Voter Disenfranchisement

The eighth post in our series on Black New York, 1921, for Black History Month

One hundred  years ago today... The February issue of The Crisis took on the failures of representative democracy in a country with rampant disenfranchisement of Black voters.

Note: We first featured The Crisis, published out of 70 Fifth Avenue at the southeast corner of 11th Street, to start off last year’s Black History Month series.

Crisis editor W.E.B. DuBois explains that states can, and that Southern U.S. States did, legally prevent voters.

This nation is putting a premium upon oligarchy and a penalty upon democracy. The states can and do control the conditions under which a citizen may or may not vote. By the 15th and 19th Amendments there are only two checks on their power: They cannot legally disfranchise men for race or for sex. They cannot say that a Negro or a woman cannot vote.

But—and this fact is often slurred or forgotten—the states can and legally do restrict the suffrage for other reasons, such as length of residence, previous registration, ability to read and write, possession of property, etc.

Moreover, states can easily disfranchise a whole group by choosing certain characteristics or disabilities of the group: Negroes as a mass are poor and ignorant; a property and literacy qualification will therefore disfranchise a large number, of them; women are occupied in homes for the most part and not in the so-called "gainful occupations". A restriction of voting to those in such occupations would be undoubtedly legal and would disfranchise 75% of the women.

(“Reduced Representation in Congress,” The Crisis 21.4, February 1921., p. 149)

DuBois points out the way that voter suppression policies in the states in question–South Carolina is the example–lead to under-representation of Black voters and over-representation by white, property-owning, male voters. But that is prelude to his main concern, which is that the power of the latter category is then exponentially increased by the federal electoral system.  Such states benefit from their large populations (including large Black populations) by being able to field large numbers of representatives to congress. The large numbers of Blacks in Southern States are used to multiply (in the adverbial sense) penalize Blacks and multiply reward whites. 

Note: DuBois has made many appearances on the NY1920s site, most prominently in two guest-posts. Marc Farrior posted about DuBois’s Darkwater for February 28, 1920, and William J. Maxwell write about DuBois’s exchange with Marcus Garvey regarding the U.N.I.A. for August 1, 1920. 

The Crisis’s graphic illustrates the disproportionate power of these states.

The remedy, DuBois says, lies in the 14th Amendment, which can be used to reduce the number of representatives on the basis of voter suppression. In DuBois’s explanation: “if for any legal reason a state disfranchises its citizens then the representation of that state in Congress must be proportionately re­duced” (150).

Such a possibly was in discussion in the early weeks of 1921.

DuBois concludes his editorial with an argument that this would be the best outcome for Black people.

The overwhelming polit­ical power of the South, whereby 10,­000 voters in Mississippi wield as much political power as 97,000 voters in Indiana, must be changed. The legal remedy is at hand and involves no jot or tittle of surrender of any right or hope of the American Negro. To hesitate is to give to that section of the United States where mobs, lynching, ignorance and murder flour­ish, four times the political power ex­ercised by the intelligence, thrift, and law-abiding devotion to democracy in the rest of the land. 

– Jonathan Goldman, February 17th, 2021

TAGS voter suppression, voting, democracy, Black magazines, African American media, race, racism, government