along with numerous individual voting rights activists and organizations who may have had greater influence and impact than the federal registrars. But these conditions did not

hold in Alabama, and here African Americans clearly needed the federal registrars. In Louisiana, those African Americans in the non-examiner counties who stepped up and went to register on their own were more than triple those who registered with the assistance of federal registrars. In Mississippi, the difference was not quite as great but the overall results were similar to Louisiana. And this finding immediately after the passage of the VRA (along with those in Chapter 22) calls into question some of the scholarly findings that “political apathy” determined the voter registration and voting behavior of the African American electorate in Mississippi.28 Table 25.5 (p. 620) adds additional evidence against the finding of African American fear and apathy in that it shows the number of days that federal examiners worked in each and every one of these counties to register African Americans in the days immediately following passage of the Voting Rights Act. In Alabama the mean was 46.3 days while the median was 50.0 days; in Louisiana the mean was 41.5 days while the median was 45.5 days; and in Mississippi the mean was 35.3 days while the median was 31.5 days. Surprisingly, the average number of days of examination were fewest in Mississippi, then Louisiana, and finally in Alabama. (The number of days worked was determined



The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Expansions and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006 619 Figure 25.7  Comparing African American Voter Registrations in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi Immediately After Passage of the Voting Rights Act

10,861 23.1%

13,009 30.8%

12,040 36.0% 21,445 64.0%

Alabama

29,213 69.2%

36,219 76.9%

Louisiana

Mississippi Examiner Counties

All Other Counties

Number of African American Registered Voters, Percent of African American Registered Voters in State Source: Table 25.4.

by Justice Department officials in light of the number of voting rights complaints that were coming in. Budget was also taken into account.) Again, the data on Louisiana and Mississippi reflect the voting rights activism prior to the passage of the 1965 VRA. Figures 25.8 and 25.9 (p. 621) show a comparison and contrast between the registration acceptances and denials of both whites and African Americans in those selected counties. These figures offer a rarely mentioned additional feature of the 1965 VRA, which are the numbers of whites who were registered or rejected immediately with the passage and implementation of the Act. Of the counties with federal registrars, in Alabama the number of African Americans registering was significantly greater than the number of whites, with the same occurring in Mississippi and to a lesser degree in Louisiana. And at the percentage level the African American electorate in Alabama and Mississippi accounted for nearly all of the newly registered voters. Even in the selected counties in the state of Louisiana African Americans accounted for nearly 90% of the total, due to the number of whites who registered in the selected parishes there. As to the actual number of rejections and denials immediately after the passage of the 1965 VRA, Figure 25.9 indicates that in these selected counties African Americans were refused registration in greater numbers than whites. Only the state of Louisiana refused whites in any significant number. This result is confirmed by examining the percentages shown in the figure. No whites were rejected and denied registration in Alabama and only a miniscule percentage in Mississippi. Even in Louisiana only about 0.2% of white applicants were denied. Meanwhile, more African Americans were turned away from the voter registration rolls in these states, albeit in small percentages of all African American applicants. Although this initial report by the Commission began with an analysis of only three states and selected counties in them, it included in its appendix data on five states—Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina—and all of their

counties, not just the ones with federal examiners. The last row of Table 25.6 (p. 621), which summarizes these data, shows that in all of these five states 99,206 African Americans attempted to register. Some 96,997 (97.8%) were registered and 2,209 (2.2%) were denied. In rank order by number of African Americans registered, Louisiana registered 36,219, Mississippi 29,213, Alabama 12,040, Georgia 10,046, and South Carolina 9,479. The mean number of those who immediately became registered is 19,339 and the median is 12,040. However, in addition to the registered or rejected African Americans, 24,459 attempted to register at the same time. Of that number 24,025 (98.2%) registered and 434 (1.8%) were denied. In rank order by number of whites registered, Louisiana registered 7,065, Mississippi 7,040, Georgia 4,722, Alabama 3,941, and South Carolina 1,257. The mean number of whites who immediately went to register was 4,805 and the median was 4,722. Map 25.2 (p. 622) emphasizes that all of these five states were in the Deep South and shows the actual number of African Americans and whites who registered immediately following the passage and implementation of the VRA. Figure 25.10 (p. 622) offers a visualization of the tabular data for both races in these five southern states in rank-order fashion. This figure shows that members of both races in these southern states were enfranchised as a consequence of this new public policy. Although not as many whites registered as African Americans, it should be understood that many other whites were already registered. But the effort to mobilize African Americans also mobilized additional whites to register to vote in each of these five southern states. Figure 25.11 (p. 623) shows how many African American and white applicants were rejected and denied the right to register in the five states following implementation of the VRA. The greatest number of rejections and denials for African Americans were in Mississippi, then in Louisiana, while for whites the highest number of rejections came in Georgia and Alabama. Alabama rejected nearly the same number of African American and white applicants;

1,212

11,095

2,774

2,275

441

692

Plaquemines

Subtotal

Mean

Median

Benton

Clay

 97.3%

5,135

16,067

2,008

1,125

58,615

Madison

Subtotal

Mean

Median

100.0%

 99.9%

 99.9%

 99.9%

56,789

1,103

1,982

15,855

5,094

5,277

1,798

1,027

356

1,179

687

437

2,235

2,734

10,935

1,202

5,264

1,978

2,491

3,396

4,286

29,999

3,396

2,527

6,925

4,442

1,658

3,304

7,747

Number

94.3%

99.1%

98.6%

98.6%

99.1%

98.0%

99.0%

99.1%

99.7%

96.8%

99.1%

99.1%

97.8%

87.2%

87.2%

46.1%

98.4%

98.3%

97.3%

94.8%

94.9%

94.9%

94.8%

93.4%

97.5%

94.9%

91.5%

95.2%

94.0%

Percent of All Applicants

Listeda

1,826

10

27

212

41

104

14

5

1

38

5

4

41

40

160

10

69

19

62

164

208

1,454

179

174

150

148

152

164

487

Number

3.0%

0.8%

1.3%

1.3%

0.8%

1.9%

0.8%

0.5%

0.3%

3.1%

0.7%

0.9%

1.1%

1.3%

1.3%

0.4%

1.3%

0.9%

2.4%

5.0%

4.6%

4.6%

5.0%

6.4%

2.1%

3.2%

8.4%

4.7%

5.9%

Percent of All Applicants

Rejectedb

1,601

1

2

15

3

1

5

4

0

1

1

0

18

360

1,439

1,396

19

16

8

6

21

147

6

5

30

90

3

4

9

Number

 2.7%

 0.1%

 0.1%

 0.1%

 0.1%

 0.0%

 0.3%

 0.4%

 0.0%

 0.1%

 0.1%

 0.0%

 0.6%

11.5%

11.5%

53.5%

 0.4%

 0.8%

 0.3%

 0.2%

 0.5%

 0.5%

 0.2%

 0.2%

 0.4%

 1.9%

 0.2%

 0.1%

 0.1%

Percent of All Applicants

Applicants

1,570

1

2

13

3

1

4

4

0

1

0

0

18

353

1,410

1,367

19

16

8

6

21

147

6

5

30

90

3

4

9

Number

2.6%

0.0%

0.1%

0.1%

0.1%

0.0%

0.2%

0.4%

0.0%

0.1%

0.0%

0.0%

0.6%

11.2%

11.2%

52.4%

0.4%

0.8%

0.3%

0.2%

0.5%

0.5%

0.2%

0.2%

0.4%

1.9%

0.2%

0.1%

0.1%

Percent of All Applicants

Listeda

Whites

31

 0

 0

 2

 0

 0

 1

 0

 0

 0

 1

 0

 0

 7

29

29

 0

 0

 0

 0

 0

 0

 0

 0

 0

 0

 0

 0

 0

Number

0.1%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.1%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.1%

0.0%

0.0%

0.2%

0.2%

1.1%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Percent of All Applicants

Rejectedb

60,216

1,127

2,010

16,082

5,138

5,382

1,817

1,036

357

1,218

693

441

2,585

3,134

12,534

2,608

5,352

2,013

2,561

3,581

4,514

31,600

3,581

2,706

7,105

4,680

1,813

3,472

8,243

All Applicants

146,043

5,977

6,826

54,607

10,148

13,286

6,727

3,067

5,226

11,276

3,795

1,082

4,961

6,826

27,305

2,801

14,583

5,894

4,027

5,805

9,162

64,131

5,805

4,161

23,056

7,020

4,926

5,518

13,645

Estimated Potential Applicants

 

31.5

35.3

 

50

50

41

37

26

26

26

26

45.5

41.5

 

25

41

50

50

50.0

46.3

 

41

41

22

50

50

50

70

Days Examining

Applicants listed by federal examiners as qualified for voter registration.

Applicants rejected by state officials for voter registration.

a

b

Source: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, The Voting Rights Act: The First Months (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1965), pp. 71–73 (Appendix D: Statistics of Registration Following August 6, 1965: Cumulative Totals on Voting Rights Examining). Calculations by the authors.

Totals

 99.9%

5,381

Leflore

 99.7%

1,812

 99.6%

1,032

Jones

100.0%

 99.9%

 99.9%

100.0%

 99.4%

 88.5%

 88.5%

 46.5%

 99.6%

 99.2%

 99.7%

 99.8%

 99.5%

 99.5%

 99.8%

 99.8%

 99.6%

 98.1%

 99.8%

 99.9%

 99.9%

Jefferson Davis

357

5,333

Ouachita

Humphreys

1,997

East Feliciana

1,217

2,553

East Carroll

Coahoma

3,575

Median

2,701

Perry

4,493

7,075

Montgomery

Mean

4,590

Marengo

3,575

1,810

Lowndes

31,453

3,468

Hale

Subtotal

8,234

Dallas

Wilcox

Number

County

Percent of All Applicants

Applicants

African Americans

Table 25.5  Cumulative Totals of Federal Examinations for Voter Registration in Selected Southern States, by County, Following Passage of the Voting Rights Act, August 6–October 30, 1965

State

Alabama

Louisiana

Mississippi



The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Expansions and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006 621 Figure 25.8  Cumulative Voter Registration Applicants Listed Under Voting Rights Examining by Race Immediately Following Passage of the Voting Rights Act 13 0.1%

147 0.5%

1,410 11.4%

29,999 99.5%

15,855 99.9%

Alabama

10,935 88.6%

Mississippi

Louisiana

Listed African Americans

Listed Whites

Number of Listed Persons, Percent of All Listed Persons Source: Table 25.5.

Figure 25.9  Cumulative Voter Registration Applicants Rejected Under Voting Rights Examining by Race Immediately Following Passage of the Voting Rights Act

0 0.0% 29 15.3%

1,454 100.0%

212 99.1%

160 84.7%

2 0.9% Alabama

Mississippi

Louisiana Rejected Whites

Rejected African Americans

Number of Rejected Persons, Percent of All Rejected Persons Source: Table 25.5.

Table 25.6  Voter Registration Totals in Selected Counties of Selected Southern States Following Passage of the Voting Rights Act, August 6–October 30, 1965 African Americans Accepted

Whites

Rejected

85

Number

Percent of White Total

Number

0.7%

12,125

75.4%

 3,941

Rejected

Number

Percent of White Total

 99.7%

 11

Total

Alabama

12,040

99.3%

Georgia

10,046

99.9%

12

0.1%

10,058

68.0%

 4,722

100.0%

  1

0.0%

 4,723

32.0%

 14,781

Louisiana

36,219

98.3%

617

1.7%

36,836

83.8%

 7,065

 99.0%

 74

1.0%

 7,139

16.2%

 43,975

Mississippi

29,213

95.2%

1,483

4.8%

30,696

80.6%

 7,040

 95.3%

348

4.7%

 7,388

19.4%

 38,084

South Carolina

 9,479

99.9%

12

0.1%

 9,491

88.3%

 1,257

100.0%

  0

0.0%

 1,257

11.7%

 10,748

Grand Totals

96,997

97.8%

2,209

2.2%

99,206

80.2%

24,025

 98.2%

434

1.8%

24,459

19.8%

123,665

Number

Percent of All Total

Accepted

Number

State

Percent of Af. Am. Total

Total

Percent of Af. Am. Total

Number

Percent of All Total

All Total Number

0.3%

 3,952

24.6%

 16,077

Source: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, The Voting Rights Act: The First Months (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1965), pp. 53–67 (Appendix D: Statistics of Registration Following August 6, 1965). Calculations by the authors. Note: Based on selected counties from data collected by the Commission following implementation of the Voting Rights Act in the period of August 6–October 30, 1965.

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Chapter 25

Map 25.2  New Voters Registered by Race Following Implementation of the Voting Rights Act, August 6–October 30, 1965 Missouri

Virginia

Kentucky

North Carolina 0

100

Tennessee

200

miles

South Carolina

Arkansas

Registered VRA Voters: 9,479 Blacks 1,257 Whites

Georgia Alabama Mississippi Registered VRA Voters: 29,213 Blacks 7,040 Whites

Louisiana

Texas

Registered VRA Voters: 12,046 Blacks 4,722 Whites

Registered VRA Voters: 12,040 Blacks 3,941 Whites

0

50

100

miles

Florida

Registered VRA Voters: 36,219 Blacks 7,065 Whites

Source: Table 25.6.

Figure 25.10  Accepted Voter Registration Applications in Selected Southern States by Race Following Passage of the Voting Rights Act, 1965

Number of Accepted Registrant Applicants

40,000 36,219 35,000 29,213

30,000 25,000 20,000 15,000 10,000

12,040 7,065

10,046

7,040 3,941

5,000

1,257 0

Louisiana

Mississippi

Alabama

Accepted African American Applicants

Percent of Accepted Registrant Applicants

100%

98.3% 99%

95.2%95.3%

99.3% 99.7%

Georgia

South Carolina

Accepted White Applicants 99.9% 100%

99.9%100%

Georgia

South Carolina

90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

Louisiana

Mississippi

Alabama

Accepted African American Applicants (%)

Source: Table 25.6.

9,479

4,722

Accepted White Applicants (%)



The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Expansions and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006 623 Figure 25.11  Rejected Voter Registration Applications in Selected Southern States by Race Following Passage of the Voting Rights Act, 1965

Number of Rejected Registrant Applicants

1,600

1,483

1,400 1,200 1,000 800 617

600

348

400 200 0

85

11 Mississippi

Louisiana

74

Alabama

Rejected African American Applicants

Percent of Rejected Registrant Applicants

5%

12 Georgia

12

0

South Carolina

Rejected White Applicants

4.8% 4.7%

4%

3%

2%

1.7% 1.0%

1%

0.7% 0.3%

0%

Mississippi

Louisiana

Alabama

Rejected African American Applicants (%)

0.1% 0.0%

0.1% 0.0%

Georgia

South Carolina

Rejected White Applicants (%)

Source: Table 25.6.

while Georgia was the only state that rejected more whites than African Americans, and in much greater numbers than in any of the other five states. And in South Carolina no whites whatsoever were rejected, and only one was rejected in Louisiana. Analysis of the percentages in Figure 25.11 shows that in each of the states slightly fewer whites were denied registration than African American applicants but that both races received a very low rejection rate. Although the percentage differences were very small indeed, nevertheless the Act helped empower whites just as much as if not more than African Americans. The only geographical locations where it might have equalized electoral power could have been in the African American majority counties. Still, before the passage of the law, African Americans had been rejected at a rate alarmingly higher than their white counterparts. It is notable that Alabama had only a medium number and percentage of rejections because Governor George Wallace had vowed to keep African Americans segregated and out of politics in his state. And the historical record shows that the county registrars in his state kept the political faith with him.29 Writing about the state’s county registrars and their ideological alignment with Governor Wallace, one of the Justice Department attorneys in the state at that time, Brian Landsberg, said: In Alabama, registration was conducted by a board of registrars, three local citizens—generally retired men and widows—appointed by the governor, the state auditor, and commissioner of agriculture and industries. In essence, during Governor George Wallace’s administration, the

appointers were all under the influence of the governor, who had won office on a platform of “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. . . .” The Alabama registration system was discriminatory. . . . It permitted the Board of Registrars great latitude in deciding whom to register and whom to reject. Moreover, its lack of transparency facilitated race-based registrar discrimination, and it was administered by untrained officials who owed their position to a segregationist governor.30 Of this initial evaluative 1965 Report, Professor Foster Dulles made the telling observation: Some three months after passage of the Voting Rights Act, the Commission drew up a report seeking the immediate effects. It found that in many areas of the South the new law was meeting full compliance, and that its administration by the Civil Service Commission was “imaginatively planned, vigorously executed, and closely supervised.” However, the Commission reported that in the opinion of staff investigators, the Attorney General was moving very slowly in assigning Federal Examiners. The Department of Justice was gradually broadening its policy, but it had at first designated for Federal intervention only such counties where there had been flagrant violations of the right to vote and ignored those where discrimination was less overt but nonetheless real.31

624

Chapter 25

And Professor Dulles noted: “To assure full success, the Commission recommended the appointment of Federal examiners in all political subdivisions covered by the law, rather than just those practicing demonstrable discrimination; once again urged an information program to acquaint Negroes with their rights and to encourage them to register” so they would be better prepared to exercise this new right by the time of the 1966 elections.32 Therefore, Professor Dulles’ analysis contradicts the very rosy portrait painted by some of an overnight success from the Act in its first one-and-one-half months. The examiners did not get into all of the counties in the states covered by the Act. Hence, the effect would have been even greater had all of the counties been supplied with federal examiners. In addition, this initial evaluation report tells us nothing about federal statistics except what was collected in the flagrant counties. This initial report does not provide any holistic portrait of the nature, scope, and size of this new registered electorate. Finally, there is historical evidence that the law had not made as much of an impact and become as influential as the initial report showed. Analyzing Mississippi, Professor John Dittmer says: “State officials at first largely ignored the voting rights act. (They would soon pass legislation to subvert its intent.) . . . Although thousands of new black voters were being added to the rolls in Mississippi, there were widespread reports of violations of the law in both letter and spirit.”33 He continued: “Initially, the attorney general dispatched registrars to only eight Mississippi counties, and as late as March 1966 no registrars had been sent to thirty Mississippi counties where less than 25 percent of the adult black population was registered, including Senator [James] Eastland’s home base in Sunflower [County].”34 Two other things happened in 1966. First, on June 4, 1966, James Meredith launched in Memphis a march to convince the African American electorate that it was “now safe to register and vote.”35 He was ambushed just as the march began, causing the other major civil rights leaders to come to the state and lead the march until he could return and end the march at the state capitol in Jackson. Second, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) launched a statewide campaign to run candidates for the midterm congressional elections by entering the Democratic primaries and the general election with Freedom Vote candidates. Thus, more African American political innovation was needed to implement the VRA due to the failure of the federal government to send in a substantial number of federal registrars and examiners.

The Short Term Impact of the 1965 Voting Rights Act: The Second Report, 1968 In 1968, three years after the initial evaluative report, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released its second report. Table 25.7 provides some of the data from this report for eight southern states: voting age populations (VAP); pre- and post-Act registrations (the post-Act data include a column titled “Unknown,” which lists the numbers of individuals whose race could not be discerned by federal examiners); the percentage gains in the ratio of registrants-to-voting-age-population; and the number

of African Americans and whites registered by federal registrars. For this second report, the Commission included more states than they had in the initial evaluative report. The report included data on nine states, with only Tennessee and Texas missing from the old Confederacy, but three of the nine states had incomplete datasets. Because of these missing or incomplete datasets, the table omits Florida, Tennessee, and Texas. Neither Arkansas nor Texas had a statewide voter registration system. Both states used paid poll tax receipts as a means of determining voter registration. They kept a record of these receipts, which the Commission could have gotten and used to determine impact and influence, but it did not.36 Arkansas was not covered in the initial report, and as a consequence it was impossible for the Commission to determine the impact and influence of the VRA there. In addition, there were no postAct registration data on Arkansas in the Commission’s second evaluative report, rendering it impossible to calculate gains and determine the impact of the federal registrars. Unlike Arkansas, Florida did not rely upon a paid poll tax system as a substitute for statewide voter registration. Florida not only had a full-fledged statewide voter registration system ever since the 1944 Smith v. Allwright Supreme Court decision, but also the Election Division of the Secretary of State’s office kept voter registration by both race and party affiliation, including third parties. In terms of official state election statistics only Louisiana predates Florida. Yet the Commission made no use of Florida’s rich trove of data in their second evaluative report; these statistics could have shown the effectiveness of individual, group, and organizational voting rights activism in Florida in empirical terms. Like Arkansas, Virginia lacked data and thus did not allow the calculation of gains to show the impact and influence of the VRA. Virginia did not keep voter registration figures by race: the state had a historical tradition where one or two scholars kept such voting statistics, and beginning in the 1950s the Secretary of State’s Board of Elections Director had given such data to scholars upon request.37 Moreover, several African American voting rights activist organizations kept some voter registration statistics on the state.38 But the Commission’s second report made no use of this type of information. Again, no federal registrars were sent into the state. And finally, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Virginia did not have any federal registrars, so all of these states’ data counts as “non-examiner.” There is one other major problem with this report’s data, the category dubbed “Unknown.” As shown in Table 25.7, the report offered some alarming (and quite misleading) numbers in the only two states, Georgia and Mississippi, with such individuals. In Georgia there were 22,776 persons of unknown race, while Mississippi’s total was 158,649. In Georgia, in Cobb County alone the number of people of unknown race was 8,341, and in Dougherty County the number was 3,332 individuals. In Mississippi’s Harrison County there were 15,824 individuals of unknown race, while in Monroe County there were 11,142 such individuals. Both the state totals and select county totals are highly unlikely. Such huge numbers of individuals with no racial characteristics would not be possible. And in the case of Mississippi this affected the state totals because the official



The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Expansions and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006 625 Table 25.7  Gains in Ratio of Registered Voters to Eligible Voters by Race Before and After the Voting Rights Act of 1965

Voting Age Population Stateb

County Summary

Alabama

All Counties Total

481,170

1,353,112

Non-Examiner Subtotal

266,366

978,246

Examiner Subtotal

214,804

All Counties Total

192,626

Non-Examiner Subtotal

192,626

Arkansas

Georgia

Louisiana

Blacks

Whites

Pre-Act Registration Blacks

Percentage Point Registration Gain in Ratio of Applicants Registrants-to- Listed by Federal Eligiblesa Examiners

Post-Act Registration

Whites

Blacks

Whites

Unknown Blacks

Whites

Blacks

Whites

92,737

935,695

247,432

1,212,317

0

61,005

720,731

121,016

919,297

0

32.1

20.4

60,316

5,244

22.5

20.3

n/a

n/a

374,866

31,732

214,964

126,416

293,020

850,643

77,714

555,946

0

0

0

44.1

20.8

60,316

5,244

0

 

 

0

0

850,643

77,714

555,946

0

0

0

 

 

n/a

n/a

Examiner Subtotal

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

 

 

0

0

All Counties Total

612,910

1,796,338

167,699

1,124,375

322,996

1,440,356

22,776

25.3

17.6

3,397

16

Non-Examiner Subtotal

603,329

1,787,316

166,709

1,116,700

316,983

1,430,973

22,776

24.9

17.6

n/a

Examiner Subtotal

9,581

9,022

990

7,675

6,013

9,383

0

52.4

18.9

3,397

n/a 16

All Counties Total

514,589

1,289,126

164,601

1,037,184

304,204

1,200,517

0

27.1

12.7

24,130

1,770

Non-Examiner Subtotal

419,968

1,106,114

155,662

908,367

254,735

1,055,339

0

23.6

13.3

n/a

n/a

Examiner Subtotal

94,621

183,012

8,939

128,817

49,469

145,178

0

42.8

 8.9

24,130

1,770

All Counties Total

422,256

748,266

12,975c

227,514c

181,234

589,066

158649b

39.8

48.3

57,947

Non-Examiner Subtotal

228,380

477,381

3,817

98,176

86,001

349,527

122063b

36.0

52.7

n/a

Examiner Subtotal

193,876

270,885

9,158

129,338

95,233

239,539

36,586

44.4

40.7

57,947

North Carolina  All Counties Total

550,929

2,005,955

78,753

351,575

277,404

1,602,980

0

36.1

62.4

550,929

2,005,955

78,753

351,575

277,404

1,602,980

0

36.1

62.4

Mississippi 

Non-Examiner Subtotal South Carolina

Virginia

c

c

243 n/a 243

0 n/a

0 n/a

Examiner Subtotal

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

 

 

0

0

All Counties Total

371,104

895,147

138,544

678,214

190,467

731,096

0

14.0

 5.9

4,606

16

Non-Examiner Subtotal

357,999

882,803

136,271

665,642

181,090

716,904

0

12.5

 5.8

n/a

Examiner Subtotal

13,105

12,344

2,273

12,572

9,377

14,192

0

54.2

13.1

4,606

16

All Counties Total

446,146

1,906,617

144,259

1,070,168

0

0

0

 

 

0

0

Non-Examiner Subtotal

446,146

1,906,617

144,259

1,070,168

0

0

0

 

 

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

 

 

Examiner Subtotal

n/a

n/a

n/a 0

0

Total

4,061,991

13,462,642 1,117,898

7,939,170

1,822,770

8,907,437

181,425

17.4

 7.2

150,396

7,289

Non-Examiner Total

3,536,004

12,612,513 1,064,806

7,445,804

1,536,262

8,206,125

144,839

13.3

 6.0

n/a

n/a

493,366

286,508

701,312

36,586

44.4

24.5

150,396

7,289

Examiner Total

525,987

850,129

53,092

Source: United States Commission on Civil Rights, Political Participation: A Study of the Participation by Negroes in the Electoral and Political Processes in 10 Southern States since Passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1968), pp. 224–256. Calculated as the difference between the ratios of registered voters to eligible voters. For example, the post-Act ratio is the fraction of post-Act registered voters divided by the eligible or voting age population. a

b

These are the states with examined counties in the USCCR report.

c

Calculation here does not match the USCCR report.

numbers did not add up in this second report. Moreover, they admitted that these numbers did not add up, and that the reason was these unknowns. But even when these unknowns are included, the numbers do not add to their totals in their own official report. This is a significant weakness in the report and its evaluation of the impact and influence of the VRA. Hence, the data on Mississippi are unreliable, and we had to make other adjustments. Overall the grand totals of registered voters in these nine states show that both African American and white registration

grew significantly in the three years after passage of the VRA. Of the 1,822,770 African American registered voters after the VRA, 1,536,262 (84.3%) were in the counties without federal examiners and 286,508 (15.7%) were in the counties where federal registrars were designated. As for whites, 8,206,125 (92.1%) were in the counties without federal registrars and 701,312 (7.9%) were in counties where federal registrars were assigned. Thus, both African Americans and whites benefitted from the presence of federal registrars and the VRA. And in the counties without federal registrars, voting rights activists and organizations placed more

626

Chapter 25

individuals on the voting rolls than in the few counties with federal registrars. There were 31 federal registrars in Mississippi, 21 in Alabama, 9 in Louisiana, 3 in Georgia, and 2 in South Carolina for a grand total of 66 by the time of this 1968 evaluative report. The mean was 13.2 and the median was 9 federal registrars in a state with the range running from a low of 2 to a high of 31. Figure 25.12 shows the percentage point gains in registration after the VRA for both African Americans and whites in the counties that had federal examiners. In South Carolina, for example, before the VRA 17.3% of eligible African Americans in these counties were registered to vote. After the VRA and the efforts of the federal examiners, that percentage rose to 71.5%. The difference was a 54.2 percentage point gain in registered African Americans. The figure displays the percentage point gains for the five states that had federal examiners and reported post-VRA data. Figure 25.13 compares the counties that had federal examiners to those that did not have them, as measured by the percentage point increase in African American voter registration after the VRA. The figure shows that the percentage of eligible African Americans registered had significantly greater gains in counties with federal examiners. Florida and North Carolina did not have federal examiners, so all of their counties were “non-examiner.” Because of the missing data it is not possible to determine any gains in Arkansas or Virginia. Table 25.8 reorganizes the data into examiner and nonexaminer counties and into pre-and post-Act registrations. It shows the total growth in voter registrations for both African

Americans and whites in the five southern states with data. For all five states, registrations in the examiner counties went from 53,092 to 287,893 for African Americans and from 493,366 to 696,041 for whites. But the changes in the non-examiner counties were even higher, from 523,428 to 957,433 for African Americans and from 3,509,356 to 4,480,665 for whites. Again, the nonexaminer counties did the majority of the job in registering both African Americans and whites. And this likely was the result of so few counties with federal registrars and the many elsewhere with voting rights activism. A percentage-level analysis of these two different county categories, as seen in Figure 25.14 (p. 628), tells a different story about the relative effectiveness of the federal examiners. This figure reveals that Mississippi, which had the largest number of federal registrars, led with an increase of 62.5 percentage points, followed by South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana. Such findings suggest that the mere presence of federal registrars stimulated and motivated unregistered individuals who were of the voting age population to come forward and register. Thus, the number of federal registrars in the other four states was not always the determining factor; maybe just their presence helped. But the lack of them had the reverse impact in varying degrees. The second evaluative report by the Commission was not covered by the three historical accounts on the Commission. Thus, we are left with the internal inconsistencies in the report, especially the inaccurate data on Mississippi and the sloppily defined and improperly used “unknown” information. Both of these categories, without careful adjustments, can cause

Figure 25.12  Percentage Point Gains in Ratio of Registered Voters to Eligible Voters in Examiner Counties by Race Before and After the Voting Rights Act of 1965 60

Percentage Point Increase in Registered Voters to Eligible Voters Ratios, Pre-and Post-VRA

54.2

52.4

50 44.4

44.1

42.8

40.7

40

30 20.8

18.9

20 13.1

8.9

10

0

South Carolina

Georgia

Mississippi

African American Registered Voter Gain

Alabama White Registered Voter Gain

Source: Table 25.7 Note: Florida and North Carolina were states without examiner counties. Arkansas and Virginia did not report post-Act registration statistics.

Louisiana



The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Expansions and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006 627

Figure 25.13  Percentage Point Gains in Ratio of African American Registered Voters to Eligible Voters Before and After the Voting Rights Act of 1965 60 Percentage Point Increase in Registered Voters to Eligible Voters Ratios, Pre-and Post-VRA

54.2

52.4

50 44.4 40

44.1

42.8 36.1

36.0

30

24.9

23.6

22.5

20 12.5

12.4

10

0 South Carolina

Georgia

Mississippi

Alabama

Louisiana

Examiner Counties

Floridaa

North Carolinaa

Arkansasb

Virginiab

Non-Examiner Counties

Source: Table 25.7. a

Florida and North Carolina were states without examiner counties.

b

Arkansas and Virginia did not report post-Act registration statistics.

Table 25.8  Impact of Federal Examiners for the Voting Rights Act of 1965: Comparison of Voter Registrations by State in Examiner and Non-Examiner Countiesa 1960 Racial Group Voting Age Population

Pre-Act Registrations

Post-Act Registrations

Percent of Racial Group VAP

Number

Number

State

Counties

Black

White

Black

White

Black

White

Black

White

Alabama

Examiner

214,804

374,866

31,732

214,964

14.8%

57.3%

127,416

293,020

Non-Examiner

266,416

978,246

61,005

720,731

22.9%

73.7%

121,016

919,257

9,581

9,022

990

7,675

10.3%

85.1%

6,013

603,294 1,787,941

166,673

1,116,740

27.6%

62.5%

316,483

183,012

8,939

128,817

9.4%

70.4%

50,413

145,178

Non-Examiner

419,968 1,106,204

155,662

908,367

37.1%

c

82.1%

252,735

Examiner

136,739

284,469

9,158

129,338

6.7%c

45.5%c

94,674

Non-Examiner

285,534

466,797

3,817

98,176

1.3%c

21.0%c

13,105

12,344

2,273

12,572

17.3%

Georgia

Examiner Non-Examiner

Louisiana Mississippi

Examiner

94,621

Percent of Racial Group VAP Unknown

Black

White

 

Listing by Federal Examinersb Black

White

59.3%

78.2%

60,316

5,244

14,297

45.4%

94.0%

 

 

9,383

 

62.8%

104.0%

3,397

16

1,434,347

22,776

52.5%

80.2%

 

 

 

53.3%

79.3%

24,130

1,770

1,055,339

 

60.2%

95.4%

 

 

234,268

36,360

69.2%c

82.4%c

57,896

243

86,559

354,798

138,939

30.3%c

76.0%c

 

 

101.8%

9,377

14,192

 

71.6%

115.0%

4,606

16

c

c

South Carolina

Examiner Non-Examiner

357,999

882,803

136,271

665,342

38.1%

75.4%

180,640

716,904

 

50.5%

81.2%

 

 

Total

Examiner

468,850

863,713

53,092

493,366

11.3%c

57.1%c

287,893

696,041

36,360

61.4%c

80.6%c

150,345

7,289

Non-Examiner 1,933,211 5,221,991

523,428

3,509,356

27.1%c

67.2%c

957,433

4,480,665

176,012

49.5%c

85.8%c

 

 

Source: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, Political Participation: A Study of the Participation by Negroes in the Electoral and Political Processes in 10 Southern States Since Passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1968), pp. 222–225. a

“Examiner” are counties where federal examiners operated; “Non-Examiner” are counties that did not have federal examiners.

b

Voter applicants certified as eligible to vote by the federal examiners.

c

Calculation here that does not match the USCCR report.

628

Chapter 25

Figure 25.14  Impact of the Voting Rights Act on African American Voter Registrations: A Comparison of Examined and Non-Examined Counties, 1965 70

Percentage Point Increase in Black Voter Registrations after VRA Federal Examinations

62.5 60 54.2

52.4

50 44.5

43.8

40

30

29.0 24.8

22.5

23.1

20 12.4 10

0

Mississippi

South Carolina Examiner Counties

Georgia

Alabama

Louisiana

Non-Examiner Counties

Source: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, Political Participation: A Study of the Participation by Negroes in the Electoral and Political Processes in Ten Southern States Since Passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1968), pp. 222–225. Calculations by the authors.

problems of interpretation about the impact and influence of the VRA. And finally, both of the two initial evaluative reports demonstrate a relatively minor use of the power to appoint federal registrars in the covered states. On this point, Professor Dittmer, in analyzing the situation in Mississippi, wrote: “The federal government, however, was reluctant to move in. . . . Federalism remained the operating principle of the Johnson administration.”39 Political scientist Steven Lawson explains: [Journalists] Pat Watters and Reese Cleghorn speculated that the administration was hesitant to offend James Eastland, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and owner of a plantation in Sunflower County, and Richard Russell of Georgia, the head of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Eastland’s committee processed the legislation sponsored by the Justice Department and deliberated on its nominations to the judiciary, whereas Russell’s group handled matters vital to the president’s military program in Southeast Asia.40

The First Decade of the 1965 Voting Rights Act: The Third Report, 1975 In 1975, on the eve of the second renewal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released its third evaluative report on the impact and influence of the Act: The Voting Rights Act: Ten Years After. Mississippi was still

leading in terms of having the highest number of counties with federal examiners as of 1974. Figure 25.15 shows that Mississippi was in its traditional leadership position but somehow Alabama, with far fewer counties with examiners than Mississippi, registered more African Americans. South Carolina, on the other hand, with only two counties with examiners, managed an even higher number of registered voters than Georgia, which had the lowest number of registered voters with three examiner counties. Overall, only 60 southern counties had federal examiners in 1974. This number is quite small not only in relationship to the 100 counties selected by the Department of Justice in its 1963 Report as the worst offenders against African American suffrage, but the total number of counties in all of the eleven southern states stood at 1,139, and of this number 60 counties is a mere 5.3%. Table 25.9, also based on the Commission’s Report, shows voter turnout in the 1964, 1968, and 1972 presidential elections in seven southern states and the nation. In the second-to-last column the gain in voter turnout from 1964 to 1968 is seen in double digits in Mississippi and Alabama, in single digits in Virginia, Louisiana, and South Carolina, as a low single digit in North Carolina, and nearly nonexistent in Georgia. The mean was an 8.9 percentage point increase while the median was 7.5 percentage points. In the last column, change in turnout from 1964 to 1972 went from an increase of 12.1 percentage points to a decrease of 8.4 percentage points. The mean was 1.3 percentage points while the median was 0.1 percentage points. And while



The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Expansions and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006 629

Figure 25.15  Numbers of Counties with VRA Federal Examiners and Persons Listed for Registration, 1974 40 34

35

Number of Examiner Counties

30 25 20 15

12 9

10 5

3

0

Mississippi (62,273)

Alabama (62,798)

Louisiana (21,107)

Georgia (3,388)

2 South Carolina (4,582)

State (Number of Persons Listed a) Source: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, The Voting Rights Act: Ten Years After (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), p. 34. a

The number of persons listed includes whites and excludes the number of rejections, which were approximately 15,000.

Table 25.9  Voter Turnout in the Presidential Elections of 1964, 1968, and 1972 in Southern States Covered by the Voting Rights Act

State

1964

1968

1972

1964–1968 Percentage Point Difference in Voter Turnout

Alabama

35.9%

52.7%

44.2%

16.8

8.3

Georgia

43.3%

43.4%

37.8%

0.1

-5.5

Louisiana

47.3%

54.8%

45.0%

7.5

-2.3

Mississippi

33.9%

53.2%

46.0%

19.3

12.1

North Carolina

52.3%

54.3%

43.9%

2.0

-8.4

South Carolina

39.4%

46.7%

39.5%

7.3

0.1

Virginia

41.1%

50.1%

45.6%

9.0

4.5

United States

61.8%

60.7%

55.7%

-1.1

-6.1

Percentage Turnout in Presidential Elections

1964–1972 Percentage Point Difference in Voter Turnout

Source: United States Commission on Civil Rights, The Voting Rights Act: Ten Years After (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), p. 45.

in 1972 there was a national drop in turnout of 6.1 percentage points, it increased in four of these southern states and dropped in three states. Despite the overall drop, Mississippi still had a double digit increase compared to 1964 at 12.1 percentage points.

Figure 25.16 (p. 630) shows the changes from 1964 in voter turnout in 1968 and 1972. The highest turnout in 1968 was in Mississippi, then Alabama, and next in Virginia, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Georgia, with similar pattern in 1972. The African American electorate, either singularly or in groups and organizations, surely played some part in this increased turnout in the South. Table 25.10 (p. 630) displays changes in the gap that existed between whites and African Americans in percent of VAP registered to vote. The mean gap before the Act was 44.1 percentage points while after the Act it was 27.4 percentage points, for a drop of 16.7 percentage points. By 1971–1972 the gap closed even further, to 11.2 percentage points. More members of the African American electorate were becoming registered even as white registration began to decline. Table 25.11 (p. 631) offers the context for the 1971–1972 data by comparing the voting age populations of African Americans and whites to their voting age populations. (The Commission’s 1975 report also included the same data for 1974 for three states—Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina—but we will defer examining that data until discussing the 1981 report, which showed it in 1971–1972, 1974, and 1980.) Whites still had a higher percentage of their VAP registered to vote in almost all of the states covered by the VRA. However, African Americans were slowly closing the gap at the regional level. Figure 25.17 (p. 631) shows just the 1971–1972 gap. Again Alabama led, followed by Louisiana, then North Carolina, next Mississippi, finally by South Carolina and Georgia. While most people might have expected Mississippi to lead the way, things had changed by

630

Chapter 25

Figure 25.16  Percentage Point Changes in Voter Turnout for the Presidential Elections of 1964, 1968, and 1972 in Southern States Covered by the Voting Rights Act 25

Percentage Point Difference in Voter Turnout

20

19.3 16.8

15 12.1 10

9.0

8.3

7.5

7.3

4.5

5

2.0 0.1

0.1

0 –2.3

–5

–5.5 –8.4

–10 Mississippi

Alabama

Virginia

Louisiana 1964 to 1968

South Carolina

North Carolina

Georgia

1964 to 1972

Source: Table 25.9.

Table 25.10  Estimated Gap in Voter Registration between Blacks and Whites in Southern States Covered by the Voting Rights Act, 1971–1972 Pre-Act Estimate

Post-Act Estimate

1971–1972 Estimate

State

Black

White

Gap

Black

White

Gap

Black

White

Gap

Alabama

19.3%

69.2%

49.9

51.6%

89.6%

38.0

57.1%

80.7%

23.6

Georgia

27.4%

62.6%

35.2

52.6%

80.3%

27.7

67.8%

70.6%

 2.8

Louisiana

31.6%

80.5%

48.9

58.9%

93.1%

34.2

59.1%

80.0%

20.9

Mississippi

 6.7%

69.9%

63.2

59.8%

91.5%

31.7

62.2%

71.6%

 9.4

North Carolina

46.8%

96.8%

50.0

51.3%

83.0%

31.7

46.3%

62.2%

15.9

South Carolina

37.3%

75.7%

38.4

51.2%

81.7%

30.5

48.0%

51.2%

 3.2

Virginia

38.3%

61.1%

22.8

55.6%

63.4%

 7.8

54.0%

61.2%

 7.2

Total

29.3%

73.4%

44.1

52.1%

79.5%

27.4

56.6%

67.8%

11.2

Source: United States Commission on Civil Rights, The Voting Rights Act: Ten Years After (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), p. 43.

the early part of the 1970s. Table 25.11 also shows the number of VAP African Americans and whites, the number and percentages registered, and the prevailing gap between the two racial groups by 1972. It should be noted that the VRA did not cover the entire state of North Carolina, only 34 counties, and that there were more African Americans registered in the uncovered counties than in the covered counties. Once again, voluntary compliance, not federal intervention, seems to have had the greatest effect. Overall, the third Commission on Civil Rights Report reveals the growth in voter registration for African Americans.

Furthermore, it confirms the findings of the first two Commission reports that voluntary compliance counties produced more registrants than those counties where federal examiners and observers were sent. Thus, federal pressure was a catalyst in the South for voter registration of African Americans but not for most of the South as many of the critics would have readers believe. There was no forced federal compliance; voter registration of African Americans worked through very effective volunteerism. The VRA was succeeding without the exercise of its full powers in the region.



The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Expansions and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006 631 Table 25.11  Voter Registration Shares by Race in Southern States Covered by the Voting Rights Act, 1971–1972

Voting Age Population Black State

Number

Percent of Voting Age Population Registered to Vote

Registered Voters

White

Black

Percent of (B + W) VAP

Number

Percent of (B + W) VAP

Number

White

Percent of (B + W) RV

Number

Percent of (B + W) RV

Black

White

Difference

Alabama

508,326

23.0%

1,697,434

77.0%

290,057

17.5%

1,369,542

82.5%

57.1%

80.7%

23.6

Georgia

633,581

21.9%

2,263,467

78.1%

450,000

22.0%

1,598,268

78.0%

71.0%

70.6%

-0.4

Louisiana

600,425

26.7%

1,644,732

73.3%

354,607

21.2%

1,315,981

78.8%

59.1%

80.0%

21.0

Mississippi

431,617

31.5%

936,704

68.5%

268,440

28.6%

670,710

71.4%

62.2%

71.6%

9.4

North Carolina

644,511

19.6%

2,647,812

80.4%

298,427

15.3%

1,648,254

84.7%

46.3%

62.2%

15.9

South Carolina

429,598

26.3%

1,200,907

73.7%

206,394

25.1%

614,383

74.9%

48.0%

51.2%

3.1

Virginia

508,995

16.7%

2,532,537

83.3%

275,000

15.1%

1,550,000

84.9%

54.0%

61.2%

7.2

3,757,053

22.5%

12,923,593

77.5%

2,142,925

19.6%

8,767,138

80.4%

57.0%

67.8%

10.8

Totals

a

a

a

Source: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, The Voting Rights Act: Ten Years After (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), pp. 53–54. Calculations by the authors. a

This calculation differs from the source.

Figure 25.17  Percentage Point Difference in Voting Age Population Registered to Vote among Blacks and Whites in Southern States Covered by the Voting Rights Act, 1971–1972 25

23.6 21.0

20 15.9 15

9.4

10

7.2 5

3.1

0 –0.4

–5

Alabama

Louisiana

North Carolina

Mississippi

Virginia

South Carolina

Georgia

Percent White VAP Registered–Percent Black VAP Registered Source: Table 25.11.

The Long-Term Impact of the 1965 Voting Rights Act: The Fourth Report, 1981 On the eve of the 1982 extension and renewal of the Voting Rights Act, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released it fourth evaluative report entitled: The Voting Rights Act:

Unfulfilled Goals. Like all of the Commission reports since the implementation of the VRA, the report provided updated information on the counties that were designated to have federal examiners as well as the number of individuals that those federal examiners registered as voters in 1980 in five southern states; Table 25.12 (pp. 632–633) shows these data. Listed in rank order

632

Chapter 25

Table 25.12  Counties Designated for Federal Examiners and Number of Persons Listed by Examiners, 1980

Autauga

Alabama

2.2%

1.0%

 

 

 

Choctaw

 

 

 

Conecuh

 

 

 

Dallas

8,418

14.1%

6.2%

Elmore

1,792

3.0%

1.3%

Greene

1,639

2.7%

1.2%

State

Percent of All Southern States

1,330

County Designated for Federal Examiners East Feliciana

Net Number

Percent of State

Percent of All Southern States

1,222

7.6%

0.9%

Madison

528

3.3%

0.4%

Ouachita

4,677

29.2%

3.4%

Plaquemines

1,768

11.0%

1.3%

Sabine

 

 

 

St. Helena

 

 

 

St. Landry

 

 

 

2,769

4.6%

2.0%

West Feliciana

93

0.6%

0.1%

Jefferson

20,560

34.4%

15.0%

State Subtotal

16,015

100.0%

11.7%

Lowndes

3,030

5.1%

2.2%

Amite

379

0.7%

0.3%

Marengo

5,076

8.5%

3.7%

Benton

335

0.6%

0.2%

Montgomery

9,731

16.3%

7.1%

Bolivar

 

 

 

Perry

2,035

3.4%

1.5%

Carroll

849

1.6%

0.6%

 

 

 

Claiborne

1,154

2.2%

0.8%

Pickens Russell

 

 

 

Clay

1,161

2.2%

0.8%

Sumter

25

0.0%

0.0%

Coahoma

3,545

6.7%

2.6%

 

 

 

Covington

 

 

 

Talladega Wilcox

3,326

5.6%

2.4%

De Soto

808

1.5%

0.6%

59,731

100.0%

43.7%

Forrest

160

0.3%

0.1%

Baker

 

 

 

Franklin

47

0.1%

0.0%

Bulloch

 

 

 

Greene

 

 

 

Burke

 

 

 

Grenada

886

1.7%

0.6%

Calhoun

 

 

 

Hinds

13,170

24.8%

9.6%

Early

 

 

 

Holmes

3,950

7.4%

2.9%

Hancock

 

 

 

Humphreys

1,733

3.3%

1.3%

Johnson

 

 

 

26

0.0%

0.0%

State Subtotal

Lee Georgia

Percent of State

Bullock

Hale

Louisiana

Net Number

Louisiana (Continued)

County Designated for Federal Examiners

Persons Listed by Examiners

475

14.0%

0.3%

Meriwether

 

 

 

Mitchell

 

 

Peach

Mississippi

State

Persons Listed by Examiners

Issaquena Jasper

614

1.2%

0.4%

Jefferson

1,756

3.3%

1.3%

 

Jefferson Davis

1,130

2.1%

0.8%

Jones

 

 

 

1,906

3.6%

1.4%

Screven

1,448

42.7%

1.1%

Kemper

 

 

 

Stewart

 

 

 

Leflore

4,547

8.6%

3.3%

Sumter

 

 

 

Madison

7,070

13.3%

5.2%

Taliaferro

 

 

 

Marshall

95

0.2%

0.1%

Neshoba

743

1.4%

0.5%

Newton

639

1.2%

0.5%

Felfair

 

 

 

Terrell

1,465

43.2%

1.1%

Tift

 

 

 

Noxubee

378

0.7%

0.3%

Twiggs

 

 

 

Oktibbeha

324

0.6%

0.2%

State Subtotal

3,388

100.0%

2.5%

Pearl River

181

0.3%

0.1%

Bossier

1,182

7.4%

0.9%

Quitman

 

 

 

Caddo

3,084

19.3%

2.3%

Rankin

1,061

2.0%

0.8%

De Soto

1,843

11.5%

1.3%

Sharkey

366

0.7%

0.3%

East Carroll

1,618

10.1%

1.2%

Simpson

1,062

2.0%

0.8%



The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Expansions and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006 633

State

Persons Listed by Examiners County Designated for Federal Examiners

Net Number

Sunflower Mississippi (Continued)

Percent of All Southern States

 

 

 

79

0.1%

0.1%

 

 

 

Walthall

1,075

2.0%

0.8%

Warren

1,649

3.1%

1.2%

Wilkinson

125

0.2%

0.1%

Winston

25

0.0%

0.0%

 

 

 

53,028

100.0%

38.8%

3,413

74.5%

2.5%

Tallahatchie Tunica

Yazoo State Subtotal South Carolina

Percent of State

Clarendon Darlington

 

 

 

Dorchester

1,169

25.5%

0.9%

 

 

 

State Subtotal

4,582

100.0%

3.4%

Total (95 counties)

136,744

 

100.0%

Mean

27,349

 

20.0%

Median

16,015

 

11.7%

Marion

Source: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, The Voting Rights Act: Unfulfilled Goals (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1981), pp. 103–104. Calculations by the authors.

from the highest to the lowest number of registered voters, Alabama had 59,731, Mississippi 53,028, Louisiana 16,015, South Carolina 4,582, and Georgia 3,388. The mean for the number of voters registered by federal examiners was 27,349 while the median was 16,015. As shown in the table, the number of southern counties designated for federal examiners was 95 in 1980, or about 8.3% of the total number of counties in these states. Thus, in 1980 federal examiners operated in less than 10% of the southern counties and registered an even smaller share of all registered voters in the five states. The fourth report also provided empirical data on the number of federal observers from 1966 through 1980 and the various

counties of the five southern states where they were designated. Table 25.13 provides the state-by-state breakdown over some fifteen years of the Act. Although none of the five states had examiners sent in every year, Mississippi got the largest number 6,452 (58.1%), Alabama next with 2,481 (22.3%), then Louisiana with 1,267 (11.4%), with Georgia coming in fourth with 466 (4.2%), and finally South Carolina with 443 (4.0%). The Fourth Report contained not only federal statistical data on African Americans and whites but also on Latinos, American Indians, and Alaskan Natives. Table 25.14 indicates the percentage of the voting age population (VAP) of all of these groups that were registered to vote in 1976 as the next presidential election was about to get underway. The mean percentage of African Americans registered to vote in 1976 was 59.9%, while the median state was Virginia with 60.7%, and the range ran from a low of 48.2% to a high of 67.4%. For Hispanics it was a mean of 56.0% while the median state was 52.8%, and the range ran from a low of 49.5% to a high of 63.7%. For American Indians/Native Americans the mean was 57.3% while the median state was 57.8%, and the range ran from a low of 48.0% to a high 65.6%. White voters had a mean of 70.2% while the median state was 69.6%, and the range ran from a low of 63.1% to a high of 78.8%. As expected white voters had the highest numbers, but the African American electorate had made tremendous strides since the Act, as had the other minority groups. Table 25.15 shows, for Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina, the number and percentage of VAP for African Americans and whites, the number and percentage of VAP registered, and the racial gap in 1971, 1974, and 1980. The difference declined for the state of Louisiana and remained about the same in North Carolina. The gap almost doubled in South Carolina, but remained relatively small at 5.8 percentage points in 1980. From 1971 to 1974, white voting percentages increased in the latter two states. Local voting rights activism in these states accounted for these changes. In 1980, the South saw the presidential bid of Ronald Reagan who made numerous trips there to mobilize and capture southern white voters.41 The administration of incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter had disappointed and therefore demobilized African American voters.42

Table 25.13  Election Observation Assignments Under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 1966–1980 Observation Assignments, 1966–1974 1966

1967

1968

1969

1970

1971

1972

1973

1974

Total 1966–1974

Alabama

739

0

  98

 44

205

   0

110

0

234

Georgia

22

0

  92

  0

  6

   0

 44

0

 64

State

Observation Assignments, 1975–1980 1975

1976

1977

1978

1979

1980

Total 1975–1980

Total 1966–1980

1,430

0

181

 0

598

0

272

1,051

2,481

228

11

 67

 0

  4

0

156

238

466

Louisiana

397

251

 125

 20

 16

  54

 60

0

 56

979

116

 30

 0

  0

130

 12

288

1,267

Mississippi

264

1,058

 616

219

134

 959

146

0

 76

3,472

1,252

132

89

 21

1,212

274

2,980

6,452

South Carolina

158 

0

  94

  0

 19

   0

105

0

  0

376

0

  0

 0

 67

0

  0

67

443

1,580

1,309

1,025

283

380

1,013

465

0

430

6,485

1,379

410

89

690

1,342

714

4,624

11,109

Total

Sources: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, The Voting Rights Act: Ten Years After (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), pp. 398–401; and United States Commission of Civil Rights, The Voting Rights Act: Unfulfilled Goals (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1981), pp. 101–102. Calculations by the authors.

634

Chapter 25

Table 25.14  Percentage of Voting Age Population Reported Registered to Vote in Jurisdictions Covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, by Race and Ethnicity, 1976 Protected Groupsa

State (by Region)

Black

Hispanic

Protected Groupsa

American Indian/ Alaskan Native

White

State (by Region)

Black

58.1%

White

Other Regions

South Alabama

Hispanic

American Indian/ Alaskan Native

 

 

75.4%

Alaska

 

 

62.8%

73.0%

 

60.9%

48.0%

71.5%

Florida

 

63.7%

 

66.5%

Arizona

Georgia

56.3%

 

 

73.2%

California

 

49.5%

 

65.3%

Colorado

 

52.8%

 

68.1%

Michigan

 

52.4%

 

63.7%

New York

 

51.4%

 

69.8%

South Dakota

 

 

52.7%

77.3%

Mean Percent—Non-South

 

53.4%

54.5%

69.8%

Median—Non-South

 

52.4%

52.7%

69.8%

Louisiana

63.9%

 

 

78.8%

Mississippi

67.4%

 

 

77.7%

North Carolina

48.2%

 

65.6%

63.1%

South Carolina

60.6%

 

 

64.1%

Texas

64.0%

61.1%

 

69.4%

Virginia

60.7%

 

 

67.0%

Mean Percent—South

59.9%

62.4%

65.6%

70.6%

Median—South

60.7%

62.4%

65.6%

69.4%

Source: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, The Voting Rights Act: Unfulfilled Goals (Washington, DC: Government Printing Press, 1981), p. 19. Calculations by the authors. Pertaining to states, or counties or towns within states, where the protected group is covered under Section 5. a

Table 25.15  Voting Age Population and Voter Registration in Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina, 1971–1980

Voting Age Population Black

Registered Voters

White

Black

White

Percent of Voting Age Population Registered to Vote

State

Year

Number

Percent of (B + W) VAP

Number

Percent of (B + W) VAP

Number

Percent of (B + W) RV

Number

Percent of (B + W) RV

Black

White

Louisiana 

1971

600,425

26.7%

1,644,732

73.3%

354,607

21.2%

1,315,981

78.8%

59.10%

80.0%

21.0

a

1974

600,425

26.7%

1,644,732

73.3%

391,666

22.7%

1,335,027

77.3%

65.20%

81.2%

15.9

1980b

759,000

27.4%

2,007,000

72.6%

463,648

23.2%

1,533,566

76.8%

61.10%

76.4%

15.3

a

1971

644,511

19.6%

2,647,812

80.4%

298,427

15.3%

1,648,254

84.7%

46.30%

62.2%

15.9

1974a

644,511

19.6%

2,647,812

80.4%

350,560

15.5%

1,911,448

84.5%

54.40%

72.2%

17.8

b

1980

796,000

19.8%

3,216,000

80.2%

439,713

16.0%

2,313,722

84.0%

55.20%

71.9%

16.7

1971a

429,598

26.3%

1,200,907

73.7%

206,394

25.1%

 614,383

74.9%

48.00%

51.2%

3.1

1974

429,598

26.3%

1,200,907

73.7%

261,110

26.2%

 736,302

73.8%

60.80%

61.3%

0.5

1980

573,000

27.9%

1,483,000

72.1%

319,826

25.9%

 914,363

74.1%

55.80%

61.7%

5.8

North Carolina

South Carolina

a

a b

Difference

Sources: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, The Voting Rights Act: Ten Years After (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), pp. 53–54; and United States Commission on Civil Rights, The Voting Rights Act: Unfulfilled Goals (Washington, DC: Government Printing Press, 1981), p. 20. Calculations by the authors. a

Based on 1970 census data.

b

1980 Census projections, rendering voting age population estimates.

Overall, the fourth report provides more empirical data on voter registration in the southern states as well as other minority groups elsewhere in the nation. In addition, the report bolstered the generalization that the VRA even by 1980 rested essentially on voluntary compliance, basically throughout the South. There was no other tool so effective in its implementation.

Extended Long Term Impact of the 1965 Voting Rights Act: The Lack of Fifth and Sixth Reports in 1992 and 2006 The Commission’s fourth report came out just as the presidential administration of Republican Ronald Reagan began in January



The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Expansions and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006 635

1981. Once in office President Reagan attacked and then remade the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights by appointing conservative ideologues to head and run the Commission.43 One of the major results of this remaking of the Commission was the lack of any further evaluative reports containing federal statistics. The Special Analysis section of the federal budget, which showed budgetary expenditures for civil rights by all of the federal agencies, was another victim. This Special Analysis, which was published each year as a part of the federal budget, abruptly disappeared, and it became impossible to follow the financing of civil rights obligations for the entire eight years of the Reagan administration.44 Thus, it is not hard to understand the disappearance of Commission reports on voting rights. No administration after Reagan saw fit to revive the reporting function of the Commission. There were no updated reports accompanying the Act’s renewals in 1992 nor in 2006. Since 1980 there have been no official federal statistics about the nature and functioning of the VRA in the nation. The sole exception came under the leadership of Chairperson Mary Francis Berry after the voting debacle in Florida in the 2000 presidential election. This report focused singularly upon the state of Florida and the disenfranchisement which occurred there. However, in closing it must be noted that the Justice Department released a report in June 2009 on how it enforced the VRA from 1965 until 2008.45

The Major Literature on the 1965 Voting Rights Act and Renewals Before closing our analysis of the VRA and its expansions and renewals, it is essential to describe and explain the nature, scope, and significance of the academic and scholarly books that have been published on this legislation. Table 25.16 (p. 636) presents in eight different categories thirty-two major books with a focus on the VRA and its renewals published from 1970 to 2009. The list excludes suffrage works, the hearings and reports of the Commission, as well as the three historical accounts published by the Commission. Previous studies that have compiled such lists have not separated out these three categories of differently focused books: (1) Commission Hearings, Reports, and Evaluative Reports (see Table 25.3 (p. 616) for a listing of these and the historical books), (2) books on suffrage struggles and outcomes, and (3) books on the VRA. The result of a pattern of treating them all as a single body of work is no demarcation in terms of intellectual boundaries, causing epistemological, conceptual, and definitional problems. And as we have seen there is a confounding of federal statistical information and data with legal information and data. The roots of this confusion begin with the simple fact that all of this information and data relate to the suffrage rights struggles of the African American electorate in America (and hence are included in this volume). This struggle began not during Reconstruction, 1867–1877, nor in the 1940s, 1950s, or 1960s, but in Colonial America, and it continued into Revolutionary America, Antebellum America, the Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the Disenfranchisement Era, both World Wars, the Cold War and Civil Rights eras, and the Post-Civil Rights Era. And in each one of these periods and eras, numerous laws, executive orders, and constitutional amendments have been put forward to remedy the

suffrage problems facing the African American electorate. Thus, whether one is talking about the Four Military Reconstruction Acts, the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, or the VRA and its renewals, these all intended to resolve African American electoral problems. And if one is not careful, to focus simply on any one of these laws is to put on blinders because such a focus cannot provide a holistic portrait of the central reality, the suffrage struggle of the African American electorate in America. This is not to say that one cannot combine these three major literatures but to treat remedies and reforms as the centerpiece is an error and treats the symptom as the problem. The problem is systemic; not the remedy. When this type of conceptualization occurs (and it has, as we shall see), then clarity is replaced by misdirection.

Classifying the Voting Rights Act Literature Our initial category of VRA literature is “Suffrage Rights and the Voting Rights Act.” This contains three books that combine the suffrage rights struggle with descriptive and evaluative criticism on the Voting Rights Act as public policy, which addresses problems faced by the African American electorate. The one exception here is Professor Garth Pauley’s LBJ’s American Promise: The 1965 Voting Rights Address, which covers the suffrage rights struggle but focuses on how President Lyndon B. Johnson shaped and used his voting rights address to convince the nation to support this national policy. On the other hand, Professor Garrow’s book basically begins its story and analysis with the 1940s and ends it with President Ronald Reagan signing the 1982 renewal in a White House Rose Garden ceremony. The book by Professor Richard Valelly starts with President Lincoln speaking from the White House balcony about which group of freedmen should get suffrage rights on April 11, 1865, and concludes with the 1992 Language Assistance Amendments, which called for bilingual ballots. Valelly’s account provides greater background and longer coverage than the Garrow book. In terms of the theory each author proposes, Garrow refines and polishes the strategy of protest theory that evolved during the civil rights movement of the sixties, while Valelly adopts a theoretical concept from Professor C. Vann Woodward, the “Second Reconstruction.” Both works use federal statistics and the number of African American officeholders to evaluate the impact and influence of the VRA. Professor Valelly went on to contribute the only volume in our fourth category, “Commentary and Documents and the Voting Rights Act,” which was titled The Voting Rights Act: Securing the Ballot. This much-needed volume consolidates commentary on the VRA with forty-three crucial and hard-to-get documents. Each of these documents critically illuminates the suffrage struggle and the attempted reform legislation. It also includes ten chapters that cover not only all of the important periods and eras from before the Civil War to the Disenfranchisement Era, but also the VRA and its relationship to other minority groups besides African Americans, as well as the current problems with the Act. Our second category of books in Table 25.16 contains those that have a geographic focus, either on a single city, or on a

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Table 25.16  Categorization of the Major Literature on the 1965 Voting Rights Act Year

Author

Title

Suffrage Rights and the Voting Rights Act 1978

David Garrow

Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965

2004

Richard Valelly

The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement

2007

Garth Pauley

LBJ’s American Promise: The 1965 Voting Rights Address

City, County, State, and Regional Studies and the Voting Rights Act 1970

Frederick Wirt

Politics of Southern Equality: Law and Social Change in a Mississippi County

1976

Steven Lawson

Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969

1985

Steven Lawson

In Pursuit of Power: Southern Blacks and Electoral Politics, 1965–1982

1987

Lawrence Hanks

The Struggle for Black Political Empowerment in Three Georgia Counties

1987

Minion Morrison

Black Political Mobilization: Leadership, Power, and Mass Behavior

1990

Frank Parker

Black Votes Count: Political Empowerment in Mississippi After 1965

2003

Laughlin McDonald

A Voting Rights Odyssey: Black Enfranchisement in Georgia

2004

Ruth Morgan

Governance by Decree: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act in Dallas

2007

Brian Landsberg

Free at Last to Vote: The Alabama Origins of the 1965 Voting Rights Act

2009 

Charles Bullock III and Ronald Gaddie

The Triumph of Voting Rights in the South 

Impact and Influence of the Voting Rights Act 1972 

Washington Research Project

The Shameful Blight: The Survival of Racial Discrimination in Voting in the South, A Report

1985

Lorn Foster

The Voting Rights Act: Consequences and Implications

1992 

Bernard Grofman and Chandler Davidson

Controversies in Minority Voting: The Voting Right Act in Perspective 

1994 

Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman

Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act of 1965–1990 

1998

David Hudson

Along Racial Lines: Consequences of the 1965 Voting Rights Act

1999 

J. Morgan Kousser 

Colorblind Justice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction

2006

David Epstein, et. al.

The Future of the Voting Rights Act

2007

Edward Blum

The Unintended Consequences of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act

2011 

Tyson King-Meadows 

When the Letter Betrays the Spirit: Voting Rights Enforcement and African American Participation from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama

Commentary and Documents and the Voting Rights Act 2006

Richard Valelly

1982

Howard Ball, et al.

Compromised Compliance: Implementation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act

2007 

Ronald Walters 

Freedom Is Not Enough: Black Voters, Black Candidates, and American Presidential Politics

2007 

Ana Henderson 

Voting Rights Act Reauthorization of 2006: Perspectives on Democracy, Participation, and Power

New Disenfranchisement Techniques and the Voting Rights Act Chandler Davidson

9.4%

10

31.3%

 9

28.1%

 1

3.1%

 3

9.4%

 1

3.1%

 2

6.3%

 3

9.4%

32

100%

Minority Vote Dilution

Conservative White Think Tank Publications 1987

Abigail Thernstrom

Whose Votes Count? Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights

2009

Abigail Thernstrom

Voting Rights—and Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections

African American Think Tank Publications 1974

David Hunter

Federal Review of Voting Changes: How to Use Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act

1984

Barbara Phillips

How to Use Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act

1986

Kenneth Thompson

The Voting Rights Act and Black Electoral Participation

Total Number of Books

Percent

 3

The Voting Rights Act: Securing the Ballot

Compliance Problems and the Voting Rights Act

1984

Number



The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Expansions and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006 637

county, state, region. These ten books are detailed case studies that analyze: (1) Panola County in Mississippi;46 (2–3) African American voting rights in the South generally; (4) three counties in Georgia (Professor Lawrence Hanks’ book The Struggle of Black Political Empowerment in Three Georgia Counties, i.e., the black majority counties Clay, Hancock, and Peach, from 1960 through 1982, providing a dual perspective before and after the VRA); (5) three small towns in three different counties in Mississippi: Bolton (Hinds County), Mayersville (Issaquena County), and Tchula (Holmes County);47 (6) the state of Mississippi (Frank Parker’s Black Votes Count: Political Empowerment in Mississippi after 1965, is a model scholarly work without peer); (7) the state of Georgia (Attorney L. McDonald’s analysis of the struggle for African American empowerment in Georgia from Reconstruction to the 1990s); (8) the city of Dallas, Texas (Professor Ruth Morgan: Governance by Decree: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act in Dallas covers city politics from 1967 to 2001); (9) the state of Alabama; and (10) another book on voting rights in the South generally. The table contains four books that look at the South as a whole, three in this category and one in the next category. The first two of these four regional studies were written by Professor Steven Lawson. His first study, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969, is a comprehensive and systematic study of the region from the defeat of the White Primary in 1944 to the eve of the initial renewal of the Voting Rights Act in 1969. His second book, In Pursuit of Power: Southern Blacks and Electoral Politics, 1965–1982, covers the rise and evolution of African American empowerment in the South as a consequence of the VRA. This book covers the initial VRA and the renewals of 1970, 1975, and 1982. The third regional study appears in the next category of the table. J. Morgan Kousser’s Colorblind Justice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction, uses historian C. Vann Woodward’s concept of the Second Reconstruction to show how the South’s use of newer and different disenfranchisement techniques undermined the 1965 Voting Rights Act and its renewals just as the earlier techniques undermined the First Reconstruction. Secondly, Professor Kousser uses linear regression technique to estimate the number and turnout of African American voters starting in 1880 in the region. This effort presented the most useful voting data on the African American electorate prior to our own study’s historical detective work. The fourth regional study includes the two southern states, Arkansas and Tennessee, that were not covered by the VRA. The regional analysis by Charles Bullock and Ronald Gaddie primarily uses African American office-holding (along with Hispanic/ Latino office-holding) to evaluate and assess the effectiveness of the VRA in the region, although there are some data on biracial voting as well. In the final analysis, all of these detailed case studies with their rich insights and findings have lots of reasons for recommendation. Most of their shortcomings are inherent in the case-study methodological approach. The third of our categories are books that have tried to measure and quantify the impact and influence of the VRA. Of these nine books two, Quiet Revolution in the South48 and The Future of

the Voting Rights Act, are the most sophisticated quantitatively. In fact, these books are the most sophisticated of all thirty-two books in Table 25.16. Both volumes are edited books, and both contain contributions by some of the leading legal and academic experts in the country on the VRA, many of whom participated as expert witnesses in numerous state and federal courts cases when state and local plans in the South were challenged by voting rights activist organizations on both sides of the ideological spectrum, sometimes aligned with, sometimes in opposition to the Justice Department in the same cases. On the other hand, not all of the books in this category have been wedded to quantification as a methodology to show opposition and refusals to comply with the VRA. The Washington Research Group—a group of voting rights activists located in Washington, D.C.—sent observers and analysts to “several southern states” over an eight-month period on the eve of the 1975 renewal and “found the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to be inadequate as public policy.”49 They found the reasons for the inadequacy of this public policy to be as follows: (1) lack of enforcement, (2) lack of effective actions on the part of the Justice Department to remedy extremely low black voter registration, (3) failure to eliminate reregistration efforts, (4) the near abandonment of the Federal Examiner’s program, (5) black office-holding remaining still token or nonexistent in some areas, (6) failure of the Justice Department to assist black officeholders, (7) continued existence of obstacles to blacks’ holding public office, (8) districting practices that dilute blacks’ voting strength, (9) efforts of the Nixon administration to remove Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, (10) impact of economically depressed and dependent status of blacks on their political activity, and (11) numerous illegal techniques to stymie black registration on the part of the states.50 Data for this study were collected from local and state court cases, local and state newspapers, face-to-face personal interviews, election data, political incidents and events, and personal observations, as well as local and statewide civil rights and voting rights organizations. The process used here was much like the data collecting techniques used in the early U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Reports and Hearings. The other studies in this category are just as informative and insightful as the Washington Research Group book. Clearly, they are worth reading. Finally, there is the superb and brilliant 2011 volume written by Professor Tyson King-Meadows, When the Letter Betrays the Spirit: Voting Rights Enforcement and African American Participation from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama. It is not only the most comprehensive and systematic work on the VRA, it is current and therefore timely. Professor King-Meadows’ original and innovative scholarship begins with his conceptualization, the “Johnson Framework,” which sees African American voting rights as an executive-centered public policy and a judicially centered and implemented, protected public policy. Professor King-Meadows’s findings challenge all of the current works

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on VRA because those works made their analysis of this public policy Congress-centered, and, as a consequence, they leave out the executive’s role and function and, to a degree, that of the federal judiciary and bureaucracy. In order to empirically assess and evaluate the hypotheses and assumptions inherent in his “Johnson Framework” conceptualization, Professor King-Meadows uses the standard data sources: the hearings and reports of the Commission, the major scholarly books and articles, the reports and recommendations of the sundry voting and civil rights organizations, media commentary from the right and left, court cases, legislative debates, and congressional roll call votes. But he adds new things like presidential appointees, public opinion data, an original survey, Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports, and the new congressional reform laws, such as the 1993 Motor Voter Law (National Voter Registration Act ) and the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), as well as the voter-ID laws and the Supreme Court decision upholding such laws. Finally, he places all of these data sources into very sophisticated quantitative models and tests his findings. These tests lead him to conclude that Congress is missing from the implementation and enforcement dimensions of the VRA and that has seriously weakened the impact and influence of the Act. The Act has never and will not reach its full potential until Congress does more than merely renew the Act with some limited modifications. And with this new set of findings and insights, this work engages the huge controversy currently surrounding the Act and its last renewal in 2006: supporters who want the Act to continue to carry out its original mandate to prevent “voter suppression and intimidation,” while those opposed want the focus and emphasis of the Act to change and address “voter fraud.”51 This is a breakthrough and benchmark work in the voting rights literature. Prior to the arrival of Professor King-Meadows’ book, the key to this literature actually lay in the one book in our sixth category, “New Disenfranchisement Techniques and the Voting Rights Act,” a pioneering work by Professor Chandler Davidson, the co-author of two other works on the VRA. His edited book, Minority Vote Dilution, appeared immediately after a major historical event in African American politics, the 1984 presidential campaign of Reverend Jesse Jackson for the Democratic Party’s nomination, which brought notoriety to the practice of vote dilution when Jackson protested its occurrence in run-off primaries. Eddie Williams, the president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, wrote in Professor Davidson’s book: The issue is a controversial one because runoff primaries, like most vote dilution mechanisms, are not discriminatory on the surface. It is only in conjunction with other mechanisms—such as racial gerrymandering and at-large elections—and with white bloc voting that runoff primaries may deprive minorities of equal access to political power. As a legal matter, the status of various vote dilution systems is currently being tested. Vote dilution systems not covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act can be challenged in court under Section 2, but such court cases were put on hold for two years following the Supreme Court’s 1980 Mobile decision,

which effectively made them impossible to win. . . . In 1982, however, Congress extended the Voting Rights Act and added a new provision that clarified the standard to be applied in cases brought under Section 2 and restored the section’s vitality.52 Professor Davidson went on to define vote dilution and its characteristics and to offer examples: “Vote dilution, like other major forms of vote discrimination, diminishes the political power of a group. Unlike them, however, dilution can operate even when there are no barriers to casting a ballot, and when the group’s candidates are able to run for office without hindrance. The essential characteristics of vote dilution are difficult to specify. In spite of two decades of vote dilution litigation and a number of articles on the subject in law reviews and other scholarly journals, no concise and comprehensive definition has emerged.”53 Hence, Davidson developed a working definition for his volume: “Vote dilution is a process whereby election laws or practices, either singly or in concert, combine with systematic bloc voting among an identifiable group to diminish the voting strength of a least one other group. Ethnic or racial minority vote dilution is a special case,” in which the African American electorate “voting strength . . . is diminished or cancelled out by the bloc vote of” whites.54 Even before the passage of the VRA there was only negligible biracial voting, and since the passage of the VRA and for many years thereafter, biracial voting has been, without dispute, less than optimal. Vote dilution has continued to have a dramatic impact and influence since the passage of the VRA. Professor Davidson concluded his discussion of vote dilution by identifying four major aspects: (1) subtlety, (2) group phenomena (white majority voting bloc), (3) diminution of another group (African Americans) in potential voting strength, and (4) almost legal or of questionable legality. On this last aspect he elaborates further: Fourth, the diminished power resulting from vote dilution is not the result of the behavior of the group whose votes are diluted. It is caused not by apathy, political ineptitude, or ignorance, but by laws or practices that operate in a discriminatory fashion when combined with bloc voting by the majority. . . . To say that a group’s votes are diluted, however, implies that the ineffectiveness of its ballots is beyond its control, and that the causes inhere in the larger political structure.55 Finally, Professor Davidson described the major types of dilution mechanisms as including the following: at-large elections, anti-single-shot devices, decreasing the size of the governmental body, exclusive slating groups, and gerrymandering. Although the sundry Commission on Civil Rights Reports began to discuss these techniques and mechanisms, when Jackson in 1984 demanded critical examination of the “runoff primaries,” he helped to highlight these rising and evolving techniques as the South’s newest responses to the VRA and its subsequent renewals. Like the region’s attempts to evade the Four Military Reconstruction Acts, the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments, and the 1957, 1960, and 1964 Civil Rights Laws,



The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Expansions and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006 639

“vote dilution” became the umbrella term for a new strategy of southern white opposition in response to the Voting Rights Act. If the southern congressional elites with a very few exceptions initially showed massive defiance, then local white political elites moved forward with not only just “White Citizens’ Councils,” but with numerous vote dilution techniques that have been fought over in the state and federal courts. Vote dilution court cases started immediately upon the Supreme Court decision in South Carolina v. Katzenbach on March 7, 1966. Simply “because of South Carolina’s desire to obtain a ruling prior to its primary elections in June 1966, . . . the Court heard the case under its original jurisdiction, which means it was the first court to hear the case,” when it was argued on January 17–18, 1966.56 In this landmark case, “the Supreme Court by an 8–1 vote . . . held that the preclearance provision” that allowed the federal government to review proposed redistricting by state governments “was a permissible exercise of Congress’s power to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition on racial discrimination in voting. Congress renewed the preclearance provisions for another twenty-five years in 1982 and the Court again upheld Congress’s power to do so in Lopez v. Monterey County” in 1999. Then, in 2006 the law was once again renewed, and the Court declared it constitutional in its June 2009 decision in North Austin Municipal District v. Holder. All of the litigation at the different levels of the federal system dealing with the constitutionality of the Act and its renewals as well as the legality of new political gerrymandering plans tended to come every ten years with new Census and population data. Hence, the need for constitutional cases at the national level and rulings on cases at the state and local levels have been the inspiration for several of the books in Table 25.16 (p. 636). Thus, books on the VRA written by lawyers and legal scholars stand side-by-side with those written by political scientists, historians, and sociologists. The other books in the “impact and influence” category do not use these two methodologies as much or as well as do the volumes of Davidson and Grofman and Epstein. The David Hudson volume is a straightforward chronological narrative, while the Edward Blum work is a conservative tirade clothed in his own constitutional interpretative language, similar to a work produced by the Virginia state attorney general in 1965 arguing for the nullification of the VRA.57 The books in this category make arguments that the VRA has been a success or a failure. None make the case that the Act has been only a qualified success, nor do they all use the same methodologies as to what constitutes “success.” In the fifth category, “Compliance Problems and Voting Rights Act,” the volume by Professors Howard Ball, Dale Krane, and Thomas Lauth is in a class by itself. Their work is a public policy implementation study without peer. They follow approaches that have been used in policy implementation, providing those familiar with this area of expertise a careful and thoughtful analysis. They show how states like Mississippi failed to comply with Act requirements, and how this noncompliance forced the federal administrative agencies away from the prescribed procedures and into compromise procedures that ultimately defeated both the spirit and substance of the Act. Professor Ronald Walters’ 2006 book, Freedom Is Not Enough: Black Voters, Black Candidates, and American

Presidential Politics makes a case for the continuation and renewal of the VRA.58 He offers insights, recommendations, and criticisms about the federal administrative agencies overseeing the implementation of the Act. He notes both the strengths and weaknesses of the Act thus far and the unfinished job left to be done in completely securing the ballot for the African American electorate. And the volume by Henderson analyzes the 2006 renewal of the VRA and tries to suggest what it means for democracy in the American political system. Finally, there are the two categories of books produced under the auspices of different types of Washington, D.C., think tanks. The conservative American Enterprise Institute published the 2009 work by Abigail Thernstrom, written from her vantage point as vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights since 2004. This self-anointed “expert” on voting rights who in her 1987 book, Whose Votes Count? Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights, declared that the VRA was merely another form of affirmative action, also argued that the continuation of the Act hurt African Americans more than bringing about any good and that it did not fix the problem of attenuated or denied suffrage rights for African Americans. The 1987 book made her overnight the scholarly advocate against the continuation of the VRA and propelled her onto the Commission on Civil Rights in 2001, where she joined in an effort to hinder and restrain the efforts of the Commission in the areas of civil and voting rights. Her second book was published the same year as that of former chair of the Commission, Professor Mary Francis Berry, who is African American, on the recent and current history of the Commission. Vice Chair Thernstrom’s later book continued her assault on the VRA and particularly its 2006 renewal and reauthorization. In her conclusion she wrote: “I have argued that raceconscious districting was a necessary jumpstart for African Americans in the aftermath of Jim Crow—but also that the time for such protective arrangements has passed.”59 She continued: The emergency provisions of the Voting Rights Act were passed when the South was in the grip of a great evil. That time has passed, and today they are the wrong remedies for very different voting problems we now face. Let us move on—immensely proud of what we have accomplished, but never indifferent to racial inequality in its many forms.60 Although her latest volume uses little systematic empirical evidence, she turns to the numbers and percentages of African American elected officials to justify the discontinuance of the VRA and hailed the election of President Obama as further reason to abolish the Act. As she sees it, “today’s alleged voting wrongs—felon voting, voter ID, provisional and absentee ballots, and the like—are not equivalent to the massive disenfranchisement of southern blacks in 1965, which was the keystone of the whole structure of racial oppression.”61 Not only is this argument error-filled; she somehow manages to leave out vote dilution and candidate diminution that are currently the tools of disenfranchisement. Selective supportive data are always subjective. And using this reasoning, Thernstrom refused to sign the 2000 Commission Report on the Florida presidential election

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situation.62 And this action on her part helped to further the rising controversy surrounding the VRA prior to and after the 2006 reauthorization. However, in contrast the publications by the African American think tanks are not scholarly advocacy books but rather informational and educational works. Two of the three pamphlets and monographs are self-help books. They are not advocating an ideological thesis and public policy but simply how to make Section 5 of the VRA work. They are indeed a striking contrast with the Thernstrom volume. The third volume in this category, by Kenneth Thompson, The Voting Rights Act and Black Electoral Participation, shows the interrelationship between the Act and political representation from the community. Like the two other volumes in this category, it is designed to provide educational insights and assistance. Collectively, all thirty-two of these books have both strengths and weaknesses. Our analysis of the Commission reports offers an important corrective to this literature, because most books on the Act do not even reference the Commission Reports. The empirical data in the Commission Reports show that federal examiners registered a significant number of whites (nearly one-fourth of new voters) who were likely to support the existing white power structure. This significant variable omission, in fact, haunts almost all of the books listed in the table. But there are some books in which the absence of the new white voters looms largest. These works have an outright conservative ideological bent. While most of the thirty-two studies find the VRA to be quite an important piece of civil rights policy— successful for both the nation and its democratic political system and vital for the continued progress in the number and influence of African American elected officials—the conservative books attack, criticize, decry, and reject the VRA as being unconstitutional, an unnecessary interference, intervention, and intrusion into the federal-state relationship. Thus, while the majority of these books argue for the extensions and renewals of the VRA, the conservative-minded books argue that the VRA was never needed and, due to its violation of the U.S. Constitution, should have never been enacted. Books with this slant argue that, at best, it might have been necessary in an earlier time in American political history but not now because conditions are so changed that the VRA has outlived its usefulness and original purpose. Therefore, the positions of the proponents of the VRA and the positions of the opponents of the VRA have developed into a full-blown dramatic controversy about the legislation, with both sides willing to undertake a political, legislative, and judicial fight to sustain their hegemony.

The Evolved Voting Rights Act Controversy: Proponents vs. Opponents In 2006, when Congress renewed the Act for the fourth time it also renamed the Act in a very symbolic manner: “Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2006” (VRARA). This was the very first time that the Act had been renamed. The renaming chose political icons who are well known in the African American community as well as in the national community.

Moreover, each of these women had played major roles and functions in the voting rights and civil rights struggles of the 1960s and beyond. And it should come as no surprise that the first political icon is the African American female most related to and associated with the struggle for African American voting rights. Finally, this renaming combined both the voting and civil rights struggles, simply because as our study reveals that has been the tradition in the African American community. In addition, this renaming took place in the midst of the ongoing rise of women’s empowerment in America. Whether this was an effort to rekindle an alliance, build an alliance, or renew an alliance, or the preliminary groundwork for launching an alliance with the majority of white women and the rising Latina and Asian women voters, such an alliance has now begun.63 But most importantly, this renaming gave many unknown and unsung African American heroines of the voting rights struggle their well deserved political symbols, which many felt had gone primarily to males with the Martin Luther King, Jr., national holiday. Although the political icons and symbols of the renewed Act did not cause any controversy, the renewal and reauthorization did finally bring the ever-evolving voting rights controversy to full maturity. Data in Figures 25.3 and 25.5 clearly reveal that in both the House and Senate southern congressmen voted very strongly against the 1965 VRA, but gradually this source of opposition declined significantly. Opposition to the Act began to come from the presidency when Nixon opposed Section 5 of the Act when it came up for its initial renewal in 1970. It continued with the Ford administration when the VRA came up for renewal, despite the fact that congressional opposition was still declining. But despite this declining trend, President Reagan not only politicized the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights but promised to veto the 1982 renewal. Nonetheless, Congress renewed the Act and overrode his veto, as well as extended the Act for twenty-five years. But the Republican Commission members began their opposition to the Act with the argument that the Act had become a form of “reverse discrimination” and should be abandoned. A Republican majority on the Supreme Court in 1980 assisted this thinking when it “changed the standard for proving vote dilution and precipitated a major crisis in the campaign for equal voting rights . . . in City of Mobile v Bolden.” In this case “it held that minority plaintiffs could not rely on the effect of a challenged voting practice but had to prove an intent to discriminate on the basis of race by public officials in order to make out a violation of the Constitution or . . . the Voting Rights Act.”64 Congress amended the 1982 renewal legislation and eliminated this problem, but the debate and dialogue against the Act continued apace. Then came the 2000 presidential election and the problem in Florida with the disputed outcome. The hue and cry about African American voter suppression and intimidation in the election were matched by opponents arguing that the great problem was voter fraud. Knowing that the Act would come up for renewal in 2007 and that, given what had happened in Florida in 2000 and in Ohio in 2004, there would be huge demands for not only renewal of the Act but possibly a stronger Act, voter fraud was pushed very strenuously by the opponents of the Act until it came nearly to replace the demand for repeal of Section 5 or



The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Expansions and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006 641

nonrenewal of the Act. When these two old goals of the opposition were not successful in undoing and undermining the renewal and reauthorization of the 2006 Act, the voter fraud issue came forth. At that point the controversy became set in very clear and stark terms: combating voter suppression and intimidation or focusing on voter fraud.65 The initial southern state to attack voter fraud was Georgia. Congress in the aftermath of the Florida electoral fiasco passed a reform act—the Help America Vote Act (HAVA)—in 2002 that attempted to create at minimum some national standards and uniform procedures for voting. Among them was a requirement for an acceptable form of identification, such as “(1) a copy of a valid state-issued photo ID; (2) a copy of a current utility bill, bank statement, paycheck, or other government document showing the name, and address of the voter; (3) a driver’s license number; or (4) the last four digits of the individual’s Social Security number.”66 But the South had a history of enacting electoral “reforms,” such as the secret ballot and the direct primary, which it used to disenfranchise the African American electorate. On this matter Professor Michael Perman has written: In the South, the secret ballot, tougher voting requirements, and voter registration were weapons selected by the Democratic Party to remove as many African Americans as possible from the electorate, regardless of their wealth, education, or knowledge of public affairs. Actually, in [the] case of the black voter, the better qualified he was, the greater the need to eliminate him. . . . However, the purpose of the effort to eliminate black voters was to secure the supremacy of white men in the region’s racial hierarchy and of the Democracy in its political order. That these weapons possessed the aura of reform and the imprimatur of reformers, inside and outside the party, bestowed a legitimacy and acceptability on the entire enterprise that it otherwise lacked.67 Nearly a century later, the Georgia general assembly, using the HAVA law signed into law on June 2, 2003, passed a revision to its election code that created its photo ID Law. Of this reform law’s relationship to racial disenfranchisement, it has been written: The political rhetoric behind the passage of the bill was concern about electioneering and voter fraud by the Republican Party. Critics of the bill argued that voter fraud was a smokescreen used to disguise the real reason, which was to help maintain Republican political power by impeding minority voters, who typically support Democratic candidates. The documented instances of election fraud in Georgia were minimal, at best. Even the director of elections in Georgia’s Secretary of State Office, Kathy A. Rogers, admitted that her office had never investigated any cases of a person trying to pose as someone else at the polls. There are no documented instances of voter fraud in recent memory.68 Said law had several state legislative and local court challenges that forced some changes and modifications; the resultant

2005 “law created a new fee for state-issued photo IDs, doubling the minimum fee from $10 to $20 for a five-year state ID, and only one-third of the states’ [159] counties at the time had offices where photo IDs could be obtained.”69 Immediately, this controversial reform law was challenged both in the local state courts as well as by the Justice Department under Section 5 of the VRA, which requires preclearance when any new modifications of the election codes are about to be implemented. As to getting the preclearance of Section 5, a study was conducted by Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox, who found that “nearly 700,000 registered Georgia voters did not have [a] valid state driver’s license. Moreover, the U.S. Justice Department determined in a separate study that the new identification law would likely discriminate against black voters.”70 These studies did not deter the Voting Section of the Justice Department in pre-clearing the 2005 Georgia photo ID law. On this matter, one scholar found that “[i]gnoring the two studies, [Republican-] appointed officials overruled the decision to deny preclearance and instead granted it. . . . Then, U.S. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales . . . approved Georgia’s Voter ID Act as constitutional.”71 Legal suits by both local and national voting rights activists pushed the law into “Fulton County Superior Court where the Judge . . . declared that the law designed to fight voter fraud actually violated the state constitution and that it disenfranchised otherwise qualified voters.”72 The state of Georgia appealed to the state supreme court, which “upheld the lower court’s decision that the photo identification requirement, even if free of cost, was overly burdensome and therefore unconstitutional.”73 Immediately, the Republicandominated state legislature revised the law by making it free of any fees. And following the passage of this revised law, the NAACP revealed that a major shortcoming still prevailed. “The law only applied to individuals who were registered but voted in person. There was no similar provision for absentee ballots, yet there are many documented instances of voter fraud involving absentee ballots.”74 Neither the incensed African American members of the Georgia state legislature, nor a march in Atlanta led by Reverend Jesse Jackson, nor legal efforts by the NAACP had any impact or influence.75 However, while the contestations over the revised photo ID law in 2005 continued in Georgia, factors on the national level would began to intervene. First, former Georgia Democratic Governor and later President James E. “Jimmy” Carter and former Texas Republican Secretary of State James Baker III chaired the National Commission on Federal Election Reforms. They stated in their 2005 Report that “up to 10 percent of voting-age Americans, approximately eleven million to nineteen million potential voters, lack any form of state-issued photo ID. These potential voters live in a variety of communities across the nation and are disenfranchised, having their political power severely limited because of new and restrictive laws that require extra voter identification.”76 Subsequently, the newly elected Democratic U.S. senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, made two speeches on the Senate floor against photo IDs and inserted them into the Congressional Record in 2006.77 And in the 109th Congress, Senator Obama introduced a bill in the Senate and a member of the Illinois

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congressional delegation, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, introduced a similar bill in the House of Representatives that was entitled: Deceptive Practices and Voting Intimidation Prevention Act of 2007. Since it did not pass, this bill was re-introduced in the 110th Congress. There it passed in the House, but in the Senate it was only reported by the committee. Said bill supported the side of the controversy that was the original focus of the VRA, voter suppression and intimidation.78 The next major national event was the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2008 which upheld the Indiana voter ID law in Crawford v. Marion County Election Bd., 128 S. Ct. 1610. The conservative bloc of justices Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas were joined by justices Anthony Kennedy and John Paul Stevens on the decision. But there was a problem with this decision. Professor Richard Scher wrote that the Supreme Court decision “claimed that the law was needed to protect Indiana from voter fraud, but it recognized that there was no evidence that any voter fraud had taken place. Nonetheless, it claimed that ‘the risk of voter fraud’ was ‘real.’”79 And a year later, in 2009, the Court upheld the Georgia photo ID law. If in 1890 Mississippi had pioneered with its state constitutional disenfranchisement of the African American electorate, Georgia had pioneered in the new century. Now, with this new technique, political leaders at the state level could begin to move against not only African American but Latino and Asian American electorates. In the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans not only won sixty seats in the House of Representatives and six seats in the Senate, they also captured the majority of state gubernatorial seats and state legislatures. And as a result, “Republican legislators [said] the new rules”—designed to “require photo identification at the polls, reduce the number of days of early voting or tighten registration rules”—that were “advanced in 13 states in the past two months [April and May, 2011], offer a practical way to weed out fraudulent votes and preserve the integrity of the ballot box.” These actions, now fully underway, come down on the other side of the controversy about the VRA.80 However, Donna Brazile, longtime activist in Democratic politics, declared that this action by the Republicans was little more than “a partisan tactic designed to weed out voters who are more likely to be Democrats and help the GOP on Election Day.”81 Amidst all of the claims and counter claims, there is a simple reality. In states where the election is close, a restricted and suppressed African American electorate works to the advantage of the Republican Party. But more important in this controversy over the VRA is the question of voter fraud. Does it really exist? One of the first to recently react to this aspect of the controversy was the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on the eve of the 2008 presidential election. The Commission, acting on the premise that the historic general election might face monitoring and enforcement problems with the Voting Rights Act, convened a panel of experts on June 6, 2008, in Washington, D.C., to brief the Commission on potential problems which the Department of Justice (DOJ) might encounter. Such action had never been taken before by the Commission for any previous presidential election. Even after the Commission explored the problems in the 2000 presidential election, it made no effort to convene experts before the 2004 election.82 And in its list

of Findings and Recommendations, the conservative Republican majority recommended to the DOJ that voter fraud needed to be given as high a priority as voter intimidation and suppression. The recommendation stated: “We urge DOJ to initiate action to prevent illegal voting, and not simply wait to hear of and react to specific accusations of wrongdoing.” (The Commission defined voter fraud as “double voting, voting by non-residents, and voting by non-citizens. . . . When illegitimate votes are counted, the votes of legitimate voters are effectively nullified.”)83 However, commissioners Arlan D. Melendez and Michael Yaki did not sign the Majority Report because they raised a serious question about the voter fraud matter. In their Minority Report, they wrote: “To our knowledge, none of these investigations have revealed systemic voter fraud in the last decade that threw an election into doubt. As was repeatedly stated throughout our June 2008 briefing, the instances of voter fraud are few and far between.”84 They added: “While the potential for mischief may be there, especially in the context of absentee ballots, the weight of evidence does not show that this is a pervasive problem requiring the allocation of massive resources, as the majority’s findings and recommendations would seem to imply. On the other hand, well-documented instances of voter intimidation, particularly against racial minorities, do require heightened vigilance by the Justice Department.”85 But the Minority Report did not stop with these comments about voter fraud. They raised the more important question of why the Commission was undertaking this unusual action. They declared: Unfortunately, although this briefing was supposed to cover both voter intimidation and voter fraud, the Commission majority stacked the briefing witnesses (or lack thereof) to have little testimony on voter intimidation and little credible testimony on the issue of voter fraud. Public officials should always work to improve the integrity of our election system. However, there is a danger to fanning flames of distrust in our election system when investigation after investigation continues to show no evidence that systemic voter fraud has undermined our elections.86 At this writing, the leading book that is advancing voter fraud, with only anecdotal evidence, is one written by journalist John Fund of the Wall Street Journal: Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (his latest book, How the Obama Administration Threatens to Undermine Our Elections pursues similar themes). Fund, a former analyst for Fox News, “writes the weekly ‘Political Diary’ for WSJ.com” and, according to a recent study, is a participant in the conservative media establishment.87 But a Government Accountability Office (GAO) review that analyzed matters initiated by the Voting Section of the DOJ covering all of the voting rights legislation from 2001 to 2007 reveals that 246 of the 442 cases (56%) “during the 7-year period were on behalf of language minority groups” while other matters dealt with racial discrimination but barely any voter fraud matters.88 Three scholarly works address the other side of the controversial voter intimidation and suppression issue: one by a



The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Expansions and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006 643

legal scholar, Spencer Overton, Stealing Democracy: The New Politics of Voter Suppression; another by a political scientist, Tyson King-Meadows, When the Letter Betrays the Spirit: Voting Rights Enforcement and African American Participation from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama; and another by historian Tracy Campbell, Deliver the Vote: A History of Election Fraud, an American Political Tradition—1742–2004, which provides a longitudinal overview of this concern.89 These studies reveal the continuing significance of the Act and the existence of racial discrimination in the administration of elections. Thus, in the aftermath of the four renewals of the Act, this controversial struggle persists, first about whether it ought to continue and then about where it should be focused.90 Besides the controversy over the VRA, other arguments have surfaced like the one advanced by legal scholar Richard Pildes that some national standards should be created instead of constant renewals of the Act. Another argument has been advanced by political scientist Robert W. Mickey that the African American voting rights struggle ended authoritarian rule in southern enclaves and thereby enabled the rise of further democratization in America. Hence, said struggle of “southern blacks and Hispanics and their white allies can be fully appreciated” because blacks and Hispanics were not the only beneficiaries of this suffrage struggle but American democracy as well.91

Summary and Conclusions on the Voting Rights Act and Its Renewals In this chapter, we have analyzed how the issue of voter suppression and intimidation evolved from a local, selected state, and regional issue to a national agenda item on both the president’s and Congress’s list of priorities. Moreover, in this evolution two African American political icons, Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King, Jr., came to play prominent roles and functions, although many other activists and participants—named and unnamed—played crucial roles and positions. We have pointed out that critical changes took place in the nation’s media environment along with leadership changes in the U.S. Senate. Both of these changes proved vital to the adoption of voting rights legislation. Nor did it hurt to have a president, Lyndon B. Johnson, who had been both a Senate majority leader and a member of the House of Representatives from Texas for a decade and who supported this type of legislation. But there was strong opposition from the president’s region through the Senate’s southern caucus (all twenty-two southern senators) that was chaired by the president’s mentor and personal family friend, Georgia Senator Richard Russell. Using roll call votes on all of the voting rights bills from 1957 to 2006, this caucus demonstrated the nature, scope, significance, and strength of this southern elite opposition over time. President Johnson and his allies were able to prevail over the southern opposition and pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act. And once this law was in place to effectuate and enforce the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendment for African Americans, this chapter began an assessment and evaluation using the official Reports of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Although there are other reports issued by scholars, laypeople, and partisan

and non-partisan groups and organizations, which we have mentioned and discussed, the official reports have served as our mainstay. Our analysis does consider the strengths and weaknesses of these official reports. After the perspectives from these official reports, we turned to the major book-length studies literature on the VRA and its four renewals. Taking the last one in 2006, we have examined a major controversy about the necessity and viability of the VRA. This chapter shows that there are two distinct camps, proponents who want the Act to maintain its original mission and focus, dealing with voter suppression and intimidation, and opponents who want the Act to switch emphasis and focus to deal with voter fraud. Essentially, this demand by those opposed to the VRA is for discontinuing the four temporary provisions that were renewed and reauthorized in 2006 and for refocusing the Act on voter fraud. The four temporary provisions are (1) the Section 4 coverage formula, (2) Section 5 preclearance, (3) attorney general power to assign federal examiners and poll watchers, and (4) bilingual voting materials and assistance.92 In addition to the renewal and reauthorization of the Act and its temporary provisions, we have discussed the renaming of the Act in 2006, the first time ever despite the rise of a full blown controversy. Moreover, we have shown that part of the reason for the maturing of this controversy is due to the partisan realignment in the South that most scholars believe began with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.93 We have shown, however, that the realignment began in the 1940 presidential election, due to the impact and influence of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, and has continued with some reversals caused by southern native-son presidents like Johnson, Carter, and Clinton.94 And now the political context and partisan response is just the opposite of what it was in the Post-Civil War Era and Reconstruction. Then it was the Democratic Party officeholders who led the disenfranchisement movement, while now, particularly since the adoption of the photo ID procedure in some states, the anti-suffrage movement is driven by the southern Republican elected officials at the gubernatorial and state legislative levels. Recently, they have been aided by the Republican-appointed conservative majority on the Supreme Court, which includes an African American justice, Clarence Thomas. At the national level, all of the renewals of the VRA have been signed into law by Republican presidents: Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and George W. Bush. Thus, currently, the southern partisan realignment has both convergent and divergent tendencies and patterns. But the controversy that surrounds the voting rights legislation and its renewals tends to obfuscate a major achievement beyond the rise in registration and officeholding. A key result of the VRA and its extensions and renewals is the rich trove of federal statistics on voter registration, by way of federal examination of registration applicants and election observers. Seemingly, much of this unique and important raw data has been overlooked, misused, or denied in analyzing the impact and influence of this public policy. Many works have tended to focus on the legal aspect of the Act and the success of the African American political candidates at the local level to the exclusion of candidate success at the statewide levels.

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One of the critical omissions has been the federal statistics on the whites who have been registered by federal examiners and the impact of their participation on the Democratic and Republican parties in the South and on the electoral process when compared with minority groups. This is an essential element in the Act’s overall success and impact, despite not being acknowledged by the majority of books engaged in the controversy as well as by the recent reports of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Sidelining data on whites affected by the VRA means one will never know or see the full impact of the Act. Table 25.17 reveals this unique aspect of the VRA. The table shows 145 counties exhibiting egregious disenfranchisement

behavior and tactics in eight southern states; the number of counties the DOJ sued in 1963, two years before the passage and implementation of the VRA; as well as the number of these original counties that the DOJ sent federal examiners and observers to under the VRA from 1965 through 1980. Thus, in this fifteen-year period some 55 of the 77 African American majority counties (71.4%) and 40 of the 68 white majority counties (58.8%) received federal examinations. Clearly, federal presence was much greater in the African American counties than in the white counties. But there was much greater voter registration in the white majority counties (1,596 more registered voters) than in the African American counties.

Table 25.17  Counties in the 1963 Department of Justice Lawsuit, Examined and Observed under the Voting Rights Act, as of 1980 Examined and Observed under the VRA, as of 1980

Number of Counties

(1960) Percent Black

Number of Counties Selected for the 1963 Department of Justice Lawsuit

Number of Counties Designated for Federal Examination

Number of Counties with Voters Listed by Federal Examination

Net Number of Persons Listed

Number of Counties with Election Observers

Cumulative Number of Election Observers 2,173

State

Racial Majority

Alabama

Black

12

66.8%

  9

 9

 8

26,318

 9

White

 9

36.4%

  4

 9

 4

33,413

 5

308

Total

21

42.9%

 13

18

12

59,731

14

2,481

Black

 1

59.4%

  1

 0

 0

0

 0

0

White

 4

25.1%

  4

 0

 0

0

 0

0

Total

 5

49.7%

  5

 0

 0

0

 0

0

Black

16

59.4%

  6

14

 3

3,388

10

377

White

14

30.0%

  9

 5

 0

0

 5

89

Total

30

41.7%

 15

19

 3

3,388

15

466

Black

 8

58.6%

  7

 6

 5

5,304

 6

1,062

White

10

35.0%

  8

 6

 4

10,711

 3

205

Total

18

39.2%

 15

12

 9

16,015

 9

1,267

Black

27

64.8%

 22

24

18

29,151

24

5,609

White

27

37.6%

 16

18

16

23,877

15

843

Total

54

49.5%

 38

42

34

53,028

39

6,452

Black

 5

57.0%

  5

 0

 0

0

 0

0

White

 2

36.1%

  2

 0

 0

0

 0

0

Total

 7

53.0%

  7

 0

 0

0

 0

0

Black

 6

62.4%

  5

 2

 1

3,413

 2

225

White

 2

45.7%

  0

 2

 1

1,169

 2

218

Total

 8

56.5%

  5

 4

 2

4,582

 4

443

Black

 2

65.2%

  0

 0

 0

0

 0

0

White

 0

0.0%

  0

 0

 0

0

 0

0

Total

 2

Florida

Georgia

Louisiana

Mississippi

North Carolina

South Carolina

Tennessee

65.2%

  2

 0

 0

0

 0

0

77 Black majority counties

63.0%

 57

55

35

67,574

51

9,446

68 White majority counties

36.1%

 43

40

25

69,170

30

1,663

All 145 counties

45.8%

100

95

60

136,744

81

11,109

Sources: Adapted from Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File] http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009; United States Commission on Civil Rights, The Voting Rights Act: The First Months (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1965); United States Commission on Civil Rights, The Voting Rights Act: Ten Years After (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975); and United States Commission on Civil Rights, The Voting Rights Act: Unfulfilled Goals (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1981). Calculations by the authors.



The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Expansions and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006 645

In addition Table 25.17 reveals that almost nine out of every ten federal election observers were stationed in the African American majority counties, and almost two-thirds of the counties where elections were monitored were African American majority counties, which was hardly an imposition of federal force upon the white majority communities. And despite the fact that DOJ filed suit against 100 of the 145 counties (68.9%), federal examiners eventually only went into 95 of these 100 counties. Hence, 50 counties escaped federal involvement. Therefore, this tabular data, as well as such data earlier in this chapter, reveal that much greater voter registration success occurred in the white majority counties than in the African American counties. Therefore, using the official federal statistics generated by the VRA, one immediately sees what Professor Mickey called the democratization of authoritarian rule in the American South; and what earlier Professor V. O. Key, Jr., in his classic work Southern Politics in State and Nation, hinted at and implied; and what historian C. Vann Woodward suggested in his concepts of the First and Second Reconstruction. The data also support what Professor Richard Valelly has pointed out about the American democratic system, “that the U.S. is distinct among democracies for having enfranchised, disenfranchised, and re-enfranchised groups of its citizens while remaining a democracy.”95 Yet somehow most of the literature in the controversy, especially by those who opposed the VRA, neglects to mention this role and function of democratization.

Notes   1. For analyses of how the re-enfranchised African American electorate enabled native-son southerners to win the presidency see Hanes Walton, Jr., The Native-Son Presidential Candidate: The Carter Vote in Georgia (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1992) and his Reelection: William J. Clinton as a Native-Son Presidential Candidate (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).   2. David Garrow, Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. xi.   3. Ibid., p. xii.  4. Walton, The Native-Son Presidential Candidate.  5. Walton, Reelection, pp. 157–164.   6. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2001). For the important role played by the southern African American electorate for Democratic presidential candidates who are non-southerners see Vincent Hutchings and LaFleur Stephens, “African American Voters and the Presidential Nomination Process,” in William Mayer (ed.), In Pursuit of the White House 2008: How We Choose Our Presidents (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 2007), pp. 119–140.   7. For a discussion of the role played by the African American electorate in Ohio during the 2004 presidential election see Anita Miller (ed.), What Went Wrong in Ohio: The Conyers Report on the 2004 Presidential Election (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 2005). See also, Robert Fitrakis, Steven Rosenfeld, and Harvey Wasserman, What Happened in Ohio? A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election (New York: The New Press, 2006).   8. Hanes Walton, Jr., and Robert C. Smith, African American Politics and the African American Quest for Universal Freedom, 5th Edition (New York: Longman, 2010), pp.147–152 and 168.   9. Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), Chapter 58.

10. See Henry Lee Moon, Balance of Power: The Negro Vote (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948). 11. John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), p. 286. 12. “Freedom Democratic Party Given Boost: Crowds Turn Out for King,” Mississippi Free Press (July 25, 1964), p. 2. 13. See Leslie Burl McLemore, “The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party: A Case Study of Grass-Roots Politics” (Amherst: Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, 1971). 14. David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986), p. 344. 15. Barbara Sinclair, The Transformation of the U.S. Senate (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 59. 16. Ibid., pp. 64–65. 17. Ibid., p. 67. 18. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, p. 39. 19. Sinclair, p. 67. 20. Sinclair, p. 53. 21. Robert Peabody, Norman Ornstein, and David Rohde, “The United States Senate as a Presidential Incubator: Many Are Called but Few Are Chosen,” Political Science Quarterly Vol. 91 (Summer 1976), pp. 237–258. 22. Ibid., pp. 239 and 240. 23. Keith Finley, Delaying the Dream: Southern Senators and the Fight Against Civil Rights, 1938–1965 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), pp. 9–14. 24. Ibid., p. 304. 25. Rayford Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson, New Enlarged Edition (New York: Collier Books, 1965), p. 73–74. 26. Sherrilyn Ifill, “Idol to Obama: What TV Elections Teach Us About Race, Youth, and Voting,” in Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke (eds.), Barack Obama and African American Empowerment: The Rise of Black America’s New Leadership (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 160. 27. V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation, A New Edition (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), pp. 37–41. 28. See Lester Salamon and Stephen Van Evera, “Fear, Apathy, and Discrimination: A Test of Three Explanations of Political Participation,” American Political Science Review Vol. 67 (December 1973), pp. 1288–1306 and Sam Kernell, “Comment: A Re-evaluation of Black Voting in Mississippi,” ibid., pp. 1307–1318. 29. See Brian K. Landsberg, Free at Last to Vote: The Alabama Origins of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007). 30. Ibid., pp. 18 and 20. 31. Foster Rhea Dulles, The Civil Rights Commission, 1957–1965 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1968), p. 245. 32. Ibid., p. 246. 33. Dittmer, p. 390. 34. Ibid., p. 391. 35. Ibid., p. 389. 36. Walton, Reelection, pp. 112–116. See also Tilman Cothran and William Phillips, Jr., “Expansion of Negro Suffrage in Arkansas,” Journal of Negro Education Vol. 26 (Summer 1957), pp. 287–296. 37. See Luther Jackson, “Race and Suffrage in the South Since 1940,” New South Vol. 3 (June–July 1948), pp. 1–26. For the responses to requests in 1952 and 1956 see Henry McGuinn and Tinsley Spraggins, “Negro Politics in Virginia,” Journal of Negro Education Vol. 26 (Summer 1957), pp. 378–389; and Elsie Barnes and Ronald Proctor, “Black Politics in Tidewater, Virginia,” in Hanes Walton, Jr. (ed.), Black Politics and Black Political Behavior: A Linkage Analysis (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), pp. 83–96. 38. Gayle Tate and Lewis Randolph, “There Is No Refuge in Conservatism: A Case Study of Black Political Conservatism in Richmond, Virginia,” in Gayle Tate and Lewis Randolph (eds.), Dimensions of Black Conservatism in the United States (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 43–65. 39. Dittmer, p. 391.

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40. Steven Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 335. Journalists Watters and Cleghorn had written their own study of the voting rights struggle in the South, Climbing Jacob’s Ladder (New York: Harcourt Brace World, 1967). 41. Hanes Walton, Jr., and Maxie Foster, “Southern Comfort: The Impact of David Duke’s Campaign on African American Politics,” in Hanes Walton, Jr., African American Power and Politics: The Political Context Variable (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 240–241. For a detailed analysis of Governor Reagan’s quiet trips to the South see Wayne Greenshaw, Elephants in the Cottonfields: Ronald Reagan and the New Republican South (New York: Macmillan, 1982). 42. Walton, The Native-Son Presidential Candidate, pp. 200–203. 43. For a comprehensive analysis of the role and function of the White House staff led by Edwin Messe III and President Reagan as well as of the congressional battles and the internal Commission squabbles led by the new chair, Clarence Pendleton, see Chapter 8 in Mary Francis Berry, And Justice for All: The United States Commission on Civil Rights and the Continuing Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Knopf, 2009), pp. 182–215. 44. For analysis of the dropping of the Special Analysis on Civil Rights see Hanes Walton, Jr., When the Marching Stopped: The Politics of the Civil Rights Regulatory Agencies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988). 45. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Department of Justice Voting Rights Enforcement for the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election: Briefing Report (Washington, DC: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 2009), pp. 1–73. 46. For a review of this book see Hanes Walton, Jr., “Review of the Politics of Southern Equality,” Annals of American Academy of Social and Political Science (September 1, 1971), pp. 210–221. 47. Minion K.C. Morrison, Black Political Mobilization: Leadership, Power, and Mass Behavior (Albany: State University of New York, 1987). 48. For a review of this book see Hanes Walton, Jr., “Review of the Quiet Revolution in the South,” Georgia Historical Quarterly Vol. 79 (Summer 1995), pp. 516–518. 49. Hanes Walton, Jr., “Review of the Shameful Blight: The Survival of Racial Discrimination in Voting in the South,” American Political Science Review Vol. 69 (March 1975), p. 289. 50. Ibid. 51. See Tyson D. King-Meadows, When the Letter Betrays the Spirit: Voting Rights Enforcement and African American Participation from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011). 52. Chandler Davidson, Minority Vote Dilution (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1984), pp. vii–viii. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., pp. 4–5. 56. “South Carolina v. Katzenbach, Decided March 7, 1966,” in Richard Valelly (ed.), The Voting Rights Act: Securing the Ballot (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006), pp. 272 and 271. 57. See Virginia Office of the Attorney, The Constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Richmond: Virginia Commission on Constitutional Government, 1965). 58. Ronald W. Walters, Freedom Is Not Enough: Black Voters, Black Candidates, and American Presidential Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2005). 59. Abigail Thernstrom, Voting Rights—and Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 2009), p. 222. 60. Ibid., p. 223. 61. Ibid., p. 198. 62. Berry, pp. 315–320. 63. Pie-te Lien, “Who Votes in Multiracial America? An Analysis of Voting Registration and Turnout by Race and Ethnicity, 1990–1996,” in Yvette M. Alex-Assensoh and Lawrence Hanks (eds.), Black and Multiracial Politics in America (New York: New York University Press, 2000), pp. 199–224. See also Tasha Philpot and Hanes Walton, Jr., “One of Our

Own: Black Female Candidates and the Voters Who Support Them,” American Journal of Political Science Vol. 51 (2007), pp. 49–62; and Andrea Simpson, “Going It Alone: Black Women Activists and Black Organizational Quiescence,” in Wilbur Rich (ed.), African American Perspectives on Political Science (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), pp. 151–168. 64. Laughlin McDonald, A Voting Rights Odyssey: Black Enfranchisement in Georgia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 163. 65. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Department of Justice Voting Rights Enforcement for the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election: A Briefing Report (Washington, DC: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, July, 2009). See also another briefing Report of the Commission that urges Congress not to renew the VRA with Section 5 in it: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Reathorization of the Temporary Provisions of the Voting Rights Act: An Examination of the Act’s Section 5 Preclearance Provision, Briefing Report (Washington, DC: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, April 2006). Congress renewed the Act, this conservative report notwithstanding. 66. Keesha Middlemass, “Racial Politics and Voter Suppression in Georgia,” in Pearl K. Ford (ed.), African Americans in Georgia: A Reflection of Politics and Policy in the New South (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2010), p. 15. For Middlemass’s other study of disenfranchisement in Georgia see “Barack Obama and the Black Electorate in Georgia: Identifying the Disenfranchised,” in Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke (eds.), Barack Obama and African American Empowerment: The Rise of Black America’s New Leadership (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 209–224. 67. Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 347. 68. Middlemass, p. 16. 69. Ibid., p. 17. 70. Ibid., p. 18. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., pp. 18–19. 74. Ibid., p. 19. 75. “Complaint Against the Georgia Photo ID Amendment, September 19, 2005,” in Valelly (ed.), pp. 345–351. See also Laughlin McDonald, “Federal Oversight of Elections and Partisan Realignment,” ibid., pp. 172–174 for the section on Georgia. For a pioneering analysis of voter fraud in Georgia where local whites used absentee ballots against an African American female candidate see Hanes Walton, Jr., “The Political Use of Absentee Ballots in a Rural Black-Belt County: Dr. Merolyn Stewart-Gaulden’s Election Campaign for Tailaferro County School Superintendent,” in Hanes Walton, Jr. (ed.), Black Politics and Black Political Behavior: A Linkage Analysis (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), pp. 169–188. 76. Middlemass, p. 17. See also Building Confidence in U.S. Elections: Report of the Commission on Federal Election Reforms (Washington, DC: Center for Democracy and Election Management—American University, 2005), pp. 45–48. 77. For a discussion of the speeches given by Senator Obama see Chapter 27. 78. http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?=s110-453. The House bill number was H.R. 1281. 79. Richard Scher, The Politics of Disenfranchisement: Why Is It So Hard to Vote in America? (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2011), p. 107. 80. Lizette Alvarez, “Republican Legislators Push to Tighten Voting Rules,” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/us/politics/29vote .html?_r=1&emc=eta1. 81. Cynthia Gordy, “Donna Brazile: Voter Photo ID Not the Answer,” http://www.theroot.com/views/donna-brazile-voter-photo-idnot-answer, May 4, 2011. 82. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Department of Justice Voting Rights Enforcement for the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election: A Briefing Before the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Held in Washington, D.C. (Washington, DC: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 2009), pp. 1–3, http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/DOJVotingRights2008Presidential Election.pdf. 83. Ibid., p. 65.



The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Expansions and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006 647

84. Ibid., p. 73. For more on how absentee ballots have been used against African American candidates see Walton, “The Political Use of Absentee Ballots,” pp. 169–188. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid. 87. Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella, Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 43. See John Fund, Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004), and his How the Obama Administration Threatens to Undermine Our Elections, 2nd Edition (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2008). 88. United States Government Accountability Office, U.S. Department of Justice: Information on Employment Litigation, Housing and Civil Enforcement, Voting, and Special Litigation Sections’ Enforcement Efforts from Fiscal Years 2001 through 2007, (Washington, DC: Government Accountability Office, 2009), p. 62, Table 20. 89. Tracy Campbell, Deliver the Vote: A History of Election Fraud, an American Political Tradition—1724–2004 (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2006). 90. King-Meadows, Chapters 4 and 5. See also Spencer Overton, Stealing Democracy: The New Politics of Voter Suppression (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007); and for a comprehensive survey of voter suppression and intimidation in the 2008 presidential elections see Wendy

Weiser and Margaret Chen, “Recent Voter Suppression Incidents,” http:// brennan.3cdn.net/e827230204c5668706_p0m6b54jk.pdf, accessed June 14, 2011, and their “Voter Suppression Incidents 2008,” www.brennancenter .org/content/resource/voter_suppresion_incidents, accessed June 14, 2011. For an earlier study see Frances Fox Piven, Lorraine C. Minnite, and Margaret Groarke, Keeping Down the Black Vote: Race and the Demobilization of American Voters (New York: The New Press, 2009). For data on the other side of the controversy see Justin Levitt, “The Truth About Voter Fraud,” http://www.truthaboutfraud.org/pdf/TruthAboutVoterFraud.pdf, accessed June 14, 2011, and Lorraine C. Minnite, “The Politics of Voter Fraud,” http://www.bradblog.com/Docs/PoliticsofVoterFraudFinal.pdf, accessed June 14, 2011. 91. Robert W. Mickey, “The Beginning of the End for Authoritarian Rule in America: Smith v. Allwright and the Abolition of the White Primary in the Deep South, 1944–1948,” Studies in American Political Development 22 (Fall 2008): 143–182. Quote on p. 182. 92. “Reauthorization of the 1965 Voting Rights Act: What Expires and What Does Not,” in Valelly, The Voting Rights Act, pp. 353–354. 93. Hanes Walton, Jr., and Daniel Brantley, “Black Southern Politics: A Look at the Tradition and the Future,” in Walton, Black Politics and Black Political Behavior: A Linkage Analysis, pp. 289, 293, and 295. 94. Ibid. 95. Mickey, p. 181.

CHAPTER 26

Felon and Ex-Felon Disenfranchisement The Newest Technique of Vote Dilution and Candidate Diminution The Historical Genesis of African American Felon Disenfranchisement: The Slave and Black Codes

650

Before Mass Incarceration: Segregation as a Criminalization System

652

Table 26.1 Number of African American and White Prisoners Sent to State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories, 1939

654

Table 26.2 Number of African American and White Male Felony Prisoners Sent to State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories, 1939

654

Table 26.3 Rank Ordered Distribution of Arrests by Race According to Type of Offense, 1940

655

African American Felons and Ex-Felons During Mass Incarceration

655

Figure 26.1 Rank Order Distribution of Non-Violent Offense Arrests of African Americans, 1940 656 Table 26.4 Statehood, Changes to Felon Disenfranchisement Laws, and Comparison to Adoption of Universal White Suffrage

657

Table 26.5 Disenfranchised Felons by Region and State, 2004 659 Table 26.6 Disenfranchised African American Felons by Region and State, 2004 660 Table 26.7 Race and Gender of Persons Convicted of Felonies in State Courts, by Offense, 2006 662 Table 26.8 Types of Felony Sentences Imposed in State Courts, by Race of Felons and Offense, 2006 662 Table 26.9 Mean Length (in Months) of Felony Sentences Imposed in State Courts, by Race, Gender, and Offense, 2006 663 Table 26.10 Corrections and Felony Disenfranchised Populations by Region and State, 2004–2008 664 Figure 26.2 Number of African Americans Disenfranchised by Felony Convictions in the South and Border States, 2004 666 Figure 26.3 African Americans by Felony Disenfranchisement in the South and Border States as a Share of the Total African American Population in the State, 2004 666 Figure 26.4 African Americans by Felony Disenfranchisement in the South and Border States as a Share of the Total Felony Disenfranchised Population in the State, 2004 667

National Coalition on Black Voter Participation (NCBVP) Report

667

Table 26.11 Procedure for the Restoration of Voting Rights to Ex-Felons and Ex-Convicts in Selected States, 1995 669

Summary and Conclusions on Felon Disenfranchisement

670

Notes 671

650

F

Chapter 26

elon and ex-felon disenfranchisement resurfaced as a voting barrier facing the African American electorate during the 2000 presidential election with the highly publicized and disputed outcome in Florida. As one of several consequences determining the outcome of the election, Republican nominee George W. Bush won the state of Florida, and thereby the presidential election, by 537 votes when the U.S. Supreme Court halted a recount in Florida. Bush’s brother Jeb was governor and Secretary of State Katherine Harris was the state co-chair of his presidential election campaign. Secretary of State Harris had contracted with a private firm to develop a list of felons and to remove them from the voting rolls, but the list was rife with errors and identification problems. Nevertheless, the state allowed its implementation, which disenfranchised numerous members of the African American electorate. In effect, this act of disenfranchisement resulted in not only a razor-thin Republican victory in the state but also a Republican Party victory in the presidential election. The United States Commission on Civil Rights, after investigating voting irregularities in the state, reported that “the state of Florida is one of eight states that permanently disenfranchise felons or former felons who have satisfied all sentencing requirements. . . . Over 31 percent of the disenfranchised population in Florida are African American men. Of all the disenfranchised former felons in the United States, one-third are found within the borders of Florida.”1 Chair of the Commission, attorney, and professor Mary Frances Berry described in her book on the history of the Commission how one African American voter, “Apostle Willie Whiting . . . the fifty-year-old African American pastor of the House of Prayer Church in Tallahassee,” was erroneously accused of being a felon and was denied the right to vote in the 2000 election due to an inaccurate purge list. She recounted that “as he stood in the polling place with his family, a poll worker told him he was a convicted felon and could not vote. Whiting protested that he had never been arrested, but to no avail.”2 Such testimony pervaded the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights’ Hearings in Florida concerning the huge numbers of voting irregularities and the disenfranchisement of the African American electorate in the 2000 presidential election in the state of Florida. Therefore, the Commission found “that the problems Florida had during the 2000 presidential election were serious and not isolated. In many cases, they were foreseeable and should have been prevented. The failure to do so resulted in an extraordinarily high and inexcusable level of disenfranchisement, with a significant disproportionate impact on African American voters.”3 This egregious use of felon disenfranchisement to restrict African American voting in fact is only the latest in a long history. When seen across the time span of the African American journey in America, from colonial times to the present, there is a linkage between the systems of criminalization—the Slave Codes, followed by the Black Codes, Segregation, and then the War on Drugs. Each system has been a way of generating convicts, felons, and ex-felons in the African American community. And the failure of scholars to include these variables in the knowledge equation about the nature and scope of the emergent massive

incarceration and to note that it only started during the War on Drugs in 1982 is simply another way to perpetuate the stereotype of African American criminality and to permit the disenfranchisement of the African American electorate to continue under the guise of another name. Most of the books and articles on felon disenfranchisement declare with no qualifications that this technique came into use to diminish the African American electorate during the Era of Disenfranchisement. But the technique began initially with the passage of Slave Codes in colonial times; it then became more refined and polished with the passage of the infamous Black Codes by the states of the old Confederacy in 1865–1866.4 Then, during the Era of Disenfranchisement, African American felon disenfranchisement came into its own as a front line issue of African American voting rights; and Florida in 2000 gave it a new birth. Thus, it has been born, reborn, and redeployed throughout American political history.

The Historical Genesis of African American Felon Disenfranchisement: The Slave and Black Codes The historical roots of felon and ex-felon disenfranchisement in America are found in the nation’s Roman, English, and European background and legacies. Historian Alexander Keyssar noted: “The right to vote also was withheld from another group of men who violated prevailing social norms, those who had committed crimes, particularly felonies or so-called infamous crimes. . . . Disfranchisement for such crimes had a long history in English, European, and even Roman law. . . . The rationale for such sanctions was straightforward: disfranchisement, whether permanent or for an extended period, served as retribution for committing a crime and as a deterrent to future criminal behavior.”5 Aspects of this technique arose in Colonial America but were not imposed upon Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color as a group or class of voters during Colonial and Antebellum America simply because so few of them had any suffrage rights at all. The technique grew out of the Slave Codes. Professor John Hope Franklin declared: “After the colonies secured their independence and established their own governments, they did not neglect the matter of slavery in the laws that they enacted. . . . All over the South . . . there emerged a body of laws generally regarded as the Slave Codes, which covered every aspect of the life of the slave.”6 Professor Franklin continued: “There were variations from state to state, but the general point of view expressed in most of them was the same: slaves are not people but property; laws should protect the ownership of such property and should also protect whites against any dangers that might arise from the presence of large numbers of slaves.”7 And finally, according to Professor Franklin: “Most petty offenses were punishable by whipping, while more serious ones were punishable by branding, imprisonment, or death. Arson, rape of a white woman, and conspiracy to rebel were capital crimes in all the slaveholding states,” and these codes everywhere forbade slaves from voting.8 These codes laid the groundwork for felon disenfranchisement for all African Americans who inhabited this category of private property.



Felon and Ex-Felon Disenfranchisement 651

Next, after the Civil War, when those who had been considered private property became recognized as free human beings and shortly thereafter as citizens, the Slave Codes evolved into the infamous Black Codes. Through 1865 and 1866 . . . [m]ost Southern whites, although willing to concede the end of slavery even to the point of voting for the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment, were convinced that laws should be speedily enacted to curb blacks and to ensure their role as a laboring force in the South. These laws, called Black Codes . . . can hardly be described as measures that respected the rights of blacks as free individuals. . . . Vagrancy laws imposed heavy penalties that were designed to force all blacks to work whether they wanted to or not. Numerous fines were imposed for seditious speeches, insulting gestures or acts, absence from work, violating curfew, and the possession of firearms. There was, of course, no enfranchisement of blacks and no indication that in the future they could look forward to full citizenship and participation in a democracy.9 Historian James M. McPherson explained the problems inherent in specific criminal punishments in the Black Codes. His findings indicated that “[t]he provisions of the black codes relating to vagrancy, apprenticeship, labor, and land, however, provoked Republican accusations of an intent to create a new slavery. The Mississippi and South Carolina codes, passed first, were the harshest in these respects. They defined vagrancy in such a broad fashion as to allow magistrates to arrest almost any black man whom they defined as unemployed, fine him for vagrancy, and hire him out to a planter to pay off the fine.”10 Thus, even perceived vagrancy made an African American a criminal, and he was jailed as a consequence. Attorney Laughlin McDonald described the Georgia Black Codes: “The first postwar constitutional convention was held at the state capitol in Milledgeville in October 1865. The delegates were all white, and they proposed a constitution designed to maintain the old racial order. They . . . continued the exclusion of blacks from voting and office holding.”11 After the state constitutional convention, state elections were held, and a new post-war state legislature was convened in December 1865. In November 1866, the state legislature hewed to its pre-war policy of white supremacy and “decline[d]” to ratify the recently enacted Fourteenth Amendment, which declared that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” . . . Although blacks were nominally given “full and equal benefits of all laws,” the law did not grant blacks the right to vote or to hold office. Alexander Stephens, elected in 1866 to the U.S. Senate from Georgia, explained to the Joint Committee on Reconstruction that, as regards the extension of political rights to Negroes, the “general opinion of the State is very much averse to it.”12

Thus, whether a slave or a freed person were in Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia, or indeed any other state of the entire southern region, the Slave and Black Codes disenfranchised and completely excluded them from political life. Also, both of the codes simultaneously criminalized them, even though this criminalization was not conjoined with disenfranchisement. Later, they would become wedded and welded to each other as felon and ex-felon disenfranchisement. Hence, these two different sets of codes would make the merger possible simply because they had set the legal groundwork and foundation to treat many or even most African Americans as criminal and therefore excludable from the electorate. Despite the linkage between these two codes, they had a great difference. Historians Richard Hume and Jerry Gough noted: “the . . . Black Codes, the bulwark of the self-reconstruction envisioned by President Andrew Johnson, had applied indiscriminately to all blacks: those free prior to the war, those liberated as a consequence of Confederate defeat, those of mixed racial heritage, those who had worn the Union blue, and even those from the North who had only recently appeared in Dixie.”13 This was not true of the Slave Codes, which applied to the vast majority of the African American population but not the Free-Women-andMen-of-Color population, who could vote in several colonies and, later, states in the nation.14 The Southern “Redemption Movement” back to white supremacy from Reconstruction became the political moment in the South where these two legal codes began the merger process at the voting rights level to provide the state constitutional foundations for felon and ex-felon disenfranchisement. Professor Alexander Keyssar explained: Even before Reconstruction came to a quasi-formal end in 1877, black voting rights were under attack. Elections were hotly contested, and white Southerners, seeking to “redeem” the region from Republican rule, engaged in both legal and extralegal efforts to limit the political influence of freedmen. In the early 1870s, both in the South and in the border states, districts were gerrymandered (i.e., reshaped for partisan reasons), precincts reorganized, and polling places closed to hinder black political participation. Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia reinstituted financial requirements for voting, while local officials often made it difficult for freedmen to pay their taxes so that they could vote.15 The Compromise of 1877 signaled the victory of the first phase of the Redemption Movement despite the fact that some of the white redeemer regimes were already in place.16 In 1882 South Carolina’s legislature passed the “Multiple Ballot-Box Law,” “which established insuperable barriers to both registration and voting. The registration law established a onetime registration in 1882 and gave registrars broad discretion in deciding an applicant’s eligibility. The election law introduced a system of multiple ballot boxes—eight, in fact, . . . that ensured the automatic rejection of wrongly deposited or incorrectly marked tickets.”17

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Redemption put political control of the state legislature, and usually the gubernatorial office, in the hands of the white Democrats, and with it enhanced their ability to manipulate the election outcomes in their states to their own satisfaction. Professor Perman described this process: [T]he ascendant Democrats used a variety of means to limit black voting and keep the Republican Party at bay. Violence continued, but the Democrats primarily focused their efforts on the electoral system, employing various methods such as gerrymandering election districts, rigging the balloting system, controlling the supervision of elections, and, not least, engaging in outright fraud at the ballot box.18 Even though electoral manipulation significantly reduced the size, impact, and influence of the African American electorate, this was a hit-or-miss procedure, and most importantly it had to be done each and every time there was a congressional, state, or local election. Thus, a more permanent solution was needed, and the writing of these new state constitutions, beginning with the Mississippi Plan of 1890, provided the instrument. Again historian Perman found that among these white Democratic Redeemers, “‘[e]limination’ was the term they invariably employed, suggesting that attempts merely to curb, limit, or restrict black voting were to be rejected in favor of measures that were sweeping and thorough.”19 Thus, the end result of the white Democratic Redemption Movement in the South was the Era of Disenfranchisement (1888–1901), which was “the promise of a [permanent] solution . . . to deprive the voter of the right to vote. In that case, the deprivation or loss of the vote would occur not at the ballot box at every election but at the point of registration and probably once. The shift in focus [was] away from manipulating and denying the vote at elections and toward eliminating it at registration. . . .”20 Hence, disenfranchisement was not just another suffrage restriction simply because it had sought to eradicate and purge, not merely suppress, the African American electorate. And in attempting to do so it merged both the Slave and Black Codes via felon and ex-felon disenfranchisement. During the Era of Disenfranchisement, “[c]riminal exclusion laws also were altered to disfranchise men convicted of minor offenses, such as vagrancy and bigamy. There restrictions sometimes were written into state constitutions; elsewhere they simply were passed as statutes by state legislatures.”21 Professor Alexander Keyssar wrote: “The precise list of crimes that triggered disfranchisement varied considerably from state to state. Major crimes were on the list almost everywhere, but lesser offenses— including vagrancy, breaking a water pipe, participating in a common-law marriage, and stealing edible meat—could do the trick in particular states.”22 In the South, during and after the Era of Disenfranchisement states crafted all sorts of laws as felonies to disenfranchise. “South Carolina crafted a law to disenfranchise for crimes of ‘thievery, adultery, arson, wife-beating, housebreaking, and attempted rape’ while excluding murder.”23 But this state was not alone. In Alabama’s state constitution of 1901, “such offenses as ‘embezzlement, larceny, receiving stolen property,

obtaining money or property under false pretenses, assault and battery on the wife, bigamy, miscegenation, crime against nature or crime involving moral turpitude; also any person convicted as a vagrant or tramp, or election fraud.”24 “The overarching aim of such restrictions usually undisguised, was to keep poor and illiterate blacks—and in Texas, Mexican Americans—from the polls.”25 With the passage and adoption of such laws in the Era of Disenfranchisement, the merger had finally taken place.

Before Mass Incarceration: Segregation as a Criminalization System The new system of legalized segregation arrived simultaneously with the Era of Disenfranchisement. Gunnar Myrdal defines segregation in his classic volume, An American Dilemma, thusly: “social segregation and discrimination is a system of deprivations forced upon the Negro group by the white group.”26 To this definition, Professor Myrdal added: “That segregation and discrimination are forced upon the Negroes by whites becomes apparent in the one-sidedness of their application. . . . The rules are understood to be for the protection of whites and directed against Negroes. This applies also to social rituals and etiquette.”27 Professor Myrdal continued: The sanctions which enforce the rules of segregation and discrimination also will be found to be one-sided in their application. They are applied by the whites to the Negroes, never by the Negroes to the whites. . . . The police and the courts . . . are active in enforcing customs far outside those set down in legal statutes; the object of this enforcement is the Negro. Threats, intimidations, and open violence are additional sanctions, all directed against the Negroes.28 Overall, segregation meant the separation of the races in all walks of public and private life. “Every Southern state and most Border States have structures of state laws and municipal regulations which prohibit Negroes from using the same schools, libraries, parks, playgrounds, railroad cars, railroad stations, sections of streetcars and buses, hotels, restaurants and other facilities as do the whites.”29 And furthermore, “[i]n the South there are, in addition, a number of sanctions other than the law for enforcing institutional segregation as well as etiquette. Officials frequently take it upon themselves to force Negroes into a certain action when they have no authority to do so.”30 Legalized and institutional segregation made all of these separations a crime if they were violated. Lastly and for our analysis here, the point must be made that “segregation of Negroes in jails, penitentiaries, reformatories, insane asylums, follows the same pattern found for schools and other public facilities.”31 Beyond the required separation of the criminal justice facilities in the South and the Border States, there were additional rules and regulations for African Americans when they entered state public buildings like county courthouses and local municipal buildings: Negroes may enter public buildings in the South . . . but in the South the rules are that they must not loiter, must remove their hats, must not expect service until all



Felon and Ex-Felon Disenfranchisement 653 whites have been accommodated . . . must sit in rear or side seats in most courtrooms, and in general must follow the etiquette most cautiously. Of all the institutions run by the government, public bathing beaches, pools and bath houses have the most complete segregation.32

Professor Perman wrote concerning the link between disenfranchisement and segregation that “at the beginning of the new century, every southern state except Georgia, which would follow in 1906–08, had disfranchised its black electorate . . . by constitutional revision,” and established “a pattern of social inequality . . . by statute.”33 And with these summary insights, he concluded, “the race problem had been settled by these two parallel and interlinked initiatives. Together, they shaped race relations after 1900, defining the system more sharply and precisely and imparting to it a quite different tone and texture.”34 In the end both of these two systems became legalized and institutionalized, and both of them made race a basis for crime and punishment. While disenfranchisement made political equality a crime, segregation was much more expansive in that it made interpersonal relations, interracial etiquette, racial contact, racial insults like protesting and disagreeing with segregation, and opposition behavior crimes. Segregation established a “color line,” and to step across this color line or even to approach it became a crime. On this point, Professor Myrdal found that “only Negroes are arrested for violations of the segregation laws, and sometimes they are even arrested for violations of the extra-legal racial etiquette (the formal charge is ‘disturbing the peace,’ ‘insolence to a police officer,’ ‘violation of municipal ordinances,’ and so on)” or simply “acting uppity.”35 Thus, in the system of legalized and institutionalized segregation, crime for African Americans simply became omnipresent, and one of the main reasons why it was embedded in the southern system of criminal justice. Again, Professor Myrdal provided some keen insights into this system of southern criminal justice during the segregation period in America. In his analysis of race-relations in America, he found: In the policeman’s relation to the Negro population in the South, there are several singularities to be observed. . . . One is that he stands not only for civic order as defined in formal laws and regulations, but also for “white supremacy” and the whole set of social customs associated with this concept. In the traditions of the region a break of caste rules against one white person is conceived of as an aggression against white society and, indeed, as a potential threat to every other white individual. It is demanded that even minor transgressions of caste etiquette should be punished, and the policeman is delegated to carry out this function. Because of this sanction from the police, the caste order of the South, and even the local variations of social custom, become extensions of the law. To enable the policeman to carry out this function, the courts were supposed to back him even when he proceeded far outside normal police activity. His word was taken against

Negroes without regard for legal rule of evidence, even when there were additional circumstantial facts supporting the contention of the Negro party.36 Beyond the police officials, the courts, and the justice system were the “operators and conductors—[who] feel themselves obliged to sanction and enforce rules of racial etiquette and custom. They also are the watchdogs against ‘social equality.’”37 Hence, it should not come as a surprise that “under these conditions it is no wonder that these [court] functionaries often feel themselves—and white authority—challenged.”38 Therefore, the final result of this reality is that “the courts will usually feel obliged to back up these functionaries [police and court officials] even when it is apparent that they have transgressed their legitimate powers.”39 Moreover, both the police and courts are available “for sanctioning private white interest against Negroes, and, on the other, the indulgence of private white persons in taking the law into their own hands,” which they did on a daily basis.40 Therefore, for the African American, crimes abounded everywhere in social segregation, and justice in such a criminal justice system resided only in “white supremacy.” Thus, mass arrests inside the African American community were further rooted in segregation as well as in electoral process via disenfranchisement. This dualism attached crime, for African Americans, to both the political and social spheres. Few were supposed to escape criminalization. The legalized and institutionalized segregation of the South also carried with it a specific attitude and belief about “Negro and crime.” Literally this attitude and belief made Negroes and crime one and the same thing. According to the classic study by Myrdal, “whites believe the Negro to be innately addicted to crime. The importance of Negro crime as a basis of social relations arises not only out of this fact, but also out of the fact that Negro crime gets great publicity. Even today a large proportion—perhaps a majority—of news about Negroes that appears in white newspapers of both South and North is about Negro crimes.”41 He added: When a Negro commits a newsworthy crime, . . . only rarely is an indication of his race not prominently displayed. To many white Northerners, this crime news is the most important source of information they get about Negroes. To white Southerners, the crime news reinforces the stereotypes and sometimes serves to unite the white community for collective violence against the individual Negro criminal or the local Negro community in general. The crime news is unfair to Negroes, on the one hand, in that it emphasizes individual cases instead of statistical proportions (a characteristic of all news, but in this case unfair to Negroes because of the racial association with especially disliked crimes) and, on the other hand, in that all other aspects of Negro life are neglected in the white press which gives unfavorable crime news an undue weight.42 Beyond creating a stereotype about Negro crime for both northern and southern media consumption, segregation aided in the generation of crime statistics so as “to buttress stereotypes of

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Chapter 26

Negro criminality and to justify discriminatory practices,” such as feeding only Negro crime stories to the northern media in the hopes of halting and limiting potential northern intervention and interferences in the unconstitutional practices in the South, when ugly acts of extreme regional violence such as lynching become nationally visible and shameful.43 These ugly acts came to light in the civil rights struggle, such as the lynching of fourteen year old Emmett Till for breaching the color line by whistling at a white woman or the brutal beating of voter rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, which she described at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City in 1964.44 Professor Myrdal pointed out that prior to 1939 “the statistical studies of Negro crime have not been consistent in their findings and each has evoked much criticism in scientific circles.”45 He even points out that the Bureau of the Census beginning in 1890 offered “criticism of its own crime statistics” and its “enumerations of the prison population.” In offering his own critique and criticism of works on Negro crime statistics between 1890 and 1938, Myrdal wrote: Statistics on Negro crime have not only all the weaknesses of crime statistics generally—such as incomplete and inaccurate reporting, variations between states as to definitions and classification of crimes, changes in policy—but also special weaknesses due to the caste situation and to certain characteristics of the Negro population. One of the basic weaknesses arises out of the fact that those who come in contact with the law are generally only a selected sample of those who commit crimes. Breaking the law is more widespread in America than the crime statistics indicate and probably everyone in the country has broken some law at some time. . . . It happens that Negroes are seldom in a position to commit these white collar crimes; they commit the crimes which much more frequently result in apprehension and punishment. This is a chief source of error when attempting to compare statistics on Negro and white crime. In the South, inequality of justice seems to be the most important factor in making statistics on Negro crime and white crime not comparable.46 Using the 1939 Negro crime data from the Myrdal book, it is possible to get some idea about the nature and scope of African American crime and felons in this dual period of disenfranchisement and social segregation. Table 26.1 provides the statistical data for the year 1939 on the African American and white, female and male prisoners in both state and federal prisons and reformatories in the entire nation. The table includes the rate of incarceration per 100,000 population in the nation for African Americans, whites, and “other races.” Table 26.2 provides a limited regional breakdown of these 1939 felony data for males by race: African American, white, or other races. The Myrdal data do not permit a breakdown between the South and the Border States because the data are combined. In terms of comparison and contrast, the South and the Border States with their social segregation system had nearly

Table 26.1  Number of African American and White Prisoners Sent to State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories,1939 Prisoners Received from Courts Female

Rate per 100,000 Population

Male

Race and Nativity Number Percent Number Percent

Total

Female Male Total

African American

1,189

6.9%

16,135

93.1%

17,324

18.0

257.4 134.7

White

2,175

4.5%

45,796

95.5%

47,971

 3.7

 77.0  42.3

2,023

4.5%

43,257

95.5%

45,280

 3.8

 80.9  42.4

152

5.6%

2,539

94.4%

2,691

 2.8

 42.2  23.6

31

4.3%

698

95.7%

729

12.7

202.9 123.8

Native Foreignborn Other Races

Source: Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1944), p. 971.

Table 26.2  Number of African American and White Male Felony Prisoners Sent to State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories, 1939 Southern and Border Statesa Race and Nativity African American White

Number

Rate per 100,000 Population

8,548

86.3

Northern and Western Statesb Number

Rate per 100,000 Population

4,402

148.7

10,791

c

24,194

c

10,659

34.3

22,759

30

Foreign-born

132

21.1

1,435

13.3

All Other Races

91

88.6

298

61.3

19,430

46.6

28,894

32.1

Native

Total

Source: Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1944), p. 971. Myrdal’s data for southern states exclude Alabama and Georgia, which did not report. In addition to Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and West Virginia, his Border States data include Oklahoma and the District of Columbia and exclude Missouri. a

b

Missouri is included among northern and western states.

c

Myrdal’s data does not indicate rate per 100,000 population for all whites.

double the number of incarcerated African American males compared to the combined North and West regions, but the other regions had a much higher rate of incarceration for African American males per 100,000 in the population. Of course, the other regions had a smaller African American population. Professor Myrdal also developed a tabular presentation on the nature and types of arrests that African Americans faced in a legal and institutionalized system of social segregation. In Table 26.3 we have rank-ordered and rearranged his data based on what percentage of the overall incidence of these arrests were attributed to African Americans. Column one lists all of the different types of offenses that African Americans were charged with committing. There are in this first column twenty-eight offenses, which include felonies and non-felonies as well as those that were not stated (19.5%). The second column shows that the



Felon and Ex-Felon Disenfranchisement 655 Table 26.3  Rank Ordered Distribution of Arrests by Race According to Type of Offense, 1940

Offense Charged

Percent African American of Total in Each Offense

Rate per 100,000 Population African American

White

Liquor laws

47.2%

36.5

4.4

Weapons, carrying, possessing, etc.

45.8%

20.3

2.5

Assault

44.0%

116.4

15.7

Gambling

41.9%

43.2

6.0

Criminal homicide

40.1%

19.8

3.2

Robbery

30.8%

31.7

7.6

Larceny-theft

28.4%

138.1

37.4

Disorderly conduct

28.1%

64.2

17.6

Stolen property; buying, receiving, etc.

27.3%

7.6

2.2

Suspicion

27.1%

130.6

37.9

Prostitution and commercialized vice

25.4%

17.7

5.6

Burglary—breaking or entering

24.5%

66.3

22.0

All other offenses

23.5%

69.2

24.1

Rape

22.1%

10.4

3.9

Road and driving laws

21.6%

10.0

3.9

Other traffic and motor vehicle laws

21.0%

15.5

6.2

Vagrancy

19.5%

81.5

36.0

Not stated

19.5%

6.5

2.9

Narcotic drug laws

19.3%

7.5

2.9

Arson

17.4%

1.5

0.8

Offenses against family and children

15.6%

9.7

5.7

Other sex offenses

14.9%

11.1

6.8

Auto-theft

14.8%

15.4

9.6

Parking violations

14.3%

0.1

0.1

Drunkenness

12.3%

110.3

84.8

Embezzlement and fraud

11.5%

17.1

14.2

Forgery and counterfeiting

9.1%

5.0

5.4

Driving while intoxicated

6.8%

15.3

22.4

673.8%

1,078.5

391.8

(Unweighted) Mean

24.1%

38.5

14.0

Median

21.9%

17.4

6.1

a

Total

Source: Adapted from Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1944), p. 973. Calculations by the authors. a

Rates per 100,000 population of less than one-tenth of a percent.

African American share of these twenty-eight offenses went from a high of 47.2% for violation of liquor laws (moonshine operations were a huge part of the underground economic system and were made more prominent during the segregation era because of Prohibition in the region)47 to a low of 6.8% for driving while intoxicated. In fact, during the overlapping eras of segregation, disenfranchisement, and Prohibition, numerous white groups and their movements against strong drink moved to have the

African Americans disenfranchised because they saw this group only as “wets” (i.e., for liquor) despite the fact that there was a substantial group inside the African American community who were “drys” (i.e., opposed liquor).48 The last two columns in the table allow a comparison and contrast between the two races. The rate per 100,000 population shows that the charges for “suspicion” for African Americans stood at 130.6 per 100,000 but only 37.9 per 100,000 for whites. Clearly, there were certain charges occurring at rates much higher for African Americans than whites. Only with driving while intoxicated and forgery and counterfeiting did whites have a higher arrest rate than African Americans. Segregation was one of the most vital reasons for this difference. Figure 26.1 (p. 656) presents the data on African American arrests for non-violent crimes. And the main finding arising from this figure is that African Americans made up a disproportionate share of the arrests for violating liquor and gambling laws. Collectively, the 1939 and 1940 crime data from the Myrdal study are quite distinctive in empirically suggesting that long before the mass incarceration of African Americans during the rise and evolution of the War on Drugs,49 segregation was filling the jails with African Americans for race crimes and felonies. The non-felony crimes, like vagrancy, suspicion, “not-stated” crimes, and all other offenses that targeted African Americans because of the color of their skin, or their alleged violations of getting near or crossing the color-line, became tools of social control during this era. Hence, jailing African Americans in large numbers before the War on Drugs was possible simply because segregation criminalized being black and black behavior. And while the numbers of those jailed were not as high as the present incarceration rate during this War on Drugs, the trend had been established about which race in America was more prone to be arrested as a criminal. And the early federal intervention with several voting rights acts (1957–1967) into the suffrage rights struggle in the southern states did not deal with the mass incarceration of African Americans during the era of segregation in the South.50

African American Felons and Ex-Felons During Mass Incarceration The great difference between the jailing of African Americans in the segregation era and the era of the War on Drugs is the rampant building of new jails and prisons in the latter period. In the more recent period, the huge rush to warehouse prisoners has become big business. Prison building is now a major industry in America, and the erection of prisons in small and mid-size communities is now an economic boon that is hardly mentioned in any of the swath of books addressing felon and ex-felon disenfranchisement.51 This ever-expanding building of prisons has allowed the growth and continuance of mass-incarceration. It is an error to declare that the modern mass incarceration of African Americans took place in response to the rise of crack cocaine. Professor Michelle Alexander found that . . . there is no truth to the notion that the War on Drugs was launched in response to crack cocaine.

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Chapter 26

Figure 26.1  Rank Order Distribution of Non-Violent Offense Arrests of African Americans, 1940 50%

Percent African American of Total in Each Offense

45%

47.2% 41.9%

40% 35% 30%

28.1%

27.1%

25%

21.6%

20%

21.0%

19.5%

19.5% 14.3%

15% 10%

12.3% 6.8%

5% 0%

Liquor laws Gambling

Disorderly conduct

Suspicion

Road and Other traffic Vagrancy driving and motor laws vehicle laws

Not stated

Parking Drunkenness Driving violations while intoxicated

Source: Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1944), p. 973.

President Ronald Reagan officially announced the current drug war in 1982, before crack became an issue in the media or a crisis in poor black neighborhoods. A few years after the drug war was declared, crack began to spread rapidly in the poor black neighborhoods of Los Angeles and later emerged in cities across the country. The Reagan administration hired staff to publicize the emergence of crack cocaine in 1985 as part of a strategic effort to build public and legislative support for the war. The media campaign was an extra-ordinary success. . . . The media bonanza surrounding the “new demon drug” helped to catapult the War on Drugs from an ambitious federal policy to an actual war.52 Professor Alexander continued: “The impact of the drug war has been astounding. In less than thirty years, the U.S. penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran.”53 Alexander further wrote: “The racial dimension of mass incarceration is its most striking feature. No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial and ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.”54 Hence, the meaning of this mass incarceration for African American

disenfranchisement is simply staggering. The third renewal and reauthorization of the VRA and the declaration of the War on Drugs both occurred in the same year: 1982. Initially, President Reagan promised to veto the VRA, but after Congress indicated that it would override the president’s veto, President Reagan signed the VRA on June 29, 1982, for a twenty-five year extension instead of the previous five-year period.55 Here was a policy for the white rural communities in America. Since crime had been a major concern for the Republican Party since 1964, “the Justice Department announced its intention to cut in half the number of specialists assigned to identify and prosecute whitecollar criminals and to shift its attention to street crime, especially drug-law enforcement. In October 1982, President Reagan officially announced his administration’s War on Drugs.”56 And at the moment that President Reagan launched the War on Drugs, “less than 2 percent of the American public viewed drugs as the most important issue facing the nation.”57 Why did the president launch the policy? Was it something for his conservative white constituency? And at the very least, someone among his advisors and policy makers had to have known that there would be political consequences. The effect of felon and ex-felon disenfranchisement on the African American electorate has long had well-known political consequences. As Table 26.4 demonstrates, the technique was employed in Congress-led Reconstruction (1867–1868), an excellent tool for diluting the African American vote in presidential, congressional, state, and local elections. And because of the mass incarceration since the 1980s, “in some states, black men



Felon and Ex-Felon Disenfranchisement 657 Table 26.4  Statehood, Changes to Felon Disenfranchisement Laws, and Comparison to Adoption of Universal White Suffrage

State

Year of Statehood

Adoption of Universal White Male Suffragea

Year of First Felon Disenfranchisement Law

Years of Major Amendments Related to Felon Disenfranchisement

South Alabama

1819

 

1867c

 

Arkansas

1836

 

1868

1964

Florida

1845

 

1868c

1885

Georgia

1788

 

1868

1983

Louisiana

1812

1845

1845c

1975

Mississippi

1817

 

1868

 

North Carolina

1789

 

1876

1970, 1971, 1973

South Carolina

1788

 

1868

1895, 1981

Tennessee

1796

 

1871

1986

Texas

1845

 

1869c

1876, 1983, 1997

Virginia

1788

 

1830c

 

Delaware

1787

 

1831

2000

Kentucky

1792

1792

1851

 

Maryland

1788

1801

1851

1957, 2002

Missouri

1821

 

1875c

1962

West Virginia

1863

1963b

1863d

 

Border States b

c

Other Regions Alaska

1959

 

1959d

1994

Arizona

1912

 

1912d

1978

California

1849

b

1849

1849

1972

Colorado

1876

 

1876d

1993, 1997

Connecticut

1788

 

1818

1975, 2001

Hawaii

1959

 

1959d

1968

Idaho

1890

 

1890

1972

Illinois

1818

 

1870c

1970, 1973

Indiana

1816

1816b

1852c

1881

Iowa

1846

1846b

1846d

2005

Kansas

1861

1861

d

1859

1969, 2002

Maine

1820

 

 

 

Massachusetts

1788

 

2000

 

Michigan

1837

 

1963

 

Minnesota

1858

1858b

1857d

 

Montana

1889

 

1909

1969

Nebraska

1867

 

1875

2005

Nevada

1864

b

1864

1864

2003

New Hampshire

1788

 

1967

 

New Jersey

1787

1844

1844

1948

New Mexico

1912

 

1911d

2001

New York

1788

1821

1847

1976

North Dakota

1889

 

1889

1973, 1979

Ohio

1803

 

1835c

1974

b

d

d

d

d

(Continued)

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Chapter 26

Table 26.4 (Continued)

State

Year of Statehood

Adoption of Universal White Male Suffragea

Year of First Felon Disenfranchisement Law

Years of Major Amendments Related to Felon Disenfranchisement

Oklahoma

1907

 

1907d

 

Oregon

1859

1859

1859

1961, 1975, 1999

Pennsylvania

1787

1931

1860

1968, 1995, 2000

Rhode Island

1790

1928

1841

1973

South Dakota

1889

 

1889d

1967

Utah

1896

 

1998

 

Vermont

1791

 

 

 

Washington

1889

 

1889

1984

Wisconsin

1848

b

1848

1848

1947

Wyoming

1890

 

1890d

 

d

d d

Source: Adapted from Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), Tables A2.1 and A2.2. a

Universal white male suffrage developed during the years of 1828 to 1865.

b

At time of statehood, state had neither a property nor a taxpaying requirement for voting.

c

Legislature given the power to restrict suffrage by the first state constitution.

d

Felons disenfranchised at statehood.

have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates twenty to fifty times greater than those of white men. And in major cities wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized” disenfranchisement for the duration of their lives.58 This racialized mass incarceration is now permitted to continue and have these disenfranchising effects because of the nature of absolution that it gives. In short, mass incarceration is predicated on the notion that an extraordinary number of African Americans (but not all) have freely chosen a life of crime and thus belong behind bars. A belief that all blacks belong in jail would be incompatible with the social consensus that we have “moved beyond” race and that race is no longer relevant. But a widespread belief that a majority of black and brown men unfortunately belong in jail is compatible with the new American creed, provided that their imprisonment can be interpreted as their own fault. If the prison label imposed on them can be blamed on their culture, poor work ethic, or even their families, then society is absolved of responsibility to do anything about their condition.59 In order to capture the empirical dimensions of the racialized felon and ex-felon laws on voting, Table 26.4 breaks down for the South, Border, and other states by the years of their first felon disenfranchisement laws. Said laws began to emerge in the South during the period when the Four Military Reconstruction Acts gave freedmen the right to vote in the South. Such is not the case in the Border States or, in the main, in the other states in the Union. In addition, the years when major amendments to these laws were passed tend to coincide with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and in those years in which African American

political empowerment was expanded at a very high rate. This coincidence clearly suggests a potential regional reaction to African American empowerment. Table 26.5 offers for 2004 the specific numbers of disenfranchised felons in the entire country broken down by prison population and crimes, as well as by region and state in relationship to the voting-age population so that one can get the potential rate of disenfranchisement. Taken collectively, the South has a higher rate of felon disenfranchisement than all of the other regions in the nation. Indeed, only five states outside the South have felon disenfranchisement rates as high as the mean in the South (4.8%). Given the region’s history, culture, and laws, this did not simply happen by chance. Table 26.6 (pp. 660–661) shows that as of 2004 the rate of disenfranchised African American felons was also higher in the South than in the Border or other states, and it was even higher than the entire national average or national median. The table shows that 10.8% of the African American voting age population in the South was disenfranchised. These empirical data offer support for our earlier comments about the South’s effort to dilute the impact of the African American electorate’s voting rights. Although these 2004 data do not permit specific types of disaggregation, a major finding from this year was that “a significant portion of the increase in felon disenfranchisement prosecution is in the area of drug crimes; the overwhelming majority of drug offenders are white, but African Americans constitute a majority of those imprisoned for drug offenses.”60 Hence, we will look for the impact of drug offences in the 2006 and 2010 data. Data on prisons and crimes for 2006 allow us to offer another empirical portrait two years beyond the 2004 data and to see the rapidity with which things have changed and increased due to this mass incarceration. Table 26.7 (p. 662) provides data on the race and gender of individuals convicted in state courts by different felony offenses in 2006. Looking at the drug offenses



Felon and Ex-Felon Disenfranchisement 659 Table 26.5  Disenfranchised Felons by Region and State, 2004

State (by Region)

Prisoners

Parolees

Felony Probation

Jail Inmates

Estimated Ex-Felons

Total Disenfranchised Felons

Voting Age Population

Disenfranchisement Rate

South Alabama

30,628

9,098

30,387

1,418

178,516

250,047

3,392,779

7.37%

Arkansas

13,699

15,461

28,532

 

 

57,692

2,043,701

2.82%

Florida

84,210

4,694

127,794

5,565

957,423

1,179,686

13,094,945

9.01%

Georgia

46,972

23,530

209,442

3,664

 

283,608

6,387,956

4.44%

Louisiana

36,047

25,065

34,366

2,712

 

98,190

3,318,779

2.96%

Mississippi

23,669

1,816

21,967

1,153

97,550

146,155

2,120,013

6.89%

North Carolina

34,298

216

37,136

1,463

 

73,113

6,319,805

1.16%

South Carolina

23,719

2,953

20,904

946

 

48,522

3,123,648

1.55%

Tennessee

25,835

7,983

32,288

2,254

25,899

94,259

4,447,269

2.12%

171,918

101,453

243,413

6,103

 

522,887

15,878,347

3.29%

35,172

5,158

37,463

2,153

297,901

377,847

5,587,563

6.76%

526,167

197,427

823,692

27,431

1,557,289

3,132,006

65,714,805

4.77%

South Mean

47,833

17,948

74,881

2,743

311,458

284,728

5,974,073

4.77%

South Median

34,298

7,983

34,366

2,204

178,516

146,155

4,447,269

3.29%

Texas Virginia South Subtotal

Border States Delaware

6,808

508

10,818

516

28,028

46,678

618,649

7.55%

Kentucky

17,470

9,609

29,311

1,183

128,775

186,348

3,123,645

5.97%

Maryland

23,434

14,223

20,482

1,111

52,272

111,522

4,130,817

2.70%

Missouri

30,515

17,123

45,305

810

 

93,753

4,297,142

2.18%

4,982

1,308

4,159

352

 

10,801

1,419,453

0.76%

Border Subtotal

83,209

42,771

110,075

3,972

209,075

449,102

13,589,706

3.30%

Border Mean

16,642

8,554

22,015

794

69,692

89,820

2,717,941

3.30%

Border Median

17,470

9,609

20,482

810

52,272

93,753

3,123,645

2.70%

West Virginia

Other Regions Alaska

4,658

927

5,083

463

 

11,131

459,529

2.42%

Arizona

33,103

9,291

55,259

1,315

77,136

176,104

4,061,499

4.34%

California

167,612

107,580

 

7,932

 

283,124

26,064,483

1.09%

Colorado

20,537

6,920

 

1,180

 

28,637

3,397,937

0.84%

Connecticut

19,012

3,090

 

752

 

22,854

2,647,997

0.86%

374

 

 

356

 

730

454,981

0.16%

Hawaii

6,265

 

 

264

 

6,529

960,466

0.68%

Idaho

6,034

2,767

8,265

350

 

17,416

994,905

1.75%

Illinois

44,156

 

 

1,669

 

45,825

9,422,938

0.49%

Indiana

24,615

 

 

1,630

 

26,245

4,591,742

0.57%

Iowa

8,700

3,446

10,632

330

98,311

121,419

2,250,634

5.39%

Kansas

9,333

4,146

13,907

477

 

27,863

2,028,426

1.37%

Maine

 

 

 

 

 

1,018,982

0.00%

Massachusetts

10,140

 

 

 

 

10,140

4,946,304

0.21%

Michigan

48,173

 

 

1,615

 

49,788

7,541,065

0.66%

Minnesota

8,675

3,614

25,768

727

 

38,784

3,810,605

1.02%

Montana

3,942

 

 

203

 

4,145

701,847

0.59%

Nebraska

4,024

736

5,385

239

51,612

61,996

1,298,451

4.77%

10,606

4,287

6,987

547

21,166

43,593

1,659,757

2.63%

2,417

 

 

170

 

2,587

981,456

0.26%

26,619

13,950

85,186

1,423

 

127,178

6,506,779

1.95%

Washington, D.C.

Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Dakota

-

6,466

2,953

8,002

658

 

18,079

1,372,580

1.32%

63,372

55,741

 

2,904

 

122,017

14,657,367

0.83%

1,380

 

 

86

 

1,466

487,010

0.30% (Continued)

660

Chapter 26

Table 26.5 (Continued)

State (by Region)

Prisoners

Parolees

Felony Probation

Estimated Ex-Felons

Jail Inmates

Total Disenfranchised Felons

Voting Age Population

Disenfranchisement Rate

Other Regions (continued) Ohio

43,927

 

 

1,560

 

45,487

8,620,509

0.53%

Oklahoma

22,844

4,047

21,962

688

 

49,541

2,633,289

1.88%

Oregon

13,376

 

 

852

 

14,228

2,710,424

0.52%

Pennsylvania

41,626

 

 

 

 

41,626

9,534,761

0.44%

Rhode Island

3,534

400

16,622

237

 

20,793

832,115

2.50%

South Dakota

3,138

 

 

133

 

3,271

568,883

0.57%

Utah

5,970

 

 

 

 

5,970

1,608,540

0.37%

 

 

 

 

 

-

481,661

0.00%

Vermont Washington

16,229

116

120,014

1,173

29,785

167,317

4,634,864

3.61%

Wisconsin

23,134

12,911

24,873

1,423

 

62,341

4,139,405

1.51%

Wyoming

2,018

586

3,171

118

14,304

20,197

380,169

5.31%

Other Subtotal

706,009

237,508

411,116

31,474

292,314

1,678,421

138,462,360

1.21%

Other Mean

21,394

12,500

27,408

1,049

48,719

47,955

3,956,067

1.21%

Other Median

10,140

3,614

13,907

673

40,699

26,245

2,250,634

0.84%

Nation Grand Total

1,315,385

477,706

1,344,883

62,877

2,058,678

5,259,529

217,766,871

2.42%

National Mean

26,845

13,649

43,383

1,397

147,048

103,128

4,269,939

2.42%

National Median

19,012

4,287

24,873

946

64,704

45,825

3,123,645

1.51%

Source: Adapted from Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 248–250. Calculations by the authors.

Table 26.6  Disenfranchised African American Felons by Region and State, 2004 African Americans

State

Prisoners

Parolees

Felony Probation

Jail Inmates

Estimated Ex-Felons

Total Disenfranchised Felons

Voting Age Population

Disenfranchisement Rate

South Alabama Arkansas

20,123

4,429

13,033

784

86,030

124,399

813,208

15.3%  9.0%

7,583

7,712

10,191

 

 

25,486

284,210

Florida

39,427

2,696

43,305

2,774

205,342

293,544

1,559,354

18.8%

Georgia

31,415

15,574

111,661

2,256

 

160,906

1,681,040

 9.6%

Louisiana

27,585

18,312

20,030

1,923

 

67,850

1,000,499

 6.8%

Mississippi

17,710

1,286

13,221

816

59,200

92,233

696,831

13.2%

North Carolina

22,466

136

18,672

952

 

42,226

1,277,505

 3.3%

South Carolina

16,622

2,054

11,515

649

 

30,840

830,653

 3.7%

Tennessee

13,143

4,542

13,675

1,311

10,526

43,197

672,913

 6.4%

Texas

78,251

40,213

45,203

2,318

 

165,985

1,785,595

 9.3%

Virginia

23,591

3,329

19,096

1,375

160,952

208,343

1,054,523

19.8%

297,916

100,283

319,602

15,158

522,050

1,255,009

11,656,331

10.8%

South Mean

27,083

9,117

29,055

1,516

104,410

114,092

1,059,666

10.8%

South Median

22,466

4,429

18,672

1,343

86,030

92,233

1,000,499

 9.3%

South Subtotal

Border States Delaware

4,364

266

5,074

 

11,159

20,863

106,283

19.6%

Kentucky

6,695

2,695

6,572

365

32,965

49,292

207,961

23.7%

Maryland

18,148

10,722

11,897

733

22,903

64,403

1,111,217

 5.8%



Felon and Ex-Felon Disenfranchisement 661 African Americans

State

Prisoners

Parolees

Felony Probation

Jail Inmates

Estimated Ex-Felons

Total Disenfranchised Felons

Voting Age Population

Disenfranchisement Rate

Border States (Continued) Missouri

13,948

6,879

13,524

335

 

34,686

435,218

 8.0%

794

256

362

50

 

1,462

42,499

 3.4%

43,949

20,818

37,429

1,483

67,027

170,706

1,903,178

 9.0%

Border Mean

8,790

4,164

7,486

371

22,342

34,141

380,636

 9.0%

Border Median

6,695

2,695

6,572

350

22,903

34,686

207,961

 8.0%  7.7%

West Virginia Border Subtotal

Other Regions Alaska

695

97

655

23

 

1,470

19,212

Arizona

5,015

1,453

4,719

179

12,815

24,181

114,708

21.1%

82,767

28,765

 

2,773

 

114,305

1,504,362

 7.6%

California Colorado

5,154

2,062

 

243

 

7,459

137,783

 5.4%

11,999

1,944

 

362

 

14,305

212,894

 6.7%

Washington, D.C.

371

 

 

327

 

698

224,361

 0.3%

Hawaii

355

 

 

11

 

366

21,442

 1.7%

Idaho

115

54

132

6

 

307

5,110

 6.0%

Illinois

31,965

 

 

1,088

 

33,053

1,230,967

 2.7%

Indiana

10,596

 

 

775

 

11,371

354,616

 3.2%

Iowa

2,218

513

1,162

62

10,750

14,705

43,275

34.0%

Kansas

3,600

1,471

3,548

130

 

8,749

118,799

 7.4%

Connecticut

Maine

 

 

 

 

 

-

3,466

 0.0%

3,804

 

 

 

 

3,804

236,703

 1.6%

Michigan

27,490

 

 

578

 

28,068

985,837

 2.8%

Minnesota

Massachusetts

2,309

1,841

4,587

128

 

8,865

111,714

 7.9%

Montana

56

 

 

6

 

62

2,783

 2.2%

Nebraska

1,194

181

846

48

9,135

11,404

50,230

22.7%

Nevada

3,303

1,406

1,540

163

6,219

12,631

101,951

12.4%

134

 

 

13

 

147

5,497

 2.7%

New Jersey

19,038

8,406

41,934

872

 

70,250

808,463

 8.7%

New Mexico

752

352

566

52

 

1,722

25,680

 6.7%

35,072

42,041

 

1,579

 

78,692

1,868,249

 4.2%

35

 

 

2

 

37

3,732

 1.0%

23,797

 

 

690

 

24,487

928,659

 2.6%

Oklahoma

8,215

1,362

5,084

222

 

14,883

202,628

 7.3%

Oregon

1,895

 

 

93

 

1,988

45,588

 4.4%  3.1%

New Hampshire

New York North Dakota Ohio

Pennsylvania

26,101

 

 

 

 

26,101

829,353

Rhode Island

1,232

113

3,775

63

 

5,183

27,489

18.9%

South Dakota

139

 

 

4

 

143

3,830

 3.7%

Utah

459

 

 

 

 

459

13,385

 3.4%

 

 

 

 

 

2,126

 0.0%

3,674

17

15,987

223

3,464

23,365

135,689

17.2%

11,156

6,129

6,483

526

 

24,294

218,943

11.1%

121

25

98

2

439

685

3,420

20.0%

324,826

98,232

91,116

11,243

42,822

568,239

10,602,944

 5.4%

Other Mean

9,843

5,170

6,074

375

7,137

16,235

302,941

 5.4%

Other Median

3,303

1,406

3,548

147

7,677

8,749

111,714

 5.4%

Vermont Washington Wisconsin Wyoming Other Subtotal

-

Nation Grand Total National Mean National Median

666,691

219,333

448,147

27,884

631,899

1,993,954

24,162,453

 8.3%

13,606

6,267

14,456

634

45,136

39,097

473,774

 8.3%

6,695

1,944

6,572

331

11,987

14,883

207,961

 6.7%

Source: Adapted from Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 251–253. Calculations by the authors. a

Maine and Vermont do not disenfranchise felons.

662

Chapter 26

Table 26.7  Race and Gender of Persons Convicted of Felonies in State Courts, by Offense, 2006

Table 26.8  Types of Felony Sentences Imposed in State Courts, by Race of Felons and Offense, 2006

Percent of Convicted Felons Most Serious Conviction Offense

Race

Percent of Felons Sentenced to— Gender

Total

African American

White

Othera

Male

Female

All offenses

100%

38%

60%

2%

83%

17%

Violent offenses

100%

39%

58%

3%

89%

11%

Murder/ Nonnegligent manslaughter

100%

51%

46%

3%

90%

10%

Sexual assault

100%

24%

74%

2%

97%

 3%

Rape

100%

28%

70%

2%

96%

 4%

Other sexual assaultb

100%

21%

77%

2%

97%

 3%

Robbery

100%

57%

42%

1%

91%

 9%

Aggravated assault

100%

39%

59%

3%

86%

14%

Most Serious Conviction Offense

Incarceration Total Total Prison

Jail

Nonincarceration Total Probation

Other

African American  All offenses

100%

72%

45%

Violent offenses

27%

28%

25%

4%

100%

78%

58%

20%

22%

19%

3%

Murder/Nonnegligent manslaughter

100%

95%

93%

 2%

 5%

 3%

2%

Sexual assaulta

100%

80%

65%

15%

20%

16%

4%

Robbery

100%

86%

71%

14%

14%

12%

2%

Aggravated assault

100%

72%

46%

26%

28%

23%

4%

Other violent

100%

68%

37%

31%

32%

28%

4%

Property offenses

100%

69%

41%

28%

31%

27%

4%

Burglary

100%

78%

57%

20%

22%

20%

3%

Larceny

100%

69%

36%

33%

31%

28%

3%

b

Other violent

100%

28%

69%

3%

88%

12%

100%

60%

30%

30%

40%

35%

5%

Property offenses

100%

33%

65%

2%

75%

25%

Drug offenses

100%

70%

43%

27%

30%

25%

4%

Burglary

100%

32%

66%

2%

90%

10%

Possession

100%

71%

38%

33%

29%

24%

5%

Larceny

100%

34%

64%

2%

75%

25%

Trafficking

100%

70%

46%

25%

30%

26%

4%

100%

26%

70%

5%

86%

14%

Weapon offenses

100%

73%

45%

28%

27%

25%

2%

Other specified offensesd

100%

70%

38%

31%

30%

27%

3%

29%

34%

29%

4%

c

Motor vehicle theft Fraud/Forgeryd

Fraud/Forgery

c

100%

32%

66%

2%

59%

41%

Drug offenses

100%

44%

55%

1%

82%

18%

All offenses

100%

66%

37%

Possession

100%

36%

62%

2%

80%

20%

Violent offenses

Trafficking

100%

49%

50%

1%

83%

17%

Weapon offenses

100%

55%

43%

2%

95%

Other specified offensese

100%

30%

67%

3%

87%

White 100%

74%

52%

23%

26%

22%

3%

100%

93%

92%

 2%

7%

 4%

3%

 5%

Murder/Nonnegligent manslaughter

13%

Sexual assaulta

100%

81%

64%

16%

19%

16%

4%

Robbery

100%

83%

70%

14%

17%

15%

2%

Aggravated assault

100%

69%

40%

29%

31%

27%

3%

Other violent

100%

68%

40%

28%

32%

27%

4%

Property offenses

100%

65%

36%

29%

35%

30%

5%

Source: Sean P. Rosenmerkel, Matthew R. Durose, and Donald J. Farole, Jr., “Felony Sentences in State Courts, 2006 – Statistical Tables,” Table 3.2, http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index .cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=2152, downloaded October 8, 2010. Note: Data on gender were reported for 86% of convicted felons and data on race for 74%. African American and white racial categories include persons of Latino or Hispanic origin. Detail may not sum to 100% because of rounding.

b

Burglary

100%

71%

46%

25%

29%

25%

4%

a

Includes American Indians, Alaska Natives, Asians, Native Hawaiians, and other Pacific Islanders.

