(1) conviction of crime,

(2) lack of property,

(3) failure
to pay
poll tax,
(4) failure
to produce
tax receipts,

(5) failure to pass an educational test,

a

(1) Nearly all the constitutions in terms prohibit persons convicted of certain crimes from ever voting again; for instance in Mississippi, the offences enumerated are "bribery, burglary, theft, arson, obtaining money under false pretense, embezzlement, perjury, or bigamy.” . .

(2) Two states Alabama and Mississippi — have a moderate property qualification as one of several alternatives.

(3) All the six states except Louisiana require the prepayment of poll taxes for one, two or three years.

(4) In two states, South Carolina and Mississippi, the voter must be able to prove at the polls that he has paid taxes, and since Negroes are notoriously careless about keeping such papers, they are much more likely to lose the necessary papers.

(5) All the constitutions have an educational clause; but in two states taxes on property worth $300 may be a substitute for reading and writing; and in Mississippi it is provided that the voter must “be able to read any section of the constitution of this state; or he shall be able to understand the same when read to him, or give a reasonable interpretation thereof." . . . The whole machinery of (such clauses] is in the hands of the white election officers, who are expected to be easily convinced that a white man understands and with difficulty convinced in the case of a Negro.

(6) Five of the six constitutions contain the remarkable “grandfather clause,” which in somewhat different phraseology sets forth that the descendant of a person who was a voter prior to January 1, 1867, shall vote, notwithstanding his inability to satisfy the intelligence or property qualifications. This is the most doubtful part of the whole system, for it sets up an exemption from the ordinary qualifications which applies only to members of one race and cannot possibly be acquired by members of the Negro race.

(6) or failure to prove descent from a person entitled to vote prior to January I, 1867.

.

197. Civic capacity cannot be created by proclamation In the whole of American politics there is no more inflammable subject than that of Negro suffrage. Whatever attitude one may

a noble

take upon the subject, some faction is certain to be incensed or al. Inflammable ienated. No one can deny that the facts of Negro suffrage are sub

nature of

the question stantially as set forth by Professor Hart in the above selection. But of Negro

suffrage. why has the Negro been disfranchised? And who is to blame for this condition? Many authorities claim that the Negro was disfranchised chiefly because the exercise of the vote by ignorant, incapable Negroes threatened the South with destruction. And for many of the evil effects of disfranchisement responsibility is placed upon those who insisted upon admitting the freed slaves suddenly and completely to full civil rights. That civic capacity cannot be created by proclamation, but is the result of slow growth, is the underlying theme of the following selection by Charles Wallace Collins, writing in the American Law Review:

In conclusion, we may ask what positive gain has the operation The perof the Fourteenth Amendment been to the Negro race? We can point

version of to nothing. All attempts at Federal intervention have been fruit- idealism. less in permanent results. The operation of the Amendment in its relation to the Negro race has in it all of the irony of history. It is the perversion of a noble idealism that the lowest and most benighted element of the African race should in these enlightened days be the ones to rise up and claim the sacred heritage of Anglo-Saxon liberties which, through the fortune of circumstance, have become embodied in the supreme law of the land in the shape of the Fourteenth Amendment...

The words “citizen,” “life, liberty and property,” “due process Self-governof law,” and “the equal protection of the laws,” were born through

ment is the

natural fruit a travail in which the African had no share. They breathe the sacred of prolonged

toil and symbols of a race which paid the price for greatness. They are the

sacrifice, fruit of unmeasured sacrifice and suffering, of innumerable and lengthened struggles through defeat and failure to final victory. They are the key words of that race which has, among all of the peoples of the earth, shown the highest genius for law and government. They can never be superimposed from 'without. The great truths which they embody can come into being only through the birth pangs of the inner life.

The Fourteenth Amendment declared the Negro to be a citizen of the United States of America. ... But it is a serious matter to

a

a

The en

presupposing be a citizen of a country like the United States. Its ideals of citizen-
centuries of
personal

ship presuppose centuries of independent personal and racial achieveand racial ment. ... In the words of an eminent statesman and patriot: “It achievement.

throws upon him a great responsibility and expects of him a constant
and watchful independence. There is no one look out for his
rights but himself. He is not a ward of the government, but his own
guardian. The law is not automatic; he must himself put it into
operation, and he must show good cause why the courts should
exercise the great powers vested in them. ..

