One Person, No Vote (YA edition): How Not All Voters Are Treated Equally

by Carol Anderson

ARGUMENT #3: The VRA picked on the South. In 1970, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, one of the most powerful members of Congress, insisted that the VRA was “nothing more than a device created to inflict political punishment upon one section of the country.” Such thinking totally ignored decades of Election Day terror, literacy tests, poll taxes, and white primaries. It failed to explain the fact that as late as World War II, fewer than 1 percent of age-eligible blacks were registered to vote in South Carolina. It also ignored stats like this: when Thurmond uttered those infamous words in 1970, only “28 percent of blacks were registered in Thurmond’s home of Edgefield County, compared with 96 percent of whites,” Ari Berman pointed out in his book Give Us the Ballot.