Civil Rights in America: Racial Voting Rights, Slides of Law

Download Civil Rights in America: Racial Voting Rights and more Slides Law in PDF only on Docsity! National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior National Historic Landmarks Program Civil Rights in America: Racial Voting Rights A National Historic Landmarks Theme Study Cover photograph: NAACP photograph showing people waiting to register to vote, 1948. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records [reproduction number: LC-USZ62-122260] Introduction 1 INTRODUCTION In 1999 the U.S. Congress directed the National Park Service to conduct a multi-state study of civil right sites to determine the national significance of the sites and the appropriateness of including them in the National Park System. To determine how best to proceed, the National Park Service partnered with the Organization of American Historians to develop an overview of civil rights history entitled, Civil Rights in America: A Framework for Identifying Significant Sites (2002, rev. 2008). The framework concluded that while a number of civil right sites had been designated as National Historic Landmarks, other sites needed to be identified and evaluated. Taking this into account, the framework recommended that a National Historic Landmarks theme study be prepared to identify sites that may be nationally significant, and that the study be based on provisions of the 1960s civil rights acts. These include the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (covering voting rights, equal employment, public accommodations, and school desegregation enforcement), the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. This specific portion of the study focuses on the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Inclusion in the National Park System first requires that properties meet the National Historic Landmark criteria, and then meet additional tests of suitability and feasibility. To establish guidance on meeting landmark criteria, this study provides a historic context within which properties may be evaluated for their significance in civil rights and creates registration guidelines for National Historic Landmark consideration. Completion of this study will also assist in the identification of sites for National Historic Landmark evaluation. Voting Rights Overview The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is “generally considered the most successful piece of civil rights legislation ever adopted by the United States Congress.”* Congress adopted this act in response to the ongoing obstruction African Americans faced in exercising their right to vote. As a result, African Americans were overwhelmingly disenfranchised in many Southern states. The act’s adoption followed nearly a century of systematic resistance by certain states to the Fifteenth Amendment guarantee of the right to vote regardless of race or color. While the Voting Rights Act was adopted in response to the African American struggle, other racial groups also fought for enfranchisement. Hispanics, Asian Americans, and American Indians faced the same methods states used to exempt African American voters from the ballot box. Therefore, this study also describes voter discrimination issues faced by Hispanics, Asian Americans, and American Indians. Study Format To establish guidance on meeting landmark criteria, this study provides a historic context within which properties may be evaluated for their significance in civil rights and establishes registration guidelines for National Historic Landmark consideration. The historic context contains separate essays on African American, American Indian, and the Hispanic and Asian American voting rights experience. All three stories begin at a different time period. The African American essay begins in 1865 with the abolition of slavery and the quest for the ballot. The American Indian essay begins in 1884 when the U.S. Supreme Court determined that * Quote from “Introduction to Federal Voting Rights Laws,” at http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/voting/intro/intro.htm, United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, accessed on August 25, 2003. Introduction 2 Indians were not American citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment with the right to vote. The Hispanic essay begins in 1848 when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo granted U.S. citizenship to those who did not wish to retain their Mexican citizenship, and the Asian essay begins in 1878 when a federal court upheld the bar against naturalizing Chinese immigrants. The African American and American Indian essays end in 1965 when Congress passed the Voting Rights Act and the emphasis in voting rights changed from an individual right to one of fair representation. The Hispanic and Asian American essays end in 1975 when Congress extended protection of the Voting Rights Act to language minorities. Registration guidelines then outline how properties may qualify for National Historic Landmark designation under this theme study. Subsequently, the methodology section describes how the survey proceeded. Properties identified during the course of the study are divided into three categories: 1) Properties Recognized as Nationally Significant, 2) National Historic Landmarks Study List, and 3) Properties Removed from Further Study. Three appendices conclude the study. Appendix A provides a chronology of the Selma to Montgomery march. Appendix B provides a chronology of the Mississippi Summer voting drive. Lastly, Appendix C lists African American voting rights-related cases. African American – Part One, 1865-1900 3 AFRICAN AMERICAN VOTING RIGHTS, 1865-1965 An illustration in Harper’s Weekly entitled, “The first vote,” 1867. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division [reproduction number: LC-USZ62-97946] African American – Part One, 1865-1900 6 unwillingness to respect blacks as citizens, Congress also adopted the Fourteenth Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification. The amendment defined citizenship to include African Americans, and recognized their right to due process and equal protection under the law, but did not directly extend the right to vote to blacks. Instead, Section 2 of the amendment penalized states that deprived the vote to male citizens (women did not count) over the age of twenty-one. Thus, if a state kept African American men from voting, it would have its representation reduced proportionately in the lower house of Congress. The amendment was ratified in 1868, but the provision to reduce representation was never enforced despite obvious examples of disenfranchisement throughout subsequent history. Congressional action did not deter continued resistance from the president and the South. Consequently, the Republican majority in Congress decided to take matters into its own hands. On March 2, 1867, Congress approved the first of three Military Reconstruction Acts, which ended Johnson’s control over Reconstruction. The legislation divided 10 former Confederate States (Tennessee had already returned to the Union) into five military districts each under supervision of a Union general. The states had to hold constitutional conventions in which all male citizens, black and white, were eligible to vote. In adopting new state constitutions, the conventions had to guarantee suffrage to African Americans. In effect, this became the first extension of the right to vote to African Americans in the South. After approving the state constitutions, the biracial electorate would vote for legislatures that were required to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. The state constitutional conventions inaugurated under Military Reconstruction, a British observer commented, reflected “the mighty revolution that had taken place in America.”8 The constitutions guaranteed blacks civil and political rights, and black delegates played leading roles in the conventions. They helped create documents that for the first time extended public education to southern children of both races. Black representatives displayed a great deal of compassion toward whites, and constitutions crafted in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas did not disenfranchise former Confederates. White Republicans more so than black Republicans were apt to punish ex-Confederates, and in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia, many of the South’s old leaders lost the right to vote.9 Myths of Black Reconstruction notwithstanding, African Americans did not constitute a majority of the legislative bodies elected under the new constitutions. A combination of white Republicans from the North (so-called Carpetbaggers) and white southerners (Scalawags) outnumbered black legislators. Nevertheless, African Americans played a significant role in the governing of the region. Over 1,400 blacks held offices during Reconstruction, and more than 600 blacks served in state assemblies, the majority of whom were former slaves.10 The largest number of blacks served as local officials in Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina; the fewest number in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia. As historian Eric Foner has written, in 1870, “hundreds of blacks were serving as city policemen and rural constables; they comprised half the police force in Montgomery [Alabama] and Vicksburg [Mississippi], and more than a quarter in New Orleans [Louisiana], Mobile [Alabama], and Petersburg [Virginia]. In the courts, defendants confronted black magistrates and justices of the peace, and racially 8 Foner, Reconstruction, 316. 9 Ibid., 324. 10 Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), xiv. African American – Part One, 1865-1900 7 integrated juries.”11 Nineteen black men held office as sheriffs in Louisiana, as did fifteen in Mississippi. In Tallahassee, Florida and Little Rock, Arkansas blacks were elected chief of police, and in Donaldson, Louisiana and Natchez, Mississippi African Americans sat in the mayor’s office. Only one African American occupied the office of state governor. In December 1872, Lieutenant Governor P. B. S. (Pinckney Benton Stewart) Pinchback of Louisiana succeeded Governor Henry Warmoth who had been suspended. Pinchback served for five weeks. Yet African Americans did hold a few high-level state posts. Jonathan C. Gibbs won the position of Florida secretary of state. James Lynch served as Mississippi’s secretary of state, and Francis L. Cardozo occupied the office of secretary of state in South Carolina. In Louisiana, Oscar J. Dunn obtained the position of lieutenant governor, and Antoine Dubuclet won the post of state treasurer.12 Sixteen blacks also won election to Congress during Reconstruction. Two of them, Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce, represented Mississippi in the Senate. Remarkably, nine of the sixteen, including Bruce, were born into slavery. Jefferson Franklin Long of Georgia provides an interesting example. He was born a slave in Knoxville, Georgia on March 3, 1836. Before the Civil War, Long’s owner moved to Macon where Long lived at the time of emancipation. Having learned his trade as a slave, Long opened a tailor shop in Macon following the war. Income from the shop provided the financial security that allowed him to turn his attention to Georgia politics. Long entered politics through the Georgia Educational Association. He attended the group’s conventions and, by 1867, he spoke out in behalf of African Americans at Republican political rallies. Early in his career, Long influenced state politics by acting as an organizer and speechwriter for the Republican Party. In 1869, Long and other black Georgia leaders called for a state convention “to consider the interests of their race.” A testament to his prominence in the black community, Long served as president of the Georgia State Colored Convention. The conference met in October and issued reports and resolutions related to the working and living conditions of freedmen. The conference also appointed a Committee on Outrages. It surveyed 45 Georgia counties and reported that “in four-fifths of them a frightful state of disorder prevails” due to white vigilante assaults against blacks. The convention demanded that Georgia courts be reorganized to protect the safety of black residents and that “the military exercise vigilant care over the state.”13 In December 1870, Georgia Republicans nominated Long for a term in the U.S. Congress. One Georgia newspaper claimed Long was chosen because he was “as light a mulatto and as little negro as they could find in the District, of the reading and writing sort.” Still, Republicans viewed Long’s candidacy as a way to appeal to black voters to support white Republicans. Of the three congressmen elected from Georgia in 1871, Jefferson Long was the only black, and he was elected to serve the shortest term. Congress had refused to seat Georgia’s elected representatives in 1869. It only relented in July 1870. The December 1870 nominees included one who would serve out the final months of the 1869-1871 term and two who would begin serving full terms in March 1871. Nominated for the short term, Long took the oath of office on January 16, 1871, and served until March of that year. Despite his brief tenure, Long became the first African American to deliver an address in the House of Representatives.14 11 Foner, Reconstruction, 362-63. 12 Ibid., 353, 354, 355. 13 Foner and Walker, Proceedings, quotes on 412 and 413. 14 Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers, 136; John M. Matthews, “Jefferson Franklin Long: The Public Career of Georgia’s First Black Congressman,” Phylon 42 (2nd Qtr. 1981): 145-56. African American – Part One, 1865-1900 8 Fifteenth Amendment Although the Military Reconstruction Acts ordered the southern states to adopt constitutions that granted blacks the franchise, Republicans in Congress endorsed a constitutional amendment to outlaw discrimination based on race that was subject to national protection and enforcement. In addition, the Reconstruction statutes only applied to southern blacks; in the North, most African Americans still could not vote. Racism was a national problem and not confined to the South. Between 1865 and 1868, white voters in Connecticut, Kansas, Michigan, New York, Ohio, and Wisconsin rejected referenda extending the ballot to blacks.15 The Fifteenth Amendment, adopted in 1870, for the first time guaranteed protection against racial discrimination in voting for all African Americans throughout the nation. However, something of a compromise, the amendment did not affirmatively grant universal suffrage to male adults, but only banned discrimination on the basis of race. Left out from coverage were supposedly non-racial qualifications such as literacy tests and poll tax payments. This omission would prove devastating to African American political freedom in the decades to come. By limiting coverage, however insufficiently to African American men, the Fifteenth Amendment created conflict among former abolitionists, women and men, blacks and whites. Frederick Douglass supported ratification of the amendment. Although a long time proponent of women’s rights, he believed that freedmen could never protect their full citizenship rights without the ballot. Sojourner Truth, on the other hand, feared that if black men gained the suffrage but not black women, then gender discrimination in African American communities would mirror that of whites. White reformers were also divided. Abolitionist Wendell Phillips declared it was the “Negro’s hour” and believed that any expansion of the right to vote, though confined to men, was welcome. He was supported by Lucy Stone and other former white abolitionists. In contrast, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony saw the Fifteenth Amendment as a perpetuation of male domination and opposed any extension of political rights that excluded women. These splits remained alive until ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, which enfranchised women.16 Women in Politics As discussed above, the enfranchisement of blacks through the Military Reconstruction Acts and the Fifteenth Amendment applied to men only. Like their white counterparts, black women remained disenfranchised. Nevertheless, it must be emphasized that black women played an important role in politics even if they could not vote. Women actively participated in political meetings and organized political societies such as the Daughters of Liberty and the Daughters of the Union Victory. Because the church was central to black political mobilization and women were central to the church, they freely joined alongside men in planning strategy to acquire and exercise the vote. In Richmond, Virginia, the First African Baptist Church attracted thousands of black women and men in discussions of political developments. Outside this church, armed women stood guard to ensure the safety of those inside.17 15 Steven F. Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944-1969 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999), 2. 16 Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), passim; Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), passim. 17 Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture 7 (Fall 1994): 110, 122-23. African American – Part One, 1865-1900 11 The adoption of the secret ballot provides a clear example of the first stage of disenfranchisement. Considered a reform to protect the privacy of the voter and prevent intimidation at the polls, the secret or Australian ballot operated as a literacy test to disenfranchise the uneducated. Prior to the secret ballot, voters went to the polls with printed ballots distributed by political parties with their candidates’ names on them. The secret ballot system prohibited the use of this material and required voters to make their choices from the numerous names and offices printed on official ballots, a task that many of them could not perform. Whatever standards of “good government” the secret ballot may have represented, in the South it “furnishes . . . the only method by which they can get rid of the great bulk of the colored vote in a legal, peaceful and unobjectionable manner,” a journalist reported in 1892.28 South Carolina provided a clever variation on this form of disenfranchisement. In 1882, the Palmetto State adopted an “Eight Box Law,” which established eight separate ballot boxes to correspond with national, state, and local contests. Voters had to place their ballots in the proper boxes or have them thrown out. Like the secret ballot laws in use elsewhere, the South Carolina measure functioned as a confusing literacy test.29 Nevertheless, states did not have an absolutely free hand in excluding black voters. Two Supreme Court decisions upheld the power of the Federal government to prosecute suffrage violations. In Ex parte Siebold, the Court affirmed the conviction of a state election judge in Maryland who interfered with federal supervisors during an election. In Ex parte Yarbrough, the high tribunal upheld the convictions of nine members of a white terrorist group, the Pop and Go Club, who beat a black man at his home to prevent him from casting his ballot in a congressional election in Georgia.30 Speaking for the unanimous Court, Justice Samuel Miller eloquently argued: “If the government of the United States has within its constitutional domain no authority to provide against these evils . . . then, indeed, is the country in danger, and its best powers, its highest purposes, the hopes which it inspires, and the love which enshrines it, are at the mercy of the combinations of those who respect no right but brute force on the one hand, and unprincipled corrruptionists on the other.”31 Notwithstanding these stirring words, in 1890, Congress failed to pass a measure introduced by Henry Cabot Lodge, a Massachusetts Republican, to extend federal supervision over southern elections. Although the bill passed the House, Senate Republicans, seeking an alliance with southern Democrats on economic issues they considered more important than racial reform, helped defeat the measure.32 Even with successful efforts to reduce black voting, African Americans continued casting their ballots and occupying public office in the South. In 1888, seven blacks sat in the Mississippi legislature. Black congressmen went to Washington, D.C. from North Carolina and Virginia. Indeed, factional struggles within the Democratic Party helped keep alive black voting. As wealthy conservatives battled opponents who represented poor whites, each side attempted to mobilize blacks to swing the balance of power in its favor. During the 1880s, the most successful coalition of blacks and impoverished whites appeared as the Readjusters in Virginia. Fusing with Republicans, the Readjuster Party captured the governorship in 1881, and the state North Carolina Press, 2001), 6. 28 Perman, Struggle for Mastery, 20; 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), 51-53. 29 Lawson, Black Ballots, 6. 30 Ex parte Siebold, 100 U.S. 371 (1879); Ex parte Yarbrough, 110 U.S. 651 (1884); Perman, Struggle for Mastery, 38. 31 Ex parte Yarbrough, 667; Nieman, Promises, 99. 32 Lawson, Black Ballots, 8. African American – Part One, 1865-1900 12 legislature promptly repealed the poll tax. Its power came to an abrupt halt in 1883, when its Democratic enemies embarked on a campaign of violence and fraud, culminating in the Danville Riot. Still, black participation did not cease, and African Americans continued to serve on juries and in public office.33 The Populist revolt in the 1890s temporarily invigorated interracial political coalitions that highlighted the importance of the black vote. A revolt of small and middle-size farmers and workers against wealthy conservatives, in the fashion of the Readjusters, Populists throughout the South campaigned for reforms to extend economic and political democracy. Tom Watson, a leading Georgia Populist, explained the need for biracial alliances: “The accident of color can make no difference in the interest of farmer, [share]croppers, and laborers. You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings.”34 Populist successes elicited a potent counteraction from Democrats. They played the race card to unite whites around one party rule, thereby removing the bulk of blacks from the electorate so that they could not take advantage of divisions among whites. To regain power, Democrats tarnished the Populists for appealing to African Americans and threatening white control over politics. The Populist commitment to racial equality proved very thin. Placed on the defensive, most Populists abandoned their African American allies and returned to the Democratic Party to fight their battles. In the name of reform, whites of various political stripes, including Populist leader Tom Watson, targeted blacks as the source of all electoral evil and corruption and took measures to purify politics by banishing African Americans from participation. Disenfranchisement II Between 1890 and 1908, the seven southern states of Mississippi (1890), South Carolina (1895), Louisiana (1898), North Carolina (1902), Alabama (1901), Virginia (1902), and Georgia (1908) adopted constitutional amendments that virtually excluded blacks from suffrage and greatly reduced poor white participation, primarily through literacy/understanding tests and grandfather clauses. In Tennessee, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas, white legislators continued to implement the secret ballot and poll tax requirements to achieve disenfranchisement. Literacy tests, if administered fairly, would have disenfranchised a considerable number of poorly educated blacks and whites. Instead, white registrars decided who passed the exam, and they used their discretion mainly against African Americans. In 1890, the Mississippi constitutional convention adopted a literacy qualification that would become the model for the region. It provided an illiterate suffrage applicant the option of enrolling if he could “understand any section of the state constitution read to him . . . or give a reasonable interpretation thereof.” In this way, voting officials denied registration to blacks but not whites, however unable to read and write the whites might have been. Supposedly to test literacy, Mississippi registrars asked only blacks such absurd questions, which they and no one else could possibly answer, such as “How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?”35 In addition to the Magnolia State, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia adopted literacy tests.36 33 Jane Dailey, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 121-26; Suzanne Lebsock, A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 71. 34 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 257. 35 Lawson, Black Ballots, 11, 146; Perman, Struggle for Mastery, 83. 36 Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, 239. African American – Part One, 1865-1900 13 In 1898, the U.S. Supreme Court validated Mississippi’s literacy test. The case, Williams v. Mississippi, resulted from the conviction for murder of Henry Williams, an African American, by an all-white jury. Williams filed an appeal arguing that he did not receive a fair trial because blacks were excluded from the jury. Because the jury list was drawn from the voting rolls, the suffrage provisions of Mississippi’s 1890 Constitution came under scrutiny. The Court ruled that the literacy test was written in a manner that did not discriminate on the basis of race, and consequently the tests themselves served as a legitimate means of discerning voter eligibility. A rejected voter would have the difficult burden of proving in court that the exam had been administered in a racially biased way. In the 1890s, as the South consolidated white supremacy and imposed racial segregation, this became a virtually impossible task.37 Louisiana added a wrinkle to the literacy test that spared illiterate whites the need of having to take the exam. In 1898, delegates to the state constitutional convention met to eliminate “the Senegambian [African American] from politics as far as can be done under the Constitution of the United States,” and pointed to the example of Mississippi.38 In fashioning their state’s literacy exam, Louisiana officials included a “grandfather clause,” which suspended the requirement for those males eligible to vote on or before January 1, 1867, as well as their descendants. In order to qualify under this regulation, applicants had to register by September 1, 1898. On its face, the section did not make any mention of race, but the provision was obviously designed to exclude blacks from taking advantage of it, for the Military Reconstruction Acts and the Fifteenth Amendment, which enfranchised blacks, went into effect after the stipulated date. North Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia followed Louisiana in adopting the grandfather clause.39 37 Williams v. Mississippi, 170 U.S. 213 (1898); Perman, Struggle for Mastery, 121. 