“Just Buy My Vote”: African American Voting Rights, and the Chicago Condition

By Joseph L. Simmons Jr.

It is a federal and state felony to buy or sell votes, or to offer to buy or sell votes, yet “Just Buy My Vote”: African American Voting Rights, and the Chicago Condition is a unique story that must be told. It is a story where I attempt to summarize without excruciating detail the relevant portions of nearly three centuries. “Just Buy My Vote” is also unique in that it covers race relations, black history and urban history; written from the perspective of the Southside of Chicago. “Just Buy My Vote” is intended to inform the reader about the significance of voting, by explaining voting rights in layman terms, with the use of the voting rights laws, history, philosophy, and sociology. It is an effort to raise the level of political consciousness among Americans, to help readers to realize the history of voting rights and be encouraged to use the power of the vote to further all of our best economic and social interests. Thankfully, in the presidential election of 2020, we got the voting part right! We now have a democracy to save.

“Just Buy My Vote” is a tale of two stories. First, it tells a story about how African Americans in this country attained the right to vote, and utilized that power to improve their lives, and the lives of many others, for future generations. And secondly, “Just Buy My Vote” uses Chicago as a case study of how voting rights and voter apathy, helped enable an old school “political villain” and his machine, to maintain a system of public and governmental corruption in Chicago for two decades. In my writing this book, I aimed to inform on history, and have also attempted to describe a journey, within a journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jan 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781665579520

Joseph L. Simmons Jr.

Joseph L. Simmons, Jr. is uniquely qualified to write “Just Buy My Vote”: African American Voting Rights, and the Chicago Condition because he grew up on the Southside of Chicago, and was an active participant in Chicago politics by organizing and fighting against the corrupt Daley Machine for several years. In addition to actively participating in many local elections, Joseph ran as a reform candidate for the Chicago City Council in 1995 and 1999. While Joseph was active in Chicago politics, he watched the beginning years of President Barack Obama’s political career in Chicago. In 1996, Joseph was appointed Treasurer of the Chicago Board of Education (a/k/a Chicago Public Schools), the first African American to have ever held that position. Joseph, while discovering years of financial mismanagement at the Board, was subsequently forced to sue the Board of Education for both political and racial discrimination for his removal from the Treasurer position. Joseph was also a plaintiff, and testified in a voting rights lawsuit against the City of Chicago (Barnett v. City of Chicago, 1997) a/k/a the “Chicago Ward Remap Case.” This lawsuit was successful in causing the re-drawing of city ward boundaries to increase the number of African American majority wards on the Southside of Chicago. And while living in Chicago, Joseph was a Board Member of the Citizens Information Services of Illinois (CIS), which among other things helped provide voter education services to the public, and in schools. Joseph’s opinions are informed not just from growing up and operating politically on the Southside of Chicago, which is the best education you can’t pay for, but also having received his B.A. in Psychology from Northern Illinois University, and a Master’s degree in Urban Planning and Policy (MUPP) from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Joseph moved from Chicago to Las Vegas in 2002, and since moving to Nevada has worked as a Realtor, transacting buying and selling real estate in the Las Vegas Metropolitan Valley.

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© 2023 Joseph L. Simmons, Jr. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 01/25/2023

ISBN: 978-1-6655-7953-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-7951-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-7952-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023900104

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Section I: History and Context of Voting Rights: A Chronology of African American Voting Rights

Chapter 1 Understanding Voting Rights: Only Some White Men Can Vote

Chapter 2 Freedom, Suffrage, and Terror: African Americans’ Tease at Democracy

Chapter 3 The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Three Reconstructions: Striving To Level The Playing Field

Section II: Understanding the Chicago Tradition

Chapter 4 Historical Chicago Politics: Great Migration to the Black Metropolis

Chapter 5 The Original Mayor Daley (1955–1976): An Overrated Powerhouse

Chapter 6 Chicago African American Political Titans and Trendsetters

Section III: It Takes More than a Village to Enact Cultural Warfare

Chapter 7 Blue-on-Black Crime

Chapter 8 Da Mayor and the Regime That Put Chicago in Crisis

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I dedicate this book to my dear friend in heaven, Bruce Crosby. We worked on the original idea of this book together, back while working on numerous campaigns on the South Side. Bruce supported me in my Eighteenth Ward efforts, and he was instrumental to my deeper interest in voting rights. Bruce had a great smile and laughter, and those who knew him know he committed his life to voting rights.

I also want to thank the younger brother, Will Crosby, a strong member and advisor in the Chicago Black community and an expert on voting rights and redistricting. I, of course, want to thank my father, my example of fatherhood. He backed me up all my life, and he has been the wind beneath my wings.

And a special thanks to my son, Joey. He reviewed many versions of chapters and gave me valuable feedback in between his college courses. It takes a village.