Larceny

100%

66%

32%

34%

34%

30%

4%

b

Includes offenses such as statutory rape and incest.

Fraud/Forgery

c

Includes offenses such as negligent manslaughter and kidnapping.

d

Includes embezzlement.

e

Comprises nonviolent offenses such as vandalism and receiving stolen property.

alone one sees that whites are convicted at a much higher rate than African Americans for possession, yet more African Americans go to prison for trafficking than whites. Table 26.8 shows that, during 2006, 70% of the African Americans tried for drug offenses were incarcerated to 61% for whites. Although these numbers in most places were very similar, the racial disparities stand out again across multiple incarceration categories for blacks and whites. Table 26.9 shows the mean sentences handed out by the state courts for felonies, broken down by race, by gender, and by types of incarceration. In 2006, whites were given longer sentences than in previous years. Part of the reason

100%

59%

31%

27%

41%

35%

6%

Drug offenses

100%

61%

31%

30%

39%

34%

5%

Possession

100%

63%

28%

35%

37%

33%

4%

Trafficking

100%

59%

33%

26%

41%

35%

6%

Weapon offenses

100%

73%

45%

28%

27%

23%

4%

Other specified offensesd

100%

69%

34%

35%

31%

27%

4%

c

Source: Sean P. Rosenmerkel, Matthew R. Durose, and Donald J. Farole, Jr., “Felony Sentences in State Courts, 2006 – Statistical Tables,” Table 3.4, http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=2152, downloaded October 8, 2010. Notes: For persons receiving a combination of sentences, the sentence designation came from the most severe penalty imposed—prison being the most severe, followed by jail, probation, and then other sentences, such as a fine, community service, or house arrest. Prison includes death sentences. In this table “probation” is defined as straight probation. African American and white racial categories include persons of Latino or Hispanic origin. Detail may not sum to total because of rounding. a Includes rape. b Includes offenses such as negligent manslaughter and kidnapping. c Includes embezzlement. d Comprises nonviolent offenses such as vandalism and receiving stolen property.



Felon and Ex-Felon Disenfranchisement 663 Table 26.9  Mean Length (in Months) of Felony Sentences Imposed in State Courts, by Race, Gender, and Offense, 2006 Mean maximum sentence length for persons who were— African American Most Serious Conviction Offense

Men

Women

Mean maximum sentence length for persons who were—

White Men

African American

Women

Most Serious Conviction Offense

Sentenced to incarcerationa  All offenses

 45

Violent offenses

 88

25 41

Men

Women

White Men

Women

Sentenced to jail   40  75

25 52

All offenses

  6

5

  6

5

Violent offenses

  8

6

  7

6

Murder/Nonnegligent manslaughter

  7

f

11

 17

8f

  8

6

Murder/Nonnegligent manslaughter

266

175

265

225

Sexual assaultb

125

32

115

72

Sexual assaultb

 10

8

Robbery

101

54

 89

61

Robbery

  9

9

 10

10

Aggravated assault

 48

29

 42

30

Aggravated assault

  7

6

  7

5

  7

7

  7

6

Other violent

 41

17

 43

55

Other violentc

Property offenses

 35

23

 31

22

Property offenses

Burglary

 50

34

 41

29

Larceny

 23

19

 24

17

Fraud/Forgeryd

 27

23

 27

22

Drug offenses

 36

22

 31

22

Possession

 25

15

 21

17

Trafficking

 40

27

 39

26

Weapon offenses

Weapon offenses

 34

24

 34

24

Other offenses

Other offensese

 25

20

 26

22

c

Sentenced to prison 

  7

5

  6

5

Burglary

  7

5

  7

7

Larceny

  7

5

  6

5

Fraud/Forgeryd

  6

5

  6

5

Drug offenses

  6

5

  5

5

Possession

  5

5

  5

4

Trafficking

  6

5

  6

6

  7

6

  6

4

  6

5

  6

5

e

Sentenced to probation  All offenses

 37

36

 37

35

Violent offenses

 45

39

 44

40

Murder/Nonnegligent manslaughter

 66

83f

102

50

Sexual assaultb

 57

37

 57

78

Robbery

 49

47

 50

52

All offenses

 65

45

 62

46

Violent offenses

111

70

100

82

Murder/Nonnegligent manslaughter

271

191

268

238

Sexual assaultb

147

59

136

90

Aggravated assault

 39

36

 40

34

Robbery

116

72

102

75

Other violentc

 50

44

 42

37

Aggravated assault

 68

54

 63

55

Property offenses

 36

35

 37

37

Other violentc

 62

34

 63

80

Burglary

 38

31

 40

44

38

Larceny

 35

35

 36

37

44

Fraud/Forgery

Property offenses Burglary

 50  63

42 57

 48  57

Larceny

 36

35

 39

34

Fraud/Forgeryd

 45

43

 42

38

Drug offenses

 53

40

 52

42

Possession

 39

30

 39

35

Trafficking

 57

46

 61

46

Weapon offenses

 50

41

 51

42

Other offensese

 39

38

 44

46

was the publicity brought to the huge racial disparities in sentencing by African American civil and voting rights organizations. Finally, Table 26.10 (pp. 664–665) presents data from the end of 2004 on the corrections and disenfranchised felon populations in the South, the Border States, and the rest of the country. (Updated data may be available at the Web site for the Sentencing Project, but they are not available in this tabular form.)

 35

35

 35

36

Drug offenses

 38

38

 35

34

Possession

 35

39

 34

31

Trafficking

 39

37

 36

35

Weapon offenses

 34

27

 34

29

Other offenses

 29

27

 36

31

d

e

Source: Sean P. Rosenmerkel, Matthew R. Durose, and Donald J. Farole, Jr., “Felony Sentences in State Courts, 2006 – Statistical Tables,” Table 3.7, http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index. cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=2152, downloaded October 8, 2010. Note: For persons receiving a combination of sentences, the sentence designation came from the most severe penalty imposed, with prison being the most severe, followed by jail, then probation. In this table “probation” is defined as straight probation. Means exclude sentences to death or life in prison or on probation. African American and white racial categories include persons of Latino or Hispanic origin. a Includes prison and jail sentences. b Includes rape. c Includes offenses such as negligent manslaughter and kidnapping. d Includes embezzlement. e Comprises nonviolent offenses such as vandalism and receiving stolen property. f Estimate is based on 10 or fewer sample cases.

325,069

88,912

56,550

19,097

49,513

144,904

131,291

22,958

Connecticut

Hawaii

Idaho

Illinois

Indiana

Iowa

51,035

Border Median

Colorado

46,051

Border Mean

California

230,254

Border Subtotal

6,708

8,283

West Virginia

82,232

57,360

Missouri

Arizona

96,360

Alaska

51,035

53,614

Virginia

Maryland

427,080

Texas

Kentucky

58,109

Tennessee

17,216

41,254

South Carolina

Delaware

109,678

North Carolina

53,614

22,267

Mississippi

137,572

40,025

Louisiana

South Median

397,081

Georgia

South Mean

279,760

Florida

1,513,289

31,169

South Subtotal

53,252

Arkansas

Probation

Alabama

State

3,159

10,637

33,683

3,361

1,904

2,328

11,654

120,753

7,534

1,732

12,277

9,747

48,736

2,005

20,683

13,220

12,277

551

8,042

18,801

206,810

4,471

102,921

10,578

1,947

3,409

2,922

24,636

23,448

4,528

19,908

8,042

Parole

8,766

28,322

45,474

7,290

5,955

20,661

23,274

173,670

39,589

5,014

21,706

17,670

88,350

6,059

30,186

23,324

21,706

7,075

38,276

51,208

563,284

38,276

172,506

27,228

24,326

39,482

22,754

38,381

52,719

102,388

14,716

30,508

Prison2

3,637

17,567

20,066

3,787

 

 

13,638

82,138

15,479

65

11,424

10,921

43,685

4,077

10,461

12,386

16,761

 

24,223

29,065

319,720

26,424

66,534

24,223

12,226

17,171

11,422

31,867

44,965

63,620

6,125

15,143

Jail

12,403

45,889

65,540

11,077

 

 

36,912

255,808

55,068

5,079

37,089

31,240

124,960

10,136

40,647

35,710

38,467

 

56,653

80,274

883,014

64,700

239,040

51,461

36,552

56,653

34,176

70,248

97,684

166,008

20,841

45,651

Total

Incarcerated

Corrections Populations (2008)1

1,062

2,616

2,631

522

123

498

2,034

15,240

1,737

363

1,104

904

4,521

579

1,293

1,104

1,242

303

1,419

2,588

28,467

2,310

8,247

1,419

1,320

1,029

444

1,200

2,631

7,302

813

1,752

Juveniles (2006)3

9.3%

10.8%

10.8%

19.8%

 9.3%

 6.4%

 3.7%

 3.3%

13.2%

 6.8%

 9.6%

18.8%

 9.0%

15.3%

South

% of Black Population

 8.0%

 9.0%

 9.0%

 3.4%

 8.0%

 5.8%

23.7%

19.6%

14,705

11,371

33,053

308

366

14,304

7,459

114,305

24,181

1,469

34.0%

 3.2%

 2.7%

 6.0%

 1.7%

 6.7%

 5.4%

 7.6%

21.1%

 7.6%

Other Regions

34,685

34,141

170,705

1,462

34,685

64,403

49,293

20,862

12.1%

43.3%

72.1%

 1.8%

 5.6%

62.6%

26.0%

40.4%

13.7%

13.2%

37.0%

38.0%

38.0%

13.5%

37.0%

57.7%

26.5%

44.7%

55.1%

40.1%

40.1%

55.1%

31.7%

45.8%

63.6%

57.8%

63.1%

69.1%

56.7%

24.9%

44.2%

49.8%

9,030

26,245

45,825

6,384

6,529

19,764

21,717

175,544

34,418

5,121

18,653

17,436

87,181

5,334

31,325

24,545

18,653

7,324

35,761

50,327

553,598

37,325

178,021

28,089

24,665

35,761

24,822

38,759

50,636

89,775

13,699

32,046

in Prison/Jail

3,446

 

 

2,767

 

3,090

6,920

107,580

9,291

927

9,609

8,554

42,771

1,308

17,123

14,223

9,609

508

7,983

17,948

197,427

5,158

101,453

7,983

2,953

216

1,816

25,065

23,530

4,694

15,461

9,098

on Parole

10,632

 

 

8,265

 

 

 

 

55,259

5,083

20,482

22,015

110,075

4,159

45,305

20,482

29,311

10,818

34,366

74,881

823,692

37,463

243,413

32,288

20,904

37,136

21,967

34,366

209,442

127,794

28,532

30,387

on Probation

98,311

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

77,136

 

52,272

69,692

209,075

 

 

52,272

128,775

28,028

178,516

311,458

1,557,289

297,901

 

25,899

 

 

97,550

 

 

957,423

 

178,516

PostSentence

All Disenfranchiseda

Disenfranchised Populations (2004)4 % of Total Disenfranchised

African Americans

Border States

92,232

114,092

1,255,009

208,343

165,985

43,198

30,840

42,227

92,232

67,850

160,905

293,545

25,486

124,398

Number

Table 26.10  Corrections and Felony Disenfranchised Populations by Region and State, 2004–2008

121,418

26,245

45,825

17,416

6,530

22,854

28,636

283,124

176,103

11,132

93,752

89,820

449,098

10,800

93,752

111,521

186,348

46,677

146,155

284,728

3,132,003

377,847

522,887

94,258

48,522

73,113

146,155

98,190

283,607

1,179,687

57,691

250,046

Total

186,973

26,754

6,146

11,103

6,940

Pennsylvania

Rhode Island

South Dakota

Utah

Vermont

5,438

Wyoming

49,513

National Median

4,528

14,303

828,169

3,724

13,540

473,894

727

18,105

6,035

11,768

1,080

3,601

2,720

515

72,951

22,195

3,073

19,119

384

52,225

3,724

15,849

1,661

3,908

846

885

5,081

22,523

3,185

31

4,958

Parole

21,184

28,183

1,518,559

10,407

22,280

757,532

2,084

23,380

 

17,926

2,116

6,546

3,342

4,045

50,147

14,167

25,864

51,686

1,452

60,347

6,402

25,953

2,904

12,743

4,520

3,607

9,406

48,738

11,408

2,195

8,539

Prison2

12,306

16,250

785,556

7,110

12,391

384,114

1,551

14,304

3,552

12,693

 

6,739

1,432

 

34,455

6,549

9,585

19,853

944

29,535

8,514

17,621

1,728

7,110

3,098

2,265

7,023

18,118

12,619

1,545

6,904

Jail

35,710

46,962

2,304,115

20,285

36,844

1,105,317

3,635

37,684

 

30,619

 

13,285

4,774

 

84,602

20,716

35,449

71,539

2,396

89,882

14,916

43,574

4,632

19,853

7,618

5,872

16,429

66,856

24,027

3,740

15,443

Total

1,104

1,789

91,257

924

1,665

58,269

315

1,347

339

1,455

54

864

597

348

4,323

1,254

924

4,149

240

4,197

471

1,704

189

885

735

243

1,623

2,760

1,164

210

1,053

Juveniles (2006)3

% of Black Population

14,882

39,286

2,000,290

8,750

16,511

577,875

685

24,293

7,040

23,364

0

459

142

5,183

26,101

1,988

14,882

27,787

37

78,692

1,722

70,249

148

12,632

11,403

61

8,865

28,067

3,804

0

8,750

 6.8%

 7.9%

 8.3%

Nation

 6.0%

 5.1%

 5.4%

20.0%

11.1%

 3.1%

17.2%

 0.0%

 3.4%

 3.7%

18.9%

 3.2%

 4.4%

 7.3%

 2.6%

 1.0%

 4.2%

 6.7%

 8.7%

20.7%

12.4%

22.7%

 2.2%

 7.9%

 2.8%

 1.6%

 0.0%

 7.4%

U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Prisoners in 2008” (December 2009, NCJ 228417, http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/).

U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, “Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement Databook” (http://www.ojjdp.ncjrs.gov/ojstatbb/cjrp/).

Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), Table A3.3, pp. 248–253.

3

4

a

An empty cell indicates population in this category (column) that is eligible to vote.

Calculations by the authors.

U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Probation and Parole in the United States, 2008” (December 2009, NCJ 228230, http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/).

2

19,764

28,264

1,384,939

10,140

22,550

744,160

2,136

24,557

7,407

17,402

 

5,970

3,271

3,771

41,626

14,228

23,532

45,487

1,466

66,276

7,124

28,042

2,587

11,153

4,263

4,145

9,402

49,788

10,140

 

9,810

1

31.7%

38.0%

38.0%

24.9%

34.3%

34.3%

 3.4%

39.0%

95.0%

14.0%

 

7.7%

 4.3%

24.9%

62.7%

14.0%

30.0%

61.1%

 2.5%

64.5%

 9.5%

55.2%

 5.7%

29.0%

18.4%

 1.5%

22.9%

56.4%

37.5%

 

31.4%

in Prison/Jail

4,287

13,649

477,706

3,614

12,500

237,508

586

12,911

 

116

 

 

 

400

 

 

4,047

 

 

55,741

2,953

13,950

 

4,287

736

 

3,614

 

 

 

4,146

on Parole

24,873

43,383

1,344,883

13,907

27,408

411,116

3,171

24,873

 

120,014

 

 

 

16,622

 

 

21,962

 

 

 

8,002

85,186

 

6,987

5,385

 

25,768

 

 

 

13,907

on Probation

64,704

147,048

2,058,678

40,699

48,719

292,314

14,304

 

 

29,785

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

21,166

51,612

 

 

 

 

 

 

PostSentence

All Disenfranchiseda

Disenfranchised Populations (2004)4 % of Total Disenfranchised

Other Regions (continued)

Number

African Americans

Sources: Adapted from “The Sentencing Project Interactive Map,” http://www.sentencingproject.org/map/map.cfm#map, downloaded August 7, 2010.

83,297

National Mean

4,270,917

27,940

Other Median

Grand Total

71,561

Other Mean

2,504,626

Wisconsin

Other Subtotal

8,581

50,418

Washington, D.C.

113,134

41,888

Oregon

Washington

27,940

Oklahoma

4,233

260,962

Ohio

North Dakota

20,883

4,549

New Hampshire

119,405

13,337

Nevada

New York

19,606

Nebraska

New Mexico

9,072

Montana

128,737

127,627

Minnesota

New Jersey

175,591

Michigan

7,504

Maine

184,308

16,263

Kansas

Massachusetts

Probation

State

Incarcerated

Corrections Populations (2008)1

45,825

103,259

5,266,206

26,245

48,146

1,685,101

20,198

62,342

7,407

167,316

0

5,970

3,271

20,793

41,626

14,228

49,541

45,487

1,466

122,018

18,080

127,178

2,587

43,594

61,996

4,145

38,784

49,788

10,140

0

27,863

Total

666

Chapter 26

Figure 26.2  Number of African Americans Disenfranchised by Felony Convictions in the South and Border States, 2004 300,000 293,545

250,000 208,343 200,000 165,985 160,905 150,000 124,398 92,232

100,000

67,850

64,403 43,198

50,000

49,293

42,227

30,840

34,685

25,486

20,862 1,462

Southern States

ia irg tV

es

De

M

la

iss

w

in

ar

e

ri ou

ky uc

Ke

ar M

Ar

nt

yla

ns ka

ro Ca

W

So

No

ut

h

nd

as

a lin

a lin ro Ca

rth

Te

Lo

nn

ui

es

sia

se

e

na

pi ip iss

M

Al

iss

ab

or

am

gi

a

a

s xa

Ge

Vi

Flo

rg

Te

in

rid

ia

a

0

Border States

Source: Table 26.10.

Figure 26.3  African Americans by Felony Disenfranchisement in the South and Border States as a Share of the Total African American Population in the State, 2004 25%

23.7%

19.8%

20%

19.6%

18.8%

15.3%

15%

13.2%

9.6%

10%

9.3%

9.0%

8.0% 6.8%

6.4%

5.8%

5%

3.7%

3.4%

3.3%

Southern States Source: Table 26.10.

Border States

ia irg

in

nd W

es

tV

ar M

ou iss M

yla

ri

e

De

la

w

ar

ky Ke

nt

uc

a

No

rth

Ca

ro

lin

a Ca

ro

lin

se e es So

ut h

nn Te

Lo

ui

sia

na

as

Ar

ka

ns

s xa Te

a gi or

ip iss iss M

Ge

pi

a m ba Al a

a rid Flo

Vi

rg

in

ia

0%



Felon and Ex-Felon Disenfranchisement 667

Figure 26.4  African Americans by Felony Disenfranchisement in the South and Border States as a Share of the Total Felony Disenfranchised Population in the State, 2004 69.1%

70%

63.6%

63.1% 57.8%

60%

56.7%

57.7%

55.1% 49.8%

50%

45.8%

44.7%

44.2%

40%

37.0% 31.7%

30%

26.5%

24.9%

20% 13.5% 10%

Southern States

la nd W es tV irg in ia

ar y M

iss ou

ri

e M

ar w la

a

ky De

Ke nt uc

r id Flo

Te xa s

a Te nn es se e Ar ka ns as

ia

Al ab am

in rg Vi

a

a gi Ge or

No

rth

Ca

ro

lin

pi

a

iss iss ip

lin

M

Ca ro

h So

ut

Lo

ui

sia na

0%

Border States

Source: Table 26.10.

Again, the mean and median rates of disenfranchisement of the African American electorate in the South were greater than in the Border and other states. The key statistic is the percent of the total disenfranchised that the African American population made up. In the South, African Americans made up a staggering 40.1% of the disenfranchised population despite making up only 20.1% of the general population, according to the 2010 Census; the median among the eleven states of the South was 55.1%. Figure 26.2 ranks the South and the Border states by the number of African American felons who were disenfranchised, reported as of the end of 2004. Among the southern states, Florida had by far the largest number of disenfranchised, while in the Border States, Maryland “led” in this category. The South clearly had more disenfranchised African American felons than the Border States, and only four southern states had fewer individuals than the highest among the Border States. Figure 26.3 offers a portrait of these two regions as of the end of 2004 by analyzing the percentage of the African American population who had been disenfranchised because of their felony convictions. Virginia led in the South, and Kentucky led in the Border States. Though they had smaller African American populations, Kentucky and Delaware had disenfranchised a higher proportion of them. Finally, Figure 26.4 shows African Americans as a percentage of all who have been disenfranchised in the South and Border states by the end of 2004. In Louisiana, African Americans made up 69.1% of all persons who had been disenfranchised due to

felony convictions, followed by South Carolina and Mississippi, at 63.6% and 63.1%, respectively. In two of the Border states, Kentucky and Delaware, the ratio is 57.8% and 44.7%, respectively. Simply put, some of the Border States are just as harsh as the Deep South states. Overall, the empirical data from 2004, 2006, and 2008 tell us that mass incarceration has continued in America, and that one major consequence has been the disenfranchisement of a significant part of the African American electorate in the South and in several of the Border States. The resultant high disenfranchisement of African Americans, especially due to the War on Drugs, means that their power and participation in the nation’s political system has been significantly diluted. In addition, many states bar those with felony convictions from holding elective office.

National Coalition on Black Voter Participation (NCBVP) Report Although “Florida is ‘ground zero’ for the most recent discussion, debate and dialogue on ex-felons disenfranchisement,”61 African American voting rights activists and organizations were cognizant of the issue long before Florida made this new type of disenfranchisement famous. Already five years before the 2000 presidential election, two African American national voter rights organizations, Operation Big Vote and the National Coalition on Black Voter Participation (NCBVP), investigated felon disenfranchisement across the fifty states.

668

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“Operation Big Vote coalitions . . . [were] created in local areas by the Joint Center for Political Studies [a Washingtonbased think tank for African American politics and politicians] to work at increasing voter registration and turnout” in the African American community.62 The organization continued even as it helped birth the NCVBP: Operation Big Vote, which became part of the National Coalition, operates local coalitions that “conduct intensive voter education, registration, and get-out-the-vote activities while bringing together a broad cross-section of the community.” In 1989, seventy-two or more chapters operated in twenty-nine states. The coalition also operates an Information Resource Center, provides assistance on voter education techniques to Operation Big Vote coordinators and conveners, provides public service announcements on voter participation to the media throughout the country, and sponsors the Black Women’s Roundtable.63 Meanwhile, a new voter rights organization—NCBVP—had evolved out of Operation Big Vote. Professor Dianne Pinderhughes wrote that “in 1976, the National Coalition on Black Voter Participation . . . was created by thirty-five national organizations ‘to reverse the decline in black voter participation.’”64 In 1989, the National Coalition on Black Voter was composed of eighty-six diverse membership organizations. The National Coalition is an organization of organizations in the tradition of the MIA and the SCLC. The membership organizations included churches and other religious groups, labor unions, professional associations, political officials, policy groups, and social groups.65 One of the executive directors of the NCBVP, Sonia Jarvis, argued that “although the Voting Rights Act did much to extend the right to vote to blacks nationally, new means of curbing the power (and concomitantly, the enthusiasm) of that vote were devised and instituted.”66 Her insights included felon disenfranchisement, and she made efforts against it as director of this new voting rights organization. These two African American voting rights organizations prepared a report from their investigative study of state voting laws pertaining to ex-convicts/felons: “On August 9, 1995, NCBVP sent a fax to each of the fifty State Board of Elections requesting ‘. . . information on your state’s voting laws as they pertain to ex-convicts; specifically what steps are necessary to reinstate an ex-offender’s right to vote.’”67 “Although the NCBVP request went to all of the fifty states, by the time of the deadline for this [report] 35 had responded.”68 An analysis of that report in Table 26.11 reveals that all but two of the states that responded (including all eleven southern states) disenfranchised individuals convicted of felonies. The second column describes the sundry and diverse state agencies that in 1995 were in charge of restoring voting rights to ex-felons. In the eleven southern states there were seven different state agencies

that dealt with this matter, as well as two of the eleven states that did not stipulate the agency. And only two states, Tennessee and Texas, used the same agency, the County Election Board. Other than these two, each state had its own restoration agency. A similarly diverse set of circumstances prevailed in the Border States. Thus, the process of restoring voting rights for ex-felons in the South was and remains cumbersome, confusing, and complicated. The fourth column in Table 26.11 shows the initial step that the ex-felon must take upon completing his or her sentence and getting out of prison. In Alabama, he or she had to first get a pardon document and then take it to the State Board of Pardon and Parole. In Arkansas the ex-felon had to follow a procedure set by an unnamed agency. Two states, Florida and Georgia, did not stipulate a procedure, while Louisiana did not have such a procedure. North Carolina required a Court Certificate, and in Tennessee the ex-felon needed a Certificate of Discharge. Texas sought the ex-felon’s discharge papers. Finally, in Virginia, ex-felons needed to make an application to the governor. Two states, Texas and Virginia, required a waiting period that ex-felons must observe before they could begin the process of re-enfranchisement. In the other nine states no such time period existed. Therefore, the data in this table tell us that exfelons must take at least two steps and in some instances three steps before they can regain their voting rights. And such steps tend to differ from state to state across the region. But the NCBVP was not the only African American organization seeking to address and deal with the matter of felon and ex-felon disfranchisement. The issue became national with the Million Man March on Washington, D.C., on October 16, 1995.69 The march and its organizers included among the goals and objectives some resolutions on the felon and ex-felon disenfranchisement problems. At the march, the official march mission statement was read to the gathering, but the “much more policy-oriented” Million Man March Manifesto with its “Political Empowerment” section “was ‘bumped’ from the program and not presented to the participants.”70 This section expressed the march’s concerns with felon and ex-felon disenfranchisement. Following the march three members of the Congressional Black Caucus— Congressman John Lewis (D-GA), Congresswomen Eleanor H. Norton (D-DC), and Congressman Charles Rangel (D-NY)— coalesced with three whites—Democrat Charles Schumer and two Republicans, Jim Leach (R-IA) and Bill McCollum (R-FL)—and sent a letter to President William J. “Bill” Clinton asking him “to appoint by Executive Order a bipartisan Blue Ribbon Commission . . . to study and make recommendations on race relations, and to issue a report.”71 When Clinton failed to do so, the momentum to publicize this new form of disenfranchisement and possibly get some public policy legislation fizzled. The Democratic presidential administration sidetracked and ignored this issue and the effort. Only the fiasco in the presidential election of 2000 in Florida catapulted it back into the local and national spotlight. Hence, what one sees from the empirical tabular evidence is the rise of the felon disenfranchisement issue after the 2000 presidential election problems in Florida. To be sure, the Department of Justice reports of the mid-1990s and the subsequent



Felon and Ex-Felon Disenfranchisement 669 Table 26.11  Procedure for the Restoration of Voting Rights to Ex-Felons and Ex-Convicts in Selected States, 1995 Disenfranchised Due to Felony

State

Restoration Agency Pardon/End of Sentences

Procedure at End of Sentence

Term Requirements

South Alabama

Yes

Board of Pardon and Parole

Pardon Document

None

Arkansas

Yes

(not stipulated)

Procedure/Agency

None

Florida

Yes

Office of Executive Clemency

(not stipulated)

None

Georgia

Yes

(not stipulated)

(not stipulated)

None

Louisiana

Yes

Clerk of Court

None

None

Mississippi

Yes

2/3 Both Houses of State Legislature

 

None

North Carolina

Yes

General Court of Justice

Court Certificate

None

South Carolina

Yes

Re-apply

(not stipulated)

None

Tennessee

Yes

County Election Board

Certificate of Discharge

None

Texas

Yes

County Election Board

Discharge Papers

2 years

Virginia

Yes

Governor

Application

9 mos.–1 yr.

a

Border States Delaware

Yes

(not stipulated)

(not stipulated)

2 years

Maryland

Yes

Board of Supervisors of Elections

Attorney General

None

West Virginia

Yes

No statute about procedures

 

9 mos.–1 yr.

Arizona

Yes

Parole Office

(not stipulated)

None

Colorado

Yes

County Clerk and Recorder

(not stipulated)

None

Connecticut

Yes

Registrar of Voters

Letter/Parole, Probation Office

None

District of Columbia

Yes

Board of Elections

(not stipulated)

None

Idaho

Yes

Board of Pardon and Parole/Governor

Application/Letter

2 years

Indianab

Yes

No Requirements

(not stipulated)

30 days

Iowa

Yes

Governor’s Office

(not stipulated)

2 years

Kansas

Yes

County Election Office

(not stipulated)

1 year

Maine

Yes

 

 

None

Nevada

Yes

County Clerk

(not stipulated)

None

New Hampshire

Yes

Re-apply

No Procedure

None

New Jersey

Yes

Re-apply

No Procedure

None

North Dakota

Yes

(not stipulated)

Certificate of Discharge

None

Oklahoma

Yes

County Election Board

Voter Registration Form

Length/Sentence

Oregon

Yes

Re-apply

(not stipulated)

None

South Dakota

Yes

County Auditors

Document

None

Utah

No

 

 

None

Vermont

No

 

 

 

Washington

Yes

(not stipulated)

Discharge Papers

9 mos.–1 yr.

Wisconsin

Yes

County Office

Certificate

9 mos.–1 yr.

Wyoming

Yes

Governor’s Office

 

9 mos.–1 yr.

Other Regions

Source: Adapted from Hanes Walton, Jr., and Simone Greene, “Voting Rights and the Million Man March: The Problem of Restoration of Voting Rights for Ex-Convicts,” African American Research Perspectives Vol. 3, No. 1 (Winter 1997), pp. 71–72. a

In Georgia, individuals convicted of moral turpitude crimes are not disenfranchised and become immediately eligible to vote after fulfilling sentencing requirements.

b

Indiana prohibits the restoration of officeholding.

670

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reports of the Sentencing Project in the same time frame helped to bring this new disenfranchising technique into public view and onto the public agenda. African Americans were quite soon in the electoral fray and offering their facts and voices, as they have since the beginning of their suffrage rights struggle in Colonial America.

Summary and Conclusions on Felon Disenfranchisement In the 2000 presidential election, a southern state (Florida) resurrected from its electoral past an enduring technique (albeit in disguise), ex-felon disenfranchisement, to limit the impact and influence of the African American electorate. The erroneous purging of African American voters began under the guise of an electoral reform which Florida “began in November 1998, when Katherine Harris, complying with a law enacted by the Republican-dominated state legislature, paid a private company, Database Technologies, Inc. (DBT), $4 million to expunge from the state’s voting rolls duplicate registrations, people who had died, and felons.”72 Adding to this list of supposed reforms, Florida’s Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who was also the state campaign chair of George W. Bush’s presidential committee, “ordered counties to strike from eligibility lists any former inmates who had moved to Florida.” DBT eventually produced a “‘scrub list’ of Florida residents who could be struck from the rolls. The list . . . was wildly inaccurate. Among those slated for purging, for instance, were individuals whose conviction dates were cited as sometime in the future.”73 Of this supposedly new reform law and the manner in which it was implemented, investigative reporter Gregory Palast notes that it was “so quiet, subtle, and intricate, that if not for Bush’s 500-vote eyelash margin of victory . . . the chance of [its] discovery would have been vanishingly small.”74 This purge of the voting rolls was so well done that it “effectively blindsided African Americans. . . . 54 percent of the voters in Hillsborough County targeted by the ‘scrub’ were African American, in a county where blacks made up 11 percent of the voting population. In Miami-Dade, fully 66 percent (3,794) of those struck from the polls were black.”75 Here, the use of reform succeeds in being effective enough to lessen the impact and influence of the African American electorate. But this is not the first time that the South and Florida had worked under the guise of electoral reform techniques to disenfranchise the African American electorate. On this point Professor Perman is quite incisive and informative. Of the earlier use of electoral reforms he found that: Disfranchisement began around 1890 when the idea of ballot reform was sweeping across the nation as state after state rushed to introduce the Australian, or secret, ballot. It ended roughly fifteen years later just as another fundamental reform in the American electoral system, the direct primary, was also proving irresistible. But it is not merely a chronological coincidence that disfranchisement occurred between these two major developments. Their relationship to southern disfranchisement went much deeper, for both reforms actually shaped the

process of disfranchisement and both were introduced by the Democrats as integral parts of their drive to reorganize the southern political system. . . . These two electoral reforms therefore provided not just the context but also content for disfranchisement.76 The other background of Florida’s voter purge was the stereotype about African Americans as criminals and criminally prone in their social behavior. Given the pervasive nature of this stereotype that had existed since the time of slavery, it should not have come as a surprise that the final list would be errorfilled, with numerous individuals who had never committed a crime much less a felony. But this result did surprise many in the nation and the African American community. And despite the existence of the Voting Rights Act, the purge literally stopped hundreds of African Americans from voting in the 2000 presidential election that was decided by 537 votes. This chapter shows, however, that the root of the ex-felon problem for the African American electorate is not individuals mistaken for felons, as happened in Florida, but the disproportionate number of African Americans who were and are disqualified by the normal application of the law. The chapter describes and explains how past legal systems and institutions like the Black Codes and Slave Codes were used from day one to circumscribe and limit the rising African American electorate by defining crimes that applied only to their race. Incarceration began then and not just with the War on Drugs. The chapter then moves to describe and explain how disenfranchisement and segregation emerged together and how the system of segregation essentially made race a crime and thereby sent numerous individuals to the jails, if not as felons surely as convicts. Segregation perpetuated the old Slave and Black Codes but just in a new and different format, and jailing continued in America as it had under the old system of slavery. Segregation exacerbated this process. And in this chapter we offer empirical data to reveal how segregation imprisoned members of the African American community for crimes that were not felonies except under the system of segregation. We then turn to defining, discussing, and explaining the nature, scope, and political significance of African American felons and ex-felons during the mass incarceration which occurred along with the War on Drugs. However, we do not say that felon and ex-felon disenfranchisement is a recent form of vote dilution. This technique evolved earlier when it was discovered that the federal government would uphold the right to vote of African Americans. Once that happened, the denial of the right to vote in the South was not possible simply based on its constitutional standing. But a system where the African American electorate could be reduced, especially via means of their own cultural, social, and political behavior, was acceptable. Thus, laws targeted these behaviors and stereotypes of the African American people. This chapter presents some of the recent empirical incarceration data that offer evidence of the numbers of African Americans in jail in the different states and on the national level. And it presents information on the groups of people state courts send to jail and for what offenses. This system remains in place despite efforts such as the one we document by the National Coalition on Black Voter

Participation (NCBVP). Much like the “military industrial complex” that Presidential Eisenhower warned of with its potential for runaway societal investment, the “prison industrial complex” has succeeded as seemingly a national urban policy for dealing with African Americans, with many small towns, in the North and South and indeed in much of the rest of the nation, seeking the largesse of their legislatures to have prisons built and even concentrated in or near their communities. These prisons can even increase the vote for particular political parties and political units. On this matter Professor of Law Gabriel Chin found: “Felon disenfranchisement . . . was aimed in substantial part at African-Americans and continues to affect them disproportionately. Yet, precisely because of that disproportionality, the political process contains powerful incentives to maintain felon disenfranchisement, as well as those aspects of the criminal justice system resulting in disproportionate prosecution of African-Americans. Prisoners count for purposes of apportioning Congress, and sometimes state and local legislative bodies as well. Accordingly, every African-American incarcerated not only suppresses a vote, but increases the voting power of everyone else in the jurisdiction” surrounding the prison.77 The building of prisons is now concentrated in the rural areas of the nation, bringing to these areas economic benefits in terms of reduced unemployment, redistribution of state and federal funding, and a new base of political representation, all at the expense of urban areas, from where most of the prison populations have come. Not only have convictions and incarcerations become the main instrument of “states’ rights” prerogatives and policy, but prison locations have succeeded as a modern day version of the “3/5ths clause” in that the Census awards representation based on its “usual residence rule.”78 Compared to its impact on reducing crime and making communities safer, the prison industrial complex has been far more consistently effective in producing patronage employment, bringing the benefits of greater population without the associated costs, and where the objective is punitive, lowering the fortunes of African Americans and the urban areas where they live.79 A state law in New Jersey allowed the state highway patrol to simply stop African Americans on the highway and ticket them whether they had committed a crime or not. This New Jersey targeting law existed prior to the 2000 presidential election. At the moment, this targeting of African Americans has not yet assumed the role of a disenfranchising tool. But it is a system that criminalizes individuals in the African American community and jails them. And since most of these prisons are now erected in rural communities, this will provide a certain type of advocacy partisanship to grow and develop in that community and Congress as well.80 And once seen in this perspective, felon and ex-felon disenfranchisement is not simply vote dilution; it is simultaneously a form of representation increases. Thus, the uniqueness of this latest and newest technique is that it cuts both ways, decreasing the potential electoral and political power of the African American electorate and increasing the potential electoral and political power of whites and certain political parties simultaneously. Hence, there will be strong political opposition to change felon and ex-felon disenfranchisement. There are some new empirical data that support this claim.

Felon and Ex-Felon Disenfranchisement 671 Two sociologists have developed statistical estimates about how ex-felons would vote as well as the size and number of these ex-felons. Professor Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen wrote first in the American Sociological Review, then in a book chapter in an edited volume, and finally in their own book about these statistical estimates.81 In their book, they make the case that felon disenfranchisement could have changed the outcome in the Florida 2000 presidential election, several senate elections, and, based on “some guesses,” the outcome in several gubernatorial elections.82 Clearly, there is a cost not only to the African American electorate but also to certain high level candidates (likely Democratic) as long as this form of disenfranchisement continues. As it is not possible to completely roll back the Fifteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—and its renewals in 1970, 1975, 1982, and 2006—this technique and tactic still has great beneficial electoral potential for some white ruling elites. Overcoming this form of disenfranchisement is one of the new tasks and struggles for the current and future African American voting rights activists and movements. The past is still here in the present and in the offing for the nation’s future, the Voting Rights Act notwithstanding.

Notes   1. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2001), pp. 56–57.   2. Mary Frances Berry, And Justice for All: The United States Commission on Civil Rights and the Continuing Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2009), p. 9.   3. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, p. xvii.   4. William Harris, “Formulation of the First Mississippi Plan: The Black Code of 1865,” Journal of Mississippi History Vol.29 (August 1967), pp. 181–201.   5. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 62.   6. John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 7th Edition (New York: McGrawHill, 1994), p. 124.  7. Ibid.   8. Ibid., p. 125.   9. Ibid., p. 225. 10. James McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1982), p. 512. 11. Laughlin McDonald, A Voting Rights Odyssey: Black Enfranchisement in Georgia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 17. 12. Ibid., p. 18. 13. Richard Hume and Jerry Gough, Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags: The Constitutional Conventions of Radical Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), p. 266. 14. Mary Francis Berry, “Slavery, the Constitution, and the Founding Fathers,” in John Hope Franklin and Genna Rae McNeil (eds.), African Americans and the Living Constitution (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 1995), pp. 11–16; and John Hope Franklin, “Race and the Constitution in the Nineteenth Century,” ibid, pp. 22–28. 15. Keyssar, p. 105. 16. For a discussion of the way that the redeemers took over and guided the southern Democratic parties through this period see Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869–1879 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). 17. Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 94. 18. Ibid., p. 11.

672

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19. Ibid., p. 13. 20. Ibid., p. 14. 21. Keyssar, pp. 111–112 22. Ibid., p. 302. 23. Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 55. 24. Katherine Irene Pettus, Felony Disenfranchisement in America: Historical Origins, Institutional Racism, and Modern Consequences (New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2005), p. 35. 25. Keyssar, pp. 111–112. 26. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944), pp. 575. 27. Ibid., pp. 575–576. 28. Ibid., p. 577. 29. Ibid., p. 628. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., p. 634. 33. Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disenfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908, p. 267. 34. Ibid. 35. Myrdal, p. 969. 36. Ibid., p. 535. 37. Ibid., p. 537. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., p. 536. 41. Ibid., p. 655. 42. Ibid., pp. 655–656. 43. Ibid., p. 967. 44. For information on the lynching of Emmett Till see Stephen Whitfield, A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); and for information on Fannie Lou Hamer see Chapters 24 and 25 in this book. 45. Myrdal, p. 967. 46. Ibid., p. 968. 47. For the African American electorate’s role in the Prohibition Party’s elections, for and against, see Hanes Walton, Jr., “Blacks, the Prohibitionists, and Disfranchisement,” Quarterly Review of Higher Education Among Negroes (April 1969), pp. 66–69; Hanes Walton, Jr., “Another Force for Disfranchisement: Blacks and the Prohibitionists in Tennessee,” Journal of Human Relations (First Quarter 1971), pp. 728–738; Hanes Walton, Jr., “The Negro in the Prohibition Party: A Case Study of the Tennessee Prohibition Party,” Faculty Research Bulletin (December 1971), pp. 24–33; and Hanes Walton, Jr., “Blacks and the Southern Prohibition Movement,” Phylon (September 1971), pp. 247–259. 48. Ibid. 49. See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010). 50. Allan Lichtman, “The Federal Assault Against Voting Discrimination in the Deep South, 1957–1967,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 54 (October 1969), pp. 346–367. 51. Kathy McCormack, “Dying Communities See Salvation in New Prisons,” http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39591357/from/toolbar. 52. Alexander, p. 5. 53. Ibid., p. 6.

54. Ibid. 55. “Voting Rights Act Extension, June 29, 1982,” in Richard Valelly (ed.), The Voting Rights Act: Securing the Ballot (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006), p. 307. 56. Alexander, pp. 48–49. 57. Ibid., p. 49. 58. Ibid., p. 7. 59. Ibid., p. 235. 60. See Gabriel Chin, “Reconstruction, Felon Disenfranchisement, and the Right to Vote: Did the Fifteenth Amendment Repeal Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment?” Georgetown Law Journal Vol. 92 (2004), pp. (306), 259–316. 61. Manza and Uggen, p. 90. 62. Dianne Pinderhughes, “The Role of African American Political Organizations in the Mobilization of Voters,” in Ralph Gomes and Linda Faye Williams (eds.), From Exclusion to Inclusion: The Long Struggle for African American Political Power (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), p. 44. 63. Pinderhughes, p. 45. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., pp. 44–45. 66. Sonia Jarvis, “Historical Overview: African Americans and the Evolution of Voting Rights,” in Gomes and Williams, p. 29. 67. Hanes Walton, Jr., and Simone Green, “Voting Rights and the Million Man March: The Problem of Restoration of Voting Rights for Ex-Convicts,” in Robert Joseph Taylor (ed.), African American Research Perspectives Vol. 3 (Winter 1997), p. 69. 68. Hanes Walton, Jr., “Public Policy Responses to the Million Man March,” Black Scholar Vol. 25 (Fall 1995), p. 21. 69. Ibid, pp. 17–23. 70. Ibid., p. 19. 71. Ibid., p. 21. 72. Elizabeth Hull, The Disenfranchisement of Ex-Felons (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), p. 134. 73. Ibid., pp. 134–135. 74. Ibid., p. 134. 75. Ibid., p. 136. 76. Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908, p. 299. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid. 79. Tommie Shelby, “Forum,” in Glenn C. Loury (ed.), Race, Incarceration, and American Values (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2008), pp. 73–84. 80. Sarah Lawrence and Jeremy Travis, “The New Landscape of Imprisonment: Mapping America’s Prison Expansion,” 2004, http://www .urban.org/urlprint.cfm?ID=8848. 81. See Christopher Uggen and Jeffrey Manza, “Democratic Contraction? Political Consequences of Felon Disfranchisement in the United States,” American Sociological Review Vol. 67 (December 2002), pp. 777–803; Christopher Uggen and Jeffrey Manza, “Lost Voices: The Civic and Political Views of Disenfranchised Felons,” in Mary Pattillo, David Weiman, and Bruce Western (eds.), Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass Incarceration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004), pp. 165–204; and Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy, pp. 181–203. 82. Manza and Uggen, Locked Out, p. 197.

CHAPTER 27

African American Voting Rights in a Historic Presidential Election The 2008 Election of President Barack Obama Invoking the Voting Rights Act in the 2008 Presidential Election: The Role of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

676

Table 27.1 Federal Election Observations (1966–1980) and Federal Examiner and Observer Assignments (July 1, 1982–June 30, 2004)

678

Table 27.2 Statutory Provisions Enforced by the Voting Section of the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, Fiscal Years 2001–2007

680

U.S. Senator Barack Obama, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and Other Voting Rights Legislation

680

Demography and the 2008 Election: State- and Individual-Level Results

682

The Long-Term Influence of Disenfranchisement on the 2008 Obama Presidential Election

685

Table 27.3 Number and Percentage of African American Majority Counties Lost during the Disenfranchisement Era until 2000 and the Relationship to Coverage by the Voting Rights Act

686

Map 27.1 Past and Present African American Majority Counties in the South

687

Figure 27.1 Coverage of States by the Voting Rights Act and Number of African American Majority Counties Lost

688

Figure 27.2 Coverage of States by the Voting Rights Act and Percentage of African American Majority Counties Lost

689

Table 27.4 2008 Presidential Election in the Southern and Border States

689

Figure 27.3 Difference in Votes between Obama and McCain in the South, Presidential Election of 2008

691

Figure 27.4 Percentage Point Difference in the Vote between Obama and McCain in the South, Presidential Election of 2008

691

Table 27.5 Counties Won by the Democratic Party by Racial Majority, U.S. Presidential Elections 2000–2008

692

Figure 27.5 Percent of Racial Majority Counties Won in the South and Border States by the Democratic Party, 2000–2008

694

Table 27.6 Republican Party Vote and Percent of Total Vote in Racial Majority Counties of the South and Border States in U.S. Presidential Elections, 2000–2008

695

Figure 27.6 Percent of White Majority Counties in the South and Border States Won by the Republican Party, 2000–2008

697

Figure 27.7 Number of Votes Gained or Lost in White Majority Counties Won by the Republican Party in the South and Border States, from 2004 to 2008

698

Table 27.7 2008 Presidential Election in the Southern States by Past and Present Black Majority Counties

699

Table 27.8 2008 Presidential Election in the Southern States by Past and Present Black Majority Counties and by Counties in the VRA Implementation

700

Table 27.9 Projecting Same Support in Former Black Majority Counties as in Current Black Majority Counties Won by Obama in the South in 2008 Presidential Election

702

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Chapter 27

The Short-Term Influence of Disenfranchisement on the 2008 Obama Presidential Election

703

Table 27.10 Comparing the Actual Outcome of the 2008 Presidential Election in the South with a Model That Awards the Votes of Former Black Majority Counties to Barack Obama 703 Table 27.11 Support for Barack Obama in the South by Race and Coverage under the Voting Rights Act, 2008 Presidential Election 704 Table 27.12 Percentage of the Vote for Obama by Region and Race in the 2008 Democratic Party Presidential Primary Elections 704 Table 27.13 Percentage of the Vote for Obama in the Presidential Election of 2008 by Region, Race, and Coverage under the Voting Rights Act in the South 705 Table 27.14 Percentage Gain or Loss in White Support for Obama From the 2008 Democratic Party Presidential Primary Elections to the General Election 706 Figure 27.8 Percentage Point Gain or Loss in White Support for Obama in the South From the 2008 Democratic Party Primary Elections to the General Election

707

Summary and Conclusions on the 2008 Obama Election

707

Notes 708



African American Voting Rights in a Historic Presidential Election 675

E

nfranchisement, disenfranchisement, and re-enfranchisement all occurred in the historic United States presidential election in 2008. The first African American president, Barack Obama, did not win simply because of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) but also in spite of its weaknesses and flaws. And if this Act had never been passed and if the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments had been accepted and implemented equally for African American males and females, an African American president may have been elected earlier. But the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments were never effectively implemented nor did they protect the African American electorate. In point of fact, presidential candidate Senator Barack H. Obama (D-IL), speaking at the 42nd Voting Rights March Commemoration at Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Alabama, on March 4, 2007, less than one month after he announced his intention to run for the Democratic Party’s nomination, never even mentioned the 1965 Act in his speech nor did he embrace it. Instead, he mentioned it only indirectly and in an oblique manner. He said: “It is because they marched that we elected councilmen, congressmen. It is because they marched that we have [Congressmen] Artur Davis [D-AL] and Keith Ellison [D-MN]. [Both men are the only African American congresspersons in their states.] It is because they marched that I got the kind of education I got, a law degree, a seat in the Illinois senate and ultimately in the United States Senate.”1 Clearly, it was not simply because they marched from Selma to Montgomery but because that march generated presidential and bipartisan congressional support for and passage of the 1965 VRA. Yet even at this late date, this presidential candidate could not embrace it in a speech at an African American church and before a majority African American audience. Obama called out some names of heroines and heroes who had struggled for the suffrage rights and ballots like “Anna Cooper and Marie Foster and Jimmy Lee Jackson and Maurice Olette, C.T. Vivian, Reverend [Joseph] Lowery, [Congressman] John Lewis [D-GA], who said we can imagine something different and we know there is something out there for us, too.”2 He declared that each of these voting rights activists was the Moses of his or her generation. “Like Moses, they challenged Pharaoh, the princes, powers who said that some are atop and others are at the bottom, and that’s how it’s always going to be.”3 He continued: So I just want to talk a little about Moses and Aaron and Joshua, because we are in the presence today of a lot of Moseses. We’re in the presence today of giants whose shoulders we stand on, people who battled, not just on behalf of African Americans but on behalf of all of America; that battled for America’s soul, that shed blood, that endured taunts and torment and in some cases gave the full measure of their devotion.4 Finally, in his oblique reference to the 1965 Act, he talked symbolically about how “[w]hat happened in Selma, Alabama, and Birmingham also stirred the conscience of the nation. It worried folks in the White House. . . . So the Kennedys decided . . . [w]e’re going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans

over to this country and give them scholarships to study. . . . This young man named Barack Obama [Sr.] got one of those tickets and came over to this county.”5 Thus, with this reference Senator Obama made a connection and linkage to the civil rights and voting rights movement. And with this new logical relationship Senator Obama declared: “So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don’t tell me I’m not coming home to Selma, Alabama.”6 Seemingly, for a person not of the South, nor of the civil or voting rights movement, he used the moment of commemoration of the Selma march to connect with the African American community and the voting rights activists and leaders but not the Act itself. However, this symbolic linking of his 2008 presidential campaign to the Selma event and declaring himself to be of the Joshua generation was not in and of itself enough; it would take the presidential caucus victory in Iowa to bring the African American electorate to his fledging campaign.7 Two days after Senator Obama spoke, Senator and former First Lady Hillary Clinton (D-NY) spoke at the African American First Baptist Church on March 6, 2007, in Selma, Alabama, on the forty-second anniversary of Bloody Sunday. She was then the leading contender (even among the African American electorate) for the Democratic nomination for president. Her speech referenced the 1965 Act three times, the (Edmund) Pettus Bridge once, and the voting rights movement several times. And then she brought up her own voting rights legislation: “My friends, we have a march to finish. I will be reintroducing the Count Every Vote Act, to ensure that every voter is given the opportunity to vote, that every vote is counted, and each voter is given the chance to verify his or her vote before it is cast and made permanent.”8 Throughout Senator Clinton’s speech one finds numerous direct references to the 1965 Act, the voting rights movement, and the heroines and heroes of the struggle in Selma for suffrage rights. She did not sidestep or downplay the issue. Senator Clinton kept her focus on the purpose of the fortysecond commemoration by declaring that: “Now, 42 years ago, from this church and from Brown [Chapel], brave men and women first tried to march. . . . Then on the third day, armed with Judge Frank Johnson’s order, more than 3,000 people crossed the Pettus Bridge. And by the time they got to Montgomery, they were 25,000 strong. . . . They understood the right to vote matters. Now, five months later the voting rights act was enacted by Congress and signed by President Johnson, but we all know it was written on the march from Selma to Montgomery.”9 In 2000, my husband said here that those who walked across the bridge made it possible for the south to grow and prosper and for two sons of the south, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, to be elected president of the United States. The Voting Rights Act gave more Americans from every corner of our nation the chance to live out their dreams. And it is the gift that keeps on giving. Today it is giving Senator Obama the chance to run for president of the United States. And by its logic and spirit, it is giving the same chance to Governor Bill Richardson, an Hispanic, and yes, it is giving me that chance too.10

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In closing with her retrospective and prospective look at the 1965 Act and its renewals, Senator Clinton reviewed the disenfranchisement problems that emerged in the two previous presidential elections, 2000 and 2004, which the 1965 Act did not address nor did the Congress, and passed a value judgment on them. Calling it as she saw it, she remarked: But in the last two presidential elections we have seen the right to vote tampered with and outright denied to too many of our citizens, especially the poor and people of color. Not just in Florida, Ohio, and Maryland, but in state after state. The very idea that in the twentyfirst century, African-Americans would wait in line for 10 hours while whites in an affluent precinct next to theirs waited in line for 10 minutes, or that AfricanAmericans would receive fliers telling them the wrong time and day to exercise their constitutional right to vote. That’s wrong. It is simply unconscionable that today young Americans are putting their lives at risk to protect democracy half a world away when here at home their precious right to vote is under siege.11 Clearly, Senator Clinton spoke directly about the 1965 Act and its current shortcomings and limitations, whereas Barack Obama had not. This difference might be a reason that the African American electorate did not immediately respond to Senator Obama’s clarion call until he grasped victory in the Iowa caucus. Was it necessary for Obama to be careful not to be seen as espousing traditional African American political concerns? If so, the 1965 Act has not created the biracial electorate that American democracy should have. This chapter addresses whether the lingering racial disenfranchisement that impaired the presidential elections in 2000 and 2004 impacted and influenced the 2008 Obama presidential election. After looking at the Democratic success rate across those three elections, we explore an empirical answer for this central research question by conceptualizing the problem into (1) long-term impact and influences and (2) short-term impact and influences. As this project has repeatedly shown, disenfranchisement has had both immediate and enduring effects. Hence, we must explore both of these effects for a comprehensive and systematic empirical portrait of the first Obama presidential election. At the moment, most of the analyses have provided only short-term influences. Moreover, there was the matter of the unusual nature of this rare and historic presidential election. Just prior to the final outcome of the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, the United States Commission on Civil Rights in one of its few proactive stances selected a panel of six experts to come on June 6, 2008 (two days before the official outcome of the Democratic primary), to its national headquarters to brief the Commission members on their reviews of the “Department of Justice (DOJ) plans to monitor voting rights enforcement for the 2008 U.S. Presidential election.”12 The Commission believed that this historic election would not only bring out large numbers of new and first-time African American voters13 but would also be a major biracial election, the type which has “caused difficulties

in the past,” thereby suggesting “that heightened scrutiny would be needed to ensure election propriety” to avoid both voter suppression and voter fraud.14 This election will also be analyzed for the findings and recommendations that these six experts offered to the Commission and that they would suggest to the Voting Section of the DOJ in preparation for this historic presidential election. The Commission was invoking the use of the Voting Rights Act for the second time in its history during this rare moment in the nation’s electoral context.15 Hence, before we analyze President Obama’s own legislative and electoral relationships to the VRA, let’s probe the bureaucratic relationship to his election. And such an approach will provide a tripartite portrait of this law, its bureaucracy, and an African American presidential candidate.

Invoking the Voting Rights Act in the 2008 Presidential Election: The Role of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Having commissioned a panel of six experts, “[e]ach of these individuals made presentations and offered their expertise on the Department of Justice’s history of monitoring voting rights enforcement and what problems might arise for the 2008 U.S. Presidential election, offered their critiques of past approaches to addressing these problems, and made recommendations for election reform.”16 In addition to holding a briefing from these six experts at the Commission national headquarters in Washington for the members of the Commission, they invited the two key individuals at DOJ who were responsible for the implementation of the VRA during the 2008 presidential election. One, “Christopher Coates, Acting Chief of the Voting Section of the Department of Justice,” was responsible for halting voter discrimination and voter suppression based on race and language minorities, while another, “William Welch, Chief of the Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice,” had the responsibility for preventing voter fraud and election crimes in this election.17 These two key individuals not only made presentations during the briefing, but they were able to get first-hand knowledge of any findings and recommendations as to proposed election reforms for the historic 2008 presidential election. Coates and Welch, being two of the six experts, also had to field “questions from the Commissioners dealing with the following issues”: (1) the number of federal observers who would be sent to polls around the country, (2) vote fraud crimes such as vote buying, non-citizens, multiple registration, and machine error fraud, (3) availability of minority language ballots and poll-place assistance, (4) current and updated voter registration databases as well as voter registration for non-citizens, (5) problems with provisional ballots, and (6) military ballots from overseas being counted in a timely fashion.18 The briefing procedure for the Commission was divided into two panel presentations, and after each panel presentation there was a full discussion of each panel’s remarks and suggestions. The first panel consisted of the two DOJ section chiefs, Coates and then Welch. Both individuals declared that they had done their jobs, were doing their jobs, and that they would



African American Voting Rights in a Historic Presidential Election 677

uphold the recently reauthorized VRA in the forthcoming 2008 election. During the discussion that took place after their opening remarks, Coates was questioned about “the criteria and the consultation processes that DOJ uses to assign election observers and monitors for the upcoming election in light of prolonged national debate about irregularities in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.”19 Coates responded by noting he had a threefold approach. First, he indicated that “the department is in active consultation with civil rights organizations to determine the types and locations of problems that they anticipate for the 2008 election. He stated that he and his staff met with civil rights organizations in April and May of 2008 to discuss . . . issues that civil rights groups felt will need federal monitoring during the 2008 election.”20 Secondly, he indicated that he had “made a presentation to the National Association of Secretaries of State in January of 2008 and that in April of 2008 he attended workshops . . . by the National Association of State Legislators . . . to help determine how many federal election monitors were needed and where they would be sent.”21 And thirdly, “Mr. Coates stated that his division is in contact with people who have made complaints about alleged violations of federal law in their own individual jurisdictions, as well as with concerned citizens who were not associated with any group but felt that they had issues to voice.”22 Collectively, these were all of the key voting rights activists and groups working in the process. But one of the Commissioners raised a revealing question to Coates after he had made these remarks. “Commissioner [Todd] Gaziano . . . asked whether there were any limit to the number of election monitors that DOJ could send to various jurisdictions. Mr. Coates replied that no one has ever indicated to him that there would be any limit to the amount of election monitors used in an election.”23 Following his question to Coates, “Commissioner Gaziano asked Mr. Welch if he could describe one or more of the vote-buying schemes that he had mentioned in his testimony and how they were uncovered. Mr. Welch said that he did not have information available, but that as a general rule, small tips initiate many election fraud investigations that then lead to larger cases.”24 Being still concerned about the vote fraud issues and its possible consequences in the 2008 election, “Commissioner Gaziano then asked what the range of federal prison sentences was for certain intentional [vote] fraud crimes. Mr. Welch replied that they range from probation to 24 months in jail. Commissioner Gaziano asked for an estimate of how many voter fraud schemes go unreported or uninvestigated.”25 In replying to this new query, Welch “said that it was impossible for him to provide an estimate, and distinguish between people who were actively cheating the system and people who were unwittingly being used as dupes for fraud schemes.”26 The continual pursuit by Commissioner Gaziano of the voter fraud issue indicated the degree and intensity of interest in this issue vis-à-vis voter intimidation and suppression. And the heavy concern with this single issue surfaced as the number two recommendation in this briefing report, immediately behind the first recommendation that focused on voting rights violations, intimidation, and the need to expand election monitoring.

The second recommendation, for which Commissioner Gaziano and the majority voted, states: “DOJ’s role in prosecuting voter fraud . . . is also important. . . . We urge DOJ to initiate action to prevent illegal voting, and not simply wait to hear of and react to specific accusations of wrongdoing.”27 This very same issue theme was continued in the statement of the vice chair of the Commission, Abigail Thernstrom, where she wrote objections to the dissent from this briefing report of two commissioners, Arlan D. Melendez and Michael Yaki. In their rebuttal statement to Vice Chair Thernstrom’s statement they wrote: . . . the Vice-Chair’s conclusion that the scope of voter fraud is “unclear,” is not well founded in our opinion and that of most experts. There have been many investigations, at all levels of government, searching for voter fraud. Yet, to our knowledge, none of these investigations have revealed systematic voter fraud in the last decade that threw an election in doubt. As was repeatedly stated throughout our June 2008 briefing, the instances of voter fraud are few and far between. While the potential for mischief may be there, especially in the context of absentee ballots, the weight of evidence does not show that this is a pervasive problem requiring the allocation of massive resources, as the majority’s findings and recommendations would seem to imply. On the other hand, well-documented instances of voter intimidation, particularly against racial minorities, do require heightened vigilance by the Justice Department.28 Besides these concerns of election monitors versus vote fraud that arose in the discussion session after the first panel, the issue which was most likely to impact and influence the African American electorate in the 2008 presidential election was the matter of voter I.D. laws. “Commissioner Kirsanow asked Mr. Coates whether the Voting Section’s approach to the 2008 election was at all affected by the Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding the Indiana Voter I.D. law. Mr. Coates replied that, if a state voter identification requirement was enforced in a racially or ethnically discriminatory fashion, such practices would raise a question under VRA and could weigh in favor of a federal presence at the polls.”29 Finally, the very last remark made during this first discussion session came from Commissioner Michael Yaki, who “made a statement reminding the panelists that, despite the recent Supreme Court decision upholding the Indiana I.D. law, localities have not been given carte blanche to create voter I.D. checks that have not been mandated by state law.”30 This comment was all that was said in the first discussion session about the possible impact and influence of voter I.D. cards in the 2008 presidential election, and no finding or recommendation was made on this issue for the election. The second panel at this briefing allowed the other four experts to make individual statements about their findings on how the Voting Section of DOJ dealt with past voter problems and then to set forth some reform suggestions for the 2008 election. These four individual presentations were followed by

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a second discussion session. In that session the main voiced concern that involved the African American electorate was the matter of provisional ballots, i.e., ballots that are “made available at polling places for people not on the registration lists or who had been wrongly removed or omitted from registration.”31 Vice Chair Thernstrom asked Daniel Tokaji, whose presentation dealt with the question of provisional ballots, “why he had a problem with provisional votes.” He then responded by noting three major problems. First, he asserted, there “is the risk that some provisional ballots will not be counted. . . . Second problem was that they consume a lot of resources for state and local officials. . . . The third and most important problem with provisional balloting is that it increases the likelihood of a litigated election by giving political parties more things to fight over.”32 Yet he never mentioned how this type of balloting might help to solve the registration problem that the African American electorate faced in

2000 in Florida and 2004 in Ohio. Nor did he offer or suggest any remedy or reform if that same problem re-occurred in the 2008 election. Nevertheless, the last statement in the third recommendation states: “Those voters who believe they have been improperly removed from the rolls are entitled to provisional ballots.”33 In light of the Commission findings and recommendations based on the remarks and insights gathered from the six experts, the initial one which dealt with voter intimidation and suppression and the call for a “dramatic expansion of . . . election monitoring” can be quantified from the beginning in 1966 through its changes and modification until 2004. Table 27.1 displays these data, with additional supplementary data in Table 27.2. As shown in Table 27.1 federal observers and examiners were deployed in 1966 and went to five southern states and none of the Border States. Three southern states, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, had no federal observers in the fourteen-year period from 1966 to 1980 but some

Table 27.1  Federal Election Observations (1966–1980) and Federal Examiner and Observer Assignments (July 1, 1982–June 30, 2004) Section 8 Coverage and Assignmentsb State (by Region)

Observer Assignments, 1966–1980a

Coverage 7/1/82–6/30/04

Certifications by Attorney General

Examiner Assignments 7/1/82–6/30/04

Observer Assignments 7/1/82–6/30/04

South Alabama

2,481

Statewide

22 counties (4 since 7/1/1982)

None

89

Georgia

 466

Statewide

29 counties (10 since 7/1/82)

None

None

Louisiana

1,267

Statewide

12 parishes (1 since 7/1/82)

None

 56

Mississippi

6,452

Statewide

51 counties (8 since 7/1/82)

6 counties (1983)

242

North Carolina

None

 

1 county (since 7/1/82)

None

  6

South Carolina

 443

Statewide

11 counties (1 since 7/1/82)

None

 23

Texas

None

Statewide

17 counties (6 since 7/1/82)

None

 10

Virginia

None

Statewide (9 cities & counties have stopped since 1997)

None

None

None

None

None

Border States  

None

None Other Regions

Alaska

 

Statewide

None

None

None

Arizona

 

Statewide

3 counties (2 since 7/1/82)

None

 40

California

 

4 counties

None

None

  7

Colorado

 

1 county (stopped in 1984)

None

None

None

Connecticut

 

3 towns (stopped 1983–1984)

None

None

None

Hawaii

 

1 county (stopped in 1984)

None

None

None

Idaho

 

1 county

None

None

None

Illinois

 

None

 

 

  3

Massachusetts

 

9 towns (stopped in 1983)

None

None

None

Michigan

 

2 townships

None

Hamtramck (2000–2006)

  8

Nebraska

 

None

 

None

None

New Hampshire

 

10 towns

None

None

None

New Jersey

 

None

 

None

 17

New Mexico

 

None

 

None

 73

New York

 

3 NYC counties

3 counties (all since 7/1/82)

None

 40



African American Voting Rights in a Historic Presidential Election 679 Section 8 Coverage and Assignmentsb State (by Region)

Observer Assignments, 1966–1980a

Coverage 7/1/82–6/30/04

Certifications by Attorney General

Examiner Assignments 7/1/82–6/30/04

Observer Assignments 7/1/82–6/30/04

Other Regions (continued) Pennsylvania

 

None

 

Berks County (2003–2007)

  3

South Dakota

 

2 counties

None

None

  1

Utah

 

None

 

None

  9

Washington

 

None

 

Covered as of September 2004

Wyoming

 

1 county (stopped in 1982)

None

None

Covered as of September 2004 None

Source: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, Voting Rights Enforcement and Reauthorization: The Department of Justice’s Record of Enforcing the Temporary Voting Rights Act Provisions (Washington, DC: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 2006), pp. 79–81, Appendix Table A–10; and United States Department of Justice, “About Federal Observers and Election Monitoring,” http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/vot/examine/activ_exam.php. a Table 25.13. b Previously as Section 6 of the Voting Rights Act, this section was a temporary provision that empowered the attorney general to send federal examiners to jurisdictions that have been certified for coverage under the Act to examine voter registration applications and ensure that jurisdictions added eligible voters to their rolls. The permanent provision of the Act, Section 3(a), allows for the appointment of federal examiners through a federal court order. Examiners were last used to register voters in 1982 and 1983. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 now governs procedures for registrations throughout the nation. This section is now Section 8 (see http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/vot/examine/activ_exam.php).

after the 1982 year. The excluded southern states were Arkansas, Florida, and Tennessee. Thus, besides the state locale of the federal observers, there is the matter of the dwindling use of these individuals in observing for voter intimidation and suppression as well as the reassignment of this function from the VRA to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. Yet in this time period many of the same members of the Commission did not speak out and demand that more observers be deployed. But on the eve of the 2008 presidential general election a demand was made for more observers and examiners under the guise of federal protection for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and the historic nature of his candidacy. This 2008 Report of the Commission made no use of its own empirical data on these individuals in its 1975 and 1981 Reports and, as shown in our Table 25.13, nor the relevant information at the Department of Justice Web site entitled “About Federal Observers and Election Monitoring.” And the Web site invites requests to “provide specific and detailed information regarding the need for a federal presence” at a particular election, which does not surface in the Commission’s 2008 Report, except as assertions. 34

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Voter Fraud, and the Department of Justice: The GAO Investigations Even as the conservative leadership of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights invoked the Voting Rights Act and recommended to the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice to place more federal observers and election monitors in southern states during the historic 2008 election to assess and evaluate voter suppression and diminution as well as the alleged voter fraud, an investigation by the General Accountability Office (GAO)—the congressional agency created to prepare objective and balanced reports on all cabinet- and federal-level bodies for Congress— was already underway concerning how the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division (CRD) had enforced Sections 2 and 5 of the VRA from 2001 through 2007. The GAO inquiry also tracked the implementation of other recent congressional acts dealing with voter registration and voting in the country

since 1993. Using the GAO’s data, Table 27.2 (p. 680) clearly reveals that the CRD of the Department of Justice had found voter disenfranchisement via voter suppression and diminution and almost none of the alleged voter fraud which the majority of the Commission—without any empirical evidence of their own— simply declared to exist. This disenfranchisement fell specifically under Sections 2 and 5, but was also essentially related to all voting rights legislation efforts. Therefore, the demand to increase the number and presence of election monitors and observers in the general election of 2008 was something new and different for the Commission, because such demands simply did not exist previously, as shown in Table 27.2. The Commission’s historic lack of concern for voter suppression and exaggerated interest in voter fraud contrasts with one of the two major party candidates, Senator Obama, who had not only come out for the reauthorization of the VRA in 2006 but also sponsored and supported congressional legislation on voter suppression and diminution—but not voter fraud. This potential president had opposed voter ID legislation and had made remarks against such techniques on both the Senate floor as well as in the Congressional Record. There was thus a wide difference between the record of the Commission that ostensibly sought to safeguard the integrity of the election that could (and did) result in the first African American president, and the views of the presidential candidate himself. This disjunction raises important questions. Was the Commission suddenly interested in data gathering simply because, if voter fraud was a voting rights problem, the 2008 historic election would surely provide empirical evidence? Moreover: was the invocation of the use of the VRA by the Commission in the 2008 general election done to undercut and devalue the policy position of a potential presidential winner? Simply put, the Commission’s report cannot be taken as objective and factual without looking at its history of inaction as shown in Table 27.2 and the viewpoints of its members. By way of contrast, we turn in more detail to the views of that first victorious African American presidential candidate.

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Table 27.2  Statutory Provisions Enforced by the Voting Section of the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, Fiscal Years 2001–2007 Fiscal Years 2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

Totals

Percent of All Matters

Voting Rights Act (VRA)

   52

   69

  136

   38

   19

   18

   29

   361

81.7%

Section 2 VRA (Protected classes, including racial minorities)a

   37

   13

   71

    9

    9

    7

   16

   162

36.7%

Section 203 VRA (Language minorities)b

   13

   52

  117

   24

   13

   12

   15

   246

55.7%

Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA)

 

 

 

 

    6

   19

 

    25

5.7%

HAVA/NVRA

 

 

 

 

 

    1

 

     1

0.2%

Statute

c

HAVA/VRA

 

 

 

 

    1

 

    2

     3

0.7%

National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA)d

    5

    2

    2

    4

    3

    3

    1

    20

4.5%

NVRA/VRA

    1

 

 

    1

 

    1

 

     3

0.7%

 

    1

    3

    3

    3

    9

    5

    24

5.4%

Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA)e Other

    4

 

 

    1

 

 

 

     5

1.1%

All Voting Section Matters

   62

   72

  141

   47

   32

   51

   37

   442

100.0%

 

Percent of All VRA Section 5 Objections

 

Fiscal Years f

VRA Section 5

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

Totals

Number of submissions received

 3,949

 5,967

 4,616

 5,506

 4,456

 7,294

 5,889

 37,677

Number of changes

12,458

20,145

15,166

18,279

13,210

20,434

19,767

119,459

Percentage of time spent on Section 5 reviews

18.0%

22.0%

15.0%

15.0%

12.0%

11.0%

  8.0%

101.0%

Number of objections to proposed changes

    2

   21

    8

    6

    1

    2

    2

    42

100.0%

Included redistricting

    1

   17

    5

    4

    1

    0

    1

    29

69.0%

Other

    1

    4

    3

    2

    0

    2

    1

    13

31.0%

Source: Adapted from U.S. General Accountability Office, Information on Employment Litigation, Housing and Civil Enforcement, Voting, and Special Litigation Sections’ Enforcement Efforts from Fiscal Years 2001 Through 2007 (Washington, DC: General Accounting Office, 2009), pp. 57–83, Tables 19, 20, 26, 27, and 29 and Figures 3 and 4. Calculations by the authors. a “. . . prohibits discriminatory procedures or practices that result in a denial or abridgement of the right to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.” Thus, there is some overlap of these matters with those of Section 203 for language minority groups. b “. . . prohibits states from denying the right to vote on the basis of English proficiency to those who were educated in public or accredited private schools in which the predominant classroom language was other than English.” c “. . . established requirements related to voting system standards, provisional voting and voting information, and computerized statewide voter registration lists to be enforced by the Attorney General.” d “. . . requires states to adopt certain federal voter registration procedures and…requirements regarding state removal of names from federal registration rolls.” e Provides for absentee voting by registered uniformed services voters and their spouses or dependents, as well as overseas voters, in federal elections. f Prohibits state and local jurisdictions in certain parts of the country from changing their election practices or procedures, including the movement of polling places or changing district lines within counties, until they obtain federal “preclearance” that the change has neither the purpose nor the effect of discriminating against protected minorities in exercising their voting rights. Note: Due to the precision of the source data, the percentages here may not sum to 100%.

U.S. Senator Barack Obama, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and Other Voting Rights Legislation Although Democratic presidential candidate Senator Obama did not emphasize the 1965 Voting Rights Act during the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries (and general election), this does not define him in regard to the 1965 Act and its renewals nor in regard to his views about voting rights discrimination in America. While in the U.S. Senate, Obama proposed legislation dealing with the problems encountered by African American voting rights activists and activism. Long before he entered the political arena in Chicago, he had personally engaged in African American voter registration both after he graduated from college and later after he returned to Chicago from Harvard Law School. During this period of his own voter registration efforts, he helped to add more than 150,000 new voters to the city’s voting rolls.35 He then entered the political arena at the behest

of State Senator Alice Palmer to contest for her seat. When she faltered against Jesse Jackson, Jr., in her congressional race, she came back to Obama and asked him to drop out of the race for her state senate seat. Obama not only refused but cleverly used the state’s election laws regarding petitions to eliminate all of his potential opponents, Ms. Palmer included, in the Democratic primary election. This ballot elimination strategy gave him experience and insight into how the election process could be manipulated to get rid of potential opponents, a technique which has eliminated African American opponents throughout U.S. history. Hence, by the time he arrived at the U.S. Senate in 2004, he had significant experiential knowledge of voting rights realities and activism.36 The 1965 Voting Rights Act came up for renewal during the second term of Republican President George W. Bush after Obama had joined the Senate. On July 20, 2006, during the debate over the renewal of the 1965 Act, Senator Obama



African American Voting Rights in a Historic Presidential Election 681

delivered a speech in support of HR 9, the House bill. After the obligatory praises and acknowledgements, he addressed the merits and success of the Act. He commented: “Nobody can deny that we’ve come a long way since 1965. Look at registration numbers. Only two years after passage of the original Act, registration numbers for minority voters in some states doubled. Soon after, not a single state covered by the Voting Rights Act had registered less than half of its minority voting-age population.”37 He continued: In fact, most of America’s elected African-American officials come from the states covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act—states like Mississippi and Alabama and Louisiana and Georgia. But to me, the most striking evidence of our progress can be found right across this building, in my dear friend, Congressman John Lewis, who was on the front lines of the civil rights movement, risking life and limb for freedom. And on March 7, 1965, he led 600 peaceful protestors demanding the right to vote across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. . . . They marched again. They crossed the bridge. They awakened a nation’s conscience, and not five months later, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law. And it was reauthorized in 1970, 1975, and 1982.38 In his Senate speech, Senator Obama not only endorsed all of the different provisions of the 1965 Act and its renewals, but he specifically addressed some of them that had been continually attacked and criticized by those opposed to this reauthorization. On Section 5 of the Act, Senator Obama offered his endorsement by saying: There are some who argue the Act is no longer needed, that the protections of Section 5’s “pre-clearance” requirement—a requirement that ensures certain states are upholding the right to vote—are targeting the wrong states. But the evidence refutes that notion. Of the 1,100 objections issued by the Department of Justice since 1965, 56% occurred since the last reauthorization in 1982. So, despite the progress these states have made in upholding the right to vote, it’s clear that problems still exist.39 On the objections to Section 203’s “language minorities” protection, he declared: Others have argued against renewing Section 203’s protection of language minorities. Unfortunately, these arguments have been tied to the debate over immigration and muddle a non-controversial issue—protecting the right to vote—with one of today’s most contentious debates. But let’s remember: you can’t request language assistance if you’re not a voter, and you can’t be a voter if you’re not a citizen. And while voters, as citizens, must be proficient in English, many are simply more

confident that they can cast ballots printed in their native language without making errors.40 Finally, Senator Obama in his speech noted that continuing problems in the electoral process demonstrated the need for another reauthorization. He said: Our challenges don’t end at reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act either. We have to prevent the problems we’ve seen in recent elections from happening again. We’ve seen political operatives purge voters from registration rolls for no legitimate reason, prevent eligible ex-felons from casting ballots, distribute polling equipment unevenly, and deceive voters about the time, location and rules of elections. Unfortunately, these efforts have been directed primarily at minorities, the disabled, low-income individuals, and other historically disenfranchised groups.41 After making these remarks in his speech, Senator Obama addressed another piece of voting rights reform legislation known as the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which sought to remedy the problems that came to light in Florida in the 2000 presidential election. He commented: The Help America Vote Act was a big step in the right direction, but we need to do more. We need to fully fund HAVA. We need to enforce critical requirements like statewide registration databases. We need to make sure polling equipment is distributed equitably and that the equipment works. And we need to work on getting more people to the polls on election day.42 Upon completing these remarks about the election administration problems minorities find in their communities around the country and especially in the South, Senator Obama provided three examples for three different regions of the nation. Of Native American voters he indicated: We need to make sure that minority voters are not the subject of deplorable intimidation tactics when they do get to the polls. In 2004, Native American voters in South Dakota were confronted by men posing as law enforcement. These hired intimidators joked about jail time for ballot missteps, and followed voters to their cars to record their license plate numbers.43 Next, he addressed problems facing the African American electorate in Ohio when he noted that “[i]n Lake County, Ohio, some voters received a memo on bogus Board of Elections letterhead informing voters who registered through Democratic and NAACP drives that they could not vote.”44 Then he described another problem in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He said: In Wisconsin, a flier purporting to be from the “Milwaukee Black Voters League” was circulated in predominantly

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African-American neighborhoods with the following message: “If you’ve already voted in any election this year, you can’t vote in the presidential election. If you violate any of these laws, you can get ten years in prison and your children will get taken away from you.”45 Overall, Senator Obama’s speech clearly defined what he thought of the value and merit of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and its renewals but also the additional reforms that were needed not just in the South but in the North as well. And many of these problems are in election administration, but they are also racebased problems even in this day and time. Prior to Senator Obama’s support of and vote for the reauthorization and renewal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in July 2006, one of the senators from Kentucky offered an amendment to a Senate bill on immigration that would have required the voter to have a photo ID. On May 24, 2006, about a month before his speech in July, Senator Obama made a speech opposing the amendment requiring a photo ID. The speech provides a further indication that Senator Obama was well aware that “[f]or a large part of our nation’s history, racial minorities have been prevented from voting because of barriers such as literacy tests, poll taxes, and property requirements. We have come a long way in the last 40 years.”46 But for him this proposed “amendment could not come at a worse time.”47 He reasoned that: This is a national voter identification law. This is a national voter identification law that breaks the careful compromise struck by a 50-50 Senate four year ago. It would be the most restrictive voter identification law ever enacted, one that could quite literally result in millions of disenfranchised voters and utter chaos at the state level. Now, I recognize there’s a certain simplistic appeal to this Amendment. Why shouldn’t we require people to have a voter identification card when they vote? Don’t we want to make sure voters are who they claim to be? And shouldn’t we at least make sure that non-citizens are not casting ballots and changing the outcome of elections?48 Senator Obama answered his own questions, and in these answers one will see how he not only was aware of past disenfranchisement techniques but also recognized the new one embedded in this amendment. Again, he declared his opposition to a photo ID requirement: There are two problems with that argument. First, there has been no [evidence] showing that there is any significant problem with voter fraud in any of the 50 states. There certainly is no [evidence] showing that non-citizens are rushing to try to vote: this is a solution in search of a problem. The second problem is that historically disenfranchised groups—minorities, the poor, the elderly and the disabled—are most affected are most affected by photo ID laws.

Let me give you a few statistics. Overall 12 percent of voting age Americans do not have a driver’s license, most of whom are minorities, new U.S. citizens, the indigent, the elderly, or the disabled. AARP reports that 3.6 million disabled Americans have no driver’s license. A recent study in Wisconsin found that white adults were twice as likely to have driver’s licenses as African Americans over 18. A study in Louisiana found that African Americans were four to five times less likely to have photo IDs than white residents. Now, why won’t poor people be able to get photo identifications or REAL IDs? It is simple: Because they cost money. You need a birth certificate, passport, or proof of naturalization, and that can cost up to $85. Then you need to go to a state office to apply for a card. That requires time off work, possibly a long trip on public transportation, assuming there’s even an office near you. . . . That is not something that most folks are going to be able to do.49 Coming as it did before the discussion and debate on HR 9, surely this amendment primed Senator Obama’s background and experiences with disenfranchisement in the African American history as well as the newer more sophisticated techniques and procedures and helped him in his support of the HR 9 legislation. Obama’s support of the Voting Rights Act helped him establish a relationship with the King family in Atlanta, Georgia, and eventually he would get their support and endorsement for his presidential campaign. This is exactly what General Colin Powell was unable to do during his affiliation with the Reagan administration in the 1980s.50 Finally, understanding that African American disenfranchisement had been a continual factor in the nation’s elections and in the presidential elections of 2000 (Florida) and 2004 (Ohio), the question remained: Would the problem resurface in the 2008 election?

Demography and the 2008 Election: State- and Individual-Level Results In order to put our demographic analysis of long- and short-term disenfranchisement influences in the 2008 election in electoral and political context, we will turn to the first and major demographic analysis of the 2008 election done by journalists Chuck Todd and Sheldon Gawiser in their book How Barack Obama Won: A State-by-State Guide to the Historic 2008 Presidential Election.51 Using state-level aggregate election return data along with individual-level data from the “National Exit Polls” they draw a demographic portrait at the state level, with some selected county-level data. In fact, they organized and structured their book around four different categories of states: (1) Battleground States, which included three southern states, Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia, (2) Receding Battleground States, which did not include a single southern state, (3) Emerging Battleground States, which included two southern states, Georgia and Texas, and (4) Red and Blue States, which included six southern states,



African American Voting Rights in a Historic Presidential Election 683

Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee.52 As for the five Border States, they fell into only two of the four categories: (1) Battleground States included Missouri, and (2) Red and Blue States included Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and West Virginia. Here, we lay out their findings beginning with their national-level insights and then move to the state level, county level (where they exist), and finally to insights within these different categories. And when possible, we reflect upon any county-level findings to discern their demographic portrait. This approach allows the reader to compare and contrast our county- and regional-level findings with those produced by these journalists. Todd and Gawiser began their demographic portrait at the national level with their findings that while “Obama made gains across almost all demographic subgroups, the majority of his support came from white voters. Sixty-one percent of his supporters were white, 23% were African Americans, and 11% were Hispanic. In contrast, 90% of John McCain’s supporters were white.”53 They added: “In 2008, one in four voters was not white, 26%, and guess what, the white vote isn’t enough to power the GOP. Obama did as well among white voters as any previous Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter in 1976, when 47% of whites cast their votes for the Democrat.”54 The striking finding here is that the white electorate was not the only path to victory. Only a certain percentage was essential. Turning to the South, these journalists wrote that “[a]part from whites under 30, McCain won a majority of every other age group of white voters. This appeared to limit Obama in many traditionally Republican states. Southern whites seemed resistant to Obama’s appeal, voting 68% to 32% for McCain. Even so, Obama managed to peel off North Carolina and Virginia, the fastest-growing states in the South outside of Texas.”55 The notable finding here is that the African American electorate would and did play a role in realigning some of the southern states. Besides the white and African American electorates, these journalists described and analyzed the Latino electorate. They wrote: “Over the last two elections, the Bush campaign was able to make inroads among Latinos. However, in 2008, Latinos came back to the Democratic Party. Hispanics were 9% of the electorate and Obama beat McCain by more than two to one. Obama led 67% to 31% among these voters, the best ever showing for a Democratic presidential candidate.”56 They also found that “Hispanic turnout was up in 19 states, including . . . [t]he not so obvious states [of] . . . Missouri, . . . North Carolina, . . . Virginia, [and] West Virginia.”57 After seeing these demographic changes in the 2008 election, they concluded that “maybe a soft-spoken Midwestern African American Democratic politician is a more powerful weapon to defeat Republicans than moderate Southern Democrats, the previous recipe” for Democratic victories in presidential elections (e.g., Carter and Clinton).58 Why is this so? According to Todd and Gawiser, the Democrats had a base/floor that made it easy for them to rise. “Democrats have carried 18 states plus D.C. in five straight presidential elections, totaling 248 electoral votes, just 22 short of the 270 to win. . . . Republicans have carried just 13 states in five straight

elections, totaling a mere 95 electoral votes. . . . The Republican party as a lot of work to do.”59

Red States in the South At this point in their analysis, they shifted from a national demographic perspective to a state-by-state analysis within their different categories. Hence, we begin by analyzing six southern states—Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee—in the red state category. “The red states voted Republican in presidential races virtually all of the time and the blue states voted Democratic virtually all of the time. With the exception of the elections involving a Southern Democrat [Native Son] in 1976, 1992, and 1996, this pattern seemed to persist.”60 Each of these Democratic southern native-son candidates had the strong voter support of the African American electorate when they won some of the southern states. Of these six red southern states, Todd and Gawiser wrote that prior to the 1960s these states were Democratic (blue), but their realignment and “change was caused by white conservative voter reaction to the Democratic-sponsored civil rights legislation pushed by Lyndon Johnson. . . . Only two counties [in Alabama] switched allegiance from 2004 to 2008 . . . Jefferson County, anchored by Birmingham . . . [and] Marengo County, halfway between Birmingham and Mobile.”61 The same party realignment occurred in Arkansas for the very same reason, and in the 2008 election “McCain won the state easily, taking 66 of the state’s 75 counties. Twelve counties switched to Republican in this election from 2004. . . . It matched Tennessee on this dimension,” due in part to the fact that it was also a red state.62 Unlike these other two red states, Louisiana saw a great decline in Democratic voting due to “the loss of AfricanAmerican population after the hurricanes over the last few years. The drop in population in the Democratic areas around New Orleans was most acute.” In fact, “New Orleans, with Orleans Parish, saw its total vote drop by nearly 50,000 from 2004.” In addition, “[f]our parishes [counties] switched columns in 2008, with Caddo and East Baton Rouge going Democratic and the small parishes of Assumption and Pointe Coupee going to the GOP.” 63 Hence, McCain swept this red southern state. Mississippi, another red state with greater turnout than in 2004, was also swept by McCain, but his total voter support was less than Bush received in 2004. Obama won 98% of the African American vote and 11% of the white vote, which was less than the 14% of the white vote that John Kerry got in 2004.64 Tying Mississippi in the huge amount of turnout, South Carolina saw McCain drawing “more than enough support from 26 of the 46 counties to win easily. . . . Obama did manage to win a majority in Charleston, one of the five counties to move into the Democratic column in 2008.”65 Finally, in the red state of Tennessee, “McCain won 89 of the state’s 95 counties, including 12 that switched into the Republican column in 2008, more than a quarter of the 44 counties nationwide that went in that direction. Only Arkansas had as many counties move in the GOP direction.” Even in the big cities, McCain “split the four largest metro areas with Obama, winning Hamilton

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County (Chattanooga) and Knox County (Knoxville) while losing Shelby County (Memphis) and Davidson County (Nashville).”66 Elsewhere in these six southern states Obama tended to win the major urban areas. This was not so in Tennessee. Overall in these six red states, this journalistic voter analysis revealed that several formerly Democratic counties switched to the Republican Party, and a few other counties switched to the Democratic Party. Obama did not win a single one of these six states, but he won varying numbers of counties as well as losing some previously Democratic ones. Although this initial analysis paints a scattered and quite limited portrait, it is essential that we look at the other southern states and their county-level information.

Battleground States in the South Three of the remaining southern states fall into the category of Battleground States. In Florida, party realignment took place, as in all of the other southern states, after President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. But the unique demographic feature of Florida, not matched by the other southern states, is the “migration of Cubans, Central and South Americans, Caribbean Islanders, retirees, and other workers that have made the state much less Southern and more heterogeneous.”67 During the 2008 election, this southern battleground state saw “five counties turned Democratic after voting for Bush in 2004. The two largest make up the bulk of the Tampa-St Petersburg area: Hillsborough and Pinellas counties. . . . In Orange County, home to Disney World, Democrats eked out an 815 vote victory in the 2004 presidential race. . . . In 2008, turnout was up by nearly 75,000 votes . . . and Obama won by 86,177 votes.”68 In addition to these urban changes, Hispanics, who made up 12% of the state’s population, switched back from the Bush-led Republicans to the Obama-led Democrats. And finally, “[w]ith home foreclosure and unemployment rates exceeding the national average, Florida voters entered the polls with strong concerns about the direction of the nation’s economy.”69 Hence, Obama won this southern battleground state. North Carolina became the second southern battleground state won by Obama. He “won 33 [of the 100] counties, including all those in [the] three metro areas. . . . Then he flipped Wake County (the biggest vote prize in the state). . . . In the Triad, Obama flipped Forsyth County into the Democratic column” while McCain won 77 counties but lost the state by a 14,000-vote margin.70 Finally, Virginia was the third southern battleground state won by Obama. Here, “Obama won 48 of the 134 Virginia counties and towns, flipping 18 of them from the Republicans compared to 2004.”71 Nevertheless, although McCain won the majority of the state’s counties, he lost this traditional red southern GOP state. Obama’s victories in northern Virginia (close to Washington, D.C.) enabled him to win. Concluding, one can say that not only did Obama win these three southern states, but he did so without the majority of the counties. McCain, as he did in the six red states, won the majority of the counties/parishes. In this category Obama flipped more counties than he did in the six red states; it was the urban counties in this category that moved him to victory.

Emerging Battleground States in the South The third category of states in the Todd and Gawiser book, the Emerging Battleground States, contains only two southern states, Georgia and Texas. In Georgia, “out of the state’s 159 counties, Obama won 34 and McCain 125. . . . Tiny Webster County went Republican in 2008 after voting for Kerry in 2004. But nine relatively small counties did switch to the Democratic candidate in 2008.”72 In Georgia, both a population increase and higher turnout led to far more votes in the counties which McCain won than in the few counties that Obama won. Hence, McCain won this emerging battleground state. Texas is the only other Southern state in this category. “Eleven of the state’s 254 counties switched to voting Democratic in 2008 from 2004. And following the pattern of Obama’s support across the country, three of the biggest counties in the state with large urban areas switched: Harris (Houston), Dallas, (Dallas), and Bexar (San Antonio).”73 Why is this so? The journalists show that “[t]urnout was up in all three counties, as it was in 2004 over 2000. But this time it was the Democratic vote that soared, while the total number of Republican votes in each county fell.”74 Although “Obama didn’t do particularly well among the 63% of voters in Texas who are white, he did better than either John Kerry or Al Gore. . . . But Obama did increase the Democratic margins among both blacks and Hispanics by more than 25 points.”75 Hence, McCain won this state also. Collectively, from this initial analysis of the 2008 presidential election we see that Obama won three of the eleven southern states by winning enough of the big urban counties to carry the states, despite the fact that McCain won more counties overall. In the eight states that Obama lost, McCain also won more counties and also on occasion won some of the urban areas. And in some of the red southern states, McCain even won some of the Democratic counties back that the party had captured in 2004. However, what we do not get from this journalistic analysis with its focus upon the urban areas is a detailed analysis of the county wins and losses vis-à-vis the African American and white majority counties, in order to see the nature and scope of Obama county-level victories in the eight southern states that he lost. And we determine how these losses are related to the past and current disenfranchisement in this region of the nation.

Border States But before we begin our demographic analysis at the county level, we will undertake a probe of the Border States. Todd and Gawiser placed the five Border States into only two of their four categories. Four states—Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and West Virginia—fell into the Red and Blue States category, while one state, Missouri, fell into the Battleground States category. Delaware, with its native son, Joe Biden, on the presidential ticket “helped make Delaware one of the Democrats’ five largest margins of victory in all 50 states. . . . With Biden on the ticket, the one county (of three) that had voted Republican in 2004 shifted. Kent County, including Dover and the giant air base there, moved easily into the Democratic column.”76 Prior to the appearance of a Delaware native son on the presidential ticket,



African American Voting Rights in a Historic Presidential Election 685

Delaware was in and had been in the Democratic column for many presidential elections, and the one small county inroad that Republicans had made in the state they lost to Obama in 2008. Thus, this blue state became completely blue. Such voting behavior for Delaware was not repeated for Kentucky. Todd and Gawiser wrote: “Kentucky is not a part of the Deep South geographically but it sure votes like it. It was Democratic like most Southern states until World War II. Since then, it has been a reliably Republican state with the exception of voting for two Southern governors [for president] in 1976, 1992, and 1996.”77 Even at the county level there was very little voter support for Obama. “Just eight of 120 counties voted for Obama, although the largest counties in the state, Jefferson (with Louisville) and Fayette (with Lexington), did vote Democratic. That was a switch for Fayette, which went narrowly for Obama after decent margins in the past two presidential races for Bush.”78 This red state remained red. “Maryland has been reliably Democratic since the Civil War. Since 1960, Maryland has voted Republican only in the landslide wins of 1972, 1984, and 1988. . . . Obama and the Democrats won only six of the 24 counties, but they were most of the large counties. Only one large county, suburban Anne Arundel with Annapolis on the Chesapeake Bay” went to the GOP.79 This blue state, despite the fact that McCain won most of the counties in the state, remained blue. As for the last of the four states in this Red and Blue category, “West Virginia was a reliably Democratic state until 2000. Democrats carried the state in every election from 1968 until 2000 with the exception of 1972 and 1984. Obama is the first Democrat since Woodrow Wilson in 1912 to win the White House without carrying West Virginia.”80 Moreover, Obama won only seven counties to McCain’s forty-eight. McCain was able to realign four counties “that went from the Democratic column in 2004 to the GOP in 2008. Two counties shifted narrowly to the Democratic side of the ledger. Turnout was down more than three percentage points to 50.6% of the voting eligible population, based on preliminary estimates.”81 This red state not only remained red but became even more red in its demographic features. Therefore, these four Border States in the Red and Blue category remained in their initial categories. Delaware and Maryland continued as blue states, and Kentucky and West Virginia continued as red states. There was some change at the county level in each one of the four states, and both parties, Republicans and Democrats, won some counties from the other party. Of the sole Border State that was in the Battleground State category, the authors tell us: “Missouri has been a true battleground state that normally votes for the winning candidate. However in 2008 it missed, not by a lot, but a miss nevertheless” because McCain won the state. “Only five of the 115 counties switched parties and all went Democratic. Most were small counties except for a St. Louis suburb, Jefferson.”82 The other unique feature of the 2008 election in the state was the fact that “[t]he vote total dropped from 2004 in 34 counties and all went Republican in both elections, except for Iron County, which narrowly went Democratic. Eighty-one counties had increases in total vote and eight were Democratic.”83 Thus, this swing state remained static in 2008 and voted red.

Overall, three of the Border States were captured by the Republican Party, while the Democrats took only two of the Border States. Clearly, the Republicans carried the majority of the states in this region. Comparing the two regions, the Border States and the South, the Republican Party captured the majority of states in each region, three of the Border States and eight states in the South. In both regions, the Republicans won the majority of the counties, except for Delaware which had a native son on the presidential ticket. And with these empirical data on the states and counties in each region, we have the essential background demographic data to compare and contrast with our county-level data, which are divided by different categories, including the African American and white majority counties in the two regions under analysis.

The Long-Term Influence of Disenfranchisement on the 2008 Obama Presidential Election Due to the shift in studying electoral behavior from aggregate election data in political units like precincts/wards, counties, congressional districts, and states to the use of commercial polls, academic polls, surveys, and media exit polls, questions about the long-term influences of systemic variables like disenfranchisement simply have been dropped from scholarly consideration. Hence, the disenfranchisement variable was never converted into a psychological variable and never appeared on any of the questionnaires or polling types of instruments to attain individual-level information. This is as true of the polling and survey instruments developed by African Americans as of those developed by whites, Latinos, and Asian Americans. But even though the newer instrumentation and the individual-level data which they generated omitted any psychological version of the disenfranchisement variable, it did not completely escape either identification or empirical measurement. In a composite study of African American voting behavior in 1985, disenfranchisement was defined as a procedure that “politically neutralized” the African American electorate’s ability to gain electoral power and control in their local communities at the county level. “The word, then, is not ‘disenfranchisement’; it is ‘political neutralization’ because blacks lost much more than the right to vote, they lost all the political benefits which accrue from suffrage rights” like political power, political representation, political control, public policies, and political outputs from government.84 Using a county-level analysis of all of the counties in the eleven states of the South, “[t]he net black political loss has been high indeed. Blacks in 1880 formed the majority in [297] counties. By 1970, nearly one-hundred years later, blacks [were] that proportion of the population in only [103] counties. The loss . . . has been rapid and unrelenting. . . . [Thus t]he effects of neutralization upon voting have been cumulative and restrictive.”85 Therefore, from the time of the 1880 presidential election the African American electorate reached their zenith of being the majority in 297 counties, whereas the 2008 presidential election marked their low point as the majority in only 91 counties. Percentage-wise, when presidential candidate Obama appeared, the African American electorate only had 30.6% of their original county-level power

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base. Thus, had they not been “politically neutralized” and maintained their total county base, it probably would have affected the outcome of the 2008 presidential election in the South.

in 1860 through 2000. Analyzing these fifteen different decades for each state, it is possible to choose the decade with the highest number of counties with African American majorities as well as the number of those counties still in existence today. Included in Table 27.3 are the counts of the African American majority counties that came into existence but disappeared during the period from 1870 to 2000. At the bottom of this table is the total number of counties lost over this same time frame to disenfranchisement. Map 27.1 shows their locations.

Measuring the Loss of African American Majority Counties Table 27.3 shows the number of African American majority counties in each of the states of the South by decade beginning

Table 27.3  Number and Percentage of African American Majority Counties Lost during the Disenfranchisement Era until 2000 and the Relationship to Coverage by the Voting Rights Act

VRA Amendment of 1975

South Carolina

Texas

Arkansas

Tennessee

GA

LA

MS

NC

SC

VA

FL

TX

AR

TN

Total

20

 44

33

31

 20

20

 44

 6

 13

 6

 3

 240

1870

22

 54

32

32

 17

21

 42

 8

 12

 8

 2

 250

1880

24

 63

36

40

 21

25

 46

 9

 15

13

 5

 297

1890

20

 63

33

39

 16

26

 39

10

 16

15

 3

 280

1900

22

 67

31

38

 18

30

 36

12

 12

15

 3

 284

1910

21

 66

25

38

 14

33

 31

10

  8

14

 2

 262

1920

18

 58

22

34

 12

32

 23

 5

  4

11

 2

 221

1930

18

 48

16

35

  9

25

 21

 4

  4

 9

 2

 191

1940

18

 46

15

35

  9

22

 18

 3

  3

 9

 2

 180

1950

14

 40

12

31

  9

21

 15

 2

  4

 6

 2

 156

1960

12

 34

10

28

  8

15

 15

 2

  3

 5

 2

 134

1970

10

 23

 8

25

  5

12

 12

 2

  1

 3

 2

 103

1980

10

 19

 6

21

  6

12

  8

 1

  0

 3

 2

  88

1990

10

 17

 6

24

  5

12

  8

 1

  0

 3

 0

  86

2000

10

 17

 6

25

  6

12

 10

 1

  0

 3

 1

  91

Former Before Census 2000

15

 60

34

20

 23

25

 42

14

 19

14

 4

 270

Former + Census 2000

25

 77

40

45

 29

37

 52

15

 19

17

 5

 361

Current # Counties in Statec

67

159

64

82

100

46

134

67

254

75

95

1,143

(# AA majority counties before 2000)/(current # counties in state)d

22%

38%

53%

24%

23%

54%

31%

21%

7%

19%

4%

 24%

(# AA majority counties before 2000)/(total # AA majority counties before 2000)e

6%

22%

13%

7%

9%

9%

16%

5%

7%

5%

1%

100%

a

b

Florida

North Carolina

AL

1860

Virginia

Mississippi

Census

Alabama

Louisiana

Not Covered by Section 5

Georgia

Covered by Voting Rights Acts Section 5

Sources: Adapted from Table 14.2, United States Bureau of the Census, Negro Population in the United States, 1790–1915 (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1968), pp. 776–797; United States Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the United States, 1920–1932 (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969), pp. 683–845; and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors. a

The total number of counties with majority African American populations in any Census from 1870 to 1990 but not in the Census of 2000.

b

The total number of African American majority counties in the Census of 2000 plus such counties in Censuses from 1870 to 1990. In some instances due to boundary changes counties overlap geographically.

c

The total number of counties in the state in 2008.

d

The total number of African American majority counties in any Census from 1870 to 1990 divided by the current total number of counties in the state.

e

The total number of African American majority counties in any Census from 1870 to 1990 divided by the total number of such counties ever in the South.



African American Voting Rights in a Historic Presidential Election 687 Map 27.1  Past and Present African American Majority Counties in the South

Maryland Pennsylvania

Wy oming Iowa

Nebraska

Ohio Illinois 0

Colorado

New Jersey

100

Indiana West Virginia

Delaware

200

miles

Missouri

Kansas

Kentucky

Virginia

North Carolina Tennessee Oklahoma

Georgia

Arkansas

Al abama

South Carolina

New Mexico

0

Texas

50 miles

100

Mississippi Florida Louisiana

African American Majority Counties Census 2000 Censuses 1870–1990

(91) (270)

Source: Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File] doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896.v3 (Hampton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009; and Table 14.2.

The total number of black majority counties that have ever existed in the entire southern region is 361. By the 2008 presidential election, African Americans, with only 91 such counties left, had lost 270 counties that at one time existed with populations of African American majorities. At the apex of 361 counties, a 270-county loss is nearly three-fourths of such counties (74.8%), leaving just over one-fourth of their maximum potential electoral community power in 2008. Figure 27.1 (p. 688) offers a rank-ordered visualization of the number of counties lost prior to 2000, many of which disenfranchisement allowed to shift from potential African American electoral control to white electoral control by the time of the 2008 presidential election. Georgia “leads” with some 60 African American counties lost to white electoral control, while Tennessee is last with only four such counties being lost. The African American electorate lost its majority in a mean of 24.5 counties among the southern states, with a median of 20 such counties and a mode of 14 counties (in both Florida and Arkansas). As Table 27.3 shows, Texas had lost all of its African American majority counties and both Florida and Tennessee had lost all their counties except one each.

Table 27.3 also provides the relationship of these local community control losses at the county level. All of the eleven southern states fall in three different categories under the coverage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Seven states were covered by Section Five of the Act (which required states with counties where less than 5% of the minorities were registered to pre-clear any changes and modifications in their election rules and procedures before they implemented them), two states were covered by the 1975 amendment to the 1965 Act, and two states were not covered by the Act at all. Here the pattern is quite clear. All of the eleven states of the old Confederacy, whether covered by the Act originally, later, or not at all, lost a substantial number of African American majority counties. The essential reason for the loss of these counties was the African American exodus from the South during this period of violence, disenfranchisement, segregation, and unemployment to numerous areas of the West, Midwest, North, and East. And one sees in the table the rank-ordered percentage of all of the counties lost. Here one sees that Texas should have been covered by Section 5 because it had counties where fewer than 5% of the minorities were registered, but when

688

Chapter 27

Figure 27.1  Coverage of States by the Voting Rights Act and Number of African American Majority Counties Lost 70

Number of Counties Lost Since Disenfranchisement

60

60

50 42 40 34 30 25

23 20

20

19 15

14

14

10 4 0 Georgia

Virginia

Louisiana

South Carolina

Covered by Section 5

North Carolina

Mississippi

Texas

Amendment of 1975

Alabama

Florida

Arkansas

Tennessee

Not Covered by Section 5

Source: Table 27.3.

it was implemented, the president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was from Texas. Hence, the number of African American majority counties lost was not the sole criterion in determining coverage. Using the bottom row in Table 27.3, Figure 27.2 shows how many African American majority counties were lost as a percentage of the current number of counties. The percentage was derived by dividing the historic total number of African American majority counties by the number of counties in each state in the 2008 presidential election year. All of the states originally covered by the 1965 Act had the highest percentage of eliminated African American majority counties. Florida and Texas, which were covered by the 1975 amendment, were two of the next three states, but Arkansas which came between them was never covered. The highest percentage was in South Carolina and the lowest percentage was in Tennessee. The mean percentage was 27.1% and the median was 23.0%.

Results of the 2000, 2004, and 2008 Presidential Elections To develop an empirical measurement of the effect of the longterm impact and influence of disenfranchisement on Senator Obama’s historic election in 2008, first one must see the actual vote outcome in the South. Table 27.4 provides the total vote outcome for Senator Obama, Senator McCain, and others seeking to

win the general election for each of the eleven states in the South and the five Border States. The Republican candidate McCain won the overall South with 20,718,684 votes to Democratic candidate Obama with 18,280,353, for a total vote difference of 2,438,331. This electoral outcome translates into 52.6% of the vote for Senator McCain and a 46.4% for Senator Obama, a 6.2 percentage point margin. And the vote for third-party candidates was smaller than the winning candidate’s margin of victory in every state except North Carolina. Senator Obama won three southern states (Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia) to Senator McCain’s victory in eight states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas). In the Border States Senator Obama won two states (Delaware and Maryland) while Senator McCain won three (Kentucky, Missouri, and West Virginia). Clearly, Senator McCain was dominant in these two regions in the nation via winning the majority of states in each of these regions. Table 27.4 not only provides the state-level partisan victories in the region, it also shows both the total vote and percentage differences at the state level. In the South, the range in terms of vote differences ran from a low of 14,177 in North Carolina to a high of 950,695 in Texas. The mean vote difference was 309,876 while the median was 234,527 (Virginia). And finally this table shows that the total vote for Senator Obama in the states he won



African American Voting Rights in a Historic Presidential Election 689

Figure 27.2  Coverage of States by the Voting Rights Act and Percentage of African American Majority Counties Lost

Percentage of Current Number of Counties in State Lost Since Disenfranchisement

60.0% 54.3%

53.1%

50.0%

40.0%

37.7% 31.3%

30.0% 24.4%

23.0%

22.4%

20.9%

18.7%

20.0%

10.0%

7.5% 4.2%

0.0% South Carolina

Louisiana

Georgia

Virginia

Mississippi

Covered by Section 5

North Carolina

Alabama

Amendment of 1975

Florida

Arkansas

Texas

Tennessee

Not Covered by Section 5

Source: Table 27.3.

Table 27.4  2008 Presidential Election in the Southern and Border States

Barack Obama

State (by Region)

Votes

Percent of Obama Total

John McCain

Votes

Percent of McCain Total

McCain-Obama Differencea

Other

Votes

Percent of Difference Total

Total Votes

Percent of Other Total

(Obama + McCain + Other) Votes

Votes

3.6%

453,067

9.9%

2,099,798

Percent of Grand Total

South Alabama

813,479

Arkansas

3.6%

1,266,546

5.1%

19,773

4.4%

422,310

1.9%

638,017

2.6%

26,290

4.8%

215,707

4.7%

1,086,617

2.3%

Floridab

4,282,074

18.9%

4,045,624

16.4%

82,621

15.0%

236,450

5.2%

8,410,319

17.5%

Georgia

1,844,137

8.1%

2,048,744

8.3%

39,222

7.1%

204,607

4.5%

3,932,103

8.2%

782,989

3.5%

1,148,275

4.6%

29,497

5.4%

365,286

8.0%

1,960,761

4.1%

554,662

2.4%

724,597

2.9%

10,606

1.9%

169,935

3.7%

1,289,865

2.7%

North Carolina

2,142,651

9.5%

2,128,474

8.6%

39,664

7.2%

14,177

0.3%

4,310,789

9.0%

South Carolina

862,449

3.8%

1,034,896

4.2%

23,624

4.3%

172,447

3.8%

1,920,969

4.0%

Louisiana Mississippi b

Tennessee

1,087,437

4.8%

1,479,178

6.0%

35,367

6.4%

391,741

8.6%

2,601,982

5.4%

Texas

3,528,633

15.6%

4,479,328

18.1%

78,723

14.3%

950,695

20.8%

8,086,684

16.9%

1,959,532

8.6%

1,725,005

7.0%

38,723

7.0%

234,527

5.1%

3,723,260

7.8%

Obama Victories

8,384,257

37.0%

7,899,103

32.0%

161,008

29.2%

485,154

10.6%

16,444,368

34.3%

McCain Victoriesd

9,896,096

43.7%

12,819,581

51.9%

263,102

47.8%

2,923,485

63.9%

22,978,779

47.9%

18,280,353

80.7%

20,718,684

83.8%

424,110

77.0%

3,408,639

74.5%

39,423,147

82.2%

Virginiab c

South Subtotal

e

(Continued)

690

Chapter 27

Table 27.4 (Continued)

Barack Obama

State (by Region)

Votes

Percent of Obama Total

John McCain

Votes

McCain-Obama Differencea

Other

Percent of McCain Total

Votes

Percent of Other Total

Votes

Percent of Difference Total

Total Votes (Obama + McCain + Other) Votes

Percent of Grand Total

Border States Delaware

255,459

1.1%

152,374

0.6%

4,579

0.80%

103,085

2.3%

412,412

0.9%

Kentucky

751,985

3.3%

1,048,462

4.2%

27,114

4.9%

296,477

6.5%

1,827,561

3.8%

Maryland

1,629,467

7.2%

959,862

3.9%

42,267

7.7%

669,605

14.6%

2,631,596

5.5%

Missouri

1,441,911

6.4%

1,445,814

5.8%

39,889

7.2%

3,903

0.1%

2,927,614

6.1%

b

b

West Virginia

303,857

1.3%

397,466

1.6%

12,531

2.3%

93,609

2.0%

713,854

1.5%

Obama Victoriesc

1,884,926

8.3%

1,112,236

4.5%

46,846

8.5%

772,690

16.9%

3,044,008

6.4%

McCain Victories

2,497,753

11.0%

2,891,742

11.7%

79,534

14.4%

393,989

8.6%

5,469,029

11.4%

Border Subtotal

4,382,679

19.3%

4,003,978

16.2%

126,380

23.0%

1,166,679e

25.5%

8,513,037

17.8%

22,663,032

100.0%

24,722,662

100.0%

550,490

100.0%

4,575,318

100.0%

47,936,184

100.0%

d

Grand Total

e

Source: Adapted from Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman Puckett, Presidential Atlas, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), Table 58.1. Calculations by the authors. a Absolute difference, rather than the signed difference. b State won by Obama. c Under the “Barack Obama” column, the sum of his victory votes; under “McCain” the sum of votes for Obama in defeat. d Under the “John McCain” column, the sum of his victory votes; under “Obama” the sum of votes for McCain in defeat. e Sum of the differences rather than the difference of the totals.

stood at 8,384,257, but he had even more votes in the states that Senator McCain won, at 9,896,096. Analyzing Senator McCain’s column, in the states in which Senator Obama won, the vote for McCain was 7,899,103, while the states that Senator McCain won gave him 12,819,581 votes. Figure 27.3 offers a visualization of the vote differences in rank-order form. The total vote difference in Texas was more than double what it was in any other southern state due to this state’s large size and a strong shift toward the Republican Party in Texas, which began at least around the mid-1940s.86 North Carolina, which Senator Obama won, was indeed a very small total vote victory when contrasted with Senator McCain’s victory in Texas. Obama’s other two victories in Florida and Virginia were quite similar to one another in terms of the total vote differences—Florida 236,450 to Virginia’s 234,527—and small in comparison to most of McCain’s victories. Figure 27.4 moves from a visualization based on total vote differences to one based on percent of the vote differences. In this figure, the greatest percentage point difference occurs in Alabama, the state formerly governed by segregationist George Wallace, and the lowest percentage difference occurs in North Carolina. The states which Senator Obama won cluster at the lower end of the figure while the states which Senator McCain won cluster at the higher end. Only in Georgia did McCain win by a lower percentage than in any of Obama’s victories. The range in Figure 27.4 runs from a high of 21.6 percentage points in Alabama to a low of 0.3 percentage points in North Carolina. The mean percentage point difference is 11.2 and the median is 11.8 (in Texas). Clearly, Senator Obama was not very competitive in the South, or for that matter in the Border States, from the standpoint of the total regional votes.

Democratic Party Success in African American Majority and White Majority Counties in the 2000, 2004, and 2008 Presidential Elections Throughout this study, we use the election results from counties with African American population majorities and compare them with counties that have white population majorities. This county-level method was the only way to begin to uncover racial voting before current polling techniques were instituted, and it also often displays evidence of racial voting suppression—when an African American majority county has voted for a candidate that supported white supremacy, then there is good reason to believe that members of the white minority there suppressed and controlled the political situation. Such a county-level method is also illuminating, however, even in the most recent elections alongside other methods like exit polling, and it can continue to say something to us about racial voting discrimination. Table 27.5 (p. 692) records the number of African American or white majority counties won by the Democratic Party in each of the southern and Border States in the 2000, 2004, and 2008 presidential elections. The range of the number of these counties found in each state ran from a high of 25 African American majority counties in Mississippi to a low of 1 such county each in Florida and Tennessee. Five of the eleven states had a doubledigit number of African American majority counties, while five had only single-digit counties, and Texas had none. There were a grand total of 91 such counties in the South, and the Democratic Party won 87 in 2000, 85 in 2004, and 90 in 2008, while in the Border States, a grand total of 3 existed, and the Democrats swept all 3 in each of the elections. Thus, one can conclude that these African American majority counties in these two regions



African American Voting Rights in a Historic Presidential Election 691

Figure 27.3  Difference in Votes between Obama and McCain in the South, Presidential Election of 2008 1,000,000

950,695

900,000 800,000

Number of Votes

700,000 600,000 500,000

453,067 391,741

400,000

365,286

300,000

236,450

234,527

215,707

204,607

200,000

172,447

169,935

100,000 14,177 0 Texas

Alabama Tennessee Louisiana

Florida

Virginia

States won by Obama

Arkansas

Georgia

South Mississippi North Carolina Carolina

States won by McCain

Source: Table 27.3.

Figure 27.4  Percentage Point Difference in the Vote between Obama and McCain in the South, Presidential Election of 2008 25 21.6 19.9

Percentage Points

20

18.6

15.1

15

13.2 11.8 10

9.0 6.3 5.2

5

2.8 0.3 0

Alabama

Arkansas Louisiana Tennessee Mississippi

Texas

States won by Obama Source: Table 27.3.

South Carolina

Virginia

States won by McCain

Georgia

Florida

North Carolina

692

Chapter 27

Table 27.5  Counties Won by the Democratic Party by Racial Majority, U.S. Presidential Elections 2000–2008

County Racial Majority

Presidential Election 2000

State

Number of Counties

Number of Counties Won by Democratic Party

Presidential Election 2004

Percent of Counties Won by Democratic Party

Number of Counties Won by Democratic Party

Percent of Counties Won by Democratic Party

Presidential Election 2008 Number of Counties Won by Democratic Party

Percent of Counties Won by Democratic Party

South Alabama

10

10

100.0%

9

90.0%

10

100.0%

Arkansas

3

3

100.0%

3

100.0%

3

100.0%

Florida

1

1

100.0%

1

100.0%

1

100.0%

Georgia

17

17

100.0%

15

88.2%

17

100.0%

6

5

83.3%

5

83.3%

5

83.3%

Louisiana Mississippi

25

22

88.0%

23

92.0%

25

100.0%

North Carolina

6

6

100.0%

6

100.0%

6

100.0%

South Carolina

12

12

100.0%

12

100.0%

12

100.0%

1

1

100.0%

1

100.0%

1

100.0%

Virginia

10

10

100.0%

10

100.0%

10

100.0%

Total

91

87

95.6%

85

93.4%

90

98.9%

African American

Tennessee

Mean

9.1

8.7

95.6%

8.5

93.4%

9.0

98.9%

Median

8

8.0

100.0%

7.5

100.0%

8.0

100.0%

Border States Maryland

2

2

100.0%

2

100.0%

2

100.0%

Missouri

1

1

100.0%

1

100.0%

1

100.0%

Total

3

3

100.0%

3

100.0%

3

100.0%

Mean

1.5

1.5

100.0%

1.5

100.0%

1.5

100.0%

Median

1.5

1.5

100.0%

1.5

100.0%

1.5

100.0%

Washington, DC

1

1

100.0%

1

100.0%

1

100.0%

94

98.9%

District of Columbia South, Border States, and District of Columbia Combined Total

95

Mean

7

91 7.0

95.8% 95.8%

Median

6

5.0

100.0%

89

93.7%

6.8

93.7%

7.2

98.9%

5.0

100.0%

5.0

100.0%

White

South Alabama

57

8

14.0%

2

3.5%

3

5.3%

Arkansas

72

29

40.3%

18

25.0%

6

8.3%

Florida

66

15

22.7%

10

15.2%

14

21.2%

Georgia

142

17

12.0%

11

7.7%

17

12.0%

Louisiana

58

9

15.5%

5

8.6%

5

8.6%

Mississippi

57

3

5.3%

1

1.8%

4

7.0%

North Carolina

94

19

20.2%

14

14.9%

27

28.7%

South Carolina

34

3

8.8%

3

8.8%

8

23.5%

94

35

37.2%

17

18.1%

5

5.3%

254

24

9.4%

18

7.1%

28

11.0%

125

21

16.8%

22

17.6%

38

30.4%

1,053

183

17.4%

121

11.5%

155

14.7%

Tennessee Texas Virginia Total Mean

95.7

16.6

17.4%

11.0

11.5%

14.1

14.7%

Median

72.0

17.0

15.5%

11.0

8.8%

8.0

11.0%



African American Voting Rights in a Historic Presidential Election 693

County Racial Majority

Presidential Election 2000

State

Number of Counties

Number of Counties Won by Democratic Party

Percent of Counties Won by Democratic Party

Presidential Election 2004 Number of Counties Won by Democratic Party

Percent of Counties Won by Democratic Party

Presidential Election 2008 Number of Counties Won by Democratic Party

Percent of Counties Won by Democratic Party

White (continued)

Border States Delaware

3

1

33.3%

1

33.3%

2

66.7%

Kentucky

120

15

12.5%

12

10.0%

8

6.7%

Maryland

22

5

22.7%

4

18.2%

5

22.7%

Missouri

114

12

10.5%

2

1.8%

7

6.0%

55

13

23.6%

9

16.4%

7

12.0%

314

46

14.6%

28

8.9%

29

9.0%

West Virginia Total Mean

62.8

Median

55

9.2 12.0

14.6%

5.6

8.9%

5.8

9.0%

22.7%

4.0

16.4%

7.0

12.0%

South and Border States Total

1,367

229

16.8%

149

10.9%

184

13.0%

Mean

85.4

14.3

16.8%

9.3

10.9%

11.5

13.0%

Median

69

14.0

16.2%

9.5

12.4%

7.0

11.0%

South, Border States, and District of Columbia Combined

All Counties

Total

1,462

320

21.9%

238

16.3%

278

19.0%

Mean

50.4

11.0

21.9%

8.2

16.3%

9.6

19.0%

Median

25

10.0

37.2%

6.0

25.0%

6.0

30.0%

Rest of Nation Total

1,671

Mean

49

Total

3,133a

Mean

61

a

354 10.4

21.2%

346

21.2%

10.2

20.7% 20.7%

601 17.7

36.0% 36.0%

National Total 674 13.2

21.5% 21.5%

584 11.5

18.6% 18.6%

879 17.2

28.1% 28.1%

Sources: Adapted from Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009; David Leip, David Leip’s Atlas of Presidential Elections, http://www.uselectionatlas.org (Accessed January 18, 2009);and Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, forthcoming). Calculations by the authors. a

The votes of several election districts in Alaska have been combined according to methods used in Deskins, Walton, and Puckett, reducing the total number of election units (counties).

significantly supported the Democratic Party. In the Border States there were no fluctuations in support, while in the southern states Obama did make a difference in the level of support. There were a total of 1,053 white majority counties in the South, and the Democratic Party won 183 in 2000, 121 in 2004, and 155 in 2008, while in the Border States, a grand total of 314 existed, and the Democratic Party won 46 in 2000, 28 in 2004, and 29 in 2008. Obama made a difference in stopping the decline in the South from 2000 to 2004, reversing this trend by winning 155, which was still 28 counties short of the 183 won by Tennessee native Al Gore in 2000. And in the Border States Obama barely reversed the trend by winning one more county than John Kerry, but failed to reach the high point of 46 won by Al Gore. Overall, Obama in both regions stopped declines in the number of counties won and had a better winning record in the South than in the Border States. His mean percentages of white majority counties won were 14.7% in the South and 9.2% in the Border States. Figure 27.5 (p. 694) shows the Democratic Party’s countylevel victories in both African American and white majority

counties in each of the states in these two regions plus the District of Columbia for the 2000, 2004, and 2008 presidential elections. In 2000 only in two southern states, Louisiana and Mississippi, did the Democratic Party fail to win all of the African American majority counties; and in only two states, Arkansas and Tennessee, did the party win more than 30% of the white majority counties. The 2004 bars of Figure 27.5 reveal a decline in the Democratic Party’s ability to win counties both in the African American majority counties (the party failed to win 100% of the counties in only two states in 2000 but in four states in 2004) and in the white majority counties (none of the states in 2004 reached the 40% level and most of them were well below the 20% mark). In the Border States, only in Delaware did the percentage of counties rise above the 30% level for 2004. John Kerry’s performance in 2004 was a good deal less in these two regions than that of Gore in 2000. In Obama’s 2008 presidential election, there was a reversal of the Democratic Party’s fortune in these two regions. Although it is known that he won overall in three states—Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia—the 2008 bars of Figure 27.5 show that

694

Chapter 27

Figure 27.5  Percent of Racial Majority Counties Won in the South and Border States by the Democratic Party, 2000–2008 South

Border States

100%

Percent of Racial Majority Counties Won

90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

n, to ng

W

as

hi

es W

DC

ia in

ri

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iss

ou

nd M

yla ar

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e ar

Ke

w la

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in

ia De

s Vi

xa Te

e se

Te

nn

Ca h

So

ut

es

ro

ro

lin

a

a lin

pi

Ca

No

rth

iss

iss

ip

na sia M

ui Lo

or

gi

a

a Ge

rid Flo

ns ka Ar

Al

ab

am

a

as

0%

Black Majority Counties Won in 2000

Black Majority Counties Won in 2004

Black Majority Counties Won in 2008

White Majority Counties Won in 2000

White Majority Counties Won in 2004

White Majority Counties Won in 2008

Sources: Adapted from Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009; and David Leip, David Leip’s Atlas of Presidential Elections, http://www.uselectionatlas.org (Accessed January 18, 2009). Calculations by the authors.

he won in nine of the ten southern states all of the African American majority counties and in four of these southern states—Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia—he increased the number of party county-level victories in the white majority counties over the 20% mark. In the Border States he won more than 60% of the white majority counties in Delaware, more than 20% in Maryland and more than 10% in West Virginia. His performance was stronger in the South than the Border States. Looking at Figure 27.5 as a composite visualization for all three elections in both regions of the country, in the African American majority counties in the South there are a few exceptions to the trends: Alabama and Georgia in 2004; Louisiana, where in all three elections the Democratic Party failed to win 100% of the parishes; and Mississippi gradually yielded victories in all of its African American majority counties in 2008. But this same category of counties stayed 100% in the Democratic Party column no matter the candidate in the Border States and the District of Columbia. However, when it comes to the Democratic Party victories in the white majority counties in both regions there is a diversity of

trends and patterns. In Tennessee and Arkansas (the home states of Al Gore and of Bill Clinton, respectively) Obama did worse than the two white Democratic candidates, while in Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, Obama did better than both the two white Democratic candidates. In Alabama and Florida he did better than one of the white candidates, while in Louisiana he tied with one and lost in regard to the other. But only in the states which he won—Florida, North Carolina and Virginia—did Obama win more than one-fifth of the counties, except in South Carolina where he did not win. Overall he made inroads into the white majority counties in seven of these southern states.

Republican Party Success in White Majority Counties in the 2000, 2004, and 2008 Presidential Elections Table 27.6 provides the Republican Party vote in the African American and white majority counties in the 2000, 2004, and 2008 presidential elections. In the 2008 presidential election the McCain-Palin ticket in competition with the Obama-Biden ticket in the white majority counties increased the number of votes for



African American Voting Rights in a Historic Presidential Election 695

County Racial Majority

Table 27.6  Republican Party Vote and Percent of Total Vote in Racial Majority Counties of the South and Border States in U.S. Presidential Elections, 2000–2008 Presidential Election 2000

State (by Region)

Number of Counties

Total Vote

Vote for Republican Party Candidate

Presidential Election 2004

Percent Republican Party Vote

Total Vote

Vote for Republican Party Candidate

Percent Republican Party Vote

Presidential Election 2008

Total Vote

Vote for Republican Party Candidate

Percent Republican Party Vote

South Alabama

10

77,178

25,068

32.5%

79,371

27,131

34.2%

89,085

26,264

29.5%

Arkansas

3

17,886

6,069

33.9%

17,705

6,378

36.0%

17,940

6,670

37.2%

Florida

1

14,731

4,770

32.4%

20,984

6,253

29.8%

22,538

6,811

30.2%

Georgia

17

355,106

109,583

30.9%

441,343

133,292

30.2%

518,769

117,780

22.7%

6

202,333

48,618

24.0%

218,860

53,115

24.3%

171,142

38,575

22.5%

25

265,231

109,125

41.1%

289,932

115,189

39.7%

325,272

107,035

32.9%

Louisiana Mississippi North Carolina

6

65,240

23,273

35.7%

73,687

28,266

38.4%

92,247

30,605

33.2%

South Carolina

12

117,207

45,369

38.7%

133,693

50,544

37.8%

152,845

52,772

34.5%

African American

Tennessee

1

6,478

2,554

39.4%

7,548

3,140

41.6%

8,121

3,165

39.0%

Virginia

10

137,819

45,540

33.0%

154,055

50,941

33.1%

188,976

46,272

24.5%

Total

91

1,259,209

419,969

33.4%

1,437,178

474,249

33.0%

1,586,935

435,949

27.5%

125,921

41,997

33.4%

143,718

47,425

33.0%

158,694

43,595

27.5%

35,218.5

33.5%

106,532

39,405

35.1%

122,546

34,590

31.6%

77,137

16.6%

532,037

91,762

17.2%

619,994

67,514

10.9%

Mean

9.1

Median

8.0

Maryland

2

464,313

Missouri

1

124,752

24,799

27,793

19.2%

159,103

24,662

15.5%

3

589,065

101,936

19.9% 17.3%

144,638

Total

676,675

119,555

17.7%

779,097

92,176

11.8%

Mean

1.5

294,533

50,968

17.3%

338,338

59,778

17.7%

389,549

46,088

11.8%

Median

1.5

294,533

50,968

18.2%

338,338

59,777.5

18.2%

389,549

46,088

13.2%

21,256

9.3%

265,853

17,367

6.5%

97,192.5

Border States

District of Columbia Washington, DC

1

201,894

18,073

 9.0%

227,586

95

2,050,168

539,978

26.3%

2,341,439

615,060

26.3%

2,631,885

545,492

20.7%

South, Border States, and District of Columbia Combined Total Mean

7.3

157,705

41,537

26.3%

180,111

47,312

26.3%

202,453

41,961

20.7%

Median

6.0

124,752

25,068

32.5%

144,638

28,266

33.1%

159,103

30,605

29.5%

1,589,094

916,105

57.6%

1,804,044

1,149,263

63.7%

2,010,713

1,240,282

61.7%

White

South Alabama

57

Arkansas

72

903,895

466,871

51.7%

1,037,240

566,520

54.6%

1,068,677

631,347

59.1%

Florida

66

5,948,379

2,908,020

48.9%

7,588,826

3,958,269

52.2%

8,387,781

4,038,813

48.2%

Georgia

142

2,241,698

1,310,137

58.4%

2,860,532

1,780,962

62.3%

3,413,334

1,930,964

56.6%

Louisiana

58

1,563,323

879,253

56.2%

1,724,246

1,049,054

60.8%

1,789,619

1,109,700

62.0%

Mississippi

57

728,953

463,719

63.6%

862,433

569,792

66.1%

964,593

617,562

64.0%

North Carolina

94

2,846,022

1,607,890

56.5%

3,427,320

1,932,900

56.4%

4,218,542

2,097,869

49.7%

South Carolina

34

1,265,510

740,568

58.5%

1,484,037

887,430

59.8%

1,768,124

982,124

55.5%

Tennessee

94

2,069,703

1,059,395

51.2%

2,429,771

1,381,235

56.8%

2,593,861

1,476,013

56.9%

Texas

254

6,407,637

3,799,639

59.3%

7,410,749

4,526,917

61.1%

8,086,684

4,479,328

55.4%

Virginia

125

2,601,628

1,391,950

53.5%

3,044,312

1,666,018

54.7%

3,534,284

1,678,733

47.5%

1,053

Total

28,165,842

15,543,547

55.2%

33,673,510

19,468,360

57.8%

37,836,212

20,282,735

53.6%

Mean

95.7

2,560,531

1,413,050

55.2%

3,061,228

1,769,851

57.8%

3,439,656

1,843,885

53.6%

Median

72.0

2,069,703

1,059,395

56.5%

2,429,771

1,381,235

59.8%

2,593,861

1,476,013

56.6% (Continued)

696

Chapter 27

County Racial Majority

Table 27.6 (Continued) Presidential Election 2000

State (by Region)

Number of Counties

Total Vote

Vote for Republican Party Candidate

Presidential Election 2004

Percent Republican Party Vote

Total Vote

Vote for Republican Party Candidate

Percent Republican Party Vote

Presidential Election 2008

Total Vote

Vote for Republican Party Candidate

Percent Republican Party Vote

White (continued)

Border States Delaware

3

327,529

137,288

41.9%

375,190

171,660

45.8%

412,412

152,374

36.9%

Kentucky

120

1,544,187

872,492

56.5%

1,795,860

1,069,439

59.6%

1,827,561

1,048,462

57.4%

Maryland

22

1,561,167

736,660

47.2%

1,854,641

932,941

50.3%

2,011,602

892,348

44.4%

Missouri

114

2,227,829

1,161,620

52.1%

2,578,580

1,424,129

55.2%

2,759,686

1,417,420

51.4%

West Virginia Total

55

648,124

336,475

51.9%

755,887

423,778

56.1%

713,854

397,466

55.7%

314

6,308,836

3,244,535

51.4%

7,360,158

4,021,947

54.6%

7,725,115

3,908,070

50.6%

Mean

62.8

1,261,767

648,907

51.4%

1,472,032

804,389

54.6%

1,545,023

781,614

50.6%

Median

55.0

1,544,187

736,660

51.9%

1,795,860

932,941

55.2%

1,827,561

892,348

51.4%

South and Border States Total

34,474,678

18,788,082

51.9%

41,033,668

23,490,307

55.2%

45,561,327

24,190,805

53.1%

Mean

1,367 85.4

2,154,667

1,174,255

51.4%

2,564,604

1,468,144

54.6%

2,847,583

1,511,925

53.1%

Median

69.0

1,576,208.5

897,679

54.9%

1,829,342.5

1,109,351

56.6%

1,174,991

55.6%

2,011,157.5

South, Border States, and District of Columbia Combined

All Counties

Total

1,462

36,524,846

19,328,060

52.9%

43,375,107

24,105,367

55.6%

48,193,212

24,736,297

51.3%

Mean

50.4

1,259,477

666,485

52.9%

1,495,693

831,220

55.6%

1,661,835

852,976

51.3%

Median

25.0

648,124

336,475

47.2%

755,887

423,778

50.3%

713,854

397,466

44.4%

Rest of Nation Total Mean

1,680 49.4

68,868,577

31,123,565

45.2%

79,084,346

38,033,413

48.1%

83,134,120

35,189,795

42.3%

2,025,546

915,399

45.2%

2,326,010

1,118,630

48.1%

2,445,121

1,034,994

42.3%

105,393,423

50,451,625

47.9%

122,459,453

62,138,780

50.7%

131,327,332

59,926,092

45.6%

2,066,538

989,248

47.9%

2,401,166

1,218,407

50.7%

2,575,046

1,175,021

45.6%

National Total Total Mean

3,142 61.6

Sources: Adapted from Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009 and David Leip, David Leip’s Atlas of Presidential Elections, http://www.uselectionatlas.org (Accessed January 18, 2009). Calculations by the authors.

the Republican candidates in every one of the southern states except Texas. The number of Republican votes in white majority counties also increased from the 2000 election to the 2004 election, when no African American presidential candidate was on the Democratic ticket. More southerners went to the polls when an African American candidate was on the opposite ticket than at any other time in this three-election span. But this was not true in the Border States—in each and every one of the five states in that region, the Republican vote in white majority counties saw an across-the-board decline in 2008. Figure 27.6 visually displays the white majority county Republican Party results for the 2000, 2004, and 2008 presidential elections. In the 2000 presidential election, in three states— Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas—the Republican Party won 90% or more of the white majority counties; in five states— Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Virginia— the party won 80% or more of the white majority counties; in

one state, Florida, it won more than 70%; and in the remaining two, Arkansas and Tennessee, it captured 60% and above. And among the Border States, two states, Kentucky and Missouri, saw the Republican Party win more than 80% of the white majority counties; while two other states, Maryland and West Virginia got more than 70%; and in the state of Delaware the party won more than 60% of the white majority counties. Figure 27.6 also shows the Republican Party won 90% or more of the white majority counties in six states in the 2004 election—Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas—while in four states the party won more than 80%—Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. Only in Arkansas did the party win a little more than 70% of the white majority counties. And in the Border States, Missouri and Kentucky saw the party capture 90% or more of the counties, while in Maryland and West Virginia the party won more than 80% of the counties. Only in Delaware did the party win a bit



African American Voting Rights in a Historic Presidential Election 697

Figure 27.6  Percent of White Majority Counties in the South and Border States Won by the Republican Party, 2000–2008 South

Border States Region

100%

Percent of White Majority Counties Won

90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

n,

in

DC

ia

i

to ng

W

as

hi

es W

So

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iss

so

ur

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ar M

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De

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0%

2000

2004

2008

Sources: Adapted from Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009 and David Leip, David Leip’s Atlas of Presidential Elections, http://www.uselectionatlas.org (Accessed January 18, 2009). Calculations by the authors.

more than 60%. In 2004 the Republican Party improved its vote performance in both regions in the white majority counties. Finally, in Figure 27.6, one can also see the Republican Party performance at the county level, where the opposite party has an African American presidential candidate at the head of its ticket, and compare them to the two previous elections. Five states— Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee—saw the party win more than 90% of their white majority counties; while two states—Georgia and Texas—saw the party win more than 80% of the counties; and in four states—Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia—the Republicans won 70% or more of their white majority counties. And in the Border States, the party won more than 90% of the counties in Kentucky and Missouri; while in West Virginia it was more than 80%; more than 70% in Maryland; and a bit more than 30% in Delaware. However, the graph shows that these rates of winning white majority counties were actually lower in eight southern states for Republicans in 2008 than in 2004 when a southern incumbent, George W. Bush, ran against a northern Democrat, John Kerry. Only Tennessee and Arkansas in the South saw large increases between 2004 and 2008 for Republicans, while West Virginia and Kentucky among the Border States saw small increases for Republicans in winning these

counties. Indeed, even when compared with 2000—when southern Democrat Al Gore ran against Bush—Republicans did better in 2008 in only five southern states (particularly Gore’s home state of Tennessee and former president Clinton’s home state of Arkansas) and worse in five others (whereas the percentage was about the same in Georgia in 2000 and 2008). On the other hand, at the actual vote level, the Republican Party saw its electoral fortunes expand and increase when the opposition party placed an African American on its presidential ticket. Although some of this can be attributed to the population changes in these states between 2004 and 2008 (as the South with the exception of Louisiana was growing), the data from these three recent presidential elections still suggest that when race became an issue in party competition in the South, the white electorate in the white majority counties surged in their Republican Party voting behavior, while in the Border States the white electorate declined in their Republican Party voting behavior. Visual presentation of the gain in terms of votes can be seen in Figure 27.7 (p. 698). The greatest gain in actual votes for the Republican Party in the white majority counties came in North Carolina and Georgia, where more than 150,000 more voters came to the polls in 2008 than in 2004; while in six other states—

698

Chapter 27

Figure 27.7  Number of Votes Gained or Lost in White Majority Counties Won by the Republican Party in the South and Border States, from 2004 to 2008 200,000 164,969 150,000

South

94,778

100,000

Border States

150,002

94,694

91,019

80,544

64,827

50,000

60,646

47,770 12,715

0 –6,709 –50,000

–19,286 –20,977 –26,312

–47,589

–40,593

M iss ou ri De la w ar e Ke nt uc ky W es tV irg in ia M ar yla nd

Te xa s

Vi rg in ia

a Ar ka ns as Lo ui sia na M iss iss ip pi

rid Flo

a lin ro Ca th No r

Ge or gi a Te nn es se So e ut h Ca ro lin a Al ab am a

–100,000

Gain/Loss in Votes of White Majority Counties Won by the Republican Party from 2004 to 2008 Sources: Adapted from Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009, and David Leip, David Leip’s Atlas of Presidential Elections, http://www.uselectionatlas.org (Accessed January 18, 2009). Calculations by the authors.

Tennessee, South Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Arkansas, and Louisiana—votes gained in the 2008 presidential election over the 2004 election was more than 50,000 additional votes, while Mississippi and Virginia gained fewer than 50,000 additional votes for the Republicans. Only in Texas and in all of the Border States were there overall losses of Republican votes in the white majority counties in 2008 compared to 2004. The Obama-Biden ticket had a two-fold impact on Republican voting that registered as a surge in ten southern states and a decline in six states, one southern and five in the Border States region.

The Effect of Long-Term Disenfranchisement on the Obama-McCain Contest Table 27.7 presents which candidate won in both former and current African American majority counties for each and every one of the eleven southern states. This table shows that Senator Obama basically won most of the current African American majority counties, with Senator McCain getting a very small number and percentage of votes in these counties. For example, in Alabama the 10 African American majority counties were all won by Senator Obama with 70.2% of the vote, to just 29.5% for Senator McCain. The lone exception throughout the entire South was one McCain victory in an African American majority county in Louisiana (Obama won the other five in the state). However, Senator McCain generally won most of the former African American majority counties, in addition to most of the other white majority counties. In Alabama, for instance, McCain won 13 of the 15 former African American

majority counties and 41 of the 42 traditionally white majority counties. Such a pattern and trend tells us immediately that there was only a small fraction of the white electorate in the white majority counties (including the former African American majority counties) who were willing to vote for an African American presidential candidate. Moreover, these former African American majority counties raise a challenge to the thesis of “white fear” or “racial threat,” a theory articulated by Professors V.O. Key, Jr., and Hubert Blalock.87 In the 2008 election, African Americans no longer constituted the majority population in these counties, yet the current majority group of these counties voted for Senator McCain. It is possible that the “white fear” or “racial threat” could be directed not at a huge presence of the African American population but toward a candidate far removed from both the county and the entire southern region. The sole exception to the pattern and trend for Senator McCain in the former African American majority counties was North Carolina. There were 23 of these counties, and Senator Obama captured the majority of votes in 14 of them to McCain’s 9. Clearly, this breakthrough at the county level in North Carolina enabled Senator Obama to win the state. Nevertheless, this same result did not occur in the other two southern states which Senator Obama won, Florida (3 Obama, 11 McCain) and Virginia (12 Obama, 30 McCain). The support for Obama’s victories in these states had to come from other types of counties. Next in Table 27.8 (pp. 700–701), we expand our analysis by including data on the counties covered by the 1963 Department



African American Voting Rights in a Historic Presidential Election 699 Table 27.7  2008 Presidential Election in the Southern States by Past and Present Black Majority Counties Black Majority Counties 

State Alabama    

(a) (b)       Alabama Subtotal Arkansas           Arkansas Subtotal Florida           Florida Subtotal Georgia               Georgia Subtotal Louisiana           Louisiana Subtotal Mississippi           Mississippi Subtotal North   Carolina         North Carolina Subtotal South   Carolina         South Carolina Subtotal Tennessee           Tennessee Subtotal   Texas     Texas Subtotal Virginia               Virginia Subtotal Southern States Totals

Barack Obama # Counties 10 15 42 67 3 14 58 75 1 14 52 67 15 2 60 82 159 6 34 24 64 25 20 37 82 6 23

# Counties Won 10 2 1 13 3 5 1 9 1 3 11 15 15 2 15 2 34 5 5 0 10 25 4 0 29 6 14

John McCain

Votes 62,545 225,321 525,613 813,479 11,001 63,679 347,630 422,310 15,582 569,375 3,697,117 4,282,074 60,182 337,121 815,429 631,405 1,844,137 130,097 463,247 189,645 782,989 216,258 158,527 179,877 554,662 61,317 277,634

% of All Votes 70.20% 44.30% 35.00% 38.70% 61.30% 50.10% 36.90% 38.90% 69.10% 48.50% 51.30% 50.90% 62.40% 79.80% 51.70% 34.40% 46.90% 76.00% 40.90% 28.80% 39.90% 66.50% 38.90% 32.30% 43.00% 66.50% 51.40%

% of State Obama Vote 7.70% 27.70% 64.60% 100% 2.60% 15.10% 82.30% 100% 0.40% 13.30% 86.30% 100% 3.30% 18.30% 44.20% 34.20% 100% 16.60% 59.20% 24.20% 100% 39.00% 28.60% 32.40% 100% 2.90% 13.00%

# Counties Won 0 13 41 54 0 9 57 66 0 11 41 52 0 0 45 80 125 1 29 24 54 0 16 37 53 0 9

Votes 26,264 279,409 960,873 1,266,546 6,670 60,480 570,867 638,017 6,811 592,094 3,446,719 4,045,624 35,693 82,087 748,199 1,182,765 2,048,744 38,575 653,209 456,491 1,148,275 107,035 245,728 371,834 724,597 30,605 258,311

% of All Votes 29.50% 54.90% 64.00% 60.30% 37.20% 47.60% 60.60% 58.70% 30.20% 50.40% 47.80% 48.10% 37.00% 19.40% 47.40% 64.40% 52.10% 22.50% 57.70% 69.40% 58.60% 32.90% 60.30% 66.70% 56.20% 33.20% 47.80%

% of State McCain Vote 2.10% 22.10% 75.90% 100% 1.00% 9.50% 89.50% 100% 0.20% 14.60% 85.20% 100% 1.70% 4.00% 36.50% 57.70% 100% 3.40% 56.90% 39.80% 100% 14.80% 33.90% 51.30% 100% 1.40% 12.10%

Other Votes 276 4,198 15,299 19,773 269 2,838 23,183 26,290 145 13,309 69,167 82,621 534 3,152 13,339 22,197 39,222 2,470 15,360 11,667 29,497 1,979 2,943 5,684 10,606 325 4,101

Total Votes 89,085 508,928 1,501,785 2,099,798 17,940 126,997 941,680 1,086,617 22,538 1,174,778 7,213,003 8,410,319 96,409 422,360 1,576,967 1,836,367 3,932,103 171,142 1,131,816 657,803 1,960,761 325,272 407,198 557,395 1,289,865 92,247 540,046

71

13

1,803,700

49.00%

84.20%

58

1,839,558

50.00%

86.40%

35,238

3,678,496

100 12 25

33 12 8

2,142,651 98,583 518,805

49.70% 64.50% 48.60%

100% 11.40% 60.20%

67 0 17

2,128,474 52,772 537,114

49.40% 34.50% 50.30%

100% 5.10% 51.90%

39,664 1,490 11,738

4,310,789 152,845 1,067,657

9

0

245,061

35.00%

28.40%

9

445,010

63.50%

43.00%

10,396

700,467

46 1 4 90 95 19 235 254 8 2 42 82 134 1,143

20 1 1 4 6 0 28 28 8 2 12 26 48 245

862,449 4,893 291,329 791,215 1,087,437 253,776 3,274,857 3,528,633 107,076 34,029 482,424 1,336,003 1,959,532 18,280,353

44.90% 60.30% 59.10% 37.70% 41.80% 36.00% 44.40% 43.60% 76.70% 69.00% 50.70% 51.70% 52.60% 46.40%

100% 0.40% 26.80% 72.80% 100% 7.20% 92.80% 100% 5.50% 1.70% 24.60% 68.20% 100%  

26 0 3 86 89 19 207 226 0 0 30 56 86 898

1,034,896 3,165 198,086 1,277,927 1,479,178 445,671 4,033,657 4,479,328 31,391 14,881 459,882 1,218,851 1,725,005 20,718,684

53.90% 39.00% 40.20% 60.80% 56.80% 63.20% 54.60% 55.40% 22.50% 30.20% 48.30% 47.20% 46.30% 52.60%

100% 0.20% 13.40% 86.40% 100% 9.90% 90.10% 100% 1.80% 0.90% 26.70% 70.70% 100%  

23,624 63 3,556 31,748 35,367 5,879 72,844 78,723 1,227 372 9,354 27,770 38,723 424,110

1,920,969 8,121 492,971 2,100,890 2,601,982 705,326 7,381,358 8,086,684 139,694 49,282 951,660 2,582,624 3,723,260 39,423,147

Source: Adapted from Table 14.2 and David Leip, David Leip’s Atlas of Presidential Elections, http://www.uselectionatlas.org (Accessed January 18, 2009). Calculations by the authors. (a) Counties with majority African American populations in the Census of 2000. (b) Counties with majority African American populations in any Census from 1870 to 1990.

700

Chapter 27

Table 27.8  2008 Presidential Election in the Southern States by Past and Present Black Majority Counties and by Counties in the VRA Implementation Black Majority Counties & 1963 DOJ Lawsuit

Barack Obama # Counties

# Counties Won

% of All Votes

% of State Obama Vote

# Counties Won

% of State McCain Vote

Other Votes

Total Votes

(a)

(b)

(c)

Alabama        







10

10

62,545

70.2%

7.7%

0

26,264

29.5%

2.1%

276

89,085







10

2

122,805

46.6%

15.1%

8

139,196

52.8%

11.0%

1,603

263,604







5

0

102,516

41.8%

12.6%

5

140,213

57.2%

11.1%

2,595

245,324







1

1

166,121

52.2%

20.4%

0

149,921

47.1%

11.8%

2,482

318,524







41

0

359,492

30.4%

44.2%

41

810,952

68.5%

64.0%

12,817

1,183,261

67

13

813,479

38.7%

100%

54

1,266,546

60.3%

100%

19,773

2,099,798

Arkansas    







3

3

11,001

61.3%

2.6%

0

6,670

37.2%

1.0%

269

17,940







14

5

63,679

50.1%

15.1%

9

60,480

47.6%

9.5%

2,838

126,997







58

1

347,630

36.9%

82.3%

57

570,867

60.6%

89.5%

23,183

941,680

75

9

422,310

38.9%

100%

66

638,017

58.7%

100%

26,290

1,086,617







1

1

15,582

69.1%

0.4%

0

6,811

30.2%

0.2%

145

22,538







1

0

895

27.2%

0.0%

1

2,339

71.2%

0.1%

52

3,286







13

3

568,480

48.5%

13.3%

10

589,755

50.3%

14.6%

13,257

1,171,492







3

1

26,668

46.1%

0.6%

2

30,570

52.8%

0.8%

649

57,887







49

10

3,670,449

51.3%

85.7%

39

3,416,149

47.7%

84.4%

68,518

7,155,116

67

15

4,282,074

50.9%

100%

52

4,045,624

48.1%

100%

82,621

8,410,319

Arkansas Subtotal Florida        

Florida Subtotal Georgia            







8

8

41,540

64.6%

2.3%

0

22,388

34.8%

1.1%

364

64,292







7

7

18,642

58.0%

1.0%

0

13,305

41.4%

0.6%

170

32,117







2

2

337,121

79.8%

18.3%

0

82,087

19.4%

4.0%

3,152

422,360







12

4

36,223

44.8%

2.0%

8

44,121

54.5%

2.2%

600

80,944







48

11

779,206

52.1%

42.3%

37

704,078

47.1%

34.4%

12,739

1,496,023







10

0

171,703

41.7%

9.3%

10

235,461

57.2%

11.5%

4,279

411,443







72

2

459,702

32.3%

24.9%

70

947,304

66.5%

46.2%

17,918

1,424,924

159

34

1,844,137

46.9%

100%

125

2,048,744

52.1%

100%

39,222

3,932,103







5

4

12,995

54.8%

1.7%

1

10,445

44.1%

0.9%

263

23,703







1

1

117,102

79.4%

15.0%

0

28,130

19.1%

2.4%

2,207

147,439







10

1

138,040

42.3%

17.6%

9

185,192

56.7%

16.1%

3,393

326,625







24

4

325,207

40.4%

41.5%

20

468,017

58.1%

40.8%

11,967

805,191







3

0

8,290

33.4%

1.1%

3

16,192

65.2%

1.4%

336

24,818







21

0

181,355

28.7%

23.2%

21

440,299

69.6%

38.3%

11,331

632,985

64

10

782,989

39.9%

100%

54

1,148,275

58.6%

100%

29,497

1,960,761







23

23

194,089

66.9%

35.0%

0

94,122

32.5%

13.0%

1,782

289,993







2

2

22,169

62.8%

4.0%

0

12,913

36.6%

1.8%

197

35,279







18

4

142,608

38.8%

25.7%

14

221,777

60.4%

30.6%

2,690

367,075







2

0

15,916

39.7%

2.9%

2

23,951

59.7%

3.3%

253

40,123







13

0

59,230

34.9%

10.7%

13

109,069

64.2%

15.1%

1,562

169,861







24

0

120,647

31.1%

21.8%

24

262,765

67.8%

36.3%

4,122

387,534

82

29

554,662

43.0%

100%

53

724,597

56.2%

100%

10,606

1,289,865

Georgia Subtotal Louisiana          

Louisiana Subtototal Mississippi          

Votes

% of All Votes

State

Alabama Subtotal

Votes

John McCain

Mississippi Subtotal



African American Voting Rights in a Historic Presidential Election 701 Black Majority Counties & 1963 DOJ Lawsuit

Barack Obama # Counties

# Counties Won

% of All Votes

% of State Obama Vote

# Counties Won

% of State McCain Vote

Other Votes

Total Votes

(a)

(b)

(c)

North Carolina          







4

4

36,828

65.6%

1.7%

0

19,097

34.0%

0.9%

197

56,122







2

2

24,489

67.8%

1.1%

0

11,508

31.9%

0.5%

128

36,125







2

0

16,881

48.6%

0.8%

2

17,545

50.5%

0.8%

316

34,742







21

14

260,753

51.6%

12.2%

7

240,766

47.6%

11.3%

3,785

505,304







1

0

1,265

30.3%

0.1%

1

2,824

67.7%

0.1%

82

4,171







70

13

1,802,435

49.1%

84.1%

57

1,836,734

50.0%

86.3%

35,156

3,674,325

South Carolina        

100

33

2,142,651

49.7%

100%

67

2,128,474

49.4%

100%

39,664

4,310,789







5

5

38,131

61.7%

4.4%

0

23,054

37.3%

2.2%

566

61,751







7

7

60,452

66.4%

7.0%

0

29,718

32.6%

2.9%

924

91,094







3

1

40,281

45.0%

4.7%

2

48,168

53.8%

4.7%

1,028

89,477







22

7

478,524

48.9%

55.5%

15

488,946

50.0%

47.2%

10,710

978,180







South Carolina Subtotal Tennessee      

0

245,061

35.0%

28.4%

9

445,010

63.5%

43.0%

10,396

700,467

20

862,449

44.9%

100%

26

1,034,896

53.9%

100%

23,624

1,920,969

4,893

60.3%

0.4%

0

3,165

39.0%

0.2%

63

8,121





1

1







1

0

6,892

35.8%

0.6%

1

12,173

63.2%

0.8%

189

19,254







3

1

284,437

60.0%

26.2%

2

185,913

39.2%

12.6%

3,367

473,717







90

4

791,215

37.7%

72.8%

86

1,277,927

60.8%

86.4%

31,748

2,100,890

95

6

1,087,437

41.8%

100%

89

1,479,178

56.8%

100%

35,367

2,601,982







19

0

253,776

36.0%

7.2%

19

445,671

63.2%

9.9%

5,879

705,326







235

28

3,274,857

44.4%

92.8%

207

4,033,657

54.6%

90.1%

72,844

7,381,358

254

28

3,528,633

43.6%

100%

226

4,479,328

55.4%

100%

78,723

8,086,684

Texas Subtotal Virginia      

9 46



Tennessee Subtotal Texas  

Votes

% of All Votes

State

North Carolina Subtotal

Votes

John McCain







8

8

107,076

76.7%

5.5%

0

31,391

22.5%

1.8%

1,227

139,694







2

2

34,029

69.0%

1.7%

0

14,881

30.2%

0.9%

372

49,282







42

12

482,424

50.7%

24.6%

30

459,882

48.3%

26.7%

9,354

951,660







82

26

1,336,003

51.7%

68.2%

56

1,218,851

47.2%

70.7%

27,770

2,582,624

134

48

1,959,532

52.6%

100%

86

1,725,005

46.3%

100%

38,723

3,723,260

1,143

245

18,280,353

46.4%

 

898

20,718,684

52.6%

 

Virginia Subtotal Southern States Totals

424,110 39,423,147

Source: Adapted from Table 14.2, Table 25.17, and David Leip, David Leip’s Atlas of Presidential Elections, http://www.uselectionatlas.org (Accessed January 18, 2009). Calculations by the authors. (a)

Counties with majority African American populations in the 2000 Census.

(b)

Counties with majority African American populations in any Census from 1870 to 1990.

Counties in the 1963 Department of Justice lawsuit, or counties having persons listed by federal examiners during the implementation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, or counties having elections with federal observers, from 1965 to 1980. (c)

of Justice lawsuit as being the 100 worst county offenders against African American enfranchisement in the South (as well as counties having elections with federal observers between 1965 to 1980).88 Among this collection of counties (the suit covered all of the southern states except Arkansas, Texas, and Virginia), 29 of the 31 offenders which had been white majority counties since 1870 voted for Senator McCain in the 2008 presidential election, with one exception each in Alabama and Florida, where a county in the suit or meriting observers voted for Senator Obama. Among the 56 offending counties that were formerly African

American majority (but not in 2000), Obama also had little success, winning only 12—1 in South Carolina, 4 in Mississippi, 1 in Louisiana, 4 in Georgia, and 2 in Alabama. However, of the 56 majority African American counties (as of 2000) named in the suit or drawing later electoral observers, Obama won 55, with the lone exception being in Louisiana. Simply put, this is a big change from days when members of the white minorities in those counties were able to control and suppress the African American electorate. Still, the fact that Senator McCain prevailed in the lion’s share of the present-day white majority “worst” counties

702

Chapter 27

from 1963 and these “remedy” counties from the VRA implementation suggests that these remedies made little or no difference and that the 1965 Act may have only proved effective and useful in present-day African American majority counties. Of the total 143 counties in the original suit or with later federal election monitors, McCain won 74 while Obama captured only 69. In Table 27.9, we project the percentage of votes that Senator Obama received from present-day African American

majority counties to the former African American majority counties, most of which were actually won by Senator McCain. Because Senator Obama captured all but one of the current African American majority counties, this hypothetical model awards to him all of the former African American majority counties. The result shows the potential impact and influence of the changes wrought in part by disenfranchisement on this historic election.

Table 27.9  Projecting Same Support in Former Black Majority Counties as in Current Black Majority Counties Won by Obama in the South in the 2008 Presidential Election Black Majority Counties

Barack Obama # Counties

# Counties Won

% of State Obama Vote

% of State McCain Vote

Other Votes

Total Votes

(a)

(b)

Alabama    





10

10

62,545

70.2%

6.6%

0

26,264

29.5%

2.3%

276

89,085





15

15

357,310

70.0%

37.8%

0

150,042

29.5%

13.2%

1,577

508,928





42

1

525,613

35.0%

55.6%

41

960,873

64.0%

84.5%

15,299

1,501,785

Arkansas    

67

26

945,468

45.0%

100%

41

1,137,179

54.2%

100%

17,152

2,099,798





3

3

11,001

61.3%

2.5%

0

6,670

37.2%

1.1%

269

17,940





14

14

77,877

61.0%

17.8%

0

47,216

37.2%

7.6%

1,905

126,997





58

1

347,630

36.0%

79.6%

57

570,867

60.6%

91.4%

23,183

941,680

75

18

436,508

40.0%

100%

57

624,753

57.5%

100%

25,357

1,086,617

Arkansas Subtotal Florida    





1

1

15,582

69.0%

0.3%

0

6,811

30.2%

0.0%

145

22,538





14

14

812,202

69.0%

17.9%

0

355,018

30.2%

9.0%

7,557

1,174,778





52

11

3,697,117

51.0%

81.7%

41

3,446,719

47.8%

90.0%

69,167

7,213,003

67

26

4,524,901

53.0%

100%

41

3,808,548

45.3%

100%

76,869

8,410,319

Florida Subtotal Georgia      





15

15

60,182

62.0%

3.0%

0

35,693

37.0%

1.9%

534

96,409





2

2

337,121

79.0%

16.7%

0

82,087

19.4%

4.4%

3,152

422,360





60

60

984,400

62.0%

48.9%

0

583,833

37.0%

31.0%

8,737

1,576,967





Georgia Subtotal Louisiana    

82

2

631,405

34.0%

31.4%

80

1,182,765

64.4%

62.8%

22,197

1,836,367

159

79

2,013,108

51.0%

100%

80

1,884,378

47.9%

100%

34,620

3,932,103





6

5

130,097

76.0%

11.0%

1

38,575

22.5%

5.1%

2,470

171,142





34

34

860,372

76.0%

72.9%

0

255,107

22.5%

34.0%

16,336

1,131,816





24

0

189,645

28.0%

16.1%

24

456,491

69.4%

60.9%

11,667

657,803

Louisiana Subtotal Mississippi    

Votes

% of All Votes

State

Alabama Subtotal

Votes

% of All Votes

John McCain # Counties Won

64

39

1,180,114

60.2%

100%

25

750,173

38.3%

100%

30,473

1,960,761





25

25

216,258

66.0%

32.4%

0

107,035

32.9%

17.5%

1,979

325,272





20

20

270,726

66.5%

40.6%

0

133,994

32.9%

21.9%

2,478

407,198





37

0

179,877

32.3%

27.0%

37

371,834

66.7%

60.7%

5,684

557,395

Mississippi Subtotal

82

45

666,861

51.7%

100%

37

612,863

47.5%

100%

10,141

1,289,865





6

6

61,317

66.5%

2.8%

0

30,605

33.2%

1.5%

325

92,247





23

23

358,970

66.5%

16.1%

0

179,172

33.2%

8.7%

1,904

540,046





71

13

1,803,700

49.0%

81.1%

58

1,839,558

50.0%

89.8%

35,238

3,678,496

North Carolina Subtotal

North Carolina    

100

42

2,223,987

51.6%

100%

58

2,049,335

47.5%

100%

37,467

4,310,789





12

12

98,583

64.5%

9.6%

0

52,772

34.5%

6.1%

1,490

152,845





25

25

688,628

64.5%

66.7%

0

368,622

34.5%

42.5%

10,406

1,067,657





9

0

245,061

35.0%

23.7%

9

445,010

63.5%

51.4%

10,396

700,467

South Carolina Subtotal

46

37

1,032,272

53.7%

100%

9

866,404

45.1%

100%

22,292

1,920,969

South Carolina    



African American Voting Rights in a Historic Presidential Election 703 Black Majority Counties

Barack Obama # Counties

# Counties Won

% of State Obama Vote

# Counties Won

% of State McCain Vote

Other Votes

Total Votes

(a)

(b)

Tennessee    





1

1

4,893

60.3%

0.4%

0

3,165

39.0%

0.2%

63

8,121





4

4

297,021

60.3%

27.2%

0

192,125

39.0%

13.0%

3,823

492,971





90

4

791,215

37.7%

72.4%

86

1,277,927

60.8%

86.7%

31,748

2,100,890

95

9

1,093,129

42.0%

100%

86

1,473,217

56.6%

100%

35,634

2,601,982

Texas  





19

0

253,776

36.0%

7.2%

19

445,671

63.2%

9.9%

5,879

705,326





235

28

3,274,857

44.4%

92.8%

207

4,033,657

54.6%

90.1%

72,844

7,381,358

254

28

3,528,633

43.6%

100%

226

4,479,328

55.4%

100%

78,723

8,086,684





8

8

107,076

76.7%

4.9%

0

31,391

22.5%

2.1%

1,227

139,694





2

2

34,029

69.0%

1.5%

0

14,881

30.2%

1.0%

372

49,282





42

42

729,452

76.7%

33.1%

0

213,854

22.5%

14.5%

8,360

951,660





82

26

1,336,003

51.7%

60.5%

56

1,218,851

47.2%

82.4%

27,770

2,582,624

Texas Subtotal Virginia      

Votes

% of All Votes

State

Tennessee Subtotal

Votes

% of All Votes

John McCain

Virginia Subtotal Southern States Totals

134

78

2,206,560

59.3%

100%

56

1,478,977

39.7%

100%

37,729

3,723,260

1,143

427

19,851,541

50.4%

 

716

19,165,155

48.6%

 

406,457

39,423,147

Source: Adapted from Table 13.2 and David Leip, David Leip’s Atlas of Presidential Elections, http://www.uselectionatlas.org (Accessed January 18, 2009). Calculations by the authors. (a) Counties with majority African American populations in the Census of 2000. (b) Counties with majority African American populations in any Census from 1870 to 1990.

In addition to the southern states actually won by Senator Obama, the model provides him victories in Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. In rank order of vote percentages the states “won” by Senator Obama in the model are Louisiana at 60.2% (meeting the normal requirement for a “landslide” victory), Virginia at 59.3% (nearly a landslide), Florida 53.8%, South Carolina 53.7%, Mississippi 51.7%, North Carolina at 51.6%, and Georgia at 51.2%. The victory rate of the model for Senator Obama is 7 of the 11 southern states, or 63.6%. Finally, this model of the impact and influence of the longterm effects of disenfranchisement does not provide definitive empirical evidence, but it does indeed provide an empirically based electoral portrait of the potential impact, along with the definitive number of counties lost from African American community level control. Table 27.10 compares the actual outcome of the 2008 presidential election in the South with the model and shows the number of popular votes, states, and electoral votes that former African American majority counties might have provided to candidate Barack Obama had these counties retained African American majorities. The model shows 427 counties captured instead of the actual 245; 7 of the 11 southern states won instead of 3; and 93 electoral votes out of 153 instead of the actual 55.

The Short-Term Influence of Disenfranchisement on the 2008 Obama Presidential Election One indicator of short-term disenfranchisement is the amount of racial polarization that exists in the voting behavior of the electorate during a single election. Patterns and trends of racial polarization indicate that amongst the racial or ethnic electorate there is a different degree of support for a particular candidate of another

Table 27.10  Comparing the Actual Outcome of the 2008 Presidential Election in the South with a Model that Awards the Votes of Former Black Majority Counties to Barack Obama

Actual Outcome of the 2008 Presidential Election in the Southern States Candidates

Popular Votes

Number Electoral of States Votes

Hypothetical Model: Votes of Former Black Counties Awarded to Obama According to Support of Current Black Counties Popular Votes

Number Electoral of States Votes

Barack Obama

18,280,353

 3

 55

19,851,541

 7

 93

John McCain

20,718,684

 8

 98

19,165,155

 4

 60

Other

424,110

 0

  0

  406,457

 0

  0

Total

39,423,147

11

153

39,423,153

11

153

Source: Table 27.9.

racial or ethnic group. The unique and rare 2008 Democratic presidential primaries and eventually the general election offered just such an opportunity to see the degree and nature of this racial polarization. While the Democratic presidential primaries of 1972, 1984, and 1988 offered racial candidates, many saw these African American presidential candidates as symbolic and “African American” candidates and not really viable candidates for the American presidency. Only Reverend Jesse Jackson’s 1988 campaign got off the launching pad, but it was marred by the tag of inexperience and ethnic antagonism. Thus, it was left trapped

704

Chapter 27

into a near third-party status, being responded to by a very limited voting segment of the primary population. Nevertheless, it set the stage for an Obama-type campaign that broke through in predominantly white states like Iowa and New Hampshire. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 had embedded in it the democratic notion that once racial barriers had fallen in the South and in other selected parts of the nation, a biracial electorate would vote for candidates and issues that would benefit the nation and states without continuing the polarizing legacy of racism and white supremacy. Table 27.11 uses exit poll voting data from most of the southern states to show that only about one-quarter (26%) of the white electorate there embraced biracial voting for Senator Obama in the general election. Nearly threefourths (74%) of the white southern electorate voted against Senator Obama, and these numbers were only very slightly different for the nine states covered by the 1965 Act. Placing this finding in the broader context of the nation, subdivided into three regions, and beginning with the Democratic primary, one sees in Table 27.12 that about one-third Table 27.11  Support for Barack Obama in the South by Race and Coverage under the Voting Rights Act, 2008 Presidential Election

Percent of Black Vote for Obama

Percent of White Vote for Obama

Percentage Point Difference between Races

Table 27.12  Percentage of the Vote for Obama by Region and Race in the 2008 Democratic Party Presidential Primary Elections

State (by Region)

84%

25%

59

Arkansas

74%

16%

58

Florida

73%

23%

50

Georgia

88%

43%

45

Louisiana

86%

30%

56

Mississippi

92%

26%

66

North Carolina

91%

37%

54

South Carolina

78%

24%

54

Tennessee

77%

26%

51

Texas

84%

44%

40

Virginia

90%

52%

38

Unweighted Mean

83%

31%

51.9

Median

84%

26%

54.0

Delaware

86%

40%

46

Kentucky

90%

23%

67

Maryland

84%

42%

42

Missouri

84%

39%

45

Border States

Section 5

Alabama

98%

10%

88

Mississippi

98%

11%

87

Louisiana

94%

14%

80

Georgia

98%

23%

75

South Carolina

96%

26%

70

Virginia

92%

39%

53

North Carolina

95%

35%

60

Colorado

Unweighted Mean

96%

23%

73.3

Connecticut

Median

96%

23%

75

Florida

96%

42%

54

Texas

98%

26%

72

Unweighted Mean

97%

34%

63

Median

97%

34%

63

Arkansas

95%

30%

65

Tennessee

94%

34%

60

Unweighted Mean

95%

32%

62.5

Median Unweighted Mean Median

West Virginia 86%

33%

50.0

Median

85%

39%

45.5

 

 

Other Regions Alaska Arizona

79%

38%

41

California

78%

45%

33

74%

48%

26

 

Idaho

 

Illinois

93%

57%

36

Indiana

89%

40%

49

Iowa

72%

33%

39

Kansas

 

Maine

 

Massachusetts

66%

40%

Michigan

 

Minnesota

   

32%

62.5

96%

26%

69.5

Nebraska

70

Nevada

Source: Adapted from Kristen Clarke, “The Struggle Continues: Combating Discrimination in the Obama Era,” in Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke (eds.), Barack Obama and African American Empowerment: The Rise of Black America’s New Leadership (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), p. 247. Calculations by the authors.

 

Hawaii

95%

26%

23%

Unweighted Mean

Montana

96%

Percentage Point Difference

Alabama

State

Not Covered by Section 5

Percent of White Vote for Obama

South

Voting Rights Act Coverage

Amendment of 1975

Percent of Black Vote for Obama

  83%

New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico

26

34%

49

36% 82%

31% 55%

51



African American Voting Rights in a Historic Presidential Election 705

State (by Region)

Percent of Black Vote for Obama

Percent of White Vote for Obama

Percentage Point Difference

Table 27.13  Percentage of the Vote for Obama in the Presidential Election of 2008 by Region, Race, and Coverage under the Voting Rights Act in the South

61%

37%

North Dakota

  87%

34%

Oklahoma

29%

Oregon

57%

Pennsylvania

90%

37%

Rhode Island

53

53

37%

South Dakota

 

Vermont

60%

Difference in Percentage Points

Alabama

 98%

10%

88

Georgia

 98%

23%

75

Louisiana

 94%

14%

80

Mississippi

 98%

11%

87

North Carolina

 95%

35%

60

South Carolina

 96%

26%

70

Virginia

 92%

39%

53

Washington

 

Unweighted Mean

 96%

23%

73.3

Washington, D.C.

 

Median

 96%

23%

75.0

Amendment of 1975

55%

Percent of White Vote for Obama

Florida

 96%

42%

54

Texas

 98%

26%

72

Unweighted Mean

 97%

34%

63.0

Median

 97%

34%

63.0

Not Covered by Section 5

Utah

State (by Region)

Percent of Black Vote for Obama South

Section 5

Ohio

24

Voting Rights Act Coverage

Other Regions (continued) New York

Arkansas

 95%

30%

65

Tennessee

 94%

34%

60

Unweighted Mean

 95%

32%

62.5

Median

91%

54%

Wyoming

37

 

Unweighted Mean

80%

43%

39.8

Median

82%

39%

39.0

Nation Unweighted Mean

82%

38%

46.0

Median

84%

37%

47.5

Source: Adapted from Kristen Clarke, “The Struggle Continues: Combating Discrimination in the Obama Era,” in Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke (eds.), Barack Obama and African American Empowerment: The Rise of Black America’s New Leadership (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), pp. 248–249. Calculations by the authors.