38 Perman, Struggle for Mastery, 134. 39 Lawson, Black Ballots, 13; Perman, Struggle for Mastery, 140-42. African American – Part Two, 1900-1941 16 not voted two weeks to register or remain permanently disenfranchised. In effect, this allowed whites who had qualified under the grandfather clause to stay on the suffrage rolls, whereas blacks, who before 1914 were unable to take advantage of the clause, were given only a brief time to register or else continue to lose their right to vote. This subterfuge went unchallenged for over two decades, until in 1939, Robert Lane from Waggoner County, Oklahoma and his NAACP attorneys convinced the Supreme Court to void it. In Lane v. Wilson the justices viewed the 1916 law as merely a clever means of keeping the effects of the grandfather clause intact, and Justice Felix Frankfurter underscored that the Fifteenth Amendment “nullifies sophisticated as well as simpleminded modes of discrimination.”46 Women’s Suffrage Prior to ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, black women continued to participate in politics. In fact, black women actively voted in non-electoral arenas, such as church conferences and temperance organizations. In electoral politics, black women found ways to encourage black men to vote. In North Carolina, during the 1896 election, Sarah Dudley Pettey and other middle-class black women went into working-class black sections of Raleigh to convince “wives, sisters, and mothers . . . to influence their husbands, brothers, and sons.”47 In 1898, the “Organization of Colored Ladies” in Wilmington warned the city’s black men: “Every Negro who refuses to register his name . . . that he may vote, we shall make it our business to deal with him in a way that will not be pleasant. He shall be branded a white-livered coward who would sell his liberty.”48 After the Tar Heel State and the rest of the South imposed measures to disenfranchise the bulk of African American males, women’s influence as collateral agents in electoral politics also declined. Nevertheless, black women continued to wield their collective power through church and civic groups to advance the race. The Nineteenth Amendment provided limited opportunities for African American women to enter the electoral arena, as they faced the same problems as did African American men with respect to poll taxes and literacy requirements. Those relatively small numbers that did join black men on the suffrage rolls also found themselves effectively excluded by the white Democratic primary from voting in the South’s key political contests. Nevertheless, black female and male voters could participate in non-partisan elections at the local level, in which the Democratic primary did not figure. Tampa, Florida offers a case in point.49 Tampa women would have an early opportunity to test their electoral power. A feud between white men over ward-based versus city commission government had raged for several years. Commission supporters wanted to reduce electoral graft and the strength of mainly Spanish, Cuban, and Italian immigrants, and to a lesser extent, after the introduction of the white primary in 1910, African American voters who could influence the choice of representatives from racially- and ethnically-homogeneous districts under the ward system. In July 1920, a Charter Commission, elected under the white primary, proposed the replacement of the ward-based city council with a commission, all five members of which would be elected at large. A binding referendum on the issue was scheduled for October. 46 Lane v. Wilson, 307 U.S. 268, 275 (1939). 47 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), 102. 48 Ibid., 107. 49 The following pages on Tampa are excerpted with permission of Nancy A. Hewitt from Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s-1920s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 237-42. African American – Part Two, 1900-1941 17 Ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment only heightened the concerns of white political leaders. A number voiced anxiety about "what the woman voter [will] do with her newly acquired rights and privileges."50 The state Democratic Party chairman began urging white women to register in order to counterbalance the feared influx of their black counterparts. In September, when the state attorney informed Tampa officials that the charter issue could not be resolved through the white Democratic primary but must be introduced to the general electorate, including newly-enfranchised women, the recruitment of white women voters intensified. City officials aided the effort by assuring local residents that blacks would be assigned to separate lines at polling places, thereby forestalling fears of racial mingling. The concern voiced by white civic leaders about the potential political power of black women was not simply a convenient argument for inspiring racial fears and inducing white women to vote. Such fears were certainly at work in charter advocates' claims that their opponents were attempting to mobilize "the suffrage of the purchasable colored women of the city."51 But black women in Tampa, over half of whom were in the paid labor force in 1920, were eager to participate for their own reasons. As a result of both the contest over charter reform and the advent of women's suffrage, African American registration peaked in 1920 with 18.5 percent of local blacks signed up to vote, including nearly 1,298 women, who formed over 60 percent of the total black registrants. They claimed the right to vote both to redress black men's disenfranchisement and to expand upon their earlier efforts at community uplift. Inez Alston, for instance, had gained respect and experience in public speaking as a teacher and clubwoman. In fall 1920, she presided over a series of debates on charter reform held at black churches such as Bowman Methodist Episcopal. Awareness of activism in African American neighborhoods and fear that such efforts would disrupt existing racial hierarchies help to explain why so many whites, already in control of elections through the white primary, felt it necessary to further dilute minority voting power through at-large elections. These fears of black political power, which drove the establishment of the white primary a decade earlier, assured that white civic leaders would rush to enlist the electoral aid of their female counterparts immediately upon their enfranchisement. The white women fulfilled their duty. On October 20, the Tampa Tribune headline proclaimed, “Charter Wins by 770, Commission Plan Triumphant Despite a High Vote Cast Against in the Town's Black Belt.” The story credited the victory to white women who recognized “that it was largely a contest between their votes and those of negroes” and that the new charter provided “a weapon by means of which they could protect their homes and children.” The report concluded, “Tampa women have shown they are able to rock the cradle and the politicians at the same time.”52 Despite the attempts of black Tampans organizing for voting rights, white civic leaders rejected the possibility that African American women and men might justifiably pursue political power on their own terms. Yet the presence of hundreds of black voters revealed their ongoing desire for political power. Unfortunately, even when African Americans did organize on their own 50 Hewitt, Southern Discomfort, 238. 51 Nancy A. Hewitt, “In Pursuit of Power: The Political Economy of Women’s Activism in Twentieth-Century Tampa,” in Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism, ed. Nancy A. Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 209. 52 Hewitt, Southern Discomfort, 241. African American – Part Two, 1900-1941 18 behalf, they could still be defeated by the combination of racism and political corruption. The advent of women’s suffrage did little to change that volatile mix. The NAACP’s Challenge of the White Primary: Opening Rounds Whatever participation southern blacks exhibited in non-partisan municipal elections, such as those in Tampa, was offset by their exclusion from white Democratic primaries. In 1923, the Texas legislature, dominated by supporters of the recently revived Ku Klux Klan, barred African Americans from voting in Democratic contests. In response, the El Paso branch of the NAACP asked the national office to file suit against the lily-white primary. Lawrence Aaron (L. A.) Nixon, an El Paso physician and head of the local NAACP branch, served as the plaintiff after the election official, C. C. Herndon, blocked him from voting in the July 26, 1924 Democratic primary. On March 7, 1927, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and his Supreme Court brethren unanimously upheld the NAACP’s position in Nixon v. Herndon. Holmes argued that the white primary violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law by excluding blacks from participation. He did not rule whether the Fifteenth Amendment covered voting in a primary conducted by a political party. Previous court rulings suggested party primaries were separate from state-sponsored elections. However, in this case, state action was clearly involved in black exclusion, thus depriving African Americans of equal treatment.53 Texas Democratic officials had no intention of opening their primary to African Americans. A few months after the Supreme Court ruling, the legislature decreed that it was up to the party executive committee, and not state lawmakers, to determine the qualifications of party members. Thus, the Democratic Party, supposedly a private organization, would not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. Nixon filed suit again after another election official, James Condon, refused to furnish him a ballot to vote in the primary. This time the Supreme Court narrowly decided in Nixon’s favor. In 1932, speaking for the majority in Nixon v. Condon, Justice Benjamin Cardozo declared that the Democratic Executive Committee had received its authority to determine membership through state legislation, and by excluding blacks had violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Cardozo left open the possibility, however, that a party convention, independent of state authority, could decide its own membership requirements and exclude Afro-Texans from participation.54 Not surprisingly, a few weeks after Nixon v. Condon, the Democratic Party held a convention and voted to keep its primary all white. The persistence of white Texans finally paid off. The Supreme Court upheld their action. Weakened financially and worried about whether it could win, the NAACP decided to refrain from mounting a fresh legal challenge. However, a group of blacks in Houston, under the auspices of the Negro Democratic Club, decided to pursue litigation without the NAACP’s support. Richard R. Grovey, became the plaintiff in the new case. Active in organizing blacks to vote through his Third Civic Ward Club, he enlisted the aid of Carter Wesley, the editor of the black Houston Informer, and J. Alston Atkins, a prominent black attorney. Both men had wanted the NAACP to use more black lawyers in the Nixon cases, but the association relied mainly on distinguished white attorneys from its national board. On this occasion, with the NAACP declining to file suit, the local black Houstonians handled the litigation. In the end, the NAACP’s concerns proved correct, and on April 1, 1935, the Supreme 53 Nixon v. Herndon, 272 U.S. 536 (1927). 54 Nixon v. Condon, 286 U.S. 73 (1932). African American – Part Three, 1941-1954 21 state, thereby subject to the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition against racial discrimination. Hastie guessed that historians would write one day that the Court’s decision in Smith v. Allwright “released and galvanized democratic forces which in turn gave the South the momentum it needed toward ultimate leadership in American liberalism.”59 Lulu White, the executive secretary of the Houston branch of the NAACP, hailed the decision as a “Second Emancipation.”60 The white primary ruling expanded the right to vote in the South and sparked further efforts to challenge other barriers to enfranchisement, but the path to success would be littered with piecemeal victories and obstructions. Although the Court had spoken clearly in Smith v. Allwright, a number of southern states attempted to evade the ruling. In July 1944, the Georgia Democratic Party declared that the Texas decision did not apply to its state because state law did not mandate the primary. A group of blacks from Columbus, Georgia, along with the local chapter of the Atlanta NAACP and C. A. Scott, the publisher of the Atlanta Daily World, contested the decision of the state Democratic Party to continue to exclude blacks from its primaries. Over the next two years, federal courts sided with the black plaintiffs, ruling that state law regulated the conduct of primaries once the Democratic Party decided to hold them. However, in February 1947, the legislature tried to outmaneuver the NAACP by repealing all of its primaries laws, presumably leaving the Democratic Party free of state supervision.61 A case from South Carolina finally put a stop to these subterfuges. On April 20, 1944, the Palmetto State General Assembly repealed all of its laws pertaining to primary elections. The NAACP brought suit in Elmore v. Rice against the official who refused to allow George Elmore, one of its members, to vote in the Democratic primary. On July 12, 1947, federal judge Julius Waties Waring, a prominent Charlestonian, ruled in favor of Elmore. Waring braved personal threats against himself and his family and warned fellow South Carolinians: “[R]ejoin the Union. It is time to fall in step with the other states and to adopt the American way of conducting elections.”62 Although Judge Waring simply carried the landmark Smith v. Allwright reasoning to its logical conclusion, this native southerner showed uncommon courage. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld his decision, effectively bringing an end to the white primary in South Carolina and throughout the South. In 1940, approximately 250,000 black southerners were registered to vote in the South; by 1948 the number had risen to over 775,000. The figure had jumped from 3 percent to 12 percent of blacks eligible to vote.63 Even before the final outcome of the white primary rulings in South Carolina, local black activists organized to expand the right to vote and to challenge the legitimacy of the state 59 Lawson, Black Ballots, 46; Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944). The lone dissenter in the case was Justice Owen Roberts who had authored the opinion in Grovey. 60 Pitre, Lulu B. White, 43. This case had a wider constitutional impact than on racial matters. It helped establish the concept of “public function,” in which traditional government functions performed by private entities are considered state action. Hall, Oxford Companion, 800. 61 Lawson, Black Ballots, 48. 62 Elmore v. Rice, 72 F. Supp. 516 (1947); Lawson, Black Ballots, 51. 63 Steven F. Lawson, Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in America Since 1941, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997), 81. The courts had some mopping up to do of remaining attempts to avoid the white primary decisions. In 1948, Judge Waring struck down another attempt to discourage black voting. The South Carolina Democratic Party allowed whites to automatically vote in its primaries, but required blacks to take an oath to support racial segregation before they could vote. Brown v. Baskin, 78 F. Supp. 933 (1948). As late as 1953, Fort Bend County in Texas permitted the Jaybird Democratic Party, an all-white group, to hold primaries closed to blacks. The victors in these contests went on to run as the official candidates of the Democratic Party. The Supreme Court declared that the Jaybird primaries, though held under private auspices, effectively controlled the outcome of the general elections and overthrew it. Terry v. Adams, 345 U.S. 461 (1953). African American – Part Three, 1941-1954 22 Democratic Party, which discriminated against them. In cooperation with the NAACP, the Reverend James Hinton, Osceola McKaine, and John McCrary formed the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP). Members of the black middle class, Hinton headed the state’s NAACP Conference of Branches and McKaine and McCray edited the black newspaper, Lighthouse and Informer. McKaine, who had fought in World War I, explained that the right to vote for blacks was critical not in and of itself but because “[t]he use and nonuse of the ballot can determine whether . . . [people] shall have adequate schools and school bus transportation for their children or whether the present handicaps to their educational and personality development shall continue or become intensified.” For these reasons, McKaine asserted, the acquisition and strategic deployment of the vote interested the black masses most of all. In a bold and imaginative move, the PDP selected a group to challenge the seating of the regular South Carolina delegation at the Democratic National Convention in 1944. The Progressive Democrats failed largely because President Roosevelt and the national Democrats did not want to cause any white defections from the powerful wing of their party in the South. Nevertheless, leaders of the PDP continued their efforts to organize black voters. They met some success as a record number of blacks, 35 thousand, turned out to vote in the 1948 regular Democratic primary.64 Poll Tax The white primary was only one major hurdle for blacks to overcome. They still had to deal with the discriminatory impact of poll taxes. World War II also helped spur challenges to this requirement, although the outcome was less successful. Whereas the effort to remove the white primary was largely directed by the NAACP and its branches, progressive white southerners and their black allies led the challenge to the poll tax. Indeed, the poll tax proved as difficult a barrier for poor white southerners to overcome as it did for blacks. Moreover, some states such as Alabama required the payment of back poll taxes if an individual had not voted in several previous elections. States also required voters to pay the tax well in advance of the election, before candidates and issues were determined, and required voters to keep their receipts and present them at the ballot box. With these handicaps placed upon them, white and black southerners had the lowest rate of voter participation in the nation.65 Southern progressives took aim at the poll tax, especially after the Great Depression had made the payment even more difficult to satisfy for the majority of potential voters. Encouraged by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms, in 1938 southern liberals formed the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) to seek ways to extend economic and political democracy to the region. The group’s headquarters rotated with the city in which it held its biennial conventions—Birmingham (1938), Chattanooga (1940), Nashville (1942), and New Orleans (1946).66 As an outgrowth of this organization, Joseph Gelders and Virginia Foster Durr spearheaded the formation of the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax (NCAPT) in 1941. Gelders had been a physics professor at the University of Alabama and a fearless supporter of union organizing in the steel industry in Birmingham. In contrast, Durr represented the model of southern femininity. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, she came from a respected family, the daughter of a minister. Her husband, Clifford Durr, was one of many bright southerners that the Roosevelt Administration had attracted to Washington, D.C. Virginia Durr counted among her close friends Eleanor Roosevelt and Lady Bird Johnson, the wife of the rising star from Texas, 64 The quote comes from Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 202. See also Lawson, Running for Freedom, 16-17, 26. 65 Lawson, Black Ballots, 55-56. 66 Linda Reed, Simple Decency & Common Sense: The Southern Conference Movement, 1938-1963 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 29. African American – Part Three, 1941-1954 23 Representative Lyndon Baines Johnson. Virginia’s older sister was married to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black of Alabama. Durr, Gelders, and their circle of southerners who supported New Deal liberalism believed that abolition of the poll tax was a necessary step in reshaping the Democratic Party in the South and defeating the conservative oligarchy of large planters and industrialists that kept most of the people disenfranchised and impoverished.67 With her connections to powerful movers and shakers in the nation’s capital and their courageous support for biracial progressive activism in the South, Virginia Durr was instrumental in helping shape and carry forth the suffrage agenda throughout the South and the country during the early years of the civil rights movement. The NCAPT welcomed support from the NAACP, but it played down the race issue in order to avoid charges that eliminating the poll tax would threaten white supremacy. Thus, the NCAPT targeted its newsletter and educational materials to reach a largely white audience. It worked closely with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), a union that sought to recruit workers in the South to its ranks. Moreover, the committee focused on the single issue of the poll tax and political democracy and avoided positions on racial integration and equality. The titular head of the organization was Jennings Perry, the editor of the Nashville Tennessean and outspoken advocate of poll tax repeal in his state. As vice-chair, Durr coordinated much of the group’s activities. As a result of her tireless efforts and important political contacts, the NCAPT persuaded Democratic Congressman Lee Geyer of California and Democratic Senator Claude Pepper of Florida to introduce anti-poll tax measures in the early 1940s. The Sunshine State had eliminated the poll tax in 1937, a move that Pepper attributed to his Senate victory in 1938. For constitutional reasons, the repeal bills covered national elections but not state contests, especially after the Supreme Court had ruled in Breedlove v. Suttles (1937) that the Constitution did not prevent a state from adopting a poll tax on voting.68 Article One, Section One of the Constitution stipulated that qualifications for national elections must be the same as those established by the states in voting for representatives to state legislatures. Reformers argued that the imposition of the poll tax was not a reasonable qualification and the national government did not have to accept it for federal elections. Opponents just as vigorously countered that the Constitution clearly left the matter to the states to determine the exact standards for voting. As with the white primary, World War II enhanced the arguments for abolishing the poll tax while the nation was fighting overseas to halt antidemocratic fascists. The NCAPT declared that “our country today is engaged in a war between a free and a slave world. A world in which the prerequisite for a victory is that we move forward now to full freedom for the common man.”69 In 1942, the door to repeal opened slightly when Congress approved a proposal offered by Senator Pepper that waived the poll tax payment for soldiers attempting to cast absentee ballots. In practice, the Soldier Vote Act still left the majority of southerners subject to the poll tax, but it did provide both encouragement and a precedent for further action. In October 1942, the House of Representatives passed the Geyer bill over the stiff opposition of southern Democrats. Although the bill affected whites more than blacks, representatives from the South believed that repeal would provide the momentum to remove other barriers to black voting and racial equality in the South. 67 Lawson, Black Ballots, 61; Virginia Foster Durr, Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr, ed. Hollinger F. Barnard (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 152-58. 68 Breedlove v. Suttles, 302 U.S. 277 (1937). A white male, Breedlove challenged the Georgia poll tax under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The plaintiff’s race underscores how the poll tax impacted working-class and progressive whites, as well as blacks. 69 Lawson, Black Ballots, 72. African American – Part Three, 1941-1954 26 difficult task proving that Bilbo, the man, rather than Bilboism, the system, illegally deterred black suffrage. The investigating committee absolved Bilbo and agreed with him that he had only dispensed “friendly advice.” However, Republicans held a majority in the Senate and were not averse to embarrassing the Democrats for Bilbo’s indiscretions. They decided to delay Bilbo’s swearing in on January 3, 1947, and postponed action on whether to accept the Mississippian’s credentials. What all concerned knew was that Bilbo was suffering from cancer of the jaw, and he needed surgery. Six months later the issue was settled permanently when Bilbo died. His replacement, John Stennis, continued to support white supremacy, although in a more gentlemanly fashion than had Bilbo.75 What should not be forgotten about this affair is the determination of black Mississippians to peacefully overthrow the oppressive racist system. The veterans and their allies did not achieve immediate success but over the next two decades, they kept chipping away at disenfranchisement until they pressured the Federal government to use its power to help overcome it. Throughout the South, the end of World War II stimulated other voting campaigns. Blacks formed voter leagues that together with NAACP branches, civic, fraternal, and religious associations, and selected CIO locals conducted suffrage drives. The Atlanta Daily World, which had editorialized against the white primary, provided crucial coverage of registration campaigns. In 1946, the Atlanta All Citizens Registration Committee succeeded in persuading some 17,000 African Americans to sign up to vote. Clarence (C. A.) Bacote, a historian at Atlanta University, chaired the committee, and Grace Towns Hamilton, the Executive Director of the Urban League, coordinated the day-to-day activities, which included mass distribution of flyers and door-to-door canvassing. Hamilton came from a civic-minded family and she had attended Atlanta University. She worked for the YWCA for several years before taking over leadership of the Urban League in 1943. The league stressed community self-development and worked on improving housing and employment conditions for Atlanta blacks. While male faculty members from Atlanta University and ministers such as the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr. played an important role, the presence of Hamilton shows that women were as critical to the success of the drive as were men. Women’s groups lent their expertise and personnel to the effort. For example, a group called the MRS Club, comprised mainly of young teachers, succeeded in registering all of its members. One of them, Narvie J. Harris, believed that citizenship education had to extend beyond the classroom to the larger community, and she established a PTA Council to promote adult education. Her extensive involvement in the social networks of her community proved invaluable in reaching potential voters throughout Atlanta’s black neighborhoods. The drive also benefited from the participation of Ruby Blackburn. From a more humble background than Hamilton and Harris, Blackburn had worked as a maid at a black school and later became the owner of Ruby’s Beauty Shoppe. Beauty parlors were an important meeting place for black women during the era of segregation and provided an independent space for discussion and dissemination of information. When the operators were as political as Blackburn, who also was active in the NAACP, the shops furnished a way to reach many women outside the middle class, social orbit of professionals like Hamilton and Harris.76 75 Lawson, Black Ballots, 113-14; Dittmer, Local People, 9. 