Black Votes Count: Political Empowerment in Mississippi After 1965

Introduction: The Quest for Black Political Equality in Mississippi

Introduction The Quest for Black Political Equality in Mississippi Since 1965 America has witnessed a renaissance of black political participation. Nationwide, more than 12 million black Americans are registered to vote. The number of black elected officials has increased about fourteenfold, from about 500 in 1965 to more than 7,200 in 1989.1 The 24 black members of Congress, more than 400 black state legislators, and more than 300 black mayors-more than at any other time in American history-symbolize this dramatic upsurge in black political participation. This tremendous increase in black political participation has had important implications for national politics and has been an essential element of the realignment of southern politics for the past twenty-five years. This dramatic progress is due in large measure to the passage by Congress of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; 67 percent of these black elected officials are in the South.2 The Voting Rights Act swept away the primary legal barriers to black registration and voting in the South, eliminating the literacy tests and the poll taxes and allowing the Justice Department to dispatch federal registrars and poll watchers to insure the integrity of the voting process. Yet, in the years following the passage of the Voting Rights Act, despite the dramatic increases in black voter registration, black voters in southern states found that, generally, they were unable to elect more than a few black candidates to public office. The reason was that immediately after the act was passed, southern states-led by Mississippi-adopted "massive resistance" strategies designed to nullify the impact of the black vote. The devices that had been used before 1965 to deny black citizens the right to vote-the literacy tests and the poll tax-were replaced with a second generation of disfranchising devices designed to nullify and dilute the black vote. These included such devices as at-large elections, racial gerrymandering of district lines, abolishing elective offices and making them appointive, and increasing the qualifying requirements for candidates running for public office. This campaign required the civil rights movement to adopt new strategies to deal with these new threats to the black franchise. The Voting Rights Act, which previously had focused on the denial of the vote to Quest for Political Equality 2 blacks, became the primary safeguard against these new efforts to dilute the black vote. A number of valuable and insightful books have been written about southern politics and black voting after 1965, including Bartley and Graham's Southern Politics and the Second Reconstruction, Bass and DeVries' The Transformation of Southern Politics, Lamis's The Two-Party South, Lawson's In Pursuit of Pmver, and, most recently, Black and Black's Politics and Society in the South, and most of these books touch on the new barriers to black participation following the passage of the Voting Rights Act. But none of these books fully describes or analyzes these new barriers in detail, focuses on them as a massive resistance strategy of the entrenched white political leadership seeking to perpetuate its power, or thoroughly explores their impact as a primary impediment to black political participation during this period. The purpose of this book is to fill a gap in the existing literature and to provide a new perspective on the political struggles of black citizens in the South by focusing on the central role of the voting rights movement after 1965 in the struggle for black political empowerment . The book describes the dramatic increase in black registration in Mississippi following passage of the Voting Rights Act, Mississippi 's official, state-sponsored program of massive resistance to nullify the newly gained black vote, the impact these vote-dilution devices had on the opportunities of black voters to elect candidates of their choice, the successful strategies employed by black Mississippians to overcome the state's massive resistance campaign, and the impact these struggles have had on both state politics and national policy. Mississippi is an appropriate focus for this analysis for several reasons . First, of all the states, the changes that have occurred in Mississippi have been the most dramatic and far-reaching. Mississippi has had a higher proportion of black people than any other state-42 percent in 1960, 37 percent in 1970, and 35 percent in 1980-and politically has been the most repressive state for black people. Before 1965, discriminatory voter registration laws prevented all but 6.7 percent of Mississippi's black adult population from registering to vote-the...