(31%) of the white primary electorate in the South voted for Senator Obama while four-fifths (83%) of the African American electorate there supported the senator. That leaves the difference between the two racial groups in the Democratic primary as a gap of about 52 percentage points. The gap was only slightly different for the Border region where it measured 50 percentage points. The gap in the non-South region is substantially narrower with a difference between black and white voters of about 40 percentage points. Whites in all three regions were wary of this African American candidate and tended to support Senator Hillary Clinton. Table 27.13 takes us back to the general election. The table shows a gap in the South of 69.5 percentage points between the races in their support of Obama, to 49.5 percentage points in the Border region, and a gap of 44.8 percentage points outside of the South. The region here with a past of disenfranchisement also exhibited the greatest extent of racially polarized voting in the 2008 presidential election. And it was here in this region with the past history that in all likelihood disenfranchisement occurred as it had in 2000 and 2004 with newer techniques. Table 27.14 (pp. 706–707) compares the percentage in white support by state for Senator Obama from his campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primary elections to the general election contest against Senator McCain. The difference in white support for Senator Obama across the entire nation was

 95%

32%

62.5

South Unweighted Mean

 96%

26%

69.5

South Median

 96%

26%

70.0

Border States Delaware

 99%

53%

46

Kentucky

 90%

36%

54

Maryland

 94%

47%

47

Missouri

 93%

42%

51

West Virginia

Voting Rights Act Not Applicable

Wisconsin

41%

Unweighted Mean

 94%

44%

49.5

Median

 94%

42%

49.0

Other Regions Alaska

33%

Arizona California

40%  94%

Colorado Connecticut

52%

42

50%  93%

Hawaii

51% 70%

Idaho

33%

Illinois

 96%

51%

45

Indiana

 90%

45%

45

Iowa

 93%

51%

42

Kansas

40%

Maine

58%

Massachusetts Michigan

59%  97%

51%

Minnesota

53%

Montana

45%

Nebraska

39%

46

(Continued)

706

Chapter 27

Voting Rights Act Coverage

Table 27.13 (Continued)

Percent of Black Vote for Obama

State (by Region)

Percent of White Vote for Obama

Difference in Percentage Points

Other Regions (continued) Nevada

 94%

45%

New Hampshire  92%

49%

Voting Rights Act Not Applicable (continued)

New Mexico 100%

52%

North Dakota  97%

44%

26%

-18

52%

39%

-13

43

Unweighted Mean

31%

26%

-5.1

Median

26%

26%

-13.0

48

46%

Oklahoma

29%

Oregon

57%

Pennsylvania

 95%

51

48%

South (continued) Virginia

42%

Ohio

47

Border States Delaware

40%

53%

13

Kentucky

23%

36%

13

Maryland

42%

47%

5

Missouri

39%

42%

3

West Virginia

23%

41%

18

44%

10.4

42%

13.0

Rhode Island

58%

Unweighted Mean

33%

South Dakota

41%

Median

39%

Utah

31%

Vermont

68%

Washington

55%

Other Regions

Washington, D.C. Wisconsin

 91%

54%

Wyoming

37

32%

Unweighted Mean

 94%

48%

44.8

Median

 94%

50%

45.0

Nation Unweighted Mean

 95%

42%

56.4

Median

 95%

44%

51.0

Source: Adapted from Kristen Clarke, “The Struggle Continues: Combating Discrimination in the Obama Era,” in Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke (eds.), Barack Obama and African American Empowerment: The Rise of Black America’s New Leadership (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), pp. 247–249. Calculations by the authors.

Table 27.14  Percentage Gain or Loss in White Support for Obama From the 2008 Democratic Party Presidential Primary Elections to the General Election

State (by Region)

Democratic Party Presidential Primary Elections, Percent of White Vote for Obama

Presidential General Election, Percent of White Vote for Obama

Gain/Loss in Percentage Points (General Election – Primary Elections)

Texas

42%

New York

Presidential General Election, Percent of White Vote for Obama

49

54%

New Jersey

State (by Region)

Democratic Party Presidential Primary Elections, Percent of White Vote for Obama

Gain/Loss in Percentage Points (General Election – Primary Elections)

South Alabama

25%

10%

-15

Arkansas

16%

30%

14

Florida

23%

42%

19

Georgia

43%

23%

-20

Louisiana

30%

14%

-16

Mississippi

26%

11%

-15

North Carolina

37%

35%

-2

South Carolina

24%

26%

Tennessee

26%

34%

Alaska

 

33%

Arizona

38%

40%

2

California

45%

52%

7

Colorado Connecticut

50% 48%

Hawaii

51%

3

70%

Idaho

33%

Illinois

57%

51%

-6

Indiana

40%

45%

5

Iowa

33%

51%

18

Kansas

40%

Maine Massachusetts

58% 40%

59%

Michigan

51%

Minnesota

53%

Montana

45%

Nebraska

19

39%

Nevada

34%

45%

11

New Hampshire

36%

54%

18

New Jersey

31%

49%

18

New Mexico

55%

42%

-13

New York

37%

52%

15

North Dakota

42%

Ohio

34%

46%

12

Oklahoma

29%

29%

0

Oregon

57%

57%

0

Pennsylvania

37%

48%

11

Rhode Island

37%

58%

21

South Dakota

41%

Utah

55%

31%

-24

2

Vermont

60%

68%

8

8

Washington

55%



African American Voting Rights in a Historic Presidential Election 707 Democratic Party Presidential Primary Elections, Percent of White Vote for Obama

State (by Region)

Presidential General Election, Percent of White Vote for Obama

slight, a gain of 3.4 percentage points. In the Border States he received 10.4 percentage points more in the general election than in the primary, and elsewhere outside of the South the disparity in white support was a positive 6.3 percentage points. The South stands out as the one region where Senator Obama’s support among whites decreased in the general election, overall by 5.1 percentage points. Figure 27.8 ranks the southern states in terms of these disparities from highest to lowest. Senator Obama had higher percentages of white support in the general election in four of the eleven southern states. Florida, a state won by the Senator in the general election but one in which he did not campaign in its Democratic Party primary, showed the largest positive disparity of 19 percentage points. The other states with higher rates of white support for Senator Obama were Arkansas (+14%), Tennessee (+8%), and South Carolina (+2%), all states that he lost in the general election. Our previous modeling of African American support suggests that had a number of counties retained their former African American majorities in population the Senator could have won at least four more states in the South.

Gain/Loss in Percentage Points (General Election – Primary Elections)

Other Regions (continued) Washington, D.C. Wisconsin Wyoming Unweighted Mean Median

  54%

54% 32%

0

43%

48%

6.3

50%

7.5

38%

43%

3.4

37%

44%

5.0

39% Nation

Unweighted Mean Median

Source: Adapted from Kristen Clarke, “The Struggle Continues: Combating Discrimination in the Obama Era,” in Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke (eds.), Barack Obama and African American Empowerment: The Rise of Black America’s New Leadership (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), pp. 247–249. Calculations by the authors.

Figure 27.8  Percentage Point Gain or Loss in White Support for Obama in the South From the 2008 Democratic Party Primary Elections to the General Election

Percentage Point Gain or Loss in White Support for Obama

25 20

19 14

15 10

8

5

2

0 –2

–5 –10

–13

–15

–15

–15

–16

–18

–20 –25

Florida

Arkansas

Tennessee

South Carolina

North Carolina

Virginia

States won by Obama

Alabama

Mississippi Louisiana

Texas

–20 Georgia

States won by McCain

Source: Table 27.12.

Thus, these limited increases in four states versus the losses in the majority of the southern states meant a stalling as well as only partial growth in a biracial electorate in the majority of the South. And such a possibility suggests attitudinal support for new disenfranchising techniques like vote dilution and suppression.

Summary and Conclusions on the 2008 Obama Election Collectively, the long-term and short-term disenfranchisement findings reveal a composite portrait with definitive findings

708

Chapter 27

about the former African American majority counties. The loss of majority counties reduced African American electorate influence and impact as much as the very long period of disenfranchisement that the African American electorate faced over time. There are also definitive data on how both the “former” counties as well as the “current” African American majority counties voted in the general election. Second, there are empirically based speculations and suggestive empirical data about how former African American majority counties might have voted and the manner in which these counties could have changed the number of electoral votes that Senator Obama received from the South. Third, this chapter shows how the Republican candidate significantly benefitted from the voting behavior in the former African American majority counties in the region. The vote in these counties for Senator McCain allowed him to win eight of the eleven southern states. And in several of these states he not only won but had landslide victories. They were significant for him electorally. Fourth, Senator McCain was able to increase turnout and voter support for the Republican Party in the South over what his party had attained in the region in the 2000 and 2004 elections, in part because of racially polarized voting and also because the Democratic opponent was not from the South, as had been the case with Clinton in 1996 and Gore in 2000. McCain was also able to strengthen the Republican base due to the fact that many in the white electorate were motivated to turn out and vote against the African American presidential candidate on the Democratic Party ticket. Therefore, disenfranchisement had varying degrees of influence during the 2008 presidential election in both the primary and general election time periods. And in some regions of the country, notably in several states of the South, Senator Obama was unable to overcome these disenfranchising forces.

Notes   1. Barack Obama, “Selma Voting Rights March Commemoration at Brown Chapel,” American Rhetoric Online Speech Bank, delivered March 4, 2007, Selma, Alabama http://americanrhetoric.com/barackobama speeches.htm, p. 3.   2. Ibid., p. 2.  3. Ibid.  4. Ibid.   5. Ibid., pp. 3–4.   6. Ibid., p. 4.   7. Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789-2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), Chapter 58.   8. Lynn Sweet, “Clinton’s Selma Speech; Text as Delivered,” Chicago Sun-Times, suntimes.com (March 6, 2007), http://blogs.suntimes .com/sweet/2007/03/Clintons_selma_speech_text.html, pp. 2–3.   9. Ibid., p. 2. 10. Ibid., p. 3. 11. Ibid. 12. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Department of Justice Voting Rights Enforcement for the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election: Briefing Report (Washington, DC: United States Commission on Civil Rights, July, 2009), p. 1. 13. Ibid., pp. 20 and 56–57. 14. Ibid., p. 8.

15. The initial report came out in April 2006. See United States Commission on Civil Rights, Reauthorization of the Temporary Provisions of the Voting Rights Act: An Examination of the Act’s Section 5 Preclearance Provision: Briefing Report (Washington, DC: United States Commission on Civil Rights, April 2006), pp. vi–65. In this report, the white conservative majority urged Congress not to reauthorize any of the temporary provisions of the Act. 16. Ibid., p. 1. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., pp. 2–3. 19. Ibid., p. 7. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., pp. 7–8. 23. Ibid., p. 10. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., p. 65. 28. Ibid., p. 73. 29. Ibid., p. 12. 30. Ibid., p. 16. 31. Ibid., p. 24. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., p. 66. 34. United States Department of Justice, “About Federal Observers and Election Monitoring,” http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/votexamine/ activ_exam.php. 35. Hanes Walton, Jr., and Robert C. Starks, “The Early Electoral Contests of Senator Barack Obama: A Longitudinal Analysis,” National Political Science Review Vol. 12 (2009), p. 124. 36. Ibid., pp. 128–137. 37. Barack Obama, “Remarks of Senator Barack Obama in Support of H.R. 9, the Voting Rights Act, July 20, 2006,” http://obamaspeeches .com/084-Support-of-HR-9-the-Voting-Rights-Act-Obama-Speech.htm; see also “Senator Barack Obama Supports Renewal of the VRA,” in Laurie Collier Hillstrom (ed.), Defining Moments: The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Detroit: Omnigraphics, 2009), pp. 212–215. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Barack Obama “Senator Obama’s Floor Speech Opposition to the Amendment Requiring a Photo ID,” May 24, 2006, http://obama speeches.com/072-Opposition-to-the-Amendment-Requiring-a-PhotoID. For a pioneering article on one of the first southern states to use the voter ID procedure and its impact on the African American electorate see Keesha Middlemass, “Racial Politics and Voter Suppression in Georgia,” in Pearl Ford, African Americans in Georgia: A Reflection of Politics and Policy in the New South (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2010), pp. 7–24. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Hanes Walton, Jr., Josephine Allen, Sherman C. Puckett, Donald R. Deskins, Jr., and Robert T. Starks, “Forecasting and Predicting the Election of an African American President: Perspectives from the Campaign Managers,” DuBois Review Vol. 7 (Spring 2010), pp. 57–80. 51. Chuck Todd and Sheldon Gawiser, How Barack Obama Won: A State-by-State Guide to the Historic 2008 Presidential Election (New York: Vintage Books, 2009). 52. Ibid., pp. vii–viii. 53. Ibid., p. 29. 54. Ibid.



African American Voting Rights in a Historic Presidential Election 709

55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., p. 30. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid., p. 47. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., p. 165. On the recent southern native-son presidential candidates see Hanes Walton, Jr., Reelection: William Jefferson Clinton as a Native-Son Presidential Candidate (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000) and his The Native-Son Presidential Candidate: The Carter Vote in Georgia (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992). 61. Ibid., p.167. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., p. 199. 64. Ibid., p. 208. 65. Ibid., p. 227. 66. Ibid., p. 232. 67. Ibid., p. 57. 68. Ibid., pp. 57–58. 69. Ibid., p. 60. 70. Ibid., p. 80. 71. Ibid., p. 92. 72. Ibid., pp. 146–147. 73. Ibid., p. 160. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid., p. 162. 76. Ibid., p. 182. 77. Ibid., p. 196. 78. Ibid.

79. Ibid., p. 204. 80. Ibid., p. 242. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid., p. 75. 83. Ibid. 84. Hanes Walton, Jr., Invisible Politics: Black Political Behavior (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), p. 83. 85. Ibid. 86. See V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation, A New Edition (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977), pp. 254–261; and for a comparative intra-regional analysis using Republican and Democratic pluralities in presidential elections in the total South and some selected states see Hanes Walton, Jr., and Daniel Brantley, “Black Southern Politics: A Look at the Tradition and the Future,” in Hanes Walton, Jr. (ed.), Black Politics and Black Political Behavior: A Linkage Analysis (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), pp. 288–297. 87. For a full discussion of this “racial threat” thesis of Professors Key and Blalock, see Keesha Middlemass, “Barack Obama and the Black Electorate in Georgia,” in Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke (eds.), Barack Obama and the African American Empowerment: The Rise of Black America’s New Leadership (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 212–214. 88. For a comprehensive list of these counties and a discussion of them see United States Commission on Civil Rights, Civil Rights ’63: 1963 Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1963), Table A, Voter Registration Statistics, pp. 32–36. This table shows data from 1956 and 1962 for all of the southern states except Arkansas, Texas, and Virginia. Arkansas and Texas never had an official voter registration list, only a poll tax list.

CHAPTER 28

Summary and Conclusions King’s Voting Rights Activism and Policy Agenda: An Additional Perspective on the Relationship between Civil and Voting Rights

712

Diagram 28.1 The Voting Rights Activism of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Public Policy Results, 1957–1965

715

The Origins of Voting Rights Activists and Activism as Variables in the Struggle for African American Suffrage Rights

715

Geography (Political Context) as a Variable in the Struggle for African American Suffrage Rights

716

The Origin of Opponents and Opposition as a Variable in the Struggle for African American Suffrage Rights

717

The Origin of Party Competition as a Variable in the Struggle for African American Suffrage Rights

720

The Origins of Public Sentiment and Mass Public Opinion as a Variable in the Struggle for African American Suffrage Rights

721

Figure 28.1 Percent of the Vote Against and For African American Suffrage Rights in Three Statewide Referenda of New York, 1846, 1860, and 1869

722

Figure 28.2 Percent of the Vote For or Against the Imposition or Repeal of Poll Taxes in Three Statewide Referenda of Texas, 1902, 1949, and 1963

723

Map 28.1 Southern States Holding Referenda on Poll Taxes and African American Suffrage Rights, 1900–1963

723

The Origins of States and Localities as a Variable in the Struggle for African American Suffrage Rights

724

The Courts and Liberal Jurisprudence as a Variable in the Struggle for African American Suffrage Rights

725

African American Election Data as a Variable in the Struggle for African American Suffrage Rights

726

Conclusion of The African American Electorate: A Statistical History 726 Diagram 28.2 The Empirically Based Determinative Variables in the African American Voting Rights Struggle

727

Notes 727

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O

ne year before he launched the mass protest movement to re-enfranchise the southern African American electorate via the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote about the need for the African American electorate to re-enter this electoral democracy with an unfettered ballot. He wrote: “Nothing could be more important in the life of this nation and determinative of the future of Western civilization than Negro Americans becoming more politically aware,” especially of the politics of the nation and its political leadership and policy circles.1 King’s 1960s leadership provides a vivid example of the unique relationship and linkage between past and recent African American leaders who work in both areas, civil and voting rights, and his example offers a vivid projection of the possibility of this type of combined leadership recurring in the future. And perhaps most importantly, in King’s voting rights activism we see the trends and patterns of the recurring and enduring major variables that have existed across time, which have determined the outcomes for the African American electorate and America’s electoral democracy. Any summary and concluding statement for this volume must make clear that there has been a continuing relationship between civil rights and voting rights throughout the nation’s political history.

King’s Voting Rights Activism and Policy Agenda: An Additional Perspective on the Relationship between Civil and Voting Rights Why did Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., insist that the rights of the African American electorate were so central both to the United States and to the future of Western civilization? King answered by posing another critical question: “Can America’s Negroes become politically aware?” Then he tried to craft an answer by describing the role and function of African American voters as well as the power and influence of those who had suppressed and denied those voters and in the process crippled and handicapped the very democracy that they resided in. King wrote: “The largest block of unregistered voters in the nation are Negroes in Southern states and Northern cities. As they vote, so goes the nation. This is by no particular virtue of the Negro.”2 And after asserting this role, he then turned to the enduring nemesis of this voter. King declared: The power of this nation now resides in southern congressmen who remain in power through the disfranchisement of the Negro, and a one-party system. Two million additional Negro votes in the Deep South will change that. This is important because these men not only block progress in race relations but also in foreign affairs, labor relations, urban problems and a host of other important issues.3 At this point in his discussion, King returned to the role and function of African American voters: Northern Negro voters now maintain a balance factor to some extent. But the addition of Negro voters in Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, Columbus, Pittsburgh,

Hartford, Oakland, and other “second line” metropolitan areas would give this nation the boost it needs to take creative action on the great economic, political and moral frontiers which now stymie us.4 After laying out this electoral strategy for African American voters, King returned once again to answering his question: “These voters may survive when thrown into the political whirlpool by the sheer power of their instincts, sharpened by years of suffering and betrayal, as did the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the National Democratic Convention [1964], but this course requires too many mistakes and failures.”5 Therefore, to avoid these problems and difficulties that had plagued African American voters and kept them from carrying out their crucial role and function, King suggested that “[s]omehow we must educate a generation of Americans who know the art and craft of politics and pursue it with dedication, integrity and a concern for the progress and future of our civilization.”6 For King, the answer to his question was yes, “America’s Negroes can become politically aware” if they would be allowed to register and vote and by doing so could carry out their determinative role and function and simultaneously diminish the decisive role played by southern congressmen. Thus, for King on the eve of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the African American electorate’s protests and demands had a purpose and objective that involved not just electoral empowerment for themselves but a reformist and corrective role for the nation itself. There was inherent in this continuing effort a greater good for his vision of the “Beloved Community.”7

Give Us the Ballot But King had been on this electoral and political journey since his speech at the March 17, 1957, March on Washington known as the “Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom,” where he delivered his speech, “Give Us the Ballot.”8 Surprisingly, few King scholars take notice of the fact that this speech foreshadowed his comments in his introduction to Edward Clayton’s 1964 book, The Negro Politician: His Success and Failure, and his powerful remarks in his “Letter from the Selma Jail,” which was published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine in early 1965 under the title “Civil Right No. 1—The Right to Vote.” While in the Selma jail, King asserted: “As I told our people in Dallas County two weeks ago, ‘We are going to bring a voting bill into being in the streets of Selma. President Johnson has a mandate from the American people. He must go out and get a voting bill this time that will end the necessity for any more voting bills.’”9 This cry was inspired by King’s earlier experience in seeing protest spur public policy. King’s protest and plea at the “Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom” occurred on March 17, 1957, and by September 9, 1957, Congress, led by Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson, had passed and Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower had signed into law the Civil Rights Act, which was in effect a voting rights law. Indeed, just as King predicted, after the series of mass demonstrations and protests in Selma, which culminated on March 25, 1965, in Montgomery, Alabama, Congress passed and



Summary and Conclusions 713

Democratic President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed into law on August 6, 1965, the Voting Rights Act of that year. In each case the president, one a Republican and the other a Democrat, signed into law a new public policy within six months of the protest. Johnson was the common denominator. As president, Johnson had encouraged King, as Professor Robert Smith wrote: The voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed partly in response to the protests at Selma lead by SNCC and Dr. King, but only partly. In early 1965 President Johnson wanted to pass the strongest voting rights act as soon as possible. In a January 15, 1965, phone conversation with King, Johnson told him that voting rights was the “core” civil right and that a voting rights bill would be the “greatest breakthrough, bigger than the 1964 Act.” He then urged King to find and “publicize the worst examples of voting registration injustices” as a means to put pressure on Congress to act. In a sense, then, Johnson invited the protest at Selma, and he effectively used it to get Congress to swiftly pass the legislation, telling Congress and the nation, “We Shall Overcome” in his post-Selma address proposing the bill.10 Professor Garth Pauley, who also found this telephone conversation between President Johnson and King, added: “Johnson claimed that, if the public were to see a dramatic example of the voter discrimination and intimidation practiced in the South, citizens would demand political action to set things rights and make the electoral system fair.”11 Professor Pauley concluded: Popular myth holds that voting rights demonstrations in Selma, Alabama, created overwhelming political pressure among legislators and citizens, which in turn forced President Johnson to introduce voting rights legislation and push for its passage. An alternative, better-informed way to view the history of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, however, is to see the protests— which Johnson had encouraged—as having cultivated support for a policy to which the president had already committed himself and his administration.12 In fact, it has always been a combination of forces generating voting rights legislation, from the Four Military Reconstruction Acts and the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments to the 1957, 1960, and 1964 Civil Rights Acts and through the various additional steps that culminated in the 1965 Voting Rights Act and its subsequent renewals.

The 1960 Civil Rights Act and the Voter Registration Pact of 1961 The next civil and also voting rights legislation passed by Congress was an outlier in the evolution from the 1957 Act to the 1965 Act. The 1960 Civil Rights Act was both a civil rights and a voting rights bill like its antecedent. Unlike the 1957 Act and later developments, King did not play a major role. The 1960

Act came as a result of congressional and presidential allies who had played central roles in past African American voting rights struggles. Two major factors altered the political context on the eve of the 1960 presidential election. First, white registrars and their equivalents, such as probate judges in Alabama, had simply refused to give voting registration records and data to the members of the United States Commission on Civil Rights who were holding hearings in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. Among the probate judges was future Alabama governor George Wallace, who even refused to obey the order of another federal judge, Frank Johnson, in his own state. Second, once these records were obtained through subterfuge and the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department began to sue under the 1957 Act, it became quite clear that the 1957 Act was inadequate because it would require suing literally on a case-by-case basis over every voting rights compliant, violation, and denial before it could enfranchise African Americans in the South. Thus, to everyone involved it was possible to see that such an approach would not be very useful, given the magnitude of the disenfranchisement problem in the South. New legislation was needed. To solve this legislative problem, the architect of the 1957 Act, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson moved first by offering another moderate bill. Liberals offered a much stronger and more demanding bill, while the southerners sought to block both without offering any alternatives. In the midst of this voting rights problem came the school desegregation problem that had been initiated by the crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, where President Eisenhower had sent federal troops.13 Later, Senate Majority Leader Johnson offered a bill that found something of a middle ground between the two initial offerings. Finally, after much deliberation and many maneuverings, the House passed their version of the 1960 Civil Rights Bill on March 23, 1960; on April 8, 1960, the Senate passed their version, and the Bill was signed into law on May 6, 1960.14 King’s involvement with this 1960 Act was indirect and less influential than his role in the 1957 and the subsequent 1961 Pact (see below), 1964 Act, and the 1965 Act. However, as he had done in 1958 to help implement the 1957 Act, after the passage of the 1960 Act, “[i]n cooperation, Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, and A. Philip Randolph formed a ‘Nonpartisan Crusade to Register One Million New Negro Voters.’”15 This implementation was soon combined with an initiative from the new Democratic president in 1961, John F. Kennedy. This 1961 step on the path from the 1957 Civil Rights Act to the 1965 Voting Rights Act is often overlooked because it was not a formal public policy but rather an informal presidential agreement between President Kennedy and the civil rights community. One of a few scholars and academics to notice this informal agreement, Professor Richard Valelly, has dubbed it, “the Voter Registration Pact of 1961.” To craft this informal presidential agreement, which emphasized African American enfranchisement over direct action mass movements and public demonstrations that usually led to public disturbances, President Kennedy created a “Subcabinet Group on Civil Rights.” This group helped specify and promote President Kennedy’s approach of placing a priority on voting to the civil rights leaders and groups.

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Apparently, at a June 1961 meeting the particulars were put into place and “[a] series of meetings on June 9, June 16, and July 28, 1961 attracted representatives from the Taconic Foundation, Field Fund, SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee], SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference], Congress of Racial Equality, NAACP, National Urban League [NUL], SRC [Southern Regional Council], and the National Student Association. The White House sent [Burke] Marshall and [Harris] Wofford as observers.”16 At these meetings, a consensus was reached “that voter registration is a matter of the highest, though not the sole priority,” while “King recommended that the Southern Regional Council assume the responsibility of supervising the field work and disbursing the money to the participants.”17 On August 23, 1961, “at a climactic meeting at the Taconic Foundation’s New York office” SNCC joined the four other civil rights organizations—SCLC, NAACP, NUL, and CORE [Congress of Racial Equality]—“to ratify the ‘Voter Education Project’ (VEP) that [Harold] Fleming, [Stephen] Currier, and the Kennedy representatives had worked out.”18 Thus, the informal presidential agreement was accepted and launched into reality. And according to Professor Lawson, “[l]ured by the prospect of fresh contributions, the habitually underfinanced civil-rights groups were willing to focus their energies on enfranchisement.”19 This pact was President Kennedy’s administrative proposal “to help the civil rights movement with voter registration campaigns—and they accepted.”20 Professor Pauley described this agreement: Eager to channel this energy into moderate activities that did not produce political crises—as had direct protest in the areas of public accommodations and interstate transportation, such as the Freedom Rides— the Kennedy administration steered some civil rights activism toward enfranchisement activities by helping to provide for massive voter registration drives. White House officials persuaded philanthropic organizations to underwrite an organized effort to register African Americans and research the causes of black voter disfranchisement. The Voter Education Project (VEP) began in 1962, with civil rights workers traveling to communities across the South to stimulate black electoral participation. Their persistence and dedication yielded increases in the number of African Americans registered to vote: Nearly seven hundred thousand blacks—almost all of whom lived in counties that the VEP canvassed—qualified to vote for the first time. The project also connected local blacks with national organizations, helped establish and energize local voter groups, and produced voting statistics that the federal government later used in its efforts to fight voter discrimination.21 Under this new President Kennedy–sponsored initiative, the VEP would be “sheltered under the wing of the tax-exempt Southern Regional Council” and “would have its own director

and would parcel out registration responsibilities and funds to local representatives and affiliates of civil rights organizations throughout the South.”22 Thus, according to Professor Garrow, VEP’s “program would satisfy all of its participants; philanthropic foundations that wanted to support civil progress, a Democratic administration eager for more southern black voters, and civil rights groups anxious for financial subventions for efforts they wanted to undertake in any case.”23 “Despite such success,” Professor Valelly has shown, “the 1961 voting rights pact did not achieve the Kennedy administration’s ulterior goal in coalition-making: lowering the political temperature. Intended to manage interracial conflict, it actually set in motion exceptionally centrifugal forces. The pact eventually needed renegotiation” because it simply became politically unstable.24 But before the pact fell apart, it became another step from the 1957 to the 1965 Act. Moreover, before it dissipated it gave rise to the Mississippi Freedom Summer, the Mississippi Freedom Vote, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party seating challenge at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

The 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Bills The activities sponsored by the 1961 Pact and African American voting rights in general were soon overshadowed by the struggle in 1963 in Birmingham for the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. This latter legislation absorbed all of the focus, interest, and protest priority along with media coverage. Professor Lawson has written: “Throughout the fiercely fought battle that led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the franchise issue remained in the background. The voting sections were among the least controversial in the bill, and many suffragists considered them outmoded.”25 Yet this Act, which again combined both civil rights and voting rights concerns, emerged in part from King’s voting rights activism in Mississippi after his 1963 Birmingham efforts. In Mississippi, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), using the foundation dollars that President Kennedy had gotten for his informal presidential agreement with the five major civil rights organizations and their summer volunteers, had launched several new political innovations. First, the Freedom Elections were held by registered and unregistered voters in the African American communities throughout Mississippi for the two top gubernatorial elections (initial and run-off primaries). Second, these Freedom Elections were held in several local elections in the state and later held in selected places in Alabama. On several occasions King traveled to Mississippi to speak, endorse, and mobilize for these elections and to urge African Americans to participate. Third, COFO established a new state Democratic Party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which sent a biracial delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention to initiate a seating challenge against the regular state Democratic Party’s all-white delegation. King was sent to speak to the MFDP delegates to try to convince them to accept the “two-seat” compromise, which they rejected. And finally, after the convention, the MFDP challenged the all-white Mississippi congressional delegation.26



Summary and Conclusions 715 Diagram 28.1  The Voting Rights Activism of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Public Policy Results, 1957–1965

King’s Prayer Pilgrmage to the Lincoln Memorial Give Us the Ballot Speech March 17, 1957

King’s Voter Registration Drives in Selected Cities

King Meets with President Kennedy Advisers and Private Foundation Leaders

1957–1960

June–July 16, 1961

1957

1960

Civil Rights Act (Voting Rights)

Civil Rights Act (Voting Rights)

September 9, 1957

May 6, 1960

King Mobilizes for the Mississippi Freedom Vote in 1963 Malcolm X Delivers His Ballot & Bullet Speech April 12, 1964

1961 Informal Presidential Agreement with Civil Rights Leaders to Make Voting Rights Their Number One Priority August 23, 1961 Creates the VEP to the Southern Regional Council

King’s Selma to Montgomery March 1965 King Writes His “Letter from the Selma Jail” (Voting Rights No. 1) March 14, 1966

1964 Civil Rights Act (Several Sections Cover Voting Rights)

1965 Voting Rights Act August 6, 1965

July 2, 1964

Source: Adapted from Hanes Walton, Jr., The Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1971).

Thus, in response to this King-assisted voting rights activism and political pressure, Congress on July 2, 1964, passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Titles I and V of this seven-title Act dealt with voting rights matters. Title V became the very first one to require the United States Commission on Civil Rights to collect voting statistics on the African American electorate.27 It was the first official recognition of this electorate since the Senate required the U.S. Army to collect this type of voting statistic on African Americans in 1867. In between, some ninety-seven years had come and gone, nearly one entire century. Following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, King became directly involved in the pressure, pleas, and lobbying that generated the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Diagram 28.1 lays out King’s relationships and linkages, direct and indirect, to the four Acts and one informal pact that dealt with voting rights during his leadership role and function in generating public policies for both civil and voting rights (1957–1965). Although this diagram may suggest that the civil and voting rights of African Americans were always tied and connected, at times they were not. Still, this Kingian example should remind us that almost from the beginning of the suffrage rights struggle in Colonial America, then evolving through Revolutionary, Antebellum, and contemporary America, these same rights have either been related or linked. Again, the reader should take away from this summary and conclusion the emphasis on the continuing national and historic relationship between these two rights.

The Origins of Voting Rights Activists and Activism as Variables in the Struggle for African American Suffrage Rights Activism on behalf of the African American electorate is typified by Martin Luther King, Jr., but it certainly did not begin with him or his generation or even the twentieth century. The presence of voting rights activism by and for African Americans predates even the nationhood of the United States. Many African American voting rights activists have been like King, a leader of a civil rights organization (like SCLC) that is supported by a host of other civil and voting rights organizations, but others have been single individuals, or groups of individuals, or organizations specifically designed to lobby for voting and civil rights such as the National Equal Rights League, or combination organizations such as the National Negro Convention Movement of the 1830s, 1840s, and the 1850s. Throughout our longitudinal coverage in this volume we reveal that a variety of such individuals, groups, and organization have appeared and lobbied for the suffrage rights of African Americans. This volume highlights pioneering African American male voting rights activists such as Frederick Douglass and John Langston and also pioneering African American women such as Mary Shadd of Canada in the National Negro Convention Movement, H. C. Johnson of North Carolina in the National Equal Rights League (NERL), and Sojouner Truth of Michigan, as well as numerous others as the movement continued down through the years. Clearly, these female trailblazers set the stage for Fannie Lou Hamer

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of the 1960s. Moreover, the composition of this movement does not stop with just African American males and females. There were white participants. The NERL gave honorary memberships to several white abolitionists. At the January 1869 National Convention of the Colored Men of America, which re-established the NERL, there were white governors, congressmen, and military and federal officials either present or acknowledged. Among them were General Oliver O. Howard; the former governor of Massachusetts and then Secretary of the Treasury George Boutwell; Congressmen James M. Ashley of Ohio; Governor Samuel Merrill of Iowa; former Secretary of the Interior and then Senator James Harlan of Iowa; United States Senator John Thayer of Nebraska; Congressman George W. Julian of Indiana; Congressmen John Trimble, Horace Maynard, and Samuel M. Arnell of Tennessee; and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Alabama, another southern state besides Mississippi and Tennessee, sent white representatives. Also in attendance was the former chief justice of the New Mexico Territory, Judge Kirby Benedict.28 While several of these white observers made speeches and presentations at this National Convention, the African American delegate from Iowa, Alexander Clark read a “Governor’s Proclamation” from Merrill that emerged as a result of a statewide referendum giving freedmen in that state the right to vote. Although this was the very first African American national convention that whites actively participated in or observed, several white members of Congress before this 1869 Convention had helped Free-Men-of-Color get suffrage rights in the District of Columbia and the other federal territories. Others who had organized and formed the sundry anti-slavery third parties between 1840 and 1860, like Gerrit Smith, had advocated equal suffrage rights for Free-Men-of-Color. Besides the suffrage activism of white males, the white women suffrage movement became another ally during and after the Civil War. “When the American Equal Rights Association was founded in May 1866 with the aim of securing suffrage for black men and all women, Douglass was chosen one of the three vice-presidents.”29 However, when it became clear in 1867 that the freedmen would get the vote before women, the two leaders of the AERA, Susan Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton “not only began to claim priority for woman suffrage, but announced that they were ready to make common cause with any group, even those opposed to Negro suffrage.”30 And when the Fifteenth Amendment was passed in 1870, these white allies were lost to the African American subsequent suffrage struggle during and after the Era of Disenfranchisement, 1888–1908. Such white allies (men and women) would be significantly active in the 1960s with King. Overall, these biracial alliances, both inside and outside the government, were at best erratic, tenuous, fickle, and unstable, and they operated in a surge-and-decline fashion around crises with the American political process. Leading women suffragists, particularly southern white women suffragists, became bitter and vigorous opponents to the enfranchisement of African American women and the re-enfranchisement of African American males.31 Many white women in the South rejected their own right to vote because they were afraid that it would lead to African American women and possibly African American men getting this right as well.32 Thus, throughout the voting rights struggle in America,

some allies and alliances have turned from supporters to foes. Therefore, as a consequence, in many periods of American history African American voting rights activists have had to go on alone and without any allies of other races, as this volume has revealed. But in the post-King period, new allies and alliances have come from the Native American, Latino, and Asian communities due to the ethnic and racial discrimination with which they have had to contend at the ballot box.33 But as our previous chapters have shown, one should not stop with the rise and presence of voting rights activists and activism.

Geography (Political Context) as a Variable in the Struggle for African American Suffrage Rights Of these African American voting rights activists and their activism, there is the essential matter of their geographical place. Not all of the colonies, states, and regions have permitted protest activities on behalf of the African American electorate. Hence, some of these activists had to participate nationally but not locally nor at the state-level. Researching the geographical places from which the delegates came to the National Negro Conventions of the Colored Men of America and the National Equal Rights League, one immediately finds numerous states and federal territories that prohibited them from voting. Pennsylvania took suffrage rights away from African Americans in 1838, but this state sent more delegates than any other state in 1869 to the NERL convention. Moving to the state level, we know that the FreeMen-of-Color in New Orleans held a local convention, gathered 1,000 signatures, and sent a two-man delegation to President Lincoln and select members of Congress just before the end of the Civil War. They set into motion a letter from President Lincoln to the Reconstruction Governor of Louisiana, Harlan Hahn, in which the president suggested to Hahn that he should consider giving the vote to African American soldiers and literate African Americans. Yet in another parish in Louisiana, Rapides Parish, Free-Men-of-Color had voted since the late 1830s, although this violated state law. But they never sent a petition or a delegation to continue this type of participation after the war. After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, “[i]n January 1926, Mrs. Indiana Little, school teacher of Birmingham, led 1,000 Negro women and a few men before the board of registrars and demanded the right to vote as ‘American citizens’. . . . As usual, ‘this militant Negro political leader was arrested and charged with vagrancy . . .’ and ‘not a single one of the thousand was registered.’”34 But in Rhode Island, where the Free-Men-of-Color lost their suffrage rights in 1822, they got their first opportunity to take sides in the state when a political conflict emerged in 1843 over the new state constitution. These African Americans partnered with one side, and when their side won, they demanded and got the return of their voting rights. Professor Christopher Malone wrote: “It was the only state in antebellum America that blacks won back the right to vote after losing it.”35 Such did not happen in Tennessee, North Carolina, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or any other state where voting rights reversals took place prior to the Civil War.



Summary and Conclusions 717

In the twentieth century, two states, Texas and Mississippi, became the geographical places where local and state voting rights activists and activism led to national agenda issues and public policies. African American voting rights activists and activism in Texas, via the courts, over the matter of White Primaries eventuated in the 1944 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Smith v. Allwright that set the groundwork for the abolition of this disenfranchising tool across all of the southern states. Mississippi became the geographical place, due to its massive resistance to African American voter registration, that helped to transform the Democratic National Convention and its rules, which allowed subsequent African American Democratic candidates to rise and further reform their rules so that, in the early twenty-first century, an African American Democrat could win the presidency. Thus, this state’s massive resistance, like that of Texas, helped set the national agenda in regard to party reform. Finally, there was Selma, Alabama. It was a local situation that eventually became writ large. Professor Pauley wrote: “Though the Selma protests brought the issue of black voting rights to its apex, activism between the mid-1940s and early 1960s made the Selma campaign possible and demonstrated African Americans’ patience, resolve, and courage in their efforts to secure the franchise.”36 African American political scientist and voting rights activist Ronald Walters declared that Selma became the geographical place where “King and his colleagues would begin their drive to convince the nation, and through the nation, the government, that a new authority to establish the legitimate right of blacks to vote was vitally necessary.”37 And of King’s role and function in Selma, Professor Pauley added: Upon King’s involvement in the Selma campaign, the activism there took on broader political significance and became poised to become a symbol of the nationwide struggle by African Americans to register and vote. While King hoped to achieve a victory locally, he also hoped to help bring about a federal legislative solution to the problem of voter discrimination through the Selma campaign. Thus, King’s activism in Selma thrust the local movement into the realm of national politics.38 Selma’s local geography and African American voting rights activism seemingly merged and provided the “dramatic example of the voter discrimination and intimidation practiced in the South” which helped to alter public sentiment and public opinion to “make the electoral system fair.”39 It instituted electoral reform on behalf of the nation and the African American electorate. Therefore, in addition to the causal variables identified in this study—(1) voting activists and activism by individuals, groups, organizations, and (2) voting rights allies and alliances—a third should be added: (3) the geographical and political context. While geography has often hindered, slowed, and reversed suffrage rights for the African American electorate, it has likewise provided at crucial moments dramatic sites and examples that have challenged the prevailing beliefs and support systems. At times due to these locations, legislative changes and public policies have been forthcoming, and at other times either nothing has emerged or these places became political sites for disenfranchisement.

The geographical and political context variable has always had a relationship with and to African American voting rights activists and their activism because there has always been over the nation’s history a place, a colony, or a state that has denied the right to vote. And likewise there has always been a place, a political context somewhere in America—in Colonial, Revolutionary, Antebellum, or contemporary America—that did not deny the right to vote to all African Americans, which has enabled sooner or later a conflict between these places to change them.

The Origin of Opponents and Opposition as a Variable in the Struggle for African American Suffrage Rights Unique to this study is the early initial date, the historical moment when voting rights discrimination based on race surfaced in the nation’s history. Most scholarly and academic legal, historical, political science, and sociological studies as well as the sundry reports and hearings of the United States Commission on Civil Rights has focused on or emerged when a crisis or appalling event has occurred. Therefore, we have sought rather the dating (establishing the chronological birth) of voting rights activism and the appearance of voting rights activists as well as the rise of civil and voting rights organizations, even when these are not well-known or often-discussed. Prime examples of the typical dating process and procedure in the study of the African American electorate are those studies that establish the birth at: (1) Reconstruction (First or Second),40 (2) adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment,41 (3) the Redemption Movement,42 (4) Era of Disenfranchisement, 1888 to 1908,43 (5) Supreme Court’s Guinn v. United States decision abolishing the grandfather clause in 1915,44 (6) the Supreme Court’s Smith v. Allwright decision abolishing the White Primary in 1944,45 or (7) the 1965 Voting Rights Act.46 All of the crisis-based points of departure can be chosen depending upon the conceptualization of the researchers involved and what it is that they want to attain and achieve. None of these data points are factually wrong; they are simply incomplete, inadequate, and indeterminate. Professor Alexander Keyssar’s pioneering and comprehensive study The Right to Vote began with the formation of the nation, 1776, and continued through to 2008 in its second edition. To be sure he did mention some dates before 1776 and offered an overview of the English heritage of the “Stakeholderin-Society” principle governing voting rights and its implementation during Colonial America, but the overall focus of his book is from 1776 to 2008. It is a very distinguished work and one without peer. But the simple truth of the matter is as we have shown in this study: Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color began voting in Colonial America and continued through Revolutionary America and into Antebellum America. Thus, long before the formation of the United States in 1776, the Free Colored population had acquired the right to vote. Some lost it before the formation of the nation took place, while others lost it after the formation took place, but voting participation had occurred in both Colonial and Revolutionary America.

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Therefore, by beginning our study in Colonial America, we learned from the colonial census in Virginia that in 1619, twenty Africans arrived in the royal colony of Jamestown, Virginia, in August 1619, and due to the tradition of the Christian religion these twenty Africans entered Colonial America as indentured servants and were given their freedom seven years later in 1626. Virginia’s Free-Women-of-Color lost their right to vote in 1699, and its Free-Men-of-Color lost their right to vote in 1723.47 Thus, here is the moment in time when race-based voting rights discrimination began in this country. Slaves, of course, were never able to vote. But here is the date for the birth of the suffrage rights struggle and movement in the country, and unlike any other study our conceptualization allowed this study to anchor African American voting history in Colonial America. Such knowledge enables us to see disenfranchisement not as something that began in the Era of Disenfranchisement (1888–1908) but long before the formation of the nation. It predates the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, and the 1787 Constitutional Convention. It began before the rise of central governmental structures like the Continental Congress and the federal government. It started before the debates between the Federalists and Anti-federalists over the matter of states’ rights. We find that it was the House of Burgesses and the Royal Governor in Virginia that passed legislation which deprived the Free-Women-and-Men-of-Color of their voting rights, and not the democratic structures of the federal government and the thirteen original states. These would later emerge and further the disenfranchisement process. And all of this can now be known because the indentured servitude status of the first African Americans allowed them to be transformed into freed people, which predates slavery itself in Colonial America. Free-Men-andWomen-of-Color had suffrage rights before the arrival of slavery status in colonial Virginia in 1661. And without this official and actual dating moment, the full and complete story of the African American electorate cannot be systematically and comprehensively analyzed unless one makes the false assumption that voting in these two periods did not have an effect upon the period of Antebellum, or even contemporary, America. There was indeed electoral continuity, particularly in the New England states, except Connecticut. And some of the individuals in these states became active advocates for voting rights for the Free-Men-ofColor via the abolitionist movement and the anti-slavery, Whig, and later Republican parties. With a beginning birth point (1699 and 1723) of voter discrimination against African Americans, a new variable can be designated: opponents and oppositions can be traced longitudinally from this point over time to see patterns and trends, the surge and declines of these opponents, as well as the tactics, strategies, and programs and their formal and informal public policies. Moreover, beginning with the initial opposition to African American voting rights one can see its evolution over time as well as the nature and scope of the continual proponents of disenfranchisement. Opposition began in the first colony, Virginia, and moved outward. As this study shows, in Colonial America not more than three of the original thirteen colonies disenfranchised Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color: Virginia, South Carolina, and

Georgia. However, once the colonies were transformed into states through the achievement of independence, the number of disenfranchisers increased. State governors and state legislatures displaced colonial governors and colonial legislatures. At the national level, the Continental Congress, which had no centralized authority over voting rights for Free-Women-and-Menof-Color, gave way to the federal Congress, which took some responsibility in the Northwest Ordinance territories but left suffrage matters up to the states. Hence, the number of states that allowed Free-Men-of-Color to vote in Colonial America immediately dropped, and of all of the new states entering the Union only one, Maine, continued to allow its Free-Men-of-Color to vote. All other new states either immediately refused or refused shortly thereafter. Six states allowed the vote by the time of the Civil War. Opponents and opposition varied from state to state, but one consistent pattern stands out. The Democratic Party on the national and on the state level became the main organization that systematically opposed this right until the Civil War, with a very few local exceptions. The forerunners of the Democratic Party, the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans, the Jacksonian Democrats, and eventually the Copperhead Democrats all opposed equal suffrage for African Americans.48 Eventually, so did the southern Democrats.49 We found more than twenty-one statewide referenda specifically on equal voting rights in the North, Midwest, and East prior to and shortly after the Civil War. Opposition was not just a southern and Border State phenomenon. Although southern colonies initially launched this opposition, eventually northern and midwestern states joined in, such as Connecticut and Rhode Island in the East, New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the North, and Ohio and Michigan in the Midwest. Leading the way in almost every one of these regions were white activists in the Democratic Party. And Democratic Party opposition reached across regions all the way to the Far West. Tactics and strategies used by Democrats included legislative and constitutional action to implant in state constitutions the word “white” only for suffrage rights. Others used passage of statutory legislation that excluded Free-Men-of-Color. Another tactic was to manipulate and heighten white fears and prejudices during the times of a referendum on the issue. There were also campaigns that alleged that African Americans were inferior and therefore not entitled to this citizenship right. This tactic emerged during the famous Lincoln-Douglass debates in the Illinois senate race in 1858.50 Our chapter on voting rights reversals before the Civil War reveals how successful all of these tactics and strategies were both before and after the Civil War, and even when the federal government had intervened in the federal territories and the unreconstructed South. Nevertheless, the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment eventually rendered opposition in all regions of the nation, except the South, to gradually diminish and decline but not disappear. But the southern white elites ignored or avoided the 1867 Military Reconstruction Act and the Fifteenth Amendment, and some have tried to circumvent the 1965 Voting Rights Act and its subsequent renewals through methods like felon disenfranchisement. Opposition in the South became a trademark.

The justifications for sundry opponents and oppositions varied and shifted through time. Initially, there were the biological theories of inferiority. This attitude and public opinion and sentiment dominated the political dialogue and discussion for a long time until the period of Reconstruction, which advanced the theory that the African American political neophytes were not ready for nor capable of this aspect of self-government. Slavery had not prepared them to undertake this aspect of democracy; hence, voting was a privilege only for the most capable. Some historians then pointed to the ten years after the Civil War, 1867–1877, sometimes called “Black Reconstruction,” in which southern governments supposedly suffered so much fraud and so many misdeeds and failures as proof positive and empirical evidence that African Americans were incapable of self-government and the right to vote. Next came the theory that in order to reform southern governments, it would be necessary to exclude African American voters from the political process because they were the most venal, corrupt, and immoral individuals in the electoral and political process; remove them and the southern political process would become a model of democracy. And finally, from the 1960s, it was the cultural habits and social pathologies in the African American communities that made them unfit for the ballot box. Today, this transition and transformation in the opponents and their objections from specific partisan moorings to ideological ones can be seen in the shifts in the latest sponsor of the 2006 Voting Rights Act renewal. Republicans sponsored the 1867 Military Reconstruction Acts, the Fifteenth Amendment, and the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Act. But then the Democrats, who had opposed these Acts, shifted their membership and priorities and sponsored the 1964 Civil Rights Act with considerable Republican bipartisan assistance. Yet the Democrats took credit for it as well as for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Republican President Ronald Reagan opposed the 1982 renewal of the Voting Rights Act, and it had to be passed over his veto. But when the renewal was due to come up in 2007, the Republican President George W. Bush renewed it in 2006 and recaptured some of the party’s historical legacy with voting rights in the nation for African Americans and minorities. Thus, due to the fact that both parties are now supporters of voting rights, states’ rights and conservative ideologues have taken up the mantle of opposition to continuing federal intervention on behalf of African American voting rights. And some of this resistance can be seen in the lack of both reports and hearings on voting rights and discrimination issued by the United States Commission on Civil Rights after President Reagan attempted to remove the liberal chairwoman, Professor Mary Francis Berry, and reconstituted the Commission by giving it a conservative majority.51 There have been two exceptions, one which came out in 2006 during the renewal of the Act52 and another which came out just prior to the 2006 midterm elections and the reauthorization of the VRA in 2007.53 And if Chairwoman Berry had been a voting rights activist prior to being appointed to the Commission, Vice Chairwoman Abigail Thernstrom had been a scholarly opponent and activist opposing renewals of the Act. Like most contemporary conservative opponents to the Act’s continuation, she claimed not to oppose African American suffrage rights but rather the enforcement of

Summary and Conclusions 719 these rights by the federal government, even though, as our study has shown, the only periods of strong growth in African American voting have come from federal legislation and enforcement of amendments, while state electoral “reform” has denied African Americans their rights even as recently as the disputed Florida election in 2000. But the opponents and opposition to African American suffrage rights and the various means of ensuring the enforcement of these rights have not only come from a single race. Already in the nineteenth century, the American Reform Society in Philadelphia in 1836–1841 denounced the drive for civil and electoral rights for African Americans and asserted that the FreeMen-and-Women-of-Color should devote themselves to moral uplift and individual moral regeneration. For this organization, character became more important than political and social rights.54 In the twentieth century, opposition arose from two African Americans, Dean Kelly Miller at Howard University and Joseph W. Holley, founder and former president of an African American state college in Albany, Georgia. Miller specifically opposed suffrage rights and the Nineteenth Amendment for African American women. As he saw it, politics was beyond the ability of African American women to comprehend. Holley, on the other hand, opposed breaking down suffrage barriers for both African American men and women. He penned a book, You Can’t Build a Chimney from the Top, in 1948.55 This work, which was applauded and given accolades from segments of the white community, argued that African Americans were not ready for suffrage rights. His argument harkened back to the colonial tradition of the voter as “Stakeholder-in-Society.” He felt certain qualifications were essential for the vote for both African Americans and whites. He wrote: Our election laws should be revised in such a way as to confine the ballot to persons who are trained and know the value of the franchise. There should be both the ownership of property and a fairly good education as requirements for registration to vote. The mere fact that a man or woman has been able to keep soul and body together for twenty-one years or more should not necessarily fit him or her for the franchise. For, with all the opportunities for acquiring a fair degree of education in America open to both Negroes and whites, it is inexcusable for one not to be able to pass a reasonable educational test.56 But these three restrictions—property, education, and a civics or literacy test—had been dropped from most other states long before this era; they had been replaced by the ideal of one person, one vote. Moreover, Holley’s proposal naively or deliberately ignored the fact that most whites in the South who administered these tests were anything but fair and unbiased in their application. Rather, they used them as a pretext to exclude African Americans wherever possible. Professor Holley devoted Chapter 8, “Suffrage,” in this thirteen-chapter book to voting rights for African Americans. In Chapter 8 he wrote: “The truth is, the Negro, as a race, is not interested in voting.”57 According to him this lack of interest

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in voting came about when the Democrats redeemed all of the eleven southern states by the 1876 presidential election and subsequently “Negroes . . . contented themselves with going to the Republican National Conventions, showing no interest in State Elections.”58 He added: “The Negro has had little or no training in the use of the ballot. He is too often led by outsiders who have small interest in him or in the Southern white man either.”59 Regarding the White Primary that excluded African Americans from the only competitive election in the Democratcontrolled South, Professor Holley wrote: The Negro has never been denied the right to vote in the general elections. I have voted in every presidential election since 1896, and almost every time in Georgia. The way to destroy the Democratic primary is to poll enough votes in the general election to elect a man of our choice.60 He disregarded the fact that to achieve change by participating in only the general election, the African American community would need to launch their own new political party or to select a candidate and get him or her on the ballot as an independent. Both tasks had been tried by African Americans in the South and had met with little or no success. Hence, to pitch this as a strategy for the African American electorate without even considering the enormous problems involved was either wishful thinking or intentional appeasement of the white authorities on whom Holley’s college relied for funding. Indeed, African Americans in Georgia filed suit against the state White Primary and won in the federal courts. Similarly, regarding the poll tax barrier, Holley asserted: “When has a dollar a year kept a Negro man or woman from doing anything he or she wanted to do? A race that spends $150,000,000 on cosmetics and $55,000,000 going to the movies could certainly get up one dollar a year each to go to the polls. . . . If either the Negro or the white man really wanted to vote, a dollar a year would be forthcoming.”61 Said solution for this white-erected barrier to halt and limit African American voter registration and voting is much exaggerated especially in terms of the huge dollar amounts that African Americans had to spend in the late 1940s. The $1.00 poll tax rate was not uniform across the eleven southern states; it varied. In Georgia, where he was working, the state had a cumulative poll tax, meaning that a potential voter had to pay for all past years since turning 21, making it one of the highest poll taxes in the region. Furthermore, in most states, there was a time lag intended to discourage African American voters; the tax had to be paid as much as a year ahead, which turned out in most instances to be even before the candidates and campaigns had even been announced. Again Holley’s proposal was either naïvely or intentionally unrealistic. Most recently, some African American conservatives have opposed suffrage rights for African Americans. For example, in December 2007 Professor Shelby Steele declared in his book A Bound Man that Senator Barack Obama could not be elected.62 Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been one of a few African American institutional power holders to represent this sector as an opponent of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Thus,

throughout African American and American history, voices of opposition to suffrage rights have come not just from white opponents and opposition but also from some in the African American community itself. Still, African American community opposition has been episodic and rare, while from the white community it has been ongoing at least regionally, and in most instances from institutional power holders at the state and national level. Finally, the current opposition coming from the conservative ideologues is cloaked by their argument and discourse that voter fraud is now the most important factor or, as we have shown since the 2008 presidential election, at least equal to the factor of voter intimidation and suppression. The key strategy has been to create voter ID laws, as was done in Georgia and Indiana. Moreover, given the Supreme Court ruling in the Crawford v. Marion County Election Board (2008) case upholding the Indiana Photo ID law and as a consequence upholding the Georgia law, many states are as we write seeking to pass their own voter ID laws. Thus, when the conservative ideologues were unable to undermine or discontinue the renewal of the VRA as well as unable to delete and eliminate certain sections of the law like Section 5, this conservative opposition began seeking to displace and sidestep the VRA with a new emphasis and focus—voter fraud—despite the near non-existence of it in the current political system. And these conservative ideologues have at least at the moment the support of a major political party. Hence, undermining of African American voting rights will continue as in the past.

The Origin of Party Competition as a Variable in the Struggle for African American Suffrage Rights Although the Free Coloreds began voting in Colonial America where party politics as we currently understand it did not formally exist, when party competition did come into existence in Antebellum America, one of the dividing and contested issues was the voting alignment of the Free-Men-of-Color with the Federalist Party. Democratic-Republicans in New York City and the state took action to curtail this alliance by placing an additional qualification on Free Colored voters, raising their property requirement to $250.00.63 According to Professor Christopher Malone, it was the future president, Democrat Martin Van Buren—then in New York in 1821—who led the fight to place these new qualifications for Free Coloreds into the state constitution. Malone observed: “Van Buren and the Bucktails . . . were able to secure a restricted franchise that essentially disqualified nearly 15,000 potential black voters across the state—including a heavily concentrated black population in New York City that predominantly voted the Federalist ticket.”64 In Pennsylvania, when a Democratic candidate lost to a Whig candidate in Bucks County because of the alignment of Free Colored voters with the Whigs, it led the state to disenfranchise Free-Men-of-Color in 1838. On this point, Professor Malone noted that “voting rights for blacks became one of the most heated issues under debate—especially after it appeared that blacks had determined the outcome of local elections in favor of the Whig candidates in Bucks County that year. In the

end, Democratic delegates were successful in placing a racial voting restriction in the new constitution, disenfranchising tens of thousands of black Pennsylvanians until the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870.”65 Throughout the northern and midwestern states, the Democratic Party opposed suffrage rights for Free-Men-of-Color, especially when the Federalists, the Whigs, and the anti-slavery parties did support them. Party competition enhanced the suffrage struggle in Antebellum America. Only in one state, Rhode Island, did this party competition result in the restoration of their voting rights, which occurred in 1842. In post-Civil War America, the Democratic Party, initially in the Border States and continually in the southern states, opposed suffrage rights in their competition with the Republicans, which at least at the national level had passed the Four Military Reconstruction Acts and the Fifteenth Amendment. And in the South, members of the Democratic Party have continued their opposition to voting rights for African Americans, the Fifteenth Amendment and the 1965 Voting Rights Act and renewals notwithstanding. However, since the 1960s the Republican Party has taken over the mantle of states’ rights and white traditional society and, at least among some conservatives, opposition to the renewal of the Voting Rights Act. As we showed in Chapter 27, in the 2008 election of the first African American president, white voters and white counties in the South predominantly rejected the Obama-Biden ticket and chose McCain-Palin, for whatever racial or partisan reasons. Across time, when party competition in presidential elections involves race, either at the issue level, dealing with suffrage rights and civil rights, or now at the candidate position, there is opposition at least in the southern states, and it impacts the electoral outcome. In addition, in none of these states, save Georgia and Virginia, have any African American candidates been elected at the statewide level, whether for governor or any other key state position. There have never been since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act any African American U.S. Senators from the South, even at the appointive level. Nor can one find any African American state party chairs in either party in the South. Moreover, since the 2008 election, all of the African Americans who ran for senatorial, gubernatorial, and other statewide offices in the South went down to defeat. Though a rising number of African American elected officials and even an African American president represent real progress, the reality remains that African Americans remain scarce in statewide offices throughout the South. Furthermore, the South is dominated by a Republican Party that has political incentives to limit African American influence, as was done in Florida in the 2000 election. And recent political science studies have empirically demonstrated that race cost Senator Obama a landslide.66

The Origins of Public Sentiment and Mass Public Opinion as a Variable in the Struggle for African American Suffrage Rights In addition to these factors—(1) African American voting rights activists, (2) the political geography (political context), (3) opposing groups and organizations, and (4) party competition—the African American electorate has been affected by

Summary and Conclusions 721 (5) the mass public and their beliefs, attitudes, and opinions. The role of public sentiment and opinions in moving the political elites to grant suffrage rights or deny them is evident in the advocacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., who mobilized public opinion among both African Americans and whites to get the issue of suffrage rights on the national agenda and subsequently on the legislative agenda to generate public policies. But this mobilization of public opinion did not begin in Reverend King’s time but rather started all the way back with the National Negro Convention Movements and the National Equal Rights League in 1864 and 1869, if not before. It is important in a longitudinal study such as this one, which covers several historical periods and eras long before modern-day polls and surveys came into use in the mid 1930s, that addressing the “mass attitudes, beliefs, and behavior” be done without making imprecise statements that African American suffrage rights “were generally popular or unpopular.”67 The critical variable of public opinion, which is the bedrock of the American democratic system, has had a problematic relationship to the African American suffrage rights problem throughout the nation’s history. Historian Lee Benson during the behavioral revolution in political science in the sixties, which introduced quantitative techniques and methodology into political science research and analyses, pioneered in history by using referenda election return data to study past public opinion.68 The first scholar to use Professor Benson’s approach and referenda data on the suffrage rights question for Free-Men-of-Color was Professor Phyllis Field. She analyzed the three suffrage rights referenda held in New York—1846, 1860, and 1869—that sought to remove the $250 property requirement placed on Free Coloreds in 1821. Each one of these referenda failed.69 Professor Field wrote: To identify public opinion accurately in a pre-poll era is no easy task, as Lee Benson has illustrated. . . . Unlike the traditional sources for the study of past public opinion—such as newspapers, diaries, and letters— referenda offer a much broader and more representative view of public reactions to an issue, since far more people participated in them than ever left written records of their feelings. Referenda provide a valuable standard by which to evaluate impressionistic assessments of the state of popular attitudes. Since referendum voting was distinct from candidate selection, it is also possible to compare the two forms of voter expression to see just how successfully party politicians managed the threats to their popular coalitions posed by the raising of the sensitive race issue [suffrage].70 Using the data available in Field’s book, Figure 28.1 (p. 722) reveals the public sentiment and mass public opinion in the state of New York both for and against full suffrage rights for the Free Coloreds in the state. The 1846 referendum occurred before the founding of the Republican Party in 1854; while the 1860 referendum occurred just before the start of the Civil War; and the 1869 referendum occurred four years after the Civil War was over, two years after southern freedmen had acquired the vote in the South, and one year before the

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Figure 28.1  Percent of the Vote Against and For African American Suffrage Rights in Three Statewide Referenda of New York, 1846, 1860, and 1869 80% 72.4% 70% 63.6% 60% Percent of Total Votes

53.1% 50%

46.9%

40%

36.4% 27.6%

30% 20% 10% 0%

1846

1860 Against African American Suffrage Rights

1869 For African American Suffrage Rights

Source: Adapted from Hanes Walton, Jr., and Robert Smith, African American Politics and the African American Quest for Universal Freedom, 2nd Ed. (New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 2003), Table 10.1, p. 152.

ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. These referenda show that what was a landslide issue in 1846 (with 44.8 point margin against expanding suffrage rights) had shrunk to a contented issue in 1869 (with a 6.2 point margin against expanding suffrage rights). Nevertheless, each referendum resulted in defeat for extending suffrage rights to African Americans in New York. Given that the immediate post-Civil War era was the high tide of Republican support for African American voting rights, it is questionable that without the Fifteenth Amendment the property restriction would ever have been removed for African American voters in New York. Beyond the data on New York, Table 2.1 in Chapter 2 reveals the outcome for similar referenda held in some 17 states and territories and the District of Columbia prior to the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. And with few exceptions, the extant quantitative data reveal that majority public opinion throughout the nation was opposed to suffrage rights for the African American electorate. Referenda data on the imposition of the poll tax in different southern states from 1920 through 1948 also exist that provide insights into mass public opinion in a different era of American political history on the African American suffrage rights struggle. Moreover, unique referenda data exist on Texas, as in New York, where the state held several referenda on this particular disenfranchising technique in 1902, 1949, and 1963. Figure 28.2 demonstrates that in Texas the majority of voters, reflecting mass white public opinion, over a sixty-one year period sought to curtail the voting rights of the African

American electorate, even two years before passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Six decades had passed since the poll tax had been enacted in the state in 1902, and there had been only a modest change in mass white racial attitudes toward this disenfranchising technique. Overall, both sets of referenda tell us in no uncertain terms that mass public opinion was opposed to having African Americans fully exercise their suffrage rights in these different eras and different regions of the country. Opposition among the white electorate in both regions was clear and consistent, and one can see its essential stability where more than one referendum on the same issue was held over different time periods. Map 28.1 locates the southern states that held referenda on the imposition or repeal of the poll tax and on disenfranchising African Americans of their suffrage rights during the period from 1900 to 1963, just prior to the ratification of the Twenty-Fourth Amendment that prohibited payment of poll taxes as a requirement for voting in federal elections. Finally, even before the era of opinion polls there are some very strong indications via referenda that mass public opinion and sentiment was indeed against suffrage rights for African Americans. Moreover, King’s voting rights activism was directed to mass public opinion both inside and outside of the South as well as to the political elites in the executive and legislative branches. Clearly, he was able to persuade the political elites to take reformist action, but it is also clear that he was not able to persuade the mass public in all of the regions of the nation. Hence, this variable must be considered.



Summary and Conclusions 723

Figure 28.2  Percent of the Vote For or Against the Imposition or Repeal of Poll Taxes in Three Statewide Referenda of Texas, 1902, 1949, and 1963 70%

65.1%

60%

56.6%

56.3%

Percent of Total Votes

50% 43.7% 40%

43.4%

34.9%

30% 20% 10% 0%

1902 Imposition

1949 Repeal

For the Imposition or Against the Repeal of Poll Taxes

1963 Repeal Against the Imposition or For the Repeal of Poll Taxes

Sources: Adapted from Alexander Heard and Donald Strong (eds.), Southern Primaries and Elections 1920–1949 (University: University of Alabama Press, 1950), pp. 189–191; with data for 1963 from the Texas Secretary of State, “Register of Elected and Appointed State and County Officials 1962–1966” in Election Register: 1838–1972 (Austin: Texas State Archives Microfilmed Copy, 1838–1972).

Map 28.1  Southern States Holding Referenda on Poll Taxes and African American Suffrage Rights, 1900–1963 C WI

SD

MI

WY

NJ

PA IA

MD

OH

NE

DE

IN 0

100

CO

WV

IL

200

miles

Virginia (1949)

MO

KY

KS

North Carolina (1900) TN OK

SC

Arkansas (1938)

NM MS

Texas (1902, 1949, 1963)

AL

Georgia (1908)

Louisiana (1934) 0

100

miles

FL

States of Disenfranchisement Referenda Year(s) of Referendum

Poll Tax African American Suffrage Rights Source: Alexander Heard and Donald Strong, Southern Primaries and Elections, 1920–1949 (University: University of Alabama Press, 1950), pp. 34, 67, 76, 104, 190–191, and 204.

200

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The Origins of States and Localities as a Variable in the Struggle for African American Suffrage Rights Political scientist Alec Ewald has in a recent book shown that suffrage rights in America have had a determinative local dimension and nature despite all of the changes and reforms from Colonial, to Revolutionary, to Antebellum, to contemporary America. “In the beginning,” Professor Ewald found, “all voting was local. During the colonial era and into the early national period, virtually every substantive aspect of voting was under local control and varied considerably from one place to the next.”71 He continued: “Before independence, Americans voted for many local and colonial offices. Elections were held at widely varying and uncertain intervals; many were essentially uncontested, and voting itself was entirely public, usually conducted out loud, or viva voce.”72 Many colonies did not put in place formal age, sex, or residency restrictions, leaving a good deal of discretion in the hands of local officials. Meanwhile, eighteenth-century Americans actually lived with several different franchises, since the voter qualifications for colony elections often differed from those in a town, city, or county.73 However, in Revolutionary America, “[b]etween independence and the Constitution, terms of office were regularized and states established election dates—some in the fall, others in the spring. Where towns were small, as in New England, elections lasted only one day. But in New York, polls were open for up to five days.”74 Even after the ratification of the Constitution, Congress in a 1792 statute allowed the presidential election to be held over a thirty-four day period. Eventually, by 1836 each state in the Union had adopted popular voting in presidential elections; it still took Congress until 1845 before it established a uniform date on which presidential elections would occur. It was “the Tuesday after the first Monday in November as the date when electors should be appointed in each state.”75 It took Congress until 1872 before it mandated that elections to the House of Representatives would fall on the same day.76 And after the Seventeenth Amendment made popular voting for U.S. Senators mandatory in 1913, Congress passed a law in 1914 requiring that these elections take place simultaneously with the other two types of federal elections.77 Again, before these laws requiring simultaneity took effect, it was the states and local governments that set the qualifications. In fact, up until these dates, each local county in the nation set its own date and time for voting for presidential elections within the thirty-four day period. The Constitution also left election qualifications up to the states and local governments as they had existed in Colonial America. Even though the national government learned about the problems inherent in local and state management of the country’s elections, it did not reform them. Professor Ewald summarized by saying: The national government began to see nonuniform election practices as a problem, but despite its textually

clear constitutional authority to change the “Times, Places, and Manner” of elections, it acted only in limited ways, establishing a weak requirement for single-member districts; a common day for presidential elections, . . . and regular contested-election hearings [in each house of Congress] that revealed every wart and dysfunction a locally administered suffrage system could have—yet left that system in place. . . . That the national government had the power to intervene in election mechanics was undisputed. Yet in practice, national authority penetrated only occasionally, even erratically, into a deeply decentralized electoral regime controlled almost entirely by states and localities.78 The federal government had established and exercised its national authority over election administration in federal territories in the 1787 Northwest Ordinance that existed before the adoption and ratification of the Constitution, and it continued this authority on January 8, 1867, for the District of Columbia and February 9, 1867, for the Nebraska Territory. This authority was first applied to the state level on March 2, 1867, with the First Military Reconstruction Act requiring suffrage rights for freedmen in the ten southern states. Eventually, these statutes were superseded by four constitutional amendments that would curtail state and local authority over election administration. Beginning in the Reconstruction Era with the passage and ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment on February 3, 1870, states could no longer use race as a qualification for voting at least in federal elections. Next came the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 that prohibited states from using sex as a qualification for voting in federal elections. Another constitutional amendment, the TwentyFourth (January 23, 1964), disallowed states from using the poll tax as a qualification for voting in federal elections. Finally, on July 1, 1971, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment banned states from prohibiting voters over the age of eighteen from voting in federal elections. Thus, with four constitutional amendments, two of which dealt with African American suffrage rights, Congress curtailed and restricted state and local authority over suffrage rights, which had previously been limited by race, sex, and age. Otherwise, the states and local governments still have considerable authority over election administration in the United States. Professor V. O. Key, Jr., revealed to the nation in his classic Southern Politics the huge problem with election administration in the South. In Chapter 21, entitled “Conduct of Elections,” he declared: Incidence of electoral fraud and irregularity varies enormously over the South; the exact degree of variation is in the nature of things difficult of determination. From extensive conversations with practicing politicians a conclusion, and probably a defensible one, emerges that Tennessee has the most consistent and widespread habit of fraud, with Arkansas a close second. While North Carolina has localized irregularities, the state as a whole has a record of progress in election administration to match that of any state outside the South. The impression develops that, with local



Summary and Conclusions 725 exceptions, Texas and Florida have relatively clean elections. The other states rank somewhere between these extremes. Everywhere habits of fraud and of rectitude in election management seem to have great powers of persistence. One county will year after year conduct its elections honestly and fairly and an adjoining county will with equal regularity operate irregularly.79

Following Professor Key’s findings, which end at 1949, further empirical evidence was gathered in the reports of the Voter Education Project and later the reports and hearings of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, on the Voting Rights Acts in the South. These reports continued to uncover gross election mismanagement in these states and localities where the potential African American electorate abounded. And the more recent reports of the Commission regarding the 2000 election in Florida added further empirical evidence about the continuing problem. States and localities are still abusing their power of election management, sometimes in the very name of “reform.” As we have shown, in several localities, mainly urban but a few rural areas, such as Savannah, Georgia, and San Antonio, Texas, political machines and bosses defied state disenfranchisement laws and permitted African Americans to vote in the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. But the problem was that these places with selected African American voting could only make small changes within the existing system of segregation and disenfranchisement but could not eliminate or replace these systems. States and localities are supposed to be neutral and administer the law even-handedly, but when opponents of African American voting rights take over, the states and localities can, as we have seen in previous chapters, reverse suffrage rights laws or impose new conditions and qualifications that restrict and circumvent the voting rights of this and other racial and ethnic groups. In Florida, essentially lifetime disenfranchisement of felons already barred from voting many African Americans, who are disadvantaged by the criminal justice system. In the 2000 election, an ostensible attempt to enforce this provision led to the denial of voting even to non-felons. In 2007, the administration of Republican Governor Charlie Crist changed the Florida felon disenfranchisement law to restore the right to vote to many ex-felons. But in 2011, Republican Governor Richard Scott reversed it and is attempting to impose a five-year waiting period before people with felonies can have their voting rights re-instated. States’ actions are therefore still an important variable even with the Voting Rights Act now in effect. The evidence from this longitudinal study is that primarily or even only federal government intervention has been successful in overcoming the abuse of the constitutional power of states and localities. Hence, Reverend King had to appeal to and deal with the federal authorities, congressional and presidential, during his lifetime as a voting rights activist. If this history is overlooked, there is the chance, particularly in this area, that history might simply repeat itself. In the final analysis, both the state and the federal government are major determinative variables in this history. And despite the numerous federal governmental interventions in the African American suffrage rights struggle since 1787, there is not in the United States now a serious biracial electorate in the South. This region did not eventually accept

the Fifteenth Amendment and the 1965 Voting Rights Act and its subsequent renewals as the rest of the country has. And one continuing indicator of this is the size and scope and significance of the biracial electorate in the region.

The Courts and Liberal Jurisprudence as a Variable in the Struggle for African American Suffrage Rights Our longitudinal analysis of African American suffrage rights in America has found and continually shown the inevitable role played by the law and the courts. In the African American electorate’s voting rights journey through Colonial, Revolutionary, Antebellum, post-Civil War, and Disenfranchisement America, nearly every time voting rights have been extended or enlarged, the matter has been immediately taken to the courts, and the courts have not always sustained African American suffrage rights. Professor Samuel DuBois Cook has stated: Until recent decades, the Supreme Court twisted and emasculated and nullified the privileges, rights and immunities of Negroes and placed great power, prestige, and moral authority behind the incubus of racism. It justified the relegation of Negroes to an inferior order of existence in conformity with the dogma of white supremacy and therefore contributed mightily to their dehumanization. It did all this by insisting that the supervision and protection of civil [and voting] rights is the responsibility of the states—thereby succumbing to the infamous and, so far as Negroes were concerned, fatal doctrine of states’ rights.80 But it is not the courts by themselves that have had negative rulings for African American suffrage rights throughout American political history. Part of the reason for these negative decisions can be found in one of the legal philosophies embraced by some judges on the courts known as liberal jurisprudence.81 Professor Robert Smith analyzed this philosophy in relationship to the VRA through its 1982 renewal and found: liberal law tends to be ad hoc, ambiguous and to involve considerable delegation of power to the bureaucracy or lower level courts. The ad hoc standardless character of liberal law along with its broad delegation of authority facilitates the pluralistic bargaining among organized interests that is the hallmark of the American state. . . . Race based apportionment demonstrates liberal law tends to emerge as a consequence of who is managing the bureaucracy [the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division], the skill and resources of the legal adversaries, the backgrounds and ideologies of local district court judges and the partisan character and interests of governors, legislators and black political leaders in the districts. The result is what [Theodore] Lowi calls “policy without law.”82 Professor Smith’s pioneering critique of liberal jurisprudence allows the reader to see and grasp the current critique of

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conservative jurisprudence and to understand that both of these legal philosophies have had negative consequences for African American suffrage rights in America. Although the conservative ideologues have continually blamed liberal judges for writing the law, this is unbalanced cherry-picking. Liberal judges, like conservatives judges, have undermined African American suffrage rights. And once this variable is understood as playing a major role in African American suffrage rights, it is not either-or in this case but a matter of both sides of the legal philosophy, liberal and conservative.

African American Election Data as a Variable in the Struggle for African American Suffrage Rights Besides the longitudinal and chronological historical narrative of this study that is both comprehensive and systematic, this pioneering study on the African American electorate has been about the gathering, organization, and visual presentation of rare data. Hence, this original study is not just a work of history, but intends to update, correct, and extend the known historical narrative over previously uncovered and little-known periods of African American political experience in American political history. Although this study does analyze little-known periods, such as African American Union soldiers voting during the Civil War or the Freedom Vote in Mississippi, and numerous other previously uncovered events and voting data, it has from the beginning initiated a broad-based detective search and analysis. From its inception, this study was designed and structured to find election data about the African American community from the Colonial Era through contemporary America. Some previous studies of the African American electorate, when official or semi-official election data were not available, have used a statistical correlational analysis in order to generate empirical findings about the electoral behavioral of African American voters. Said procedure used U.S. Census population data, correlated them with election return data to see if a strong relationship existed, and extrapolated from these correlations that African American voters supported a particular political party or candidate. As we have noted in this study, there were both strengths and weakness with this statistical procedure. And more important, but rarely ever acknowledged, was the failure to search for and find existing data on the African American electorate. More recently, scholars working in African American politics have used ordinary least squares regression (OLS) procedure to generate numerical findings on African American (1) voter registration, (2) voter turnout, (3) vote choice, and (4) political participation in periods before the contemporary one. Again, this technique has both strengths and weakness and limitations, as we have acknowledged in earlier chapters. In addition, like the previous technique, this one omits the search for and collection of available election data on the African American electorate. Hence, we began with a careful and systematic search first for existing data on the African American electorate in each period under analysis. We analyzed the relevant monographs, books, book chapters, master’s theses, doctoral dissertations,

and academic and scholarly journal articles, as well as government documents, reports, and hearings that were devoted to the subject matter. We then culled relevant election data from these sources, uncovering the Senate and House Executive Documents on Freedmen voter registration in 1867 and 1868 in ten states of the South. When we had gathered the data that were readily available, we then went searching for other election data that had not surfaced in these sources, as well as cross-checking what we had with other reliable sources. When we cross-checked existing data with the estimated data from the correlational and regression analyses, we found the latter left a lot to be desired. Next, in order to ensure that we were developing a longitudinal study, we carefully integrated existing election data with newly found election data so that it was possible to extend coverage over longer and longer periods of time with reliable empirical data. This procedure has allowed this study to extend beyond the event-based studies that start with unique moments, such as those that begin with the 1944 White Primary Supreme Court decision and go until the 1965 Voting Rights Act, or from the 1965 Voting Rights Act through the most recent renewal. Such studies are by their nature limited, and alongside them is needed the presence of a widerranging study to give the full context. Finally, our data gathering is not based on the very popular hypothesis-testing approach that currently dominates conceptualization in the social sciences, an approach of only collecting data that are useful to confirming or overturning one’s hypothesis. We avoided this limited and narrower data gathering in order to provide a more complete portrait of the African American electorate. This study thus presents, in numerous visual formats— maps, graphs, figures, tables, scatter plots, and diagrams—the basic election data so that other scholars and academics can use this newly collected and integrated data for their own research analyses and studies. And when these empirical data are interwoven with the historical narratives and the visual presentations, one can see the importance of the actual data vis-à-vis the very limited estimated data. We hope and believe that this study reveals much more than previously the actual nature and scope of the African American electorate in America.

Conclusion of The African American Electorate: A Statistical History Due to our conceptualization and data collecting approach, this study has been able to identify recurring and dominant variables, to demonstrate their endurance across different time frames, and most importantly to show their relationship and linkage to each other in determining specific outcomes in the nation’s history of African American suffrage. We hope this study suggests to the reader what is important and significant in suffrage struggles and that it helps to provide insights, clues, and suggestions for theory-building in this particular area of African American political behavior. The Kingian example of African American voting rights activism, directly or indirectly, reveals the presence of eight key variables that have shaped suffrage rights behavior in the nation.



Summary and Conclusions 727

Diagram 28.2  The Empirically Based Determinative Variables in the African American Voting Rights Struggle

Independent Variables

Dependent Variable

African American Voting Rights Activists & Activism Political Geography (Political Context) Opponents & Opposition

Party Competition Public Sentiment & Mass Public Opinion

Public Policy Responses and Enactments: Revisions, Reversals, and Modifications

State & Federal Government African American Election Data Source: Developed from Chapters 1–27.

Diagram 28.2 provides a detailed representation of these eight major variables and helps to encapsulate the discussion as well as the findings about patterns and trends in this study on racial suffrage rights in America. The reader should understand not only the wealth of the narrative and data on this subject matter but, with this diagram, see that: · a ctivists and activism from the excluded community are critical; · s ome places are more important than others in terms of mobilization around the issue; · t here will always be opponents and opposition in the political context; · p  arty competition can not only highlight this issue but can, with majorities in the government, design legislative solutions for the issue; · m  ass public sentiment and opinion can impact and sustain or deny public policies; · t he state and local government are critical in maintaining or resisting these legislative solutions; · e lection data can speak to the nature, scope, and significance of the problem. A crucial variable among these seven is control of the state government by opponents or supporters of suffrage rights, which can make or break the attainment of suffrage rights. We hope that the presentation of these variables together will promote the

understanding and appreciation of the problem throughout the nation’s history, along with dialogue and discussion about this issue in regard to the national agenda.

Notes   1. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Introduction,” in Edward Clayton, The Negro Politician: His Success and Failure (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 1964), pp. vii–viii.   2. Ibid., p. viii.   3. Ibid., pp. viii–ix.   4. Ibid., p. ix.  5. Ibid.  6. Ibid.   7. Hanes Walton, Jr., The Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1971), pp. 8, 69–74. See also his, “The Political Leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Quarterly Review of Higher Education Among Negroes Vol. 36 (1968), pp. 163–193.   8. David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986), p. 93.   9. Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Melvin Washington, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991), p. 187. 10. Robert C. Smith, Conservatism and Racism, and Why in America They Are the Same (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), p. 150. 11. Garth Pauley, LBJ’s American Promise: The 1965 Voting Rights Address (College Station: Texas A&M University, 2007), p. 57. 12. Ibid., p. 84. 13. Daisy Bates, The Long Shadow of Little Rock (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2004), pp. 98–106. See also Robert F. Burk, The Eisenhower Administration and Black Civil Rights (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1984), pp. 174–203. 14. Steven Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 243 and 246. See also Richard Valelly (ed.), The Voting Rights Act: Securing the Ballot (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006), p. 240. 15. Ibid., p. 249. After the passage of the 1957 Act and the rise of SCLC, King announced a voter registration program in some ten to twelve southern cities. Following King’s remarks, Wilkins of the NAACP announced his own organization’s voter registration program. By 1960 they issued this joint statement. See also Daniel Berman, A Bill Becomes a Law: The Civil Rights Act of 1960 (New York: Macmillan, 1962). 16. Steven Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 261. 17. Ibid., pp. 261–262. 18. Garrow, p. 163. 19. Lawson, p. 261. 20. Richard Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 183. 21. Pauley, p. 50. 22. Garrow, p. 163. 23. Ibid. 24. Valelly, p. 186. 25. Lawson, p. 299. 26. Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Political Parties (New York: Free Press, 1972); see also Hardy Frye, Black Parties and Political Power: A Case Study (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980); Hanes Walton, Jr., and William Boone, “A Demographic Analysis,” Journal of Black Studies Vol. 5 (1974), pp. 86–95; and Hanes Walton, Jr., “The National Democratic Party of Alabama and Party Failure in America,” in Kay Lawson and Peter Merkl (eds.), When Parties Fail: Emerging Alternative Organizations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 365–388. 27. Eric Freedman and Stephen Jones (eds.), African Americans in Congress: A Documentary History (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2008), pp. 199–203.

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28. National Convention of the Colored Men of America, Proceedings of the National Convention of the Colored Men of America (Washington, DC: Great Republic Book and Job Printing Establishment, 1869), pp. 15, 16, 29, 35, 37, 42 and Appendix XI. 29. Philip Foner (ed.), Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), pp. 27–28. 30. Ibid., p. 29. 31. See Marjorie S. Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 100–132. 32. Ibid. See also Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “The Politics of the AntiWoman Suffrage Agenda: African Americans Respond to Conservatism,” in Gayle Tate and Lewis Randolph (eds.), Dimensions of Black Conservatism in the United States (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 69–84. 33. For a succinct discussion see The Editors of Black Issues in Higher Education with Dara N. Byrne (eds.), The Unfinished Agenda of the Selma-Montgomery Voting Rights March (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), pp. 123–152. 34. Joseph M. Britain, “Some Reflections on Negro Suffrage and Politics in Alabama—Past and Present,” Journal of Negro History 47, no. 2 (1962): 127–138. Quoted in Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Politics (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1972), p. 42. 35. Christopher Malone, Between Freedom and Bondage: Race, Party, and Voting Rights in the Antebellum North (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 104. 36. Pauley, p. 48. 37. Ronald Walters, Freedom Is Not Enough: Black Voters, Black Candidates, and American Presidential Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), p. 15. 38. Pauley, p. 57. 39. Ibid. 40. C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History, Updated 3rd Edition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), pp. 89–107 and pp. 167–186. See also, Hanes Walton, Jr., Josephine A. V. Allen, Sherman C. Puckett, and Donald R. Deskins, Jr., “Beyond the Second Reconstruction: C. Vann Woodward’s Concept of the Third Reconstruction in the South,” American Review of Politics (Summer 2011), pp. 105–130. 41. William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969). 42. Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869–1879 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). 43. Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 44. See Abraham L. Davis and Barbara Luck Graham, The Supreme Court, Race, and Civil Rights (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995), pp. 60–69. 45. See Darlene Clark Hine, Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas (New York: KTO Press, 1979); Charles Zelden, The Battle for the Black Ballot: Smith v. Allwright and the Defeat of the Texas All-White Primary (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004) and Steven Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976). 46. Steven Lawson, In Pursuit of Power: Southern Blacks and Electoral Politics, 1965–1982 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); David Garrow, Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); and Richard Valelly (ed.), The Voting Rights Act: Securing the Ballot (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2006) and Loren Foster (ed.), The Voting Rights Act: Consequences and Implications (New York: Praeger, 1985). 47. John Kolp, Gentlemen and Freeholders: Electoral Politics in Colonial Virginia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 41. 48. Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 318–320; and Phyllis Field, The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); and

Jean Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). 49. V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation, A New Edition (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984). 50. See Harold Holzer (ed.), The Lincoln-Douglas Debates: The First Complete, Unexpurgated Text (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994). 51. See the recent book by conservative Vice Chairwoman Abigail Thernstrom, Voting Rights—and Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 2009); as well as one by the liberal Chairwoman Mary Francis Berry, And Justice for All: The United States Commission on Civil Rights and the Continuing Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2009). 52. See United States Commission on Civil Rights, Voting Rights Enforcement and Reauthorization (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2006). 53. United States Commission on Civil Rights, Reauthorization of the Temporary Provisions of the Voting Rights Act: An Examination of the Act’s Section 5 Preclearance Provision (Washington, DC: United States Commission on Civil Rights, 2006). 54. Robert Weems, Jr., “The American Moral Reform Society and the Origins of Black Conservative Ideology,” in Gayle Tate and Lewis Randolph (eds.), Dimensions of Black Conservatism in the United States (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 31–42. 55. Joseph W. Holley, You Can’t Build a Chimney from the Top (New York: William Frederick Press, 1948). The book was re-released in 1992. 56. Ibid., p. 157. 57. Ibid., p. 156. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., p. 155. 61. Ibid., pp. 155–156. 62. Shelby Steele, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win (New York: Free Press, 2008). See also, Hanes Walton, Jr., “Defending the Indefensible: The African American Conservative Client, Spokesperson of the Reagan-Bush Era,” The Black Scholar Vol. 24 (Fall 1994), pp. 46–49; Hanes Walton, Jr., “Remaking African American Public Opinion: The Role and Function of the African American Conservatives,” in Tate and Randolph, pp. 141–160. 63. Phyllis Field, The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 19–176; and Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 318–324. 64. Malone, p. 55. 65. Ibid., p. 60. 66. Donald Kinder and Allison Dale-Riddle, The End of Race? Obama, 2008, and Racial Politics in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), pp. 98–117; Michael Tesler and David O. Sears, Obama’s Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); and Badong Liu, The Election of Barack Obama: How He Won (New York: Macmillan, 2010). The common finding of each one of these books is that President Obama’s race kept him from getting a landslide victory. See Hanes Walton, Jr., “Review of The Election of Barack Obama: How He Won,” American Review of Politics Vol. 32 (Winter 2012), pp. 379–381. 67. Field, p. 8. 68. Lee Benson, “An Approach to the Scientific Study of Past Public Opinion,” Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 31 (Winter 1967), pp. 522–567. See also his “Research Problems in American Political Historiography” in Mirra Komarovsky (ed.), Common Frontiers of the Social Sciences (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), pp. 113–183. 69. Field, pp. 220–230. 70. Ibid., p. 8. 71. Alec Ewald, The Way We Vote: The Local Dimension of American Suffrage (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009), p. 21. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., p. 23. 74. Ibid.

75. Ibid., p. 34. 76. Ibid., p. 51. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid., p. 47. 79. V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), pp. 443–444.

Summary and Conclusions 729 80. Samuel D. Cook, “Review of The Petitioners by Loren Miller,” Journal of Negro History (July 1966), p. 221. 81. Robert Smith, “Liberal Jurisprudence and the Quest for Racial Representation,” Southern University Law Review Vol. 15 (Spring 1988), pp. 1–51. 82. Ibid., p. 42.

Appendices Introductory Remarks In order that we may present as comprehensive a picture of the African American electorate as possible, we include in this Appendix tables in addition to the tables that appeared in the chapters. These tables are very rich, detailed, and long, which is why we have determined that they are best located here, outside the chapter, so as not to interrupt the historical narrative. Each Appendix Table is linked to a particular chapter. In some cases, there are longer versions of a table that appears in abbreviated form in the chapter. For instance, Appendix Table A20.14 (pp. 732–734) is a fuller and more complete version of Table 20.14 (p. 438). Both tables show rare and unique data concerning Maggie L. Walker, who ran for Superintendent of Public Instruction in Virginia on the ticket of the Black and Tan Republicans. This African American splinter party was at that time, in 1921, revolting against the other Republicans known as the Lily White Republicans. The Table 20.14 in Chapter 20 shows a helpful summary and overview of the data by racial majority county, which fits within the narrative of the chapter, but Table A20.14 gives the data county-by-county (and city) through Virginia for this rare electoral event. In other cases, as with the nine Appendix Tables A6.7 through A6.15 (pp. 735–799), the data do not match up to a particular shorter table in a chapter, but they do fit within the theme of a chapter (in this case, Chapter 6, the African American Electorate in Antebellum and Civil War America 1788–1867). Here are the votes and percentages of the vote—county by county—for each political party in states that permitted Free-Men-of-Color to vote in every presidential election from 1828 through 1860. These county-level presidential voting data have been combined for the first time with the U.S. Census Free-Men-of-Color population data. Here are unique data for researchers and students of the African American electorate to study, ponder, and consider. Appendix Tables A16.8, A16.9, and A16.10 report on the voting behavior of southern and Border States and their racial majority counties in the presidential elections of 1868 to 1920. Table A16.8 (pp. 800–813) shows the collective vote of African American majority counties and white majority counties for the major political parties, the number of counties in each majority group, the collective total population, and the racial group population in each state of these regions. For each election and group

of counties Tables A16.9 (pp. 814–818) and A16.10 (pp. 819–823) identify in each state the counties with the largest majorities of African Americans and whites, respectively, and compare how these particular counties voted. Appendix Table A23.25 (pp. 824–826) shows data that derive from the second Civil Rights Commission Report, from 1963. As we write in Chapter 23, 100 counties of eight southern states had been deemed by this Commission the worst offenders of White Supremacy in denying the African American electorate their constitutional (Fifteenth Amendment and Nineteenth Amendment) right to vote. The Commission’s report showed the change in voter registration before and after, which was not a great change (about 5 percent to 8.3 percent). Whereas in Figure 23.26 (p. 492) we show these data’s overall picture visually, here in this Appendix Table we present the data county by county for researchers and students to utilize and draw their own conclusions, by state and by county. Appendix Tables A23.32 (pp. 827–854), A23.33 (pp. 855–858), and A23.34 (pp. 859–863) match up with Appendix A, B, and C, respectively, of the 1961 report of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. The 1961 report provided voter registration statistics at the county level for 1960 and census data for the same time period for not only all of the eleven southern states but for three of the Border States: Delaware, Maryland, and West Virginia. Moreover, the 1961 report provided voter registration by race in all of the African American majority counties for two years: 1958 and 1960. Since there were no African American majority counties in the Border States, Table 2 in the 1961 Report, which provides these data, has no such information on the Border States. Although there are some limitations to these data, they are still some of the most reliable data available. Appendix Tables A25.6 and A25.7 match the Tables 25.6 (p. 621) and 25.7 (p. 625) in Chapter 25 concerning the 1965 Voting Rights Act and its expansions and renewals. These tables show in greater detail the immediate effect of this landmark voting rights legislation on selected counties in the South, drawing from the first two reports of the Civil Rights Commission on the effectiveness of this new measure. Table A25.6 (pp. 864–874) has data from the initial report of the Commission released in 1965, while Table A25.7 (pp. 875–894) has data from the second report released in 1968. These data are presented in summary form in Chapter 25, but here in the Appendix we provide them in their full county-by-county detail.

732

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A25.13 (pp. 895–896) shows a more detailed picture of the data found in Table 25.13 (p. 633), a summary of the election observation assignments at the state level for the periods of 1966–1974 and 1975–1980 under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Table A25.13 brings out the data to the county level. Appendix Table A25.15 (pp. 897–902) shows a more detailed picture of the data found in Table 25.15 (p. 634) concerning the

voting age population (VAP, African American and white) for the three southern states—Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina—the number and percentage of the VAP in these states that was registered, and the racial gap in registration that still existed in favor of whites in most cases. These data are county-by-county data from 1974. They come from the fourth report of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, entitled The Voting Rights Act: Ten Years After.

Appendix Table A20.14  Election Results by County and Racial Majority for Superintendent of Public Instruction in Virginia, 1921

County/ Citya County

African American

Racial Majority

Maggie L. Walker Black & Tan Republican

Votes

Percent

Democrat

Amelia

10

 1.5%

151

22.2%

520

76.4%

681

Brunswick

13

 1.3%

36

 3.7%

928

95.0%

977

Caroline

54

 6.0%

70

 7.7%

783

86.3%

907

Charles City

24

12.0%

33

16.5%

143

71.5%

200

Cumberland

1

 0.2%

123

19.6%

504

80.3%

628

Dinwiddie

5

 0.6%

123

14.3%

730

85.1%

858

Essex

15

 4.0%

32

 8.6%

326

87.4%

373

Goochland

58

 7.9%

130

17.8%

542

74.2%

730

Greensville

36

 6.0%

68

11.3%

500

82.8%

604

James City

5

 1.7%

63

20.8%

235

77.6%

303

King And Queen

15

 3.2%

73

15.8%

375

81.0%

463

King William

69

11.5%

98

16.4%

431

72.1%

598

Lancaster

35

 5.3%

79

12.0%

547

82.8%

661

Mecklenburg

26

 1.6%

193

11.8%

1,419

86.6%

1,638

Middlesex

32

 5.3%

100

16.5%

474

78.2%

606

Nansemond

4

 0.7%

47

 7.8%

554

91.6%

605

24

 9.3%

48

18.7%

185

72.0%

257

120

10.7%

68

 6.1%

930

83.2%

1,118

Votes

Percent

385

Total Votes

Powhatan

47

12.2%

67

17.4%

271

70.4%

Prince Edward

27

 2.8%

115

12.0%

816

85.2%

958

Southampton

22

 1.4%

132

8.6%

1,374

89.9%

1,528

Surry

28

 6.6%

65

15.2%

334

78.2%

427

Sussex

22

 3.1%

36

 5.1%

643

91.7%

701

Total

692

 4.3%

1,950

12.0%

13,564

83.7%

16,206

Mean

30

 4.3%

85

12.0%

590

83.7%

705

Median

24

 4.0%

70

14.3%

520

82.8%

628

Accomack

40

 1.7%

397

16.9%

1,908

81.4%

2,345

Albemarle

45

 2.4%

390

21.0%

1,421

76.6%

1,856

Alleghany

73

 4.7%

729

46.8%

756

48.5%

1,558

Amherst

13

 1.2%

81

 7.4%

1,006

91.5%

1,100

2

 0.2%

122

12.0%

893

87.8%

1,017

82

 5.3%

567

36.4%

909

58.3%

1,558

107

 3.4%

1,142

36.6%

1,875

60.0%

3,124

Bath

16

 2.0%

376

47.8%

395

50.2%

787

Bedford

42

 2.3%

238

13.3%

1,516

84.4%

1,796

Bland

13

 1.5%

433

48.8%

441

49.7%

887

Botetourt

19

 0.6%

1,320

44.4%

1,637

55.0%

2,976

Buchanan

12

 0.8%

765

51.8%

699

47.4%

1,476

Buckingham

61

 5.3%

258

22.6%

824

72.1%

1,143

Appomattox County

Lily White Republican

Votes

Northampton

White

Harris Hart

County

New Kent

Percent

Elizabeth L. Otey

Arlington/Alexander Augusta



Appendices 733

County/ Citya County (continued)

White (continued)

Racial Majority

Maggie L. Walker Black & Tan Republican County

Votes

Percent

Elizabeth L. Otey

Harris Hart

Lily White Republican Votes

Percent

Democrat Votes

Percent

Total Votes

Campbell

25

 2.0%

143

11.6%

1,062

86.3%

1,230

Carroll

41

 1.1%

2,083

53.6%

1,759

45.3%

3,883

Charlotte

23

 1.6%

207

14.2%

1,232

84.3%

1,462

Chesterfield

51

 3.1%

283

17.1%

1,323

79.8%

1,657

Clarke

7

 1.0%

69

10.0%

612

89.0%

688

Craig

10

 1.4%

261

35.3%

468

63.3%

739

Culpeper

23

 2.1%

220

20.3%

843

77.6%

1,086

Dickenson

21

 1.2%

837

47.4%

907

51.4%

1,765

Elizabeth City

33

 3.6%

177

19.2%

711

77.2%

921

Fairfax

44

 2.0%

709

31.9%

1,467

66.1%

2,220

Fauquier

20

 1.0%

404

20.5%

1,542

78.4%

1,966

Floyd

32

 1.9%

1,034

62.4%

592

35.7%

1,658

Fluvanna

17

 2.5%

198

28.6%

477

68.9%

692

Franklin

13

 0.4%

1,221

35.4%

2,219

64.3%

3,453

Frederick

23

 1.3%

518

28.2%

1,293

70.5%

1,834

Giles

19

 1.0%

660

36.1%

1,147

62.8%

1,826

Gloucester

45

 6.4%

83

11.7%

579

81.9%

707

Grayson

15

 0.4%

2,063

48.4%

2,180

51.2%

4,258

Greene

6

 1.0%

307

50.1%

300

48.9%

613

Halifax

119

 4.6%

275

10.7%

2,180

84.7%

2,574

Hanover

48

 4.6%

149

14.3%

845

81.1%

1,042

Henrico

49

 3.9%

328

26.4%

864

69.6%

1,241

Henry

43

 2.6%

530

32.2%

1,074

65.2%

1,647

Highland

22

 2.5%

401

45.3%

463

52.3%

886

Isle Of Wight

9

 1.0%

109

12.2%

773

86.8%

891

King George

16

 3.8%

159

37.4%

250

58.8%

425

Lee

42

 1.2%

1,799

53.3%

1,537

45.5%

3,378

Loudoun

30

 1.1%

722

25.9%

2,040

73.1%

2,792

Louisa

51

 4.0%

409

31.9%

822

64.1%

1,282

Lunenburg Madison Mathews

7

 1.0%

82

11.4%

628

87.6%

717

23

 1.9%

304

25.4%

870

72.7%

1,197

3

 0.4%

152

19.0%

644

80.6%

799

Montgomery

39

 1.6%

1,081

44.4%

1,317

54.0%

2,437

Nelson

49

 3.2%

310

20.0%

1,188

76.8%

1,547

Norfolk

19

 0.9%

241

11.1%

1,919

88.1%

2,179

Northumberland

83

11.6%

79

11.0%

554

77.4%

716

Nottoway

14

 1.4%

112

11.4%

858

87.2%

984

Orange

18

 1.7%

246

23.9%

766

74.4%

1,030

Page

28

 1.8%

680

43.4%

858

54.8%

1,566

7

 0.3%

1,037

42.9%

1,371

56.8%

2,415

Pittsylvania

30

 1.0%

497

16.9%

2,421

82.1%

2,948

Prince George

24

 5.0%

96

20.1%

358

74.9%

478

Princess Anne

1

 0.2%

30

 5.0%

565

94.8%

596

Prince William

28

 2.6%

250

23.3%

793

74.0%

1,071

Pulaski

21

 0.7%

1,273

40.9%

1,815

58.4%

3,109

5

 0.9%

97

17.2%

462

81.9%

564

Richmond

9

 2.3%

123

31.3%

261

66.4%

393

Roanoke

21

 1.6%

378

28.5%

925

69.9%

1,324

Rockbridge

95

 3.8%

959

38.7%

1,427

57.5%

2,481

Patrick

Rappahannock

(Continued)

734

The African American Electorate

County/ Citya County (continued)

White (continued)

Racial Majority

Appendix Table A20.14 (Continued)

County

Democrat

Percent

Votes

Percent

 1.3%

1,899

44.4%

2,324

54.3%

4,280

Russell

37

 1.3%

1,133

40.5%

1,627

58.2%

2,797

Scott

58

 1.7%

2,052

58.5%

1,397

39.8%

3,507

Shenandoah

54

 1.1%

2,205

46.9%

2,442

51.9%

4,701

Smyth

27

 1.0%

1,286

48.3%

1,349

50.7%

2,662

Spotsylvania

23

 3.7%

177

28.5%

420

67.7%

620

Stafford

11

 1.0%

421

39.9%

623

59.1%

1,055

Tazewell

119

 4.6%

1,226

47.5%

1,236

47.9%

2,581

Warren

29

 3.1%

266

28.1%

650

68.8%

945

Warwick

17

 8.3%

31

15.2%

156

76.5%

204

Washington

55

 1.2%

2,201

48.5%

2,280

50.3%

4,536

Westmoreland

Votes

Votes

Percent

Total Votes

9

 2.3%

44

11.1%

343

86.6%

396

Wise

99

 1.9%

2,557

48.0%

2,676

50.2%

5,332

Wythe

46

 1.2%

1,750

47.1%

1,920

51.7%

3,716

York

23

 7.5%

37

12.1%

246

80.4%

306

Total

2,610

 1.9%

48,488

35.5%

85,530

62.6%

136,628

Mean

34

 1.9%

630

35.5%

1,111

62.6%

1,774

Median

24

 1.7%

378

28.5%

907

68.8%

1,476

Alexandria City

89

 5.4%

423

25.5%

1,145

69.1%

1,657

Bristol

38

 3.2%

243

20.6%

897

76.1%

1,178

9

 1.7%

192

36.8%

321

61.5%

522

93

 9.2%

99

 9.8%

821

81.0%

1,013

Clifton Forge

93

10.8%

217

25.2%

550

64.0%

860

166

 7.9%

140

 6.7%

1,791

85.4%

2,097

Fredericksburg

49

 6.5%

144

19.1%

559

74.3%

752

Hampton

31

 5.2%

57

9.5%

513

85.4%

601

Harrisonburg

95

 7.2%

516

39.3%

701

53.4%

1,312

Hopewell

13

 3.4%

108

27.8%

267

68.8%

388

Lynchburg

150

 7.5%

236

11.7%

1,624

80.8%

2,010

Newport News

324

12.9%

340

13.6%

1,842

73.5%

2,506

Norfolk City

125

 1.7%

897

12.1%

6,404

86.2%

7,426

Petersburg

145

 6.6%

147

6.7%

1,904

86.7%

2,196

Portsmouth

129

 3.8%

401

11.8%

2,876

84.4%

3,406

Danville

Citya

Harris Hart

57

Charlottesville

White

Elizabeth L. Otey Lily White Republican

Rockingham

Buena Vista

Radford

22

 2.3%

301

31.0%

648

66.7%

971

1,635

 9.8%

2,605

15.5%

12,513

74.7%

16,753

Roanoke City

192

 3.3%

976

16.7%

4,661

80.0%

5,829

South Norfolk

9

 1.5%

71

11.7%

525

86.8%

605

197

12.4%

387

24.4%

999

63.1%

1,583

Suffolk

21

 2.6%

64

 7.9%

722

89.5%

807

Williamsburg

18

 6.4%

50

17.7%

215

76.0%

283

Winchester

46

 3.6%

358

27.8%

883

68.6%

1,287

Total

3,689

 6.6%

8,972

16.0%

43,381

77.4%

56,042

Mean

160

 6.6%

390

16.0%

1,886

77.4%

2,437

93

 5.4%

236

16.7%

883

76.0%

1,287

Total

6,991

 3.3%

59,410

28.4%

142,475

68.2%

208,876

Mean

57

 3.3%

483

28.4%

1,158

68.2%

1,698

Median

28

 2.3%

243

20.3%

843

74.3%

1,118

Richmond City

Staunton

Median Commonwealth of Virginia

Maggie L. Walker Black & Tan Republican

Sources: Adapted from Secretary of the Commonwealth, Annual Report to the Governor and General Assembly of Virginia (Richmond, Virginia: Davis Bottom, 1922), pp. 423–424, and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. a County-equivalent city.



Appendices 735 Appendix Table A6.7  County Level Results of the 1828 Presidential Election with Matching 1820 Census Demography Georgia Presidential Candidates Nat’l Rep JQ Adams %

Census Data White

County

W/L

Warren

W

99.8%

0.2%

0.0%

581

10,630

8

0.8%

940

99.2%

Morgan

W

99.7%

0.3%

0.0%

373

13,520

4

0.4%

1,104

99.6%

Hancock

W

98.7%

1.3%

0.0%

395

12,734

2

0.2%

935

99.8%

Baldwin

W

97.6%

2.4%

0.0%

889

7,734

2

0.3%

593

99.7%

Jones

W

97.5%

2.5%

0.0%

606

16,570

14

1.0%

1,405

99.0%

Jasper

W

95.6%

4.4%

0.0%

611

14,614

8

0.6%

1,381

99.4%

Richmond

W

65.8%

34.2%

0.0%

696

8,608

11

1.3%

811

98.7%

# Counties Won

7

92.6%

7.4%

0.0%

4,151

84,410

49

0.7%

7,169

99.3%

Total of These Counties

7

92.6%

7.4%

0.0%

4,151

84,410

49

0.7%

7,169

99.3%

Other %

Total Vote

1820 Total Populaton

Free African American

Democrat Jackson %

*Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

Louisiana Presidential Candidates Nat’l Rep JQ Adams %

Other %

Census Data White

County

W/L

Rapides

W

74.4%

25.6%

0.0%

324

6,065

22

3.5%

598

96.5%

# Counties Won

1

74.4%

25.6%

0.0%

324

6,065

22

3.5%

598

96.5%

Total of These Counties

1

74.4%

25.6%

0.0%

324

6,065

22

3.5%

598

96.5%

Total Vote

1820 Total Populaton

Free African American

Democrat Jackson %

*Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

Maine Presidential Candidates Nat’l Rep JQ Adams %

Other %

Census Data White

County

W/L

Cumberland

W

51.1%

48.9%

0.0%

8,272

49,445

79

1.0%

7,901

99.0%

# Counties Won

1

51.1%

48.9%

0.0%

8,272

49,445

79

1.0%

7,901

99.0%

Oxford

L

46.8%

52.7%

0.5%

6,199

27,104

4

0.1%

4,296

99.9%

Penobscot

L

43.2%

56.8%

0.0%

2,407

13,870

3

0.1%

2,163

99.9%

York

L

37.9%

61.9%

0.2%

4,921

46,283

20

0.3%

7,576

99.7%

Washington

L

37.3%

62.7%

0.0%

2,256

12,744

7

0.3%

2,139

99.7%

Hancock

L

31.6%

68.4%

0.0%

1,247

31,290

9

0.2%

4,703

99.8%

Somerset

L

31.5%

68.5%

0.0%

2,389

21,787

1

0.0%

3,212

100.0%

Lincoln

L

28.2%

71.6%

0.2%

2,949

53,189

25

0.3%

8,340

99.7%

Kennebec

L

25.6%

74.4%

0.1%

4,135

42,623

33

0.5%

6,590

99.5%

# Counties Lost

8

36.5%

63.3%

0.2%

26,503

248,890

102

0.3%

39,019

99.7%

Total of These Counties

9

40.0%

59.9%

0.1%

34,775

298,335

181

0.4%

46,920

99.6%

Total Vote

1820 Total Populaton

Free African American

Democrat Jackson %

*Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

Massachusetts Presidential Candidates

Other %

W/L

Berkshire

L

35.1%

64.8%

0.1%

3,859

35,720

166

2.7%

6,051

97.3%

Hampden

L

29.2%

67.6%

3.3%

2,284

28,021

72

1.4%

4,959

98.6%

Essex

L

16.9%

78.5%

4.6%

4,726

74,655

143

1.1%

12,910

98.9%

Dukes

L

15.9%

84.1%

0.0%

88

3,292

21

3.4%

596

96.6%

Bristol

L

14.2%

75.6%

10.3%

2,303

40,908

160

2.2%

7,080

97.8%

Suffolk

L

13.7%

50.7%

35.5%

6,213

43,940

503

5.3%

8,980

Total Vote

1820 Total Populaton

White

Democrat Jackson %

County

Nat’l Rep JQ Adams %

Census Data Free African American *Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

94.7% (Continued)

736

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.7 (Continued) Massachusetts (continued) Presidential Candidates

Census Data White

Democrat Jackson %

Nat’l Rep JQ Adams %

Other %

Middlesex

L

13.3%

85.3%

1.4%

3,947

61,472

103

0.9%

11,033

99.1%

Worcester

L

13.3%

86.3%

0.4%

5,962

73,625

83

0.6%

13,136

99.4%

Norfolk

L

11.4%

80.6%

8.1%

3,123

36,471

52

0.8%

6,832

99.2%

Plymouth

L

8.0%

91.9%

0.1%

1,786

38,136

86

1.2%

6,981

98.8%

Hampshire

L

4.5%

91.9%

3.6%

1,968

26,487

44

0.9%

4,650

99.1%

Barnstable

L

3.6%

89.9%

6.5%

691

24,026

23

0.6%

3,891

99.4%

Franklin

L

3.3%

94.9%

1.8%

2,124

29,268

22

0.4%

5,026

99.6%

# Counties Lost

13

15.4%

76.4%

8.3%

39,074

516,021

1,478

1.6%

92,125

98.4%

Total of These Counties

13

15.4%

76.4%

8.3%

39,074

516,021

1,478

1.6%

92,125

98.4%

Total Vote

1820 Total Populaton

Free African American

W/L

County

*Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

New Hampshire Presidential Candidates Nat’l Rep JQ Adams %

Other %

Census Data

County

W/L

Democrat Jackson %

Coos

W

61.2%

38.8%

0.0%

# Counties Won

1

61.2%

38.8%

0.0%

983

Strafford

L

48.7%

51.3%

0.0%

8,272

Hillsborough

L

46.7%

53.3%

0.0%

6,695

Rockingham

L

44.6%

55.4%

0.0%

7,150

Grafton

L

44.0%

56.0%

0.0%

6,092

Cheshire

L

26.1%

73.9%

0.0%

4,958

# Counties Lost

5

43.2%

56.8%

0.0%

Total of These Counties

6

43.7%

56.3%

0.0%

Total Vote 983

1820 Total Populaton 5,549

Free African American *Males

Males %

0

0.0%

5,549

0

51,117

22

53,884

43

55,246

93

32,989 45,376

33,167

238,612

34,150

244,161

White **Males

Males %

847

100.0%

0.0%

847

100.0%

0.3%

8,417

99.7%

0.5%

8,959

99.5%

0.9%

10,057

99.1%

5

0.1%

5,329

99.9%

11

0.1%

7,760

99.9%

174

0.4%

40,522

99.6%

174

0.4%

41,369

99.6%

New York Presidential Candidates

Census Data White

W/L

Democrat Jackson %

Nat’l Rep JQ Adams %

Other %

Ulster

W

71.9%

28.1%

0.0%

4,696

30,934

127

2.6%

4,714

97.4%

Rockland

W

71.1%

28.9%

0.0%

1,465

8,837

46

2.8%

1,611

97.2%

Putnam

W

66.4%

33.6%

0.0%

1,686

11,268

29

1.6%

1,775

98.4%

Steuben

W

66.0%

34.0%

0.0%

4,358

21,989

20

0.6%

3,400

99.4%

Warren

W

65.0%

35.0%

0.0%

1,789

9,453

2

0.1%

1,506

99.9%

Sullivan

W

64.5%

35.5%

0.0%

1,937

8,900

6

0.4%

1,419

99.6%

Delaware

W

64.1%

35.9%

0.0%

4,372

26,587

13

0.3%

4,242

99.7%

Cayuga

W

63.3%

36.7%

0.0%

6,575

38,897

62

1.0%

6,059

99.0%

New York

W

61.6%

38.4%

0.0%

25,073

123,706

1,993

8.5%

21,331

91.5%

Schoharie

W

60.8%

39.2%

0.0%

4,273

23,154

47

1.3%

3,549

98.7%

Tompkins

W

60.0%

40.0%

0.0%

5,390

20,681

13

0.4%

3,062

99.6%

Orange

W

59.5%

40.5%

0.0%

6,384

41,213

208

3.2%

6,377

96.8%

Dutchess

W

58.9%

41.1%

0.0%

7,943

46,615

314

3.9%

7,708

96.1%

Greene

W

58.4%

41.6%

0.0%

4,331

22,996

82

2.2%

3,588

97.8%

Broome

W

58.3%

41.7%

0.0%

2,134

14,343

15

0.6%

2,394

99.4%

Tioga

W

57.2%

42.8%

0.0%

3,743

16,971

8

0.3%

2,640

99.7%

County

Total Vote

1820 Total Populaton

Free African American *Males

Males %

**Males

Males %



Appendices 737 New York (continued) Presidential Candidates Nat’l Rep JQ Adams %

Other %

Census Data White

County

W/L

Democrat Jackson %

Suffolk

W

57.0%

43.0%

0.0%

3,414

24,272

256

5.9%

4,076

94.1%

Kings

W

56.2%

43.8%

0.0%

2,402

11,187

157

7.3%

1,985

92.7%

Herkimer

W

55.9%

44.1%

0.0%

5,687

31,017

23

0.5%

4,845

99.5%

Schenectady

W

55.7%

44.3%

0.0%

2,051

13,081

67

3.2%

2,024

96.8%

Oswego

W

54.0%

46.0%

0.0%

3,849

12,374

5

0.3%

1,980

99.7%

Lewis

W

53.7%

46.3%

0.0%

1,927

9,227

6

0.4%

1,493

99.6%

Jefferson

W

53.2%

46.8%

0.0%

7,294

32,952

24

0.4%

5,717

99.6%

Onondaga

W

52.9%

47.1%

0.0%

8,060

41,467

32

0.5%

6,437

99.5%

Richmond

W

52.2%

47.8%

0.0%

993

6,135

17

1.7%

991

98.3%

Otsego

W

52.1%

47.9%

0.0%

8,141

44,856

29

0.4%

6,902

99.6%

Westchester

W

50.8%

49.2%

0.0%

5,255

32,638

269

4.7%

5,441

95.3%

Clinton

W

50.7%

49.3%

0.0%

2,743

12,070

14

0.6%

2,167

99.4%

# Counties Won

29

58.8%

41.2%

0.0%

143,235

769,035

3,915

3.1%

124,355

96.9%

Allegany

L

49.6%

50.4%

0.0%

3,252

9,330

4

0.3%

1,518

99.7%

St. Lawrence

L

49.3%

50.7%

0.0%

5,225

16,037

3

0.1%

2,758

99.9%

Montgomery

L

48.7%

51.3%

0.0%

7,760

37,569

53

0.9%

5,830

99.1%

Columbia

L

48.6%

51.4%

0.0%

7,088

38,330

183

3.0%

5,948

97.0%

Albany

L

48.3%

51.7%

0.0%

8,119

38,116

187

2.9%

6,217

97.1%

Seneca

L

48.3%

51.7%

0.0%

3,107

23,619

29

0.8%

3,599

99.2%

Rensselaer

L

47.8%

52.2%

0.0%

8,913

40,153

116

1.8%

6,374

98.2%

Cortland

L

47.0%

53.0%

0.0%

3,250

16,507

8

0.3%

2,548

99.7%

Oneida

L

46.9%

53.1%

0.0%

10,953

50,997

49

0.6%

8,073

99.4%

Saratoga

L

45.2%

54.8%

0.0%

6,474

36,052

74

1.2%

5,882

98.8%

Queens

L

45.0%

55.0%

0.0%

2,508

21,519

389

10.3%

3,402

89.7%

Madison

L

44.5%

55.5%

0.0%

5,860

32,208

28

0.6%

4,727

99.4%

Cattaraugus

L

40.1%

59.9%

0.0%

2,132

4,090

1

0.1%

691

99.9%

Essex

L

39.8%

60.2%

0.0%

3,219

12,811

6

0.3%

2,079

99.7%

Franklin

L

39.8%

60.2%

0.0%

1,708

4,439

0

0.0%

837

100.0%

Washington

L

39.4%

60.6%

0.0%

6,743

38,831

46

0.7%

6,117

99.3%

Chautauqua

L

35.0%

65.0%

0.0%

4,452

12,568

3

0.1%

2,061

99.9%

Ontario

L

33.0%

67.0%

0.0%

6,150

88,267

123

0.9%

13,648

99.1%

Genesee

L

30.7%

69.3%

0.0%

7,568

58,093

20

0.2%

9,186

99.8%

# Counties Lost

19

43.9%

56.1%

0.0%

104,481

579,536

1,322

1.4%

91,495

98.6%

Total of These Counties

48

52.5%

47.5%

0.0%

247,716

1,348,571

5,237

2.4%

215,850

97.6%

Total Vote

1820 Total Populaton

Free African American *Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

North Carolina Presidential Candidates County

W/L

Democrat Jackson %

Nat’l Rep JQ Adams %

Haywood

W

99.7%

0.3%

0.0%

Caswell

W

97.3%

2.7%

Rutherford

W

95.8%

4.2%

Person

W

94.2%

Warren

W

Tyrrell

W

Other %

Census Data Total Vote

1820 Total Populaton

Free African American *Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

936

4,073

3

0.7%

438

99.3%

0.0%

967

13,253

39

3.2%

1,163

96.8%

0.0%

1,267

15,351

4

0.2%

1,959

99.8%

5.8%

0.0%

417

9,029

17

2.2%

750

97.8%

94.2%

5.8%

0.0%

565

11,158

32

4.5%

680

95.5%

93.2%

6.8%

0.0%

293

4,319

6

1.4%

423

98.6%

Halifax

W

92.7%

7.3%

0.0%

825

17,237

260

19.6%

1,067

80.4%

Currituck

W

91.9%

8.1%

0.0%

431

8,098

27

3.0%

869

97.0% (Continued)

738

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.7 (Continued) North Carolina (continued) Presidential Candidates Nat’l Rep JQ Adams %

Other %

Census Data White

County

W/L

Democrat Jackson %

Rockingham

W

90.0%

10.0%

0.0%

1,099

11,474

13

1.1%

1,148

98.9%

Edgecombe

W

89.0%

11.0%

0.0%

1,013

13,276

32

2.9%

1,073

97.1%

Nash

W

88.8%

11.2%

0.0%

510

8,185

26

3.5%

713

96.5%

Franklin

W

88.5%

11.5%

0.0%

712

9,741

26

3.7%

673

96.3%

Columbus

W

88.2%

11.8%

0.0%

340

3,912

10

2.3%

422

97.7%

Buncombe

W

87.3%

12.7%

0.0%

873

10,542

6

0.5%

1,268

99.5%

Camden

W

86.8%

13.2%

0.0%

491

6,347

11

1.7%

630

98.3%

Burke

W

86.2%

13.8%

0.0%

1,525

13,411

10

0.6%

1,537

99.4%

Moore

W

85.1%

14.9%

0.0%

605

7,128

13

1.4%

890

98.6%

Granville

W

83.9%

16.1%

0.0%

1,004

18,222

98

6.9%

1,332

93.1%

Washington

W

83.6%

16.4%

0.0%

377

3,986

8

2.2%

348

97.8%

Sampson

W

83.3%

16.7%

0.0%

719

8,908

24

2.6%

898

97.4%

Gates

W

83.3%

16.7%

0.0%

509

6,837

12

2.0%

600

98.0%

Stokes

W

82.9%

17.1%

0.0%

1,435

14,033

30

1.7%

1,685

98.3%

New Hanover

W

82.0%

18.0%

0.0%

815

10,866

49

5.2%

887

94.8%

Onslow

W

81.9%

18.1%

0.0%

581

7,016

11

1.6%

694

98.4%

Surry

W

81.4%

18.6%

0.0%

1,462

12,320

15

1.0%

1,464

99.0%

Duplin

W

80.5%

19.5%

0.0%

678

9,744

4

0.4%

904

99.6%

Wake

W

79.6%

20.4%

0.0%

1,303

20,102

97

5.3%

1,735

94.7%

Rowan

W

78.9%

21.1%

0.0%

1,518

26,009

21

0.7%

3,039

99.3%

Bladen

W

77.6%

22.4%

0.0%

495

7,276

24

3.5%

657

96.5%

Chowan

W

76.5%

23.5%

0.0%

294

6,464

23

4.7%

467

95.3%

Mecklenburg

W

76.1%

23.9%

0.0%

1,570

16,895

5

0.3%

1,780

99.7%

Ashe

W

74.9%

25.1%

0.0%

426

4,335

6

1.7%

347

98.3%

Hyde

W

73.7%

26.3%

0.0%

335

4,967

18

3.7%

463

96.3%

Lincoln

W

73.5%

26.5%

0.0%

1,620

18,147

7

0.3%

2,183

99.7%

Bertie

W

73.1%

26.9%

0.0%

781

10,805

40

5.8%

654

94.2%

Cumberland

W

71.6%

28.4%

0.0%

1,146

14,446

110

6.6%

1,560

93.4%

Orange

W

70.6%

29.4%

0.1%

1,498

23,492

76

3.1%

2,337

96.9%

Hertford

W

70.4%

29.6%

0.0%

538

7,712

123

19.2%

518

80.8%

Martin

W

70.0%

30.0%

0.0%

659

6,320

12

2.3%

514

97.7%

Johnston

W

69.6%

30.4%

0.0%

601

9,607

14

1.4%

954

98.6%

Lenoir

W

69.4%

30.6%

0.0%

363

6,799

22

4.2%

499

95.8%

Wilkes

W

69.3%

30.7%

0.0%

1,009

9,967

25

2.0%

1,242

98.0%

Perquimans

W

69.2%

30.8%

0.0%

435

6,857

29

4.7%

582

95.3%

Robeson

W

68.7%

31.3%

0.0%

843

8,204

65

6.8%

889

93.2%

Wayne

W

65.6%

34.4%

0.0%

820

9,040

16

2.0%

803

98.0%

Chatham

W

63.1%

36.9%

0.0%

1,107

12,661

23

1.8%

1,249

98.2%

Montgomery

W

63.0%

37.0%

0.0%

895

8,693

8

0.9%

926

99.1%

Northampton

W

61.4%

38.6%

0.0%

590

13,242

101

11.2%

802

88.8%

Richmond

W

60.1%

39.9%

0.0%

524

7,537

9

1.1%

798

98.9%

Anson

W

58.7%

41.3%

0.0%

1,195

12,534

30

2.4%

1,212

97.6%

Greene

W

58.2%

41.8%

0.0%

349

4,533

8

2.2%

352

97.8%

Cabarrus

W

57.1%

42.9%

0.0%

749

7,248

2

0.2%

804

99.8%

Craven

W

57.1%

41.4%

1.5%

963

13,394

305

23.8%

979

76.2%

Pasquotank

W

56.0%

44.0%

0.0%

666

8,008

142

16.6%

714

83.4%

# Counties Won

54

77.8%

22.1%

0.0%

43,741

563,760

2,147

3.9%

53,574

96.1%

Total Vote

1820 Total Populaton

Free African American *Males

Males %

**Males

Males %



Appendices 739 North Carolina (continued) Presidential Candidates W/L

Democrat Jackson %

Jones

L

49.6%

50.4%

0.0%

427

5,216

Iredell

L

49.6%

50.4%

0.0%

1,134

Carteret

L

48.1%

51.9%

0.0%

675

Brunswick

L

46.0%

54.0%

0.0%

Pitt

L

40.4%

59.6%

Randolph

L

40.3%

59.7%

Beaufort

L

37.3%

62.7%

0.0%

Guilford

L

36.0%

64.0%

0.0%

# Counties Lost

8

42.1%

57.9%

0.0%

6,923

Total of These Counties

62

73.0%

27.0%

0.0%

50,664

County

Nat’l Rep JQ Adams %

Other %

Census Data Total Vote

1820 Total Populaton

Free African American *Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

29

7.8%

341

92.2%

13,071

8

0.5%

1,488

99.5%

5,609

14

2.1%

643

97.9%

324

5,480

32

5.8%

519

94.2%

0.0%

814

10,001

6

0.7%

907

99.3%

0.0%

1,036

11,331

40

2.7%

1,430

97.3%

997

9,850

38

3.8%

973

96.2%

1,516

14,511

38

2.0%

1,836

98.0%

75,069

205

2.5%

8,137

97.5%

638,829

2,352

3.7%

61,711

96.3%

Pennsylvania Presidential Candidates Nat’l Rep JQ Adams %

Other %

Census Data

County

W/L

Democrat Jackson %

Union

W

89.0%

11.0%

0.0%

Pike

W

88.1%

11.9%

0.0%

Armstrong

W

87.0%

13.0%

0.0%

Westmoreland

W

86.2%

13.8%

0.0%

4,546

Venango

W

85.9%

14.1%

0.0%

895

Somerset

W

85.0%

15.0%

0.0%

1,585

Berks

W

83.7%

16.3%

0.0%

5,477

Centre

W

81.5%

18.5%

0.0%

2,451

Tioga

W

81.5%

18.5%

0.0%

Perry

W

81.5%

18.5%

0.0%

Northumberland

W

80.9%

19.1%

Northampton

W

80.3%

Schuylkill

W

79.7%

Lehigh

W

Cambria

W

Columbia Greene

Total Vote 1,907

1820 Total Populaton

Free African American *Males

Males %

18,619

10

0.4%

623

2,894

10

1,302

10,324

10

30,540

White **Males

Males %

2,743

99.6%

2.0%

479

98.0%

0.6%

1,571

99.4%

41

0.9%

4,593

99.1%

4,915

5

0.6%

768

99.4%

13,974

16

0.8%

2,048

99.2%

46,275

95

1.3%

7,232

98.7%

13,796

23

1.1%

2,063

98.9%

1,043

4,021

3

0.4%

665

99.6%

1,301

11,342

9

0.5%

1,819

99.5%

0.0%

2,064

15,424

11

0.5%

2,314

99.5%

19.7%

0.0%

4,517

31,765

43

1.0%

4,125

99.0%

20.3%

0.0%

1,083

11,339

16

0.9%

1,837

99.1%

79.5%

20.5%

0.0%

2,516

18,895

9

0.3%

2,934

99.7%

77.0%

23.0%

0.0%

408

3,287

2

0.4%

560

99.6%

W

76.9%

23.1%

0.0%

2,431

17,621

12

0.5%

2,627

99.5%

W

76.8%

23.2%

0.0%

1,950

15,554

42

1.8%

2,231

98.2%

Lycoming

W

76.7%

23.3%

0.0%

2,001

13,517

27

1.3%

2,035

98.7%

Mifflin

W

76.5%

23.5%

0.0%

2,156

16,618

25

1.0%

2,554

99.0%

Bedford

W

74.3%

25.7%

0.0%

3,040

20,248

64

2.0%

3,112

98.0%

Lebanon

W

70.7%

29.3%

0.0%

2,036

16,988

22

0.8%

2,577

99.2%

Fayette

W

70.5%

29.5%

0.0%

4,175

27,285

123

2.9%

4,101

97.1%

Cumberland

W

70.2%

29.8%

0.0%

3,011

23,606

118

3.3%

3,497

96.7%

Allegheny

W

69.9%

30.1%

0.0%

5,532

34,921

116

2.0%

5,793

98.0%

Washington

W

69.7%

30.3%

0.0%

5,570

40,038

135

2.1%

6,410

97.9%

Mercer

W

68.5%

31.5%

0.0%

2,341

11,681

16

0.9%

1,810

99.1%

York

W

66.2%

33.8%

0.0%

5,509

38,759

145

2.3%

6,245

97.7%

Philadelphia

W

66.0%

34.0%

0.0%

18,217

137,097

2,374

10.3%

20,762

89.7%

Clearfield

W

65.1%

34.9%

0.0%

604

2,342

6

1.2%

483

98.8%

Butler

W

63.6%

36.4%

0.0%

1,678

10,193

3

0.2%

1,576

99.8% (Continued)

740

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.7 (Continued) Pennsylvania (continued) Presidential Candidates Nat’l Rep JQ Adams %

Other %

Census Data White

County

W/L

Dauphin

W

63.4%

36.6%

0.0%

3,114

21,653

115

3.4%

3,274

96.6%

Bradford

W

63.1%

36.9%

0.0%

2,463

11,554

4

0.2%

1,773

99.8%

Wayne

W

62.4%

37.6%

0.0%

851

4,127

7

1.0%

701

99.0%

Susquehanna

W

60.5%

39.5%

0.0%

1,756

9,960

8

0.5%

1,601

99.5%

Huntingdon

W

59.9%

40.1%

0.0%

2,852

20,142

48

1.5%

3,102

98.5%

Montgomery

W

59.1%

40.9%

0.0%

5,652

35,793

186

3.1%

5,909

96.9%

Warren

W

58.3%

41.7%

0.0%

583

1,976

0

0.0%

382

100.0%

Lancaster

W

58.2%

41.8%

0.0%

8,905

68,336

384

3.5%

10,728

96.5%

Franklin

W

55.5%

44.5%

0.0%

4,301

31,892

264

5.4%

4,645

94.6%

Crawford

W

53.8%

46.2%

0.0%

2,075

9,397

8

0.5%

1,473

99.5%

Luzerne

W

53.4%

46.6%

0.0%

3,080

20,027

19

0.8%

2,369

99.2%

Chester

W

52.0%

48.0%

0.0%

7,370

44,451

552

7.5%

6,768

92.5%

# Counties Won

42

68.8%

31.2%

0.0%

134,971

943,186

5,126

3.4%

144,289

96.6%

Beaver

L

49.4%

50.6%

0.0%

2,535

15,340

21

0.9%

2,324

99.1%

Bucks

L

49.0%

51.0%

0.0%

6,722

37,842

323

4.8%

6,361

95.2%

Adams

L

45.9%

54.1%

0.0%

2,703

19,370

84

2.6%

3,139

97.4%

Delaware

L

45.0%

55.0%

0.0%

2,117

14,810

205

7.6%

2,491

92.4%

Erie

L

45.0%

55.0%

0.0%

1,718

8,553

19

1.4%

1,386

98.6%

# Counties Lost

5

47.6%

52.4%

0.0%

15,795

95,915

652

4.0%

15,701

96.0%

Total of These Counties

47

66.6%

33.4%

0.0%

150,766

1,039,101

5,778

3.5%

159,990

96.5%

Total Vote

1820 Total Populaton

Free African American

Democrat Jackson %

*Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

Rhode Island Presidential Candidates

Census Data White

W/L

Democrat Jackson %

Nat’l Rep JQ Adams %

Other %

Washington

L

35.7%

64.0%

0.3%

611

15,687

110

4.2%

2,498

95.8%

Bristol

L

28.4%

71.6%

0.0%

317

5,637

54

5.9%

865

94.1%

Providence

L

21.8%

78.1%

0.1%

1,523

35,736

262

4.2%

5,905

95.8%

Kent

L

19.8%

80.2%

0.0%

469

10,228

55

3.1%

1,721

96.9%

Newport

L

13.2%

86.7%

0.2%

660

15,771

141

5.3%

2,517

94.7%

# Counties Lost

5

22.9%

77.0%

0.1%

3,580

83,059

622

4.4%

13,506

95.6%

Total of These Counties

5

22.9%

77.0%

0.1%

3,580

83,059

622

4.4%

13,506

95.6%

County

Total Vote

1820 Total Populaton

Free African American * Males

Males %

** Males

Males %

Tennessee Presidential Candidates Nat’l Rep JQ Adams %

Census Data White

County

W/L

Democrat Jackson %

Hawkins

W

100.0%

0.0%

0.0%

836

10,949

42

3.4%

1,184

96.6%

Sullivan

W

100.0%

0.0%

0.0%

685

7,015

23

2.4%

930

97.6%

Greene

W

100.0%

0.0%

0.0%

677

11,324

4

0.3%

1,447

99.7%

Washington

W

100.0%

0.0%

0.0%

633

9,557

13

1.1%

1,158

98.9%

Anderson

W

100.0%

0.0%

0.0%

559

4,668

3

0.6%

525

99.4%

Cocke

W

100.0%

0.0%

0.0%

352

4,892

2

0.3%

598

99.7%

Other %

Total Vote

1820 Total Populaton

Free African American *Males

Males %

**Males

Males %



Appendices 741 Tennessee (continued) Presidential Candidates Nat’l Rep JQ Adams %

Census Data White

County

W/L

Democrat Jackson %

Carter

W

100.0%

0.0%

0.0%

320

4,835

0

0.0%

605

Robertson

W

98.8%

1.2%

0.0%

986

9,938

9

0.8%

1,063

99.2%

Perry

W

98.6%

1.4%

0.0%

210

2,384

0

0.0%

290

100.0%

Dickson

W

98.5%

1.5%

0.0%

530

5,190

2

0.4%

547

99.6%

Humphreys

W

98.3%

1.7%

0.0%

420

4,067

2

0.4%

461

99.6%

Claiborne

W

97.9%

2.1%

0.0%

630

5,508

3

0.5%

628

99.5%

Morgan

W

97.8%

2.2%

0.0%

186

1,676

0

0.0%

219

100.0%

Campbell

W

97.7%

2.3%

0.0%

440

4,244

8

1.3%

595

98.7%

Grainger

W

97.2%

2.8%

0.0%

927

7,651

25

2.7%

905

97.3%

Blount

W

96.9%

3.1%

0.0%

1,003

11,258

12

0.9%

1,367

99.1%

Sevier

W

96.7%

3.3%

0.0%

333

4,772

2

0.3%

579

99.7%

Stewart

W

95.3%

4.7%

0.0%

468

8,397

11

1.2%

909

98.8%

Jefferson

W

91.1%

8.9%

0.0%

962

8,953

5

0.5%

1,061

99.5%

Montgomery

W

87.9%

12.1%

0.0%

1,045

12,219

15

1.3%

1,098

98.7%

Williamson

W

87.6%

12.4%

0.0%

5,719

20,640

13

0.7%

1,895

99.3%

Rutherford

W

87.2%

12.8%

0.0%

1,771

19,552

39

2.0%

1,911

98.0%

Davidson

W

86.8%

13.2%

0.0%

2,234

20,154

38

1.9%

1,993

98.1%

Knox

W

84.5%

15.5%

0.0%

1,409

13,034

19

1.2%

1,560

98.8%

# Counties Won

25

92.6%

7.4%

0.0%

24,469

220,772

298

1.2%

24,429

98.8%

Total of These Counties

25

92.6%

7.4%

0.0%

24,469

220,772

298

1.2%

24,429

98.8%

Other %

Total Vote

1820 Total Populaton

Free African American *Males

Males %

**Males

Males % 100.0%

Vermont Presidential Candidates

W/L

Democrat Jackson %

Washington

L

47.6%

52.4%

0.0%

Essex

L

42.7%

56.9%

0.4%

464

Orange

L

37.5%

62.2%

0.2%

3,204

Chittenden

L

37.5%

62.5%

0.0%

2,921

Grand Isle

L

34.2%

65.8%

0.0%

404

Orleans

L

32.6%

63.7%

3.7%

1,380

Franklin

L

30.7%

69.3%

0.0%

2,625

Caledonia

L

26.9%

72.3%

0.7%

1,830

Addison

L

19.6%

80.2%

0.1%

3,218

Bennington

L

18.8%

80.6%

0.7%

Windham

L

16.7%

83.1%

0.3%

Rutland

L

16.0%

83.9%

Windsor

L

11.1%

88.6%

# Counties Lost

13

25.4%

Total of These Counties

13

25.4%

Total of Counties Here

236

54.3%

County

Nat’l Rep JQ Adams %

Other %

Census Data

Total Vote 2,505

1820 Total Populaton 14,113

Free African American *Males

Males %

3

0.1%

3,284

1

24,681

12

16,955 3,527

White **Males

Males %

2,230

99.9%

0.2%

545

99.8%

0.3%

3,917

99.7%

20

0.8%

2,563

99.2%

2

0.4%

559

99.6%

6,976

8

0.7%

1,154

99.3%

17,192

16

0.6%

2,726

99.4%

16,669

4

0.2%

2,597

99.8%

20,469

18

0.5%

3,325

99.5%

2,058

16,125

18

0.7%

2,617

99.3%

3,500

28,457

6

0.1%

4,750

99.9%

0.1%

4,184

29,983

31

0.6%

4,861

99.4%

0.4%

4,540

38,233

34

0.5%

6,380

99.5%

74.2%

0.4%

32,833

236,664

173

0.5%

38,224

99.5%

74.2%

0.4%

32,833

236,664

173

0.5%

38,224

99.5%

45.1%

0.5%

622,502

4,715,988

16,364

2.3%

701,891

97.7%

Sources: ICPSR Study No. 1, United States Historical Election Returns, 1824–1968 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR00001 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved June 2002, and Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, Historical Census Browser, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/index.html (Charlottesville: University of Virginia), retrieved April 13, 2008. Notes: * Persons of age 26 years and over. ** Persons of age 26 years and over.

742

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.8  County Level Results of the 1832 Presidential Election with Matching 1830 Census Demography Louisiana Presidential Candidates Democrat Jackson %

Nat’l Rep Clay %

Anti-Masonic Wirt %

Census Data

Other %

Total Vote

1830 Total Populaton

Free African American *Males

Males %

White

County

W/L

**Males

Males %

Rapides

W

61.2%

38.8%

 0.0%

0.0%

250

7,575

23

3.5%

641

96.5%

# Counties Won

1

61.2%

38.8%

 0.0%

0.0%

250

7,575

23

3.5%

641

96.5%

Total of These Counties

1

61.2%

38.8%

 0.0%

0.0%

250

7,575

23

3.5%

641

96.0%

Maine Presidential Candidates Democrat Jackson %

Nat’l Rep Clay %

Anti-Masonic Wirt %

Census Data

Other %

Total Vote

Free African American

1830 Total Populaton

*Males

Males %

White

County

W/L

**Males

Males %

Waldo

W

73.4%

23.2%

3.4%

0.0%

4,472

29,788

10

0.2%

6,459

99.8%

Oxford

W

61.5%

36.5%

2.1%

0.0%

5,689

35,219

7

0.1%

7,654

99.9%

Penobscot

W

60.0%

38.5%

1.5%

0.0%

5,491

31,530

8

0.1%

7,605

99.9%

York

W

58.6%

41.2%

0.2%

0.0%

8,681

51,722

18

0.2%

11,530

99.8%

Cumberland

W

56.9%

43.0%

0.1%

0.0%

10,262

60,102

109

0.8%

13,878

99.2%

Washington

W

54.7%

45.1%

0.2%

0.0%

2,843

21,294

15

0.3%

5,308

99.7%

Hancock

W

54.2%

45.7%

0.0%

0.0%

3,203

24,336

7

0.1%

5,384

99.9%

Lincoln

W

50.2%

47.8%

2.0%

0.0%

8,123

57,192

53

0.4%

12,738

99.6%

# Counties Won

8

58.2%

40.7%

1.1%

0.0%

48,764

311,183

227

0.3%

70,556

99.7%

Somerset

L

47.5%

51.4%

1.1%

0.0%

5,115

35,787

8

0.1%

7,518

99.9%

Kennebec

L

38.4%

58.8%

2.8%

0.0%

8,274

52,485

40

0.3%

11,898

99.7%

# Counties Lost

2

41.9%

56.0%

2.2%

0.0%

13,389

88,272

48

0.2%

19,416

99.8%

Total of These Counties

10

54.7%

44.0%

1.4%

0.0%

62,153

399,455

275

0.3%

89,972

99.7%

Massachusetts Presidential Candidates

County

W/L

Democrat Jackson %

Nat’l Rep Clay %

Anti-Masonic Wirt %

Census Data

Other %

Total Vote

1830 Total Populaton

Free African American *Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

Dukes

L

39.0%

56.4%

4.7%

0.0%

172

3,517

23

2.5%

915

97.5%

Berkshire

L

35.3%

54.0%

4.1%

6.6%

4,564

37,835

210

2.3%

8,907

97.7%

Essex

L

29.7%

49.2%

7.7%

13.3%

9,350

82,859

120

0.6%

20,613

99.4%

Hampden

L

29.7%

41.4%

9.3%

19.6%

4,588

31,639

82

1.1%

7,271

98.9%

Middlesex

L

25.3%

51.7%

20.4%

2.6%

8,124

77,961

121

0.6%

20,347

99.4%

Suffolk

L

23.4%

59.1%

17.5%

0.0%

5,287

62,163

519

3.1%

16,020

96.9%

Worcester

L

19.4%

54.0%

16.8%

9.8%

12,098

84,355

75

0.4%

20,690

99.6%

Plymouth

L

15.4%

35.8%

27.1%

21.6%

5,181

43,044

95

0.9%

10,745

99.1%

Barnstable

L

12.6%

65.8%

8.0%

13.6%

1,540

28,514

23

0.3%

6,593

99.7%

Norfolk

L

10.5%

35.9%

40.6%

13.1%

5,149

41,972

39

0.4%

10,920

99.6%

Bristol

L

10.1%

24.3%

48.0%

17.6%

4,919

49,592

206

1.7%

11,828

98.3%

Nantucket

L

 9.9%

88.6%

1.4%

0.0%

352

7,202

69

3.8%

1,733

96.2%

Franklin

L

 7.9%

50.2%

40.1%

1.8%

3,054

29,501

42

0.6%

6,781

99.4%

Hampshire

L

 5.1%

39.8%

47.0%

8.2%

3,241

30,254

41

0.6%

7,210

99.4%

# Counties Lost

14

20.6%

47.3%

21.7%

10.4%

67,619

610,408

1,665

1.1%

150,573

98.9%

Total of These Counties

14

20.6%

47.3%

21.7%

10.4%

67,619

610,408

1,665

1.1%

150,573

98.9%



Appendices 743 New Hampshire Presidential Candidates

County

W/L

Democrat Jackson %

Nat’l Rep Clay %

Anti-Masonic Wirt %

Census Data

Other %

Total Vote

1830 Total Populaton

Free African American *Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

Coos

W

74.2%

25.8%

0.0%

0.0%

1,023

8,388

1

0.1%

1,921

99.9%

Merrimack

W

66.1%

33.9%

0.0%

0.0%

6,185

34,614

26

0.3%

8,215

99.7%

Grafton

W

59.3%

40.7%

0.0%

0.0%

6,163

38,682

5

0.1%

8,959

99.9%

Strafford

W

58.9%

41.1%

0.0%

0.0%

8,672

58,910

16

0.1%

12,875

99.9%

Hillsborough

W

58.1%

41.9%

0.0%

0.0%

6,583

37,724

23

0.3%

8,832

99.7%

Rockingham

W

54.7%

45.3%

0.0%

0.0%

6,892

44,325

46

0.4%

10,681

99.6%

Sullivan

W

53.9%

46.1%

0.0%

0.0%

3,562

19,669

2

0.0%

4,742

100.0%

# Counties Won

7

59.2%

40.8%

0.0%

0.0%

39,080

242,312

119

0.2%

56,225

99.8%

Cheshire

L

36.5%

63.5%

0.0%

0.0%

4,713

27,016

11

0.2%

6,426

99.8%

# Counties Lost

1

36.5%

63.5%

0.0%

0.0%

4,713

27,016

11

0.2%

6,426

99.8%

Total of These Counties

8

56.8%

43.2%

0.0%

0.0%

43,793

269,328

130

0.2%

62,651

99.8%

New York Presidential Candidates Democrat Jackson %

Nat’l Rep Clay %

Anti-Masonic Wirt %

Census Data

Other %

Total Vote

Free African American

White

1830 Total Populaton

*Males

**Males

Males %

95

4.1%

2,196

95.9%

County

W/L

Rockland

W

71.3%

28.7%

0.0%

0.0%

1,367

9,388

Males %

Steuben

W

66.8%

33.2%

0.0%

0.0%

5,938

33,851

37

0.5%

7,029

99.5%

Ulster

W

65.6%

34.4%

0.0%

0.0%

6,050

36,550

330

3.9%

8,096

96.1%

Warren

W

65.6%

34.4%

0.0%

0.0%

1,916

11,796

4

0.2%

2,627

99.8%

Putnam

W

64.0%

36.0%

0.0%

0.0%

1,860

12,628

31

1.1%

2,702

98.9%

Lewis

W

63.9%

36.1%

0.0%

0.0%

2,296

15,239

16

0.5%

3,475

99.5%

Suffolk

W

63.8%

36.2%

0.0%

0.0%

4,041

26,780

340

5.4%

6,012

94.6%

Tioga

W

62.6%

37.4%

0.0%

0.0%

5,043

27,690

32

0.5%

6,249

99.5%

Schoharie

W

62.0%

38.0%

0.0%

0.0%

4,428

27,902

123

2.1%

5,814

97.9%

Clinton

W

61.2%

38.8%

0.0%

0.0%

2,810

19,344

16

0.4%

4,547

99.6%

Delaware

W

59.9%

40.1%

0.0%

0.0%

4,870

33,024

44

0.6%

7,184

99.4%

Orange

W

59.5%

40.5%

0.0%

0.0%

7,118

45,366

447

4.4%

9,798

95.6%

Yates

W

59.2%

40.8%

0.0%

0.0%

3,251

19,009

26

0.6%

4,080

99.4%

New York

W

59.0%

41.0%

0.0%

0.0%

30,526

202,589

3,293

6.6%

46,547

93.4%

Herkimer

W

58.7%

41.3%

0.0%

0.0%

6,217

35,870

63

0.8%

8,193

99.2%

Greene

W

58.2%

41.8%

0.0%

0.0%

5,294

29,525

195

2.8%

6,719

97.2%

Kings

W

57.9%

42.1%

0.0%

0.0%

3,005

20,535

492

9.1%

4,905

90.9%

Westchester

W

57.7%

42.3%

0.0%

0.0%

5,426

36,456

530

5.6%

8,894

94.4%

Montgomery

W

56.7%

43.3%

0.0%

0.0%

8,098

43,715

129

1.3%

9,668

98.7%

Otsego

W

54.9%

45.1%

0.0%

0.0%

9,028

51,372

51

0.5%

11,212

99.5%

Dutchess

W

54.7%

45.3%

0.0%

0.0%

8,944

50,926

497

4.0%

12,031

96.0%

St. Lawrence

W

54.4%

45.6%

0.0%

0.0%

6,100

36,354

10

0.1%

8,282

99.9%

Queens

W

54.2%

45.8%

0.0%

0.0%

3,055

22,460

649

12.2%

4,666

87.8%

Seneca

W

54.0%

46.0%

0.0%

0.0%

3,805

21,041

22

0.5%

4,703

99.5%

Schenectady

W

53.6%

46.4%

0.0%

0.0%

2,402

12,347

59

2.2%

2,567

97.8%

Sullivan

W

53.6%

46.4%

0.0%

0.0%

2,364

12,364

14

0.5%

2,840

99.5%

Cayuga

W

53.2%

46.8%

0.0%

0.0%

8,384

47,948

99

0.9%

11,096

99.1% (Continued)

744

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.8 (Continued) New York (continued) Presidential Candidates

County

W/L

Democrat Jackson %

Nat’l Rep Clay %

Anti-Masonic Wirt %

Census Data

Other %

Total Vote

Free African American

1830 Total Populaton

*Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

Rensselaer

W

53.2%

46.8%

0.0%

0.0%

9,066

49,424

230

1.9%

11,697

98.1%

Onondaga

W

52.9%

47.1%

0.0%

0.0%

10,132

58,973

95

0.7%

13,898

99.3%

Chenango

W

52.6%

47.4%

0.0%

0.0%

7,043

37,238

45

0.5%

8,236

99.5%

Tompkins

W

52.3%

47.7%

0.0%

0.0%

6,381

36,545

40

0.5%

7,698

99.5%

Oswego

W

51.9%

48.1%

0.0%

0.0%

4,944

27,119

35

0.6%

6,148

99.4%

Columbia

W

51.9%

48.1%

0.0%

0.0%

7,647

39,907

340

3.6%

9,049

96.4%

Oneida

W

51.7%

48.3%

0.0%

0.0%

12,405

71,326

104

0.6%

16,999

99.4%

Richmond

W

51.7%

48.3%

0.0%

0.0%

1,111

7,082

117

7.1%

1,524

92.9%

Wayne

W

51.1%

48.9%

0.0%

0.0%

5,507

33,643

35

0.5%

7,335

99.5%

Albany

W

50.6%

49.4%

0.0%

0.0%

8,765

53,520

357

2.7%

13,064

97.3%

Saratoga

W

50.5%

49.5%

0.0%

0.0%

7,017

38,679

112

1.2%

9,000

98.8%

# Counties Won

38

56.4%

43.6%

0.0%

0.0%

233,654

1,395,525

9,154

2.8%

316,780

97.2%

Jefferson

L

49.8%

50.2%

0.0%

0.0%

8,801

48,493

26

0.2%

11,040

99.8%

Madison

L

49.4%

50.6%

0.0%

0.0%

7,078

39,038

41

0.5%

8,942

99.5%

Cortland

L

48.8%

51.2%

0.0%

0.0%

3,938

23,791

5

0.1%

5,050

99.9%

Allegany

L

47.5%

52.5%

0.0%

0.0%

4,445

26,276

19

0.3%

5,631

99.7%

Orleans

L

46.2%

53.8%

0.0%

0.0%

3,080

17,732

5

0.1%

3,867

99.9%

Broome

L

45.6%

54.4%

0.0%

0.0%

3,113

17,579

16

0.4%

3,974

99.6%

Franklin

L

45.2%

54.8%

0.0%

0.0%

1,942

11,312

7

0.3%

2,647

99.7%

Essex

L

43.5%

56.5%

0.0%

0.0%

3,095

19,287

12

0.3%

4,493

99.7%

Cattaraugus

L

43.2%

56.8%

0.0%

0.0%

3,135

16,724

9

0.2%

3,825

99.8%

Monroe

L

41.3%

58.7%

0.0%

0.0%

8,364

49,855

104

0.9%

12,080

99.1%

Niagara

L

37.7%

62.3%

0.0%

0.0%

3,476

18,482

34

0.8%

4,343

99.2%

Livingston

L

37.4%

62.6%

0.0%

0.0%

4,711

27,729

21

0.3%

6,023

99.7%

Ontario

L

36.9%

63.1%

0.0%

0.0%

6,612

40,288

79

0.9%

9,077

99.1%

Genesee

L

36.3%

63.7%

0.0%

0.0%

8,840

52,147

21

0.2%

11,545

99.8%

Chautauqua

L

36.2%

63.8%

0.0%

0.0%

6,224

34,671

21

0.3%

7,940

99.7%

Washington

L

32.2%

67.8%

0.0%

0.0%

6,748

42,635

81

0.8%

9,749

99.2%

Erie

L

29.5%

70.5%

0.0%

0.0%

6,137

35,719

74

0.8%

8,758

99.2%

# Counties Lost

17

41.0%

59.0%

0.0%

0.0%

89,739

521,758

575

0.5%

118,984

99.5%

Total of These Counties

55

52.1%

47.9%

0.0%

0.0%

323,393

1,917,283

9,729

2.2%

435,764

97.8%

North Carolina Presidential Candidates Anti-Masonic Wirt %

Free African American

W/L

Nash

W

100.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

445

8,490

40

4.2%

922

95.8%

Haywood

W

100.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

358

4,578

7

0.9%

799

99.1%

Other %

Total Vote

1830 Total Populaton

*Males

White

Democrat Jackson %

County

Nat’l Rep Clay %

Census Data

Males %

**Males

Males %

Edgecombe

W

99.5%

0.5%

0.0%

0.0%

930

14,935

33

2.1%

1,570

97.9%

Macon

W

99.3%

0.7%

0.0%

0.0%

443

5,333

8

0.9%

932

99.1%

Caswell

W

98.8%

1.3%

0.0%

0.0%

640

15,185

43

2.3%

1,787

97.7%

Moore

W

98.6%

1.4%

0.0%

0.0%

360

7,745

9

0.7%

1,224

99.3%



Appendices 745 North Carolina (continued) Presidential Candidates

County

W/L

Democrat Jackson %

Nat’l Rep Clay %

Anti-Masonic Wirt %

Census Data

Other %

Total Vote

1830 Total Populaton

Free African American *Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

Onslow

W

98.4%

1.6%

0.0%

0.0%

379

7,814

18

1.8%

994

98.2%

Warren

W

98.2%

1.8%

0.0%

0.0%

433

11,877

49

4.9%

947

95.1%

Johnston

W

98.1%

1.9%

0.0%

0.0%

367

10,938

16

1.1%

1,462

98.9%

Halifax

W

98.0%

2.0%

0.0%

0.0%

511

17,739

343

20.5%

1,333

79.5%

Rutherford

W

97.6%

2.4%

0.0%

0.0%

1,002

17,557

12

0.4%

2,713

99.6%

Sampson

W

97.4%

2.6%

0.0%

0.0%

380

11,634

48

3.1%

1,525

96.9%

Duplin

W

96.3%

3.7%

0.0%

0.0%

300

11,291

21

1.4%

1,435

98.6%

Martin

W

96.2%

3.8%

0.0%

0.0%

449

8,539

43

3.9%

1,067

96.1%

Person

W

94.6%

5.4%

0.0%

0.0%

277

10,027

24

2.1%

1,131

97.9%

Tyrrell

W

94.5%

5.5%

0.0%

0.0%

146

4,732

6

0.9%

678

99.1%

Camden

W

94.5%

5.5%

0.0%

0.0%

200

6,733

28

2.9%

949

97.1%

Franklin

W

94.0%

6.0%

0.0%

0.0%

498

10,665

58

5.1%

1,088

94.9%

Currituck

W

93.9%

6.1%

0.0%

0.0%

163

7,655

18

1.7%

1,072

98.3%

Hertford

W

93.0%

7.0%

0.0%

0.0%

213

8,537

138

14.7%

799

85.3%

Wayne

W

92.7%

7.3%

0.0%

0.0%

463

10,331

18

1.4%

1,306

98.6%

Lenoir

W

92.5%

7.5%

0.0%

0.0%

252

7,723

25

3.2%

749

96.8%

Rockingham

W

92.3%

7.7%

0.0%

0.0%

415

12,935

32

1.8%

1,731

98.2%

Granville

W

91.7%

8.3%

0.0%

0.0%

481

19,355

126

6.2%

1,919

93.8%

Buncombe

W

91.4%

8.6%

0.0%

0.0%

694

16,281

17

0.6%

2,729

99.4%

Gates

W

88.9%

11.1%

0.0%

0.0%

361

7,866

58

6.5%

832

93.5%

New Hanover

W

88.1%

11.9%

0.0%

0.0%

621

10,959

53

4.3%

1,169

95.7%

Columbus

W

87.4%

12.6%

0.0%

0.0%

238

4,141

8

1.4%

581

98.6%

Davidson

W

87.0%

13.0%

0.0%

0.0%

446

13,389

29

1.3%

2,214

98.7%

Wilkes

W

87.0%

13.0%

0.0%

0.0%

530

11,968

17

0.8%

2,025

99.2%

Bertie

W

86.9%

13.1%

0.0%

0.0%

343

12,262

39

3.5%

1,075

96.5%

Washington

W

86.3%

13.7%

0.0%

0.0%

175

4,552

22

3.5%

604

96.5%

Ashe

W

85.9%

14.1%

0.0%

0.0%

348

6,987

14

 

 

 

Surry

W

85.2%

14.8%

0.0%

0.0%

608

14,504

35

1.4%

2,415

98.6%

Burke

W

84.9%

15.1%

0.0%

0.0%

753

17,888

31

1.1%

2,732

98.9%

Lincoln

W

84.7%

15.3%

0.0%

0.0%

1,475

22,455

9

0.2%

3,633

99.8%

Wake

W

83.9%

16.1%

0.0%

0.0%

626

20,398

131

5.3%

2,332

94.7%

Rowan

W

83.8%

16.2%

0.0%

0.0%

727

20,786

24

0.8%

2,868

99.2%

Chatham

W

83.8%

16.2%

0.0%

0.0%

499

15,405

55

2.7%

2,005

97.3%

Anson

W

83.7%

16.3%

0.0%

0.0%

679

14,095

37

2.0%

1,808

98.0%

Beaufort

W

82.8%

17.2%

0.0%

0.0%

308

10,969

85

5.5%

1,474

94.5%

Montgomery

W

82.1%

17.9%

0.0%

0.0%

475

10,919

16

0.9%

1,734

99.1%

Orange

W

81.8%

18.2%

0.0%

0.0%

935

23,908

96

2.9%

3,237

97.1%

Perquimans

W

81.3%

18.7%

0.0%

0.0%

166

7,419

50

5.2%

913

94.8%

Robeson

W

80.5%

19.5%

0.0%

0.0%

513

9,433

106

7.5%

1,316

92.5%

Richmond

W

80.5%

19.5%

0.0%

0.0%

353

9,396

22

1.7%

1,252

98.3%

Stokes

W

80.0%

20.0%

0.0%

0.0%

835

16,196

35

1.3%

2,643

98.7%

Pitt

W

80.0%

20.0%

0.0%

0.0%

404

12,093

8

0.6%

1,359

99.4%

Hyde

W

79.8%

20.2%

0.0%

0.0%

178

6,184

31

3.6%

831

96.4% (Continued)

746

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.8 (Continued) North Carolina (continued) Presidential Candidates

County

W/L

Democrat Jackson % 78.2%

Nat’l Rep Clay %

Anti-Masonic Wirt %

Mecklenburg

W

Bladen

W

Cumberland

W

Northampton

W

Greene

W

Brunswick Pasquotank Craven

W

68.1%

Jones

W

66.5%

Chowan

W

66.5%

33.5%

0.0%

Carteret

W

65.5%

34.5%

0.0%

Census Data

Other % 0.0%

Total Vote 975

Free African American

1830 Total Populaton

*Males

20,073

20

Males % 0.7%

White **Males

Males %

2,802

99.3%

21.8%

0.0%

78.1%

21.9%

0.0%

0.0%

269

7,811

24

2.4%

974

97.6%

78.1%

21.9%

0.0%

0.0%

834

14,834

110

5.2%

2,002

94.8%

75.8%

24.2%

0.0%

0.0%

157

13,391

160

12.6%

1,109

87.4%

71.7%

28.3%

0.0%

0.0%

244

6,413

15

2.1%

702

97.9%

W

69.1%

30.9%

0.0%

0.0%

165

6,516

71

9.2%

700

90.8%

W

68.6%

31.4%

0.0%

0.0%

341

8,641

170

13.9%

1,057

86.1%

31.9%

0.0%

0.0%

430

13,734

185

10.8%

1,529

89.2%

33.5%

0.0%

0.0%

167

5,608

34

6.1%

521

93.9%

0.0%

164

6,697

30

4.8%

589

95.2%

0.0%

171

6,597

24

2.3%

1,029

97.7%

Cabarrus

W

65.5%

34.5%

0.0%

0.0%

501

8,810

6

0.4%

1,353

99.6%

Randolph

W

59.2%

40.8%

0.0%

0.0%

542

12,406

57

2.6%

2,095

97.4%

Iredell

W

58.2%

41.8%

0.0%

0.0%

795

14,918

4

0.2%

2,301

99.8%

# Counties Won

63

85.7%

14.3%

0.0%

0.0%

29,150

719,250

3,101

3.2%

92,676

96.8%

Guilford

L

42.2%

57.8%

0.0%

0.0%

649

18,737

67

1.9%

3,375

98.1%

# Counties Lost

1

42.2%

57.8%

0.0%

0.0%

649

18,737

67

1.9%

3,375

98.1%

Total of These Counties

64

84.8%

15.2%

0.0%

0.0%

29,799

737,987

3,168

3.2%

96,051

96.8%

Pennsylvania Presidential Candidates

County

W/L

Pike

W

Democrat Jackson % 92.2%

Nat’l Rep Clay % 0.0%

Anti-Masonic Wirt %

Census Data

Other %

Total Vote

7.8%

0.0%

549

Free African American

White

1830 Total Populaton

*Males

**Males

Males %

4,843

16

1.6%

986

98.4%

Males %

Tioga

W

84.0%

0.0%

16.0%

0.0%

1,232

8,978

5

0.3%

1,889

99.7%

Cambria

W

82.5%

0.0%

17.5%

0.0%

538

7,076

13

0.7%

1,779

99.3%

Greene

W

81.0%

0.0%

19.0%

0.0%

1,781

18,028

48

1.3%

3,517

98.7%

Columbia

W

80.4%

0.0%

19.6%

0.0%

2,062

20,059

24

0.6%

4,298

99.4%

Westmoreland

W

79.9%

0.0%

20.1%

0.0%

4,280

38,400

60

0.7%

8,319

99.3%

Berks

W

79.5%

0.0%

20.5%

0.0%

5,622

53,152

141

1.2%

11,287

98.8%

Venango

W

79.2%

0.0%

20.8%

0.0%

1,411

9,470

9

0.4%

2,155

99.6%

Northumberland

W

78.1%

0.0%

21.9%

0.0%

1,875

18,133

19

0.5%

3,967

99.5%

Armstrong

W

77.0%

0.0%

23.0%

0.0%

1,866

17,701

18

0.5%

3,729

99.5%

Bedford

W

75.3%

0.0%

24.7%

0.0%

2,617

24,502

82

1.6%

5,137

98.4%

Perry

W

74.7%

0.0%

25.3%

0.0%

1,367

14,261

22

0.7%

3,132

99.3%

Centre

W

73.0%

0.0%

27.0%

0.0%

2,686

18,879

59

1.4%

4,150

98.6%

Schuylkill

W

72.5%

0.0%

27.5%

0.0%

1,752

20,744

44

0.7%

6,451

99.3%

Northampton

W

71.8%

0.0%

28.2%

0.0%

3,878

39,482

31

0.3%

9,199

99.7%

Warren

W

71.6%

0.0%

28.4%

0.0%

684

4,697

2

0.2%

1,136

99.8%

Clearfield

W

71.5%

0.0%

28.5%

0.0%

727

4,803

8

0.8%

1,032

99.2%

Lycoming

W

69.7%

0.0%

30.3%

0.0%

2,209

17,636

55

1.4%

3,752

98.6%

Fayette

W

69.2%

0.0%

30.8%

0.0%

3,823

29,172

141

2.3%

5,886

97.7%



Appendices 747 Pennsylvania (continued) Presidential Candidates

County

W/L

Democrat Jackson %

Nat’l Rep Clay %

Anti-Masonic Wirt %

Census Data

Other %

Total Vote

Free African American

1830 Total Populaton

*Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

York

W

68.5%

0.0%

31.5%

0.0%

4,604

42,859

195

2.1%

9,104

97.9%

Mifflin

W

63.3%

0.0%

36.7%

0.0%

1,238

21,690

75

1.3%

5,897

98.7%

Wayne

W

63.3%

0.0%

36.7%

0.0%

1,000

7,663

7

0.4%

1,950

99.6%

Butler

W

62.7%

0.0%

37.3%

0.0%

1,717

14,581

4

0.1%

3,091

99.9%

Jefferson

W

62.5%

0.0%

37.5%

0.0%

280

2,025

4

0.9%

435

99.1%

Washington

W

62.3%

0.0%

37.7%

0.0%

5,013

42,784

155

1.7%

9,040

98.3%

Lehigh

W

62.3%

0.0%

37.7%

0.0%

2,477

22,256

19

0.4%

4,915

99.6%

Cumberland

W

61.7%

0.0%

38.3%

0.0%

3,487

29,226

162

2.6%

6,116

97.4%

Montgomery

W

56.9%

0.0%

43.1%

0.0%

5,822

39,406

178

1.9%

9,169

98.1%

Luzerne

W

56.8%

0.0%

43.2%

0.0%

3,070

27,379

45

0.7%

6,205

99.3%

Bradford

W

56.7%

0.0%

43.3%

0.0%

2,819

19,746

23

0.5%

4,217

99.5%

Crawford

W

56.5%

0.0%

43.5%

0.0%

2,600

16,030

13

0.4%

3,517

99.6%

Susquehanna

W

55.5%

0.0%

44.5%

0.0%

1,950

16,787

13

0.4%

3,344

99.6%

Lebanon

W

55.4%

0.0%

44.6%

0.0%

1,976

20,557

24

0.5%

4,545

99.5%

Union

W

55.0%

0.0%

45.0%

0.0%

1,921

20,795

9

0.2%

4,262

99.8%

Mercer

W

52.9%

0.0%

47.1%

0.0%

2,580

19,729

33

0.8%

4,162

99.2%

Indiana

W

52.9%

0.0%

47.1%

0.0%

1,237

14,252

19

0.6%

3,093

99.4%

Allegheny

W

52.7%

0.0%

47.3%

0.0%

6,306

50,552

256

2.1%

11,733

97.9%

Huntingdon

W

51.2%

0.0%

48.8%

0.0%

2,951

27,145

82

1.2%

6,715

98.8%

Dauphin

W

50.9%

0.0%

49.1%

0.0%

2,743

25,243

224

4.1%

5,274

95.9%

Beaver

L

49.5%

0.0%

50.5%

0.0%

2,748

24,183

35

0.7%

5,073

99.3%

Somerset

L

48.9%

0.0%

51.1%

0.0%

1,592

17,762

16

0.5%

3,485

99.5%

Franklin

L

47.6%

0.0%

52.4%

0.0%

4,155

35,037

335

4.4%

7,212

95.6%

Bucks

L

47.1%

0.0%

52.9%

0.0%

5,692

45,745

352

3.2%

10,609

96.8%

Philadelphia

L

45.7%

0.0%

54.3%

0.0%

21,938

188,797

3,369

7.7%

40,210

92.3%

Lancaster

L

44.1%

0.0%

55.9%

0.0%

9,201

76,631

518

3.0%

16,793

97.0%

Adams

L

44.0%

0.0%

56.0%

0.0%

2,433

21,379

107

2.2%

4,664

97.8%

Erie

L

41.3%

0.0%

58.7%

0.0%

2,543

17,041

30

0.8%

3,849

99.2%

Delaware

L

40.2%

0.0%

59.8%

0.0%

2,378

17,323

276

6.7%

3,874

93.3%

Chester

L

38.9%

0.0%

61.1%

0.0%

7,018

50,910

656

5.5%

11,273

94.5%

# Counties Lost

10

44.7%

0.0%

55.3%

0.0%

59,698

494,808

5,694

5.1%

107,042

94.9%

Total of These Counties

49

57.6%

0.0%

42.4%

0.0%

156,448

1,345,529

8,031

2.6%

295,627

97.4%

Rhode Island Presidential Candidates

County

W/L

Democrat Jackson %

Nat’l Rep Clay %

Anti-Masonic Wirt %

Census Data

Other %

Total Vote

Free African American

1830 Total Populaton

*Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

Washington

W

60.1%

36.0%

3.6%

0.3%

800

15,411

150

4.4%

3,263

95.6%

# Counties Won

1

60.1%

36.0%

3.6%

0.3%

800

15,411

150

4.4%

3,263

95.6% 95.7%

Bristol

L

40.7%

48.9%

10.1%

0.4%

268

5,446

55

4.3%

1,211

Providence

L

32.5%

53.2%

14.3%

0.1%

2,862

47,018

319

2.9%

10,833

97.1%

Kent

L

32.0%

45.4%

22.6%

0.0%

804

12,789

59

2.1%

2,771

97.9%

Newport

L

27.1%

55.8%

17.0%

0.1%

1,013

16,535

127

3.1%

3,982

96.9%

# Counties Lost

4

31.7%

52.2%

16.0%

0.1%

4,947

81,788

560

2.9%

18,797

97.1%

Total of These Counties

5

35.7%

50.0%

14.3%

0.1%

5,747

97,199

710

3.1%

22,060

96.9% (Continued)

748

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.8 (Continued) Tennessee Presidential Candidates Anti-Masonic Wirt %

W/L

Washington

W

100.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

735

10,995

26

1.3%

1,937

98.7%

Campbell

W

100.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

380

5,110

13

1.5%

863

98.5%

McNairy

W

100.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

263

5,697

1

0.1%

1,042

99.9%

Jackson

W

100.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

258

9,698

19

1.2%

1,506

98.8%

Rhea

W

100.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

200

8,186

2

0.1%

1,365

99.9%

Hamilton

W

100.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

100

2,276

8

2.1%

379

97.9%

Other %

Total Vote

1830 Total Populaton

*Males

White

Democrat Jackson %

County

Nat’l Rep Clay %

Census Data Free African American Males %

**Males

Males %

Cocke

W

100.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

86

6,017

17

1.7%

994

98.3%

Perry

W

100.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

46

7,094

4

0.4%

1,092

99.6%

Robertson

W

99.9%

0.1%

0.0%

0.0%

686

13,272

17

0.8%

1,984

99.2%

White

W

99.8%

0.2%

0.0%

0.0%

533

9,967

14

0.8%

1,689

99.2%

Lincoln

W

99.8%

0.2%

0.0%

0.0%

824

22,075

16

0.5%

3,419

99.5%

Grainger

W

99.7%

0.3%

0.0%

0.0%

346

10,066

42

2.4%

1,678

97.6%

Giles

W

99.7%

0.3%

0.0%

0.0%

1,023

18,703

2

0.1%

2,512

99.9%

Greene

W

99.4%

0.6%

0.0%

0.0%

690

14,410

16

0.6%

2,530

99.4%

Hickman

W

99.4%

0.6%

0.0%

0.0%

165

8,119

4

0.3%

1,280

99.7%

Sullivan

W

99.3%

0.7%

0.0%

0.0%

541

10,073

33

1.9%

1,706

98.1%

Monroe

W

99.2%

0.8%

0.0%

0.0%

525

13,708

7

0.3%

2,334

99.7%

Humphreys

W

99.2%

0.8%

0.0%

0.0%

255

6,187

3

0.3%

1,020

99.7%

Hawkins

W

99.2%

0.8%

0.0%

0.0%

491

13,683

63

2.7%

2,259

97.3%

Claiborne

W

99.1%

0.9%

0.0%

0.0%

341

8,470

16

1.1%

1,483

98.9%

Smith

W

99.0%

1.0%

0.0%

0.0%

628

19,906

14

0.5%

2,889

99.5%

Wilson

W

99.0%

1.0%

0.0%

0.0%

520

25,472

70

1.8%

3,811

98.2%

Warren

W

99.0%

1.0%

0.0%

0.0%

1,099

15,210

4

0.2%

2,496

99.8%

Roane

W

98.9%

1.1%

0.0%

0.0%

468

11,341

15

0.8%

1,883

99.2%

Gibson

W

98.9%

1.1%

0.0%

0.0%

185

5,801

4

0.4%

928

99.6%

Marion

W

98.7%

1.3%

0.0%

0.0%

158

5,508

2

0.2%

977

99.8%

Sumner

W

98.6%

1.4%

0.0%

0.0%

738

20,569

28

1.0%

2,728

99.0%

Carter

W

98.6%

1.4%

0.0%

0.0%

516

6,414

3

0.3%

1,178

99.7%

Lawrence

W

98.4%

1.6%

0.0%

0.0%

64

5,411

0

0.0%

892

100.0%

Wayne

W

98.1%

1.9%

0.0%

0.0%

373

6,013

1

0.1%

1,043

99.9%

Madison

W

98.0%

2.0%

0.0%

0.0%

550

11,594

10

0.6%

1,634

99.4%

Bledsoe

W

97.8%

2.2%

0.0%

0.0%

179

4,648

9

1.1%

805

98.9%

McMinn

W

97.5%

2.5%

0.0%

0.0%

529

14,460

8

0.3%

2,434

99.7%

Dickson

W

97.4%

2.6%

0.0%

0.0%

462

7,265

6

0.5%

1,154

99.5%

Franklin

W

97.0%

3.0%

0.0%

0.0%

975

15,620

6

0.3%

2,327

99.7%

Hardeman

W

97.0%

3.0%

0.0%

0.0%

465

11,655

4

0.2%

1,733

99.8% 99.7%

Bedford

W

96.7%

3.3%

0.0%

0.0%

1,408

30,396

15

0.3%

4,361

Hardin

W

96.6%

3.4%

0.0%

0.0%

207

4,868

11

1.3%

866

98.7%

Overton

W

96.6%

2.7%

0.0%

0.7%

413

8,242

11

0.8%

1,328

99.2%

Maury

W

96.4%

3.6%

0.0%

0.0%

1,448

27,665

12

0.3%

3,452

99.7%

Stewart

W

96.4%

3.6%

0.0%

0.0%

611

6,968

15

1.4%

1,047

98.6%

Obion

W

96.0%

4.0%

0.0%

0.0%

75

2,099

0

0.0%

384

100.0%



Appendices 749 Tennessee (continued) Presidential Candidates Democrat Jackson %

Nat’l Rep Clay %

Anti-Masonic Wirt %

Census Data

Other %

Total Vote

Free African American

1830 Total Populaton

*Males

White

County

W/L

Fayette

W

95.4%

4.6%

0.0%

0.0%

562

8,652

9

0.7%

1,277

99.3%

Dyer

W

95.1%

4.9%

0.0%

0.0%

122

1,904

4

1.3%

293

98.7% 99.1%

Males %

**Males

Males %

Blount

W

94.8%

5.2%

0.0%

0.0%

688

11,028

17

0.9%

1,940

Haywood

W

94.3%

5.7%

0.0%

0.0%

441

5,334

7

0.8%

840

99.2%

Anderson

W

94.2%

5.8%

0.0%

0.0%

277

5,310

4

0.5%

875

99.5%

Morgan

W

92.3%

7.7%

0.0%

0.0%

117

2,582

2

0.4%

458

99.6%

Rutherford

W

91.4%

8.6%

0.0%

0.0%

1,039

26,134

27

0.8%

3,442

99.2%

Montgomery

W

91.2%

8.8%

0.0%

0.0%

780

14,349

20

1.1%

1,846

98.9%

Carroll

W

88.6%

11.4%

0.0%

0.0%

651

9,397

6

0.4%

1,512

99.6%

Knox

W

88.4%

11.6%

0.0%

0.0%

1,072

14,498

22

0.9%

2,463

99.1%

Weakley

W

87.0%

13.0%

0.0%

0.0%

316

4,797

3

0.4%

797

99.6%

Jefferson

W

86.2%

13.8%

0.0%

0.0%

392

11,801

18

0.9%

2,016

99.1%

Williamson

W

85.8%

14.3%

0.0%

0.0%

800

26,638

30

0.9%

3,349

99.1%

Davidson

W

85.4%

14.6%

0.0%

0.0%

968

28,122

117

3.1%

3,663

96.9% 99.7%

Sevier

W

81.9%

18.1%

0.0%

0.0%

271

5,717

3

0.3%

977

Tipton

W

81.7%

18.3%

0.0%

0.0%

416

5,317

2

0.2%

908

99.8%

Shelby

W

76.9%

23.1%

0.0%

0.0%

442

5,648

19

2.1%

907

97.9%

# Counties Won

59

95.4%

4.5%

0.0%

0.0%

29,913

658,159

881

0.9%

100,985

99.1%

Total of These Counties

59

95.4%

4.5%

0.0%

0.0%

29,913

658,159

881

0.9%

100,985

99.1%

Vermont Presidential Candidates

County

W/L

Democrat Jackson %

Nat’l Rep Clay %

Anti-Masonic Wirt %

Census Data

Other %

Total Vote

Free African American

1830 Total Populaton

*Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

Essex

W

44.4%

19.3%

36.3%

0.0%

405

3,981

3

0.3%

943

99.7%

Washington

W

44.0%

28.0%

27.6%

0.4%

2,578

21,378

8

0.2%

4,796

99.8%

# Counties Won

2

44.1%

26.8%

28.8%

0.3%

2,983

25,359

11

0.2%

5,739

99.8%

Chittenden

L

37.9%

41.5%

20.6%

0.0%

2,109

21,765

23

0.4%

5,362

99.6%

Bennington

L

37.7%

43.9%

18.4%

0.0%

1,835

17,468

30

0.7%

4,126

99.3%

Grand Isle

L

36.9%

59.2%

3.9%

0.0%

363

3,696

0

0.0%

822

100.0%

Orleans

L

29.2%

29.7%

41.1%

0.0%

1,409

13,980

7

0.2%

3,193

99.8%

Orange

L

29.2%

34.0%

36.8%

0.0%

3,261

27,285

8

0.1%

6,302

99.9%

Windham

L

26.6%

46.5%

26.6%

0.2%

2,905

28,748

8

0.1%

6,591

99.9%

Franklin

L

21.0%

31.7%

47.3%

0.0%

2,329

24,525

18

0.3%

5,485

99.7%

Rutland

L

19.7%

41.9%

38.4%

0.1%

4,232

31,294

24

0.3%

7,562

99.7%

Caledonia

L

15.3%

12.1%

71.7%

0.9%

2,406

20,967

7

0.2%

4,635

99.8%

Addison

L

14.5%

27.1%

54.8%

3.6%

3,452

24,940

20

0.3%

5,982

99.7%

Windsor

L

11.8%

36.6%

50.9%

0.8%

5,060

40,625

33

0.3%

9,712

99.7%

# Counties Lost

11

22.3%

35.3%

41.7%

0.7%

29,361

255,293

178

0.3%

59,772

99.7%

Total of These Counties

13

24.3%

34.5%

40.5%

0.6%

32,344

280,652

189

0.3%

65,511

99.7%

Total of Counties Here

278

52.6%

33.7%

12.7%

1.%

751,459

6,323,575

24,801

1.8%

1,319,835

98.2%

Sources: ICPSR Study No. 1, United States Historical Election Returns, 1824–1968 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR00001 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved June 2002, and Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, Historical Census Browser, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/index.html (Charlottesville: University of Virginia), retrieved April 13, 2008. Notes: * Persons of age 24 years and over. ** Persons of age 20 years and over.