76 Kathryn L. Nasstrom, “Down to Now: Memory, Narrative, and Women’s Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta, Georgia,” Gender & History 11 (April 1999): 117-24, 132. In 1965, Grace Hamilton was elected to the Georgia Legislature, the first black woman to do so. Lorraine Nelson Spritzer and Jean B. Bergmark, Grace Towns Hamilton and the Politics of Southern Change (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), passim. African American – Part Three, 1941-1954 27 After Smith v. Allwright, Lulu White concentrated her energies in mobilizing black voters. She argued “that a strong black vote was needed to shape governmental policies at local and state levels in the 1940s and 1950s.” Under her direction, the NAACP conducted citizenship classes to instruct people about voting procedures, economic rights, and African American history to provide the incentive of blacks to acquire the ballot. An indefatigable speaker, she appeared before civic organizations, church groups, and graduation ceremonies and invoked audiences to “[p]ay your poll tax and go out to vote.” Her initial efforts to stimulate black voter registration did not succeed in affecting the outcome of local elections in Houston. However, in collaboration with ministers and members of the black press, she helped increase the size of the black electorate by 1948. In that year, black voters went to the polls and overwhelmingly cast their ballots for Lyndon Johnson in his campaign to defeat Governor Coke Stevenson for the Senate. With a victory of only 89 votes, Johnson benefited from the solid black vote.77 Although women played essential roles in sustaining voter registration, men stood in the limelight. As ministers, businessmen, and academics they mainly held the leadership positions in the most powerful institutions within black communities: churches, businesses, and colleges. They also tended to run state and local chapters of the NAACP. This proved the case with voting rights leaders J. M. Tinsley of Richmond, Virginia; Arthur Shores in Birmingham, Alabama; Charles Gomillion and William P. Mitchell of Tuskegee, Alabama; and Harry T. Moore of Brevard County, Florida. Because the NAACP avoided partisanship, these leaders either established or worked closely with voter leagues that campaigned for candidates sympathetic to black interests. In Atlanta, NAACP lawyer Austin Thomas (A. T.) Walden headed the Georgia Association of Citizens Democratic Clubs. As a result of the 1946 registration drive, he swung the African American vote behind the candidacy of Helen Douglas Mankin, a while liberal who defeated her racist opponent for Congress.78 Interracial union locals, such as those that the CIO tried to create in the South, spurred black political participation. Following World War II, Local 22 of the Food and Tobacco Workers succeeded in organizing black and white workers at the R. J. Reynolds Company in Winston- Salem, North Carolina. As part of its activities, the union helped register some 3,000 blacks in the city, which in 1947 resulted in the election of Kenneth Williams to Winston-Salem’s Board of Aldermen, the first black to hold this position since Reconstruction. However, R. J. Reynolds struck back against the union. Communists had helped organize Local 22, and during this Cold War period of anti-communism, the tobacco company and its allies in the chamber of commerce and the press attacked the union as un-American. Red-baiting succeeded, as it would increasingly over the next decade throughout the United States, and Local 22 collapsed. Even without charges of communist infiltration, it is unlikely that unions in the South would have succeeded in joining black and white workers together for racial equality. Many of the white workers that unions sought to organize could not overcome their own racist beliefs. Indeed, many of the same workers targeted by unions also were recruited by the Ku Klux Klan.79 Extra-legal Means of Disenfranchisement The situation in Winston-Salem indicated that despite legal victories, black citizens remained vulnerable to pressure and intimidation if they tried to vote. Some of it was the kind of coercion 77 Pitre, Lulu B. White, 43-55, the first quote is on 44, the second on 45. 78 Lawson, Black Ballots, 127. 79 Lawson, Running for Freedom, 41; Robert Rodgers Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 306-10. African American – Part Three, 1941-1954 28 that Bilbo applied in Mississippi; some was the type that businessmen used in warning black workers that they would lose their jobs or be denied financial credit; and some was the brand the white press employed to warn readers against the dangers of radicalism and black independence. Above all of these, violence loomed as the main threat. In March 1948, the Ku Klux Klan paraded around Wrightsville, Georgia and warned that “blood would flow” if blacks tried to vote in the forthcoming election. Seven months later on September 8, two whites threatened Isaac Nixon, a black veteran, not to vote. He refused to heed their warning, cast his ballot shortly after sunrise, and by nightfall he had been murdered. Before he died, he revealed the names of the killers to the president of the local NAACP branch, D. V. Carter. A few days later, some whites assaulted Carter in his home and forced him to flee town. Although Nixon’s assailants later stood trial, an all-white jury acquitted them. Three years later on Christmas Eve, 1951, Florida’s NAACP director and voting rights champion, Harry T. Moore, along with his wife, were murdered when the Klan dynamited their home. Moore’s attackers killed him for a variety of liberationist activities besides voting, but the message was clear. Blacks who organized for social change, for whatever reason, were vulnerable to violent white retaliation. 80 Violence or its threat had an insidious multiplier effect. Blacks in counties with a history of lynching and terror, even if in the distant past, inherited a legacy of fear. African Americans did not have to experience violence directly. Within the solid South, intimidation anywhere, to paraphrase Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was interpreted as intimidation everywhere. A resident of Walton County, Georgia remarked in the late 1940s: “There is no need to vote, it won’t amount to anything anyway. White folks are running things and they will continue to do so.”81 This statement reflected a pervasive belief among many African Americans in the South that was usually perceived as apathy, although this was not necessarily the case. Rather, violence and intimidation both occasioned and reinforced this feeling of powerlessness and had to be checked before the majority of blacks became enfranchised. Literacy and Understanding Tests Perhaps the most effective form of coercion was not lethal. Even without the white primary and poll taxes, the greatest barriers to black suffrage remained the manipulation of literacy tests and the registration system itself. Literacy tests for voting abounded everywhere in the South except Arkansas and Texas. Even if the tests had been administered impartially, a sizable number of blacks would not have passed. In 1950, nearly 45 percent of southern blacks over the age of 25 had received less than four years of formal schooling. (The comparable figure for whites was slightly more than 13 percent.) However, state officials did function impartially. Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, quoted one boastful southern official on his approach to administering literacy tests: “I can keep the President of the United States from registering, if I want to. God, Himself, couldn’t understand that sentence. I, myself, am the judge.”82 Alabama provides a prime example of how the system worked. The state did not challenge the end of the white primary as did Georgia and South Carolina, but it devised a plan to limit the number of blacks who could take advantage of its demise. In 1945, the legislature proposed an amendment to the state constitution that required prospective voter registrants to demonstrate literacy by reading and writing any portion of the state constitution as well as an understanding 80 Lawson, Black Ballots, 131-32. 81 Ibid., 124. 82 Quoted in Hall, Oxford Companion, 886. For the original citation, Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper, 1944), 1325, n. 34. My thanks to Susan Salvatore for pointing this out. African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 31 attitudes generally ruled in the narrowest manner possible to preserve segregation. Thus, in 1955 federal judge John J. Parker of the Fourth Circuit set the boundaries for enforcement very restrictively. In a case from South Carolina, Briggs v. Elliott, he ruled that Brown only required states to throw out laws that assigned pupils to schools based exclusively on race; it did not mandate that schools take affirmative steps to ensure that black students attend schools with whites.86 The prospects of Congress and the president taking action posed a more direct threat to white supremacy. Although black southerners had waged a courageous battle to reclaim their voting rights throughout the 20th century, there was a limit to what they could do by themselves. Given the commitment of white southerners to retain political power and minimize black enfranchisement through legal subterfuges and coercion, African Americans needed the national government to wield its extensive power and shatter southern obstructionism. They had a better chance with respect to the right to vote than with school desegregation. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had been in office a year and a half when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown. Although Eisenhower had appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren to the high bench, the chief executive later admitted that it was the “biggest damn fool mistake” he had made.87 Eisenhower’s views on race were complex. The former five-star general had not originally supported integration of the armed forces and many of his closest military associates were white southerners who often influenced his racial views. He believed that school segregation had been the law of the land for nearly 60 years and that the South could not be expected to reverse itself overnight. Eisenhower never used his considerable popularity in the South to proclaim the region’s moral as well as legal obligation to obey Brown. Instead, he advised that changes in the hearts and minds of white southerners had to come through religion and education, not through government coercion. Yet Eisenhower believed in equality under the law, and he placed particular faith in the right to vote to remedy racial problems. Unlike education, the Constitution specifically protected the suffrage from racial discrimination and the Federal government had a clear responsibility in this area. In a similar vein, Eisenhower used his authority to promote racial equality in those venues specifically under national control. Thus, he ordered the desegregation of military base facilities in the South and worked behind-the-scenes to desegregate schools and public accommodations in Washington, D.C.88 By the mid-1950s, a number of considerations pushed the Eisenhower administration toward expanding the right to vote for black southerners. Following Brown, the pace of the civil rights movement quickened. The yearlong bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama against segregated transportation resulted in a victory and vaulted into national prominence the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Around the same time, in 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black youth from Chicago, who was visiting his great uncle in Mississippi, was brutally murdered for allegedly acting discourteously to a white woman at Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in Money. Till’s alleged violation of the South’s racial and gender codes of behavior undoubtedly led to his 86 Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 751-52. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954); Briggs v. Elliott, 132 F. Supp. 776 (1955). 87 James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and its Troubled Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 60. 88 Robert Fredrick Burk, The Eisenhower Administration and Black Civil Rights (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), passim. African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 32 homicide. Nevertheless, the killing occurred in a context of black challenges to white supremacy, including efforts to gain the right to vote. As one of Till’s killers, John William (J. W.) Milam reflected later: I like niggers—in their place—I know how to work ‘em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place. Niggers ain’t gonna vote where I live. If they did, they’d control the government.89 Till’s death, and the subsequent acquittal of the two white men charged with his killing by an all- white jury, attracted widespread media attention and outrage in this country and throughout the world. The acquittal played into the hands of the Soviet Union in its propaganda battle with the United States during the Cold War. Along with the murder of George Lee and the shooting of Gus Courts for their voter registration activities in Mississippi, White House officials worried about a “dangerous racial conflagration” stirring in Dixie. Furthermore, in winning reelection in 1956, Eisenhower’s portion of the black vote had risen by 5 percent, and northern Republicans hoped to improve their share of black ballots in tight Congressional districts. The New York Times commented: “The Republican high command was persuaded that the party needed an aggressive position on an issue popular in the country at large to defeat the Democrats in 1958 and 1960. The drive for civil rights was an obvious choice.” Thus, the Eisenhower Administration had sound political, diplomatic, and ideological reasons to propose civil rights legislation.90 During the 1956 presidential campaign, Eisenhower endorsed a legislative plan that his attorney general, Herbert Brownell, had proposed to combat racial discrimination on several fronts. The measure created a national Commission on Civil Rights to investigate racial problems and offer recommendations, elevated the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Section into a Division to give it increased resources to prosecute civil rights violations, and empowered the attorney general to initiate litigation to enforce school desegregation and voting rights cases. Eisenhower had not been enthusiastic about the school desegregation proposal, which generated the greatest opposition in the South and among southern congressmen. After the election, the president backed away from supporting this provision and focused instead on voting rights and two other sections. Even after whittling the bill down basically to a suffrage measure, the administration and its supporters faced serious obstacles. The main problem lay in the Senate. Southern Democrats controlled important leadership posts, and James Eastland of Mississippi, who shared that state’s Senator Theodore Bilbo’s distaste for racial change, presided over the critical Judiciary Committee, which held hearings on the bill. Besides stalling the measure in committee, Eastland could join his southern colleagues in a filibuster should the bill reach the floor of the Senate. Unless the bill’s legislative supporters could muster the two-thirds vote to shut off debate through cloture, the measure would fail as had previous legislation to eliminate the poll tax and prosecute lynching. 89 William Bradford Huie, “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” in Racial Violence on Trial: A Handbook with Cases, Laws, and Documents, ed. Christopher Waldrep (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2001), 245. For a cultural history of the incident, see Stephen J. Whitfield, A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 90 Lawson, Black Ballots, 163 has New York Times quote; Lawson, Running for Freedom, 52-53; Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), passim. African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 33 In fact, Eastland maneuvered to keep the bill in his clutches and prevent it from coming out of committee. However, he could not defeat the measure. While he was delaying, the House passed its own version of the bill. A bipartisan group of supporters in the Senate, aided by Republican Minority Leader William Knowland of California and Vice-President Richard Nixon sitting as presiding officer of the Upper Chamber, engaged in its own brand of parliamentary maneuvering. They used Senate rules to place the House version directly on the Senate floor, thereby bypassing Eastland’s Judiciary Committee. On June 20, 1957, the Senate finally had a civil rights bill to consider. Republican leaders cooperated with Democrats and tailored the measure to ensure that it could survive a filibuster. In response to sharp attacks from southern Democrats, most prominently Richard Russell of Georgia, Eisenhower signaled that he would not fight to retain the school desegregation provision in the bill, and the Senate eliminated it. However, the president reaffirmed his commitment to the ballot. “I think the voting right is something that should be emphasized,” Eisenhower affirmed. “If in every locality every person . . . is permitted to vote . . . he has got a means of getting what he wants in democratic government and that is the one on which I place the greatest emphasis.”91 With Democrats in command of the Senate, the Eisenhower administration relied heavily on Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson to navigate the bill to successful passage. The Texas senator had opposed all civil rights measures in the past, most recently, those that had been proposed by the Truman Administration in 1948 and 1949. However, Johnson had never been a race-baiter in the tradition of Bilbo; nor had he taken the leadership in defending segregation in the South as had his close friend and mentor, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia. In 1955, Johnson declined to sign his name to the “Southern Manifesto,” a declaration by 101 southern congressmen, including most of his Senate colleagues, denouncing Brown v. Board of Education and pledging to find lawful ways of evading it. As democratic majority leader, Johnson wanted to find a way of preventing a rupture between northern liberal supporters and southern conservative opponents over Eisenhower’s civil rights plan. At the same time, if Johnson could broker a compromise it would increase his political stock among northern Democrats, thereby improving his chances of gaining the party’s presidential nomination, which he coveted. As the consummate legislative tactician, Johnson realized that with Eisenhower supporting a civil rights measure, the prospects for its passage were much greater than in the past. Republicans had decided to go after the black vote and withdraw the cooperation they had previously given southerners in blocking the imposition of cloture and sustaining the filibuster. As Johnson’s legislative assistant explained: “The South is now completely without allies.” However, Democrats could avoid a major internal rift chiefly “by appealing to those men who wish to see a civil rights bill enacted but who are willing to listen to reason.”92 In effect, this meant fashioning a civil rights bill that avoided school desegregation and focused on protection of the right to vote through judicial means. This would disappoint many northern Democratic liberals, but it would attract party moderates and keep southerners from waging a prolonged filibuster. The final version of the bill accomplished Johnson’s objectives and provided a legislative victory for the Eisenhower administration. After deleting reference to school desegregation, the Senate 91 Lawson, Black Ballots, 182-83. 92 Ibid., 183; Lawson, Running for Freedom, 54; Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2002), 944-89. African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 36 Georgia will be willing to put up with some inconveniences to see that illiterate black voters don't get on the registration lists.”99 One inconvenience he hoped to avoid concerned the possibility that prospective black voters who failed the new test “might then challange [sic] on masse the registered and qualified [white] voters on the list, and attempt to subject the old voters to the new examination.”100 Wishing to deter this “catastrophic” option, Geer recommended that the legislation not be applied retroactively. This would protect the approximately 3,500 whites registered to vote in Geer's home Miller County; in contrast, only six blacks were on the rolls.101 Newspaper coverage of Geer's frank statements placed the committee on the defensive. It received a letter from Wylie Clayton (W. C.) Henson, a Cartersville lawyer, who objected to the proposed voter law because it “will be construed everywhere as an effort to disqualify Negroes and prevent them from voting which it is likely meant to do.”102 Sensitive to charges that the proposal was aimed at keeping blacks disenfranchised and concerned about federal meddling into Georgia’s electoral practices, Secretary of State Ben Fortson, who sat on this body, declared that the committee was not “attempting to create anything in the election laws that is directed against anybody.” Seconding this claim of innocence, Vice Chairman Eugene Cook, the state attorney general, revealed indirectly but pointedly what was on many of his colleagues’ minds. “There may be members of this Committee that would bar Negroes from voting,” he declared, There may be members of this Committee in an individual capacity—who feel that since the NAACP has openly stated that their efforts to increase the vote power of the Negroes to bloc vote to the point that they will be able to control some elections—that these individual members as such feel that perhaps there should be a retaliatory position that could meet that unwholesome situation on the part of the NAACP.103 Cook himself was an outspoken opponent of the Brown opinion and the NAACP, which he branded “part and parcel of the Communist conspiracy to overthrow democratic government.”104 After the ELSC completed its work in 1958, the legislature adopted the literacy test proposal and Governor Marvin Griffin, a staunch segregationist, signed it into law. Together with administrative changes in the revised election code, the stricter literacy test posed problems for potential voters. The Atlanta Journal and Constitution bemoaned the confusion caused by the new procedures and the fact “that a law touted as a means of keeping down the registration of new Negro voters is, in actual fact, keeping down the registration of a great many white voters too.”105 Nevertheless, as the Raines case showed, in counties where potential black voters outnumbered whites, the application of literacy tests fell hardest on African Americans. 99 Atlanta Constitution, November 22, 1957, clipping, Election Law Study Committee (ELSC) Papers, University of Georgia. See also, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, December 15, 1957, 2, clipping, ELSC Papers. The 1949 election statute established a passing grade of 10 correct answers out of 30. This examination was administered to those applicants who sought to qualify on the basis of "good character and understanding of the duties and obligations of citizenship." The other option for a prospective voter was to read and write a section of the Georgia Constitution. 100 Peter Zack Geer to Frank Edwards, November 29, 1957, RG 37, SG 11, Series 17, ELSC Papers. 101 Atlanta Constitution, December 22, 1957, 2, clipping, ELSC Papers. Geer was co-counsel for the state in United States v. Raines. 102 Minutes, January 9, 1958, ELSC Papers. 103 Minutes, December 12, 1957, ELSC Papers. 104 Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South during the 1950s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 185. 