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

by Carol Anderson

What Talmadge had done was to give his blessing to waves of anti-black violence.67 A World War II veteran, Maceo Snipes, was one of the first to get caught in the tide of state-sponsored lynching. This was no surprise. Black veterans were particular targets throughout the South because their sense of rights and racial justice had grown especially acute during the battles to defeat the Nazis.68 Snipes knew that he had already put his life on the line for democracy. He was willing to do it again. But what World War II didn’t kill, Georgia most certainly did. The 1946 primary was the first since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Smith v. Allwright decision, and Snipes, as an American citizen, believed that he actually had the right to participate in his state’s election. He was mistaken. Whites had already posted a sign on the black church in Taylor County, Georgia: “The first Negro to vote will never vote again.”69 Snipes was not deterred. In July 1946, he cast his ballot in Taylor County’s primary. In fact, he was the only black person to do so; and with that act of democratic bravery, Maceo Snipes signed his death warrant. A few days later four white men showed up at Snipes’s house and demanded that he step outside. As he stood on the porch, they pointed their guns at him and began firing. Snipes staggered and fell to the ground. They just walked away. His mother ran out of the house and got him to the hospital, but in Jim Crow America, black patients did not have the right to heal...