750

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.9  County Level Results of the 1836 Presidential Election with Matching 1830 Census Demography Georgia Presidential Candidates

Census Data

County

W/L

Democrat Van Buren %

Whig Harrison %

Whig White %

Whig Webster %

Bulloch

W

100.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Wayne

W

100.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Rabun

W

97.4%

0.0%

2.6%

Irwin

W

95.1%

0.0%

4.9%

Emanuel

W

91.7%

0.0%

Carroll

W

76.9%

Early

W

75.8%

Habersham

W

Franklin

W

Campbell Baker

Free African American

White

1830 Total Populaton

*Males

217

2,587

1

0.3%

376

99.7%

56

963

5

3.4%

144

96.6%

0.0%

190

2,176

2

0.5%

405

99.5%

0.0%

81

1,180

1

0.5%

194

99.5%

8.3%

0.0%

60

2,673

2

0.5%

421

99.5%

0.0%

23.1%

0.0%

523

3,419

31

5.4%

542

94.6%

0.0%

24.2%

0.0%

198

2,051

2

0.6%

326

99.4%

70.5%

0.0%

29.5%

0.0%

817

10,671

1

0.1%

1,962

99.9%

69.8%

0.0%

30.2%

0.0%

693

10,107

9

0.6%

1,514

99.4%

W

67.0%

0.0%

33.0%

0.0%

442

3,323

2

0.4%

544

99.6%

W

64.1%

0.0%

35.9%

0.0%

142

1,253

0

0.0%

219

100.0%

Walton

W

63.7%

0.0%

36.3%

0.0%

844

10,929

1

0.1%

1,545

99.9%

Hall

W

61.9%

0.0%

38.1%

0.0%

764

11,748

2

0.1%

1,998

99.9%

Jackson

W

61.9%

0.0%

38.1%

0.0%

782

9,004

9

0.7%

1,204

99.3%

Fayette

W

61.8%

0.0%

38.2%

0.0%

497

5,504

7

0.8%

875

99.2%

Appling

W

60.7%

0.0%

39.3%

0.0%

56

1,468

5

2.1%

238

97.9%

Crawford

W

60.3%

0.0%

39.7%

0.0%

619

5,313

2

0.3%

752

99.7%

Chatham

W

60.0%

0.0%

40.0%

0.0%

878

14,127

89

6.6%

1,266

93.4%

Pike

W

59.8%

0.0%

40.2%

0.0%

714

6,149

1

0.1%

874

99.9%

Dooly

W

58.1%

0.0%

41.9%

0.0%

279

2,135

2

0.5%

382

99.5%

Wilkes

W

57.2%

0.0%

42.8%

0.0%

829

14,237

2

0.2%

1,133

99.8%

Pulaski

W

55.6%

0.0%

44.4%

0.0%

268

4,906

7

1.0%

686

99.0%

Randolph

W

55.3%

0.0%

44.7%

0.0%

432

2,191

1

0.3%

370

99.7%

Butts

W

55.2%

0.0%

44.8%

0.0%

469

4,944

1

0.1%

685

99.9%

De Kalb

W

54.7%

0.0%

45.3%

0.0%

854

10,042

1

0.1%

1,629

99.9%

Gwinnett

W

53.8%

0.0%

46.2%

0.0%

1,175

13,289

1

0.0%

2,106

100.0%

Camden

W

52.8%

0.0%

47.2%

0.0%

214

4,578

13

3.7%

338

96.3%

Meriwether

W

52.6%

0.0%

47.4%

0.0%

968

4,422

2

0.3%

647

99.7%

Wilkinson

W

52.2%

0.0%

47.8%

0.0%

483

6,513

0

0.0%

875

100.0%

Washington

W

51.0%

0.0%

49.0%

0.0%

735

9,820

1

0.1%

1,235

99.9%

Twiggs

W

50.7%

0.0%

49.3%

0.0%

598

8,031

6

0.6%

973

99.4%

Baldwin

W

50.1%

0.0%

49.9%

0.0%

1,001

7,295

7

1.0%

695

99.0%

# Counties Won

32

60.4%

0.0%

39.6%

0.0%

16,878

197,048

216

0.8%

27,153

99.2%

Bibb

L

48.9%

0.0%

51.1%

0.0%

1,279

7,154

9

0.9%

1,002

99.1%

Talbot

L

48.7%

0.0%

51.3%

0.0%

1,274

5,940

1

0.1%

835

99.9%

Warren

L

48.5%

0.0%

51.5%

0.0%

654

10,946

6

0.5%

1,245

99.5%

Jones

L

48.3%

0.0%

51.7%

0.0%

725

13,345

10

0.8%

1,311

99.2%

Coweta

L

47.7%

0.0%

52.3%

0.0%

855

5,003

0

0.0%

780

100.0%

Houston

L

44.6%

0.0%

55.4%

0.0%

1,010

7,369

6

0.5%

1,088

99.5%

Monroe

L

44.4%

0.0%

55.6%

0.0%

1,278

16,202

4

0.2%

1,840

99.8%

Madison

L

41.8%

0.0%

58.2%

0.0%

380

4,646

1

0.2%

639

99.8%

Hancock

L

41.5%

0.0%

58.5%

0.0%

586

11,820

7

0.7%

975

99.3%

Liberty

L

41.4%

0.0%

58.6%

0.0%

215

7,233

4

1.2%

326

98.8%

Total Vote

Males %

**Males

Males %



Appendices 751 Georgia (continued) Presidential Candidates

Census Data

W/L

Democrat Van Buren %

Whig Harrison %

Whig White %

Whig Webster %

McIntosh

L

41.3%

0.0%

58.7%

0.0%

Screven

L

40.7%

0.0%

59.3%

0.0%

Jasper

L

40.5%

0.0%

59.5%

0.0%

Clarke

L

40.4%

0.0%

59.6%

0.0%

Henry

L

40.2%

0.0%

59.8%

Richmond

L

39.3%

0.0%

60.7%

Bryan

L

39.2%

0.0%

Effingham

L

38.0%

Marion

L

38.0%

Upson

L

Glynn

L

Decatur Lincoln

Free African American

White

1830 Total Populaton

*Males

92

4,998

16

5.5%

276

94.5%

332

4,776

2

0.4%

468

99.6%

1,002

13,131

17

1.2%

1,451

98.8%

774

10,176

10

0.9%

1,117

99.1%

0.0%

976

10,566

2

0.1%

1,600

99.9%

0.0%

825

11,644

56

3.7%

1,457

96.3%

60.8%

0.0%

74

3,139

6

3.4%

168

96.6%

0.0%

62.0%

0.0%

213

2,924

1

0.3%

370

99.7%

0.0%

62.0%

0.0%

558

1,436

0

0.0%

260

100.0%

37.8%

0.0%

62.2%

0.0%

786

7,013

5

0.5%

944

99.5%

37.3%

0.0%

62.7%

0.0%

83

4,567

1

0.6%

169

99.4%

L

36.9%

0.0%

63.1%

0.0%

404

3,854

1

0.2%

572

99.8%

L

35.3%

0.0%

64.7%

0.0%

439

6,145

7

1.1%

645

98.9%

Harris

L

35.3%

0.0%

64.7%

0.0%

936

5,105

1

0.2%

642

99.8%

Newton

L

34.6%

0.0%

65.4%

0.0%

973

11,155

4

0.3%

1,542

99.7%

Lee

L

33.5%

0.0%

66.5%

0.0%

170

1,680

 

 

297

 

Morgan

L

33.4%

0.0%

66.6%

0.0%

512

12,046

5

0.4%

1,162

99.6%

Telfair

L

32.8%

0.0%

67.2%

0.0%

134

2,136

1

0.3%

323

99.7%

Putnam

L

32.8%

0.0%

67.2%

0.0%

664

13,261

11

0.9%

1,262

99.1%

Muscogee

L

31.4%

0.0%

68.6%

0.0%

1,036

3,508

4

0.7%

594

99.3%

Lowndes

L

30.9%

0.0%

69.1%

0.0%

236

2,453

1

0.2%

428

99.8%

Burke

L

30.1%

0.0%

69.9%

0.0%

452

11,833

20

1.7%

1,173

98.3%

Columbia

L

27.4%

0.0%

72.6%

0.0%

387

12,606

21

2.1%

981

97.9%

Oglethorpe

L

21.0%

0.0%

79.0%

0.0%

362

13,618

14

1.1%

1,273

98.9%

Troup

L

18.8%

0.0%

81.2%

0.0%

1,164

5,799

2

0.2%

821

99.8%

Jefferson

L

18.4%

0.0%

81.6%

0.0%

645

7,309

19

2.4%

770

97.6%

Montgomery

L

14.1%

0.0%

85.9%

0.0%

78

1,269

0

0.0%

180

100.0%

Elbert

L

12.3%

0.0%

87.7%

0.0%

626

12,354

22

1.6%

1,362

98.4%

Thomas

L

9.9%

0.0%

90.1%

0.0%

223

3,299

4

0.8%

475

99.2%

Tattnall

L

8.0%

0.0%

92.0%

0.0%

162

2,040

0

0.0%

313

100.0%

Taliaferro

L

6.5%

0.0%

93.5%

0.0%

386

4,934

6

1.2%

483

98.8%

Greene

L

5.3%

0.0%

94.7%

0.0%

582

12,549

12

1.1%

1,119

98.9%

County

Total Vote

Males %

**Males

Males %

Laurens

L

0.3%

0.0%

99.7%

0.0%

289

5,589

4

0.6%

661

99.4%

# Counties Lost

43

35.4%

0.0%

64.6%

0.0%

24,831

318,570

323

0.9%

35,399

99.9%

Total of These Counties

75

45.5%

0.0%

54.5%

0.0%

41,709

515,618

539

0.9%

62,552

99.6%

Louisiana Presidential Candidates

Census Data

Whig Harrison %

Whig White %

Whig Webster %

Free African American

County

W/L

Rapides

L

40.7%

59.3%

0.0%

0.0%

295

7,575

23

3.5%

641

96.5%

# Counties Lost

1

40.7%

59.3%

0.0%

0.0%

295

7,575

23

3.5%

641

96.5%

Total of These Counties

1

40.7%

59.3%

0.0%

0.0%

295

7,575

23

3.5%

641

96.5%

Total Vote

1830 Total Populaton

*Males

White

Democrat Van Buren %

Males %

**Males

Males %

(Continued)

752

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.9 (Continued) Maine Presidential Candidates

Census Data

County

W/L

Democrat Van Buren %

Whig Harrison %

Whig White %

Whig Webster %

Waldo

W

84.1%

15.9%

0.0%

0.0%

1,916

29,788

Oxford

W

72.1%

27.9%

0.0%

0.0%

2,981

Washington

W

65.9%

34.1%

0.0%

0.0%

2,322

York

W

63.9%

36.1%

0.0%

0.0%

Penobscot

W

62.1%

37.9%

0.0%

0.0%

Hancock

W

61.8%

38.2%

0.0%

Cumberland

W

57.1%

42.9%

0.0%

Lincoln

W

52.8%

47.2%

Somerset

W

52.1%

47.9%

# Counties Won

9

61.3%

Kennebec

L

# Counties Lost

1

Total of These Counties

10

Total Vote

1830 Total Populaton

Free African American *Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

10

0.2%

6,459

99.8%

35,219

7

0.1%

7,654

99.9%

21,294

15

0.3%

5,308

99.7%

5,306

51,722

18

0.2%

11,530

99.8%

3,904

31,530

8

0.1%

7,605

99.9%

0.0%

1,620

24,336

7

0.1%

5,384

99.9%

0.0%

8,420

60,102

109

0.8%

13,878

99.2%

0.0%

0.0%

4,788

57,192

53

0.4%

12,738

99.6%

0.0%

0.0%

3,175

35,787

8

0.1%

7,518

99.9%

38.7%

0.0%

0.0%

34,432

346,970

235

0.3%

78,074

99.7%

49.0%

51.0%

0.0%

0.0%

3,658

52,485

40

0.3%

11,898

99.7%

49.0%

51.0%

0.0%

0.0%

3,658

52,485

40

0.3%

11,898

99.7%

60.1%

39.9%

0.0%

0.0%

38,090

399,455

275

0.3%

89,972

99.7%

Massachusetts Presidential Candidates

Census Data

County

W/L

Democrat Van Buren %

Whig Harrison %

Whig White %

Whig Webster %

Bristol

W

57.2%

0.0%

0.0%

42.8%

Middlesex

W

54.3%

0.0%

0.0%

45.7%

Hampden

W

51.0%

0.0%

0.0%

49.0%

4,784

# Counties Won

3

54.2%

0.0%

0.0%

45.8%

19,949

Plymouth

L

49.8%

0.0%

0.0%

50.2%

5,665

Norfolk

L

49.6%

0.0%

0.0%

50.4%

4,500

Berkshire

L

49.4%

0.0%

0.0%

50.6%

Essex

L

45.5%

0.0%

0.0%

54.5%

Dukes

L

44.7%

0.0%

0.0%

55.3%

Barnstable

L

42.7%

0.0%

0.0%

Suffolk

L

38.1%

0.0%

0.0%

Worcester

L

35.0%

0.0%

Franklin

L

34.3%

0.0%

Hampshire

L

29.8%

Nantucket

L

24.5%

# Counties Lost

11

Total of These Counties

14

Free African American

White

1830 Total Populaton

*Males

4,491

49,592

206

1.7%

11,828

98.3%

10,674

77,961

121

0.6%

20,347

99.4%

31,639

82

1.1%

7,271

98.9%

159,192

409

1.0%

39,446

99.0%

43,044

95

0.9%

10,745

99.1%

41,972

39

0.4%

10,920

99.6%

4,228

37,835

210

2.3%

8,907

97.7%

11,565

82,859

120

0.6%

20,613

99.4%

309

3,517

23

2.5%

915

97.5%

57.3%

2,070

28,514

23

0.3%

6,593

99.7%

61.9%

7,822

62,163

519

3.1%

16,020

96.9%

0.0%

65.0%

10,995

84,355

75

0.4%

20,690

99.6%

0.0%

65.7%

3,395

29,501

42

0.6%

6,781

99.4%

0.0%

0.0%

70.2%

2,267

30,254

41

0.6%

7,210

99.4%

0.0%

0.0%

75.5%

375

7,202

69

3.8%

1,733

96.2%

41.7%

0.0%

0.0%

58.3%

53,191

451,216

1,256

1.1%

111,127

98.9%

45.1%

0.0%

0.0%

54.9%

73,140

610,408

1,665

1.1%

150,573

98.9%

Total Vote

Males %

**Males

Males %

New Hampshire Presidential Candidates

Census Data White

W/L

Democrat Van Buren %

Whig Harrison %

Whig White %

Whig Webster %

Coos

W

89.3%

10.7%

0.0%

0.0%

750

8,388

1

0.1%

1,921

99.9%

Merrimack

W

84.3%

15.7%

0.0%

0.0%

3,784

34,614

26

0.3%

8,215

99.7%

Grafton

W

82.3%

17.7%

0.0%

0.0%

3,292

38,682

5

0.1%

8,959

99.9%

County

Total Vote

1830 Total Populaton

Free African American *Males

Males %

**Males

Males %



Appendices 753 New Hampshire (continued) Presidential Candidates

Census Data

W/L

Democrat Van Buren %

Whig Harrison %

Whig White %

Whig Webster %

Hillsborough

W

79.3%

20.7%

0.0%

0.0%

Strafford

W

77.6%

22.4%

0.0%

0.0%

Rockingham

W

75.6%

24.4%

0.0%

Sullivan

W

62.9%

37.1%

0.0%

Cheshire

W

51.0%

49.0%

0.0%

0.0%

2,953

# Counties Won

8

75.0%

25.0%

0.0%

0.0%

24,929

Total of These Counties

8

75.0%

25.0%

0.0%

0.0%

24,929

269,328

County

Free African American

White

1830 Total Populaton

*Males

3,627

37,724

23

0.3%

8,832

99.7%

4,764

58,910

16

0.1%

12,875

99.9%

0.0%

3,392

44,325

46

0.4%

10,681

99.6%

0.0%

2,367

19,669

2

0.0%

4,742

100.0%

27,016

11

0.2%

6,426

99.8%

269,328

130

0.2%

62,651

99.8%

130

0.2%

62,651

99.8%

Total Vote

Males %

**Males

Males %

New York Presidential Candidates

Census Data

W/L

Democrat Van Buren %

Whig Harrison %

Whig White %

Whig Webster %

Delaware

W

77.9%

22.1%

0.0%

0.0%

Putnam

W

77.6%

22.4%

0.0%

0.0%

Rockland

W

73.8%

26.2%

0.0%

0.0%

Lewis

W

72.7%

27.3%

0.0%

0.0%

Herkimer

W

71.9%

28.1%

0.0%

Warren

W

69.8%

30.2%

0.0%

Suffolk

W

66.6%

33.4%

Otsego

W

65.2%

34.8%

Westchester

W

63.2%

Schoharie

W

63.2%

Madison

W

Ulster

W

Dutchess Onondaga

Free African American

White

1830 Total Populaton

*Males

3,623

33,024

44

0.6%

7,184

99.4%

1,054

12,628

31

1.1%

2,702

98.9%

1,416

9,388

95

4.1%

2,196

95.9%

1,507

15,239

16

0.5%

3,475

99.5%

0.0%

4,220

35,870

63

0.8%

8,193

99.2%

0.0%

1,886

11,796

4

0.2%

2,627

99.8%

0.0%

0.0%

3,108

26,780

340

5.4%

6,012

94.6%

0.0%

0.0%

7,096

51,372

51

0.5%

11,212

99.5%

36.8%

0.0%

0.0%

4,758

36,456

530

5.6%

8,894

94.4%

36.8%

0.0%

0.0%

3,859

27,902

123

2.1%

5,814

97.9%

63.1%

36.9%

0.0%

0.0%

4,612

39,038

41

0.5%

8,942

99.5%

62.8%

37.2%

0.0%

0.0%

5,825

36,550

330

3.9%

8,096

96.1%

W

62.7%

37.3%

0.0%

0.0%

6,347

50,926

497

4.0%

12,031

96.0%

W

61.6%

38.4%

0.0%

0.0%

7,757

58,973

95

0.7%

13,898

99.3%

Oswego

W

61.5%

38.5%

0.0%

0.0%

5,051

27,119

35

0.6%

6,148

99.4%

Greene

W

61.2%

38.8%

0.0%

0.0%

4,859

29,525

195

2.8%

6,719

97.2%

Orange

W

61.2%

38.8%

0.0%

0.0%

5,783

45,366

447

4.4%

9,798

95.6%

Clinton

W

60.9%

39.1%

0.0%

0.0%

2,185

19,344

16

0.4%

4,547

99.6%

Steuben

W

60.5%

39.5%

0.0%

0.0%

6,034

33,851

37

0.5%

7,029

99.5%

Oneida

W

60.2%

39.8%

0.0%

0.0%

9,097

71,326

104

0.6%

16,999

99.4%

Sullivan

W

59.6%

40.4%

0.0%

0.0%

2,060

12,364

14

0.5%

2,840

99.5%

Yates

W

59.0%

41.0%

0.0%

0.0%

2,858

19,009

26

0.6%

4,080

99.4%

St. Lawrence

W

58.0%

42.0%

0.0%

0.0%

5,324

36,354

10

0.1%

8,282

99.9%

Montgomery

W

57.6%

42.4%

0.0%

0.0%

7,473

43,715

129

1.3%

9,668

98.7%

Seneca

W

57.6%

42.4%

0.0%

0.0%

3,537

21,041

22

0.5%

4,703

99.5%

Chenango

W

56.9%

43.1%

0.0%

0.0%

6,345

37,238

45

0.5%

8,236

99.5%

Tioga

W

56.5%

43.5%

0.0%

0.0%

2,879

27,690

32

0.5%

6,249

99.5%

Schenectady

W

56.3%

43.7%

0.0%

0.0%

2,629

12,347

59

2.2%

2,567

97.8%

Cattaraugus

W

55.9%

44.1%

0.0%

0.0%

3,377

16,724

9

0.2%

3,825

99.8%

Kings

W

55.4%

44.6%

0.0%

0.0%

4,189

20,535

492

9.1%

4,905

90.9%

Columbia

W

55.3%

44.7%

0.0%

0.0%

6,818

39,907

340

3.6%

9,049

96.4%

County

Total Vote

Males %

**Males

Males %

(Continued)

754

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.9 (Continued) New York (continued) Presidential Candidates

Census Data

Whig White %

Whig Webster %

W/L W

55.0%

45.0%

0.0%

0.0%

8,356

48,493

26

0.2%

11,040

99.8%

Queens

W

54.2%

45.8%

0.0%

0.0%

3,053

22,460

649

12.2%

4,666

87.8%

Albany

W

53.7%

46.3%

0.0%

0.0%

9,208

53,520

357

2.7%

13,064

97.3%

Cayuga

W

53.5%

46.5%

0.0%

0.0%

8,008

47,948

99

0.9%

11,096

99.1%

Broome

W

52.8%

47.2%

0.0%

0.0%

3,107

17,579

16

0.4%

3,974

99.6%

Wayne

W

52.8%

47.2%

0.0%

0.0%

5,621

33,643

35

0.5%

7,335

99.5%

Saratoga

W

52.6%

47.4%

0.0%

0.0%

6,351

38,679

112

1.2%

9,000

98.8%

Rensselaer

W

51.8%

48.2%

0.0%

0.0%

9,617

49,424

230

1.9%

11,697

98.1%

New York

W

51.7%

48.3%

0.0%

0.0%

33,817

202,589

3,293

6.6%

46,547

93.4%

Tompkins

W

51.3%

48.7%

0.0%

0.0%

5,721

36,545

40

0.5%

7,698

99.5%

# Counties Won

41

57.9%

42.1%

0.0%

0.0%

230,425

1,510,277

9,129

2.6%

343,037

97.4%

Richmond

L

50.0%

50.0%

0.0%

0.0%

1,298

7,082

117

7.1%

1,524

92.9%

Orleans

L

49.5%

50.5%

0.0%

0.0%

3,684

17,732

5

0.1%

3,867

99.9%

Allegany

L

49.2%

50.8%

0.0%

0.0%

5,311

26,276

19

0.3%

5,631

99.7%

Franklin

L

48.6%

51.4%

0.0%

0.0%

1,772

11,312

7

0.3%

2,647

99.7%

Niagara

L

48.6%

51.4%

0.0%

0.0%

4,410

18,482

34

0.8%

4,343

99.2%

Essex

L

46.4%

53.6%

0.0%

0.0%

3,458

19,287

12

0.3%

4,493

99.7%

Cortland

L

46.1%

53.9%

0.0%

0.0%

3,741

23,791

5

0.1%

5,050

99.9%

Monroe

L

44.6%

55.4%

0.0%

0.0%

8,818

49,855

104

0.9%

12,080

99.1%

Chautauqua

L

44.5%

55.5%

0.0%

0.0%

7,015

34,671

21

0.3%

7,940

99.7%

Ontario

L

44.3%

55.7%

0.0%

0.0%

6,167

40,288

79

0.9%

9,077

99.1%

Washington

L

41.9%

58.1%

0.0%

0.0%

6,185

42,635

81

0.8%

9,749

99.2%

Livingston

L

41.8%

58.2%

0.0%

0.0%

4,545

27,729

21

0.3%

6,023

99.7%

Genesee

L

38.2%

61.8%

0.0%

0.0%

8,553

52,147

21

0.2%

11,545

99.8%

Erie

L

35.3%

64.7%

0.0%

0.0%

7,543

35,719

74

0.8%

8,758

99.2%

# Counties Lost

14

43.6%

56.4%

0.0%

0.0%

72,500

407,006

600

0.6%

92,727

99.4%

Total of These Counties

55

54.5%

45.5%

0.00%

0.00%

302,925

1,917,283

9,729

2.2%

435,764

97.8%

Total Vote

1830 Total Populaton

*Males

White

Jefferson

County

Whig Harrison %

Free African American

Democrat Van Buren %

Males %

**Males

Males %

North Carolina Presidential Candidates

Census Data

W/L

Democrat Van Buren %

Whig Harrison %

Whig White %

Whig Webster %

Edgecombe

W

92.9%

0.0%

7.1%

0.0%

Caswell

W

90.8%

0.0%

9.2%

Warren

W

88.5%

0.0%

11.5%

Nash

W

83.5%

0.0%

New Hanover

W

83.1%

0.0%

Rockingham

W

79.4%

Wayne

W

77.3%

Onslow

W

Person

W

Martin

Free African American

White

1830 Total Populaton

*Males

1,265

14,935

33

2.1%

1,570

97.9%

0.0%

1,162

15,185

43

2.3%

1,787

97.7%

0.0%

747

11,877

49

4.9%

947

95.1%

16.5%

0.0%

576

8,490

40

4.2%

922

95.8%

16.9%

0.0%

885

10,959

53

4.3%

1,169

95.7%

0.0%

20.6%

0.0%

1,083

12,935

32

1.8%

1,731

98.2%

0.0%

22.7%

0.0%

713

10,331

18

1.4%

1,306

98.6%

76.1%

0.0%

23.9%

0.0%

586

7,814

18

1.8%

994

98.2%

76.0%

0.0%

24.0%

0.0%

667

10,027

24

2.1%

1,131

97.9%

W

75.7%

0.0%

24.3%

0.0%

738

8,539

43

3.9%

1,067

96.1%

Moore

W

73.1%

0.0%

26.9%

0.0%

674

7,745

9

0.7%

1,224

99.3%

Lincoln

W

70.1%

0.0%

29.9%

0.0%

1,977

22,455

9

0.2%

3,633

99.8%

County

Total Vote

Males %

**Males

Males %



Appendices 755 North Carolina (continued) Presidential Candidates

Census Data

W/L

Democrat Van Buren %

Gates

W

67.9%

0.0%

32.1%

0.0%

414

7,866

Sampson

W

65.3%

0.0%

34.7%

0.0%

856

11,634

Craven

W

63.3%

0.0%

36.7%

0.0%

510

13,734

Lenoir

W

62.0%

0.0%

38.0%

0.0%

453

7,723

25

Robeson

W

61.7%

0.0%

38.3%

0.0%

765

9,433

106

Cumberland

W

61.5%

0.0%

38.5%

0.0%

1,085

14,834

Macon

W

61.3%

0.0%

38.7%

0.0%

470

5,333

Haywood

W

60.1%

0.0%

39.9%

0.0%

341

Stokes

W

58.8%

0.0%

41.2%

0.0%

1,662

Bertie

W

58.6%

0.0%

41.4%

0.0%

754

Mecklenburg

W

58.0%

0.0%

42.0%

0.0%

1,697

Bladen

W

57.4%

0.0%

42.6%

0.0%

Surry

W

57.0%

0.0%

43.0%

0.0%

Greene

W

55.5%

0.0%

44.5%

0.0%

Carteret

W

55.3%

0.0%

44.7%

0.0%

Wake

W

55.0%

0.0%

45.0%

Orange

W

54.9%

0.0%

45.1%

# Counties Won

29

68.1%

0.0%

Pitt

L

49.4%

0.0%

Hertford

L

45.8%

Chatham

L

45.5%

Pasquotank

L

Halifax

L

Brunswick

County

Whig Harrison %

Whig White %

Whig Webster %

Free African American

Total Vote

1830 Total Populaton

*Males 58

Males %

White **Males

Males %

6.5%

832

93.5%

48

3.1%

1,525

96.9%

185

10.8%

1,529

89.2%

3.2%

749

96.8%

7.5%

1,316

92.5%

110

5.2%

2,002

94.8%

8

0.9%

932

99.1%

4,578

7

0.9%

799

99.1%

16,196

35

1.3%

2,643

98.7%

12,262

39

3.5%

1,075

96.5%

20,073

20

0.7%

2,802

99.3%

458

7,811

24

2.4%

974

97.6%

1,269

14,504

35

1.4%

2,415

98.6%

321

6,413

15

2.1%

702

97.9%

275

6,597

24

2.3%

1,029

97.7%

0.0%

1,478

20,398

131

5.3%

2,332

94.7%

0.0%

2,008

23,908

96

2.9%

3,237

97.1%

31.9%

0.0%

25,889

344,589

1,337

2.9%

44,374

97.1%

50.6%

0.0%

745

12,093

8

0.6%

1,359

99.4%

0.0%

54.2%

0.0%

467

8,537

138

14.7%

799

85.3%

0.0%

54.5%

0.0%

1,317

15,405

55

2.7%

2,005

97.3%

43.7%

0.0%

56.3%

0.0%

355

8,641

170

13.9%

1,057

86.1%

42.2%

0.0%

57.8%

0.0%

669

17,739

343

20.5%

1,333

79.5%

L

38.8%

0.0%

61.2%

0.0%

255

6,516

71

9.2%

700

90.8%

Jones

L

36.7%

0.0%

63.3%

0.0%

245

5,608

34

6.1%

521

93.9%

Camden

L

35.9%

0.0%

64.1%

0.0%

245

6,733

28

2.9%

949

97.1%

Cabarrus

L

34.4%

0.0%

65.6%

0.0%

671

8,810

6

0.4%

1,353

99.6%

Northampton

L

33.8%

0.0%

66.2%

0.0%

542

13,391

160

12.6%

1,109

87.4%

Buncombe

L

32.6%

0.0%

67.4%

0.0%

1,074

16,281

17

0.6%

2,729

99.4%

Rutherford

L

32.6%

0.0%

67.4%

0.0%

1,378

17,557

12

0.4%

2,713

99.6%

Burke

L

30.9%

0.0%

69.1%

0.0%

1,077

17,888

31

1.1%

2,732

98.9%

Hyde

L

30.5%

0.0%

69.5%

0.0%

243

6,184

31

3.6%

831

96.4%

Iredell

L

30.4%

0.0%

69.6%

0.0%

1,109

14,918

4

0.2%

2,301

99.8%

Perquimans

L

23.1%

0.0%

76.9%

0.0%

216

7,419

50

5.2%

913

94.8%

Beaufort

L

22.6%

0.0%

77.4%

0.0%

796

10,969

85

5.5%

1,474

94.5%

Wilkes

L

21.9%

0.0%

78.1%

0.0%

953

11,968

17

0.8%

2,025

99.2%

Washington

L

19.9%

0.0%

80.1%

0.0%

241

4,552

22

3.5%

604

96.5%

Tyrrell

L

15.6%

0.0%

84.4%

0.0%

224

4,732

6

0.9%

678

99.1%

Davidson

L

15.5%

0.0%

84.5%

0.0%

702

13,389

29

1.3%

2,214

98.7%

Montgomery

L

14.1%

0.0%

85.9%

0.0%

750

10,919

16

0.9%

1,734

99.1%

Richmond

L

11.5%

0.0%

88.5%

0.0%

495

9,396

22

1.7%

1,252

98.3%

Rowan

L

8.7%

0.0%

91.3%

0.0%

1,239

20,786

24

0.8%

2,868

99.2%

# Counties Lost

24

29.7%

0.0%

70.3%

0.0%

16,008

270,431

1,379

3.7%

36,253

96.3%

Total of These Counties

53

53.4%

0.0%

46.6%

0.0%

41,897

615,020

2,716

3.3%

80,627

96.7% (Continued)

756

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.9 (Continued) Pennsylvania Presidential Candidates

Census Data

Whig White %

Whig Webster %

W/L

Pike

W

87.3%

12.7%

0.0%

0.0%

410

4,843

16

1.6%

986

98.4%

Berks

W

75.8%

24.2%

0.0%

0.0%

6,551

53,152

141

1.2%

11,287

98.8%

Columbia

W

74.1%

25.9%

0.0%

0.0%

2,104

20,059

24

0.6%

4,298

99.4%

Tioga

W

72.0%

28.0%

0.0%

0.0%

1,427

8,978

5

0.3%

1,889

99.7%

Perry

W

70.1%

29.9%

0.0%

0.0%

1,580

14,261

22

0.7%

3,132

99.3%

Washington

W

68.0%

32.0%

0.0%

0.0%

1,064

42,784

155

1.7%

9,040

98.3%

Schuylkill

W

66.8%

33.2%

0.0%

0.0%

2,067

20,744

44

0.7%

6,451

99.3%

Northumberland

W

66.6%

33.4%

0.0%

0.0%

2,133

18,133

19

0.5%

3,967

99.5%

Warren

W

66.2%

33.8%

0.0%

0.0%

752

4,697

2

0.2%

1,136

99.8%

Centre

W

66.2%

33.8%

0.0%

0.0%

2,733

18,879

59

1.4%

4,150

98.6%

Lycoming

W

64.5%

35.5%

0.0%

0.0%

2,643

17,636

55

1.4%

3,752

98.6%

Clearfield

W

63.7%

36.3%

0.0%

0.0%

783

4,803

8

0.8%

1,032

99.2%

Westmoreland

W

62.5%

37.5%

0.0%

0.0%

4,603

38,400

60

0.7%

8,319

99.3%

Northampton

W

62.5%

37.5%

0.0%

0.0%

3,804

39,482

31

0.3%

9,199

99.7%

Venango

W

61.7%

38.3%

0.0%

0.0%

1,567

9,470

9

0.4%

2,155

99.6%

Armstrong

W

60.1%

39.9%

0.0%

0.0%

2,542

17,701

18

0.5%

3,729

99.5%

Montgomery

W

58.9%

41.1%

0.0%

0.0%

5,855

39,406

178

1.9%

9,169

98.1%

Luzerne

W

58.7%

41.3%

0.0%

0.0%

3,423

27,379

45

0.7%

6,205

99.3%

York

W

57.9%

42.1%

0.0%

0.0%

4,761

42,859

195

2.1%

9,104

97.9%

Susquehanna

W

57.2%

42.8%

0.0%

0.0%

2,001

16,787

13

0.4%

3,344

99.6%

Crawford

W

56.7%

43.3%

0.0%

0.0%

2,846

16,030

13

0.4%

3,517

99.6%

Greene

W

55.4%

44.6%

0.0%

0.0%

2,053

18,028

48

1.3%

3,517

98.7%

Mifflin

W

55.1%

44.9%

0.0%

0.0%

1,665

21,690

75

1.3%

5,897

98.7%

Fayette

W

54.7%

45.3%

0.0%

0.0%

3,685

29,172

141

2.3%

5,886

97.7%

Cumberland

W

52.9%

47.1%

0.0%

0.0%

3,600

29,226

162

2.6%

6,116

97.4%

Lehigh

W

52.7%

47.3%

0.0%

0.0%

3,771

22,256

19

0.4%

4,915

99.6%

Jefferson

W

51.6%

48.4%

0.0%

0.0%

473

2,025

4

0.9%

435

99.1%

# Counties Won

27

62.0%

38.0%

0.0%

0.0%

70,896

598,880

1,561

1.2%

132,627

98.8%

Bradford

L

49.0%

51.0%

0.0%

0.0%

2,984

19,746

23

0.5%

4,217

99.5%

Bucks

L

48.4%

51.6%

0.0%

0.0%

6,370

45,745

352

3.2%

10,609

96.8%

Philadelphia

L

47.3%

52.7%

0.0%

0.0%

23,128

188,797

3,369

7.7%

40,210

92.3%

Wayne

L

46.6%

53.4%

0.0%

0.0%

5,250

7,663

7

0.4%

1,950

99.6%

Butler

L

46.4%

53.6%

0.0%

0.0%

2,174

14,581

4

0.1%

3,091

99.9%

Union

L

46.3%

53.7%

0.0%

0.0%

2,471

20,795

9

0.2%

4,262

99.8%

Allegheny

L

45.9%

54.1%

0.0%

0.0%

6,697

50,552

256

2.1%

11,733

97.9%

Delaware

L

45.7%

54.3%

0.0%

0.0%

2,254

17,323

276

6.7%

3,874

93.3%

Franklin

L

45.6%

54.4%

0.0%

0.0%

4,730

35,037

335

4.4%

7,212

95.6%

Chester

L

45.5%

54.5%

0.0%

0.0%

7,198

50,910

656

5.5%

11,273

94.5%

Bedford

L

45.3%

54.7%

0.0%

0.0%

3,507

24,502

82

1.6%

5,137

98.4%

Cambria

L

44.8%

55.2%

0.0%

0.0%

1,004

7,076

13

0.7%

1,779

99.3%

Lebanon

L

44.0%

56.0%

0.0%

0.0%

2,655

20,557

24

0.5%

4,545

99.5%

Adams

L

43.8%

56.2%

0.0%

0.0%

2,706

21,379

107

2.2%

4,664

97.8%

Total Vote

1830 Total Populaton

*Males

White

Democrat Van Buren %

County

Whig Harrison %

Free African American Males %

**Males

Males %



Appendices 757 Pennsylvania (continued) Presidential Candidates

Census Data

County

W/L

Democrat Van Buren %

Whig Harrison %

Whig White %

Whig Webster %

Dauphin

L

40.8%

59.2%

0.0%

0.0%

Lancaster

L

39.9%

60.1%

0.0%

0.0%

Mercer

L

38.6%

61.4%

0.0%

0.0%

Erie

L

38.1%

61.9%

0.0%

0.0%

Indiana

L

37.2%

62.8%

0.0%

Beaver

L

34.1%

65.9%

0.0%

Huntingdon

L

33.8%

66.2%

Somerset

L

21.2%

78.8%

# Counties Lost

22

43.5%

Total of These Counties

49

51.0%

Free African American

White

1830 Total Populaton

*Males

3,365

25,243

224

4.1%

5,274

95.9%

10,394

76,631

518

3.0%

16,793

97.0%

3,244

19,729

33

0.8%

4,162

99.2%

3,446

17,041

30

0.8%

3,849

99.2%

0.0%

1,861

14,252

19

0.6%

3,093

99.4%

0.0%

3,152

24,183

35

0.7%

5,073

99.3%

0.0%

0.0%

3,968

27,145

82

1.2%

6,715

98.8%

0.0%

0.0%

2,416

17,762

16

0.5%

3,485

99.5%

56.5%

0.0%

0.0%

104,974

746,649

6,470

3.8%

163,000

96.2%

49.0%

0.0%

0.0%

175,870

1,345,529

8,031

2.6%

295,627

97.4%

Total Vote

Males %

**Males

Males %

Rhode Island Presidential Candidates

Census Data

W/L

Washington

W

59.4%

40.6%

0.0%

0.0%

Kent

W

57.0%

43.0%

0.0%

0.0%

747

12,789

59

Providence

W

51.0%

49.0%

0.0%

0.0%

2,443

47,018

319

# Counties Won

3

54.1%

45.9%

0.0%

0.0%

4,193

75,218

Newport

L

47.4%

52.6%

0.0%

0.0%

1,079

16,535

Bristol

L

45.8%

54.2%

0.0%

0.0%

402

# Counties Lost

2

46.9%

53.1%

0.0%

0.0%

1,481

Total of These Counties

5

52.2%

47.8%

0.0%

0.0%

5,674

97,199

County

Whig Harrison %

Whig White %

Whig Webster %

Free African American

Democrat Van Buren %

1830 Total Populaton

*Males

1,003

15,411

150

4.4%

Total Vote

Males %

White **Males

Males %

3,263

95.6%

2.1%

2,771

97.9%

2.9%

10,833

97.1%

528

3.0%

16,867

97.0%

127

3.1%

3,982

96.9%

5,446

55

4.3%

1,211

95.7%

21,981

182

3.4%

5,193

96.6%

710

3.1%

22,060

96.9%

Tennessee Presidential Candidates

Census Data White

County

W/L

Democrat Van Buren %

Whig Harrison %

Whig White %

Whig Webster %

Hickman

W

80.6%

0.0%

19.4%

0.0%

770

8,119

4

0.3%

1,280

99.7%

Sullivan

W

75.6%

0.0%

24.4%

0.0%

1,236

10,073

33

1.9%

1,706

98.1%

Warren

W

74.8%

0.0%

25.2%

0.0%

1,566

15,210

4

0.2%

2,496

99.8%

Franklin

W

72.8%

0.0%

27.2%

0.0%

1,647

15,620

6

0.3%

2,327

99.7%

Stewart

W

70.4%

0.0%

29.6%

0.0%

571

6,968

15

1.4%

1,047

98.6%

Overton

W

69.0%

0.0%

31.0%

0.0%

807

8,242

11

0.8%

1,328

99.2%

Dickson

W

67.7%

0.0%

32.3%

0.0%

629

7,265

6

0.5%

1,154

99.5%

Lincoln

W

66.3%

0.0%

33.7%

0.0%

2,231

22,075

16

0.5%

3,419

99.5%

Washington

W

63.4%

0.0%

36.6%

0.0%

1,199

10,995

26

1.3%

1,937

98.7%

Maury

W

62.3%

0.0%

37.7%

0.0%

3,207

27,665

12

0.3%

3,452

99.7%

Sumner

W

60.8%

0.0%

39.2%

0.0%

1,908

20,569

28

1.0%

2,728

99.0%

Humphreys

W

58.5%

0.0%

41.5%

0.0%

299

6,187

3

0.3%

1,020

99.7%

Weakley

W

55.6%

0.0%

44.4%

0.0%

559

4,797

3

0.4%

797

99.6%

Lawrence

W

54.4%

0.0%

45.6%

0.0%

500

5,411

0

0.0%

892

100.0%

Hardeman

W

53.6%

0.0%

46.4%

0.0%

990

11,655

4

0.2%

1,733

99.8%

Total Vote

1830 Total Populaton

Free African American *Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

(Continued)

758

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.9 (Continued) Tennessee (continued) Presidential Candidates

Census Data

County

W/L

Democrat Van Buren %

Whig Harrison %

Whig White %

Whig Webster %

Bedford

W

51.8%

0.0%

48.2%

0.0%

Greene

W

51.0%

0.0%

49.0%

0.0%

# Counties Won

17

63.3%

0.0%

36.7%

Fayette

L

49.8%

0.0%

Tipton

L

48.9%

0.0%

Campbell

L

48.4%

Giles

L

46.7%

Rutherford

L

Henry

L

Davidson

Free African American

White

1830 Total Populaton

*Males

3,114

30,396

15

0.3%

4,361

99.7%

1,419

14,410

16

0.6%

2,530

99.4%

0.0%

22,652

225,657

202

0.6%

34,207

99.4%

50.2%

0.0%

1,765

8,652

9

0.7%

1,277

99.3%

51.1%

0.0%

677

5,317

2

0.2%

908

99.8%

0.0%

51.6%

0.0%

304

5,110

13

1.5%

863

98.5%

0.0%

53.3%

0.0%

1,704

18,703

2

0.1%

2,512

99.9%

45.9%

0.0%

54.1%

0.0%

2,179

26,134

27

0.8%

3,442

99.2%

43.6%

0.0%

56.4%

0.0%

1,143

12,249

19

1.0%

1,876

99.0%

L

42.5%

0.0%

57.5%

0.0%

2,319

28,122

117

3.1%

3,663

96.9%

Hamilton

L

42.4%

0.0%

57.6%

0.0%

373

2,276

8

2.1%

379

97.9%

Robertson

L

41.4%

0.0%

58.6%

0.0%

1,471

13,272

17

0.8%

1,984

99.2%

Obion

L

39.0%

0.0%

61.0%

0.0%

269

2,099

0

0.0%

384

100.0%

Shelby

L

38.8%

0.0%

61.2%

0.0%

798

5,648

19

2.1%

907

97.9%

Montgomery

L

38.5%

0.0%

61.5%

0.0%

1,212

14,349

20

1.1%

1,846

98.9%

Hawkins

L

38.4%

0.0%

61.6%

0.0%

1,251

13,683

63

2.7%

2,259

97.3%

Marion

L

37.2%

0.0%

62.8%

0.0%

457

5,508

2

0.2%

977

99.8%

Wayne

L

36.3%

0.0%

63.7%

0.0%

427

6,013

1

0.1%

1,043

99.9%

Hardin

L

35.9%

0.0%

64.1%

0.0%

393

4,868

11

1.3%

866

98.7%

McMinn

L

34.2%

0.0%

65.8%

0.0%

1,252

14,460

8

0.3%

2,434

99.7%

Monroe

L

33.8%

0.0%

66.2%

0.0%

851

13,708

7

0.3%

2,334

99.7%

Haywood

L

32.7%

0.0%

67.3%

0.0%

819

5,334

7

0.8%

840

99.2%

McNairy

L

28.9%

0.0%

71.1%

0.0%

526

5,697

1

0.1%

1,042

99.9%

Dyer

L

27.4%

0.0%

72.6%

0.0%

201

1,904

4

1.3%

293

98.7%

Jackson

L

27.0%

0.0%

73.0%

0.0%

973

9,698

19

1.2%

1,506

98.8%

Anderson

L

26.8%

0.0%

73.2%

0.0%

302

5,310

4

0.5%

875

99.5%

Wilson

L

25.6%

0.0%

74.4%

0.0%

2,163

25,472

70

1.8%

3,811

98.2%

Perry

L

21.9%

0.0%

78.1%

0.0%

547

7,094

4

0.4%

1,092

99.6%

Claiborne

L

21.5%

0.0%

78.5%

0.0%

419

8,470

16

1.1%

1,483

98.9%

Blount

L

21.3%

0.0%

78.7%

0.0%

717

11,028

17

0.9%

1,940

99.1%

Williamson

L

21.2%

0.0%

78.8%

0.0%

1,893

26,638

30

0.9%

3,349

99.1%

Smith

L

20.4%

0.0%

79.6%

0.0%

1,628

19,906

14

0.5%

2,889

99.5%

Carroll

L

20.1%

0.0%

79.9%

0.0%

1,004

9,397

6

0.4%

1,512

99.6%

Roane

L

19.3%

0.0%

80.7%

0.0%

570

11,341

15

0.8%

1,883

99.2%

Rhea

L

18.9%

0.0%

81.1%

0.0%

334

8,186

2

0.1%

1,365

99.9%

Gibson

L

17.8%

0.0%

82.2%

0.0%

854

5,801

4

0.4%

928

99.6%

Madison

L

13.2%

0.0%

86.8%

0.0%

1,280

11,594

10

0.6%

1,634

99.4%

White

L

11.8%

0.0%

88.2%

0.0%

850

9,967

14

0.8%

1,689

99.2%

Henderson

L

9.5%

0.0%

90.5%

0.0%

918

8,748

5

0.3%

1,460

99.7%

Carter

L

8.5%

0.0%

91.5%

0.0%

541

6,414

3

0.3%

1,178

99.7%

Total Vote

Males %

**Males

Males %



Appendices 759 Tennessee (continued) Presidential Candidates

County

W/L

Democrat Van Buren %

Census Data

Whig Harrison %

Whig White %

Whig Webster %

Total Vote

Free African American

1830 Total Populaton

*Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

Knox

L

8.2%

0.0%

91.8%

0.0%

1,051

14,498

22

0.9%

2,463

99.1%

Bledsoe

L

6.3%

0.0%

93.7%

0.0%

238

4,648

9

1.1%

805

98.9%

Fentress

L

4.0%

0.0%

96.0%

0.0%

173

2,748

0

0.0%

512

100.0%

Jefferson

L

3.8%

0.0%

96.2%

0.0%

600

11,801

18

0.9%

2,016

99.1%

Morgan

L

3.4%

0.0%

96.6%

0.0%

88

2,582

2

0.4%

458

99.6%

Grainger

L

2.6%

0.0%

97.4%

0.0%

617

10,066

42

2.4%

1,678

97.6%

Cocke

L

2.2%

0.0%

97.8%

0.0%

316

6,017

17

1.7%

994

98.3%

Sevier

L

1.3%

0.0%

98.7%

0.0%

155

5,717

3

0.3%

977

99.7%

# Counties Lost

45

29.8%

0.0%

70.2%

0.0%

38,622

456,247

703

1.0%

70,626

99.0%

Total of These Counties

62

42.2%

0.0%

57.8%

0.0%

61,274

681,904

905

0.9%

104,833

99.1%

Vermont Presidential Candidates

Census Data White

W/L

Democrat Van Buren %

Whig Harrison %

Whig White %

Whig Webster %

Essex

W

53.9%

0.0%

46.1%

0.0%

356

3,981

3

0.3%

943

99.7%

Franklin

W

50.5%

0.0%

49.5%

0.0%

1,919

24,525

18

0.3%

5,485

99.7%

Washington

W

50.2%

0.0%

49.8%

0.0%

3,840

21,378

8

0.2%

4,796

99.8%

# Counties Won

3

50.5%

0.0%

49.5%

0.0%

6,115

49,884

29

0.3%

11,224

99.7%

Bennington

L

46.4%

0.0%

53.6%

0.0%

2,350

17,468

30

0.7%

4,126

99.3%

Orange

L

45.0%

0.0%

55.0%

0.0%

3,644

27,285

8

0.1%

6,302

99.9%

Orleans

L

44.7%

0.0%

55.3%

0.0%

1,954

13,980

7

0.2%

3,193

99.8%

Chittenden

L

43.8%

0.0%

56.2%

0.0%

2,422

21,765

23

0.4%

5,362

99.6%

Caledonia

L

42.2%

0.0%

57.8%

0.0%

2,438

20,967

7

0.2%

4,635

99.8%

Windham

L

39.1%

0.0%

60.9%

0.0%

3,729

28,748

8

0.1%

6,591

99.9%

Grand Isle

L

38.2%

0.0%

61.8%

0.0%

387

3,696

0

0.0%

822

100.0%

Addison

L

35.8%

0.0%

64.2%

0.0%

2,623

24,940

20

0.3%

5,982

99.7%

Rutland

L

31.5%

0.0%

68.5%

0.0%

4,040

31,294

24

0.3%

7,562

99.7%

Windsor

L

27.0%

0.0%

73.0%

0.0%

5,329

40,625

33

0.3%

9,712

99.7%

# Counties Lost

10

37.9%

0.0%

62.1%

0.0%

28,916

230,768

160

0.3%

54,287

99.7%

Total of These Counties

13

40.1%

0.0%

59.9%

0.0%

35,031

280,652

189

0.3%

65,511

99.7%

Total of Counties Shown

345

51.7%

31.0%

12.3%

5.0%

800,834

6,739,971

24,912

1.8%

1,370,811

98.2%

County

Total Vote

1830 Total Populaton

Free African American *Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

Sources: ICPSR Study No. 1, United States Historical Election Returns, 1824–1968 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR00001 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved June 2002, and Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, Historical Census Browser, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/index.html (Charlottesville: University of Virginia), retrieved April 13, 2008. Notes: * Persons of age 24 years and over. ** Persons of age 20 years and over.

760

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.10  County Level Results of the 1840 Presidential Election with Matching 1840 Census Demography Georgia Presidential Candidates W/L

Whig Harrison %

Democrat Van Buren %

Liberty Birney %

Montgomery

W

95.4%

4.6%

Taliaferro

W

90.2%

9.8%

Elbert

W

90.1%

Tattnall

W

90.0%

Thomas

W

87.7%

12.3%

0.0%

Greene

W

87.6%

12.4%

0.0%

Glynn

W

86.3%

13.7%

0.0%

Ware

W

86.0%

14.0%

0.0%

Oglethorpe

W

83.7%

16.3%

Jefferson

W

83.7%

16.3%

Lowndes

W

82.4%

Lee

W

79.8%

Telfair

W

Bryan

W

Troup Harris

Census Data Free African American

White

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

0.0%

175

1,616

0

0.0%

242

100.0%

0.0%

478

5,190

8

1.5%

528

98.5%

9.9%

0.0%

1,062

11,125

13

1.1%

1,219

98.9%

10.0%

0.0%

281

2,724

1

0.3%

371

99.7%

486

6,766

2

0.2%

801

99.8%

1,015

11,690

9

0.9%

1,010

99.1%

102

5,302

2

0.7%

277

99.3%

250

2,323

1

0.3%

387

99.7%

0.0%

781

10,868

7

0.7%

986

99.3%

0.0%

547

7,254

6

1.0%

624

99.0%

17.6%

0.0%

512

5,574

1

0.1%

821

99.9%

20.2%

0.0%

381

4,520

3

0.5%

561

99.5%

79.3%

20.7%

0.0%

256

2,763

1

0.2%

426

99.8%

78.4%

21.6%

0.0%

102

3,182

4

2.2%

180

97.8%

W

76.4%

23.6%

0.0%

1,401

15,733

3

0.2%

1,766

99.8%

W

74.5%

25.5%

0.0%

1,145

13,933

5

0.3%

1,442

99.7%

Burke

W

74.5%

25.5%

0.0%

796

13,176

100

8.7%

1,047

91.3%

Effingham

W

74.2%

25.8%

0.0%

213

3,075

1

0.3%

367

99.7%

Newton

W

73.8%

26.2%

0.0%

1,339

11,628

5

0.3%

1,498

99.7%

Lincoln

W

72.0%

28.0%

0.0%

440

5,895

4

0.8%

528

99.2%

Sumter

W

71.8%

28.2%

0.0%

625

5,759

0

0.0%

849

100.0%

Richmond

W

69.8%

30.2%

0.0%

1,346

11,932

32

2.0%

1,584

98.0%

Warren

W

69.4%

30.6%

0.0%

795

9,789

8

0.8%

1,049

99.2%

Upson

W

68.3%

31.7%

0.0%

925

9,408

3

0.3%

1,061

99.7%

Decatur

W

68.0%

32.0%

0.0%

635

5,872

4

0.5%

760

99.5%

Columbia

W

67.8%

32.2%

0.0%

693

11,356

17

1.9%

877

98.1%

Marion

W

67.7%

32.3%

0.0%

597

4,812

0

0.0%

738

100.0%

Hancock

W

66.7%

33.3%

0.0%

721

9,659

10

1.3%

789

98.7%

Clarke

W

66.0%

34.0%

0.0%

935

10,522

10

0.9%

1,089

99.1%

Liberty

W

64.9%

35.1%

0.0%

222

7,241

11

3.2%

333

96.8%

Morgan

W

63.1%

36.9%

0.0%

758

9,121

5

0.7%

755

99.3%

Appling

W

60.4%

39.6%

0.0%

154

2,052

4

1.2%

320

98.8%

Putnam

W

60.2%

39.8%

0.0%

778

10,260

5

0.6%

805

99.4%

Wayne

W

59.2%

40.8%

0.0%

125

1,258

3

1.5%

192

98.5%

Stewart

W

58.0%

42.0%

0.0%

1,521

12,933

4

0.2%

1,699

99.8%

Baldwin

W

58.0%

42.0%

0.0%

1,261

7,250

13

1.5%

869

98.5%

Washington

W

56.7%

43.3%

0.0%

1,046

10,565

7

0.6%

1,194

99.4%

Jones

W

56.7%

43.3%

0.0%

813

10,065

3

0.3%

985

99.7%

Muscogee

W

56.3%

43.7%

0.0%

1,855

11,699

26

1.6%

1,617

98.4%

Madison

W

55.5%

44.5%

0.0%

643

4,510

0

0.0%

620

100.0%

Wilkes

W

55.4%

44.6%

0.0%

790

10,148

8

1.0%

779

99.0%

Macon

W

54.9%

45.1%

0.0%

672

5,045

1

0.1%

724

99.9%

County

*Males

Males %

**Males

Males %



Appendices 761 Georgia (continued) Presidential Candidates Democrat Van Buren %

Liberty Birney %

Census Data Free African American

White

County

W/L

Whig Harrison %

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

Gwinnett

W

54.4%

45.6%

0.0%

1,369

10,804

1

0.1%

1,612

99.9%

Monroe

W

54.1%

45.9%

0.0%

1,471

16,275

5

0.3%

1,540

99.7%

Henry

W

54.0%

46.0%

0.0%

1,724

11,756

3

0.2%

1,602

99.8%

Houston

W

53.8%

46.2%

0.0%

1,239

9,711

1

0.1%

974

99.9%

Talbot

W

53.1%

46.9%

0.0%

1,719

15,627

5

0.3%

1,781

99.7%

Twiggs

W

52.4%

47.6%

0.0%

784

8,422

8

0.9%

899

99.1%

Paulding

W

52.3%

47.7%

0.0%

434

2,556

0

0.0%

406

100.0%

Meriwether

W

51.8%

48.2%

0.0%

1,457

14,132

6

0.4%

1,706

99.6%

Jackson

W

51.3%

48.7%

0.0%

1,114

8,522

2

0.2%

1,221

99.8%

Coweta

W

50.8%

49.2%

0.0%

1,560

10,364

4

0.3%

1,432

99.7%

Floyd

W

50.7%

49.3%

0.0%

542

4,441

2

0.3%

641

99.7%

Bibb

W

50.3%

49.7%

0.0%

1,506

9,802

9

0.7%

1,298

99.3%

# Counties Won

55

64.3%

35.7%

0.0%

45,151

453,590

399

0.8%

50,501

99.2%

Jasper

L

50.0%

50.0%

0.0%

990

11,111

11

1.0%

1,037

99.0%

Randolph

L

49.5%

50.5%

0.0%

1,028

8,276

1

0.1%

1,157

99.9%

Crawford

L

48.7%

51.3%

0.0%

893

7,981

0

0.0%

877

100.0%

Chattooga

L

48.1%

51.9%

0.0%

387

3,438

0

0.0%

556

100.0%

Chatham

L

47.7%

52.3%

0.0%

1,237

18,801

112

4.5%

2,364

95.5%

Wilkinson

L

47.5%

52.5%

0.0%

902

6,842

3

0.3%

1,016

99.7%

Screven

L

47.5%

52.5%

0.0%

379

4,794

0

0.0%

432

100.0%

Pike

L

47.3%

52.7%

0.0%

1,184

9,176

5

0.4%

1,274

99.6%

Heard

L

47.2%

52.8%

0.0%

667

5,329

0

0.0%

732

100.0%

Baker

L

47.2%

52.8%

0.0%

386

4,226

4

0.7%

560

99.3%

Cherokee

L

47.0%

53.0%

0.0%

785

5,895

1

0.1%

1,033

99.9%

Hall

L

46.9%

53.1%

0.0%

949

7,875

1

0.1%

1,300

99.9%

McIntosh

L

46.9%

53.1%

0.0%

254

5,360

20

5.5%

342

94.5%

Early

L

46.8%

53.2%

0.0%

551

5,444

1

0.1%

696

99.9%

De Kalb

L

46.7%

53.3%

0.0%

1,424

10,467

4

0.2%

1,616

99.8%

Pulaski

L

46.7%

53.3%

0.0%

516

5,389

7

1.1%

638

98.9%

Camden

L

46.5%

53.5%

0.0%

357

6,075

4

0.8%

481

99.2%

Walton

L

45.5%

54.5%

0.0%

1,135

10,209

1

0.1%

1,221

99.9%

Gilmer

L

43.6%

56.4%

0.0%

291

2,536

1

0.2%

468

99.8%

Dooly

L

43.3%

56.7%

0.0%

522

4,427

1

0.2%

646

99.8%

Forsyth

L

43.2%

56.8%

0.0%

805

5,619

4

0.4%

1,014

99.6%

Walker

L

41.7%

58.3%

0.0%

928

6,572

5

0.4%

1,251

99.6%

Emanuel

L

41.5%

58.5%

0.0%

193

3,129

6

1.3%

454

98.7%

Cobb

L

39.4%

60.6%

0.0%

1,086

7,539

1

0.1%

1,324

99.9%

Carroll

L

38.7%

61.3%

0.0%

713

5,252

1

0.1%

900

99.9%

Fayette

L

38.3%

61.7%

0.0%

879

6,191

5

0.5%

964

99.5%

Franklin

L

37.8%

62.2%

0.0%

934

9,886

6

0.4%

1,478

99.6%

Murray

L

37.7%

62.3%

0.0%

725

4,695

1

0.1%

966

99.9%

Butts

L

35.3%

64.7%

0.0%

524

5,308

0

0.0%

694

100.0%

Irwin

L

32.8%

67.2%

0.0%

180

2,038

0

0.0%

359

100.0%

*Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

(Continued)

762

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.10 (Continued) Georgia (continued) Presidential Candidates Democrat Van Buren %

Liberty Birney %

Census Data Free African American

White

County

W/L

Whig Harrison %

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

Lumpkin

L

31.1%

68.9%

0.0%

1,141

5,671

2

0.2%

1,059

99.8%

Habersham

L

27.6%

72.4%

0.0%

1,051

7,961

3

0.2%

1,359

99.8%

Campbell

L

27.6%

72.4%

0.0%

590

5,370

0

0.0%

867

100.0%

Union

L

22.9%

77.1%

0.0%

467

3,152

0

0.0%

573

100.0%

Dade

L

18.9%

81.1%

0.0%

201

1,364

0

0.0%

238

100.0%

Rabun

L

12.4%

87.6%

0.0%

242

1,912

0

0.0%

356

100.0%

*Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

Bulloch

L

6.1%

93.9%

0.0%

409

3,102

0

0.0%

427

100.0%

# Counties Lost

37

41.5%

58.5%

0.0%

25,905

228,412

211

0.6%

32,729

99.4%

Total of These Counties

92

56.0%

44.0%

0.0%

71,056

682,002

610

0.7%

83,230

99.3%

Louisiana Presidential Candidates County

W/L

Whig Harrison %

Democrat Van Buren %

Liberty Birney %

Rapides

W

55.4%

44.6%

# Counties Won

1

55.4%

Total of These Counties

1

55.4%

Census Data Free African American

White

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

0.0%

857

14,132

60

5.6%

1,002

94.4%

44.6%

0.0%

857

14,132

60

5.6%

1,002

94.4%

44.6%

0.0%

857

14,132

60

5.6%

1,002

94.4%

* Males

Males %

** Males

Males %

Maine Presidential Candidates Liberty Birney %

Total Vote

Total Populaton

White

W/L

Whig Harrison %

Kennebec

W

66.2%

33.8%

0.0%

10,426

55,823

43

0.3%

13,075

99.7%

Somerset

W

58.7%

41.3%

0.0%

6,281

33,912

6

0.1%

7,628

99.9%

Lincoln

W

54.8%

45.2%

0.0%

11,469

63,517

63

0.4%

15,171

99.6%

Piscataquis

W

52.9%

47.1%

0.0%

2,411

13,138

0

0.0%

2,826

100.0%

Cumberland

W

51.3%

48.7%

0.0%

13,228

68,658

137

0.8%

16,291

99.2%

Washington

W

51.3%

48.7%

0.0%

4,592

28,327

15

0.2%

6,364

99.8%

# Counties Won

6

56.4%

43.6%

0.0%

48,407

263,375

264

0.4%

61,355

99.6%

Penobscot

L

49.4%

50.6%

0.0%

8,778

45,705

30

0.3%

11,385

99.7%

Hancock

L

49.2%

50.8%

0.0%

4,943

28,605

6

0.1%

6,442

99.9%

Franklin

L

47.4%

52.6%

0.0%

3,900

20,801

4

0.1%

4,735

99.9%

York

L

45.5%

54.5%

0.0%

10,510

54,034

18

0.1%

12,445

99.9%

Oxford

L

37.9%

62.1%

0.0%

7,732

38,351

3

0.0%

8,872

100.0%

Aroostook

L

37.6%

62.4%

0.0%

769

9,413

0

0.0%

2,602

100.0%

Waldo

L

34.7%

65.3%

0.0%

7,763

41,509

15

0.2%

9,519

99.8%

# Counties Lost

7

43.5%

56.5%

0.0%

44,395

238,418

76

0.1%

56,000

99.9%

Total of These Counties

13

50.2%

49.8%

0.0%

92,802

501,793

340

0.3%

117,355

99.7%

County

Democrat Van Buren %

Census Data Free African American *Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

Massachusetts Presidential Candidates W/L

Whig Harrison %

Democrat Van Buren %

Liberty Birney %

Hampshire

W

69.6%

27.8%

Nantucket

W

67.6%

32.3%

Barnstable

W

62.9%

35.5%

County

Census Data Free African American

White

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

2.6%

5,860

30,897

37

0.5%

8,009

99.5%

0.1%

992

9,012

242

8.6%

2,569

91.4%

1.6%

4,373

32,548

103

1.3%

7,950

98.7%

*Males

Males %

**Males

Males %



Appendices 763 Massachusetts (continued) Presidential Candidates Democrat Van Buren %

Liberty Birney %

Census Data Free African American

White

County

W/L

Whig Harrison %

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

Suffolk

W

62.7%

36.3%

1.0%

11,949

95,773

990

3.1%

31,123

96.9%

Worcester

W

62.4%

36.6%

1.0%

18,477

95,313

122

0.5%

24,714

99.5%

Franklin

W

61.2%

37.8%

1.0%

5,655

28,812

23

0.3%

7,130

99.7%

Essex

W

59.9%

38.8%

1.3%

16,784

94,987

118

0.5%

24,781

99.5%

Norfolk

W

55.5%

43.5%

1.0%

9,735

53,140

33

0.2%

14,180

99.8%

Plymouth

W

55.3%

43.5%

1.2%

9,277

47,373

77

0.6%

12,250

99.4%

Dukes

W

53.1%

45.2%

1.7%

651

3,958

1

0.1%

1,078

99.9%

Middlesex

W

52.3%

46.1%

1.6%

18,562

106,611

152

0.5%

27,583

99.5%

Berkshire

W

50.5%

48.6%

0.8%

7,772

41,745

277

2.5%

11,005

97.5%

Hampden

W

50.1%

48.2%

1.7%

6,867

37,366

69

0.7%

10,176

99.3%

# Counties Won

13

58.1%

40.6%

1.3%

116,954

677,535

2,244

1.2%

182,548

98.8%

Bristol

L

49.2%

49.7%

1.2%

9,871

60,164

383

2.4%

15,482

97.6%

# Counties Lost

1

49.2%

49.7%

1.2%

9,871

60,164

383

2.4%

15,482

97.6%

Total of These Counties

14

57.4%

41.3%

1.3%

126,825

737,699

2,627

1.3%

198,030

98.7%

*Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

New Hampshire Presidential Candidates Liberty Birney %

White

W/L

Whig Harrison %

Cheshire

W

61.2%

38.8%

0.0%

Hillsborough

W

55.5%

44.5%

0.0%

9,177

42,494

28

0.3%

10,466

99.7%

# Counties Won

2

57.7%

42.3%

0.0%

15,112

68,923

39

0.2%

17,266

99.8%

Sullivan

L

47.7%

52.3%

0.0%

4,397

20,340

8

0.2%

5,215

99.8%

Rockingham

L

45.3%

54.7%

0.0%

9,107

45,771

34

0.3%

11,558

99.7%

Strafford

L

44.3%

55.7%

0.0%

12,138

61,127

7

0.0%

14,451

100.0%

Grafton

L

42.7%

57.3%

0.0%

8,668

42,311

7

0.1%

10,757

99.9%

Merrimack

L

35.4%

64.6%

0.0%

7,785

36,253

27

0.3%

9,153

99.7%

Coos

L

28.3%

71.7%

0.0%

1,877

9,849

1

0.0%

2,277

100.0%

# Counties Lost

6

42.3%

57.7%

0.0%

43,972

215,651

84

0.2%

53,411

99.8%

Total of These Counties

8

46.2%

53.8%

0.0%

59,084

284,574

123

0.2%

70,677

99.8%

County

Democrat Van Buren %

Census Data Free African American

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

* Males

** Males

Males %

5,935

26,429

11

0.2%

6,800

99.8%

Males %

New York Presidential Candidates W/L

Whig Harrison %

Democrat Van Buren %

Liberty Birney %

Erie

W

64.5%

35.1%

Genesee

W

64.0%

34.5%

Chautauqua

W

64.0%

Washington

W

62.4%

Essex

W

Livingston

W

Ontario Monroe

Census Data Free African American

White

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

0.3%

10,511

62,465

191

1.2%

15,574

98.8%

1.4%

11,022

59,587

28

0.2%

13,405

99.8%

35.8%

0.2%

9,353

47,975

30

0.3%

10,959

99.7%

37.2%

0.3%

8,123

41,080

67

0.7%

10,151

99.3%

59.4%

40.6%

0.0%

4,407

23,634

21

0.4%

5,714

99.6%

59.3%

39.9%

0.8%

6,602

35,140

33

0.4%

9,053

99.6%

W

57.3%

40.9%

1.8%

8,431

43,501

133

1.2%

10,572

98.8%

W

56.8%

42.5%

0.7%

11,379

64,902

165

1.0%

16,430

99.0%

Niagara

W

56.4%

42.2%

1.4%

5,255

31,132

68

0.9%

7,649

99.1%

Franklin

W

56.3%

43.4%

0.2%

2,556

16,518

1

0.0%

3,697

100.0%

Orleans

W

55.3%

43.0%

1.6%

4,710

25,127

20

0.3%

5,816

99.7%

County

*Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

(Continued)

764

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.10 (Continued) New York (continued) Presidential Candidates County

W/L

Whig Harrison %

Democrat Van Buren %

Liberty Birney %

Allegany

W

54.4%

44.5%

Fulton

W

54.0%

45.2%

Cortland

W

53.9%

Cattaraugus

W

53.8%

Saratoga

W

Broome

W

Tompkins Schenectady

Census Data Free African American

White

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

1.0%

7,593

40,975

28

0.3%

9,731

99.7%

0.8%

3,638

18,049

25

0.6%

4,241

99.4%

45.1%

0.9%

4,937

24,607

9

0.2%

5,786

99.8%

45.0%

1.2%

5,515

28,872

11

0.2%

6,476

99.8%

53.2%

46.6%

0.2%

8,305

40,553

143

1.4%

10,152

98.6%

52.7%

46.9%

0.5%

4,547

22,338

50

1.0%

5,174

99.0%

W

52.5%

47.1%

0.4%

7,559

37,948

50

0.6%

8,586

99.4%

W

52.5%

47.3%

0.1%

3,334

17,387

94

2.1%

4,426

97.9%

Jefferson

W

52.4%

47.1%

0.5%

11,946

60,984

26

0.2%

14,222

99.8%

Chenango

W

52.2%

47.5%

0.3%

8,406

40,785

52

0.5%

9,639

99.5%

Clinton

W

52.1%

47.1%

0.8%

3,882

28,157

18

0.3%

6,440

99.7%

Wayne

W

51.6%

47.9%

0.4%

8,342

42,057

43

0.4%

9,838

99.6%

Albany

W

51.5%

48.1%

0.4%

12,361

68,593

294

1.7%

17,113

98.3%

Richmond

W

51.5%

48.5%

0.0%

1,754

10,965

106

3.7%

2,743

96.3%

Rensselaer

W

51.3%

48.4%

0.3%

11,209

60,259

300

1.9%

15,155

98.1%

Ulster

W

51.2%

48.8%

0.0%

8,773

45,822

337

3.1%

10,527

96.9%

Cayuga

W

51.1%

48.1%

0.7%

10,101

50,338

133

1.1%

12,450

98.9%

Kings

W

50.9%

48.8%

0.4%

6,474

47,613

727

5.8%

11,830

94.2%

Oswego

W

50.7%

47.3%

2.0%

8,265

43,619

41

0.4%

10,034

99.6%

St. Lawrence

W

50.0%

49.5%

0.4%

9,595

56,706

8

0.1%

12,772

99.9%

Madison

W

49.5%

47.7%

2.8%

8,620

40,008

43

0.4%

9,952

99.6%

# Counties Won

32

54.8%

44.4%

0.7%

237,505

1,277,696

3,295

1.1%

306,307

98.9%

Dutchess

L

49.9%

49.9%

0.1%

10,733

52,398

481

3.6%

12,885

96.4%

Seneca

L

49.8%

49.9%

0.3%

4,951

24,874

39

0.7%

5,899

99.3%

Queens

L

49.7%

50.2%

0.0%

5,074

30,324

778

10.0%

6,971

90.0%

Onondaga

L

49.6%

49.6%

0.8%

13,225

67,911

110

0.6%

17,097

99.4%

Yates

L

49.3%

49.6%

1.0%

4,203

20,444

26

0.5%

4,892

99.5%

Columbia

L

48.9%

51.1%

0.0%

8,770

43,252

320

2.9%

10,731

97.1%

Lewis

L

48.9%

50.0%

1.0%

3,510

17,830

11

0.2%

4,409

99.8%

New York

L

48.7%

50.9%

0.3%

43,046

312,710

3,832

4.6%

79,755

95.4%

Westchester

L

48.3%

51.5%

0.1%

8,446

48,686

595

4.3%

13,347

95.7%

Warren

L

48.0%

51.8%

0.2%

2,722

13,422

10

0.3%

3,095

99.7%

Greene

L

47.8%

52.1%

0.1%

6,256

30,446

182

2.4%

7,372

97.6%

Orange

L

47.4%

52.5%

0.0%

9,219

50,739

473

3.7%

12,395

96.3%

Tioga

L

46.8%

53.0%

0.1%

4,110

20,527

29

0.6%

4,777

99.4%

Oneida

L

46.7%

50.7%

2.6%

15,317

85,310

158

0.7%

21,444

99.3%

Sullivan

L

46.6%

53.1%

0.3%

3,163

15,629

15

0.4%

3,761

99.6%

Otsego

L

46.3%

53.2%

0.6%

10,497

49,628

37

0.3%

11,834

99.7%

Schoharie

L

46.2%

53.4%

0.4%

6,266

32,358

143

1.9%

7,278

98.1%

Montgomery

L

46.1%

53.7%

0.1%

6,135

35,818

125

1.3%

9,815

98.7%

Steuben

L

45.6%

53.9%

0.5%

8,943

46,138

63

0.6%

10,196

99.4%

Delaware

L

43.4%

55.9%

0.6%

6,877

35,396

41

0.5%

8,156

99.5%

Chemung

L

42.3%

57.4%

0.2%

3,998

20,732

28

0.6%

4,722

99.4%

*Males

Males %

**Males

Males %



Appendices 765 New York (continued) Presidential Candidates Democrat Van Buren %

Liberty Birney %

Census Data Free African American

White

County

W/L

Whig Harrison %

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

Herkimer

L

41.4%

57.7%

0.9%

7,538

37,477

66

0.7%

9,749

99.3%

Suffolk

L

40.9%

59.0%

0.0%

5,897

32,469

445

5.4%

7,829

94.6%

Putnam

L

36.7%

63.2%

0.0%

2,503

12,825

32

1.0%

3,105

99.0%

Hamilton

L

35.6%

64.3%

0.0%

345

1,907

1

0.2%

487

99.8%

Rockland

L

27.8%

72.2%

0.0%

2,294

11,975

96

2.8%

3,366

97.2%

# Counties Lost

26

47.0%

52.5%

0.5%

204,038

1,151,225

8,136

2.8%

285,367

97.2%

Total of These Counties

58

51.2%

48.2%

0.6%

441,543

2,428,921

11,431

1.9%

591,674

98.1%

*Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

North Carolina Presidential Candidates County

W/L

Whig Harrison %

Democrat Van Buren %

Liberty Birney %

Wilkes

W

92.7%

7.3%

Montgomery

W

91.5%

8.5%

Richmond

W

88.9%

Washington

W

88.9%

Camden

W

Guilford

W

Iredell Burke

Census Data Free African American

White

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

0.0%

1,564

12,577

17

0.8%

2,190

99.2%

0.0%

1,241

10,780

12

0.8%

1,541

99.2%

11.1%

0.0%

922

8,909

53

5.0%

1,012

95.0%

11.1%

0.0%

486

4,525

30

4.8%

589

95.2%

86.0%

14.0%

0.0%

712

5,663

32

3.8%

817

96.2%

84.7%

15.3%

0.0%

2,714

19,175

104

3.1%

3,304

96.9%

W

84.4%

15.6%

0.0%

2,108

15,685

8

0.3%

2,530

99.7%

W

84.0%

16.0%

0.0%

1,932

15,799

35

1.4%

2,426

98.6%

Randolph

W

83.3%

16.7%

0.0%

1,613

12,875

64

2.8%

2,207

97.2%

Hyde

W

82.9%

17.1%

0.0%

520

6,458

79

8.3%

870

91.7%

Pasquotank

W

82.3%

17.7%

0.0%

842

8,514

203

16.2%

1,050

83.8%

Tyrrell

W

82.1%

17.9%

0.0%

463

4,657

9

1.3%

680

98.7%

Perquimans

W

81.6%

18.4%

0.0%

730

7,346

62

6.5%

897

93.5%

Davidson

W

78.7%

21.3%

0.0%

1,831

14,606

20

0.8%

2,405

99.2%

Cherokee

W

78.6%

21.4%

0.0%

527

3,427

2

0.3%

668

99.7%

Rutherford

W

76.9%

23.1%

0.0%

2,342

19,202

18

0.6%

3,058

99.4%

Beaufort

W

75.7%

24.3%

0.0%

1,270

12,225

118

7.0%

1,559

93.0%

Davie

W

75.3%

24.7%

0.0%

912

7,574

16

1.4%

1,138

98.6%

Anson

W

75.1%

24.9%

0.0%

1,589

15,077

18

0.9%

1,900

99.1%

Macon

W

72.0%

28.0%

0.0%

601

4,869

9

1.1%

831

98.9%

Cabarrus

W

71.6%

28.4%

0.0%

1,245

9,259

9

0.6%

1,550

99.4%

Carteret

W

70.9%

29.1%

0.0%

640

6,591

17

1.5%

1,083

98.5%

Chowan

W

67.6%

32.4%

0.0%

488

6,690

29

4.4%

624

95.6%

Hertford

W

66.6%

33.4%

0.0%

595

7,484

126

14.6%

737

85.4%

Chatham

W

66.4%

33.6%

0.0%

1,692

16,242

58

2.6%

2,140

97.4%

Haywood

W

66.1%

33.9%

0.0%

652

4,975

4

0.5%

829

99.5%

Rowan

W

65.2%

34.8%

0.0%

1,444

12,109

20

1.1%

1,821

98.9%

Jones

W

64.8%

35.2%

0.0%

375

4,945

33

6.7%

460

93.3%

Halifax

W

62.9%

37.1%

0.0%

960

16,865

280

19.1%

1,187

80.9%

Pitt

W

61.6%

38.4%

0.0%

1,018

11,806

6

0.5%

1,293

99.5%

Brunswick

W

60.3%

39.7%

0.0%

580

5,265

63

9.3%

617

90.7%

Surry

W

59.5%

40.5%

0.0%

2,003

15,079

29

1.1%

2,497

98.9%

Northampton

W

58.9%

41.1%

0.0%

933

13,369

115

8.5%

1,240

91.5%

*Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

(Continued)

766

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.10 (Continued) North Carolina (continued) Presidential Candidates Democrat Van Buren %

Liberty Birney %

Census Data Free African American

County

W/L

Whig Harrison %

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

Yancey

W

58.9%

41.1%

0.0%

705

5,962

4

0.4%

Greene

W

58.0%

42.0%

0.0%

512

6,595

29

Bertie

W

56.3%

43.7%

0.0%

881

12,175

63

Ashe

W

55.7%

44.3%

0.0%

1,038

7,467

Craven

W

55.2%

44.8%

0.0%

1,206

13,438

Granville

W

54.5%

45.5%

0.0%

1,711

18,817

Gates

W

53.5%

46.5%

0.0%

706

8,161

Robeson

W

53.4%

46.6%

0.0%

1,085

Stokes

W

53.3%

46.7%

0.0%

2,273

Orange

W

53.1%

46.9%

0.0%

Johnston

W

52.1%

47.9%

0.0%

Moore

W

51.7%

48.3%

0.0%

1,024

# Counties Won

45

69.9%

30.1%

0.0%

52,918

Wake

L

47.2%

52.8%

0.0%

2,175

Bladen

L

45.5%

54.5%

0.0%

760

Mecklenburg

L

44.5%

55.5%

0.0%

Sampson

L

42.7%

57.3%

0.0%

Lenoir

L

39.5%

60.5%

Columbus

L

39.3%

60.7%

Cumberland

L

39.2%

Rockingham

L

37.7%

Franklin

L

Lincoln

L

Martin Wayne

*Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

1,058

99.6%

4.0%

688

96.0%

5.6%

1,069

94.4%

11

0.8%

1,295

99.2%

175

10.3%

1,517

89.7%

121

5.7%

1,992

94.3%

48

5.4%

849

94.6%

10,370

199

12.9%

1,345

87.1%

16,265

19

0.7%

2,729

99.3%

3,087

24,356

99

2.8%

3,450

97.2%

1,146

10,599

19

1.3%

1,399

98.7%

7,988

9

0.7%

1,249

99.3%

482,815

2,494

3.6%

66,390

96.4%

21,118

159

5.9%

2,527

94.1%

8,022

46

4.6%

963

95.4%

2,246

18,273

17

0.7%

2,515

99.3%

1,294

12,157

44

2.7%

1,564

97.3%

0.0%

638

7,605

40

4.7%

806

95.3%

0.0%

519

3,941

9

1.5%

573

98.5%

60.8%

0.0%

1,562

15,284

155

7.3%

1,980

92.7%

62.3%

0.0%

1,452

13,442

41

2.2%

1,836

97.8%

35.2%

64.8%

0.0%

1,063

10,980

81

6.8%

1,104

93.2%

33.8%

66.2%

0.0%

2,958

25,160

13

0.3%

3,959

99.7%

L

32.8%

67.2%

0.0%

887

7,637

54

5.5%

923

94.5%

L

29.5%

70.5%

0.0%

1,037

10,891

63

4.5%

1,349

95.5%

Person

L

26.4%

73.6%

0.0%

811

9,790

32

2.9%

1,074

97.1%

Duplin

L

23.9%

76.1%

0.0%

1,060

11,182

41

3.0%

1,347

97.0%

Currituck

L

23.3%

76.7%

0.0%

610

6,703

21

2.3%

903

97.7%

New Hanover

L

21.9%

78.1%

0.0%

1,335

13,312

68

4.1%

1,610

95.9%

Caswell

L

19.1%

80.9%

0.0%

1,445

14,693

64

3.8%

1,627

96.2%

Onslow

L

17.2%

82.8%

0.0%

833

7,527

22

2.1%

1,022

97.9%

Warren

L

12.2%

87.8%

0.0%

859

12,919

56

5.6%

946

94.4%

Edgecombe

L

8.9%

91.1%

0.0%

1,509

15,708

84

4.8%

1,654

95.2%

Nash

L

8.9%

91.1%

0.0%

875

9,047

52

4.9%

999

95.1%

# Counties Lost

21

31.4%

68.6%

0.0%

25,928

255,391

1,162

3.6%

31,281

96.4%

Total of These Counties

66

57.2%

42.8%

0.0%

78,846

738,206

3,656

3.6%

97,671

96.4%

Pennsylvania Presidential Candidates W/L

Whig Harrison %

Somerset

W

76.6%

23.4%

0.0%

Beaver

W

64.8%

35.2%

Lancaster

W

63.9%

36.1%

County

Democrat Van Buren %

Liberty Birney %

Census Data Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

3,266

19,650

0.0%

4,853

0.0%

15,148

Free African American *Males

Males %

21

0.5%

29,368

54

84,203

671

White **Males

Males %

4,121

99.5%

0.8%

6,549

99.2%

3.5%

18,757

96.5%



Appendices 767 Pennsylvania (continued) Presidential Candidates Liberty Birney %

White

W/L

Whig Harrison %

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

Erie

W

63.8%

36.2%

0.0%

5,697

31,344

23

0.3%

7,496

99.7%

Huntingdon

W

62.8%

37.2%

0.0%

6,092

35,484

96

1.2%

7,886

98.8%

Lebanon

W

62.8%

37.2%

0.0%

3,772

21,872

23

0.5%

4,726

99.5%

Allegheny

W

62.5%

37.5%

0.0%

12,192

81,235

452

2.3%

19,191

97.7%

Indiana

W

61.8%

38.2%

0.0%

3,162

20,782

31

0.7%

4,264

99.3%

Union

W

61.5%

38.5%

0.0%

3,941

22,787

19

0.4%

4,679

99.6%

Delaware

W

60.3%

39.7%

0.0%

3,366

19,791

297

6.3%

4,428

93.7%

Adams

W

60.1%

39.9%

0.0%

4,081

23,044

144

2.8%

5,037

97.2%

Dauphin

W

58.8%

41.2%

0.0%

5,311

30,118

209

2.9%

7,078

97.1%

Mercer

W

58.2%

41.8%

0.0%

5,583

32,873

73

1.0%

7,056

99.0%

Franklin

W

55.4%

44.6%

0.0%

6,478

37,793

401

4.7%

8,101

95.3%

Bedford

W

54.3%

45.7%

0.0%

5,356

29,335

96

1.6%

6,090

98.4%

Butler

W

53.8%

46.2%

0.0%

3,904

22,378

12

0.2%

4,894

99.8%

Chester

W

53.6%

46.4%

0.0%

10,524

57,515

965

6.9%

12,955

93.1%

Washington

W

53.5%

46.5%

0.0%

7,760

41,279

195

2.0%

9,318

98.0%

Bucks

W

51.2%

48.8%

0.0%

9,193

48,107

456

3.9%

11,327

96.1%

Cumberland

W

50.9%

49.1%

0.0%

5,486

30,953

226

3.2%

6,910

96.8%

# Counties Won

20

59.0%

41.0%

0.0%

125,165

719,911

4,464

2.7%

160,863

97.3%

Philadelphia

L

49.7%

50.3%

0.0%

35,921

258,037

4,199

6.8%

57,492

93.2%

Clinton

L

49.6%

50.4%

0.0%

1,287

8,323

24

1.2%

1,916

98.8%

Lehigh

L

49.5%

50.5%

0.0%

4,855

25,787

7

0.1%

5,946

99.9%

Mifflin

L

49.1%

50.9%

0.0%

2,495

13,092

95

3.2%

2,914

96.8%

McKean

L

48.8%

51.2%

0.0%

539

2,975

1

0.1%

668

99.9%

Bradford

L

48.1%

51.9%

0.0%

5,475

32,769

37

0.5%

7,852

99.5%

Juniata

L

48.1%

51.9%

0.0%

2,009

11,080

24

1.0%

2,447

99.0%

Fayette

L

47.6%

52.4%

0.0%

5,790

33,574

255

3.7%

6,728

96.3%

Warren

L

47.1%

52.9%

0.0%

1,756

9,278

8

0.4%

2,252

99.6%

Cambria

L

46.9%

53.1%

0.0%

1,731

11,256

21

0.8%

2,484

99.2%

York

L

46.4%

53.6%

0.0%

8,174

47,010

183

1.7%

10,400

98.3%

Schuylkill

L

46.3%

53.7%

0.0%

4,065

29,053

79

1.2%

6,775

98.8%

Crawford

L

45.9%

54.1%

0.0%

5,377

31,724

24

0.3%

7,504

99.7%

Montgomery

L

45.5%

54.5%

0.0%

8,937

47,241

186

1.6%

11,520

98.4%

Jefferson

L

44.6%

55.4%

0.0%

1,068

7,253

9

0.6%

1,595

99.4%

Susquehanna

L

43.6%

56.4%

0.0%

3,582

21,195

27

0.6%

4,800

99.4%

Northampton

L

42.6%

57.4%

0.0%

6,684

40,996

39

0.4%

9,167

99.6%

Armstrong

L

41.9%

58.1%

0.0%

3,004

28,365

24

0.4%

5,835

99.6%

Lycoming

L

40.8%

59.2%

0.0%

3,685

22,649

93

1.8%

5,052

98.2%

Luzerne

L

40.3%

59.7%

0.0%

6,895

44,006

39

0.3%

11,816

99.7%

Greene

L

40.2%

59.8%

0.0%

3,360

19,147

64

1.6%

3,850

98.4%

Venango

L

40.1%

59.9%

0.0%

2,131

17,900

8

0.2%

3,872

99.8%

Centre

L

39.2%

60.8%

0.0%

3,690

20,492

64

1.4%

4,546

98.6%

Northumberland

L

38.2%

61.8%

0.0%

3,538

20,027

26

0.6%

4,293

99.4%

Clearfield

L

38.1%

61.9%

0.0%

1,311

7,834

11

0.6%

1,703

99.4%

Westmoreland

L

37.1%

62.9%

0.0%

7,482

42,699

59

0.6%

9,198

99.4%

Wayne

L

36.2%

63.8%

0.0%

1,863

11,848

8

0.3%

2,927

99.7%

Perry

L

35.2%

64.8%

0.0%

3,042

17,096

37

1.0%

3,697

99.0%

Tioga

L

34.2%

65.8%

0.0%

2,616

15,498

15

0.4%

3,480

99.6%

County

Democrat Van Buren %

Census Data Free African American *Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

(Continued)

768

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.10 (Continued) Pennsylvania (continued) Presidential Candidates

Census Data

Liberty Birney %

White

W/L

Whig Harrison %

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

Potter

L

33.1%

66.9%

0.0%

543

3,371

1

0.1%

759

99.9%

Berks

L

32.5%

67.5%

0.0%

11,007

64,569

131

0.9%

13,967

99.1%

Columbia

L

31.9%

68.1%

0.0%

4,154

24,267

17

0.3%

5,260

99.7%

Pike

L

20.5%

79.5%

0.0%

659

3,832

26

2.9%

883

97.1%

Monroe

L

19.3%

80.7%

0.0%

1,792

9,879

10

0.5%

2,131

99.5%

# Counties Lost

34

43.3%

56.7%

0.0%

160,517

1,004,122

5,851

2.5%

225,729

97.5%

Total of These Counties

54

50.2%

49.8%

0.0%

285,682

1,724,033

10,315

2.6%

386,592

97.4%

County

Democrat Van Buren %

Free African American *Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

Rhode Island Presidential Candidates

Census Data White

County

W/L

Whig Harrison %

Democrat Van Buren %

Liberty Birney %

Bristol

W

77.8%

22.2%

0.0%

612

6,476

59

3.2%

1,760

96.8%

Newport

W

68.1%

30.4%

1.5%

1,247

16,874

92

2.1%

4,232

97.9%

Providence

W

58.9%

40.6%

0.5%

4,215

58,073

352

2.4%

14,338

97.6%

Kent

W

58.0%

32.2%

9.8%

1,154

13,083

68

2.2%

3,023

97.8%

Washington

W

52.5%

47.4%

0.1%

1,403

14,324

99

2.9%

3,313

97.1%

# Counties Won

5

60.4%

37.8%

1.8%

8,631

108,830

670

2.5%

26,666

97.5%

Total of These Counties

5

60.4%

37.8%

1.8%

8,631

108,830

670

2.5%

26,666

97.5%

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

Free African American *Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

Vermont Presidential Candidates County

W/L

Whig Harrison %

Democrat Van Buren %

Liberty Birney %

Windsor

W

76.0%

23.8%

Addison

W

74.8%

24.4%

Rutland

W

72.5%

Grand Isle

W

Windham

W

Franklin

Census Data Free African American

White

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

0.2%

7,650

40,356

34

0.3%

10,192

99.7%

0.7%

3,749

23,583

29

0.5%

5,804

99.5%

27.3%

0.2%

5,673

30,699

29

0.4%

7,656

99.6%

69.0%

30.8%

0.2%

526

3,883

0

0.0%

829

100.0%

66.6%

32.9%

0.5%

5,212

27,442

8

0.1%

6,861

99.9%

W

64.0%

34.9%

1.1%

3,416

24,531

15

0.3%

5,407

99.7%

Orleans

W

62.9%

36.2%

0.9%

2,056

13,634

4

0.1%

3,171

99.9%

Chittenden

W

61.9%

37.5%

0.7%

3,687

22,977

17

0.3%

5,558

99.7%

Essex

W

59.7%

40.3%

0.0%

751

4,226

4

0.4%

1,019

99.6%

Orange

W

55.7%

42.9%

1.4%

5,163

27,873

4

0.1%

6,854

99.9%

Bennington

W

55.3%

43.8%

0.9%

3,249

16,872

24

0.6%

4,228

99.4%

Caledonia

W

54.2%

45.8%

0.0%

3,738

21,891

1

0.0%

5,335

100.0%

Lamoille

W

50.2%

49.1%

0.7%

1,807

10,475

0

0.0%

2,513

100.0%

Washington

W

50.1%

48.30%

1.6%

4,105

23,506

5

0.1%

5,546

99.9%

# Counties Won

14

63.9%

35.5%

0.7%

50,782

291,948

174

0.2%

70,973

99.8%

Total of These Counties

14

63.9%

35.5%

0.7%

50,782

291,948

174

0.2%

70,973

99.8%

Total of Counties Here

325

52.6%

47.0%

0.4%

1,216,108

7,512,138

30,006

1.8%

1,643,870

98.2%

* Males

Males %

** Males

Males %

Sources: Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved June 2002, and Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, Historical Census Browser, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/index.html (Charlottesville: University of Virginia), retrieved April 13, 2008. Notes: * Persons of age 24 years and over. ** Persons of age 20 years and over.



Appendices 769 Appendix Table A6.11  County Level Results of the 1844 Presidential Election with Matching 1840 Census Demography Georgia Presidential Candidates

Census Data White

County

W/L

Democrat Polk %

Whig Clay %

Liberty Birney %

Bulloch

W

96.0%

Other %

**Males

Males %

4.0%

0.0%

0.0%

426

3,102

0

0.0%

427

100.0%

Irwin

W

91.4%

8.6%

0.0%

0.0%

243

2,038

0

0.0%

359

100.0%

Rabun

W

87.2%

12.8%

0.0%

0.0%

257

1,912

0

0.0%

356

100.0%

Dade

W

84.3%

15.7%

0.0%

0.0%

293

1,364

0

0.0%

238

100.0%

Habersham

W

75.0%

25.0%

0.0%

0.0%

1,290

7,961

3

0.2%

1,359

99.8%

Franklin

W

73.7%

26.3%

0.0%

0.0%

1,437

9,886

6

0.4%

1,478

99.6%

Campbell

W

72.6%

27.4%

0.0%

0.0%

748

5,370

0

0.0%

867

100.0%

Union

W

70.0%

30.0%

0.0%

0.0%

791

3,152

0

0.0%

573

100.0%

Gilmer

W

70.0%

30.0%

0.0%

0.0%

730

2,536

1

0.2%

468

99.8%

Murray

W

69.8%

30.2%

0.0%

0.0%

1,002

4,695

1

0.1%

966

99.9%

Baker

W

69.5%

30.5%

0.0%

0.0%

728

4,226

4

0.7%

560

99.3%

Carroll

W

68.4%

31.6%

0.0%

0.0%

1,122

5,252

1

0.1%

900

99.9%

Emanuel

W

68.3%

31.7%

0.0%

0.0%

338

3,129

6

1.3%

454

98.7%

Camden

W

67.7%

32.3%

0.0%

0.0%

322

6,075

4

0.8%

481

99.2%

Early

W

66.6%

33.4%

0.0%

0.0%

629

5,444

1

0.1%

696

99.9%

Lumpkin

W

65.3%

34.7%

0.0%

0.0%

1,919

5,671

2

0.2%

1,059

99.8%

Dooly

W

65.3%

34.7%

0.0%

0.0%

776

4,427

1

0.2%

646

99.8%

Pulaski

W

64.9%

35.1%

0.0%

0.0%

704

5,389

7

1.1%

638

98.9%

Paulding

W

64.4%

35.6%

0.0%

0.0%

612

2,556

0

0.0%

406

100.0%

Butts

W

64.1%

35.9%

0.0%

0.0%

677

5,308

0

0.0%

694

100.0%

Fayette

W

63.1%

36.9%

0.0%

0.0%

1,117

6,191

5

0.5%

964

99.5%

De Kalb

W

62.5%

37.5%

0.0%

0.0%

1,546

10,467

4

0.2%

1,616

99.8%

Forsyth

W

61.7%

38.3%

0.0%

0.0%

1,185

5,619

4

0.4%

1,014

99.6%

Cherokee

W

61.1%

38.9%

0.0%

0.0%

1,330

5,895

1

0.1%

1,033

99.9%

Walker

W

60.6%

39.4%

0.0%

0.0%

1,134

6,572

5

0.4%

1,251

99.6%

Heard

W

59.8%

40.2%

0.0%

0.0%

729

5,329

0

0.0%

732

100.0%

Wilkinson

W

59.1%

40.9%

0.0%

0.0%

947

6,842

3

0.3%

1,016

99.7%

Cobb

W

58.9%

41.1%

0.0%

0.0%

1,601

7,539

1

0.1%

1,324

99.9%

Hall

W

58.8%

41.2%

0.0%

0.0%

1,186

7,875

1

0.1%

1,300

99.9%

Walton

W

57.9%

42.1%

0.0%

0.0%

1,318

10,209

1

0.1%

1,221

99.9%

Meriwether

W

57.4%

42.6%

0.0%

0.0%

1,614

14,132

6

0.4%

1,706

99.6%

Jackson

W

57.4%

42.6%

0.0%

0.0%

1,154

8,522

2

0.2%

1,221

99.8%

Pike

W

56.9%

43.1%

0.0%

0.0%

1,530

9,176

5

0.4%

1,274

99.6%

Jasper

W

55.1%

44.9%

0.0%

0.0%

973

11,111

11

1.0%

1,037

99.0%

Bibb

W

55.0%

45.0%

0.0%

0.0%

1,568

9,802

9

0.7%

1,298

99.3%

Randolph

W

54.8%

45.2%

0.0%

0.0%

1,341

8,276

1

0.1%

1,157

99.9%

Floyd

W

54.8%

45.2%

0.0%

0.0%

775

4,441

2

0.3%

641

99.7%

Twiggs

W

54.6%

45.4%

0.0%

0.0%

855

8,422

8

0.9%

899

99.1%

Crawford

W

54.6%

45.4%

0.0%

0.0%

831

7,981

0

0.0%

877

100.0%

Jones

W

53.4%

46.6%

0.0%

0.0%

852

10,065

3

0.3%

985

99.7%

Chattooga

W

53.2%

46.8%

0.0%

0.0%

607

3,438

0

0.0%

556

100.0%

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

Free African American *Males

Males %

(Continued)

770

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.11 (Continued) Georgia (continued) Presidential Candidates Whig Clay %

Liberty Birney %

Other %

Census Data White

County

W/L

Democrat Polk %

**Males

Males %

Telfair

W

52.8%

47.2%

0.0%

0.0%

375

2,763

1

0.2%

426

99.8%

Houston

W

52.3%

47.7%

0.0%

0.0%

1,382

9,711

1

0.1%

974

99.9%

Screven

W

52.0%

48.0%

0.0%

0.0%

535

4,794

0

0.0%

432

100.0%

Talbot

W

51.6%

48.4%

0.0%

0.0%

1,766

15,627

5

0.3%

1,781

99.7%

Liberty

W

51.5%

48.5%

0.0%

0.0%

369

7,241

11

3.2%

333

96.8%

Chatham

W

50.5%

49.5%

0.0%

0.0%

1,652

18,801

112

4.5%

2,364

95.5%

# Counties Won

47

61.3%

38.7%

0.0%

0.0%

45,316

316,334

239

0.6%

43,057

99.4%

Gwinnett

L

49.5%

50.5%

0.0%

0.0%

1,543

10,804

1

0.1%

1,612

99.9%

Coweta

L

48.9%

51.1%

0.0%

0.0%

1,520

10,364

4

0.3%

1,432

99.7%

Henry

L

48.8%

51.2%

0.0%

0.0%

1,677

11,756

3

0.2%

1,602

99.8%

Washington

L

48.6%

51.4%

0.0%

0.0%

1,224

10,565

7

0.6%

1,194

99.4%

Madison

L

48.5%

51.5%

0.0%

0.0%

674

4,510

0

0.0%

620

100.0%

Baldwin

L

48.3%

51.7%

0.0%

0.0%

627

7,250

13

1.5%

869

98.5%

Appling

L

48.3%

51.7%

0.0%

0.0%

294

2,052

4

1.2%

320

98.8%

Stewart

L

47.7%

52.3%

0.0%

0.0%

1,704

12,933

4

0.2%

1,699

99.8%

Decatur

L

47.5%

52.5%

0.0%

0.0%

727

5,872

4

0.5%

760

99.5%

Wilkes

L

47.4%

52.6%

0.0%

0.0%

818

10,148

8

1.0%

779

99.0%

McIntosh

L

47.3%

52.7%

0.0%

0.0%

241

5,360

20

5.5%

342

94.5%

Monroe

L

47.0%

53.0%

0.0%

0.0%

1,505

16,275

5

0.3%

1,540

99.7%

Lowndes

L

45.9%

54.1%

0.0%

0.0%

789

5,574

1

0.1%

821

99.9%

Muscogee

L

45.2%

54.8%

0.0%

0.0%

2,170

11,699

26

1.6%

1,617

98.4%

Putnam

L

45.0%

55.0%

0.0%

0.0%

780

10,260

5

0.6%

805

99.4%

Morgan

L

44.1%

55.9%

0.0%

0.0%

790

9,121

5

0.7%

755

99.3%

Thomas

L

43.4%

56.6%

0.0%

0.0%

615

6,766

2

0.2%

801

99.8%

Burke

L

42.5%

57.5%

0.0%

0.0%

967

13,176

100

8.7%

1,047

91.3%

Macon

L

42.5%

57.5%

0.0%

0.0%

576

5,045

1

0.1%

724

99.9%

Richmond

L

41.7%

58.3%

0.0%

0.0%

1,550

11,932

32

2.0%

1,584

98.0%

Clarke

L

41.3%

58.7%

0.0%

0.0%

1,016

10,522

10

0.9%

1,089

99.1%

Bryan

L

41.1%

58.9%

0.0%

0.0%

175

3,182

4

2.2%

180

97.8%

Wayne

L

40.8%

59.2%

0.0%

0.0%

233

1,258

3

1.5%

192

98.5%

Sumter

L

40.6%

59.4%

0.0%

0.0%

1,094

5,759

0

0.0%

849

100.0%

Ware

L

40.1%

59.9%

0.0%

0.0%

312

2,323

1

0.3%

387

99.7%

Hancock

L

39.1%

60.9%

0.0%

0.0%

844

9,659

10

1.3%

789

98.7%

Lincoln

L

38.5%

61.5%

0.0%

0.0%

465

5,895

4

0.8%

528

99.2%

Columbia

L

38.4%

61.6%

0.0%

0.0%

799

11,356

17

1.9%

877

98.1%

Marion

L

38.0%

62.0%

0.0%

0.0%

673

4,812

0

0.0%

738

100.0%

Upson

L

37.4%

62.6%

0.0%

0.0%

1,027

9,408

3

0.3%

1,061

99.7%

Warren

L

36.5%

63.5%

0.0%

0.0%

1,009

9,789

8

0.8%

1,049

99.2%

Harris

L

35.4%

64.6%

0.0%

0.0%

1,309

13,933

5

0.3%

1,442

99.7%

Newton

L

35.0%

65.0%

0.0%

0.0%

1,578

11,628

5

0.3%

1,498

99.7%

Effingham

L

31.1%

68.9%

0.0%

0.0%

280

3,075

1

0.3%

367

99.7%

Troup

L

31.6%

68.4%

0.0%

0.0%

1,542

15,733

3

0.2%

1,766

99.8%

Oglethorpe

L

27.8%

72.2%

0.0%

0.0%

867

10,868

7

0.7%

986

99.3%

Lee

L

26.5%

73.5%

0.0%

0.0%

456

4,520

3

0.5%

561

99.5%

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

Free African American *Males

Males %



Appendices 771 Georgia (continued) Presidential Candidates

Census Data

W/L

Democrat Polk %

Glynn

L

20.0%

80.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Tattnall

L

15.9%

84.1%

0.0%

0.0%

402

Elbert

L

15.7%

84.3%

0.0%

0.0%

1,185

Jefferson

L

15.7%

84.3%

0.0%

0.0%

687

Taliaferro

L

14.8%

85.2%

0.0%

0.0%

453

Greene

L

14.5%

85.5%

0.0%

0.0%

Montgomery

L

12.5%

87.5%

0.0%

0.0%

County

Whig Clay %

Liberty Birney %

Other %

Total Vote 115

1840 Total Populaton

Free African American

**Males

Males %

277

99.3%

0.3%

371

99.7%

1.1%

1,219

98.9%

6

1.0%

624

99.0%

8

1.5%

528

98.5%

11,690

9

0.9%

1,010

99.1%

1,616

0

0.0%

242

100.0%

5,302

*Males

Males %

White

2

0.7%

2,724

1

11,125

13

7,254 5,190

912 272

Laurens

L

2.3%

97.7%

0.0%

0.0%

642

5,585

3

0.5%

620

99.5%

# Counties Lost

45

38.9%

61.1%

0.0%

0.0%

39,138

365,668

371

0.9%

40,173

99.1%

Total of These Counties

92

50.9%

49.1%

0.0%

0.0%

84,454

682,002

610

0.7%

83,230

99.3%

Louisiana Presidential Candidates

Census Data

Whig Clay %

Liberty Birney %

Other %

White

County

W/L

Democrat Polk %

**Males

Males %

Rapides

W

58.3%

41.7%

0.0%

0.0%

1,005

14,132

60

5.6%

1,002

94.4%

# Counties Won

1

58.3%

41.7%

0.0%

0.0%

1,005

14,132

60

5.6%

1,002

94.4%

Total of These Counties

1

58.3%

41.7%

0.0%

0.0%

1,005

14,132

60

5.6%

1,002

94.4%

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

Free African American *Males

Males %

Maine Presidential Candidates

Census Data White

W/L

Democrat Polk %

Whig Clay %

Liberty Birney %

Other %

Waldo

W

68.5%

26.8%

4.6%

0.0%

6,803

41,509

15

0.2%

9,519

99.8%

Aroostook

W

68.4%

30.0%

1.6%

0.0%

1,326

9,413

0

0.0%

2,602

100.0%

Oxford

W

65.8%

28.3%

5.9%

0.0%

6,679

38,351

3

0.0%

8,872

100.0%

York

W

58.2%

36.6%

5.2%

0.0%

8,786

54,034

18

0.1%

12,445

99.9%

Hancock

W

57.2%

40.5%

2.3%

0.0%

4,562

28,605

6

0.1%

6,442

99.9%

Cumberland

W

55.1%

38.8%

6.0%

0.0%

11,545

68,658

137

0.8%

16,291

99.2%

Penobscot

W

54.6%

37.7%

7.8%

0.0%

8,966

45,705

30

0.3%

11,385

99.7%

Washington

W

52.0%

46.5%

1.5%

0.0%

5,011

28,327

15

0.2%

6,364

99.8%

Lincoln

W

51.6%

44.0%

4.4%

0.0%

10,381

63,517

63

0.4%

15,171

99.6%

Franklin

W

51.4%

36.1%

12.5%

0.0%

3,133

20,801

4

0.1%

4,735

99.9%

Piscataquis

W

46.6%

44.1%

9.4%

0.0%

2,438

13,138

0

0.0%

2,826

100.0%

# Counties Won

11

56.9%

37.5%

5.5%

0.0%

69,630

412,058

291

0.3%

96,652

99.7%

Somerset

L

43.5%

49.0%

7.5%

0.0%

5,814

33,912

6

0.1%

7,628

99.9%

Kennebec

L

37.3%

56.8%

5.9%

0.0%

9,489

55,823

43

0.3%

13,075

99.7%

# Counties Lost

2

39.7%

53.8%

6.5%

0.0%

15,303

89,735

49

0.2%

20,703

99.8%

Total of These Counties

13

53.8%

40.5%

5.7%

0.0%

84,933

501,793

340

0.3%

117,355

99.7%

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

Free African American

County

*Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

Massachusetts Presidential Candidates

Census Data 1840 Total Populaton

Free African American

County

W/L

Democrat Polk %

Whig Clay %

Liberty Birney %

Other %

Total Vote

Bristol

W

47.0%

46.3%

6.1%

0.6%

10,641

60,164

383

Hampden

W

46.9%

45.3%

5.7%

2.1%

7,475

37,366

69

# Counties Won

2

47.0%

45.9%

5.9%

1.2%

18,116

97,530

452

*Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

2.4%

15,482

97.6%

0.7%

10,176

99.3%

1.7%

25,658

98.3% (Continued)

772

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.11 (Continued) Massachusetts (continued) Presidential Candidates Liberty Birney %

Other %

W/L

**Males

Males %

Berkshire

L

47.3%

47.7%

4.9%

0.0%

7,876

41,745

277

2.5%

11,005

97.5%

Middlesex

L

44.9%

46.6%

8.3%

0.3%

20,438

106,611

152

0.5%

27,583

99.5%

Dukes

L

43.8%

52.1%

4.1%

0.0%

582

3,958

1

0.1%

1,078

99.9%

Norfolk

L

40.9%

49.5%

8.5%

1.2%

10,513

53,140

33

0.2%

14,180

99.8%

Franklin

L

39.5%

51.2%

9.3%

0.1%

5,230

28,812

23

0.3%

7,130

99.7%

Worcester

L

39.4%

49.3%

11.3%

0.1%

19,161

95,313

122

0.5%

24,714

99.5%

Plymouth

L

38.4%

49.2%

8.7%

3.6%

8,280

47,373

77

0.6%

12,250

99.4%

Essex

L

37.8%

51.0%

11.1%

0.1%

16,514

94,987

118

0.5%

24,781

99.5%

Suffolk

L

33.9%

61.3%

4.7%

0.1%

14,200

95,773

990

3.1%

31,123

96.9%

Barnstable

L

33.5%

54.3%

6.3%

5.9%

4,209

32,548

103

1.3%

7,950

98.7%

Hampshire

L

26.9%

62.8%

10.3%

0.0%

5,931

30,897

37

0.5%

8,009

99.5%

Nantucket

L

23.9%

64.1%

2.5%

9.4%

987

9,012

242

8.6%

2,569

91.4%

# Counties Lost

12

39.1%

51.6%

8.6%

0.8%

113,921

640,169

2,175

1.2%

172,372

98.8%

Total of These Counties

14

40.2%

50.8%

8.2%

0.8%

132,037

737,699

2,627

1.3%

198,030

98.7%

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

White

Democrat Polk %

County

Whig Clay %

Census Data Free African American *Males

Males %

New Hampshire Presidential Candidates W/L

Democrat Polk %

Coos

W

74.9%

19.1%

5.9%

0.0%

1,820

9,849

1

0.0%

Merrimack

W

63.3%

26.3%

10.4%

0.0%

6,038

36,253

27

Grafton

W

55.9%

35.4%

8.7%

0.0%

7,243

42,311

7

Hillsborough

W

54.7%

37.3%

8.1%

0.0%

8,382

42,494

Rockingham

W

54.0%

38.1%

7.9%

0.0%

7,421

45,771

Sullivan

W

50.5%

40.4%

9.1%

0.0%

3,847

Strafford

W

47.1%

44.3%

8.6%

0.0%

3,840

# Counties Won

7

55.9%

35.5%

8.6%

0.0%

Cheshire

L

41.4%

51.1%

7.5%

0.0%

# Counties Lost

1

41.4%

51.1%

7.5%

0.0%

5,002

Total of These Counties

8

54.2%

37.3%

8.5%

0.0%

43,593

County

Whig Clay %

Liberty Birney %

Other %

Census Data Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

Free African American *Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

2,277

100.0%

0.3%

9,153

99.7%

0.1%

10,757

99.9%

28

0.3%

10,466

99.7%

34

0.3%

11,558

99.7%

20,340

8

0.2%

5,215

99.8%

61,127

7

0.0%

14,451

100.0%

38,591

258,145

112

0.2%

63,877

99.8%

5,002

26,429

11

0.2%

6,800

99.8%

26,429

11

0.2%

6,800

99.8%

284,574

123

0.2%

70,677

99.8%

New York Presidential Candidates

Census Data

W/L

Democrat Polk %

Whig Clay %

Liberty Birney %

Other %

Rockland

W

67.9%

32.1%

0.0%

0.0%

2,474

11,975

96

Putnam

W

63.9%

36.1%

0.0%

0.0%

2,710

12,825

Chemung

W

57.7%

39.9%

2.4%

0.0%

4,489

20,732

Suffolk

W

57.4%

42.3%

0.2%

0.0%

5,876

Delaware

W

56.3%

40.9%

2.7%

0.0%

7,506

Herkimer

W

55.6%

36.7%

7.8%

0.0%

Warren

W

55.3%

41.1%

3.6%

Tioga

W

54.9%

43.1%

1.9%

Steuben

W

54.3%

43.2%

Otsego

W

54.0%

St. Lawrence

W

53.9%

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

Free African American

County

*Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

2.8%

3,366

97.2%

32

1.0%

3,105

99.0%

28

0.6%

4,722

99.4%

32,469

445

5.4%

7,829

94.6%

35,396

41

0.5%

8,156

99.5%

7,822

37,477

66

0.7%

9,749

99.3%

0.0%

3,239

13,422

10

0.3%

3,095

99.7%

0.0%

4,635

20,527

29

0.6%

4,777

99.4%

2.4%

0.0%

10,140

46,138

63

0.6%

10,196

99.4%

42.3%

3.7%

0.0%

11,206

49,628

37

0.3%

11,834

99.7%

41.9%

4.2%

0.0%

11,148

56,706

8

0.1%

12,772

99.9%



Appendices 773 New York (continued) Presidential Candidates Whig Clay %

Liberty Birney %

Other %

Census Data

County

W/L

Democrat Polk %

Greene

W

53.8%

45.8%

0.5%

0.0%

6,486

30,446

Lewis

W

53.6%

42.4%

4.0%

0.0%

3,867

Orange

W

53.2%

46.4%

0.4%

0.0%

9,966

Schoharie

W

53.2%

45.1%

1.7%

0.0%

Montgomery

W

52.8%

45.9%

1.4%

0.0%

Sullivan

W

52.6%

46.6%

0.8%

Columbia

W

52.0%

47.9%

0.1%

Queens

W

51.9%

48.1%

0.0%

0.0%

5,298

New York

W

51.6%

48.1%

0.2%

0.0%

54,798

Seneca

W

51.2%

46.3%

2.5%

0.0%

5,020

Westchester

W

50.8%

49.0%

0.2%

0.0%

8,689

Richmond

W

50.3%

49.6%

0.0%

0.0%

Chenango

W

50.2%

47.1%

2.7%

0.0%

Jefferson

W

50.0%

44.3%

5.7%

Cayuga

W

49.6%

46.8%

3.6%

Tompkins

W

49.0%

47.0%

3.9%

Onondaga

W

48.8%

46.0%

5.2%

Clinton

W

48.8%

42.2%

9.0%

Oneida

W

48.7%

44.1%

7.2%

Oswego

W

48.7%

41.9%

Yates

W

48.2%

47.0%

Wayne

W

47.2%

Madison

W

43.5%

# Counties Won

34

Ulster

L

Dutchess Albany

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

Free African American *Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

7,372

97.6%

0.2%

4,409

99.8%

3.7%

12,395

96.3%

143

1.9%

7,278

98.1%

125

1.3%

9,815

98.7%

15,629

15

0.4%

3,761

99.6%

43,252

320

2.9%

10,731

97.1%

30,324

778

10.0%

6,971

90.0%

312,710

3,832

4.6%

79,755

95.4%

24,874

39

0.7%

5,899

99.3%

48,686

595

4.3%

13,347

95.7%

2,113

10,965

106

3.7%

2,743

96.3%

8,953

40,785

52

0.5%

9,639

99.5%

0.0%

12,579

60,984

26

0.2%

14,222

99.8%

0.0%

10,486

50,338

133

1.1%

12,450

98.9%

0.0%

8,180

37,948

50

0.6%

8,586

99.4%

0.0%

14,105

67,911

110

0.6%

17,097

99.4%

0.0%

4,547

28,157

18

0.3%

6,440

99.7%

0.0%

15,844

85,310

158

0.7%

21,444

99.3%

9.4%

0.0%

9,004

43,619

41

0.4%

10,034

99.6%

4.7%

0.0%

4,373

20,444

26

0.5%

4,892

99.5%

46.2%

6.6%

0.0%

8,562

42,057

43

0.4%

9,838

99.6%

41.6%

14.8%

0.0%

8,842

40,008

43

0.4%

9,952

99.6%

51.7%

45.0%

3.3%

0.0%

298,546

1,508,487

8,174

2.2%

368,671

97.8%

49.8%

50.0%

0.1%

0.0%

9,599

45,822

337

3.1%

10,527

96.9%

L

49.2%

50.4%

0.3%

0.0%

11,431

52,398

481

3.6%

12,885

96.4%

L

48.9%

50.2%

0.9%

0.0%

14,149

68,593

294

1.7%

17,113

98.3%

Franklin

L

48.1%

48.9%

3.0%

0.0%

3,118

16,518

1

0.0%

3,697

100.0%

Schenectady

L

47.6%

51.5%

0.9%

0.0%

3,524

17,387

94

2.1%

4,426

97.9%

Broome

L

47.5%

50.4%

2.0%

0.0%

5,275

22,338

50

1.0%

5,174

99.0%

Kings

L

47.3%

51.9%

0.8%

0.0%

9,832

47,613

727

5.8%

11,830

94.2%

Saratoga

L

47.3%

51.3%

1.3%

0.0%

8,869

40,553

143

1.4%

10,152

98.6%

Rensselaer

L

46.2%

52.3%

1.5%

0.0%

12,159

60,259

300

1.9%

15,155

98.1%

Allegany

L

45.6%

49.0%

5.4%

0.0%

7,988

40,975

28

0.3%

9,731

99.7%

Cattaraugus

L

44.9%

46.8%

8.3%

0.0%

5,864

28,872

11

0.2%

6,476

99.8%

Cortland

L

44.7%

45.0%

10.3%

0.0%

5,279

24,607

9

0.2%

5,786

99.8%

Orleans

L

44.5%

50.1%

5.3%

0.0%

5,187

25,127

20

0.3%

5,816

99.7%

Monroe

L

43.4%

53.2%

3.3%

0.0%

12,914

64,902

165

1.0%

16,430

99.0%

Niagara

L

43.1%

51.7%

5.2%

0.0%

5,999

31,132

68

0.9%

7,649

99.1%

Ontario

L

42.2%

52.7%

5.0%

0.0%

8,662

43,501

133

1.2%

10,572

98.8%

Essex

L

42.0%

54.9%

3.0%

0.0%

4,753

23,634

21

0.4%

5,714

99.6%

Erie

L

40.8%

55.8%

3.3%

0.0%

12,370

62,465

191

1.2%

15,574

98.8%

Livingston

L

40.5%

56.4%

3.1%

0.0%

6,692

35,140

33

0.4%

9,053

99.6%

Washington

L

37.9%

58.2%

3.9%

0.0%

8,632

41,080

67

0.7%

10,151

99.3%

182

2.4%

17,830

11

50,739

473

6,620

32,358

6,212

35,818

0.0%

3,733

0.0%

9,024

(Continued)

774

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.11 (Continued) New York (continued) Presidential Candidates

Census Data

W/L

Democrat Polk %

Whig Clay %

Liberty Birney %

Other %

L

36.5%

60.1%

3.4%

0.0%

Genesee

L

35.0%

60.0%

5.0%

0.0%

6,007

# Counties Lost

22

44.4%

52.6%

3.0%

0.0%

177,636

Total of These Counties

56

49.0%

47.8%

3.2%

0.0%

476,182

2,408,965

County Chautauqua

Total Vote 9,333

1840 Total Populaton 47,975

Free African American *Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

10,959

99.7%

0.2%

13,405

99.8%

1.5%

218,275

98.5%

1.9%

586,946

98.1%

30

0.3%

59,587

28

900,478

3,231 11,405

Rhode Island Presidential Candidates

Census Data

Democrat Polk %

Whig Clay %

Liberty Birney %

Other %

Providence

L

46.0%

54.0%

0.0%

0.0%

6,945

58,073

352

Washington

L

42.4%

57.6%

0.0%

0.0%

1,679

14,324

Kent

L

32.6%

67.3%

0.0%

0.1%

1,168

13,083

Newport

L

27.8%

72.1%

0.0%

0.1%

1,704

Bristol

L

15.6%

84.4%

0.0%

0.0%

698

# Counties Lost

5

39.9%

60.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Total of These Counties

5

39.9%

60.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

Free African American

W/L

County

* Males

Males %

White ** Males

Males %

2.4%

14,338

97.6%

99

2.9%

3,313

97.1%

68

2.2%

3,023

97.8%

16,874

92

2.1%

4,232

97.9%

6,476

59

3.2%

1,760

96.8%

12,194

108,830

670

2.5%

26,666

97.5%

12,194

108,830

670

2.5%

26,666

97.5%

Vermont Presidential Candidates Liberty Birney %

Other %

W/L

** Males

Males %

Washington

W

51.7%

40.9%

7.5%

0.0%

4,036

23,506

5

0.1%

5,546

99.9%

Lamoille

W

45.9%

29.3%

24.8%

0.0%

1,655

10,475

0

0.0%

2,513

100.0%

# Counties Won

2

50.0%

37.5%

12.5%

0.0%

5,691

33,981

5

0.1%

8,059

99.9%

Caledonia

L

47.1%

47.9%

5.0%

0.0%

3,676

21,891

1

0.0%

5,335

100.0%

Essex

L

44.7%

52.9%

2.4%

0.0%

741

4,226

4

0.4%

1,019

99.6%

Bennington

L

44.3%

50.6%

5.1%

0.0%

3,274

16,872

24

10.6%

4,228

99.4%

Orange

L

43.4%

47.2%

9.4%

0.0%

4,398

27,873

4

0.1%

6,854

99.9%

Franklin

L

40.3%

52.4%

7.3%

0.0%

3,571

24,531

15

0.3%

5,407

99.7%

Chittenden

L

38.5%

51.3%

10.3%

0.0%

3,754

22,977

17

0.3%

5,558

99.7%

Orleans

L

36.7%

52.5%

10.8%

0.0%

2,270

13,634

4

0.1%

3,171

99.9%

Windham

L

36.0%

55.9%

8.1%

0.0%

4,730

27,442

8

0.1%

6,861

99.9%

Grand Isle

L

32.7%

67.3%

0.0%

0.0%

504

3,883

0

0.0%

829

100.0%

Rutland

L

28.7%

65.2%

6.1%

0.0%

5,495

30,699

29

0.4%

7,656

99.6%

Windsor

L

26.1%

66.2%

7.6%

0.0%

7,050

40,356

34

0.3%

10,192

99.7%

Addison

L

21.4%

70.0%

8.6%

0.0%

3,611

23,583

29

0.5%

5,804

99.5%

# Counties Lost

12

35.3%

57.2%

7.5%

0.0%

43,074

257,967

169

0.3%

62,914

99.7%

Total of These Counties

14

37.0%

54.9%

8.1%

0.0%

48,765

291,948

174

0.2%

70,973

99.8%

Total of Counties Here

203

47.8%

47.7%

4.4%

0.1%

883,163

5,029,943

16,009

1.4%

1,154,879

98.6%

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

White

Democrat Polk %

County

Whig Clay %

Census Data Free African American * Males

Males %

Sources: Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved June 2002, and Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, Historical Census Browser, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/index.html (Charlottesville: University of Virginia), retrieved April 13, 2008. Notes: * Persons of age 24 years and over. ** Persons of age 20 years and over.



Appendices 775 Appendix Table A6.12  County Level Results of the 1848 Presidential Election with Matching 1840 Census Demography Georgia Presidential Candidates Democrat Cass %

Free Soil Van Buren %

Census Data Free African American

White

County

W/L

Whig Taylor %

Laurens

W

95.8%

4.2%

0.0%

0.0%

592

5,585

3

0.5%

620

99.5%

Montgomery

W

90.6%

9.4%

0.0%

0.0%

255

1,616

0

0.0%

242

100.0%

Tattnall

W

89.1%

10.9%

0.0%

0.0%

405

2,724

1

0.3%

371

99.7%

Taliaferro

W

87.6%

12.4%

0.0%

0.0%

443

5,190

8

1.5%

528

98.5%

Elbert

W

86.0%

14.0%

0.0%

0.0%

1,152

11,125

13

1.1%

1,219

98.9%

Glynn

W

85.7%

14.3%

0.0%

0.0%

154

5,302

2

0.7%

277

99.3%

Greene

W

85.6%

14.4%

0.0%

0.0%

966

11,690

9

0.9%

1,010

99.1%

Jefferson

W

84.5%

15.5%

0.0%

0.0%

718

7,254

6

1.0%

624

99.0%

Oglethorpe

W

76.7%

23.3%

0.0%

0.0%

829

10,868

7

0.7%

986

99.3%

Troup

W

74.5%

25.5%

0.0%

0.0%

1,506

15,733

3

0.2%

1,766

99.8%

Burke

W

73.6%

26.4%

0.0%

0.0%

813

13,176

100

8.7%

1,047

91.3%

Harris

W

68.3%

31.7%

0.0%

0.0%

1,273

13,933

5

0.3%

1,442

99.7%

Thomas

W

67.9%

32.1%

0.0%

0.0%

775

6,766

2

0.2%

801

99.8%

Newton

W

67.6%

32.4%

0.0%

0.0%

1,548

11,628

5

0.3%

1,498

99.7%

Columbia

W

67.2%

32.8%

0.0%

0.0%

772

11,356

17

1.9%

877

98.1%

Bryan

W

67.2%

32.8%

0.0%

0.0%

183

3,182

4

2.2%

180

97.8%

Lincoln

W

66.5%

33.5%

0.0%

0.0%

358

5,895

4

0.8%

528

99.2%

Upson

W

65.6%

34.4%

0.0%

0.0%

1,001

9,408

3

0.3%

1,061

99.7%

Effingham

W

64.9%

35.1%

0.0%

0.0%

282

3,075

1

0.3%

367

99.7%

Lee

W

64.1%

35.9%

0.0%

0.0%

504

4,520

3

0.5%

561

99.5%

Warren

W

63.0%

37.0%

0.0%

0.0%

974

9,789

8

0.8%

1,049

99.2%

Hancock

W

62.6%

37.4%

0.0%

0.0%

756

9,659

10

1.3%

789

98.7%

Morgan

W

60.9%

39.1%

0.0%

0.0%

765

9,121

5

0.7%

755

99.3%

Muscogee

W

60.7%

39.3%

0.0%

0.0%

2,188

11,699

26

1.6%

1,617

98.4%

Wilkes

W

60.7%

39.3%

0.0%

0.0%

745

10,148

8

1.0%

779

99.0%

Richmond

W

60.4%

39.6%

0.0%

0.0%

1,503

11,932

32

2.0%

1,584

98.0%

Macon

W

58.9%

41.1%

0.0%

0.0%

659

5,045

1

0.1%

724

99.9%

Decatur

W

58.5%

41.5%

0.0%

0.0%

843

5,872

4

0.5%

760

99.5%

Putnam

W

57.6%

42.4%

0.0%

0.0%

693

10,260

5

0.6%

805

99.4%

Stewart

W

57.4%

42.6%

0.0%

0.0%

1,611

12,933

4

0.2%

1,699

99.8%

Appling

W

57.1%

42.9%

0.0%

0.0%

252

2,052

4

1.2%

320

98.8%

Liberty

W

56.4%

43.6%

0.0%

0.0%

305

7,241

11

3.2%

333

96.8%

Lowndes

W

56.1%

43.9%

0.0%

0.0%

904

5,574

1

0.1%

821

99.9%

Clarke

W

55.8%

44.2%

0.0%

0.0%

1,118

10,522

10

0.9%

1,089

99.1%

Sumter

W

55.5%

44.5%

0.0%

0.0%

1,320

5,759

0

0.0%

849

100.0%

Coweta

W

55.4%

44.6%

0.0%

0.0%

1,484

10,364

4

0.3%

1,432

99.7%

Ware

W

54.5%

45.5%

0.0%

0.0%

354

2,323

1

0.3%

387

99.7%

Monroe

W

54.4%

45.6%

0.0%

0.0%

1,455

16,275

5

0.3%

1,540

99.7%

McIntosh

W

54.4%

45.6%

0.0%

0.0%

215

5,360

20

5.5%

342

94.5%

Screven

W

54.3%

45.7%

0.0%

0.0%

488

4,794

0

0.0%

432

100.0%

Gwinnett

W

54.0%

46.0%

0.0%

0.0%

1,379

10,804

1

0.1%

1,612

99.9%

Baldwin

W

54.0%

46.0%

0.0%

0.0%

704

7,250

13

1.5%

869

98.5%

Henry

W

53.3%

46.7%

0.0%

0.0%

1,764

11,756

3

0.2%

1,602

99.8%

Other %

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

*Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

(Continued)

776

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.12 (Continued) Georgia (continued) Presidential Candidates Democrat Cass %

Free Soil Van Buren %

Census Data White

County

W/L

*Males

Males %

**Males

Chatham

W

53.2%

46.8%

0.0%

0.0%

1,584

18,801

112

4.5%

2,364

95.5%

Talbot

W

52.6%

47.4%

0.0%

0.0%

1,557

15,627

5

0.3%

1,781

99.7%

Washington

W

52.5%

47.5%

0.0%

0.0%

1,318

10,565

7

0.6%

1,194

99.4%

Randolph

W

51.9%

48.1%

0.0%

0.0%

1,504

8,276

1

0.1%

1,157

99.9%

Marion

W

51.7%

48.3%

0.0%

0.0%

987

4,812

0

0.0%

738

100.0%

Telfair

W

51.6%

48.4%

0.0%

0.0%

310

2,763

1

0.2%

426

99.8%

Houston

W

50.8%

49.2%

0.0%

0.0%

1,371

9,711

1

0.1%

974

99.9%

Madison

W

50.8%

49.2%

0.0%

0.0%

662

4,510

0

0.0%

620

100.0%

Floyd

W

50.3%

49.7%

0.0%

0.0%

1,352

4,441

2

0.3%

641

99.7%

Chattooga

W

50.2%

49.7%

0.0%

0.0%

800

3,438

0

0.0%

556

100.0%

# Counties Won

53

61.4%

38.6%

0.0%

0.0%

48,453

439,502

501

1.0%

48,645

99.0%

Jones

L

49.3%

50.7%

0.0%

0.0%

819

10,065

3

0.3%

985

99.7%

Wilkinson

L

48.7%

51.3%

0.0%

0.0%

971

6,842

3

0.3%

1,016

99.7%

Meriwether

L

48.3%

51.7%

0.0%

0.0%

1,485

14,132

6

0.4%

1,706

99.6%

Pike

L

48.1%

51.9%

0.0%

0.0%

1,720

9,176

5

0.4%

1,274

99.6%

Crawford

L

48.1%

51.9%

0.0%

0.0%

836

7,981

0

0.0%

877

100.0%

Heard

L

46.8%

53.2%

0.0%

0.0%

887

5,329

0

0.0%

732

100.0%

Bibb

L

46.7%

53.3%

0.0%

0.0%

1,511

9,802

9

0.7%

1,298

99.3%

Forsyth

L

45.7%

54.3%

0.0%

0.0%

1,376

5,619

4

0.4%

1,014

99.6%

Wayne

L

45.7%

54.3%

0.0%

0.0%

127

1,258

3

1.5%

192

98.5%

Paulding

L

45.6%

54.4%

0.0%

0.0%

772

2,556

0

0.0%

406

100.0%

Jackson

L

45.0%

55.0%

0.0%

0.0%

1,248

8,522

2

0.2%

1,221

99.8%

Walker

L

44.8%

55.2%

0.0%

0.0%

1,749

6,572

5

0.4%

1,251

99.6%

Jasper

L

44.4%

55.6%

0.0%

0.0%

921

11,111

11

1.0%

1,037

99.0%

Twiggs

L

44.4%

55.6%

0.0%

0.0%

745

8,422

8

0.9%

899

99.1%

Hall

L

44.0%

56.0%

0.0%

0.0%

1,185

7,875

1

0.1%

1,300

99.9%

Pulaski

L

43.1%

56.9%

0.0%

0.0%

743

5,389

7

1.1%

638

98.9%

Emanuel

L

42.8%

57.2%

0.0%

0.0%

362

3,129

6

1.3%

454

98.7%

Murray

L

42.7%

57.3%

0.0%

0.0%

1,871

4,695

1

0.1%

966

99.9%

Walton

L

42.4%

57.6%

0.0%

0.0%

1,284

10,209

1

0.1%

1,221

99.9%

De Kalb

L

42.1%

57.9%

0.0%

0.0%

1,896

10,467

4

0.2%

1,616

99.8%

Fayette

L

42.1%

57.9%

0.0%

0.0%

1,238

6,191

5

0.5%

964

99.5%

Cobb

L

40.6%

59.4%

0.0%

0.0%

2,121

7,539

1

0.1%

1,324

99.9%

Cherokee

L

40.2%

59.8%

0.0%

0.0%

1,643

5,895

1

0.1%

1,033

99.9%

Union

L

39.1%

60.9%

0.0%

0.0%

1,053

3,152

0

0.0%

573

100.0%

Butts

L

39.0%

61.0%

0.0%

0.0%

689

5,308

0

0.0%

694

100.0%

Dooly

L

37.6%

62.4%

0.0%

0.0%

915

4,427

1

0.2%

646

99.8%

Lumpkin

L

37.3%

62.7%

0.0%

0.0%

1,749

5,671

2

0.2%

1,059

99.8%

Carroll

L

36.3%

63.7%

0.0%

0.0%

1,309

5,252

1

0.1%

900

99.9%

Habersham

L

35.3%

64.7%

0.0%

0.0%

1,203

7,961

3

0.2%

1,359

99.8%

Baker

L

35.0%

65.0%

0.0%

0.0%

975

4,226

4

0.7%

560

99.3%

Campbell

L

32.6%

67.4%

0.0%

0.0%

863

5,370

0

0.0%

867

100.0%

Camden

L

32.1%

67.9%

0.0%

0.0%

324

6,075

4

0.8%

481

99.2%

Gilmer

L

32.0%

68.0%

0.0%

0.0%

1,257

2,536

1

0.2%

468

99.8%

Early

L

28.3%

71.7%

0.0%

0.0%

704

5,444

1

0.1%

696

99.9%

Other %

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

Free African American

Whig Taylor %

Males %



Appendices 777 Georgia (continued) Presidential Candidates

W/L

Whig Taylor %

Democrat Cass %

Dade

L

28.3%

71.7%

0.0%

0.0%

Franklin

L

27.3%

72.7%

0.0%

Rabun

L

21.0%

79.0%

0.0%

Irwin

L

19.5%

80.5%

Bulloch

L

10.2%

# Counties Lost

39

40.6%

Total of These Counties

92

51.8%

County

Free Soil Van Buren %

Census Data Free African American

White

1840 Total Populaton

*Males

Males %

**Males

360

1,364

0

0.0%

238

0.0%

1,328

9,886

6

0.4%

1,478

99.6%

0.0%

262

1,912

0

0.0%

356

100.0%

0.0%

0.0%

441

2,038

0

0.0%

359

100.0%

89.8%

0.0%

0.0%

421

3,102

0

0.0%

427

100.0%

59.4%

0.0%

0.0%

41,363

242,500

109

0.3%

34,585

99.7%

48.2%

0.0%

0.0%

89,816

682,002

610

0.7%

83,230

99.3%

Other %

Total Vote

Males % 100.0%

Louisiana Presidential Candidates

W/L

Whig Taylor %

Democrat Cass %

Rapides

L

41.4%

58.6%

0.0%

0.0%

# Counties Lost

1

41.4%

58.6%

0.0%

0.0%

Total of These Counties

1

41.4%

58.6%

0.0%

0.0%

County

Free Soil Van Buren %

Census Data

Other %

Free African American

White

1840 Total Populaton

*Males

Males %

**Males

926

14,132

60

5.6%

1,002

94.4%

926

14,132

60

5.6%

1,002

94.4%

926

14,132

60

5.6%

1,002

94.4%

Total Vote

Males %

Maine Presidential Candidates

Census Data

    W/L

Whig Taylor %

Democrat Cass %

Free Soil Van Buren %

Kennebec

W

54.1%

28.2%

17.7%

0.0%

Lincoln

W

48.5%

42.6%

8.8%

Washington

W

46.2%

45.5%

Somerset

W

44.0%

37.7%

# Counties Won

4

49.0%

37.9%

Hancock

L

45.0%

Penobscot

L

39.1%

York

L

Cumberland Piscataquis

Total Vote

Free African American

White

1840 Total Populaton

*Males

Males %

**Males

9,346

55,823

43

0.3%

13,075

99.7%

0.0%

10,953

63,517

63

0.4%

15,171

99.6%

8.3%

0.0%

5,420

28,327

15

0.2%

6,364

99.8%

18.3%

0.0%

5,585

33,912

6

0.1%

7,628

99.9%

13.1%

0.0%

31,304

181,579

127

0.3%

42,238

99.7%

49.7%

5.3%

0.0%

4,672

28,605

6

0.1%

6,442

99.9%

45.7%

15.3%

0.0%

10,174

45,705

30

0.3%

11,385

99.7%

38.5%

52.2%

9.3%

0.0%

9,004

54,034

18

0.1%

12,445

99.9%

L

38.3%

47.8%

13.9%

0.0%

12,530

68,658

137

0.8%

16,291

99.2%

L

36.9%

46.0%

17.0%

0.0%

2,537

13,138

0

0.0%

2,826

100.0%

Aroostook

L

30.7%

61.8%

7.5%

0.0%

1,405

9,413

0

0.0%

2,602

100.0%

Franklin

L

28.3%

45.8%

25.9%

0.0%

3,127

20,801

4

0.1%

4,735

99.9%

Waldo

L

27.8%

55.1%

17.2%

0.0%

6,530

41,509

15

0.2%

9,519

99.8%

Oxford

L

24.1%

56.8%

19.0%

0.0%

6,342

38,351

3

0.0%

8,872

100.0%

# Counties Lost

9

35.4%

50.3%

14.3%

0.0%

56,321

320,214

213

0.3%

75,117

99.7%

Total of These Counties

13

40.3%

45.9%

13.9%

0.0%

87,625

501,793

340

0.3%

117,355

99.7%

County

  Other %

Males %

Massachusetts Presidential Candidates

Census Data

W/L

Whig Taylor %

Democrat Cass %

Free Soil Van Buren %

Nantucket

W

63.8%

12.8%

22.8%

0.6%

Suffolk

W

62.6%

22.3%

15.0%

0.0%

Dukes

W

57.5%

26.4%

16.1%

0.0%

504

Hampshire

W

51.5%

18.0%

30.4%

0.1%

5,935

County

Other %

Free African American

White

1840 Total Populaton

*Males

Males %

696

9,012

242

8.6%

2,569

91.4%

14,205

95,773

990

3.1%

31,123

96.9%

3,958

1

0.1%

1,078

99.9%

30,897

37

0.5%

8,009

99.5%

Total Vote

**Males

Males %

(Continued)

778

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.12 (Continued) Massachusetts (continued) Presidential Candidates Democrat Cass %

Free Soil Van Buren %

Census Data Free African American

White

County

W/L

Whig Taylor %

Bristol

W

49.2%

22.0%

28.8%

0.1%

Berkshire

W

47.4%

31.9%

20.7%

0.0%

7,485

41,745

277

2.5%

11,005

97.5%

Essex

W

46.8%

25.6%

27.5%

0.0%

18,260

94,987

118

0.5%

24,781

99.5%

Norfolk

W

43.9%

22.7%

33.4%

0.1%

10,806

53,140

33

0.2%

14,180

99.8%

Middlesex

W

43.5%

30.1%

26.3%

0.1%

22,668

106,611

152

0.5%

27,583

99.5%

Hampden

W

43.2%

40.0%

16.8%

0.0%

7,652

37,366

69

0.7%

10,176

99.3%

Plymouth

W

41.5%

21.5%

37.0%

0.1%

8,610

47,373

77

0.6%

12,250

99.4%

Franklin

W

40.1%

29.0%

30.9%

0.0%

5,320

28,812

23

0.3%

7,130

99.7%

# Counties Won

13

47.9%

26.2%

25.8%

0.1%

115,323

642,386

2,505

1.4%

173,316

98.6%

Worcester

L

30.0%

26.0%

44.0%

0.0%

19,425

95,313

122

0.5%

24,714

99.5%

# Counties Lost

1

30.0%

26.0%

44.0%

0.0%

19,425

95,313

122

0.5%

24,714

99.5%

Total of These Counties

14

45.3%

26.2%

28.4%

0.0%

134,748

737,699

2,627

1.3%

198,030

98.7%

Other %

1840 Total Populaton

*Males

Males %

**Males

9,849

60,164

383

2.4%

15,482

97.6%

Total Vote

Males %

New Hampshire Presidential Candidates

Census Data

County

W/L

Whig Taylor %

Democrat Cass %

Free Soil Van Buren %

Strafford

L

40.9%

47.0%

12.2%

0.0%

4,071

Cheshire

L

38.4%

42.4%

19.3%

0.0%

4,902

Rockingham

L

35.4%

51.8%

12.8%

0.0%

Sullivan

L

33.0%

52.3%

14.7%

0.0%

Hillsborough

L

31.7%

54.1%

14.2%

Grafton

L

27.2%

57.3%

15.6%

Merrimack

L

19.0%

64.5%

Coos

L

13.3%

# Counties Lost

8

30.7%

Total of These Counties

8

30.7%

Other %

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

Free African American

White Males %

*Males

Males %

**Males

61,127

7

0.0%

14,451

100.0%

26,429

11

0.2%

6,800

99.8%

7,664

45,771

34

0.3%

11,558

99.7%

3,565

20,340

8

0.2%

5,215

99.8%

0.0%

8,829

42,494

28

0.3%

10,466

99.7%

0.0%

7,091

42,311

7

0.1%

10,757

99.9%

16.5%

0.0%

6,539

36,253

27

0.3%

9,153

99.7%

74.1%

12.7%

0.0%

1,731

9,849

1

0.0%

2,277

100.0%

54.4%

14.9%

0.0%

44,392

284,574

123

0.2%

70,677

99.8%

54.4%

14.9%

0.0%

44,392

284,574

123

0.2%

70,677

99.8%

New York Presidential Candidates

Census Data

W/L

Whig Taylor %

Democrat Cass %

Free Soil Van Buren %

Washington

W

57.8%

15.7%

26.0%

0.4%

7,757

Erie

W

57.2%

25.1%

17.6%

0.2%

13,374

Kings

W

56.6%

36.8%

6.2%

0.4%

Essex

W

55.3%

21.1%

23.5%

0.1%

Genesee

W

55.2%

22.6%

21.2%

New York

W

54.5%

35.6%

Dutchess

W

54.3%

32.6%

Westchester

W

54.3%

28.3%

Chautauqua

W

54.2%

24.7%

Queens

W

53.7%

28.8%

County

Other %

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

Free African American

White Males %

*Males

Males %

**Males

41,080

67

0.7%

10,151

99.3%

62,465

191

1.2%

15,574

98.8%

13,244

47,613

727

5.8%

11,830

94.2%

4,757

23,634

21

0.4%

5,714

99.6%

1.1%

5,234

59,587

28

0.2%

13,405

99.8%

9.6%

0.3%

53,288

312,710

3,832

4.6%

79,755

95.4%

13.1%

0.1%

9,903

52,398

481

3.6%

12,885

96.4%

17.3%

0.2%

7,576

48,686

595

4.3%

13,347

95.7%

21.0%

0.1%

7,756

47,975

30

0.3%

10,959

99.7%

17.6%

0.0%

4,557

30,324

778

10.0%

6,971

90.0%



Appendices 779 New York (continued) Presidential Candidates

Census Data

W/L

Whig Taylor %

Democrat Cass %

Free Soil Van Buren %

Schenectady

W

53.1%

33.1%

13.7%

0.2%

Richmond

W

52.9%

41.4%

5.8%

0.0%

Saratoga

W

52.7%

29.9%

16.7%

Rensselaer

W

52.5%

22.6%

24.7%

Ulster

W

52.4%

22.1%

25.5%

Albany

W

52.3%

29.6%

17.9%

Monroe

W

51.5%

11.4%

Montgomery

W

50.1%

Ontario

W

49.2%

Columbia

W

Broome

W

Orange Orleans

Free African American

White

1840 Total Populaton

*Males

Males %

**Males

3,230

17,387

94

2.1%

4,426

97.9%

2,077

10,965

106

3.7%

2,743

96.3%

0.7%

8,418

40,553

143

1.4%

10,152

98.6%

0.2%

11,867

60,259

300

1.9%

15,155

98.1%

0.0%

8,893

45,822

337

3.1%

10,527

96.9%

0.3%

13,511

68,593

294

1.7%

17,113

98.3%

36.8%

0.4%

12,698

64,902

165

1.0%

16,430

99.0%

22.0%

27.5%

0.3%

5,828

35,818

125

1.3%

9,815

98.7%

16.2%

33.5%

1.0%

7,828

43,501

133

1.2%

10,572

98.8%

48.3%

26.0%

25.7%

0.1%

8,166

43,252

320

2.9%

10,731

97.1%

47.6%

37.5%

14.9%

0.1%

5,230

22,338

50

1.0%

5,174

99.0%

W

47.5%

36.1%

16.3%

0.0%

8,766

50,739

473

3.7%

12,395

96.3%

W

47.2%

18.0%

33.8%

1.0%

5,086

25,127

20

0.3%

5,816

99.7%

Suffolk

W

46.9%

22.6%

30.1%

0.3%

4,644

32,469

445

5.4%

7,829

94.6%

Cattaraugus

W

46.8%

30.2%

22.2%

0.8%

5,561

28,872

11

0.2%

6,476

99.8%

Sullivan

W

46.8%

38.2%

15.0%

0.0%

3,569

15,629

15

0.4%

3,761

99.6%

Chenango

W

46.6%

33.9%

19.3%

0.2%

7,702

40,785

52

0.5%

9,639

99.5%

Cayuga

W

46.0%

11.0%

42.3%

0.6%

9,388

50,338

133

1.1%

12,450

98.9%

Allegany

W

45.3%

20.9%

33.2%

0.7%

6,152

40,975

28

0.3%

9,731

99.7%

Niagara

W

45.3%

21.0%

33.3%

0.4%

6,237

31,132

68

0.9%

7,649

99.1%

Schoharie

W

44.9%

44.0%

10.8%

0.4%

6,067

32,358

143

1.9%

7,278

98.1%

Steuben

W

43.8%

19.8%

36.4%

0.0%

9,958

46,138

63

0.6%

10,196

99.4%

Tompkins

W

43.4%

18.3%

38.2%

0.2%

6,922

37,948

50

0.6%

8,586

99.4%

Warren

W

43.0%

34.4%

20.9%

1.7%

2,953

13,422

10

0.3%

3,095

99.7%

Onondaga

W

43.0%

17.6%

39.1%

0.3%

12,651

67,911

110

0.6%

17,097

99.4%

Greene

W

42.7%

24.5%

22.5%

10.2%

6,330

30,446

182

2.4%

7,372

97.6%

Clinton

W

41.8%

31.7%

26.2%

0.2%

4,641

28,157

18

0.3%

6,440

99.7%

Franklin

W

41.8%

30.1%

28.1%

0.0%

3,236

16,518

1

0.0%

3,697

100.0%

Tioga

W

41.8%

39.5%

18.4%

0.3%

4,266

20,527

29

0.6%

4,777

99.4%

Oneida

W

41.5%

24.6%

33.2%

0.7%

14,534

85,310

158

0.7%

21,444

99.3%

Jefferson

W

41.5%

20.9%

37.2%

0.4%

11,656

60,984

26

0.2%

14,222

99.8%

Yates

W

41.1%

21.5%

36.9%

0.4%

4,010

20,444

26

0.5%

4,892

99.5%

Otsego

W

41.0%

38.3%

20.2%

0.4%

9,581

49,628

37

0.3%

11,834

99.7%

Cortland

W

40.0%

20.1%

38.3%

1.6%

4,699

24,607

9

0.2%

5,786

99.8%

Madison

W

39.0%

21.1%

36.9%

3.0%

7,414

40,008

43

0.4%

9,952

99.6%

Seneca

W

37.9%

29.1%

32.6%

0.3%

4,659

24,874

39

0.7%

5,899

99.3%

# Counties Won

47

49.2%

26.7%

23.5%

0.6%

392,630

2,130,348

11,039

2.1%

520,795

97.9%

Wayne

L

44.0%

9.8%

45.5%

0.6%

8,100

42,057

43

0.4%

9,838

99.6%

Delaware

L

43.2%

12.0%

44.3%

0.5%

6,560

35,396

41

0.5%

8,156

99.5%

Rockland

L

40.9%

47.5%

11.4%

0.3%

2,242

11,975

96

2.8%

3,366

97.2%

Chemung

L

40.2%

15.0%

44.8%

0.0%

4,835

20,732

28

0.6%

4,722

99.4%

Lewis

L

37.2%

24.0%

38.3%

0.4%

3,281

17,830

11

0.2%

4,409

99.8%

County

Other %

Total Vote

Males %

(Continued)

780

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.12 (Continued) New York (continued) Presidential Candidates Democrat Cass %

Free Soil Van Buren %

Census Data White

County

W/L

Whig Taylor %

*Males

Males %

**Males

Putnam

L

36.7%

44.7%

18.6%

0.0%

2,223

12,825

32

1.0%

3,105

99.0%

St. Lawrence

L

35.6%

5.9%

58.5%

0.0%

10,293

56,706

8

0.1%

12,772

99.9%

Herkimer

L

34.5%

9.9%

55.2%

0.4%

7,043

37,477

66

0.7%

9,749

99.3%

# Counties Lost

9

39.2%

14.1%

46.2%

0.5%

53,732

278,617

366

0.6%

66,151

99.4%

Total of These Counties

56

48.0%

25.2%

26.3%

0.6%

446,362

2,408,965

11,405

1.9%

586,946

98.1%

Other %

Total Vote

1840 Total Populaton

Free African American

Males %

Rhode Island  Presidential Candidates Free Soil Van Buren %

Census Data

County

W/L

Whig Taylor %

Democrat Cass %

Bristol

W

79.7%

17.7%

2.4%

0.1%

Newport

W

78.4%

14.0%

7.5%

0.1%

Kent

W

65.1%

30.0%

4.9%

0.0%

Washington

W

55.5%

33.4%

11.1%

0.0%

Providence

W

54.8%

39.0%

6.2%

0.0%

# Counties Won

5

60.7%

32.7%

6.6%

0.0%

Total of These Counties

5

60.7%

32.7%

6.6%

0.0%

11,049

Other %

Free African American

White

1840 Total Populaton

*Males

Males %

**Males

740

6,476

59

3.2%

1,760

96.8%

1,462

16,874

92

2.1%

4,232

97.9%

1,057

13,083

68

2.2%

3,023

97.8%

1,347

14,324

99

2.9%

3,313

97.1%

6,443

58,073

352

2.4%

14,338

97.6%

11,049

108,830

670

2.5%

26,666

97.5%

108,830

670

2.5%

26,666

97.5%

Total Vote

Males %

Vermont Presidential Candidates Democrat Cass %

Free Soil Van Buren %

Census Data

County

W/L

Whig Taylor %

Addison

W

65.4%

8.2%

26.5%

0.0%

Rutland

W

57.8%

14.8%

27.4%

Grand Isle

W

57.1%

23.9%

19.1%

Windham

W

56.4%

12.8%

Windsor

W

54.8%

Essex

W

49.8%

Orleans

W

Bennington

Free African American

White

1840 Total Populaton

*Males

Males %

**Males

3,912

23,583

29

0.5%

5,804

0.0%

5,032

30,699

29

0.4%

7,656

99.6%

0.0%

545

3,883

0

0.0%

829

100.0%

30.7%

0.0%

4,694

27,442

8

0.1%

6,861

99.9%

16.5%

28.6%

0.0%

6,667

40,356

34

0.3%

10,192

99.7%

44.5%

5.7%

0.0%

743

4,226

4

0.4%

1,019

99.6%

49.0%

26.1%

24.9%

0.0%

2,154

13,634

4

0.1%

3,171

99.9%

W

46.8%

34.6%

18.6%

0.0%

3,320

16,872

24

0.6%

4,228

99.4%

Chittenden

W

45.8%

14.8%

39.4%

0.0%

3,850

22,977

17

0.3%

5,558

99.7%

Franklin

W

43.4%

20.6%

35.9%

0.0%

3,351

24,531

15

0.3%

5,407

99.7%

Caledonia

W

40.1%

33.9%

26.0%

0.0%

3,413

21,891

1

0.0%

5,335

100.0%

Orange

W

39.5%

31.4%

29.1%

0.0%

4,502

27,873

4

0.1%

6,854

99.9%

# Counties Won

12

50.8%

20.8%

28.4%

0.0%

42,183

257,967

169

0.3%

62,914

99.7%

Washington

L

33.3%

40.3%

26.4%

0.0%

4,197

23,506

5

0.1%

5,546

99.9%

Lamoille

L

19.1%

31.2%

49.7%

0.0%

1,517

10,475

0

0.0%

2,513

100.0%

# Counties Lost

2

29.5%

37.9%

32.6%

0.0%

5,714

33,981

5

0.1%

8,059

99.9%

Total of These Counties

14

48.3%

22.8%

28.9%

0.0%

47,897

291,948

174

0.2%

70,973

99.8%

Total of Counties Here

203

46.5%

31.4%

21.9%

0.3%

862,815

5,029,943

16,009

1.4%

1,154,879

98.6%

Other %

Total Vote

Males % 99.5%

Sources: Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved June 2002, and Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, Historical Census Browser, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/index.html (Charlottesville: University of Virginia), retrieved April 13, 2008. Notes: * Persons of age 24 years and over. ** Persons of age 20 years and over.