105 Atlanta Journal and Constitution, April 27, 1958, 10F. African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 37 Louisiana Louisiana found still another way to disenfranchise blacks. Under state law, two qualified voters could challenge the qualifications of anyone on the rolls. The Citizens’ Council advised its members to question the credentials of black registrants. They succeeded in purging thousands of blacks from the rolls by locating insignificant mistakes in black applications, while those same errors also appeared on white forms. In Ouachita Parish, some 3,000 black names, 75 percent of the total, disappeared following segregationist challenges. The state legislature aided and abetted the Citizens’ Council. In late 1958, State Senator William Rainach convened his Joint Legislative Committee to devise plans to harass the NAACP and extend the persecution of black voters. Equating the NAACP with the Communist Party, he accused both of trying to stir up the “Negro bloc vote.” Rainach instructed registrars to use Louisiana’s literacy/understanding test together with the purges to further whittle down the black electorate. Employing these methods, for example, Citizens’ Council members succeeded in removing 85 percent of Washington Parish’s 1,377 registered blacks.106 To combat these practices, the Justice Department filed United States v. Thomas under the 1957 law, calling for an end to the purges that singled out blacks for discriminatory treatment. This time, the government encountered a favorable district court judge in J. Skelly Wright. In contrast to T. Hoyt Davis in Georgia and in the tradition of J. Waties Waring of South Carolina, Wright upheld the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act, issued an injunction against racial purging of the voter lists, and ordered the restoration of nearly 1,400 people to the ranks of registrants. The Supreme Court agreed with him.107 Tuskegee, Alabama In the black belt of Alabama, known for the color of its fertile soil as well as the preponderance of African Americans, white supremacists devised a variety of methods to curtail black suffrage. Located 45 miles from the Montgomery capital, Tuskegee had a long history of black community development and agitation for first-class citizenship. The Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington in the 1880s, drew black teachers and students to the town and created an educated middle class within the larger, primarily poor, rural black population of Macon County. The Veterans Administration Hospital, constructed in 1923, provided additional employment opportunities for black physicians, nurses, and technicians. The town had blossomed even more during World War II, when it housed a base to train black pilots to fight in the war. African Americans held a majority of the white-collar jobs in town. Despite their success or more likely because of it, black Tuskegeeans faced relentless discrimination in exercising their right to vote. White officials correctly perceived a threat to their power if they allowed the majority of qualified blacks to register. Enrollment officers administered literacy tests to keep blacks off the rolls. This obviously required a good deal of discrimination because black college graduates had no greater chance of registering than did those with little more than a grade school education. Registration boards accepted applications and then failed to notify blacks of the results. On still other occasions, board members asked 106 Adam Fairclough, Race & Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana 1915-1972 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 227-28. 107 United States v. Thomas, 177 F. Supp. 335 (1959), 180 F. Supp. 10 (1960), 362 U.S. 58 (1960). Fairclough, Race and Democracy, 230; Jack Bass, Unlikely Heroes: The Dramatic Story of the Southern Judges of the Fifth Circuit Who Translated the Supreme Court’s Brown Decision into a Revolution for Equality (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981), 112-35. African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 38 blacks, but not whites, to furnish the names of registered voters who could vouch for them. With so few blacks enrolled, the system of vouchers meant that the numbers remained low. In 1958, although blacks comprised 84 percent of Macon County’s population, white voters outnumbered black voters two-and-a-half-times.108 As one might expect, Tuskegee’s African American middle class did not remain silent in the face of this discrimination. During the 1930s, Charles G. Gomillion, a sociologist at the Institute and a registered voter, campaigned to enroll qualified blacks. In 1941, he formed the Tuskegee Civic Association (TCA) and organized around the idea of “civic democracy.” Only by acquiring the opportunity to cast a ballot, Gomillion reasoned, could blacks obtain their fair share of municipal services to improve health and education. In the late 1940s, the TCA, aided by one of the only sympathetic white registrars, succeeded in enrolling some 400 additional blacks. However, white segregationists fought back. In 1957, State Senator Sam M. Engelhardt, Jr., who represented Macon County, sponsored a bill designed to eliminate all African American voters in Tuskegee. The legislature agreed and redrew the boundary lines of Tuskegee in the shape of a salamander, thereby removing black voters from participating in town elections. Black Tuskegeeans fought back. Two years after the Montgomery bus boycott, the TCA organized a selective buying campaign against local white merchants to defeat the gerrymander. On June 25, 1957, Gomillion convened a meeting at the Butler Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church to inaugurate the boycott.109 As in Montgomery, churches played a large role in convening mass meetings and keeping up the morale of people living in town and in the surrounding countryside. The boycott helped unify the black community, but it did not defeat the gerrymander. The Supreme Court accomplished this. In 1960, the high tribunal ruled in Gomillion v. Lightfoot that the legislature had violated the Fifteenth Amendment in sending Tuskegee blacks into political exile under the guise of redistricting.110 Before this judicial victory, the civic association pressed its case before Congress. Together with William P. Mitchell, an employee of the hospital and executive secretary of the TCA, Gomillion testified before a Senate committee holding hearings on the 1957 civil rights bill. They carefully documented the instances of racial discrimination against Tuskegee blacks persisting over two decades. When the Civil Rights Commission, created under the 1957 law, convened televised hearings in Montgomery in December 1958, it learned firsthand of the experiences of black property owners, taxpayers, farmers, veterans, college graduates, and hospital employees from Tuskegee and Macon County who had been barred from registering. At the same time, the commission received no cooperation from local white officials who refused to testify or invoked the Fifth Amendment so as not to incriminate themselves.111 Instead, the Justice Department tried to enjoin Macon County authorities from preventing black registration. In one of three cases initially brought under the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the attorney general filed suit against the state of Alabama because the board of registrars had ceased functioning through resignations and the death of one of its members. Based on a technicality in the law, the lower federal court ruled in United States v. Alabama that under the 1957 act only registrars, and not the state itself, could be sued for injunctive relief. After Congress changed the wording in 1960 to include state governments under this provision, the same federal judge, Frank 108 Lawson, Black Ballots, 209; Lawson, Running for Freedom, 56-57. 109 Robert J. Norrell, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee (New York: Vintage, 1985), 93. Booker T. Washington founded Tuskegee Institute at this historic location. 110 Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 365 U.S. 339 (1960). Philip Lightfoot was the mayor of Tuskegee. 111 Lawson, Running for Freedom, 59-60; Norrell, Reaping the Whirlwind, 110-20. African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 41 teacher in Fayette County in 1961, estimated that over 700 sharecropping families were evicted that year.121 (Other estimates put the number between 257 and 400.) Most of them had no money and could not find work. They could not get credit at grocery stores and could not access medical care. When the Justice Department heard about the evictions, it filed another lawsuit. On December 14, 1960, according to historian Robert Hamburger, the Justice Department “invoked its unused powers and filed a suit against forty-five landowners, twenty-four merchants, and a bank—all seventy parties were accused of violating the civil rights of black citizens of Fayette County.”122 Georgia Mae Turner registered in August 1960—timed to make sure she received her last paycheck—and shortly thereafter, her employer for 38 years told her she had to pack her stuff and leave before the start of the New Year. “She made me get out of her house in the snow,” Turner recalled. “I had to get out before winter was even over.”123 Even though she was evicted, Turner tried to maintain a sense of humor: “They say if you register, you going to have a hard time. Well, I had a hard time before I registered. Hard times, you could have named me that— Georgia Mae Hard Times.” Besides always living in “hard times,” Turner said she went to register “because I want to be a citizen . . . I registered so that my children could get their freedom. I don’t figure it would do me no good.”124 Evicted sharecroppers like Georgia Mae Turner moved to “Tent City”—a stretch of land owned by Shepard Towles, an independent African American farmer. Towles allowed the sharecroppers to pitch tents on his land and live there while they protested their evictions and demanded their right to vote and be free. A second camp was set up near Moscow, Tennessee on land owned by Gertrude Beasley, an African American woman. While Tent City was “the scene of severe hardship” it was also “a symbol of defiance and fierce pride.”125 Tent City also became the site of several shoot-outs between members of the White Citizens’ Councils and the African Americans who lived there. James Forman described the armed guards that kept watch over the tents each night: “black men with guns, guns, and more guns were deployed around the tents, on the side of the road, behind bushes, and in the fields.”126 Early B. Williams, a resident of Tent City, was hit by a stray bullet one night and had to be driven all the way to Memphis to receive medical care. The bullet just barely missed his sleeping toddler.127 That summer and fall, “Tent City” received national attention in the New York Post, Ebony, and the New York Times, which helped stimulate food and clothing drives all around the country. Tent City residents received assistance, food, and supplies from various organizations including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Southern Conference Education Fund, the Quaker’s Operation Freedom, the Emergency Relief Committee, the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), the NAACP, and the National Freedom Council.128 According to 121 James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries: A Personal Account (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 116. Hamburger says that “257 people in all were thrown off their farms,” 6. The Jackson Sun states landowners evicted 400 African Americans according to the Justice Department’s December 1960 lawsuit. “October 1960, The Untold Story of Jackson’s Civil Rights Movement,” at http://orig.jacksonsun.com/civilrights/sec4_timeline.shtml, accessed on August 21, 2009. 122 Hamburger, Our Portion of Hell, 4. The case was United States v. Atkeison et al., (WD Tenn., Civil Action #4131, 1961). 123 Forman, Making of Black Revolutionaries, 123. 124 Ibid., 126. 125 Hamburger, Our Portion of Hell, 6. 126 Forman, Making of Black Revolutionaries, 127. 127 Hamburger, Our Portion of Hell, 74-75; Forman, Making of Black Revolutionaries, 127-28. 128 Fayette County Project Volunteers, Step by Step, 36; Forman, 134-37. Forman became Executive Director of the African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 42 Robert Hamburger, a “convoy of seven forty-foot trucks carried 150 tons of food and clothing from New York to Tent City.”129 (The Federal government did not authorize shipments of “surplus” food until July, 1961.)130 While members of Tent City, the Fayette County Civic, and Welfare League—especially John McFerren and Harpman Jameson—scored a major victory in the Justice Department lawsuit. It brought about retaliation on a massive scale by local whites, and it was not until late June 26, 1962, when a consent decree in federal district court in Memphis ended all pending lawsuits against the 74 defendants, landowners, and merchants. The agreement permanently “enjoined the defendants from engaging in any acts for the purpose of interfering with the right of any person to vote.”131 The ruling was a technical victory; reprisals against African Americans continued and many found it difficult to gain suffrage rights without risking their lives or livelihoods thereafter. Still, it was a major win that yielded tangible results: in 1966, the first African American men and women were elected to the Fayette County Quarterly Court.132 Citizenship Schools The 1957 Civil Rights Act, which the Federal government used in Fayette County, had its greatest value come from stimulating renewed black voter registration drives and citizenship education classes, which in turn demonstrated the need for stronger federal intervention. Citizenship schools developed from the community organizing workshops of the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. Established in the 1930s by activist Myles Horton, Highlander sought to democratize the South by promoting unionization and racial equality. It operated on the belief that the oppressed should help themselves. In 1956, Septima Clark, a South Carolina educator and civil rights activist, became the director of workshops at Highlander. Soon after, she initiated a citizenship school on Johns Island, off the coast of South Carolina. To this end, Clark enlisted Esau Jenkins, a local leader who needed help in trying to register blacks to vote. Jenkins had formed the Progressive Club, which had 26 members and met in a building that the group had fixed up. The front of the building functioned as a grocery store, and in the back, hidden from whites, citizenship classes were held. Clark’s cousin, Bernice Robinson, a beautician, ran the classes and adopted a curriculum that emphasized the practical experiences of the adult students. This approach fit in with Highlander’s and Clark’s philosophy of having ordinary citizens teach each other and not relying on experts who might prove intimidating. Although Clark considered voter registration and literacy important objectives, her main purpose was to foster development of community leaders who would use their skills to confront the day-to-day problems facing blacks. Besides suffrage, the citizenship schools led to the creation of a credit union, nursing home, kindergarten, and a low-income housing project. By 1961, 37 citizenship schools on Johns Island and other nearby Sea Islands succeeded in increasing black voter registration despite the overall decline throughout the rest of the state.133 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. 129 Hamburger, Our Portion of Hell, 85. 130 Forman, Making of Black Revolutionaries, 140. 131 Fayette County Project Volunteers, Step by Step, 34. 132 Hamburger, Our Portion, 97-105. 133 Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 69-76. African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 43 The success of the schools attracted the attention of the SCLC. In 1961, Dr. King’s group took over the program and established two training centers. One was at the Dorchester Boys’ Academy in Midway, Georgia. Housed in the boys’ dormitory, the SCLC employed 700 teachers and turned out thousands of new voters. The SCLC conducted a second training school at Penn School in Frogmore, South Carolina on St. Helena Island.134 Civil Rights Act of 1960 The generally slow pace of registration, the legal obstructions encountered by the Federal government, and the public exposure of suffrage abuses in Alabama persuaded congressional lawmakers and the president to seek new voting remedies. They also had a political incentive. The 1958 congressional elections increased the Democratic majority and bolstered support for civil rights measures. Both parties viewed the returns as foreshadowing possibilities for the presidential election two years away. As Democratic prospects appeared to brighten, Republicans made their own calculations for retaining the White House. In a contest that was expected to be close, the GOP acknowledged “the vote of Negroes may well be crucial in determining which party wins the Presidency.”135 The Eisenhower administration, which had been hesitant to introduce any new civil rights legislation, began drafting a bill to strengthen enforcement of the suffrage. Once again, the president wanted to avoid the issue of granting the Justice Department the same powers in school desegregation as the 1957 Civil Rights Act had extended to voting. Nor did he intend to do more than deal with technical problems that the government had experienced in implementing the 1957 law. Eisenhower recommended a provision that required states to preserve all suffrage records for a three-year period and open them up for inspection by the attorney general. This would counter the Alabama legislature’s authorization of registrars to destroy their files as quickly as they pleased. Also related to the Alabama experience, the administration sought to empower the Justice Department to sue a state if the board of registration ceased to function. The need for a stronger franchise proposal became evident in September 1959, after the Civil Rights Commission released its report. Based on the hearings in Alabama, the commission concluded that the Civil Rights Division had not vigorously implemented the 1957 law, but even if it had performed better, the commissioners doubted that emphasizing litigation would have enfranchised blacks. Reliance on the judiciary proved slow, as states improvised new procedures to evade previous decisions and federal district judges, upon whom adjudication depended, generally reflected the racial views of the local communities. Thus, the commission proposed a plan that permitted the president to dispatch federal voting registrars to those areas that were proven to prevent blacks from registering to vote. After receiving nine or more sworn affidavits of racial bias from a particular locality and having them verified by the Civil Right Commission, the president would direct a federal registrar to sign up all qualified black voters.136 Until the commission released its report, all civil rights bills introduced in Congress had stalled in committee. Not only had the Civil Rights Commission brought new momentum, but it also 134 Sandra B. Oldendorf, “The South Carolina Sea Island Citizenship Schools, 1957-1961,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers & Torchbearers, 1941-1965, ed. Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1990), 174. 135 Lawson, Black Ballots, 222. 136 United States Commission on Civil Rights, Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1959 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1959), passim. African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 46 Word of their success traveled to surrounding counties and brought requests for SNCC to establish classes in them. Moses went to neighboring Amite County and made contact with the local leader, Eldridge W. (E. W.) Steptoe, the founder of the NAACP chapter. Moses, who along with other SNCC organizers was committed to nonviolence, quickly discovered that rural blacks like Steptoe stored guns in their houses to protect themselves against white harassment. On August 15, Moses took three people into Liberty, the ironically named county seat, to register and was arrested for the first but not the last time. The following week one of the sheriff’s cousins slammed the blunt end of a knife into Moses’s head, requiring the SNCC organizer to receive eight stitches for his bloody wound. Although Moses brought criminal charges against his attacker, a bold move for a black man to take against a white man in this repressive county, an all-white jury acquitted the assailant. Nevertheless, through his courage and boldness, Moses attracted other SNCC workers to join him in southwest Mississippi and inspired local youths to venture into the movement. Two of them, Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes, who lived just outside of McComb, organized a demonstration against segregated facilities and were arrested. With the upsurge of protest, segregationist violence accelerated. On September 7, John Hardy accompanied two black applicants to register to vote in neighboring Tylertown in Walthall County. The registrar hit Hardy over the head with a gun, warning him: “Stay out of here, you dumb son of a bitch.” Adding insult to injury, the sheriff, John Q. Wood, then arrested Hardy for disorderly conduct.140 A few weeks later, on September 25, E. H. Hurst, a state legislator, shot and murdered Herbert Lee near Liberty. Lee belonged to the NAACP and worked with Moses on voter registration. Hurst claimed that he had gotten into a dispute with Lee over money and that Lee had attacked him first with a tire iron. When Hurst whipped out his gun to protect himself, he claimed, it accidentally fired and killed Lee. A coroner’s jury backed up Hurst’s version.141 In the face of this terror, the voter registration campaign fizzled. McComb’s black high school students continued to protest segregation through sit-ins and marches, which led to arrests and expulsions from school. Bryant and other community elders had only bargained for voter registration and not mass demonstrations that would expose their children to danger. The man who had invited Moses into his community withdrew support for SNCC. The final blow came on October 31, when Moses and several SNCC workers were convicted of disturbing the peace and sent to jail for up to six months. From his cell in the town of Magnolia, an undaunted Moses recorded his thoughts: “This is Mississippi, the middle of the iceberg. Hollis [Watkins] is leading off with his tenor, ‘Michael row the boat ashore, Alleluia; Christian brothers don’t be slow, Alleluia; Mississippi’s next to go, Alleluia.’ This is a tremor in the middle of the iceberg, from a stone that the builders rejected.”142 The following month, Moses and his comrades walked out of jail on bail money provided by the Southern Conference Educational Fund, the successor to the SCHW. Having failed to crack the iceberg in McComb, they nevertheless remained in Mississippi, continued to organize blacks around voter registration, and chipped away at the glacier of white supremacy. The Kennedy Administration John F. Kennedy had defeated Richard Nixon for the presidency in 1960 by a razor-thin margin of less than 1 percent of the popular vote. The African American electorate helped swing the 140 Dittmer, Local People, 108. The Civil Rights Division filed litigation that prevented the state from bringing Hardy to trial. 141 Ibid., 109. 142 Ibid., 114. African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 47 balance of power to Kennedy’s side in New Jersey, Michigan, Illinois, Texas, and South Carolina, all states that had supported Eisenhower in 1956. Overall, Kennedy brought back to the Democratic Party the 7 percent of black ballots that had defected to the Republicans four years earlier. The Massachusetts senator mainly owed this increased support from black voters to a highly publicized incident during the campaign. In late October, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. had been arrested in Atlanta after participating in a sit-in demonstration to integrate eating facilities in Rich’s department store. After King was sent to the state prison in Reidsville, Kennedy telephoned Mrs. Coretta King to express his concern, and his aides clandestinely arranged for Dr. King’s release. Vice President Nixon refused to intervene, which prompted King’s father, a prominent minister and previously a Nixon supporter, to throw his endorsement to Kennedy.143 Ironically, during the 1950s, Kennedy’s record on black civil rights was unspectacular and virtually indistinguishable from Nixon’s. He operated more from political than moral conviction. As a northerner, he spoke out in favor of the Brown ruling and routinely voted for passage of the two civil rights acts. Yet, he had lined up behind Johnson’s effort to add a jury trial amendment to the 1957 law, and he worked to secure the backing of segregationist governors such as John Patterson of Alabama for his presidential nomination. Within the Democratic Party, Kennedy was considered a moderate between the liberal and conservative wings. He intended to take a cautious approach toward implementing civil rights in the South and opposed policies that resembled federal intervention during Reconstruction.144 Whatever Kennedy’s intentions may have been, they were altered by pressure from the civil rights movement. The Freedom Rides in 1961 forced the Kennedy administration to dispatch federal marshals to Montgomery, Alabama to protect the demonstrators. A year later, the president had to deploy federal troops to Oxford, Mississippi to quell a riot that erupted after James Meredith became the first African American to gain admission to the state university campus. Still, the president and his brother Robert, whom he had appointed attorney general, preferred to keep federal force out of the South and defuse potential crises through appealing to southern officials to obey the law of the land. Because they recognized that mass demonstrations to desegregate public accommodations and schools tended to provoke unruly confrontations between blacks and whites, the Kennedys sought a more orderly means of promoting civil rights without attracting unflattering headlines. At a time when President Kennedy stepped up the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the chief executive wanted to avoid unfavorable publicity that besmirched America’s claim as the defender of democracy against Communist tyranny.145 Now that the Supreme Court had upheld the constitutionality of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the Kennedy administration acted to increase the number of voting suits brought under it. With his brother in charge of the Justice Department, the president intended to use the courts to make its presence in Dixie lightly felt and to avoid loud confrontations that protests for desegregation could provoke. The Civil Rights Division, led by Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall and his top aide John Doar, sent lawyers into those southern communities with the worst records of black enrollment. Doar visited McComb and filed litigation that ended prosecution of SNCC’s John Hardy. 143 Lawson, Black Ballots, 255-56; Harris Wofford, Of Kennedys & Kings: Making Sense of the Sixties (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 13-25. 144 Lawson, Running for Freedom, 76; Carl M. Brauer, John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), passim. 