INTRODUCTION

The preamble to the United States Constitution begins with the words We, the people. Therefore, supposedly We, the People, by way of the American voting system, determine the lawmakers and appointees that we, as citizens, pay and trust to govern our country. Therefore, in theory, our voting determines the laws that we live by on a local, state, and national level. It follows that in America, and every city and town within, our electoral decisions determine the basis of our collective, current, and future living conditions. Voter participation and turnout are the bottom line on voting and impacting the system in which we live. However, there remain too many Americans who are not registered—and even more who are qualified to vote but typically don’t bother to show up on Election Day. The nearly 56 percent voting age population turnout in 2016 put the US behind most developed democratic nations in the world for voting participation. Then in 2020, we sprang back in a historic way, in the most divisive and consequential presidential election in many lifetimes.

The presidential election of 2020 ironically, one hundred years after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote, and fifty-five years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, seems like poetic justice. The 2020 presidential election had a historic turnout, the highest turnout in more than a century, at least in part because Donald Trump and his Trumpism was so divisive to the nation. It was arguably the most incompetent, irresponsible, and worst administration in the history of the republic, and their mismanagement of the global coronavirus pandemic, which has infected more than 99 million Americans and caused more than one million American deaths. And still, there was so much more on the ballot, including a tattered economy with a huge financial deficit attached, major layoffs with record unemployment, many small businesses closing, overwhelming food lines, a looming eviction crisis, four years of exhaustion from openly governmental corruption, and extremely exacerbated racial inequalities and unrest worsened by a racially divisive president. One of Trump’s worst features and effects was that he amplified and reanimated racism into the open.

Voter participation was off the charts and up on both sides. Voter turnout was at least 65 percent as a share of the voting-eligible population. Coincidentally, the last time the nation’s turnout level was 65 percent was in 1908, the same year Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. was founded at Howard University. And the first woman elected vice president, Kamala Harris, is a member of the AKA sorority and founding chapter. More than eighty million people voted for the Biden-Harris ticket. More people voted for Joe Biden and VP Kamala Harris than any other presidential ticket in history. Biden received approximately 87 percent of the Black vote, performing better among Black voters than any other demographic group. Joe Biden publicly admitted himself that his election was in large part due to the support he received from the Black community across the country.

There are years of evidence that turnout varies considerably among different racial, ethnic, and age groups. The Pew Research Center report (May 2018) noted the Black voter turnout rate had declined for the first time in twenty years in a presidential election, falling to 59.6 percent in 2016 after reaching a record-high 66.6 percent in 2012 with President Obama on the ballot. With Barack Obama on the ballot that year, the Black voter turnout rate surpassed that of White voters for the first time. Black turnout was a substantial 7-percentage-point decline for the following presidential election with Hillary Clinton on the ticket. Despite the global pandemic, given all the circumstances and urgencies in the monumentally historic year of 2020, despite immense attempts and various forms of voter suppression in several counties and states, Black voters turned it up and out, and they were pivotal for Biden-Harris.

By far, the crescendo to the most infamous year of 2020 was the defeat of Donald Trump. One proud Black voter emerged from the polls in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Election Day, November 3, 2020, and mentioned with pride about the Black vote, We went from picking cotton to picking presidents. To that, I say, Just Buy My Vote.

Historically, the Thirteenth Amendment freed the slaves, and the Fourteenth Amendment gave them citizenship. But the key to the First Reconstruction was the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing male former slaves the right to vote. The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the federal government and each state from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen’s race, color, or previous condition of servitude. That First Reconstruction era was a remarkably brief Reconstruction period of 1865–1877, which I refer to as the African Americans’ Tease at Democracy. It was followed by an era of White violence, lynch mobs of White supremacy, and ninety years of violent Jim Crow rule. It took nearly one hundred years for the Second Reconstruction to emerge, spurred by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the civil rights movement, and culminating with the election and reelection of President Barack Obama.

Voter apathy and voter suppression contribute to the corruption and gridlock we see in our government today and throughout history. Just Buy My Vote: African American Voting Rights and the Chicago Condition is intended to inform the reader about the significance of voting by explaining voting rights in layman’s terms with the use of the voting rights laws, history, philosophy, and sociology. Just Buy My Vote is an effort to raise the level of political sophistication among all Americans, meaning helping every reader realize and be encouraged to use the power of the vote to further each and everyone’s best economic and social interests. Because with voter participation comes the power of having your collective interests addressed and concerns embraced.