Appendices 781 Appendix Table A6.13  County Level Results of the 1852 Presidential Election with Matching 1850 Census Demography Georgia Presidential Candidates Whig Scott %

Union Webster %

Census Data

Free Soil Hale %

Other %

Free African American

County

W/L

Democrat Pierce %

Bulloch

W

100.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

287

4,300

0

Irwin

W

90.6%

5.7%

3.8%

0.0%

0.0%

212

3,334

1

Camden

W

87.2%

12.8%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

242

6,319

Emanuel

W

87.0%

2.5%

10.5%

0.0%

0.0%

200

Appling

W

85.6%

14.4%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

90

Butts

W

84.8%

2.1%

13.1%

0.0%

0.0%

Baker

W

83.6%

13.4%

2.5%

0.0%

Wilkinson

W

82.8%

15.5%

1.7%

0.0%

Wayne

W

82.3%

12.7%

5.1%

Screven

W

79.5%

3.7%

Chatham

W

78.3%

McIntosh

W

77.6%

Carroll

W

Forsyth Campbell

Total Vote

1850 Total Population

*Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

0.0%

545

100.0%

0.2%

540

99.8%

2

0.5%

442

99.5%

4,577

5

0.7%

685

99.3%

2,949

7

1.5%

473

98.5%

512

6,488

0

0.0%

804

100.0%

0.5%

754

8,120

0

0.0%

992

100.0%

0.0%

606

8,296

0

0.0%

1,187

100.0%

0.0%

0.0%

79

1,499

1

0.5%

200

99.5%

16.7%

0.0%

0.0%

215

6,847

1

0.2%

659

99.8%

20.3%

0.4%

0.0%

1.0%

1,501

23,901

130

4.2%

2,933

95.8%

13.8%

8.6%

0.0%

0.0%

116

6,027

24

7.0%

321

93.0%

76.6%

16.7%

2.9%

0.0%

3.9%

1,110

9,357

0

0.0%

1,636

100.0%

W

76.4%

13.7%

5.1%

0.0%

4.8%

771

8,850

1

0.1%

1,540

99.9%

W

73.7%

21.6%

4.0%

0.0%

0.7%

730

7,232

1

0.1%

1,119

99.9%

Dooly

W

72.3%

26.7%

1.1%

0.0%

0.0%

656

8,361

2

0.2%

1,141

99.8%

Paulding

W

72.3%

9.7%

0.4%

0.0%

17.5%

452

7,039

1

0.1%

1,063

99.9%

Pulaski

W

71.7%

10.2%

17.7%

0.0%

0.3%

322

6,627

8

1.0%

811

99.0%

Early

W

71.5%

24.7%

1.1%

0.0%

2.7%

523

7,246

0

0.0%

803

100.0%

Thomas

W

70.2%

24.1%

4.6%

0.0%

1.1%

369

10,103

0

0.0%

1,026

100.0%

Twiggs

W

69.5%

29.4%

1.0%

0.0%

0.0%

384

8,179

8

1.0%

768

99.0%

Bibb

W

68.8%

28.1%

2.5%

0.0%

0.6%

1,133

12,699

14

0.8%

1,799

99.2%

Cobb

W

68.7%

21.6%

1.4%

0.0%

8.2%

1,419

13,843

1

0.0%

2,321

100.0%

Pike

W

68.7%

24.8%

6.3%

0.0%

0.1%

741

14,306

10

0.5%

1,844

99.5%

Burke

W

67.8%

5.7%

26.1%

0.0%

0.4%

261

16,100

31

2.2%

1,363

97.8%

Liberty

W

67.2%

29.3%

3.5%

0.0%

0.0%

198

7,926

2

0.5%

420

99.5%

Jasper

W

67.0%

23.8%

6.1%

0.0%

3.1%

555

11,486

4

0.4%

992

99.6%

Crawford

W

67.0%

29.4%

3.6%

0.0%

0.0%

548

8,984

0

0.0%

937

100.0%

Ware

W

66.7%

1.9%

31.5%

0.0%

0.0%

54

3,888

2

0.3%

668

99.7%

Franklin

W

66.1%

10.0%

0.0%

0.0%

23.9%

658

11,513

12

0.6%

1,840

99.4%

Jones

W

65.1%

31.8%

3.1%

0.0%

0.0%

522

10,224

3

0.3%

855

99.7%

Meriwether

W

64.8%

33.0%

2.2%

0.0%

0.0%

979

16,476

1

0.1%

1,720

99.9%

Randolph

W

64.4%

34.4%

1.0%

0.0%

0.2%

1,052

12,868

1

0.1%

1,657

99.9%

Fayette

W

64.4%

29.5%

4.3%

0.0%

1.8%

904

8,709

0

0.0%

1,400

100.0%

Walker

W

63.5%

30.1%

4.0%

0.0%

2.3%

1,237

13,109

2

0.1%

2,313

99.9%

Lincoln

W

63.3%

7.3%

27.3%

0.0%

2.0%

245

5,998

8

1.6%

491

98.4%

Houston

W

63.2%

34.3%

2.5%

0.0%

0.0%

796

16,450

4

0.3%

1,402

99.7%

Coweta

W

63.1%

20.9%

15.5%

0.0%

0.5%

1,030

13,635

4

0.2%

1,825

99.8%

Lowndes

W

62.6%

4.8%

32.6%

0.0%

0.0%

463

7,714

5

0.5%

1,052

99.5%

Washington

W

61.4%

32.2%

6.1%

0.0%

0.3%

734

11,766

9

0.7%

1,340

99.3%

Heard

W

61.3%

38.6%

0.1%

0.0%

0.0%

669

6,923

2

0.2%

890

99.8%

De Kalb

W

61.2%

34.1%

3.1%

0.0%

1.6%

1,659

14,328

8

0.3%

2,423

99.7%

Gordon

W

61.1%

27.6%

0.3%

0.0%

11.0%

956

5,984

0

0.0%

1,037

100.0% (Continued)

782

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.13 (Continued) Georgia (continued) Presidential Candidates Whig Scott %

Census Data

Union Webster %

Free Soil Hale %

Other %

Free African American

W/L

**Males

Males %

Warren

W

61.1%

5.0%

28.7%

0.0%

5.2%

501

12,425

23

1.7%

1,338

98.3%

Monroe

W

59.1%

35.5%

5.2%

0.0%

0.1%

1,067

16,985

1

0.1%

1,525

99.9%

Telfair

W

59.1%

31.5%

9.4%

0.0%

0.0%

149

3,026

0

0.0%

443

100.0%

Sumter

W

57.6%

41.4%

1.0%

0.0%

0.0%

785

10,322

4

0.3%

1,384

99.7%

Muscogee

W

56.3%

41.9%

1.2%

0.0%

0.6%

1,554

18,578

18

0.7%

2,412

99.3%

Murray

W

55.9%

41.0%

0.3%

0.0%

2.8%

578

14,433

1

0.0%

2,760

100.0%

Chattooga

W

55.3%

20.0%

13.8%

0.0%

10.9%

571

6,815

0

0.0%

1,078

100.0%

Macon

W

55.1%

42.3%

2.6%

0.0%

0.0%

700

7,052

0

0.0%

913

100.0%

Stewart

W

55.0%

36.5%

8.4%

0.0%

0.0%

892

16,027

3

0.2%

1,834

99.8%

Henry

W

54.4%

44.3%

1.0%

0.0%

0.3%

967

14,726

4

0.2%

1,971

99.8%

Marion

W

54.2%

44.8%

1.0%

0.0%

0.0%

784

10,280

3

0.2%

1,378

99.8%

Putnam

W

53.8%

43.4%

2.5%

0.0%

0.4%

528

10,794

4

0.5%

767

99.5%

Columbia

W

53.3%

22.6%

23.7%

0.0%

0.4%

486

11,961

16

1.8%

887

98.2%

Bryan

W

52.4%

47.6%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

126

3,424

5

1.9%

258

98.1%

Rabun

W

52.0%

1.4%

0.7%

0.0%

45.8%

277

2,448

0

0.0%

435

100.0%

Decatur

W

51.7%

38.5%

9.8%

0.0%

0.0%

571

8,262

3

0.3%

1,034

99.7%

Floyd

W

51.5%

38.3%

4.2%

0.0%

6.0%

959

8,205

3

0.3%

1,181

99.7%

Baldwin

W

51.3%

33.4%

9.6%

0.0%

5.7%

530

8,148

9

0.9%

981

99.1%

Richmond

W

51.2%

33.7%

11.9%

0.0%

3.2%

1,220

16,246

55

2.4%

2,198

97.6%

Cherokee

W

50.9%

6.2%

0.8%

0.0%

42.1%

1,296

12,800

3

0.1%

2,334

99.9%

Glynn

W

50.6%

36.7%

12.7%

0.0%

0.0%

79

4,933

5

2.8%

175

97.2%

Talbot

W

48.7%

47.5%

3.8%

0.0%

0.0%

905

16,534

2

0.1%

1,686

99.9%

Walton

W

48.2%

13.4%

13.3%

0.0%

25.1%

828

10,821

1

0.1%

1,482

99.9%

Lee

W

48.1%

40.7%

9.1%

0.0%

2.2%

464

6,660

2

0.3%

691

99.7%

Morgan

W

47.3%

31.2%

19.7%

0.0%

1.8%

605

10,744

3

0.4%

843

99.6%

Gwinnett

W

47.1%

6.7%

38.0%

0.0%

8.2%

907

11,257

2

0.1%

1,820

99.9%

Dade

W

45.5%

23.5%

0.0%

0.0%

31.0%

277

2,680

0

0.0%

486

100.0%

Cass

W

44.8%

18.0%

0.8%

0.0%

36.3%

1,459

13,300

2

0.1%

2,192

99.9%

Newton

W

41.0%

35.7%

20.9%

0.0%

2.4%

942

13,296

5

0.3%

1,681

99.7%

Lumpkin

W

36.1%

27.3%

0.9%

0.0%

35.6%

651

8,955

3

0.2%

1,627

99.8%

# Counties Won

73

61.6%

26.6%

6.2%

0.0%

5.7%

48,602

712,717

495

0.5%

90,071

99.5%

Upson

L

43.9%

46.1%

10.0%

0.0%

0.0%

770

9,424

0

0.0%

984

100.0%

Harris

L

40.5%

55.9%

3.5%

0.0%

0.1%

837

14,721

4

0.3%

1,381

99.7%

Troup

L

39.4%

55.6%

4.7%

0.0%

0.3%

1,071

16,879

10

0.6%

1,635

99.4%

Wilkes

L

39.0%

2.4%

8.7%

0.0%

49.9%

495

12,107

2

0.2%

832

99.8%

Oglethorpe

L

39.0%

13.1%

44.4%

0.0%

3.5%

459

12,259

2

0.2%

1,005

99.8%

Clinch

L

38.4%

3.2%

56.8%

0.0%

1.6%

125

637

0

0.0%

92

100.0%

Gilmer

L

36.3%

13.6%

0.0%

0.0%

50.1%

851

8,440

3

0.2%

1,663

99.8%

Effingham

L

36.0%

10.1%

53.9%

0.0%

0.0%

178

3,864

2

0.4%

455

99.6%

Tattnall

L

30.7%

67.6%

1.7%

0.0%

0.0%

179

3,227

1

0.2%

496

99.8%

Clarke

L

29.6%

18.2%

18.6%

0.0%

33.6%

764

11,119

8

0.7%

1,211

99.3%

Hall

L

28.8%

9.9%

2.2%

0.0%

59.1%

646

8,713

2

0.1%

1,448

99.9%

Greene

L

27.4%

49.5%

23.1%

0.0%

0.0%

628

13,068

11

1.0%

1,069

99.0%

Montgomery

L

24.8%

9.9%

64.5%

0.0%

0.7%

141

2,154

0

0.0%

349

100.0%

Total Vote

1850 Total Population

*Males

White

County

Democrat Pierce %

Males %



Appendices 783 Georgia (continued) Presidential Candidates

Census Data

W/L

Democrat Pierce %

Whig Scott %

Union Webster %

Free Soil Hale %

Other %

Jefferson

L

24.4%

23.9%

51.4%

0.0%

0.3%

Taliaferro

L

22.2%

5.5%

72.3%

0.0%

0.0%

Laurens

L

21.1%

22.5%

56.4%

0.0%

Madison

L

17.0%

5.7%

28.4%

Jackson

L

15.0%

6.6%

7.3%

Elbert

L

13.0%

19.2%

Habersham

L

8.9%

# Counties Lost

21

Total of These Counties

94

County

Free African American

1850 Total Population

*Males

381

9,131

10

343

5,146

8

0.0%

298

6,442

0.0%

48.9%

405

0.0%

71.1%

686

59.0%

0.0%

8.8%

14.7%

1.5%

0.0%

29.5%

25.2%

19.6%

55.5%

26.3%

8.7%

Total Vote

Males %

White **Males

Males %

1.2%

804

98.8%

1.6%

484

98.4%

2

0.3%

742

99.7%

5,703

2

0.3%

781

99.7%

9,768

6

0.4%

1,438

99.6%

826

12,959

3

0.2%

1,474

99.8%

74.9%

666

8,895

0

0.0%

1,575

100.0%

0.0%

25.7%

11,400

181,890

76

0.4%

21,248

99.6%

0.0%

9.5%

60,002

894,607

571

0.5%

111,319

99.5%

Louisiana Presidential Candidates Whig Scott %

Union Webster %

Census Data

Free Soil Hale %

Other %

Free African American

County

W/L

**Males

Males %

Rapides

W

60.8%

39.2%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

1,024

16,561

32

2.3%

1,385

97.7%

# Counties Won

1

60.8%

39.2%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

1,024

16,561

32

2.3%

1,385

97.7%

Total of These Counties

1

60.8%

39.2%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

1,024

16,561

32

2.3%

1,385

97.7%

Total Vote

1850 Total Population

*Males

White

Democrat Pierce %

Males %

Maine Presidential Candidates

County

W/L

Democrat Pierce %

Whig Scott %

Oxford

W

64.2%

24.7%

Waldo

W

59.4%

Hancock

W

56.4%

York

W

Cumberland Penobscot

Union Webster %

Census Data

Free Soil Hale %

Other %

0.0%

11.1%

0.0%

26.2%

0.0%

14.4%

39.0%

0.0%

4.6%

56.1%

36.1%

0.0%

W

52.6%

36.2%

W

52.1%

36.2%

Washington

W

51.9%

Aroostook

W

Franklin Piscataquis

Free African American

1850 Total Population

*Males

6,306

39,763

2

0.0%

5,262

47,230

0.0%

4,642

34,372

7.7%

0.0%

9,389

0.0%

11.2%

0.0%

0.0%

11.7%

0.0%

44.0%

0.0%

4.1%

49.5%

45.5%

0.0%

W

45.1%

34.3%

W

44.2%

36.0%

# Counties Won

10

54.5%

Lincoln

L

Somerset

L

Kennebec

Total Vote

Males %

White **Males

Males %

0.0%

10,497

100.0%

10

0.1%

11,666

99.9%

10

0.1%

8,436

99.9%

60,098

14

0.1%

15,323

99.9%

12,354

79,538

165

0.8%

21,118

99.2%

8,660

63,089

23

0.1%

16,432

99.9%

0.0%

5,179

38,811

30

0.3%

9,498

99.7%

5.0%

0.0%

1,591

12,529

3

0.1%

3,072

99.9%

0.0%

20.5%

0.0%

2,903

20,027

7

0.1%

5,001

99.9%

0.0%

19.8%

0.0%

1,925

14,735

1

0.0%

3,751

100.0%

35.1%

0.0%

10.4%

0.0%

58,211

410,192

265

0.3%

104,794

99.7%

47.2%

47.7%

0.0%

5.1%

0.0%

10,955

74,875

82

0.4%

20,525

99.6%

41.5%

49.2%

0.0%

9.4%

0.0%

4,870

35,581

5

0.1%

8,909

99.9%

L

33.2%

55.1%

0.0%

11.7%

0.0%

8,146

62,521

49

0.3%

16,414

99.7%

# Counties Lost

3

41.3%

50.5%

0.0%

8.2%

0.0%

23,971

172,977

136

0.3%

45,848

99.7%

Total of These Counties

13

50.6%

39.6%

0.0%

9.8%

0.0%

82,182

583,169

401

0.3%

150,642

99.7%

Massachusetts Presidential Candidates

W/L

Democrat Pierce %

Whig Scott %

Hampden

W

45.1%

44.9%

Suffolk

W

41.8%

37.6%

Middlesex

W

40.2%

# Counties Won

3

41.6%

County

Union Webster %

Census Data

Free Soil Hale %

Other %

0.1%

9.9%

0.0%

8.0%

12.4%

0.2%

39.4%

1.3%

19.1%

0.0%

39.8%

3.1%

15.4%

0.1%

Free African American

1850 Total Population

*Males

7,670

51,283

136

12,951

144,517

621

22,186

161,383

42,807

357,183

Total Vote

Males %

White **Males

Males %

0.9%

14,469

99.1%

1.5%

40,460

98.5%

220

0.5%

44,795

99.5%

977

1.0%

99,724

99.0% (Continued)

784

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.13 (Continued) Massachusetts (continued) Presidential Candidates

County

W/L

Democrat Pierce %

Whig Scott %

Dukes

L

42.9%

47.7%

Berkshire

L

41.4%

49.8%

Norfolk

L

35.7%

Bristol

L

Barnstable Franklin

Union Webster %

Census Data

Free Soil Hale %

Other %

0.2%

9.2%

0.0%

524

4,540

15

0.0%

8.8%

0.0%

7,185

49,591

356

37.1%

1.7%

25.6%

0.0%

9,683

78,892

35.1%

41.1%

0.1%

22.5%

1.2%

9,310

L

32.4%

50.1%

0.3%

17.2%

0.0%

L

31.4%

46.4%

0.0%

22.2%

0.0%

Essex

L

31.1%

44.5%

0.7%

23.7%

Worcester

L

29.2%

35.7%

0.1%

Plymouth

L

27.5%

39.6%

0.5%

Nantucket

L

26.7%

46.5%

Hampshire

L

23.9%

# Counties Lost

11

31.7%

Total of These Counties

14

35.1%

Total Vote

1850 Total Population

Free African American *Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

1.1%

1,376

98.9%

2.6%

13,394

97.4%

72

0.3%

22,023

99.7%

76,192

426

2.1%

20,162

97.9%

2,753

35,276

29

0.3%

9,692

99.7%

5,496

30,870

24

0.3%

8,661

99.7%

0.0%

14,710

131,300

171

0.5%

36,709

99.5%

35.0%

0.0%

20,404

130,789

162

0.4%

38,049

99.6%

32.3%

0.0%

7,553

55,697

124

0.8%

15,808

99.2%

0.2%

26.7%

0.0%

708

8,452

213

8.0%

2,444

92.0%

55.3%

0.0%

20.8%

0.0%

5,970

35,732

93

0.9%

9,919

99.1%

42.3%

0.4%

25.4%

0.1%

84,296

637,331

1,685

0.9%

178,237

99.1%

41.4%

1.3%

22.1%

0.1%

127,103

994,514

2,662

0.9%

277,961

99.1%

New Hampshire Presidential Candidates

County

W/L

Democrat Pierce %

Whig Scott %

Carroll

W

69.5%

17.9%

Coos

W

68.3%

Belknap

W

64.8%

Merrimack

W

Grafton Rockingham

Union Webster %

Census Data

Free Soil Hale %

Other %

0.0%

12.6%

0.0%

21.8%

0.0%

10.0%

26.0%

0.0%

9.2%

64.1%

21.1%

0.0%

W

59.9%

29.2%

W

55.7%

31.0%

Sullivan

W

53.8%

Hillsborough

W

Strafford

W

Cheshire

Free African American

1850 Total Population

*Males

2,780

20,157

0

0.0%

1,594

11,853

0.0%

2,836

17,721

14.8%

0.0%

6,574

0.0%

10.9%

0.0%

0.0%

13.3%

0.0%

34.4%

0.0%

11.7%

51.8%

32.4%

0.0%

47.4%

42.2%

0.0%

W

44.2%

41.4%

# Counties Won

10

56.4%

Total of These Counties

10

56.4%

Total Vote

Males %

White **Males

Males %

0.0%

5,332

100.0%

2

0.1%

3,161

99.9%

9

0.2%

4,898

99.8%

40,337

32

0.3%

11,265

99.7%

6,909

42,343

10

0.1%

11,735

99.9%

8,080

49,194

31

0.2%

13,715

99.8%

0.0%

3,564

19,375

10

0.2%

5,276

99.8%

15.8%

0.0%

8,916

57,478

40

0.3%

15,519

99.7%

10.5%

0.0%

4,751

29,374

14

0.2%

7,333

99.8%

0.0%

14.4%

0.0%

4,531

30,144

7

0.1%

9,274

99.9%

30.6%

0.0%

13.0%

0.0%

50,535

317,976

155

0.2%

87,508

99.8%

30.6%

0.0%

13.0%

0.0%

50,535

317,976

155

0.2%

87,508

99.8%

New York Presidential Candidates Whig Scott %

Union Webster %

Census Data

Free Soil Hale %

Other %

Free African American

County

W/L

**Males

Males %

Hamilton

W

73.1%

26.9%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

468

2,188

0

0.0%

581

100.0%

Rockland

W

70.9%

29.1%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

2,518

16,962

138

2.8%

4,832

97.2%

Putnam

W

64.8%

35.2%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

2,347

14,138

30

0.8%

3,796

99.2%

Suffolk

W

63.3%

36.7%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

5,223

36,922

527

5.4%

9,197

94.6%

New York

W

59.5%

40.2%

0.0%

0.3%

0.0%

57,547

515,547

3,858

2.6%

145,210

97.4%

Warren

W

57.0%

39.0%

0.0%

3.9%

0.0%

3,006

17,199

9

0.2%

4,514

99.8%

Herkimer

W

56.6%

35.9%

0.0%

7.4%

0.0%

7,454

38,244

66

0.6%

10,542

99.4%

Queens

W

56.6%

43.1%

0.0%

0.2%

0.0%

5,119

36,833

864

8.6%

9,167

91.4%

Schoharie

W

56.4%

43.3%

0.0%

0.3%

0.0%

6,822

33,548

131

1.6%

8,155

98.4%

Westchester

W

56.3%

43.0%

0.0%

0.6%

0.0%

9,367

58,263

647

3.9%

16,030

96.1%

Sullivan

W

56.1%

43.0%

0.0%

0.9%

0.0%

4,779

25,088

28

0.4%

6,788

99.6%

Total Vote

1850 Total Population

*Males

White

Democrat Pierce %

Males %



Appendices 785 New York (continued) Presidential Candidates Union Webster %

Free Soil Hale %

Other %

Free African American

W/L

**Males

Males %

Lewis

W

55.5%

37.8%

0.0%

6.6%

0.0%

4,565

24,564

17

0.3%

6,353

99.7%

Kings

W

55.4%

44.3%

0.0%

0.3%

0.0%

19,174

138,882

1,120

3.1%

35,434

96.9%

Steuben

W

55.2%

42.0%

0.0%

2.8%

0.0%

12,461

63,771

93

0.6%

16,806

99.4%

Orange

W

55.0%

44.9%

0.0%

0.2%

0.0%

9,408

57,145

640

4.2%

14,438

95.8%

Chemung

W

54.5%

39.7%

0.0%

5.8%

0.0%

5,854

28,821

90

1.2%

7,590

98.8%

Tioga

W

53.6%

42.6%

0.0%

3.7%

0.0%

5,246

24,880

61

0.9%

6,375

99.1%

Greene

W

53.5%

46.2%

0.0%

0.3%

0.0%

6,061

33,126

246

2.8%

8,639

97.2%

Schenectady

W

53.5%

46.5%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

3,554

20,054

96

1.7%

5,532

98.3%

Ulster

W

53.3%

46.4%

0.0%

0.2%

0.0%

11,095

59,384

383

2.4%

15,859

97.6%

Albany

W

53.1%

46.0%

0.0%

0.8%

0.0%

15,742

93,279

332

1.4%

24,154

98.6%

Richmond

W

52.9%

45.9%

0.0%

1.2%

0.0%

2,501

15,061

176

4.3%

3,906

95.7%

Delaware

W

52.8%

42.8%

0.0%

4.4%

0.0%

7,680

39,834

62

0.6%

10,454

99.4%

Montgomery

W

52.6%

46.7%

0.0%

0.6%

0.0%

6,408

31,992

134

1.6%

8,395

98.4%

Clinton

W

52.6%

42.8%

0.0%

4.6%

0.0%

5,343

40,047

37

0.4%

9,879

99.6%

Franklin

W

52.5%

44.2%

0.0%

3.3%

0.0%

3,951

25,102

20

0.3%

6,476

99.7%

Otsego

W

51.8%

42.1%

0.0%

6.1%

0.0%

10,583

48,638

42

0.3%

12,943

99.7%

Columbia

W

51.8%

48.1%

0.0%

0.1%

0.0%

8,604

43,073

333

2.9%

11,298

97.1%

Chenango

W

51.7%

44.8%

0.0%

3.5%

0.0%

8,664

40,311

71

0.7%

10,688

99.3%

Seneca

W

51.0%

44.9%

0.0%

4.1%

0.0%

4,924

25,441

52

0.8%

6,520

99.2%

Rensselaer

W

50.6%

47.7%

0.0%

1.7%

0.0%

12,966

73,363

291

1.5%

19,357

98.5%

Dutchess

W

50.3%

49.4%

0.0%

0.3%

0.0%

11,128

58,992

508

3.2%

15,176

96.8%

Broome

W

50.3%

43.9%

0.0%

5.7%

0.0%

6,085

30,660

114

1.4%

8,049

98.6%

Jefferson

W

49.5%

44.6%

0.0%

6.0%

0.0%

12,692

68,153

44

0.2%

17,808

99.8%

Oneida

W

49.3%

44.7%

0.0%

5.9%

0.0%

17,500

99,566

185

0.7%

27,056

99.3%

St. Lawrence

W

48.4%

39.6%

0.0%

12.0%

0.0%

11,539

68,617

9

0.1%

16,796

99.9%

Yates

W

48.4%

44.3%

0.0%

7.3%

0.0%

4,451

20,590

48

0.9%

5,514

99.1%

Allegany

W

48.0%

43.9%

0.0%

8.1%

0.0%

8,357

37,808

31

0.3%

9,690

99.7%

Onondaga

W

45.1%

42.9%

0.0%

12.0%

0.0%

14,213

85,890

173

0.7%

24,553

99.3%

Wayne

W

44.9%

44.7%

0.0%

10.4%

0.0%

9,024

44,953

54

0.4%

12,010

99.6%

Tompkins

W

44.8%

44.0%

0.0%

11.1%

0.0%

7,744

38,746

94

0.9%

10,283

99.1%

Oswego

W

43.2%

38.0%

0.0%

18.7%

0.0%

11,496

62,198

65

0.4%

16,364

99.6%

Madison

W

40.9%

40.2%

0.0%

18.9%

0.0%

8,398

43,072

78

0.7%

11,860

99.3%

# Counties Won

43

52.9%

43.0%

0.0%

4.2%

0.0%

392,061

2,380,945

11,997

1.9%

635,067

98.1%

Saratoga

L

48.4%

50.8%

0.0%

0.8%

0.0%

8,860

45,646

164

1.3%

12,227

98.7%

Fulton

L

47.5%

49.8%

0.0%

2.6%

0.0%

4,356

20,171

23

0.4%

5,237

99.6%

Erie

L

45.2%

51.5%

0.0%

3.3%

0.0%

15,566

100,993

265

1.0%

27,079

99.0%

Cattaraugus

L

45.1%

47.6%

0.0%

7.2%

0.0%

7,741

38,950

24

0.2%

11,205

99.8%

Cayuga

L

44.1%

46.9%

0.0%

8.9%

0.0%

10,304

55,458

197

1.3%

15,554

98.7%

Monroe

L

43.4%

51.3%

0.0%

5.3%

0.0%

14,556

87,650

192

0.8%

24,077

99.2%

Orleans

L

41.5%

47.4%

0.0%

11.1%

0.0%

5,458

28,501

33

0.4%

7,617

99.6%

Livingston

L

40.9%

54.9%

0.0%

4.1%

0.0%

7,459

40,875

62

0.6%

11,119

99.4%

Cortland

L

40.9%

46.1%

0.0%

13.0%

0.0%

5,047

25,140

17

0.3%

6,522

99.7%

Washington

L

40.4%

53.8%

0.0%

5.7%

0.0%

7,855

44,750

103

0.8%

12,306

99.2%

Ontario

L

40.3%

53.1%

0.0%

6.6%

0.0%

8,296

43,929

157

1.3%

11,987

98.7%

Essex

L

40.2%

56.2%

0.0%

3.5%

0.0%

4,903

31,148

17

0.2%

8,156

99.8%

Total Vote

1850 Total Population

*Males

White

Democrat Pierce %

County

Whig Scott %

Census Data

Males %

(Continued)

786

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.13 (Continued) New York (continued) Presidential Candidates Union Webster %

Free Soil Hale %

Other %

Free African American

W/L

**Males

Males %

Wyoming

L

39.8%

48.4%

0.0%

11.7%

0.0%

6,203

31,981

21

0.3%

8,329

99.7%

Niagara

L

39.0%

46.5%

0.0%

14.4%

0.0%

7,331

42,276

106

1.0%

11,018

99.0%

Genesee

L

37.1%

57.5%

0.0%

5.4%

0.0%

5,837

28,488

21

0.3%

7,878

99.7%

Chautauqua

L

35.4%

53.6%

0.0%

10.9%

0.0%

10,461

50,493

40

0.3%

13,324

99.7%

# Counties Lost

16

42.1%

51.0%

0.0%

6.8%

0.0%

130,233

716,449

1,442

0.7%

193,635

99.3%

Total of These Counties

59

50.2%

45.0%

0.0%

4.8%

0.0%

522,294

3,097,394

13,439

1.6%

828,702

98.4%

Total Vote

1850 Total Population

*Males

White

Democrat Pierce %

County

Whig Scott %

Census Data

Males %

Rhode Island Presidential Candidates

W/L

Democrat Pierce %

Whig Scott %

Free Soil Hale %

Other %

Providence

W

56.1%

39.5%

0.0%

4.4%

0.0%

Washington

W

49.6%

# Counties Won

2

54.9%

46.7%

0.0%

3.7%

0.0%

40.8%

0.0%

4.3%

0.0%

Kent

L

44.8%

50.2%

0.0%

5.0%

0.0%

Newport Bristol

L

43.7%

54.3%

0.0%

2.1%

L

36.8%

63.0%

0.0%

0.2%

# Counties Lost

3

42.7%

54.6%

0.0%

2.7%

0.0%

4,969

Total of These Counties

5

51.3%

44.9%

0.0%

3.8%

0.0%

17,005

County

Union Webster %

Census Data Free African American

1850 Total Population

*Males

87,526

467

1.9%

2,188

16,430

130

12,036

103,956

597

1,670

15,068

0.0%

2,302

0.0%

997

Total Vote 9,848

Males %

White **Males

Males %

23,596

98.1%

2.9%

4,326

97.1%

2.1%

27,922

97.9%

55

1.4%

3,977

98.6%

20,007

264

4.9%

5,176

95.1%

8,514

112

4.4%

2,460

95.6%

43,589

431

3.6%

11,613

96.4%

147,545

1,028

2.5%

39,535

97.5%

Vermont Presidential Candidates

W/L

Democrat Pierce %

Whig Scott %

Free Soil Hale %

Other %

1850 Total Population

*Males

Bennington

L

42.3%

51.0%

0.0%

6.7%

0.0%

2,719

18,589

28

Caledonia

L

40.7%

Orange

L

37.9%

46.0%

0.0%

13.4%

43.8%

0.0%

18.3%

0.0%

3,640

23,595

0.0%

4,106

27,296

Orleans

L

36.3%

50.7%

0.0%

13.0%

0.0%

2,366

15,707

Grand Isle Franklin

L

36.3%

57.6%

L

35.5%

49.1%

0.0%

6.1%

0.0%

512

0.0%

15.4%

0.0%

3,412

Washington

L

32.0%

Lamoille

L

29.9%

36.4%

0.0%

31.6%

0.0%

3,850

25.5%

0.0%

44.6%

0.0%

1,544

Windsor

L

25.5%

56.1%

0.0%

18.4%

0.0%

Chittenden Windham

L

23.7%

49.4%

0.0%

26.8%

L

22.5%

52.4%

0.0%

25.2%

Rutland

L

21.0%

61.7%

0.0%

Addison

L

12.3%

66.7%

# Counties Lost

14

29.8%

50.6%

Total of These Counties

14

29.8%

Total of Counties Shown

210

47.8%

County

Union Webster %

Census Data Free African American

Total Vote

Males %

White **Males

Males %

0.6%

4,992

99.4%

6

0.1%

6,759

99.9%

3

0.0%

7,353

100.0%

4

0.1%

3,978

99.9%

4,145

0

0.0%

1,052

100.0%

28,586

22

0.3%

7,361

99.7%

24,654

4

0.1%

6,597

99.9%

10,872

1

0.0%

2,857

100.0%

5,991

38,504

39

0.4%

10,589

99.6%

0.0%

3,383

29,036

35

0.5%

7,681

99.5%

0.0%

3,920

29,062

10

0.1%

8,207

99.9%

17.3%

0.0%

4,469

33,059

31

0.3%

9,421

99.7%

0.0%

21.0%

0.0%

3,061

26,549

20

0.3%

7,222

99.7%

0.0%

19.7%

0.0%

43,838

314,304

205

0.2%

85,288

99.8%

50.6%

0.0%

19.7%

0.0%

43,838

314,304

205

0.2%

85,288

99.8%

42.2%

0.8%

8.5%

0.6%

903,983

6,366,070

18,493

1.2%

1,582,340

98.8%

Sources: Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved June 2002, and Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, Historical Census Browser, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/index.html (Charlottesville: University of Virginia), retrieved April 13, 2008. Notes: * Persons of age 20 years and over. ** Persons of age 20 years and over.



Appendices 787 Appendix Table A6.14  County Level Results of the 1856 Presidential Election with Matching 1850 Census Demography Georgia Presidential Candidates Total Vote

Ware

W

95.4%

0.0%

4.6%

131

3,888

2

0.3%

668

99.7%

Bulloch

W

93.1%

0.0%

6.9%

494

4,300

0

0.0%

545

100.0%

Camden

W

86.9%

0.0%

13.1%

214

6,319

2

0.5%

442

99.5%

Rabun

W

85.0%

0.0%

15.0%

479

2,448

0

0.0%

435

100.0%

Franklin

W

84.2%

0.0%

15.8%

1,155

11,513

12

0.6%

1,840

99.4%

Irwin

W

83.8%

0.0%

16.2%

185

3,334

1

0.2%

540

99.8%

Gilmer

W

81.1%

0.0%

18.9%

1,011

8,440

3

0.2%

1,663

99.8%

Paulding

W

80.2%

0.0%

19.8%

967

7,039

1

0.1%

1,063

99.9%

Wayne

W

77.1%

0.0%

22.9%

170

1,499

1

0.5%

200

99.5%

Habersham

W

77.0%

0.0%

23.0%

1,114

8,895

0

0.0%

1,575

100.0%

McIntosh

W

76.0%

0.0%

24.0%

204

6,027

24

7.0%

321

93.0%

Appling

W

73.6%

0.0%

26.4%

364

2,949

7

1.5%

473

98.5%

Burke

W

72.8%

0.0%

27.2%

673

16,100

31

2.2%

1,363

97.8%

Carroll

W

72.1%

0.0%

27.9%

1,631

9,357

0

0.0%

1,636

100.0%

Baker

W

72.1%

0.0%

27.9%

628

8,120

0

0.0%

992

100.0%

Cherokee

W

71.1%

0.0%

28.9%

1,713

12,800

3

0.1%

2,334

99.9%

Murray

W

70.3%

0.0%

29.7%

807

14,433

1

0.0%

2,760

100.0%

Warren

W

70.2%

0.0%

29.8%

839

12,425

23

1.7%

1,338

98.3%

Jones

W

69.5%

0.0%

30.5%

443

10,224

3

0.3%

855

99.7%

Taliaferro

W

68.6%

0.0%

31.4%

347

5,146

8

1.6%

484

98.4%

Dooly

W

67.7%

0.0%

32.3%

619

8,361

2

0.2%

1,141

99.8%

Early

W

66.7%

0.0%

33.3%

448

7,246

0

0.0%

803

100.0%

Madison

W

65.9%

0.0%

34.1%

630

5,703

2

0.3%

781

99.7%

Wilkinson

W

65.3%

0.0%

34.7%

813

8,296

0

0.0%

1,187

100.0%

Cass

W

64.6%

0.0%

38.4%

1,956

13,300

2

0.1%

2,192

99.9%

Forsyth

W

63.5%

0.0%

36.5%

1,256

8,850

1

0.1%

1,540

99.9%

Union

W

63.5%

0.0%

36.5%

715

7,234

0

0.0%

1,330

100.0%

Pulaski

W

63.5%

0.0%

36.5%

657

6,627

8

1.0%

811

99.0%

Jackson

W

63.1%

0.0%

36.9%

1,226

9,768

6

0.4%

1,438

99.6%

Campbell

W

62.7%

0.0%

37.3%

1,202

7,232

1

0.1%

1,119

99.9%

Crawford

W

62.4%

0.0%

37.6%

606

8,984

0

0.0%

937

100.0%

Cobb

W

62.1%

0.0%

37.9%

2,015

13,843

1

0.0%

2,321

100.0%

Fayette

W

61.7%

0.0%

38.3%

1,189

8,709

0

0.0%

1,400

100.0%

Twiggs

W

61.7%

0.0%

38.3%

465

8,179

8

1.0%

768

99.0%

Screven

W

61.6%

0.0%

38.4%

435

6,847

1

0.2%

659

99.8%

Lumpkin

W

61.1%

0.0%

38.9%

1,204

8,955

3

0.2%

1,627

99.8%

Dade

W

60.8%

0.0%

39.2%

395

2,680

0

0.0%

486

100.0%

Hall

W

60.7%

0.0%

39.3%

1,147

8,713

2

0.1%

1,448

99.9%

Oglethorpe

W

60.5%

0.0%

39.5%

845

12,259

2

0.2%

1,005

99.8%

Wilkes

W

60.5%

0.0%

39.5%

707

12,107

2

0.2%

832

99.8%

W/L

Republican Fremont %

Know-Nothing Fillmore %

White

1850 Total Population

County

Democrat Buchanan %

Census Data Free African American *Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

(Continued)

788

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.14 (Continued) Georgia (continued) Presidential Candidates Democrat Buchanan %

Republican Fremont %

Know-Nothing Fillmore %

Census Data Total Vote

1850 Total Population

Free African American *Males

Males %

White

County

W/L

**Males

Males %

Lowndes

W

60.3%

0.0%

39.7%

735

7,714

5

0.5%

1,052

99.5%

Coweta

W

60.2%

0.0%

39.8%

1,466

13,635

4

0.2%

1,825

99.8%

Gordon

W

59.9%

0.0%

40.1%

1,485

5,984

0

0.0%

1,037

100.0%

Chatham

W

59.8%

0.0%

40.2%

2,416

23,901

130

4.2%

2,933

95.8%

Walton

W

59.8%

0.0%

40.2%

1,144

10,821

1

0.1%

1,482

99.9%

Elbert

W

59.7%

0.0%

40.3%

878

12,959

3

0.2%

1,474

99.8%

De Kalb

W

59.5%

0.0%

40.5%

1,118

14,328

8

0.3%

2,423

99.7%

Gwinnett

W

59.3%

0.0%

40.7%

1,841

11,257

2

0.1%

1,820

99.9%

Walker

W

59.3%

0.0%

40.7%

1,389

13,109

2

0.1%

2,313

99.9%

Randolph

W

59.3%

0.0%

40.7%

1,106

12,868

1

0.1%

1,657

99.9%

Liberty

W

59.0%

0.0%

41.0%

324

7,926

2

0.5%

420

99.5%

Bryan

W

58.6%

0.0%

41.4%

227

3,424

5

1.9%

258

98.1%

Thomas

W

58.2%

0.0%

41.8%

796

10,103

0

0.0%

1,026

100.0%

Butts

W

57.8%

0.0%

42.2%

670

6,488

0

0.0%

804

100.0%

Columbia

W

57.1%

0.0%

42.9%

798

11,961

16

1.8%

887

98.2%

Chattooga

W

56.7%

0.0%

43.3%

892

6,815

0

0.0%

1,078

100.0%

Glynn

W

56.7%

0.0%

43.3%

210

4,933

5

2.8%

175

97.2%

Pike

W

56.2%

0.0%

43.8%

1,121

14,306

10

0.5%

1,844

99.5%

Bibb

W

55.3%

0.0%

44.7%

1,733

12,699

14

0.8%

1,799

99.2%

Heard

W

55.2%

0.0%

44.8%

934

6,923

2

0.2%

890

99.8%

Putnam

W

54.6%

0.0%

45.4%

647

10,794

4

0.5%

767

99.5%

Baldwin

W

53.0%

0.0%

47.0%

566

8,148

9

0.9%

981

99.1%

Jasper

W

52.2%

0.0%

47.7%

800

11,486

4

0.4%

992

99.6%

Lee

W

52.2%

0.0%

47.8%

479

6,660

2

0.3%

691

99.7%

Meriwether

W

52.0%

0.0%

48.0%

1,351

16,476

1

0.1%

1,720

99.9%

Emanuel

W

51.3%

0.0%

48.7%

532

4,577

5

0.7%

685

99.3%

Houston

W

51.2%

0.0%

48.8%

1,180

16,450

4

0.3%

1,402

99.7%

Floyd

W

51.1%

0.0%

48.9%

1,659

8,205

3

0.3%

1,181

99.7%

Lincoln

W

50.8%

0.0%

49.2%

431

5,998

8

1.6%

491

98.4%

# Counties Won

69

62.9%

0.0%

37.1%

61,027

630,097

413

0.5%

81,459

99.5%

Marion

L

49.9%

0.0%

50.1%

989

10,280

3

0.2%

1,378

99.8%

Tattnall

L

48.6%

0.0%

51.4%

383

3,227

1

0.2%

496

99.8%

Jefferson

L

48.4%

0.0%

51.6%

729

9,131

10

1.2%

804

98.8%

Stewart

L

48.3%

0.0%

51.7%

1,156

16,027

3

0.2%

1,834

99.8%

Newton

L

48.1%

0.0%

51.9%

1,754

13,296

5

0.3%

1,681

99.7%

Telfair

L

47.6%

0.0%

52.4%

231

3,026

0

0.0%

443

100.0%

Decatur

L

46.6%

0.0%

53.4%

850

8,262

3

0.3%

1,034

99.7%

Sumter

L

45.1%

0.0%

54.9%

1,556

10,322

4

0.3%

1,384

99.7%

Washington

L

44.7%

0.0%

55.3%

1,263

11,766

9

0.7%

1,340

99.3%

Clarke

L

44.7%

0.0%

55.3%

1,090

11,119

8

0.7%

1,211

99.3%

Talbot

L

44.7%

0.0%

55.3%

989

16,534

2

0.1%

1,686

99.9%

Richmond

L

43.8%

0.0%

56.2%

2,033

16,246

55

2.4%

2,198

97.6%



Appendices 789 Georgia (continued) Presidential Candidates County

W/L

Democrat Buchanan %

Republican Fremont %

Census Data

Know-Nothing Fillmore %

Total Vote

1850 Total Population

Free African American *Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

Henry

L

43.8%

0.0%

56.2%

1,350

14,726

4

0.2%

1,971

99.8%

Clinch

L

43.8%

0.0%

56.2%

304

637

0

0.0%

92

100.0%

Monroe

L

43.5%

0.0%

56.5%

1,161

16,985

1

0.1%

1,525

99.9%

Muscogee

L

43.2%

0.0%

56.8%

1,643

18,578

18

0.7%

2,412

99.3%

Hancock

L

41.7%

0.0%

58.3%

733

11,578

11

1.1%

961

98.9%

Macon

L

41.6%

0.0%

58.4%

659

7,052

0

0.0%

913

100.0%

Harris

L

41.2%

0.0%

58.8%

1,281

14,721

4

0.3%

1,381

99.7%

Effingham

L

39.3%

0.0%

60.7%

488

3,864

2

0.4%

455

99.6%

Morgan

L

39.2%

0.0%

60.8%

597

10,744

3

0.4%

843

99.6%

Upson

L

33.1%

0.0%

66.9%

922

9,424

0

0.0%

984

100.0%

Greene

L

32.9%

0.0%

67.1%

859

13,068

11

1.0%

1,069

99.0%

Troup

L

29.1%

0.0%

70.9%

1,417

16,879

10

0.6%

1,635

99.4%

Laurens

L

14.7%

0.0%

85.3%

476

6,442

2

0.3%

742

99.7%

Montgomery

L

11.5%

0.0%

88.5%

227

2,154

0

0.0%

349

100.0%

# Counties Lost

26

42.1%

0.0%

57.9%

25,140

276,088

169

0.5%

30,821

99.5%

Total of These Counties

95

56.9%

0.0%

43.1%

86,167

906,185

582

0.5%

112,280

99.5%

Louisiana Presidential Candidates

Census Data Free African American

White

County

W/L

Democrat Buchanan %

Republican Fremont %

Know-Nothing Fillmore %

Total Vote

1850 Total Population

Rapides

W

56.6%

0.0%

43.4%

1,347

16,561

32

2.3%

1,385

97.7%

# Counties Won

1

56.6%

0.0%

43.4%

1,347

16,561

32

2.3%

1,385

97.7%

Total of These Counties

1

56.6%

0.0%

43.4%

1,347

16,561

32

2.3%

1,385

97.7%

*Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

Maine Presidential Candidates Total Vote

Aroostook

L

48.5%

51.0%

0.5%

1,640

12,529

3

0.1%

3,072

99.9%

Washington

L

46.0%

53.0%

1.0%

6,230

38,811

30

0.3%

9,498

99.7%

York

L

42.7%

56.0%

1.3%

11,844

60,098

14

0.1%

15,323

99.9%

Oxford

L

41.5%

58.1%

0.4%

7,508

39,763

2

0.0%

10,497

100.0%

Lincoln

L

40.3%

55.3%

4.4%

8,925

74,875

82

0.4%

20,525

99.6%

Cumberland

L

37.6%

58.0%

4.3%

13,974

79,538

165

0.8%

21,118

99.2%

Waldo

L

37.3%

61.3%

1.4%

8,411

47,230

10

0.1%

11,666

99.9%

Hancock

L

35.9%

61.4%

2.7%

5,974

34,372

10

0.1%

8,436

99.9%

Piscataquis

L

35.3%

63.1%

1.5%

2,747

14,735

1

0.0%

3,751

100.0%

Franklin

L

34.7%

64.7%

0.5%

3,908

20,027

7

0.1%

5,001

99.9%

Penobscot

L

31.6%

65.5%

2.8%

11,995

63,089

23

0.1%

16,432

99.9%

Somerset

L

29.1%

64.6%

6.3%

6,626

35,581

5

0.1%

8,909

99.9%

Kennebec

L

24.5%

72.1%

3.4%

10,147

62,521

49

0.3%

16,414

99.7%

# Counties Lost

13

36.5%

60.8%

2.7%

99,929

583,169

401

0.3%

150,642

99.7%

Total of These Counties

13

36.5%

60.8%

2.7%

99,929

583,169

401

0.3%

150,642

99.7%

W/L

Republican Fremont %

Know-Nothing Fillmore %

White

1850 Total Population

County

Democrat Buchanan %

Census Data Free African American *Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

(Continued)

790

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.14 (Continued) Massachusetts Presidential Candidates County

W/L

Democrat Buchanan %

Republican Fremont %

Census Data

Know-Nothing Fillmore %

Total Vote

1850 Total Population

Free African American *Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

Berkshire

L

32.5%

63.1%

4.5%

8,468

49,591

356

2.6%

13,394

97.4%

Hampden

L

30.7%

62.2%

7.1%

8,896

51,283

136

0.9%

14,469

99.1%

Suffolk

L

30.2%

44.3%

24.0%

19,387

144,517

621

1.5%

40,460

98.5%

Dukes

L

26.6%

52.4%

20.2%

605

4,540

15

1.1%

1,376

98.9%

Middlesex

L

25.8%

57.7%

13.7%

29,852

161,383

220

0.5%

44,795

99.5%

Norfolk

L

25.0%

56.8%

18.1%

14,782

78,892

72

0.3%

22,023

99.7%

Franklin

L

21.3%

74.4%

4.4%

5,975

30,870

24

0.3%

8,661

99.7%

Essex

L

19.8%

68.7%

11.3%

23,113

131,300

171

0.5%

36,709

99.5%

Bristol

L

19.3%

69.2%

7.3%

12,779

76,192

426

2.1%

20,162

97.9%

Barnstable

L

19.2%

72.7%

8.2%

3,670

35,276

29

0.3%

9,692

99.7%

Worcester

L

18.6%

72.4%

4.6%

24,807

130,789

162

0.4%

38,049

99.6%

Plymouth

L

16.7%

68.0%

14.1%

10,630

55,697

124

0.8%

15,808

99.2%

Nantucket

L

16.1%

74.6%

9.3%

782

8,452

213

8.0%

2,444

92.0%

Hampshire

L

13.2%

82.0%

4.4%

6,302

35,732

93

0.9%

9,919

99.1%

# Counties Lost

14

23.5%

64.7%

11.8%

170,048

994,514

2,662

0.9%

277,961

99.1%

Total of These Counties

14

23.5%

64.7%

11.8%

170,048

994,514

2,662

0.9%

277,961

99.1%

New Hampshire Presidential Candidates Total Vote

Coos

W

56.5%

43.4%

0.1%

1,285

11,853

2

0.1%

3,161

99.9%

Carroll

W

53.3%

46.4%

0.4%

4,712

20,157

0

0.0%

5,332

100.0%

Belknap

W

51.6%

47.9%

0.5%

4,303

17,721

9

0.2%

4,898

99.8%

# Counties Won

3

53.0%

46.6%

0.4%

10,300

49,731

11

0.1%

13,391

99.9%

Merrimack

L

48.6%

51.0%

0.4%

9,742

40,337

32

0.3%

11,265

99.7%

Grafton

L

47.6%

52.0%

0.4%

9,563

42,343

10

0.1%

11,735

99.9%

Rockingham

L

44.90%

54.1%

1.0%

10,943

49,194

31

0.2%

13,715

99.8%

Sullivan

L

44.9%

54.7%

0.4%

4,368

19,375

10

0.2%

5,276

99.8%

Hillsborough

L

43.1%

56.2%

0.7%

12,354

57,478

40

0.3%

15,519

99.7%

Strafford

L

42.8%

56.9%

0.3%

6,269

29,374

14

0.2%

7,333

99.8%

Cheshire

L

36.4%

62.7%

0.9%

6,235

30,144

7

0.1%

9,274

99.9%

# Counties Lost

7

44.5%

54.9%

0.6%

59,474

268,245

144

0.2%

74,117

99.8%

Total of These Counties

10

45.7%

53.7%

0.6%

69,774

317,976

155

0.2%

87,508

99.8%

W/L

Republican Fremont %

Know-Nothing Fillmore %

White

1850 Total Population

County

Democrat Buchanan %

Census Data Free African American *Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

New York Presidential Candidates County

W/L

Democrat Buchanan %

Republican Fremont %

Know-Nothing Fillmore %

Census Data Total Vote

1850 Total Population

Free African American *Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

New York

W

52.6%

22.3%

25.0%

79,606

515,547

3,858

2.6%

145,210

97.4%

Rockland

W

48.7%

21.3%

29.9%

3,131

16,962

138

2.8%

4,832

97.2%

Hamilton

W

48.4%

28.9%

22.7%

516

2,188

0

0.0%

581

100.0%

Richmond

W

47.9%

22.8%

29.3%

3,232

15,061

176

4.3%

3,906

95.7%

Kings

W

46.2%

25.6%

28.2%

30,667

138,882

1,120

3.1%

35,434

96.9%

Putnam

W

43.2%

37.9%

18.9%

2,538

14,138

30

0.8%

3,796

99.2%

Albany

W

42.9%

27.8%

29.3%

18,068

93,279

332

1.4%

24,154

98.6%



Appendices 791 New York (continued) Presidential Candidates County

W/L

Democrat Buchanan %

Republican Fremont %

Know-Nothing Fillmore %

Census Data Total Vote

1850 Total Population

Free African American *Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

Schoharie

W

41.4%

34.7%

23.8%

6,843

33,548

131

1.6%

8,155

98.4%

Greene

W

38.8%

35.8%

25.4%

6,043

33,126

246

2.8%

8,639

97.2%

Franklin

W

38.0%

34.8%

27.2%

4,214

25,102

20

0.3%

6,476

99.7%

Erie

W

37.8%

34.6%

27.6%

19,957

100,993

265

1.0%

27,079

99.0%

Westchester

W

36.2%

35.1%

28.7%

12,691

58,263

647

3.9%

16,030

96.1%

# Counties Won

12

46.5%

26.9%

26.6%

187,506

1,047,089

6,963

2.4%

284,292

97.6%

Orange

L

38.0%

41.1%

20.9%

10,394

57,145

640

4.2%

14,438

95.8%

Tioga

L

36.4%

56.3%

7.3%

5,920

24,880

61

0.9%

6,375

99.1%

Queens

L

35.2%

27.7%

37.1%

6,801

36,833

864

8.6%

9,167

91.4%

Clinton

L

35.0%

43.6%

21.5%

6,104

40,047

37

0.4%

9,879

99.6%

Dutchess

L

34.9%

47.7%

17.4%

11,564

58,992

508

3.2%

15,176

96.8%

Ulster

L

34.5%

25.1%

40.3%

11,665

59,384

383

2.4%

15,859

97.6%

Chemung

L

34.3%

51.0%

14.7%

5,219

28,821

90

1.2%

7,590

98.8%

Columbia

L

34.2%

43.3%

22.5%

8,819

43,073

333

2.9%

11,298

97.1%

Oneida

L

33.3%

58.3%

8.3%

19,159

99,566

185

0.7%

27,056

99.3%

Otsego

L

32.1%

56.9%

11.0%

11,197

48,638

42

0.3%

12,943

99.7%

Seneca

L

32.1%

42.8%

25.0%

5,053

25,441

52

0.8%

6,520

99.2%

Suffolk

L

31.9%

37.3%

30.8%

6,418

36,922

527

5.4%

9,197

94.6%

Rensselaer

L

31.3%

36.5%

32.2%

14,116

73,363

291

1.5%

19,357

98.5%

Monroe

L

30.5%

49.4%

20.0%

15,337

87,650

192

0.8%

24,077

99.2%

Sullivan

L

29.8%

31.8%

38.4%

5,310

25,088

28

0.4%

6,788

99.6%

Broome

L

29.3%

59.7%

11.0%

7,194

30,660

114

1.4%

8,049

98.6%

Wyoming

L

29.2%

62.1%

8.7%

6,548

31,981

21

0.3%

8,329

99.7%

Oswego

L

28.1%

62.9%

9.0%

13,104

62,198

65

0.4%

16,364

99.6%

Fulton

L

27.5%

51.8%

20.7%

5,001

20,171

23

0.4%

5,237

99.6%

Jefferson

L

27.3%

64.4%

8.3%

12,803

68,153

44

0.2%

17,808

99.8%

Chenango

L

26.9%

61.1%

12.0%

8,934

40,311

71

0.7%

10,688

99.3%

Onondaga

L

26.4%

62.8%

10.8%

16,022

85,890

173

0.7%

24,553

99.3%

Steuben

L

25.7%

58.1%

16.2%

12,521

63,771

93

0.6%

16,806

99.4%

Saratoga

L

25.6%

47.4%

27.0%

9,551

45,646

164

1.3%

12,227

98.7%

Warren

L

25.5%

55.8%

18.6%

3,943

17,199

9

0.2%

4,514

99.8%

Delaware

L

24.8%

51.5%

23.7%

8,483

39,834

62

0.6%

10,454

99.4%

Niagara

L

24.0%

50.4%

25.6%

7,755

42,276

106

1.0%

11,018

99.0%

Lewis

L

23.9%

67.1%

9.0%

4,656

24,564

17

0.3%

6,353

99.7%

Montgomery

L

23.7%

49.0%

27.3%

6,274

31,992

134

1.6%

8,395

98.4%

Genesee

L

23.3%

58.8%

17.9%

6,154

28,488

21

0.3%

7,878

99.7%

Essex

L

23.3%

57.7%

19.0%

5,033

31,148

17

0.2%

8,156

99.8%

Livingston

L

22.8%

49.8%

27.4%

7,228

40,875

62

0.6%

11,119

99.4%

Cattaraugus

L

22.4%

65.2%

12.3%

7,917

38,950

24

0.2%

11,205

99.8%

Cortland

L

21.8%

66.5%

11.6%

5,405

25,140

17

0.3%

6,522

99.7%

Wayne

L

21.7%

62.6%

15.7%

9,223

44,953

54

0.4%

12,010

99.6%

Yates

L

21.5%

70.3%

8.2%

4,260

20,590

48

0.9%

5,514

99.1%

Schenectady

L

21.2%

46.1%

32.7%

3,714

20,054

96

1.7%

5,532

98.3%

Herkimer

L

20.7%

63.8%

15.5%

7,954

38,244

66

0.6%

10,542

99.4%

Tompkins

L

20.7%

58.1%

21.2%

6,919

38,746

94

0.9%

10,283

99.1%

Madison

L

20.6%

69.8%

9.6%

9,038

43,072

78

0.7%

11,860

99.3% (Continued)

792

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.14 (Continued) New York (continued) Presidential Candidates Democrat Buchanan %

Census Data

Republican Fremont %

Know-Nothing Fillmore %

Free African American

White

County

W/L

Total Vote

1850 Total Population

Ontario

L

19.6%

54.3%

26.1%

8,382

43,929

157

1.3%

11,987

98.7%

Orleans

L

18.9%

55.6%

25.4%

5,552

28,501

33

0.4%

7,617

99.6%

Washington

L

18.8%

59.8%

21.3%

8,654

44,750

103

0.8%

12,306

99.2%

Allegany

L

18.1%

72.4%

9.5%

9,041

37,808

31

0.3%

9,690

99.7%

Chautauqua

L

16.9%

64.5%

18.5%

10,901

50,493

40

0.3%

13,324

99.7%

Cayuga

L

16.9%

65.3%

17.8%

10,776

55,458

197

1.3%

15,554

98.7%

St. Lawrence

L

15.0%

74.7%

10.3%

12,980

68,617

9

0.1%

16,796

99.9%

# Counties Lost

47

26.6%

55.1%

18.4%

404,996

2,050,305

6,476

1.2%

544,410

98.8%

Total of These Counties

59

32.9%

46.2%

21.0%

592,502

3,097,394

13,439

1.6%

828,702

98.4%

*Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

Rhode Island Presidential Candidates County

W/L

Democrat Buchanan %

Republican Fremont %

Census Data

Know-Nothing Fillmore %

Total Vote

1850 Total Population

2.8%

11,666

87,526

Providence

L

38.0%

59.2%

Kent

L

30.7%

68.4%

0.8%

1,841

Bristol

L

29.1%

52.1%

18.8%

1,158

Newport

L

28.1%

47.2%

24.7%

2,667

Washington

L

23.9%

58.0%

18.2%

2,490

# Counties Lost

5

33.7%

57.9%

8.4%

19,822

Total of These Counties

5

33.7%

57.9%

8.4%

19,822

147,545

Free African American *Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

467

1.9%

23,596

98.1%

15,068

55

1.4%

3,977

98.6%

8,514

112

4.4%

2,460

95.6%

20,007

264

4.9%

5,176

95.1%

16,430

130

2.9%

4,326

97.1%

147,545

1,028

2.5%

39,535

97.5%

1,028

2.5%

39,535

97.5%

Vermont Presidential Candidates Total Vote

Essex

L

30.4%

69.1%

0.4%

900

4,650

2

0.2%

1,219

99.8%

Orange

L

29.4%

69.2%

1.3%

4,632

27,296

3

0.0%

7,353

100.0%

Caledonia

L

29.3%

70.1%

0.6%

3,624

23,595

6

0.1%

6,759

99.9%

Bennington

L

26.4%

71.3%

2.4%

2,975

18,589

28

0.6%

4,992

99.4%

Washington

L

26.2%

73.7%

0.1%

5,185

24,654

4

0.1%

6,597

99.9%

Franklin

L

25.7%

72.4%

1.9%

3,389

28,586

22

0.3%

7,361

99.7%

Lamoille

L

19.9%

79.5%

0.6%

2,022

10,872

1

0.0%

2,857

100.0%

Orleans

L

19.7%

80.1%

0.2%

2,507

15,707

4

0.1%

3,978

99.9%

Chittenden

L

19.1%

78.9%

2.0%

3,605

29,036

35

0.5%

7,681

99.5%

Grand Isle

L

18.2%

80.0%

1.8%

506

4,145

0

0.0%

1,052

100.0%

Windsor

L

18.1%

81.0%

0.9%

7,045

38,504

39

0.4%

10,589

99.6%

Windham

L

15.3%

83.8%

1.0%

4,857

29,062

10

0.1%

8,207

99.9%

Rutland

L

14.7%

84.7%

0.6%

5,664

33,059

31

0.3%

9,421

99.7%

Addison

L

8.9%

89.3%

1.8%

3,764

26,549

20

0.3%

7,222

99.7%

# Counties Lost

14

20.9%

78.1%

1.1%

50,675

314,304

205

0.2%

85,288

99.8%

Total of These Counties

14

20.9%

78.1%

1.1%

50,675

314,304

205

0.2%

85,288

99.8%

Total of Counties Here

211

34.0%

48.8%

17.2%

1,090,264

6,377,648

18,504

1.2%

1,583,301

98.8%

W/L

Republican Fremont %

Know-Nothing Fillmore %

White

1850 Total Population

County

Democrat Buchanan %

Census Data Free African American *Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

Sources: Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved June 2002, and Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, Historical Census Browser, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/index.html (Charlottesville: University of Virginia), retrieved April 13, 2008. Notes: * Persons of age 20 years and over. ** Persons of age 20 years and over.



Appendices 793 Appendix Table A6.15  County Level Results of the 1860 Presidential Election with Matching 1860 Census Demography Georgia Presidential Candidates Republican Lincoln %

Southern Democrat Breckinridge %

Northern Democrat Douglas %

Census Data Const. Union Bell %

Total Vote

1850 Total Population

Free African American *Males

Males %

White

County

W/L

**Males

Males %

Chatham

L

0.0%

11.9%

67.1%

21.0%

2,700

31,043

127

2.3%

5,343

97.7%

Fulton

L

0.0%

13.6%

39.7%

46.7%

2,562

14,427

6

0.2%

2,990

99.8%

Richmond

L

0.0%

45.7%

17.5%

36.8%

2,302

21,284

93

2.7%

3,368

97.3%

Cobb

L

0.0%

2.3%

67.1%

30.6%

2,038

14,242

2

0.1%

2,174

99.9%

Bibb

L

0.0%

15.2%

40.6%

44.2%

2,001

16,291

11

0.4%

2,608

99.6%

Floyd

L

0.0%

15.1%

40.0%

44.9%

1,890

15,195

4

0.2%

2,087

99.8%

Carroll

L

0.0%

1.6%

70.7%

27.7%

1,831

11,991

2

0.1%

2,039

99.9%

Muscogee

L

0.0%

9.4%

45.3%

45.2%

1,696

16,584

41

1.7%

2,428

98.3%

Gwinnett

L

0.0%

14.2%

39.0%

46.8%

1,650

12,940

8

0.4%

2,087

99.6%

Newton

L

0.0%

23.0%

23.9%

53.1%

1,525

14,320

8

0.5%

1,717

99.5%

Coweta

L

0.0%

3.8%

60.3%

35.9%

1,485

14,703

4

0.2%

1,667

99.8%

Walker

L

0.0%

21.9%

33.5%

44.6%

1,454

10,082

2

0.1%

1,772

99.9%

Gordon

L

0.0%

6.7%

60.2%

33.1%

1,452

10,146

7

0.4%

1,724

99.6%

Cherokee

L

0.0%

10.0%

59.2%

30.8%

1,447

11,291

7

0.3%

2,069

99.7%

Troup

L

0.0%

3.4%

28.3%

68.3%

1,420

16,262

8

0.5%

1,497

99.5%

Whitfield

L

0.0%

14.4%

53.4%

32.2%

1,399

10,047

0

0.0%

1,852

100.0%

Walton

L

0.0%

13.9%

42.3%

43.7%

1,312

11,074

0

0.0%

1,435

100.0%

Jackson

L

0.0%

8.7%

54.2%

37.2%

1,246

10,605

5

0.3%

1,545

99.7%

Henry

L

0.0%

4.4%

42.3%

53.3%

1,235

10,702

3

0.2%

1,359

99.8%

Meriwether

L

0.0%

3.9%

50.4%

45.7%

1,220

15,330

1

0.1%

1,463

99.9%

Campbell

L

0.0%

1.2%

64.8%

34.0%

1,211

8,301

1

0.1%

1,348

99.9%

Clarke

L

0.0%

4.8%

37.5%

57.7%

1,205

11,218

5

0.4%

1,241

99.6%

Sumter

L

0.0%

11.1%

31.5%

57.3%

1,205

9,428

0

0.0%

1,029

100.0%

Washington

L

0.0%

23.5%

26.0%

50.5%

1,204

12,698

3

0.2%

1,424

99.8%

Monroe

L

0.0%

4.9%

40.0%

55.0%

1,159

15,953

7

0.5%

1,340

99.5%

Houston

L

0.0%

2.7%

48.1%

49.3%

1,155

15,611

5

0.5%

1,094

99.5%

Spalding

L

0.0%

2.3%

51.7%

46.0%

1,153

8,699

8

0.7%

1,131

99.3%

Randolph

L

0.0%

5.0%

51.6%

43.4%

1,138

9,571

1

0.1%

1,130

99.9%

De Kalb

L

0.0%

5.7%

57.0%

37.2%

1,115

7,806

4

0.3%

1,295

99.7%

Harris

L

0.0%

2.7%

35.3%

62.0%

1,111

13,736

4

0.3%

1,360

99.7%

Decatur

L

0.0%

0.1%

52.7%

47.2%

1,100

11,922

4

0.3%

1,367

99.7%

Hall

L

0.0%

7.9%

44.5%

47.6%

1,050

9,366

5

0.3%

1,616

99.7%

Forsyth

L

0.0%

4.5%

60.5%

35.0%

1,041

7,749

2

0.1%

1,352

99.9%

Stewart

L

0.0%

1.7%

51.7%

46.5%

1,040

13,422

0

0.0%

1,237

100.0%

Pike

L

0.0%

1.4%

57.4%

41.1%

1,038

10,078

4

0.3%

1,168

99.7%

Paulding

L

0.0%

3.8%

76.7%

19.4%

1,018

7,038

1

0.1%

1,279

99.9%

Talbot

L

0.0%

8.9%

40.6%

50.5%

1,000

13,616

4

0.4%

1,131

99.6%

Thomas

L

0.0%

3.5%

46.4%

50.1%

996

10,766

7

0.7%

1,010

99.3%

Wilkinson

L

0.0%

11.6%

50.5%

38.0%

959

9,376

3

0.3%

1,182

99.7%

Upson

L

0.0%

5.1%

29.8%

65.1%

936

9,910

4

0.4%

1,052

99.6%

Burke

L

0.0%

27.3%

50.1%

22.6%

934

17,165

25

2.1%

1,174

97.9%

Baldwin

L

0.0%

10.2%

47.3%

42.5%

931

9,078

18

1.4%

1,231

98.6%

Gilmer

L

0.0%

3.6%

83.0%

13.4%

910

6,724

0

0.0%

1,285

100.0% (Continued)

794

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.15 (Continued) Georgia (continued) Presidential Candidates Republican Lincoln %

Southern Democrat Breckinridge %

Northern Democrat Douglas %

Census Data Const. Union Bell %

Total Vote

1850 Total Population

Free African American *Males

Males %

White

County

W/L

Murray

L

0.0%

23.8%

47.7%

28.5%

882

7,083

1

0.1%

**Males 1,115

Males % 99.9%

Heard

L

0.0%

7.0%

49.8%

43.2%

882

7,805

2

0.2%

1,045

99.8%

Chattooga

L

0.0%

17.4%

32.8%

49.8%

875

7,165

2

0.2%

1,089

99.8%

Elbert

L

0.0%

52.6%

13.8%

33.5%

868

10,433

6

0.6%

1,072

99.4%

Franklin

L

0.0%

0.3%

83.8%

15.8%

866

7,393

10

0.8%

1,252

99.2%

Greene

L

0.0%

17.8%

13.5%

68.7%

846

12,652

7

0.7%

993

99.3%

Oglethorpe

L

0.0%

23.1%

32.0%

44.9%

822

11,549

5

0.5%

915

99.5%

Fayette

L

0.0%

3.6%

58.5%

37.9%

797

7,047

1

0.1%

1,040

99.9%

Catoosa

L

0.0%

9.3%

48.1%

42.6%

794

5,082

0

0.0%

903

100.0%

Jasper

L

0.0%

21.9%

31.6%

46.5%

794

10,743

3

0.3%

873

99.7%

Fannin

L

0.0%

11.7%

69.4%

18.9%

785

5,139

0

0.0%

988

100.0%

Pulaski

L

0.0%

4.3%

59.2%

36.5%

784

8,744

6

0.6%

999

99.4%

Milton

L

0.0%

3.2%

53.3%

43.5%

782

4,602

0

0.0%

841

100.0%

Taylor

L

0.0%

2.8%

50.7%

46.5%

777

5,998

0

0.0%

768

100.0%

Columbia

L

0.0%

47.4%

8.7%

43.9%

766

11,860

13

1.5%

847

98.5%

Jefferson

L

0.0%

43.1%

8.9%

48.0%

756

10,219

10

1.1%

920

98.9%

Lumpkin

L

0.0%

4.0%

53.0%

43.0%

742

4,626

9

1.0%

857

99.0%

Wilkes

L

0.0%

23.1%

36.0%

40.9%

739

11,420

9

1.1%

803

98.9%

Hart

L

0.0%

12.4%

66.7%

20.9%

723

6,137

2

0.2%

960

99.8%

Warren

L

0.0%

59.1%

7.6%

33.2%

722

9,820

18

1.8%

972

98.2%

Polk

L

0.0%

6.9%

45.2%

47.9%

721

6,295

2

0.2%

830

99.8%

Habersham

L

0.0%

10.0%

63.7%

26.2%

717

5,966

7

0.7%

1,055

99.3%

Macon

L

0.0%

2.0%

38.5%

59.5%

704

8,449

1

0.1%

819

99.9%

Union

L

0.0%

1.6%

67.6%

30.8%

701

4,413

2

0.2%

874

99.8%

Terrell

L

0.0%

10.1%

33.2%

56.7%

683

6,232

0

0.0%

776

100.0%

Marion

L

0.0%

5.9%

47.1%

47.1%

682

7,390

1

0.1%

851

99.9%

Hancock

L

0.0%

21.8%

18.9%

59.3%

678

12,044

8

0.8%

934

99.2%

Dougherty

L

0.0%

3.9%

55.1%

41.0%

675

8,295

7

1.1%

640

98.9%

Pickens

L

0.0%

7.0%

69.9%

23.2%

647

4,951

0

0.0%

965

100.0%

Dooly

L

0.0%

4.5%

55.5%

40.0%

627

8,917

2

0.2%

1,033

99.8%

Putnam

L

0.0%

25.2%

28.2%

46.6%

624

10,125

6

0.8%

717

99.2%

Brooks

L

0.0%

0.6%

54.1%

45.2%

621

6,356

0

0.0%

714

100.0%

Madison

L

0.0%

1.8%

60.6%

37.6%

619

5,933

3

0.4%

839

99.6%

Clayton

L

0.0%

16.8%

32.2%

51.0%

612

4,466

0

0.0%

682

100.0%

Morgan

L

0.0%

23.5%

16.9%

59.7%

605

9,997

3

0.4%

709

99.6%

Butts

L

0.0%

4.5%

51.1%

44.5%

605

6,455

1

0.1%

753

99.9%

Laurens

L

0.0%

6.1%

21.6%

72.3%

592

6,998

1

0.1%

762

99.9%

Bulloch

L

0.0%

0.2%

98.6%

1.2%

575

5,668

0

0.0%

696

100.0%

Banks

L

0.0%

1.8%

81.9%

16.3%

569

4,707

1

0.1%

761

99.9%

Crawford

L

0.0%

0.4%

66.5%

33.1%

568

7,693

2

0.3%

756

99.7%

Screven

L

0.0%

6.2%

62.6%

31.2%

548

8,274

0

0.0%

828

100.0%

Chattahoochee

L

0.0%

3.5%

55.3%

41.2%

548

5,797

1

0.2%

637

99.8%

Lowndes

L

0.0%

0.4%

57.4%

42.2%

545

5,249

0

0.0%

667

100.0%

Clay

L

0.0%

2.2%

52.6%

45.2%

544

4,893

7

1.2%

588

98.8%



Appendices 795 Georgia (continued) Presidential Candidates Republican Lincoln %

Southern Democrat Breckinridge %

Northern Democrat Douglas %

Census Data Const. Union Bell %

Total Vote

1850 Total Population

Free African American

W/L

Webster

L

0.0%

0.9%

44.8%

54.3%

540

5,030

1

0.2%

593

Berrien

L

0.0%

0.2%

59.0%

40.9%

536

3,475

2

0.3%

581

99.7%

Tattnall

L

0.0%

0.8%

60.2%

39.0%

518

4,352

0

0.0%

673

100.0%

Twiggs

L

0.0%

1.2%

63.1%

35.7%

507

8,320

11

1.7%

639

98.3%

Mitchell

L

0.0%

5.6%

65.5%

28.9%

499

4,308

1

0.2%

584

99.8%

Emanuel

L

0.0%

8.5%

42.6%

48.9%

493

5,081

3

0.4%

755

99.6%

Dawson

L

0.0%

12.6%

68.7%

18.7%

492

3,856

0

0.0%

705

100.0%

Lee

L

0.0%

3.8%

50.2%

46.0%

478

7,196

2

0.4%

542

99.6%

Jones

L

0.0%

3.0%

50.8%

46.2%

463

9,107

9

1.3%

694

98.7%

Dade

L

0.0%

5.0%

56.4%

38.6%

459

3,069

3

0.5%

586

99.5%

Schley

L

0.0%

14.7%

32.2%

53.1%

441

4,633

5

1.0%

502

99.0%

Liberty

L

0.0%

5.1%

61.3%

33.6%

431

8,367

6

1.3%

473

98.7%

Haralson

L

0.0%

0.2%

85.0%

14.8%

419

3,039

0

0.0%

571

100.0%

Effingham

L

0.0%

0.7%

50.0%

49.3%

418

4,755

3

0.5%

562

99.5%

Early

L

0.0%

0.2%

70.5%

29.3%

417

6,149

0

0.0%

498

100.0%

Quitman

L

0.0%

0.7%

58.2%

41.0%

407

3,499

1

0.2%

449

99.8%

Taliaferro

L

0.0%

54.8%

2.2%

42.9%

403

4,583

9

2.2%

398

97.8%

Appling

L

0.0%

0.2%

71.7%

28.0%

400

4,190

1

0.2%

659

99.8%

White

L

0.0%

7.2%

55.0%

37.7%

400

3,315

1

0.2%

635

99.8%

Johnson

L

0.0%

24.3%

29.6%

46.1%

395

2,919

2

0.5%

405

99.5%

Worth

L

0.0%

1.0%

67.6%

31.4%

389

2,763

4

0.9%

446

99.1%

Towns

L

0.0%

24.3%

49.6%

26.1%

387

2,459

2

0.4%

455

99.6%

Rabun

L

0.0%

2.6%

91.9%

5.5%

384

3,271

0

0.0%

644

100.0%

Baker

L

0.0%

0.5%

69.4%

30.0%

373

4,985

0

0.0%

368

100.0%

Calhoun

L

0.0%

1.8%

68.9%

29.3%

334

4,913

1

0.2%

407

99.8%

Pierce

L

0.0%

0.3%

74.8%

24.9%

317

1,973

0

0.0%

348

100.0%

Lincoln

L

0.0%

36.0%

10.8%

53.2%

314

5,466

0

0.0%

396

100.0%

Montgomery

L

0.0%

2.0%

13.3%

84.7%

301

2,997

2

0.5%

438

99.5%

Wilcox

L

0.0%

1.1%

92.0%

6.9%

276

2,115

2

0.6%

327

99.4%

Bryan

L

0.0%

0.4%

71.7%

27.9%

269

4,015

0

0.0%

359

100.0%

Miller

L

0.0%

0.0%

89.2%

10.8%

259

1,791

0

0.0%

248

100.0%

Ware

L

0.0%

0.4%

85.8%

13.8%

247

2,200

2

0.5%

380

99.5%

Glascock

L

0.0%

70.2%

23.7%

6.1%

245

2,437

1

0.3%

335

99.7%

Camden

L

0.0%

0.0%

85.5%

14.5%

242

5,420

0

0.0%

310

100.0%

McIntosh

L

0.0%

0.0%

83.0%

17.0%

241

5,546

19

5.3%

340

94.7%

Telfair

L

0.0%

2.6%

42.4%

55.0%

231

2,713

0

0.0%

408

100.0%

Clinch

L

0.0%

2.6%

50.7%

46.7%

227

3,063

1

0.2%

531

99.8%

Glynn

L

0.0%

0.5%

90.8%

8.7%

195

3,889

1

0.4%

255

99.6%

Charlton

L

0.0%

1.1%

75.8%

23.1%

186

1,780

0

0.0%

252

100.0%

Colquitt

L

0.0%

0.5%

62.8%

36.6%

183

1,316

4

1.5%

255

98.5%

Wayne

L

0.0%

0.0%

78.4%

21.6%

171

2,268

9

2.8%

309

97.2%

Coffee

L

0.0%

10.2%

67.9%

21.9%

137

2,879

2

0.5%

431

99.5%

Echols

L

0.0%

0.0%

77.7%

22.3%

112

1,491

0

0.0%

235

100.0%

Irwin

*Males

Males %

White

County

**Males

Males % 99.8%

L

0.0%

2.1%

77.9%

20.0%

95

1,699

0

0.0%

284

100.0%

# Counties Lost

131

0.0%

10.7%

48.8%

40.4%

104,717

1,041,562

723

0.6%

130,103

99.4%

Total of These Counties

131

0.0%

10.7%

48.8%

40.4%

104,717

1,041,562

723

0.6%

130,103

99.4% (Continued)

796

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.15 (Continued) Louisiana Presidential Candidates

County

W/L

Republican Lincoln %

Southern Democrat Breckinridge %

Northern Democrat Douglas %

Census Data Const. Union Bell %

Total Vote

1850 Total Population

Free African American *Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

Rapides

L

0.0%

5.6%

59.1%

35.3%

1,754

25,360

57

2.1%

2,649

97.9%

# Counties Lost

1

0.0%

5.6%

59.1%

35.3%

1,754

25,360

57

2.1%

2,649

97.9%

Total of These Counties

1

0.0%

5.6%

59.1%

35.3%

1,754

25,360

57

2.1%

2,649

97.9%

Maine Presidential Candidates Southern Democrat Breckinridge %

Northern Democrat Douglas %

Census Data Const. Union Bell %

1850 Total Population

White

W/L

Kennebec

W

70.9%

25.3%

1.7%

2.1%

9,308

55,655

42

0.3%

15,184

99.7%

Sagadahoc

W

68.3%

19.1%

4.3%

8.4%

3,305

21,790

19

0.3%

5,946

99.7%

Piscataquis

W

67.7%

16.4%

15.3%

0.6%

2,445

15,032

0

0.0%

4,006

100.0%

Aroostook

W

66.0%

23.9%

9.7%

0.4%

1,730

22,479

6

0.1%

5,732

99.9%

Penobscot

W

65.1%

14.5%

18.8%

1.7%

10,755

72,731

38

0.2%

19,741

99.8%

Waldo

W

64.9%

24.5%

9.2%

1.4%

5,855

38,447

6

0.1%

10,187

99.9%

Somerset

W

64.6%

29.2%

3.4%

2.8%

6,267

36,753

8

0.1%

9,820

99.9%

Androscoggin

W

64.4%

33.5%

1.2%

0.9%

5,479

29,726

3

0.0%

8,208

100.0%

Lincoln

W

61.8%

26.4%

5.2%

6.6%

4,060

27,860

13

0.2%

7,524

99.8%

Franklin

W

61.7%

36.7%

1.5%

0.1%

3,698

20,403

1

0.0%

5,552

100.0%

Oxford

W

60.8%

36.1%

2.9%

0.2%

6,982

36,698

1

0.0%

9,946

100.0%

Hancock

W

60.3%

16.9%

19.3%

3.4%

5,505

37,757

10

0.1%

9,703

99.9%

Cumberland

W

59.0%

35.8%

2.6%

2.6%

13,439

75,591

128

0.6%

20,599

99.4%

York

W

57.5%

39.1%

2.6%

0.8%

11,236

62,107

17

0.1%

16,443

99.9%

Washington

W

56.2%

37.1%

5.6%

1.2%

6,258

42,534

35

0.3%

10,484

99.7%

Knox

W

54.8%

39.7%

4.0%

1.5%

4,596

32,716

35

0.4%

8,649

99.6%

# Counties Won

16

62.2%

29.4%

6.3%

2.0%

100,918

628,279

362

0.2%

167,724

99.8%

Total of These Counties

16

62.2%

29.4%

6.3%

2.0%

100,918

628,279

362

0.2%

167,724

99.8%

County

Total Vote

Free African American

Republican Lincoln %

*Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

Massachusetts Presidential Candidates Const. Union Bell %

W/L

Republican Lincoln %

Southern Democrat Breckinridge %

Hampshire

W

81.8%

10.8%

4.1%

3.2%

5,617

37,823

62

0.6%

10,734

99.4%

Nantucket

W

78.2%

6.0%

1.7%

14.2%

537

6,094

33

2.0%

1,630

98.0%

Barnstable

W

74.7%

4.2%

12.2%

8.9%

3,176

35,990

34

0.3%

9,840

99.7%

Franklin

W

74.2%

17.0%

6.1%

2.5%

5,385

31,434

15

0.2%

8,986

99.8%

Bristol

W

73.7%

15.8%

4.6%

5.9%

10,827

93,794

487

1.9%

25,287

98.1%

Worcester

W

69.7%

21.2%

1.5%

7.6%

24,787

159,659

185

0.4%

44,862

99.6%

Plymouth

W

65.6%

13.6%

2.9%

17.9%

10,448

64,768

121

0.6%

18,517

99.4%

Essex

W

65.1%

16.6%

3.6%

14.0%

22,779

165,611

168

0.4%

45,918

99.6%

Hampden

W

64.3%

24.7%

7.3%

3.7%

8,065

57,366

117

0.8%

15,363

99.2%

County

Northern Democrat Douglas %

Census Data Free African American

Total Vote

1850 Total Population

*Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %



Appendices 797 Massachusetts (continued) Presidential Candidates Southern Democrat Breckinridge %

Northern Democrat Douglas %

Census Data Const. Union Bell %

Total Vote

White

W/L

Berkshire

W

61.2%

33.7%

2.3%

2.8%

8,504

55,120

315

2.1%

14,537

97.9%

Dukes

W

58.7%

20.1%

11.1%

10.1%

576

4,403

2

0.1%

1,535

99.9%

Middlesex

W

57.8%

23.0%

3.0%

15.7%

30,801

216,354

260

0.4%

58,997

99.6%

Norfolk

W

55.8%

22.6%

2.9%

18.8%

15,891

109,950

71

0.2%

29,688

99.8%

Suffolk

W

48.8%

21.8%

4.3%

25.1%

22,483

192,700

732

1.4%

53,192

98.6%

# Counties Won

14

62.9%

20.3%

3.6%

13.2%

169,876

1,231,066

2,602

0.8%

339,086

99.2%

Total of These Counties

14

62.9%

20.3%

3.6%

13.2%

169,876

1,231,066

2,602

0.8%

339,086

99.2%

County

1850 Total Population

Free African American

Republican Lincoln %

*Males

Males %

**Males Males %

New Hampshire Presidential Candidates Southern Democrat Breckinridge %

Northern Democrat Douglas %

Census Data Const. Union Bell %

Total Vote

1850 Total Population

Free African American

White

County

W/L

Republican Lincoln %

Cheshire

W

64.7%

32.2%

2.8%

0.0%

5,942

27,434

8

0.1%

7,834

99.9%

Strafford

W

60.6%

34.2%

4.4%

0.0%

5,832

31,493

9

0.1%

8,397

99.9%

Rockingham

W

59.0%

33.3%

6.5%

0.0%

9,696

50,122

31

0.2%

13,994

99.8%

Hillsborough

W

58.6%

38.8%

1.9%

0.0%

11,755

62,140

33

0.2%

17,093

99.8%

Sullivan

W

56.3%

40.7%

2.2%

0.0%

4,327

19,041

7

0.1%

5,447

99.9%

Grafton

W

55.4%

40.2%

3.9%

0.0%

8,713

42,260

10

0.1%

12,304

99.9%

Merrimack

W

53.6%

42.7%

3.1%

0.0%

8,943

41,408

41

0.3%

11,973

99.7%

Belknap

W

51.9%

46.8%

1.3%

0.0%

3,820

18,549

8

0.1%

5,367

99.9%

Carroll

W

51.3%

47.6%

1.0%

0.0%

4,191

20,465

0

0.0%

5,658

100.0%

Coos

W

49.5%

48.8%

1.6%

0.0%

2,724

13,161

2

0.1%

3,887

99.9%

# Counties Won

10

57.3%

39.5%

3.2%

0.0%

65,943

326,073

149

0.2%

91,954

99.8%

Total of These Counties

10

57.3%

39.5%

3.2%

0.0%

65,943

326,073

149

0.2%

91,954

99.8%

*Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

New York Presidential Candidates Const. Union Bell %

W/L

Republican Lincoln %

Southern Democrat Breckinridge %

St. Lawrence

W

73.9%

26.1%

0.0%

0.0%

Allegany

W

71.8%

28.2%

0.0%

Chautauqua

W

69.8%

30.2%

0.0%

Cortland

W

69.4%

30.5%

Franklin

W

68.9%

Yates

W

67.3%

Cayuga

W

Madison

County

Northern Democrat Douglas %

Census Data Total Vote

1850 Total Population

Free African American *Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

15,331

83,689

11

0.1%

21,373

99.90%

0.0%

8,973

41,881

64

0.6%

11,276

99.4%

0.0%

12,154

58,422

59

0.4%

16,273

99.6%

0.0%

0.0%

5,605

26,294

9

0.1%

7,208

99.9%

31.1%

0.0%

0.0%

4,505

30,837

7

0.1%

7,422

99.9%

32.7%

0.0%

0.0%

4,480

20,290

37

0.7%

5,613

99.3%

66.7%

33.3%

0.0%

0.0%

11,876

55,767

155

1.0%

15,821

99.0%

W

66.2%

33.8%

0.0%

0.0%

9,505

43,545

80

0.7%

12,106

99.3%

Essex

W

65.8%

34.2%

0.0%

0.0%

5,247

28,214

28

0.4%

7,272

99.6%

Wyoming

W

65.3%

34.7%

0.0%

0.0%

6,888

31,968

14

0.2%

8,682

99.8%

Genesee

W

64.5%

35.5%

0.0%

0.0%

6,920

32,189

29

0.3%

9,118

99.7% (Continued)

798

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A6.15 (Continued) New York (continued) Presidential Candidates Southern Democrat Breckinridge %

Northern Democrat Douglas %

Census Data Const. Union Bell %

1850 Total Population

White

W/L

Washington

W

63.9%

36.1%

0.0%

0.0%

9,655

45,904

73

0.6%

12,744

99.4%

Cattaraugus

W

63.6%

36.4%

0.0%

0.0%

9,364

43,886

40

0.3%

11,964

99.7%

Orleans

W

63.2%

36.8%

0.0%

0.0%

6,105

28,717

40

0.5%

8,050

99.5%

Wayne

W

62.9%

37.1%

0.0%

0.0%

10,606

47,762

80

0.6%

13,258

99.4%

Oswego

W

62.6%

37.4%

0.0%

0.0%

14,490

75,958

89

0.4%

19,873

99.6%

Steuben

W

62.1%

37.8%

0.0%

0.0%

13,273

66,690

102

0.6%

17,316

99.4%

Jefferson

W

61.4%

38.6%

0.0%

0.0%

14,327

69,825

53

0.3%

18,683

99.7%

Ontario

W

61.3%

38.7%

0.0%

0.0%

9,398

44,563

149

1.2%

12,329

98.8%

Livingston

W

61.3%

38.6%

0.0%

0.0%

8,439

39,546

51

0.5%

10,917

99.5%

Broome

W

61.3%

38.7%

0.0%

0.0%

7,430

35,906

115

1.2%

9,565

98.8%

Herkimer

W

61.2%

38.8%

0.0%

0.0%

8,664

40,561

67

0.6%

11,363

99.4%

Onondaga

W

60.9%

39.1%

0.0%

0.0%

18,465

90,686

167

0.7%

24,510

99.3%

Delaware

W

60.9%

39.1%

0.0%

0.0%

8,213

42,465

48

0.4%

11,338

99.6%

Chenango

W

60.7%

39.3%

0.0%

0.0%

9,371

40,934

64

0.6%

11,463

99.4%

Schuyler

W

59.9%

40.1%

0.0%

0.0%

4,259

18,840

33

0.6%

5,206

99.4%

Monroe

W

59.7%

40.3%

0.0%

0.0%

18,099

100,648

155

0.6%

26,451

99.4%

Tompkins

W

59.0%

41.0%

0.0%

0.0%

7,374

31,409

80

0.9%

8,628

99.1%

Lewis

W

58.9%

41.1%

0.0%

0.0%

5,531

28,580

14

0.2%

7,689

99.8%

Oneida

W

58.1%

41.9%

0.0%

0.0%

21,519

105,202

164

0.6%

28,034

99.4%

Warren

W

58.0%

42.0%

0.0%

0.0%

4,689

21,434

17

0.3%

5,699

99.7%

Tioga

W

57.8%

42.2%

0.0%

0.0%

6,503

28,748

65

0.8%

7,872

99.2%

Niagara

W

57.2%

42.8%

0.0%

0.0%

8,733

50,399

207

1.6%

12,938

98.4%

Otsego

W

56.4%

43.6%

0.0%

0.0%

11,604

50,157

59

0.4%

14,041

99.6%

Saratoga

W

56.4%

43.5%

0.0%

0.0%

10,452

51,729

177

1.3%

13,885

98.7%

Fulton

W

55.1%

44.9%

0.0%

0.0%

5,406

24,162

51

0.8%

6,249

99.2%

Clinton

W

54.8%

45.2%

0.0%

0.0%

7,231

45,735

68

0.6%

10,926

99.4%

Chemung

W

54.3%

45.7%

0.0%

0.0%

5,427

26,917

159

2.2%

6,940

97.8%

Erie

W

53.3%

46.7%

0.0%

0.0%

23,315

141,971

273

0.7%

36,354

99.3%

Dutchess

W

52.7%

47.3%

0.0%

0.0%

12,834

64,941

497

2.8%

17,090

97.2%

Ulster

W

52.0%

48.0%

0.0%

0.0%

13,027

76,381

404

2.0%

19,525

98.0%

Columbia

W

52.0%

48.0%

0.0%

0.0%

9,830

47,172

342

2.7%

12,269

97.3%

Montgomery

W

52.0%

48.0%

0.0%

0.0%

6,781

30,866

88

1.0%

8,334

99.0%

Schenectady

W

51.9%

48.1%

0.0%

0.0%

4,148

20,002

61

1.1%

5,331

98.9%

Suffolk

W

51.6%

48.4%

0.0%

0.0%

7,275

43,275

451

3.8%

11,286

96.2%

Seneca

W

50.3%

49.7%

0.0%

0.0%

6,015

28,138

54

0.7%

7,600

99.3%

Rensselaer

W

50.1%

49.9%

0.0%

0.0%

16,885

86,328

295

1.3%

22,548

98.7%

# Counties Won

47

60.0%

40.0%

0.0%

0.0%

456,221

2,289,533

5,345

0.9%

610,432

99.1%

Orange

L

49.5%

50.5%

0.0%

0.0%

11,909

63,812

520

3.1%

16,457

96.9%

Putnam

L

48.4%

51.6%

0.0%

0.0%

2,568

14,002

54

1.4%

3,777

98.6%

Sullivan

L

48.1%

51.8%

0.0%

0.0%

6,114

32,385

22

0.3%

8,197

99.7%

Greene

L

47.0%

53.0%

0.0%

0.0%

6,671

31,930

221

2.6%

8,320

97.4%

Albany

L

46.9%

53.1%

0.0%

0.0%

20,980

113,917

258

0.9%

29,278

99.1%

Queens

L

46.0%

53.9%

0.0%

0.0%

8,141

57,391

894

5.8%

14,640

94.2%

County

Total Vote

Free African American

Republican Lincoln %

*Males

Males %

**Males

Males %



Appendices 799 New York (continued) Presidential Candidates

Free African American

W/L

Republican Lincoln %

Southern Democrat Breckinridge %

Westchester

L

45.6%

54.4%

0.0%

0.0%

14,852

99,497

648

2.3%

27,374

97.7%

Schoharie

L

43.8%

56.2%

0.0%

0.0%

7,492

34,469

131

1.5%

8,799

98.5%

Kings

L

43.5%

56.4%

0.0%

0.0%

36,466

279,122

1,250

1.8%

69,866

98.2%

Rockland

L

37.3%

62.7%

0.0%

0.0%

3,779

22,492

143

2.2%

6,407

97.8%

Richmond

L

37.3%

62.7%

0.0%

0.0%

3,778

25,492

184

2.7%

6,691

97.3%

New York

L

34.8%

65.2%

0.0%

0.0%

95,583

813,669

3,399

1.5%

216,243

98.5%

Hamilton

L

22.3%

77.7%

0.0%

0.0%

601

3,024

1

0.1%

863

99.9%

# Counties Lost

13

40.6%

59.4%

0.0%

0.0%

218,934

1,591,202

7,725

1.8%

416,912

98.2%

Total of These Counties

60

53.7%

46.3%

0.0%

0.0%

675,155

3,880,735

13,070

1.3%

1,027,344

98.7%

County

Northern Democrat Douglas %

Census Data Const. Union Bell %

Total Vote

1850 Total Population

*Males

Males %

White **Males

Males %

Rhode Island Presidential Candidates Southern Democrat Breckinridge %

Northern Democrat Douglas %

Census Data Const. Union Bell %

1850 Total Population

White

W/L

Republican Lincoln %

Kent

W

65.5%

34.5%

0.0%

0.0%

1,903

17,303

79

1.7%

4,503

98.3%

Newport

W

64.7%

35.3%

0.0%

0.0%

2,489

21,896

228

3.8%

5,702

96.2%

Washington

W

64.6%

35.4%

0.0%

0.0%

2,353

18,715

134

2.7%

4,856

97.3%

Providence

W

59.6%

40.4%

0.0%

0.0%

12,077

107,799

490

1.7%

28,928

98.3%

Bristol

W

59.1%

40.9%

0.0%

0.0%

1,129

8,907

92

3.7%

2,428

96.3%

# Counties Won

5

61.4%

38.6%

0.0%

0.0%

19,951

174,620

1,023

2.2%

46,417

97.8%

Total of These Counties

5

61.4%

38.6%

0.0%

0.0%

19,951

174,620

1,023

2.2%

46,417

97.8%

County

Total Vote

Free African American *Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

Vermont Presidential Candidates Southern Democrat Breckinridge %

Northern Democrat Douglas %

Census Data Const. Union Bell %

Total Vote

1850 Total Population

Free African American

White

County

W/L

Republican Lincoln %

Addison

W

86.6%

11.3%

0.0%

1.5%

3,034

24,010

20

0.3%

6,629

99.7%

Windsor

W

80.9%

14.2%

0.0%

4.4%

6,564

37,193

31

0.3%

10,714

99.7%

Orleans

W

80.7%

13.5%

0.0%

5.5%

2,168

18,981

5

0.1%

5,142

99.9%

Windham

W

79.7%

9.8%

0.0%

10.1%

4,683

26,982

14

0.2%

7,952

99.8%

Lamoille

W

78.4%

19.1%

0.0%

2.3%

1,632

12,311

0

0.0%

3,466

100.0%

Chittenden

W

77.8%

18.9%

0.0%

2.4%

2,880

28,171

29

0.4%

7,369

99.6%

Rutland

W

73.8%

23.8%

0.0%

2.0%

5,665

35,946

42

0.4%

10,073

99.6%

Caledonia

W

73.0%

19.8%

0.0%

6.5%

2,929

21,708

3

0.0%

6,216

100.0%

Franklin

W

71.6%

19.5%

0.0%

8.2%

2,764

27,231

7

0.1%

6,706

99.9%

Grand Isle

W

71.0%

19.0%

0.0%

8.7%

469

4,276

1

0.1%

1,027

99.9%

Bennington

W

70.4%

25.8%

0.0%

3.4%

2,753

19,436

27

0.5%

5,382

99.5%

Washington

W

70.1%

28.8%

0.0%

1.0%

4,197

27,612

8

0.1%

7,831

99.9%

Orange

W

68.9%

24.7%

0.0%

5.4%

3,937

25,455

7

0.1%

7,261

99.9%

Essex

W

66.7%

32.2%

0.0%

1.0%

969

5,786

0

0.0%

1,694

100.0%

# Counties Won

14

76.1%

19.5%

0.0%

4.4%

44,644

315,098

194

0.2%

87,462

99.8%

Total of These Counties

14

76.1%

19.5%

0.0%

4.4%

44,644

315,098

194

0.2%

87,462

99.8%

Total of Counties Shown

251

52.1%

36.4%

5.7%

15.9%

1,182,958

7,622,793

18,180

1.0%

1,892,739

99.0%

*Males

Males %

**Males

Males %

Sources: Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), retrieved June 2002, and Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, Historical Census Browser, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/index.html (Charlottesville: University of Virginia), retrieved April 13, 2008. Notes: * Persons of age 20 years and over. ** Persons of age 20 years and over.

800

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A16.8  Presidential Election Results, 1868–1920, and Census Information, 1860–1920 1868 Presidential Election Results and 1860 Census Information for the Border and Southern States African American Majority Counties

Border States

African American Number of 1860 Total Counties Population Population %

Kentucky

1

Maryland Border Subtotals

Southern States

1868 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

11,219

5,943

53.0%

1,040

969

93.2%

71

6.8%

0

0.0%

5

89,404

51,459

57.6%

8,117

6,507

80.2%

1,610

19.8%

0

0.0%

6

100,623

57,402

57.0%

9,157

7,476

81.6%

1,681

18.4%

0

0.0%

African American %

1868 Total Votes

Number of 1860 Total Counties Population Population

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Other Parties*

Votes

%

Votes

%

Votes

%

Alabama

20

465,627

300,032

64.4%

73,470

26,948

36.7%

46,522

63.3%

0

0.0%

Arkansas

6

60,166

35,831

59.6%

7,933

3,146

39.7%

4,787

60.3%

0

0.0%

Georgia

44

447,844

277,388

61.9%

66,075

41,340

62.6%

24,735

37.4%

0

0.0%

Louisiana

32

396,007

265,145

67.0%

65,383

37,682

57.6%

27,701

42.4%

0

0.0%

North Carolina

20

261,254

147,225

56.4%

53,638

21,472

40.0%

32,166

60.0%

0

0.0%

South Carolina

19

482,634

320,330

66.4%

81,815

28,905

35.3%

52,910

64.7%

0

0.0%

3

67,386

38,980

57.8%

5,082

2,318

45.6%

2,764

54.4%

0

0.0%

Southern Subtotals

144

2,180,918

1,384,931

63.5%

353,396

161,811

45.8%

191,585

54.2%

0

0.0%

Black Subtotals

150

2,281,541

1,442,333

63.2%

362,553

169,287

46.7%

193,266

53.3%

0

0.0%

Tennessee

1868 Presidential Election Results and 1860 Census Information for the Border and Southern States White Majority Counties White Border States

Number of 1860 Total Counties Population Population

%

1868 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Delaware

3

112,216

90,589

80.7%

18,571

10,957

59.0%

7,614

41.0%

0

0.0%

Kentucky

108

1,144,465

914,241

79.9%

152,605

113,860

74.6%

38,745

25.4%

0

0.0%

Maryland

13

286,558

213,315

74.4%

77,064

50,115

65.0%

26,949

35.0%

0

0.0%

Missouri

109

1,160,437

1,043,133

89.9%

150,917

64,680

42.9%

86,237

57.1%

0

0.0%

Border Subtotals

233

2,703,676

2,261,278

83.6%

399,157

239,612

60.0%

159,545

40.0%

0

0.0%

Southern States

White Number of 1860 Total Counties Population Population

%

1868 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Alabama

31

487,392

350,942

72.0%

55,412

35,094

63.3%

20,312

36.7%

6

0.0%

Arkansas

49

375,284

299,856

79.9%

32,437

15,291

47.1%

17,146

52.9%

0

0.0%

Georgia

88

609,442

421,132

69.1%

93,741

61,369

65.5%

32,372

34.5%

0

0.0%

Louisiana

14

282,943

216,743

76.6%

44,541

40,358

90.6%

4,183

9.4%

0

0.0%

North Carolina

66

731,368

517,071

70.7%

126,407

62,503

49.4%

63,902

50.6%

2

0.0%

South Carolina

10

181,187

113,430

62.6%

24,328

15,241

62.6%

9,087

37.4%

0

0.0%

Tennessee

79

1,012,080

774,991

76.6%

77,675

23,803

30.6%

53,872

69.4%

0

0.0%

Southern Subtotals

337

3,679,696

2,694,165

73.2%

454,541

253,659

55.8%

200,874

44.2%

8

0.0%

White Subtotals

570

6,383,372

4,955,443

77.6%

853,698

493,271

57.8%

360,419

42.2%

8

0.0%

1872 Presidential Election Results and 1870 Census Information for the Border and Southern States African American Majority Counties African American Border States

Number of 1870 Total Counties Population Population

%

1872 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Maryland

3

40,547

22,577

55.7%

8,426

3,933

46.7%

4,493

53.3%

0

0.0%

Border Subtotals

3

40,547

22,577

55.7%

8,426

3,933

46.7%

4,493

53.3%

0

0.0%



Appendices 801 African American Majority Counties (continued)

Southern States

African American Number of 1870 Total Counties Population Population %

1872 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Alabama

22

498,598

337,507

67.7%

92,709

33,207

35.8%

59,502

64.2%

0

0.0%

Arkansas

8

68,918

43,818

63.6%

18,314

4,616

25.2%

13,698

74.8%

0

0.0%

Florida

8

99,138

67,617

68.2%

18,357

5,923

32.3%

12,434

67.7%

0

0.0%

Georgia

54

612,682

378,178

61.7%

77,340

39,871

51.6%

37,469

48.4%

0

0.0%

Louisiana

31

351,914

234,257

66.6%

60,301

17,951

29.8%

42,350

70.2%

0

0.0%

Mississippi

32

531,301

348,678

65.6%

87,273

24,404

28.0%

62,869

72.0%

0

0.0%

North Carolina

17

253,058

147,832

58.4%

47,653

15,802

33.2%

31,836

66.8%

15

0.0%

South Carolina

21

544,166

356,976

65.6%

76,277

15,956

20.9%

59,953

78.6%

368

0.5%

2

51,239

30,819

60.1%

9,104

2,769

30.4%

6,335

69.6%

0

0.0%

Tennessee Texas

12

98,773

60,441

61.2%

18,785

6,576

35.0%

12,209

65.0%

0

0.0%

Virginia

41

498,136

291,614

58.5%

71,490

29,213

40.9%

42,251

59.1%

26

0.0%

Southern Subtotals

248

3,607,923

2,297,737

63.7%

577,603

196,288

34.0%

380,906

65.9%

409

0.1%

Black Subtotals

251

3,648,470

2,320,314

63.6%

586,029

200,221

34.2%

385,399

65.8%

409

0.1%

1872 Presidential Election Results and 1870 Census Information for the Border and Southern States White Majority Counties

Border States

White Number of 1870 Total Counties Population Population

%

1872 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Delaware

3

125,015

102,221

81.8%

21,822

10,200

46.7%

11,135

51.0%

487

2.2%

Kentucky

114

1,317,280

1,095,181

83.1%

190,324

99,812

52.4%

88,126

46.3%

2,386

1.3%

Maryland

17

676,356

536,983

79.4%

120,187

61,085

50.8%

59,102

49.2%

0

0.0%

Missouri

111

1,697,779

1,580,175

93.1%

269,612

150,775

55.9%

118,837

44.1%

0

0.0%

52

440,062

422,082

95.9%

61,954

29,242

47.2%

32,113

51.8%

599

1.0%

297

4,256,492

3,736,642

87.8%

663,899

351,114

52.9%

309,313

46.6%

3,472

0.5%

West Virginia Border Subtotals

Southern States

White Number of 1870 Total Counties Population Population

%

1872 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Alabama

41

483,307

348,004

72.0%

75,436

45,188

59.9%

30,247

40.1%

1

0.0%

Arkansas

49

389,625

312,389

80.2%

56,560

31,208

55.2%

25,352

44.8%

0

0.0%

Florida

30

87,394

63,341

72.5%

14,833

9,501

64.1%

5,332

35.9%

0

0.0%

Georgia

78

571,427

404,463

70.8%

60,023

35,438

59.0%

24,585

41.0%

0

0.0%

Louisiana

21

364,891

242,656

66.5%

63,158

37,067

58.7%

26,091

41.3%

0

0.0%

Mississippi

33

296,621

201,098

67.8%

34,479

19,591

56.8%

14,888

43.2%

0

0.0%

North Carolina

71

807,263

564,893

70.0%

115,790

53,349

46.1%

62,194

53.7%

247

0.2%

South Carolina

10

161,440

102,602

63.6%

16,189

6,099

37.7%

10,017

61.9%

73

0.5%

Tennessee

83

1,207,281

915,769

75.9%

165,995

89,033

53.6%

76,962

46.4%

0

0.0%

119

716,599

523,680

73.1%

97,309

61,267

63.0%

35,927

36.9%

115

0.1%

58

731,071

509,791

69.7%

83,905

48,172

57.4%

35,710

42.6%

23

0.0%

Texas Virginia Southern Subtotals

593

5,816,919

4,188,686

72.0%

783,677

435,913

55.6%

347,305

44.3%

459

0.1%

White Subtotals

890

10,073,411

7,925,328

78.7%

1,447,576

787,027

54.4%

656,618

45.4%

3,931

0.3%

1876 Presidential Election Results and 1870 Census Information for the Border and Southern States African American Majority Counties

Border States

African American Number of 1870 Total Counties Population Population %

1876 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Greenback Votes

Maryland

3

40,547

22,577

55.7%

9,268

4,835

52.2%

4,433

47.8%

0

0.0%

0

Border Subtotals

3

40,547

22,577

55.7%

9,268

4,835

52.2%

4,433

47.8%

0

0.0%

0 (Continued)

802

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A16.8 (Continued) African American Majority Counties (continued) African American Southern States

Number of 1870 Total Counties Population Population

%

1876 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Greenback Votes

Alabama

22

498,598

337,507

67.7%

84,711

41,791

49.3%

42,920

50.7%

0

0.0%

0

Arkansas

8

68,918

43,818

63.6%

15,473

4,505

29.1%

10,968

70.9%

0

0.0%

0

Florida

8

99,138

67,617

68.2%

23,800

8,270

34.7%

15,530

65.3%

0

0.0%

0

Georgia

54

612,682

378,178

61.7%

81,924

54,923

67.0%

27,001

33.0%

0

0.0%

0

Louisiana

29

333,898

222,450

66.6%

66,162

23,365

35.3%

42,797

64.7%

0

0.0%

0

Mississippi

32

531,301

348,678

65.6%

94,858

60,998

64.3%

33,860

35.7%

0

0.0%

0

North Carolina

17

253,058

147,832

58.4%

54,655

22,080

40.4%

32,575

59.6%

0

0.0%

0

South Carolina

21

544,166

356,976

65.6%

138,289

60,850

44.0%

77,439

56.0%

0

0.0%

0

2

51,239

30,819

60.1%

10,207

4,475

43.8%

5,732

56.2%

0

0.0%

0

Tennessee Texas

11

98,106

60,069

61.2%

16,864

6,234

37.0%

10,630

63.0%

0

0.0%

0

Virginia

41

498,136

291,614

58.5%

90,606

44,139

48.7%

46,467

51.3%

0

0.0%

0

Southern Subtotals

245

3,589,240

2,285,558

63.7%

677,549

331,630

48.9%

345,919

51.1%

0

0.0%

0

Black Subtotals

248

3,629,787

2,308,135

63.6%

686,817

336,465

49.0%

350,352

51.0%

0

0.0%

0

1876 Presidential Election Results and 1870 Census Information for the Border and Southern States White Majority Counties

Border States

White Number of 1870 Total Counties Population Population

%

1876 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Greenback Votes

Delaware

3

125,015

102,221

81.8%

24,133

13,380

55.4%

10,753

44.6%

0

0.0%

0

Kentucky

114

1,317,280

1,095,181

83.1%

259,602

159,734

61.5%

96,875

37.3%

2,993

1.2%

0 0

Maryland

17

676,356

536,983

79.4%

146,242

82,740

56.6%

63,502

43.4%

0

0.0%

Missouri

113

1,712,911

1,595,271

93.1%

348,918

200,938

57.6%

144,504

41.4%

3,476

1.0%

0

53

442,014

424,034

95.9%

98,282

55,677

56.7%

41,502

42.2%

1,103

1.1%

1,108

300

4,273,576

3,753,690

87.8%

877,177

512,469

58.4%

357,136

40.7%

7,572

0.9%

1,108

West Virginia Border Subtotals

White Southern States

Number of 1870 Total Counties Population Population

%

1876 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Alabama

42

489,501

353,061

72.1%

85,590

60,006

70.1%

25,584

29.9%

0

0.0%

0

Arkansas

53

415,553

337,202

81.1%

66,551

44,068

66.2%

22,332

33.6%

151

0.2%

152

Florida

30

86,679

62,695

72.3%

22,976

14,661

63.8%

8,315

36.2%

0

0.0%

0

Georgia

78

571,427

404,463

70.8%

94,963

72,346

76.2%

22,617

23.8%

0

0.0%

0

Louisiana

21

364,891

242,656

66.5%

72,223

44,149

61.1%

28,074

38.9%

0

0.0%

0

Mississippi

33

296,621

201,098

67.8%

54,018

41,042

76.0%

12,976

24.0%

0

0.0%

0

North Carolina

73

818,303

574,485

70.2%

175,122

101,028

57.7%

74,094

42.3%

0

0.0%

0

South Carolina

10

161,440

102,602

63.6%

39,275

27,147

69.1%

12,128

30.9%

0

0.0%

0

Tennessee

83

1,207,281

915,769

75.9%

206,374

125,229

60.7%

81,145

39.3%

0

0.0%

0

124

718,182

525,174

73.1%

128,893

96,223

74.7%

32,625

25.3%

45

0.0%

0

Texas Virginia

58

731,071

509,791

69.7%

113,976

78,209

68.6%

35,767

31.4%

0

0.0%

0

Southern Subtotals

605

5,860,949

4,228,996

72.2%

1,059,961

704,108

66.4%

355,657

33.6%

196

0.0%

152

White Subtotals

905

10,134,525

7,982,686

78.8%

1,937,138

1,216,577

62.8%

712,793

36.8%

7,768

0.4%

1,260

1880 Presidential Election Results and 1880 Census Information for the Border and Southern States African American Majority Counties

Border States

African American Number of 1880 Total Counties Population Population %

1880 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Greenback Votes

Maryland

3

46,020

25,234

54.8%

10,314

5,094

49.4%

5,220

50.6%

0

0.0%

0

Border Subtotals

3

46,020

25,234

54.8%

10,314

5,094

49.4%

5,220

50.6%

0

0.0%

0



Appendices 803 African American Majority Counties (continued) White Southern States

Number of 1870 Total Counties Population Population

%

1876 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Greenback Votes

Alabama

24

634,898

435,795

68.6%

75,072

38,996

51.9%

34,718

46.2%

1,358

1.8%

1,359

Arkansas

13

146,964

97,559

66.4%

23,081

7,607

33.0%

14,543

63.0%

931

4.0%

0

Florida

9

132,640

88,200

66.5%

24,894

10,271

41.3%

14,623

58.7%

0

0.0%

0

Georgia

63

870,674

541,269

62.2%

86,895

48,733

56.1%

38,162

43.9%

0

0.0%

0

Louisiana

36

491,960

334,550

68.0%

57,455

33,090

57.6%

24,075

41.9%

290

0.5%

0

Mississippi

40

762,604

526,413

69.0%

74,788

46,104

61.6%

24,830

33.2%

3,854

5.2%

3,171

North Carolina

21

376,219

223,352

59.4%

66,886

28,694

42.9%

37,544

56.1%

648

1.0%

0

South Carolina

24

784,191

521,195

66.5%

137,414

88,017

64.1%

48,902

35.6%

495

0.4%

0

5

188,261

109,707

58.3%

34,495

15,666

45.4%

18,251

52.9%

578

1.7%

582

14

158,612

97,820

61.7%

24,715

9,627

39.0%

12,440

50.3%

2,648 10.7%

2,651

Tennessee Texas Virginia

40

628,988

366,928

58.3%

76,757

26,871

35.0%

41,138

53.6%

Southern Subtotals

289

5,176,011

3,342,788

64.6%

682,452

353,676

51.8%

309,226

45.3%

19,550

8,748 11.4% 2.9%

7,763

0

Black Subtotals

292

5,222,031

3,368,022

64.5%

692,766

358,770

51.8%

314,446

45.4%

19,550

2.8%

7,763

1880 Presidential Election Results and 1880 Census Information for the Border and Southern States White Majority Counties

Border States

White Number of 1880 Total Counties Population Population

%

1880 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Greenback Votes

Delaware

3

146,608

120,166

82.0%

29,458

15,174

51.5%

14,151

48.0%

133

0.5%

0

Kentucky

117

1,648,690

1,377,239

83.5%

267,104

148,877

55.7%

106,478

39.9%

11,749

4.4%

11,496

Maryland

19

537,071

412,808

76.9%

159,895

87,493

54.7%

72,402

45.3%

0

0.0%

0

Missouri

113

1,807,472

1,684,936

93.2%

395,518

207,524

52.5%

153,000

38.7%

34,994

8.8%

34,980

West Virginia Border Subtotals

Southern States

54

618,457

592,571

95.8%

112,641

57,239

50.8%

46,256

41.1%

9,146

8.1%

9,002

306

4,758,298

4,187,720

88.0%

964,616

516,307

53.5%

392,287

40.7%

56,022

5.8%

55,478

White Number of 1880 Total Counties Population Population

%

1880 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Greenback Votes

Alabama

42

627,607

463,299

73.8%

76,830

52,136

67.9%

21,628

28.2%

3,066

4.0%

3,074

Arkansas

60

647,191

536,413

82.9%

84,691

52,878

62.4%

27,113

32.0%

4,700

5.5%

0

Florida

30

136,853

98,363

71.9%

26,725

17,695

66.2%

9,030

33.8%

0

0.0%

0

Georgia

74

671,506

487,642

72.6%

70,556

54,242

76.9%

16,314

23.1%

0

0.0%

0

Louisiana

22

447,986

298,881

66.7%

47,007

31,963

68.0%

14,895

31.7%

149

0.3%

0

Mississippi

33

359,459

237,876

66.2%

41,194

29,018

70.4%

9,907

24.0%

2,269

5.5%

2,271

North Carolina

72

1,021,196

713,294

69.8%

174,058

95,516

54.9%

78,073

44.9%

469

0.3%

0

South Carolina

8

192,645

121,961

63.3%

32,379

23,219

71.7%

9,052

28.0%

108

0.3%

0

88

1,347,306

1,057,278

78.5%

210,866

115,397

54.7%

89,971

42.7%

5,498

2.6%

5,477

144

1,381,732

1,093,466

79.1%

209,259

146,551

70.0%

37,939

18.1%

24,769 11.8%

24,752

Tennessee Texas Virginia

59

888,718

624,068

70.2%

107,831

55,203

51.2%

32,294

29.9%

20,334 18.9%

Southern Subtotals

632

7,722,199

5,732,541

74.2%

1,081,396

673,818

62.3%

346,216

32.0%

61,362

5.7%

35,574

0

White Subtotals

938

12,480,497

9,920,261

79.5%

2,046,012

1,190,125

58.2%

738,503

36.1% 117,384

5.7%

91,052

1884 Presidential Election Results and 1880 Census Information for the Border and Southern States African American Majority Counties African American Border States

Number of 1880 Total Counties Population Population

%

1884 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Greenback Votes

Maryland

3

46,020

25,234

54.8%

10,890

5,205

47.8%

5,564

51.1%

121

1.1%

0

Border Subtotals

3

46,020

25,234

54.8%

10,890

5,205

47.8%

5,564

51.1%

121

1.1%

0 (Continued)

804

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A16.8 (Continued) African American Majority Counties (continued) African American Southern States

Number of 1880 Total Counties Population Population

%

1884 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

Greenback Votes

%

Alabama

24

634,898

435,795

68.6%

74,321

41,578

55.9%

32,406

43.6%

337

0.5%

0

Arkansas

13

146,964

97,559

66.4%

23,234

8,515

36.6%

14,635

63.0%

84

0.4%

84

Florida

9

132,640

88,200

66.5%

25,207

10,490

41.6%

14,713

58.4%

4

0.0%

0

Georgia

63

870,674

541,269

62.2%

79,828

48,665

61.0%

31,163

39.0%

0

0.0%

0

Louisiana

36

491,960

334,550

68.0%

62,799

32,776

52.2%

29,861

47.6%

162

0.3%

0

Mississippi

40

762,604

526,413

69.0%

76,133

45,748

60.1%

30,385

39.9%

0

0.0%

0

North Carolina

21

376,219

223,352

59.4%

71,838

32,405

45.1%

39,433

54.9%

0

0.0%

0

South Carolina

25

802,932

533,648

66.5%

70,859

52,291

73.8%

17,494

24.7%

1,074

1.5%

0

5

188,261

109,707

58.3%

33,879

15,508

45.8%

18,338

54.1%

33

0.1%

0

13

152,426

94,527

62.0%

26,747

10,631

39.7%

16,003

59.8%

113

0.4%

5

Tennessee Texas Virginia

40

628,988

366,928

58.3%

103,357

46,508

45.0%

56,830

55.0%

19

0.0%

0

Southern Subtotals

289

5,188,566

3,351,948

64.6%

648,202

345,115

53.2%

301,261

46.5%

1,826

0.3%

89

Black Subtotals

292

5,234,586

3,377,182

64.5%

659,092

350,320

53.2%

306,825

46.6%

1,947

0.3%

89

1884 Presidential Election Results and 1880 Census Information for the Border and Southern States White Majority Counties White Border States

Number of 1880 Total Counties Population Population

%

1876 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

Greenback Votes

%

Delaware

3

146,608

120,166

82.0%

29,984

16,965

56.6%

12,945

43.2%

74

0.2%

0

Kentucky

117

1,648,690

1,377,239

83.5%

275,897

152,494

55.3%

118,573

43.0%

4,830

1.8%

0

Maryland

19

537,071

412,808

76.9%

173,066

90,704

52.4%

79,123

45.7%

3,239

1.9%

0

Missouri

113

1,807,472

1,684,936

93.2%

439,469

234,896

53.4%

202,387

46.1%

2,186

0.5%

0

54

618,457

592,571

95.8%

132,145

67,299

50.9%

63,105

47.8%

1,741

1.3%

0

306

4,758,298

4,187,720

88.0%

1,050,561

562,358

53.5%

476,133

45.3%

12,070

1.1%

0

%

1884 Total Votes

West Virginia Border Subtotals

Southern States

White Number of 1880 Total Counties Population Population

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties

*

Votes

%

Greenback Votes

Alabama

42

627,607

463,299

73.8%

79,303

51,153

64.5%

27,039

34.1%

1,111

1.4%

0

Arkansas

60

647,191

536,413

82.9%

100,896

63,008

62.4%

36,172

35.9%

1,716

1.7%

1,708

Florida

30

136,853

98,363

71.9%

34,783

21,283

61.2%

13,313

38.3%

187

0.5%

0

Georgia

74

671,506

487,642

72.6%

63,442

45,999

72.5%

17,443

27.5%

0

0.0%

0

Louisiana

22

447,986

298,881

66.7%

46,600

29,817

64.0%

16,483

35.4%

300

0.6%

0

Mississippi

33

359,459

237,876

66.2%

43,583

31,207

71.6%

12,376

28.4%

0

0.0%

0

North Carolina

73

1,023,531

715,606

69.9%

190,974

107,775

56.4%

82,771

43.3%

428

0.2%

0

South Carolina

8

192,645

121,961

63.3%

18,847

16,332

86.7%

2,356

12.5%

159

0.8%

0

Tennessee Texas Virginia

91

1,371,293

1,076,749

78.5%

227,009

119,628

52.7%

106,253

46.8%

1,128

0.5%

0

156

1,414,658

1,122,562

79.4%

294,159

212,263

72.2%

75,242

25.6%

6,654

2.3%

3,307

59

888,718

624,068

70.2%

144,033

79,421

55.1%

64,544

44.8%

68

0.0%

0

Southern Subtotals

648

7,781,447

5,783,420

74.3%

1,243,629

777,886

62.5%

453,992

36.5%

11,751

0.9%

5,015

White Subtotals

954

12,539,745

9,971,140

79.5%

2,294,190

1,340,244

58.4%

930,125

40.5%

23,821

1.0%

5,015

1888 Presidential Election Results and 1880 Census Information for the Border and Southern States African American Majority Counties African American Border States

Number of 1880 Total Counties Population Population

%

1888 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Maryland

3

46,020

25,234

54.8%

11,945

5,160

43.2%

6,162

51.6%

623

5.2%

Border Subtotals

3

46,020

25,234

54.8%

11,945

5,160

43.2%

6,162

51.6%

623

5.2%



Appendices 805 African American Majority Counties (continued)

Southern States

African American Number of 1880 Total Counties Population Population %

1888 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Alabama

24

634,898

435,795

68.6%

82,091

53,506

65.2%

28,461

34.7%

124

0.2%

Arkansas

13

146,964

97,559

66.4%

30,416

10,574

34.8%

19,428

63.9%

414

1.4%

Florida

9

132,640

88,200

66.5%

22,678

12,873

56.8%

9,771

43.1%

34

0.1%

Georgia

63

870,674

541,269

62.2%

71,382

48,728

68.3%

22,021

30.8%

633

0.9%

Louisiana

36

491,960

334,550

68.0%

66,878

48,614

72.7%

18,230

27.3%

34

0.1%

Mississippi

40

762,604

526,413

69.0%

71,709

50,503

70.4%

21,121

29.5%

85

0.1%

North Carolina

21

376,219

223,352

59.4%

65,956

31,131

47.2%

34,625

52.5%

200

0.3%

South Carolina

25

802,932

533,648

66.5%

59,164

48,430

81.9%

10,385

17.6%

349

0.6%

5

188,261

109,707

58.3%

37,210

23,256

62.5%

13,954

37.5%

0

0.0%

Texas

11

119,252

72,810

61.1%

21,954

9,532

43.4%

10,860

49.5%

1,562

7.1%

Virginia

40

628,988

366,928

58.3%

101,788

45,667

44.9%

55,816

54.8%

305

0.3%

Southern Subtotals

287

5,155,392

3,330,231

64.6%

631,226

382,814

60.6%

244,672

38.8%

3,740

0.6%

Black Subtotals

290

5,201,412

3,355,465

64.5%

643,171

387,974

60.3%

250,834

39.0%

4,363

0.7%

Tennessee

1888 Presidential Election Results and 1880 Census Information for the Border and Southern States White Majority Counties White Border States

Number of 1880 Total Counties Population Population

%

1888 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Delaware

3

146,608

120,166

82.0%

29,764

16,409

55.1%

12,955

43.5%

400

1.3%

Kentucky

117

1,648,690

1,377,239

83.5%

343,089

182,498

53.2%

154,694

45.1%

5,897

1.7%

Maryland

19

537,071

412,808

76.9%

196,847

100,135

50.9%

92,656

47.1%

4,056

2.1%

Missouri

113

1,807,472

1,684,936

93.2%

519,364

260,769

50.2%

235,447

45.3%

23,148

4.5%

West Virginia Border Subtotals

Southern States

54

618,457

592,571

95.8%

159,440

78,683

49.3%

78,172

49.0%

2,585

1.6%

306

4,758,298

4,187,720

88.0%

1,248,504

638,494

51.1%

573,924

46.0%

36,086

2.9%

%

1888 Total Votes

White Number of 1880 Total Counties Population Population

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Alabama

42

627,607

463,299

73.8%

92,994

63,792

68.6%

28,722

30.9%

480

0.5%

Arkansas

60

647,191

536,413

82.9%

124,384

74,010

59.5%

39,966

32.1%

10,408

8.4%

Florida

30

136,853

98,363

71.9%

38,407

22,960

59.8%

15,146

39.4%

301

0.8%

Georgia

74

671,506

487,642

72.6%

71,418

51,759

72.5%

18,467

25.9%

1,192

1.7%

Louisiana

22

447,986

298,881

66.7%

48,402

35,817

74.0%

12,427

25.7%

158

0.3%

Mississippi

33

359,459

237,876

66.2%

43,189

34,221

79.2%

8,813

20.4%

155

0.4%

North Carolina

73

1,023,531

715,606

69.9%

212,758

113,542

53.4%

96,596

45.4%

2,620

1.2%

South Carolina

8

192,645

121,961

63.3%

17,904

15,780

88.1%

2,038

11.4%

86

0.5%

91

1,371,293

1,076,749

78.5%

262,721

136,934

52.1%

125,787

47.9%

0

0.0%

166

1,416,208

1,121,200

79.2%

331,996

221,913

66.8%

78,171

23.5%

31,912

9.6%

59

888,718

624,068

70.2%

156,293

81,793

52.3%

73,306

46.9%

1,194

0.8%

Tennessee Texas Virginia Southern Subtotals

658

7,782,997

5,782,058

74.3%

1,400,466

852,521

60.9%

499,439

35.7%

48,506

3.5%

White Subtotals

964

12,541,295

9,969,778

79.5%

2,648,970

1,491,015

56.3%

1,073,363

40.5%

84,592

3.2%

1892 Presidential Election Results and 1890 Census Information for the Border and Southern States African American Majority Counties

Border States

African American Number of 1890 Total Counties Population Population %

1892 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Populist Votes

Maryland

2

25,051

13,200

52.7%

7,543

3,465

45.9%

3,706

49.1%

372

4.9%

0

Border Subtotals

2

25,051

13,200

52.7%

7,543

3,465

45.9%

3,706

49.1%

372

4.9%

0 (Continued)

806

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A16.8 (Continued) African American Majority Counties (continued) White Southern States

Number of 1890 Total Counties Population Population

%

1892 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Populist Votes

Alabama

20

563,843

405,941

72.0%

81,129

76,679

94.5%

4,434

5.5%

16

0.0%

0

Arkansas

15

240,949

161,188

66.9%

26,524

13,907

52.4%

11,396

43.0%

1,221

4.6%

1,041

Florida

10

168,964

104,618

61.9%

11,400

10,076

88.4%

0

0.0%

1,324 11.6%

1,265

Georgia

63

981,145

610,733

62.2%

116,043

68,650

59.2%

27,916

24.1%

19,477 16.8%

19,210

Louisiana

34

565,379

387,633

68.6%

61,245

49,755

81.2%

11,490

18.8%

Mississippi

39

848,851

597,733

70.4%

27,397

22,098

80.7%

721

North Carolina

16

295,879

175,255

59.2%

46,811

20,730

44.3%

South Carolina

26

892,016

594,257

66.6%

51,245

39,858

77.8%

3

165,176

97,674

59.1%

13,303

10,186

Texas

15

208,678

126,297

60.5%

30,153

Virginia

35

499,725

292,377

58.5%

69,504

Southern Subtotals

276

5,430,605

3,553,706

65.4%

Black Subtotals

278

5,455,656

3,566,906

65.4%

Tennessee

0

0.0%

0

2.6%

4,578 16.7%

4,122

19,833

42.4%

6,248 13.3%

6,163

10,571

20.6%

816

1.6%

794

76.6%

2,434

18.3%

683

5.1%

688

12,974

43.0%

13,590

45.1%

3,589 11.9%

3,317

33,148

47.7%

31,657

45.5%

4,699

6.8%

4,396

534,754

358,061

67.0%

134,042

25.1%

42,651

8.0%

40,996

542,297

361,526

66.7%

137,748

25.4%

43,023

7.9%

40,996

1892 Presidential Election Results and 1890 Census Information for the Border and Southern States White Majority Counties

Border States

White Number of 1890 Total Counties Population Population

%

1892 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Populist Votes

Delaware

3

168,493

140,107

83.2%

37,235

18,570

49.9%

18,072

48.5%

593

1.6%

0

Kentucky

119

1,858,635

1,590,564

85.6%

340,864

175,462

51.5%

135,444

39.7%

29,958

8.8%

23,480

Maryland

20

563,153

434,534

77.2%

203,569

109,460

53.8%

87,861

43.2%

6,248

3.1%

0

Missouri

113

2,217,531

2,094,708

94.5%

539,686

267,219

49.5%

226,950

42.1%

45,517

8.4%

41,138

54

762,794

730,104

95.7%

171,079

84,471

49.4%

80,303

46.9%

6,305

3.7%

4,162

309

5,570,606

4,990,017

89.6%

1,292,433

655,182

50.7%

548,630

42.4%

88,621

6.9%

68,780

%

1892 Total Votes

West Virginia Border Subtotals

White Southern States

Number of 1890 Total Counties Population Population

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Populist Votes

Alabama

46

949,174

676,626

71.3%

151,414

146,435

96.7%

4,736

3.1%

243

0.2%

0

Arkansas

60

887,230

739,301

83.3%

121,593

73,930

60.8%

35,675

29.3%

11,988

9.9%

10,785

Florida

35

222,458

160,896

72.3%

24,071

20,078

83.4%

0

0.0%

3,993 16.6%

3,576

Georgia

74

856,208

608,126

71.0%

104,738

60,790

58.0%

20,500

19.6%

23,448 22.4%

22,732

Louisiana

26

565,570

382,650

67.7%

54,968

39,453

71.8%

15,515

28.2%

0.0%

0

Mississippi

36

440,749

295,923

67.1%

25,122

17,931

71.4%

679

2.7%

6,512 25.9%

5,996

North Carolina

80

1,322,068

936,305

70.8%

233,459

112,228

48.1%

80,516

34.5%

40,715 17.4%

38,187

South Carolina Tennessee Texas Virginia Southern Subtotals White Subtotals

0

8

239,877

150,750

62.8%

19,259

14,827

77.0%

2,769

14.4%

1,663

8.6%

1,618

95

1,620,570

1,286,552

79.4%

255,429

132,730

52.0%

99,076

38.8%

23,623

9.2%

23,601

197

1,986,769

1,625,609

81.8%

381,552

224,226

58.8%

57,472

15.1%

99,854 26.2%

93,877

38.1%

66

1,157,885

817,426

70.6%

177,034

99,985

56.5%

67,432

5.4%

7,795

723

10,248,558

7,680,164

74.9%

1,548,639

942,613

60.9%

384,370

24.8% 221,656 14.3%

9,617

208,167

1,032

15,819,164

12,670,181

80.1%

2,841,072

1,597,795

56.2%

933,000

32.8% 310,277 10.9%

276,947

1896 Presidential Election Results and 1890 Census Information for the Border and Southern States African American Majority Counties

Border States

African American Number of 1890 Total Counties Population Population %

1896 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Maryland

2

25,051

13,200

52.7%

8,719

3,698

42.4%

4,728

54.2%

293

3.4%

Border Subtotals

2

25,051

13,200

52.7%

8,719

3,698

42.4%

4,728

54.2%

293

3.4%



Appendices 807 African American Majority Counties (continued) African American Southern States

Number of 1890 Total Counties Population Population

%

1896 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Alabama

19

544,853

395,333

72.6%

59,089

40,138

67.9%

13,433

22.7%

5,518

9.3%

Arkansas

15

240,949

161,188

66.9%

24,862

17,037

68.5%

7,264

29.2%

561

2.3%

Florida

10

168,964

104,618

61.9%

16,963

11,586

68.3%

4,112

24.2%

1,265

7.5%

Georgia

63

981,145

610,733

62.2%

73,707

43,295

58.7%

25,309

34.3%

5,103

6.9%

Louisiana

34

565,379

387,633

68.6%

43,292

34,396

79.5%

8,237

19.0%

659

1.5%

Mississippi

39

848,851

597,733

70.4%

35,920

29,751

82.8%

2,411

6.7%

North Carolina

16

295,879

175,255

59.2%

60,090

25,387

42.2%

34,299

57.1%

404

0.7%

South Carolina

26

892,016

594,257

66.6%

46,743

38,777

83.0%

7,185

15.4%

781

1.7%

3

165,176

97,674

59.1%

17,965

10,456

58.2%

7,065

39.3%

444

2.5%

Texas

15

208,678

126,297

60.5%

44,881

17,679

39.4%

24,044

53.6%

3,158

7.0%

Virginia

35

499,725

292,377

58.5%

67,612

36,396

53.8%

30,479

45.1%

737

1.1%

Southern Subtotals

275

5,411,615

3,543,098

65.5%

491,124

304,898

62.1%

163,838

33.4%

22,388

4.6%

Black Subtotals

277

5,436,666

3,556,298

65.4%

499,843

308,596

61.7%

168,566

33.7%

22,681

4.5%

Tennessee

3,758 10.5%

1896 Presidential Election Results and 1890 Census Information for the Border and Southern States White Majority Counties White Border States

Number of 1890 Total Counties Population Population

%

1896 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Delaware

3

168,493

140,107

83.2%

38,341

16,570

43.2%

20,449

53.3%

1,322

3.4%

Kentucky

119

1,858,635

1,590,564

85.6%

445,928

217,848

48.9%

218,203

48.9%

9,877

2.2%

Maryland

20

563,153

434,534

77.2%

239,295

99,619

41.6%

130,935

54.7%

8,741

3.7%

Missouri

112

2,181,224

2,061,870

94.5%

545,194

308,926

56.7%

232,100

42.6%

4,168

0.8%

54

762,794

730,104

95.7%

199,916

93,290

46.7%

104,738

52.4%

1,888

0.9%

308

5,534,299

4,957,179

89.6%

1,468,674

736,253

50.1%

706,425

48.1%

25,996

1.8%

%

1896 Total Votes

West Virginia Border Subtotals

White Southern States

Number of 1890 Total Counties Population Population

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Alabama

46

949,174

676,626

71.3%

135,491

65,237

48.1%

42,234

31.2%

Arkansas

60

887,230

739,301

83.3%

124,534

93,066

74.7%

30,260

24.3%

1,208

Florida

35

222,458

160,896

72.3%

29,525

19,120

64.8%

7,191

24.4%

3,214 10.9%

Georgia

73

852,873

605,661

71.0%

88,286

50,148

56.8%

34,081

38.6%

4,057

4.6%

Louisiana

26

565,570

382,650

67.7%

58,198

43,013

73.9%

13,976

24.0%

1,209

2.1%

Mississippi

36

440,749

295,923

67.1%

33,671

26,186

77.8%

2,410

7.2%

5,075 15.1%

North Carolina

80

1,322,068

936,305

70.8%

271,247

149,016

54.9%

120,817

44.5%

1,414

0.5%

South Carolina

9

259,133

164,456

63.5%

20,894

18,783

89.9%

2,057

9.8%

54

0.3%

95

1,620,570

1,286,552

79.4%

306,425

154,246

50.3%

143,024

46.7%

9,155

3.0%

208

2,026,121

1,664,273

82.1%

501,910

277,610

55.3%

141,374

28.2% 47.5%

Tennessee Texas Virginia Southern Subtotals White Subtotals

28,020 20.7% 1.0%

82,926 16.5%

66

1,157,885

817,426

70.6%

183,355

93,684

51.1%

87,134

2,537

1.4%

734

10,303,831

7,730,069

75.0%

1,753,536

990,109

56.5%

624,558

35.6% 138,869

7.9%

15,838,130

12,687,248

80.1%

3,222,210

1,726,362

53.6%

1,330,983

41.3% 164,865

5.1%

1,042

1900 Presidential Election Results and 1900 Census Information for the Border and Southern States African American Majority Counties

Border States

African American Number of 1900 Total Counties Population Population %

1900 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Maryland

2

27,885

14,791

53.0%

9,963

4,509

45.3%

5,161

51.8%

293

2.9%

Border Subtotals

2

27,885

14,791

53.0%

9,963

4,509

45.3%

5,161

51.8%

293

2.9% (Continued)

808

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A16.8 (Continued) African American Majority Counties (continued) African American Southern States

Number of 1900 Total Counties Population Population

%

1900 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Alabama

22

711,115

505,576

71.1%

50,362

38,520

76.5%

10,519

20.9%

1,323

2.6%

Arkansas

15

278,231

187,866

67.5%

23,614

14,222

60.2%

9,250

39.2%

142

0.6%

Florida

12

221,433

134,784

60.9%

12,743

9,636

75.6%

2,359

18.5%

748

5.9%

Georgia

67

1,132,202

708,765

62.6%

51,119

37,800

73.9%

11,121

21.8%

2,198

4.3%

Louisiana

31

638,775

418,148

65.5%

21,257

17,799

83.7%

3,454

16.2%

4

0.0%

Mississippi

38

952,371

696,115

73.1%

27,802

25,145

90.4%

1,973

7.1%

684

2.5%

North Carolina

18

350,656

198,237

56.5%

53,941

33,572

62.2%

20,249

37.5%

120

0.2%

South Carolina

30

1,005,830

662,991

65.9%

35,841

32,936

91.9%

2,905

8.1%

0

0.0%

3

208,447

123,535

59.3%

13,120

8,878

67.7%

4,063

31.0%

179

1.4%

12

207,335

120,078

57.9%

21,849

11,684

53.5%

9,671

44.3%

494

2.3%

Tennessee Texas Virginia

34

477,020

278,630

58.4%

57,871

31,730

54.8%

25,834

44.6%

307

0.5%

Southern Subtotals

282

6,183,415

4,034,725

65.3%

369,519

261,922

70.9%

101,398

27.4%

6,199

1.7%

Black Subtotals

284

6,211,300

4,049,516

65.2%

379,482

266,431

70.2%

106,559

28.1%

6,492

1.7%

1900 Presidential Election Results and 1900 Census Information for the Border and Southern States White Majority Counties

Border States

White Number of 1900 Total Counties Population Population

%

1900 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Delaware

3

184,735

154,038

83.4%

41,989

18,857

44.9%

22,529

53.7%

603

1.4%

Kentucky

119

2,147,174

1,862,468

86.7%

468,265

235,128

50.2%

227,140

48.5%

5,997

1.3%

Maryland

20

630,337

496,193

78.7%

252,107

116,832

46.3%

129,583

51.4%

5,692

2.3%

Missouri

113

2,521,068

2,395,824

95.0%

681,412

350,639

51.5%

313,179

46.0%

17,594

2.6%

55

958,800

915,301

95.5%

220,796

98,804

44.7%

119,837

54.3%

2,155

1.0%

310

6,442,114

5,823,824

90.4%

1,664,569

820,260

49.3%

812,268

48.8%

32,041

1.9%

%

1900 Total Votes

West Virginia Border Subtotals

White Southern States

Number of 1900 Total Counties Population Population

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Alabama

44

1,117,582

795,851

71.2%

109,330

58,612

53.6%

45,087

41.2%

5,631

5.2%

Arkansas

60

1,033,333

854,343

82.7%

104,352

67,010

64.2%

35,552

34.1%

1,790

1.7%

Florida

33

307,109

211,163

68.8%

26,906

18,637

69.3%

4,994

18.6%

3,275 12.2%

Georgia

70

1,084,129

758,081

69.9%

70,291

43,373

61.7%

23,139

32.9%

3,779

5.4%

Louisiana

28

742,850

510,194

68.7%

46,649

35,877

76.9%

10,772

23.1%

0

0.0%

Mississippi

37

598,899

387,384

64.7%

31,253

26,560

85.0%

3,737

12.0%

956

3.1%

North Carolina

79

1,543,154

1,116,922

72.4%

238,577

124,148

52.0%

112,762

47.3%

1,667

0.7%

South Carolina

10

334,486

215,156

64.3%

14,857

14,239

95.8%

618

4.2%

0

0.0%

95

1,832,615

1,474,931

80.5%

264,044

138,122

52.3%

120,586

45.7%

5,336

2.0%

198

2,695,628

2,228,409

82.7%

400,639

256,265

64.0%

121,497

30.3%

22,877

5.7%

Tennessee Texas Virginia Southern Subtotals White Subtotals

83

1,376,574

1,000,261

72.7%

206,107

114,338

55.5%

89,945

43.6%

1,824

0.9%

737

12,666,359

9,552,695

75.4%

1,513,005

897,181

59.3%

568,689

37.6%

47,135

3.1%

1,047

19,108,473

15,376,519

80.5%

3,177,574

1,717,441

54.0%

1,380,957

43.5%

79,176

2.5%

1904 Presidential Election Results and 1900 Census Information for the Border and Southern States African American Majority Counties African American Border States

Number of 1900 Total Counties Population Population

%

1904 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Populist Votes

Socialist Votes

Maryland

2

27,885

14,791

53.0%

8,239

3,899

47.3%

4,130

50.1%

210

2.5%

0

39

Border Subtotals

2

27,885

14,791

53.0%

8,239

3,899

47.3%

4,130

50.1%

210

2.5%

0

39



Appendices 809 African American Majority Counties (continued)

Southern States

African American Number of 1900 Total Counties Population Population %

1904 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Populist Votes

Socialist Votes

Alabama

22

711,115

505,576

71.1%

23,574

21,767

92.3%

1,203

5.1%

604

2.6%

377

0

Arkansas

15

278,231

187,866

67.5%

22,209

12,775

57.5%

9,092

40.9%

342

1.5%

102

168

Florida

12

221,433

134,784

60.9%

12,927

9,202

71.2%

2,693

20.8%

1,032

8.0%

444

588

Georgia

67

1,132,202

708,765

62.6%

53,664

38,869

72.4%

6,894

12.8%

7,901 14.7%

7,644

0

Louisiana

31

638,775

418,148

65.5%

17,054

15,728

92.2%

1,207

7.1%

119

0.7%

0

121

Mississippi

38

952,371

696,115

73.1%

26,574

24,806

93.3%

974

3.7%

794

3.0%

590

0

North Carolina

18

350,656

198,237

56.5%

26,351

21,969

83.4%

4,265

16.2%

117

0.4%

0

0

South Carolina

30

1,005,830

662,991

65.9%

38,045

35,948

94.5%

2,096

5.5%

1

0.0%

0

0

3

208,447

123,535

59.3%

14,980

12,031

80.3%

2,687

17.9%

262

1.7%

25

0

Texas

11

175,457

98,381

56.1%

11,829

6,920

58.5%

4,483

37.9%

426

3.6%

177

50

Virginia

35

482,060

282,326

58.6%

23,709

16,393

69.1%

7,103

30.0%

213

0.9%

0

0

Southern Subtotals

282

6,156,577

4,016,724

65.2%

270,916

216,408

79.9%

42,697

15.8%

11,811

4.4%

9,359

927

Black Subtotals

284

6,184,462

4,031,515

65.2%

279,155

220,307

78.9%

46,827

16.8%

12,021

4.3%

9,359

966

Tennessee

1904 Presidential Election Results and 1900 Census Information for the Border and Southern States White Majority Counties

Border States

White Number of 1900 Total Counties Population Population

%

1904 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Populist Votes

Socialist Votes

Delaware

3

184,735

154,038

83.4%

43,856

19,339

44.1%

23,703

54.0%

814

1.9%

0

0

Kentucky

119

2,147,174

1,862,468

86.7%

435,946

217,190

49.8%

205,429

47.1%

13,327

3.1%

0

0

Maryland

20

630,337

496,193

78.7%

214,193

104,786

48.9%

104,301

48.7%

5,106

2.4%

0

2,150

Missouri

113

2,521,068

2,395,824

95.0%

641,694

295,162

46.0%

320,548

50.0%

25,984

4.0%

0

12,964

West Virginia Border Subtotals

Southern States

55

958,800

915,301

95.5%

239,987

100,853

42.0%

132,638

55.3%

6,496

2.7%

0

0

310

6,442,114

5,823,824

90.4%

1,575,676

737,330

46.8%

786,619

49.9%

51,727

3.3%

0

15,114

%

1904 Total Votes

White Number of 1900 Total Counties Population Population

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Populist Votes

Socialist Votes

Alabama

44

1,117,582

795,851

71.2%

83,489

56,784

68.0%

20,884

25.0%

5,821

7.0%

4,598

0

Arkansas

60

1,033,333

854,343

82.7%

94,119

51,663

54.9%

37,662

40.0%

4,794

5.1%

2,226

1,647

Florida

33

307,109

211,163

68.8%

25,778

17,248

66.9%

5,620

21.8%

2,910 11.3%

1,160

1,749

Georgia

70

1,084,129

758,081

69.9%

77,322

44,597

57.7%

17,111

22.1%

15,614 20.2%

14,998

0

Louisiana

28

742,850

510,194

68.7%

36,854

31,988

86.8%

4,004

10.9%

862

2.3%

0

880

Mississippi

37

598,899

387,384

64.7%

31,821

28,440

89.4%

2,235

7.0%

1,146

3.6%

890

0

North Carolina

79

1,543,154

1,116,922

72.4%

181,467

102,135

56.3%

78,168

43.1%

1,164

0.6%

0

0

South Carolina

10

334,486

215,156

64.3%

16,328

15,870

97.2%

458

2.8%

0

0.0%

0

0

Tennessee

95

1,832,615

1,474,931

80.5%

230,544

121,059

52.5%

103,976

45.1%

5,509

2.4%

2,499

0

180

2,347,400

1,957,437

83.4%

221,780

160,179

72.2%

46,822

21.1%

14,779

6.7%

7,870

2,740

81

1,364,314

992,200

72.7%

106,203

63,865

60.1%

40,973

38.6%

1,365

1.3%

0

0

717

12,305,871

9,273,662

75.4%

1,105,705

693,828

62.7%

357,913

32.4%

53,964

4.9%

34,241

7,016

1,027

18,747,985

15,097,486

80.5%

2,681,381

1,431,158

53.4%

1,144,532

42.7% 105,691

3.9%

34,241

22,130

Texas Virginia Southern Subtotals White Subtotals

1908 Presidential Election Results and 1900 Census Information for the Border and Southern States African American Majority Counties African American Border States

Number of 1900 Total Counties Population Population

%

1908 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Prohibition Socialist Votes Votes

Maryland

2

27,885

14,791

53.0%

9,144

4,717

51.6%

4,211

46.1%

216

2.4%

216

0

Border Subtotals

2

27,885

14,791

53.0%

9,144

4,717

51.6%

4,211

46.1%

216

2.4%

216

0 (Continued)

810

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A16.8 (Continued) African American Majority Counties (continued) African American

Southern States

Number of 1900 Total Counties Population Population

%

1908 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Prohibition Socialist Votes Votes

Alabama

22

711,115

505,576

71.1%

22,460

20,724

92.3%

1,274

5.7%

462

2.1%

294

0

Arkansas

15

278,231

187,866

67.5%

25,011

13,365

53.4%

10,839

43.3%

807

3.2%

191

616

Florida

12

221,433

134,784

60.9%

14,680

9,772

66.6%

3,070

20.9%

1,838 12.5%

534

756

Georgia

66

1,126,080

705,612

62.7%

55,408

33,767

60.9%

14,170

25.6%

7,471 13.5%

635

0

Louisiana

31

638,775

418,148

65.5%

20,707

18,285

88.3%

1,816

8.8%

606

2.9%

15

591

Mississippi

38

952,371

696,115

73.1%

29,880

27,902

93.4%

1,343

4.5%

635

2.1%

420

215

North Carolina

18

350,656

198,237

56.5%

30,716

23,165

75.4%

7,544

24.6%

7

0.0%

7

0

South Carolina

30

1,005,830

662,991

65.9%

43,757

40,806

93.3%

2,857

6.5%

94

0.2%

94

0

Tennessee

3

208,447

123,535

59.3%

14,057

10,475

74.5%

3,258

23.2%

324

2.3%

324

0

Texas

12

207,335

120,078

57.9%

12,817

8,641

67.4%

3,908

30.5%

268

2.1%

110

158

Virginia

35

482,060

282,326

58.6%

22,982

16,336

71.1%

6,535

28.4%

111

0.5%

111

0

Southern Subtotals

282

6,182,333

4,035,268

65.3%

292,475

223,238

76.3%

56,614

19.4%

12,623

4.3%

2,735

2,336

Black Subtotals

284

6,210,218

4,050,059

65.2%

301,619

227,955

75.6%

60,825

20.2%

12,839

4.3%

2,951

2,336

1908 Presidential Election Results and 1900 Census Information for the Border and Southern States White Majority Counties White

Border States

Number of 1900 Total Counties Population Population

%

1908 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Prohibition Socialist Votes Votes

Delaware

3

184,735

154,038

83.4%

48,015

22,053

45.9%

25,002

52.1%

960

2.0%

960

0

Kentucky

119

2,147,174

1,862,468

86.7%

490,719

244,102

49.7%

235,741

48.0%

10,876

2.2%

10,876

0

Maryland

21

1,139,294

925,892

81.3%

227,574

110,480

48.5%

111,212

48.9%

5,882

2.6%

5,882

0

Missouri

113

2,521,068

2,395,824

95.0%

713,660

345,464

48.4%

346,113

48.5%

22,083

3.1%

6,626

15,457

55

958,800

915,301

95.5%

258,098

111,379

43.2%

137,864

53.4%

8,855

3.4%

5,178

3,677

311

6,951,071

6,253,523

90.0%

1,738,066

833,478

48.0%

855,932

49.2%

48,656

2.8%

29,522

19,134

West Virginia Border Subtotals

African American

Southern States

Number of 1900 Total Counties Population Population

%

1908 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Prohibition Socialist Votes Votes

Alabama

44

1,117,582

795,851

71.2%

81,229

52,707

64.9%

23,868

29.4%

4,654

5.7%

3,275

0

Arkansas

60

1,033,333

854,343

82.7%

126,834

73,650

58.1%

45,850

36.1%

7,334

5.8%

2,104

5,230

Florida

33

307,109

211,163

68.8%

34,246

21,048

61.5%

7,515

21.9%

5,683 16.6%

1,347

2,950

Georgia

70

1,084,129

758,081

69.9%

71,445

35,579

49.8%

25,457

35.6%

10,409 14.6%

1,312

0

Louisiana

28

742,850

510,194

68.7%

54,410

45,289

83.2%

7,130

13.1%

1,991

3.7%

56

1,935

Mississippi

37

598,899

387,384

64.7%

35,163

30,835

87.7%

2,804

8.0%

1,524

4.3%

824

700

North Carolina

79

1,543,154

1,116,922

72.4%

220,445

112,945

51.2%

106,776

48.4%

724

0.3%

724

0

South Carolina

10

334,486

215,156

64.3%

20,875

19,849

95.1%

973

4.7%

53

0.3%

53

0

Tennessee

95

1,832,615

1,474,931

80.5%

246,323

126,769

51.5%

116,289

47.2%

3,265

1.3%

3,265

0

208

2,728,330

2,234,885

81.9%

279,867

207,856

74.3%

61,620

22.0%

10,391

3.7%

2,772

7,619

81

1,364,314

992,200

72.7%

112,457

65,727

58.4%

45,743

40.7%

987

0.9%

987

0

745

12,686,801

9,551,110

75.3%

1,283,294

792,254

61.7%

444,025

34.6%

47,015

3.7%

16,719

18,434

19,637,872

15,804,633

80.5%

3,021,360

1,625,732

53.8%

1,299,957

43.0%

95,671

3.2%

46,241

37,568

Texas Virginia Southern Subtotals White Subtotals

1,056

1912 Presidential Election Results and 1910 Census Information for the Border and Southern States African American Majority Counties African American

Border States

Number of 1910 Total Counties Population Population

%

1912 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Progressive Socialist Votes Votes

Maryland

1

16,386

8,572

52.3%

5,329

2,510

47.1%

2,387

44.8%

432

8.1%

314

53

Border Subtotals

1

16,386

8,572

52.3%

5,329

2,510

47.1%

2,387

44.8%

432

8.1%

314

53



Appendices 811 African American Majority Counties (continued)

Southern States

African American Number of 1910 Total Counties Population Population %

1912 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

Progressive Socialist Votes Votes

%

Alabama

21

686,308

487,399

71.0%

23,107

21,411

92.7%

480

2.1%

1,216

5.3%

913

300

Arkansas

14

330,594

226,145

68.4%

19,643

10,320

52.5%

4,995

25.4%

4,328 22.0%

3,609

662

Florida

10

172,349

106,456

61.8%

8,511

6,465

76.0%

892

10.5%

1,154 13.6%

496

414

Georgia

66

1,170,283

735,972

62.9%

43,875

38,360

87.4%

1,381

3.1%

4,134

9.4%

3,928

0

Louisiana

25

551,165

356,707

64.7%

15,632

12,681

81.1%

875

5.6%

2,076 13.3%

1,137

939

Mississippi

38

1,034,280

749,269

72.4%

28,260

25,715

91.0%

549

1.9%

1,996

7.1%

1,326

670

North Carolina

14

290,475

166,520

57.3%

20,139

17,326

86.0%

1,318

6.5%

1,495

7.4%

1,451

50

South Carolina

33

1,103,066

699,471

63.4%

33,402

32,026

95.9%

361

1.1%

1,015

3.0%

0

0

2

56,167

40,412

71.9%

2,204

1,899

86.2%

93

4.2%

212

9.6%

181

28

Tennessee Texas

8

145,218

84,464

58.2%

7,513

5,404

71.9%

1,251

16.7%

858 11.4%

528

288

30

427,038

246,750

57.8%

19,018

14,353

75.5%

2,622

13.8%

2,043 10.7%

1,890

0

Southern Subtotals

261

5,966,943

3,899,565

65.4%

221,304

185,960

84.0%

14,817

6.7%

20,527

9.3%

15,459

3,351

Black Subtotals

262

5,983,329

3,908,137

65.3%

226,633

188,470

83.2%

17,204

7.6%

20,959

9.2%

15,773

3,404

Virginia

1912 Presidential Election Results and 1910 Census Information for the Border and Southern States White Majority Counties White Border States

Number of 1910 Total Counties Population Population

%

1912 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

Delaware

3

202,322

171,141

84.6%

48,690

22,637

46.5%

16,004

Kentucky

119

2,289,905

2,028,249

88.6%

451,469

219,292

48.6%

115,111

Maryland

21

698,634

566,730

81.1%

224,879

109,527

48.7%

51,576

Missouri

113

2,595,699

2,482,593

95.6%

696,254

329,566

47.3%

206,710

55

1,221,119

1,156,946

94.7%

264,211

113,108

42.8%

56,749

311

7,007,679

6,405,659

91.4%

1,685,503

794,130

47.1%

446,150

%

1912 Total Votes

West Virginia Border Subtotals

Southern States

White Number of 1910 Total Counties Population Population

Democratic Party Votes

%

% 32.9%

Votes

Progressive Socialist Votes Votes

%

10,049 20.6%

8,872

566

25.5% 117,066 25.9%

101,258

11,533

22.9%

63,776 28.4%

57,392

3,901

29.7% 159,978 23.0%

124,287

28,478

94,354 35.7%

79,104

15,260

26.5% 445,223 26.4%

370,913

59,738

21.5%

Republican Party Votes

Other Parties*

%

Other Parties

*

Votes

%

Progressive Socialist Votes Votes

Alabama

46

1,451,785

1,030,902

71.0%

94,852

61,030

64.3%

9,328

9.8%

24,494 25.8%

21,760

2,736

Arkansas

61

1,243,855

1,027,109

82.6%

105,461

58,493

55.5%

20,597

19.5%

26,371 25.0%

18,031

7,488

Florida

37

580,270

378,057

65.2%

40,908

28,022

68.5%

3,304

8.1%

9,582 23.4%

3,809

4,199

Georgia

80

1,438,838

997,823

69.3%

77,595

54,726

70.5%

3,807

4.9%

19,062 24.6%

18,060

0

Louisiana

35

1,105,223

748,056

67.7%

63,070

47,727

75.7%

2,914

4.6%

12,429 19.7%

Mississippi

41

762,834

502,616

65.9%

36,223

31,609

87.3%

1,010

2.8%

North Carolina

84

1,915,812

1,384,489

72.3%

221,601

126,251

57.0%

27,611

12.5%

South Carolina

10

412,334

275,962

66.9%

16,803

16,131

96.0%

173

1.0%

94

2,128,622

1,695,946

79.7%

251,288

132,270

52.6%

60,950

232

3,750,230

3,144,646

83.9%

292,406

212,769

72.8%

27,015

Tennessee Texas Virginia Southern Subtotals White Subtotals

8,120

4,277

9.9%

2,225

1,380

67,739 30.6%

3,604

66,686

937

3.0%

0

0

24.3%

58,068 23.1%

53,707

3,534

9.2%

52,622 18.0%

25,990

24,553

17.6%

499

87

1,637,122

1,215,979

74.3%

116,786

75,021

64.2%

20,573

21,192 18.1%

19,781

0

807

16,426,925

12,401,585

75.5%

1,316,993

844,049

64.1%

177,282

13.5% 295,662 22.4%

238,169

49,104

23,434,604

18,807,244

80.3%

3,002,496

1,638,179

54.6%

623,432

20.8% 740,885 24.7%

609,082

108,842

1,118

1916 Presidential Election Results and 1910 Census Information for the Border and Southern States African American Majority Counties African American Border States

Number of 1910 Total Counties Population Population

%

1916 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Prohibition Socialist Votes Votes

Maryland

1

16,386

8,572

52.3%

5,320

2,750

51.7%

2,468

46.4%

102

1.9%

91

11

Border Subtotals

1

16,386

8,572

52.3%

5,320

2,750

51.7%

2,468

46.4%

102

1.9%

91

11 (Continued)

812

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A16.8 (Continued) African American Majority Counties (continued) African American

Southern States

Number of 1910 Total Counties Population Population

%

1916 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Prohibition Socialist Votes Votes

Alabama

21

686,308

487,399

71.0%

24,491

23,286

95.1%

972

4.0%

233

1.0%

66

167

Arkansas

14

330,594

226,145

68.4%

23,198

15,524

66.9%

7,181

31.0%

493

2.1%

147

346

Florida

10

172,349

106,456

61.8%

11,986

9,061

75.6%

1,872

15.6%

1,053

8.8%

564

489

Georgia

66

1,170,283

735,972

62.9%

51,865

44,888

86.5%

2,453

4.7%

4,524

8.7%

160

0

Louisiana

25

551,165

356,707

64.7%

19,759

17,713

89.6%

1,230

6.2%

816

4.1%

65

0

Mississippi

37

985,375

706,506

71.7%

34,386

33,057

96.1%

1,074

3.1%

255

0.7%

0

269

North Carolina

14

290,475

166,520

57.3%

22,565

19,008

84.2%

3,557

15.8%

0

0.0%

0

0

South Carolina

0

33

1,103,066

699,471

63.4%

41,678

40,166

96.4%

1,235

3.0%

277

0.7%

277

Tennessee

2

56,167

40,412

71.9%

3,679

3,489

94.8%

177

4.8%

13

0.4%

13

0

Texas

8

145,218

84,464

58.2%

8,581

6,582

76.7%

1,795

20.9%

204

2.4%

27

177

Virginia

30

427,038

246,750

57.8%

21,088

17,060

80.9%

3,902

18.5%

126

0.6%

126

0

Southern Subtotals

260

5,918,038

3,856,802

65.2%

263,276

229,834

87.3%

25,448

9.7%

7,994

3.0%

1,445

1,448

Black Subtotals

261

5,934,424

3,865,374

65.1%

268,596

232,584

86.6%

27,916

10.4%

8,096

3.0%

1,536

1,459

1916 Presidential Election Results and 1910 Census Information for the Border and Southern States White Majority Counties White Border States

Number of 1910 Total Counties Population Population

%

1916 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Prohibition Socialist Votes Votes

Delaware

3

202,322

171,141

84.6%

51,810

24,756

47.8%

26,027

50.2%

1,027

2.0%

1,027

Kentucky

119

2,289,905

2,028,249

88.6%

518,095

269,689

52.1%

240,239

46.4%

8,167

1.6%

8,167

0

Maryland

21

698,634

566,730

81.1%

254,762

134,737

52.9%

113,857

44.7%

6,168

2.4%

3,499

2,669

Missouri

113

2,595,699

2,482,593

95.6%

784,401

396,833

50.6%

368,225

46.9%

19,343

2.5%

4,655

14,688

55

1,221,119

1,156,946

94.7%

289,671

140,409

48.5%

143,113

49.4%

6,149

2.1%

0

6,167

311

7,007,679

6,405,659

91.4%

1,898,739

966,424

50.9%

891,461

47.0%

40,854

2.2%

17,348

23,524

West Virginia Border Subtotals

African American

Southern States

Number of 1910 Total Counties Population Population

%

1916 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

0

Prohibition Socialist Votes Votes

Alabama

46

1,451,785

1,030,902

71.0%

105,944

75,827

71.6%

27,684

26.1%

2,433

2.3%

683

1,750

Arkansas

61

1,243,855

1,027,109

82.6%

146,906

96,697

65.8%

41,710

28.4%

8,499

5.8%

1,853

6,646

Florida

37

580,270

378,057

65.2%

62,493

43,001

68.8%

11,278

18.0%

8,214 13.1%

3,837

4,377

Georgia

80

1,438,838

997,823

69.3%

105,800

80,358

76.0%

8,579

8.1%

16,863 15.9%

783

0

Louisiana

34

1,087,839

734,388

67.5%

69,606

59,011

84.8%

4,854

7.0%

5,741

8.2%

209

0

Mississippi

41

762,834

502,616

65.9%

50,598

46,387

91.7%

3,141

6.2%

1,070

2.1%

0

1,206

North Carolina

84

1,915,812

1,384,489

72.3%

264,300

148,238

56.1%

116,060

43.9%

2

0.0%

2

0

South Carolina

10

412,334

275,962

66.9%

21,390

20,800

97.2%

312

1.5%

278

1.3%

278

0

94

2,128,622

1,695,946

79.7%

269,921

151,057

56.0%

116,189

43.0%

2,675

1.0%

2,675

0

233

3,750,561

3,144,977

83.9%

362,781

279,298

77.0%

62,889

17.3%

20,594

5.7%

1,920

18,674

Tennessee Texas Virginia Southern Subtotals White Subtotals

85

1,614,707

1,197,775

74.2%

129,107

83,526

64.7%

43,923

34.0%

1,658

1.3%

1,658

0

805

16,387,457

12,370,044

75.5%

1,588,846

1,084,200

68.2%

436,619

27.5%

68,027

4.3%

13,898

32,653

23,395,136

18,775,703

80.3%

3,487,585

2,050,624

58.8%

1,328,080

38.1% 108,881

3.1%

31,246

56,177

1,116

1920 Presidential Election Results and 1920 Census Information for the Border and Southern States African American Majority Counties

Southern States

African American Number of 1920 Total Counties Population Population %

1920 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Socialist Votes

Alabama

18

557,649

386,293

69.3%

27,648

26,028

94.1%

1,326

4.8%

294

1.1%

239

Arkansas

11

316,010

218,474

69.1%

22,284

13,798

61.9%

8,172

36.7%

314

1.4%

318



Appendices 813 African American Majority Counties (continued)

Southern States

African American Number of 1920 Total Counties Population Population %

1920 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Socialist Votes

Florida

5

96,584

58,879

61.0%

9,890

7,442

75.2%

1,992

20.1%

456

4.6%

190

Georgia

58

991,032

606,595

61.2%

36,749

31,470

85.6%

5,166

14.1%

113

0.3%

0

Louisiana

22

453,837

274,793

60.5%

17,762

14,002

78.8%

3,744

21.1%

16

0.1%

0

Mississippi

34

907,893

650,053

71.6%

29,747

27,116

91.2%

2,356

7.9%

275

0.9%

272

North Carolina

12

313,310

176,441

56.3%

33,670

29,290

87.0%

4,380

13.0%

0

0.0%

0

South Carolina

32

1,000,810

622,779

62.2%

35,091

33,554

95.6%

1,252

3.6%

285

0.8%

0

Tennessee

2

56,885

40,485

71.2%

4,816

4,361

90.6%

446

9.3%

9

0.2%

0

Texas

4

82,874

48,753

58.8%

6,725

3,672

54.6%

1,181

17.6%

1,872 27.8%

25

22

288,270

165,861

57.5%

16,350

12,508

76.5%

3,754

23.0%

88

0.5%

0

Southern Subtotals

220

5,065,154

3,249,406

64.2%

240,732

203,241

84.4%

33,769

14.0%

3,722

1.5%

1,044

Black Subtotals

220

5,065,154

3,249,406

64.2%

240,732

203,241

84.4%

33,769

14.0%

3,722

1.5%

1,044

Virginia

1920 Presidential Election Results and 1920 Census Information for the Border and Southern States White Majority Counties

Border States

White Number of 1920 Total Counties Population Population

%

1916 Total Votes

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Socialist Votes

Delaware

3

223,003

192,668

86.4%

94,864

39,883

42.0%

52,868

55.7%

2,113

2.2%

1,004

Kentucky

120

2,416,630

2,180,692

90.2%

918,805

457,153

49.8%

451,414

49.1%

10,238

1.1%

0

Maryland

22

693,526

564,593

81.4%

425,449

179,471

42.2%

234,294

55.1%

11,684

2.7%

8,907

Missouri

113

2,621,349

2,513,260

95.9%

1,329,152

573,612

43.2%

725,461

54.6%

30,079

2.3%

20,455

55

1,463,701

1,377,356

94.1%

509,934

220,839

43.3%

281,969

55.3%

7,126

1.4%

5,615

313

7,418,209

6,828,569

92.1%

3,278,204

1,470,958

44.9%

1,746,006

53.3%

61,240

1.9%

35,981

%

1920 Total Votes

West Virginia Border Subtotals

Southern States

White Number of 1920 Total Counties Population Population

Democratic Party Votes

%

Republican Party Votes

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

Socialist Votes

Alabama

49

1,790,525

1,276,166

71.3%

206,303

130,011

63.0%

73,362

35.6%

2,930

1.4%

2,175

Arkansas

64

1,436,194

1,182,448

82.3%

161,337

93,613

58.0%

62,935

39.0%

4,789

3.0%

4,790

Florida

49

871,886

601,278

69.0%

135,794

83,067

61.2%

42,868

31.6%

9,859

7.3%

4,984

Georgia

96

1,901,487

1,302,763

68.5%

112,902

74,648

66.1%

37,814

33.5%

440

0.4%

0

Louisiana

42

1,344,672

919,208

68.4%

108,474

73,336

67.6%

34,808

32.1%

330

0.3%

0

Mississippi

48

882,725

597,594

67.7%

52,671

42,138

80.0%

9,176

17.4%

1,357

2.6%

1,367

North Carolina

88

2,245,813

1,658,847

73.9%

504,516

276,094

54.7%

228,422

45.3%

0

0.0%

0

South Carolina

14

682,914

440,974

64.6%

31,717

30,618

96.5%

995

3.1%

104

0.3%

0

2,275

0.5%

0

81,272 16.9%

8,108

Tennessee Texas Virginia Southern Subtotals White Subtotals

93

2,281,000

1,869,727

82.0%

423,220

202,145

47.8%

218,800

51.7%

243

4,556,090

3,867,551

84.9%

479,724

285,275

59.5%

113,177

23.6%

97

2,000,292

1,483,286

74.2%

211,785

127,562

60.2%

82,470

38.9%

883

19,993,598

15,199,842

76.0%

2,428,443

1,418,507

58.4%

1,196

27,411,807

22,028,411

80.4%

5,706,647

2,889,465

50.6%

1,753

0.8%

0

904,827

37.3% 105,109

4.3%

21,424

2,650,833

46.5% 166,349

2.9%

57,405

Other votes include the vote for parties to the right, if any are indicated. Other votes are calculated as the votes remaining after Democratic Party votes and Republican Party votes are subtracted from Total Votes. Democratic Party votes and Republican Party votes are calculated from the party percentages of the Total Vote, where each is given in the data file to one decimal place among up to six different parties. Therefore, the resulting party votes are subject to error based on the percision of the vote percentages and may not always sum to the total number of votes. *

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), retrieved December 26, 2002, and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File] http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), retrieved January 20, 2006. Calculations by the authors.

814

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A16.9  The Voting Behavior of the Maximum Majority African American County by State in the South Presidential Election of 1868 County, State

Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

1860 Census Total Population

African American Population

%

Marengo, Alabama

4,672

1,878

40.2%

2,794

59.8%

0

0.0%

31,171

24,410

78.3%

Chicot, Arkansas

1,068

148

13.9%

920

86.1%

0

0.0%

9,234

7,512

81.4%

Camden, Georgia

550

110

20.0%

440

80.0%

0

0.0%

5,420

4,144

76.5%

Concordia, Louisiana

1,755

202

11.5%

1,553

88.5%

0

0.0%

13,805

12,563

91.0%

Warren, North Carolina

3,361

1,052

31.3%

2,309

68.7%

0

0.0%

15,726

10,803

68.7%

Georgetown, South Carolina

2,945

265

9.0%

2,680

91.0%

0

0.0%

21,305

18,292

85.9%

Fayette, Tennessee

1,493

672

45.0%

821

55.0%

0

0.0%

24,327

15,501

63.7%

1868 Election    Totals

15,844

4,327

27.3%

11,517

72.7%

0

0.0%

120,988

93,225

77.1%

              Means

2,263

618

27.3%

1,645

72.7%

0

0.0%

17,284

13,318

77.1%

Presidential Election of 1872 County, State

Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

1860 Census Total Population

African American Population

%

Lowndes, Alabama

4,864

905

18.6%

3,959

81.4%

0

0.0%

25,719

20,633

80.2%

Chicot, Arkansas

1,932

274

14.2%

1,658

85.8%

0

0.0%

7,214

5,393

74.8%

Leon, Florida

3,071

673

21.9%

2,398

78.1%

0

0.0%

15,236

12,341

81.0%

Dougherty, Georgia

2,195

944

43.0%

1,251

57.0%

0

0.0%

11,517

9,424

81.8%

Concordia, Louisiana

1,857

167

9.0%

1,690

91.0%

0

0.0%

9,977

9,257

92.8%

Issaquena, Mississippi

1,623

128

7.9%

1,495

92.1%

0

0.0%

6,887

6,146

89.2%

Warren, North Carolina

3,463

1,008

29.1%

2,455

70.9%

0

0.0%

17,768

12,492

70.3%

Beaufort, South Carolina

5,003

495

9.9%

4,508

90.1%

0

0.0%

34,359

29,050

84.5%

Fayette, Tennessee

4,767

1,425

29.9%

3,342

70.1%

0

0.0%

26,145

16,987

65.0%

837

109

13.0%

728

87.0%

0

0.0%

3,426

2,910

84.9%

Wharton, Texas Nottoway, Virginia

1,533

425

27.7%

1,108

72.3%

0

0.0%

9,291

7,050

75.9%

1872 Election    Totals

31,145

6,553

21.0%

24,592

79.0%

0

0.0%

167,539

131,683

78.6%

              Means

2,831

596

21.0%

2,236

79.0%

0

0.0%

15,231

11,971

78.6%

Presidential Election of 1876 County, State

Total Votes

Lowndes, Alabama

5,461

Chicot, Arkansas Leon, Florida

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

1,311

24.0%

4,150

76.0%

0

0.0%

2,000

488

24.4%

1,512

75.6%

0

0.0%

4,036

1,005

24.9%

3,031

75.1%

0

0.0%

942

528

56.1%

414

43.9%

0

0.0%

Concordia, Louisiana

2,832

309

10.9%

2,523

89.1%

0

Issaquena, Mississippi

1,697

787

46.4%

910

53.6%

0

Warren, North Carolina

3,819

1,321

34.6%

2,498

65.4%

Beaufort, South Carolina

9,803

2,255

23.0%

7,548

77.0%

Fayette, Tennessee

5,295

2,579

48.7%

2,716

Dougherty, Georgia

Wharton, Texas

1870 Census Total Population 25,719

African American Population

%

20,633

80.2%

7,214

5,393

74.8%

15,236

12,341

81.0%

11,517

9,424

81.8%

0.0%

9,977

9,257

92.8%

0.0%

6,887

6,146

89.2%

0

0.0%

17,768

12,492

70.3%

0

0.0%

34,359

29,050

84.5%

51.3%

0

0.0%

26,145

16,987

65.0%

443

39

8.8%

404

91.2%

0

0.0%

3,426

2,910

84.9%

1,291

648

50.2%

643

49.8%

0

0.0%

9,291

7,050

75.9%

1876 Election    Totals

37,619

11,270

30.0%

26,349

70.0%

0

0.0%

167,539

131,683

78.6%

              Means

3,420

1,025

30.0%

2,395

70.0%

0

0.0%

15,231

11,971

78.6%

Nottoway, Virginia



Appendices 815 Presidential Election of 1880 County, State

Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

1880 Census Total Population

Greene, Alabama

2,406

943

39.2%

1,463

60.8%

0

0.0%

21,931

Chicot, Arkansas

1,832

266

14.5%

1,552

84.7%

14

0.8%

Leon, Florida

3,817

985

25.8%

2,832

74.2%

0

0.0%

Dougherty, Georgia

1,398

368

26.3%

1,030

73.7%

0

East Carroll, Louisiana

1,512

209

13.8%

1,303

86.2%

Issaquena, Mississippi

392

57

14.5%

335

85.5%

Warren, North Carolina

4,048

1,364

33.7%

2,684

Beaufort, South Carolina

6,419

385

6.0%

Fayette, Tennessee

5,329

2,249

42.2%

Fort Bend, Texas

1,182

264

Nottoway, Virginia

1,448

129

1880 Election    Totals

29,783

              Means

2,708

African American Population

%

18,165

82.8%

10,117

8,495

84.0%

19,662

16,840

85.6%

0.0%

12,622

10,670

84.5%

0

0.0%

12,134

11,090

91.4%

0

0.0%

10,004

9,174

91.7%

66.3%

0

0.0%

22,619

16,233

71.8%

6,034

94.0%

0

0.0%

30,176

27,732

91.9%

3,080

57.8%

0

0.0%

31,871

22,238

69.8%

22.3%

918

77.7%

0

0.0%

9,380

7,508

80.0%

8.9%

1,043

72.0%

276

19.1%

11,156

8,144

73.0%

7,219

24.2%

22,274

74.8%

290

1.0%

191,672

156,289

81.5%

656

24.2%

2,025

74.8%

26

1.0%

17,425

14,208

81.5%

Presidential Election of 1884 County, State

Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

Greene, Alabama

1,929

625

Chicot, Arkansas

1,294

Leon, Florida

3,029

%

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

1880 Census Total Population

32.4%

1,304

67.6%

0

0.0%

21,931

123

9.5%

1,171

90.5%

0

0.0%

833

27.5%

2,196

72.5%

0

0.0%

417

317

76.0%

100

24.0%

0

East Carroll, Louisiana

1,421

190

13.4%

1,229

86.5%

Issaquena, Mississippi

1,290

195

15.1%

1,095

84.9%

Warren, North Carolina

3,286

1,144

34.8%

2,142

Beaufort, South Carolina

2,895

252

8.7%

2,643

Fayette, Tennessee

4,366

1,729

39.6%

Fort Bend, Texas

1,905

316

Nottoway, Virginia

1,731

454

1884 Election    Totals

23,563

              Means

2,142

Dougherty, Georgia

African American Population

%

18,165

82.8%

10,117

8,495

84.0%

19,662

16,840

85.6%

0.0%

12,622

10,670

84.5%

2

0.1%

12,134

11,090

91.4%

0

0.0%

10,004

9,174

91.7%

65.2%

0

0.0%

22,619

16,233

71.8%

91.3%

0

0.0%

30,176

27,732

91.9%

2,637

60.4%

0

0.0%

31,871

22,238

69.8%

16.6%

1,589

83.4%

0

0.0%

9,380

7,508

80.0%

26.2%

1,277

73.8%

0

0.0%

11,156

8,144

73.0%

6,178

26.2%

17,383

73.8%

2

0.0%

191,672

156,289

81.5%

562

26.2%

1,580

73.8%

0

0.0%

17,425

14,208

81.5%

Presidential Election of 1888 County, State

Total Votes

Greene, Alabama

2,181

Chicot, Arkansas Leon, Florida

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

1880 Census Total Population

1,400

64.2%

779

35.7%

2

0.1%

21,931

1,832

211

11.5%

1,621

88.5%

0

0.0%

1,502

1,314

87.5%

188

12.5%

0

0.0%

Dougherty, Georgia

1,042

815

78.2%

222

21.3%

5

East Carroll, Louisiana

2,370

1,996

84.2%

374

15.8%

Issaquena, Mississippi

1,055

487

46.2%

568

53.8%

Warren, North Carolina

1,428

548

38.4%

880

Beaufort, South Carolina

2,278

508

22.3%

Fayette, Tennessee

4,793

3,815

79.6%

Fort Bend, Texas

2,519

552

21.9%

Nottoway, Virginia

African American Population

%

18,165

82.8%

10,117

8,495

84.0%

19,662

16,840

85.6%

0.5%

12,622

10,670

84.5%

0

0.0%

12,134

11,090

91.4%

0

0.0%

10,004

9,174

91.7%

61.6%

0

0.0%

22,619

16,233

71.8%

1,770

77.7%

0

0.0%

30,176

27,732

91.9%

978

20.4%

0

0.0%

31,871

22,238

69.8%

1,967

78.1%

0

0.0%

9,380

7,508

80.0%

1,731

611

35.3%

1,116

64.5%

4

0.2%

11,156

8,144

73.0%

1888 Election    Totals

22,731

12,257

53.9%

10,463

46.0%

11

0.0%

191,672

156,289

81.5%

              Means

2,066

1,114

53.9%

951

46.0%

1

0.0%

17,425

14,208

81.5% (Continued)

816

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A16.9 (Continued) Presidential Election of 1892 County, State

Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

Lowndes, Alabama

4,303

3,950

Chicot, Arkansas

%

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

1890 Census Total Population

African American Population

%

91.8%

349

8.1%

4

0.1%

31,550

26,985

85.5%

1,081

361

33.4%

685

63.4%

35

3.2%

11,419

10,023

87.8%

Leon, Florida

634

634

100.0%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

17,752

14,631

82.4%

Lee, Georgia

725

300

41.4%

422

58.2%

3

0.4%

9,074

7,642

84.2%

Madison, Louisiana

3,450

3,433

99.5%

17

0.5%

0

0.0%

14,135

13,204

93.4%

Issaquena, Mississippi

145

119

82.1%

25

17.2%

1

0.7%

12,318

11,579

94.0%

Warren, North Carolina

3,072

737

24.0%

1,475

48.0%

860

28.0%

19,360

13,480

69.6%

Beaufort, South Carolina Fayette, Tennessee Fort Bend, Texas Charles City, Virginia

443

175

39.5%

268

60.5%

0

0.0%

34,119

31,421

92.1%

3,022

2,170

71.8%

659

21.8%

193

6.4%

28,878

20,492

71.0%

955

390

40.8%

524

54.9%

41

4.3%

10,586

8,981

84.8%

887

337

38.0%

541

61.0%

9

1.0%

5,066

3,717

73.4%

1892 Election    Totals

18,717

12,606

67.4%

4,965

26.5%

1,146

6.1%

194,257

162,155

83.5%

              Means

1,702

1,146

67.4%

451

26.5%

104

6.1%

17,660

14,741

83.5%

Presidential Election of 1896 County, State Lowndes, Alabama Chicot, Arkansas

Total Votes 3,689

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

1890 Census Total Population

African American Population

%

2,973

80.6%

642

17.4%

74

2.0%

31,550

26,985

85.5%

760

418

55.0%

258

33.9%

84

11.1%

11,419

10,023

87.8%

Leon, Florida

1,592

1,270

79.8%

247

15.5%

75

4.7%

17,752

14,631

82.4%

Lee, Georgia

448

285

63.6%

163

36.4%

0

0.0%

9,074

7,642

84.2%

Madison, Louisiana

1,356

1,248

92.0%

96

7.1%

12

0.9%

14,135

13,204

93.4%

Issaquena, Mississippi

128

97

75.8%

29

22.7%

2

1.6%

12,318

11,579

94.0%

Warren, North Carolina

3,393

1,215

35.8%

2,175

64.1%

3

0.1%

19,360

13,480

69.6%

Beaufort, South Carolina

733

289

39.4%

444

60.6%

0

0.0%

34,119

31,421

92.1%

Fayette, Tennessee

3,720

2,355

63.3%

1,317

35.4%

48

1.3%

28,878

20,492

71.0%

Fort Bend, Texas

3,131

849

27.1%

2,229

71.2%

53

1.7%

10,586

8,981

84.8%

Charles City, Virginia

646

272

42.1%

362

56.0%

12

1.9%

5,066

3,717

73.4%

1896 Election    Totals

19,596

11,271

57.5%

7,962

40.6%

363

1.9%

194,257

162,155

83.5%

              Means

1,781

1,025

57.5%

724

40.6%

33

1.9%

17,660

14,741

83.5%

Presidential Election of 1900 County, State Lowndes, Alabama Chicot, Arkansas

Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

1900 Census Total Population

African American Population

%

3,313

1,769

53.4%

1,524

46.0%

20

0.6%

35,651

30,889

86.6%

713

269

37.7%

430

60.3%

14

2.0%

14,528

12,650

87.1%

Leon, Florida

1,159

932

80.4%

160

13.8%

67

5.8%

19,887

15,999

80.4%

Lee, Georgia

423

269

63.6%

149

35.2%

5

1.2%

10,344

8,837

85.4%

Tensas, Louisiana

217

212

97.7%

5

2.3%

0

0.0%

19,070

17,839

93.5%

Issaquena, Mississippi

103

85

82.5%

17

16.5%

1

1.0%

10,400

9,771

94.0%

Warren, North Carolina

2,910

1,574

54.1%

1,336

45.9%

0

0.0%

19,151

13,069

68.2%

Beaufort, South Carolina

763

378

49.5%

385

50.5%

0

0.0%

35,495

32,137

90.5%

Fayette, Tennessee

3,200

2,282

71.3%

886

27.7%

32

1.0%

29,701

21,682

73.0%

Harrison, Texas

2,387

1,234

51.7%

1,122

47.0%

31

1.3%

31,878

21,697

68.1%

Cumberland, Virginia

743

537

72.3%

205

27.6%

1

0.1%

8,996

6,205

69.0%

1900 Election    Totals

15,931

9,541

59.9%

6,219

39.0%

171

1.1%

235,101

190,775

81.1%

              Means

1,448

867

59.9%

565

39.0%

16

1.1%

21,373

17,343

81.1%



Appendices 817 Presidential Election of 1904 County, State Lowndes, Alabama Chicot, Arkansas

Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

1900 Census Total Population

African American Population

%

732

697

95.2%

32

4.4%

3

0.4%

35,651

30,889

86.6%

1,045

549

52.5%

496

47.5%

0

0.0%

14,528

12,650

87.1%

Leon, Florida

734

644

87.7%

84

11.4%

6

0.8%

19,887

15,999

80.4%

Lee, Georgia

382

297

77.7%

73

19.1%

12

3.1%

10,344

8,837

85.4%

Tensas, Louisiana

209

203

97.1%

6

2.9%

0

0.0%

19,070

17,839

93.5%

Issaquena, Mississippi

119

96

80.7%

21

17.6%

2

1.7%

10,400

9,771

94.0%

Warren, North Carolina

1,242

1,059

85.3%

165

13.3%

18

1.4%

19,151

13,069

68.2%

734

415

56.5%

319

43.5%

0

0.0%

35,495

32,137

90.5%

2,089

2,010

96.2%

63

3.0%

16

0.8%

29,701

21,682

73.0%

776

273

35.2%

486

62.6%

17

2.2%

10,754

7,147

66.5%

Beaufort, South Carolina Fayette, Tennessee Marion, Texas Charles City, Virginia

208

129

62.0%

78

37.5%

1

0.5%

5,040

3,696

73.3%

1904 Election    Totals

8,270

6,372

77.0%

1,823

22.0%

75

0.9%

210,021

173,716

82.7%

              Means

752

579

77.0%

166

22.0%

7

0.9%

19,093

15,792

82.7%

Presidential Election of 1908 County, State Lowndes, Alabama Chicot, Arkansas

Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

672

633

94.2%

36

5.4%

Other Parties* Votes 3

%

1900 Census Total Population

African American Population

%

0.4%

35,651

30,889

86.6%

1,087

438

40.3%

644

59.2%

5

0.5%

14,528

12,650

87.1%

Leon, Florida

958

698

72.9%

143

14.9%

117

12.2%

19,887

15,999

80.4%

Lee, Georgia

596

337

56.5%

252

42.3%

7

1.2%

10,344

8,837

85.4%

Tensas, Louisiana

307

300

97.7%

7

2.3%

0

0.0%

19,070

17,839

93.5%

Issaquena, Mississippi

96

85

88.5%

11

11.5%

0

0.0%

10,400

9,771

94.0%

Warren, North Carolina

1,362

1,066

78.3%

296

21.7%

0

0.0%

19,151

13,069

68.2%

794

522

65.7%

272

34.3%

0

0.0%

35,495

32,137

90.5%

Fayette, Tennessee

1,870

1,849

98.9%

4

0.2%

17

0.9%

29,701

21,682

73.0%

Harrison, Texas

1,461

1,143

78.2%

289

19.8%

29

2.0%

31,878

21,697

68.1%

Beaufort, South Carolina

Charles City, Virginia

183

99

54.1%

84

45.9%

0

0.0%

5,040

3,696

73.3%

1908 Election    Totals

9,386

7,170

76.4%

2,038

21.7%

178

1.9%

231,145

188,266

81.4%

              Means

853

652

76.4%

185

21.7%

16

1.9%

21,013

17,115

81.4%

Presidential Election of 1912 County, State

Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

1910 Census Total Population

African American Population

%

Lowndes, Alabama

601

583

97.0%

4

0.7%

14

2.3%

31,894

28,125

88.2%

Crittenden, Arkansas

797

423

53.1%

89

11.2%

285

35.8%

22,447

19,000

84.6%

Jefferson, Florida

556

459

82.6%

47

8.5%

50

9.0%

17,210

13,114

76.2%

Lee, Georgia

225

210

93.3%

9

4.0%

6

2.7%

11,679

9,992

85.6%

Tensas, Louisiana

240

220

91.7%

1

0.4%

19

7.9%

17,060

15,613

91.5%

Issaquena, Mississippi

129

99

76.7%

3

2.3%

27

20.9%

10,560

9,946

94.2%

Warren, North Carolina

1,145

987

86.2%

112

9.8%

46

4.0%

20,266

13,207

65.2%

Beaufort, South Carolina

576

464

80.6%

50

8.7%

62

10.8%

30,355

26,376

86.9%

Fayette, Tennessee

983

829

84.3%

59

6.0%

95

9.7%

30,257

22,702

75.0%

Marion, Texas

460

339

73.7%

85

18.5%

36

7.8%

10,472

6,725

64.2%

Charles City, Virginia

181

121

66.9%

37

20.4%

23

12.7%

5,253

3,765

71.7%

1912 Election    Totals

5,893

4,734

80.3%

496

8.4%

663

11.3%

207,453

168,565

81.3%

              Means

536

430

80.3%

45

8.4%

60

11.3%

18,859

15,324

81.3% (Continued)

818

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A16.9 (Continued) Presidential Election of 1916 County, State

Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

1910 Census Total Population

African American Population

%

Lowndes, Alabama

551

540

98.0%

9

1.6%

2

0.4%

31,894

28,125

88.2%

Crittenden, Arkansas

660

562

85.2%

89

13.5%

9

1.4%

22,447

19,000

84.6%

Jefferson, Florida

759

646

85.1%

104

13.7%

9

1.2%

17,210

13,114

76.2%

Lee, Georgia

323

316

97.8%

3

0.9%

4

1.2%

11,679

9,992

85.6%

Tensas, Louisiana

211

204

96.7%

5

2.4%

2

0.9%

17,060

15,613

91.5%

Issaquena, Mississippi

105

94

89.5%

8

7.6%

3

2.9%

10,560

9,946

94.2%

Warren, North Carolina

1,444

1,217

84.3%

227

15.7%

0

0.0%

20,266

13,207

65.2%

485

376

77.5%

105

21.6%

4

0.8%

30,355

26,376

86.9%

1,930

1,812

93.9%

116

6.0%

2

0.1%

30,257

22,702

75.0%

Marion, Texas

614

445

72.5%

166

27.0%

3

0.5%

10,472

6,725

64.2%

Charles City, Virginia

197

139

70.6%

57

28.9%

1

0.5%

5,253

3,765

71.7%

1916 Election    Totals

7,279

6,351

87.3%

889

12.2%

39

0.5%

207,453

168,565

81.3%

              Means

662

577

87.3%

81

12.2%

4

0.5%

18,859

15,324

81.3%

Beaufort, South Carolina Fayette, Tennessee

Presidential Election of 1920 County, State Lowndes, Alabama

Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

1920 Census Total Population

African American Population

%

733

727

99.2%

6

0.8%

0

0.0%

25,406

22,016

86.7%

Crittenden, Arkansas

1,080

905

83.8%

167

15.5%

8

0.7%

29,309

24,650

84.1%

Jefferson, Florida

1,046

754

72.1%

238

22.8%

54

5.2%

14,502

10,521

72.5%

Lee, Georgia

270

251

93.0%

19

7.0%

0

0.0%

10,904

8,977

82.3%

East Carroll, Louisiana

255

247

96.9%

8

3.1%

0

0.0%

11,231

9,701

86.4%

Issaquena, Mississippi

96

83

86.5%

13

13.5%

0

0.0%

7,618

6,915

90.8%

Warren, North Carolina

2,160

1,864

86.3%

296

13.7%

0

0.0%

21,593

13,821

64.0%

Beaufort, South Carolina

414

265

64.0%

15

3.6%

134

32.4%

22,269

17,454

78.4%

Fayette, Tennessee

2,640

2,294

86.9%

346

13.1%

0

0.0%

31,499

23,526

74.7%

Harrison, Texas

3,181

2,134

67.1%

379

11.9%

668

21.0%

43,565

26,858

61.7%

202

119

58.9%

82

40.6%

1

0.5%

4,793

3,603

75.2%

1920 Election    Totals

12,077

9,643

79.8%

1,569

13.0%

865

7.2%

222,689

168,042

75.5%

              Means

1,098

877

79.8%

143

13.0%

79

7.2%

20,244

15,277

75.5%

1868–1920 Overall Totals

257,834

115,492

44.8%

138,539

53.7%

3,803

1.5%

2,733,458

2,207,697

80.8%

1868–1920 Overall Means

1,719

770

44.8%

924

53.7%

25

1.5%

18,223

14,718

80.8%

Charles City, Virginia

Other votes are calculated as the votes remaining after Democratic Party votes and Republican Party votes are subtracted from Total Votes. Democratic Party votes and Republican Party votes are calculated from the party percentages of the Total Vote, where each is given in the data file to one decimal place among up to six different parties. Therefore, the resulting party votes are subject to error based on the percision of the vote percentages and may not always sum to the total number of votes. *

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), retrieved December 26, 2002, Michael R. Haines, and ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File] http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), retrieved January 20, 2006. Calculations by the authors.



