The Weight of Their Votes: Southern Women and Political Leverage in the 1920s

Introduction

Introduction D oes voting really matter? From the time of the Revolution to recurring debates over redistricting, Americans have fought for the right to vote. The Founding Fathers created a government by elected representatives to ensure that propertied white men were ruled by a government they could control. Since then, other Americans have fought to share in that power by securing the franchise for themselves. This book assesses the significance of those struggles by exploring the effects of woman suffrage in the repressive Jim Crow South. Two long, fierce struggles illustrate the importance Americans have placed on the right to vote. In 1848, the pioneering women who gathered at Seneca Falls insisted that, like white men, they too were deserving of ballots. In the ensuing battle for woman suffrage, activists marched in the streets, picketed outside the White House, endured jail sentences, and staged hunger strikes to secure their full participation in the American polity. Their battle for suffrage rights lasted more than seventy years. When the Civil War ended, newly freed slaves insisted that Emancipation would be meaningless if they did not have ballots with which to protect themselves. As black men exercised their voting rights for the first time in the wake of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, white southerners organized campaigns of violence and intimidation before resorting to “legal” disfranchisement statutes to ensure that the prized right of voting would remain the privilege of white men only. For nearly a century, African Americans continued to fight for full access to the polls. In the face of poll taxes, literacy tests, and violence that eviscerated black voting rights, black southerners staged Freedom Schools and public protests, faced beatings and hostile registrars, risked humiliation and even death to exercise their right to vote. Voting rights have been vigorously—even violently—contested in the United States because they are so powerful. Since the earliest days of the republic, those Americans with suffrage rights have used their votes not only to elect representatives to office but also, and more importantly, to influence 2 Introduction the policies of government. As President Lyndon Johnson affirmed in 1965, there is nothing more effective than voting rights; they provide a power “that all the eloquence in the world won’t bring, because,” as he told Martin Luther King Jr., legislators “will be coming to you then, instead of you calling” them.1 That is certainly what American women believed when they fought for their own voting rights. For decades before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, women sought changes in the nation’s prohibition laws and social welfare policies. During those fights women became convinced that their policy concerns would never receive adequate attention until they could back their demands with their ballots. In the months and years that followed the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, women found that the vote did make a difference. This book is about the difference that women’s votes made, and, by extension , the significance of the vote itself. The American South in the 1920s may seem an unlikely place to look for meaningful democratic participation.2 Disfranchisers, determined to secure their control over the region’s political system, had enacted an incredibly thoroughgoing system of voting restrictions in the decades prior to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. In the South, potential voters faced not only poll taxes and literacy tests but registration and tax deadlines that passed months before any campaigning began. Registrars in many states were required to open the enrollment books only a few days per year. Citizens who did manage to register successfully faced confusing ballot-marking procedures, which made it easy for election officials to disqualify the ballots of dissident voters. Historian Dewey Grantham has described this as the “classic period of southern politics,” marked by Democratic Party dominance and white supremacy.3 No more than one in five southerners voted from 1920 to 1930.4 Yet after decades marked by the removal of millions of men from the electorate and the consolidation of political power in the hands of a few white men, the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment signaled a dramatic break with the past. In the weeks and months that followed the enfranchisement of women, the closed system of southern politics opened up for hundreds of thousands of southern women who for the first time were able to participate directly in the southern body politic. After fighting for decades for the right to vote, those southern women who were able...