The Triumph of Voting Rights in the South (review)

Abstract

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 284 The Triumph of Voting Rights in the South. By Charles S. Bullock and Ronald Keith Gaddie. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009. xiv, 440 pp. $55.00. ISBN 978-0-8061-4079-7. Most historians of modern America agree that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a significant milestone in the mid-century Civil Rights movement that had profound implications for political life in the South. The federal act banned the use of practices designed to prevent African American southerners from voting, including literacy, understanding, and good character tests. In order to ensure that southern election of- ficials never returned to these discriminatory techniques, the act also required jurisdictions to obtain federal approval before making any changes to local election laws. Federal officials could also be sent to southern locales to register voters and monitor Election Day activities where there had been a history of disfranchising black voters. Yet these changes were not permanent; Congress must periodically renew the Voting Rights Act. Political disagreements about the effectiveness and necessity of the act therefore coincide with debates over its extension. The on-the-ground implementation of the Voting Rights Act in the decades after its passage is the subject of a new study by political scientists Charles S. Bullock and Ronald Keith Gaddie. The authors argue that the Voting Rights Act was “a landmark departure in the century-long pursuit of voting rights in the United States” and that its successes, including the recent election of Barack Obama as president, have been undeniable (p. 3). By using state tabulations of voter registration and turnout rates, surveys on postelection participation and African American of- ficeholding conducted by the Census Bureau and the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and Election Day exit polls, Bullock and Gaddie show that the Voting Rights Act resulted in a major shift in the distribution of power within the American federal system. According to the authors, however, this progress has unfortunately been uneven and unequal. Through a close analysis of the last forty-five years of voting records in the eleven former Confederate states, Bullock and Gaddie conclude that states such as Mississippi and Alabama, which used some of the most repressive disfranchisement techniques and as a result felt the effects of the Voting Rights Act early and most directly, achieved the largest increase in black voter participation and black officeholding after the implementation of the act. In states where the act did not apply to as many jurisdictions the results were less dramatic. Alabama was one of those southern states that practiced the full range of voter disfranchisement techniques to prevent African Americans from O C T O B E R 2 0 1 0 285 taking part in the political process and as a result felt the full brunt of the Voting Rights Act. In 1964 only 19.3 percent of adult African Americans in Alabama were registered to vote; in 1967, just two years after the act’s passage, that number had increased to 51.6 percent, and nearly one-fourth of those new voters had registered with federal officials. In Lowndes and Wilcox counties, where no African Americans had registered to vote before 1965, black voters represented a majority of those registered by 1967. Black voter turnout and public officeholding have also increased dramatically in the state, although only modest gains have been made in electing African Americans to statewide offices. The Alabama experience thus offers a remarkable piece of evidence supporting Bullock and Gaddie’s argument that the Voting Rights Act brought profound yet unequal changes across the South. “It is striking,” the authors conclude, “that Ross Barnett’s Mississippi and George Wallace’s Alabama, less than two generations after those noted opponents to racial progress sought to block the force of history, now have the best composite scores” in the South with regard to African American voter registration , political participation, and officeholding (pp. 340–41). Historians, particularly those interested in the transformation of southern politics in the twentieth century, will find much that is useful...