One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

by Carol Anderson

In the original confined districts, African Americans’ numbers were large enough to carry enormous electoral weight. Yet literacy tests, poll taxes, and Election Day terror had nullified that power and reduced black voter registration to the single digits. Therefore, there was no possibility of an African American candidate, or even a candidate openly attuned to the black community’s concerns, winning an election. So long as disfranchisement shut down the black vote, white Mississippi felt safe. After the Voting Rights Act, however, those districts could easily produce African American elected officials. Mississippi opted, therefore, to diffuse or dilute the black vote among a sea of whites by erasing the district boundaries and requiring candidates to run and succeed in a much wider geographical (and demographic) area. These supposedly race-neutral changes, one Mississippi legislator candidly admitted, would “preserve our way of doing business.”109