David Blight has an interesting article in the New York Times on how current efforts to suppress the vote echo those tried during the Reconstruction Era. Blight writes:
The creation of black male suffrage was the most contested of all the problems of the early new state governments formed during Reconstruction. Most white Southerners were hellbent on trying to restore white supremacy, especially in voting. Appointed by President Andrew Johnson as South Carolina’s governor in 1865, Benjamin F. Perry believed that black suffrage would give political power over to “ignorant, stupid, demi-savage paupers.” In North Carolina, the politician William A. Graham believed enfranchising blacks would “roll back the tide of civilization two centuries at least.”
In Southern history, when the law wasn’t on the side of voter suppression, intimidation, fraud and murderous violence served as ready alternatives. As the historian Carol Anderson writes in her brilliant book “One Person, No Vote,” the techniques of voter suppression in the 19th century were conducted with “warped brilliance” and were “simultaneously mundane and pernicious,” whether by requiring voters to interpret bizarrely complex written passages to prove literacy, in fail-safe grandfather clauses or through allegedly race-neutral poll taxes. Today’s vote suppressors are no less pernicious, sporting earnest outrage at the fraud they cannot find.
As many Americans broadly came to embrace the defeat of Reconstruction in the South, viewing it as a futile, even unnatural, racial experiment, historians at the turn of the 20th century declared black suffrage the great demon of a “tragic era.” Writing in 1901 in The Atlantic, the historian William A. Dunning, whose work helped define a generation’s interpretation of the post-Civil War era, wrote of “The Undoing of Reconstruction.”
In Dunning’s polite brand of white supremacy, black voting during Reconstruction — which for a while brought political revolution and hundreds of black elected officials to the South — was a curse and a historical blunder. The “political equality of the negroes,” he maintained, went too far and necessitated a counterrevolution to roll it back.
Dunning never used our modern term, suppression. He called it “pressure applied by all these various methods” to reduce the black vote. Indeed, the “undoing” of Reconstruction could be measured, as Dunning celebrated, in the large reductions of black voter turnout in Southern states. Votes were not suppressed; they simply “disappeared,” he said, like bad weather.
In the 1884 presidential election compared with that of 1876, the black vote declined from 182,000 to 91,000 in South Carolina, 164,000 to 120,000 in Mississippi and 160,000 to 108,000 in Louisiana. As the Jim Crow system descended on Southern life, black voters became increasingly “extinct,” Dunning wrote. Dr. Anderson documents this “voter mortality rate” by the early 20th century: Between 1896 and 1904, registered black voters in Louisiana plummeted from 130,000 to 1,342, and in Alabama from 180,000 to 3,000. Today’s Republicans can only dream of such numbers, but they need only fractions of those counts to succeed. Their trickery matches their challenge. We should not mince words: Voter mortality is their goal.
Fueling Dunning’s confidence about Jim Crow’s control over voting was the coup and bloody massacre committed by white Democrats in Wilmington, N.C., in the election of 1898. The largest city in the state, Wilmington had forged a black majority and a successful black economic and political leadership. White Democrats found black rule and economic success unbearable. In a vicious white-supremacist campaign led by a Confederate veteran and congressman, Alfred Waddell, whites used lies, intimidation, cartoon journalism and racial terrorism to take back control first of the city and then of the entire state. Organized mobs, energized by grievance and racial hatred, violently overthrew the election.
In rousing speeches, Waddell made their “duty” clear to the mobs of Wilmington. “This city, county and state shall be rid of Negro domination, once and forever,” he shouted at an election-eve rally. “Go to the polls tomorrow and if you find a Negro voting, tell him to leave the polls. And if he refuses, kill him! Shoot him down in his tracks!” The mob roared and raised their rifles in the air. On and after Election Day, 15 to 20 people were murdered in the immediate uprising, while hundreds of black women and children fled into nearby swamps. About 1,400 fled the city during the next 30 days.