145 Dudziak, Cold War, 152-202. African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 48 Although President Kennedy preferred to operate through the courts, the chief executive could not side step demands for legislation. On September 9, 1961, the Civil Rights Commission once again issued a report that embarrassed the White House, pushing it to introduce a new remedial suffrage measure. After holding extensive hearings in New Orleans, the commission found that southern registrars “have built a fortress against Negro registration with such procedural impediments as interpretation of the Constitution, identification, calculation of age, and filling in application blanks.”146 The panel contended that the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 would not solve the immediate problem, because the case-by-case adjudication by the courts proceeded too slowly. Instead, it recommended passage of legislation requiring state registrars to automatically accept six grades of formal schooling as proof of literacy. In response, the Kennedy administration decided to act. First, it supported a constitutional amendment to prohibit poll taxes as a voting qualification, but limited it only to federal elections. Introducing this proposal did not break any new ground, which perhaps explains why it proved successful. In 1964, the states ratified the Twenty-fourth Amendment incorporating the Kennedy anti-poll tax language. Second, the Justice Department drafted a bill that borrowed a page from the Civil Rights Commission’s report. The measure established a sixth grade education as the standard to prove literacy in registration and voting in federal elections. To ruffle fewer southern feathers, the bill excluded coverage of state elections. However, even this mild bill went down to defeat. The usual southern opposition formed to derail the proposal by waging a filibuster. Unlike successful attempts in 1957 and 1960, the Kennedy administration declined to make a fight to impose cloture. After some perfunctory debate in the Senate, in early May 1962, Kennedy’s legislative forces lost the battle to shut off the filibuster and quickly abandoned the effort.147 The outcome reflected the Kennedy administration’s meager commitment to seeking legislation and its preference for extending the right to vote through the courts. To push civil rights activists off the streets, the president offered them financial incentives to undertake voter registration drives backed by Justice Department litigation. Assistant Attorney General Marshall and White House civil rights advisor Harris Wofford persuaded several philanthropic foundations to finance suffrage campaigns. In a series of meetings in June and July 1961, the government brokered negotiations between the philanthropic organizations, the Taconic Foundation and Field Fund, and civil rights groups—NAACP, SNCC, SCLC, CORE, National Urban League, National Student Association, and the Southern Regional Council (SRC). The SRC had been created in 1944 and promoted improved race relations in the South through conferences, research, and publications. Headquartered in Atlanta, by the early 1960s the group publicly endorsed desegregation and enfranchisement. From these discussions, SRC agreed to run the Voter Education Project (VEP), the foundations provided a million dollars to fund it, and the civil rights groups furnished the personnel for voter registration drives throughout the South. Wiley Branton, an Arkansas lawyer who had represented nine black students in their attempt to integrate Central High School in Little Rock in 1957, was appointed director of the project.148 146 Lawson, Black Ballots, 289; United States Commission on Civil Rights, Report, Voting, 1961 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961). In 1959, the Supreme Court had ruled that North Carolina could impose a literacy test for voting to promote intelligent use of the ballot. This ruling, however, did not suggest that the federal government lacked the power to establish an impartial standard to demonstrate literacy. Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections, 360 U.S. 45 (1959). 147 Lawson, Black Ballots, 289-93. 148 Pat Watters and Reese Cleghorn, Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: The Arrival of Negroes in Southern Politics (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), 44-48; Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings, 159-60. African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 51 Despite this intimidation, Block remained in Greenwood and along with Peacock continued the organizing drive. They did not get any blacks registered, but they succeeded in enlisting local support. Laura McGhee, the sister of Gus Courts who had been shot for his voter registration activities in Belzoni in 1955, opened her home for meetings. Her three sons, Silas, Jake, and Clarence, also joined the movement. Through their daily activities in the community and their own exemplary courage, Block and Peacock enlisted aid from other families as well. The sons of Dewey Greene, Sr., who had headed the NAACP in the 1950s, and June Johnson and her mother Belle also joined the local campaign.156 With support gradually growing for SNCC in Greenwood, in October 1962 Leflore County officials devised a new set of reprisals. They ceased distributing surplus food furnished by the Federal government to the area’s 22,000 needy residents who depended on it. SNCC developed its own system of food distribution to feed impoverished families and at the same time encourage recipients to try to register to vote. The group’s allies in the North collected food and clothing and sent them to Greenwood, and the singer Harry Belafonte raised funds in New York City at a Carnegie Hall concert. The comedian Dick Gregory from Chicago not only gathered supplies but also delivered them in person. Volunteers distributed the goods from several locations: the Catholic Center and the Wesley Chapel in Greenwood, Amzie Moore’s home in Cleveland, and the residence of Aaron Henry, an NAACP official who lived in Clarksdale.157 As blacks refused to capitulate, white supremacists responded with violence and intimidation. On February 20, 1963, following the shipment of food and clothing from Chicago, arsonists set fire to black businesses on the street housing the SNCC office, then located on McLaurin Street. When Sam Block gave a newspaper interview charging that opponents of the voter registration drive were behind the terrorism, he was prosecuted and convicted for “public utterances designed to incite breach of peace” and sentenced to six months in jail and a $500 fine. On February 28, with no let up in the registration campaign, white terrorists struck directly at SNCC. While meeting at their office with Randolph Blackwell, an official of the VEP from Atlanta, SNCC members spotted an automobile with no license plates parked outside in the street. Smelling danger, Bob Moses, who was in attendance, recommended that those inside leave the building and disperse. Moses along with Blackwell and Jimmy Travis, a SNCC staffer from Jackson, drove out of town along Highway 82 toward Greenville. Seven miles along the road, the same menacing car from Greenwood pulled alongside the SNCC vehicle and fired shots into the automobile. Travis, the driver, took two bullets, one in the shoulder and one in the neck. Though the wounds were serious, he survived.158 Rather than retreating, SNCC dug in even deeper. The group summoned its workers from throughout Mississippi and concentrated them in Greenwood to accelerate the voter registration drive. The white reign of terror continued. Snipers fired into the SNCC office, blowing out some windows and slightly injuring workers inside with spraying glass. On March 24, someone set fire to the SNCC office, inflicting heavy damage to its contents. On March 26, Dewey Greene and his family were awakened in the night by gunshots that blasted through their front door and crashed through a bedroom window where six of his children slept. The Greenes were a respected family in town, and Greenwood’s black residents became enraged. On March 27, James Forman, SNCC’s executive secretary, spoke to a crowd gathered at Wesley Chapel and then led a procession to city hall to protest the violence. Police broke up the peaceful 156 Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 208-25. 157 Dittmer, Local People, 145-46. 158 Ibid., 147. African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 52 demonstration by unleashing snarling German shepherds against the marchers, who dispersed. Ten SNCC leaders, including Moses and Forman, were arrested and jailed. The following day, this scene was replayed, but this time police attacked blacks at Wesley Chapel after returning from trying to vote.159 At this juncture, the demonstrations and violence against them had attracted the attention of the national media. Backed by the VEP, SNCC leaders called upon the Federal government to intervene to enforce the right to vote and protect those who tried to register. With pressure exerted upon it, the Kennedy administration filed litigation against Greenwood officials, seeking the release of the incarcerated civil rights activists and protection for those participating in the suffrage campaign. Before the government’s case received a hearing, on April 3 the Justice Department engineered a compromise. Criticized by Mississippi’s two powerful senators, Eastland and Stennis, for filing unnecessary litigation and worried that angry blacks in Greenwood would provoke white segregationists into increased violence, the Civil Rights Division entered into an accord with local officials. John Doar, the division’s attorney who was most sympathetic to the plight of civil rights advocates, followed Justice Department instructions to drop the lawsuit in exchange for the release of the SNCC prisoners. However, both the VEP and SNCC were bitterly disappointed with the government’s failure to follow through on its pledge of protection and denounced the agreement.160 Although SNCC continued in Greenwood and established a new office at 708 Avenue N, their efforts produced few tangible results.161 By mid-1963, some 1,300 blacks had braved the obstacles to make an attempt to pass the literacy test and register to vote without success. With a great deal of reluctance, on November 12, 1963, the VEP decided that it could no longer afford to fund projects in Mississippi. In reaching this decision, the project’s executive director, Wiley Branton, singled out the Federal government for its failure “to protect the people who have sought to register and vote or who are working actively in getting others to register.”162 Fewer than 5,000 black Mississippians had managed to enroll, which broke down to an expenditure by the VEP of $12.13 per voter. This was two and one-half times as high ($4.84) as in the next most costly state of Louisiana.163 Freedom Vote Bitterly disappointed, SNCC and its allies nevertheless did not give up in the Magnolia State. Indeed, they stepped up their efforts in a two-pronged strategy to publicize the plight of Mississippi blacks and continue organizing local communities around the right to vote. Because of the fierce resistance they had met, since 1962 the civil rights forces in the state had united under the banner of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). Guided mainly by SNCC and CORE, COFO also gathered under its umbrella the NAACP and SCLC, although the latter group was the least active. The NAACP furnished one of its most tireless representatives in the state as COFO’s president: Aaron Henry, who operated a drug store in Clarksdale in the Delta county of Coahoma. In 1963, in the aftermath of the Greenwood campaign, COFO decided to conduct a “mock election” to coincide with the regularly scheduled gubernatorial contest in the fall. Because the overwhelming majority of blacks still could not vote, the “Freedom Ballot 159 Ibid., 151-52. 160 Ibid., 153-57; Lawson, Black Ballots, 276-77. 161 Davis, Weary Feet, 277. 162 Steven F. Lawson and Charles Payne, Debating the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1968 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 83. 163 Lawson, Black Ballots, 284. The average cost was $2.55. African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 53 Campaign” would attempt informally to sign up African Americans and have them cast unofficial ballots. A large turnout would show that if given a fair opportunity Mississippi blacks wanted to vote and cast their ballots.164 The idea for the project had developed out of discussions between Allard Lowenstein and Bob Moses. A graduate of the University of North Carolina and Yale Law School, Lowenstein served as a dean at Stanford University. He had close connections to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and he had spoken out against apartheid in South Africa. Lowenstein envisioned that newly enfranchised Mississippi blacks, as well as those throughout the South, would help reshape the Democrats in a more liberal direction by using their clout to topple southern conservatives like Eastland and Stennis. Moses did not have the fortunes of the Democratic Party uppermost in his mind; he saw the simulated election campaign primarily as a means of organizing blacks and providing an independent electoral base to obtain their political goals. Nevertheless, both agreed that Lowenstein should use his influence on northern campuses to recruit white student volunteers to spend the fall in Mississippi to help with the campaign. Not only would this provide increased personnel, but it would also highlight for a national audience the undemocratic and brutal conditions blacks faced. Not everyone in SNCC supported the idea of importing highly educated whites into communities in which blacks could barely read and might feel intimidated in the presence of these well-intentioned individuals. However, Moses prevailed in his belief that blacks would have to pry support from the Federal government before they could vote.165 On October 6, COFO launched the campaign at its statewide convention at the Masonic Temple in Jackson. The delegates adopted a platform that endorsed school desegregation, racial justice, and expansion of the right to vote. With respect to the latter, COFO argued that Mississippi should not be entitled to administer a literacy test because it had failed to provide blacks with equal education. The convention nominated Aaron Henry to run for governor. Running with him for lieutenant governor was Ed King, the white chaplain at Tougaloo College. As expected, segregationists harassed the candidates and their campaign workers. Police in Indianola arrested civil rights workers for distributing leaflets without a permit. In Clarksdale, Lowenstein went to jail for violating the town’s curfew ordinance. Student volunteers and veterans alike spent time in jail for allegedly disobeying traffic ordinances. In a few cases campaign workers found themselves shot at and chased out of town.166 The mock election succeeded in proving two main points about the situation in Mississippi. First, the approximately 80,000 blacks who cast their ballots, nearly four times the number of those actually registered, vividly demonstrated that given the opportunity they wanted to vote and participate as first-class citizens in the electoral process. Nearly all of them supported the Henry-King ticket. Second, a breakdown of the results underscored that numerous obstacles remained. The largest contingent of blacks signed up to vote in Jackson, the state capital and the most urban area in Mississippi. SNCC and CORE, which operated projects mainly in the rural Delta, produced fewer participants, about one-fifth of the total. For example, in Leflore County only 2,000 blacks voted in the campaign. Rather than an indication of apathy on the part of blacks, the lean participation indicated that well justified fear continued to keep blacks from 164 Ibid., 87; Aaron Henry with Constance Curry, Aaron Henry: The Fire Ever Burning (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000), 156-61. 165 Dittmer, Local People, 200-01; William H. Chafe, Never Stop Running: Allard Lowenstein and the Struggle to Save American Liberalism (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 180-82. 166 Dittmer, Local People, 203-04. African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 56 SNCC staff, and whites should work mainly in white communities. The issue of race had become more salient in light of black perceptions that Lowenstein’s recruits could not help but act paternalistically toward black folks from a markedly different class and social background from themselves. Some of the staff also believed that placing whites in a leadership position would reinforce the subservience local blacks felt in the presence of whites. Moses disagreed for philosophical and tactical reasons. To limit white participation was a racist position, he argued, and “that’s what we are fighting against.” Also, Moses had not given up on the idea that bringing northern whites into Mississippi would convince the Federal government to follow. He candidly admitted that while the nation did not respond to black deaths in the state, its leaders would pay heed to the violence that would likely be perpetrated against the hundreds of white college students who encountered violence—including murder. Moses, a reader of Albert Camus and other existentialist philosophers, took personal responsibility very seriously and dreaded the lives that would be lost as a result of his actions. However, he was not the source of Mississippi’s violence and wanted to show those living outside the Magnolia Curtain the terror that blacks experienced every day.175 His arguments prevailed. Before Freedom Summer, COFO continued its efforts to register black voters in a number of key areas in Mississippi. COFO declared January 22, 1964 as “Freedom Day” in Hattiesburg. In United States v. Lynd, the Justice Department had won an injunction that prevented Theron Lynd from engaging in discriminatory voter registration practices. The registrar of Forrest County, where Hattiesburg was the county seat, Lynd had long been involved in thwarting African Americans from passing the state literacy test. With this boost from the judiciary, COFO mobilized a few hundred people to line up en masse at the Forrest County Courthouse and apply to register. COFO also threw up a picket line at the courthouse to protest discriminatory treatment. Under the watchful eyes of national reporters summoned by COFO, the local police did not use physical force to break up the demonstration, an unprecedented event in the county. More than 150 people took the test in a generally peaceful atmosphere. The drive encouraged COFO and the local residents to continue organizing. The police waited until the national media departed before making arrests, but they did not stop further attempts to register.176 Civil rights activists in the town of Canton in Madison County copied “Freedom Day” after witnessing the events in Hattiesburg. CORE had set up a base in Canton and recruited a local businessman, C. O. Chinn, to work with the group in rallying blacks behind the movement. Madison County had its own Theron Lynd in the person of Foote Campbell, the registrar who had kept a tight grip on the voting books, which contained the names of 97 percent of adult whites but only 1.2 percent of eligible blacks. SNCC and NAACP staff joined those from CORE in turning out some 350 blacks at the courthouse. Only five people were allowed to take the test, and the following week the Justice Department filed suit against Foote for discrimination. The case went to Judge Cox, the judicial obstructionist, who referred publicly to blacks in court as “chimpanzees.” Nevertheless, Cox, who had previous decisions reversed by the higher courts, ordered that Campbell handle at least 50 applications a day.177 Buoyed by demonstrations in Hattiesburg and Canton, black residents in Greenwood declared their own “Freedom Day” set for March 25. The situation here was less peaceful. The day 175 Lawson, Running for Freedom, 94. 176 Dittmer, Local People, 220-21; United States v. Lynd, 301 F. 2d 818 (1962); United States v. Lynd, Manuscript Collection, at http://www.lib.usm.edu/~archives/m027.htm, The University of Southern Mississippi, accessed on April 7, 2009. 177 Dittmer, Local People, 221-23. African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 57 before the rally, the police arrested SNCC’s Willie Peacock and three others for distributing flyers, and the Ku Klux Klan burned a fiery cross in front of SNCC headquarters. After gathering at the Elks Hall, some 200 blacks went to the courthouse to register and another 100, including a few white clergymen, joined a picket line to protest racial bias. About three dozen were permitted to take the voting test. Freedom Days did stir blacks in Mississippi to make the attempt to register, but few managed to do so in the face of solid opposition.178 Against this background, the organizers of Freedom Summer began their campaign. After setting up a recruiting process and carefully screening applicants, in mid-June COFO convened a two-week orientation session at the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio to help prepare more than 500 volunteers for the challenges and dangers that awaited them behind the Magnolia Curtain. These mainly white children of privilege listened to somber recitations by civil rights veterans, including project director Bob Moses, about the facts of life in Mississippi, which for blacks resembled a third-world economy and a totalitarian state. Through the drama of role playing, volunteers received training in the abuse they would receive and the nonviolence with which they were expected to respond. They would face grave difficulties, and their lives would be in jeopardy. Jimmy Travis, who had been shot outside Greenwood the year before, warned them: “It’s hell in Mississippi. And you got to realize that nobody cares. I’m black. You’re white. If you’re going down there, you’re going to be treated worse than black. Because you are supposed to be free. But I say no one is free until everyone is.”179 This lesson hit home quickly, even before most of them had left for Mississippi. On June 21, a week after the Oxford orientations had begun, COFO learned that three of its staff in Mississippi had disappeared. Michael Schwerner and James Chaney worked for CORE and Andrew Goodman, one of the summer volunteers from Queens, New York, had gone to investigate the torching of the Mount Zion Methodist Church in Longdale, near Meridian in Neshoba County. Shortly after investigating the ruins, they were arrested on a traffic charge by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price and placed in jail in the town of Philadelphia. Later that evening, they were released and headed by car back to Meridian. On the way, Deputy Sheriff Price stopped them once again, but this time under cover of darkness turned the trio over to members of the Ku Klux Klan, who murdered them, burned their car, and buried their bodies under a remote earthen dam. Their remains were not discovered until August 4, but by then COFO had no doubt that they had been murdered.180 Until then the Federal government had declined to become involved in safeguarding Freedom Summer workers. Although many parents of volunteers along with civil rights organizations had urged Washington to take steps to protect voting rights crusaders, the president and his advisors demurred. Lyndon B. Johnson had succeeded John F. Kennedy after his assassination the previous November. Sympathetic to civil rights, even more so than Kennedy, like his predecessor Johnson believed that federal force should be deployed sparingly in the internal affairs of states. Law enforcement was a matter for local officials to undertake. Yet as Attorney General Robert Kennedy had acknowledged, in Mississippi the police “are widely believed to be linked to extremist anti-Negro activity, or at the very least to tolerate it.” Nevertheless, four days before the three civil rights workers disappeared, a White House aide rejected a request from parents of the volunteers for federal protection “before a tragic incident takes place.” Lee White 178 Ibid., 224. 179 Nicolaus Mills, Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964—The Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992), 92. 180 For an account of these murders, see Seth Cagin and Philip Dray, We are not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi (New York: McMillan, 1988), chapter 1. African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 58 found it “incredible that those people who are voluntarily sticking their head into the lion’s mouth would ask for somebody to come down and shoot the lion.”181 The disappearance of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman generated nationwide and international publicity and forced the Federal government to act. Johnson ordered the FBI to head up an investigation and set up an office in Mississippi to do so. Previously, the FBI had compiled a poor record in dealing with civil rights issues. Both the Justice Department and the bureau’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, argued that the FBI did not constitute a national police force that could provide protection for civil rights activists. Its agents on the scene in southern racial hot spots merely recorded their observations and did nothing to intervene when they saw blacks and their white colleagues under assault. In fact, Hoover had a dim view of the capacity of blacks to handle equality, and he had also initiated a clandestine operation to spy on and smear Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. However, under the president’s orders and with the bureau’s professional reputation on the line, Hoover’s agents conducted a successful probe that led to the apprehension of the killers.182 However, the Federal government did not change its position about refusing to provide protection, and throughout the summer violence continued to flare. In Leake County, the tiny town of Harmony—another oxymoron in the state’s racial inferno—came under assault for its civil rights activities. Two sisters, Winson and Dovie Hudson, led the movement in this community, as did women in many other towns throughout the South. They collaborated with CORE workers to set up a “Freedom School” in Harmony. These schools were a critical aspect of Freedom Summer, designed to provide an education for black youths that gave them an opportunity to learn the academic skills missing from their limited and impoverished segregated education. The schools would also instill in them a sense of pride in learning about their African American heritage and prepare them to exercise their rights as first-class citizens. However, terrorists aimed to stop this freedom education and began planting bombs in black mailboxes. When a carload of whites drove up to Dovie Hudson’s mailbox, she had her sons on alert armed with guns. They riddled the approaching vehicle with bullets, fending off the assault. This incident demonstrated that local blacks would use force to defend themselves, despite the movement’s tactical support of nonviolence.183 The freedom campaign in McComb, where three years earlier Bob Moses had started his quest to organize blacks for the right to vote, once again became the target of Klan violence and segregationist harassment. A bomb rocked C. C. Bryant’s house along with two others the day after the killings outside of Philadelphia. COFO operated a freedom house owned by Mrs. Willie Mae Cotton on Wall Street. Bombers blasted the house, knocking down one of the walls and injuring the project director Curtis Hayes and a white volunteer. The reign of terror continued throughout June and July as the Klan torched three churches in adjacent Pike and Amite Counties. In early August, black business leaders gathered at Aylene Quinn’s café, which served as a haven for beleaguered COFO staff. They agreed to support the local movement and 181 Lawson, Black Ballots, both quotes on 302. 