Appendices 819 Appendix Table A16.10  The Voting Behavior of the Maximum Majority African American County by State in the South Presidential Election of 1868 County, State

Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

1860 Census Total Population

White Population

%

Winston/Hancock, Alabama

333

39

11.7%

294

88.3%

0

0.0%

3,576

3,454

96.6%

Newton, Arkansas

301

78

25.9%

223

74.1%

0

0.0%

3,393

3,369

99.3%

Gilmer, Georgia

850

444

52.2%

406

47.8%

0

0.0%

6,724

6,554

97.5%

25,846

24,657

95.4%

1,189

4.6%

0

0.0%

174,491

149,068

85.4%

651

348

53.5%

303

46.5%

0

0.0%

4,957

4,772

96.3%

1,430

1,107

77.4%

323

22.6%

0

0.0%

19,639

15,335

78.1%

223

12

5.4%

211

94.6%

0

0.0%

3,519

3,446

97.9%

1868 Election    Totals

29,634

26,685

90.0%

2,949

10.0%

0

0.0%

216,299

185,998

86.0%

              Means

4,233

3,812

90.0%

421

10.0%

0

0.0%

30,900

26,571

86.0%

Orleans, Louisiana Watauga, North Carolina Pickens, South Carolina Scott, Tennessee

Presidential Election of 1872 County, State

Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

1870 Census Total Population

White Population

%

Winston/Hancock, Alabama

538

105

19.5%

433

80.5%

0

0.0%

4,155

4,134

99.5%

Newton, Arkansas

496

172

34.7%

324

65.3%

0

0.0%

4,374

4,365

99.8%

Manatee, Florida

277

198

71.5%

79

28.5%

0

0.0%

1,931

1,843

95.4%

Gilmer, Georgia

514

214

41.6%

300

58.4%

0

0.0%

6,644

6,527

98.2%

Winn, Louisiana

689

575

83.5%

114

16.5%

0

0.0%

4,954

4,045

81.7%

Jones, Mississippi

328

256

78.0%

72

22.0%

0

0.0%

3,313

3,005

90.7%

Cherokee, North Carolina

658

284

43.2%

372

56.5%

2

0.3%

8,080

7,779

96.3%

Oconee, South Carolina

920

393

42.7%

511

55.5%

16

1.7%

10,536

8,114

77.0%

Scott, Tennessee

368

7

1.9%

361

98.1%

0

0.0%

4,054

4,015

99.0%

99

38

38.4%

61

61.6%

0

0.0%

1,488

1,488

100.0%

Zapata, Texas Buchanan, Virginia

267

214

80.1%

53

19.9%

0

0.0%

3,777

3,730

98.8%

1872 Election    Totals

5,154

2,456

47.7%

2,680

52.0%

18

0.3%

53,306

49,045

92.0%

              Means

469

223

47.7%

244

52.0%

2

0.3%

4,846

4,459

92.0%

Presidential Election of 1876 County, State

Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

1870 Census Total Population

White Population

%

Winston/Hancock, Alabama

691

237

34.3%

454

65.7%

0

0.0%

4,155

4,134

99.5%

Newton, Arkansas

597

268

44.9%

329

55.1%

0

0.0%

4,374

4,365

99.8%

Brevard/St Lucie, Florida

169

111

65.7%

58

34.3%

0

0.0%

1,216

1,197

98.4%

Gilmer, Georgia

725

561

77.4%

164

22.6%

0

0.0%

6,644

6,527

98.2%

Winn, Louisiana

626

550

87.9%

76

12.1%

0

0.0%

4,954

4,045

81.7%

Jones, Mississippi

356

342

96.1%

14

3.9%

0

0.0%

3,313

3,005

90.7%

Cherokee, North Carolina

1,212

680

56.1%

532

43.9%

0

0.0%

8,080

7,779

96.3%

Oconee, South Carolina

2,636

2,098

79.6%

538

20.4%

0

0.0%

10,536

8,114

77.0%

Scott, Tennessee

377

69

18.3%

308

81.7%

0

0.0%

4,054

4,015

99.0%

Zapata, Texas

110

46

41.8%

64

58.2%

0

0.0%

1,488

1,488

100.0%

Buchanan, Virginia

1,332

1,329

99.8%

3

0.2%

0

0.0%

3,777

3,730

98.8%

1876 Election    Totals

8,831

6,291

71.2%

2,540

28.8%

0

0.0%

52,591

48,399

92.0%

              Means

803

572

71.2%

231

28.8%

0

0.0%

4,781

4,400

92.0% (Continued)

820

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A16.10 (Continued) Presidential Election of 1880 County, State

Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

1880 Census Total Population

White Population

%

Winston/Hancock, Alabama

275

149

54.2%

126

45.8%

0

0.0%

4,253

4,236

99.6%

Newton, Arkansas

718

320

44.6%

340

47.4%

58

8.1%

6,120

6,115

99.9%

Manatee, Florida

766

604

78.9%

162

21.1%

0

0.0%

3,544

3,409

96.2%

Gilmer, Georgia

719

494

68.7%

225

31.3%

0

0.0%

8,386

8,260

98.5%

Vernon, Louisiana

372

372

100.0%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

5,160

4,783

92.7%

Jones, Mississippi

295

295

100.0%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

3,828

3,469

90.6%

Swain, North Carolina

409

308

75.3%

101

24.7%

0

0.0%

3,784

3,675

97.1%

Pickens, South Carolina

2,173

1,682

77.4%

491

22.6%

0

0.0%

14,389

10,673

74.2%

Cumberland, Tennessee

678

287

42.3%

371

54.7%

20

2.9%

4,538

4,496

99.1%

El Paso, Texas

342

163

47.7%

179

52.3%

0

0.0%

1,902

1,901

99.9%

Buchanan, Virginia

305

110

36.1%

33

10.8%

162

53.1%

5,694

5,661

99.4%

1880 Election    Totals

7,052

4,784

67.8%

2,028

28.8%

240

3.4%

61,598

56,678

92.0%

              Means

641

435

67.8%

184

28.8%

22

3.4%

5,600

5,153

92.0%

Presidential Election of 1884 County, State

Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

1880 Census Total Population

White Population

%

Winston/Hancock, Alabama

315

131

41.6%

184

58.4%

0

0.0%

4,253

4,236

99.6%

Newton, Arkansas

582

237

40.7%

345

59.3%

0

0.0%

6,120

6,115

99.9%

Manatee, Florida

886

670

75.6%

216

24.4%

0

0.0%

3,544

3,409

96.2%

Gilmer, Georgia

520

373

71.7%

147

28.3%

0

0.0%

8,386

8,260

98.5%

Vernon, Louisiana

472

472

100.0%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

5,160

4,783

92.7%

Jones, Mississippi

412

394

95.6%

18

4.4%

0

0.0%

3,828

3,469

90.6%

Graham, North Carolina

420

276

65.7%

144

34.3%

0

0.0%

2,335

2,312

99.0%

Pickens, South Carolina

1,424

1,320

92.7%

104

7.3%

0

0.0%

14,389

10,673

74.2%

Cumberland, Tennessee

803

312

38.9%

488

60.8%

3

0.4%

4,538

4,496

99.1%

Donley, Texas

137

125

91.2%

12

8.8%

0

0.0%

160

160

100.0%

Buchanan, Virginia

530

287

54.2%

243

45.8%

0

0.0%

5,694

5,661

99.4%

1884 Election    Totals

6,501

4,597

70.7%

1,901

29.2%

3

0.0%

58,407

53,574

91.7%

              Means

591

418

70.7%

173

29.2%

0

0.0%

5,310

4,870

91.7%

Presidential Election of 1888 County, State

Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

1880 Census Total Population

White Population

%

Winston/Hancock, Alabama

543

220

40.5%

323

59.5%

0

0.0%

4,253

4,236

99.6%

Newton, Arkansas

932

367

39.4%

559

60.0%

6

0.6%

6,120

6,115

99.9%

Manatee, Florida

595

422

70.9%

172

28.9%

1

0.2%

3,544

3,409

96.2%

1,121

556

49.6%

543

48.4%

22

2.0%

8,386

8,260

98.5%

Vernon, Louisiana

588

588

100.0%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

5,160

4,783

92.7%

Jones, Mississippi

671

671

100.0%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

3,828

3,469

90.6%

Graham, North Carolina

479

284

59.3%

195

40.7%

0

0.0%

2,335

2,312

99.0%

Pickens, South Carolina

953

858

90.0%

95

10.0%

0

0.0%

14,389

10,673

74.2%

Cumberland, Tennessee

1,054

422

40.0%

632

60.0%

0

0.0%

4,538

4,496

99.1%

441

247

56.0%

24

5.4%

170

38.5%

287

287

100.0%

Gilmer, Georgia

Oldham, Texas Buchanan, Virginia

919

492

53.5%

427

46.5%

0

0.0%

5,694

5,661

99.4%

1888 Election    Totals

8,296

5,127

61.8%

2,970

35.8%

199

2.4%

58,534

53,701

91.7%

              Means

754

466

61.8%

270

35.8%

18

2.4%

5,321

4,882

91.7%



Appendices 821 Presidential Election of 1892 County, State

Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

1890 Census Total Population

White Population

%

Cullman, Alabama

2,103

2,088

99.3%

6

0.3%

9

0.4%

13,439

13,401

99.7%

Newton, Arkansas

983

458

46.6%

525

53.4%

0

0.0%

9,950

9,944

99.9%

De Soto, Florida

825

566

68.6%

0

0.0%

259

31.4%

4,944

4,805

97.2%

Gilmer, Georgia

1,150

601

52.3%

483

42.0%

66

5.7%

9,074

9,005

99.2%

704

361

51.3%

343

48.7%

0

0.0%

5,903

5,363

90.9%

Vernon, Louisiana Itawamba, Mississippi

1,119

793

70.9%

23

2.1%

303

27.1%

11,708

10,723

91.6%

Graham, North Carolina

601

339

56.4%

262

43.6%

0

0.0%

3,313

3,288

99.2%

Pickens, South Carolina

1,196

603

50.4%

129

10.8%

464

38.8%

16,389

12,253

74.8%

Pickett, Tennessee

833

407

48.9%

427

51.3%

0

0.0%

4,736

4,724

99.7%

Coke, Texas

481

197

41.0%

0

0.0%

284

59.0%

2,059

2,059

100.0%

Buchanan, Virginia

910

472

51.9%

367

40.3%

71

7.8%

5,867

5,843

99.6%

1892 Election    Totals

10,905

6,885

63.1%

2,565

23.5%

1,456

13.4%

87,382

81,408

93.2%

              Means

991

626

63.1%

233

23.5%

132

13.4%

7,944

7,401

93.2%

Presidential Election of 1896 County, State

Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

1890 Census Total Population

White Population

%

Cullman, Alabama

1,816

755

41.6%

447

24.6%

614

33.8%

13,439

13,401

99.7%

Newton, Arkansas

1,404

658

46.9%

733

52.2%

13

0.9%

9,950

9,944

99.9%

De Soto, Florida

941

515

54.7%

198

21.0%

228

24.2%

4,944

4,805

97.2%

Gilmer, Georgia

1,209

706

58.4%

503

41.6%

0

0.0%

9,074

9,005

99.2%

737

697

94.6%

35

4.7%

5

0.7%

5,903

5,363

90.9%

1,137

882

77.6%

32

2.8%

223

19.6%

11,708

10,723

91.6%

Vernon, Louisiana Itawamba, Mississippi Graham, North Carolina

710

363

51.1%

347

48.9%

0

0.0%

3,313

3,288

99.2%

Pickens, South Carolina

1,431

1,261

88.1%

169

11.8%

1

0.1%

16,389

12,253

74.8%

Pickett, Tennessee

938

394

42.0%

544

58.0%

0

0.0%

4,736

4,724

99.7%

Zapata, Texas

404

14

3.5%

390

96.5%

0

0.0%

3,562

3,562

100.0%

1,204

509

42.3%

695

57.7%

0

0.0%

5,867

5,843

99.6%

1896 Election    Totals

11,931

6,754

56.6%

4,093

34.3%

1,084

9.1%

88,885

82,911

93.3%

              Means

1,085

614

56.6%

372

34.3%

99

9.1%

8,080

7,537

93.3%

Buchanan, Virginia

Presidential Election of 1900 County, State

Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

Winston/Hancock, Alabama

1,087

539

49.6%

518

47.7%

Baxter, Arkansas

Other Parties* Votes

%

1900 Census Total Population

White Population

%

30

2.8%

9,554

9,547

99.9%

1,015

723

71.2%

287

28.3%

5

0.5%

9,298

9,293

99.9%

Lee, Florida

341

278

81.5%

38

11.1%

25

7.3%

3,071

2,883

93.9%

Gilmer, Georgia

995

502

50.5%

493

49.5%

0

0.0%

10,198

10,121

99.2%

Vernon, Louisiana

783

522

66.7%

261

33.3%

0

0.0%

10,327

9,048

87.6%

Itawamba, Mississippi

959

834

87.0%

110

11.5%

15

1.6%

13,544

12,202

90.1%

Graham, North Carolina

745

358

48.1%

387

51.9%

0

0.0%

4,343

4,317

99.4%

Pickens, South Carolina

993

933

94.0%

60

6.0%

0

0.0%

19,375

14,574

75.2%

859

345

40.2%

514

59.8%

0

0.0%

5,366

5,355

99.8%

4,115

2,206

53.6%

580

14.1%

1,329

32.3%

23,009

23,009

100.0%

Pickett, Tennessee Comanche, Texas Dickenson, Virginia

1,410

728

51.6%

682

48.4%

0

0.0%

7,747

7,747

100.0%

1900 Election    Totals

13,302

7,968

59.9%

3,930

29.5%

1,404

10.6%

115,832

108,096

93.3%

              Means

1,209

724

59.9%

357

29.5%

128

10.6%

10,530

9,827

93.3% (Continued)

822

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A16.10 (Continued) Presidential Election of 1904 County, State Winston/Hancock, Alabama

Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

1,429

602

42.1%

789

55.2%

Baxter, Arkansas

686

426

62.1%

236

34.4%

Lee, Florida

491

264

53.8%

84

17.1%

1,231

550

44.7%

617

50.1%

Vernon, Louisiana

765

469

61.3%

275

Itawamba, Mississippi

908

838

92.3%

56

Graham, North Carolina

763

362

47.4%

Pickens, South Carolina

920

914

99.3%

Gilmer, Georgia

Pickett, Tennessee

Other Parties* Votes 38

%

1900 Census Total Population

White Population

%

2.7%

9,554

9,547

99.9%

24

3.5%

9,298

9,293

99.9%

143

29.1%

3,071

2,883

93.9%

64

5.2%

10,198

10,121

99.2%

35.9%

21

2.7%

10,327

9,048

87.6%

6.2%

14

1.5%

13,544

12,202

90.1%

401

52.6%

0

0.0%

4,343

4,317

99.4%

6

0.7%

0

0.0%

19,375

14,574

75.2%

855

346

40.5%

509

59.5%

0

0.0%

5,366

5,355

99.8%

Comanche, Texas

3,064

1,606

52.4%

294

9.6%

1,164

38.0%

23,009

23,009

100.0%

Dickenson, Virginia

1,262

577

45.7%

684

54.2%

1

0.1%

7,747

7,747

100.0%

1904 Election    Totals

12,374

6,954

56.2%

3,951

31.9%

1,469

11.9%

115,832

108,096

93.3%

              Means

1,125

632

56.2%

359

31.9%

134

11.9%

10,530

9,827

93.3%

Presidential Election of 1908 County, State Winston/Hancock, Alabama

Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

1,404

444

31.6%

949

67.6%

Baxter, Arkansas

976

607

62.2%

300

30.7%

Lee, Florida

533

266

49.9%

72

13.5%

Gilmer, Georgia

886

360

40.6%

519

58.6%

1,139

618

54.3%

273

988

859

86.9%

67

Vernon, Louisiana Itawamba, Mississippi

Other Parties* Votes 11

%

1900 Census Total Population

White Population

%

0.8%

9,554

9,547

99.9%

69

7.1%

9,298

9,293

99.9%

195

36.6%

3,071

2,883

93.9%

7

0.8%

10,198

10,121

99.2%

24.0%

248

21.8%

10,327

9,048

87.6%

6.8%

62

6.3%

13,544

12,202

90.1%

Graham, North Carolina

883

418

47.3%

465

52.7%

0

0.0%

4,343

4,317

99.4%

Pickens, South Carolina

1,287

1,241

96.4%

46

3.6%

0

0.0%

19,375

14,574

75.2%

Pickett, Tennessee

908

391

43.1%

517

56.9%

0

0.0%

5,366

5,355

99.8%

Comanche, Texas

2,841

2,335

82.2%

293

10.3%

213

7.5%

23,009

23,009

100.0%

Dickenson, Virginia

1,222

551

45.1%

671

54.9%

0

0.0%

7,747

7,747

100.0%

1908 Election    Totals

13,067

8,090

61.9%

4,172

31.9%

805

6.2%

115,832

108,096

93.3%

              Means

1,188

735

61.9%

379

31.9%

73

6.2%

10,530

9,827

93.3%

Presidential Election of 1912 County, State

Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

1910 Census Total Population

White Population

%

Winston/Hancock, Alabama

1,700

508

29.9%

292

17.2%

900

52.9%

12,855

12,801

99.6%

Marion, Arkansas

1,003

537

53.5%

160

16.0%

306

30.5%

10,203

10,203

100.0%

Holmes, Florida

672

411

61.2%

52

7.7%

209

31.1%

11,557

10,363

89.7%

Towns, Georgia

529

230

43.5%

89

16.8%

210

39.7%

3,932

3,917

99.6%

Cameron, Louisiana

141

119

84.4%

13

9.2%

9

6.4%

4,288

3,750

87.5%

1,022

908

88.8%

26

2.5%

88

8.6%

14,526

13,328

91.8%

Graham, North Carolina

900

416

46.2%

261

29.0%

223

24.8%

4,749

4,749

100.0%

Pickens, South Carolina

848

815

96.1%

15

1.8%

18

2.1%

25,422

19,992

78.6%

Pickett, Tennessee

901

411

45.6%

355

39.4%

135

15.0%

5,087

5,076

99.8%

Childress, Texas

877

714

81.4%

34

3.9%

129

14.7%

9,538

9,538

100.0%

Itawamba, Mississippi

Buchanan, Virginia

1,138

523

46.0%

223

19.6%

392

34.4%

12,334

12,330

100.0%

1912 Election    Totals

9,731

5,592

57.5%

1,520

15.6%

2,619

26.9%

114,491

106,047

92.6%

              Means

885

508

57.5%

138

15.6%

238

26.9%

10,408

9,641

92.6%



Appendices 823 Presidential Election of 1916 County, State

Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

1910 Census Total Population

White Population

%

Winston/Hancock, Alabama

1,846

725

39.3%

1,108

60.0%

13

0.7%

12,855

12,801

99.6%

Marion, Arkansas

1,233

780

63.3%

274

22.2%

179

14.5%

10,203

10,203

100.0%

Holmes, Florida

1,481

763

51.5%

427

28.8%

291

19.6%

11,557

10,363

89.7%

Towns, Georgia

845

358

42.4%

481

56.9%

6

0.7%

3,932

3,917

99.6%

Cameron, Louisiana

173

163

94.2%

10

5.8%

0

0.0%

4,288

3,750

87.5%

Itawamba, Mississippi

1,592

1,406

88.3%

185

11.6%

1

0.1%

14,526

13,328

91.8%

Graham, North Carolina

936

476

50.9%

460

49.1%

0

0.0%

4,749

4,749

100.0%

Pickens, South Carolina

1,198

1,139

95.1%

7

0.6%

52

4.3%

25,422

19,992

78.6%

919

418

45.5%

501

54.5%

0

0.0%

5,087

5,076

99.8%

Childress, Texas

1,059

948

89.5%

31

2.9%

80

7.6%

9,538

9,538

100.0%

Buchanan, Virginia

1,554

720

46.3%

827

53.2%

7

0.5%

12,334

12,330

100.0%

1916 Election    Totals

12,836

7,896

61.5%

4,311

33.6%

629

4.9%

114,491

106,047

92.6%

              Means

1,167

718

61.5%

392

33.6%

57

4.9%

10,408

9,641

92.6%

Pickett, Tennessee

Presidential Election of 1920 County, State

Total Votes

Democratic Party

Republican Party

Votes

Votes

%

%

Other Parties* Votes

%

1920 Census Total Population

White Population

%

Winston/Hancock, Alabama

3,344

1,037

31.0%

2,307

69.0%

0

0.0%

14,378

14,297

99.4%

Marion, Arkansas

1,297

744

57.4%

371

28.6%

182

14.0%

10,154

10,154

100.0%

Holmes, Florida

1,600

869

54.3%

538

33.6%

193

12.1%

12,850

11,816

92.0%

608

254

41.8%

354

58.2%

0

0.0%

4,204

4,204

100.0%

Dawson, Georgia Livingston, Louisiana

885

666

75.3%

218

24.6%

1

0.1%

11,643

9,976

85.7%

Tishomingo, Mississippi

1,249

841

67.3%

387

31.0%

21

1.7%

15,091

14,181

94.0%

Graham, North Carolina

1,559

644

41.3%

915

58.7%

0

0.0%

4,872

4,867

99.9%

Pickens, South Carolina

1,018

955

93.8%

50

4.9%

13

1.3%

28,329

23,398

82.6%

Unicoi, Tennessee

3,135

545

17.4%

2,583

82.4%

7

0.2%

10,120

10,116

100.0%

Mills, Texas

1,201

669

55.7%

247

20.6%

285

23.7%

9,019

9,019

100.0%

Buchanan, Virginia

1,755

676

38.5%

1,078

61.4%

1

0.1%

15,441

15,441

100.0%

1920 Election    Totals

17,651

7,900

44.8%

9,048

51.3%

703

4.0%

136,101

127,469

93.7%

              Means

1,605

718

44.8%

823

51.3%

64

4.0%

12,373

11,588

93.7%

1868–1920 Overall Totals

167,265

107,979

64.6%

48,658

29.1%

10,629

6.4%

1,389,581

1,275,565

91.8%

1868–1920 Overall Means

1,115

720

64.6%

324

29.1%

71

6.4%

9,264

8,504

91.8%

Other votes are calculated as the votes remaining after Democratic Party votes and Republican Party votes are subtracted from Total Votes. Democratic Party votes and Republican Party votes are calculated from the party percentages of the Total Vote, where each is given in the data file to one decimal place among up to six different parties. Therefore, the resulting party votes are subject to error based on the percision of the vote percentages and may not always sum to the total number of votes. *

Sources: Adapted from Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File] http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR08611 (Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), retrieved December 26, 2002, and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File] http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), retrieved January 20, 2006. Calculations by the authors.

824

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A23.25  Voter Registrations Statistics for 100 Counties in Department of Justice Suit, 1956–1962

Alabama 

State

African American Registered Voters 1956 Registrations County

73

1.9%

Barbour

220

Bullock

6

Dallas Greene

Number

Percent of Eligible

Net Difference Number -1

Percent of Eligible

72

2.0%

3.5%

600

10.9%

380

7.4%

0.1%

1,075

26.3%

1,069

26.2%

275

1.7%

242

1.7%

-33

0.0%

157

2.8%

300

6.4%

143

3.6%

Jefferson

8,386

7.1%

13,500

11.7%

5,114

4.6%

Lowndes

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

1,100

8.5%

3,240

28.5%

2,140

20.0%

140

2.6%

650

13.9%

510

11.3%

Macon

Montgomery

0.1%

2,176

6.5%

5,704

17.4%

3,528

10.9%

Pickens

763

15.8%

553

13.4%

-210

-2.4%

Sumter

295

3.9%

475

7.4%

180

3.5%

Wilcox

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

13,591

5.8%

26,411

12.1%

12,820

6.3%

64

7.5%

133

15.8%

69

8.3%

Gadsden

5

0.04%

373

3.0%

368

3.0%

Lafayette

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

Liberty

1

0.4%

0

0.0%

-1

-0.4%

Union

6

0.4%

6

0.6%

0

0.2%

76

0.5%

512

3.5%

436

3.0%

0

0.0%

300

25.0%

300

25.0%

39

2.7%

45

3.4%

6

0.7%

8

0.5%

17

0.9%

9

0.4%

2,130

16.1%

2,858

19.5%

728

3.4%

300

7.7%

261

8.8%

-39

1.1%

11

0.9%

31

2.6%

20

1.7%

1,000

55.4%

1,301

70.0%

301

14.6%

29

1.4%

150

6.0%

121

4.6%

Lincoln

3

0.2%

3

20.0%

0

19.8%

Marion

126

7.0%

55

4.0%

-71

-3.0%

6

0.5%

6

70.0%

0

69.5%

Seminole

22

1.6%

29

2.5%

7

0.9%

Terrell

48

1.1%

133

3.4%

85

2.3%

Treulten

18

1.8%

45

4.7%

27

2.9%

Webster

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

GA Total

3,740

9.6%

5,234

14.3%

1,494

4.7%

AL Total Flagler

Florida 

Percent of Eligible

Autauga

Monroe

FL Total Baker Bleckley Chatahoochie Dougherty Early Fayette Gwinnett Georgia  

Number

1962 Registrations

Lee

Miller



Appendices 825

State

African American Registered Voters (continued) 1956 Registrations County

Number

Percent of Eligible

Number

Percent of Eligible

35

0.8%

500

12.5%

465

11.7%

Bossier

516

7.5%

542

7.9%

26

0.4%

3,615

9.0%

4,420

10.4%

805

1.4%

17

0.3%

34

0.7%

17

0.4%

0

0.0%

89

2.3%

89

2.3%

1,319

21.5%

85

1.4%

-1,234

-20.1%

167

6.8%

499

19.3%

332

12.5%

Madison

0

0.0%

211

4.3%

211

4.3%

Ouachita

956

6.1%

1,038

6.2%

82

0.1%

46

1.6%

94

3.2%

48

1.6%

Red River

1,360

55.0%

36

1.8%

-1,324

-53.2%

St. Helena

1,614

77.5%

224

10.8%

-1,390

-66.7%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

1,776

25.8%

229

3.2%

-1,547

-22.6%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

Claiborne East Carroll East Feliciana Jackson Louisiana

Percent of Eligible

Net Difference

Bienville

Caddo

Plaquemines

Tensas Webster West Feliciana

11,421

10.03%

8,001

6.9%

-3,420

-3.1%

Amite

1

0.03%

1

0.03%

0

0.0%

Attala

34

0.7%

61

1.5%

27

0.8%

Bolivar

511

2.8%

612

4.1%

101

1.3%

Carroll

0

0.0%

3

0.1%

3

0.1%

Chickasaw

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

Clarke

0

0.0%

1

0.04%

1

0.0%

Clay

12

0.3%

10

0.2%

-2

-0.1%

Copiah

16

0.2%

20

0.3%

4

0.1%

De Soto

0

0.0%

1

0.0%

1

0.0%

Forrest

12

0.2%

22

0.3%

10

0.1%

Grenada

39

0.9%

135

3.2%

96

2.3%

Holmes

45

0.4%

41

0.5%

-4

0.1%

Humphreys

37

0.6%

2

0.04%

-35

-0.6%

Issaquena

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

Jasper

9

0.2%

6

0.2%

-3

0.0%

LA Total

Mississippi

Number

1962 Registrations

Jefferson

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

1,246

35.6%

76

2.5%

-1,170

-33.1%

LeFlore

400

2.6%

258

2.0%

-142

-0.6%

Lowndes

151

1.7%

95

1.2%

-56

-0.5%

Marshall

15

0.2%

90

1.5%

75

1.3%

Monroe

18

0.3%

9

0.2%

-9

-0.1%

Montgomery

0

0.0%

11

0.4%

11

0.4%

Noxubee

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

Jefferson Davis

(Continued)

826

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A23.25 (Continued)

State

African American Registered Voters (continued) 1956 Registrations County Oktibbeha

Mississippi (continued)

Panola

107

2.2%

Number

Percent of Eligible

-21

-0.3%

0.01%

2

0.03%

1

0.0%

1.3%

150

2.2%

57

0.9%

Rankin

33

0.4%

94

1.4%

61

1.0%

Sharkey

1

0.03%

3

0.1%

2

0.1%

Sunflower

114

0.7%

114

0.9%

0

0.2%

Tallahatchie

1

0.01%

5

0.08%

4

0.1%

Tate

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

29

0.4%

37

0.7%

8

0.3%

Walthall

0

0.0%

2

0.1%

2

0.1%

Wayne

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

Wilkinson

43

1.0%

60

1.5%

17

0.5%

Winston

30

0.8%

57

1.6%

27

0.8%

Tunica

9

0.3%

4

0.2%

-5

-0.1%

223

2.3%

178

2.2%

-45

-0.1%

3,251

1.4%

2,267

1.1%

-984

-0.3%

400

6.1%

713

11.7%

313

5.6%

Franklin

0

0.0%

1,600

30.0%

1,600

30.0%

Graham

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

Greene

0

0.0%

385

12.1%

385

12.1%

Halifax

950

6.8%

1,954

14.3%

1,004

7.5%

Hereford

700

11.4%

537

8.8%

-163

-2.6%

Northampton

500

6.5%

1,300

18.2%

800

11.7%

NC Total

2,550

5.8%

6,489

15.6%

3,939

9.8%

Calhoun

0

0.0%

179

5.8%

179

5.8%

1,200

14.4%

486

6.5%

-714

-7.9%

350

8.2%

652

16.5%

302

8.3%

0

0.0%

200

9.2%

200

9.2%

900

8.1%

480

4.7%

-420

-3.4%

2,450

8.2%

1,997

7.4%

-453

-0.8%

58

0.7%

2,800

40.8%

2,742

40.1%

Haywood

0

0.0%

2,000

33.5%

2,000

33.5%

TN Total

58

0.4%

4,800

37.4%

4,742

37.0%

37,137

5.1%

55,711

8.3%

18,574

3.2%

Bertie

North Carolina 

2.5%

Percent of Eligible

1

MS Total

South Carolina 

128

Number

93

Yazoo

Clarendon Hampton McCormick Williamsburg SC Total

Tennessee

Percent of Eligible

Net Difference

Pike

Yalobusha

100 Counties

Number

1962 Registrations

Fayette

Grand Total

*

Sources: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1963 Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1963), pp. 32–35. Calculations by the authors. Note: The 1963 report indicates a total of 55,481 registrations for African Americans in 1962. The total given here results from the authors’ calculations as does the confirmation of the total registrations for 1956. *



Appendices 827 Appendix Table A23.32  (United States Commission on Civil Rights Appendix A) Voter Registration Statistics, 1960

The Southern States Alabama (South) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Black Population (Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Autauga

10,839

6,353

4,614

72.6%

7,900

42.2%

3,651

125

3.4%

2.6%

36.5%

Baldwin

38,759

22,236

16,340

73.5%

10,329

21.0%

4,527

900

19.9%

5.2%

16.9%

Barbour

11,850

7,338

6,400

87.2%

12,850

52.0%

5,787

400

6.9%

5.9%

44.1%

9,940

5,807

5,692

98.0%

4,417

30.8%

1,990

200

10.1%

3.4%

25.5%

Blount

24,613

14,368

11,609

80.8%

836

3.3%

378

100

26.5%

0.9%

2.6%

Bullock

3,781

2,387

2,200

92.2%

9,681

71.9%

4,450

5

0.1%

0.2%

65.1%

Butler

13,575

8,363

8,402

100.5%

10,985

44.7%

4,820

831

17.2%

9.0%

36.6%

Calhoun/Benton

77,805

44,739

24,557

54.9%

18,073

18.9%

9,036

2,000

22.1%

7.5%

16.8%

Chambers

23,959

15,369

12,361

80.4%

13,869

36.7%

6,497

400

6.2%

3.1%

29.7%

Cherokee

14,610

8,537

7,650

89.6%

1,693

10.4%

782

350

44.8%

4.4%

8.4%

Chilton/Baker

21,615

12,861

11,401

88.7%

4,078

15.9%

1,947

750

38.5%

6.2%

13.2%

9,012

5,192

5,560

107.1%

8,858

49.6%

3,982

150

3.8%

2.6%

43.4%

Clarke

12,987

7,899

8,100

102.5%

12,751

49.5%

5,833

400

6.9%

4.7%

42.5%

Clay

13,372

6,470

7,229

111.7%

2,028

16.4%

926

350

37.8%

4.6%

12.5%

Cleburne

10,212

5,870

5,518

94.0%

699

6.4%

385

75

19.5%

1.3%

6.2%

Coffee

24,220

14,221

10,901

76.7%

6,363

20.8%

2,935

588

20.0%

5.1%

17.1%

Colbert

37,524

21,680

17,024

78.5%

8,982

19.3%

4,575

1,300

28.4%

7.1%

17.4%

Conecuh

9,674

5,907

3,336

56.5%

8,088

45.5%

3,635

300

8.3%

8.3%

38.1%

Bibb

Choctaw

Coosa

6,847

4,201

4,203

100.1%

3,879

36.2%

1,794

397

22.1%

8.6%

29.9%

Covington

29,880

18,466

15,788

85.5%

5,751

16.1%

2,876

835

29.0%

5.0%

13.5%

Crenshaw

10,266

6,310

6,196

98.2%

4,643

31.1%

2,207

493

22.3%

7.4%

25.9%

Cullman

45,051

25,848

17,350

67.1%

521

1.1%

285

150

52.6%

0.9%

1.1%

Dale

25,459

14,861

7,400

49.8%

5,607

18.1%

2,743

600

21.9%

7.5%

15.6%

Dallas

23,952

14,400

9,195

63.9%

32,715

57.7%

15,115

130

0.9%

1.4%

51.2%

De Kalb

40,596

23,878

19,915

83.4%

821

2.0%

441

85

19.3%

0.4%

1.8%

Elmore

20,221

12,510

9,225

73.7%

10,303

33.8%

4,808

275

5.7%

2.9%

27.8%

Escambia

22,052

12,779

11,000

86.1%

11,459

34.2%

5,685

1,000

17.6%

8.3%

30.8%

Etowah

81,982

48,563

32,726

67.4%

14,998

15.5%

7,661

1,955

25.5%

5.6%

13.6%

Fayette

13,574

8,277

8,500

102.7%

2,574

15.9%

1,291

450

34.9%

5.0%

13.5%

Franklin

20,756

12,412

10,967

88.4%

1,232

5.6%

645

350

54.3%

3.1%

4.9%

Geneva

18,945

11,357

7,281

64.1%

3,365

15.1%

1,606

14

0.9%

0.2%

12.4%

Greene

2,546

1,649

1,731

105.0%

11,054

81.3%

5,001

166

3.3%

8.8%

75.2%

Hale

5,726

3,594

3,350

93.2%

13,811

70.7%

5,999

150

2.5%

4.3%

62.5%

Henry

8,321

5,165

4,631

89.7%

6,965

45.6%

3,168

400

12.6%

8.0%

38.0%

Houston

36,832

22,095

12,850

58.2%

13,886

27.4%

6,899

675

9.8%

5.0%

23.8%

Jackson

34,443

19,298

13,599

70.5%

2,238

6.1%

1,175

269

22.9%

1.9%

5.7%

Jefferson

415,035

256,319

124,260

48.5%

219,829

34.6%

116,160

11,900

10.2%

8.7%

31.2% (Continued)

828

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A23.32 (Continued) The Southern States (continued) Alabama (South) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Black Population (Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Lamar/Sanford

12,168

7,503

9,152

122.0%

2,103

14.7%

1,027

600

58.4%

6.2%

12.0%

Lauderdale

54,355

31,089

18,605

59.8%

7,267

11.8%

3,726

900

24.2%

4.6%

10.7%

Lawrence

19,033

10,509

9,420

89.6%

5,468

22.3%

2,471

645

26.1%

6.4%

19.0%

Lee

31,458

17,547

9,256

52.8%

18,296

36.8%

8,913

1,500

16.8%

14.0%

33.7%

Limestone

28,884

16,173

9,450

58.4%

7,629

20.9%

3,579

650

18.2%

6.4%

18.1%

Lowndes

2,978

1,900

2,240

117.9%

12,439

80.7%

5,122

0

0.0%

0.0%

72.9%

Macon

4,405

2,818

3,310

117.5%

22,312

83.5%

11,886

1,000

8.4%

23.2%

80.8%

Madison

95,283

54,516

21,650

39.7%

22,065

18.8%

10,666

1,350

12.7%

5.9%

16.4%

Marengo

10,264

6,104

5,886

96.4%

16,834

62.1%

7,791

139

1.8%

2.3%

56.1%

Marion

21,104

12,656

11,191

88.4%

733

3.4%

403

194

48.1%

1.7%

3.1%

Marshall

46,894

26,997

19,175

71.0%

1,124

2.3%

637

50

7.9%

0.3%

2.3%

Mobile

212,873

121,589

55,025

45.3%

101,428

32.3%

50,793

9,488

18.7%

14.7%

29.5%

Monroe

11,030

6,631

5,800

87.5%

11,342

50.7%

4,894

200

4.1%

3.3%

42.5%

104,485

62,911

29,000

46.1%

64,725

38.3%

33,056

2,995

9.1%

9.4%

34.5%

52,807

30,955

17,027

55.0%

7,647

12.7%

4,159

1,800

43.3%

9.6%

11.8%

Montgomery Morgan/Cotaco Perry

5,943

3,441

3,235

94.0%

11,415

65.8%

5,202

265

5.1%

7.6%

60.2%

Pickens

12,098

7,336

6,266

85.4%

9,784

44.7%

4,373

550

12.6%

8.1%

37.4%

Pike

15,242

9,126

7,950

87.1%

10,745

41.4%

5,259

200

3.8%

2.5%

36.6%

Randolph

14,501

9,196

7,415

80.6%

4,976

25.6%

2,366

1,500

63.4%

16.8%

20.5%

Russell

23,365

13,761

7,878

57.3%

22,986

49.6%

10,531

700

6.7%

8.2%

43.4%

St. Clair

21,116

12,244

8,200

67.0%

4,272

16.8%

2,035

800

39.3%

8.9%

14.3%

Shelby

26,049

14,771

10,650

72.1%

6,083

18.9%

2,889

350

12.1%

3.2%

16.4%

Sumter

4,743

3,061

2,650

86.6%

15,298

76.3%

6,814

450

6.6%

14.5%

69.0%

Talladega

44,525

25,635

17,866

69.7%

20,970

32.0%

9,333

2,650

28.4%

12.9%

26.7%

Tallapoosa

24,888

15,310

13,600

88.8%

10,119

28.9%

4,999

700

14.0%

4.9%

24.6%

Tuscaloosa

77,719

47,076

22,869

48.6%

31,328

28.7%

15,332

5,000

32.6%

17.9%

24.6%

Walker

48,584

28,148

19,300

68.6%

5,627

10.4%

2,890

1,200

41.5%

5.9%

9.3%

Washington

10,066

5,293

6,000

113.4%

5,306

34.5%

2,297

600

26.1%

9.1%

30.3%

4,141

2,624

2,950

112.4%

14,598

77.9%

6,085

0

0.0%

0.0%

69.9%

Winston/ Hancock

14,777

8,559

7,996

93.4%

81

0.6%

47

15

31.9%

0.2%

0.6%

Alabama Subtotal

2,286,609

1,353,058

860,073

63.6%

983,131

30.1%

481,270

66,009

13.7%

7.1%

26.2%

Wilcox

Arkansas (South) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Black Population (Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Arkansas

17,584

10,589

6,868

64.9%

5,771

24.7%

2,809

1,051

37.4%

13.3%

21.0%

Ashley

15,337

9,012

6,436

71.4%

8,883

36.7%

4,258

1,568

36.8%

19.6%

32.1%



Appendices 829 Arkansas (South) (continued) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Black Population (Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Baxter

9,939

6,584

4,159

63.2%

4

0.0%

3

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.1%

Benton

36,153

23,309

12,619

54.1%

119

0.3%

63

10

15.9%

0.1%

0.3%

Boone

16,110

10,414

6,081

58.4%

6

0.0%

4

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Bradley

9,109

5,837

4,214

72.2%

4,920

35.1%

2,372

1,081

45.6%

20.4%

28.9%

Calhoun

3,882

2,496

2,407

96.4%

2,109

35.2%

1,056

781

74.0%

24.5%

29.7%

Carroll

11,274

7,533

4,420

58.7%

10

0.1%

8

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.1%

Clark

15,528

9,419

6,128

65.1%

5,422

25.9%

2,725

958

35.2%

13.5%

22.4%

Clay

21,254

12,645

5,493

43.4%

4

0.0%

3

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Cleburne

9,058

5,697

3,340

58.6%

1

0.0%

1

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Cleveland

5,239

3,246

2,712

83.6%

1,705

24.6%

832

449

54.0%

14.2%

20.4%

Columbia

16,887

10,646

6,508

61.1%

9,513

36.0%

4,808

1,025

21.3%

13.6%

31.1%

Conway

12,003

7,323

6,512

88.9%

3,427

22.2%

1,674

1,503

89.8%

18.8%

18.6%

Craighead

45,692

26,047

13,450

51.6%

1,612

3.4%

881

334

37.9%

2.4%

3.3%

Crawford

20,766

12,505

6,691

53.5%

552

2.6%

340

174

51.2%

2.5%

2.7%

Crittenden

19,461

10,569

6,210

58.8%

28,103

59.1%

12,871

1,537

11.9%

19.8%

54.9%

Cross

13,640

7,608

4,597

60.4%

5,911

30.2%

2,640

925

35.0%

16.8%

25.8%

Dallas

6,332

4,122

3,316

80.5%

4,190

39.8%

2,049

949

46.3%

22.3%

33.2%

Desha

10,784

6,103

4,638

76.0%

9,986

48.1%

4,802

2,230

46.4%

32.5%

44.0%

Drew

10,052

5,926

3,963

66.9%

5,161

33.9%

2,506

1,379

55.0%

25.8%

29.7%

Faulkner

21,699

12,850

9,670

75.3%

2,604

10.7%

1,246

659

52.9%

6.4%

8.8%

Franklin

10,091

6,363

4,491

70.6%

122

1.2%

63

29

46.0%

0.6%

1.0%

Fulton Garland Grant

6,653

4,237

3,094

73.0%

4

0.1%

4

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.1%

41,691

27,811

17,019

61.2%

5,006

10.7%

2,964

2,466

83.2%

12.7%

9.6%

7,724

4,794

3,579

74.7%

570

6.9%

256

122

47.7%

3.3%

5.1%

Greene

25,181

14,835

7,837

52.8%

17

0.1%

11

4

36.4%

0.1%

0.1%

Hempstead

12,330

8,333

5,694

68.3%

7,331

37.3%

3,717

1,576

42.4%

21.7%

30.9%

Hot Spring

18,693

11,267

7,851

69.7%

3,200

14.6%

1,584

720

45.5%

8.4%

12.3%

8,610

5,667

3,549

62.6%

2,268

20.9%

1,210

493

40.7%

12.2%

17.6%

19,517

12,386

7,324

59.1%

531

2.7%

321

75

23.4%

1.0%

2.5%

Howard Independence Izard

6,710

4,349

3,221

74.1%

56

0.8%

36

24

66.7%

0.7%

0.8%

Jackson

19,373

11,117

7,046

63.4%

3,470

15.2%

1,736

934

53.8%

11.7%

13.5%

Jefferson

45,915

27,284

15,931

58.4%

35,458

43.6%

17,505

6,589

37.6%

29.3%

39.1%

Johnson

12,157

7,715

4,839

62.7%

264

2.1%

137

54

39.4%

1.1%

1.7%

Lafayette

6,051

3,839

2,662

69.3%

4,979

45.1%

2,447

875

35.8%

24.7%

38.9%

Lawrence

17,112

10,016

6,010

60.0%

155

0.9%

112

17

15.2%

0.3%

1.1%

Lee

8,167

4,545

2,817

62.0%

12,834

61.1%

5,957

1,386

23.3%

33.0%

56.7%

Lincoln

7,430

4,619

2,709

58.7%

7,017

48.6%

3,579

1,338

37.4%

33.1%

43.7%

Little River

6,326

3,923

3,040

77.5%

2,885

31.3%

1,415

878

62.1%

22.4%

26.5%

Logan

15,615

10,290

5,967

58.0%

342

2.1%

163

45

27.6%

0.8%

1.6%

Lonoke

18,690

11,121

7,814

70.3%

5,861

23.9%

2,518

806

32.0%

9.4%

18.5%

Madison

9,060

5,552

3,550

63.9%

8

0.1%

7

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.1%

Marion

6,038

3,938

2,976

75.6%

3

0.1%

2

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.1% (Continued)

830

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A23.32 (Continued)

Arkansas (South) (continued) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Black Population (Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Miller

23,541

14,327

9,062

63.3%

8,145

25.7%

4,290

2,093

48.8%

18.8%

23.0%

Mississippi

49,343

26,739

13,998

52.4%

20,831

29.7%

9,638

3,880

40.3%

21.7%

26.5%

Monroe

8,888

5,101

3,558

69.8%

8,439

48.7%

3,914

1,132

28.9%

24.1%

43.4%

Montgomery

5,347

3,372

2,630

78.0%

23

0.4%

20

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.6%

Nevada

6,843

4,619

3,386

73.3%

3,857

36.1%

1,940

850

43.8%

20.1%

29.6%

Newton

5,955

3,403

2,396

70.4%

8

0.1%

2

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.1%

Ouachita

19,450

12,021

8,617

71.7%

12,191

38.5%

6,163

2,931

47.6%

25.4%

33.9%

4,767

2,892

2,375

82.1%

160

3.3%

82

64

78.1%

2.6%

2.8%

18,552

10,431

6,213

59.6%

25,445

57.8%

12,208

3,505

28.7%

36.1%

53.9%

7,525

4,786

3,032

63.4%

339

4.3%

188

85

45.2%

2.7%

3.8%

Poinsett

27,585

14,636

8,565

58.5%

3,249

10.5%

1,446

350

24.2%

3.9%

9.0%

Polk

11,968

7,686

4,892

63.7%

13

0.1%

8

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.1%

Pope

20,494

12,431

7,383

59.4%

683

3.2%

370

90

24.3%

1.2%

2.9%

Prairie

8,571

5,179

3,618

69.9%

1,944

18.5%

938

429

45.7%

10.6%

15.3%

Pulaski

Perry Phillips Pike

190,777

118,811

69,169

58.2%

52,203

21.5%

27,822

12,015

43.2%

14.8%

19.0%

Randolph

12,349

7,427

4,622

62.2%

171

1.4%

94

25

26.6%

0.5%

1.3%

St. Francis

14,324

7,963

5,402

67.8%

18,979

57.0%

8,403

2,250

26.8%

29.4%

51.3%

Saline

27,095

16,990

9,323

54.9%

1,861

6.4%

1,340

409

30.5%

4.2%

7.3%

Scott

7,290

4,625

3,569

77.2%

7

0.1%

3

45

1500.0%

1.3%

0.1%

Searcy

8,123

4,942

3,245

65.7%

1

0.0%

1

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Sebastian

62,029

38,180

19,007

49.8%

4,656

7.0%

2,485

658

26.5%

3.4%

6.1%

Sevier

9,194

5,910

3,285

55.6%

962

9.5%

499

231

46.3%

6.6%

7.8%

Sharp

9,318

4,104

3,001

73.1%

1

0.0%

 

0

 

0.0%

 

Stone

6,293

3,718

2,943

79.2%

1

0.0%

1

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Union

34,447

21,725

14,795

68.1%

15,071

30.4%

7,590

2,677

35.3%

15.3%

25.9%

7,133

4,565

3,460

75.8%

95

1.3%

56

22

39.3%

0.6%

1.2%

Washington

55,228

33,359

14,413

43.2%

569

1.0%

311

12

3.9%

0.1%

0.9%

White

31,467

19,172

10,289

53.7%

1,278

3.9%

659

300

45.5%

2.8%

3.3% 35.4%

Van Buren

Woodruff Yell Arkansas Subtotal

8,202

4,836

3,121

64.5%

5,752

41.2%

2,652

930

35.1%

23.0%

11,510

7,395

5,249

71.0%

430

3.6%

253

150

59.3%

2.8%

3.3%

1,398,704

850,643

517,897

60.9%

390,569

21.9%

192,626

72,603

37.7%

12.3%

18.5%

Florida (South) Voting Age White Population

County Alachua Baker Bay Bradford/ New River

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Black Population (Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

54,466

30,555

20,978

68.7%

19,608

26.5%

9,898

2,886

29.2%

12.1%

24.5%

5,763

3,203

3,893

121.5%

1,600

21.7%

807

564

69.9%

12.7%

20.1%

57,080

31,940

20,550

64.3%

10,051

15.0%

4,964

2,572

51.8%

11.1%

13.5%

9,569

5,580

4,573

82.0%

2,877

23.1%

1,345

842

62.6%

15.6%

19.4%



Appendices 831 Florida (South) (continued) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Black Population (Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Brevard/ St Lucie

98,909

58,433

35,871

61.4%

12,526

11.2%

6,494

2,002

30.8%

5.3%

10.0%

Broward

278,624

189,517

125,966

66.5%

55,322

16.6%

27,009

9,670

35.8%

7.1%

12.5%

Calhoun

6,232

3,434

4,705

137.0%

1,190

16.0%

582

281

48.3%

5.6%

14.5%

Charlotte

11,869

8,659

5,760

66.5%

725

5.8%

427

229

53.6%

3.8%

4.7%

Citrus

7,614

5,174

4,659

90.1%

1,654

17.9%

829

505

60.9%

9.8%

13.8%

Clay

16,837

9,508

6,662

70.1%

2,698

13.8%

1,276

861

67.5%

11.4%

11.8%

Collier

13,295

8,163

5,716

70.0%

2,458

15.6%

1,364

408

29.9%

6.7%

14.3%

Columbia

13,993

8,092

7,105

87.8%

6,084

30.3%

3,122

1,704

54.6%

19.3%

27.8%

796,054

537,448

380,120

70.7%

138,993

14.9%

75,573

27,769

36.7%

6.8%

12.3%

De Soto

9,141

6,339

3,937

62.1%

2,542

21.8%

1,343

954

71.0%

19.5%

17.5%

Dixie

3,829

2,138

2,398

112.2%

650

14.5%

363

202

55.7%

7.8%

14.5%

Duval

349,033

203,804

128,180

62.9%

106,378

23.4%

58,430

30,666

52.5%

19.3%

22.3%

Escambia

137,425

76,688

53,540

69.8%

36,404

20.9%

18,041

9,133

50.6%

14.6%

19.0%

Flagler

2,826

1,789

1,729

96.7%

1,740

38.1%

846

50

5.9%

2.8%

32.1%

Franklin

5,180

3,186

3,277

102.9%

1,396

21.2%

779

571

73.3%

14.8%

19.7%

Gadsden

17,038

11,711

7,097

60.6%

24,951

59.4%

12,261

355

2.9%

4.8%

51.2%

Gilchrist

2,534

1,513

1,704

112.6%

334

11.7%

154

51

33.1%

2.9%

9.2%

Glades

1,727

1,061

925

87.2%

1,223

41.5%

741

253

34.1%

21.5%

41.1%

Gulf

7,550

4,196

3,533

84.2%

2,387

24.0%

1,138

561

49.3%

13.7%

21.3%

Hamilton

4,275

2,486

2,599

104.6%

3,430

44.5%

1,621

662

40.8%

20.3%

39.5%

Hardee

11,206

6,734

5,210

77.4%

1,164

9.4%

552

308

55.8%

5.6%

7.6%

Hendry

5,921

3,430

2,780

81.1%

2,198

27.1%

1,180

792

67.1%

22.2%

25.6%

Hernando/ Benton

8,850

5,689

4,455

78.3%

2,355

21.0%

1,151

580

50.4%

11.5%

16.8%

Highlands

16,820

10,997

10,254

93.2%

4,518

21.2%

2,251

1,204

53.5%

10.5%

17.0%

341,952

213,950

133,085

62.2%

55,836

14.0%

31,114

15,767

50.7%

10.6%

12.7%

Holmes

10,390

6,131

6,562

107.0%

454

4.2%

249

157

63.1%

2.3%

3.9%

Indian River

19,920

13,182

9,513

72.2%

5,389

21.3%

2,637

586

22.2%

5.8%

16.7%

Jackson

24,966

14,087

11,900

84.5%

11,242

31.1%

5,390

2,959

54.9%

19.9%

27.7%

Jefferson

3,901

2,383

2,225

93.4%

5,642

59.1%

2,600

319

12.3%

12.5%

52.2%

Lafayette

2,545

1,536

1,995

129.9%

344

11.9%

152

0

0.0%

0.0%

9.0%

Lake

46,209

30,535

22,659

74.2%

11,174

19.5%

6,438

1,265

19.7%

5.3%

17.4%

Lee

45,964

30,363

21,433

70.6%

8,575

15.7%

4,677

1,584

33.9%

6.9%

13.4%

Leon

49,816

28,241

20,346

72.0%

24,409

32.9%

12,322

5,793

47.0%

22.2%

30.4%

Levy

7,231

4,483

3,853

86.0%

3,133

30.2%

1,568

356

22.7%

8.5%

25.9%

Liberty

2,660

1,525

1,948

127.7%

478

15.2%

240

0

0.0%

0.0%

13.6%

Madison

7,430

4,380

4,200

95.9%

6,724

47.5%

3,067

1,124

36.7%

21.1%

41.2%

Dade

Hillsborough

(Continued)

832

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A23.32 (Continued)

Florida (South) (continued) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Black Population (Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Manatee

58,642

42,291

29,165

69.0%

10,526

15.2%

5,278

1,654

31.3%

5.4%

11.1%

Marion

33,586

21,001

15,442

73.5%

18,030

34.9%

9,283

3,807

41.0%

19.8%

30.7%

Martin

13,513

9,291

7,192

77.4%

3,419

20.2%

1,753

702

40.1%

8.9%

15.9%

Monroe

42,952

25,512

13,963

54.7%

4,969

10.4%

2,919

1,960

67.2%

12.3%

10.3%

Nassau

12,875

7,054

5,742

81.4%

4,314

25.1%

2,076

1,300

62.6%

18.5%

22.7%

Okaloosa

56,979

30,816

21,040

68.3%

4,196

6.9%

2,097

933

44.5%

4.3%

6.4%

Okeechobee

5,356

2,870

2,685

93.6%

1,068

16.6%

533

423

79.4%

13.6%

15.7%

Orange/ Mosquito

224,105

137,780

78,444

56.9%

39,435

15.0%

21,771

3,917

18.0%

4.8%

13.7%

Osceola

17,021

11,697

9,042

77.3%

2,008

10.6%

1,122

423

37.7%

4.5%

8.8%

175,931

119,342

91,164

76.4%

52,175

22.9%

29,541

9,060

30.7%

9.0%

19.8%

Palm Beach Pasco

32,699

22,329

10,861

48.6%

4,086

11.1%

2,391

895

37.4%

7.6%

9.7%

Pinellas

341,361

255,369

183,336

71.8%

33,304

8.9%

18,121

5,709

31.5%

3.0%

6.6%

Polk

159,007

97,314

67,560

69.4%

36,132

18.5%

19,224

6,738

35.1%

9.1%

16.5%

Putnam

22,180

13,095

9,591

73.2%

10,032

31.1%

5,089

1,810

35.6%

15.9%

28.0%

St. Johns

21,804

13,771

10,566

76.7%

8,230

27.4%

4,331

1,887

43.6%

15.2%

23.9%

St Lucie

26,523

17,238

14,061

81.6%

12,771

32.5%

6,527

2,324

35.6%

14.2%

27.5%

Santa Rosa

27,384

14,710

10,979

74.6%

2,163

7.3%

1,082

696

64.3%

6.0%

6.9%

Sarasota

69,428

49,533

31,608

63.8%

7,467

9.7%

4,125

937

22.7%

2.9%

7.7%

Seminole

41,373

24,372

14,578

59.8%

13,574

24.7%

7,050

2,246

31.9%

13.4%

22.4%

8,809

5,396

5,043

93.5%

3,060

25.8%

1,523

689

45.2%

12.0%

22.0%

10,888

6,409

6,173

96.3%

4,073

27.2%

2,149

515

24.0%

7.7%

25.1%

9,931

5,454

5,071

93.0%

3,237

24.6%

1,724

77

4.5%

1.5%

24.0%

Sumter Suwannee Taylor Union

4,426

2,880

1,841

63.9%

1,617

26.8%

1,082

6

0.6%

0.3%

27.3%

Volusia

104,177

74,209

54,546

73.5%

21,142

16.9%

11,615

5,858

50.4%

9.7%

13.5%

Wakulla

37,755

2,120

2,302

108.6%

1,502

28.6%

753

417

55.4%

15.3%

26.2%

Walton

13,461

7,958

7,436

93.4%

2,115

13.6%

1,086

799

73.6%

9.7%

12.0%

9,071

5,364

6,016

112.2%

2,178

19.4%

1,021

870

85.2%

12.6%

16.0%

4,097,881

2,617,438

1,813,342

69.3%

887,679

17.9%

470,261

183,197

39.0%

9.2%

15.2%

Washington Florida Subtotal

Georgia (South) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Black Population (Census 1960) Number 2,676

Percent of County 58.9%

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Baker

1,867

1,139

1,740

152.8%

1,285

Dawson

3,589

2,148

2,183

101.6%

1

0.0%

Early

6,329

4,013

4,111

102.4%

6,822

51.9%

Fayette

5,768

3,585

2,760

77.0%

2,431

29.7%

1,190

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County 53.0%

0

0.0%

0.0%

1

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.1%

3,277

214

6.5%

5.0%

45.0%

26

2.2%

0.9%

24.9%

Forsyth

12,166

7,328

5,419

74.0%

4

0.0%

4

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.1%

Fulton

362,923

247,892

102,272

41.3%

193,403

34.8%

117,049

33,197

28.4%

24.5%

32.1%

40,035

24,299

19,370

79.7%

3,506

8.1%

1,841

1,267

68.8%

6.1%

7.0%

Gwinnett



Appendices 833 Georgia (South) (continued) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Black Population (Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Hancock

2,518

1,727

1,658

96.0%

7,461

74.8%

3,576

1,404

39.3%

45.9%

67.4%

Lee

2,314

1,427

1,210

84.8%

3,890

62.7%

1,795

29

1.6%

2.3%

55.7%

Liberty

8,348

5,310

2,000

37.7%

6,139

42.4%

3,176

2,014

63.4%

50.2%

37.4%

Towns

4,537

2,942

3,514

119.4%

1

0.0%

1

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Union

6,509

3,957

5,662

143.1%

1

0.0%

1

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Webster

1,172

775

811

104.7%

2,075

63.9%

975

0

0.0%

0.0%

55.7%

Georgia subtotal

458,075

306,542

152,710

49.8%

228,410

33.3%

134,171

38,151

28.4%

20.0%

30.4%

Louisiana (South) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Black Population (Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Acadia

40,104

22,399

19,926

89.0%

9,827

19.7%

4,557

3,780

83.0%

16.0%

16.9%

Allen

14,934

8,357

8,169

97.8%

4,933

24.8%

2,310

1,995

86.4%

19.6%

21.7%

Ascension

19,013

10,110

8,401

83.1%

8,914

31.9%

4,171

2,350

56.3%

21.9%

29.2%

Assumption

10,573

5,877

5,022

85.5%

7,418

41.2%

3,237

1,967

60.8%

28.1%

35.5%

Avoyelles

27,134

15,845

13,630

86.0%

10,472

27.9%

4,717

1,837

38.9%

11.9%

22.9%

Beauregard

14,886

8,682

7,969

91.8%

4,305

22.4%

2,145

1,131

52.7%

12.4%

19.8%

Bienville

8,470

5,617

5,184

92.3%

8,256

49.4%

4,077

26

0.6%

0.5%

42.1%

Bossier

43,276

23,696

12,813

54.1%

14,346

24.9%

6,847

542

7.9%

4.1%

22.4%

Caddo

142,203

87,774

58,144

66.2%

81,656

36.5%

41,749

4,686

11.2%

7.5%

32.2%

Calcasieu

115,100

62,987

43,553

69.2%

30,375

20.9%

14,924

7,364

49.3%

14.5%

19.2%

Caldwell

6,499

3,843

4,019

104.6%

2,505

27.8%

1,161

92

7.9%

2.2%

23.2%

Cameron

6,470

3,642

3,184

87.4%

439

6.4%

239

160

67.0%

4.8%

6.2%

Catahoula

7,405

4,110

4,117

100.2%

4,016

35.2%

1,919

377

19.7%

8.4%

31.8%

Claiborne

9,646

6,415

5,510

85.9%

9,761

50.3%

5,032

28

0.6%

0.5%

44.0%

Concordia

10,993

5,963

5,323

89.3%

9,474

46.3%

4,582

383

8.4%

6.7%

43.5%

De Soto

10,294

6,543

5,828

89.1%

13,954

57.6%

6,753

595

8.8%

9.3%

50.8%

East Baton Rouge

156,895

87,985

66,173

75.2%

73,163

31.8%

36,908

10,576

28.7%

13.8%

29.6%

East Carroll

5,602

2,990

2,845

95.2%

8,831

61.2%

4,183

0

0.0%

0.0%

58.3%

East Feliciana

9,284

7,043

2,448

34.8%

10,914

54.0%

6,081

82

1.4%

3.2%

46.3%

Evangeline

23,158

13,652

13,450

98.5%

8,481

26.8%

3,342

3,135

93.8%

18.9%

19.7%

Franklin

15,497

8,954

8,260

92.3%

10,591

40.6%

4,433

390

8.8%

4.5%

33.1%

Grant

10,106

6,080

6,066

99.8%

3,224

24.2%

1,553

674

43.4%

10.0%

20.4%

Iberia

36,843

20,200

16,662

82.5%

14,814

28.7%

7,165

4,436

61.9%

21.0%

26.2%

Iberville

15,272

8,733

7,236

82.9%

14,667

49.0%

7,060

2,486

35.2%

25.6%

44.7%

Jackson

10,696

6,607

5,817

88.0%

5,132

32.4%

2,535

484

19.1%

7.7%

27.7%

Jefferson

176,845

98,103

77,859

79.4%

31,924

15.3%

14,970

8,563

57.2%

9.9%

13.2%

Jefferson Davis

23,491

12,892

9,599

74.5%

6,334

21.2%

2,881

1,655

57.5%

14.7%

18.3%

Lafayette

64,323

35,513

27,244

76.7%

20,333

24.0%

9,473

5,505

58.1%

16.8%

21.1% (Continued)

834

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A23.32 (Continued)

Louisiana (South) (continued) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Black Population (Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Lafourche

48,619

25,737

22,197

86.3%

6,762

12.2%

3,078

2,039

66.2%

8.4%

10.7%

La Salle

11,355

6,799

6,823

100.4%

1,656

12.7%

849

220

25.9%

3.1%

11.1%

Lincoln

16,594

9,611

6,927

72.1%

11,941

41.9%

5,723

860

15.0%

11.0%

37.3%

Livingston

22,921

12,306

11,814

96.0%

4,053

15.0%

1,818

1,200

66.0%

9.2%

12.9%

Madison

5,767

3,334

2,714

81.4%

10,677

64.9%

5,181

0

0.0%

0.0%

60.9%

Morehouse

17,911

10,311

7,490

72.6%

15,798

46.9%

7,208

301

4.2%

3.9%

41.1%

Natchitoches

20,082

11,328

8,752

77.3%

15,571

43.7%

7,444

1,779

23.9%

16.9%

39.7%

Orleans

392,594

257,495

176,742

68.6%

234,931

37.4%

125,752

36,283

28.9%

17.0%

32.8%

Ouachita

68,904

40,185

24,856

61.9%

32,759

32.2%

16,377

730

4.5%

2.9%

29.0%

Plaquemines

16,041

8,633

7,170

83.1%

6,504

28.9%

2,897

47

1.6%

0.7%

25.1%

Pointe Coupee

10,434

6,085

5,354

88.0%

12,054

53.6%

5,273

2,313

43.9%

30.2%

46.4%

Rapides

77,345

44,823

30,055

67.1%

34,006

30.5%

18,141

3,036

16.7%

9.2%

28.8%

Red River

5,232

3,294

3,440

104.4%

4,746

47.6%

2,181

27

1.2%

0.8%

39.8%

Richland

13,255

7,601

6,075

79.9%

10,569

44.4%

4,608

263

5.7%

4.2%

37.7%

Sabine

14,181

8,251

8,471

102.7%

4,383

23.6%

2,143

1,624

75.8%

16.1%

20.6%

St. Bernard

29,761

15,836

14,669

92.6%

2,425

7.5%

1,105

779

70.5%

5.0%

6.5%

St. Charles

15,474

8,117

7,451

91.8%

5,745

27.1%

2,621

1,958

74.7%

20.8%

24.4%

St. Helena

4,076

2,363

2,478

104.9%

5,086

55.5%

2,082

1,243

59.7%

33.4%

46.8%

St. James

9,315

4,892

4,447

90.9%

9,054

49.3%

3,964

2,528

63.8%

36.2%

44.8%

St. John the Baptist

8,926

4,982

4,143

83.2%

9,513

51.6%

4,279

2,967

69.3%

41.7%

46.2%

St. Landry

46,443

25,550

21,918

85.8%

35,050

43.0%

14,982

11,178

74.6%

33.8%

37.0%

St. Martin

18,242

9,781

8,449

86.4%

10,821

37.2%

4,664

2,848

61.1%

25.2%

32.3%

St. Mary

33,755

17,991

14,027

78.0%

15,078

30.9%

7,176

4,077

56.8%

22.5%

28.5%

St. Tammany

28,031

16,032

16,878

105.3%

10,612

27.5%

5,038

2,847

56.5%

14.4%

23.9%

Tangipahoa

39,315

22,311

18,631

83.5%

20,119

33.9%

9,401

3,137

33.4%

14.4%

29.6%

4,128

2,287

1,964

85.9%

7,668

65.0%

3,533

0

0.0%

0.0%

60.7%

Terrebonne

48,328

24,393

17,328

71.0%

12,443

20.5%

5,464

1,796

32.9%

9.4%

18.3%

Union

11,139

7,021

5,927

84.4%

6,485

36.8%

3,006

597

19.9%

9.2%

30.0%

Vermillion

33,836

19,710

17,902

90.8%

5,019

12.9%

2,429

2,065

85.0%

10.3%

11.0%

Vernon

15,858

9,279

9,704

104.6%

2,443

13.4%

1,268

773

61.0%

7.4%

12.0%

Washington

29,107

16,804

15,423

91.8%

14,908

33.9%

6,821

1,729

25.4%

10.1%

28.9%

Webster

26,006

15,713

12,217

77.8%

13,695

34.5%

7,045

130

1.9%

1.1%

31.0%

West Baton Rouge

7,502

3,974

3,323

83.6%

7,294

49.3%

3,502

1,194

34.1%

26.4%

46.8%

West Carroll

10,998

6,171

5,185

84.0%

3,179

22.4%

1,389

70

5.0%

1.3%

18.4%

Tensas

West Feliciana Winn Louisiana Subtotal

4,197

2,814

1,305

46.4%

8,198

66.1%

4,553

0

0.0%

0.0%

61.8%

11,031

6,790

6,418

94.5%

5,003

31.2%

2,590

1,096

42.3%

14.6%

27.6%

2,211,715

1,289,216

993,118

77.0%

1,305,047

32.1%

514,589

159,033

30.9%

13.8%

28.5%



Appendices 835 Mississippi (South) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Black Population

Percent Registered

(Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Adams

19,035

10,888

 

 

18,695

49.6%

9,340

1,050

11.2%

 

46.2%

Alcorn

21,949

13,347

 

 

3,333

13.2%

1,756

61

3.5%

 

11.6%

Amite

7,130

4,449

 

 

8,443

54.2%

3,560

1

0.0%

 

44.5%

Attala

11,789

7,522

 

 

9,546

44.7%

4,262

61

1.4%

 

36.2%

Benton

4,114

2,514

 

 

3,609

46.7%

1,419

136

9.6%

 

36.1%

Bolivar

17,521

10,031

 

 

36,943

67.8%

15,939

612

3.8%

 

61.4%

Calhoun

11,595

7,188

 

 

4,346

27.3%

1,767

0

0.0%

 

19.7%

Carroll

4,677

2,969

 

 

6,500

58.2%

2,704

6

0.2%

 

47.7%

10,380

6,388

 

 

6,511

38.6%

3,054

0

0.0%

 

32.3%

Choctaw

5,903

3,728

 

 

2,520

29.9%

1,105

19

1.7%

 

22.9%

Claiborne

2,600

1,688

 

 

8,245

76.0%

3,969

138

3.5%

 

70.2%

10,001

6,072

 

 

6,492

39.4%

2,988

0

0.0%

 

33.0%

9,214

5,547

 

 

9,719

51.3%

4,444

10

0.2%

 

44.5%

Coahoma

14,630

8,708

 

 

31,582

68.3%

14,604

1,960

13.4%

 

62.7%

Copiah

12,992

8,153

 

 

14,059

52.0%

6,407

20

0.3%

 

44.0%

Covington

8,896

5,329

 

 

4,741

34.8%

2,032

560

27.6%

 

27.6%

De Soto

9,248

5,338

 

 

14,643

61.3%

6,246

3

0.1%

 

53.9%

Forrest

37,970

22,431

 

 

14,752

28.0%

7,495

12

0.2%

 

25.1%

Franklin

5,466

3,403

 

 

3,800

40.9%

1,842

146

7.9%

 

35.1%

George

9,811

5,276

 

 

1,287

11.6%

580

0

0.0%

 

9.9%

Greene

6,443

3,518

 

 

1,923

23.0%

859

38

4.4%

 

19.6%

Grenada

9,352

5,792

 

 

9,057

49.2%

4,323

61

1.4%

 

42.7%

Hancock

11,784

6,813

 

 

2,255

16.1%

1,129

449

39.8%

 

14.2%

Harrison

100,233

55,094

 

 

19,256

16.1%

9,670

2,000

20.7%

 

14.9%

Hinds

112,205

67,836

 

 

74,840

40.0%

36,138

5,000

13.8%

 

34.8%

Holmes

7,595

4,773

 

 

19,501

72.0%

8,757

41

0.5%

 

64.7%

Humphreys

5,758

3,344

 

 

13,335

69.8%

5,561

2

0.0%

 

62.5%

Issaquena

1,176

640

 

 

2,400

67.1%

1,081

0

0.0%

 

62.8%

Itawamba

14,206

8,523

 

 

874

5.8%

463

47

10.2%

 

5.2%

Jackson

44,658

24,447

 

 

10,864

19.6%

5,113

1,400

27.4%

 

17.3%

Jasper

8,402

5,327

 

 

8,507

50.3%

3,675

6

0.2%

 

40.8%

Jefferson

2,489

1,666

 

 

7,653

75.5%

3,540

0

0.0%

 

68.0%

Jefferson Davis

6,126

3,629

 

 

7,414

54.8%

3,222

96

3.0%

 

47.0%

44,095

25,943

 

 

15,447

25.9%

7,427

872

11.7%

 

22.3%

4,828

3,113

 

 

7,449

60.7%

3,221

20

0.6%

 

50.9%

Lafayette

14,110

8,074

 

 

7,245

33.9%

3,239

134

4.1%

 

28.6%

Lamar

11,443

6,489

 

 

2,232

16.3%

1,071

0

0.0%

 

14.2%

Chickasaw

Clarke Clay

Jones Kemper

(Continued)

836

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A23.32 (Continued)

Mississippi (South) (continued) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Black Population

Percent Registered

(Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Lauderdale

43,635

27,806

23,484

35.0%

11,924

2,000

16.8%

30.0%

Lawrence

6,354

3,878

3,861

37.8%

1,720

356

20.7%

30.7%

Leake

10,559

6,754

 

 

8,101

43.4%

3,397

66

1.9%

 

33.5%

Lee

30,300

18,709

 

 

10,289

25.4%

5,130

231

4.5%

 

21.5%

Leflore

16,699

10,274

 

 

30,443

64.6%

13,567

472

3.5%

 

56.9%

Lincoln

18,407

11,072

 

 

8,352

31.2%

3,913

516

13.2%

 

26.1%

Lowndes

28,871

16,460

 

 

17,768

38.1%

8,362

63

0.8%

 

33.7%

Madison

9,267

5,622

 

 

23,637

71.8%

10,366

607

5.9%

 

64.8%

Marion

15,408

8,997

 

 

7,885

33.9%

3,630

400

11.0%

 

28.8%

Marshall

7,264

4,342

 

 

17,239

70.4%

7,168

17

0.2%

 

62.3%

Monroe

21,932

13,426

 

 

12,021

35.4%

5,610

9

0.2%

 

29.5%

7,349

4,700

 

 

5,971

44.8%

2,627

11

0.4%

 

35.9%

Neshoba

15,026

9,143

 

 

5,901

28.2%

2,565

8

0.3%

 

21.9%

Newton

12,950

8,014

 

 

6,567

33.7%

3,018

32

1.1%

 

27.4%

Noxubee

4,724

2,997

 

 

12,102

71.9%

5,172

0

0.0%

 

63.3%

Oktibbeha

14,727

8,423

 

 

11,448

43.7%

4,952

107

2.2%

 

37.0%

Panola

12,565

7,639

 

 

16,226

56.4%

7,250

10

0.1%

 

48.7%

Pearl River

17,221

9,765

 

 

5,190

23.2%

2,473

0

0.0%

 

20.2%

Perry

6,333

3,515

 

 

2,412

27.6%

1,140

127

11.1%

 

24.5%

Pike

19,655

12,163

 

 

15,408

43.9%

6,936

207

3.0%

 

36.3%

Pontotoc

13,946

8,772

 

 

3,286

19.1%

1,519

6

0.4%

 

14.8%

Prentiss

15,763

9,535

 

 

2,186

12.2%

1,070

18

1.7%

 

10.1%

Quitman

7,715

4,176

 

 

13,304

63.3%

5,673

316

5.6%

 

57.6%

Rankin

21,504

13,246

 

 

12,818

37.4%

6,944

43

0.6%

 

34.4%

Scott

Montgomery

13,050

7,742

 

 

8,137

38.4%

3,752

15

0.4%

 

32.6%

Sharkey

3,247

1,882

 

 

7,491

69.8%

3,152

3

0.1%

 

62.6%

Simpson

13,254

8,073

 

 

7,200

35.2%

3,186

61

1.9%

 

28.3%

Smith

11,056

6,597

 

 

3,247

22.7%

1,293

24

1.9%

 

16.4%

Stone

5,302

2,965

 

 

1,711

24.4%

868

39

4.5%

 

22.7%

14,730

8,785

 

 

31,020

67.8%

13,524

161

1.2%

 

60.6%

8,580

5,099

 

 

15,501

64.4%

6,483

0

0.0%

 

56.0%

Sunflower Tallahatchie Tate

7,696

4,506

 

 

10,442

57.6%

4,326

0

0.0%

 

49.0%

Tippah

12,337

7,513

 

 

2,756

18.3%

1,281

176

13.7%

 

14.6%

Tishomingo

13,210

8,068

 

 

679

4.9%

359

6

1.7%

 

4.3%

Tunica

3,505

2,011

 

 

13,321

79.2%

5,822

22

0.4%

 

74.3%

Union

15,592

9,512

 

 

3,312

17.5%

1,626

6

0.4%

 

14.6%

Walthall

7,412

4,536

 

 

6,100

45.2%

2,490

0

0.0%

 

35.4%

Warren

22,447

13,530

 

 

19,759

46.8%

10,726

1,910

17.8%

 

44.2%

Washington

35,239

19,837

 

 

43,399

55.2%

20,619

2,563

12.4%

 

51.0%



Appendices 837 Mississippi (South) (continued) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Black Population

Percent Registered

(Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Wayne

10,449

5,881

5,809

35.7%

2,556

0

0.0%

30.3%

Webster

7,938

4,993

2,642

25.0%

1,174

2

0.2%

19.0%

Wilkinson

3,807

2,340

 

 

9,428

71.2%

4,120

110

2.7%

 

63.8%

Winston

10,853

6,808

 

 

8,393

43.6%

3,611

57

1.6%

 

34.7%

6,962

4,572

 

 

5,540

44.3%

2,441

4

0.2%

 

34.8%

12,862

7,598

 

 

18,791

59.4%

8,719

179

2.1%

 

53.4%

1,257,526

748,266

 

 

920,595

42.3%

422,256

25,921

6.1%

 

36.1%

Yalobusha Yazoo Mississippi Subtotal

North Carolina (South) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Black Population (Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Alamance

70,865

42,755

47,604

111.3%

14,809

17.3%

7,429

4,801

64.6%

9.2%

14.8%

Alexander

14,558

8,370

8,300

99.2%

1,067

6.8%

506

200

39.5%

2.4%

5.7%

Alleghany

7,501

4,588

6,458

140.8%

233

3.0%

119

54

45.4%

0.8%

2.5%

Anson

12,989

7,847

7,600

96.9%

11,973

48.0%

5,218

600

11.5%

7.3%

39.9%

Ashe

19,569

11,276

12,293

109.0%

199

1.0%

115

67

58.3%

0.5%

1.0%

Avery

11,854

6,507

7,507

115.4%

155

1.3%

124

68

54.8%

0.9%

1.9%

Beaufort

22,724

13,737

16,212

118.0%

13,290

36.9%

6,196

3,319

53.6%

17.0%

31.1%

Bertie

9,897

6,156

6,242

101.4%

14,453

59.4%

6,261

713

11.4%

10.3%

50.4%

Bladen

16,657

9,173

8,277

90.2%

12,224

42.3%

5,147

954

18.5%

10.3%

35.9%

Brunswick

13,103

7,602

9,900

130.2%

7,175

35.4%

3,170

2,100

66.3%

17.5%

29.4%

Buncombe

115,950

72,249

53,036

73.4%

14,124

10.9%

8,510

4,523

53.2%

7.9%

10.5%

Burke

48,968

29,506

38,000

128.8%

3,733

7.1%

1,921

2,000

104.1%

5.0%

6.1%

Cabarrus

57,309

35,165

27,067

77.0%

10,828

15.9%

5,380

1,019

18.9%

3.6%

13.3%

Caldwell

46,040

25,520

26,150

102.5%

3,512

7.1%

1,723

1,181

68.5%

4.3%

6.3%

Camden

3,240

1,988

1,915

96.3%

2,358

42.1%

1,054

187

17.7%

8.9%

34.7%

Carteret

27,107

16,030

16,620

103.7%

3,833

12.4%

1,932

812

42.0%

4.7%

10.8%

Caswell

10,356

6,026

5,177

85.9%

9,556

48.0%

4,129

1,240

30.0%

19.3%

40.7%

Catawba

66,378

38,542

45,312

117.6%

6,813

9.3%

3,296

2,670

81.0%

5.6%

7.9%

Chatham

18,371

11,227

12,062

107.4%

8,414

31.4%

4,026

800

19.9%

6.2%

26.4%

Cherokee

15,951

9,102

7,450

81.9%

384

2.4%

226

100

44.3%

1.3%

2.4%

Chowan

6,265

3,825

3,465

90.6%

5,464

46.6%

2,507

550

21.9%

13.7%

39.6%

Clay

5,476

3,112

3,471

111.5%

50

0.9%

37

35

94.6%

1.0%

1.2%

Cleveland

51,250

30,356

29,239

96.3%

14,798

22.4%

6,474

1,792

27.7%

5.8%

17.6%

Columbus

31,858

17,830

14,185

79.6%

17,115

35.0%

7,382

2,992

40.5%

17.4%

29.3%

Craven

41,764

22,994

10,950

47.6%

17,009

28.9%

8,242

2,150

26.1%

16.4%

26.4%

108,911

58,279

25,173

43.2%

39,507

26.6%

18,789

5,097

27.1%

16.8%

24.4%

Currituck

4,515

2,845

2,739

96.3%

2,086

31.6%

1,076

177

16.5%

6.1%

27.4%

Dare

5,529

3,467

3,725

107.4%

406

6.8%

237

75

31.7%

2.0%

6.4%

Cumberland

(Continued)

838

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A23.32 (Continued)

North Carolina (South) (continued) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Davidson

70,846

Davie

14,657

8,898

8,475

Duplin

25,126

14,477

14,923

Durham

75,965

47,098

46,213

Edgecombe

26,092

15,515

11,129

Forsyth

143,660

87,219

Franklin

15,993

9,842

Gaston

110,446 4,232

Gates

41,462

Registered Voters 42,385

Percent Registered 102.2%

Black Population (Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

2,484

55.3%

5.5%

9.8%

8,647

10.9%

4,491

95.3%

2,071

12.4%

1,080

669

61.9%

7.3%

10.8%

103.1%

15,144

37.6%

6,955

1,539

22.1%

9.4%

32.5%

98.1%

36,030

32.2%

19,475

13,201

67.8%

22.2%

29.3%

71.7%

28,134

51.9%

12,330

1,787

14.5%

13.8%

44.3%

73,992

84.8%

45,768

24.2%

24,952

14,798

59.3%

16.7%

22.2%

8,600

87.4%

12,762

44.4%

5,554

1,600

28.8%

15.7%

36.1%

64,154

72,671

113.3%

16,628

13.1%

8,365

4,954

59.2%

6.4%

11.5%

2,714

2,654

97.8%

5,022

54.3%

2,344

351

15.0%

11.7%

46.3%

Graham

6,176

3,324

4,025

121.1%

256

4.0%

125

0

0.0%

0.0%

3.6%

Granville

18,389

11,584

8,550

73.8%

14,721

44.5%

6,996

1,487

21.3%

14.8%

37.7%

Greene

8,317

4,793

4,882

101.9%

8,424

50.3%

3,268

385

11.8%

7.3%

40.5%

Guilford

194,984

116,748

81,816

70.1%

51,536

20.9%

27,292

10,296

37.7%

11.2%

19.0%

Halifax

26,492

16,496

15,406

93.4%

32,464

55.1%

13,766

1,954

14.2%

11.3%

45.5%

Harnett

34,813

20,061

12,207

60.9%

13,423

27.8%

6,150

600

9.8%

4.7%

23.5%

Haywood

38,817

23,055

24,889

108.0%

894

2.3%

500

329

65.8%

1.3%

2.1%

Henderson

34,194

21,062

33,838

160.7%

1,969

5.4%

1,170

629

53.8%

1.8%

5.3%

Hertford

9,318

5,606

6,415

114.4%

13,400

59.0%

6,102

537

8.8%

7.7%

52.1%

Hoke

6,962

3,998

4,454

111.4%

9,394

57.4%

3,747

650

17.4%

12.7%

48.4%

Hyde

3,330

2,201

1,949

88.6%

2,435

42.2%

1,100

173

15.7%

8.2%

33.3%

Iredell

51,393

31,094

31,180

100.3%

11,133

17.8%

5,517

3,106

56.3%

9.1%

15.1%

Jackson

16,040

9,227

8,570

92.9%

1,740

9.8%

841

1,531

182.1%

15.2%

8.4%

Johnston

48,807

28,259

43,883

155.3%

14,129

22.5%

6,395

4,252

66.5%

8.8%

18.5%

5,832

3,248

3,336

102.7%

5,173

47.0%

2,251

562

25.0%

14.4%

40.9%

Lee

20,658

12,041

9,267

77.0%

5,903

22.2%

2,803

947

33.8%

9.3%

18.9%

Lenoir

33,404

19,260

14,603

75.8%

21,872

39.6%

10,293

2,220

21.6%

13.2%

34.8%

Lincoln

25,288

14,893

14,068

94.5%

3,526

12.2%

1,546

978

63.3%

6.5%

9.4%

McDowell

25,366

14,693

20,095

136.8%

1,376

5.2%

755

785

104.0%

3.8%

4.9%

Macon

14,637

8,573

9,045

105.5%

298

2.0%

180

55

30.6%

0.6%

2.1%

Madison

17,094

9,574

12,200

127.4%

123

0.7%

75

200

266.7%

1.6%

0.8%

Jones

Martin

13,579

8,052

8,040

99.9%

13,560

50.0%

5,683

1,253

22.1%

13.5%

41.4%

205,164

123,787

96,074

77.6%

66,947

24.6%

34,150

14,729

43.1%

13.3%

21.6%

Mitchell

13,863

7,977

6,127

76.8%

43

0.3%

29

13

44.8%

0.2%

0.4%

Montgomery

13,820

8,119

9,988

123.0%

4,588

24.9%

2,075

812

39.1%

7.5%

20.4%

Moore

26,998

15,733

17,022

108.2%

9,735

26.5%

4,803

1,750

36.4%

9.3%

23.4%

Nash

36,722

21,761

25,914

119.1%

24,280

39.8%

10,573

2,015

19.1%

7.2%

32.7%

New Hanover

51,744

31,641

31,421

99.3%

19,998

27.9%

10,569

7,353

69.6%

19.0%

25.0%

Northampton

9,712

6,178

6,700

108.5%

17,099

63.8%

7,304

1,300

17.8%

16.3%

54.2%

Onslow

71,684

33,988

13,574

39.9%

11,022

13.3%

5,015

1,303

26.0%

8.8%

12.9%

Orange

32,765

19,385

13,988

72.2%

10,205

23.8%

4,978

1,510

30.3%

9.7%

20.4%

6,239

3,708

4,017

108.3%

3,611

36.7%

1,593

442

27.8%

9.9%

30.1%

15,501

9,409

7,527

80.0%

10,129

39.5%

4,936

1,894

38.4%

20.1%

34.4%

Mecklenburg

Pamlico Pasquotank



Appendices 839 North Carolina (South) (continued) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Black Population

Percent Registered

(Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Pender

9,602

5,631

6,240

110.8%

8,906

48.1%

4,085

889

21.8%

12.5%

42.0%

Perquimans

4,875

3,083

3,559

115.4%

4,303

46.9%

2,027

610

30.1%

14.6%

39.7%

Person

16,911

9,994

10,098

101.0%

9,483

35.9%

4,227

2,042

48.3%

16.8%

29.7%

Pitt

39,458

22,621

23,441

103.6%

30,484

43.6%

13,575

2,520

18.6%

9.7%

37.5%

Polk

9,972

6,104

10,103

165.5%

1,423

12.5%

766

705

92.0%

6.5%

11.2%

Randolph

56,369

33,477

34,000

101.6%

5,128

8.3%

2,591

1,000

38.6%

2.9%

7.2%

Richmond

27,375

16,019

14,349

89.6%

11,827

30.2%

5,514

1,793

32.5%

11.1%

25.6%

Robeson

36,552

20,851

25,537

122.5%

52,550

59.0%

21,424

11,994

56.0%

32.0%

50.7%

Rockingham

54,957

33,438

19,250

57.6%

14,672

21.1%

7,398

4,800

64.9%

20.0%

18.1%

Rowan

68,863

42,866

47,074

109.8%

13,954

16.9%

7,209

4,798

66.6%

9.3%

14.4%

Rutherford

39,691

24,020

24,500

102.0%

5,400

12.0%

2,572

1,050

40.8%

4.1%

9.7%

Sampson

29,863

17,378

23,790

136.9%

18,150

37.8%

8,203

5,726

69.8%

19.4%

32.1%

Scotland

14,037

7,812

11,903

152.4%

11,146

44.3%

4,686

1,045

22.3%

8.1%

37.5%

Stanly

36,376

22,056

24,625

111.7%

4,497

11.0%

2,164

1,500

69.3%

5.7%

8.9%

Stokes

20,045

11,786

13,574

115.2%

2,269

10.2%

1,025

562

54.8%

4.0%

8.0%

Surry

45,398

26,796

27,042

100.9%

2,807

5.8%

1,423

469

33.0%

1.7%

5.0%

Swain

6,720

3,878

4,650

119.9%

1,667

19.9%

756

150

19.8%

3.1%

16.3%

Transylvania

15,505

8,687

11,435

131.6%

867

5.3%

405

478

118.0%

4.0%

4.5%

Tyrrell

2,544

1,597

1,976

123.7%

1,976

43.7%

849

298

35.1%

13.1%

34.7%

Union

35,092

20,044

15,582

77.7%

9,578

21.4%

4,423

2,098

47.4%

11.9%

18.1%

Vance

17,973

11,005

13,912

126.4%

14,029

43.8%

6,520

1,526

23.4%

9.9%

37.2%

Wake

124,956

76,799

53,625

69.8%

44,126

26.1%

22,856

6,576

28.8%

10.9%

22.9%

Warren

6,939

4,439

6,123

137.9%

12,713

64.7%

5,490

881

16.1%

12.6%

55.3%

Washington

7,405

4,365

4,700

107.7%

6,083

45.1%

2,643

600

22.7%

11.3%

37.7%

Watauga

17,296

9,639

9,535

98.9%

233

1.3%

126

65

51.6%

0.7%

1.3%

Wayne

51,835

29,349

18,779

64.0%

30,224

36.8%

15,754

3,165

20.1%

14.4%

34.9%

Wilkes

42,558

23,779

24,116

101.4%

2,711

6.0%

1,444

1,374

95.2%

5.4%

5.7%

Wilson

34,674

20,566

14,256

69.3%

23,218

40.2%

10,770

2,662

24.7%

15.7%

34.4%

Yadkin

21,674

13,039

11,480

88.0%

1,130

5.0%

576

1,314

228.1%

10.3%

4.2%

Yancey

13,872

7,856

6,935

88.3%

136

1.0%

76

51

67.1%

0.7%

1.0%

3,399,461

2,005,955

1,858,430

92.7%

1,156,870

25.4%

550,929

210,450

38.2%

10.2%

21.6%

North Carolina Subtotal

South Carolina (South) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Black Population (Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Calhoun

4,058

2,623

2,145

81.8%

8,198

66.9%

3,318

26

0.8%

1.2%

55.9%

Clarendon

9,360

5,223

3,992

76.4%

20,130

68.3%

7,735

388

5.0%

8.9%

59.7%

Hampton

8,038

4,711

4,350

92.3%

9,387

53.9%

4,052

351

8.7%

7.5%

46.2%

McCormick

3,311

1,915

1,737

90.7%

5,318

61.6%

2,248

50

2.2%

2.8%

54.0%

24,767

14,472

12,224

84.5%

43,033

63.5%

17,353

815

4.7%

6.3%

54.5%

South Carolina Subtotal

(Continued)

840

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A23.32 (Continued)

Tennessee (South) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Black Population

Percent Registered

(Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Anderson

57,973

32,520

 

 

2,059

3.4%

1,034

 

 

 

3.1%

Bedford

20,387

12,716

 

 

2,763

11.9%

1,603

 

 

 

11.2%

Benton

10,346

6,619

6,850

103.5%

316

3.0%

171

150

87.7%

2.1%

2.5%

Bledsoe

7,356

3,980

 

 

455

5.8%

118

 

 

 

2.9%

Blount

54,732

31,329

25,650

81.9%

2,793

4.9%

1,520

1,350

88.8%

5.0%

4.6%

Bradley

36,324

20,834

 

 

2,000

5.2%

1,047

 

 

 

4.8%

Campbell

27,672

15,274

 

 

264

1.0%

140

 

 

 

0.9%

Cannon

8,337

5,127

 

 

200

2.3%

108

 

 

 

2.1%

Carroll

20,313

13,154

12,648

96.2%

3,163

13.5%

1,787

2,245

125.6%

15.1%

12.0%

Carter

41,133

23,669

 

 

445

1.1%

238

 

 

 

1.0%

Cheatham

8,800

5,238

4,400

84.0%

628

6.7%

344

600

174.4%

12.0%

6.2%

Chester

8,274

4,879

4,220

86.5%

1,295

13.5%

685

816

119.1%

16.2%

12.3%

18,757

10,603

10,609

100.1%

310

1.6%

164

146

89.0%

1.4%

1.5%

7,123

4,006

4,443

110.9%

166

2.3%

96

113

117.7%

2.5%

2.3%

Cocke

22,676

12,748

14,365

112.7%

714

3.1%

373

300

80.4%

2.1%

2.8%

Coffee

27,581

15,876

 

 

1,022

3.6%

583

 

 

 

3.5%

Crockett

11,028

6,933

 

 

3,566

24.4%

1,586

 

 

 

18.6%

Cumberland

19,129

10,343

9,145

88.4%

6

0.0%

6

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.1%

322,911

197,949

 

 

76,832

19.2%

44,984

 

 

 

18.5%

Decatur

7,791

4,979

5,701

114.5%

533

6.4%

251

250

99.6%

4.2%

4.8%

De Kalb

10,498

6,477

4,864

75.1%

276

2.6%

183

122

66.7%

2.5%

2.8%

Dickson

17,471

10,666

 

 

1,368

7.3%

729

 

 

 

6.4%

Dyer

25,174

15,484

14,400

93.0%

4,363

14.8%

2,456

1,140

46.4%

7.3%

13.7%

Fayette

7,646

4,437

6,391

144.0%

16,931

68.9%

7,215

1,500

20.8%

19.0%

61.9%

Fentress

13,286

6,703

6,537

97.5%

2

0.0%

2

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Franklin

23,252

13,328

14,753

110.7%

2,276

8.9%

1,131

775

68.5%

5.0%

7.8%

Gibson

35,070

22,888

17,439

76.2%

9,629

21.5%

4,903

3,077

62.8%

15.0%

17.6%

Giles

18,406

11,601

11,000

94.8%

4,004

17.9%

2,161

1,000

46.3%

8.3%

15.7%

Grainger

12,327

7,045

 

 

179

1.4%

100

 

 

 

1.4%

Greene

41,072

24,647

 

 

1,091

2.6%

601

 

 

 

2.4%

Grundy

11,497

6,191

6,612

106.8%

15

0.1%

10

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.2%

Hamblen

31,028

18,366

 

 

2,064

6.2%

1,099

 

 

 

5.7%

Hamilton

190,530

116,321

84,591

72.7%

47,375

19.9%

26,658

21,147

79.3%

20.0%

18.6%

Hancock

7,657

4,224

5,003

118.4%

100

1.3%

51

70

137.3%

1.4%

1.2%

Hardeman

13,125

8,653

6,270

72.5%

8,392

39.0%

4,072

1,028

25.3%

14.1%

32.0%

Hardin

16,309

9,734

8,992

92.4%

1,088

6.3%

578

556

96.2%

5.8%

5.6%

Claiborne Clay

Davidson



Appendices 841 Tennessee (South) (continued) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Black Population

Percent Registered

(Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Hawkins

29,376

17,120

16,372

95.6%

1,092

3.6%

602

603

100.2%

3.6%

3.4%

Haywood

9,055

5,497

6,500

118.3%

14,338

61.3%

6,295

300

4.8%

4.4%

53.4%

Henderson

14,402

8,988

6,696

74.5%

1,713

10.6%

862

608

70.5%

8.3%

8.8%

Henry

18,950

12,429

10,500

84.5%

3,325

14.9%

1,977

1,250

63.2%

10.6%

13.7%

Hickman

11,228

6,796

3,757

55.3%

634

5.3%

324

1,253

386.7%

25.0%

4.6%

Houston

4,431

2,705

 

 

363

7.6%

197

 

 

 

6.8%

10,937

6,613

 

 

574

5.0%

323

 

 

 

4.7%

Humphreys Jackson

9,199

5,551

6,434

115.9%

34

0.4%

27

18

66.7%

0.3%

0.5%

Jefferson

20,564

12,159

9,625

79.2%

929

4.3%

516

375

72.7%

3.8%

4.1%

Johnson

10,625

6,198

7,079

114.2%

140

1.3%

86

69

80.2%

1.0%

1.4%

227,603

138,724

115,000

82.9%

22,920

9.2%

13,275

10,000

75.3%

8.0%

8.7%

Knox Lake

7,360

4,047

 

 

2,212

23.1%

1,108

 

 

 

21.5%

Lauderdale

13,461

8,152

9,256

113.5%

8,383

38.4%

4,137

2,250

54.4%

19.6%

33.7%

Lawrence

27,521

15,837

 

 

528

1.9%

300

 

 

 

1.9%

Lewis

6,147

3,561

 

 

122

2.0%

59

 

 

 

1.6%

Lincoln

20,672

12,621

10,259

81.3%

3,157

13.3%

1,673

709

42.4%

6.5%

11.7%

Loudon

23,310

13,786

 

 

447

1.9%

268

 

 

 

1.9%

McMinn

31,873

18,738

 

 

1,789

5.3%

958

 

 

 

4.9%

McNairy

16,836

10,235

11,016

107.6%

1,249

6.9%

631

709

112.4%

6.1%

5.8%

Macon

12,076

7,458

5,950

79.8%

121

1.0%

69

68

98.6%

1.1%

0.9%

Madison

39,980

25,617

 

 

20,675

34.1%

10,416

 

 

 

28.9%

Marion

19,695

10,730

11,750

109.5%

1,341

6.4%

707

600

84.9%

4.9%

6.2%

Marshall

14,877

9,473

8,373

88.4%

1,982

11.8%

1,042

674

64.7%

7.5%

9.9%

Maury

33,314

20,323

18,988

93.4%

8,385

20.1%

4,710

3,540

75.2%

15.7%

18.8%

Meigs

4,905

2,642

2,927

110.8%

255

4.9%

117

113

96.6%

3.7%

4.2%

Monroe

22,404

12,318

14,665

119.1%

912

3.9%

507

400

78.9%

2.7%

4.0%

Montgomery

44,596

24,503

13,465

55.0%

11,049

19.9%

5,916

2,610

44.1%

16.2%

19.5%

Moore

3,159

2,012

2,031

100.9%

295

8.5%

146

102

69.9%

4.8%

6.8%

Morgan

13,996

7,625

7,119

93.4%

308

2.2%

296

12

4.1%

0.2%

3.7%

Obion

23,753

15,362

11,692

76.1%

3,204

11.9%

1,849

1,579

85.4%

11.9%

10.7%

Overton

14,584

8,501

 

 

77

0.5%

44

 

 

 

0.5%

Perry

5,079

3,183

3,318

104.2%

194

3.7%

85

71

83.5%

2.1%

2.6%

Pickett

4,425

2,462

 

 

6

0.1%

5

 

 

 

0.2%

Polk

12,132

6,776

 

 

28

0.2%

13

 

 

 

0.2%

Putnam

28,700

16,764

14,563

86.9%

536

1.8%

306

126

41.2%

0.9%

1.8%

Rhea

15,210

8,564

7,000

81.7%

653

4.1%

354

453

128.0%

6.1%

4.0%

Roane

37,512

21,079

 

 

1,621

4.1%

878

 

 

 

4.0%

Robertson

22,549

13,748

 

 

4,786

17.5%

2,656

 

 

 

16.2%

Rutherford

45,190

26,387

14,888

56.4%

7,178

13.7%

3,960

1,878

47.4%

11.2%

13.1% (Continued)

842

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A23.32 (Continued)

Tennessee (South) (continued) Voting Age White Population

County Scott Sequatchie

(Census 1960) White Population 15,410

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Black Population

Percent Registered

7,792

6,019

77.3%

(Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

3

0.0%

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

3

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

5,912

3,176

3,151

99.2%

3

0.1%

1

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Sevier

24,060

13,906

 

 

191

0.8%

105

 

 

 

0.8%

Shelby

398,937

240,499

172,786

71.8%

228,082

36.4%

119,033

76,582

64.3%

30.7%

33.1%

Smith

11,445

7,321

8,145

111.3%

614

5.1%

333

400

120.1%

4.7%

4.4%

Stewart

7,614

4,637

4,215

90.9%

237

3.0%

150

103

68.7%

2.4%

3.1%

Sullivan

111,634

65,683

 

 

2,505

2.2%

1,438

 

 

 

2.1%

Sumner

32,091

19,472

 

 

4,126

11.4%

2,304

 

 

 

10.6%

Tipton

17,366

9,864

9,626

97.6%

11,198

39.2%

5,048

3,022

59.9%

23.9%

33.9%

4,085

2,549

2,611

102.4%

829

16.9%

478

508

106.3%

16.3%

15.8%

Unicoi

15,075

8,737

7,818

89.5%

7

0.1%

7

1

14.3%

0.0%

0.1%

Union

8,496

4,713

4,452

94.5%

2

0.0%

2

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Van Buren

3,640

1,940

2,409

124.2%

31

0.8%

16

21

131.3%

0.9%

0.8%

Warren

21,983

13,251

10,864

82.0%

1,119

4.8%

630

236

37.5%

2.1%

4.5%

Washington

62,286

37,705

34,400

91.2%

2,546

3.9%

1,582

1,467

92.7%

4.1%

4.0%

Wayne

11,702

6,521

9,090

139.4%

206

1.7%

124

136

109.7%

1.5%

1.9%

Weakley

22,470

14,694

 

 

1,757

7.3%

1,016

 

 

 

6.5%

White

15,139

9,033

7,456

82.5%

438

2.8%

275

188

68.4%

2.5%

3.0%

Williamson

20,203

11,919

 

 

5,064

20.0%

2,616

 

 

 

18.0%

Wilson

23,528

14,781

13,050

88.3%

4,140

15.0%

2,231

1,450

65.0%

10.0%

13.1%

2,977,753

1,779,018

930,198

52.3%

589,336

16.5%

313,873

150,869

48.1%

14.0%

15.0%

Trousdale

Tennessee Subtotal

Texas (South) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Black Population (Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Anderson

19,797

13,114

8,307

63.3%

8,365

29.7%

4,430

2,289

51.7%

21.6%

25.3%

Andrews

16,164

7,011

4,433

63.2%

286

2.1%

137

53

38.7%

1.2%

1.9%

Angelina

32,731

20,049

14,526

72.5%

7,083

17.8%

3,762

1,419

37.7%

8.9%

15.8%

Aransas

6,719

3,921

1,778

45.4%

287

4.1%

154

49

31.8%

2.7%

3.8%

Archer

6,082

3,692

2,402

65.1%

28

0.5%

18

3

16.7%

0.1%

0.5%

Armstrong

1,961

1,283

929

72.4%

5

0.3%

3

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.2%

Atascosa

18,640

9,876

6,825

69.1%

188

1.0%

92

35

38.0%

0.5%

0.9%

Austin

10,819

7,450

4,500

60.4%

2,958

21.5%

1,566

500

31.9%

10.0%

17.4%

Bailey

8,718

4,930

2,575

52.2%

372

4.1%

179

9

5.0%

0.4%

3.5%

Bandera

3,873

2,577

118

4.6%

19

0.5%

19

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.7%

Bastrop

11,632

7,561

3,855

51.0%

5,293

31.3%

2,867

1,285

44.8%

25.0%

27.5%

Baylor

5,660

3,712

1,680

45.3%

233

4.0%

112

20

17.9%

1.2%

2.9%

23,116

11,895

4,825

40.6%

639

2.7%

369

125

33.9%

2.5%

3.0%

Bee



Appendices 843 Texas (South) (continued) Voting Age White Population

County Bell

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Black Population

Percent Registered

(Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

82,699

48,932

18,192

37.2%

11,398

12.1%

6,228

1,200

19.3%

6.2%

11.3%

639,756

350,918

152,673

43.5%

47,395

6.9%

27,072

9,693

35.8%

6.0%

7.2%

Blanco

3,554

2,308

 

 

103

2.8%

75

 

 

 

3.2%

Borden

1,076

612

501

81.9%

0

0.0%

 

0

 

0.0%

 

Bosque

10,441

7,313

4,700

64.3%

368

3.4%

196

300

153.1%

6.0%

2.6%

Bowie

45,575

28,576

15,769

55.2%

14,396

24.0%

7,684

2,492

32.4%

13.7%

21.2%

Brazoria

67,054

37,767

21,867

57.9%

9,150

12.0%

5,497

1,376

25.0%

5.9%

12.7%

Brazos

35,410

19,987

11,282

56.5%

9,485

21.1%

4,957

1,152

23.2%

9.3%

19.9%

Brewster

6,385

3,520

2,067

58.7%

49

0.8%

30

6

20.0%

0.3%

0.9%

Briscoe

3,383

1,976

1,174

59.4%

194

5.4%

65

7

10.8%

0.6%

3.2%

Brooks

8,597

4,456

3,460

77.7%

12

0.1%

9

6

66.7%

0.2%

0.2%

Brown

23,967

15,924

9,463

59.4%

761

3.1%

456

167

36.6%

1.7%

2.8%

Burleson

7,679

4,926

2,400

48.7%

3,498

31.3%

1,871

720

38.5%

23.1%

27.5%

Burnet

9,094

5,753

2,212

38.5%

171

1.9%

95

50

52.6%

2.2%

1.6%

Caldwell

14,618

8,732

3,289

37.7%

2,604

15.1%

1,504

358

23.8%

9.8%

14.7%

Calhoun

15,770

8,059

4,359

54.1%

822

5.0%

421

151

35.9%

3.4%

5.0%

Callahan

7,921

5,274

2,181

41.4%

8

0.1%

3

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.1%

Cameron

Bexar

149,877

73,664

 

 

1,221

0.8%

725

 

 

 

1.0%

Camp

4,863

3,196

 

 

2,986

38.0%

1,586

 

 

 

33.2%

Carson

7,754

4,314

2,625

60.9%

27

0.4%

20

6

30.0%

0.2%

0.5%

16,512

10,511

5,266

50.1%

6,984

29.7%

3,509

52

1.5%

1.0%

25.0%

Castro

8,550

4,360

2,774

63.6%

373

4.2%

156

17

10.9%

0.6%

3.5%

Chambers

8,086

4,750

3,200

67.4%

2,293

22.1%

1,144

700

61.2%

18.0%

19.4%

Cherokee

24,590

16,480

6,252

37.9%

8,530

25.8%

4,839

1,081

22.3%

14.7%

22.7%

Childress

7,894

5,176

3,000

58.0%

527

6.3%

284

200

70.4%

6.3%

5.2%

Clay

8,268

5,318

2,275

42.8%

83

1.0%

51

7

13.7%

0.3%

1.0%

Cochran

6,124

3,280

1,291

39.4%

293

4.6%

131

150

114.5%

10.4%

3.8%

Coke

3,584

2,206

1,731

78.5%

5

0.1%

4

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.2%

Cass/Davis

Coleman

12,134

8,169

3,702

45.3%

324

2.6%

178

300

168.5%

7.5%

2.1%

Collin

36,786

23,448

 

 

4,461

10.8%

2,275

 

 

 

8.8%

5,740

3,632

 

 

536

8.5%

244

 

 

 

6.3%

Colorado

13,868

8,493

 

 

4,595

24.9%

2,529

 

 

 

23.0%

Comal

19,421

11,368

5,890

51.8%

423

2.1%

205

25

12.2%

0.4%

1.8%

Comanche

Collingsworth

11,848

8,330

3,129

37.6%

17

0.1%

9

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.1%

Concho

3,669

2,331

915

39.3%

3

0.1%

3

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.1%

Cooke

21,699

13,143

8,179

62.2%

861

3.8%

488

100

20.5%

1.2%

3.6%

Coryell

22,507

13,190

4,467

33.9%

1,454

6.1%

719

75

10.4%

1.7%

5.2%

Cottle

3,863

2,410

1,148

47.6%

344

8.2%

175

38

21.7%

3.2%

6.8%

Crane

4,472

2,565

 

 

227

4.8%

95

 

 

 

3.6% (Continued)

844

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A23.32 (Continued) Texas (South) (continued) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Black Population

Percent Registered

(Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Crockett

4,083

2,221

1,349

60.7%

126

3.0%

80

37

46.3%

2.7%

3.5%

Crosby

9,466

5,234

2,617

50.0%

881

8.5%

395

15

3.8%

0.6%

7.0%

Culberson

2,780

1,459

 

 

14

0.5%

6

 

 

 

0.4%

Dallam

6,243

3,830

2,207

57.6%

59

0.9%

33

12

36.4%

0.5%

0.9%

Dallas

811,261

493,340

 

 

140,266

14.7%

76,927

 

 

 

13.5%

Dawson

18,104

10,030

5,599

55.8%

1,081

5.6%

501

294

58.7%

5.0%

4.8%

Deaf Smith

12,921

6,955

3,170

45.6%

266

2.0%

99

6

6.1%

0.2%

1.4%

5,000

3,486

1,479

42.4%

860

14.7%

422

18

4.3%

1.2%

10.8%

Denton

44,446

26,011

11,303

43.5%

2,986

6.3%

1,594

466

29.2%

4.0%

5.8%

De Witt

17,896

11,013

4,184

38.0%

2,787

13.5%

1,699

336

19.8%

7.4%

13.4%

Dickens

4,702

3,002

 

 

261

5.3%

137

 

 

 

4.4%

Dimmit

10,040

4,839

1,942

40.1%

55

0.5%

17

3

17.7%

0.2%

0.4%

Donley

4,228

2,806

1,493

53.2%

221

5.0%

108

10

9.3%

0.7%

3.7%

Duval

13,391

7,148

5,118

71.6%

7

0.1%

7

3

42.9%

0.1%

0.1%

Eastland

19,180

13,135

 

 

346

1.8%

207

 

 

 

1.6%

Ector

86,120

46,903

16,095

34.3%

4,875

5.4%

2,591

1,215

46.9%

7.0%

5.2%

Delta

Edwards

2,309

1,405

919

65.4%

8

0.4%

7

2

28.6%

0.2%

0.5%

33,127

21,069

9,035

42.9%

10,268

23.7%

5,114

835

16.3%

8.5%

19.5%

303,555

160,240

53,458

33.4%

10,515

3.4%

5,861

1,653

28.2%

3.0%

3.5%

Erath

16,095

10,840

5,801

53.5%

141

0.9%

108

59

54.6%

1.0%

1.0%

Falls

14,306

9,466

4,974

52.6%

6,957

32.7%

3,630

1,095

30.2%

18.0%

27.7%

Fannin

21,373

14,920

6,729

45.1%

2,507

10.5%

1,357

200

14.7%

2.9%

8.3%

Fayette

17,504

11,980

5,882

49.1%

2,880

14.1%

1,634

1,120

68.5%

16.0%

12.0%

Fisher

7,488

4,619

2,391

51.8%

377

4.8%

195

42

21.5%

1.7%

4.1%

Floyd

11,476

6,567

3,468

52.8%

893

7.2%

379

49

12.9%

1.4%

5.5%

Foard

2,847

1,861

1,040

55.9%

278

8.9%

138

110

79.7%

9.6%

6.9%

32,400

17,879

7,530

42.1%

8,127

20.1%

4,373

1,250

28.6%

14.2%

19.7%

Franklin

4,706

3,218

2,300

71.5%

395

7.7%

199

177

88.9%

7.2%

5.8%

Freestone

7,604

5,272

2,040

38.7%

4,921

39.3%

2,531

611

24.1%

23.1%

32.4%

Frio

10,051

5,052

2,410

47.7%

61

0.6%

32

14

43.8%

0.6%

0.6%

Gaines

11,902

6,470

 

 

365

3.0%

156

 

 

 

2.4%

110,297

65,830

40,423

61.4%

30,067

21.4%

16,685

7,059

42.3%

14.9%

20.2%

6,290

3,524

2,088

59.3%

321

4.9%

179

66

36.9%

3.1%

4.8%

Gillespie

10,030

6,514

4,195

64.4%

18

0.2%

12

5

41.7%

0.1%

0.2%

Glasscock

1,105

666

505

75.8%

13

1.2%

7

5

71.4%

1.0%

1.0%

Goliad

4,801

2,894

 

 

628

11.6%

361

 

 

 

11.1%

Gonzales

14,588

9,006

 

 

3,257

18.3%

1,752

 

 

 

16.3%

Gray

30,592

18,205

11,773

64.7%

943

3.0%

514

95

18.5%

0.8%

2.8%

Ellis El Paso

Fort Bend

Galveston Garza



Appendices 845 Texas (South) (continued) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Black Population

Percent Registered

(Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Grayson

66,513

42,364

6,530

8.9%

3,712

Gregg

53,506

32,941

18,723

56.8%

15,930

22.9%

8,508

6,240

73.3%

25.0%

20.5%

Grimes

7,859

5,068

 

 

4,850

38.2%

2,665

 

 

 

34.5%

Guadalupe

25,705

14,684

7,239

49.3%

3,312

11.4%

1,924

729

37.9%

9.2%

11.6%

Hale

34,782

19,158

1,949

10.2%

2,016

5.5%

898

26

2.9%

1.3%

4.5%

Hall

6,357

4,104

 

 

965

13.2%

436

 

 

 

9.6%

Hamilton

8,475

5,954

3,345

56.2%

13

0.2%

8

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.1%

Hansford

6,184

3,491

2,381

68.2%

24

0.4%

11

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.3%

Hardeman

7,283

4,776

2,875

60.2%

992

12.0%

453

100

22.1%

3.4%

8.7%

Hardin

20,609

11,905

5,260

44.2%

4,020

16.3%

2,126

2,003

94.2%

27.6%

15.2%

Harris

993,685

586,839

357,121

60.9%

249,473

20.1%

136,118

40,000

29.4%

10.1%

18.8%

Harrison

25,798

15,994

6,321

39.5%

19,796

43.4%

10,287

1,897

18.4%

23.1%

39.1%

Hartley

2,169

1,290

783

60.7%

2

0.1%

1

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.1%

Haskell

10,531

6,554

3,203

48.9%

643

5.8%

321

65

20.3%

2.0%

4.7%

Hays

18,802

10,352

 

 

1,132

5.7%

659

 

 

 

6.0%

Hemphill

8.1%

3,183

1,934

1,391

71.9%

2

0.1%

 

0

 

0.0%

 

17,263

11,299

4,000

35.4%

4,523

20.8%

2,222

1,500

67.5%

27.3%

16.4%

180,228

87,137

42,567

48.9%

676

0.4%

396

100

25.3%

0.2%

0.5%

Hill

19,959

13,743

5,249

38.2%

3,691

15.6%

1,917

289

15.1%

5.2%

12.2%

Hockley

21,066

11,289

5,857

51.9%

1,274

5.7%

578

151

26.1%

2.5%

4.9%

5,391

3,590

2,107

58.7%

52

1.0%

34

5

14.7%

0.2%

0.9%

Hopkins

16,274

11,146

4,190

37.6%

2,320

12.5%

1,180

184

15.6%

4.2%

9.6%

Houston

11,918

8,341

3,924

47.0%

7,458

38.5%

3,906

1,470

37.6%

27.3%

31.9%

Howard

38,368

22,139

11,195

50.6%

1,771

4.4%

889

300

33.8%

2.6%

3.9%

3,329

1,806

961

53.2%

14

0.4%

9

1

11.1%

0.1%

0.5%

Hunt

32,934

21,544

 

 

6,465

16.4%

3,214

 

 

 

13.0%

Hutchinson

33,657

19,045

12,137

63.7%

762

2.2%

371

110

29.7%

0.9%

1.9%

Henderson Hidalgo

Hood

Hudspeth

Irion

1,172

731

647

88.5%

11

0.9%

10

0

0.0%

0.0%

1.4%

Jack

7,332

4,828

2,111

43.7%

86

1.2%

52

8

15.4%

0.4%

1.1%

Jackson

12,347

6,840

3,876

56.7%

1,696

12.1%

907

215

23.7%

5.3%

11.7%

Jasper

16,598

9,892

4,419

44.7%

5,502

24.9%

2,748

996

36.2%

18.4%

21.7%

Jeff Davis

1,580

889

495

55.7%

2

0.1%

2

5

250.0%

1.0%

0.2%

Jefferson

188,297

112,761

70,000

62.1%

57,362

23.4%

30,672

12,575

41.0%

15.2%

21.4%

Jim Hogg

5,016

2,716

1,829

67.3%

6

0.1%

5

2

40.0%

0.1%

0.2%

Jim Wells

34,151

17,287

10,146

58.7%

397

1.2%

228

70

30.7%

0.7%

1.3%

Johnson

33,032

20,908

11,208

53.6%

1,688

4.9%

915

590

64.5%

5.0%

4.2%

Jones

18,179

11,472

7,082

61.7%

1,120

5.8%

573

300

52.4%

4.1%

4.8%

Karnes

14,570

7,929

4,141

52.2%

425

2.8%

243

64

26.3%

1.5%

3.0%

Kaufman

20,965

14,411

5,640

39.1%

8,966

30.0%

4,637

892

19.2%

13.7%

24.3% (Continued)

846

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A23.32 (Continued) Texas (South) (continued) Voting Age White Population

County Kendall Kenedy

(Census 1960) White Population 5,849

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Black Population

Percent Registered

3,721

2,366

63.6%

(Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

40

0.7%

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

35

30

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

85.7%

1.3%

0.9%

884

435

210

48.3%

0

0.0%

Kent

1,680

1,063

 

 

47

2.7%

24

 

 

 

2.2%

Kerr

16,084

11,065

3,473

31.4%

716

4.3%

476

400

84.0%

10.3%

4.1%

3,934

2,497

1,914

76.7%

9

0.2%

9

3

33.3%

0.2%

0.4%

582

347

254

73.2%

58

9.1%

30

6

20.0%

2.3%

8.0%

Kimble King

0

Elg. % of County

0.0%

Kinney

2,262

1,331

763

57.3%

190

7.8%

98

72

73.5%

8.6%

6.9%

Kleberg

28,918

14,748

6,694

45.4%

1,134

3.8%

655

351

53.6%

5.0%

4.3%

Knox

7,274

4,526

2,312

51.1%

583

7.4%

273

24

8.8%

1.0%

5.7%

Lamar

27,799

18,342

12,414

67.7%

6,435

18.8%

3,576

2,586

72.3%

17.2%

16.3%

Lamb

20,217

11,434

5,566

48.7%

1,679

7.7%

747

68

9.1%

1.2%

6.1%

Lampasas

9,128

5,743

1,615

28.1%

290

3.1%

175

30

17.1%

1.8%

3.0%

La Salle

5,965

3,057

1,490

48.7%

7

0.1%

6

2

33.3%

0.1%

0.2%

Lavaca

18,062

11,559

6,376

55.2%

2,112

10.5%

1,173

274

23.4%

4.1%

9.2%

Lee

6,808

4,459

2,511

56.3%

2,141

23.9%

1,152

409

35.5%

14.0%

20.5%

Leon

6,153

4,128

 

 

3,798

38.2%

2,040

 

 

 

33.1%

Liberty

24,182

14,216

6,912

48.6%

7,413

23.5%

3,796

1,317

34.7%

16.0%

21.1%

Limestone

14,606

10,187

 

 

5,807

28.5%

3,120

 

 

 

23.5%

Lipscomb

3,378

2,102

1,447

68.8%

28

0.8%

27

0

0.0%

0.0%

1.3%

Live Oak

7,827

4,176

1,940

46.5%

19

0.2%

14

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.3%

Llano

5,194

3,592

2,290

63.8%

46

0.9%

35

10

28.6%

0.4%

1.0%

Loving Lubbock Lynn

216

125

92

73.6%

10

4.4%

10

9

90.0%

8.9%

7.4%

143,802

78,842

40,909

51.9%

12,469

8.0%

5,989

971

16.2%

2.3%

7.1%

10,245

5,642

3,755

66.6%

669

6.1%

310

106

34.2%

2.8%

5.2%

McCulloch

8,487

5,550

1,560

28.1%

328

3.7%

195

22

11.3%

1.4%

3.4%

McLennan

125,870

78,090

 

 

24,221

16.1%

13,232

 

 

 

14.5%

McMullen

1,116

667

643

96.4%

0

0.0%

 

0

 

0.0%

 

Madison

4,503

3,185

1,945

61.1%

2,426

36.0%

1,210

250

20.7%

11.4%

27.5%

Marion

3,828

2,463

1,209

49.1%

4,221

52.4%

2,218

623

28.1%

34.0%

47.4%

Martin

4,857

2,700

1,350

50.0%

211

4.2%

98

50

51.0%

3.6%

3.5%

Mason

3,757

2,485

1,537

61.9%

23

0.6%

10

1

10.0%

0.1%

0.4%

Matagorda

20,417

11,474

5,563

48.5%

5,327

20.7%

2,870

960

33.5%

14.7%

20.0%

Maverick

14,474

7,143

2,883

40.4%

34

0.2%

21

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.3%

Medina

18,724

10,106

4,341

43.0%

180

1.0%

108

12

11.1%

0.3%

1.1%

Menard

2,926

1,900

 

 

38

1.3%

16

 

 

 

0.8%

Midland

61,404

33,970

18,872

55.6%

6,313

9.3%

3,282

900

27.4%

4.6%

8.8%

Milam

18,231

11,686

4,513

38.6%

4,032

18.1%

2,120

1,236

58.3%

21.5%

15.4%

Mills

4,463

3,144

1,327

42.2%

4

0.1%

2

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.1%

Mitchell

10,423

6,107

3,800

62.2%

832

7.4%

403

240

59.6%

5.9%

6.2%

Montague

14,891

10,016

6,495

64.9%

2

0.0%

2

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%



Appendices 847 Texas (South) (continued) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Black Population

Percent Registered

(Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Montgomery

20,693

12,398

6,146

22.9%

3,246

Moore

14,709

7,880

5,098

64.7%

64

0.4%

25

0

0.0%

0.0%

20.8% 0.3%

Morris

9,176

5,615

3,374

60.1%

3,400

27.0%

1,591

454

28.5%

11.9%

22.1%

Motley

2,604

1,667

1,238

74.3%

266

9.3%

132

74

56.1%

5.6%

7.3%

Nacogdoches

20,517

13,093

 

 

7,529

26.9%

3,843

 

 

 

22.7%

Navarro

25,856

17,323

10,025

57.9%

8,567

24.9%

4,586

1,382

30.1%

12.1%

20.9%

Newton

6,925

4,047

2,316

57.2%

3,447

33.2%

1,703

795

46.7%

25.6%

29.6%

Nolan

18,211

11,076

6,489

58.6%

752

4.0%

400

105

26.3%

1.6%

3.5%

Nueces

211,180

109,917

52,580

47.8%

10,393

4.7%

5,780

2,767

47.9%

5.0%

5.0%

Ochiltree

9,359

5,244

2,990

57.0%

21

0.2%

13

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.3%

Oldham

1,924

985

658

66.8%

4

0.2%

4

2

50.0%

0.3%

0.4%

Orange

54,318

29,595

13,936

47.1%

6,039

10.0%

3,111

875

28.1%

5.9%

9.5%

Palo Pinto

19,583

12,303

 

 

933

4.6%

550

 

 

 

4.3%

Panola

11,691

7,483

4,850

64.8%

5,179

30.7%

2,470

1,350

54.7%

21.8%

24.8%

Parker

22,413

14,163

 

 

467

2.0%

268

 

 

 

1.9%

Parmer

9,338

5,038

 

 

245

2.6%

106

 

 

 

2.1%

Pecos

11,863

6,390

3,745

58.6%

94

0.8%

45

15

33.3%

0.4%

0.7%

9,410

5,958

2,000

33.6%

4,451

32.1%

2,194

1,539

70.2%

43.5%

26.9%

107,593

61,007

26,498

43.4%

7,987

6.9%

4,054

1,994

49.2%

7.0%

6.2%

Presidio

5,455

3,021

 

 

5

0.1%

2

 

 

 

0.1%

Rains

2,686

1,839

 

 

307

10.3%

158

 

 

 

7.9%

Randall

33,841

19,025

11,608

61.0%

72

0.2%

54

12

22.2%

0.1%

0.3%

Reagan

3,520

1,989

1,261

63.4%

262

6.9%

117

67

57.3%

5.1%

5.6%

Real

2,075

1,249

933

74.7%

4

0.2%

4

3

75.0%

0.3%

0.3%

Red River

11,854

7,929

3,557

44.9%

3,828

24.4%

1,984

346

17.4%

8.9%

20.0%

Reeves

17,010

8,930

3,411

38.2%

634

3.6%

307

45

14.7%

1.3%

3.3%

Refugio

9,943

5,378

 

 

1,032

9.4%

514

 

 

 

8.7%

Roberts

1,063

675

540

80.0%

12

1.1%

7

1

14.3%

0.2%

1.0%

Robertson

9,612

6,173

 

 

6,545

40.5%

3,413

 

 

 

35.6%

Rockwall

4,463

2,927

 

 

1,415

24.1%

607

 

 

 

17.2%

Runnels

14,608

8,910

3,400

38.2%

408

2.7%

236

100

42.4%

2.9%

2.6%

Rusk

25,808

16,907

8,927

52.8%

10,613

29.1%

5,424

1,853

34.2%

17.2%

24.3%

Sabine

5,404

3,421

1,774

51.9%

1,898

26.0%

956

508

53.1%

22.3%

21.8%

San Augustine

4,713

3,002

1,883

62.7%

3,009

39.0%

1,437

606

42.2%

24.4%

32.4%

San Jacinto

2,944

1,878

1,401

74.6%

3,209

52.2%

1,678

1,000

59.6%

41.7%

47.2%

San Patricio

44,163

21,773

10,399

47.8%

858

1.9%

452

101

22.4%

1.0%

2.0%

6,331

4,219

2,293

54.4%

50

0.8%

37

21

56.8%

0.9%

0.9%

Polk Potter

San Saba Schleicher Scurry

2,711

1,625

925

56.9%

80

2.9%

30

21

70.0%

2.2%

1.8%

19,793

11,155

6,988

62.6%

576

2.8%

288

200

69.4%

2.8%

2.5% (Continued)

848

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A23.32 (Continued) Texas (South) (continued) Voting Age White Population

County Shackelford

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Black Population

Percent Registered

(Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

3,862

2,618

1,245

47.6%

128

3.2%

78

10

12.8%

0.8%

2.9%

15,218

9,838

4,816

49.0%

5,261

25.7%

2,655

740

27.9%

13.3%

21.3%

2,604

1,531

982

64.1%

1

0.0%

1

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.1%

62,966

39,152

21,227

54.2%

23,384

27.1%

12,421

3,568

28.7%

14.4%

24.1%

2,574

1,770

1,242

70.2%

3

0.1%

2

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.1%

17,122

8,374

 

 

15

0.1%

7

 

 

 

0.1%

Stephens/ Buchanan

8,487

5,720

2,475

43.3%

398

4.5%

253

152

60.1%

5.8%

4.2%

Sterling

1,167

695

537

77.3%

10

0.9%

10

0

0.0%

0.0%

1.4%

Stonewall

2,898

1,841

1,421

77.2%

119

3.9%

64

40

62.5%

2.7%

3.4%

Sutton

3,706

2,107

792

37.6%

32

0.9%

18

4

22.2%

0.5%

0.9%

Swisher

10,173

5,775

3,935

68.1%

434

4.1%

168

180

107.1%

4.4%

2.8%

Tarrant

478,747

287,360

145,447

50.6%

59,748

11.1%

32,995

9,940

30.1%

6.4%

10.3%

Taylor

96,329

55,618

 

 

4,749

4.7%

2,548

 

 

 

4.4%

Terrell

2,591

1,469

813

55.3%

9

0.4%

7

1

14.3%

0.1%

0.5%

Terry

15,681

8,518

3,335

39.2%

605

3.7%

301

103

34.2%

3.0%

3.4%

2,739

1,876

840

44.8%

28

1.0%

12

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.6%

13,843

8,922

5,119

57.4%

2,942

17.5%

1,592

966

60.7%

15.9%

15.1%

Shelby Sherman Smith Somervell Starr

Throckmorton Titus Tom Green

61,427

36,052

18,556

51.5%

3,203

5.0%

1,845

607

32.9%

3.2%

4.9%

Travis

184,912

108,111

53,576

49.6%

27,224

12.8%

15,284

6,500

42.5%

10.8%

12.4%

Trinity

5,504

3,665

1,441

39.3%

2,035

27.0%

1,178

823

69.9%

36.4%

24.3%

Tyler

8,415

5,187

1,500

28.9%

2,251

21.1%

1,099

500

45.5%

25.0%

17.5%

Upshur

14,665

9,161

5,900

64.4%

5,128

25.9%

2,600

1,600

61.5%

21.3%

22.1%

Upton

5,967

3,226

2,226

69.0%

272

4.4%

150

100

66.7%

4.3%

4.4%

Uvalde

16,647

9,151

3,523

38.5%

167

1.0%

104

13

12.5%

0.4%

1.1%

Val Verde

23,661

12,488

4,624

37.0%

800

3.3%

435

200

46.0%

4.2%

3.4%

Van Zandt

17,656

11,679

 

 

1,435

7.5%

725

 

 

 

5.8%

Victoria

42,456

22,957

12,534

54.6%

4,019

8.7%

2,328

644

27.7%

4.9%

9.2%

Walker

14,441

9,127

2,772

30.4%

7,034

32.8%

4,308

903

21.0%

24.6%

32.1%

Waller

5,590

3,527

1,960

55.6%

6,481

53.7%

3,158

1,031

32.7%

34.5%

47.2%

Ward

14,528

7,969

4,246

53.3%

389

2.6%

222

114

51.4%

2.6%

2.7%

Washington

13,025

8,947

3,619

40.5%

6,120

32.0%

3,239

636

19.6%

15.0%

26.6%

Webb

64,510

32,843

15,890

48.4%

281

0.4%

155

5

3.2%

0.0%

0.5%

Wharton

30,344

16,949

7,864

46.4%

7,808

20.5%

4,168

955

22.9%

10.8%

19.7%

Wheeler

7,648

4,857

2,475

51.0%

299

3.8%

164

35

21.3%

1.4%

3.3%

Wichita

114,448

67,002

30,897

46.1%

9,080

7.4%

5,055

1,142

22.6%

3.6%

7.0%

Wilbarger

16,073

10,446

6,100

58.4%

1,675

9.4%

856

111

13.0%

1.8%

7.6%

Willacy

19,977

9,383

 

 

107

0.5%

60

 

 

 

0.6%

Williamson

30,155

18,673

6,750

36.2%

4,889

14.0%

2,575

30

1.2%

0.4%

12.1%

Wilson

13,007

7,306

4,097

56.1%

260

2.0%

132

60

45.5%

1.4%

1.8%

Winkler

13,213

7,183

4,054

56.4%

439

3.2%

205

85

41.5%

2.1%

2.8%



Appendices 849 Texas (South) (continued) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Black Population

Percent Registered

(Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Wise

16,867

10,628

4,925

46.3%

145

0.9%

70

75

107.1%

1.5%

0.7%

Wood

14,908

9,899

4,505

45.5%

2,745

15.6%

1,504

1,325

88.1%

22.7%

13.2%

7,948

4,315

 

 

84

1.1%

49

 

 

 

1.1%

16,975

10,875

 

 

279

1.6%

165

 

 

 

1.5%

Zapata

4,374

2,315

 

 

19

0.4%

10

 

 

 

0.4%

Zavala

12,629

5,932

2,445

41.2%

67

0.5%

32

25

78.1%

1.0%

0.5%

8,377,831

4,884,765

1,973,218

40.4%

1,205,029

12.6%

649,512

174,386

26.9%

8.1%

11.7%

Yoakum Young

Texas Subtotal

Virginia (South) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Black Population

Percent Registered

(Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Accomack

18,779

13,148

5,414

41.2%

11,856

38.7%

6,142

797

13.0%

12.8%

31.8%

Albemarle

26,363

15,670

4,590

29.3%

4,606

14.9%

2,576

683

26.5%

13.0%

14.1%

Alleghany

11,656

6,675

2,140

32.1%

472

3.9%

256

160

62.5%

7.0%

3.7%

Amelia

3,806

2,261

1,983

87.7%

4,009

51.3%

1,924

638

33.2%

24.3%

46.0%

Amherst

17,439

10,523

5,079

48.3%

5,514

24.0%

2,693

593

22.0%

10.5%

20.4%

Appomattox Arlington/ Alexandria Augusta Bath Bedford Bland Botetourt

6,818

4,245

2,395

56.4%

2,330

25.5%

1,142

165

14.5%

6.5%

21.2%

154,172

102,364

40,471

39.5%

9,229

5.7%

5,214

1,195

22.9%

2.9%

4.9%

35,728

21,314

7,868

36.9%

1,635

4.4%

864

207

24.0%

2.6%

3.9%

4,835

2,976

1,560

52.4%

500

9.4%

340

67

19.7%

4.1%

10.3%

25,017

15,258

5,190

34.0%

6,011

19.4%

3,044

858

28.2%

14.2%

16.6%

5,783

3,504

1,716

49.0%

199

3.3%

146

8

5.5%

0.5%

4.0%

15,190

9,045

4,490

49.6%

1,525

9.1%

778

167

21.5%

3.6%

7.9%

Brunswick

7,348

4,637

3,764

81.2%

10,431

58.7%

4,734

765

16.2%

16.9%

50.5%

Buchanan

36,714

16,782

11,625

69.3%

10

0.0%

8

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.1%

6,015

3,776

1,275

33.8%

4,862

44.7%

2,208

465

21.1%

26.7%

36.9%

26,004

15,518

 

 

6,954

21.1%

3,291

 

 

 

17.5%

6,037

3,793

2,295

60.5%

6,688

52.6%

3,210

1,055

32.9%

31.5%

45.8%

23,101

13,614

6,245

45.9%

77

0.3%

41

11

26.8%

0.2%

0.3%

Buckingham Campbell Caroline Carroll Charles City Charlotte Chesterfield Clarke Craig Culpeper Cumberland

917

582

558

95.9%

4,575

83.3%

2,126

749

35.2%

57.3%

78.5%

8,037

5,014

3,062

61.1%

5,331

39.9%

2,500

294

11.8%

8.8%

33.3%

61,762

35,855

12,625

35.2%

9,435

13.3%

4,862

1,320

27.2%

9.5%

11.9%

6,573

4,016

2,402

59.8%

1,369

17.2%

786

194

24.7%

7.5%

16.4%

3,351

2,053

1,085

52.9%

5

0.2%

3

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.2%

10,945

6,964

3,271

47.0%

4,143

27.5%

2,068

421

20.4%

11.4%

22.9%

2,910

1,819

1,300

71.5%

3,450

54.3%

1,647

360

21.9%

21.7%

47.5%

Dickenson

20,053

9,791

8,910

91.0%

158

0.8%

64

35

54.7%

0.4%

0.7%

Dinwiddie

8,499

5,212

3,618

69.4%

13,684

61.7%

8,587

879

10.2%

19.6%

62.2%

Essex

3,509

2,241

865

38.6%

3,181

47.6%

1,665

280

16.8%

24.5%

42.6%

260,145

140,605

49,406

35.1%

14,857

5.4%

9,110

999

11.0%

2.0%

6.1%

17,818

10,726

4,340

40.5%

6,248

26.0%

3,093

500

16.2%

10.3%

22.4%

Fairfax Fauquier

(Continued)

850

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A23.32 (Continued) Virginia (South) (continued) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Black Population

Percent Registered

(Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Floyd

9,929

6,017

4,758

79.1%

533

5.1%

308

105

34.1%

2.2%

4.9%

Fluvanna

4,502

2,790

872

31.3%

2,725

37.7%

1,378

127

9.2%

12.7%

33.1%

Franklin

22,178

12,801

4,381

34.2%

3,747

14.5%

1,728

511

29.6%

10.5%

11.9%

Frederick

21,507

12,479

 

 

434

2.0%

232

 

 

 

1.8%

Giles

16,777

9,629

4,950

51.4%

442

2.6%

232

46

19.8%

0.9%

2.4%

Gloucester

8,562

5,341

3,007

56.3%

3,357

28.2%

1,882

676

35.9%

18.4%

26.1%

Goochland

4,773

3,121

1,920

61.5%

4,433

48.2%

2,312

752

32.5%

28.1%

42.6%

Grayson

16,708

10,173

7,024

69.1%

682

3.9%

329

81

24.6%

1.1%

3.1%

Greene

4,129

2,331

1,650

70.8%

586

12.4%

328

87

26.5%

5.0%

12.3%

Greensville

7,281

4,499

3,464

77.0%

8,874

54.9%

3,885

949

24.4%

21.5%

46.3%

18,702

11,377

4,730

41.6%

14,935

44.4%

6,769

477

7.1%

9.2%

37.3%

Hanover

20,651

12,432

5,455

43.9%

6,989

25.4%

3,302

866

26.2%

13.7%

21.0%

Henrico

111,269

66,822

33,246

49.8%

6,070

5.2%

3,397

956

28.1%

2.8%

4.8%

31,222

17,805

6,145

34.5%

9,113

22.6%

4,113

401

9.8%

6.1%

18.8%

Highland

3,203

2,040

1,162

57.0%

18

0.6%

16

10

62.5%

0.9%

0.8%

Isle Of Wight

8,133

4,991

3,556

71.3%

9,031

52.6%

4,317

1,063

24.6%

23.0%

46.4%

James City

7,439

4,845

1,105

22.8%

4,100

35.5%

2,056

307

14.9%

21.7%

29.8%

King And Queen

2,759

1,735

740

42.7%

3,130

53.2%

1,617

445

27.5%

37.6%

48.2%

King George

5,283

3,200

1,411

44.1%

1,960

27.1%

1,009

280

27.8%

16.6%

24.0%

King William

3,999

2,491

1,045

42.0%

3,564

47.1%

1,864

365

19.6%

25.9%

42.8%

Lancaster

5,535

3,613

 

 

3,639

39.7%

1,978

 

 

 

35.4%

Lee

25,655

14,072

10,684

75.9%

169

0.7%

100

52

52.0%

0.5%

0.7%

Loudoun

Halifax

Henry

20,204

12,014

7,562

62.9%

4,345

17.7%

2,239

418

18.7%

5.2%

15.7%

Louisa

7,793

4,917

2,090

42.5%

5,166

39.9%

2,482

380

15.3%

15.4%

33.6%

Lunenburg

7,233

4,611

2,495

54.1%

5,290

42.2%

2,534

460

18.2%

15.6%

35.5%

Madison

6,357

3,883

2,000

51.5%

1,830

22.4%

898

135

15.0%

6.3%

18.8%

Mathews

5,364

3,809

1,550

40.7%

1,757

24.7%

1,062

525

49.4%

25.3%

21.8%

16,717

10,474

5,492

52.4%

14,711

46.8%

6,624

529

8.0%

8.8%

38.7%

3,700

2,586

1,260

48.7%

2,619

41.5%

1,363

266

19.5%

17.4%

34.5%

Montgomery

31,394

18,091

6,285

34.7%

1,529

4.6%

960

300

31.3%

4.6%

5.0%

Nansemond

Mecklenburg Middlesex

11,584

6,965

3,311

47.5%

19,782

63.1%

9,806

1,737

17.7%

34.4%

58.5%

Nelson

9,197

5,693

3,657

64.2%

3,555

27.9%

1,813

466

25.7%

11.3%

24.2%

New Kent

2,126

1,325

862

65.1%

2,378

52.8%

1,229

432

35.2%

33.4%

48.1%

Norfolk

38,076

21,162

7,337

34.7%

13,536

26.2%

6,310

1,385

22.0%

15.9%

23.0%

Northampton

7,778

5,340

2,175

40.7%

9,188

54.2%

4,786

345

7.2%

13.7%

47.3%

Northumberland

5,840

3,965

2,553

64.4%

4,345

42.7%

2,123

722

34.0%

22.1%

34.9%

Nottoway

8,664

5,564

3,310

59.5%

6,477

42.8%

3,458

515

14.9%

13.5%

38.3%

Orange

10,013

6,269

2,885

46.0%

2,887

22.4%

1,429

340

23.8%

10.5%

18.6%

Page

15,094

9,121

5,900

64.7%

478

3.1%

271

110

40.6%

1.8%

2.9%



Appendices 851 Virginia (South) (continued) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Black Population (Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Patrick

13,902

8,076

3,985

49.3%

1,380

9.0%

616

98

15.9%

2.4%

7.1%

Pittsylvania

38,339

22,835

8,261

36.2%

19,957

34.2%

8,604

531

6.2%

6.0%

27.4%

Powhatan

4,071

2,376

1,470

61.9%

2,676

39.7%

1,563

505

32.3%

25.6%

39.7%

Prince Edward

8,488

5,125

2,775

54.2%

5,633

39.9%

2,896

1,100

38.0%

28.4%

36.1%

Prince George

15,444

8,860

1,978

22.3%

4,826

23.8%

2,420

478

19.8%

19.5%

21.5%

Princess Anne

63,494

33,581

11,408

34.0%

12,630

16.6%

6,239

1,437

23.0%

11.2%

15.7%

Prince William

46,032

24,477

6,498

26.6%

4,132

8.2%

2,217

406

18.3%

5.9%

8.3%

Pulaski

25,441

14,802

5,725

38.7%

1,817

6.7%

1,030

380

36.9%

6.2%

6.5%

Rappahannock

4,423

2,608

1,950

74.8%

945

17.6%

540

330

61.1%

14.5%

17.2%

Richmond

4,159

2,713

1,215

44.8%

2,216

34.8%

1,132

270

23.9%

18.2%

29.4%

Roanoke

58,011

35,014

17,630

50.4%

3,682

6.0%

2,211

590

26.7%

3.2%

5.9%

Rockbridge

22,045

12,662

4,680

37.0%

1,994

8.3%

1,127

480

42.6%

9.3%

8.2%

Rockingham

39,767

22,976

7,430

32.3%

718

1.8%

427

78

18.3%

1.0%

1.8%

Russell

25,782

13,883

9,250

66.6%

508

1.9%

297

59

19.9%

0.6%

2.1%

Scott

25,502

14,626

8,711

59.6%

311

1.2%

193

0

0.0%

0.0%

1.3%

Shenandoah

21,468

13,416

6,126

45.7%

357

1.6%

188

90

47.9%

1.5%

1.4%

Smyth

30,561

18,191

7,905

43.5%

505

1.6%

327

93

28.4%

1.2%

1.8%

Southampton

11,536

7,239

4,645

64.2%

15,659

57.6%

7,435

875

11.8%

15.9%

50.7%

Spotsylvania

10,663

6,262

3,500

55.9%

3,156

22.8%

1,503

400

26.6%

10.3%

19.4%

Stafford

14,900

8,594

3,095

36.0%

1,976

11.7%

971

345

35.5%

10.0%

10.2%

Surry

2,196

1,479

925

62.5%

4,024

64.7%

1,842

450

24.4%

32.7%

55.5%

Sussex

4,186

2,662

2,275

85.5%

8,225

66.3%

3,706

690

18.6%

23.3%

58.2%

Tazewell

42,781

23,237

12,259

52.8%

2,010

4.5%

1,071

492

45.9%

3.9%

4.4%

Warren

13,600

8,211

4,005

48.8%

1,055

7.2%

587

210

35.8%

5.0%

6.7%

Washington

37,119

21,146

7,686

36.4%

957

2.5%

546

178

32.6%

2.3%

2.5%

5,872

3,836

3,465

90.3%

5,170

46.8%

2,352

378

16.1%

9.8%

38.0%

Wise

42,334

22,602

11,105

49.1%

1,245

2.9%

685

165

24.1%

1.5%

2.9%

Wythe

21,014

12,299

12,391

100.8%

961

4.4%

523

285

54.5%

2.3%

4.1%

York

16,850

9,596

3,763

39.2%

4,733

21.9%

2,428

749

30.9%

16.6%

20.2%

Alexandria City

80,388

50,548

80,388

159.0%

23,368

25.7%

6,025

1,018

16.9%

1.3%

10.7%

Bristol

15,988

9,373

15,988

170.6%

3,600

21.0%

672

120

17.9%

0.7%

6.7%

Westmoreland

Buena Vista

6,046

3,390

6,046

178.4%

1,047

16.6%

156

27

17.3%

0.4%

4.4%

23,830

15,904

23,830

149.8%

10,058

34.2%

3,369

1,334

39.6%

5.3%

17.5%

Clifton Forge

4,228

2,920

4,228

144.8%

2,100

39.9%

600

235

39.2%

5.3%

17.1%

Colonial Heights

9,567

6,049

9,567

158.2%

2,500

26.1%

17

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.3%

Charlottesville

Covington

9,736

6,206

9,736

156.9%

2,775

25.1%

751

465

61.9%

4.6%

10.8%

Danville

35,004

22,404

35,004

156.2%

10,489

22.5%

6,388

1,781

27.9%

4.8%

22.2%

Falls Church

10,011

5,720

10,011

175.0%

3,165

31.1%

114

37

32.5%

0.4%

2.0%

Fredericksburg

11,036

6,717

11,036

164.3%

4,545

33.3%

1,471

570

38.8%

4.9%

18.0%

4,910

3,073

4,910

159.8%

1,287

24.5%

152

15

9.9%

0.3%

4.7%

Galax

(Continued)

852

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A23.32 (Continued) Virginia (South) (continued) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Black Population

Percent Registered

(Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Hampton

70,163

40,795

70,136

171.9%

15,185

17.0%

10,825

2,941

27.2%

4.0%

21.0%

Harrisonburg

11,175

6,747

11,175

165.6%

3,250

27.3%

436

189

43.4%

1.7%

6.1%

Hopewell

14,905

8,854

14,905

168.3%

3,400

19.0%

1,549

210

13.6%

1.4%

14.9%

Lynchburg

43,665

27,728

43,665

157.5%

19,133

34.9%

6,574

2,496

38.0%

5.4%

19.2%

Martinsville

13,106

8,084

13,106

162.1%

3,369

17.9%

2,972

371

12.5%

2.8%

26.9%

Newport News

74,602

44,258

74,602

168.6%

17,756

15.6%

20,974

5,094

24.3%

6.4%

32.2%

225,251

129,423

225,251

174.0%

64,662

21.1%

45,376

11,486

25.3%

4.9%

26.0%

4,615

2,764

4,615

167.0%

825

16.5%

188

50

26.6%

1.1%

6.4%

Petersburg

19,372

12,528

19,372

154.6%

6,017

16.4%

9,821

2,316

23.6%

10.7%

43.9%

Portsmouth

75,092

44,286

75,092

169.6%

19,557

17.0%

21,055

5,290

25.1%

6.6%

32.2%

8,741

5,032

8,741

173.7%

2,713

29.0%

333

78

23.4%

0.9%

6.2%

Richmond City

127,627

90,508

127,627

141.0%

51,362

23.4%

53,719

15,641

29.1%

10.9%

37.3%

Roanoke City

80,568

52,527

80,568

153.4%

30,725

31.6%

9,519

2,698

28.3%

3.2%

15.3%

South Boston

4,030

2,639

4,030

152.7%

1,450

24.3%

969

200

20.6%

4.7%

26.9%

South Norfolk

16,229

9,288

16,229

174.7%

3,990

18.1%

3,118

745

23.9%

4.4%

25.1%

Staunton

20,029

13,290

20,029

150.7%

4,293

19.3%

1,288

377

29.3%

1.9%

8.8%

Suffolk

7,899

5,272

7,899

149.8%

2,696

21.4%

2,769

600

21.7%

7.1%

34.4%

Virginia Beach

7,557

4,706

7,557

160.6%

3,600

44.5%

342

125

36.6%

1.6%

6.8%

14,712

8,667

14,712

169.8%

4,448

28.3%

548

168

30.7%

1.1%

6.0%

Norfolk City Norton

Radford

Waynesboro Williamsburg Winchester Virginia Subtotal Southern States Total

5,897

3,509

5,897

168.1%

1,103

16.1%

583

103

17.7%

1.7%

14.3%

13,920

9,200

13,920

151.3%

3,644

24.1%

708

91

12.9%

0.7%

7.2%

3,142,533

1,876,167

1,607,554

85.7%

773,318

19.5%

436,718

100,499

23.0%

5.9%

18.9%

29,632,855

17,725,540

10,718,764

60.5%

8,223,277

21.7%

4,183,558

1,181,933

28.3%

10.0%

19.1%

The Border States Delaware (Border State) Voting Age White Population

County Kent

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Black Population

Percent Registered

(Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

55,647

32,779

22,571

68.9%

10,004

15.2%

5,455

3,463

63.5%

13.3%

14.3%

271,025

164,670

154,484

93.8%

36,421

11.9%

20,458

8,818

43.1%

5.4%

11.1%

57,655

35,801

34,812

97.2%

15,540

21.2%

8,086

6,533

80.8%

15.8%

18.4%

Delaware Subtotal

384,327

233,250

211,867

90.8%

61,965

13.9%

33,999

18,814

55.3%

8.2%

12.7%

Allegany

82,969

52,303

40,035

76.5%

1,200

1.4%

641

412

64.3%

1.0%

1.2%

Anne Arundel

176,045

101,232

63,171

62.4%

30,589

14.8%

17,086

6,772

39.6%

9.7%

14.4%

Baltimore

New Castle Sussex

Maryland (Border State)

474,893

280,974

234,848

83.6%

17,535

3.6%

9,454

7,612

80.5%

3.1%

3.3%

Calvert

9,154

5,377

4,121

76.6%

6,672

42.2%

2,747

1,639

59.7%

28.5%

33.8%

Caroline

15,528

9,838

8,290

84.3%

3,934

20.2%

2,135

1,637

76.7%

16.5%

17.8%

Carroll

50,584

32,040

20,673

64.5%

2,201

4.2%

1,296

511

39.4%

2.4%

3.9%



Appendices 853 Maryland (Border State) (continued) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Black Population (Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Cecil

45,368

25,200

15,661

62.2%

3,040

6.3%

1,761

924

52.5%

5.6%

6.5%

Charles

21,661

11,909

8,296

69.7%

10,911

33.5%

4,564

4,320

94.7%

34.2%

27.7%

Dorchester

20,646

14,131

9,354

66.2%

9,020

30.4%

5,053

3,118

61.7%

25.0%

26.3%

Frederick

66,779

40,337

27,229

67.5%

5,151

7.2%

2,709

1,298

47.9%

4.6%

6.3%

Garrett

20,380

11,659

9,483

81.3%

40

0.2%

0

0

 

0.0%

0.0%

Harford

69,082

39,570

24,821

62.7%

7,640

10.0%

4,128

2,141

51.9%

7.9%

9.5%

Howard

32,070

18,685

13,804

73.9%

4,082

11.3%

2,146

1,535

71.5%

10.0%

10.3%

11,603

7,185

5,853

81.5%

3,878

25.1%

2,184

1,951

89.3%

25.0%

23.3%

Montgomery

327,736

186,770

145,750

78.0%

13,192

3.9%

7,221

2,958

41.0%

2.0%

3.7%

Prince Georges

Kent

324,714

183,986

124,340

67.6%

32,681

9.1%

16,245

9,431

58.1%

7.1%

8.1%

Queen Annes

12,104

7,564

6,538

86.4%

4,465

27.0%

2,506

1,636

65.3%

20.0%

24.9%

St Marys

31,672

16,125

9,000

55.8%

7,243

18.6%

3,278

3,000

91.5%

25.0%

16.9%

Somerset

12,315

8,131

7,290

89.7%

7,308

37.2%

3,972

3,235

81.5%

30.7%

32.8%

Talbot

15,717

10,236

8,973

87.7%

5,861

27.2%

3,436

2,289

66.6%

20.3%

25.1%

Washington

88,582

54,671

39,831

72.9%

2,637

2.9%

1,367

793

58.0%

2.0%

2.4%

Wicomico

38,045

24,154

16,864

69.8%

11,005

22.4%

6,068

2,810

46.3%

14.3%

20.1%

Worcester Baltimore City Maryland Subtotal

15,664

10,431

8,014

76.8%

8,069

34.0%

4,167

1,978

47.5%

19.8%

28.6%

610,608

408,653

293,972

71.9%

328,416

35.0%

179,742

106,199

59.1%

26.5%

30.6%

2,573,919

1,561,161

1,146,211

73.4%

526,770

17.0%

283,906

168,199

59.2%

12.8%

15.4%

West Virginia (Border State) Voting Age White Population

County

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Black Population (Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

Barbour

15,262

8,903

10,539

118.4%

212

1.4%

108

25

23.2%

0.2%

1.2%

Berkeley

32,475

20,444

20,691

101.2%

1,316

3.9%

875

843

96.3%

3.9%

4.1%

Boone

28,409

14,975

15,233

101.7%

355

1.2%

188

202

107.5%

1.3%

1.2%

Braxton

15,016

8,517

6,740

79.1%

136

0.9%

68

72

105.9%

1.1%

0.8%

Brooke

28,528

16,929

15,817

93.4%

412

1.4%

237

240

101.3%

1.5%

1.4%

Cabell

103,361

65,220

56,987

87.4%

4,841

4.5%

3,082

2,137

69.3%

3.6%

4.5%

7,936

4,527

5,855

129.3%

12

0.2%

6

3

50.0%

0.1%

0.1%

11,874

5,914

6,975

117.9%

68

0.6%

37

42

113.5%

0.6%

0.6%

Calhoun Clay Doddridge

6,969

4,234

4,650

109.8%

1

0.0%

1

1

100.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Fayette

54,106

30,257

35,155

116.2%

7,625

12.4%

3,766

3,913

103.9%

10.0%

11.1%

Gilmer

8,049

4,586

4,067

88.7%

1

0.0%

1

1

100.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Grant

8,071

4,645

4,930

106.1%

233

2.8%

122

116

95.1%

2.3%

2.6%

Greenbrier

32,555

18,941

17,116

90.4%

1,891

5.5%

1,097

878

80.0%

4.9%

5.5%

Hampshire

11,542

6,682

6,918

103.5%

163

1.4%

85

55

64.7%

0.8%

1.3%

Hancock

38,068

22,820

20,267

88.8%

1,547

3.9%

842

700

83.1%

3.3%

3.6%

Hardy

9,067

5,347

5,733

107.2%

241

2.6%

137

137

100.0%

2.3%

2.5%

Harrison

76,516

47,811

48,257

100.9%

1,340

1.7%

821

877

106.8%

1.8%

1.7%

Jackson

18,535

10,562

10,799

102.2%

6

0.0%

6

1

16.7%

0.0%

0.1%

Jefferson

15,772

9,400

8,208

87.3%

2,893

15.5%

1,480

1,040

70.3%

11.3%

13.6% (Continued)

854

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A23.32 (Continued) West Virginia (Border State) (continued) Voting Age White Population

County Kanawha

(Census 1960) White Population

Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Black Population

Percent Registered

(Census 1960) Number

Percent of County

Voting Age African American Population Eligible Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Reg. % of County

Elg. % of County

238,178

139,181

127,143

91.4%

14,747

5.8%

8,402

7,700

91.6%

5.7%

5.7%

Lewis

19,608

13,254

11,116

83.9%

103

0.5%

76

35

46.1%

0.3%

0.6%

Lincoln

20,262

10,513

15,285

145.4%

5

0.0%

3

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Logan

56,772

28,830

31,855

110.5%

4,798

7.8%

2,450

2,797

114.2%

8.1%

7.8%

McDowell

60,960

28,438

36,413

128.0%

2,757

3.9%

7,761

1,582

20.4%

4.2%

21.4%

Marion

37,670

38,556

20,596

53.4%

371

0.6%

1,647

60

3.6%

0.3%

4.1%

Marshall

23,927

23,697

13,807

58.3%

532

1.4%

296

75

25.3%

0.5%

1.2%

Mason

55,437

13,616

29,650

217.8%

15,922

65.1%

472

8,071

1710.0%

21.4%

3.4%

Mercer

61,001

36,005

33,000

91.7%

7,205

10.6%

4,045

3,211

79.4%

8.9%

10.1%

Mineral

21,668

12,840

12,391

96.5%

686

3.1%

364

383

105.2%

3.0%

2.8%

Mingo

37,679

18,750

27,742

148.0%

2,063

5.2%

1,129

1,605

142.2%

5.5%

5.7%

Monongalia

54,446

32,469

29,149

89.8%

1,171

2.1%

721

634

87.9%

2.1%

2.2%

Monroe

11,236

6,780

7,150

105.5%

348

3.0%

198

175

88.4%

2.4%

2.8%

Morgan

8,203

4,919

5,027

102.2%

173

2.1%

110

51

46.4%

1.0%

2.2%

Nicholas

25,405

13,630

14,607

107.2%

9

0.0%

8

1

12.5%

0.0%

0.1%

Ohio

66,288

43,004

39,329

91.5%

2,149

3.1%

1,239

4,200

339.0%

9.7%

2.8%

Pendleton

7,921

4,719

4,429

93.9%

172

2.1%

71

68

95.8%

1.5%

1.5%

Pleasants

7,116

4,105

4,472

108.9%

8

0.1%

 

0

 

0.0%

 

Pocahontas

9,752

5,934

5,923

99.8%

383

3.8%

246

179

72.8%

2.9%

4.0%

Preston

27,120

15,265

13,776

90.3%

113

0.4%

63

33

52.4%

0.2%

0.4%

Putnam

23,542

13,142

12,856

97.8%

19

0.1%

16

20

125.0%

0.2%

0.1%

Raleigh

68,255

38,032

37,414

98.4%

9,571

12.3%

5,162

4,936

95.6%

11.7%

12.0%

Randolph

26,072

15,147

15,000

99.0%

277

1.1%

178

210

118.0%

1.4%

1.2%

Ritchie

10,871

6,795

6,705

98.7%

6

0.1%

3

1

33.3%

0.0%

0.0%

Roane

15,702

9,666

10,547

109.1%

18

0.1%

16

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.2%

Summers

14,584

8,795

 

 

1,056

6.8%

742

 

 

 

7.8%

Taylor

14,816

9,121

9,343

102.4%

194

1.3%

124

60

48.4%

0.6%

1.3%

Tucker

7,726

4,646

5,840

125.7%

24

0.3%

15

10

66.7%

0.2%

0.3%

Tyler

10,014

6,192

6,300

101.7%

12

0.1%

11

20

181.8%

0.3%

0.2%

Upshur

18,208

10,529

11,274

107.1%

84

0.5%

60

30

50.0%

0.3%

0.6%

Wayne

38,941

21,670

23,011

106.2%

36

0.1%

19

10

52.6%

0.0%

0.1%

Webster

13,715

7,140

7,487

104.9%

4

0.0%

3

0

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Wetzel

19,340

11,653

11,594

99.5%

7

0.0%

5

3

60.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Wirt

4,378

2,597

2,840

109.4%

13

0.3%

10

9

90.0%

0.3%

0.4%

Wood

77,658

46,754

46,587

99.6%

673

0.9%

408

350

85.8%

0.8%

0.9%

Wyoming

33,550

16,594

18,000

108.5%

1,286

3.7%

623

2,000

321.0%

10.0%

3.6%

West Virginia Subtotal

1,770,132

1,033,692

1,012,595

98.0%

90.288

4.9%

49,655

49,802

100.3%

4.7%

4.6%

Border States Total

4,728,378

2,828,103

2,370,673

83.8%

6,79,023

12.6%

367,560

236,815

64.4%

9.1%

11.5%

Overall Total

34,361,233

20,553,643

13,089,437

63.7%

8,902,300

20.6%

4,551,118

1,418,748

31.2%

9.8%

18.1%

Sources: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, Voting: 1961 Commission on Civil Rights Report (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1961), pp. 252–311, and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790-2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/ Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.



