Civil Rights

How important is the right to vote? For those who do not have it, that right can seem as important as life itself. Indeed, in the Deep South of the 1960s, Civil Rights workers suffered arrest, beatings, shocks with electric cattle prods, even death--all in the name of the right to vote. Their efforts inspired the nation and led to large-scale federal efforts to secure suffrage for African Americans and other minority groups in the United States. 

The effort to extend the franchise to African Americans began with the 15th Amendment, which was ratified in 1870. It declares that the right to vote cannot be denied to any citizen of the United States because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The amendment was plainly intended to ensure that African American men, nearly all of them former slaves and nearly all of them living in the South, could vote. 

The 15th Amendment is not self-executing, however. In other words, simply stating a general principle without providing for a means to enforce implementation was not enough to carry out the intention of the amendment. To make it effective, Congress had to act. Yet for almost 90 years the Federal Government paid little attention to voting rights for African Americans. 

During that period, African Americans were generally ad systematically kept from the polls in much of the South. White Supremacists employed a number of tactics to that end. Their major weapon was violence. Other tactics included more subtle threats and social pressures, such as firing an African American man who tried to register or vote, or denying his family credit at local stores. 

More formal "legal" devices were used, as well. The most effective were literacy tests. White officials regularly manipulated these tests to disenfranchise African American citizens. 

Registration laws served the same end. As written, they applied to all potential voters. In practice, however, they were often administered to keep African Americans from qualifying to vote. Poll taxes, "white primaries", gerrymandering, and several other devices were also regularly used to disenfranchise African Americans. Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing electoral district lines (the boundaries of the geographic area from which a candidate is elected to a public office) in order to limit the voting strength of a particular group or party. 

The white primary arose out of the decades-long Democratic domination of politics in the South. It was almost a given that the Democratic candidate for an office would be elected. Therefore, almost always, it was only the Democrats who nominated candidates, generally in primaries. In several southern States, political parties were defined by law as "private associations". As such, they could exclude whomever they chose, and the Democrats regularly refused to admit African Americans. Because only party members could vote in the party's primary, African Americans were then excluded from a critical step in the public election process. 

The Supreme Court finally outlawed the white primary in a case from Texas, Smith v Allwright, 1944. The Court held that nominations are an integral part of the election process. Consequently, when a political party holds a primary it is performing a public function and it is, therefore, bound by the terms of the 15th Amendment. 

The Supreme Court outlawed gerrymandering when used for purposes of racial discrimination in a case from Alabama, Gomillion v Lightfoot, in 1960. In this case, the Alabama legislature had redrawn the electoral district boundaries of Tuskegee, effectively excluding all Blacks from the city limits. The Court ruled that the legislature's act violated the 15th Amendment because the irregularly shaped district clearly was created to deprive Blacks of political power. 

Led by these decisions of the Supreme Court, the lower federal courts struck down many of the practices designed to disenfranchise African Americans in the 1940s and 1950s. Still, the courts could act only when those who claimed to be victims of discrimination sued. That case-by-case method was, at best, agonizingly slow. 

Finally, and largely in response to the Civil Rights Movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Congress was moved to act. It has passed several Civil Rights laws since the late 1950s. Those statutes contain a number of sections specifically intended to implement the 15th Amendment. 

The first law passed by Congress to implement the 15th Amendment was the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which set up the United States Civil Rights Commission. One of the Commission's major duties is to inquire into claims of voter discrimination. The Commission reports its findings to Congress and the President and, through the media, to the public. The Act also gave the attorney general the power to seek federal court orders to prevent interference with any person's right to vote in any federal election. 

The Civil Rights Act of 1960 added an additional safeguard. It provided for the appointment of federal voting referees. These officers were to serve anywhere a federal court found voter discrimination. They were given the power to help qualified person to register and vote in federal elections.