vention declared that "the whole scheme is not in favor of fair elections. I will not question the motives of those who prepared it, but I declare to you that the scheme, as presented by the majority of this committee, permits the most infamous frauds that were ever planned in Alabama.” 22 Other expressions substantiate the suspicion that the elimination of corrupt practices was used as an excuse for evading the clear intent of the Fifteenth Amendment. The President of the Louisiana Constitutional Convention stated frankly in his closing remarks: We have not drafted the exact Constitution that we should like to have drafted; otherwise we should have inscribed in it, if I know the popular sentiment of this state, universal white manhood suffrage, and the exclusion from the suffrage of every man with a trace of African blood in his veins. . . . What care I whether the test we have put be a new one or an old one? What care I whether it be more or less ridiculous or not? Doesn't it meet the case? Doesn't it let the white man vote, and doesn't it stop the Negro from voting, and isn't that what we came here for? [Applause.] " 23 It is very easy, at this distance from the events, to conclude that all white Southerners agreed with these sentiments and supported the laws restricting suffrage. Actually, many Southerners opposed these programs of statutory or constitutional revision. Opposition to a constitutional convention in Virginia delayed action in that State for more than ten years and the convention was approved by only 56 percent of those voting. A suffrage amendment was defeated in a Louisiana referendum by what were called "disgraceful" methods. The convention in South Carolina was approved by the close margin of 31,402 to 29,523, and in Mississippi the legislature issued the call for the convention without a referendum. In Alabama, opponents of the convention cast 39.3 percent of the referendum vote and carried 25 of the 66 counties. Only in Alabama was the constitution itself submitted to the people. In North Carolina the suffrage amendment was approved by 58.6 percent of those voting and failed to receive a majority in 32 of the 97 counties." This opposition in the various States was located in sections predominantly white and was motivated by the fear that whites as well as Negroes would be disfranchised. The expectation or desire that the poll tax, literacy and registration procedures would restrict voting among poor whites as well as Negroes was not so frequently in evidence but was expressed. A delegate to the Virginia convention put it this way: The need is universal, not only in the country, but in the cities and towns; not only among the blacks, but among the whites, in order to deliver the State from the burden of illiteracy and poverty and crime, which rests on it as a deadening Official Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Alabama, 1901, III, p. 2828 (1941). Official Journal of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Louisiana, 1898, p. 380 (1898). 24 This information is taken from Frederick D. Ogden, The Poll Tax in the South, University of Alabama, 1958, pp. 12, 13, 18, 25–28. 517016-594 pall. . . . It is not the Negro vote which works the harm, for the Negroes are generally Republicans, but it is the depraved and incompetent men of our race, who have nothing at stake in government, and who are used by designing politicians to accomplish their purposes, irrespective of the welfare of the community." An Alabama lawyer made a similar point, writing four years after the 1901 convention: How to get rid of the venal and ignorant among white men as voters was a far more serious and difficult problem than how to get rid of the undesirable among the Negroes as voters. While it was generally wished by leaders in Alabama to disfranchise many unworthy white men, as a practical matter it was impossible to go further than was done and secure any relief at all. . . . To rid the State eventually, so far as could possibly be done by law, of the corrupt and ignorant among its electorate, white as well as black, the poll tax and vagrancy clauses were put into the constitution." Some of these voter qualifications have subsequently been abandoned or held unconstitutional by the courts. The poll tax has been increasingly attacked over the years as a device that restricts suffrage generally.26 Under influence of this new thinking, one State after another repealed the poll tax as a voting qualification until only five remain. The cumulative provision, often the most onerous feature of the tax, has also been considerably reduced. The accompanying chart shows the pertinent information on the poll tax in the five states still using it. The "grandfather clause" was intended primarily to disfranchise Negroes while sparing illiterate whites. The device was outlawed in 1915, when the Supreme Court held a 1910 Amendment to the Oklahoma Constitution which embodied a grandfather clause to be in violation of the Fifteenth Amendment.27 The most lasting and effective means of disfranchising Negroes arose from the unique political system of the South. When Southern whites assumed control after Reconstruction, the Republican Party began a rapid decline until, in some of the Deep-South States, it virtually ceased to exist. The Republican Party, associated with Reconstruction in general, stood specifically for attempts to insure the vote for Negroes, who had been its firm supporters during Reconstruction. For most Southerners, loyalty to the South and to the Democratic Party became synonymous-and until the coming of the New 25 Report of the Proceedings and Debates of the Constitutional Convention of Virginia 1901-2, p. 2998, quoted in Key, op. cit. supra note 16, at 534. 26 Francis G. Caffey, "Suffrage Limitations at the South," Political Science Quarterly, vol. 20, March 1905, pp. 56-57. 20 The Truman Committee Report included figures showing that in the 1944 Presidential election the percentage of potential voters voting in the non-poll tax States was over three times the percentage in poll tax States. The Committee recommended that, failing prompt State action, the poll tax be outlawed either by act of Congress or by constitutional amendment. (To Secure These Rights, Report of the President's Committee on Civil Rights, 1947, p. 160.) 27 Guinn v. United States, 238 U.S. 347 (1915). Deal in the 1930's it was taken for granted that all Negroes were Republican. Thus the South became a one-party region. Since the turn of the century the Democratic Party has dominated all State government and, except for a few localities (principally in Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee), local government as well. With rare exceptions, the only genuine contests for public office have been in the nominating primaries of the Democratic Party, where victory is tantamount to election. Republican candidacies have been been perfunctory non-existent. or To be eligible to vote at a direct primary, a person must be a qualified voter under the laws of the State but another qualification, party membership, was always added in the South and in a majority of other States as well on the logical premise that only members of a party should take part in the selection of party nominees. The Southern laws, however, had some distinctive features. In most of these states, the administration of the direct primary was delegated, by statute, to the individual party, making the party responsible for holding its own primary including the determination of who was eligible to vote. Leaders of the Democratic Party determined that Negroes could not be Democrats and automatically excluded them in some States.27A A Democratic primary for whites only was finally given the popular name, white primary. Once the constitutionality of the white primary was challenged, it was possible to defend it on the ground that a primary was not an election in the sense in which the word was used in the Constitution of the United States. The Supreme Court had provided the basis for this position in an election case arising in the North and not involving any racial questions.28 However, the Court would not allow a State law specificially excluding Negroes from the primary of the Democratic Party.29 This and subsequent decisions prohibiting the white primary were based, not on the Fifteenth Amendment, but on the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, asserting that a State by its own action could not enforce a white primary.30 The Court finally upheld the exclusion of Negroes when it concluded that a white primary resulted from the action of a political party, not a State.31 Constitutional interpretation continued to evolve, and the Court eventually held that a direct primary is an election within the meaning of the Constitution.32 Thereafter, in Smith v. Allwright,33 it reversed A Material submitted to the Truman Committee reveals that in at least one county in Texas the white primary was also used to prevent Mexican-Americans from voting. Newberry v. United States, 256 U.S. 232 (1921). "Nixon v. Herndon, 273 U.S. 536 (1927). 30 Nixon v. Condon, 286 U.S. 73 (1932). Grovey v. Townsend, 295 U.S. 45 (1935). "United States v. Classic, 313 U.S. 299 (1941). 321 U.S. 649 (1944). |