The Rules

Your first problem if you aspire to vote but your color isn't white and you live in the South, is how to get your name on the registration books as qualified to vote and to keep it there.

Originally registration was designed merely as a means of preventing unscrupulous persons from casting more than one ballot, but Negro Emancipation prompted Southern officials to seize upon registration requirements, as a means of barring Negroes from the polls.

To begin with, many Southern states open their books for new registrants for a very limited time only—generally at a time far removed from an election, so that public interest would be at a low ebb. Indeed, the opening of the books is often something of a state secret, as there is no desire on the part of the incumbents to increase the number of white voters either. . . .

If you do go to your county courthouse to register, in segregated territory you will doubtless find two lines—one for whites, one for Negroes. If you are a Negro, it might be well to take along a box lunch of some sort, as it is not unheard of for Negro applicants to be kept standing in line for one or more days. . . .

Your session with the registrar may be something of an ordeal. . . . [I]n some states the registrar may simply qualify certain applicants as being "of good character and understanding the duties of citizenship." This latter criterion, however, you will generally find reserved for white folks.

This machinery thus enables the registrar to refuse to register you if you are a Negro and he so chooses . . .

Of course, you are free to appeal against a registrar's decision in the courts, but by the time a ruling can be had, the election will undoubtedly be over. . . .

The current trend is for the states to vest more and more discretionary power in the registrars so that the actual discrimination can be left to them, without appearing in statutory form. . . .

Don't think, if you put on the uniform of the United States in time of war to defend democracy, that this will in any wise improve your chances of voting in the South when the war is over if your skin color isn't white. On the contrary, special efforts have been made to deter Negro war veterans from voting. . . .

Should you succeed in getting your name on the list of qualified voters, your troubles may have only begun. . . .

For one thing, your name may be purged from the list before you get a chance to vote. . . . In some counties the vast majority of Negro registrants were stricken from the lists. Appeals to the U.S. Department of Justice were in vain. . . .

Any white person, it would appear, can challenge any number of Negroes on all sorts of grounds. For instance, G. R. Fossett, who purged 183 Negroes from the voting list of Spaulding County, Georgia, admitted that he did so solely on the basis of their handwriting. . . .

If you are a Negro and your name is on a voters' list somewhere in segregated territory, as Election Day draws nigh you may decide that those whose names are merely purged are the lucky ones.

While the hand of every white man may not be turned against you, you may get the impression that it is. Candidates, officeholders, law enforcement officers, and Klansmen may severally or collectively resort to intimidation and violence to dissuade you from actually going to the polls. . . .

If, despite such as this, you persist in going to the Polls, be careful not to take with you any sort of memorandum—even one you prepared yourself—because election officials are in the habit of arresting Negroes early in the day on charges of carrying "dummy ballots," so that the publicity in the afternoon papers will deter other Negroes from voting. . . .

Don't think that by establishing residence in one of the 150 or more Southern counties where Negroes are still in the majority you can find more self-government; the more Negroes there are in any given political entity down South, the less the political expression permitted them.

If you happened to be visiting in Great Britain while the U.S. State Department had on display there its exhibit "Souvenirs of American Elections," complete with facsimile of the Declaration of Independence, you shouldn't think you could go back to the American South in this century and raise the standard of the American Revolution, "No Taxation without Representation!," with impunity. Nor would the latter-day Tories of the American South be likely to tolerate any refusal on the part of Negro Southerners to pay taxes on this basis.

--Excerpts from "Who May Vote Where," Chapter 10 of Stetson Kennedy, The Jim Crow Guide: The Way It Was (1959)

            ***         ***         ***Update: David Scott Anderson took the time to explain to me something about blogging etiquette I hadn't understood before—that when I send a trackback it should be from a post that explicitly links to the one I pinged. I have often sent trackbacks simply to alert other bloggers that my post is relevant to theirs. So, without further ado, here are some blogs with recent posts on Republican use of overt Jim Crow tactics to suppress the votes of African Americans and other minorities.

In Search Of Utopia
Blogs Of War
DebWire
Oliver Willis