First Chapter: Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy by Darryl Pinckney
Below is an excerpt from the introduction to Darryl Pinckney’s 2014 book, Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy. On November 3, 2014, Pinckney spoke about Blackballed at the Ash Center as part of its Challenges to Democracy public dialogue series.
Blackballed is a masterfully-crafted study of American democracy and the changing role of the black vote within it, from Reconstruction to the election of Barack Obama. It is insightful, personal, informative, and remarkably timely. The book not only speaks to current questions about race within the social and political arenas, but to broader issues of the health and legitimacy of a democracy in which some voices are kept from entering the dialogue. Blackballed is one of those special works that effortlessly transports readers to another time while subtly drawing thematic ties to the present day. One leaves the experience not only appreciating the work done by generations past, but contemplating one’s own role in the historical arc.
In the excerpt below, Pinckney shines a light on the oft-forgotten pieces of the American Civil Rights narrative. Pinckney details the ways in which this narrative has become a shell of the historical reality. For instance, the tension between the struggle for African American voting rights and women’s suffrage is often downplayed if not completely ignored. This tension caused turmoil in both movements and put black women in the unenviable position of choosing to prioritize their race over their sex or visa versa. Also minimized in the familiar Civil Rights narrative are the divisions that existed within the Movement. Indeed, most modern accounts of this time period depict the leadership of the Civil Rights Movement as a united and homogenous body that agreed on everything from the Movement’s objectives to its strategies; but this could not be further from the truth. Pinckney paints a beautifully detailed portrait of the ideological and strategic disagreements, showing us that the direction of the Civil Rights Movement and its eventual success, particularly with regard to voting rights, were not foregone conclusions. Pinckney’s exploration of the tensions within the Movement shows us what can be accomplished because of, and not in spite of, our humanity.
This post is part of an occasional series highlighting the first chapters of recent books by speakers and participants in the Challenges to Democracy series. Many thanks to the New York Review Books for allowing us to re-print the first chapter of Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy. Readers who enjoy this excerpt should consider reading the whole book, which can be purchased online here.
I.
…Throughout the South as states rejoined the Union state legislatures passed laws that disfranchised black people. The federal government did not help; neither did the federal courts or even the Supreme Court, insisting that black people had a remedy in that they could file suit in their states. But because blacks were barred from juries and election boards, their cases were never heard. Southern congressional power needed unfairness: the number of representatives southern states were entitled to was determined by their total populations. However, those unlikely to support the Democrats were kept from voting. In 1904, though 782,509 black people represented 58 percent of South Carolina’s population, only 25,433 blacks voted.
Sojourner Truth had her reasons for opposing the Fifteenth Amendment. She didn’t want having the vote to give black men power over black women, who had, in theory, only just thrown off the white man’s yoke. At the turn of the twentieth century, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were enraged that black men had the vote while white women did not. Middle- class white women offered their vote as a counterweight to the vote of the poor and of working-class, naturalized Americans. But Frederick Douglass — and the black novelist Frances E. W. Harper — concluded that if the black race had no rights, then the women’s struggle would be meaningless for black women. “When women are hunted down because they are women, then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own,” Douglass said. Black women were hunted down not because they were women but because they were black, he added. But many black women continued to agitate for women’s suffrage.
The Ku Klux Klan reemerged after thousands of black women tried to vote in 1920. Whites marched through black neighborhoods in Jacksonville, Florida, but in spite of the campaign of intimidation, blacks stood in lines to vote. White registrars resorted to de- laying tactics and managed to keep an estimated four thousand blacks in the city from voting. In Ocoee, in central Florida, a black owner of an orange grove, resented by whites because of his prosperity, was lynched by a mob when he tried to vote. The racial violence that continued in the town left fifty-six black people dead. To add minorities to the vote was not a goal most politicians were in favor of. As Alexander Keyssar notes in The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (2000), elections were also rituals of white supremacy and racist rhetoric was an important feature of campaigns. Anti-lynching legislation routinely failed in Congress throughout the 1920s.
Blacks in the South did not get much out of the New Deal, as Ira Katznelson shows in When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (2005). For instance, the Social Security Act of 1935 represented an unheard- of opportunity for blacks, yet “fully 65 percent of African Americans fell outside the reach of the new program; between 70 and 80 percent in different parts of the South,” because people who had been farmworkers and domestic help were ineligible to receive benefits. Without such “occupational disabilities” as part of the legislation, “the program’s inclusive and national structure would have powerfully undermined the racialized, low- wage economy” on which Jim Crow stood. Franklin Roosevelt had had to make concessions to southern congressmen in order to get his legislative program passed. Moreover, the federal government left the running of New Deal programs to the states, which in the South resulted in what Katznelson calls “policy apartheid.”
Nevertheless, because of limited gains under the New Deal, black voters in the northern cities began in 1936 to move away from the party of Lincoln. But for blacks to vote Democratic in the North did not mean the same thing as it did in the South. In 1937, in Breedlove v. Suttles, the Supreme Court upheld the local and state election poll tax in Georgia. Southern filibusters in the Senate defeated attempts to pass legislation making the poll tax illegal. Even when proposals were before Congress in 1943 concerning the reintegration of military veterans, southern politicians made sure that they were in control of the legislation and could guard the old order.