182 David J. Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From “Solo” to Memphis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), passim; Kenneth O’Reilly, “Racial Matters”: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972 (New York: Free Press, 1989), passim. In 1967 an all-white federal jury convicted Deputy Price and six Klansmen of the killings. 183 Dittmer, Local People, 256-57; Winson Hudson and Constance Curry, Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 35-46. African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 61 the loyalty oath. At the same time, after a series of caucuses at the Union Temple Baptist Church, the MFDP members rejected the “back of the bus bargain,” as they termed it. In her powerful voice, Hamer declared: “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats.”190 Yet the MFDP did not go away empty handed. The convention voted to establish a committee to draw up guidelines to eliminate racial discrimination in delegate selection to the 1968 and succeeding national conventions. (Indeed, Hamer would take a seat at that convention in a delegation of 36 blacks and 32 whites.191) Nor did the MFDP give up. As an outgrowth of the summer project, the party had run candidates for Congress. Besides Hamer, Annie Devine and Victoria Gray competed for seats in the House of Representatives. The three underscored the importance of local women to the movement. Devine, a mother of four, a pillar of her church, and a schoolteacher, had emerged out of organizing drives in Canton. A resident of Hattiesburg, Gray shared a similar profile as a wife and mother, though in her case she came from a business background to work with COFO. Unlike the situation at the Democratic convention, the three candidates had a weak legal position and little political support to win their challenge for seats in Congress. At best, they may have hoped to block the seating of the regularly elected white congressmen, as had occurred with respect to Bilbo in 1947. However, at the new session of the Eighty-ninth Congress opening in January 1965, the House overwhelmingly rejected their attempt.192 Civil Rights Act of 1964 While the MFDP highlighted the terror of southern disenfranchisement, the president and Congress adopted a voting measure that did little to solve the problem. Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 produced strong and effective provisions in undermining segregation in public accommodations and schools as well as discrimination in employment, it fell short of extending the right to vote to African Americans. The law contained the proposal first offered by President Kennedy in 1962 to accept evidence of a sixth-grade education as proof of literacy to satisfy voter registration qualifications. The statute still left implementation in the hands of the judiciary, which had proven a cumbersome and time-consuming method in the past. Furthermore, the law basically retained the use of literacy as a standard for registering, and even an objective one as the measure provided left a large number of blacks who had been deprived of adequate education disenfranchised. At the same time, the large number of whites who did not have either a sixth-grade education or more literacy than blacks remained on the rolls because registrars had given them preferential treatment.193 Nevertheless, a few federal judges in the South had departed from their obstructionist colleagues to take an active role in devising novel legal methods of promoting black voting rights. Frank M. Johnson of Alabama helped pioneer the way. Johnson had struck down bus segregation in Montgomery in 1956, and by the early 1960s had a good deal of experience trying to get local registration boards to comply with the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960. Often frustrated by delays and subterfuges, in 1962 Judge Johnson decided to tackle the continuing discriminatory application of literacy tests head on. Because so many whites had not been required to satisfy the literacy exams, Johnson “froze” the requirements to vote that were then in effect and that allowed whites to register. In practice this meant that blacks would only have to meet the same 190 Ibid., 298, 302. 191 Steven F. Lawson, In Pursuit of Power: Southern Black and Electoral Politics, 1965-1982 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 114. 192 Lawson, Black Ballots, 323-26. 193 Lawson, Running for Freedom, 95. African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 62 criteria—which in this case meant no proof of literacy—to enroll to vote. This principle of freezing recognized the realities of the differential treatment of the races in the South and provided a rationale to justify suspending the administration of literacy tests. In March 1965, in Louisiana v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld freezing of voting standards as a constitutional method of correcting past bias against blacks, thereby suspending the application of literacy tests. Justice Hugo Black stated what southern blacks had long known about literacy exams: “This is not a test but a trap, sufficient to stop even the most brilliant man on his way to the voting booth.”194 The Tuskegee Breakthrough As Congress and the courts added voting rights remedies to the federal arsenal and civil rights activists in Mississippi demonstrated the need for much stronger measures to crush disenfranchisement, in one historic town black southerners cracked through the solid edifice of white supremacy. Despite biased voter registration schemes and racial redistricting, Dr. Charles Gomillion had persevered in his struggle for black political equality. In the summer of 1964, the Macon County Democratic Club, an offshoot of the Tuskegee Civic Association, backed an interracial slate of candidates for city elections. Blacks constituted slightly less than a majority of Tuskegee’s electorate of 1,900 voters, and both ideology and pragmatism convinced Gomillion and the Democratic Club of the need for a black-white coalition. The club endorsed three whites and two blacks for city council. In the August 11 election, the three whites won their races to the council, and the two blacks faced a runoff against white candidates. On September 15, the two black candidates, Kenneth L. Buford and Stanley Smith, became the first non-whites elected to the city council. At its initial meeting the new council resolved: “We shall work for a community composed of citizens whose hearts are united in brotherly love.”195 Prelude to the Future While judges, lawmakers, and civil rights groups pressed their case for expanded voting rights, some southern states began to realize the inevitable and made plans to defend white political supremacy once African Americans obtained the ballot. They would have to accept black voter registration one day, but they could also shift their focus from denying blacks the vote to reducing the influence blacks exerted over the outcome of elections. Drawn up to appear impartial on the surface, these electoral measures packed racial motives behind them. Georgia offers a case in point. In 1962, federal courts had struck a blow against Georgia's unique county unit system. The county unit system had laid the foundation for maintaining rural domination of the state legislature and restricting black political influence in the electorate. Valdimer Orlando (V. O.) Key, the foremost student of southern politics, noted that under the county unit system it "becomes possible to use the cities as whipping boys, to inflate rural pride and prejudice, including that against Negroes who vote most frequently in the cities, and to perpetuate the frictions between county and city."196 194 Fairclough, Race and Democracy, 310. The Court affirmed the lower court decision issued by Judge John Minor Wisdom, another of the handful of progressive federal district judges in the South, along with Frank Johnson and Skelly Wright, who ruled against discriminatory suffrage procedures. Bass, Unlikely Heroes, 46-51; Lawson, Black Ballots, 268, 313; Louisiana v. United States, 380 U.S. 145 (1965). 195 Norrell, Reaping the Whirlwind, 167. 196 Key, Southern Politics, 122. African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 63 Codified in the Neill Primary Act of 1917, the rules gave each of Georgia's 159 counties twice as many unit votes as it had representatives in the lower state house. The eight most populous counties each had three representatives and six unit votes a piece; the next 30 had two each and four unit votes; and the remaining 121 had one each and two unit votes. The 121 counties containing a minority of the population controlled nearly 60 percent of the unit votes. Nominations for governor and U.S. senator required a majority of unit votes, while those for secretary of state, attorney general, and judges on the Supreme Court and Court of Appeals needed merely a plurality. In no instance was a majority of the popular vote necessary for victory.197 The county unit system proved constitutionally indefensible. In the spring of 1962, a three-judge federal panel in Gray v. Sanders rejected it for violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment by weighing votes cast in small rural counties more heavily than those in large urban jurisdictions. The next year the U.S. Supreme Court concurred.198 In two cases, Toombs v. Fortson and Westberry v. Sanders, the judiciary also ordered Georgia to reapportion its state legislature so that legislative districts reflected boundaries of roughly equal populations.199 This would remove the advantage that rural areas had over urban centers. With the demise of the county unit system, Georgia politicians looked for other ways to preserve white power. In 1963, state representative Denmark Groover from Macon introduced a proposal to apply majority-vote, runoff election rules to all local, state, and federal offices. A staunch segregationist, Groover's hostility to black voting was reinforced by personal experience. Having served as a state representative in the early 1950s, Groover was defeated for election to the House in 1958. The Macon politico blamed his loss on "Negro bloc voting." He carried the white vote, but his opponent triumphed by garnering black ballots by a five-to-one margin.200 Groover soon devised a way to challenge growing black political strength. Elected to the House again in 1962, he led the fight to enact a majority vote, runoff rule for all county and state contests in both primary and general elections. Until 1963, plurality voting was widely used in Georgia county elections, and the decision on whether to have a majority or plurality was left to the option of each local party executive committee throughout the state.201 Why did Groover propose this significant alteration in January 1963? Two decades after introducing the majority vote plan, he candidly admitted that back in the 1950s and 1960s, "I was a segregationist. I was a county unit man. But if you want to establish if I was racially prejudiced, I was. If you want to establish that some of my political activity was racially motivated, it was."202 At the time of the legislative debate in February 1963, it was extensively reported in the state's newspapers that Groover and his allies saw the measure "as a means of circumventing what is called the Negro bloc vote."203 Groover later confirmed that he used the 197 Ibid., 119-20. The method of nomination for congressional representatives, whether by county unit or not, was left to local option. 198 Gray v. Sanders, 203 F. Supp. 158 (N.D. Ga 1962), 372 U.S. 368 (1963). 199 Toombs v. Fortson, 205 F. Supp. 248 (N.D. Ga. 1962); Westberry v. Sanders, 376 U.S. 1 (1964). 200 Macon Telegraph, September 11, 1958, 1. This story is also told in J. Morgan Kousser, Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), chapter 4. 201 Valdosta Daily Times, February 21, 1963, 1. 202 Denmark Groover, Deposition, April 23, 1984, United States v. Lowndes County, Georgia, CA No. 83-108-VAL, 22. 203 Moultrie Observer, February 21, 1963, 2; Valdosta Daily Times, February 21, 1963, 1; Macon Telegraph, February 21, 1963, 1. African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 66 Across from Brown’s Chapel, residents of the George Washington Carver Homes, a two-story apartment project built for black Selmans in 1951, assisted the movement. They put up civil rights volunteers from outside the city and joined in protests and mass meeting at the nearby church. The SCLC used the surrounding area between the church and Carver buildings “as a training ground for nonviolent protests.”214 King’s presence attracted national press coverage, which had been missing from earlier drives. Selma had a public safety director, Wilson Baker, who believed that the best way to defuse the publicity King generated was to have law enforcement act with restraint. When King and the SCLC launched their campaign on January 18, Baker maintained a peaceful police presence. Not so the deputy sheriffs under the command of Jim Clark. On January 19, Sheriff Clark’s men halted a march to the Dallas County Courthouse, and Clark himself accosted Mrs. Boynton, treated her roughly, and arrested her. Boynton’s arrest spurred other blacks to protest, most dramatically the town’s teachers who, except for Reese, had previously refrained from bold action. Each attempt to register, however, proved fruitless.215 Despite passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawing segregation in public accommodations, hotels in Selma remained segregated. The Torch Motel, located at 1802 Vine Street, was one of two facilities that served blacks, and King and his SCLC lieutenants took shelter in its $5 a day rooms. Annie Lee Cooper, a 53-year-old nurse who had been fired from her previous job at the Dunn Rest Home for engaging in voter registration activities, managed the facility. During attempts to register voters in January, Mrs. Cooper and Sheriff Clark got into a fist fight at the county courthouse, when the sheriff pushed her while she stood on line. Despite the strictures of nonviolent protest, Cooper punched him in the face several times. As deputies grabbed her, she brazenly yelled at Clark: “I wish you would hit me, you scum.” Clark then whacked Cooper over the head with his club, an image that photographers captured for the national media.216 With the efforts of the demonstrators stalemated, King stepped up the campaign on February 1. After rallying demonstrators at Brown’s Chapel, he led a march to the courthouse. Before arriving there he was arrested, not by Clark but by the gentler Baker. However, the result was the same, and King went to jail. From his cell, he penned the “Letter from a Selma Jail,” in which he wrote sarcastically: “This is Selma, Alabama, where there are more Negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls.”217 His incarceration prompted further marches and arrests, including those of nearly 1,000 schoolchildren. With the jails overflowing and the national press recording the arrests, the demonstrations attracted national attention. A delegation of 15 congressmen traveled to Selma to see the situation firsthand, and on February 4 the black nationalist Malcolm X spoke at Brown’s Chapel and warned that “white people should thank Dr. King for holding people in check, for there are other [black leaders] who do not believe in these [nonviolent] measures.”218 While local whites did not appreciate the implications of Malcolm’s remarks, President Johnson did. On February 4, the chief executive informed the nation that he intended to assure that the right to vote was secured for black Alabamians. Johnson meant to keep his word. 214 Davis, Weary Feet, 105. 215 Ibid., 259-61. 216 David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1986), 381; Davis, Weary Feet, 113-14; Williams, Eyes on the Prize, 260. 217 Williams, Eyes on the Prize, 264. 218 Ibid., 262. African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 67 Following additional confrontations with Sheriff Clark’s troops, on February 18, SCLC leaders, led by the Reverend Cordy Tindnell (C. T.) Vivian, conducted a night march in the town of Marion in neighboring Perry County, where blacks were similarly without the franchise. The protest resulted in the killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson by state troopers and the indiscriminate beatings of protesters and news reporters. With national sympathy building, the SCLC came up with a dramatic way of highlighting the plight of Alabama blacks. The group proposed a march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery, a distance of 50 miles, to memorialize Jackson’s death and voice black grievances at the doorstep of Governor George C. Wallace, the segregationist firebrand. On Sunday, March 7, demonstrators gathered at Brown’s Chapel before undertaking the dangerous journey along Route 80, a demonstration that Wallace had already denounced and threatened to block as a public safety hazard. Led by the SCLC’s Hosea Williams (King was out of town tending to his church duties in Atlanta) and SNCC’s John Lewis, some 600 people marched two abreast to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which crossed the Alabama River out of town. As the marchers reached the crest of the bridge, they encountered Wallace’s state troopers and Clark’s deputies who ordered them to turn back. Before they had a chance to comply, the combined police forces, some on horseback, charged into their ranks, fired tear gas, routed the protesters, and sent them sprawling. They rushed to get back to Selma and the confines of Brown’s Chapel.219 The brutality on the bridge had whet the appetite of Clark and his deputies for more. About 150 policemen chased the fleeing demonstrators, many of them wounded and choking from tear gas back to the church sanctuary. Enraged residents of the Carver Homes abandoned nonviolence and hurled bricks and bottles at the troopers. An injured John Lewis, who was severely beaten at the bridge and carried back to Brown’s, recalled the havoc caused by the police outside the church: “I was inside . . . , which was awash with sounds of groaning and weeping. And singing and crying. Mothers shouting out for their children. Children screaming for their mothers, brothers and sisters. So much confusion and fear and anger all erupting at the same time.”220 Volunteer nurses and doctors treated the wounded in Brown’s parsonage next door, which according to Lewis looked like “a MASH [Mobile Army Surgical Hospital] unit.” They treated victims for cuts and bruises and tear gas burns. Ambulances dispatched from black funeral homes transported some of the more seriously wounded to Good Samaritan Hospital. Established by white Catholics and staffed mainly by black medical personnel, this facility was the largest serving African Americans. With more than 90 people needing treatment and examining rooms overflowing, some patients were taken to the smaller Birwell Infirmary.221 Network news cameras recorded the events of “Bloody Sunday,” and the American Broadcasting Company interrupted its evening broadcast of the movie “Judgment at Nuremberg,” providing a vivid juxtaposition of racial crimes in Nazi Germany and white supremacist Alabama.222 King and the SCLC immediately planned to undertake a second march from Selma to Montgomery scheduled to begin on March 9. However, Judge Frank M. Johnson issued a temporary injunction to halt the march pending an appeal. King chose to go ahead anyway, and on Tuesday, along with 1,500 marchers, headed across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Once again, they encountered state troopers, but this time violence was averted when King decided to turn around. Behind the scenes, the Federal government had brokered a compromise that allowed marchers time to kneel in prayer and kept the state police from charging into them. Nevertheless, on the 219 Lawson, Running for Freedom, 106-09. 220 John Lewis with Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 329. 221 Ibid., 330. 222 Ibid., 331. African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 68 evening of “Turnaround Tuesday,” two white Unitarian ministers who had journeyed to Selma to participate in the march, were attacked by white thugs on the streets of Selma. One of them, the Reverend James Reeb, died from his beating. The list of martyrs now numbered two. The nation’s response to Reeb’s murder evoked bittersweet feelings among civil rights activists. Once again it appeared that political leaders responded more vigorously to the death of white than black martyrs. Following Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death earlier in the campaign, despite both television and newspaper coverage, neither the president nor Congress stirred into action. However, Reeb’s murder prompted President Johnson to place a personal telephone call of sympathy to the slain minister’s wife and father. In addition, nearly a score of congressmen spoke out on the House and Senate floors demanding swift consideration of voting rights legislation.223 Among civil rights workers, the satisfaction of seeing the Federal government respond favorably to increased pressure was mitigated by the belief that the nation viewed white lives as more valuable than black lives. In the meantime, protests in Alabama reached a climax. After holding hearings, Judge Johnson lifted the ban on the Selma to Montgomery march. When Wallace declined to furnish state protection, President Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard and dispatched army troops, FBI agents, and federal marshals to provide security. On Sunday, March 21, 4,000 blacks and whites from all over the country, the largest crowd to date, assembled at Brown’s Chapel to begin the pilgrimage to Montgomery. With King and other civil rights notables up front, the marchers tramped along the Jefferson Davis Highway (Route 80) this time with their way clear. For four nights marchers camped along the route. The final evening before heading into Montgomery, a huge throng gathered at the unincorporated City of St. Jude, a Catholic complex that since 1938 had provided housing, medical facilities, and education for black residents of west Montgomery. In what Townsend Davis called the “Movement’s Woodstock,” thousands crowded into a muddy field for an evening concert and heard Sammy Davis, Jr.; Harry Belafonte; and Joan Baez sing and James Baldwin speak.224 The next day some 25,000 people had joined the protest as it reached the state capitol with the Confederate flag waving in the breeze and Governor Wallace inside the building. Television cameras recorded the triumphant procession, and the audience heard King deliver a typically stirring address. Acknowledging that the black pilgrimage to freedom was not yet over, the minister pledged: “We are still in for a season of suffering. However difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because truth crushed to earth will rise again.”225 King’s words proved prophetic. The day of the march’s culmination, a carload of Klansmen about half way along Route 80 near Lowndesboro shot into a car driven by a white volunteer from Detroit, Viola Liuzzo, as she was riding with Leroy Moton, a black SCLC volunteer, to Montgomery after shuttling marchers back to Selma. As the automobile carrying the civil rights workers careened off the road, Mrs. Liuzzo lay dead and Moton survived but feigned death until the killers roared off in their automobile. The number of martyrs had grown to three.226 223 Garrow, Protest at Selma, 95-97. 224 Davis, Weary Feet, 50-51. 225 Williams, Eyes on the Prize, 283. 