Recent Restrictions Upon Negro Suffrage: The Case of Georgia

Abstract

D URING THE DECADE AND A HALF which has elapsed since the invalidation of the white primary by the U. S. Supreme Court,' advocates of white supremacy in Georgia, as in other states in the deep South, have employed several techniques to keep colored persons away from the ballot boxes. The passage, meanwhile, of the Civil Rights Act of 1957,2 the deliberations of the Eighty-Sixth Congress and the activities of the Civil Rights Commission and the Department of Justice evince an increasingly active role by federal authorities in implementing the guarantees of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The principal aims of this paper are to describe and analyze the tactics of obstruction in Georgia and to suggest specific legal procedures and measures for curbing practices which deny to Negro citizens the equal protection of the laws. An assumption is that most of the obstacles erected in Georgia are typical of resistance in the deep South and that weapons of discrimination, found to be effective in one state, are likely to be used in other states. In fulfillment of its chief aims, the paper discusses the impediments found in several aspects of the franchise process: registration, purging of registration lists, voting and electoral structure. A final section of the paper is devoted to an appraisal of the impact of discrimination upon Negro suffrage and of the prospects for reform.