White supremacy still ruled the South, but in 1944 in Smith v. Allwright the Supreme Court found the white- only primaries of the Democratic Party of Texas unconstitutional, reversing previous Court decisions. Keyssar points out that among the reasons for the shift was the changed composition of the Court. Roosevelt’s New Deal appointees were willing “to extend federal authority over state voting laws.” Previous rulings had held that primaries were not elections within the meaning of the Constitution and also that political parties were voluntary or private organizations and therefore their membership requirements did not violate the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. However, the Court decided that political parties were not private but rather agencies of the states, being regulated by state statutes.
In spite of To Secure These Rights, the 1947 report of Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights that recommended desegregation in public facilities, education, and the military, some of Atlanta’s blacks, among them Martin Luther King Sr., frustrated by the domination of segregationists within the Democratic Party in the South, formed a group to take blacks back to the Republican Party. However, these black voters were in the big cities, like Condoleezza Rice’s parents, who were Republicans in Birmingham, Alabama. Black churches and black colleges were self-contained communities that afforded some protection for blacks, especially in a city like Atlanta where there was a significant black middle class, in part because of the number of black educational institutions there. However, voting was not a part of small-town and rural life for blacks in the Deep South.
Civil rights may have been one of the planks at the 1948 Democratic convention, but Strom Thurmond’s rebellion was aided by the Communist witch-hunt. Liberals became timid. “Not until 1954, when Republicans controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, and southern Democrats finally lost their ability to mold legislation, were the occupational exclusions that had kept the large majority of blacks out of the Social Security system eliminated,” Katznelson observes.
“Give us the ballot,” Martin Luther King Jr. said in a Prayer Pilgrimage March on Washington in 1957. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 contained a provision whereby the Justice Department could sue those who sought to intimidate or coerce voters, but it was not enforced. In France, everyone pretends to have been in the Resistance, and no one was a collaborator. So, too, in retrospect everyone participated in the civil rights movement. But there was nothing widespread about it at the time of the Montgomery bus boycott. Black ministers and black educators protected their institutions by keeping away from trouble.
To be a race leader or the head of a civil rights group had become a middle-class career. Ralph Bunche, who as undersecretary-general of the United Nations shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for his part in negotiating an end to the first Arab-Israeli war, wrote four memoranda for Gunnar Myrdal in 1940 when Myrdal was at work on his monumental study of race in America, An American Dilemma (1944). In the memorandum on black leadership, Bunche looked back to Frederick Dou- glass, who believed that the future of black people would be made secure by the exercise of the franchise.
Black leaders split over what was more essential to black freedom. W. E. B. Du Bois and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in New York in 1909, championed political rights, and Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the best-known vocational school in the South, and the president of the National Negro Business League, cautioned blacks to cast down their buckets where they were and to live with segregation. Region and class did not necessarily dictate which side blacks took, a debate that shaped strategies for freedom among blacks well into the 1970s.
Bunche accepted the philosophies of Washington and Du Bois both, praising Washington for getting black people through hard times after their political dreams had been destroyed, and then praising Du Bois for vigorously redefining the importance of civil liberties. But the mass of Negroes was remote from the black leaders of the professional class, and because of the racial mores of the country, Bunche said,
it is beyond the conceptions of both Negroes and whites that, for instance, there should ever be a Negro president in this country. Only a very emancipated few can think in terms of Negro leadership attaining the exalted heights of a position in the cabinet, or on the Supreme Court, or a general in the Army, or even a Senator.
James Baldwin said that Martin Luther King Jr. was the first Negro leader to say to whites what he said to blacks. Before King, the Negro leader had only been at the bargaining table to force from his adversary what he could get: new schools or new jobs. “He was invested with very little power because the Negro vote had so little power.” What concessions the Negro leader carried away were won with the tacit understanding that blacks would not agitate for more. That was why both whites and blacks found King dangerous, because he genuinely believed in the mission to prepare blacks for first-class citizenship. People seldom give their power away, Baldwin noted. “Forces beyond their control take their power from them.”
King understood that American officials couldn’t call for free elections in Europe when there weren’t free elections in Alabama or Georgia. The civil rights movement was going to complete the process of democratization in the US. However, King warned in Stride Toward Freedom (1958), his account of the Montgomery bus boycott, that underhanded methods by white officials were not the only barriers that kept blacks from voting. Blacks themselves were slow to exercise their voting privileges, even when the polls were open to them. Black leaders had to make a concerted effort to arouse their people. Apathy was not only a moral failing; it was political suicide.