Appendices 855 Appendix Table A23.33  Population by Race in All Black Belt Counties, 1950 and 1960 Alabama Total Population

Nonwhite Population

White Population

Percent Nonwhite to Total Population

County

1950

1960

1950

1960

1950

1960

1950

1960

Barbour

28,892

24,700

15,427

12,850

13,465

11,850

53.4%

52.0%

Bullock

16,054

13,462

11,815

9,681

4,239

3,781

73.6%

71.9%

Choctaw

19,152

17,870

10,063

8,858

9,089

9,012

52.5%

49.6%

Dallas

56,270

56,667

36,551

32,715

19,719

23,952

65.0%

57.7%

Greene

16,482

13,600

13,682

11,054

2,800

2,546

83.0%

81.3%

Hale

20,832

19,537

14,641

13,811

6,191

5,726

70.3%

70.7%

Lowndes

18,018

15,417

14,804

12,439

3,214

2,978

82.2%

80.7%

Macon

30,561

26,717

25,784

22,312

4,777

4,405

84.4%

83.5%

Marengo

29,494

27,098

20,476

16,834

9,018

10,264

69.4%

62.1%

Monroe

25,732

22,372

13,155

11,342

12,577

11,030

51.1%

50.7%

Perry

20,439

17,358

13,789

11,415

6,650

5,943

67.5%

65.8%

Russell

40,364

46,351

21,004

22,986

19,360

23,365

52.0%

49.6%

Sumter

23,610

20,041

17,959

15,298

5,651

4,743

76.1%

76.3%

Wilcox

23,476

18,739

18,564

14,598

4,912

4,141

79.1%

77.9%

 

 

 

 

 

 

32.1%

30.0%

State Total

Arkansas Total Population

Nonwhite Population

White Population

Percent Nonwhite to Total Population

County

1950

1960

1950

1960

1950

1960

1950

1960

Chicot

22,306

18,990

12,174

10,811

10,132

8,179

54.6%

56.9%

Crittenden

47,184

47,564

31,511

28,103

15,673

19,461

66.8%

59.1%

Lee

24,322

21,001

14,451

12,834

9,871

8,167

59.4%

61.1%

Lincoln

17,079

14,447

9,096

7,017

7,983

7,430

53.3%

48.6%

Phillips

46,254

43,997

27,601

25,445

15,653

18,552

59.7%

57.8%

St. Francis

36,841

33,303

21,130

18,979

15,711

14,324

57.4%

57.0%

State Total

 

 

 

 

 

 

22.4%

21.8%

Florida Total Population

Nonwhite Population

White Population

Percent Nonwhite to Total Population

County

1950

1960

1950

1960

1950

1960

1950

1960

Gadsden

36,457

41,989

20,468

24,951

15,989

17,038

56.1%

59.4%

Jefferson

10,413

9,543

6,513

5,642

3,900

3,901

62.6%

59.1%

 

 

 

 

 

 

21.8%

17.8%

State Total

Georgia Total Population

Nonwhite Population

White Population

Percent Nonwhite to Total Population

County

1950

1960

1950

1960

1950

1960

1950

1960

Baker

5,952

4,543

3,633

2,676

2,319

1,867

61.0%

58.9%

Burke

23,458

20,596

16,734

13,685

6,734

6,911

71.3%

66.4%

Calhoun

8,578

7,341

5,793

4,779

2,785

2,562

67.5%

65.1%

Camden

7,322

9,975

3,709

4,024

2,613

5,951

50.7%

40.3%

Clay

5,844

4,551

4,071

2,837

1,773

1,714

69.7%

62.3%

Crawford

6,080

5,816

3,509

3,364

2,571

2,452

57.7%

57.8%

Dooly

14,159

11,474

7,510

6,027

6,649

5,447

53.0%

52.5%

Early

17,413

13,151

9,219

6,822

8,194

6,329

52.9%

51.9%

Greene

12,843

11,193

6,549

5,878

6,294

5,315

51.0%

52.5%

Hancock

11,052

9,979

8,047

7,461

3,005

2,518

72.8%

74.8%

Harris

11,265

11,167

6,374

6,108

4,891

5,059

56.6%

54.7%

Jasper

7,473

6,135

4,223

3,303

3,250

2,832

56.5%

53.8%

Jefferson

18,855

17,468

10,845

9,882

8,010

7,586

57.5%

56.6%

Jenkins

10,264

9,148

5,505

4,545

4,759

4,603

53.6%

49.7%

Jones

7,538

8,468

4,146

4,257

3,392

4,211

55.0%

50.3%

Lee

6,674

6,204

4,757

3,890

1,917

2,314

71.3%

62.7% (Continued)

856

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A23.33 (Continued) Georgia (continued) Total Population

Nonwhite Population

White Population

Percent Nonwhite to Total Population

County

1950

1960

1950

1960

1950

1960

1950

1960

Liberty

8,444

14,487

5,167

6,139

3,277

8,348

61.2%

42.4%

McIntosh

6,008

6,364

3,672

3,690

2,336

2,674

61.1%

58.0%

Macon

14,213

13,170

9,398

8,299

4,815

4,871

66.1%

63.0%

Marion

6,521

5,477

3,859

3,291

2,662

2,186

59.2%

60.1%

Meriwether

21,055

19,756

10,723

9,836

10,332

9,920

50.9%

49.8%

Mitchell

22,528

19,652

11,330

10,021

11,198

9,631

50.3%

51.0%

Monroe

10,523

10,495

5,351

5,080

5,172

5,415

50.9%

48.4%

Morgan

11,899

10,280

6,190

4,920

5,709

5,360

52.0%

47.9%

Peach

11,705

13,846

7,174

8,130

4,531

5,716

61.3%

58.7%

Putnam

7,731

7,798

4,294

4,214

3,437

3,584

55.5%

54.0%

Quitman

3,015

2,432

1,998

1,560

1,017

872

66.3%

64.1%

Randolph

13,804

11,078

9,044

6,887

4,760

4,191

65.5%

62.2%

Schley

4,036

3,256

2,395

1,839

1,641

1,417

59.3%

56.5%

Screven

18,000

14,919

10,151

7,832

7,849

7,087

56.4%

52.5%

Stewart

9,194

7,371

6,655

5,208

2,539

2,163

72.4%

70.7%

Sumter

24,208

24,652

13,304

13,026

10,904

11,626

55.0%

52.8%

Talbot

7,687

7,127

5,356

4,975

2,331

2,152

69.7%

69.8%

Taliaferro

4,515

3,370

2,971

2,097

1,544

1,273

65.8%

62.2%

Terrell

14,314

12,742

9,612

8,209

4,702

4,533

67.2%

64.4%

Twiggs

8,308

7,935

5,144

4,771

3,164

3,164

61.9%

60.1%

Warren

8,779

7,360

5,608

4,609

3,171

2,751

63.9%

62.6%

21,012

18,903

11,912

10,801

9,100

8,105

56.7%

57.1%

4,081

3,247

2,608

2,075

1,473

1,172

63.9%

63.9%

12,388

10,961

6,905

5,619

5,483

5,342

55.7%

51.3%

 

 

 

 

 

 

30.9%

28.5%

Washington Webster Wilkes State Total

Louisiana Total Population County

Nonwhite Population

White Population

Percent Nonwhite to Total Population

1950

1960

1950

1960

1950

1960

1950

1960

Claiborne

25,063

19,407

12,957

9,761

12,106

9,646

51.7%

50.3%

Concordia

14,398

20,467

8,531

9,474

5,867

10,993

59.3%

46.3%

De Soto

24,398

24,248

13,816

13,954

10,582

10,294

56.6%

57.6%

East Carroll

16,302

14,433

9,967

8,831

6,335

5,602

61.1%

61.2%

East Feliciana

19,133

20,198

11,139

10,914

7,994

9,284

58.2%

54.0%

Madison

17,451

16,444

11,560

10,677

5,891

5,767

66.2%

64.9%

Pointe Coupee

21,841

22,488

11,727

12,054

10,114

10,434

53.7%

53.6%

Red River

12,113

9,978

6,056

4,746

6,057

5,232

50.0%

47.6%

St. Helena

9,013

9,162

4,785

5,086

4,228

4,076

53.1%

55.5%

St. James

15,334

18,369

7,708

9,054

7,626

9,315

50.3%

49.3%

Tensas

13,209

11,796

8,565

7,668

4,644

4,128

64.8%

65.0%

West Baton Rouge

11,738

14,796

6,241

7,294

5,497

7,502

53.2%

49.3%

West Feliciana

10,169

12,395

7,240

8,198

2,929

4,197

71.2%

66.1%

 

 

 

 

 

 

33.1%

31.9%

State Total

Mississippi Total Population County

Nonwhite Population

White Population

Percent Nonwhite to Total Population

1950

1960

1950

1960

1950

1960

1950

1960

Amite

19,261

15,573

10,438

8,443

8,823

7,130

54.2%

54.2%

Bolivar

63,004

54,464

43,136

36,943

19,868

17,521

68.5%

67.8%

Carroll

15,499

11,177

8,836

6,500

6,663

4,677

57.0%

58.2%

Claiborne

11,944

10,845

8,934

8,245

3,010

2,600

74.8%

76.0%

Clay

17,757

18,933

10,097

9,719

7,660

9,214

56.9%

51.3%



Appendices 857 Mississippi (continued) County

Total Population

Nonwhite Population

White Population

Percent Nonwhite to Total Population

Coahoma

49,361

46,212

35,659

31,582

13,702

14,630

72.2%

68.3%

Copiah

30,493

27,051

16,283

14,059

14,210

12,992

53.4%

52.0%

De Soto

24,599

23,891

16,522

14,643

8,077

9,248

67.2%

61.3%

Grenada

18,830

18,409

9,829

9,057

9,001

9,352

52.2%

49.2%

Holmes

33,301

27,096

24,477

19,501

8,824

7,595

73.5%

72.0%

Humphreys

23,115

19,093

16,102

13,335

7,013

5,758

69.7%

69.8%

Issaquena

4,966

3,576

3,349

2,400

1,617

1,176

67.4%

67.1%

Jasper

18,912

16,909

9,719

8,507

9,193

8,402

51.4%

50.3%

Jefferson

11,306

10,142

8,419

7,653

2,887

2,489

74.5%

75.5%

Jefferson Davis

15,500

13,540

8,610

7,414

6,890

6,126

55.6%

54.8%

Kemper

15,893

12,277

9,433

7,449

6,460

4,828

59.4%

60.7%

Leflore

51,813

47,142

35,331

30,443

16,482

16,699

68.2%

64.6%

Madison

33,860

32,904

24,934

23,637

8,926

9,267

73.6%

71.8%

Marshall

25,106

24,503

17,732

17,239

7,374

7,264

70.6%

70.4%

Noxubee

20,022

16,826

14,905

12,102

5,117

4,724

74.4%

71.9%

Panola

31,271

28,791

17,489

16,226

13,782

12,565

55.9%

56.4%

Quitman

25,885

21,019

15,702

13,304

10,183

7,715

60.7%

63.3%

Sharkey

12,903

10,738

9,196

7,491

3,707

3,247

71.3%

69.8%

Sunflower

56,031

45,750

38,159

31,020

17,872

14,730

68.1%

67.8%

Tallahatchie

30,486

24,081

19,408

15,501

11,078

8,580

63.7%

64.4%

Tate

18,011

18,138

10,371

10,442

7,640

7,696

57.6%

57.6%

Tunica

21,664

16,826

17,725

13,321

3,939

3,505

81.8%

79.2%

Warren

39,616

42,206

20,092

19,759

19,524

22,447

50.7%

46.8%

Washington

70,504

78,638

47,068

43,399

23,436

35,239

66.8%

55.2%

Wilkinson

14,116

13,235

9,758

9,428

4,358

3,807

69.1%

71.2%

Yazoo

35,712

31,653

22,080

18,791

13,632

12,862

61.8%

59.4%

 

 

 

 

 

 

45.5%

42.0%

State Total

North Carolina Total Population County

Nonwhite Population

White Population

Percent Nonwhite to Total Population

1950

1960

1950

1960

1950

1960

1950

1960

Bertie

26,439

24,350

15,811

14,453

10,628

9,897

59.8%

59.4%

Edgecombe

51,634

54,226

26,816

28,134

24,818

26,092

51.9%

51.9%

Gates

9,555

9,254

5,023

5,022

4,532

4,232

52.6%

54.3%

Greene

18,024

16,741

8,390

8,424

9,634

8,317

46.6%

50.3%

Halifax

58,377

58,956

33,028

32,464

25,349

26,492

56.6%

55.1%

Hertford

21,453

22,718

12,862

13,400

8,591

9,318

60.0%

59.0%

Hoke

15,756

16,356

9,542

9,394

6,214

6,962

60.6%

57.4%

Martin

27,938

27,139

14,080

13,560

13,858

13,579

50.4%

50.0%

Northampton

28,432

26,811

18,250

17,099

10,182

9,712

64.2%

63.8%

Robeson

87,769

89,102

50,279

52,550

37,490

36,552

57.3%

59.0%

Warren

23,539

19,652

15,638

12,713

7,901

6,939

66.4%

64.7%

 

 

 

 

 

 

26.6%

24.5%

State Total

South Carolina Total Population County

Nonwhite Population

White Population

Percent Nonwhite to Total Population

1950

1960

1950

1960

1950

1960

1950

1960

Allendale

11,773

11,362

8,513

7,184

3,260

4,178

72.3%

63.2%

Bamberg

17,533

16,274

10,138

9,087

7,365

7,187

57.8%

55.8%

Barnwell

17,266

17,659

10,653

7,655

6,613

10,004

61.7%

43.4%

Beaufort

26,993

44,187

15,521

17,104

11,472

27,083

57.5%

38.7%

Berkeley

30,251

38,196

19,105

18,963

11,146

19,233

63.2%

49.7%

Calhoun

14,753

12,256

10,449

8,198

4,304

4,058

70.8%

66.9%

Clarendon

32,215

29,490

22,836

20,130

9,379

9,360

70.9%

68.3% (Continued)

858

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A23.33 (Continued) South Carolina County

Total Population

Nonwhite Population

White Population

Percent Nonwhite to Total Population

Colleton

28,242

27,816

15,044

14,227

13,198

13,589

53.3%

51.2%

Dorchester

22,601

24,383

12,483

11,903

10,118

12,480

55.2%

48.8%

Edgefield

16,591

15,735

9,931

9,154

6,660

6,581

59.9%

58.2%

Fairfield

21,780

20,713

12,921

12,319

8,859

8,394

59.3%

59.5%

Georgetown

31,762

34,798

16,862

18,146

14,900

16,652

53.1%

52.2%

Hampton

18,027

17,425

10,081

9,387

7,946

8,038

55.9%

53.9%

Jasper

10,995

12,237

7,171

7,618

3,824

4,619

65.2%

62.3%

Lee

23,173

21,832

15,509

14,373

7,664

7,459

66.9%

65.8%

McCormick

9,577

8,629

5,998

5,318

3,579

3,311

62.6%

61.6%

Marion

33,110

32,014

18,529

17,599

14,581

14,415

56.0%

55.0%

Marlboro

31,766

28,529

16,753

13,921

15,013

14,608

52.7%

48.8%

Orangeburg

68,726

68,559

43,431

41,192

25,295

27,367

63.2%

60.1%

Sumter

57,634

74,941

33,025

35,095

24,609

39,846

57.3%

46.8%

Williamsburg

43,807

40,932

29,635

27,216

14,172

13,716

67.7%

66.5%

 

 

 

 

 

 

38.9%

34.8%

State Total

Tennessee Total Population

Nonwhite Population

White Population

Percent Nonwhite to Total Population

County

1950

1960

1950

1960

1950

1960

1950

1960

Fayette

27,535

24,577

19,445

16,931

8,090

7,646

70.6%

68.9%

Haywood

26,212

23,393

16,223

14,338

9,989

9,055

61.9%

61.3%

 

 

 

 

 

 

16.2%

16.5%

State Total

Texas Total Population

Nonwhite Population

White Population

Percent Nonwhite to Total Population

County

1950

1960

1950

1960

1950

1960

1950

1960

Harrison

47,745

45,594

24,743

19,796

23,002

25,798

51.8%

43.4%

Marion

10,172

8,049

5,784

4,221

4,388

3,828

56.9%

52.4%

7,172

6,153

3,767

3,209

3,405

2,944

52.5%

52.2%

11,961

12,071

6,329

6,481

5,632

5,590

52.9%

53.7%

 

 

 

 

 

 

12.8%

12.4%

San Jacinto Waller State Total

Virginia Total Population

Nonwhite Population

White Population

Percent Nonwhite to Total Population

County

1950

1960

1950

1960

1950

1960

1950

1960

Amelia

7,908

7,815

3,948

4,009

3,960

3,806

49.9%

51.3%

Brunswick

20,136

17,779

11,648

10,431

8,488

7,348

57.9%

58.7%

Caroline

12,471

12,725

6,413

6,688

6,058

6,037

51.4%

52.6%

Charles City

4,676

5,492

3,786

4,575

890

917

81.0%

83.3%

Cumberland

7,252

6,360

4,041

3,450

3,211

2,910

55.7%

54.3%

Dinwiddie

18,839

22,183

12,176

13,684

6,663

8,499

64.6%

61.7%

Goochland

8,934

9,206

4,469

4,433

4,465

4,773

50.0%

48.2%

Greensville

16,319

16,155

9,670

8,874

6,649

7,281

59.3%

54.9%

Isle of Wight

14,906

17,164

7,742

9,031

7,164

8,133

51.9%

52.6%

6,299

5,889

3,389

3,130

2,910

2,759

53.8%

53.2%

25,238

31,366

16,490

19,782

8,748

11,584

65.3%

63.1%

King and Queen Nansemond New Kent

3,995

4,504

2,157

2,378

1,838

2,126

54.0%

52.8%

Northampton

17,300

16,966

9,255

9,188

8,045

7,778

53.5%

54.2%

Southampton

26,522

27,195

16,163

15,659

10,359

11,536

60.9%

57.6%

6,220

6,220

3,971

4,024

2,249

2,196

63.8%

64.7%

12,785

12,411

8,392

8,225

4,393

4,186

65.6%

66.3%

 

 

 

 

 

 

22.2%

20.6%

Surry Sussex State Total

Sources: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, Voting: 1961 Commission on Civil Rights Report (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1961), pp. 332–341, and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790-2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/ Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors.



Appendices 859 Appendix Table A23.34  Southern States’ Black Belt Counties, 1958 and 1960 Alabama Nonwhites Registered

% Nonwhites of Voting Age Registered

Whites Registered

% Whites of Voting Age Registered

County

1958

1960

1958

1960

1958

1960

1958

1960

Barbour

450

400

6.3%

6.9%

6,289

6,400

78.5%

87.2%

Bullock

5

5

0.1%

0.1%

2,200

2,200

83.6%

92.2%

Choctaw

172

150

3.6%

3.8%

5,228

5,560

106.4%

107.1%

Dallas

520

130

2.9%

0.9%

7,480

9,195

59.4%

63.9%

Greene

174

166

2.6%

3.3%

1,566

1,731

86.0%

105.0%

Hale

150

150

2.1%

2.5%

3,050

3,350

82.9%

93.2%

0

0

0.0%

0.0%

2,306

2,240

112.1%

117.9%

Lowndes Macon

1,218

1,000

8.4%

8.4%

3,102

3,310

100.7%

117.5%

Marengo

132

139

1.3%

1.8%

5,392

5,886

98.8%

96.4%

Monroe

160

200

2.7%

4.1%

5,815

5,800

80.9%

87.5%

Perry

250

265

3.9%

5.1%

4,050

3,235

107.8%

94.0%

Russell

500

700

4.9%

6.7%

8,006

7,878

67.5%

57.3%

Sumter

425

450

4.9%

6.6%

2,875

2,650

79.9%

86.6%

Wilcox

0

0

0.0%

0.0%

3,040

2,950

99.5%

112.4%

Totals*

4,156

3,755

6.4%

5.7%

60,399

62,385

93.6%

94.3%

Arkansas Nonwhites Registered

% Nonwhites of Voting Age Registered

Whites Registered

% Whites of Voting Age Registered

County

1958

1960

1958

1960

1958

1960

1958

1960

Chicot

2,525

2,426

36.5%

43.7%

3,761

3,827

66.7%

79.5%

Crittenden

1,145

1,537

6.9%

11.9%

5,778

6,210

68.0%

58.8%

Lee

1,366

1,386

18.0%

23.3%

2,805

2,817

53.8%

62.0%

Lincoln

1,302

1,338

27.1%

37.4%

2,569

2,709

56.8%

58.7%

Phillips

3,612

3,505

23.7%

28.7%

5,900

6,213

56.2%

59.6%

St. Francis

1,900

2,250

17.7%

26.8%

5,262

5,402

61.0%

67.8%

11,850

12,442

31.3%

31.4%

26,075

27,178

68.8%

68.6%

Totals

*

Florida Nonwhites Registered County

% Nonwhites of Voting Age Registered

Whites Registered

% Whites of Voting Age Registered

1958

1960

1958

1960

1958

1960

1958

1960

Gadsden

7

355

0.1%

2.9%

6.31

7.097

56.4%

60.6%

Jefferson

432

319

13.2%

12.3%

3.038

2.225

126.9%

93.4%

Totals*

439

674

4.5%

6.7%

9.348

9.322

95.5%

93.3%

Georgia Nonwhites Registered County

% Nonwhites of Voting Age Registered

1958

1960

1958

1960

Baker

0

0

0.0%

Burke

427

 

5.3%

Calhoun

132

 

Camden

1,385

 

94

 

Crawford

155

Dooly

722

Early

226

Clay

Whites Registered

% Whites of Voting Age Registered

1958

1960

1958

1960

0.00%

1670

1740

132.5%

152.8%

5.30%

3.664

 

90.4%

 

4.5%

0.00%

1,682

 

97.7%

 

73.0%

 

2,606

 

125.3%

 

4.9%

 

1,013

 

87.3%

 

 

9.5%

 

1,496

 

95.7%

 

 

20.8%

 

4,252

 

104.5%

 

214

5.3%

6.53%

4,335

4,111

91.8%

102.4% (Continued)

860

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A23.34 (Continued) Georgia (continued) Nonwhites Registered

% Nonwhites of Voting Age Registered

Whites Registered

% Whites of Voting Age Registered

County

1958

1960

1958

1960

1958

1960

Greene

2,728

 

85.0%

 

5,053

 

129.0%

1958

1960  

Hancock

1,730

1,404

47.7%

39.26%

2,064

1,658

105.6%

96.0%

Harris

215

 

7.1%

 

3,635

 

116.3%

 

Jasper

804

 

39.0%

 

2,530

 

119.3%

 

Jefferson

264

 

5.3%

 

4,120

 

84.6%

 

Jenkins

694

 

26.3%

 

2,502

 

89.2%

 

Jones

611

 

30.7%

 

2,048

 

96.4%

 

29

29

1.3%

1.62%

1,281

1,210

115.3%

84.8%

Liberty

2,472

2,014

95.0%

63.41%

2,128

2,000

116.9%

37.7%

McIntosh

1,219

 

64.6%

 

1,396

 

102.3%

 

178

 

4.1%

 

3,024

 

101.2%

 

Lee

Macon Marion

52

 

3.1%

 

1,330

 

87.6%

 

Meriwether

927

 

17.8%

 

5,457

 

86.0%

 

Mitchell

375

 

7.0%

 

7,298

 

115.9%

 

Monroe

753

 

29.0%

 

3,333

 

106.28%

 

Morgan

738

 

24.8%

 

2,615

 

78.20%

 

Peach

679

 

18.7%

 

2,539

 

88.07%

 

Putnam

570

 

27.6%

 

2,366

 

111.13%

 

Quitman

43

 

4.8%

 

721

 

116.86%

 

Randolph

493

 

11.0%

 

2,585

 

84.75%

 

Schley

158

 

14.9%

 

1,006

 

96.45%

 

Screven

335

 

7.3%

 

3,027

 

64.57%

 

Stewart

107

 

3.5%

 

1,555

 

94.01%

 

Sumter

483

 

7.1%

 

5,164

 

75.32%

 

Talbot

219

 

8.9%

 

1,448

 

95.33%

 

Taliaferro

756

 

53.5%

 

913

 

88.04%

 

Terrell

48

 

1.1%

 

2,810

 

91.41%

 

Twiggs

348

 

15.1%

 

2,517

 

135.69%

 

Warren Washington Webster

195

 

7.6%

 

2,006

 

98.38%

 

1,704

 

29.4%

 

6,696

 

119.66%

 

0

0

0.0%

0.00%

934

811

104.83%

104.65%

Wilkes

290

 

8.5%

 

3,364

 

97.45%

 

Totals

23,358

3,661

17.5%

24.10%

110,183

11,530

82.51%

75.90%

*

Louisiana Nonwhites Registered County

% Nonwhites of Voting Age Registered

Whites Registered

% Whites of Voting Age Registered

1958

1960

1958

1960

1958

1960

1958

1960

Claiborne

15

28

0.2%

0.6%

5,718

5,510

73.8%

85.9%

Concordia

291

383

6.3%

8.4%

3,867

5,323

116.2%

89.3%

De Soto

498

595

7.3%

8.8%

5,527

5,828

83.2%

89.1%

0

0

0.0%

0.0%

2,180

2,845

67.6%

95.2%

450

82

7.2%

1.4%

2,449

2,448

39.4%

34.8%

0

0

0.0%

0.0%

1,564

2,714

46.4%

81.4%

East Carroll East Feliciana Madison



Appendices 861 Louisiana (continued) Nonwhites Registered County Pointe Coupee Red River

% Nonwhites of Voting Age Registered

Whites Registered

% Whites of Voting Age Registered

1958

1960

1958

1960

1958

1960

1958

1960

659

2,313

11.5%

43.9%

3,456

5,354

58.9%

88.0%

16

27

0.6%

1.2%

2,346

3,440

65.7%

104.4%

St. Helena

1,091

1,243

52.3%

59.7%

1,830

2,478

75.0%

104.9%

St. James

2,230

2,528

58.4%

63.8%

4,138

4,447

96.5%

90.9%

0

0

0.0%

0.0%

1,025

1,964

39.6%

85.9%

719

1,194

20.9%

34.1%

2,076

3,323

65.7%

83.6%

0

0

0.0%

0.0%

977

1,305

45.8%

46.4%

5,969

8,393

13.8%

15.2%

37,153

46,979

86.2%

84.8%

Tensas West Baton Rouge West Feliciana Totals

*

Mississippi Nonwhites Registered County

% Nonwhites of Voting Age Registered

Whites Registered

% Whites of Voting Age Registered

1958

1960

1958

1960

1958

1960

Amite

3

1

0.1%

0.03%

 

 

 

 

Bolivar

35

612

0.2%

3.84%

 

 

 

 

0

6

0.0%

0.22%

 

 

 

 

111

138

2.4%

3.48%

 

 

 

 

Carroll Claiborne Clay

1958

1960

12

10

0.2%

0.23%

 

 

 

 

1,070

1,960

5.6%

13.42%

 

 

 

 

Copiah

16

20

0.2%

0.31%

 

 

 

 

De Soto

1

3

0.0%

0.05%

 

 

 

 

Grenada

39

61

0.8%

1.41%

 

 

 

 

Holmes

45

41

0.4%

0.47%

 

 

 

 

Humphreys

37

2

0.5%

0.04%

 

 

 

 

Issaquena

0

0

0.0%

0.00%

 

 

 

 

Jasper

9

6

0.2%

0.16%

 

 

 

 

Jefferson

0

0

0.0%

0.00%

 

 

 

 

Coahoma

Jefferson Davis

1,038

96

26.5%

2.98%

 

 

 

 

Kemper

20

20

0.5%

0.62%

 

 

 

 

Leflore

297

472

1.7%

3.48%

 

 

 

 

Madison

431

607

3.7%

5.9%

 

 

 

 

Marshall

15

17

0.2%

0.2%

 

 

 

 

Noxubee

0

0

0.0%

0.0%

 

 

 

 

Panola

1

10

0.0%

0.1%

 

 

 

 

Quitman

234

316

3.0%

5.6%

 

 

 

 

Sharkey

1

3

0.0%

0.1%

 

 

 

 

Sunflower

114

161

0.6%

1.2%

 

 

 

 

Tallahatchie

0

0

0.0%

0.0%

 

 

 

 

Tate

0

0

0.0%

0.0%

 

 

 

 

Tunica

27

22

0.3%

0.4%

 

 

 

 

Warren

1,099

1,910

8.9%

17.8%

 

 

 

 

Washington

1,464

2,563

5.7%

12.4%

 

 

 

 

Wilkinson

40

110

0.9%

2.7%

 

 

 

 

Yazoo

81

179

0.7%

2.1%

 

 

 

 

6,240

9,346

 

 

 

 

 

 

Totals

*

(Continued)

862

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A23.34 (Continued) North Carolina Nonwhites Registered County Bertie

1958

1960

% Nonwhites of Voting Age Registered 1958

1960

Whites Registered 1958

% Whites of Voting Age Registered

1960

1958

1960

 

713

 

11.4%

 

6,242

 

101.4%

Edgecombe

839

1,787

6.5%

14.5%

7,224

11,129

48.2%

71.7%

Gates

150

351

6.4%

15.0%

2,340

2,654

81.4%

97.8%

Greene

 

385

 

11.8%

 

4,882

 

101.9%

Halifax

1,537

1,954

10.7%

14.2%

14,231

15,406

90.3%

93.4%

Hertford

180

537

2.9%

8.8%

6,068

6,415

113.5%

114.4%

Hoke

164

650

3.9%

17.4%

467

4,454

12.6%

111.4%

Martin

847

1,253

13.9%

22.1%

8,278

8,040

106.7%

99.9%

 

1,300

 

17.8%

 

6,700

 

108.5%

6,389

11,994

29.0%

56.0%

23,800

25,537

113.5%

122.5%

Northampton Robeson Warren

784

881

11.4%

16.1%

5,982

6,123

122.7%

137.9%

Totals*

10,890

21,805

13.7%

18.3%

68,390

97,582

86.3%

81.7%

South Carolina Nonwhites Registered County

% Nonwhites of Voting Age Registered

Whites Registered

% Whites of Voting Age Registered

1958

1960

1958

1960

1958

1960

Allendale

140

 

3.6%

 

2,419

 

115.7%

 

Bamberg

393

 

8.8%

 

3,267

 

72.8%

 

Barnwell

531

 

11.1%

 

4,786

 

120.8%

 

Beaufort

1,286

 

16.9%

 

2,855

 

50.1%

 

Berkeley

1,913

 

23.5%

 

5,147

 

86.3%

 

Calhoun

74

26

1.7%

0.8%

1,699

2,145

63.2%

81.8%

Clarendon

324

388

3.5%

5.0%

3,458

3,992

67.5%

76.4%

Colleton

735

 

10.9%

 

5,695

 

71.7%

 

Dorchester

412

 

7.1%

 

5,330

 

89.9%

 

Edgefield

270

 

6.3%

 

3,267

 

78.0%

 

Fairfield

750

 

12.7%

 

4,218

 

81.0%

 

Georgetown

911

 

12.4%

 

4,667

 

58.1%

 

Hampton

250

351

5.4%

8.7%

3,210

4,350

69.5%

92.3%

Jasper

489

 

14.9%

 

1,975

 

90.6%

 

Lee

742

 

11.9%

 

4,166

 

91.2%

 

0

50

0.0%

2.2%

1,399

1,737

67.4%

90.7%

Marion

972

 

11.2%

 

5,280

 

65.0%

 

Marlboro

395

 

5.3%

 

7,016

 

81.9%

 

Orangeburg

2,220

 

11.6%

 

10,068

 

65.6%

 

Sumter

2,130

 

14.4%

 

7,574

 

52.4%

 

234

 

1.9%

 

6,156

 

81.3%

 

15,171

815

13.9%

6.3%

93,652

12,224

86.1%

93.8%

McCormick

Williamsburg Totals

*

1958

1960



Appendices 863 Tennessee Nonwhites Registered

% Nonwhites of Voting Age Registered

Whites Registered

% Whites of Voting Age Registered

County

1958

1960

1958

1960

1958

1960

Fayette

58

1,500

0.65%

20.8%

 

6,391

 

144.0%

0

300

0.00%

4.8%

 

6,500

 

118.3%

58

1,800

 

12.3%

 

12,891

 

87.8%

Haywood Totals*

1958

1960

Texas Nonwhites Registered

% Nonwhites of Voting Age Registered

Whites Registered

% Whites of Voting Age Registered

County

1958

1960

1958

1960

1958

1960

1958

1960

Harrison

3,743

1,897

29.2%

18.4%

4,449

6,321

30.4%

39.5%

Marion

1,606

623

52.0%

28.1%

823

1,209

29.6%

49.1%

San Jacinto

1,070

1,000

54.0%

59.6%

654

1,401

32.0%

74.6%

Waller

1,391

1,031

44.2%

32.7%

1,225

1,960

34.1%

55.6%

Totals

7,810

4,551

52.2%

29.5%

7,151

10,891

47.8%

70.5%

*

Virginia Nonwhites Registered

% Nonwhites of Voting Age Registered

Whites Registered

% Whites of Voting Age Registered

County

1958

1960

1958

1960

1958

1960

1958

1960

Amelia

607

638

30.4%

33.2%

1,975

1,983

82.6%

87.7%

Brunswick

770

765

14.0%

16.2%

3,856

3,764

74.8%

81.2%

Caroline

502

1,055

16.3%

32.9%

1,410

2,295

36.6%

60.5%

Charles City

704

749

36.5%

35.2%

554

558

91.4%

95.9%

Cumberland

300

360

15.0%

21.9%

1,475

1,300

75.5%

71.5%

Dinwiddie

836

879

10.6%

10.2%

3,424

3,618

82.1%

69.4%

Goochland

675

752

26.8%

32.5%

1,950

1,920

65.7%

61.5%

Greensville

875

949

19.4%

24.4%

2,810

3,464

69.3%

77.0%

Isle of Wight

931

1,063

23.5%

24.6%

3,592

3,556

79.5%

71.3%

King and Queen

350

445

19.5%

27.5%

565

740

30.8%

42.7%

1,338

1,737

15.0%

17.7%

2,909

3,311

53.5%

47.5%

New Kent

374

432

32.5%

35.2%

808

862

69.7%

65.1%

Northampton

520

345

10.2%

7.2%

2,275

2,175

40.0%

40.7%

Southampton

525

875

6.6%

11.8%

3,630

4,645

54.5%

64.2%

Surry

265

450

13.7%

24.4%

1,075

925

67.3%

62.5%

635

690

15.7%

18.6%

2,275

2,275

80.3%

85.5%

10,207

12,184

22.8%

24.6%

34,583

37,391

77.2%

75.4%

Nansemond

Sussex Totals

*

Sources: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, Voting: 1961 Commission on Civil Rights Report (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1961), pp. 342-351, and Michael R. Haines, ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790-2000 [Computer File], http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/ Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR), downloaded June 14, 2009. Calculations by the authors. Note: While the USCCR provides voter registration data for African Americans in the Border States of Delaware, Maryland, and West Virginia, it does not distinguish African American majority counties in these states. *

Based on complete sets of statistics in reported counties.

864

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A25.6  Voter Registration in Selected Southern States and Counties Following Passage of the Voting Rights Act, 1965

State

African Americans Accepted County

Total

Accepted

Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number

Percent

Rejected

Total

Number Percent Number Percent

All Total Number

Autauga

73

100%

0

0%

73

92%

6

100%

 

0%

6

8%

79

Baldwin

52

100%

0

0%

52

62%

32

100%

 

0%

32

38%

84

Barbour

671

100%

0

0%

671

99%

6

100%

 

0%

6

1%

677

Bibb

Alabama

Rejected

Whites

14

100%

0

0%

14

67%

7

100%

 

0%

7

33%

21

Blount

5

100%

0

0%

5

28%

13

100%

 

0%

13

72%

18

Bullock

292

100%

0

0%

292

98%

6

100%

 

0%

6

2%

298

Butler

334

99%

5

1%

339

99%

3

100%

 

0%

3

1%

342

Calhoun/Benton

379

100%

0

0%

379

88%

53

100%

 

0%

53

12%

432

Chambers

9

100%

0

0%

9

25%

27

100%

 

0%

27

75%

36

Cherokee

0

 

0

 

0

0%

22

100%

 

0%

22

100%

22

Chilton/Baker

2

100%

0

0%

2

8%

23

100%

 

0%

23

92%

25

Choctaw

217

100%

1

0%

218

94%

13

100%

 

0%

13

6%

231

Clarke

265

94%

16

6%

281

93%

20

100%

 

0%

20

7%

301

Clay

3

100%

0

0%

3

33%

6

100%

 

0%

6

67%

9

Cleburne

0

 

0

 

0

0%

7

100%

 

0%

7

100%

7

Coffee

96

99%

1

1%

97

62%

59

100%

 

0%

59

38%

156

Colbert

90

100%

0

0%

90

75%

30

100%

 

0%

30

25%

120

Conecuh

181

100%

0

0%

181

98%

4

100%

 

0%

4

2%

185

Coosa

72

100%

0

0%

72

82%

16

100%

 

0%

16

18%

88

Covington

13

100%

0

0%

13

27%

35

100%

 

0%

35

73%

48

Crenshaw

196

99%

2

1%

198

92%

18

100%

 

0%

18

8%

216

0

 

0

 

0

0%

37

100%

 

0%

37

100%

37

456

100%

0

0%

456

91%

46

100%

 

0%

46

9%

502

3

100%

0

0%

3

0%

674

100%

2

0%

676

100%

679

Cullman Dale Dallas De Kalb

0

 

0

 

0

0%

21

100%

 

0%

21

100%

21

Elmore

68

100%

0

0%

68

60%

46

100%

 

0%

46

40%

114

1

100%

0

0%

1

7%

13

100%

 

0%

13

93%

14

Etowah

272

100%

0

0%

272

87%

39

100%

 

0%

39

13%

311

Fayette

1

100%

0

0%

1

17%

5

100%

 

0%

5

83%

6

Franklin

0

 

0

 

0

0%

15

100%

 

0%

15

100%

15

Geneva

102

100%

0

0%

102

96%

3

75%

1

25%

4

4%

106

Greene

458

100%

0

0%

458

98%

9

100%

 

0%

9

2%

467

0

0%

1

100%

1

1%

131

100%

 

0%

131

99%

132

343

99%

3

1%

346

89%

41

95%

2

5%

43

11%

389

Houston

86

99%

1

1%

87

46%

102

99%

1

1%

103

54%

190

Jackson

101

100%

0

0%

101

91%

10

100%

 

0%

10

9%

111

2,300

100%

0

0%

2,300

82%

506

100%

 

0%

506

18%

2,806

Escambia

Hale Henry

Jefferson



Appendices 865

State

African Americans Accepted County Lamar/Sanford

Alabama (continued)

Total

Accepted

Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number

Rejected

Percent

Total

Number Percent Number Percent

All Total Number

1

100%

0

0%

1

33%

2

100%

 

0%

2

67%

3

Lauderdale

15

100%

0

0%

15

26%

42

100%

 

0%

42

74%

57

Lawrence

47

100%

0

0%

47

73%

17

100%

 

0%

17

27%

64

478

99%

4

1%

482

98%

12

100%

 

0%

12

2%

494

Limestone

28

100%

0

0%

28

64%

16

100%

 

0%

16

36%

44

Lowndes

3

100%

0

0%

3

11%

24

100%

 

0%

24

89%

27

Macon

0

 

0

 

0

 

0

 

 

 

0

 

0

Madison

247

100%

0

0%

247

33%

491

100%

 

0%

491

67%

738

Marengo

0

 

0

 

0

0%

11

100%

 

0%

11

100%

11

Marion

0

 

0

 

0

0%

211

100%

 

0%

211

100%

211

Marshall

2

100%

0

0%

2

3%

59

98%

1

2%

60

97%

62

Mobile

1,043

99%

7

1%

1,050

93%

83

100%

 

0%

83

7%

1,133

Monroe

80

100%

0

0%

80

47%

92

100%

 

0%

92

53%

172

220

84%

42

16%

262

76%

81

100%

 

0%

81

24%

343

28

100%

0

0%

28

30%

66

100%

 

0%

66

70%

94

1

100%

0

0%

1

1%

84

100%

 

0%

84

99%

85

66

100%

0

0%

66

73%

24

100%

 

0%

24

27%

90

1,453

100%

1

0%

1,454

94%

88

100%

 

0%

88

6%

1,542

12

100%

0

0%

12

57%

9

100%

 

0%

9

43%

21

Russell

262

100%

0

0%

262

91%

25

100%

 

0%

25

9%

287

St. Clair

229

100%

0

0%

229

100%

0

 

 

 

0

0%

229

Shelby

10

100%

0

0%

10

16%

52

100%

 

0%

52

84%

62

Sumter

0

 

0

 

0

0%

8

100%

 

0%

8

100%

8

Talladega

4

100%

0

0%

4

21%

15

100%

 

0%

15

79%

19

Tallapoosa

48

100%

0

0%

48

53%

42

98%

1

2%

43

47%

91

Tuscaloosa

502

100%

0

0%

502

78%

145

100%

 

0%

145

22%

647

Walker

10

100%

0

0%

10

36%

18

100%

 

0%

18

64%

28

Washington

96

99%

1

1%

97

92%

9

100%

 

0%

9

8%

106

Wilcox

0

 

0

 

0

0%

59

95%

3

5%

62

100%

62

Winston/Hancock

0

 

0

 

0

0%

52

100%

 

0%

52

100%

52

Subtotal

12,040

99%

85

0.7%

12,125

75%

3,941

99.72%

11

0.28%

3,952

25%

16,077

Appling

0

 

 

 

0

0%

2

100%

 

0%

2

100%

2

Atkinson

6

100%

 

0%

6

75%

2

100%

 

0%

2

25%

8

Bacon

0

 

 

 

0

0%

13

100%

 

0%

13

100%

13

Baker

14

88%

2

13%

16

57%

11

92%

1

8%

12

43%

28

7

100%

 

0%

7

26%

20

100%

 

0%

20

74%

27

Banks

12

100%

 

0%

12

75%

4

100%

 

0%

4

25%

16

Barrow

10

100%

 

0%

10

34%

19

100%

 

0%

19

66%

29

Lee

Montgomery Morgan/Cotaco Perry Pickens Pike Randolph

Georgia

Rejected

Whites

Baldwin

(Continued)

866

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A25.6 (Continued)

State

African Americans Accepted County Bartow/Cass

Total

Accepted

Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number

Rejected

Percent

Total

Number Percent Number Percent

All Total Number

9

100%

 

0%

9

38%

15

100%

 

0%

15

63%

24

Ben Hill

164

100%

 

0%

164

93%

13

100%

 

0%

13

7%

177

Berrien

2

100%

 

0%

2

50%

2

100%

 

0%

2

50%

4

Bibb

135

100%

 

0%

135

64%

75

100%

 

0%

75

36%

210

Bleckley

7

100%

 

0%

7

39%

11

100%

 

0%

11

61%

18

Brooks

11

100%

 

0%

11

61%

7

100%

 

0%

7

39%

18

Bryan

0

 

 

 

0

 

0

 

 

 

0

 

0

14

100%

 

0%

14

28%

36

100%

 

0%

36

72%

50

183

100%

 

0%

183

95%

10

100%

 

0%

10

5%

193

Bulloch Burke Butts

Georgia (continued)

Rejected

Whites

2

100%

 

0%

2

50%

2

100%

 

0%

2

50%

4

Calhoun

17

100%

 

0%

17

74%

6

100%

 

0%

6

26%

23

Camden

8

100%

 

0%

8

73%

3

100%

 

0%

3

27%

11

Carroll

16

100%

 

0%

16

24%

50

100%

 

0%

50

76%

66

Catoosa

0

 

 

 

0

0%

11

100%

 

0%

11

100%

11

Charlton

20

100%

 

0%

20

69%

9

100%

 

0%

9

31%

29

Chatham

968

100%

 

0%

968

84%

190

100%

 

0%

190

16%

1,158

Chattahoochee

5

100%

 

0%

5

83%

1

100%

 

0%

1

17%

6

Chattooga

0

 

 

 

0

0%

9

100%

 

0%

9

100%

9

Cherokee

3

100%

 

0%

3

30%

7

100%

 

0%

7

70%

10

272

100%

 

0%

272

51%

258

100%

 

0%

258

49%

530

Clay

14

100%

 

0%

14

47%

16

100%

 

0%

16

53%

30

Clayton

34

100%

 

0%

34

15%

188

100%

 

0%

188

85%

222

Clinch

1

100%

 

0%

1

20%

4

100%

 

0%

4

80%

5

Cobb

 

 

 

 

0

 

 

 

 

 

0

 

0

Coffee

15

100%

 

0%

15

47%

17

100%

 

0%

17

53%

32

Colquitt

11

100%

 

0%

11

32%

23

100%

 

0%

23

68%

34

Clarke

Columbia

8

100%

 

0%

8

47%

9

100%

 

0%

9

53%

17

18

100%

 

0%

18

86%

3

100%

 

0%

3

14%

21

Coweta

8

100%

 

0%

8

36%

14

100%

 

0%

14

64%

22

Crawford

8

100%

 

0%

8

53%

7

100%

 

0%

7

47%

15

Crisp

309

100%

 

0%

309

95%

15

100%

 

0%

15

5%

324

Dade

0

 

 

 

0

0%

2

100%

 

0%

2

100%

2

Cook

Dawson

0

 

 

 

0

 

0

 

 

 

0

 

0

Decatur

47

100%

 

0%

47

75%

16

100%

 

0%

16

25%

63

De Kalb

24

100%

 

0%

24

6%

358

100%

 

0%

358

94%

382

Dodge

0

 

 

 

0

0%

13

100%

 

0%

13

100%

13

Dooly

23

100%

 

0%

23

70%

10

100%

 

0%

10

30%

33

Dougherty

 

 

 

 

0

 

 

 

 

 

0

 

0

Douglas

3

100%

 

0%

3

19%

13

100%

 

0%

13

81%

16



Appendices 867

State

African Americans Accepted County

Total

Accepted

Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number

Rejected

Percent

Total

Number Percent Number Percent

All Total Number

Early

35

100%

 

0%

35

83%

7

100%

 

0%

7

17%

42

Echols

0

 

 

 

0

 

0

 

 

 

0

 

0

13

100%

 

0%

13

45%

16

100%

 

0%

16

55%

29

4

100%

 

0%

4

50%

4

100%

 

0%

4

50%

8

19

100%

 

0%

19

54%

16

100%

 

0%

16

46%

35

Evans

7

100%

 

0%

7

54%

6

100%

 

0%

6

46%

13

Fannin

0

 

 

 

0

0%

12

100%

 

0%

12

100%

12

Fayette

2

100%

 

0%

2

29%

5

100%

 

0%

5

71%

7

42

100%

 

0%

42

28%

109

100%

 

0%

109

72%

151

Forsyth

0

 

 

 

0

 

0

 

 

 

0

 

0

Franklin

0

 

 

 

0

0%

5

100%

 

0%

5

100%

5

Fulton

223

100%

 

0%

223

30%

510

100%

 

0%

510

70%

733

Gilmer

0

 

 

 

0

 

0

 

 

 

0

 

0

Glascock

1

100%

 

0%

1

25%

3

100%

 

0%

3

75%

4

Glynn

47

100%

 

0%

47

47%

53

100%

 

0%

53

53%

100

Gordon

4

100%

 

0%

4

33%

8

100%

 

0%

8

67%

12

Grady

13

100%

 

0%

13

43%

17

100%

 

0%

17

57%

30

Greene

6

100%

 

0%

6

67%

3

100%

 

0%

3

33%

9

Gwinnett

3

100%

 

0%

3

4%

68

100%

 

0%

68

96%

71

Habersham

4

100%

 

0%

4

12%

30

100%

 

0%

30

88%

34

Hall

42

100%

 

0%

42

35%

78

100%

 

0%

78

65%

120

Hancock

40

100%

 

0%

40

93%

3

100%

 

0%

3

7%

43

Haralson

0

 

 

 

0

0%

7

100%

 

0%

7

100%

7

87

100%

 

0%

87

66%

45

100%

 

0%

45

34%

132

Hart

3

100%

 

0%

3

23%

10

100%

 

0%

10

77%

13

Heard

0

 

 

 

0

0%

7

100%

 

0%

7

100%

7

Henry

8

100%

 

0%

8

22%

29

100%

 

0%

29

78%

37

89

100%

 

0%

89

50%

88

100%

 

0%

88

50%

177

Irwin

2

100%

 

0%

2

13%

14

100%

 

0%

14

88%

16

Jackson

2

100%

 

0%

2

18%

9

100%

 

0%

9

82%

11

Jasper

45

100%

 

0%

45

92%

4

100%

 

0%

4

8%

49

Jeff Davis

8

100%

 

0%

8

35%

15

100%

 

0%

15

65%

23

Jefferson

1,693

99%

10

1%

1,703

99%

16

100%

 

0%

16

1%

1,719

Jenkins

8

100%

 

0%

8

50%

8

100%

 

0%

8

50%

16

Johnson

7

100%

 

0%

7

35%

13

100%

 

0%

13

65%

20

Jones

10

100%

 

0%

10

56%

8

100%

 

0%

8

44%

18

Lamar

6

100%

 

0%

6

35%

11

100%

 

0%

11

65%

17

Lanier

2

100%

 

0%

2

40%

3

100%

 

0%

3

60%

5

Effingham Elbert Emanuel

Floyd

Georgia (continued)

Rejected

Whites

Harris

Houston

(Continued)

868

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A25.6 (Continued)

State

African Americans Accepted County

Total

Accepted

Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number

Laurens

69

100%

 

0%

69

Lee

14

100%

 

0%

Liberty

44

100%

 

0%

Lincoln

8

100%

 

Long

1

100%

Lowndes

16

Lumpkin McDuffie McIntosh

Rejected

Percent

Total

Number Percent Number Percent

All Total Number

57%

53

100%

 

0%

53

43%

122

14

54%

12

100%

 

0%

12

46%

26

44

100%

0

 

 

 

0

0%

44

0%

8

100%

0

 

 

 

0

0%

8

 

0%

1

11%

8

100%

 

0%

8

89%

9

100%

 

0%

16

33%

33

100%

 

0%

33

67%

49

0

 

 

 

0

0%

3

100%

 

0%

3

100%

3

7

100%

 

0%

7

50%

7

100%

 

0%

7

50%

14

21

100%

 

0%

21

75%

7

100%

 

0%

7

25%

28

Macon

888

100%

 

0%

888

99%

13

100%

 

0%

13

1%

901

Marion

49

100%

 

0%

49

91%

5

100%

 

0%

5

9%

54

Meriwether

17

100%

 

0%

17

49%

18

100%

 

0%

18

51%

35

Miller

Georgia (continued)

Rejected

Whites

66

100%

 

0%

66

81%

15

100%

 

0%

15

19%

81

Mitchell

158

100%

 

0%

158

84%

29

100%

 

0%

29

16%

187

Monroe

16

100%

 

0%

16

46%

19

100%

 

0%

19

54%

35

Montgomery

2

100%

 

0%

2

20%

8

100%

 

0%

8

80%

10

Morgan

0

 

 

 

0

0%

1

100%

 

0%

1

100%

1

Murray

0

 

 

 

0

0%

5

100%

 

0%

5

100%

5

Muscogee

89

100%

 

0%

89

18%

396

100%

 

0%

396

82%

485

Newton

8

100%

 

0%

8

62%

5

100%

 

0%

5

38%

13

Oconee

5

100%

 

0%

5

56%

4

100%

 

0%

4

44%

9

22

100%

 

0%

22

79%

6

100%

 

0%

6

21%

28

2

100%

 

0%

2

22%

7

100%

 

0%

7

78%

9

241

100%

 

0%

241

70%

102

100%

 

0%

102

30%

343

Oglethorpe Paulding Peach Pickens

0

 

 

 

0

0%

7

100%

 

0%

7

100%

7

Pierce

7

100%

 

0%

7

47%

8

100%

 

0%

8

53%

15

Pike

2

100%

 

0%

2

33%

4

100%

 

0%

4

67%

6

Polk

0

 

 

 

0

0%

11

100%

 

0%

11

100%

11

33

100%

 

0%

33

75%

11

100%

 

0%

11

25%

44

Putnam

1

100%

 

0%

1

10%

9

100%

 

0%

9

90%

10

Quitman

26

100%

 

0%

26

96%

1

100%

 

0%

1

4%

27

0

 

 

 

0

0%

6

100%

 

0%

6

100%

6

Randolph

42

100%

 

0%

42

79%

11

100%

 

0%

11

21%

53

Richmond

324

100%

 

0%

324

46%

373

100%

 

0%

373

54%

697

Rockdale

8

100%

 

0%

8

57%

6

100%

 

0%

6

43%

14

Schley

11

100%

 

0%

11

100%

0

 

 

 

0

0%

11

Screven

10

100%

 

0%

10

53%

9

100%

 

0%

9

47%

19

Seminole

222

100%

 

0%

222

88%

29

100%

 

0%

29

12%

251

Stephens

3

100%

 

0%

3

33%

6

100%

 

0%

6

67%

9

Pulaski

Rabun



Appendices 869

State

African Americans Accepted County

Accepted

Rejected

Percent

Total

Number Percent Number Percent

All Total Number

63

100%

 

0%

63

98%

1

100%

 

0%

1

2%

64

Sumter

1,648

100%

 

0%

1,648

92%

135

100%

 

0%

135

8%

1,783

14

100%

 

0%

14

45%

17

100%

 

0%

17

55%

31

105

100%

 

0%

105

88%

14

100%

 

0%

14

12%

119

Tattnall

0

 

 

 

0

0%

4

100%

 

0%

4

100%

4

Taylor

18

100%

 

0%

18

67%

9

100%

 

0%

9

33%

27

Telfair

12

100%

 

0%

12

55%

10

100%

 

0%

10

45%

22

Terrell

68

100%

 

0%

68

67%

34

100%

 

0%

34

33%

102

Thomas

16

100%

 

0%

16

38%

26

100%

 

0%

26

62%

42

Tift

14

100%

 

0%

14

31%

31

100%

 

0%

31

69%

45

Toombs

9

100%

 

0%

9

38%

15

100%

 

0%

15

63%

24

Towns

0

 

 

 

0

 

0

 

 

 

0

 

0

Treutlen

2

100%

 

0%

2

67%

1

100%

 

0%

1

33%

3

Troup

145

100%

 

0%

145

63%

85

100%

 

0%

85

37%

230

Turner

21

100%

 

0%

21

48%

23

100%

 

0%

23

52%

44

Twiggs

15

100%

 

0%

15

88%

2

100%

 

0%

2

12%

17

Union

0

 

 

 

0

 

0

 

 

 

0

 

0

Upson

5

100%

 

0%

5

16%

26

100%

 

0%

26

84%

31

Walker

3

100%

 

0%

3

9%

29

100%

 

0%

29

91%

32

Walton

314

100%

 

0%

314

77%

95

100%

 

0%

95

23%

409

Ware

27

100%

 

0%

27

60%

18

100%

 

0%

18

40%

45

Warren

47

100%

 

0%

47

50%

47

100%

 

0%

47

50%

94

Washington

59

100%

 

0%

59

75%

20

100%

 

0%

20

25%

79

Wayne

3

100%

 

0%

3

25%

9

100%

 

0%

9

75%

12

Webster

16

100%

 

0%

16

76%

5

100%

 

0%

5

24%

21

Wheeler

4

100%

 

0%

4

44%

5

100%

 

0%

5

56%

9

White

0

 

 

 

0

0%

4

100%

 

0%

4

100%

4

Whitfield

0

 

 

 

0

0%

24

100%

 

0%

24

100%

24

Wilcox

7

100%

 

0%

7

70%

3

100%

 

0%

3

30%

10

Wilkes

55

100%

 

0%

55

73%

20

100%

 

0%

20

27%

75

1

100%

 

0%

1

10%

9

100%

 

0%

9

90%

10

40

100%

 

0%

40

67%

20

100%

 

0%

20

33%

60

10,046

99.88%

12

0.12%

10,058

68%

4,722

99.98%

1

0.02%

4,723

32%

14,781

Acadia

7

100%

 

0%

7

28%

18

100%

 

0%

18

72%

25

Allen

5

100%

 

0%

5

22%

18

100%

 

0%

18

78%

23

Ascension

33

100%

 

0%

33

75%

11

100%

 

0%

11

25%

44

Assumption

27

100%

 

0%

27

73%

10

100%

 

0%

10

27%

37

177

100%

 

0%

177

74%

63

100%

 

0%

63

26%

240

Taliaferro

Georgia (continued)

Total

Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number

Stewart

Talbot

Wilkinson Worth Subtotal

Louisiana

Rejected

Whites

Avoyelles

(Continued)

870

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A25.6 (Continued)

State

African Americans Accepted County Beauregard

Total

Accepted

Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number

Rejected

Percent

Total

Number Percent Number Percent

All Total Number

7

100%

 

0%

7

41%

10

100%

 

0%

10

59%

17

Bienville

879

100%

 

0%

879

99%

8

100%

 

0%

8

1%

887

Bossier

596

99%

5

1%

601

87%

91

98%

2

2%

93

13%

694

Caddo

1,600

84%

301

16%

1,901

94%

99

84%

19

16%

118

6%

2,019

Calcasieu

61

97%

2

3%

63

56%

50

100%

 

0%

50

44%

113

Caldwell

6

100%

 

0%

6

60%

4

100%

 

0%

4

40%

10

Cameron

0

 

 

 

0

0%

4

100%

 

0%

4

100%

4

Catahoula

334

99%

2

1%

336

96%

13

100%

 

0%

13

4%

349

Claiborne

587

77%

175

23%

762

97%

19

86%

3

14%

22

3%

784

Concordia

557

100%

 

0%

557

96%

25

100%

 

0%

25

4%

582

De Soto

1,171

100%

 

0%

1,171

98%

22

100%

 

0%

22

2%

1,193

East Baton Rouge

1,470

100%

 

0%

1,470

89%

171

99%

2

1%

173

11%

1,643

33

100%

 

0%

33

8%

390

100%

 

0%

390

92%

423

8

100%

 

0%

8

3%

269

99%

3

1%

272

97%

280

Evangeline

85

96%

4

4%

89

39%

139

99%

1

1%

140

61%

229

Franklin

83

100%

 

0%

83

57%

63

100%

 

0%

63

43%

146

Grant

9

100%

 

0%

9

64%

5

100%

 

0%

5

36%

14

Iberia

125

100%

 

0%

125

59%

86

99%

1

1%

87

41%

212

Iberville

831

100%

 

0%

831

92%

73

100%

 

0%

73

8%

904

Jackson

23

100%

 

0%

23

66%

12

100%

 

0%

12

34%

35

Jefferson

383

88%

54

12%

437

43%

541

94%

36

6%

577

57%

1,014

1

100%

 

0%

1

100%

0

 

 

 

0

0%

1

Lafayette

396

99%

2

1%

398

68%

184

100%

 

0%

184

32%

582

Lafourche

17

100%

 

0%

17

52%

16

100%

 

0%

16

48%

33

La Salle

272

100%

 

0%

272

89%

34

100%

 

0%

34

11%

306

Lincoln

58

100%

 

0%

58

74%

20

100%

 

0%

20

26%

78

2

100%

 

0%

2

5%

38

100%

 

0%

38

95%

40

1,819

100%

3

0%

1,822

97%

49

100%

 

0%

49

3%

1,871

252

100%

1

0%

253

71%

102

100%

 

0%

102

29%

355

East Carroll East Feliciana

Louisiana (continued)

Rejected

Whites

Jefferson Davis

Livingston Madison Morehouse Natchitoches

2,054

100%

 

0%

2,054

92%

175

100%

 

0%

175

8%

2,229

10,645

100%

 

0%

10,645

82%

2,296

100%

 

0%

2,296

18%

12,941

373

100%

 

0%

373

71%

148

99%

2

1%

150

29%

523

 

 

 

 

0

 

 

 

 

 

0

 

0

Pointe Coupee

1,239

100%

2

0%

1,241

91%

128

100%

 

0%

128

9%

1,369

Rapides

Orleans Ouachita Plaquemines

2,035

100%

 

0%

2,035

90%

237

100%

 

0%

237

10%

2,272

Red River

646

100%

 

0%

646

97%

20

100%

 

0%

20

3%

666

Richland

103

100%

 

0%

103

66%

54

100%

 

0%

54

34%

157

Sabine

2

100%

 

0%

2

17%

10

100%

 

0%

10

83%

12

St. Bernard

7

100%

 

0%

7

11%

58

98%

1

2%

59

89%

66



Appendices 871

Louisiana (continued)

State

African Americans Accepted County

Total

Accepted

Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number

Percent

Rejected

Total

Number Percent Number Percent

All Total Number

St. Charles

6

100%

 

0%

6

33%

10

83%

2

17%

12

67%

18

St. Helena

1,070

97%

30

3%

1,100

94%

70

99%

1

1%

71

6%

1,171

St. James

81

90%

9

10%

90

86%

15

100%

 

0%

15

14%

105

St. John the Baptist

20

100%

 

0%

20

61%

13

100%

 

0%

13

39%

33

St. Landry

20

100%

 

0%

20

57%

15

100%

 

0%

15

43%

35

St. Martin

39

93%

3

7%

42

41%

60

100%

 

0%

60

59%

102

St. Mary

621

100%

1

0%

622

90%

67

100%

 

0%

67

10%

689

St. Tammany

27

100%

 

0%

27

16%

143

100%

 

0%

143

84%

170

Tangipahoa

842

99%

7

1%

849

86%

143

100%

 

0%

143

14%

992

Tensas

555

100%

 

0%

555

98%

12

100%

 

0%

12

2%

567

Terrebonne

655

100%

2

0%

657

87%

97

100%

 

0%

97

13%

754

Union

74

99%

1

1%

75

64%

43

100%

 

0%

43

36%

118

Vermillion

22

100%

 

0%

22

29%

54

100%

 

0%

54

71%

76

3

100%

 

0%

3

19%

13

100%

 

0%

13

81%

16

1,313

100%

3

0%

1,316

93%

104

99%

1

1%

105

7%

1,421

Webster

897

100%

1

0%

898

87%

134

100%

 

0%

134

13%

1,032

West Baton Rouge

489

100%

2

0%

491

94%

32

100%

 

0%

32

6%

523

31

100%

 

0%

31

14%

193

100%

 

0%

193

86%

224

383

98%

6

2%

389

88%

54

100%

 

0%

54

12%

443

53

98%

1

2%

54

84%

10

100%

 

0%

10

16%

64

36,219

98%

617

1.67%

36,836

84%

7,065

99%

74

1.04%

7,139

16%

43,975

Adams

767

94%

45

6%

812

82%

148

83%

30

17%

178

18%

990

Alcorn

24

89%

3

11%

27

36%

48

98%

1

2%

49

64%

76

Amite

470

100%

1

0%

471

94%

30

100%

 

0%

30

6%

501

Attala

185

99%

2

1%

187

83%

36

97%

1

3%

37

17%

224

Benton

34

39%

53

61%

87

93%

7

100%

 

0%

7

7%

94

Bolivar

715

77%

211

23%

926

51%

812

92%

69

8%

881

49%

1,807

Calhoun

31

100%

 

0%

31

65%

17

100%

 

0%

17

35%

48

Carroll

167

98%

4

2%

171

77%

48

96%

2

4%

50

23%

221

Chickasaw

203

100%

 

0%

203

85%

36

100%

 

0%

36

15%

239

Choctaw

50

100%

 

0%

50

68%

24

100%

 

0%

24

32%

74

Claiborne

801

98%

14

2%

815

95%

45

100%

 

0%

45

5%

860

Clarke

633

100%

2

0%

635

89%

77

99%

1

1%

78

11%

713

Clay

328

96%

12

4%

340

82%

73

100%

 

0%

73

18%

413

1,292

79%

342

21%

1,634

87%

198

81%

47

19%

245

13%

1,879

959

98%

17

2%

976

86%

151

98%

3

2%

154

14%

1,130

39

100%

 

0%

39

56%

31

100%

 

0%

31

44%

70

Vernon Washington

West Carroll West Feliciana Winn Subtotal

Mississippi

Rejected

Whites

Coahoma Copiah Covington

(Continued)

872

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A25.6 (Continued)

State

African Americans Accepted County

Total

Accepted

Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number

De Soto

618

93%

43

Forrest

310

99%

Franklin

43

88%

George

42

Greene

Rejected

Percent

Total

Number Percent Number Percent

All Total Number

7%

661

83%

140

100%

 

0%

140

17%

801

2

1%

312

58%

226

100%

 

0%

226

42%

538

6

12%

49

70%

21

100%

 

0%

21

30%

70

100%

 

0%

42

55%

33

94%

2

6%

35

45%

77

72

100%

 

0%

72

74%

23

92%

2

8%

25

26%

97

Grenada

322

100%

 

0%

322

87%

50

100%

 

0%

50

13%

372

Hancock

10

100%

 

0%

10

20%

40

100%

 

0%

40

80%

50

Harrison

485

99%

4

1%

489

75%

162

99%

2

1%

164

25%

653

Hinds

1,883

93%

146

7%

2,029

75%

627

94%

38

6%

665

25%

2,694

Holmes

1,034

93%

74

7%

1,108

97%

39

100%

 

0%

39

3%

1,147

Humphreys

315

87%

46

13%

361

92%

29

94%

2

6%

31

8%

392

Issaquena

197

98%

4

2%

201

95%

9

90%

1

10%

10

5%

211

Itawamba

2

100%

 

0%

2

7%

25

100%

 

0%

25

93%

27

Jackson

211

98%

5

2%

216

79%

57

97%

2

3%

59

21%

275

Jasper

274

98%

7

2%

281

95%

13

81%

3

19%

16

5%

297

 

 

 

 

0

 

 

 

 

 

0

 

0

579

100%

2

0%

581

96%

23

100%

 

0%

23

4%

604

86

100%

 

0%

86

75%

28

100%

 

0%

28

25%

114

Kemper

140

100%

 

0%

140

85%

25

100%

 

0%

25

15%

165

Lafayette

383

99%

3

1%

386

83%

76

99%

1

1%

77

17%

463

91

99%

1

1%

92

69%

42

100%

 

0%

42

31%

134

Jefferson Mississippi (continued)

Rejected

Whites

Jefferson Davis Jones

Lamar Lauderdale

1,800

100%

1

0%

1,801

76%

568

99%

5

1%

573

24%

2,374

Lawrence

935

100%

 

0%

935

100%

1

100%

 

0%

1

0%

936

Leake

403

100%

 

0%

403

82%

86

100%

 

0%

86

18%

489

Lee

175

100%

 

0%

175

75%

59

100%

 

0%

59

25%

234

Leflore

414

100%

 

0%

414

75%

137

100%

 

0%

137

25%

551

Lincoln

194

100%

 

0%

194

88%

27

100%

 

0%

27

12%

221

Lowndes

596

98%

15

2%

611

81%

131

92%

12

8%

143

19%

754

Madison

282

94%

19

6%

301

75%

94

92%

8

8%

102

25%

403

Marion

334

100%

 

0%

334

87%

48

100%

 

0%

48

13%

382

1,111

99%

12

1%

1,123

97%

36

90%

4

10%

40

3%

1,163

253

100%

 

0%

253

78%

70

100%

 

0%

70

22%

323

53

98%

1

2%

54

68%

25

100%

 

0%

25

32%

79

Neshoba

178

93%

13

7%

191

96%

1

13%

7

88%

8

4%

199

Newton

137

100%

 

0%

137

78%

39

100%

 

0%

39

22%

176

0

 

 

 

0

0%

11

92%

1

8%

12

100%

12

Oktibbeha

401

100%

1

0%

402

80%

96

95%

5

5%

101

20%

503

Panola

180

97%

5

3%

185

70%

75

95%

4

5%

79

30%

264

Marshall Monroe Montgomery

Noxubee



Appendices 873

State

African Americans Accepted County Pearl River

Accepted

Rejected

Percent

Total

Number Percent Number Percent

All Total Number

100%

 

0%

91

61%

57

97%

2

3%

59

39%

150

Perry

137

96%

6

4%

143

89%

17

94%

1

6%

18

11%

161

Pike

807

85%

141

15%

948

88%

79

59%

56

41%

135

12%

1,083

Pontotoc

48

98%

1

2%

49

41%

71

100%

 

0%

71

59%

120

Prentiss

21

100%

 

0%

21

47%

24

100%

 

0%

24

53%

45

Quitman

498

100%

 

0%

498

86%

77

99%

1

1%

78

14%

576

Rankin

577

99%

3

1%

580

92%

52

100%

 

0%

52

8%

632

Scott

361

99%

2

1%

363

93%

29

100%

 

0%

29

7%

392

Sharkey

283

99%

2

1%

285

91%

29

100%

 

0%

29

9%

314

Simpson

179

99%

2

1%

181

78%

52

100%

 

0%

52

22%

233

37

100%

 

0%

37

61%

23

96%

1

4%

24

39%

61

Stone Mississippi (continued)

Total

Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number 91

Smith

22

96%

1

4%

23

46%

27

100%

 

0%

27

54%

50

Sunflower

375

87%

56

13%

431

56%

332

98%

6

2%

338

44%

769

Tallahatchie

209

99%

3

1%

212

88%

30

100%

 

0%

30

12%

242

Tate

341

85%

58

15%

399

86%

62

97%

2

3%

64

14%

463

Tippah

145

98%

3

2%

148

82%

32

97%

1

3%

33

18%

181

4

100%

 

0%

4

10%

38

100%

 

0%

38

90%

42

Tunica

217

95%

11

5%

228

93%

14

82%

3

18%

17

7%

245

Union

28

100%

 

0%

28

41%

41

100%

 

0%

41

59%

69

Walthall

36

95%

2

5%

38

67%

11

58%

8

42%

19

33%

57

Warren

106

85%

19

15%

125

68%

59

100%

 

0%

59

32%

184

2,062

99%

16

1%

2,078

74%

714

98%

12

2%

726

26%

2,804

Wayne

129

100%

 

0%

129

93%

9

100%

 

0%

9

7%

138

Webster

20

100%

 

0%

20

40%

30

100%

 

0%

30

60%

50

Wilkinson

153

96%

6

4%

159

82%

35

100%

 

0%

35

18%

194

Winston

406

95%

23

5%

429

85%

76

99%

1

1%

77

15%

506

75

100%

 

0%

75

88%

10

100%

 

0%

10

12%

85

Tishomingo

Washington

Yalobusha Yazoo

605

98%

12

2%

617

94%

37

97%

1

3%

38

6%

655

29,213

95%

1,483

4.83%

30,696

81%

7,040

95%

348

4.71%

7,388

19%

38,084

Abbeville

32

100%

 

0%

32

70%

14

100%

 

 

14

30%

46

Aiken

11

100%

 

0%

11

42%

15

100%

 

 

15

58%

26

Allendale

511

100%

2

0%

513

100%

 

 

 

 

0

0%

513

Anderson

32

97%

1

3%

33

39%

52

100%

 

 

52

61%

85

Bamberg

15

100%

 

0%

15

83%

3

100%

 

 

3

17%

18

Barnwell

69

100%

 

0%

69

96%

3

100%

 

 

3

4%

72

Beaufort

111

100%

 

0%

111

85%

20

100%

 

 

20

15%

131

Berkeley

274

100%

 

0%

274

93%

22

100%

 

 

22

7%

296

Calhoun

366

100%

 

0%

366

98%

7

100%

 

 

7

2%

373

1,207

100%

 

0%

1,207

89%

151

100%

 

 

151

11%

1,358

Subtotal

South Carolina

Rejected

Whites

Charleston

(Continued)

874

The African American Electorate

State

African Americans Accepted County

Total

Accepted

Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number

Rejected

Percent

Total

Number Percent Number Percent

All Total Number

Cherokee

1

100%

 

0%

1

6%

16

100%

 

 

16

94%

17

Chester

6

100%

 

0%

6

33%

12

100%

 

 

12

67%

18

Chesterfield

3

100%

 

0%

3

27%

8

100%

 

 

8

73%

11

Clarendon

256

100%

 

0%

256

100%

1

100%

 

 

1

0%

257

Colleton

180

100%

 

0%

180

95%

10

100%

 

 

10

5%

190

Darlington

430

100%

 

0%

430

86%

72

100%

 

 

72

14%

502

4

100%

 

0%

4

31%

9

100%

 

 

9

69%

13

Dorchester

321

100%

 

0%

321

100%

 

 

 

 

0

0%

321

Edgefield

38

100%

 

0%

38

95%

2

100%

 

 

2

5%

40

Fairfield

118

100%

 

0%

118

91%

12

100%

 

 

12

9%

130

Florence

587

100%

 

0%

587

89%

69

100%

 

 

69

11%

656

Georgetown

147

100%

 

0%

147

80%

37

100%

 

 

37

20%

184

Greenville

123

100%

 

0%

123

51%

119

100%

 

 

119

49%

242

Greenwood

44

100%

 

0%

44

58%

32

100%

 

 

32

42%

76

197

100%

 

0%

197

93%

15

100%

 

 

15

7%

212

Horry

15

100%

 

0%

15

31%

33

100%

 

 

33

69%

48

Jasper

246

100%

 

0%

246

98%

4

100%

 

 

4

2%

250

Kershaw

530

100%

 

0%

530

95%

28

100%

 

 

28

5%

558

Lancaster

19

100%

 

0%

19

68%

9

100%

 

 

9

32%

28

0

 

 

 

0

0%

7

100%

 

 

7

100%

7

430

100%

 

0%

430

99%

4

100%

 

 

4

1%

434

Lexington

84

100%

 

0%

84

57%

63

100%

 

 

63

43%

147

McCormick

24

100%

 

0%

24

92%

2

100%

 

 

2

8%

26

Marion

15

100%

 

0%

15

79%

4

100%

 

 

4

21%

19

Marlboro

24

100%

 

0%

24

96%

1

100%

 

 

1

4%

25

Newberry

99

98%

2

2%

101

54%

87

100%

 

 

87

46%

188

4

100%

 

0%

4

18%

18

100%

 

 

18

82%

22

553

100%

 

0%

553

90%

64

100%

 

 

64

10%

617

3

100%

 

0%

3

14%

18

100%

 

 

18

86%

21

Dillon

Hampton South Carolina (continued)

Rejected

Whites

Laurens Lee

Oconee Orangeburg Pickens Richland

1,085

100%

 

0%

1,085

89%

134

100%

 

 

134

11%

1,219

Saluda

9

100%

 

0%

9

56%

7

100%

 

 

7

44%

16

Spartanburg

2

100%

 

0%

2

6%

32

100%

 

 

32

94%

34

221

100%

 

0%

221

99%

2

100%

 

 

2

1%

223

8

100%

 

0%

8

57%

6

100%

 

 

6

43%

14

Williamsburg

646

99%

7

1%

653

99%

4

100%

 

 

4

1%

657

York

379

100%

 

0%

379

93%

29

100%

 

29

7%

408

9,479

99.87%

12

0.13%

9,491

88%

1,257

100%

0

0%

1,257

12%

10,748

96,997

98%

2,209

2%

99,206

80%

24,025

98%

434

2%

24,459

20%

123,665

Sumter Union

Subtotal Grand Totals

Sources: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, The Voting Rights Act: The First Months (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1965), pp. 53–67 (Appendix D: Statistics of Registration Following August 6, 1965). Calculations by the authors.



Appendices 875

Alabama

State

Appendix Table A25.7  Ratio Gains in Registered Voters to Eligible Voters by Race before and after the Voting Rights Act of 1965

Voting Age Population County

Blacks

Whites

Pre-Act Registration Blacks

Whites

Percentage Gain in Ratio of Registrantsa

Post-Act Registration Blacks

Whites

Unknown  

Registration Applicants Listed by Federal Examiners

Blacks

Whites

Blacks

Whites

64.1%

39.6%

1,017

275

8,972

75

1,558

192

Autauga

3,651

6,353

50

4,991

2,391

7,508

Baldwin

4,527

22,236

1,100

20,021

1,382

20,771

6.2%

3.4%

Barbour

5,787

7,338

450

7,107

3,684

9,931

55.9%

38.5%

Bibb

1,990

5,807

475

7,192

954

8,137

24.1%

16.3%

Blount

298

14,368

150

12,600

163

14,116

4.4%

10.6%

Bullock

4,450

2,387

1,200

2,300

2,854

3,431

37.2%

47.4%

Butler

4,820

8,363

248

7,239

1,835

8,036

32.9%

9.5%

Calhoun/Benton

9,036

44,739

2,200

29,000

4,463

34,427

25.0%

12.1%

Chambers

6,497

15,369

850

10,083

1,458

12,082

9.4%

13.0%

Cherokee

782

8,597

288

6,438

483

9,729

24.9%

38.3%

Chilton/Baker

1,947

12,861

700

8,139

774

16,371

3.8%

64.0%

Choctaw

3,982

5,192

252

5,163

3,044

5,953

70.1%

15.2%

Clarke

5,833

7,899

650

8,350

2,614

10,579

33.7%

28.2%

Clay

926

6,470

320

6,342

404

8,627

9.1%

35.3%

Cleburne

385

5,870

80

5,235

144

7,565

16.6%

39.7%

Coffee

2,935

14,221

503

9,310

1,007

11,521

17.2%

15.5%

Colbert

4,575

21,680

500

16,229

3,009

21,881

54.8%

26.1%

Conecuh

3,635

5,907

400

4,385

2,103

5,645

46.9%

21.3%

Coosa

1,794

4,201

350

3,800

1,026

5,742

37.7%

46.2%

Covington

2,876

18,460

685

12,330

1,066

16,863

13.2%

24.6%

Crenshaw

2,207

6,310

492

5,452

1,299

6,534

36.6%

17.1%

285

25,848

250

19,850

123

25,437

-44.6%

21.6%

2,743

14,861

794

8,864

1,442

11,955

23.6%

20.8%

15,115

14,400

320

9,463

10,644

13,134

68.3%

25.5%

441

23,878

250

22,950

224

26,969

-5.9%

16.8%

Elmore

4,808

12,510

400

11,728

2,912

16,072

52.2%

34.7%

Escambia

5,685

12,779

1,150

11,843

1,904

15,986

13.3%

32.4%

Etowah

7,661

48,563

1,800

35,200

4,197

43,116

31.3%

16.3%

Fayette

1,291

8,277

360

9,432

675

9,263

24.4%

-2.0%

Franklin

645

12,412

800

11,787

734

13,952

-10.2%

17.4%

Geneva

1,606

11,357

75

8,043

611

10,780

33.4%

24.1%

Greene

5,001

1,649

275

2,305

3,953

2,057

73.5%

-15.0%

2,053

49

Hale

5,999

3,594

236

4,824

4,104

4,517

64.5%

-8.5%

3,570

34

Henry

3,168

5,165

503

4,958

1,474

6,715

30.7%

34.0%

Houston

6,899

22,095

1,000

12,106

1,834

15,831

12.1%

16.9% 19,126

4,122

Cullman Dale Dallas De Kalb

Jackson Jefferson

1,175

19,298

350

13,034

633

18,714

24.1%

29.4%

116,160

256,319

23,992

130,804

63,978

181,083

34.4%

19.6%

Lamar/Sanford

1,027

7,503

300

8,580

375

10,001

7.3%

18.9%

Lauderdale

3,726

31,089

1,200

21,600

1,397

19,217

5.3%

-7.7%

Lawrence

2,471

10,509

800

11,227

1,337

14,779

21.7%

33.8%

Lee

8,913

17,547

1,995

11,384

3,066

14,140

12.0%

15.7%

Limestone

3,579

16,173

750

11,221

1,285

14,486

14.9%

20.2% (Continued)

876

The African American Electorate

State

Appendix Table A25.7 (Continued)

Voting Age Population County Lowndes

Alabama (continued)

Whites

5,122

Blacks

1,900

0

Whites

Post-Act Registration Blacks

2,314

3,025

Whites

Unknown

Blacks

Whites

Blacks

Whites

59.1%

28.4%

2,730

23

4,890

193

9,991

174

2,731

87

12

9

3,666

11

11,886

2,818

3,479

3,733

5,379

5,066

16.0%

47.3%

Madison

10,666

54,516

2,000

32,000

3,187

42,988

11.1%

20.2%

Marengo

7,791

6,104

295

6,280

4,821

7,403

58.1%

18.4%

Marion

383

12,656

400

7,050

269

16,585

-34.2%

75.3%

Marshall

637

26,997

125

21,925

192

17,816

10.5%

-15.2%

Mobile

50,793

121,589

12,917

69,795

25,663

107,455

25.1%

31.0%

Monroe

4,894

6,631

325

7,017

2,515

7,647

44.7%

9.5%

33,056

62,911

5,500

33,000

19,504

45,302

42.4%

19.6%

Morgan/Cotaco

4,159

30,955

1,200

18,000

1,298

27,720

2.4%

31.4%

Perry

5,202

3,441

289

3,006

3,861

5,563

68.7%

74.3%

Pickens

4,373

7,336

438

6,511

1,741

7,512

29.8%

13.6%

Pike

5,259

9,126

273

10,356

3,440

11,945

60.2%

17.4%

Randolph

Registration Applicants Listed by Federal Examiners

2,854

Macon

Montgomery

2,366

9,196

1,100

9,900

1,200

10,319

4.2%

4.6%

Russell

10,531

13,761

800

7,520

4,219

12,879

32.5%

38.9%

St. Clair

2,035

12,244

850

7,726

922

11,431

3.5%

30.3%

Shelby

2,889

14,771

500

12,500

987

13,211

16.9%

4.8%

Sumter

6,814

3,061

375

3,275

3,443

3,848

45.0%

18.7%

Talladega

9,333

25,635

3,000

19,000

4,288

22,376

13.8%

13.2%

Tallapoosa

4,999

15,310

903

14,880

1,880

18,024

19.5%

20.5%

Tuscaloosa

15,332

47,076

6,000

26,000

5,943

30,675

-0.4%

9.9%

Walker

2,890

28,148

1,710

21,602

1,301

27,170

-14.2%

19.8%

Washington

2,297

5,293

700

6,068

1,475

7,785

33.7%

32.4%

Wilcox

6,085

2,624

0

2,974

3,780

3,679

62.1%

26.9%

47

8,559

15

10,354

40

11,411

53.2%

12.3%

Subtotal

481,170

1,353,112

92,737

935,695

247,432

1,212,317

0

32.1%

20.4%

60,316

5,244

Non-Examiner Subtotal

266,366

978,246

61,005

720,731

121,016

919,297

0

22.5%

20.3%

0

0

Examiner Subtotal

214,804

374,866

31,732

214,964

126,416

293,020

0

44.1%

20.8%

60,316

5,244

Arkansas

2,809

10,589

1,271

7,316

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ashley

4,258

9,012

1,650

6,822

 

 

 

Baxter

3

6,584

0

5,080

 

 

 

Benton

63

23,309

10

13,872

 

 

 

Boone

4

10,414

0

7,022

 

 

 

Bradley

2,372

5,837

1,059

4,323

 

 

 

Calhoun

1,056

2,496

785

2,442

 

 

 

Carroll

8

7,533

0

4,926

 

 

 

Chicot

5,555

4,817

2,919

3,913

 

 

 

Clark

2,725

9,419

1,095

6,048

 

 

 

Clay

3

12,645

0

6,950

 

 

 

Cleburne

1

5,697

0

3,907

 

 

 

Cleveland

832

3,246

445

2,699

 

 

 

Columbia

4,808

10,646

1,509

6,907

 

 

 

Winston/Hancock

Arkansas

Blacks

Pre-Act Registration

Percentage Gain in Ratio of Registrantsa

Appendices 877

State



Voting Age Population County Conway Craighead Crawford

Whites

Blacks

Whites

Post-Act Registration Blacks

Whites

Unknown

Blacks

Whites

1,674

7,323

1,444

6,813

 

 

 

881

26,047

301

15,019

 

 

 

340

12,505

181

7,547

 

 

 

12,871

10,569

1,777

7,299

 

 

 

Cross

2,640

7,608

611

4,648

 

 

 

Dallas

2,049

4,122

1,004

3,276

 

 

 

Desha

4,802

6,103

2,445

4,670

 

 

 

Drew

2,506

5,926

1,190

3,987

 

 

 

Faulkner

1,246

12,850

560

10,731

 

 

 

Franklin

63

6,363

48

4,691

 

 

 

Crittenden

Fulton

4

4,237

0

3,595

 

 

 

2,964

27,811

2,317

19,495

 

 

 

256

4,794

94

3,738

 

 

 

11

14,835

4

9,022

 

 

 

Hempstead

3,717

8,333

1,581

5,970

 

 

 

Hot Spring

1,584

11,267

720

8,110

 

 

 

Howard

1,210

5,667

621

3,985

 

 

 

321

12,386

75

7,840

 

 

 

Garland Grant Greene

Independence Izard Arkansas (continued)

Blacks

Pre-Act Registration

Percentage Gain in Ratio of Registrantsa

36

4,349

14

3,498

 

 

 

Jackson

1,736

11,117

1,031

7,357

 

 

 

Jefferson

17,505

27,284

7,733

17,462

 

 

 

137

7,715

82

5,373

 

 

 

2,447

3,839

1,031

2,756

 

 

 

Johnson Lafayette Lawrence

112

10,016

40

7,074

 

 

 

Lee

5,957

4,545

1,434

2,792

 

 

 

Lincoln

3,579

4,619

1,541

3,114

 

 

 

Little River

1,415

3,923

781

3,296

 

 

 

163

10,290

45

6,518

 

 

 

Logan Lonoke

2,518

11,121

918

7,874

 

 

 

Madison

7

5,552

0

3,900

 

 

 

Marion

2

3,938

0

3,129

 

 

 

Miller

4,290

14,327

1,848

9,290

 

 

 

Mississippi

9,638

26,739

3,134

12,366

 

 

 

Monroe

3,914

5,101

1,281

3,728

 

 

 

20

3,372

0

2,750

 

 

 

1,940

4,619

1,047

3,360

 

 

 

Montgomery Nevada Newton Ouachita Perry Phillips Pike Poinsett Polk

2

3,403

0

2,680

 

 

 

6,163

12,021

3,298

8,756

 

 

 

82

2,892

57

2,685

 

 

 

12,208

10,431

3,963

6,381

 

 

 

188

4,786

98

3,395

 

 

 

1,446

14,636

337

8,905

 

 

 

8

7,686

0

5,116

 

 

 

Registration Applicants Listed by Federal Examiners Blacks

Whites

(Continued)

878

The African American Electorate

State

Appendix Table A25.7 (Continued)

Voting Age Population County Pope

Arkansas (continued)

Whites

370

Blacks

12,431

90

Whites

Post-Act Registration Blacks

Whites

Unknown

Blacks

Whites

8,584

 

 

 

Prairie

938

5,179

429

3,728

 

 

 

Pulaski

27,822

118,811

12,960

67,918

 

 

 

Randolph

94

7,427

25

4,751

 

 

 

St. Francis

8,403

7,963

2,920

5,613

 

 

 

Saline

1,340

16,990

388

10,175

 

 

 

Scott

3

4,625

45

3,320

 

 

 

Searcy

1

4,942

0

3,451

 

 

 

Sebastian

2,485

38,180

750

23,355

 

 

 

Sevier

499

5,910

231

3,751

 

 

 

Sharp

0

4,104

0

3,520

 

 

 

Stone

1

3,718

0

3,441

 

 

 

Union

7,590

21,725

2,799

15,133

 

 

 

Van Buren Washington White

56

4,565

22

3,608

 

 

 

311

33,359

12

17,448

 

 

 

Registration Applicants Listed by Federal Examiners Blacks

Whites

659

19,172

381

12,782

 

 

 

2,652

4,836

1,083

3,528

 

 

 

253

7,395

150

5,622

 

 

 

Subtotal

192,626

850,643

77,714

555,946

0

0

0

 

 

0

0

Non-Examiner Subtotal

192,626

850,643

77,714

555,946

0

0

0

 

 

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

 

 

0

0

9,898

30,555

4,421

21,534

6,216

25,595

 

18.1%

13.3%

 

 

807

3,203

569

3,439

562

3,497

-0.9%

1.8%

Bay

4,964

31,940

3,473

21,634

3,345

23,587

-2.6%

6.1%

Bradford/New River

1,345

5,580

772

4,714

907

4,899

10.0%

3.3%

Woodruff Yell

Examiner Subtotal Alachua Baker

Brevard/St Lucie

Florida

Blacks

Pre-Act Registration

Percentage Gain in Ratio of Registrantsa

6,494

58,433

2,570

49,977

4,217

65,360

25.4%

26.3%

Broward

27,009

189,517

13,430

153,175

20,123

180,735

24.8%

14.5%

Calhoun

582

3,434

440

4,606

390

4,007

-8.6%

-17.4%

Charlotte

427

8,659

294

9,652

320

11,887

6.1%

25.8%

Citrus

829

5,174

548

5,598

565

7,011

2.1%

27.3%

Clay

1,276

9,508

1,008

8,084

1,006

9,771

-0.2%

17.7%

Collier

1,364

8,163

489

6,970

753

8,763

19.4%

22.0%

Columbia Dade De Soto

3,122

8,092

2,309

8,552

2,558

8,792

8.0%

3.0%

75,573

537,448

41,634

383,304

55,660

377,856

18.6%

-1.0%

1,343

6,339

640

4,123

990

4,648

26.1%

8.3%

Dixie

363

2,138

375

2,861

370

2,778

-1.4%

-3.9%

Duval

58,430

203,804

36,972

130,285

39,014

139,353

3.5%

4.4%

Escambia

18,041

76,688

11,075

54,151

13,574

59,197

13.9%

6.6%

846

1,789

294

1,860

388

1,942

11.1%

4.6%

Flagler Franklin Gadsden

779

3,186

585

3,510

533

3,423

-6.7%

-2.7%

12,261

11,711

1,425

8,015

4,620

6,557

26.1%

-12.4%

Appendices 879

State



Voting Age Population County

Blacks

Whites

154

1,513

97

1,721

88

1,833

-5.8%

7.4%

Glades

741

1,061

287

1,142

267

1,185

-2.7%

4.1%

Gulf

1,138

4,196

737

4,063

712

3,681

-2.2%

-9.1%

Hamilton

1,621

2,486

1,056

2,729

1,063

2,695

0.4%

-1.4%

Hardee

552

6,734

348

5,635

349

5,543

0.2%

-1.4%

Hendry

1,180

3,430

794

3,499

753

3,400

-3.5%

-2.9%

Hernando/Benton

1,151

5,689

679

5,387

733

5,746

4.7%

6.3%

Blacks

Whites

Blacks

Whites

Unknown

2,251

10,997

1,352

10,591

1,666

12,287

13.9%

15.4%

31,114

213,950

18,876

147,270

20,117

156,642

4.0%

4.4%

249

6,131

185

6,511

196

6,406

4.4%

-1.7%

Indian River

2,637

13,182

1,292

10,672

1,571

11,732

10.6%

8.0%

Jackson

5,390

14,087

3,382

11,518

3,525

11,485

2.7%

-0.2%

Jefferson

2,600

2,383

638

2,443

1,628

2,470

38.1%

1.1%

Lafayette

152

1,536

0

1,889

102

1,778

67.1%

-7.2%

6,438

30,535

1,948

22,972

2,715

25,834

11.9%

9.4%

Lee

4,677

30,363

1,270

25,979

1,914

32,313

13.8%

20.9%

Leon

12,322

28,241

6,334

20,783

7,331

25,856

8.1%

18.0%

Levy

1,568

4,483

543

4,857

613

3,910

4.5%

-21.1%

Hillsborough Holmes

Lake

240

1,525

0

2,104

177

2,088

73.8%

-1.0%

Madison

3,067

4,380

1,602

4,632

2,038

4,287

14.2%

-7.9%

Manatee

5,278

42,291

2,444

31,696

3,517

35,530

20.3%

9.1%

Marion

9,283

21,001

6,377

18,215

5,886

20,394

-5.3%

10.4%

Martin

1,753

9,291

1,062

8,752

1,283

9,365

12.6%

6.6%

Monroe

2,919

25,512

2,189

15,922

1,945

16,828

-8.4%

3.6%

Nassau

2,076

7,054

1,474

6,039

1,561

5,858

4.2%

-2.6%

Okaloosa

2,097

30,816

1,138

23,334

1,349

24,140

10.1%

2.6%

Liberty Florida (continued)

Whites

Post-Act Registration

Gilchrist

Highlands

Blacks

Pre-Act Registration

Percentage Gain in Ratio of Registrantsa

Okeechobee Orange/Mosquito Osceola

533

2,870

394

3,063

424

3,220

5.6%

5.5%

21,771

137,780

8,381

89,582

10,455

101,777

9.5%

8.9%

1,122

11,697

508

9,836

627

10,005

10.6%

1.4%

29,541

119,342

11,035

99,123

18,611

105,762

25.6%

5.6%

2,391

22,329

1,052

20,820

1,145

24,631

3.9%

17.1%

Pinellas

18,121

255,369

8,462

189,134

11,409

217,764

16.3%

11.2%

Polk

19,224

97,314

9,010

67,362

10,047

74,879

5.4%

7.7%

Putnam

5,089

13,095

1,722

9,054

2,044

9,347

6.3%

2.2%

St. Johns

4,331

13,771

2,329

10,919

2,259

10,501

-1.6%

-3.0%

St Lucie

6,527

17,238

2,338

13,791

4,154

15,149

27.8%

7.9%

Santa Rosa

1,082

14,710

789

12,322

765

13,281

-2.2%

6.5%

Sarasota

4,125

49,533

1,161

36,620

2,162

43,834

24.3%

14.6%

Seminole

7,050

24,372

2,377

16,017

3,231

18,601

12.1%

10.6%

Sumter

1,523

5,396

889

5,168

930

5,387

2.7%

4.1%

Suwannee

2,149

6,409

1,046

6,970

1,134

5,563

4.1%

-22.0%

Taylor

1,724

5,454

876

5,911

974

5,393

5.7%

-9.5%

Union

1,082

2,880

128

2,254

175

2,062

4.3%

-6.7%

Palm Beach Pasco

Registration Applicants Listed by Federal Examiners Blacks

Whites

(Continued)

880

The African American Electorate

State

Appendix Table A25.7 (Continued)

Voting Age Population County

Florida (continued)

Volusia Wakulla Walton

Whites

Blacks

Whites

Post-Act Registration

Blacks

Whites

11,615

74,209

6,428

57,701

Blacks 6,946

Whites 64,771

Unknown

4.5%

9.5%

753

2,120

552

2,603

602

2,684

6.6%

3.8%

1,086

7,958

820

8,050

862

7,909

3.9%

-1.8%

Registration Applicants Listed by Federal Examiners Blacks

Whites

1,021

5,364

892

5,800

867

5,641

-2.4%

-3.0%

Subtotal

470,261

2,617,438

240,616

1,958,499

299,033

2,131,105

0

12.4%

6.6%

0

0

Non-Examiner Subtotal

470,261

2,617,438

240,616

1,958,499

299,033

2,131,105

0

12.4%

6.6%

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

 

 

0

0

1,401

5,862

1,359

7,705

1,281

7,400

 

-5.6%

-5.2%

 

 

812

2,486

692

2,498

806

3,202

14.0%

28.3%

Bacon

536

4,203

101

6,184

300

4,671

37.1%

-36.0%

Baker

1,285

1,139

24

1,631

921

1,560

69.8%

-6.2%

Baldwin

9,235

16,109

1,477

5,353

1,934

6,984

4.9%

10.1%

Washington

Examiner Subtotal Appling Atkinson

207

213

3,850

30

3,696

78

3,668

22.5%

-0.7%

Barrow

1,332

7,865

312

5,848

465

6,563

11.5%

9.1%

Bartow/Cass

2,393

14,942

1,208

11,239

1,532

13,903

13.5%

17.8%

Ben Hill

2,436

5,931

740

3,292

1,007

3,666

11.0%

6.3%

Berrien

964

6,179

561

5,078

844

5,844

29.4%

12.4%

26,812

60,429

5,042

26,827

14,023

44,480

5,548

33.5%

29.2%

1,380

4,528

45

3,346

287

4,756

6

17.5%

31.1%

Banks

Bibb Bleckley Brantley

Georgia

Blacks

Pre-Act Registration

Percentage Gain in Ratio of Registrantsa

384

2,854

265

3,500

378

4,047

29.4%

19.2%

Brooks

3,711

5,059

445

3,097

940

3,545

13.3%

8.9%

Bryan

1,111

2,289

817

1,972

1,165

2,335

31.3%

15.9%

Bulloch

4,337

10,101

1,403

7,780

2,277

8,775

20.2%

9.9%

Burke

6,600

4,358

427

3,664

2,760

4,346

35.3%

15.6%

Butts

2,099

3,195

1,582

4,086

974

4,143

-29.0%

1.8%

Calhoun

2,393

1,654

145

1,685

588

1,898

18.5%

12.9%

Camden

2,059

3,447

1,176

2,428

1,551

3,286

18.2%

24.9%

Candler

1,200

2,714

1,066

2,989

832

2,478

-19.5%

-18.8%

Carroll

3,595

19,234

797

11,789

2,372

14,232

43.8%

12.7%

Catoosa

172

12,370

73

7,876

88

11,967

8.7%

33.1%

Charlton

810

2,077

204

1,096

438

2,275

28.9%

56.8%

Chatham

3

37,563

78,118

10,068

36,072

21,527

56,047

30.5%

25.6%

Chattahoochee

1,830

8,061

17

338

131

510

6.2%

2.1%

Chattooga

1,025

11,460

906

8,733

956

9,384

59

4.9%

5.7%

517

13,964

325

14,300

614

13,855

535

55.9%

-3.2%

Clarke

6,740

23,895

1,451

8,907

4,960

14,621

52.1%

23.9%

Clay

1,441

1,130

150

900

398

1,214

17.2%

27.8%

Clayton

2,456

23,996

544

15,094

777

19,977

9.5%

20.3%

Clinch

1,256

2,373

339

2,293

359

2,449

1.6%

6.6%

Cobb

4,568

63,291

1,808

29,622

1,808

29,680

0.0%

0.1%

Coffee

2,977

9,678

2,000

8,000

1,619

11,779

-12.8%

39.0%

Colquitt

4,081

15,982

1,117

11,362

1,673

12,802

13.6%

9.0%

Cherokee

8,341 642

Appendices 881

State



Voting Age Population County

Whites

Blacks

Whites

Post-Act Registration

Blacks

Whites

Columbia

2,364

5,096

659

4,061

1,007

5,312

14.7%

24.5%

Cook

1,755

5,213

600

5,400

1,010

5,351

23.4%

-0.9%

Coweta

5,579

11,891

1,594

9,108

3,496

11,086

34.1%

16.6%

Crawford

1,611

1,596

284

1,403

739

1,548

28.2%

9.1%

Crisp

3,858

6,451

890

5,179

1,915

6,462

26.6%

19.9%

Dade

Blacks

Whites

Unknown

28

70

4,083

26

4,100

60

4,242

48.6%

3.5%

Dawson

1

2,148

0

1,835

0

2,373

 

25.0%

Decatur

5,515

9,069

1,016

7,841

1,193

10,308

3.2%

27.2%

De Kalb

12,407

148,167

2,153

64,450

8,177

125,984

48.6%

41.5%

Dodge

2,328

7,392

2,180

8,794

1,871

7,013

-13.3%

-24.1%

2,866

3,581

722

4,252

1,604

3,828

30.8%

-11.8%

14,163

29,897

4,800

13,700

4,800

13,811

3,332

0.0%

0.4%

Douglas

1,268

8,595

916

8,489

1,000

8,945

24

6.6%

5.3%

Early

3,277

4,013

261

3,729

655

4,099

12.0%

9.2%

246

832

19

838

19

855

0.0%

2.0%

Effingham

1,756

4,008

188

2,618

617

4,006

24.4%

34.6%

Elbert

3,127

7,752

934

8,787

1,246

7,191

10.0%

-20.6%

Emanuel

3,005

7,627

2,098

7,864

1,954

6,869

-4.8%

-13.0%

Evans

1,308

2,738

483

2,206

745

2,816

20.0%

22.3%

Fannin

31

8,111

18

8,649

18

8,494

0.0%

-1.9%

Fayette

1,190

3,585

26

2,760

68

3,043

3.5%

7.9%

Floyd

5,949

38,230

1,653

21,045

2,647

25,885

16.7%

12.7%

Forsyth

4

7,328

0

5,418

0

6,539

 

15.3%

Franklin

776

7,611

100

7,500

728

7,669

80.9%

2.2%

117,049

247,892

35,834

109,262

77,064

184,242

35.2%

30.2%

Dooly Dougherty

Echols

Georgia (continued)

Blacks

Pre-Act Registration

Percentage Gain in Ratio of Registrantsa

Fulton Gilmer Glascock Glynn Gordon

7

5,431

4

4,106

3

7,997

-14.3%

71.6%

351

1,281

1

1,283

21

1,371

5.7%

6.9%

6,762

18,750

2,133

7,701

2,882

8,758

11.1%

5.6%

669

11,441

321

8,423

544

10,832

33.3%

21.1%

Grady

3,364

7,205

629

4,080

1,326

5,411

20.7%

18.5%

Greene

2,998

3,565

1,538

2,665

2,638

3,446

36.7%

21.9%

Gwinnett

1,841

24,299

1,301

20,628

1,538

23,750

12.9%

12.8%

518

10,676

200

8,223

515

7,437

60.8%

-7.4%

Hall

2,789

27,726

733

13,174

1,224

17,485

17.6%

15.5%

Hancock

3,576

1,727

853

1,409

2,400

1,661

125

43.3%

14.6%

Haralson

642

8,571

384

7,162

331

7,456

89

-8.3%

3.4%

Harris

3,102

3,310

263

3,340

1,119

3,893

27.6%

16.7%

Hart

1,832

7,382

281

5,978

418

6,095

7.5%

1.6%

Heard

590

2,661

325

2,321

376

3,094

8.6%

29.0%

Henry

3,539

6,429

2,377

7,225

3,174

8,551

22.5%

20.6%

Houston

4,228

17,742

413

7,799

2,318

14,220

45.1%

36.2%

Irwin

1,602

3,759

1,300

3,500

1,523

4,382

13.9%

23.5%

Jackson

1,309

10,228

408

6,679

749

8,162

26.1%

14.5%

Habersham

33

Registration Applicants Listed by Federal Examiners Blacks

Whites

(Continued)

882

The African American Electorate

State

Appendix Table A25.7 (Continued)

Voting Age Population County

Blacks

Whites

2,238

10.4%

10.1%

6,130

591

5,607

58.9%

-12.7%

4,050

2,623

4,524

49.0%

9.6%

704

2,837

895

2,564

8.6%

-9.1%

262

3,208

642

3,424

30.1%

6.3%

2,655

923

2,570

974

2,695

2.3%

4.7%

2,118

4,078

992

3,590

1,114

3,913

5.8%

7.9%

756

2,158

359

1,794

389

1,830

4.0%

1.7%

Laurens

6,284

13,178

2,231

9,590

4,327

13,794

33.4%

31.9%

Lee

1,795

1,427

29

1,210

988

1,800

53.4%

41.3%

Liberty

3,176

5,310

2,014

2,000

2,594

2,950

18.3%

17.9%

Lincoln

1,336

1,974

3

2,437

636

2,341

47.4%

-4.9%

635

1,527

1,061

2,201

1,095

2,273

5.4%

4.7%

Lowndes

8,459

20,746

1,673

8,943

2,629

12,192

11.3%

15.7%

Lumpkin

79

4,500

43

2,886

109

4,467

83.5%

35.1%

McDuffie

2,740

4,625

251

4,046

1,133

4,559

32.2%

11.1%

McIntosh

1,823

1,643

1,219

1,396

1,961

1,641

40.7%

14.9%

Macon

4,077

3,171

443

3,052

1,796

3,607

33.2%

17.5%

1,705

1,925

Jeff Davis

909

Jefferson

4,780

Jenkins Johnson

Blacks

Whites

653

2,044

4,116

56

4,937

283

2,210

2,985

1,261

3,455

Jones

2,185

Lamar Lanier

Long

Georgia (continued)

Whites

Post-Act Registration 830

Jasper

Blacks

Pre-Act Registration

Percentage Gain in Ratio of Registrantsa

Madison

Blacks

Whites

Unknown

205 10

989

5,962

55

4,588

261

4,778

20.8%

3.2%

Marion

1,609

1,353

55

1,508

280

1,599

14.0%

6.7%

Meriwether

4,990

6,547

950

4,508

1,966

5,690

20.4%

18.1%

946

3,095

6

3,220

188

1,637

19.2%

-51.1%

Mitchell

4,971

6,055

375

7,928

1,474

5,761

22.1%

-35.8%

Monroe

2,652

3,607

738

3,938

1,212

3,454

17.9%

-13.4%

Montgomery

1,288

2,520

715

2,385

1,033

2,931

24.7%

21.7%

Morgan

2,469

3,415

892

1,576

999

1,675

4.3%

2.9%

Murray

51

6,209

27

4,520

25

6,210

-3.9%

27.2%

Miller

Muscogee

224 127

22,549

74,662

4,801

27,595

10,157

39,384

23.8%

15.8%

Newton

3,767

9,045

901

5,883

2,002

7,107

29.2%

13.5%

Oconee

681

3,228

89

2,317

119

2,903

4.4%

18.2%

1,709

2,964

259

2,763

448

3,035

11.1%

9.2%

603

7,353

543

7,626

551

7,735

1.3%

1.5%

4,562

3,650

679

2,539

1,805

3,034

24.7%

13.6%

251

5,264

140

5,124

196

6,129

22.3%

19.1%

Pierce

1,135

4,432

380

3,876

649

4,666

23.7%

17.8%

Pike

1,643

2,584

496

2,520

701

2,630

12.5%

4.3%

Polk

2,442

15,065

1,395

10,490

1,784

12,768

15.9%

15.1%

Pulaski

1,843

3,018

235

3,020

627

3,420

21.3%

13.3%

Putnam

2,204

2,297

563

2,303

790

2,408

10.3%

4.6%

707

581

38

793

181

685

20.2%

-18.6%

43

4,392

29

5,089

33

4,415

9.3%

-15.3%

3,663

2,878

423

2,495

1,139

2,598

19.5%

3.6%

Oglethorpe Paulding Peach Pickens

Quitman Rabun Randolph

30

228

Registration Applicants Listed by Federal Examiners Blacks

Whites

472

1

Appendices 883

State



Voting Age Population County

Blacks

Whites

24,785

61,315

6,747

26,097

13,985

38,706

29.2%

20.6%

Rockdale

1,512

4,708

731

4,641

903

4,977

11.4%

7.1%

Blacks

Whites

Blacks

Whites

Unknown

903

961

134

893

332

1,165

21.9%

28.3%

Screven

3,729

4,557

863

3,530

2,837

4,209

52.9%

14.9%

Seminole

1,255

2,648

11

3,500

425

3,690

33.0%

7.2%

Spalding

5,252

16,657

1,391

9,370

3,246

12,494

35.3%

18.8%

Stephens

1,355

9,975

627

8,242

766

7,840

10.3%

-4.0%

Stewart

2,681

1,465

136

1,656

707

1,700

21.3%

3.0%

Sumter

6,710

7,730

548

5,681

3,134

8,527

38.5%

36.8%

Talbot

2,507

1,437

219

1,448

650

1,483

17.2%

2.4%

Taliaferro

1,073

917

828

946

1,172

1,054

32.1%

11.8%

Tattnall

3,135

7,377

1,310

6,630

3,028

6,693

54.8%

0.9%

Taylor

2,004

2,767

389

2,940

653

2,843

13.2%

-3.5%

Telfair

2,087

4,938

325

3,959

1,260

4,547

44.8%

11.9%

Terrell

4,057

3,038

98

2,935

2,188

3,374

51.5%

14.5%

Thomas

7,644

13,179

1,579

8,422

1,681

8,707

1.3%

2.2%

Tift

3,513

10,211

1,113

6,681

1,701

7,955

16.7%

12.5%

Toombs

2,444

7,513

431

5,962

902

7,099

19.3%

15.1%

1

2,942

0

3,514

0

2,600

 

-31.1%

Towns Georgia (continued)

Whites

Post-Act Registration

Richmond Schley

Blacks

Pre-Act Registration

Percentage Gain in Ratio of Registrantsa

7

1,948

968

2,473

45

2,638

601

2,112

57.4%

-21.3%

Troup

8,577

20,579

1,732

11,759

2,943

13,387

14.1%

7.9%

Turner

1,535

3,422

464

3,530

537

2,918

4.8%

-17.9%

Twiggs

Treutlen

2,255

1,969

246

1,698

895

1,880

Union

1

3,957

0

5,662

0

3,500

Upson

3,615

11,159

655

6,404

961

6,913

8.5%

4.6%

Walker

1,388

26,511

1,019

24,928

1,178

32,101

10

11.5%

27.1%

Walton

3,076

9,392

458

6,381

982

6,800

35

17.0%

4.5%

Ware

4,763

15,671

2,391

12,365

2,801

13,421

8.6%

6.7%

Warren

2,224

1,911

188

1,640

1,417

1,965

55.3%

17.0%

Washington

5,451

5,373

1,542

5,269

1,672

5,367

2.4%

1.8%

Wayne

1,878

8,204

809

7,171

1,218

8,140

21.8%

11.8%

Webster

975

775

9

766

261

875

25.8%

14.1%

Wheeler

824

2,236

474

2,302

730

2,179

31.1%

-5.5%

White

169

4,047

242

4,220

235

4,735

-4.1%

12.7%

Whitfield

1,085

24,437

898

17,259

1,010

20,545

10.3%

13.4%

Wilcox

1,282

3,309

230

3,059

608

3,919

29.5%

26.0%

Wilkes

3,101

3,621

493

3,529

1,088

3,696

19.2%

4.6%

Wilkinson

2,279

3,135

411

3,041

975

3,427

Worth

3,776

5,324

296

5,855

973

5,428

Subtotal

612,910

1,796,338

167,699

1,124,375

322,996

1,440,356

Non-Examiner Subtotal

603,329

1,787,316

166,709

1,116,700

316,983

1,430,973

9,581

9,022

990

7,675

6,013

9,383

Examiner Subtotal

187

763

8

22

28.8%

9.2%

 

-54.6%

Registration Applicants Listed by Federal Examiners Blacks

Whites

1,467

10

1,458

5

24.7%

12.3%

17.9%

-8.0%

22,776

25.3%

17.6%

3,397

16

22,776

24.9%

17.6%

0

0

0

52.4%

18.9%

3,397

16 (Continued)

884

The African American Electorate

State

Appendix Table A25.7 (Continued)

Voting Age Population County

4,557

Allen Ascension Assumption Avoyelles

Whites

Blacks

Whites

Post-Act Registration Blacks

Whites

Blacks

17.5%

12.2%

 

 

9,412

14.1%

12.8%

10,373

18.0%

15.5%

5,913

11.1%

13.1%

15,504

31.5%

14.8%

9,326

16.3%

16.0%

2,063

5,535

36.3%

9.4%

3,077

17,688

36.2%

11.6%

1,409

26

62,362

20,912

65,217

38.2%

3.3%

7,291

87

46,918

10,514

53,662

15.4%

10.7%

361

3,786

714

4,644

30.4%

22.3%

2,235

6

3,580

20,187

4,378

2,310

8,357

1,884

8,343

2,210

4,171

10,110

2,448

8,808

3,199

3,237

5,877

1,933

5,141

2,293

4,717

15,845

1,756

13,157

3,242

Beauregard

2,145

8,682

1,048

7,936

1,397

Bienville

4,077

5,617

584

5,007

Bossier

6,847

23,696

599

14,934

Caddo

41,749

87,774

4,954

Calcasieu

14,924

62,987

8,213

Caldwell

1,161

3,843

Whites 22,926

Unknown  

239

3,642

190

3,400

230

3,873

16.7%

13.0%

Catahoula

1,919

4,110

236

4,080

1,092

5,170

44.6%

26.5%

Claiborne

5,032

6,415

96

5,229

2,083

5,982

39.5%

11.7%

Concordia

4,582

5,963

563

5,505

2,821

7,500

49.3%

33.5%

De Soto

Registration Applicants Listed by Federal Examiners

Blacks

22,399

Cameron

Whites

6,753

6,543

849

5,830

5,032

6,851

61.9%

15.6%

36,908

87,985

11,990

75,773

21,285

89,550

25.2%

15.7%

East Carroll

4,183

2,990

136

1,939

2,882

3,208

65.6%

42.4%

2,633

25

East Feliciana

6,081

7,043

182

2,726

2,365

3,569

35.9%

12.0%

2,048

51

Evangeline

3,342

13,652

3,136

14,055

4,231

15,866

32.8%

13.3%

Franklin

4,433

8,954

284

7,540

721

8,862

9.9%

14.8%

Grant

1,553

6,080

618

5,966

944

6,915

21.0%

15.6%

Iberia

7,165

20,200

4,336

17,670

5,769

19,988

20.0%

11.5%

Iberville

7,060

8,733

2,971

7,422

6,311

9,259

47.3%

21.0%

Jackson

2,535

6,607

1,244

6,078

1,863

6,647

24.4%

8.6%

Jefferson

492

14

East Baton Rouge

Louisiana

Blacks

Acadia

Pre-Act Registration

Percentage Gain in Ratio of Registrantsa

14,970

98,013

8,177

86,430

10,647

105,510

16.5%

19.5%

Jefferson Davis

2,881

12,892

1,549

10,056

2,160

11,595

21.2%

11.9%

Lafayette

9,473

35,513

5,863

32,253

6,732

36,792

9.2%

12.8%

Lafourche

3,078

25,737

1,963

24,788

2,559

28,009

19.4%

12.5%

849

6,799

272

6,961

738

7,797

54.9%

12.3%

La Salle Lincoln

5,723

9,611

1,314

6,937

2,277

8,567

16.8%

17.0%

Livingston

1,818

12,306

1,419

13,156

1,780

16,181

19.9%

24.6%

Madison

5,181

3,334

294

2,467

3,862

3,921

68.9%

43.6%

Morehouse

7,208

10,311

491

7,690

1,408

9,252

12.7%

15.1%

Natchitoches

7,444

11,328

1,983

9,743

5,403

11,617

45.9%

16.5%

Orleans

125,752

257,495

35,736

162,215

60,308

174,261

19.5%

4.7%

Ouachita

16,377

40,185

1,744

29,587

7,755

33,049

36.7%

8.6%

5,468

50

Plaquemines

2,897

8,633

96

7,627

1,389

9,917

44.6%

26.5%

1,254

1,492

Pointe Coupee

5,273

6,085

1,515

4,384

3,722

6,014

41.9%

26.8%

Rapides

18,141

44,823

3,792

32,456

8,821

37,579

27.7%

11.4%

Red River

2,181

3,294

96

3,530

1,414

4,126

60.4%

18.1%

Richland

4,608

7,601

381

5,688

1,000

7,128

13.4%

18.9%

Sabine

2,143

8,251

1,366

8,735

1,688

10,075

15.0%

16.2%

Appendices 885

Louisiana (continued)

State



Voting Age Population County

Blacks

Whites

1,105

15,836

682

18,425

880

23,819

17.9%

34.1%

St. Charles

2,621

8,117

2,342

7,969

2,825

9,457

18.4%

18.3%

St. Helena

2,082

2,363

560

2,059

2,042

2,808

71.2%

31.7%

St. James

3,964

4,892

2,537

4,611

3,385

5,220

21.4%

12.4%

St. John the Baptist

4,279

4,982

3,009

4,475

3,689

5,692

15.9%

24.4%

St. Landry

14,982

25,550

10,325

22,131

13,536

25,769

21.4%

14.2%

St. Martin

4,664

9,781

3,182

9,397

4,151

10,689

20.8%

13.2%

St. Mary

7,176

17,991

3,214

14,782

5,531

19,620

32.3%

26.9%

St. Tammany

5,038

16,032

2,807

18,350

3,301

21,145

9.8%

17.4%

Tangipahoa

9,401

22,311

3,247

19,918

5,736

23,535

26.5%

16.2%

Tensas

3,533

2,287

60

2,154

1,067

2,563

28.5%

17.9%

Terrebonne

5,464

24,393

1,645

19,132

2,900

23,093

23.0%

16.2%

Union

3,006

7,021

864

6,534

1,647

7,417

26.0%

12.6%

Vermillion

2,429

19,710

2,183

18,972

2,758

21,547

23.7%

13.1%

Vernon

1,268

9,279

684

9,971

858

11,697

13.7%

18.6%

Washington

6,821

16,804

1,634

15,795

3,943

18,126

33.9%

13.9%

Webster

7,045

15,713

803

12,002

3,655

13,431

40.5%

9.1%

West Baton Rouge

3,502

3,974

1,245

3,642

2,805

4,707

44.5%

26.8%

West Carroll

1,389

6,171

76

4,078

362

5,724

20.6%

26.7%

West Feliciana

4,553

2,814

85

1,345

2,195

1,758

46.3%

14.7%

Winn

2,590

6,790

1,175

6,947

1,647

7,870

18.2%

13.6%

Subtotal

514,589

1,289,126

164,601

1,037,184

304,204

1,200,517

0

27.1%

Non-Examiner Subtotal

419,968

1,106,114

155,662

908,367

254,735

1,055,339

0

23.6%

94,621

183,012

8,939

128,817

49,469

145,178

0

Adams

9,340

10,888

 

 

4,388

7,542

Alcorn

1,756

13,347

 

460

8,928

Amite

3,560

4,449

 

1,723

4,035

Attala

4,262

7,522

 

1,996

7,316

Benton

1,419

2,514

55

1,189

2,875

Bolivar

15,939

10,031

 

1,831

4,880

Calhoun

1,767

7,188

 

61

5,565

Carroll

2,704

2,969

 

926

2,896

Chickasaw

3,054

6,388

1

2,371

7,500

77.6%

46.2%

Choctaw

1,105

3,728

 

719

4,312

65.1%

115.7%

Claiborne

3,969

1,688

26

1,528

3,092

1,865

77.2%

20.0%

Clarke

2,988

6,072

64

4,829

751

5,745

23.0%

15.1%

33.3%

63.5%

1,431

3

52.5%

82.3%

4,292

17

64.5%

12.4%

Clay

Mississippi

Whites

Blacks

Whites

Post-Act Registration

2,226

4,548

Blacks

Whites

Unknown

Registration Applicants Listed by Federal Examiners

St. Bernard

Examiner Subtotal

Blacks

Pre-Act Registration

Percentage Gain in Ratio of Registrantsa

Blacks

Whites

1,300

19

12.7%

24,130

1,770

13.3%

0

0

42.8%

8.9%

24,130

1,770

 

47.0%

69.3%

 

 

2,250

26.2%

66.9%

749

48.4%

90.7%

356

0

759

46.8%

97.3%

79.9%

25.8%

517

0

8,438

11.5%

48.6%

1,719

3.5%

77.4%

1,366

34.2%

97.5%

900

0

1,343

1

4,444

5,547

 

1,481

3,524

14,604

8,708

 

7,668

7,163

Copiah

6,407

8,153

25

4,159

8,540

Covington

2,032

5,329

 

1,013

5,169

49.9%

97.0%

De Soto

6,246

5,338

 

2,381

6,863

613

38.1%

128.6%

1,221

2

Forrest

7,495

22,431

236

4,302

20,384

1,165

54.2%

31.8%

953

5

Coahoma

7,533

13,253

2,727

(Continued)

886

The African American Electorate

State

Appendix Table A25.7 (Continued)

Voting Age Population County

Whites

Blacks

Franklin

1,842

3,403

 

George

580

5,276

14

Greene

859

3,518

 

Grenada

4,323

5,792

Hancock

1,129

6,813

Harrison

9,670

Hinds

Mississippi (continued)

Blacks

Pre-Act Registration Whites

Post-Act Registration Blacks

Whites

1,171

3,114

305

6,440

498

5,095

 

2,537

 

724

55,094

 

1,996

17,450

4,200

Percentage Gain in Ratio of Registrantsa

Unknown

Blacks

Whites

Blacks

Whites

63.6%

91.5%

57

3

1,405

1

50.2%

42.5%

58.0%

144.8%

7,505

58.7%

129.6%

7,336

64.1%

107.7%

15,824

20.6%

31.7%

260

Registration Applicants Listed by Federal Examiners

36,138

67,836

5,616

62,410

17,248

63,043

9,135

32.2%

0.9%

10,726

71

Holmes

8,757

4,773

20

4,800

6,332

5,501

40

72.1%

14.7%

4,537

7

Humphreys

5,561

3,344

0

2,538

1,810

2,824

841

32.5%

8.6%

1,420

8

Issaquena

1,081

640

5

640

643

871

59.0%

36.1%

59

2

Itawamba

463

8,523

 

287

7,606

3,230

62.0%

89.2%

Jackson

5,113

24,447

 

1,649

15,841

5,224

32.3%

64.8%

Jasper

3,675

5,327

10

1,124

4,668

1,143

30.3%

3.2%

629

2

Jefferson

3,540

1,666

 

2,061

1,913

58.2%

114.8%

2,060

0

Jefferson Davis

3,222

3,629

126

1,885

3,435

54.6%

5.5%

1,121

4

Jones

7,427

25,943

 

3,261

12,649

43.9%

48.8%

2,304

5

Kemper

3,221

3,113

 

874

3,457

27.1%

111.1%

Lafayette

3,239

8,074

 

561

4,711

1,996

17.3%

58.3%

7,230

5

6,586

31

619

1

4,500 3,236

114

1,071

6,489

0

5,752

419

1,063

7,975

39.1%

-72.3%

Lauderdale

11,924

27,806

1,700

18,000

4,969

21,832

931

27.4%

13.8%

Lawrence

1,720

3,878

 

1,821

3,960

105.9%

102.1%

Leake

3,397

6,754

220

2,161

7,227

57.1%

18.2%

Lee

5,130

18,709

 

1,906

15,403

37.2%

82.3%

Leflore

13,567

10,274

281

Lincoln

3,913

11,072

 

Lowndes

8,362

16,460

99

Madison

10,366

5,622

218

Marion

3,630

8,997

Marshall

7,168

4,342

Monroe

5,610

13,426

 

Montgomery

2,627

4,700

 

Neshoba

2,565

9,143

 

Newton

3,018

8,014

 

1,386

Noxubee

5,172

2,997

 

2,620

Oktibbeha

4,952

8,423

128

4,413

763

386

Panola

7,250

7,639

878

5,922

3,760

7,548

Pearl River

2,473

9,765

 

1,197

13,390

Perry

1,140

3,515

 

704

4,248

Pike

6,936

12,163

 

2,834

2,168

Pontotoc

1,519

8,772

 

559

6,679

Prentiss

1,070

9,535

 

387

3,462

8,914

Quitman

5,673

4,176

 

2,610

4,035

60

Lamar

6,000 7,348

7,526

7,428

53.4%

0.8%

2,931

12,948

3,021

74.9%

116.9%

8,687

2,686

12,354

30.9%

22.3%

6,256

7,037

6,287

65.8%

0.6%

383

10,123

2,501

12,047

58.3%

21.4%

177

4,229

4,603

5,643

61.7%

32.6%

1,669

2,789

11,142

29.8%

20.8%

38

804

6,181

1.4%

17.1%

1,013

6,891

1,643

39.5%

75.4%

7,097

45.9%

88.6%

610

0

2,944

50.7%

98.2%

2,236

5

8,537

12.8%

-47.8%

129

0

142

39.8%

21.3%

48.4%

137.1%

61.8%

120.9%

40.9%

17.8%

36.8%

76.1%

36.2%

36.3%

46.0%

96.6%

9,576

Appendices 887

State



Voting Age Population County

Mississippi (continued)

Whites

Blacks

Whites

Blacks

Whites

25.8%

94.4%

906

0

39.6%

44.0%

972

42.2%

296.7%

286

0

41

65.0%

107.9%

1,435

0

1,041

6,841

30.3%

15.8%

484

3,181

32.5%

16.3%

7,418

39.7%

3.8%

3,377

5,595

51.8%

22.2%

2,171

4,765

50.2%

105.7%

 

675

8,352

52.7%

111.2%

 

193

8,810

53.8%

109.2%

1,407

504

1,564

8.0%

7.8%

394

8,463

4

4,536

1,803

4,855

13,530

2,433

11,654

6,315

19,837

 

3,274

2,556

5,881

 

1,225

7,265

Webster

1,174

4,993

 

83

154

6,875

7.1%

3.1%

Wilkinson

4,120

2,340

 

185

2,484

3,263

4.5%

Winston

3,611

6,808

 

558

5,271

226

Yalobusha

2,441

4,572

 

1,126

768

3,963

Yazoo

8,719

7,598

 

2,856

1,622

Subtotal

422,256

748,266

12975*

227514*

181,234

Non-Examiner Subtotal

228,380

477,381

3,817

98,176

86,001

Examiner Subtotal

193,876

270,885

9,158

129,338

Alamance

7,429

42,755

5,177

 

Alexander

506

8,370

 

Alleghany

119

4,588

5,218 115

6,944

13,246

 

Scott

3,752

7,742

16

Sharkey

3,152

1,882

Simpson

3,186

8,073

Smith

1,293

Stone

868

Whites

Post-Act Registration Blacks

Whites

1,793

12,503

1,503

8,808

 

1,330

5,583

 

2,070

8,714

6,597

 

392

2,965

 

282

13,524

8,785

185

7,082

5,548

Tallahatchie

6,483

5,099

17

4,464

Tate

4,326

4,506

 

Tippah

1,281

7,513

359

8,068

Tunica

5,822

2,011

38

Union

1,626

9,512

 

Walthall

2,490

4,536

Warren

10,726

Washington

20,619

Wayne

Tishomingo

Anson Ashe Avery

5,400

Unknown

Registration Applicants Listed by Federal Examiners

Blacks

Rankin

Sunflower

North Carolina

Blacks

Pre-Act Registration

Percentage Gain in Ratio of Registrantsa 870

2,066

24.2%

89.0%

3

72.2%

7.0%

1,246

1

13,968

117

36.2%

17.1%

1,266

27

13,385

7,174

15.9%

67.5%

47.9%

123.5% 106.2%

16

42

15.5%

77.4%

51

0

46.1%

16.8%

7,342

32.8%

21.3%

589,066

158,649*

39.8%

48.3%

57,947

243

349,527

122,063*

36.0%

52.7%

0

0

95,233

239,539

36,586

44.4%

40.7%

57,947

243

5,221

38,517

 

0.6%

90.1%

 

 

460

10,018

90.9%

119.7%

 

83

6,899

69.7%

150.4%

7,847

 

1,800

6,500

34.5%

82.8%

11,276

 

110

13,038

95.7%

115.6%

124

6,507

 

41

6,018

33.1%

92.5%

Beaufort

6,196

13,737

 

1,721

9,857

27.8%

71.8%

Bertie

6,261

6,156

 

3,951

5,997

63.1%

97.4%

Bladen

5,147

9,173

 

2,721

10,109

52.9%

110.2%

Brunswick

3,170

7,602

 

2,608

10,243

82.3%

134.7%

Buncombe

8,510

72,249

5,695

5,608

69,379

-1.0%

56.0%

Burke

1,921

29,506

 

2,488

35,057

129.5%

118.8%

Cabarrus

5,380

35,165

 

2,953

32,973

54.9%

93.8%

Caldwell

1,723

25,520

 

1,958

23,286

113.6%

91.2%

Camden

1,054

1,988

 

422

1,933

40.0%

97.2%

Carteret

1,932

16,030

 

1,190

12,170

61.6%

75.9%

Caswell

4,129

6,026

 

1,600

5,200

38.8%

86.3%

28,894

(Continued)

888

The African American Electorate

State

Appendix Table A25.7 (Continued)

Voting Age Population County

Blacks

Whites

3,296

38,542

 

4,406

24,968

133.7%

64.8%

Chatham

4,026

11,227

 

1,874

11,962

46.5%

106.5%

Cherokee

226

9,102

 

142

8,957

62.8%

98.4%

2,507

3,825

 

828

3,488

33.0%

91.2%

37

3,112

 

30

2,902

81.1%

93.3%

Cleveland

6,474

30,356

2,353

2,406

20,093

0.8%

0.9%

Columbus

7,382

17,830

 

6,107

16,512

82.7%

92.6%

Clay

Craven

Blacks

Whites

19,827

Blacks

Whites

Unknown

8,242

22,994

 

3,473

12,001

42.1%

52.2%

18,789

58,279

 

7,165

26,087

38.1%

44.8%

1,076

2,845

 

397

2,624

36.9%

92.2%

237

3,467

 

98

3,140

41.4%

90.6%

Davidson

4,491

41,462

 

 

 

 

Davie

1,080

8,898

 

987

10,110

91.4%

113.6%

Duplin

6,955

14,477

 

3,185

15,812

45.8%

109.2%

Durham

19,475

47,098

 

16,176

36,717

83.1%

78.0%

Edgecombe

12,330

15,515

 

3,525

10,650

28.6%

68.6%

Forsyth

24,952

87,219

12,000

17,428

69,394

21.8%

3.0%

Franklin

5,554

9,842

 

2,045

10,923

36.8%

111.0%

Gaston

8,365

64,154

 

4,243

43,924

50.7%

68.5%

Gates

2,344

2,714

 

1,289

3,061

55.0%

112.8%

125

3,324

 

0

4,767

 

143.4%

6,996

11,584

 

2,537

10,205

36.3%

88.1%

Cumberland Currituck Dare

North Carolina (continued)

Whites

Post-Act Registration

Catawba

Chowan

Blacks

Pre-Act Registration

Percentage Gain in Ratio of Registrantsa

Graham Granville

66,800

Greene

3,268

4,793

 

795

5,070

24.3%

105.8%

Guilford

27,292

116,748

16,796

85,689

15,916

76,078

-3.2%

-8.2%

Halifax

13,766

16,496

3,644

15,469

4,883

15,667

9.0%

1.2%

Harnett

6,150

20,061

 

1,177

11,666

19.1%

58.2%

Haywood

500

23,055

 

377

22,052

75.4%

95.6%

Henderson

1,170

21,062

 

651

17,419

55.6%

82.7%

Hertford

6,102

5,606

 

2,484

4,378

40.7%

78.1%

Hoke

3,747

3,998

 

1,354

2,962

36.1%

74.1%

Hyde

1,100

2,201

 

399

1,970

36.3%

89.5%

Iredell

5,517

31,094

 

2,965

23,858

53.7%

76.7%

841

9,227

 

168

8,244

20.0%

89.3%

Johnston

6,395

28,259

 

2,575

22,924

40.3%

81.1%

Jones

2,251

3,248

 

1,604

4,508

71.3%

138.8%

Jackson

Lee

2,803

12,041

 

1,964

11,551

70.1%

95.9%

Lenoir

10,293

19,260

 

3,673

15,709

35.7%

81.6%

Lincoln

1,546

14,893

 

1,594

18,456

103.1%

123.9%

McDowell

755

14,693

 

626

14,232

82.9%

96.9%

Macon

180

8,573

 

72

8,327

40.0%

97.1%

75

9,574

 

42

8,489

56.0%

88.7%

5,683

8,052

 

2,203

7,845

38.8%

97.4%

34,150

123,787

15,284

18,470

100,534

9.3%

22.4%

Madison Martin Mecklenburg

72,840

Registration Applicants Listed by Federal Examiners Blacks

Whites

Appendices 889

State



Voting Age Population County Mitchell

Whites

29

Blacks

Whites

Post-Act Registration Blacks

7,977

 

15

Whites

Blacks

Whites

7,505

Unknown

51.7%

94.1%

Montgomery

2,075

8,119

 

1,469

7,959

70.8%

98.0%

Moore

4,803

15,733

 

2,162

13,447

45.0%

85.5%

Nash

10,573

21,761

 

2,679

15,412

25.3%

70.8%

New Hanover

10,569

31,641

 

6,799

23,190

64.3%

73.3%

Northampton

7,304

6,178

 

4,016

6,062

55.0%

98.1%

Onslow

5,015

33,988

 

1,488

8,531

29.7%

25.1%

Orange

4,978

19,385

 

 

 

 

Pamlico

1,593

3,708

 

766

3,125

48.1%

84.3%

Pasquotank

4,936

9,409

 

2,127

6,079

43.1%

64.6%

Pender

4,085

5,631

 

1,672

5,486

40.9%

97.4%

Perquimans

2,027

3,083

 

995

2,327

49.1%

75.5%

Person

4,227

9,994

 

2,115

10,298

50.0%

103.0%

Pitt

13,575

22,621

 

4,507

27,754

33.2%

122.7%

Polk

766

6,104

 

805

8,459

105.1%

138.6%

2,591

33,477

 

1,413

28,054

54.5%

83.8%

Richmond

5,514

16,019

 

3,820

13,827

69.3%

86.3%

Robeson

21,424

20,851

 

9,391

12,859

43.8%

61.7%

Rockingham

7,398

33,438

 

4,330

26,842

58.5%

80.3%

Rowan

7,209

42,866

 

4,387

33,211

60.9%

77.5%

Rutherford

2,572

24,020

 

1,525

24,275

59.3%

101.1%

Sampson

8,203

17,378

 

7,662

23,326

93.4%

134.2%

Scotland

4,686

7,812

 

1,620

5,031

34.6%

64.4%

Stanly

2,164

22,056

 

1,310

19,559

60.5%

88.7%

Stokes

1,025

11,786

 

1,550

7,950

151.2%

67.5%

Surry

Randolph

North Carolina (continued)

Blacks

Pre-Act Registration

Percentage Gain in Ratio of Registrantsa

1,423

26,796

 

964

32,480

67.7%

121.2%

Swain

756

3,878

 

97

6,378

12.8%

164.5%

Transylvania

405

8,687

 

398

6,242

98.3%

71.9%

Tyrrell

849

1,597

 

424

1,111

49.9%

69.6%

Union

4,423

20,044

 

1,422

13,513

32.2%

67.4%

Vance

6,520

11,005

 

Wake

22,856

76,799

12,586

Warren

5,490

4,439

Washington

2,643

4,365

Watauga

2,495

8,343

38.3%

75.8%

11,853

64,579

-3.2%

27.0%

 

2,399

4,548

43.7%

102.5%

 

1,346

3,896

50.9%

89.3%

126

9,639

 

Wayne

15,754

29,349

5,218

Wilkes

1,444

23,779

Wilson

10,770

Yadkin

576

Yancey

43,869

97

10,081

77.0%

104.6%

5,010

17,647

-1.3%

-1.8%

 

1,826

24,440

126.5%

102.8%

20,566

 

3,114

12,807

28.9%

62.3%

13,039

 

 

 

 

18,187

Registration Applicants Listed by Federal Examiners Blacks

Whites

76

7,856

 

68

8,917

89.5%

113.5%

Subtotal

550,929

2,005,955

78,753*

351,575*

277,404

1,602,980

0

36.1%

62.4%

0

0

Non-Examiner Subtotal

550,929

2,005,955

78,753

351,575

277,404

1,602,980

0

36.1%

62.4%

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

 

 

0

0

Examiner Subtotal

(Continued)

890

The African American Electorate

State

Appendix Table A25.7 (Continued)

Voting Age Population County Abbeville Aiken

Whites

Blacks

Whites

Post-Act Registration Blacks

Whites

3,215

8,733

900

6,100

1,142

7,202

Unknown  

Whites

Blacks

7.5%

12.6%

 

 

3,403

13

1,203

3

10,040

33,646

4,000

26,000

8,701

33,582

46.8%

22.5%

3,205

2,531

504

2,900

1,665

3,063

36.2%

6.4%

Anderson

9,598

47,542

7,500

30,000

2,749

31,242

-49.5%

2.6%

Bamberg

3,807

4,371

1,400

4,169

1,378

4,320

-0.6%

3.5%

Barnwell

3,242

5,652

1,500

6,800

917

6,912

-18.0%

2.0%

Beaufort

7,247

12,098

3,500

6,500

3,060

6,130

-6.1%

-3.1%

Berkeley

7,619

10,122

4,000

10,000

4,253

10,683

3.3%

6.7%

3,318

2,623

487

2,415

619

2,619

4.0%

7.8%

Charleston

35,499

77,909

13,976

50,310

17,991

54,648

11.3%

5.6%

Cherokee

3,360

16,037

1,438

14,245

1,775

14,991

10.0%

4.7%

Chester

5,664

11,172

3,000

10,088

2,569

11,222

-7.6%

10.2%

Chesterfield

5,219

12,099

2,400

10,936

3,984

10,755

30.4%

-1.5%

Clarendon

7,735

5,223

523

4,708

5,368

5,491

62.6%

15.0%

Colleton

6,180

8,203

1,870

8,045

2,802

8,597

15.1%

6.7%

Darlington

9,900

16,706

5,000

13,000

5,007

15,763

0.1%

16.5%

Dillon

5,529

8,725

2,500

6,500

2,865

7,613

6.6%

12.8%

Dorchester

5,370

7,121

1,750

7,864

4,009

8,701

42.1%

11.8%

Edgefield

3,764

4,103

650

3,950

1,073

4,223

11.2%

6.7%

Fairfield

5,536

4,975

1,650

5,050

2,409

4,945

13.7%

-2.1%

Florence

15,951

27,047

4,458

23,881

7,976

25,206

22.1%

4.9%

7,173

8,855

4,604

6,907

4,450

8,758

-2.1%

20.9%

Greenville

18,605

102,365

8,368

66,040

8,757

69,086

2.1%

3.0%

Greenwood

6,764

19,218

2,300

15,714

2,937

16,339

9.4%

3.3%

Hampton

4,052

4,711

1,025

4,696

2,837

5,000

44.7%

6.5%

Horry

7,429

27,518

2,300

20,700

3,063

20,592

10.3%

-0.4%

Jasper

3,333

2,689

1,200

2,580

2,107

2,953

27.2%

13.9%

Kershaw

5,903

11,258

2,266

10,862

3,185

11,972

15.6%

9.9%

Lancaster

4,762

16,213

1,800

16,265

1,946

17,486

3.1%

7.5%

Laurens

6,818

19,775

6,400

9,637

6,282

11,358

-1.7%

8.7%

Lee

5,446

4,394

1,150

4,654

2,691

4,680

28.3%

0.6%

Lexington

4,782

28,774

3,500

20,500

2,540

25,777

-20.1%

18.3%

McCormick

2,248

1,915

210

1,900

978

2,181

34.2%

14.7%

Marion

7,684

8,103

1,200

6,470

3,082

7,236

24.5%

9.5%

Marlboro

5,932

8,230

1,200

7,800

1,593

8,556

6.6%

9.2%

Newberry

4,954

12,204

1,000

11,200

1,897

10,997

18.1%

-1.7%

Oconee

2,230

19,762

1,400

12,100

1,241

13,871

-7.1%

9.0%

Georgetown

Orangeburg

17,355

16,381

6,483

15,619

8,478

16,215

11.5%

3.6%

Pickens

2,356

24,015

1,700

15,300

1,098

17,725

-25.6%

10.1%

Richland

32,670

79,050

8,750

58,750

19,621

57,628

33.3%

-1.4%

2,327

5,573

440

5,840

1,119

5,629

29.2%

-3.8%

17,047

73,317

7,171

57,129

7,850

59,292

4.0%

3.0%

Saluda Spartanburg

Registration Applicants Listed by Federal Examiners

Blacks

Allendale

Calhoun

South Carolina

Blacks

Pre-Act Registration

Percentage Gain in Ratio of Registrantsa

Whites

Appendices 891

South Carolina (continued)

State



Voting Age Population County

Whites

Blacks

Whites

Post-Act Registration

Blacks

Whites

Sumter

15,380

22,004

4,200

9,800

8,290

14,141

26.6%

19.7%

Union

4,125

12,826

1,438

13,423

1,731

13,040

7.1%

-3.0%

Blacks

Whites

Unknown

Registration Applicants Listed by Federal Examiners Blacks

Whites

Williamsburg

10,535

7,560

1,933

8,067

5,847

9,352

37.2%

17.0%

York

10,196

31,799

3,500

22,800

4,535

23,324

10.2%

1.6%

Subtotal

371,104

895,147

138,544

678,214

190,467

731,096

0

14.0%

5.9%

4,606

16

Non-Examiner Subtotal

357,999

882,803

136,271

665,642

181,090

716,904

0

12.5%

5.8%

0

0

Examiner Subtotal

13,105

12,344

2,273

12,572

9,377

14,192

0

54.2%

13.1%

4,606

16

Accomack

6,142

13,148

979

5,698

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Albemarle

2,576

15,670

1,215

6,485

 

 

 

Alleghany

256

6,675

800

4,650

 

 

 

Amelia

1,924

2,261

888

2,447

 

 

 

Amherst

2,693

10,523

1,275

6,702

 

 

 

Appomattox

1,142

4,245

505

4,041

 

 

 

Arlington/ Alexander

5,214

102,364

2,525

66,054

 

 

 

864

21,314

339

10,163

 

 

 

Augusta Bath Bedford Bland Botetourt Brunswick Buchanan

Virginia

Blacks

Pre-Act Registration

Percentage Gain in Ratio of Registrantsa

340

2,976

116

1,632

 

 

 

3,044

15,258

1,343

7,788

 

 

 

146

3,504

7

1,947

 

 

 

778

9,045

145

4,596

 

 

 

4,734

4,637

914

3,671

 

 

 

8

16,782

0

11,221

 

 

 

Buckingham

2,208

3,776

825

1,700

 

 

 

Campbell

3,291

15,518

1,132

6,103

 

 

 

Caroline

3,210

3,793

1,601

2,602

 

 

 

41

13,614

11

6,627

 

 

 

Charles City

2,126

582

943

490

 

 

 

Charlotte

2,500

5,014

808

4,514

 

 

 

Chesterfield

4,862

35,855

1,794

29,200

 

 

 

786

4,016

348

3,137

 

 

 

3

2,053

0

1,250

 

 

 

Culpeper

2,068

6,964

807

5,054

 

 

 

Cumberland

Carroll

Clarke Craig

1,647

1,819

759

2,000

 

 

 

Dickenson

64

9,791

27

7,608

 

 

 

Dinwiddie

8,587

5,212

1,284

3,241

 

 

 

Essex

1,665

2,241

667

1,640

 

 

 

Fairfax

9,110

140,605

1,904

87,261

 

 

 

Fauquier

3,093

10,726

1,492

6,734

 

 

 

308

6,017

155

4,483

 

 

 

Fluvanna

1,378

2,790

222

1,366

 

 

 

Franklin

1,728

12,801

451

5,249

 

 

 

232

12,479

50

5,975

 

 

 

Floyd

Frederick

(Continued)

892

The African American Electorate

State

Appendix Table A25.7 (Continued)

Voting Age Population County Giles

Whites

Blacks

Whites

Post-Act Registration Blacks

Whites

Unknown

Blacks

Whites

232

9,629

84

6,020

 

 

 

Gloucester

1,882

5,341

1,172

3,873

 

 

 

Goochland

2,312

3,121

514

1,627

 

 

 

Grayson

329

10,173

173

6,778

 

 

 

Greene

328

2,331

125

1,726

 

 

 

Greensville

3,885

4,499

1,890

3,467

 

 

 

Halifax

6,769

11,377

1,700

6,155

 

 

 

Hanover

3,302

12,432

1,639

8,784

 

 

 

Henrico

3,397

66,822

1,527

47,112

 

 

 

Henry

4,113

17,805

1,574

9,829

 

 

 

16

2,040

10

1,497

 

 

 

Isle of Wight

4,317

4,991

1,893

4,241

 

 

 

James City

2,056

4,845

960

2,688

 

 

 

King and Queen

1,617

1,735

780

1,156

 

 

 

King George

1,009

3,200

513

1,841

 

 

 

King William

1,864

2,491

683

1,870

 

 

 

Lancaster

1,978

3,613

1,229

3,078

 

 

 

100

14,072

59

11,931

 

 

 

Loudoun

2,239

12,014

979

9,423

 

 

 

Louisa

2,482

4,917

1,279

2,844

 

 

 

Lunenburg

Highland

Lee Virginia (continued)

Blacks

Pre-Act Registration

Percentage Gain in Ratio of Registrantsa

2,534

4,611

660

2,821

 

 

 

Madison

898

3,883

247

2,135

 

 

 

Mathews

1,062

3,809

326

2,218

 

 

 

Mecklenburg

6,624

10,474

620

4,670

 

 

 

Middlesex

1,363

2,586

538

1,684

 

 

 

Montgomery

960

18,091

355

7,065

 

 

 

Nansemond

9,806

6,965

2,792

4,104

 

 

 

Nelson

1,813

5,693

704

4,327

 

 

 

New Kent

1,229

1,325

501

1,185

 

 

 

Norfolk

6,310

21,162

 

 

 

 

Northampton

4,786

5,340

810

2,325

 

 

 

Northumberland

2,123

3,965

1,021

3,376

 

 

 

Nottoway

3,458

5,564

1,320

4,020

 

 

 

Orange

1,429

6,269

561

3,025

 

 

 

271

9,121

85

7,015

 

 

 

Page Patrick

616

8,076

229

4,980

 

 

 

Pittsylvania

8,604

22,835

1,476

8,340

 

 

 

Powhatan

1,563

2,376

867

1,820

 

 

 

Prince Edward

2,896

5,125

1,112

3,085

 

 

 

Prince George

2,420

8,860

986

3,343

 

 

 

Princess Anne

6,239

33,581

 

 

 

 

Prince William

2,217

24,477

438

 

 

 

9,617

Registration Applicants Listed by Federal Examiners Blacks

Whites

Appendices 893

State



Voting Age Population County Pulaski Rappahannock

Whites

Blacks

Whites

Post-Act Registration Blacks

Whites

Unknown

Blacks

Whites

1,030

14,802

366

6,470

 

 

 

540

2,608

213

1,379

 

 

 

Richmond

1,132

2,713

353

1,644

 

 

 

Roanoke

2,211

35,014

977

27,474

 

 

 

Rockbridge

1,127

12,662

950

6,830

 

 

 

Rockingham

427

22,976

70

8,630

 

 

 

Russell

297

13,883

76

9,535

 

 

 

Scott

193

14,626

84

10,557

 

 

 

Shenandoah

188

13,416

115

9,436

 

 

 

Smyth

327

18,191

70

8,578

 

 

 

Southampton

7,435

7,239

2,045

4,575

 

 

 

Spotsylvania

1,503

6,262

632

4,465

 

 

 

971

8,594

712

3,685

 

 

 

Surry

1,842

1,479

1,140

1,621

 

 

 

Sussex

3,706

2,662

1,354

2,536

 

 

 

Tazewell

1,071

23,237

768

13,716

 

 

 

Stafford

Warren

587

8,211

250

5,235

 

 

 

Washington

546

21,146

249

9,188

 

 

 

Westmoreland Virginia (continued)

Blacks

Pre-Act Registration

Percentage Gain in Ratio of Registrantsa

2,352

3,836

441

3,320

 

 

 

Wise

685

22,602

225

11,232

 

 

 

Wythe

523

12,299

283

10,030

 

 

 

York

2,428

9,596

1,623

6,552

 

 

 

Alexandria City

6,025

50,548

2,548

32,918

 

 

 

Bristol

672

9,373

192

4,528

 

 

 

Buena Vista

156

3,390

23

1,018

 

 

 

Charlottesville

3,369

15,904

2,181

11,462

 

 

 

Chesapeake

9,428

30,450

3,672

21,514

 

 

 

Clifton Forge

600

2,920

435

2,225

 

 

 

Colonial Heights Covington Danville

17

6,049

0

4,337

 

 

 

751

6,206

1,005

2,860

 

 

 

6,388

22,404

3,246

13,879

 

 

 

 

41

5,822

 

 

 

114

5,720

69

4,386

 

 

 

 

899

1,752

 

 

 

1,471

6,717

621

3,713

 

 

 

Fairfax City Falls Church Franklin City Fredericksburg Galax Hampton Harrisonburg

152

3,073

20

1,500

 

 

 

10,825

40,795

5,789

21,433

 

 

 

436

6,747

190

3,875

 

 

 

Hopewell

1,549

8,854

750

5,600

 

 

 

Lynchburg

6,574

27,728

3,446

16,708

 

 

 

Martinsville

2,972

8,084

1,233

6,172

 

 

 

Newport News

20,974

44,258

8,307

25,489

 

 

 

Norfolk City

45,376

129,423

15,801

58,893

 

 

 

Registration Applicants Listed by Federal Examiners Blacks

Whites

(Continued)

894

The African American Electorate

State

Appendix Table A25.7 (Continued)

Voting Age Population County Norton

Whites

Blacks

Whites

Post-Act Registration Blacks

Whites

Unknown

Blacks

Whites

Whites

 

0

0

 

0

0

 

 

0

0

181,425

17.4%

7.2%

150,396

7,289

8,206,125

144,839

13.3%

6.0%

0

0

701,312

36,586

44.4%

24.5%

150,396

7,289

2,764

200

1,220

 

 

 

Petersburg

9,821

12,528

3,919

6,353

 

 

 

Portsmouth

21,055

44,286

6,725

17,986

 

 

 

333

5,032

296

4,565

 

 

 

Richmond City

53,719

90,508

 

 

 

 

Roanoke City

9,519

52,527

3,037

32,138

 

 

 

South Boston

969

2,639

540

1,975

 

 

 

South Norfolk

3,118

9,288

 

 

 

 

Staunton

1,288

13,290

645

7,063

 

 

 

Suffolk

2,769

5,272

817

2,779

 

 

 

Virginia Beach

342

4,706

2,961

26,163

 

 

 

Waynesboro

548

8,667

335

5,963

 

 

 

Williamsburg

583

3,509

384

1,632

 

 

 

Winchester

708

9,200

174

5,135

 

 

 

Subtotal

446,146

1,906,617

144,259

1,070,168

0

0

0

 

Non-Examiner Subtotal

446,146

1,906,617

144,259

1,070,168

0

0

0

 

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

Total

4,061,991

13,462,642

1,117,898

7,939,170

1,822,770

8,907,437

Non-Examiner Total

3,536,004

12,612,513

1,064,806

7,445,804

1,536,262

Examiner Total

525,987

850,129

53,092

493,366

286,508

Examiner Subtotal

Registration Applicants Listed by Federal Examiners Blacks

188

Radford

Virginia (continued)

Blacks

Pre-Act Registration

Percentage Gain in Ratio of Registrantsa

Sources: United States Commission on Civil Rights, Political Participation: a Study of the Participation by Negroes in the Electoral and Political Processes in 10 Southern States since Passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1968), pp. 224–256. Notes: Calculated as the difference between the ratios of registered voters to eligible voters. For example, the post-Act ratio is the fraction of post-Act registered voters divided by the eligible or voting age population. a

*

Calculation here does not match the USCCR report.



Appendices 895

State

Appendix Table A25.13  Number of Election Observers under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 1966–1980 Number of Observers from 1966 to 1974 1966

Bullock

 

 

 

 

 

0

 

Choctaw

 

 

 

 

24

24

 

Conecuh

 

 

 

 

 

0

 

Dallas

96

 

Greene

118

22

37

Lowndes Marengo

Alabama

1969 1970

1971

1972 1973 1974

1975

1976 1977 1978 1979 1980   14

 

32

32

 

 

14

38

 

 

93

93

93

 

 

 

96

 

 

 

42

138

 

18

242

 

 

 

0

242

 

25

42

30

134

 

 

131

265

36

14

34

 

42

126

 

 

 

0

126

208

10

54

 

 

272

 

 

 

195

467

68

 

 

 

 

68

 

 

25

93

Pickens

 

 

 

 

 

0

 

 

27

 

58

58

Russell

 

 

 

 

 

0

 

 

65

 

Sumter

38

28

 

 

22

88

 

 

55

 

Perry

44

42

32

Total 1975 Total 1966 to 1980 to 1980

40

Talladega

Georgia

1968

Total 1966 to 1974

County

Hale

25

24

82 195

 

49

31

65

65

69

148

236

 

 

 

 

54

54

 

0

54

138

24

52

68

44

326

 

76

 

142

 

30

248

574

State Subtotal

739

0

98

44

205

0

110

0

234

1,430

0

181

0

598

0

272

1,051

2,481

Baker

 

 

18

 

 

 

12

 

 

30

 

 

 

 

 

 

0

30

Bulloch

 

 

 

 

 

0

 

 

 

9

9

9

Calhoun

 

 

 

 

 

0

 

 

 

18

18

18

Early

 

 

 

 

 

0

 

 

 

19

19

19

Hancock

22

36

 

 

64

122

 

 

4

126

Johnson

 

 

 

 

 

0

 

33

33

Meriwether

 

 

 

 

 

0

 

15

15

Mitchell

 

 

 

 

 

0

 

19

19

Peach

 

 

 

20

 

20

 

Stewart

 

 

 

 

 

0

 

Sumter

 

 

 

 

 

0

Taliaferro

 

22

6

12

 

Telfair

 

 

 

 

 

Terrell

 

16

 

 

 

State Subtotal De Soto

 

 

 

 

22

0

92

0

6

0

44

0

 

 

 

30

 

 

 

Wilcox

Tift

Louisiana

1967

Number of Observers from 1975 to 1980

 

4

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

0

20

 

 

25

25

 

 

 

26

26

26

40

 

 

 

0

40

0

 

 

 

18

18

18

16

11

27

 

 

38

54

67

0

4  

 

0

 

64

228

11

15

25

 

33 19

 

14

14

14

0

156

238

466

 

 

 

12

22

 

64

5

 

 

5

69

East Carroll

40

40

16

 

 

24

120

38

30

 

45

113

233

East Feliciana

82

56

 

 

 

 

138

13

 

 

13

151

Madison

97

49

21

 

20

265

56

 

 

56

321

Ouachita

40

 

 

 

 

40

 

 

 

0

40

Plaquemines

58

38

30

 

 

 

126

 

 

27

27

153

 

 

 

12

12

 

 

 

0

12

Sabine

 

20

16

42

St Helena

 

 

 

30

 

30

4

 

58

62

92

West Feliciana

80

56

36

 

12

 

 

184

 

 

 

12

12

196

State Subtotal

397

251

125

16

54

60

56

979

116

130

12

288

1,267

20

0

30

0

0

(Continued)

896

The African American Electorate

State

Appendix Table A25.13 (Continued) Number of Observers from 1966 to 1974 County

1966

Amite Benton

4

Bolivar

1967

1968

24

36

12

20

20

20

20 6

Carroll

10

54

20

Claiborne

22

64

32

Clay

14

12

10

40

30

Coahoma

1969 1970 5

20 18

1972 1973 1974

97

20

56

29

48

126

55

16

26

14

5

38

188

76

60

16

8

Total 1975 Total 1966 to 1980 to 1980

122

236

73

85

119

245

0

90

54

203

391

36

65

125

0

236

41

41

56

72

41

8

16

Forrest

6

6

0

6

Franklin

12

38

0

38

33

33

26

44

Hinds

36

44

28

22

66

36

32

Humphreys

10

38

20

8

18

20

Jasper

11

12

Jefferson

14

72

Jefferson Davis

12

33

44

Holmes

10

14

19

108

26

3

180

34

5

36

6

118

67

28

19

85

2

60

12

0

16

55

103

169

358

64

24

16

12

64

112

40

14

14

219

10

120

202

126

18

54

16

18

22

18

Oktibbeha

36

Quitman 6

38 30

Simpson

10

Sunflower

32

14

20

Warren

419

217

19

377

26

7

65

86

86 20

20

10 24

12

66

134

71

10

10

6

0

8

48 258

48

Wilkinson

62

20

16

38

36

4

6

34

State Subtotal

264 1,058

Clarendon

118

616

219

36

134

959

9

146

0

58

10

16

70

20

20

0

44

20

84

0

10

77

211 103

76

76

42

133

175

223

20

26

46

304

76

3,472

1,252

132

89

4

94

30

186

228

21

1,212

274

2,980

6,452

0

213

55

163 0

0 16

213

Marion

32 512

93

46

55

0 310

28

0 40

1,032

85

42

50

438

613

2

8

Darlington

187

24

16

4

Yazoo

Grand Total

187

64

Tunica

State Subtotal

251

7

44

Tallahatchie

Dorchester

55 162

0

Sharkey

Winston

48 189

32 32

91

16

24 14

339

6

18

Madison

Noxubee

221

0

6

20

252

18

22

47

72

41

68

48

137

184

59

34

63

29

26

26

Leflore

Kemper

48

19

18

158 6

Neshoba

106 4 18

8

Marshall

33

23

8

Rankin

2

0

Grenada

Jones

54

97

29 45

13

0

Issaquena

Mississippi

1976 1977 1978 1979 1980

0

24

Greene

South Carolina

1975

12

Covington De Soto

Total 1966 to 1974

90 6

28

1971

Number of Observers from 1975 to 1980

55

0

163

12

12

94

0

19

0

105

0

0

376

0

0

0

67

0

0

67

443

1,580 1,309 1,025

283

380

1,013

465

0

430

6,485

1,379

410

89

690

1,342

714

4,624

11,109

158

0

12

55

Sources: Adapted from United States Commission on Civil Rights, The Voting Rights Act: Ten Years After (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1975), pp. 398–401, and United States Commission of Civil Rights, The Voting Rights Act: Unfulfilled Goals (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1981), pp. 101-102. Calculations by the authors.



Appendices 897 Appendix Table A25.15  Voting Age Population and Registered Voters by Race and County in Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina, 1974 Whites

Percentage Point (White-Black) Registered Voter Gap

Covered by VRA?

Louisiana

State

African Americans

County

 

Acadia

5,548

4,837

87.2%

25,706

24,089

93.7%

6.5

 

Allen

2,688

2,013

74.9%

9,722

8,838

90.9%

16.0

 

Ascension

5,188

4,463

86.0%

16,011

14,841

92.7%

6.7

 

Assumption

3,728

3,095

83.0%

7,336

6,837

93.2%

10.2

 

Avoyelles

5,173

3,980

76.9%

17,717

16,476

93.0%

16.1

 

Beauregard

2,390

1,519

63.6%

11,847

11,476

96.9%

33.3

 

Bienville

4,324

3,301

76.3%

5,999

5,419

90.3%

14.0

 

Bossier

7,092

3,948

55.7%

30,869

22,115

71.6%

16.0

 

Caddo

47,861

23,636

49.4%

98,539

73,126

74.2%

24.8

 

Calcasieu

17,161

12,148

70.8%

70,763

57,802

81.7%

10.9

 

Caldwell

1,197

899

75.1%

4,762

4,775

100.3%

25.2

 

Cameron

316

271

85.8%

4,558

4,388

96.3%

10.5

 

Catahoula

1,794

1,414

78.8%

5,207

5,318

102.1%

23.3

 

Claiborne

4,949

3,198

64.6%

6,171

5,659

91.7%

27.1

 

Concordia

4,562

3,756

82.3%

8,378

8,300

99.1%

16.7

 

De Soto

7,017

4,943

70.4%

7,341

6,879

93.7%

23.3

 

East Baton Rouge

48,107

30,859

64.1%

131,065

105,432

80.4%

16.3

 

East Carroll

3,814

3,238

84.9%

3,230

3,294

102.0%

17.1

 

East Feliciana

5,509

3,756

68.2%

5,959

4,335

72.7%

4.6

 

Evangeline

4,062

4,420

108.8%

15,069

16,017

106.3%

-2.5

 

Franklin

4,132

2,278

55.1%

10,100

9,608

95.1%

40.0

 

Grant

1,688

1,066

63.2%

6,995

7,300

104.4%

41.2

 

Iberia

8,592

6,543

76.2%

24,398

21,800

89.4%

13.2

 

Iberville

7,743

6,859

88.6%

10,007

9,556

95.5%

6.9

 

Jackson

2,928

2,291

78.2%

7,603

6,671

87.7%

9.5

 

Jefferson

21,824

14,988

68.7%

180,945

145,281

80.3%

11.6

 

Jefferson Davis

3,126

2,417

77.3%

14,309

12,634

88.3%

11.0

 

Lafayette

12,773

9,803

76.7%

53,378

47,164

88.4%

11.6

 

Lafourche

3,837

3,253

84.8%

36,118

33,748

93.4%

8.7

 

La Salle

792

689

87.0%

7,897

8,648

109.5%

22.5

 

Lincoln

8,991

3,776

42.0%

15,056

11,417

75.8%

33.8

 

Livingston

2,068

2,032

98.3%

19,619

20,876

106.4%

8.1

 

Madison

4,781

3,953

82.7%

3,811

4,258

111.7%

29.0

 

Morehouse

6,959

4,006

57.6%

12,327

9,683

78.6%

21.0

 

Natchitoches

7,210

5,192

72.0%

15,763

11,856

75.2%

3.2

Voting Age Population

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Voting Age Population

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

(Continued)

898

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A25.15 (Continued)

Louisiana (continued)

County

Voting Age Population

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

 

Orleans

152,650

83,545

54.7%

 

Ouachita

17,110

9,365

 

Plaquemines

2,907

 

Pointe Coupee

 

Voting Age Population

Percentage Point (White-Black) Registered Voter Gap

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

236,597

137,296

58.0%

3.3

54.7%

55,320

39,882

72.1%

17.4

1,828

62.9%

11,290

11,216

99.3%

36.5

5,735

5,028

87.7%

6,901

6,900

100.0%

12.3

Rapides

18,758

9,558

51.0%

54,693

44,268

80.9%

30.0

 

Red River

2,111

1,757

83.2%

3,622

4,041

111.6%

28.3

 

Richland

4,472

2,311

51.7%

8,631

7,370

85.4%

33.7

 

Sabine

2,056

1,885

91.7%

9,784

9,867

100.8%

9.2

 

St. Bernard

1,367

983

71.9%

29,169

29,265

100.3%

28.4

 

St. Charles

3,913

3,452

88.2%

12,451

11,525

92.6%

4.3

 

St. Helena

2,709

2,831

104.5%

2,805

3,429

122.2%

17.7

 

St. James

4,796

4,185

87.3%

6,019

5,851

97.2%

9.9

 

St. John the Baptist

5,688

5,710

100.4%

7,467

8,124

108.8%

8.4

 

St. Landry

17,095

15,477

90.5%

29,218

28,259

96.7%

6.2

 

St. Martin

5,708

5,517

96.7%

12,586

12,748

101.3%

4.6

 

St. Mary

8,698

6,649

76.4%

25,450

22,002

86.5%

10.0

 

St. Tammany

6,209

4,346

70.0%

31,164

31,557

101.3%

31.3

 

Tangipahoa

10,610

7,428

70.0%

29,681

25,725

86.7%

16.7

 

Tensas

3,035

2,594

85.5%

2,565

2,877

112.2%

26.7

 

Terrebonne

5,927

3,416

57.6%

35,434

27,486

77.6%

19.9

 

Union

3,377

2,546

75.4%

8,556

7,926

92.6%

17.2

 

Vermillion

3,093

3,161

102.2%

23,297

22,753

97.7%

-4.5

 

Vernon

4,393

1,116

25.4%

36,572

13,392

36.6%

11.2

 

Washington

7,171

5,067

70.7%

18,767

18,539

98.8%

28.1

 

Webster

7,364

5,097

69.2%

18,775

15,891

84.6%

15.4

 

West Baton Rouge

3,856

3,026

78.5%

5,682

5,429

95.5%

17.1

 

West Carroll

1,261

762

60.4%

6,872

6,227

90.6%

30.2

 

West Feliciana

5,624

2,136

38.0%

3,004

1,791

59.6%

21.6

 

Winn

2,808

2,050

73.0%

7,785

7,475

96.0%

23.0

600,425

391,666

65.2%

1,644,732

1,335,027

81.2%

15.9

Totals North Carolina

Whites

Covered by VRA?

State

African Americans

 

Alamance

10,151

4,177

41.1%

53,792

35,587

66.2%

25.0

 

Alexander

840

690

82.1%

11,765

11,528

98.0%

15.8

 

Alleghany

140

75

53.6%

5,514

5,101

92.5%

38.9

Y

Anson

5,914

2,490

42.1%

8,897

6,554

73.7%

31.6

 

Ashe

120

78

65.0%

12,966

12,465

96.1%

31.1



Appendices 899

North Carolina (continued)

Covered by VRA?

State

African Americans

County

 

Avery

Y

Voting Age Population

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Percentage Point (White-Black) Registered Voter Gap

Whites Percent Registered

Voting Age Population

Registered Voters

65

26

40.0%

8,489

6,205

73.1%

33.1

Beaufort

6,704

2,960

44.2%

16,511

12,695

76.9%

32.7

Y

Bertie

6,117

4,764

77.9%

6,381

5,873

92.0%

14.2

Y

Bladen

5,528

3,420

61.9%

10,774

8,271

76.8%

14.9

 

Brunswick

3,834

3,272

85.3%

11,152

10,508

94.2%

8.9

 

Buncombe

8,386

4,287

51.1%

91,020

58,898

64.7%

13.6

 

Burke

2,679

1,496

55.8%

37,174

27,299

73.4%

17.6

 

Cabarrus

6,930

3,052

44.0%

42,843

26,834

62.6%

18.6

 

Caldwell

2,032

1,373

67.6%

33,866

24,628

72.7%

5.2

Y

Camden

1,066

522

49.0%

2,331

1,704

73.1%

24.1

 

Carteret

1,987

1,024

51.5%

18,867

15,052

79.8%

28.2

Y

Caswell

5,134

2,911

56.7%

6,727

4,736

70.4%

13.7

 

Catawba

4,450

3,225

72.5%

55,053

43,671

79.3%

6.9

 

Chatham

5,229

3,149

60.2%

14,231

11,418

80.2%

20.0

 

Cherokee

213

170

79.8%

10,723

10,239

95.5%

15.7

Y

Chowan

2,566

1,415

55.1%

4,297

3,601

83.8%

28.7

 

Clay

32

22

68.8%

3,505

3,935

112.3%

43.5

Y

Cleveland

7,859

2,073

26.4%

38,820

23,451

60.4%

34.0

 

Columbus

7,567

4,663

61.6%

21,120

16,023

75.9%

14.2

Y

Craven

8,953

3,827

42.7%

30,947

15,796

51.0%

8.3

Y

Cumberland

30,073

10,133

33.7%

103,405

37,311

36.1%

2.4

 

Currituck

1,045

622

59.5%

3,523

3,401

96.5%

37.0

 

Dare

308

174

56.5%

4,617

4,604

99.7%

43.2

 

Davidson

5,371

4,301

80.1%

56,915

46,486

81.7%

1.6

 

Davie

1,318

875

66.4%

11,208

10,332

92.2%

25.8

 

Duplin

7,294

3,864

53.0%

16,778

15,093

90.0%

37.0

 

Durham

27,621

13,715

49.7%

63,164

43,977

69.6%

20.0

Y

Edgecombe

13,039

6,824

52.3%

18,412

12,581

68.3%

16.0

 

Forsyth

29,131

22,559

77.4%

112,264

90,153

80.3%

2.9

Y

Franklin

6,222

3,788

60.9%

11,275

9,318

82.6%

21.8

Y

Gaston

10,348

4,885

47.2%

85,746

52,500

61.2%

14.0

Y

Gates

2,510

2,303

91.8%

2,837

2,447

86.3%

-5.5

 

Graham

4,071

4,277

105.1%

Y

Granville

8,252

4,769

57.8%

12,681

9,375

73.9%

16.1

Y

Greene

3,383

1,807

53.4%

5,434

4,405

81.1%

27.6

Y

Guilford

38,612

19,280

49.9%

151,545

104,498

69.0%

19.0

 

(Continued)

900

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A25.15 (Continued)

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Percentage Point (White-Black) Registered Voter Gap

18,965

16,206

85.5%

31.2

45.7%

25,987

17,558

67.6%

21.9

284

56.9%

27,847

19,426

69.8%

12.8

1,213

651

53.7%

28,051

21,714

77.4%

23.7

Hertford

7,069

4,697

66.4%

7,309

5,356

73.3%

6.8

Y

Hoke

3,656

1,856

50.8%

4,787

3,023

63.2%

12.4

 

Hyde

1,234

825

66.9%

2,281

1,992

87.3%

20.5

 

Iredell

6,924

2,912

42.1%

40,421

30,010

74.2%

32.2

 

Jackson

298

191

64.1%

14,232

11,039

77.6%

13.5

 

Johnston

7,234

3,669

50.7%

33,163

26,776

80.7%

30.0

 

Jones

2,282

1,799

78.8%

3,630

3,017

83.1%

4.3

Y

Lee

3,930

2,405

61.2%

15,550

13,356

85.9%

24.7

Y

Lenoir

11,265

6,040

53.6%

23,257

15,889

68.3%

14.7

 

Lincoln

1,890

1,647

87.1%

19,554

18,864

96.5%

9.3

 

McDowell

942

622

66.0%

19,172

13,618

71.0%

5.0

 

Macon

228

57

25.0%

10,785

9,657

89.5%

64.5

 

Madison

71

48

67.6%

11,315

9,518

84.1%

16.5

Y

Martin

6,038

4,172

69.1%

9,218

7,960

86.4%

17.3

 

Mecklenburg

48,424

26,568

54.9%

178,757

138,870

77.7%

22.8

 

Mitchell

18

11

61.1%

9,193

8,708

94.7%

33.6

 

Montgomery

2,610

1,532

58.7%

9,888

8,550

86.5%

27.8

 

Moore

5,432

2,554

47.0%

19,647

15,872

80.8%

33.8

Y

Nash

11,285

5,764

51.1%

26,195

18,788

71.7%

20.6

 

New Hanover

11,160

5,852

52.4%

42,992

31,230

72.6%

20.2

Y

Northampton

7,545

5,911

78.3%

7,326

5,949

81.2%

2.9

Y

Onslow

9,473

2,734

28.9%

59,373

18,352

30.9%

2.0

 

Orange

6,082

4,302

70.7%

35,586

27,315

76.8%

6.0

 

Pamlico

1,738

1,053

60.6%

4,326

3,221

74.5%

13.9

Y

Pasquotank

6,052

2,906

48.0%

11,367

7,682

67.6%

19.6

 

Pender

4,442

2,271

51.1%

6,990

5,737

82.1%

30.9

Y

Perquimans

1,979

955

48.3%

3,443

2,189

63.6%

15.3

Y

Person

4,574

3,929

85.9%

11,798

10,859

92.0%

6.1

Y

Pitt

14,152

5,671

40.1%

34,859

22,102

63.4%

23.3

 

Polk

843

573

68.0%

7,271

6,393

87.9%

20.0

 

Randolph

3,237

1,685

52.1%

47,181

36,407

77.2%

25.1

 

Richmond

6,282

4,738

75.4%

18,897

13,580

71.9%

-3.6

Y

Robeson

11,539

10,178

88.2%

24,173

18,915

78.2%

-10.0

North Carolina (continued)

Whites

Covered by VRA?

State

African Americans

County

Voting Age Population

Y

Halifax

13,715

7,446

54.3%

Y

Harnett

6,508

2,973

 

Haywood

499

 

Henderson

Y

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Voting Age Population



Appendices 901

South Carolina

North Carolina (continued)

Covered by VRA?

State

African Americans

County

Voting Age Population

Registered Voters

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Percentage Point (White-Black) Registered Voter Gap

Whites Percent Registered

Voting Age Population

Y

Rockingham

8,565

4,440

51.8%

39,218

25,363

64.7%

12.8

 

Rowan

8,979

4,155

46.3%

52,603

37,143

70.6%

24.3

 

Rutherford

2,864

1,353

47.2%

28,820

19,967

69.3%

22.0

 

Sampson

8,646

4,830

55.9%

19,579

16,509

84.3%

28.5

Y

Scotland

4,959

2,779

56.0%

11,082

7,468

67.4%

11.3

 

Stanly

2,692

1,557

57.8%

26,402

20,532

77.8%

19.9

 

Stokes

1,261

1,281

101.6%

14,421

15,880

110.1%

8.5

 

Surry

1,506

1,040

69.1%

32,947

24,252

73.6%

4.6

 

Swain

127

52

40.9%

4,551

4,873

107.1%

66.1

 

Transylvania

598

427

71.4%

12,270

11,015

89.8%

18.4

 

Tyrrell

879

554

63.0%

1,551

1,296

83.6%

20.5

Y

Union

5,491

2,495

45.4%

29,498

19,738

66.9%

21.5

Y

Vance

7,796

4,450

57.1%

12,952

9,101

70.3%

13.2

 

Wake

30,716

15,857

51.6%

121,160

96,420

79.6%

28.0

 

Warren

5,209

3,311

63.6%

4,394

3,572

81.3%

17.7

Y

Washington

3,053

2,004

65.6%

5,393

3,648

67.6%

2.0

 

Watauga

173

69

39.9%

17,089

11,992

70.2%

30.3

Y

Wayne

16,192

5,838

36.1%

37,041

20,805

56.2%

20.1

 

Wilkes

1,560

1,160

74.4%

30,896

25,205

81.6%

7.2

Y

Wilson

11,510

5,926

51.5%

25,016

17,527

70.1%

18.6

 

Yadkin

737

375

50.9%

16,049

12,449

77.6%

26.7

 

Yancey

112

66

58.9%

8,454

8,165

96.6%

37.7

Totals

644,511

350,560

54.4%

2,647,812

1,911,448

72.2%

17.8

Covered Jurisdictions

338,626

173,740

51.3%

960,827

602,950

62.8%

11.4

Uncovered Jurisdictions

305,885

176,820

57.8%

1,686,985

1,308,498

77.6%

19.8

3,753

1,826

48.7%

10,194

6,474

63.5%

14.9

11,958

6,487

54.2%

44,176

30,449

68.9%

14.7

 

Abbeville

 

Aiken

 

Allendale

3,330

3,087

92.7%

2,653

2,371

89.4%

-3.3

 

Anderson

10,890

4,100

37.6%

58,797

30,805

52.4%

14.7

 

Bamberg

4,846

2,971

61.3%

4,854

3,829

78.9%

17.6

 

Barnwell

3,849

3,357

87.2%

6,561

6,203

94.5%

7.3

 

Beaufort

9,117

4,680

51.3%

23,062

9,221

40.0%

-11.3

 

Berkeley

8,507

6,547

77.0%

21,880

14,173

64.8%

-12.2

 

Calhoun

3,362

2,081

61.9%

3,015

2,313

76.7%

14.8

 

Charleston

41,640

29,975

72.0%

113,708

62,890

55.3%

-16.7

 

Cherokee

3,838

2,548

66.4%

19,826

14,139

71.3%

4.9

 

Chester

6,199

3,130

50.5%

12,611

7,797

61.8%

11.3

 

Chesterfield

5,873

4,192

71.4%

14,743

11,272

76.5%

5.1 (Continued)

902

The African American Electorate

Appendix Table A25.15 (Continued)

South Carolina (continued)

Covered by VRA?

