I don’t even remember what the white woman looked like, but I do recall her attitude.
I was a junior at Paine College in Augusta, GA, a city on the tip of the northwest corner of the state, across the Savannah River from South Carolina. Some female friends and I went to the local elections office to register to vote. I can’t remember if there was an election coming up or we just wanted to test the system.
We were doing this in a state that had been and was still inhumane in its treatment of African Americans. We were in the South in 1972, where 10 years before the Civil Rights Movement was getting its bearing, black students at Paine had conducted sit-ins at department stores and segregationist Lester Maddox had gone after black protesters who tried to enter his restaurant in Atlanta.
I was newly arrived at Paine when two days rioting broke out in the city in May 1970 over the death of a black man.
I was from the South. My family lived in Macon, smack in the middle of the state, about 75 miles a straight shot south of Altanta and about 102 miles from Augusta, from where I’d ride a Trailways bus through small hitching-post towns like Sparta to visit my family. I had grown up in segregration but apart from it. My family never discussed it or gave us warnings about it. It was just a natural way of life; we didn’t mix with whites and I had little dealings with them.
I also didn’t come from a family that voted. I don’t ever recall anyone in my immediate or extended family – which I grew up with and am very close to now – ever talk about voting, not when I was around. I’m sure they must have discussed voting and segregation among themselves, but kept quiet around us children.
There must have been much talk about voting on Paine’s campus back in the early 1970s, because on this day we young women were staking our claim to it.
Voting is still very important to me and should be to all black people, especially today as states across the country, not only in the South, are erecting roadblocks to prevent black folks from voting with “exact-match” systems and voter ID laws. These are merely new forms of the poll tax and literacy tests.
I wrote about my experience at the elections office in a journal for a class at Paine. I was a quietly budding revolutionary at the time, filling my head with stories of Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party, George Jackson and Angela Davis with her ‘fro out to here.
Here’s what I wrote in a sparse paragraph after my encounter. We were apparently discussing an upcoming election because another entry discusses the state’s old literacy test:
“September 15, 1972 – I went to the Board of Electors to register to vote and an old white lady, gray hair, wrinkled face, and stern voice, attempted to assist me. (I could have really done without her.) Her tone was quite nasty and she acted as if she was doing me a favor. … I thought that college students could vote in any city where the college is located. If so, someone should hip the old hag to the situation.”
In an entry the next day, I questioned why the white supremacist J.B. Stoner could suggest genocide of all black people and be accepted, while Newton and the Panthers were systematically attacked, condemned and murdered. The country then – and still now 40 years later – can’t get past race and distrust.
Although the white woman’s attitude was brash and hateful, she didn’t keep me from registering that day. I’m sure I also voted in the next election. I knew that registering to vote on that autumn day in September was easy for me as a black woman but it had not always been so.
Had I approached her 40 years earlier in Georgia and any other southern state, I would have had to pay a poll tax of $1 to $2, which I couldn’t afford back then and could barely afford in 1972 – in order to register. My home state had been the first of these southern gems to pass the poll tax in 1877 as an early Jim Crow law aimed at disenfranchising, belittling and emasculating black people.
The law applied to black men and poor white men – women didn’t count, black or white – between the ages of 21 and 60, although white men could get around it through a “grandfather clause.” Under that provision, they didn’t have to pay the tax if their forebears fought in the Civil War or voted before the war. That effectively left black people out because our ancestors were enslaved Africans with no rights.
The law was cumulative, meaning that if you wanted to vote, you had to pay back taxes for each year you missed.
The poll tax was a burden on a group of people – most illiterate – who were sharecroppers, farmers and others in low-paying or no-paying jobs who sustained their families by buying on credit. Very few of them dealt in cash or had it lying around for emergencies.
Then came literacy tests that were just as demoralizing. I wasn’t required to take a literacy test in 1972, but I’m sure I could have passed it – much better than the female registrar. The questions and requirements of some of those tests were both difficult and ridiculous.
South Carolina has the distinction of having the first version of a literacy test, an “eight-box” ballot begun in 1882. Here’s how it worked: “Voters had to put ballots for separate offices in separate boxes. A ballot for the governor’s race put in the box for the Senate seat would be thrown out. The order of the boxes was continuously shuffled, so that literate people could not assist illiterate voters by arranging their ballots in the proper order.”
Georgia instituted its literacy test in 1907. It tested its citizens’ knowledge of state politics, the state constitution and its elected officials. The registrar in charge decided whether or not you passed the test, and sometimes would give tough questions to blacks and easy ones to whites.
Here are some of the questions from a training test in one Georgia county. It came with answers for the registrars. Could you answer them, even for your own state?
What is the republican form of government?
What is the name of the state judicial circuit in which you live?
What is the definition of a felony in Georgia?
How many representatives are there in the Georgia House of Representatives?
What does the constitution of the United States provide regarding the suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus?
What is treason against the state of Georgia?
In some states, election officials asked people to read or interpret parts of the state’s constitution. Here are questions and a breakdown of the Louisiana test from the 1960s and instructions to registrars.
All of these stumbling blocks came about in spite of the 15th Amendment that gave all citizens the right to vote. In Georgia, a white man sued in 1937 to abolish the poll tax, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it constitutional, deciding that it was not used to deter voting but to raise revenue. The tax was finally abolished in the state in 1945 under Gov. Ellis Arnall. The 24th amendment in 1964 finally ridded the country of the tax in federal elections, and the Supreme Court knocked it out for good in all states in 1966. The Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965, had given everyone the right to vote.
Blacks in some cities in Georgia pushed back against the determents to voting. In Columbus, blacks who were turned away from voting filed suit and won. Armed with this new decision, blacks in such cities as Atlanta, Savannah and Macon increased registrations, helped elect moderate candidates and resisted white-supremacist candidates.
By the 1960s southern blacks were still hampered by those Jim Crow laws, but they were fighting back.
“It was a vicious cycle, and no way for the African-American residents to win,” said civil rights worker Jeff Schwartz. “Yet the courage of the Black community led many determined souls to go to Freedom Schools, learn how to take the test and make no easy mistakes, endure the slights, derision, and stonewalling (and even threats) from white registrars, and come back again and again, more determined than ever to win the right to vote and demonstrate the illegitimacy of the system that kept them from exercising that right.”
