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

by Carol Anderson

Despite the fact that this scene played out over and over in registrars’ offices across the South—where a registrar in Mississippi could even ask African Americans, “How many bubbles in a bar of soap?”—the law itself was just race-neutral enough to withstand judicial scrutiny.27 Not only did literacy tests appear nondiscriminatory; they also carried the aura of plausibility. Voters, everyone could agree, ought to be able to understand their state’s laws. Yet when that device was made operational, it had nothing to do with the law, of course, nothing to do with an engaged citizenry, and precisely everything to do with eliminating as many age-eligible African Americans from the voter rolls as possible. Eighty percent was Carter Glass’s goal. But the actual numbers were even more brutal. By 1953 in the Deep South, “eleven counties where the black population equaled or exceeded that of whites” had only 1.3 percent of all eligible blacks registered to vote.