Or Other Crime
In 1866, an Army officer named Robert Avery was stationed in North Carolina when he began hearing disturbing reports: Former rebels were rounding up as many Black men as they could find, dispensing summary justice, and whipping them in public view. Avery, an agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau there, alerted his superiors in Washington. The press got hold of his dispatch and began to chronicle the situation. Harper’s Weekly told of 500 people in Raleigh gathering to watch “the public whipping of colored men.”
The whippings were about more than bloodlust. They served a political purpose. Under North Carolina law, a crime punished by public whipping would cost the offender the right to vote. The white rebels plotted to “seize negroes, procure convictions for petty offenses punishable at the whipping post, and thus disqualify them forever from voting in North Carolina,” Avery reported. He had overheard members of the state legislature celebrating that it would “head off Congress from making the negroes voters.” One had bragged, “We are licking them in our part of the State and if we keep on we can lick them all by next year, and none of them can vote.”
Just a few months earlier, Congress had passed the 14th Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification. In the second section of the amendment, the antislavery Republicans sought to enfranchise the freed men in the South. But rather than affirmatively extend the franchise, they devised a way to punish states that did not allow Black men to vote: Should a state disenfranchise its Black men, its congressional delegation would be reduced in proportion to the number of those excluded from the vote. But the architects of this approach left a loophole: States would not see their delegations reduced for citizens disenfranchised “for participation in rebellion, or other crime.” In North Carolina, white supremacists decided to turn every Black man they could into a convict, taking away his right to vote while preserving their power in Congress.
. Three small words that continue to shape America today. It is a great irony of our history that the 14 Amendment, which enshrined in the Constitution the promise of equal protection under the law, is today the principal source of Black disenfranchisement. But there’s no reason to accept this fate. At a time when the public is increasingly aware of modern attempts at suppression, the tools for resurrecting the fundamental right to vote are waiting to be put to use. Our future could depend on how seriously we decide to take the rest of the words in Section