State

African Americans

County

Voting Age Population

Registered Voters

Percent Registered

Percentage Point (White-Black) Registered Voter Gap

Whites Percent Registered

Voting Age Population

Registered Voters

 

Clarendon

7,784

5,197

66.8%

6,440

5,400

83.9%

17.1

 

Colleton

6,798

4,587

67.5%

9,854

7,648

77.6%

10.1

 

Darlington

10,671

7,163

67.1%

21,865

16,204

74.1%

7.0

 

Dillon

5,776

2,969

51.4%

10,494

6,426

61.2%

9.8

 

Dorchester

6,174

5,610

90.9%

12,610

12,641

100.2%

9.4

 

Edgefield

4,167

2,539

60.9%

5,195

3,773

72.6%

11.7

 

Fairfield

6,242

4,162

66.7%

5,584

3,882

69.5%

2.8

 

Florence

17,632

10,819

61.4%

37,034

25,292

68.3%

6.9

 

Georgetown

8,003

6,717

83.9%

11,098

8,455

76.2%

-7.7

 

Greenville

22,806

10,819

47.4%

134,143

72,773

54.3%

6.8

 

Greenwood

8,015

3,621

45.2%

24,355

14,943

61.4%

16.2

 

Hampton

4,204

3,572

85.0%

5,440

4,138

76.1%

-8.9

 

Horry

8,726

5,733

65.7%

34,530

23,048

66.7%

1.0

 

Jasper

3,667

2,684

73.2%

3,270

2,548

77.9%

4.7

 

Kershaw

6,048

3,251

53.8%

15,260

11,855

77.7%

23.9

 

Lancaster

5,784

2,336

40.4%

21,297

14,091

66.2%

25.8

 

Laurens

7,992

3,054

38.2%

24,447

11,590

47.4%

9.2

 

Lee

5,278

4,262

80.8%

4,922

4,369

88.8%

8.0

 

Lexington

6,018

3,458

57.5%

49,784

40,251

80.9%

23.4

 

McCormick

2,501

1,492

59.7%

2,099

1,846

87.9%

28.3

 

Marion

8,348

4,856

58.2%

9,954

6,156

61.8%

3.7

 

Marlboro

6,229

2,990

48.0%

9,850

6,473

65.7%

17.7

 

Newberry

5,524

2,007

36.3%

14,220

10,383

73.0%

36.7

 

Oconee

2,402

949

39.5%

24,137

12,335

51.1%

11.6

 

Orangeburg

21,184

15,190

71.7%

21,074

16,035

76.1%

4.4

 

Pickens

3,263

997

30.6%

36,979

19,290

52.2%

21.6

 

Richland

43,810

28,555

65.2%

114,182

59,614

52.2%

-13.0

 

Saluda

2,560

1,454

56.8%

6,464

4,575

70.8%

14.0

 

Spartanburg

20,614

8,417

40.8%

93,606

51,303

54.8%

14.0

 

Sumter

17,602

8,772

49.8%

28,903

14,263

49.3%

-0.5

 

Union

4,583

3,136

68.4%

14,391

11,285

78.4%

10.0

 

Williamsburg

10,449

8,202

78.5%

8,686

7,083

81.5%

3.0

 

York

11,532

6,559

56.9%

42,660

24,398

57.2%

0.3

429,548

261,110

60.8%

1,200,907

736,302

61.3%

0.5

Totals

Sources: United States Commission on Civil Rights, The Voting Rights Act: Ten Years After (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1975), pp. 366–376.

Cumulative Bibliography T

he following bibliography is by no means a complete listing of works in this subject area, but it does provide the reader with a list of the sources used in this study that will be most fruitful for further research. The interested reader may wish to consult the overall literature review in Chapter 2 as well as the review of Voting Rights Act literature in Chapter 25, and to look at the chapters on a particular era or topic of interest to see the discussion of key texts. We have separated a few sources from the general bibliography: key data sources, government documents and primary sources, and other periodicals and online resources. For sources written by historic figures, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., look first at the Government Documents and Primary Sources section.

Key Data Sources Geospatial and Statistical Data Center. Historical Census Browser. Charlottesville: University of Virginia, retrieved April 13, 2008. http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/index.html. ICPSR Study No. 1, United States Historical Election Returns, 1824–1968, 2nd ICPSR ed. [Computer File]. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research, retrieved June 2002. http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR00001. Clubb, Jerome M., William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale. ICPSR Study No. 8611, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840–1972 [Computer File]. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, retrieved June 2002. http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR08611. Haines, Michael R. ICPSR Study No. 2896, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 [Computer File]. Hamilton, NY: Colgate University/Ann Arbor, Michigan: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, downloaded June 14, 2009. http://dx.doi.org:10.3886/ICPSR02896. Bartley, Numan V. and Hugh D. Graham. ICPSR Study No. 72, Southern Primary and General Election Data, 1946–1972 [Computer File]. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, downloaded June 7, 2010. http://dx.doi .org:10.3886/ICPSR00072. The Sentencing Project Interactive Map. http://www.sentencingproject. org/map/map.cfm#map. Table Series Z 1–19: “Estimated Population of American Colonies: 1610 to 1780.” Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2, 1168. Washington, D.C: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975. Table Series Z 24–132: “Population Censuses Taken in the Colonies and States During the Colonial and Pre–Federal Period: 1624–25 to 1786.” Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2, 1169–1171. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975.

Table Series Z 50–59: “Population Censuses Taken in the Colonies and States During the Colonial and Pre-Federal Period: 1624–25 to 1786.” Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2, 1169–1171. Washington, D.C.: Bureau of the Census, 1975. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1909. A Century of Population Growth, from the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth, 1790–1900. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1909. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negro Population in the United States, 1790–1915. New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1968.

Government Documents and Primary Sources “1830—Philadelphia Constitution of the American Society of Free Persons of Colour and the Proceedings of the Convention.” In A Survey of the Negro Convention Movement, 1830–1861, edited by Howard Bell, iii–12. New York: Arno Press, 1969. “1855—Philadelphia Proceedings of the Colored National Convention.” In A Survey of the Negro Convention Movement, 1830–1861, edited by Howard Bell, 7. “1864—Syracuse Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men.” In A Survey of the Negro Convention Movement, 1830–1861, edited by Howard Bell, 7. The American Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Independent Events of the Year 1867. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1868. The American Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Independent Events of the Year 1868. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1869. The American Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Independent Events of the Year 1869. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1870. The American Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Independent Events of the Year 1870. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1871. “Appeal from Executive Board National Equal Rights League, 1864.” In A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, edited by Herbert Aptheker, 526. New York: Citadel Press, 1959. “The Appeal of Forty Thousand Disfranchised Citizens of Pennsylvania.” In A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States: From Colonial Times Through the Civil War, Vol. 1, edited by Herbert Aptheker, 176–178. New York: Citadel Press, 1967. “Complaint Against the Georgia Photo ID Amendment, September 19, 2005.” In The Voting Rights Act: Securing the Ballot, edited by Richard M. Valelly, 345–351. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2006. “Reauthorization of the 1965 Voting Rights Act: What Expires and What Does Not.” In The Voting Rights Act: Securing the Ballot, edited by Richard M. Valelly, 353–354. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2006. “Senator Barack Obama Supports Renewal of the VRA.” In Defining Moments: The Voting Rights Act of 1965, edited by Laurie Collier Hillstrom, 212–215. Detroit: Omnigraphics, 2009. “South Carolina v. Katzenbach, Decided March 7, 1966.” In The Voting Rights Act: Securing the Ballot, edited by Richard M. Valelly, 271 and 272. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2006.

904

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“Voting Rights Act Extension, June 29, 1982.” In The Voting Rights Act: Securing the Ballot, edited by Richard M. Valelly, 307. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006. Bureau of the Census. A Century of Population Growth. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1909. ———. Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 Part 2. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975. Chatham County, Georgia. Oath of Voters: 1915–1916: Colored. 1 vol. Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1915–1916. ———. Oath of Voters: 1920–1921: Colored. 5 vol. Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1920–1921. ———. Oath of Voters: 1924–1926: Colored. 1 vol. Chatham County, GA: Chatham County, 1924–1926. Clinton, Hillary. “Clinton’s Selma Speech; Text as Delivered.” Chicago Sun-Times, reported by Lynn Sweet. March 6, 2007. http://blogs .suntimes.com/sweet/2007/03/Clintons_selma_speech_text.html, pp. 2–3. Commission on Federal Election Reform. Building Confidence in U.S. Elections: Report of the Commission on Federal Election Reforms. Washington, D.C.: Center for Democracy and Election Management—American University, September 2005. Illinois General Assembly. “Illinois State Representatives, 97th General Assembly,” http://www.ilga.gov/house/default.asp, accessed December 14, 2011. ———. “Illinois State Senators, 97th General Assembly,” http://www.ilga .gov/senate, accessed December 14, 2011. Illinois House Democrats. “Illinois House Legislative Black Caucus Homepage.” http://www.housedem.state.il.us/constituents/ blackcaucus.htm, accessed December 14, 2011. Illinois Secretary of State. Illinois Blue Book, 1876–1944. Springfield: Illinois Secretary of State, 1876–1944. Johnson, Andrew. “Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, May 29, 1865.” In A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897, vol. 6., edited by James D. Richardson, 310–312. 1920. Available online at TeachingAmericanHistory.org. Joint Committee on Printing. Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1774–1989. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1988. King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Introduction.” In The Negro Politician: His Success and Failure, edited by Edward Clayton, vii–viii. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 1964. King, Martin Luther, Jr., and James Melvin Washington. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991. Langston, John M. Freedom and Citizenship: Selected Lectures and Addresses. Washington, D.C.: Mnemosyne Publishing, 1883. ———. From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol. New York: Arno Press, 1894. Lincoln, Abraham. “The Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction,” December 8, 1863, in United States, Statutes at Large, Treaties, and Proclamations of the United States of America, Vol. 13. Boston, 1866. Louisiana Department of State. Democratic Primary Election Returns, Elections Held January 15, 1952 and February 19, 1952. Baton Rouge, 1952. ———. Democratic Primary Election Returns, Election Held January 17, 1956. Baton Rouge, 1956. McKelvy, David, Margaret McKelvy Bird, and Daniel W. Crofts. “Notes and Documents: Soldier Voting in 1864: The David McKelvy Diary,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 115, No. 3 (July 1991): 371–413. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Disfranchisement of Colored Americans in the Presidential Election of 1920. New York: NAACP Pamphlet, n.d. National Convention of the Colored Men of America. Proceedings of the National Convention of the Colored Men of American Held in Washington, D.C., on January 13, 14, 15, and 16. Washington, D.C.: Great Republic Book and Job Printing Establishment, 1869.

National Equal Rights League. Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the National Equal Rights League Held in Cleveland, Ohio, October 19, 20, and 21, 1865. Philadelphia: E. C. Markley and Sons, 1865. Obama, Barack. “Selma Voting Rights March Commemoration at Brown Chapel.” American Rhetoric Online Speech Bank. Delivered in Selma, Alabama, March 4, 2007. http://americanrhetoric.com/ barackobamaspeeches.htm. Obama, Barack. “Senate Floor Speech on Renewing Expired Provisions of Voting Rights Act.” American Rhetoric Online Speech Bank. Delivered in Washington, D.C., July 20, 2006. http:// americanrhetoric.com/barackobamaspeeches.htm. State of Georgia, Department of Archives and History. The Georgia Official and Statistical Register 1967–1968. Atlanta: Georgia Secretary of State, 1969. http://statregister.galileo.usg.edu/ statregister/view?docId=statregister/stat1967/stat1967-0005.xml. Texas Secretary of State. “Register of Elected and Appointed State and County Officials 1962–1966.” In Election Register: 1838–1972. Austin: Texas State Archives Microfilmed Copy, 1838–1972. U.S. Bureau of the Census. U.S. Department of Commerce. Voting and Registration in the Election of November 1966. Current Population Reports, Population Characteristics. Series P–20, No. 174. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, August 8, 1968. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. 1961 Commission on Civil Rights Report Book I: Voting. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1961. http://www.law.umaryland.edu/marshall/usccr/ documents/cr11961bk1.pdf. ———. Civil Rights ’63: 1963 Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1963. http://www.crmvet.org/docs/ccr_63_civil_rights.pdf. ———. Department of Justice Voting Rights Enforcement for the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election: A Briefing Before the United States Commission on Civil Rights Held in Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, July 2009. http://www .usccr.gov/pubs/DOJVotingRights2008PresidentialElection.pdf. ———. Hearings Before the United States Commission on Civil Rights: Voting. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1959. ———. Hearings Before the United States Commission on Civil Rights: Hearings Held in New Orleans, Louisiana, September 27 and 28, 1960, and May 5 and 6, 1961. Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1961. http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/rvalell1/ docs/hearingneworleanslouisiana.pdf. ———. Political Participation: A Study of the Participation by Negroes in the Electoral and Political Processes in Ten Southern States Since Passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1968. ———. Reauthorization of The Temporary Provisions of the Voting Rights Act: An Examination of the Act’s Section 5 Preclearance Provision: A Briefing Before the United States Commission on Civil Rights, October 7, 2005. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, April 2006. http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/Re_VRA_09-02-11 .pdf. ———. Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights 1959. Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1959. http:// www.law.umaryland.edu/marshall/usccr/documents/cr11959.pdf. ———. Voting: Hearings Held in Montgomery, Alabama. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959. ———. Voting in Mississippi: A Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights 1965. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965. http://www.crmvet.org/docs/ccr_65_voting_ms.pdf. ———. Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election. Washington, D.C.: Governmental Printing Office, June 2001. http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/main.htm. ———. The Voting Rights Act: The First Months. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1965 ———. The Voting Rights Act: Ten Years After. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975. ———. The Voting Rights Act: Unfulfilled Goals. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1981.

———. Voting Rights Enforcement and Reauthorization: The Department of Justice’s Record of Enforcing the Temporary Voting Rights Act Provisions. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, May 2006. http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/051006VRAStatReport.pdf. U.S. Congress. House. Committee on the Census. Apportionment of Representatives: Hearings before the Committee on the Census on H.R. 14498, H.R. 15021, H.R. 15158, and H.R. 15217. 66th Cong., 3d sess. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1921. U.S. Congress. House. Committee on House Administration. “Black Americans in Congress - Jefferson Franklin Long, Representative from Georgia.” Retrieved November 11, 2011. http://baic.house .gov/member-profiles/profile.html?intID=7 ———. Committee on House Administration. Black Americans in Congress, 1870–2007. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2008. ———. Committee on the Judiciary. Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio: Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2005. ———. Office of the Clerk. “Party Divisions in the House of Representatives: (1789 to Present).” http://clerk.house.gov/art_ history/house_history/partyDiv.html, accessed January 11, 2010. ———. “General Orders—Reconstruction: Letter from the Secretary of War in answer to a Resolution of the House of February 3, 1868, communicating, copies of all General and Special Orders promulgated by the several commanders of the military districts of the south for the execution of the reconstruction laws.” 40th Cong, 2d sess, Ex. Doc. 342. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1868. U.S. Congress. Senate. “Letter of the General of the Army of the United States Communicating, In Compliance with a resolution of the Senate of December 5, 1867, a statement of the number of white and colored voters registered in each of the States subject to the reconstruction acts of Congress, with other statistics relative to the same subject,” 40th Cong., 2d sess., S. Ex. Doc. 53, May 13, 1868. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1868. ———. Report and Testimony of the Select Committee of the United States Senate to Investigate the Causes of the Removal of Negroes from the Southern States to the Northern States. 46th Cong., 2d sess., S. Rep 693. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880. U.S. Department of Justice, “About Federal Observers and Election Monitoring,” http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/votexamine/activ_ exam.php. U.S. Government Accountability Office. Information on Employment Litigation, Housing and Civil Enforcement, Voting, and Special Litigation Sections’ Enforcement Efforts from Fiscal Years 2001 Through 2007. Washington, DC: Government Accountability Office, 2009. U.S. Government Accountability Office. GAO-10-75: U.S. Department of Justice: Information on Employment Litigation, Housing and Civil Enforcement, Voting, and Special Litigation Sections’ Enforcement Efforts from Fiscal Years 2001 through 2007. Washington, D.C.: Government Accountability Office, October 2009. http://www.gao .gov/new.items/d1075.pdf Virginia Office of the Attorney General Robert Y. Button. The Constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965: A Response to the Attorney General of the United States. Richmond: Virginia Commission on Constitutional Government, 1965. West Virginia Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics. “The Negro in West Virginia.” Report of the Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics of the State of West Virginia to Governor Ephraim F. Morgan. Charleston: Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics, 1921–1922. West Virginia Clerk of the State Senate. West Virginia Legislative Hand Book and Manual and Official Register, 1919. Charleston: Tribune Printing Company, 1919. West Virginia Secretary of State. State of West Virginia Official Returns of the General Election, November, 1952. Charleston: Secretary of State Office, 1952.

Cumulative Bibliography 905

Other Periodicals and Online Resources “2 Negroes on State Ballot: Smith, Lindsey are First to Make Race.” Mississippi Free Press, April 21, 1962: 1. “200,000 Negroes to Vote: Seek Four Times Total of Gov. Barnett in 1959.” Mississippi Free Press, September 21, 1963: 1. “733 Vote for Freedom: Patterson Threatens $100 Fines, Jail Terms, but Greenwood Negroes Turn in 400 Ballots.” Mississippi Free Press, August 10, 1963: 1, 4. “90,000 Vote for Henry: Johnson Refused Consent of Governed.” Mississippi Free Press, November 9, 1963, pp. 1, 4, 8. “COFO Maps Future.” Mississippi Free Press, November 16, 1963: 8. “COFO Team: Henry and King—‘We Will Be Free.’” Mississippi Free Press, October 19, 1963: 1. “Freedom Democratic Party Given Boost: Crowds Turn Out for King.” Mississippi Free Press, July 25, 1964: 2. “Governor Candidate Henry: ‘We Shall Vote for Freedom.’” Mississippi Free Press, October 12, 1963, pp. 1–2. “June 5th Was Historic Day for Negroes: Two Candidates Try for U.S. Congress: Vote Showed Negro ‘Block’ Vote Just Does Not Exist.” Mississippi Free Press, June 30, 1962: 4 “La. Negro Lawyer Seeks Dem. Governor’s Nomination” Jet Magazine (April 11, 1963): 7. “Lindsey for Congress: Rally Set for Sunday.” Mississippi Free Press, April 26, 1962: 1, 4. “Make-Believe Vote.” Newsweek 62 (October 28, 1963): 23. “Name New Orleans Negro Assistant District Attorney.” Jet Magazine (May 29, 1958): 11. “Negro Attorney to Run for New Orleans Council.” Jet Magazine (December 17, 1953): 7. “Negro Loses Council Race in New Orleans.” Jet Magazine (February 20, 1958): 7. “Negroes Pick Candidate: Convention to Set Off Mighty Freedom Vote.” Mississippi Free Press, October 5, 1963: 1, 4. “Negro Republicans in Three States.” New York Times, April 29, 1920: 2. “Negro Runs for Louisiana Governor.” Jet Magazine (January 17, 1952): 10. “Negroes to File Freedom Votes.” Mississippi Free Press, August 24, 1963: 1. “New Voters Find ‘Way to Freedom.’” Mississippi Free Press, August 31, 1963: 1, 8. “Rev. King—Lt. Gov. Candidate: A Pulpit for Freedom.” Mississippi Free Press, October 26, 1963: 1 “Rev. Merrill Winston Lindsey, Announces Candidacy for U.S. Congress.” Mississippi Free Press, April 7, 1962: 1, 4. “Smith Announces for Congress: R. L. T. Smith Will be First Negro to Run in 20th Century.” Mississippi Free Press, December 16, 1961. “Smith’s Campaign Committee Sponsors Dinners.” Mississippi Free Press, April 28, 1962: 1. “State Law Provides Way for Unregistered to Vote.” Mississippi Free Press, August 3, 1963 “The First Colored Convention.” The Anglo-American Magazine 1 (October 1859): 3, in Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions, 1830–1864, edited by Howard Bell, New York: Arno Press, 1969. “‘Underground Ballot’ Necessary as Henry Nears Election.” Mississippi Free Press, November 2, 1963 “Unregistered Negroes to Cast Protest Votes.” Mississippi Free Press, August 3, 1963: 1. “With Political Organization: Negroes Wield Ballot Power.” Mississippi Free Press, October 26, 1963: 1 Alvarez, Lizette “Republican Legislators Push to Tighten Voting Rules.” New York Times, May 29, 2011, http://www.nytimes .com/2011/05/29/us/politics/29vote.html?_r=1&emc=eta1. Fikes, Robert. “Roberts, Frederick M. (1879–1952),” BlackPast.org. http://www.blackpast.org/?q=aaw/roberts-frederick-m-1879-1952, accessed November 25, 2011. Gordy, Cynthia. “Donna Brazile: Voter Photo ID Not the Answer.” The Root, May 4, 2011. http://www.theroot.com/views/ donna-brazile-voter-photo-id-not-answer.

906

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Herron, Jeannine. “Underground Election.” Nation 197 (December 7, 1963): 387–389. Holt, Len. “The Freedom Vote Triumphs Over Terror.” National Guardian, November 21, 1963): 7. Kestenbaum, Lawrence. “The Political Graveyard,” http:// politicalgraveyard.com. Lawrence, Sarah and Jeremy Travis. “The New Landscape of Imprisonment: Mapping America’s Prison Expansion.” 2004. http://www.urban.org/urlprint.cfm?ID=8848. Levitt, Justin. “The Truth About Voter Fraud.” http://www.truthabout fraud.org/pdf/TruthAboutVoterFraud.pdf, accessed June 14, 2011. McCormack, Kathy. “Dying Communities See Salvation in New Prisons.” Associated Press, October 9, 2010. Minnite, Lorraine C. “The Politics of Voter Fraud.” http://www.bradblog .com/Docs/PoliticsofVoterFraudFinal.pdf, accessed June 14, 2011. Rosenmerkel, Sean P., Matthew R. Durose, and Donald J. Farole, Jr. “Felony Sentences in State Courts, 2006 – Statistical Tables.” Table 3.7. Bureau of Justice Statistics, December 30, 2009. http://bjs.ojp .usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=2152. Seelye, Katharine. “Senators Hear Bitter Words on Florida Vote.” New York Times, June 28, 2001: 1.

General Bibliography Abney, F. Glenn. Mississippi Election Statistics, 1900–1967. University, MS: Bureau of Governmental Research, 1968. Achen, Christopher and W. Phillips Shively. Cross-Level Inference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Adams, James Truslow. “Disfranchisement of Negroes in New England.” American Historical Review 30, no. 3 (April 1925): 543–547. Akari, Roy. “Black Suffrage in Bucks County: The Election of 1837.” Bucks County Historical Society Journal (Spring 1974): 28–39. Aldrich, John. Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2010. Alexander, Thomas. Political Reconstruction in Tennessee. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1950. Ali, Omar H. In the Balance of Power: Independent Black Politics and Third-Party Movements in the United States. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. ———. In The Lion’s Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886– 1900. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. Alilunas, Leo. “The Rise of the ‘White Primary’ Movement as a Means of Barring the Negro From The Polls,” Journal of Negro History 25, no. 2 (April 1940): 161–172. Alt, James E. “The Impact of the Voting Rights Act on Black and White Voter Registration in the South.” In Quiet Revolution in the South, edited by Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman, 351–377. Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1994. Ambler, Charles. “Disfranchisement in West Virginia: I & II.” Yale Review 14 (May and August 1905): 38–59, 155–180. Anderson, Eric. Race and Politics in North Carolina, 1872–1901: The Black Second. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. Archer, J. Clark, Stephen Lavin, Kenneth Martis, and Fred Shelley. Historical Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, 1788–2004. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2006. Bacote, Clarence A. “The Negro in Atlanta Politics.” Phylon 16, no. 4 (Fourth Quarter 1955): 333–350. ———. The Negro in Georgia Politics, 1880–1908. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1955. ———. “Negro Officeholders in Georgia under President McKinley.” Journal of Negro History 44, no. 3 (July 1959): 217–39. ———. “The Negro Voter in Georgia Politics, Today.” Journal of Negro Education 26 (Summer 1957): 307–318. Baker, Jean. Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.

Baker, Riley. “Negro Voter Registration in Louisiana, 1879–1964.” Louisiana Studies 4 (Winter 1965): 332–349. Barnes, Elsie M. and Ronald E. Proctor. “Black Politics in Tidewater, Virginia.” In Black Politics and Black Political Behavior: A Linkage Analysis, edited by Hanes Walton, Jr., 83–96. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994. Barnes, James Franklin. “Negro Voting in Mississippi.” Master’s thesis, University of Mississippi, 1955. Bartley, Numan. From Thurmond to Wallace: Political Tendencies in Georgia, 1948–1968. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970. Bartley, Numan and Hugh Graham. Southern Elections: County and Precinct Data, 1950–1972. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1978. ———. Southern Politics and the Second Reconstruction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Bates, Daisy. The Long Shadow of Little Rock. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2004. Beasley, Delilah L. Negro Trail Blazers of California: A Compilation of Records from the California Archives in the Bancroft Library. Los Angeles: R and E Research Associates, 1919. Beatty, Bess. A Revolution Gone Backward: The Black Response to National Politics, 1876–1896. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987. Belfrage, Sally. Freedom Summer. New York: Viking, 1965. Bell, Howard H. “National Negro Convention of the Middle 1840’s: Moral Suasion vs. Political Action.” Journal of Negro History 42, no. 4 (October 1957): 247–260. ———. “The Negro Convention Movement, 1830–1860: New Perspectives.” Negro History Bulletin (February 1951): 103–105. ———. A Survey of the Negro Convention Movement, 1830–1861. New York: Arno Press, 1969. Belz, Herman. “Origins of Negro Suffrage During the Civil War.” Southern Studies 17 (Summer 1978): 115–130. Benedict, Michael Les. “Southern Democrats in the Crisis of 1876–1877: A Reconsideration of Reunion and Reaction.” Journal of Southern History 46, no. 4 (November 1980): 489–524. Bensel, Richard F. The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Benson, Lee. “An Approach to the Scientific Study of Past Public Opinion.” Public Opinion Quarterly 31, no. 4 (Winter 1967): 522–567. ———. The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. ———. “Research Problems in American Political Historiography.” In Common Frontiers of the Social Sciences, edited by Mirra Komarovsky, 113–183. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957. Benton, Josiah. Voting in the Field: A Forgotten Chapter of the Civil War. Boston: Privately Printed, 1915. Berman, Daniel. A Bill Becomes a Law: The Civil Rights Act of 1960. New York: Macmillan, 1962. Bernd, Joseph L. Grass Roots Politics in Georgia. Atlanta: Emory University Research Committee, 1960. ———. “White Supremacy and the Disfranchisement of Blacks in Georgia, 1946.” Georgia Historical Quarterly 66, no. 4 (Winter 1982): 492–513. Bernd, Joseph L. and Lynwood M. Holland. “Recent Restrictions upon Negro Suffrage: The Case of Georgia.” Journal of Politics 21, no. 3 (August 1959): 487–513. Berry, Mary Frances. And Justice for All: The United States Commission on Civil Rights and the Continuing Struggle for Freedom in America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. ———. “Slavery, the Constitution, and the Founding Fathers: The African American Vision.” In African Americans and the Living Constitution, edited by John Hope Franklin and Genna Rae McNeil, 11–20. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 1995. Black, Earl and Merle. The Rise of Southern Republicans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Blue, Frederick J. The Free-Soilers: Third Party Politics, 1848–54. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973.

Boller, Paul, Jr. Presidential Campaigns. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Bositis, David. Black State Legislators: A Survey and Analysis of Black Leadership in State Capitals. Washington, D.C.: Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 1992. Brewer, William M. “The Poll Tax and the Poll Taxers.” Journal of Negro History 29, no. 3 (July 1944): 260–299. Brice, Donald and John Barron. An Index to the 1867 Voters’ Registration of Texas. Bowie, MD: Heritage Book, 2000. Brittain, Joseph M. “Some Reflections on Negro Suffrage and Politics in Alabama—Past and Present.” Journal of Negro History 47, no. 2 (April 1962): 127–138. Brodsky, Alyn. Grover Cleveland: A Study in Character. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Brooke, Edward. Bridging the Divide: My Life: Senator Edward W. Brooke. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Brooks Williams, Erma. Political Empowerment of Illinois’ AfricanAmerican State Lawmakers from 1877 to 2005. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 2008. Brown, Elsa Barkley. “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom.” Public Culture 7 (Fall 1994): 107–146. ———. “To Catch the Vision of Freedom: Reconstructing Southern Black Women’s Political History, 1865–1880.” In African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965, edited by Ann D. Gordon, et al., 66–99. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. Bullock, Henry Allen. “The Expansion of Negro Suffrage in Texas.” Journal of Negro Education 26, no. 3, The Negro Voter in the South (Summer 1957): 369–377. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2293420. Bunche, Ralph J. A Brief and Tentative Analysis of Negro Leadership. Edited and with an introduction by Jonathan Scott Holloway. New York: New York University Press, 2005. ———. “Disfranchisement of the Negro.” In The Negro Caravan, edited by Sterling A. Brown, Arthur P. Davis, and Ulysses G. Lee, 48–59. New York: Dryden Press, 1941. ———. The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR. Edited by Dewey Grantham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. Burcher, William M. “A History of Soldier Voting in the State of New York.” New York History 25 (1944): 459–481. Burke, Robert F. The Eisenhower Administration and Black Civil Rights. Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1984. Burke, Albie. Federal Regulation of Congressional Elections in Northern Cities, 1871–1894. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1968. Burnham, Walter Dean. Presidential Ballots, 1836–1892. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955. ———. “Printed Sources.” In Analyzing Electoral History, edited by Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, 39–74. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1981. Burstein, Paul. Discrimination, Jobs, and Politics: The Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity in the United States Since the New Deal, with a New Introduction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Burton, Orville Vernon, Terence Finnegan, Peyton McCray, and James W. Loewen. “South Carolina.” In Quiet Revolution in the South, edited by Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman, 191–232. Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1994. Calhoun, Charles. Conceiving a New Republic: The Republican Party and the Southern Question, 1869–1900. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006. Callcott, Margaret Law. The Negro in Maryland Politics, 1870–1912. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969. Campbell, Tracy. Deliver The Vote: A History of Election Fraud, an American Political Tradition—1724–2004. New York: Ca & Graf Publishers, 2006. Carefoot, Jean. Guide to Genealogical Resources in the Texas State Archives. Austin: Archives Division, Texas State Library, 1984. Caro, Robert A. Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. ———.The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.

Cumulative Bibliography 907 Cheek, William F. “A Negro Runs for Congress: John Mercer Langston and the Virginia Campaign of 1888.” Journal of Negro History 52, no. 1 (January 1967): 14–34. Cheek, William F. and Aimee L. Cheek. John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829–1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Chin, Gabriel J. “Felon Disenfranchisement and Democracy in the Late Jim Crow Era.” Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, 5, no. 1 (Fall 2007): 329–340. ———. “Reconstruction, Felon Disenfranchisement, and the Right to Vote: Did the Fifteenth Amendment Repeal Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment?” Georgetown Law Journal 92, no. 2 (January 2004): 259–316. Clark Hine, Darlene. Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas. New York: KTO Press, 1979. ———. Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas, New Ed. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. Clifford, Clark. Counsel to the President: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 1991. Colston, Freddie C. The Influence of the Black Legislators in the Ohio House of Representatives. Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1972. Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to U.S. Elections, 5th ed. 2 vol. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2005. Converse, Philip E. “Change in the American Electorate.” In The Human Meaning of Social Change, edited by Angus Campbell and Philip E. Converse, 263–337. New York: Russell Sage, 1972. Conyers, John and Anita Miller. What Went Wrong in Ohio: The Conyers Report on the 2004 Presidential Election. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 2005. Cook, Samuel DuBois. “Political Movements and Organizations.” Journal of Politics 26, no. 1 (February 1964): 130–153. ———. “Review of The Petitioners by Loren Miller.” Journal of Negro History 51, no. 3 (July 1966): 220–222. Cornish, Dudley Taylor. “The Union Army as a School for Negroes.” Journal of Negro History 37, no. 4 (October 1952): 368–382. Cothran, Tilman C. and William M. Phillips, Jr. “Expansion of Negro Suffrage in Arkansas.” Journal of Negro Education 26 (Summer 1957): 287–296. Cox, Lawanda and John H. “Negro Suffrage and Republican Politics: The Problem of Motivation in Reconstruction Historiography.” Journal of Southern History 38, no. 3 (August 1967): 303–330. Cripps, Thomas. The Lily-White Republicans: The Negro, the Party, and the South in the Progressive Era. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, 1967. Cuomo, Mario and Harold Holzer eds. Lincoln on Democracy. New York: HarperPerennial, 1990. Currie, James T. “The Beginnings of Congressional Reconstruction in Mississippi.” Journal of Mississippi History 35 (August 1973): 267–286. Curry, Richard, ed. Radicalism, Racism, and Party Realignment: The Border States During Reconstruction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969. Davidson, Chandler. Minority Vote Dilution. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1984. Davis, Abraham L. and Barbara Luck Graham. The Supreme Court, Race, and Civil Rights. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995. Davis, Hugh. “The Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League and the Northern Black Struggle for Legal Equality, 1864–1877.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 26, no. 4 (October 2002): 611–634. DenBoer, Gordon, Lucy Trumbull Brown, Alfred Lindsay Skerpan, and Charles Hagermann, eds. The Documentary History of the First Federal Elections, 1788–1790, Volume II. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984. DenBoer, Gordon. The Documentary History of the First Federal Elections, 1788–1790, Volume III. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.

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———. The Documentary History of the First Federal Elections, 1788– 1790, Volume IV. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. Deskins, Donald R., Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett. Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming. Dickerson, Dennis. African American Preachers and Politics: The Careys of Chicago. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. Dinkin, Robert J. Voting in Revolutionary America: A Study of Elections in the Original Thirteen States, 1776–1789. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982. ———. Voting in Provincial America: A Study of Elections in the Thirteen Colonies, 1689–1776. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977. Dittmer, John. Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. ———. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Donaldson, Ivanhoe. “Notes From Southern Diaries: Ivanhoe Donaldson, SNCC Field Worker.” Freedomways 4 (Winter 1964): 139–142. Doyle, Judith Kaaz. “Maury Maverick and Racial Politics in San Antonio, Texas, 1938–1941.” Journal of Southern History 53, no. 2 (May 1987): 194–224. Drago, Edmund L. Black Politicians and Reconstruction Georgia: A Splendid Failure. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. ———. “Georgia’s First Black Voter Registrars During Reconstruction.” Georgia Historical Quarterly 78, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 760–793. ———. Hurrah for Hampton: Black Red Shirts in South Carolina During Reconstruction. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1998. Dubin, Michael. United States Congressional Elections, 1788–1997: The Official Results of Elections of the 1st through 105th Congress. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 1998. ———. United States Presidential Elections, 1788–1860: The Official Results by County and State. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2002. DuBois, Ellen Carol. “Taking Law into Their Own Hands: Voting Women during Reconstruction.” In Voting and the Spirit of American Democracy: Essays on the History of Voting and Voting Rights in America, edited by Donald W. Rogers, 67–82. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. DuBois, W.E.B. “A Colored Congressman.” Crisis 15 (February 1918): 163. ———. “From McKinley to Wallace, My Fifty Years as an Independent.” Masses & Mainstream 1 (August 1948): 3–14. Republished in Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois in Periodicals Edited by Others. Edited by H. Aptheker. Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson Organization, 59–65. ———. “Political Rebirth and the Office Seeker.” Crisis 21 (January 1921): 104. ———, ed. Selections From the Crisis. Millwood, New York: KrausThomson, 1983. Dulles, Foster Rhea. The Civil Rights Commission, 1957–1965. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1968. Dumas, Frederick. “The Black and Tan Faction of the Republican Party in Louisiana, 1908–1936.” New Orleans: Xavier University, M. A. Thesis, 1943. Dunbar, Willis F. and William G. Shade. “The Black Man Gains the Vote: The Centennial of ‘Impartial Suffrage’ in Michigan.” Michigan History 56, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 42–57. Dyer, Brainerd. “One Hundred Years of Negro Suffrage.” Pacific Historical Review 42, no. 1 (February 1968): 1–20. Dykstra, Robert R. and Harlan Hahn. “Northern Voters and Negro Suffrage: The Case of Iowa, 1868.” Public Opinion Quarterly 32, no. 2 (Summer 1968): 202–215. Eagles, Charles. Democracy Delayed: Congressional Reapportionment and Urban-Rural Conflict in the 1920s. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990. Edmonds, Helen. The Negro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina, 1894–1901. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1951.

Editors of Black Issues in Higher Education with Dara N. Byrne. The Unfinished Agenda of the Selma-Montgomery Voting Rights March. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2005. Eldersveld, Samuel and Hanes Walton, Jr. Political Parties in American Society, 2nd ed. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000. Elliot, Jeffrey. “Interview with Gilbert Lindsay: Black Politician.” Negro History Bulletin 40 (July–August 1977): 718–720. Evans, Rowland and Robert Novak. Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power: A Political Biography. New York: New American Library, 1966. Ewald, Alec. The Way We Vote: The Local Dimension of American Suffrage. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009. Farris, Charles D. “The Re-Enfranchisement of Negroes in Florida.” Journal of Negro History 39, no. 4 (October 1954): 259–283. Fenton, John H. “The Negro Voter in Louisiana.” Journal of Negro Education 26, no. 3 (Summer 1957): 319–328. Fenton, John H. and Kenneth N. Vines. “Negro Registration in Louisiana.” American Political Science Review 51, no. 3 (September 1957): 704–713. Field, Phyllis. The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982. ———. “Republicans and Black Suffrage in New York State: The Grass Roots Response.” Civil War History, Vol. 21, no. 2 (June 1975): 136–147. Finley, Keith. Delaying the Dream: Southern Senators and the Fight Against Civil Rights, 1938–1965. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. Fishel, Leslie H. Jr. “Northern Prejudice and Negro Suffrage, 1865– 1870.” Journal of Negro History 39, no. 1 (January 1954): 8–26. ———. “Wisconsin and Negro Suffrage.” Wisconsin Magazine of History 46, no. 3 (Spring 1963): 180–196. Fitrakis, Robert, Steven Rosenfeld, and Harvey Wasserman. What Happened in Ohio? A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election. New York: The New Press, 2006. Foner, Eric. Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction, rev. ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. ———. “Politics and Prejudice: The Free-Soil Party and the Negro, 1849–1852.” Journal of Negro History 50, no. 4 (October 1965): 239–256. ———. “Racial Attitudes of the New York Free-Soilers.” New York History 46, (October 1965): 311–329. Foner, Philip and George Walker, eds. Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840–1865, Vols. 1 and 2. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979 and 1980. Foner, Philip, ed. Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights. New York: Da Capo Press, 1992. Formisano, Ronald P. The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827–1861. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. ———. “The Edge of Caste: Colored Suffrage in Michigan, 1827–1861.” Michigan History 56, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 19–41. Foster, Loren, ed. The Voting Rights Act: Consequences and Implications. New York: Praeger, 1985. Fox, Dixon Ryan. “The Negro Vote in Old New York.” Political Science Quarterly 32, no. 2 (June 1917): 252–275. Frank, Joseph. With Ballot and Bayonet: The Political Socialization of American Civil War Soldiers. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. Franklin, John Hope. “Race and the Constitution in the Nineteenth Century.” In African Americans and the Living Constitution, edited by John Hope Franklin and Genna Rae McNeil, 21–32. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 1995. Franklin, John Hope and Alfred Moss, Jr. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 7th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994. Franklin, John Hope and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 9th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011.

Freedman, Eric and Stephen Jones, eds. African Americans in Congress: A Documentary History. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2008. Frye, Hardy. Black Parties and Political Power: A Case Study. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. Fund, John. How the Obama Administration Threatens to Undermine Our Elections, 2nd ed. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2008. ———. Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004. Gambill, Edward. Conservative Ordeal: Northern Democrats and Reconstruction, 1865–1868. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1981. Gamm, Gerald. The Making of New Deal Democrats: Voting Behavior and Realignment in Boston, 1920–1940. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Garrow, David. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: William Morrow, 1986. ———. Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978. Gillette, William. Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. ———. The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969. Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. “False Friends and Avowed Enemies: Southern African Americans and Party Allegiances in the 1920s.” In Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics From Civil War to Civil Rights, edited by Jane Dailey, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, and Bryant Simon, 219–238. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. ———. Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Ginzl, David J. “Lily-Whites versus Black-and-Tans: Mississippi Republicans During the Hoover Administration.” Journal of Mississippi History 42 (August 1980): 194–211. Gliozzo, Charles A. “John Jones: A Study of a Black Chicagoan.” Illinois Historical Journal 80, no. 3 (Autumn 1987): 177–188. Goldman, Robert. “A Free Ballot and a Fair Count”: The Department of Justice and the Enforcement of Voting Rights in the South, 1877– 1893. New York: Garland Publishing, 1990. Gomillion, C. G. “The Negro Voter in Alabama,” Journal of Negro Education 26, no. 3, The Negro Voter in the South (Summer 1957): 281–286. Gordon, Ann D. “Woman Suffrage (Not Universal Suffrage) by Federal Amendment.” In Votes for Women! The Woman Suffrage Movement in Tennessee, the South, and the Nation, edited by Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, 3–24. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. Gordon, Ann D., Bettye Collier Thomas, John Bracey, Ariene Avakian, and Joyce Borkman. African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. Gosnell, Harold F. Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. ———. “The Negro Vote in Northern Cities.” National Municipal Review 30, no. 5 (May 1941): 264–278. Gosnell, Harold F. and Robert E. Martin. “The Negro as Voter and Officeholder.” Journal of Negro Education 32, no. 4 (Autumn 1963): 415–425. Graham, Lawrence Otis. The Senator and the Socialite. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Grantham, Dewey W., Jr. “Georgia Politics and the Disfranchisement of the Negro.” Georgia Historical Quarterly 32, no. 1 (March 1948): 1–21. Greene, Evart and Virginia Harrington. American Population before the Federal Census of 1790. New York: Columbia University Press, 1932. Greenshaw, Wayne. Elephants in the Cottonfields: Ronald Reagan and the New Republican South. New York: Macmillan, 1982. Grimshaw, William. Bitter Fruit: Black Politics and the Chicago Machine, 1931–1991. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Cumulative Bibliography 909 Gross, Bella. Clarion Call: The History and Development of the Negro Convention Movement in the United States from 1817 to 1840. New York: Privately Printed, 1947. ———. “The First National Negro Convention.” Journal of Negro History 31, no. 4 (October 1946): 435–443. ———. “The Roots of the National Negro Convention Movement.” Negro History Bulletin 10, no. 2 (November 1946): 40–47. Guyot, Lawrence and Michael Thelwell. “The Politics of Necessity and Survival in Mississippi.” Freedomways 5 (Spring 1966): 120–132. ———. “Toward Independent Political Power.” Freedomways 6, no. 3 (Summer 1966): 246–254. Guzman, Jessie P. “Monroe Nathan Work and His Contributions: Background and Preparations for Life’s Career.” Journal of Negro History 34, no. 4 (October 1949): 428–461. Hahn, Alice. “The Exercise of the Electoral Franchise in Iowa in Constitutional Referendums, 1838–1933.” Master’s thesis, Drake University, 1933. Hahn, Michael. Alexander Twilight: Vermont’s African American Pioneer. Shelburne, Vermont: New England Press, 1998. Hahn, Steven. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay. The Federalist Papers. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2006. Hamilton, Charles V. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma. New York: Atheneum, 1991. ———. Minority Politics in Black Belt Alabama. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960. ———. The Bench and the Ballot: Southern Federal Judges and Black Voters. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Hanchett, William. “Yankee Law and the Negro in Nevada, 1861–1869.” Western Humanities Review 10 (Summer 1956): 241–49. Hancock, Harold B. “The Status of the Negro in Delaware After the Civil War, 1865–1875.” Delaware History 13, no. 1 (April 1968): 57–66. Hanks, Lawrence. The Struggle for Black Political Empowerment in Three Georgia Counties. Knoxville; University of Tennessee Press, 1987. Harding, Vincent. There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. New York; Vintage Books, 1981. Hargrove, Hondon. Black Union Soldiers in the Civil War. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1988. Harris, Frederick. Something Within: Religion in African-American Political Activism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Harris, Fred R. Deadlock or Decision: The U.S. Senate and the Rise of National Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Harris, William C. “Formulation of the First Mississippi Plan: The Black Code of 1865.” Journal of Mississippi History 29, no. 3 (August 1967): 181–201. Haskins, James. Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback. New York: Macmillan, 1973. Havel, James T. U.S. Presidential Candidates and the Elections, Vol. 1: The Candidates. New York: Macmillan Library Reference, 1996. ———. U.S. Presidential Candidates and the Elections, Vol. 2: The Elections, 1789–1992. New York: Macmillan Library Reference, 1996. Haworth, Paul. The Hayes-Tilden Disputed Presidential Election of 1876. Massachusetts: General Books, 2009. Haygood, Wil. King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. Heard, Alexander. A Two-Party South? Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952. Heard, Alexander and Donald Strong, eds. Southern Primaries and Elections, 1920–1949. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1950. Henry, Aaron with Constance Curry. Aaron Henry: The Fire Ever Burning. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. Hiller, Amy. “The Disfranchisement of Delaware Negroes in the Late Nineteenth Century.” Delaware History 13 (October 1968): 124–154.

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Valelly, Richard M., ed. The Voting Rights Act: Securing the Ballot. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2006. ———. The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Valien, Preston. “Expansion of Negro Suffrage in Tennessee,” Journal of Negro Education 26, no. 3, The Negro Voter in the South (Summer 1957): 362–368. Walker, Jack L. “Negro Voting in Atlanta, 1953–1961.” Phylon 24, no. 4 (4th Quarter 1963): 379–387. Wallace, D.D. “The Question of the Withdrawal of the Democratic Presidential Electors in South Carolina in 1876.” Journal of Southern History 8, no. 3 (August 1942): 374–385. Walters, Ronald W. Freedom Is Not Enough: Black Voters, Black Candidates, and American Presidential Politics. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2005. Walton, Hanes, Jr. “Another Force for Disfranchisement: Blacks and the Prohibitionists in Tennessee.” Journal of Human Relations (First Quarter 1971): 728–738. ———. African American Power and Politics: The Political Context Variable. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. ———. “Black Group Interest as Individual Intent: The Empirical Black Politics of Michael Dawson: A Book Review Essay.” The Black Scholar 25, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 48–51. ———. Black Political Parties: An Historical and Political Analysis. New York: Free Press, 1972. ———, ed. Black Politics and Black Political Behavior: A Linkage Analysis. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1994. ———. Black Politics: A Theoretical and Structural Analysis. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972. ———. “Black Presidential Participation and the Critical Election Theory.” In The Social and Political Implications of the 1984 Jesse Jackson Presidential Campaign, edited by Lorenzo Morris, 49–64. New York: Praeger, 1990. ———. Black Republicans: The Politics of the Black and Tans. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1972. ———. “Black Southern Politics: The Influences of Bunche, Martin and Key.” In Black Politics and Black Political Behavior: A Linkage Analysis, edited by Hanes Walton, Jr., 19–40. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994. ———. “Blacks, the Prohibitionists, and Disfranchisement.” Quarterly Review of Higher Education Among Negroes (April 1969): 66–69. ———. “Black Voting Behavior in the Segregation Era: 1944–1964.” In Black Politics and Black Political Behavior: A Linkage Analysis, edited by Hanes Walton, Jr., 115–134. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994. ———. “Defending the Indefensible: The African American Conservative Client, Spokesperson of the Reagan-Bush Era.” The Black Scholar 24, no. 4 (Fall 1994): 46–49. ———. “The Democrats and African Americans: The American Idea.” In Democrats and the American Idea: A Bicentennial Appraisal, edited by Peter B. Kovler, 333–347. Washington, DC: Center for National Policy Press, 1992. ———. Invisible Politics: Black Political Behavior. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985. ———. “The National Democratic Party of Alabama and Party Failure in America.” In When Parties Fail: Emerging Alternative Organizations, edited by Kay Lawson and Peter H. Merkl, 365–388. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. ———. The Native-Son Presidential Candidate: The Carter Vote in Georgia. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1992. ———. “The Negro in the Prohibition Party: A Case Study of the Tennessee Prohibition Party.” Faculty Research Bulletin (December 1971): 24–33. ———. The Negro in Third Party Politics. Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1969. ———. “The Political Leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr.” Quarterly Review of Higher Education Among Negroes 36 (1968): 163–193. ———. The Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1971.

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Cumulative Bibliography 915 Wickham, DeWayne. Bill Clinton and Black America. New York: Ballantine Books, 2002. Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Random House, 2010. Williams, George Washington. A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 1861–65. New York: Bergman Publishers, 1968. Williams, Frank B., Jr. “The Poll Tax as a Suffrage Requirement in the South, 1870–1901.” Journal of Southern History 18, no. 4 (November 1952): 469–496. Williams, Vernon J., Jr. “Monroe N. Work’s Contribution to Booker T. Washington’s Nationalistic Legacy.” Western Journal of Black Studies 21, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 85–91. Wills, Garry. “Negro President”: Jefferson and the Slave Power. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Wilson, James Q. Negro Politics: The Search for Leadership. New York: Free Press, 1960. Winther, Oscar O. “The Soldier Vote in the Election of 1864.” New York History 25 (October 1944): 440–458. Woods, Randall. “C.H.J. Taylor and The Movement For Black Political Independence, 1882–1896.” Journal of Negro History 67, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 122–135. Woodward, C. Vann. “Communication: Yes, There Was a Compromise of 1877.” Journal of American History 60, no. 1 (June 1973): 215–223. ———. The Burden of Southern History, 3rd ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. ———. Origins of the New South, 1877–1913. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951. ———. “The Political Legacy of the First Reconstruction.” Chap. 5 in The Burden of Southern History, 3rd ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. ———. “The Political Legacy of Reconstruction.” Journal of Negro Education 26 (Summer 1957): 231–240. ———. Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951. ———. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955. Woofter, T. J., Jr. “The Negro and Agricultural Policy.” In Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944. Work, Monroe N. “The Negro and Politics.” Negro Year Book, 1931–1932. Tuskegee, Alabama: Negro Year Book Publishing Company, 1932. Work, Monroe N. “Negro Women in Politics.” Negro Year Book, 1918–1919. Tuskegee, Alabama: Negro Year Book Publishing Company, 1919. ———. “Representation Negroes in National Republican Convention Cut Down.” Negro Year Book, 1918–1919. Tuskegee, Alabama: Negro Year Book Publishing Company, 1919. ———. “Total Number Males and Females Voting Age in Southern States In 1920,” Negro Year Book, 1921–1922. Tuskegee, Alabama: Negro Year Book Publishing Company, 1922. Work, Monroe N., et. al. “Some Negro Members of Reconstruction Conventions and Legislatures and of Congress.” Journal of Negro History 5 (January 1920): 63–119. Wright, James. The Free Negro in Maryland, 1634–1860. New York: 1921. Wright, Marion Thompson. “Negro Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1875.” Journal of Negro History 33, no. 2 (April 1948): 168–224. Wright, William. Memphis Politics: A Study in Racial Bloc Voting. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960. Wynne, Frances H. North Carolina Extant Voter Registration of 1867. Bowie, Maryland: Heritage Books, 1992. Zelden, Charles. The Battle for the Black Ballot: Smith v. Allwright and the Defeat of the Texas All-White Primary. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004.

Copyright Acknowledgments The authors would like to acknowledge the following works from which they have excerpted quotations and data. All of the authors and publishers of these works are given credit within the chapters in which the use of their work appears. Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Copyright © 2010, 2012 by Michelle Alexander. Excerpts reprinted by permission of the New Press. www .thenewpress.com Bunche, Ralph J. The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR. Edited by Dewey Grantham. Copyright © 1973 by the University of Chicago. Excerpts reprinted by permission of the publisher. Calhoun, Charles. Conceiving a New Republic: The Republican Party and the Southern Question, 1869–1900. Copyright © 2006 University Press of Kansas. Excerpts used by permission of the publisher. Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. Davidson, Chandler. Minority Vote Dilution. Copyright © 1984 Chandler Davidson. Excerpts used by permission of the author. Deskins, Donald R. Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett. Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data. Copyright © 2010 (update forthcoming) the University of Michigan. Data adapted and presented by permission of University of Michigan Press. Doyle, Judith Kaaz. “Maury Maverick and Racial Politics in San Antonio, Texas, 1938–1941.” Journal of Southern History 53, no. 2 (May 1987). Copyright © 1987 by the Southern Historical Association. Reprinted by permission of the Editor. Drago, Edmund L. “Georgia’s First Black Voter Registrars During Reconstruction.” Georgia Historical Quarterly 78, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 760–793. Excerpt courtesy of the Georgia Historical Society. For more information go to www.georgiahistory.com. Dunbar, Willis F. and William G. Shade. “The Black Man Gains the Vote: The Centennial of ‘Impartial Suffrage’ in Michigan.” Michigan History 56, no. 1 (Spring 1972). Excerpts reprinted with permission of the Historical Society of Michigan. Dykstra, Robert R. and Harlan Hahn. “Northern Voters and Negro Suffrage: The Case of Iowa, 1868.” Public Opinion Quarterly 32, no. 2 (Summer 1968): 202–215. Excerpted by permission of Oxford University Press. Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. Ewald, Alec. The Way We Vote: The Local Dimension of American Suffrage. Copyright © 2009 by Vanderbilt University Press. Excerpts reprinted with permission of the publisher. Field, Phyllis. The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era. Copyright © 1982 Cornell University Press. Excerpts used by permission of the publisher. Fenton, John H. and Kenneth N. Vines. “Negro Registration in Louisiana.” American Political Science Review 51, no. 3 (September 1957). Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press. Fishel, Leslie H. Jr. “Wisconsin and Negro Suffrage.” Wisconsin Magazine of History 46, no. 3 (Spring 1963): 180–196. Reprinted with permission of the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Foner, Eric. Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction, rev. ed. Copyright © 1992, 1996 Louisiana State University Press. Excerpts reprinted with permission of the publisher. Foner, Eric. “Politics and Prejudice: The Free-Soil Party and the Negro, 1849–1852.” Journal of Negro History 50, no. 4 (October 1965): 239–256. Excerpts used with the permission of the Association for the Study of African American Life & History, www.asalh.org. Foner, Eric. “Racial Attitudes of the New York Free-Soilers.” New York History 46, (October 1965). Excerpts reprinted with permission of the New York Historical Society. Formisano, Ronald P. “The Edge of Caste: Colored Suffrage in Michigan, 1827–1861.” Michigan History 56, no. 1 (Spring 1972). Excerpts reprinted with permission of the Historical Society of Michigan. Franklin, John Hope and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 9th ed. Copyright © 2011 McGraw-Hill, Inc. Excerpts used by permission of the publisher. Garrow, David. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Copyright © 1986 David Garrow. Excerpts reprinted with permission of HarperCollins, Inc. Gillette, William. The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment pp. 25–31, 33, 82-85, 105, 110, 118, 133, 156, 160-161, 163, 165, 167, 207. Copyright © 1965, 1969. Excerpts reprinted by permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920. Copyright © 1996 by the University of North Carolina Press. Excerpts used by permission of the publisher. www.uncpress.unc .edu Gosnell, Harold F. Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago. Copyright © 1967 by the University of Chicago. Excerpts reprinted by permission of the publisher. Greene, Evarts and Virginia D. Harrington. American Population before the Federal Census of 1790. Copyright © 1932 Columbia University Press. Excerpts reprinted with permission of the publisher. Hume, Richard L. and Jerry B. Gough. Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags: The Constitutional Conventions of Radical Reconstruction. Copyright © 2008 Louisiana State University Press. Excerpts reprinted with permission of the publisher. Key, V. O. Jr. Southern Politics in State and Nation. Copyright © 1949, 1977 V.O. Key Jr. Excerpts reprinted by permission of the Estate of V.O. Key Jr. Keyssar, Alexander. The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States of America. Copyright © 2009 Alexander Keyssar. Excerpts reprinted by permission of Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

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Journal of Negro Education 26, no. 3 (Summer 1957) [multiple authors]. Excerpts reprinted with permission of Howard University Press. Lawson, Steven. Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969. Copyright © 1976 Columbia University Press. Excerpts reprinted with the permission of the publisher. Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. Lemons, J. Stanley and Michael McKenna. “Re-enfranchisement of Rhode Island Negroes.” Rhode Island History 30, no. 1 (Winter 1971). Excerpts reprinted with permission of the Rhode Island Historical Society. Logan, Rayford W. The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson, new ed. New York: Collier Books, 1965. Copyright © 1965 Rayford W. Logan. Excerpts reprinted with permission of the Estate of Rayford W. Logan. Manza, Jeff and Christopher Uggen. Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy. Copyright © 2006 Oxford University Press. Excerpts reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. Materson, Lisa G. For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932. Copyright © 2009 by the University of North Carolina Press. Excerpts used by permission of the publisher. www.uncpress.unc.edu McManus, Michael, “Wisconsin Republicans and Negro Suffrage: Attitudes and Behavior” Civil War History, Volume 25, March 1979. Copyright © 1979 by The Kent State University Press. Reproduced by permission. McPherson, James. Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction. Copyright © 1982 McGraw-Hill, Inc. Excerpts used by permission of the publisher. Middlemass, Keesha. “Racial Politics and Voter Suppression in Georgia.” In Pearl K. Ford (ed.), African Americans in Georgia: A Reflection of Politics and Policy in the New South. Copyright © 2010 Mercer University Press. Excerpts reprinted by permission of the publisher. Middlemass, Keesha. “Barack Obama and the Black Electorate in Georgia: Identifying the Disenfranchised.” In Barack Obama and African American Empowerment: The Rise of Black America’s New Leadership, edited by Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke. Copyright © 2009 Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke. Excerpts reprinted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan. Myrdal, Gunnar. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. Copyright © 1944 Transaction Publishers. Excerpts reprinted with the permission of the publisher. Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. Nieman, Donald. Promises to Keep: African-Americans and the Constitutional Order, 1776 to the Present. Copyright © 1990 Oxford University Press, rights reverted to the author. Excerpts reprinted by permission of the author. Ogden, Frederic. The Poll Tax in the South. Copyright © 1958 Frederic D. Ogden. Excerpts reprinted with permission of University of Alabama Press. Pauley, Garth. LBJ’s American Promise: The 1965 Voting Rights Address. Copyright © 2007 Garth E. Pauley. Excerpts reprinted with the permission of Texas A&M University Press. Perman, Michael. Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908. Copyright © 2001 by the University of North Carolina Press. Excerpts used by permission of the publisher. www.uncpress.unc.edu Perman, Michael. The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869–1879. Copyright © 1984 by the University of North Carolina Press. Excerpts used by permission of the publisher. www.uncpress.unc.edu Rusk, Jerrold G. and John J. Stucker. “The Effects of the Southern System of Election Laws on Voting Participation: A Reply to V. O. Key, Jr.” In Silbey, Joel H.: The History of American Electoral Behavior, The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA. Copyright © 1978. Excerpts reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. Scammon, Richard M. Excerpts from pages 220 and 225 from America Votes 5: A Handbook of Contemporary American Election Statistics, compiled and edited by Richard M. Scammon, © 1964. Reprinted by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.

Schwalm, Leslie. Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest. Copyright © 2009 by the University of North Carolina Press. Excerpts used by permission of the publisher. www. uncpress.unc.edu Shugg, Roger Wallace. “Negro Voting in the Ante-Bellum South.” Journal of Negro History 21, no. 4 (October 1936): 357–364. Excerpts used with the permission of the Association for the Study of African American Life & History, www.asalh.org. Sinsheimer, Joseph A. “The Freedom Vote of 1963: New Strategies of Racial Protest in Mississippi.” Journal of Southern History 55, no. 2 (May 1989). Copyright © 1989 by the Southern Historical Association. Reprinted by permission of the Editor. Stone, James H. “A Note on Voter Registration Under the Mississippi Understanding Clause, 1892.” Journal of Southern History 38, no. 2 (May 1972). Copyright © 1972 by the Southern Historical Association. Reprinted by permission of the Editor. Swinney, Everette. “Enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment, 1870–1877.” Journal of Southern History 28, no. 2 (May 1962). Copyright ©1962 by the Southern Historical Association. Reprinted by permission of the Editor. Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn. African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920. Copyright © 1998 Rosalyn Terborg-Penn. Excerpts reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press. Todd, Chuck and Sheldon D. Gawiser. How Barack Obama Won: A State-by-State Guide to the Historic 2008 Presidential Election. Copyright © 2009 by Chuck Todd and Sheldon D. Gawiser. Excerpts reprinted by permission of Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Valelly, Richard M. The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement. Copyright © 2004 by the University of Chicago. Excerpts reprinted by permission of the publisher. Walton, Hanes Jr. African American Power and Politics: The Political Context Variable. Copyright © 1997 Columbia University Press. Excerpts reprinted with the permission of the publisher. Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. Walton, Hanes Jr. Black Politics and Black Political Behavior: A Linkage Analysis. Copyright © 1994 Praeger. Excerpts reprinted with the permission of the publisher. Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. Walton, Hanes Jr. Black Republicans: The Politics of the Black and Tans. Copyright © 1972 Scarecrow Press, Inc.. Excerpts reprinted with the permission of the publisher. Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. Walton, Hanes Jr. “Protest Politics.” In African Americans and Political Participation: A Reference Handbook, edited by Minion K. C. Morrison. Copyright © 2003 by ABC-Clio. Reproduced with permission of Greenwood Publishing, Inc., Westport, CT. Walton, Hanes Jr. Reelection: William Jefferson Clinton as a Native-Son Presidential Candidate. Copyright © 2000 Columbia University Press. Excerpts reprinted with the permission of the publisher. Wang, Xi. The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860–1910. Copyright © 1997 University of Georgia Press. Excerpts reprinted by permission of the publisher. Wesley, Charles H. “Negro Suffrage in the Period of ConstitutionMaking, 1787–1865.” Journal of Negro History 32, no. 2 (April 1947): 143–168. Excerpts used with the permission of the Association for the Study of African American Life & History, www.asalh.org. Wesley, Charles H. “The Participation of Negroes in Anti-Slavery Political Parties.” Journal of Negro History 29, No. 1 (January 1941): 32–74. Excerpts used with the permission of the Association for the Study of African American Life & History, www.asalh.org. Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. Copyright © 2010 by Isabel Wilkerson. Excerpts used by permission of Random House, Inc. Wright, Marion Thompson. “Negro Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1875.” Journal of Negro History 33, no. 2 (April 1948): 168–224. Excerpts used with the permission of the Association for the Study of African American Life & History, www.asalh.org.

Index Abrams, Alexander St. Clair, 15 Activism, civil rights versus voting rights, 2–3 Adams, James, 135 Address to the American People (National Equal Rights League), 198–200 AERA. See American Equal Rights Association African Americans. See specific topics Agricultural Adjustment Act referenda: about, 2, 34, 547 (table), 548, 563, 567 (table) Bunche, Ralph, on, 564–565 (table), 564–567, 566 (table) Martin, Robert E., on, 567–570, 567–573 (table) Myrdal, Gunnar, on, 563–564 Alabama: Black Belt counties, 855 (table), 859 (table) Commission on Civil Rights data, 533, 533 (table), 534 (figure) federal examiners/observers, 626, 627 (table), 629, 629 (figure), 631, 632–633 (table), 633, 644–645, 644 (table), 895 (table) freedmen federal registrars, first, 251 literature on African American electorate, 39 poll tax, 471 (table), 473 population by race, 855 (table) presidential election (2008), 683 presidential election voter turnout (1964–1972), 628–629, 629 (table), 630 (figure) voter registrations, African American, 824 (table) voter registrations, by race, 629–630, 630 (table), 631 (figure), 631 (table) voter registrations, statistics of, 827–828 (table) Voting Rights Act (1965), African American electorate before, 489–490, 489 (figure), 490 (figure), 491 (figure), 492 (figure) Voting Rights Act (1965), immediate impact of, 616, 617 (table), 618–619, 619 (figure), 620–621 (table), 621–623 (figure), 623, 864–865 (table) Voting Rights Act (1965), short-term impact of, 624–626, 625 (table), 626–628 (figure), 627 (table), 628, 875–876 (table) voting rights cases, 461 White Primary, 486 See also South Alexander, Michelle, 655–656 Ali, Omar, 601 Allen, Richard, 193 Ambler, Charles, 285, 287, 289 Amedee, Earl J., 503, 503 (figure), 577, 578–579 (table), 579, 580–581 (table) American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, The (Bensel), 39

American Dilemma, An (Myrdal), 652–655 American Equal Rights Association (AERA), 205, 416–417, 716 American Negro Academy, 18 American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (Greene and Harrington), 46 American Reform Society, 719 American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), 417–418, 419 Antebellum and Civil War America, 117–132 anti-slavery parties, 126–128 federal election, first, 126 federal elections, African American voting in, 126–130 partisanship in state elections, African American, 120–126 Republican Party, 128 states that considered reduction of African American suffrage rights, 119–120, 120 (table) states that forbade suffrage upon entry to the Union, 119, 119 (table) states that initially allowed suffrage upon entry to the Union, 118 statistical analyses for Antebellum Era, 128–130, 129 (table), 130 (table) Union, admission to, 118, 119, 119 (table) voters, potential African American, 118–120, 118 (table) Antebellum Era: Census (1790), 97–98, 99 (table) Census (1800), 98–99, 100 (table) Census (1810), 100, 101 (table) Census (1820), 101, 102 (table), 103 Census (1830), 103, 104 (table) Census (1840), 103, 105 (table) Census (1850), 103, 106, 107 (table) Census (1860), 106, 108 (table) demography of African Americans, 96–109 Free-Men-of-Color, voting rights of, 10, 11 (table), 12 (map), 13, 22(n10) population growth, African American, 111–112, 112 (figure), 113, 113 (figure) population growth, white, 112–113, 112 (figure), 113 (figure) statistical analyses for, 128–130, 129 (table), 130 (table) suffrage literature, 28–30, 31 (table) women voters, 413 women voters, potential African American, 415–416, 416 (table) See also Antebellum and Civil War America; Three-Fifths Clause Anthony, Susan B., 205, 417, 418 Anti-slavery political parties, 126–128, 180–185, 181 (table), 184 (table), 185 (table) See also specific parties

I-2

The African American Electorate

“Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens, Threatened With Disenfranchisement, to the People of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1838, The,” 28–29 Arkansas: Black Belt counties, 855 (table), 859 (table) Commission on Civil Rights data, 533, 533 (table), 534 (figure) poll tax, 325, 471 (table), 472 population by race, 855 (table) presidential election (2008), 683 racial data breakdown, missing, 238 voter participation literature, 34, 35 (table), 36 (map), 37, 37 (table) voter registration statistics, 828–830 (table) Voting Rights Act (1965), African American electorate before, 491, 492 (figure) Voting Rights Act (1965), short-term impact of, 624, 625 (table), 876–878 (table) White Primary, 486 See also South Arrests by race, 654–655, 655 (table), 656 (figure) Arthur, Chester, 365 Articles of Confederation, 80 Association of Citizens Councils of Louisiana, 541, 574 Atlanta (Ga.), 497, 499, 499 (table), 500 (figure) AWSA. See American Woman Suffrage Association Bacote, Clarence, 499 Baker, James, III, 641 Balance of Power (Moon), 38 Balance of power theory literature, 38–39 Ball, Howard, 636 (table), 639 Ballots, provisional, 678 Barnburners, 123–124, 182, 183 Bartley, Numan, 5, 35–36, 497 Battleground States, 684 Becker, Robert, 120 Bell, John, 135 Belz, Herman, 237 Bensel, Richard Franklin, 39 Benson, Lee, 122, 123, 171, 721 Benton, Josiah, 218, 219, 221–222, 223, 229–230 Bernd, Joseph, 35, 494, 497 Berry, Mary Frances, 616, 616 (table), 719 Bilbo, Theodore, 503, 505 Birney, James Gillespie, 180–181 Bitter Fruit (Grimshaw), 408 Black and Tan Republicans: Mississippi, 450–453, 451 (table), 452 (figure), 453 (figure) roots and rising of, 443–445 South Carolina, 454–456, 454 (table), 455 (figure) states with gubernatorial and senatorial candidates, 456, 457 (map) Virginia, 446 votes and percentages for, 446, 447 (table), 448 (table), 449 (table), 450 voting behavior, longitudinal, 450–456, 451 (table), 452 (figure), 453 (figure), 454 (table), 455 (figure) See also Republican Party Black Ballots (Lawson), 5, 636 (table), 637 Black Belt counties, 855–858 (table), 859–863 (table) Black Codes, 235, 275, 651–652 Black Political Power in America (Stone), 38 Black Presidential Politics in America (Walters), 38

Blacks. See specific topics Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags (Hume and Gough), 39, 187 Blackwell, Kenneth, 26 Blue, Frederick, 123 Booker, C. A., 463 Border Colonies, 46–47, 47 (table), 48 (table), 49 (figure), 81 (table) Border States: counties, all-white, 312, 314 (table) counties, majority African American, 280, 282 (map) counties with largest African American majorities, 312, 315–316, 315 (table) counties with largest white majorities, 312, 315–316, 315 (table) Democratic Party support, 317, 318 (figure) disenfranchisement, category of, 1888–1908, 327–328, 328 (map) disenfranchisement devices, 328–329, 329 (table) disenfranchisement laws, stringency of, 1890–1920, 331, 332 (table) Enforcement Acts, criminal prosecutions under, 369, 370 (figure) Fifteenth Amendment, enforcement cases under, 372, 372 (figure), 382, 384 (map) Fifteenth Amendment, ratification of, 280–281, 283–284, 283 (table) grandfather clause, 332–334, 334 (table), 335 (figure), 337–338, 337 (table), 338 (figure) importance of, 4 literacy tests, 332, 333 (table), 334 (figure), 335–336, 336 (table), 337 (figure) poll tax, 331–332, 332 (table), 333 (figure), 334–335, 335 (table), 336 (figure) population, non-white, 525, 525 (map), 526 (map) potential African American vote, 281, 283 (table) presidential election (1868–1920), 309, 310 (figure), 311, 316, 316 (figure) presidential election (1876), 301–302 (table), 301–307, 305, 305 (table), 306–307 (figure), 307 presidential election (2008), 684–685, 688, 690 (table) Republican Party support, 317, 319, 319 (figure) states comprising, 280, 281 (map) Twenty-Fourth Amendment, ratification of, 476, 476 (table) voter registration statistics, 852–854 (table) White Primaries, 347 (table) See also Presidential election (1868); Presidential election (1872); specific states Boswell Amendment, 486 Bradley, Joseph, 299 Branton, Wiley, 582 Breedlove v. Suttles (1937), 473, 486 Brewer, W. M., 477 “Brief and Tentative Analysis of Negro Leadership, A” (Bunche), 19 Brown, Thomas, 121, 180 Brown, William Wells, 181, 181 (table) Bruce, Blanche K., 184, 184 (table) Bucks County (Penn.), 136, 720–721 Bunche, Ralph: African American preachers, 553 cotton referenda, memoranda on, 34, 564–565 (table), 564–567, 566 (table) Myrdal, Gunnar, and, 18–19 poll tax, 551 Bureau of the Census, 19, 21, 45–46 Burleigh reapportionment bill (1900), 377–378, 378 (table) Burnham, Walter Dean, 13

Burr, Aaron, 10 Butler, Jessie, 477 Butler v. Thompson (1951), 477 By One Vote (Holt), 299 Byrd, Harry, 472 Caging, 26 California. See Far West States Candidates, African American: first, 14, 185–186, 185 (table) gubernatorial and senatorial, 456, 457 (map) Illinois, 389–391, 392–394 (table), 394, 395 (figure) North (excluding Illinois), 396, 401 (table), 402 (map) sources of, 15–20, 17 (table) West Virginia, 596, 599–600, 599 (table), 600 (map) women, 396, 401 (table), 402 (map) See also Candidates, African American (Louisiana); specific candidates Candidates, African American (Louisiana): about, 547 (table), 548–549, 570, 573–574 Amedee, Earl J., 503, 503 (figure), 577, 578–579 (table), 579, 580–581 (table) Parker, Kermit, 574, 575–576 (table), 577, 579, 580–581 (table), 603(n59) results, comparing, 577, 579, 580–581 (table) Carmichael, James, 495, 496–497 (table), 497, 498 (map) Carter, James “Jimmy,” 607, 641 Case-study approach, 6 Catto, Octavius V., 206 CCR. See Commission on Civil Rights Census (1790), 97–98, 99 (table) Census (1800), 98–99, 100 (table) Census (1810), 100, 101 (table) Census (1820), 101, 102 (table), 103, 735–741 (table) Census (1830), 103, 104 (table), 742–759 (table) Census (1840), 103, 105 (table), 760–780 (table) Census (1850), 103, 106, 107 (table), 781–792 (table) Census (1860), 106, 108 (table), 280, 282 (map), 793–799 (table), 800 (table) Census (1870), 301 (table), 302 (table), 800–802 (table) Census (1880), 802–805 (table) Census (1890), 805–807 (table) Census (1900), 807–810 (table) Census (1910), 427–428 (table), 429, 810–812 (table) Census (1920), 429, 430–431 (table), 812–813 (table) Census (1930), 429, 431–432 (table) Censuses: as data source, 7 demography of African Americans (Colonial Era), 46, 47 (table), 60 (table) demography of African Americans (Revolutionary Era), 80–81, 81 (table), 92 (table) See also specific censuses Century of Population Growth, A (Bureau of the Census), 46 “Challenge of the Disfranchised, The,” 18 Chase, Salmon P., 220 Chatham County (Ga.). See Savannah (Ga.) Cheatam, Henry P., 373, 374 Cheswell, Wentworth, 186–187 Chicago (Ill.), 406, 407 (figure) Chin, Gabriel, 671 Church, Robert, 514

Index I-3 City of Mobile v. Bolden (1980), 640 Civil Rights Act (1957): about, 487 congressional votes for, 609, 610–611 (table) Democrats voting for/against, 609, 611, 612 (figure), 613, 613 (figure), 614 (figure) passage of, 613, 615, 615 (table) Republicans voting for/against, 613, 614 (figure), 615, 615 (figure) shortcomings of, 487, 529, 601, 713 Civil Rights Act (1960): about, 487, 529, 542 African American registration/voting in the South and, 529 case-by-case approach of, 601 congressional votes for, 609, 610–611 (table) Democrats voting for/against, 609, 611, 612 (figure), 613, 613 (figure), 614 (figure) passage of, 613, 615, 615 (table), 713 Republicans voting for/against, 613, 614 (figure), 615, 615 (figure) Civil Rights Act (1964): about, 487 congressional votes for, 609, 610–611 (table) Democrats voting for/against, 609, 611, 612 (figure), 613, 613 (figure), 614 (figure) federal assistance/support for African American voting rights, 601 passage of, 613, 615, 615 (table), 714–715, 715 (diagram) Republicans voting for/against, 613, 614 (figure), 615, 615 (figure) Civil Rights Act (1965), 715, 715 (diagram) Civil rights activism, 2–3 “Civil Rights” category (Negro Year Book), 16, 17 (table) Civil rights laws, restrictive, 326–327, 326 (figure), 329, 329 (table) Civil War, 11 (table), 220–222, 221 (table) See also Antebellum and Civil War America; Presidential election (1864) Cleghorn, Reese, 37 Cleveland, Grover, 368–369, 375–376, 376 (figure) Clifford, Clark, 38 Climbing Jacob’s Ladder (Watters and Cleghorn), 37 Clinton, Hillary, 675–676 See also Presidential election (2008) Clinton, William J., 607 Coates, Christopher, 676–677 COFO. See Council of Federated Organizations Coleman, James, 584, 585–586 (table), 587 (table) Colfax, Schuyler, 210 Colonial Era, 43–78 censuses, 46, 47 (table), 60 (table) colonies that gave African Americans legal right to vote, 56–57, 56 (table) demography of African Americans, 45–54 election administration, 724 election data, colony-level, 57, 58 (table), 59, 59 (table) election data, county-level, 59–77, 60 (table) electorate, criteria and formal qualifications of, 10 Free-Men-of-Color, voting rights of, 10, 11 (table) opponents and oppositions in, 718 population, African American, 46–47, 48 (table), 49 (figure), 50–53 (table) population by race and gender, 54, 55 (table) population change during, 47, 54 (figure) suffrage literature, 28

I-4

The African American Electorate

voters, potential African American, 54–77, 55–56 (table), 58–60 (table) voting age, primary source data on, 54 women voters, 412–413 Colorblind Justice (Kousser), 636 (table), 637 Colored American Council, 437 Commercial publications, as election data source, 13, 14 Commission on Civil Rights (CCR): about, 525 Alabama data, 533, 533 (table), 534 (figure) analyzing V. O. Key thesis with reports from, 532–541 Arkansas data, 533, 533 (table), 534 (figure) county-level data, 538–539, 538 (map), 539 (table), 540 (table), 541 episodic events not covered by, 547 felon disenfranchisement, 650 Florida data, 533–535, 534 (table), 535 (figure) Georgia data, 533–535, 534 (table), 535 (figure) Hearing and Report (1959), 19, 526, 528 (figure), 528 (table), 529, 541, 542 Louisiana data, 535, 536 (figure), 536 (table) Louisiana hearings, 570, 573, 574 Mississippi data, 533, 533 (table), 534 (figure) North Carolina data, 535, 537 (figure), 537 (table), 538 presidential election (2000), 26 presidential election (2008), 676–679, 708(n15) Report (1961), 529–530, 541, 582 Report (1963), 530–531, 530 (figure), 541 Report (1965), 531–532, 531–532 (table), 541, 542, 582 South Carolina data, 535, 537 (figure), 537 (table), 538 Texas data, 535, 536 (figure), 536 (table) Virginia data, 535, 537 (figure), 537 (table), 538 voter fraud, 642 voter participation data, 33 Voting Rights Act reports, 616, 616 (table) See also Voting Rights Act (1965) Comparative politics literature, 602(n44) Compromised Compliance (Ball, Krane, and Lauth), 636 (table), 639 Compromise of 1850, 103, 106 Compromise of 1877, 30, 276, 299–301, 325 See also Presidential election (1876) Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, The (Benson), 171 Condict, John, 135 Congress: African American voters and electoral empowerment in the North, 402–404, 404 (table), 405 (figure), 406 historical composition of, 380, 381–382 (table), 382 Republican and Democratic Party majorities in, 366, 367 (figure), 367 (table), 368 voting rights acts, legislative voting behavior of Southern members on, 609, 610–611 (table), 611, 612–615 (figure), 613, 615, 615 (table) See also House of Representatives; Senate Congressional elections (1868), 273, 274 (table) Congressional elections (1869), 274, 274 (table) Congressional elections (1870), 273, 274–275, 274 (table) Congressional elections (1872), 274–275, 274 (table) Congressional elections (1962), 579, 582, 582 (table), 583 (map) Connecticut: censuses, local-level, 68 (table), 92 (table) demography, county-level, 63 (table), 89 (table) election data, Colonial Era, 62, 63 (table) election data, Revolutionary Era, 88, 89 (table)

population, 51 (table), 82 (table) reversal of African American suffrage rights, 135 slave elections, mock, 86–87 suffrage referenda, 156, 157 (figure), 157 (table) voters, potential African American, 85 (table) voting age population, African American, 55 (table) voting rights, African American, 56 (table), 86–87, 86 (table) “Conscience Whigs,” 168 Conservative ideologues, opposition to African American suffrage rights, 720 Constitution (U.S.), 10, 162 Constitutional Convention (federal), 10, 13, 81 Constitutional conventions (state): about, 30, 31 (table) freedmen elected as delegates to, 248–249, 248 (table), 249 (table) Michigan, 152, 153 Mississippi, 31–32 New York, 137–138, 171 Official Senate Report on, 240–243, 240 (table), 241–243 (figure), 242–243 (table), 245 (table) Pennsylvania, 136–137, 136 (table) Rhode Island, 138–139 Tennessee, 236 Wisconsin, 148 Constitution pamphlet, model, 199 (figure) Continental Congress, 80, 96 Convention of Colored Citizens, 181 Converse, Philip, 324 Conyers, John, 26 Cook, Samuel DuBois, 725 Cotton and tobacco referenda. See Agricultural Adjustment Act referenda “Cotton Whigs,” 168 Coulter, E. Merton, 20 Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), 582, 588–589, 592, 714 Courts and liberal jurisprudence, impact of, 725–726 Cox, Cathy, 641 Crawford v. Marion County Election Bd. (2008), 642 Criminalization system, segregation as, 652–655, 654 (table), 655 (table), 656 (figure) Cripps, Thomas, 442 Crisis magazine, 18, 19, 23(n54), 390, 424 Crump, Edward, 514 Crumpacker, Edgar D., 377–378 Cuney, Norris Wright, 444 “Current Politics” category (Negro Year Book), 16, 17 (table) Current Population Reports, 19, 21 Darlington County (S.C.), 567–570, 568–573 (table) Data: inferential/derivative, 21–22 presentation of, 2, 7 sources of, 2, 3, 6–7, 13–14 Database Technologies, Inc., 670 Davidson, Chandler, 37–38, 636 (table), 638–639 Davis, Abraham L., 358, 461 Davis, E. J., 444 Davis v. Schnell (1949), 486 Dawson, William, 408 Days of Hope (Sullivan), 511 Dayton, William L., 183 Defying Disfranchisement (Riser), 39, 460

Delaware: population, 52 (table), 83 (table) presidential election (2008), 684–685 reversal of African American suffrage rights, 134 voter registration statistics, 852 (table) voters, potential African American, 85 (table) voting rights, African American, 56 (table), 86 (table) See also Border States Delaying the Dream (Finley), 609 Democratic National Committee (DNC), 443 Democratic National Convention (1964), 595–596 Democratic Party: African American electorate and, 3–4 African American suffrage rights, opposition to, 718 Border State support for, 317, 318 (figure) Civil Rights Acts, voting for/against, 609, 611, 612 (figure), 613, 613 (figure), 614 (figure) New York, 122–123 Peace Democrats, 219–220 presidential election (1864), 219–220 presidential election (1868), 268–269, 269 (figure), 304, 304 (figure), 307, 307 (figure) presidential election (1868–1872), 268–270, 269 (figure), 270 (figure), 284–285, 286 (figure) presidential election (1872), 269, 270 (figure), 304, 304 (figure), 307, 307 (figure) presidential election (1876), 304, 304 (figure), 307, 307 (figure) presidential election (2000–2008), 690, 692–693 (table), 693–694, 694 (figure) satellite parties, 443 South support for, 317, 317 (figure) suffrage referenda, 149 Voting Rights Acts, votes for/against, 611, 613, 613 (figure) War Democrats, 219–220 Demography of African Americans (Antebellum Era), 96–109 about, 96–97 Census (1790), 97–98, 99 (table) Census (1800), 98–99, 100 (table) Census (1810), 100, 101 (table) Census (1820), 101, 102 (table), 103 Census (1830), 103, 104 (table) Census (1840), 103, 105 (table) Census (1850), 103, 106, 107 (table) Census (1860), 106, 108 (table) Demography of African Americans (Colonial Era), 45–54 African American population by region, 46–47, 48 (table), 49 (figure), 50–53 (table) censuses, 46, 47 (table), 60 (table) colonial population by race and gender, 54, 55 (table) population change, 47, 54 (figure) voting age, primary source data on, 54 Demography of African Americans (Revolutionary Era), 80–84 censuses, 80–81, 81 (table), 92 (table) Three-Fifths Clause and slave population, 81, 82–83 (table), 84 Department of Justice (DOJ): presidential election (2008), 676–678 Voting Rights Acts, 642, 644–645, 644 (table) Voting Section, Civil Rights Division, 679, 680 (table) De Priest, Oscar, 391, 402–403, 406 Derivative data, 21–22 DeSantis, Vincent, 442 Dinkin, Robert J., 10, 80

Index I-5 Disenfranchisement: category of, 327–328, 328 (map) devices for, 328–331, 329–331 (table), 338, 339 (table), 340 (figure) dynamic history of, 2 laws, stringency of, 331, 332 (table) long-term influence of, 685–703, 686 (table), 687 (map), 688–689 (figure), 699–703 (table) short-term influence of, 703–705, 704–707 (table), 707, 707 (figure) voter restriction versus, 323 See also Era of Disenfranchisement “Disenfranchisement of the Negro” (Bunche), 19 Disenfranchisement referenda: Georgia, 353–354, 354 (figure), 355–356 (table), 357 (map) North Carolina, 343, 350–351 (table), 351, 351 (figure), 352 (map), 353 District of Columbia suffrage referenda, 157, 157 (table) DNC. See Democratic National Committee Documentary History of the First Federal Elections, 1788–1790, The (Jensen and Becker), 120 Dodson, Howard, 15 DOJ. See Department of Justice Doolittle, James R., 149–150 Dorr, Thomas, 138 Douglass, Frederick: American Equal Rights Association and, 205 anti-slavery parties, 127, 128 demography, Census (1860), 183–184 Free-Soil Party and, 183 Johnson, Andrew, and, 205 Lincoln, Abraham, and, 184, 197, 229 National Equal Rights League and, 205 as nominee, 181, 184, 184 (table) partisanship in state elections, African American, 123, 124 presidential election (1860), 183–184 Radical Political Abolitionists and, 184 Drago, Edmund, 249, 251, 348–349 Drugs, war on, 655–656, 658 Dubin, Michael J., 14 DuBois, W. E. B.: Crisis magazine, 390, 424 election data, historical, 18 Georgia, disenfranchisement in, 353 North, congressional empowerment in, 402 woman suffrage, 424, 433 Dulles, Foster Rhea, 616, 616 (table), 623–624 Dunbar, Willis, 154, 155 Durham County (N.C.), 510, 510 (table) Dykstra, Robert, 29, 155–156 Earle, Thomas, 180 Ecological inference, 294 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 523, 524 (table) Election administration, 724–725 Election data, African American, 20–22, 726 Electoral events, African American, nature and types of, 547–549, 547 (table), 548 (map), 549 (table) Electoral votes: presidential election (1876), 299–301, 300 (map) Three-Fifths Clause, impact of, 111–113, 111 (figure), 112 (figure), 113 (figure) Elmore v. Rice, 486

I-6

The African American Electorate

Emancipation Proclamation, 114 Emerging Battleground States, 684 Enforcement Acts: convictions under, 368–369, 368 (figure) criminal prosecutions under, 369, 370 (figure), 382, 383 (table) dismissals under, 369, 369 (figure) failure to pass new, 373–376, 374 (figure), 375 (figure), 376 (figure), 380, 381 (diagram) repealed sections by political party, 379, 379 (figure) Epstein, David, 636 (table) Era of Disenfranchisement, 327–345 about, 327–331, 328 (map), 329 (table), 330 (table), 331 (table), 332 (table) disenfranchisement, measuring on voter registration, 338–341, 341 (figure), 342–343 (table), 345, 345 (figure), 346 (table) disenfranchisement devices, impact on freedmen voting in presidential elections, 331–338, 332–337 (table), 333–338 (figure), 339 (table), 340 (figure) felon disenfranchisement, 652 suffrage literature, 32–33 See also Disenfranchisement Ewald, Alec, 724 Ex-felon disenfranchisement. See Felon disenfranchisement Factions, 124 Fairchild, Lucius, 150 Fait accompli theory, 323–325 Far West States, 280, 281 (map), 292 See also specific states Fayette County (Tenn.), 514, 516 (table) Federal agencies, as election data source, 14 Federal election, first, 126 Federal examiners/observers: about, 678–679, 678–679 (table) Alabama, 626, 627 (table), 629, 629 (figure), 631, 632–633 (table), 633, 644–645, 644 (table), 895 (table) Georgia, 626, 627 (table), 629, 629 (figure), 631, 632–633 (table), 633, 644–645, 644 (table), 895 (table) Louisiana, 626, 627 (table), 629, 629 (figure), 631, 632–633 (table), 633, 644–645, 644 (table), 895 (table) Mississippi, 626, 627 (table), 629, 629 (figure), 631, 632–633 (table), 633, 644–645, 644 (table), 896 (table) North Carolina, 644–645, 644 (table) South, 626, 627 (table), 629, 629 (figure), 631, 632–633 (table), 633, 644–645, 644 (table), 895–896 (table) South Carolina, 626, 627 (table), 629, 629 (figure), 631, 632–633 (table), 633, 644–645, 644 (table), 896 (table) Tennessee, 644–645, 644 (table) Federalist Party, 121–122 Federal registrars, first African American, 249, 250 (map), 250 (table), 251 Felon disenfranchisement, 649–672 about, 650 African American felons and ex-felons during mass incarceration, 655–656, 657–665 (table), 658, 662–663, 666–667 (figure), 667, 670 Era of Disenfranchisement, 652 Florida, 650, 670, 725 historical genesis of, 650–652 literature on, 26, 33 National Coalition on Black Voter Participation report, 667–668, 669 (table)

by region and state, 658, 659–661 (table), 663, 664–665 (table), 666 restoration procedure for voting rights, 668, 669 (table) segregation as criminalization system, 652–655, 654 (table), 655 (table), 656 (figure) statehood and adoption of universal white suffrage, compared to, 656, 657–658 (table), 658 summary and conclusions on, 670–671 Felons: race and gender of, 658, 662, 662 (table) sentences for, 662–663, 662 (table), 663 (table) Fenton, John, 502 Field, Phyllis, 28, 124, 137, 192, 721 Fifteenth Amendment: Border States, ratification by, 280–281, 283–284, 283 (table) criminal cases in enforcement of, 369, 371 (table), 372 enforcement cases in Border States, 372, 372 (figure), 382, 384 (map) enforcement cases in South, 369, 371 (figure), 372, 372 (figure), 382, 384 (map) need for, 30 opposition to, 388 Finley, Keith, 609 First Congressional District (Ill.), 403–404, 404 (table), 405 (figure), 406 First Military Reconstruction Act (1867), 158, 233 (table), 234 See also Military Reconstruction Acts (1867) Fishel, Leslie H., Jr., 388 Flick Amendment (W.V.), 285, 287, 289 Florida: Black Belt counties, 855 (table), 859 (table) Commission on Civil Rights data, 533–535, 534 (table), 535 (figure) felon disenfranchisement, 650, 670, 725 poll tax, 471 (table), 472 population, 855 (table) presidential election (1868), 303–304, 303 (figure), 304, 304 (figure) presidential election (1872), 303–304, 303 (figure), 304, 304 (figure) presidential election (1876), 299, 303–304, 303 (figure), 304, 304 (figure) presidential election (2000), 26, 650, 670 presidential election (2008), 684 voter registrations, African American, 824 (table), 878–880 (table) voter registrations, statistics of, 830–832 (table) Voting Rights Act (1965), African American electorate before, 491–494, 493 (figure), 493 (table), 494 (figure), 494 (table), 495 (figure) See also South Foner, Eric, 15, 20, 182, 183 Formisano, Ronald, 152, 153–154, 155 Fort Bend County (Tex.), 487 Fourteenth Amendment, 235–236, 235 (table) Fourth Military Reconstruction Act (1867), 233 (table), 234 See also Military Reconstruction Acts (1867) Fox, Dixon Ryan, 121–122 Frank, Joseph, 227 Franklin, John Hope, 45, 103, 206, 275, 650–651 Freedom Elections. See Mississippi Freedom Is Not Enough (Walters), 38, 636 (table), 639 Freedom movement, 541–542 Freedom’s Journal, 193

Freedom’s Lawmakers (Foner), 15 Freedom Vote. See Mississippi Freehold qualification, 137–138 Free-Men-of-Color, voting rights of: Antebellum Era, 10, 11 (table), 12 (map), 13, 22(n10) Civil War Era, 11 (table) Colonial Era, 10, 11 (table) referenda votes on, 30, 31 (table) Revolutionary Era, 11 (table) Free-Soil Party: African American delegates at national convention, 181 (table), 182–183 as anti-slavery party, 127, 128 Maine, 125 New York, 123, 124 Fremont, John C., 183 From Thurmond to Wallace (Bartley), 497 Fugitive slave law, 103, 106 Fund, John, 642 Furloughing of soldiers to vote, 219 Future of the Voting Rights Act, The (Epstein), 636 (table), 637 Gamm, Gerald, 550 GAO. See General Accounting Office Gardner, Charles W., 28–29, 136 Garland, Augustus, 368 Garnet, Henry Highland, 123, 124, 126, 127 Garrison, William Lloyd, 123, 126 Garrow, David, 607, 608, 635, 636 (table) Gary, Martin, 349 Gary, Victoria J., 592, 595 (table) Gawiser, Sheldon, 682–685 Gaziano, Todd, 677 General Accounting Office (GAO), 679 Geographers, as election data source, 13–14 Geography (political context), impact of, 716–717 Georgia: Black Belt counties, 855–856 (table), 859–860 (table) Black Codes, 651 Commission on Civil Rights data, 533–535, 534 (table), 535 (figure) demography, Census (1820), 735 (table) demography, Census (1830), 750–751 (table) demography, Census (1840), 760–762 (table), 769–771 (table), 775–777 (table) demography, Census (1850), 781–783 (table), 787–789 (table) demography, Census (1860), 793–795 (table) disenfranchisement referendum, 353–354, 354 (figure), 355–356 (table), 357 (map) election data, African American, 20 federal examiners/observers, 626, 627 (table), 629, 629 (figure), 631, 632–633 (table), 633, 644–645, 644 (table), 895 (table) federal registrars, first African American, 249, 250 (map), 250 (table), 251 freedmen federal registrars, first, 249, 250 (map), 250 (table), 251 Free-Men-of-Color, voting rights of, 13, 22(n10) governor’s race (1946), 495, 496–497 (table), 497, 498 (map) photo ID law, 641, 642, 720 poll tax, 471 (table), 472, 473, 550–552, 553 (table) population, 53 (table), 83 (table) population by race, 855–856 (table) presidential election (1828), 735 (table)

Index I-7 presidential election (1836), 750–751 (table) presidential election (1840), 760–762 (table) presidential election (1844), 769–771 (table) presidential election (1848), 775–777 (table) presidential election (1852), 781–783 (table) presidential election (1856), 787–789 (table) presidential election (1860), 793–795 (table) presidential election (1868), 268 presidential election (2008), 684 presidential election voter turnout (1964–1972), 628–629, 629 (table), 630 (figure) purges, 494–495, 496–497 (table), 497, 498 (map), 529–530, 541 racial majority counties, 354, 357 (map) voter participation literature, 35–36, 37 (table) voter registrations, African American, 824 (table) voter registrations, by race, 629–630, 630 (table), 631 (figure), 631 (table) voter registrations, statistics of, 832–833 (table) voting rights, African American, 56 (table), 86 (table) Voting Rights Act (1965), African American electorate before, 494–495, 496–497 (table), 497, 498 (map), 499, 499 (table), 500 (figure) Voting Rights Act (1965), immediate impact of, 619, 621–623 (figure), 621 (table), 623, 865–869 (table) Voting Rights Act (1965), short-term impact of, 624–626, 625 (table), 626–628 (figure), 627 (table), 628, 880–883 (table) White Primary, 486 See also South Gerald, J. Bates, 454 Ghettoes, 408–409 Giles, Jackson W., 461 Giles v. Harris, 461 Gillem, Alvan C., 238 Gillespie, Ezekiel, 150 Gillespie v. Palmer et al., 150 Gillette, William: Border States, 280, 281, 283–284, 290 Colonial Era, 57 Midwest States, 292 North, 388 suffrage literature, 29 suffrage referenda, 151–152 Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth, 433–434, 436, 550 Gladney, Ida Mae Brandon, 409 “Good character” clause, 331 Gore, Al, 607 Gosnell, Harold, 388, 389, 406, 407 Gough, Jerry, 39, 187 Graham, Barbara Luck, 358, 461 Graham, Hugh, 5 Grandfather clause: elimination of, 211–212 enactment years of, 328–329, 329 (table) as literacy test alternative, 330, 331 (table) Oklahoma, 354, 358 presidential election turnout and, 332–334, 334 (table) presidential election turnout in African American counties and, 337–338, 337 (table), 338 (figure) racial majority counties, impact in, 334, 335 (figure) Grant, Ulysses S., 162, 210, 237–238, 239 (figure), 239 (table), 269 See also Presidential election (1868) Grantham, Dewey, 19

I-8

The African American Electorate

Grass Roots Politics in Georgia (Bernd), 35, 497 Greeley, Horace, 162, 177(n2) See also Presidential election (1872) Grice, Hezekiah, 193 Grimshaw, William J., 408–409 Grofman, Bernard, 37–38, 636 (table) Grovey, William, 486 Grovey v. Townsend (1935), 486 Guinn v. United States (1915), 211–212, 332, 358 Guzman, Jessie, 16, 17 Hahn, Harlan, 29, 155–156 Hahn, Michael, 200, 202 Hale, John, 125 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 592, 595, 595 (table), 596, 607–608 Hamilton, Charles V., 403 Hampton, Wade, 348, 349 Hancock, Major General, 238 Hanks, Lawrence, 5, 36 Harding, Warren G. See Presidential election (1920) Harper, Ellen Watkins, 417 Harper, Minnie Buckingham, 396, 599–600 Harris, Katherine, 650, 670 Hart, Harris, 438, 438 (table), 732–734 (table) Hasgett v. Werner (1941), 466 Hayes, Rutherford B. See Presidential election (1876) Haygood, Wil, 403 Hays, Brook, 476 Haywood County (Tenn.), 514, 516 (table) Heard, Alexander, 5 Help America Vote Act (2002), 641, 681 Henry, Aaron, 588–591 (table), 592, 593–594 (table), 596 Hewitt, Gaye, 550 Hinton, Frederick, 28, 136 Historians, as election data source, 14 Historical Statistics of the United States (Bureau of the Census), 45–46 Holden, Matthew, Jr., 32 Holley, Joseph W., 719–720 Holloway, Harry, 602(n44) Holt, Michael, 299 House Executive Document 342 (1868), 34, 238, 240 House of Representatives: Burleigh reapportionment bill vote, 377–378, 378 (table) Civil Rights Acts, Democrats voting for/against, 609, 611, 612 (figure), 613, 614 (figure) Lodge bill, vote on, 374, 374 (figure) seats attributable to Three-Fifths Clause (1787–1860s), 109, 110 (figure), 111 seats attributable to Three-Fifths Clause (1790 Census), 97–98, 99 (table) seats attributable to Three-Fifths Clause (1800 Census), 98–99, 100 (table) seats attributable to Three-Fifths Clause (1810 Census), 100, 101 (table) seats attributable to Three-Fifths Clause (1820 Census), 101, 102 (table), 103 seats attributable to Three-Fifths Clause (1830 Census), 103, 104 (table) seats attributable to Three-Fifths Clause (1840 Census), 103, 105 (table) seats attributable to Three-Fifths Clause (1850 Census), 103, 106, 107 (table)

seats attributable to Three-Fifths Clause (1860 Census), 106, 108 (table) seats held by slave states during/after period of Three-Fifths Clause, 115, 115 (table) See also Congress Houston, James M., 592, 595 (table) How Barack Obama Won (Todd and Gawiser), 682–685 Hughes, Charles Evans, 423 See also Presidential election (1916) Hume, Richard, 39, 187 Hunter, Robert A., 139–140 Hunterdon County (N.J.), 413 Hyman, Herman, 228 Identification: political, 15–17, 17 (table), 18–19, 20 racial, 15, 21 Illinois: First Congressional District, 403–404, 404 (table), 405 (figure), 406 population, 53 (table) state legislature, African American candidates for, 389–391, 392–394 (table), 394, 395 (figure) suffrage referenda, 156, 157 (figure), 157 (table) women, African American, 421, 423–424 Indiana voter ID law, 642, 677, 720 Inferential data, 21–22 In Pursuit of Power (Lawson), 5, 636 (table), 637 Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research, 6–7 In the Lion’s Mouth (Ali), 601 Iowa, 155–156, 155 (table), 156 (figure), 394 See also Midwest States Jackson, Andrew, 119–120, 134 Jackson, James S., 40 Jackson, Luther, 37 Jackson, Maynard, 20 Jacksonville (Fla.), 436, 437 (table) Jefferson, Thomas, 10 Jensen, Merrill, 120 Jim and Jane Crow laws, 326–327, 326 (figure), 329, 329 (table) Joens, David, 389 Johnson, Andrew: African American suffrage, opposition to, 234–235 Congress and, 206 Douglass, Frederick, and, 205 National Equal Rights League and, 202, 205 presidential election (1864), 220 Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, 204–205 (document) suffrage referenda/rights, 149, 157, 158, 202, 205, 275 Tennessee and, 234–235, 236, 237 Johnson, Cave, 135 Johnson, H. C., 207–208 Johnson, Henry Lincoln, 212 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 712–713 Johnson, Paul, 584, 585–586 (table), 587 (table), 588, 589–591 (table), 592 Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 19–20 Joint Federal Electoral Commission, 299–300 Joint Legislative Committee (La.), 573–574 Jones, Dorothy Bentley, 477 Jones v. Settle, 477

Journal of Negro Education, 19, 487, 489 Julian, George W., 418 Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), 106 Kansas suffrage referenda, 156, 157 (figure), 157 (table) Kelley, Frank, 206 Kelley, William, 157 Kennedy, John F., 476, 713–714 Kentucky: presidential election (2008), 685 reversal of African American suffrage rights, 134 voter registration estimates, African American, 293–294 voters, potential African American, 118 See also Border States Key, V. O., Jr.: Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi data as test of thesis, 533, 533 (table), 534 (figure) Commission on Civil Rights reports as test of thesis, 532–541 county-level data as test of thesis, 538–539, 538 (map), 539 (table), 540 (table), 541 disenfranchisement, 323–325, 361(n65) election administration in the South, 724–725 Florida and Georgia data as test of thesis, 533–535, 534 (table), 535 (figure) Louisiana and Texas data as test of thesis, 535, 536 (figure), 536 (table) North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia data as test of thesis, 535, 537 (figure), 537 (table), 538 Keyssar, Alexander: Constitution, 10 Redemption Movement, 651 reversal of African American suffrage rights, 137–138 voting rights history, 13, 57, 717 women, African American, enfranchisement of, 413 King, Ed, 588, 592, 596 King, Gary, 294 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 3, 607–609, 712–715, 715 (diagram), 717, 727(n15) King-Meadows, Tyson, 636 (table), 637–638 King v. Chapman (1945), 486 KKK. See Ku Klux Klan Know-Nothing party, 139 Kolp, John Gilman, 45, 412–413 Kousser, J. Morgan, 324, 325, 636 (table), 637 Krane, Dale, 639 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 364 Lamar, Lucius Q. C., 368 Lane v. Wilson (1939), 358 Langston, John Mercer: as early publicly elected official, 14, 180, 185 (table), 186 National Equal Rights League and, 197, 200, 201 (table), 202, 209–211 Lauth, Thomas, 639 Law and Order Party, 138–139 Lawson, Steven, 5, 636 (table), 637 “Leading the Civil Rights Vanguard in South Carolina” (Roefs), 511 Legislatures, state. See State legislatures Lewinson, Paul: African American electorate in Savannah, 550 African American registration and voting in the South, 34, 461–462, 466, 468, 469, 520–521 White Primaries, 348

Index I-9 Liberal jurisprudence and courts, impact of, 725–726 Liberty League, 125 Liberty Party, 123, 126–127, 180–181, 181 (table), 183–184, 185 (table) Lightfoot, Claude, 394, 410(n31) Lighthouse and Informer, 511 Lily-White Republicans: attitudes and behaviors of, 445–446 origin of, 444–445 Texas, 444 votes and percentages for, 446, 447 (table), 448 (table), 449 (table), 450 See also Black and Tan Republicans Lily White Republicans, The (Cripps), 442 Lincoln, Abraham: African Americans, suffrage for, 200, 201–202 Douglass, Frederick, and, 184, 197, 229 presidential election (1860), 128, 183–184 presidential election (1864), 218 Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, 203–204 (document) Tennessee and, 236 See also Presidential election (1864) Lindsey, Merrill, 579, 582, 582 (table) Literacy, 521 (table) Literacy tests: enactment years of, 328, 329 (table) law characteristics and alternatives, 330–331, 331 (table) presidential election turnout and, 332, 333 (table), 335–336, 336 (table), 337 (figure) racial majority counties, impact in, 332, 334 (figure) Literature: balance of power theory, 38–39 comparative politics, 602(n44) felony disenfranchisement, 26, 33 “minor,” 39 progress in voting rights, 39 Redemption Movement, 325–327, 326 (figure), 327 (table) voter participation, 26 33–38, 35 (table), 36 (map), 37 (table) See also Suffrage literature Localities, origins of, 724–725 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 30, 32 See also Lodge bill Lodge bill, 373–376, 374 (figure), 375 (figure), 376 (figure), 380, 381 (diagram) Logan, Rayford, 30, 31–32, 290 Loguen, J. W., 181, 181 (table) Long, Earl K., 503, 504 (figure) Long, Huey “The Kingfish,” 471–472 Louisiana: Black Belt counties, 856 (table), 860–861 (table) Commission on Civil Rights data, 535, 536 (figure), 536 (table) Commission on Civil Rights hearings, 570, 573, 574 demography, Census (1820), 735 (table) demography, Census (1830), 742 (table), 751 (table) demography, Census (1840), 762 (table), 771 (table), 777 (table) demography, Census (1850), 783 (table), 789 (table) demography, Census (1860), 796 (table) elections, statewide (1956), 503, 504 (figure) federal examiners/observers, 626, 627 (table), 629, 629 (figure), 631, 632–633 (table), 633, 644–645, 644 (table), 895 (table) poll tax, 471–472, 471 (table)

I-10

The African American Electorate

population by race, 856 (table) presidential election (1828), 735 (table) presidential election (1832), 742 (table) presidential election (1836), 751 (table) presidential election (1840), 762 (table) presidential election (1844), 771 (table) presidential election (1848), 777 (table) presidential election (1852), 783 (table) presidential election (1856), 789 (table) presidential election (1860), 796 (table) presidential election (1868), 268, 303–304, 303 (figure), 304, 304 (figure) presidential election (1872), 303–304, 303 (figure), 304, 304 (figure) presidential election (1876), 299, 303–304, 303 (figure), 304, 304 (figure) presidential election (2008), 683 presidential election voter turnout (1964–1972), 628–629, 629 (table), 630 (figure) purges, 529–530, 541 racial data, missing, 238 religio-cultural sections and African American voter registration, 502–503, 502 (table) reversal, politics of, 139–141, 139 (map), 140 (table), 141 (figure) voter registrations, African American, 539, 540 (table), 541, 825 (table) voter registrations, African American and white, 340–341, 341 (figure), 342–343 (table) voter registrations, by race, 468–469, 468 (table), 469 (table), 629–630, 630–631 (table), 631 (figure) voter registrations, statistics of, 833–834 (table) voting age population and voter registration, 633, 634 (table), 897–898 (table) Voting Rights Act (1965), African American electorate before, 499, 501 (figure), 502 (figure), 502 (table), 503 (figure), 504 (figure) Voting Rights Act (1965), immediate impact of, 616, 617 (table), 618–619, 619 (figure), 620–621 (table), 621–623 (figure), 623, 869–871 (table) Voting Rights Act (1965), short-term impact of, 624–626, 625 (table), 626–628 (figure), 627 (table), 628, 884–885 (table) voting rights for African Americans, 200, 202, 237 See also Candidates, African American (Louisiana); South Lowenstein, Allard K., 588 Mabson, George, 207 Macon (Ga.), 497, 499, 499 (table), 500 (figure) Macon County (Ala.), 510, 510 (table), 526–527, 526 (table) Madison, James, 96, 124 Madison Parish (La.), 574, 577 Maine: African American electorate, estimated, 59 (table) demography, Census (1820), 735 (table) demography, Census (1830), 742 (table), 752 (table) demography, Census (1840), 762 (table), 771 (table), 777 (table) demography, Census (1850), 783 (table), 789 (table) demography, Census (1860), 796 (table) partisanship, African American, 125 presidential election (1828), 735 (table) presidential election (1832), 742 (table) presidential election (1836), 752 (table) presidential election (1840), 762 (table)

presidential election (1844), 771 (table) presidential election (1848), 777 (table) presidential election (1852), 783 (table) presidential election (1856), 789 (table) presidential election (1860), 796 (table) voters, potential African American, 85 (table) voting age population, African American, 55 (table) Maine Territory of Massachusetts, 63 (table), 91 (table) Manza, Jeff, 671 Marshall, Thurgood, 484 Martin, Robert E., 34, 567–570, 567–573 (table) Maryland: African American electorate, estimated, 59 (table) censuses, local-level, 68 (table) demography, county-level, 62 (table), 67 (table), 68 (table) disenfranchisement devices, 328–329, 329 (table) election data, Colonial Era, 67–68, 67 (table), 68 (table) election data, colony-level, 57, 58 (table), 59, 59 (table) partisanship, African American, 121 population, 52 (table), 83 (table) population, African American, 46, 49 (figure), 56 presidential election (1864), 229, 230 presidential election (2008), 685 reversal of African American suffrage rights, 134 slave code, 45 state legislature, 396 taxable population, African American, 57, 58 (table) voter registration statistics, 852–853 (table) voters, potential African American, 85 (table) voting age population, African American, 55 (table), 57, 58 (table) voting rights, African American, 56 (table), 84, 86 (table) See also Border States Massachusetts: African American electorate, estimated, 59 (table) censuses, local-level, 68 (table), 92 (table) demography, Census (1820), 735–736 (table) demography, Census (1830), 742 (table), 752 (table) demography, Census (1840), 762–763 (table), 771–772 (table), 777–778 (table) demography, Census (1850), 783–784 (table), 790 (table) demography, Census (1860), 796–797 (table) demography, county-level, 62 (table), 63 (table), 91 (table) election data, Colonial Era, 61–62, 62 (table), 63 (table) election data, Revolutionary Era, 90, 91 (table) partisanship, African American, 125–126 population, 50 (table), 82 (table) presidential election (1828), 735–736 (table) presidential election (1832), 742 (table) presidential election (1836), 752 (table) presidential election (1840), 762–763 (table) presidential election (1844), 771–772 (table) presidential election (1848), 777–778 (table) presidential election (1852), 783–784 (table) presidential election (1856), 790 (table) presidential election (1860), 796–797 (table) presidential election (1864), 224 voters, potential African American, 85 (table) voting age population, African American, 55 (table) voting behavior percentages, correlations of, 129, 129 (table) voting rights, African American, 56 (table), 86 (table) Mass-based political parties, 146 Materson, Lisa, 423

Matthews, Donald, 602(n44) Maverick, Maury, 463–466, 464 (table), 465 (table), 466 (figure) McCabe, Edwin P., 358 McCain, James, 510–511 McCain, John. See Presidential election (2008) McClellan, George B., 218 See also Presidential election (1864) McCray, John H., 511, 513 McDonald, Laughlin, 329, 651 McKaine, Osceola E., 511, 512–514 McKinley, William, 377 McLaughlin, Tom, 29 McLemore, Leslie Burl, 608 McManus, Michael, 148–149 McMillan, James, 374 McMurry, Linda, 17 McPherson, Edward, 242, 246 McPherson, James, 229, 268 Melendez, Arlan D., 642, 677 “Memorial To the Honorable, The Delegates of The People of Pennsylvania In Convention at Philadelphia Assembled” (Hinton and Gardner), 28, 29 Memphis (Tenn.), 510, 510 (table), 514, 516 (table) Menard, John Willis, 208 Meredith, James, 624 MFDP. See Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party Michigan: constitutional convention, 152, 153 partisanship, African American, 124–125 population, 53 (table) suffrage referenda, 152–155, 153 (table), 154 (figure) Middle Colonies, 46–47, 47 (table), 48 (table), 49 (figure), 81 (table) Midwest States, 280, 281 (map), 291–292 See also specific states “Migration and Distribution of the Negro Population as Affecting the Elective Franchise” (Miller), 18 Military Districts, 234 Military Reconstruction Acts (1867), 206–213 about, 233–234, 233 (table) African Americans and whites disenfranchised by, 242–243, 244 (figure), 244 (table) First, 158, 233 (table), 234 Fourth, 233 (table), 234 National Convention of the Colored Men of America (1869) and, 207–211, 208 (table), 209 (map), 210 (figure), 716 National Equal Rights League and, 211–212 Second, 233 (table), 234 Third, 233 (table), 234 Miller, Kelly, 18, 719 Milwaukee (Wisc.), 681–682 Minnesota suffrage referenda, 151–152, 151 (table), 152 (figure) See also Midwest States Minority Vote Dilution (Davidson), 636 (table), 638–639 “Minor” literature, 39 Mississippi: Black and Tan Republicans, 450–453, 451 (table), 452 (figure), 453 (figure) Black Belt counties, 856–857 (table), 861 (table) Commission on Civil Rights data, 533, 533 (table), 534 (figure) congressional districts, First and Third, 583 (map) Constitutional Convention, 31–32

Index I-11 federal examiners/observers, 626, 627 (table), 629, 629 (figure), 631, 632–633 (table), 633, 644–645, 644 (table), 896 (table) Freedom Elections, 579, 581–596 Freedom Elections, about, 547 (table), 549, 579, 582, 582 (table), 583 (map), 584 Freedom Elections, and Democratic National Convention seating challenge, 595–596 Freedom Elections, congressional, 579, 582, 582 (table), 583 (map) Freedom Elections, gubernatorial, 584–587 (table), 588–589, 589–591 (table), 592, 593–594 (table) Freedom Votes, 592, 595, 595 (table) new voters, increase in, 246, 248, 248 (table) population by race, 856–857 (table) presidential election (1964), 595, 595 (table) presidential election (2008), 683 presidential election voter turnout (1964–1972), 628–629, 629 (table), 630 (figure) racial data breakdown, missing, 238 suffrage literature, 30–32 Understanding Clause, 341, 344 (table), 345, 345 (figure) voter registrations, African American, 825–826 (table) voter registrations, by race, 629–630, 630 (table), 631 (figure), 631 (table) voter registrations, statistics of, 531–532, 531–532 (table), 835–837 (table) Voting Rights Act (1965), African American electorate before, 503, 505–506, 505 (table), 506 (table), 507 (table) Voting Rights Act (1965), immediate impact of, 616, 617 (table), 618–619, 619 (figure), 620–621 (table), 621–623 (figure), 623, 624, 871–873 (table) Voting Rights Act (1965), short-term impact of, 624–626, 625 (table), 626–628 (figure), 627 (table), 628, 885–887 (table) voting rights activists and activism, 716–717 voting rights cases, 461 White Primary, 345 See also South Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), 443, 595–596, 608, 624, 714 Mississippi Free Press, 584, 589 Missouri, 156, 157 (figure), 157 (table), 685 See also Border States Missouri Compromise, 103 Mitchell, John, Jr., 446 Model constitution pamphlet, 199 (figure) Modernization theory, 602(n44) Montgomery, Isaiah T., 31–32 Moon, Henry Lee, 38 Multiple Ballot-Box Law (S.C.), 651 Murphy, Frank, 563 Murray, George H., 437 Mutual aid societies, 192, 193 Myrdal, Gunnar, 18, 563–564, 652–655 NAACP. See National Association for the Advancement of Colored People National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), 418, 419 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP): founding of, 460–461 grandfather clause, elimination of, 211–212 National Equal Rights League and, 212 Oklahoma, disenfranchisement in, 354, 358

I-12

The African American Electorate

photo ID laws, 641 Smith v. Allwright (1944), 455, 486, 487–489, 488 (figure), 489 (table) voting cases, 460–461, 462 (table) White Primaries, 486 woman suffrage, 424, 433, 434 (table), 435 (map), 436–437 National Association of Colored Women, 418 National Coalition on Black Voter Participation (NCBVP), 667–668, 669 (table) National Convention Movement: birth and evolution of, 193–197 convention of 1869, 207–211, 208 (table), 209 (map), 210 (figure), 716 conventions, national versus state, 194 (figure) founding National Convention, 194 (table), 195 (map) Liberty Party and, 181 revitalization of, 152–153 states, cities, and delegates participating in, 196 (table) See also National Equal Rights League National Equal Rights League (NERL), 191–216 about, 192 Address to the American People, 198–200 African American political agency, rise of, 192–193 annual meeting, first, 200–201 branch states, 200–201, 202 (map) efforts from late 1865 to the 1867 Military Reconstruction Acts, 201–206 final incarnation of, 211–212 founding of, 197–200, 198 (table), 199 (map) leadership and organizational structure of, 201 (table) manifestations of, 212–213, 212 (diagram) Military Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and, 206–213 model constitution pamphlet, 199 (figure) NAACP and, 212 National Convention Movement, birth and evolution of, 193–197, 194 (figure), 194 (table), 195 (map), 196 (table) National Convention of the Colored Men of America (1869) and, 207–211, 208 (table), 209 (map), 210 (figure), 716 rebirth and recreation of, 207–211, 716 rise and evolution of, 197–206, 198 (table), 199 (map) standing committees, 200, 201 (diagram) summary and conclusions on, 213–214 National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), 417–418, 419, 424 Naturalization Act (1870), 364 NAWSA. See National American Woman Suffrage Association NCBVP. See National Coalition on Black Voter Participation Nebraska territory, 158 “Negro Delegates” category (Negro Year Book), 16, 17 (table) Negroes and the New Southern Politics (Matthews and Prothro), 602(n44) “Negro History Week,” 390–391 Negro Legislators in Georgia During the Reconstruction Period (Coulter), 20 “Negro Officeholding” category (Negro Year Book), 16, 17 (table) Negro Politics, The (Wilson), 408 “Negro Voting Age Population” category (Negro Year Book), 16–17, 17 (table) Negro Year Book, 15, 16–18, 17 (table), 33, 390 NERL. See National Equal Rights League Nevada. See Far West States Newberry v. U.S. (1921), 484

New England Colonies: censuses, 46, 47 (table), 81 (table) population, African American, 46–47, 48 (table), 49 (figure) New Hampshire: African American electorate, estimated, 59 (table) censuses, local-level, 68 (table), 92 (table) demography, Census (1820), 736 (table) demography, Census (1830), 743 (table), 752–753 (table) demography, Census (1840), 763 (table), 772 (table), 778 (table) demography, Census (1850), 784 (table), 790 (table) demography, Census (1860), 797 (table) demography, county-level, 64 (table), 89 (table), 90 (table) election data, Colonial Era, 62, 64 (table) election data, Revolutionary Era, 88, 89 (table), 90 (table) partisanship, African American, 125 population, 50 (table), 82 (table) presidential election (1828), 736 (table) presidential election (1832), 743 (table) presidential election (1836), 752–753 (table) presidential election (1840), 763 (table) presidential election (1844), 772 (table) presidential election (1848), 778 (table) presidential election (1852), 784 (table) presidential election (1856), 790 (table) presidential election (1860), 797 (table) voters, potential African American, 85 (table) voting age population, African American, 55 (table) voting behavior percentages, correlations of, 130, 130 (table) voting behavior prior to Fifteenth Amendment, 171 voting rights, African American, 56 (table), 86 (table) New Jersey: African American electorate, estimated, 59 (table) censuses, local-level, 68 (table) demography, county-level, 66 (table), 67 (table) election data, Colonial Era, 65–67, 66 (table), 67 (table) partisanship, African American, 121 population, 51 (table), 82 (table) reversal of African American suffrage rights, 134–135 voters, potential African American, 85 (table), 86 voting age population, African American, 55 (table) voting rights, African American, 56 (table), 86, 86 (table) women voters, 413–415, 415 (table) women voters, potential, 415–416, 416 (table) New Orleans (La.): statewide elections (1956), 503, 504 (figure) voter registration, 468–469, 468 (table), 469 (figure) Newspapers, African American, 193 New York: African American electorate, estimated, 59 (table) censuses, local-level, 68 (table), 92 (table) constitutional convention, 137–138, 171 demography, African American, 69 (figure), 74 (figure) demography, Census (1820), 736–737 (table) demography, Census (1830), 743–744 (table), 753–754 (table) demography, Census (1840), 763–765 (table), 772–774 (table), 778–780 (table) demography, Census (1850), 784–786 (table), 790–792 (table) demography, Census (1860), 797–799 (table) demography, county-level, 69–74 (table), 90 (table) election data, Colonial Era, 68–69, 69–74 (table), 69 (figure), 74 (figure) election data, Revolutionary Era, 88–90, 90 (table)

partisanship, African American, 121–124 population, 51 (table), 82 (table) presidential election (1828), 736–737 (table) presidential election (1832), 743–744 (table) presidential election (1836), 753–754 (table) presidential election (1840), 763–765 (table) presidential election (1844), 772–774 (table) presidential election (1848), 778–780 (table) presidential election (1852), 784–786 (table) presidential election (1856), 790–792 (table) presidential election (1860), 797–799 (table) presidential election (1864), 224 reversal of African American suffrage rights, 137–138 suffrage literature, 28 suffrage referenda, 151, 151 (figure), 151 (table), 192, 721–722, 722 (figure) voters, potential African American, 85 (table), 119 voting age population, African American, 55 (table) voting behavior percentages, correlations of, 129, 129 (table), 130, 130 (table) voting behavior prior to Fifteenth Amendment, 171 voting rights, African American, 56 (table), 86 (table) Nieman, Donald, 96–97, 196 Nineteenth Amendment: African American women, enfranchisement of, 424–438, 425 (map) influencer disenfranchisement, 433–434, 434–435 (table), 435 (map), 436–438, 437–438 (table) passage of, 379–380 potential and promise of, 427–428 (table), 429, 429 (figure), 430–432 (table) See also Women Nixon, Lawrence A., 484 Nixon v. Condon (1927), 484 Nominees, African American. See Candidates, African American North Carolina: Black Belt counties, 857 (table), 862 (table) censuses, local-level, 68 (table), 92 (table) Commission on Civil Rights data, 535, 537 (figure), 537 (table), 538 demography, Census (1820), 737–739 (table) demography, Census (1830), 744–746 (table), 754–755 (table) demography, Census (1840), 765–766 (table) demography, county-level, 75–77 (table), 91 (table) disenfranchisement referendum, 343, 350–351 (table), 351, 351 (figure), 352 (map), 353 election data, Colonial Era, 69, 72–74, 75–77 (table), 75 (figure) election data, Revolutionary Era, 90–91, 91 (table) federal examiners/observers, 644–645, 644 (table) partisanship, African American, 125 poll tax, 470–471, 471 (table) population, 52 (table), 83 (table), 857 (table) presidential election (1828), 737–739 (table) presidential election (1832), 744–746 (table) presidential election (1836), 754–755 (table) presidential election (1840), 765–766 (table) presidential election (2008), 684 presidential election voter turnout (1964–1972), 628–629, 629 (table), 630 (figure) reversal of African American suffrage rights, 135 taxable population, African American share of, 75 (figure)

Index I-13 voter registrations, African American, 433–434, 435 (table), 436, 624–626, 625 (table), 627 (figure), 826 (table), 887–889 (table) voter registrations, by race, 629–630, 630 (table), 631 (figure), 631 (table) voter registrations, statistics of, 837–839 (table) voting age population and voter registration, 633, 634 (table), 898–901 (table) voting behavior percentages, correlations of, 130, 130 (table) voting rights, African American, 56 (table), 86 (table) Voting Rights Act (1965), African American electorate before, 507–508, 508–509 (figure), 508 (table), 510, 510 (table) See also South NWSA. See National Woman Suffrage Association Obama, Barack H.: vote for, by region and race, 704–705, 704–707 (table), 707 voting laws, 641–642 voting rights, 675, 676, 680–682 white support for, 705, 706–707 (table), 707, 707 (figure) See also Presidential election (2008) Official Senate Report (1868): about, 237–238 constitutional conventions, 240–243, 240 (table), 241–243 (figure), 242–243 (table), 245 (table) data, missing, 238, 245–248, 246 (table), 247 (figure), 247 (map), 248 (table) Military Reconstruction Acts, 242–243, 244 (figure), 244 (table) new voters, increase in, 246, 248, 248 (table) registered voters, 239 (figure), 239 (table), 245–246, 246 (table), 247 (figure), 247 (map) results of, 240–245, 240 (table), 241–244 (figure), 242–245 (table) Ogden, Frederic, 473, 475–476 Ohio, 26, 156, 157 (figure), 157 (table) Oklahoma, grandfather clause in, 354, 358 Olbrich, Emil, 84, 86–87, 92, 135, 137 Olivet Baptist Church (Chicago), 389 Olmsted, Marlin E., 377, 412 Operation Big Vote, 667–668 Opponents and oppositions, origin of, 717–720 Ordinance of 1787, 80, 87 Ordinary least squares regression procedure, 726 Oregon. See Far West States “Origins of Negro Suffrage during the Civil War” (Belz), 214 Ortiz, Paul, 436, 550 Otey, Elizabeth L., 438, 438 (table), 732–734 (table) Palmer, Alice, 680 Palmer, Henry L., 150 Parallel political parties, 442–443 Parker, John J., 445 Parker, Kermit, 574, 575–576 (table), 577, 579, 580–581 (table), 603(n59) Partisanship, 120–126 about, 3–4, 120–121 Maine, 125 Maryland, 121 Massachusetts, 125–126 Michigan, 124–125 New Hampshire, 125 New Jersey, 121 New York, 121–124 North Carolina, 125 Tennessee, 125

I-14

The African American Electorate

Party competition, origin of, 720–721 “Past Politics” category (Negro Year Book), 16, 17 (table) Patterson, Joe, 584 Pauley, Garth, 713, 714, 717 Peace Democrats, 219–220 Pennsylvania: constitutional convention, 136–137, 136 (table) demography, Census (1820), 739–740 (table) demography, Census (1830), 746–747 (table), 756–757 (table) demography, Census (1840), 766–768 (table) population, 52 (table), 83 (table) presidential election (1828), 739–740 (table) presidential election (1832), 746–747 (table) presidential election (1836), 756–757 (table) presidential election (1840), 766–768 (table) reversal of African American suffrage rights, 136–137, 136 (table) suffrage literature, 28–29 voters, potential African American, 85 (table) voting behavior percentages, correlations of, 129–130, 130 (table) voting rights, African American, 56 (table), 86 (table) Periodization approach, 5–6 Perman, Michael: disenfranchisement, 323–324, 325, 328, 329 electoral reforms, 652, 670 nominees and public office holders, African American, 187–188 Republican Party African Americans, 444 Philadelphia (Penn.), 406, 407 (figure) Phillips, Ruebel, 588, 589–591 (table) Photo ID laws, 641–642, 682, 720 Pickens, William, 433 Pinderhughes, Dianne, 668 Pirtle v. Brown (1941), 474 Political identification, 15–17, 17 (table), 18–19, 20 Political parties: anti-slavery, 126–128, 180–185, 181 (table), 184 (table), 185 (table) mass-based, 146 satellite, 442–443 See also specific parties Political scientists, as election data source, 14 “Political Status of the Negro, The” (Bunche), 18–19 Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR, The (Bunche), 19 Politics of Race in New York, The (Field), 28 Politics of the Southern Negro, The (Holloway), 602(n44) Pollbooks, 45 Poll tax: African American activists and voters, role in fighting, 477 Alabama, 471 (table), 473 Arkansas, 325, 471 (table), 472 Border States, 331–332, 332 (table), 333 (figure), 334–335, 335 (table), 336 (figure) characteristics of, 329–330, 330 (table) enactment years of, 328, 329 (table) Florida, 471 (table), 472 Georgia, 471 (table), 472, 473, 550–552, 553 (table) Holley, Joseph W., on, 720 literature on, 33 Louisiana, 471–472, 471 (table) North Carolina, 470–471, 471 (table) “Oath of Voter” form, missing item from, 550–552, 553 (table) presidential election turnout and, 331, 332 (table), 334–335, 335 (table), 336 (figure) racial majority counties, impact in, 331–332, 333 (figure)

reconsideration of, 470–473, 471 (table) repeal of, 469–479, 474 (map), 475–476 (table), 475 (figure), 478 (figure), 478 (table) South Carolina, 471 (table), 472–473 Tennessee, 471 (table), 473, 474 Texas, 471 (table), 472, 722, 723 (figure) Virginia, 471 (table), 472, 477 Pope, John, 249, 251 Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr., 402–403, 406 Powell, Lawrence, 276 “Pre-primaries,” 487 Presidency, political party in control of, 366, 367 (table) Presidential election (1789–1868), 167–170, 170 (table), 173–176 (table) Presidential election (1800), 10 Presidential election (1828), 735–741 (table) Presidential election (1832), 742–749 (table) Presidential election (1836), 750–759 (table) Presidential election (1840), 760–768 (table) Presidential election (1844), 181, 769–774 (table) Presidential election (1848), 182, 775–780 (table) Presidential election (1852), 781–786 (table) Presidential election (1856), 787–792 (table) Presidential election (1860), 128, 183–184, 793–799 (table) Presidential election (1864), 217–230 about, 218 African American soldiers, demography and deployment of, 220–222, 221 (table) African American soldiers’ vote, 222–225, 223 (map), 224 (figure), 224 (table), 225 (map) debates over soldiers voting in, 218–220 Democratic Party, 219–220 Lincoln, Abraham, 218 McClellan, George B., 218 presidential vote differences in, 225–229, 226 (table), 227 (figure), 228 (table) Republican Party, 220 soldiers’ vote, total, 222, 222 (table) summary and conclusions on, 229–230 Presidential election (1868): Border States, results for, 800 (table) Border States, support for Democratic Party, 284–285, 286 (figure), 307, 307 (figure) Border States, support for Republican Party, 284, 285 (figure), 305, 306 (figure), 307 Border States, vote for major political parties, 280, 282 (table), 283 (table) Florida, 303–304, 303 (figure) Louisiana, 303–304, 303 (figure) maximum majority African American county, voting behavior of, 814 (table) maximum majority white county, voting behavior of, 819 (table) presidential election (1872) vote compared to, 265, 266 (table) South, African American vote in, 257–264, 258 (figure), 258 (map), 259–263 (table) South, gain and loss of majority African American counties voting for the Republican Party in, 261, 261 (table), 271, 271 (table) South, gain and loss of majority white counties voting for the Republican Party in, 261, 262 (table), 271, 272 (table) South, gain and loss of votes in majority African American counties voting for the Republican Party in, 261, 262 (table), 263, 271, 272 (table)

South, gain and loss of votes in majority white counties voting for the Republican Party in, 263, 263 (table), 271, 273 (table) South, majority African American counties in, 258 (map), 259–260, 260 (table) South, percent of racial majority counties voting for the Democratic Party in, 268–269, 269 (figure) South, percent of racial majority counties voting for the Republican Party in the South, 263–264, 264 (table) South, popular and electoral votes in, 260–261, 260 (table) South, Republican Party percentage of vote and African American percentage of population in, 276–277, 276 (figure) South, results for, 800 (table) South Carolina, 303–304, 303 (figure) See also Presidential election (1868–1872) Presidential election (1868–1872): Border States, comparative portrait of party voting in, 284–285, 285 (figure), 286 (figure) Border States, Republican Party in, 284, 285 (figure) Republican Party, majority African American counties voting for in the South, 261–262 (table), 263, 265, 267, 271–272 (table) Republican Party, majority white counties voting for in the South, 261, 262–263 (table), 263, 267, 271, 272–273 (table) Republican Party, percentage of vote and African American percentage of population in the South, 276–277, 276 (figure), 277 West Virginia, 285, 287–288 (table), 288–290, 289 (table) See also Presidential election (1868); Presidential election (1872) Presidential election (1868–1920): Border States, 309, 310 (figure), 311, 316, 316 (figure) Rapides Parish (La.), 305, 306 (figure) South, 307–309, 308–310 (figure), 312, 312 (figure), 314 (figure) Presidential election (1872): Border States, results for, 800–801 (table) Border States, support for Democratic Party, 284–285, 286 (figure), 307, 307 (figure) Border States, support for Republican Party, 284, 285 (figure), 305, 306 (figure), 307 Border States, vote for major political parties, 282 (table), 283 (table), 284 candidates in, 162, 177(n2) Florida, 303–304, 303 (figure) Louisiana, 303–304, 303 (figure) presidential election (1868) vote compared to, 265, 266 (table) South, African American voting behavior in, 264–268, 265 (map), 266 (table), 268 (figure) South, gain and loss of majority African American counties voting for the Republican Party in, 261 (table), 265, 267, 271, 271 (table) South, gain and loss of majority white counties voting for the Republican Party in, 262 (table), 267, 271, 272 (table) South, gain and loss of votes in majority African American counties voting for the Republican Party in, 262 (table), 267, 271, 272 (table) South, gain and loss of votes in majority white counties voting for the Republican Party in, 263 (table), 267, 271, 273 (table) South, majority African American counties in, 265, 265 (map) South, percent of racial majority counties voting for the Democratic Party in, 269, 270 (figure) South, percent of racial majority counties voting for the Republican Party in, 267, 268 (figure) South, Republican Party percentage of vote and African American percentage of population in, 276 (figure), 277

Index I-15 South, results for, 800–801 (table) South Carolina, 303–304, 303 (figure) voting behavior of maximum majority African American county, 814 (table) voting behavior of maximum majority white county, 819 (table) See also Presidential election (1868–1872) Presidential election (1876): Border States, results for, 801–802 (table) Border States, results for majority African American counties in, 301–302, 301 (table) Border States, results for majority white counties in, 302–303, 302 (table) Border States, vote of African Americans in, 301–302 (table), 301–307, 303–304 (figure), 305 (table), 306–307 (figure) Democratic Party, support for, 307, 307 (figure) electoral vote by state, 299–301, 300 (map) Florida, 299, 303–304, 303 (figure), 304, 304 (figure) Louisiana, 299, 303–304, 303 (figure), 304, 304 (figure) Republican Party, support for, 305, 306 (figure), 307 South, results for, 801–802 (table) South, results for majority African American counties in, 301–302, 301 (table) South, results for majority white counties in, 302–303, 302 (table) South, vote of African Americans in, 301–302 (table), 301–307, 303–304 (figure), 305 (table), 306–307 (figure) South Carolina, 299, 303–304, 303 (figure), 304, 304 (figure) voting behavior of maximum majority African American county, 814 (table) voting behavior of maximum majority white county, 819 (table) See also Compromise of 1877 Presidential election (1876–1944), 406–407, 407 (figure) Presidential election (1880), 802–803 (table), 815 (table), 820 (table) Presidential election (1884), 803–804 (table), 815 (table), 820 (table) Presidential election (1888), 804–805 (table), 815 (table), 820 (table) Presidential election (1892), 805–806 (table), 816 (table), 821 (table) Presidential election (1896), 806–807 (table), 816 (table), 821 (table) Presidential election (1900), 807–808 (table), 816 (table), 821 (table) Presidential election (1904), 808–809 (table), 817 (table), 822 (table) Presidential election (1908), 809–810 (table), 817 (table), 822 (table) Presidential election (1912), 810–811 (table), 817 (table), 822 (table) Presidential election (1916): results for Border States and South, 811–812 (table) Savannah (Ga.), African American voters in, 561 (table) voting behavior of maximum majority African American county, 818 (table) voting behavior of maximum majority white county, 823 (table) women voters, African American, 423 Presidential election (1920): Border States, results for, 812–813 (table) results for Border States and South, 812–813 (table) Savannah (Ga.), African American voters in, 561 (table) South, results for, 812–813 (table) voting behavior of maximum majority African American county, 818 (table) voting behavior of maximum majority white county, 823 (table) women, African American, 423–424, 433–434, 434–435 (table), 435 (map), 436–438, 437–438 (table) Presidential election (1924), 561 (table) Presidential election (1932–1960), 406, 407 (figure) Presidential election (1952), 523, 524 (table) Presidential election (1952–1956), 523, 524 (table) Presidential election (1956), 523, 524 (table)

I-16

The African American Electorate

Presidential election (1964): Mississippi Freedom Vote, 595, 595 (table) voter turnout, 628–629, 629 (table), 630 (figure) Presidential election (1964–1972), 628–629, 629 (table), 630 (figure) Presidential election (1968), 628–629, 629 (table), 630 (figure) Presidential election (1972), 628–629, 629 (table), 630 (figure) Presidential election (1976), 607 Presidential election (1992), 607 Presidential election (1996), 607 Presidential election (2000), 26, 650, 670 Presidential election (2000–2008), 688–698 about, 689–690 (table), 690, 691 (figure), 698 Democratic Party success, 690, 692–693 (table), 693–694, 694 (figure) Republican Party success, 694, 695–696 (table), 696–698, 697 (figure), 698 (figure) Presidential election (2004), 26 Presidential election (2008), 673–709 about, 675–676 African American vote, 607 Battleground States, 684 Border States, 684–685, 688, 690 (table) Commission on Civil Rights and, 676–679, 678–679 (table), 680 (table) demography and, 682–685 disenfranchisement, long-term influence of, 685–703, 699–701 (table), 702–703 (table) disenfranchisement, short-term influence of, 703–705, 704–707 (table), 707, 707 (figure) Emerging Battleground States, 684 majority African American counties, measuring loss of, 686–688, 686 (table), 687 (map), 688 (figure), 689 (figure) Obama, vote for by region and race, 704–705, 704–707 (table), 707 Obama, white support for, 705, 706–707 (table), 707, 707 (figure) Red States, 683–684 South, 688–690, 689 (table), 691 (figure) South, by past and present African American majority counties, 698, 699–701 (table), 701–703, 702–703 (table) South, support for Obama, 704, 704 (table) summary and conclusions on, 707 (figure) Voting Rights Act (1965) and, 704, 704 (table), 705, 705 (table) voting rights legislation and, 680–682 Presidential election turnout, and poll tax, 331, 332 (table), 334–335, 335 (table), 336 (figure) Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), 103, 196 Prisoners by race, 654, 654 (table) Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction: Johnson, Andrew, 204–205 (document) Lincoln, Abraham, 203–204 (document) Progress in voting rights literature, 39 Property alternative to literacy test, 330, 331 (table) Protest at Selma (Garrow), 635, 636 (table) Protest organizations and votes, role of, 3 Prothro, James, 602(n44) Provisional ballots, 678 Proxy voting, 219, 222, 224 Public sentiment and mass public opinion, origins of, 721–722, 722 (figure), 723 (figure), 723 (map) Purges, 494–495, 496–497 (table), 497, 498 (map), 529–530, 541 Quarles, Benjamin, 121, 180, 229 Quasi-militia organizations, 290

Quay, Matt, 374 Quiet Revolution in the South (Davidson and Grofman), 37–38, 636 (table), 637 Quin, Charles Kennon (C. K.), 464–466, 464 (table), 465 (table), 466 (figure) Race, Class, and Party (Lewinson), 34 “Race and Suffrage in the South since 1940” (Jackson), 37 “Race men” (race heroes), 402–403 Racial identification, 15, 21 Radical Political Abolitionists, 181 (table), 184 Rainach, W. M., 574 Rapides Parish (La.): election results, 304–305, 305 (table) presidential elections, 305, 306 (figure) reversal, politics of, 139–141, 139 (map), 140 (table), 141 (figure) Ray, Charles B., 127, 181, 181 (table) Reagan, Ronald, 656 Reapportionment bill (1900), 377–378, 378 (table) Reconstruction, 15, 26, 236–237 Redemption Movement: about, 303–304, 364, 388 literature on, 325–327, 326 (figure), 327 (table) voting rights, 651–652 Red States, 683–684 Reference works, as election data source, 14 Referenda. See Agricultural Adjustment Act referenda; Disenfranchisement referenda; Suffrage referenda Regression analysis, 276, 293–294 Republican National Committee (RNC), 423–424, 443 Republican Party: African American electorate and, 3–4 Border States support for, 317, 319, 319 (figure) Centrists faction, 188 Civil Rights Acts, votes for/against, 613, 614 (figure), 615, 615 (figure) delegates, African American, 183–184 federal elections, African American voting in, 128 founding of, 106 New York, 124 photo ID laws, 642 presidential and vice presidential candidates, 185 (table) presidential election (1864), 220 presidential election (1868), 263–264, 264 (table), 303–304, 303 (figure), 305, 306 (figure), 307 presidential election (1872), 267, 268 (figure), 303–304, 303 (figure), 305, 306 (figure), 307 presidential election (1876), 303–304, 303 (figure), 305, 306 (figure), 307 presidential election (2000–2008), 694, 695–696 (table), 696–698, 697 (figure), 698 (figure) Radical faction, 188 satellite parties, 443 South support for, 317, 318 (figure) suffrage referenda, 148–149, 155–156 Voting Rights Acts and, 613, 614–615 (figure), 615, 615 (table), 719 See also Black and Tan Republicans; Presidential election (1868–1872) Republican Party and Black America from McKinley to Hoover, 1896–1933, The (Sherman), 442 Republicans Face the Southern Question (DeSantis), 442

Restrictive civil rights laws, 326–327, 326 (figure), 329, 329 (table) Revels, Hiram, 443 Reversal of African American suffrage rights prior to the Fifteenth Amendment, 133–143 about, 134, 141–142, 141 (map) partial reversals, 137–139 politics of reversal, 139–141, 139 (map), 140 (table), 141 (figure) total reversals, 134–137, 136 (table) Revolutionary Era, 79–93 about, 80, 91–92, 92 (table) censuses, 80–81, 81 (table), 92 (table) Connecticut election data, county-level, 88, 89 (table) demography of African Americans, 80–84, 81 (table), 82–83 (table), 92 (table) election administration, 724 election data, county-level, 87–91, 87–91 (table) Free-Men-of-Color, voting rights of, 11 (table) Massachusetts election data, county-level, 90, 91 (table) New Hampshire election data, county-level, 88, 89 (table), 90 (table) New York election data, county-level, 88–90, 90 (table) North Carolina election data, county-level, 90–91, 91 (table) Rhode Island election data, county-level, 87–88, 87 (table), 88 (table) Three-Fifths Clause and slave population, 81, 82–83 (table), 84 voters, potential African American, 84, 86–87, 86 (table) women voters, 413 women voters, potential African American, 415–416, 416 (table) Rhode Island: African American electorate, estimated, 59 (table) anti-slavery parties, 127–128 censuses, local-level, 68 (table), 92 (table) constitutional convention, 138–139 demography, Census (1820), 740 (table) demography, Census (1830), 747 (table), 757 (table) demography, Census (1840), 768 (table), 774 (table), 780 (table) demography, Census (1850), 786 (table), 792 (table) demography, Census (1860), 799 (table) demography, town-level, 64 (table), 65 (table), 87 (table), 88 (table) election data, Colonial Era, 62–63, 64 (table), 65 (table) election data, Revolutionary Era, 87–88, 87 (table), 88 (table) population, 50 (table), 82 (table) presidential election (1828), 740 (table) presidential election (1832), 747 (table) presidential election (1836), 757 (table) presidential election (1840), 768 (table) presidential election (1844), 774 (table) presidential election (1848), 780 (table) presidential election (1852), 786 (table) presidential election (1856), 792 (table) presidential election (1860), 799 (table) reversal of African American suffrage rights, 138–139 slave elections, mock, 86, 87 voters, potential African American, 85 (table), 119 voting age population, African American, 55 (table) voting behavior percentages, correlations of, 130, 130 (table) voting behavior prior to Fifteenth Amendment, 171 voting rights, African American, 56 (table), 86, 86 (table), 87 Right to Vote, The (Keyssar), 13, 717 Riser, R. Volney, 39, 460 RNC. See Republican National Committee Roberts, Adelbert H., 390

Index I-17 Roefs, Wim, 511 Roosevelt, Franklin, 476 Roosevelt, Theodore, 377, 378 Roster of Black Elected Officials (Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies), 19–20 Ruby, George T., 444 Run-Off Primaries, 347–348, 347 (table) Rusk, Jerrold, 27, 324 Russell, Charles, 148 Russell, Richard, 529 San Antonio (Tex.), 463–466, 464 (table), 465 (table), 466 (figure) Sanderson, G. K., 240 San Francisco County (Calif.), 292 Satellite political parties, 442–443 Savannah (Ga.), 550–563 about, 547–548, 547 (table), 550 African American electorate, portrait of, 552–553, 555, 557–558, 560 “Oath of Voter” documents, 550, 551 (document), 552 (document) Oath of Voter statistics for African American voters (1915), 557, 557 (table) Oath of Voter statistics for African American voters (1915–1926), 552–553, 554 (table), 555 Oath of Voter statistics for African American voters (1916), 557–558, 557 (table) Oath of Voter statistics for African American voters (1920), 558, 558 (table) Oath of Voter statistics for African American voters (1921), 558, 559 (table) Oath of Voter statistics for African American voters (1924), 558, 559 (table) Oath of Voter statistics for African American voters (1925), 558, 560, 560 (table) Oath of Voter statistics for African American voters (1926), 560, 561 (table) poll tax, 550–552, 553 (table) presidential election (1916–1924), 560, 561 (table), 562 registered voters, African American, 555, 556 (figure), 557 voter rolls, opening of and closing to African Americans, 562–563 Scholars, as election data source, 13–14 Schureman, James, 121 Schwalm, Leslie, 291, 394 SCPDP. See South Carolina Progressive Democratic Party Second Military Reconstruction Act (1867), 233 (table), 234 See also Military Reconstruction Acts (1867) “Second Reconstruction,” as term, 26 Segregation: as criminalization system, 652–655, 654 (table), 655 (table), 656 (figure) laws, 326–327, 326 (figure), 329, 329 (table) Selma (Ala.), 717 Senate: changes in, 609 Civil Rights Acts, Democrats voting for/against, 611, 612 (figure), 613, 614 (figure) Republican and Democratic Party majorities in, 365–366, 366 (figure) Wolcott’s motion, vote on, 375, 375 (figure) See also Congress; Official Senate Report (1868) Senate Executive Document 53 (1867), 33–34 Separate-coach laws, 326–327, 326 (figure), 329

I-18

The African American Electorate

Separation phenomenon, 26–27 Seventeenth Amendment, 10 Seymour, Horatio. See Presidential election (1868) Shadd, Mary A., 194 Shade, William, 154, 155 Sherman, Richard, 442 Shugg, Roger Wallace, 139, 140 Sinclair, Barbara, 608, 609 Sinsheimer, Joseph, 592 Sixteenth Amendment, proposed, 418–419 Slave Codes, 45, 650–651 Slave elections, mock, 86–87 Slaves, county-level demography of, 62 (table) Smith, Hoke, 353 Smith, Robert C., 713, 725–726 Smith, Robert L. T., 579, 582, 582 (table) Smith v. Allwright (1944), 455, 486, 487–489, 488 (figure), 489 (table) Soldiers’ field voting behavior in presidential election (1864), 222–229 African American soldiers’ vote, 222–225, 223 (map), 224 (figure), 224 (table), 225 (map) presidential vote differences, 225–229, 226 (table), 227 (figure), 228 (table) total soldiers’ vote, 222, 222 (table) See also Presidential election (1864) “Soldier Vote in the Election of 1864, The” (Winther), 221–222 South: Battleground States, 684 Black Belt counties, 855–858 (table), 859–863 (table) congressional election (1868), 273, 274 (table) congressional election (1869), 274, 274 (table) congressional election (1870), 273, 274–275, 274 (table) congressional election (1872), 274–275, 274 (table) constitutional conventions, 240–243, 240 (table), 241–243 (figure), 242–243 (table), 245 (table) counties, all-white, 312, 314 (table) counties with largest African American majorities, 311–312, 311 (table) counties with largest white majorities, 312, 313 (table) Democratic Party support, 317, 317 (figure) disenfranchisement, category of, 327–328, 328 (map) disenfranchisement devices, 328–331, 329 (table), 330 (table), 331 (table) disenfranchisement devices and voter turnout, 338, 339 (table), 340 (figure) disenfranchisement laws, stringency of, 331, 332 (table) election administration, 724–725 Emerging Battleground States, 684 Enforcement Acts, criminal prosecutions under, 369, 370 (figure) federal examiners/observers, 626, 627 (table), 629, 629 (figure), 631, 632–633 (table), 633, 644–645, 644 (table), 895–896 (table) felon disenfranchisement, African American, 666 (figure), 667, 667 (figure) Fifteenth Amendment enforcement cases, 369, 371 (figure), 372, 372 (figure), 382, 384 (map) Fourteenth Amendment, legislatures’ votes on, 235–236, 235 (table) grandfather clause, 332–334, 334 (table), 335 (figure), 337–338, 337 (table), 338 (figure) literacy tests, and presidential election turnout, 332, 333 (table), 335–336, 336 (table), 337 (figure)

literacy tests, characteristics and alternatives, 330–331, 331 (table) literacy tests, impact in racial majority counties, 332, 334 (figure) poll tax, and presidential election turnout, 331, 332 (table), 334–335, 335 (table), 336 (figure) poll tax, characteristics of, 329–330, 330 (table) poll tax, elimination of, 470–473, 471 (table) poll tax, impact in racial majority counties, 1892–1920, 331–332, 333 (figure) population, non-white, 525, 525 (map), 526 (map) population by race, 855–858 (table) presidential election (1868–1920), 307–309, 308–310 (figure), 312, 312 (figure), 314 (figure) presidential election (1876), 301–302 (table), 301–307, 303–304 (figure), 305 (table), 306 (figure) presidential election (2008), 688–690, 689 (table), 691 (figure), 698, 699–703 (table), 701–703, 704, 704 (table) presidential election voter turnout (1964–1972), 628–629, 629 (table), 630 (figure) Red States, 683–684 Republican Party support, 317, 318 (figure) Run-Off Primaries, 347–348, 347 (table) separate-coach laws, 326–327, 326 (figure), 329 suffrage referenda, 722, 723 (map) Twenty-Fourth Amendment, ratification of, 476–477, 476 (table) urban areas, 461–469, 467–468 (table), 469 (figure), 470 (map) voter registrations, African American (1867), 239 (figure), 239 (table), 245–246, 246 (table), 247 (figure), 247 (map) voter registrations, African American (1940–1956), 488 (figure), 488 (table), 489 (table) voter registrations, African American (1956–1962), 530–531, 530 (figure), 824–826 (table) voter registrations, African American (1958), 527, 529, 529 (figure) voter registrations, African American, gain/loss in, 359, 360 (figure), 360 (table) voter registrations, by race, 629–630, 630 (table), 631 (figure), 631 (table) voter registrations, statistics of, 827–852 (table) voter registrations, white (1867), 239 (figure), 239 (table), 245, 246, 246 (table), 247 (figure) voting age population, African American, 466, 467 (table), 468, 468 (table) voting age population registered to vote, 633, 634 (table) voting behavior, African American, 538 (map), 539, 539 (table) voting rights acts, legislative voting behavior of southern members of Congress on, 609, 610–611 (table), 611, 612–615 (figure), 613, 615, 615 (table) White Primary, 345, 347, 347 (table), 348 (map) See also Presidential election (1868); Presidential election (1872); specific states South Carolina: African American voting and non-voting behavior, 348–349 Black and Tan Republicans, 454–456, 454 (table), 455 (figure) Black Belt counties, 857–858 (table), 862 (table) Commission on Civil Rights data, 535, 537 (figure), 537 (table), 538 federal examiners/observers, 626, 627 (table), 629, 629 (figure), 631, 632–633 (table), 633, 644–645, 644 (table), 896 (table) Multiple Ballot-Box Law, 651 poll tax, 471 (table), 472–473 population, 53 (table), 83 (table), 857–858 (table) presidential election (1868), 303–304, 303 (figure), 304, 304 (figure)

presidential election (1872), 303–304, 303 (figure), 304, 304 (figure) presidential election (1876), 299, 303–304, 303 (figure), 304, 304 (figure) presidential election (2008), 683 presidential election voter turnout (1964–1972), 628–629, 629 (table), 630 (figure) voter registrations, African American, 826 (table) voter registrations, by race, 629–630, 630 (table), 631 (figure), 631 (table) voter registrations, statistics of, 839 (table) voting age population and voter registration, 633, 634 (table), 901–902 (table) voting rights, African American, 56 (table), 84, 86 (table) Voting Rights Act (1965), African American electorate before, 510–514, 512–513 (table), 514 (table), 515–516 (table) Voting Rights Act (1965), immediate impact of, 619, 621 (figure), 621 (table), 622 (figure), 623, 623 (figure), 873–874 (table) Voting Rights Act (1965), short-term impact of, 624–626, 625 (table), 626–628 (figure), 627 (table), 628, 890–891 (table) See also South South Carolina Progressive Democratic Party (SCPDP), 443, 455, 456, 458(n45), 511–514, 512–513 (table) South During Reconstruction, The (Coulter), 20 Southern Colonies, 46–47, 47 (table), 48 (table), 49 (figure), 81 (table) Southern Elections (Bartley and Graham), 5 Southern Politics in State and Nation (Key), 323, 361(n65), 724–725 Southern Primaries and Elections, 1920–1949 (Heard and Strong), 5 Southern Regional Council (SRC), 19, 487 See also Voter Education Project St. Bernard Parish (La.), 577 Stanley, John, 122–123 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 205, 417 State constitutional conventions. See Constitutional conventions (state) State election manuals, separation phenomenon in, 27 State elections, 120–126 about, 120–121 Louisiana, 503, 504 (figure) Maine, 125 Maryland, 121 Massachusetts, 125–126 Michigan, 124–125 New Hampshire, 125 New Jersey, 121 New York, 121–124 North Carolina, 125 Tennessee, 125 State legislatures: Illinois, 389–391, 392–394 (table), 394, 395 (figure) Iowa, 394 Maryland, 396 North (excluding Illinois), 394, 396, 397–400 (table), 401 (map), 401 (table), 402 (map) West Virginia, 596, 599–600, 599 (table), 600 (map) women candidates for, 396, 401 (table), 402 (map) States: as election data source, 13, 14 origins of, 724–725 Union, admission to, 106, 109 (figure), 109 (table), 118, 119, 119 (table)

Index I-19 women, enfranchisement of, 424, 425 (map) See also specific states Statewide voter registration organizations, African American, 549, 549 (table) Statistical correlational analysis, 726 Statistical History of the American Electorate, A (Rusk), 27 Stealing Elections (Fund), 642 Stevens, Thaddeus, 137, 158, 218 Stevenson, Adlai, 523, 524 (table) Stone, Chuck, 38 Stone, Lucy, 417 Stoney, George, 564–565, 566 (table) Story, Joseph, 196 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 103, 106 Strong, Donald, 5 Struggle for Black Political Empowerment in Three Georgia Counties, The (Hanks), 5, 36 Stucker, John, 324 Suffrage literature: 1800–1869, 28–30, 31 (table) 1890–1964, 30–33 about, 26, 27–28 Antebellum Era, 28–30, 31 (table) Colonial Era, 28 Era of Disenfranchisement, 32–33 Mississippi, 30–32 New York, 28 Pennsylvania, 28–29 presidential election (2000), 26 presidential election (2004), 26 Suffrage Party, 138 Suffrage referenda, 145–160 about, 146, 158, 159 (map) Connecticut, 156, 157 (figure), 157 (table) District of Columbia, 157, 157 (table) failure of, 157–158, 157 (table) Illinois, 156, 157 (figure), 157 (table) Iowa, 155–156, 155 (table), 156 (figure) Kansas, 156, 157 (figure), 157 (table) Michigan, 152–155, 153 (table), 154 (figure) Minnesota, 151–152, 151 (table), 152 (figure) Missouri, 156, 157 (figure), 157 (table) nature and scope of, 146, 147 (figure), 147 (table), 148 New York, 151, 151 (figure), 151 (table), 192, 721–722, 722 (figure) Ohio, 156, 157 (figure), 157 (table) South, 722, 723 (map) states with multiple referenda, 148–156 states with single referendum, 156–157, 157 (figure), 157 (table) Wisconsin, 148–151, 149 (table), 150 (figure) “Suffrage Rights” category (Negro Year Book), 16, 17 (table) Sullivan, Charles, 585–586 (table) Sullivan, Patricia, 511, 512 Sumter County (Ga.), 607 Superintendent of Public Instruction (Virginia), 437–438, 438 (table), 440(n93), 732–734 (table) Taft, William Howard, 378–379, 380 Talmadge, Eugene, 472, 495, 496–497 (table), 497, 498 (map) Talmadge Plan, 495 Tennessee: Black Belt counties, 858 (table), 863 (table) constitutional convention, 236

I-20

The African American Electorate

demography, Census (1820), 740–741 (table) demography, Census (1830), 748–749 (table), 757–759 (table) disenfranchisement case study, 324 federal examiners/observers, 644–645, 644 (table) Johnson, Andrew, and, 234–235, 236, 237 partisanship, African American, 125 poll tax, 471 (table), 473, 474 population, 858 (table) presidential election (1828), 740–741 (table) presidential election (1832), 748–749 (table) presidential election (1836), 757–759 (table) presidential election (2008), 683–684 Reconstruction, 236–237 reversal of African American suffrage rights, 135 state election (1867), 236–237 voter registrations, African American, 826 (table) voter registrations, statistics of, 840–842 (table) voters, potential African American, 118 Voting Rights Act (1965), African American electorate before, 514, 516, 516 (table), 517 (figure) See also South Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn, 418 Terrell, Mary Church, 126 Terry v. Adams (1953), 487 Texas: Black Belt counties, 858 (table), 863 (table) Commission on Civil Rights data, 535, 536 (figure), 536 (table) Lily-White Republicans, 444 poll tax, 471 (table), 472, 722, 723 (figure) population by race, 858 (table) presidential election (2008), 684 voter registration statistics, 842–849 (table) Voting Rights Act (1965), African American electorate before, 516–517, 517 (figure), 518 (figure), 519 (map), 520 (table) voting rights activists and activism, 716–717 White Primary, 484, 486, 487 See also South Thernstrom, Abigail M., 616, 616 (table), 636 (table), 639–640, 719 Third Military Reconstruction Act (1867), 233 (table), 234 See also Military Reconstruction Acts (1867) Thomas, John W. E., 389–390 Thomas, Norman, 589 Three-Fifths Clause: about, 96–97 accounting for missing “two-fifths of a person,” 114, 114 (figure) Constitutional Convention, 13 death of, 114–115, 115 (table) electoral votes attributable to, 111–112, 111 (figure), 112 (figure) electoral votes by slavery status grouping of states, 113, 113 (figure) House of Representatives seats and electoral votes attributable to (1790 Census), 97–98, 99 (table) House of Representatives seats and electoral votes attributable to (1800 Census), 98–99, 100 (table) House of Representatives seats and electoral votes attributable to (1810 Census), 100, 101 (table) House of Representatives seats and electoral votes attributable to (1820 Census), 101, 102 (table), 103 House of Representatives seats and electoral votes attributable to (1830 Census), 103, 104 (table) House of Representatives seats and electoral votes attributable to (1840 Census), 103, 105 (table)

House of Representatives seats and electoral votes attributable to (1850 Census), 103, 106, 107 (table) House of Representatives seats and electoral votes attributable to (1860 Census), 106, 108 (table) House of Representatives seats attributable to, 109, 110 (figure), 111 House of Representatives seats held by slave states during and after period of, 115, 115 (table) impact of, 13 longitudinal analysis of, 109–115, 110–114 (figure) slave population and, 81, 82–83 (table), 84 Tilden, Samuel J. See Presidential election (1876) Tobacco and cotton referenda. See Agricultural Adjustment Act referenda Todd, Chuck, 682–685 Tokaji, Daniel, 678 Tolbert, Joseph W. “Tireless Joe,” 454, 455 Topping, Simon, 456–457 Train, George Francis, 417 Tribune Almanac, The, 13 Trotter, William Monroe, 211, 212 Truman, Harry, 38 Truth, Sojourner, 193 Tuskegee (Ala.), 510, 510 (table), 526–527 Tuskegee Institute, 15–16, 17 Twelfth Amendment, 10 Twenty-Fourth Amendment, 476–477, 476 (table) Twilight, Alexander, 186 Two Reconstructions, The (Valelly), 635, 636 (table) Uggen, Christopher, 671 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 103, 106 Underground Railroad, 193 Understanding alternative to literacy test, 330, 331 (table), 341, 344 (table), 345, 345 (figure) Union Leagues, 290 Union Party, 149–150 United States v. Classic (1942), 484, 486 United States v. McElveen (1960), 529–530 United States v. Raines (1960), 487, 529 Urban areas, southern, 461–469, 467–468 (table), 469 (figure), 470 (map) See also specific cities Valelly, Richard, 293, 358, 378, 379, 635, 636 (table) Van Buren, Martin, 122, 123–124, 720 Variables, African American suffrage rights: about, 726–727, 727 (diagram) African American election data, 726 courts and liberal jurisprudence, 725–726 geography (political context), 716–717 opponents and oppositions, origin of, 717–720 party competition, origin of, 720–721 public sentiment and mass public opinion, origins of, 721–722, 722 (figure), 723 (figure), 723 (map) states and localities, origins of, 724–725 voting rights activists and activism, origins of, 715–716 VEP. See Voter Education Project Vermont: demography, Census (1820), 741 (table) demography, Census (1830), 749 (table), 759 (table) demography, Census (1840), 768 (table), 774 (table), 780 (table)

demography, Census (1850), 786 (table), 792 (table) demography, Census (1860), 799 (table) presidential election (1828), 741 (table) presidential election (1832), 749 (table) presidential election (1836), 759 (table) presidential election (1840), 768 (table) presidential election (1844), 774 (table) presidential election (1848), 780 (table) presidential election (1852), 786 (table) presidential election (1856), 792 (table) presidential election (1860), 799 (table) Vineland (N.J.), 413 Vines, Kenneth, 502 Virginia: Black and Tan Republicans, 446 Black Belt counties, 858 (table), 863 (table) censuses, local-level, 68 (table) Commission on Civil Rights data, 535, 537 (figure), 537 (table), 538 demography, settlement-level, 61 (table) election data, Colonial Era, 61, 61 (table) House of Burgesses, 10, 415 literacy, 521 (table) pollbooks, 45 poll tax, 471 (table), 472, 477 population, 52 (table), 83 (table) population, African American, 46, 49 (figure) population, by race, 858 (table) presidential election (2008), 684 presidential election voter turnout (1964–1972), 628–629, 629 (table), 630 (figure) slave code, 45 Superintendent of Public Instruction, 437–438, 438 (table), 440(n93), 732–734 (table) voter registrations, African American, 624–626, 625 (table), 891–894 (table) voter registrations, by race, 629–630, 630 (table), 631 (figure), 631 (table) voter registrations, statistics of, 849–852 (table) voting age population, African American, 55 (table) voting rights, African American, 56 (table), 84, 86 (table) Voting Rights Act (1965), African American electorate before, 520–521, 521 (figure), 521 (table), 522–523 (table), 523 women, 412–413, 414, 414 (table) See also South Voter Education Project (VEP): Council of Federated Organizations and, 592 as data source, 19 Mississippi, 582 origins of, 487 role of, 714 as voting rights activism, 3 Voter eligibility, defined, 27 Voter fraud, 641, 642, 677 Voter ID laws, 641–642, 677, 682, 720 Voter intimidation and suppression, 641–643 Voter mobilization, defined, 27 Voter participation literature, 26 33–38, 35 (table), 36 (map), 37 (table) Voter Registration Pact (1961), 713–714 Voter restriction, 323 “Voter’s loyal oath,” 486

Index I-21 Voting in Revolutionary America (Dinkin), 80 Voting in the Field (Benton), 218, 219, 221–222, 223, 229–230 Voting Rights Act (1965): African American electorate before, 487–523 Clinton, Hillary, on, 675–676 Commission on Civil Rights reports, 616, 616 (table) congressional votes for, 609, 610–611 (table) Democrats voting for/against, 609, 611, 612 (figure), 613, 613 (figure), 614 (figure) impact of, during first decade, 628–630, 629–631 (figure), 629–631 (table) impact of, immediate, 616–624, 617 (table), 618 (map), 619 (figure), 620–621 (table), 621–623 (figure), 622 (map), 864–874 (table) impact of, long-term, 631, 632–634 (table), 633–635 impact of, short-term, 624–626, 625 (table), 626–628 (figure), 627 (table), 628, 875–894 (table) literature on, 635, 636 (table), 637–640, 642–643 Obama, Barack H., on, 675, 680–682 passage of, 613, 615, 615 (table), 712–713 presidential election (2008) and, 704, 704 (table), 705, 705 (table) proponents versus opponents of, 640–643 Republicans voting for/against, 613, 614 (figure), 615, 615 (figure) Voting Rights Act (1970): congressional votes for, 609, 610–611 (table) Democrats voting for/against, 609, 611, 612 (figure), 613, 613 (figure), 614 (figure) passage of, 613, 615, 615 (table) Republicans voting for/against, 613, 614 (figure), 615, 615 (figure) Voting Rights Act (1975): congressional votes for, 609, 610–611 (table) Democrats voting for/against, 609, 611, 612 (figure), 613, 613 (figure), 614 (figure) passage of, 613, 615, 615 (table) Republicans voting for/against, 613, 614 (figure), 615, 615 (figure) Voting Rights Act (1982): congressional votes for, 609, 610–611 (table) Democrats voting for/against, 609, 611, 612 (figure), 613, 613 (figure), 614 (figure) passage of, 613, 615, 615 (table) Republicans voting for/against, 613, 614 (figure), 615, 615 (figure) Voting Rights Act (1992): congressional votes for, 609, 610–611 (table) Democrats voting for/against, 609, 611, 612 (figure), 613, 613 (figure), 614 (figure) passage of, 613, 615, 615 (table) Republicans voting for/against, 613, 614 (figure), 615, 615 (figure) Voting Rights Act (2006): congressional votes for, 609, 610–611 (table) Democrats voting for/against, 609, 611, 612 (figure), 613, 613 (figure), 614 (figure) Obama, Barack H., on, 680–682 passage of, 613, 615, 615 (table) Republican Party and, 613, 614 (figure), 615, 615 (figure), 719 Voting Rights Act, The (Valelly), 635, 636 (table) Voting rights activism versus civil rights activism, 2–3 Voting Rights—and Wrongs (Thernstrom), 636 (table), 639–640 Voting rights cases, first generation, 461, 462 (table) Wabash valley (Ind.), 53 (table) Walker, J. E., 514 Walker, Jack L., 497

I-22

The African American Electorate

Walker, Maggie L., 437–438, 438 (table), 440(n93), 446, 732–734 (table) Wallace, George, 623 Wallace, Henry A., 563 Walters, Ronald, 38, 636 (table), 639 Wang, Xi, 364, 373, 377 Ward, Samuel R., 123, 127, 181, 181 (table), 183 War Democrats, 219–220 Warmth of Other Suns, The (Wilkerson), 409 War on Drugs, 655–656, 658 Washington, Booker T., 15–16, 17, 211 Washington, Margaret, 418 Washington Research Group, 637 Washington (D.C.) suffrage referenda, 157, 157 (table) Watters, Pat, 37 Welch, William, 676–677 Wesley, Charles, 136 West Virginia: candidates for state legislature, African American, 596, 599–600, 599 (table), 600 (map) correlations, voting behavior, 289–290, 289 (table) eligible voters, African American, 596, 597–598 (table) Flick Amendment, 285, 287, 289 presidential election (1872), 285, 287–288 (table), 288–290, 289 (table) presidential election (2008), 685 registered voters, African American, 287–288 (table), 596–597 (table) voter registration statistics, 853–854 (table) See also Border States When the Letter Betrays the Spirit (King-Meadows), 636 (table), 637–638 Whig Almanac and Politician’s Register, The, 13 Whigs, 122, 127–128, 168 White, Walter, 433 White Citizens Council Movement, 574 White participants in African American suffrage rights struggle, 715–716 White Primaries: Alabama, 486 Arkansas, 486 Border States, 347 (table) dismantling, legal stages in, 484, 485 (diagram), 486–487 Georgia, 486 Holley, Joseph W., on, 720 Mississippi, 345 South, 345, 347, 347 (table), 348 (map) Texas, 484, 486, 487 “White Supremacy and the Disenfranchisement of Blacks in Georgia, 1946” (Bernd), 35 Whiting, Apostle Willie, 650 Whose Votes Count? (Thernstrom), 636 (table), 639 Wilkerson, Isabel, 409

Wilkins, Ross, 152 Williams, Frank, Jr., 325, 327 Williams v. Mississippi (1898), 461, 486 Wilson, James Q., 408, 409 Wilson, Woodrow, 424 See also Presidential election (1916) Wilson County (N.C.), 567–570, 568–573 (table) Winther, Oscar, 221–222 Wisconsin, 148–151, 149 (table), 150 (figure) See also Midwest States Wolcott, Edward O., 375, 375 (figure) Women: African American voters, distribution by region and state, 427–428 (table), 429, 429 (figure), 430–432 (table) American Equal Rights Association and, 416–418 Antebellum Era, 413, 415–416, 416 (table) Colonial Era, 412–413, 414, 414 (table), 415, 416 (table) disenfranchisement of women, in New Jersey, 413–414 Illinois, 421, 423–424 Jacksonville (Fla.), 436–437, 437 (table) New Jersey, Revolutionary/Antebellum, 414–416, 415 (table), 416 (table) North Carolina, 433–434, 435 (table), 436 populations, in colonial Virginia, 414, 414 (table) populations, in Revolutionary/Antebellum New Jersey, 414–415, 415 (table) presidential election (1916), 423 presidential election (1920), 423–424, 433, 434 (table), 435 (map) Sixteenth Amendment, proposed, 418–419 state legislature candidates, African American, 396, 401 (table), 402 (map) state/municipal suffrage rights for African American women, 419, 420–421 (table), 421, 422 (table) states/territories fully enfranchising women prior to 19th amendment, 424, 425 (map) struggle for re-acquisition of voting rights for African American women, 416–424 Superintendent of Public Instruction (Virginia), 437–438, 438 (table), 440(n93), 732–734 (table) Virginia, colonial, 414, 414 (table), 415, 416 (table) voters, potential, 419, 420–422 (table), 421, 425–427, 426 (table) See also Nineteenth Amendment; specific women Women suffrage movement, 205, 716 See also Nineteenth Amendment Woodward, C. Vann, 275, 323 Work, Monroe N., 15–18, 19, 20, 390 World and Mind of Isaiah T. Montgomery, The (Holden), 32 Wright, Marion Thompson, 413 Wyoming territory, 157–158 Yaki, Michael, 642, 677 You Can’t Build a Chimney from the Top (Holley), 719–720