These remarks were spoken to white men yet they apply franchise

also to the Afro-American. They speak to him with redoubled force. ment of the Negro was,

They set before him the most exalted ideal of citizenship yet achieved under the

by man and bid him reach it if he can. There is a touch of pathos circumstances, a

in all of this. The Negro has been the only innocent party in this crime

turmoil of the times. He at least, by every moral law, has been en-
against the
colored race. titled to have justice meted out to him. On the contrary he has been

used as a tool first by one section of the country and then by the
other. . . . And finally, to satisfy the political idealism and the
partizan plans of those to whom he himself was a stranger, he has
been thrown naked, penniless and deserted upon the land to pick
his

way in the midst of the highest and most complicated civiliza

tion known to the earth. The Four- The adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment could not make teenth

Anglo-Saxons out of Africans. It was unjust to the Negro to force
Amendment
could not him to play a rôle for which by the forces of nature he was unfitted.
make Anglo- He deserves neither ridicule nor blame for the comedy and the tragedy
Saxons out
of Africans. of the Reconstruction. It is one of the fundamental precepts of po-

litical science to-day that only those people in a community can par-
ticipate in its civic, social and political life who are conscious of a
common origin, share a common idealism and look forward to a com-
mon destiny. Where the community is composed of two divergent
races rendering such a community of life impossible, the weaker and
less favored race must inevitably and in the nature of things take
the place assigned to it by the stronger and dominant race.

The Republican party, which controlled all branches of the govern-
ment after the War, might have made the Negroes wards of the
nation, putting them into a position similar to that occupied by the

a

1

American Indians. They, especially at that time, needed the pro- The fundatecting arm of the Federal government thrown around them. Under

mental

mistake in this system of sympathetic tutelage the African might have been our Negro led to develop whatever latent powers that may be inherent in his poicy. race. To-day he can justly raise the cry that many of the doors of opportunity are closed to him.

1

198. How many potential voters really vote? The suffrage is, of course, a means and not an end. To extend the Though inprivilege of voting to people who make little or no use of it may be terest in

elections is of little consequence; the extension of the suffrage to persons who probably habitually use the ballot will have an appreciable effect upon govern- increasing,

the neglect ment. It becomes a matter of grave concern, therefore, to know to vote is whether or not persons who are legally entitled to the vote are really still a

serious using the ballot. Professor Hart believes that in general the interest evil. of individuals in elections is increasing. At the same time the fact that a large number of potential voters habitually stay away from the polls constitutes a serious problem. In the following selection, Professor Hart discusses the proposal to penalize those who neglect to vote:

Bad weather keeps many thousands of voters at home; compul- Some people sory voting would . . . disqualify thousands of men who are kept stay away ·

from the away by bad roads, or by the rising of the southern streams, along polls bethe beds of which highways are often constructed. The voter who cause of båd

weather. has a cold or who justly fears a cold . . . will be debarred. I doubt whether fear of disfranchisement or fine would greatly diminish any of the bad-weather classes.

Another group is made up of those who will not mix in “dirty Others repolitics”; who think all parties “packs of scoundrels,” and who fuse to mix

in "dirty want to be left to their comfortable private life. . . . That such politics." persons constitute one in a hundred of the voters is hard to believe. If disfranchised for not voting, how many additional votes will be got, and how many dollars for the public treasury?

Much larger numbers neglect to vote because they know their party to be in a hopeless minority, and that their votes can make no

.

a

voters are

Many possible difference. One would expect to find many thousands of persons such men in the absolutely sure states.

All the southern states neglect to vote because have a small proportional vote; the congressional vote of Tennessee they know

is about half that of Iowa, which has about the same population and their party is in a

the same industries. In Vermont, which has never gone anything hopeless

but Republican since there was a Republican party, the majority minority.

takes pride in displaying its own size. The stay-at-homes are about as numerous in close as in sure states, particularly if the opinion

gets abroad that one party is reasonably sure to win. Sometimes One large class of abstainers would probably be reduced by [a

compulsory voting] law; it is the men who are public-spirited and “too busy" to go to who know that they ought to vote, but who are too busy and who the polls.

think their duty will be performed by some one else. If such men voted without much regard for party when they did go to the polls, they might frequently change elections; in fact, however, their number would probably only swell the total vote on both sides without

much altering results. ... The problem Next comes the class, unhappily too large, of those who neither of dealing

know nor care anything about the election, the candidates or the with the vote seller. result, but who do care to sell their votes. The hope of the reformers

seems to be that such men will get so deeply in arrears of fines that they will disappear out of politics from sheer inability to pay their

way back to the suffrage. . . Conclusion This brings us to the last and most important class of absentees,

those who deliberately withhold 'their votes because they think that proposal to penalize they can exert more influence on public affairs in that way than by potential

casting them. The great evil of the whole suffrage system is not that voters for neglecting votes are few, but that they are unconsidered. If a commission

went from house to house to get votes, so that there were no trouble to the voters, nineteen men out of twenty would vote their usual party ticket. Any unusual defection of voters means a deliberate lesson to party managers. A similar lesson might be taught by voting for some third-party candidate, or by voting for a good candidate on the other ticket. As a matter of fact there is not in the United States one voter in fifty who will do either under any circumstances. Neither party feels more confidence in the nominating apparatus of the other side than in its own. American voters rarely pass from

upon the

to vote.