Delta Fragments: The Recollections of a Sharecropper's Son

Civil Rights

Civil Rights Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. . . . This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Frederick Douglass, “West India Emancipation” speech (1857) We were neither shocked nor surprised when our civics instructor in high school failed to pass the literacy test necessary to become a registered voter in Leflore County. We knew that he was bright enough. After all, he was teaching us government , which meant he at least had a college education. But when he went to register, he was not able to pass a test that required him to copy a section of the state constitution and then, and here is the problem, to interpret the same passage in front of the registrar.1 It didn’t matter what blacks said; the clerk always indicated that the response was wrong. We teased our teacher for a long time, asking him how he could teach us something about the constitution he didn’t know himself. Another hindrance to voting was the poll tax. When I was a child, the amount was two dollars. This, I admit, is not a large sum by today’s standards. But in the 1950s and 1960s it was an entire day’s pay for some people. The amount Civil Rights 168 notwithstanding, it was a real nuisance to pay any sum to vote for a candidate who would not be significantly different from his opponent. One of the aims of the voter-registration project was to increase the number of registered black voters. In 1962, according to government statistics, six Mississippi counties had 38,772 of 53,742 eligible whites registered to vote and only 1,955 of 49,998 black eligible voters were registered.2 That is, of those eligible to vote, 4 percent of blacks were registered, as compared to 72 percent of whites. Furthermore, a larger percentage of blacks than whites were ruled ineligible . The figures are astounding and, if one assumes that blacks were attempting to vote, offer evidence that blacks were systematically being disfranchised. The literacy requirement and poll taxes were not the only hurdle; on November 8, 1960, the legislature added good moral character as a requirement for voter registration. These restrictions, although they technically applied to all applicants, actually were used as a means of maintaining white racial supremacy by insuring a white electorate. In addition to these “legal” means, intimidation and reprisals also kept blacks from registering to vote. The newspapers, which didn’t normally print anything positive about blacks, made sure that it recorded for public information those blacks who had attempted to register to vote, along with their addresses. Once their names were published in the papers, they could expect to receive phone calls or visits that encouraged them to withdraw their names from the rolls. Employers were routinely contacted whenever any of their black employees showed up to register to vote.3 In short, there were very few blacks who were registered voters in the Mississippi of my youth. My parents never registered; neither did those of most of my schoolmates. I doubt that many of our teachers or ministers were registered . Blacks thus had no voice in the political affairs of the state or the nation. Unabashed and unashamed, white candidates tried to outdo each other in their promises to maintain white supremacy and keep blacks under foot. They followed the trail blazed by the “Great White Chief,” James Kimble Vardaman, who served as Mississippi governor and later senator early in the twentieth century; among his openly racist campaign slogans was this: “a vote for vardaman is a vote for white supremacy, the safety of the home, and the protection of our women and children.”4 The right of blacks to vote would not only mean that more blacks could run for political office and stand a chance of winning but, even more important, that candidates could no longer make such blatant racist appeals with impunity. 169 Civil Rights Getting more blacks to vote in the Mississippi Delta was a most difficult task. When the Reverend George Lee of Belzoni tried to do that in 1955, it cost him his life. Blacks knew that second...