Suffrage Rights Research Articles

Citizenship Training--A Neglected Area in Adult Education

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

Disabilities Affecting Suffrage Among Negroes

President Roosevelt's strident pronunciamiento of a few weeks ago against the imposition of a poll tax requirement was a forceful reminder that today in these United States, the land of Democracy, there are still millions of people, white and black, twenty-one years of age or more, possessed of sound minds, and free from any criminal records, citizens of the United States and of the particular states wherein they reside, and therefore qualified electors who, nevertheless, do not possess the free and untrammelled right of suffrage. So many disabilities, some legal and some administratively imposed, have been thrown around the utilization of this suffrage right that a great segment of the American people is a stranger to the ballot, its responsibilities, and its advantages. It is agreed that necessarily some restriction must be imposed upon the exercise of suffrage by the several states in order that fraud, bribery, and corruption may be eliminated from elections as much as it is possible so to do,' but it is submitted that a study

The Anti-Saloon League—Why and What?

THE Anti-Saloon League came into existence at Oberlin, Ohio, in the month of May, 1893. It was conceived in the brain of Rev. Howard H. Russell, aformer student of Oberlin and, for some years prior to 1893, pastor of a Congregational church in Chicago. In the long struggle to suppress drunkenness, many organizations have been conceived and born. Most of them have died a natural death within a brief period. After the Civil War drunkenness steadily increased. The liquor traffic grew and flourished until, as a commercial enterprise, it overshadowed most others of which the land could boast. Up to the close of the last century, the most efficient group in the movement to curb drunkenness was the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Through the influence of the leaders of that organization, every state in the Union adopted laws requiring the teaching of scientific temperance in the public schools. But the women were denied the right of suffrage and hence their influence in politics was not an important factor. On the other hand, the strongly financed liquor interests maintained powerful lobbies at Washington and in every state capital of the nation. Year after year witnessed the enactment of laws more favorable to the saloon and more detrimental to sobriety. Such were some of the existing conditions when this Chicago preacher dreamed of a federated church, organized and marching as one army to the defense of the country against its most powerful internal foe. WHAT?

The Recent Italian Elections

Since this is the first time that the great majority of male adults have had the opportunity of exercising the franchise, the recent Italian elections constitute an event of considerable significance, and were watched with much interest in Europe.According to the new electoral law of 1912–13, practically all adult male Italians were given the right to vote at Parliamentary elections. More specifically, this right of suffrage may now be exercised by three classes of citizens: (1) all literate male Italians who are twenty-one years old; (2) illiterates who have reached the age of thirty; (3) all who have served in the Italian army or navy, even though they have not attained the age of twenty-one. Thus the number of possible voters has been increased from less than 3,500,000 to more than 8,500,000—an addition of over 5,000,000 illiterates.