Citizenship Training--A Neglected Area in Adult Education

Abstract

Citizenship training as an area of adult education is such a recent movement among Negroes that a definition of terms is necessary at the beginning of any article or manuscript on the subject. As used in this article, citizenship training means the process by which individuals unacquainted with the significance and operation of democratic government may be led to exercise the right of suffrage. The personnel for citizenship training may embrace teachers in a school or college, or individuals who have no school connection whatever. The agencies for citizenship training may embrace two types of organizations: (1) voters leagues or civic associations which devote their entire effort to making their members and their fellow citizens vote conscious, and (2) a variety of civic, social, and fraternal bodies who devote only a part of their time to the voting question. The latter group may go no further than to make the requirement that in order to hold membership in the body the individual must be a registered voter. In this essay the writer shall lay emphasis on the organized efforts of the voters leagues. The geographical area under consideration is the Southern states of the United States. The activity of the voters leagues and civic associations is classified as organized effort because they meet the standard of maintaining an office, operating under a budget, and promoting a continous program. The officers of these leagues are responsible officers in the sense that they are obligated to make one or more reports annually to their bodies and to the public. So involved are the civic, social, and fraternal bodies in a multiplicity of activities that they cannot 'maintain any such standard as is here indicated. They may be identified, however, with the movement for citizenship training in that they may support the voters leagues financially and unite with them occasionally in the promotion of some project. The state of the South which is best known to the writer and the state which perhaps maintains organized activity on the widest scale is Virginia with its Virginia Voters League. This state and this organization shall therefore receive chief consideration in this article. But before entering into a narration of the activities of the Virginia Voters League and other organizations it is necessary to view the historical background of Negro suffrage and to present the attitudes toward voting at the present time. Such an approach will reveal the need for citizenship training and show to what extent it is a neglected area in adult education. In most of the Southern states the present generation of adult Negroes passed through the period of youth without any instruction which would awaken in them a desire to exercise