To: Zoltan! who wrote (308 ) 5/28/1998 9:40:00 PM From: Dragonfly Read Replies (3) | Respond to
No, you were totally, absolutely wrong about the poll tax. newdeal.feri.org Suffrage in the South Part I: The Poll Tax or Suffrage in the South, Part II: The One Party System and then READ THEM! [28]TAKE THE NEGRO OUT OF POLITICS, WAS THE FIRST NECESSITY, the southern Democrats agreed. A majority of southern people, including the Populists, agreed with them. How could this be done within the framework of the fifteenth amendment? A whole set of complicated election qualifications and restrictions provided the answer. Literacy tests came first. The majority of the Negroes could be honestly eliminated in this way. But what of the approximately 33 percent of the whites who were at that time illiterate? For these the famous "grandfather clauses" were written, allowing illiterates to vote whose grandfathers had voted in the elections of 1860. Since then, the Democratic white primary, forbidding Negroes membership in the party and thus barring them from the only significant election-combined with twisted interpretations of the literacy tests, and, when necessary, frank intimidation-has deprived all but a handful of Negroes of a vote in the South. [32] There is one new provision in the Mississippi law that is a test of some kind of mental dexterity. To vote, one must present poll tax receipts for two years back. ... [44] There are counties and districts where Negroes are in a majority, but the white primary, manipulation of the literacy tests, and keep all but a handful of Negroes away from the polls. [16] In North Carolina ... Under the guise of the old law, election officers permitted markers (paid by the party, or a candidate) or a single member of a household to secure, mark, and cast ballots ... to assist only physically incapables or illiterates (the state constitution calls for a literacy test for voters)