226 Mary Stanton, From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), passim. Davis, Weary Feet, 119-20. Before the end of the year, there would be one more death associated with the Selma campaign. Following the march to Montgomery, a white Unitarian minister, Jon Daniels, was headed to neighboring Lowndes County to organize black voter registrants. He worked closely with SNCC’s Stokely Carmichael. Daniels was murdered in broad daylight and a companion seriously wounded in front of Varner’s Cash Store in Haynesville. Daniel’s killer was acquitted by an all-white jury. In the following year, local blacks led by John Hewlett, formed the Lowndes County Freedom Organization and created an independent party African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 71 complaints of mistreatment. Regardless of McCulloch’s intentions, southern lawmakers jumped behind his version as a means of weakening voting rights enforcement, much preferring it to the administration bill. Nevertheless, their efforts failed, and the House adopted the administration version in early July. One further wrinkle needed ironing out. The House bill contained a provision repealing the poll tax in state elections, whereas the Senate version did not. President Johnson favored the Senate handiwork, and sent Attorney General Katzenbach to persuade the legislative conference committee trying to reconcile the competing bills to accept the upper chamber’s. He struck a compromise with lawmakers. The conferees removed the outright poll tax ban and added language instructing the Justice Department to file suit against state use of poll tax qualifications for voting. In addition, the congressmen broadened the bill beyond race to include language minorities by extending the sixth-grade literacy standard to non-English speaking residents. On August 3 and 4, the House and Senate respectively passed the revised bill with provisions for the triggering formula, federal examiners, and Justice Department oversight firmly in place.234 All that was left to be done was for President Johnson to affix his signature to the law. Johnson wanted to do so amidst great fanfare. He chose to sign the measure in the same room in the Capitol Rotunda that Abraham Lincoln had used to stamp his approval on a law granting freedom to slaves owned by Civil War Confederates. On August 6, sitting at a mammoth table, the president gathered behind him a delegation of civil rights leaders, congressional supporters, and administration officials to witness this landmark occasion. To this gathering Johnson proclaimed: “Today what is perhaps the last of the legal barriers is tumbling.”235 The Aftermath of the Voting Rights Act As Johnson understood, passage alone did not resolve the problem. Enfranchisement depended on enforcement of the powerful act. The administration tried to show it meant business when within three days after signing the bill into law, the Justice Department dispatched federal examiners into nine counties. Among them were two that had commanded the civil rights movement’s greatest attention and sacrifice: Dallas County, Alabama in which Selma was located and Leflore County, Mississippi, where SNCC and COFO had valiantly toiled. In Dallas County the percentage of African Americans signed up to vote zoomed from 2.1 in 1965 to 70.4 in 1968. Black voters in Leflore County saw their percentage skyrocket from 2.1 to 72.2. In a third notable trouble spot, “Terrible Terrell” County, Georgia, the proportion of black voters on the suffrage rolls soared from 2.4 to 53.9.236 While enforcement of the 1965 act proceeded, South Carolina challenged its constitutionality in the Supreme Court. The plaintiffs in South Carolina v. Katzenbach, joined by five other southern states, contended that Congress had exceeded its power in implementing the Fifteenth Amendment. The Palmetto State argued that by establishing the triggering formula and a Justice Department veto of changes in election laws in the covered jurisdictions, Congress encroached upon the reserved powers of the states, treated states unequally, and adjudicated guilt without due process of law. Speaking for the high tribunal, Chief Justice Earl Warren rejected these claims. The author of the opinion in Brown asserted that Congress had legitimately decided that 234 Ibid., 320-21. 235 Ibid., 322. 236 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), 224-25, 236-37, 244-45. African American – Part Four, 1954-1965 72 the case-by-case approach of litigation did not work, and given the history of systematic resistance to the Fifteenth Amendment over the course of a century, lawmakers could constitutionally shift the burden of proof from the victims of disenfranchisement to “the perpetrators of the evil.”237 Over the next four years, the results were striking throughout the South. Although the Federal government did not dispatch examiners to all the counties that warranted them (58 of 185 counties where less than 50 percent of blacks were enrolled received them), the mere suspension of literacy tests provided a potent boost for black enrollment. Encouraged by the 1965 Act, the Southern Regional Council initiated a second Voter Registration Project in 1966. Thus, by 1969, the proportion of registered blacks in the South swelled to an average of around 62 percent, up from 43 percent in 1964. In 1966, the Supreme Court had ruled in the case of Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections that the poll tax violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment by discriminating against the poor.238 The remaining obstacle installed by the post- Reconstruction governments to limit black suffrage had finally fallen. Typically, these achievements did not come without more sorrow. Vernon Dahmer had been a leader of the movement in Hattiesburg. A cotton farmer, grocery store owner, operator of a sawmill, and NAACP member, Dahmer had opened his home to freedom riders and voter registration workers. After passage of the Voting Rights Act, Dahmer’s grocery store became a place where blacks could pay their poll taxes. Dahmer even offered to pay the tax for those who could not afford it. In the early morning hours of January 26, 1966, Dahmer’s house and adjacent store became the target of Klansmen. They set fire to his store and tossed Molotov cocktails through his house windows. Dahmer bravely evacuated his family members, while firing his rifle at the assailants. The flames and smoke inhalation from the blaze left him severely wounded, and Dahmer died later that day from his injuries. The rest of his family survived. Four of 16 Klansmen were convicted for Dahmer’s murder, but not until 1998, after Mississippi authorities reopened the case, was Sam Bowers, the Klan’s leader, found guilty of the crime.239 The experience of African American protest for the suffrage demonstrates that the power of the right to vote comes, not from the formality of individuals casting their ballots, but from the purposeful, collective will of the electorate. The vote furnished a necessary, but insufficient, instrument for achieving black equality in practice as well as theory. Overall, it could be said that between 1944 and 1969, southern blacks “had come out of the political desert, but they had not yet entered the promised land.”240 237 South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301 (1966). 238 Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections, 383 U.S. 663 (1966); Lawson, Black Ballots, 332, 334; Lawson, Running for Freedom, 81, 253. 239 Davis, Weary Feet, 304. 240 Lawson, Black Ballots, 352. American Indian 73 AMERICAN INDIAN VOTING RIGHTS, 1884-1965 “‘Move on!’ Has the Native American no rights that the naturalized American is bound to respect?” A policeman ordering a Native man to “move on” away from a voting poll. From Harper’s Weekly, April 22, 1871. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division [reproduction number: LC-USZ62-53856] American Indian 76 It is a pity that so many Americans today think of the Indian as a romantic or comic figure in American history without contemporary significance. In fact, the Indian plays much the same role in our American society that the Jews played in Germany. Like the miner’s canary, the Indian marks the shifts from fresh air to poisonous gas in our political atmosphere; and our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise and fall of our democratic faith.7 As the 20th century began, any public dialogue about Indians centered more on the issue of survival rather than the realization of justice. Most Americans assumed that Indian communities teetered on the edge of extinction; they believed that Indians would disappear well before the century concluded. The Indian wars, as they were popularly labeled, had come to an end on December 29, 1890, near Wounded Knee Creek in western South Dakota. In that same month, Sitting Bull, one of the great symbols of Native resistance, had been killed in a confrontation with a member of his own community who had joined the tribal police force. Only four years before, the Chiricahua Apache leader, Geronimo, had surrendered for a final time at Skeleton Canyon in southern Arizona. As the new century began, he lived on in exile at Fort Sill in Oklahoma Territory.8 In 1900, Indians lived on remnants of their former lands. Given prevailing patterns in American history, one could not imagine these remnants remaining under Indian control or Federal trusteeship for an extended period of time. A new law had been enacted, known as the General Allotment Act of 1887, also known as the Dawes Act after its primary sponsor, Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts. The act’s provisions obviously had been crafted with two primary objectives: to transform reservations from communally held land to individually owned land and to enable those owners to lease or sell those parcels to non-Indians who continued to flood into the western states seeking farm or ranch land or seeking their fortunes in the development of towns and cities. If a reservation had been designated for allotment, one could not boycott the process. The Federal agent was empowered to make choices for any Indian who decided not to participate in the division of the land.9 The agency in charge of federal dealings with the Indians, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), saw its primary responsibility as facilitating what historian Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. later would term “expansion with honor.” The allotment act utilized the Homestead Act of 1863 as a model, but the 160 acres available to allottees could not be perceived as comparable to the acreage available through allotment. For most migrants to the west, homesteading meant farming and on the right parcel of land, a dairy farm or a farm that emphasized the growing of an appropriate crop for the region had a chance for success. But as the frontier continued to push westward, the 7 Felix S. Cohen, “The Erosion of Indian Rights, 1950-1953: A Case Study in Bureaucracy,” 62 The Yale Law Journal 348, 390 (February 1953). Cohen numbered among those who gave this subject the kind of respect and regard it merited. By his 24th birthday he had earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard and a degree in law from Columbia. Cohen left a prominent law firm in New York to work for the Interior Department on Indian issues. He wrote centrally important articles as well as The Handbook of Federal Indian Law before his untimely death in 1953 at the age of 46. His papers are at the Beinecke Library at Yale. “Felix S. Cohen, July 3, 1907 - October 19, 1953,” 9 Rutgers Law Review 345 (Winter 1954). 8 For the Indian wars, see Robert Utley, The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846-1890 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 146-200. Angie Debo’s final book, Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985) remains important. 9 For description and analysis of allotment, see Prucha, The Great Father, 2:631-86; and Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indian, 1880-1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 147- 86. American Indian 77 elevation became higher, the climate considerably drier, and the prospective rancher or farmer needed a good deal more land for a viable commercial operation. Although within the ranks of the BIA one could find professional people who truly tried to do what they perceived as being best for Native peoples, it remained a paternalistic system that appeared to be overflowing with appointees with limited skills, extended memories, and a tendency toward authoritarianism.10 Anticipating the extinction of Indian communities, moreover, could not be considered a new development. James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans was published in 1826. Nineteenth century painter George Catlin perceived the Indians as “melting away at the approach of civilization.” U.S. Army officer James Carleton wrote in 1864 that the Navajos realized it was “their destiny . . . to give way to the insatiable progress of our race.” Photographer Edward Curtis had become convinced that Indians were destined for disappearance. Over several decades in the late 19th and early 20th centuries he carried out a massive campaign to photograph individual and groups of indigenous peoples. In “A Vanishing Race,” a 1904 photograph of Navajos on horseback, Curtis said he attempted to portray Indians who had been “shorn of their tribal strength” now “passing into the darkness of an unknown future.” For the Pacific-Panama International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, sculptor James Fraser fashioned a Plains Indian warrior on horseback, slumped over in defeat. He called the work “The End of the Trail.”11 It seemed only to be a matter of time. Immigrants from around the world and migrants from the eastern United States continued to make their way into the West. The superintendent of the U.S. census declared the frontier to be over. Most Indians lived west of the Mississippi, but most non-Indians lived east of the river. With the wars over and five transcontinental railroads completed, the West represented the chance to regenerate one’s fortune. Federal policy makers sought to create a new day as well for Native Americans. They often used the same rhetoric in emphasizing the need for command of the English language and love of the American flag. For example, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas Jefferson Morgan pronounced: “The Indian youth should . . . be taught to love the American flag; should be imbued with genuine patriotism and should be taught that the United States, not some paltry reservation, is their home.” He added: “Education should seek the disintegration of the tribes, and not their segregation. They should be educated not as Indians, but as Americans.” The schools, Morgan concluded, “should do for them what they are so successfully doing for all of the other races in this country— assimilate them.” Another commissioner of Indian Affairs put it more simply. He suggested that the Federal government had the responsibility to make the Indian feel at home in America.12 If our national history had suggested anything about Native Americans, it had emphasized endings rather than beginnings. Passage of the General Allotment Act and subsequent acts and court decisions facilitated the transfer of what remained of the Indian estate. For every three acres possessed by Indians in the mid-1880s, two had been wrested from them by the mid-1920s. 10 Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Random House, 1978), 134-52. 11 McNickle, Native American Tribalism, 3-4; James Carleton to Lorenzo Thomas, March 12, 1864, in Through White Men’s Eyes: A Contribution to Navajo History, ed. J. Lee Correll (Window Rock, AZ: Navajo Heritage Center, 1979), 1:29; Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982), 209. 12 Not counting St. Louis and Minneapolis along the Mississippi River, of the 20 largest cities in the United States only San Francisco is in what was then considered the West. Los Angeles in 1900 claimed fewer people than Jersey City, NJ; Worcester, MA; or New Haven, CT. The statistics are from the U.S. census of 1900. Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Americanizing the American Indians: Writings of the “Friends of the Indian,” 1880-1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 3; Prucha, The Great Father, 2:702-03. American Indian 78 Regardless of Indian sentiment and the language included in treaties or executive orders establishing Indian reservations, most Americans assumed that these enclaves would not persist for many more years. After designing the Allotment Act, Dawes went on to engineer the “Great Sioux Agreement” of 1889 and other creations obviously meant to speed this process along. In regard to the agreement, he commented: “We may cry out against the violation of treaties, denounce flagrant disregard of inalienable rights and the inhumanity of our treatment of the defenseless . . . but the fact remains. . . . Without doubt these Indians are going to be absorbed into and become a part of the 50,000,000 of our people.”13 The possibility of voting in Federal elections did not exactly top the list of priorities for Indian communities at the turn of the century. They had to concentrate on survival, on getting from one day to the next in the face of all of the difficulties confronting them. With the end of buffalo hunting and raiding on the Plains, Indian men had to find new ways to honor old values. Hemmed in by new boundaries, consigned to lands that in many instances they did not know well, these indigenous nations hoped somehow to discover new means to stay together, to remain on what land remained to them. For tribal councils to be established successfully, for American Indians to be allowed to vote and then to decide that it mattered to vote in non-tribal elections, reservations had to become a little less like prisons and a little more like home. Indians generally had to be able to believe in the future once again as well as remember the past.14 The Ironic Consequences of the Reservation System The reservation constituted, in historian Robert Trennert’s words, an “alternative to extinction.” Federal officials interested in encouraging people to migrate to the West realized continuing confrontation, let alone war, did not expedite this process. Moreover, they wanted America to be perceived as a law-abiding and high-minded nation where national expansion took place in an honorable way. They saw reservations as a means to end continuing bloodshed on the frontier and prepare Indians to live in a rapidly changing world.15 Amherst College president Merrill Gates did not mince words. He argued Indians needed to become “more intelligently selfish,” to be “touched by the wings of the divine angel of discontent.” Gates thought it time, in sum, “to get the Indian out of the blanket and into trousers—and trousers with a pocket in them, and a pocket that aches to be filled with dollars!”16 The reservation may have been designed to encourage assimilation, but it also revealed the Anglo-American tendency to keep people of color in separate residential spheres. Reservations were perceived as places where Indians could learn the language, the religious beliefs, the values (including private property) of the American nation. At the same time, having a degree of geographic separation allowed for new institutions to develop that promoted social and cultural separation. In an era when the Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson sanctioned “separate but equal,” Indian reservations could foster new means of promoting continuity within a world of rapid change. This is not to suggest that all Indians prospered during this era. It is useful to remember that unfortunate policies always yield only unfortunate results. In the face of discrimination and in response to difficult times, American Indians often reaffirmed their 13 Prucha, The Great Father, 2:703-04. 14 Hoxie, “From Prison,” 1-24. 15 For an overview of how the reservation concept evolved from a policy motivated by considerable idealism, see Robert A. Trennert, Alternative to Extinction: Federal Indian Policy and the Beginnings of the Reservation System, 1846-51 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1975). 16 Prucha, Americanizing the American Indians, 331-34. American Indian 81 Even though many Indians continued to be denied citizenship and the right to vote, nearly all Native Americans supported Native participation in World War I. Carlos Montezuma, M.D., (Yavapai) raised the question of Native status in this context: “We Indians are ready to defend the country of our forefathers as we have been doing these five hundred years against all odds,” he wrote, “but . . . what are we? We are nothing but wards; we are not citizens.” One of the first Indian M.D.s in the United States, Montezuma published his own newsletter to record Indian achievements, reveal injustice on reservations, and advocate universal Indian citizenship and the abolition of the BIA. He died in 1923, one year before the Citizenship Act finally passed. In the final edition of his newsletter, he urged his readers to “go ahead and fight on for freedom and citizenship” and “to remain on the pathway that leads to the emancipation of our race, keeping in our hearts that our children will pass over our graves to victory.”25 Most Indians saw the war as an opportunity to demonstrate their patriotism. More than 16,000 Native people served in World War I, including several thousand non-citizens who volunteered for duty. For example, Ross Shaw (Pima) was not a citizen and thus ineligible for the draft, but nevertheless signed up. In her memoir, Anna Moore Shaw praised Ross Shaw, her former fiancé, and other such men as “patriots all” who “decided to risk their lives for their native land, as had their ancestors.” Those who joined the armed services and fought in the war did gain citizenship, although the process took longer than many observers thought that it should.26 In the meantime, Indian voting continued to be an issue throughout America. The question proved problematic in many eastern and southern states because some small groups who self- identified as Indians were not seen as Indians by either other recognized Native communities or by non-Indian residents of these areas. Using North Carolina as an example, we can appreciate why the Eastern Cherokees generally did not support the efforts of the Lumbees, another Native community in the state, to gain recognition as an Indian people. By the start of the 20th century, the Lumbees had achieved considerable headway in defining themselves as Indians. Although they never gained Federal recognition as an Indian tribe nor established a reservation, the Lumbees did succeed in 1885 in obtaining state recognition as an indigenous entity and received state funding to operate their school system. The Lumbees developed a separate school system and dozens of all-Indian churches. They did not want to be in the same school system or attend the same churches as local African Americans, even though most Lumbees were primarily of American Indian and African American biological heritage.27 The Lumbees gave new meaning to an old term. In the Plains country people spoke of “mixed bloods,” but in that region one almost always meant a mix of “White” and “Indian” ancestry. The matter of “blood” clouded the claims for federal recognition initiated by many marginalized American Indian groups east of the Mississippi River. Established Native communities, such as the Eastern Cherokees, did not always applaud the efforts of other enclaves to gain recognition and acceptance, but these other groups persisted in their efforts.28 25 “Carlos Montezuma on the Draft, 1917,” in Talking Back to Civilization: Indian Voices from the Progressive Era, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001), 125-27. 26 Anna Moore Shaw, A Pima Past (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974), 143-46. 27 John R. Finger, Cherokee Americans: The Eastern Band of Cherokees in the Twentieth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 45-46; Jack Campisi, “Lumbee,” in Native America in the Twentieth Century: An Encyclopedia, ed. Mary B. Davis (New York: Garland, 1996), 32. 28 Jack Campisi and Laurence M. Hauptman, “There Are No Indians East of the Mississippi,” in Tribes & Tribulations: Misconceptions about American Indians and Their Histories, ed. Laurence M. Hauptman (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 94-108. American Indian 82 In Nevada some Shoshones hesitated about the tradeoffs that might be involved with citizenship. Some feared the possible loss of certain federal services. Others saw their people as a sovereign nation or as a separate nation. Still others worried about the possible imposition of additional taxes. Historian Steven Crum (Western Shoshone) noted: “to oppose citizenship, several Western Shoshone and Northern Paiute leaders sponsored anti-citizenship meetings in northern Nevada from 1924 to 1930 . . . most Shoshones—at least those in northern Nevada—refused to register to vote in local, state, and national elections.”29 The courthouse in Lake County, California became an important center in the drive to register Indians to vote. Its significance in regard to California Indian history is found in the story of Ethan Anderson (Pomo). Anderson lived off the reservation and was determined to register to vote. In 1915 he attempted to register but was turned away by the Lake County clerk. For two years Anderson and other Native Californians raised money for a lawsuit. In 1917 Anderson took his case to court and won, gaining voting rights for Indians in the state who did not live on a reservation.30 Universal citizenship finally arrived through the Citizenship Act passed by Congress in 1924. The act said that acquiring citizenship “shall not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property.” The act did not make all Indians eligible to vote, but it did confer citizenship on approximately 125,000 people and its symbolic significance cannot be denied.31 Opposition to the Enfranchisement of Indians American historians have written considerably about the fragile nature of voting rights in the South during the final years of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th century. Once Reconstruction had been abandoned, a version of the old order started to surface. Conservative whites employed violence and other forms of intimidation in an effort to discourage or prevent African Americans from voting. Hispanic Americans confronted similar tactics in the Southwest. American Indians soon discovered that it was one thing to have the right to vote and another thing to exercise that right.32 In the American electoral system, states control the process of voting. This control did not help increase the percentage of American Indians participating in the electoral process. Indians who resided in Minnesota, for example, may have been U.S. citizens, but many non-Indians believed that Native peoples were not citizens of the state. If they were not perceived as truly citizens of the state, then they should not be allowed to vote. Because many Indians did not pay as many different kinds of taxes as non-Indian citizens paid, this seeming inequity caused many non- Indians to oppose Indian voting. According to historian Frederick Hoxie, all of the states with a significant Indian population in the late 19th and early 20th centuries attempted to discourage Native American participation in the 29 Steven J. Crum, The Road On Which We Came: Po’i Pentun Tammen Kimmappeh: A History of the Western Shoshone (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994), 69. 30 The first courthouse in California to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it is now the Lake County Pioneer and Indian Museum. “A History of American Indians in California: Historic Sites,” at http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/5views/5views1.htm, maintained by the National Park Service. 31 Linda S. Parker, “The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924,” in Between Two Worlds: The Survival of Twentieth Century Indians, ed. Arrell Morgan Gibson (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Historical Society, 1986), 44-71. 32 Wolfley, “Jim Crow,” 181-82. American Indian 83 electoral process. Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, Oregon, South Dakota, and Wyoming stipulated that the elector had to be a U.S. citizen. Minnesota, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin dictated that voters must be “civilized,” with all but Oklahoma requiring voters to have “adopted the language, customs, and habits of civilization.” Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Washington denied reservation residents the right to vote because they did not pay state taxes and thus did not support state government as fully as other voters. Arizona, Nevada, and Utah required prospective Indian voters to live off of a reservation and to be citizens. Several states also claimed that Indians were “under guardianship” and therefore the equivalent of inmates in a prison or patients at an insane asylum.33 Keyssar’s conclusions about this area echoed Hoxie’s judgments. By the early 1900s, he wrote, “nearly all states with Native American populations had enacted . . . double-edged constitutional or statutory provisions (see Table 1). “On the one hand,” Keyssar stated, “they—explicitly or implicitly—enfranchised some Native Americans, generally those who had assimilated or ‘severed their tribal relations.’ At the same time, states disfranchised Indians who continued to belong to tribes, or were ‘not taxed’ or ‘not civilized’.” Keyssar concluded: “The prevailing policy was clear, if difficult to apply: Native Americans could become voters, but only by surrendering or repudiating their own culture, economic organization, and societal norms.”34 TABLE 1: NATIVE AMERICAN VOTING RIGHTS, 1870-192035 State Date Provision California 1849 C The legislature may, “by a two-thirds concurrent vote,” admit “to the right of suffrage, Indians, or the descendants of Indians in such special cases as the legislative body may deem just and proper.” (Provision came into effect with statehood in 1850.) Idaho 1899 C Excludes “Indians not taxed, who have not severed their tribal relations and adopted the habits of civilization.” (Provision came into effect with statehood in 1890.) Maine 1819 C Excludes Indians not taxed. (Provision came into effect with statehood in 1820.) Massachusetts 1869 S 1892 S “Indians and peoples of color, heretofore known and called Indians…are citizens of the Commonwealth…entitled to all the rights, privileges, and immunities” of citizenship. “Indians residing within this commonwealth shall, as citizens thereof, have all the rights, privileges, and immunities, and be subject to all of the duties and liabilities to which all other citizens of the Common-wealth are entitled and subject.” Michigan 1850 C 1908 C Includes “civilized male inhabitants of Indian descent, native of the United States and not a member of any tribe.” Includes “every inhabitant of Indian descent, a native of the United States.” Minnesota 1857 C 1917 C Includes “persons of mixed white and Indian blood who have adopted the custom and habits of civilization; persons of Indian blood residing in the State, who have adopted the language, customs, and habits of civilization; after an examination before any district court of the State, in such manner as may be provided by law.” (Provision came into effect with statehood in 1858.) Denied the right to vote to all “tribal Indians.” To vote, Indians had to sever relationships with Tribes. (Opsahl v. Johnson, 163 N.W. 988 (Minn. 1917)). Mississippi 1868 C 1890 C Excludes Indians not taxed. Excludes Indians not taxed. Montana 1897 S Excludes from residency “any person living on an Indian or military reservation, unless that person previously had acquired a residence in a county of Montana and is in 33 Hoxie, A Final Promise, 231-34. 34 Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 164-66. 35 Ibid., Appendix, Table A-15. In the table’s Date column, C=constitution, S=statute. States not listed in the table had no provisions specifically concerning Native Americans. American Indian 86 have strong feelings about who is elected to the school board, the town or city council, and so forth. In other words, they are more apt to vote if they have some kind of investment in the results. Thus, it is not surprising that in the early years of some reservation communities, Native voters did not express much enthusiasm about the choices confronting them on the ballot. At this point Native persons were ultimately more concerned about survival than about which candidate would gain a seat on a local elected body whose decisions might affect basic concerns about how land was used or how a law might be interpreted. However, as Indians became more and more attached to the lands contained within the reservation boundaries (if they did not gain reservation land in what they considered to be their homeland), they became all the more determined to use any means possible to safeguard this acreage. Even though during the early 20th century the BIA employee assigned to a particular reservation often attempted to rule it heavy-handedly, some fundamentally important transitions were beginning to occur. Since the Federal government increasingly defined people as being from a particular reservation and since place had become increasingly defined as important to one’s identity, then during the early 20th century, indigenous people began to call this place home. This identification and subsequent investment began to make it progressively more important to take part in certain elections, either at the tribal level or at a local level that included both Indians and non-Indians. Hoxie argued persuasively that we should see this era not as “a period of assimilation but as a time of rapid cultural change.” He added: “[T]he early history of the Cheyenne River Reservation should be understood not as a time of defeat and hopelessness but as a crucial period of adaptation and survival.”41 A case involving two Pima men, residents of the Gila River reservation in Arizona who tried to participate in the first presidential election following passage of the Citizenship Act, demonstrated that the act had not removed all the barriers confronting Indian voting rights. A Pinal County official denied this attempt to vote in the November 8, 1928, election, arguing that the men were not residents of Arizona and that they were “persons under guardianship.” Challenging this decision in Porter v. Hall, the Arizona Supreme Court determined that Indians living on reservations in Arizona were residents of the state, but as persons under guardianship were not entitled to vote. It defined a “person under guardianship” as “any person who, by reason of personal inherent status, age, mental deficiency, or education, or lack of self-control, is deemed by the law to be incapable of handling his own affairs in the ordinary manner.” Guardianship, the court stated, existed because of the Indian “condition of tutelage or dependency.” Therefore “so long as the federal government insists that, notwithstanding their citizenship, their responsibility under our law differs from that of the ordinary citizen, and that they are, or may be, regulated by that government by virtue of its guardianship, in any manner different from that which may be used in the regulation of white citizens, they are within the meaning of our constitutional provision, persons under guardianship, and not entitled to vote.”42 In a law review article concerning the legal status of Indian suffrage published soon after this decision, Neal Doyle (N. D.) Houghton of the University of Arizona argued that the justices did not think it advisable “as a matter of sound public policy” to “suddenly” extend “the voting privilege to great numbers of tribal Indians living on reservations” who are “largely beyond the authority of state law and government.” Houghton concurred, arguing that “Indians living on reservations and enjoying immunity from state authority” were not entitled to the franchise. 41 Hoxie, “From Prison,” 23-24. 42 N. D. Houghton, “The Legal Status of Indian Suffrage in the United States,” 19 California Law Review 507, 509 (July 1931) citing from Porter v. Hall, 34 Ariz. 308, 331; 271 P. 411, 419 (1928). American Indian 87 There the matter rested in Arizona for an appeal would have been both expensive and time- consuming and ultimately the men and their allies decided not to take the issue to the U.S. Supreme Court. This decision disappointed Felix Cohen and others. In an article published in the Minnesota Law Review, Cohen stated: “The defense of Indian rights in the Federal courts is a significant part of the pageant of American liberty. Across the panorama of the years pass judges who were tolerant enough to appreciate the grievances of an oppressed people and courageous enough to vindicate rights that Presidents, cabinet officers, army generals and reservation superintendents had violated.”43 Voting in Different Political Arenas Voting rights on reservations and within Indian communities formed an important element in the overall effort to gain the right to vote in federal elections. Native attitudes toward participating in non-tribal elections affected eventual participation in county, state, and federal electoral contests. When the Federal government attempted to impose a form of tribal government with which its officials felt comfortable, frequently this creation did not seem appropriate to the Indians themselves. In those instances, Native individuals often boycotted this new institution and tried to find additional ways and means to disrupt or discredit it. In both style and substance these newly developed councils often differed from the prevailing ways of decision making. Indian communities tended to emphasize thorough examination of a particular question. They wanted to be sure everyone who wished to speak had a chance to do so. The smaller the community the more important it became to avoid factional disputes. The ideal answer to a question facing a body representing the people would be one that reflected a degree of compromise and embodied a degree of consensus. The Federal government wanted councils to follow a fixed routine, as in Robert’s Rules of Order, and to make decisions promptly and decisively. Councils often were formed initially in order to satisfy outside demands for utilization of some resource: oil, coal, gas, timber, or some other valued substance that was situated within the confines of the reservation. As the century progressed, these demands escalated. If the council was to have a chance of truly representing the people and mirroring community sentiment, then well-regarded people had to be willing to serve on it and had to obtain sufficient support to gain election or re-election. Some councils succeeded in representing the people in confronting difficult questions facing the community. Others did not, for a variety of reasons. Some Indian nations had established traditions for decision making that involved hereditary positions passed down from one generation to the next. Others might have discouraged younger individuals from taking on too significant a role before they had gained the kind of wisdom that only came with age. Still others might have reacted negatively against a new council because its functioning gave priority to those who spoke English or who had greater experience in dealing with the outside world. Participation on the council or observation of council decision making began to widen the political world view of many Native Americans. Indian individuals and nations witnessed the impact of political decisions and recognized the need to become more fully involved in the larger political arena. However, it proved difficult to maintain that interest in the face of continuing prejudice at the polls. 43 Houghton, “The Legal Status,” 519, 520; Felix S. Cohen, “Indian Rights and the Federal Courts,” 24 Minnesota Law Review 145, 199 (January 1940). American Indian 88 Voting on the Reservation As American Indians attempted to gain the right to vote in local, state, and national elections, a related but not always parallel proposition began to emerge within the boundaries of the reservations. Voting rights within Indian nations eventually encompassed a series of significant and often not easily resolved questions. As the Federal government began its attempts to impose forms of tribal government that reflected Anglo-American values and traditions, Indians debated among themselves about what kind of government would be both culturally appropriate and politically effective. Indian community decision making usually involved extended discussions that sought the ultimate goal of consensus. What the Indians perceived as necessary thoroughness often appeared absolutely endless and often irrelevant to local BIA bureaucrats. These officials preferred what they perceived as prompt, efficient, and focused discussions. They also advocated majority rule. If a council had 12 members and a motion carried seven to five, then according to this system those who had voted in the minority had to say to themselves, “better luck next time.” Yet if the seven-to-five vote had not achieved a degree of compromise, an ultimate conclusion that all 12 council members could live with, then most community members would have declared that democracy had triumphed but the community had not been well served. The smaller the community the more devastating this factionalism could become. If some members of an Indian nation became increasingly disaffected, there remained the possibility that this faction would consider the newly established council an ineffective group that did not work. Then this group might well express its disapproval by boycotting its meetings and ignoring its decisions. When things reached this point, a council might attempt to function, but it would be to little avail. The New Deal Years The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 ushered in a new era of federal policy toward American Indians. Roosevelt’s Commissioner of Indian affairs, John Collier, had been a vitriolic critic of the government’s policies during the 1920s. Now Collier assumed the unenviable assignment of reforming the very agency he had criticized so severely. He wanted to move federal policy from its staunchly assimilationist approach to one that allowed for cultural pluralism. Collier wanted to end land allotment, encourage the development of written forms of Native languages, support freedom of religion, and encourage Indian arts. Collier argued that Indian societies “whether ancient, regenerated or created anew must be given status, responsibility, and power.” The commissioner stated: “The experience of responsible democracy, is, of all experiences, the most therapeutic, the most disciplinary, the most dynamic, and the most productive of efficiency.” However, in his eagerness to realize immediate and far- reaching reform, Collier ultimately revealed some of the same paternalistic tendencies as his predecessors.44 In 1934 Congress passed the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA, also known as the Wheeler- Howard Act after its congressional sponsors, Senator Burton Wheeler of Montana and Representative Edgar Howard of Nebraska). Collier helped organize a series of “congresses” 44 The best survey of Collier’s term as Commissioner of Indian Affairs remains Kenneth R. Philp, John Collier’s Crusade for Indian Reform, 1920-1954 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977), 113-213. Collier quotes from Prucha, The Great Father, 2:944. American Indian 91 duty is beyond question . . . you are entitled to the same right of suffrage as other citizens.” He pledged: “While you are fighting on the battle front, a fight must be waged here on the home front to obtain for you the right accorded all free peoples.” Stewart articulated the hope that the battle for voting rights would be “as successful as your fight here so that upon your return you can take your rightful place in the powerful army of citizens, kept free through your efforts, and cast your vote with theirs.”53 As the war went on, American Indian soldiers lost their lives. Private Clarence Spotted Wolf, a Gros Ventre from northern Montana, was among those who lost his life. Spotted Wolf was killed in a battle in Luxembourg four days before Christmas in 1944. His family followed the instructions he had left with them before his departure: “If I should be killed, I want you to bury me on one of the hills east of the place where my grandparents and brothers and sisters and other relatives are buried. If you have a memorial service, I want the soldiers to go ahead with the American flag. I want cowboys to follow, all on horseback. I want one of the cowboys to lead one of the wildest of the T over X horses with saddle and bridle on. I will be riding that horse.”54 The war eliminated what remained of the separation and isolation that had often characterized reservation life. Because of their varied experiences—in the armed forces, in off-reservation war-related industries, and as laborers for the railroad and many other employers—Indians generally possessed a much stronger sense of that larger world in which they and their community had to live. Dakota linguist Ella Cara Deloria summarized the transition: “The war has indeed wrought an overnight change in the outlook, horizon, and even the habits of the Indian people—a change that might not have come for many years yet.”55 The war years did include unanticipated and unwanted usurpation of Native American lands. The Federal government appropriated land from the Gila River and Colorado River reservations in Arizona for two of the Japanese American internment camps. These were temporary intrusions, unlike the land taken from Lakotas at Pine Ridge in South Dakota for a gunnery range. Eventually the people whose land had been taken for this military purpose received partial financial compensation. What they really wanted was the land and the land was never returned.56 During the war discrimination had not taken a holiday. Two of the most striking examples of ongoing racism occurred in Alaska. That state’s African American population remained small until after World War II, but in the words of a visiting journalist who came to the territory in 1943, the status of indigenous persons was “equivalent to that of a Negro in Georgia or Mississippi.” According to Alaskan historian Terrence M. Cole, prior to the war, Natives were often denied the right to vote and were compelled to attend segregated churches and to send their children to segregated schools.57 Two stunning examples of that racism took place during the war. The anger over these and other incidents fueled the fight for voting rights after World War II had ended. Unangan (Aleuts) 53 Iverson, Diné, 201. 54 Peter Iverson, “Building Toward Self-Determination: Plains and Southwestern Indians in the 1940s and 1950s,” Western Historical Quarterly 16 (April 1985): 165. 55 Ella Cara Deloria, Speaking of Indians (New York: Friendship Press, 1944), quote on 94, 137-48. 56 Peter Iverson, We Are Still Here: American Indians in the Twentieth Century (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1998), 110-13. 57 Terrence M. Cole, “Jim Crow in Alaska: The Passage of the Alaska Equal Rights Act of 1945,” Western Historical Quarterly 23 (November 1992): 429-34. American Indian 92 residing in the Aleutian islands were evacuated during the war, ostensibly because their home country might well have become a major battleground. Hundreds of people were interned and forced to live in miserable conditions until the war ended. The sprinkling of whites who lived in the Aleutians were not compelled to leave. When those who had survived imprisonment finally were permitted to return home, they discovered that U.S. soldiers had trashed their homes and churches. Religious icons that truly could not be replaced had vanished together with personal property they had assumed would not be harmed in their absence.58 The second incident involved a young Yup’ik (formerly Eskimo) woman who, along with many other indigenous citizens in Alaska had grown weary over “No Natives Allowed” signs, segregated seating at movie theatres, and the bigoted attitudes of people like General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., the commanding officer of the Alaska Defense Command. When Governor Ernest Gruening complained to Buckner about his views, Buckner responded, “I can think of no better way to exterminate native tribes than to encourage their women to associate with unmarried white men, far from home and from white women.” When Gruening introduced an anti-discrimination bill in the 1943 legislature it failed on an eight-to-eight vote. The only good thing about the result, Gruening said afterward, was that it might “awaken the Indians from their political lethargy” and encourage them to become a “potentially powerful constituency” in Alaska politics. That legislative action, in turn, demonstrated beyond any doubt the importance of greater Aleut, Native, and Inuit (Eskimo) involvement in local and state elections.59 Alberta Schenck had been fired from her job at a movie theatre in Nome because she complained about segregated seating there. She had also written a letter to the editor of the Nome newspaper in which she suggested to her readers that segregated seating and other practices “were not in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution that she was studying in school,” but rather were “following the steps of Hitlerism.” Several days later she and her date, a white sergeant stationed in Nome went to see a film at the theatre and sat on “the white side.” “Suddenly,” historian Terrence Cole wrote, “the manager came down the aisle and ordered her to move.” When she refused, the manager left, came back with the town police chief and the two men grabbed her, pulled her into the aisle, pushed her out the door and threw her into the Nome jail, where she spent the night. Her experience helped ignite the ultimately successful effort to pass an equal rights bill into law.60 In 1946, Felix Cohen summarized the importance of Indian voting rights. “In a democracy,” he argued, “suffrage is the most basic civil right, since its existence is the chief means whereby other rights may be safeguarded.” When the war ended, Indian veterans began to test the state laws banning them from voting. On May 3, 1946, William Ashley, Theodore R. Dawes, Tom Irving, Charlie Manuelito, Salago Nez, Robert Perry, and Alvin Wilson drove south to the Apache County seat, St. Johns, in Arizona. The small off-reservation Mormon enclave, about 100 miles south of Ganado and well over 200 miles south of Mexican Water (the northernmost Navajo community within the county), housed the one site in the county where prospective voters could attempt to register. The seven Navajo men duly filled out the appropriate forms. Ashley proclaimed that he weighed 145 pounds and could read the English language well enough to understand the U.S. Constitution. He noted his status as a veteran. Like a majority of Arizonans at this time, he identified himself as a Democrat. The county clerk dutifully filled in additional information about Ashley. In the space that said “color,” he entered “Indian.” He 58 Ibid., 437-38. See also Dean Kohlhoff, When the Wind was a River: Aleut Evacuation in World War II (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995). 59 Cole, “Jim Crow in Alaska,” 439, 441-49, quotes on 437, 439, 440. 60 Ibid., quotes on 443. American Indian 93 then took the forms over to the local justice of the peace. The justice of the peace, in turn, rejected the applications in accordance with the instructions he had received from the county attorney.61 Not every person in St. Johns expressed pleasure at these developments. Levi Stewart Udall thought it a bad business. Udall was a well-regarded and ambitious attorney who hoped to be appointed to the Arizona Supreme Court. Only a decision at that level, he realized, could open the door to Navajo participation in the electoral process. A few weeks before Ashley and his compatriots had made their trek to St. Johns, Udall had written to a friend outlining this situation and expressing the hope that if he gained a seat on the court then “[m]aybe there will be something I can do.”62 In the meantime the prospects for registration appeared a bit brighter in New Mexico. Four Navajos in San Juan County already were registered to vote, and had voted in prior elections. They also all shared the name of Morgan. Former Navajo tribal council chairman Jacob C. Morgan, Mrs. Jacob C. Morgan, Wilbur E. Morgan, and Irvin Morgan all owned property and all had established residency in the county seat of Farmington, just east of the Navajo reservation line. The real test came when other Navajos who lived on the reservation and did not pay property taxes attempted to register.63 Robert Martin, the tribal council representative of Shiprock, presented an automobile tax receipt as evidence of his status and was allowed to vote in a local election. Others cast absentee ballots in the same election. Additional Navajo residents of Farmington (Hugh Dempsey, Taylor Jones, Ben Lopez, and George Yazzie) and two residents of the border town of Bloomfield voted, but some reservation residents also sent in absentee ballots, including Keeyah H. Begay, Kee D. Jackson, and Hugh S. Johnson from Toadlena as well as 11 people from the Shiprock area: Roland N. Begay, Daniel Benally, Clah Been Nez, Fred Blue Eyes, John Chee, Willie Frank, LeRoy John, Joe Kee, Frank D. Pete, Norman Yazzie, and Woody Yazzie.64 On May 6, 1946, John Dayish, Harry Denetclaw, Julie Denetclaw, Jimmie K. King, Howard H. Nez and other Diné came to the Shiprock public school in a vain effort to register to vote. They filled out affidavits that affirmed the length of their residence in New Mexico and San Juan County and their particular voting precinct. It did not take long for Dayish to complete this form. “Fifty-three years,” he observed, “53 years, 53 years.” Julie Denetclaw’s form mirrored that of Dayish. “Forty-eight years,” she wrote, “48 years, 48 years.” Despite the fact they had lived their entire lives in the same place, they could not register at this time.65 Such complete and unhesitating denials of the fundamental right to vote angered not only Ralph Anderson, William Ashley, John Dayish, and Julia Denetclaw, but American Indians everywhere. Exclusion of the Indians as Indians, however, appeared consistent with the overall political climate of the era. A movement thus began to terminate federal trust responsibilities to Indians and to “liberate” Native Americans from BIA control.66 From the mid-1940s to the early 1960s this crusade attempted to end the trust status of various 61 Wunder, “Retained by the People,” 86 including Cohen quote; Iverson, Diné, 201-04. 62 Iverson, Diné, 203-04. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. See the text of Julia Denetclaw’s affidavit in Iverson, “For Our Navajo People,” 148. 66 See, for example, Donald L. Fixico, Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945-1960 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986).