Septima Clark relates in her autobiography, Echo in My Soul (1962), her work with the Citizenship Education Program, which was designed to teach black people to read and write as part of their preparation to register to vote. In the late 1950s, the group held workshops in different communities, from East Texas to Virginia, looking to train people in each place who could, in turn, train others in their towns, teach them how to be comfortable fulfilling their civic duties. However, because the Citizenship Education Program was associated with Clark’s Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, it was not entirely trusted by blacks. Even though Rosa Parks had been trained at Highlander, it had long been an experiment in coalitions, held integrated political meetings, and as such was suspected of being a Communist Party front.
Eventually, the Highlander Folk School closed and the Citizenship Education Program, paid for by a grant from the Marshall Field Foundation, was transferred to King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC). In spite of great opposition, the Citizenship Education Program trained enough people to open schools in eighteen Georgia counties. Some nine thousand blacks were able to answer Georgia’s notorious “thirty questions” on its literacy tests and joined the roll of voters in 1961, before passage of any voting rights legislation.
In 1961, the safest way for a civil rights worker to travel in Mississippi, Congressman John Lewis tells us in his memoir, Walking with the Wind (1998), was to take a car on the back roads at night at one hundred miles an hour with no headlights on. Lewis, an Alabama Bible college student, would go to jail that summer, along with James Farmer, the founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Farmer recalls in Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement (1985) that he was afraid to go to Mississippi with the Freedom Riders he’d recruited. He came to see them off at the bus station with the many reasons he could not leave Chicago. But the terrified expression of one young woman shamed him into getting on the bus. They would barely escape with their lives.
What comes across in these memoirs is how dangerous those days were. Blacks known merely to talk about voting in certain towns in Alabama or Mississippi could get fired or have their businesses wrecked. Back then there was no guarantee about how things would turn out, no experience of American politics that could reassure black people that justice would prevail. Police dogs, fire hoses, mass arrests, beatings, assassinations — Anne Moody’s stoic autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), reminds us that the violence meted out to civil rights demonstrators was not new. Moody remembers that after Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi in 1955 for having supposedly whistled at a white woman, she was convinced that she, too, would be killed, just because she was a black child. Moody tells how in the early 1960s her family all but hid from her, so fearful were they of reprisals because of the trouble she was stirring up as a volunteer registrar in a nearby county.
King knew his Thoreau: “For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be.” Less than one percent of Alabama’s eligible black voters were registered when a local group, the Dallas County Voters League, first tried to add black names to the rolls in the late 1950s. In 1963, registrars from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) joined the effort and were attacked by whites. The all-white school board in Dallas County, of which Selma is the county seat, fired thirty-two black teachers who’d applied to register. Mass meetings increased in size and frequency. The police attacked again, their aggression captured on the evening news. John F. Kennedy, who had called Coretta Scott King when her husband was jailed in 1960, proposed a civil rights bill and addressed the nation, saying that the Constitution’s intent was clear. King had noted that the black vote in the South contributed to Kennedy’s margin of victory in states such as South Carolina.
In the fall of 1963, the Klan reacted to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom by killing four black girls in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. Black students began sit-in demonstrations at Selma lunch counters. Hundreds were arrested and hundreds more the following month when blacks converged on the voter registration office. Even after President Lyn- don Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in the summer of 1964 that made segregation illegal, Selma’s sheriff continued to arrest blacks who tried to register. Mal- colm X urged blacks to hold back their votes as if they were bullets and not to use them until their target was in sight. The turmoil in the South was answered by a summer of black unrest in northern cities.
The integrated Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party challenged the legitimacy of the white-only delegation at the Democratic Party’s national convention in 1964, but Johnson was unwilling to risk offending the white vote in the South and refused to support reform. The Democrats won the election by a wide margin, not in small part because of the tender feelings that remained following Kennedy’s assassination, but also because the black vote nationally offset the widespread defection of white southerners to Goldwater and the Republicans.
“Give us the ballot,” King said again in Selma to a packed chapel, violating a court injunction against more than three blacks congregating in public at any one time. President Johnson hadn’t been greatly interested in a voting rights act when King visited the White House on his way home from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1964. In February 1965, shortly after Malcolm X was gunned down in New York, a young man who’d been part of a march in Marion, Alabama, on behalf of a civil rights worker held in the town jail was shot while trying to shield his grandmother from police violence. He died a week later. A grand jury refused to indict the state trooper who’d fired on him at close range. The SCLC organized a march from Selma to Montgomery in response.
In early March, some six hundred civil rights protesters tried to cross over the Alabama River just outside Selma. They were met by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The troopers, some on horseback, at- tacked the protesters with tear gas, billy clubs, and bull- whips. ABC interrupted its regular programming that night to show footage of the brutality. Two days later King led a second, largely symbolic march of 2,500 to the Edmund Pettus Bridge for prayer. But that evening three white ministers were attacked, one of whom died of his injuries. A judge upheld the First Amendment rights of the protestors and at the end of the month several thousand set off from Selma behind King, through Lowndes County, notorious as a “totalitarian state” that was 81 percent black but where no blacks were registered to vote.”
Reprinted from Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy by Darryl Pinckney, published by New York Review Books 2014.
Readers can purchase the book here.
Originally published at www.challengestodemocracy.us.