Just Buy My Vote is a tale of two stories. First, it tells a story about how African Americans in this country attained the right to vote and utilized that power to improve their lives, and the lives of many others, for future generations. Secondly, Just Buy My Vote uses Chicago as a case study of how voting rights and voter apathy helped enable an old-school political villain and his machine to maintain a system of public and governmental corruption in Chicago for two decades. This discussion must include the Black community’s complicity (BCC) in this negative cycle. Just Buy My Vote provides a brief history of Chicago politics, my home sweet home Chicago. The story of Chicago politics is a story of machine politics, systemic government corruption, and American racial politics. I explain how the participation of a racially biased media, various political conspirators, and African American voter apathy helped the former mayor of Chicago, Richard M. Daley (Daley II), a corrupt local dictator, take one of the largest American cities for a long ride in the wrong direction and helped create the path that we see today of social and financial crisis.

Just Buy My Vote was originally conceived in the late 1990s, in the basement of the home I grew up, on Eighty-Second and Loomis Boulevard, on the South Side of Chicago. At that time, the book was intended to be the book that woke up Chicago and helped defeat Mayor Daley. I attribute all credit for the book title, and many ideas, to my father, Joseph L. Simmons, Sr. The title is a sarcastic and humorous way of expressing that I don’t believe in any allegiance or loyalty to any particular political party. I believe in a loyalty to my social, financial, and community interests. Truth be told, the Chicago Democratic organization was responsible for decades of corruption and multigenerational cultural warfare inflicted upon the Black community in Chicago. Hence, Just Buy My Vote. Much has transpired since then. I moved out of Chicago, and Daley II finally decided to retire from being mayor. Since Daley’s retirement, Chicago has had two very different mayors. While Daley stepping down from mayor after twenty-two years in office was no doubt a great relief for the city and its citizens, I felt the story still needed to be told of how corrupt Daley’s tenure was and how regime change was only a single first step toward finding positive solutions for Chicago’s future.

While growing up on the South Side of Chicago, I was an active participant in Chicago politics by organizing and fighting against the corrupt Daley II machine for several years. In addition to actively participating in many local elections, I ran as a reform candidate for the Chicago City Council in 1995 and 1999. While I was active in Chicago politics, I also watched the beginning years of President Barack Obama’s political career in Chicago.

Michelle Obama, the native Chicagoan and South Sider, said it best at the White House Convening on Creating Opportunity for Native Youth on April 8, 2015: Poverty and violence didn’t just randomly happen to this community. These issues are the result of a long history of systematic discrimination and abuse. This describes the problems within the Black community as well. This book will make exactly that case about why Chicago is in the crisis it finds itself today, and it will place the blame and responsibility where it belongs. More importantly, once the problem has been diagnosed, we can better see a cure and solution to the crisis in Chicago.

In the fall of 1996, I was hired as treasurer of the Chicago Board of Education (Chicago Public Schools). I was the first African American to have ever held that position. After discovering years of financial mismanagement at the board, I was removed from the position of treasurer, and I subsequently sued the board of education for both political and racial discrimination. While in litigation, I continued to work at the board of education for six years in various departments (1996–2002).

I have advocated for and studied voting rights for several years. Additionally, I was a plaintiff and testified in a federal voting rights lawsuit against the City of Chicago (Barnett v. City of Chicago, 1997), which was known as the Chicago Ward Remap Case. This lawsuit was successful in causing the redrawing of city ward boundaries to increase the number of African American majority wards on the South Side of Chicago. Just Buy My Vote is a compilation of research and firsthand knowledge and experiences in Chicago politics.

Nationally, and even among Chicagoans, much of the turbulent Chicago political history is not known because it is not taught, publicized, or even properly discussed from a perspective other than to glorify the past political bosses of Chicago. The point of this book is to provide another perspective: a South Side of Chicago perspective. It is essential to tell the other side of the story, which just happens to explain, at least in part, a number of the very serious problems facing Chicago today.

Just Buy My Vote is organized in three sections. Section I is a comprehensive and easy-to-read summary of the journey to attain voting rights for African Americans (as early as the nineteenth century), including some of the voting rights pioneers, voting rights legislation, various legal and legislative battles, and the sociological context that helped fuel the Great Migration of African Americans to cities like Chicago. Section II provides a brief history of some of the most notable Chicago politicians as well as the underreported Great Migration and its impact on Chicago and other parts of the nation. The story of Chicago politics is an American story of machine politics and American racial politics. Section III explains how by largely controlling the media, various political conspirators, and the crucial role of African American voter apathetic complicity, Mayor Richard M. Daley (Daley II) put the City of Chicago on the path to unavoidable crisis. The Chicago condition can be explained by a form of cultural warfare against African Americans and a commitment to racial segregation and discrimination that lasted for decades and generations.

We must recognize that the United States has gone through both gradual and significant changes within the law and implementation of the various laws regarding voting and civil rights. In addition to the legal aspects, there are various racial and sociological aspects and impacts of voting in American history. Therefore, this book is written to provide some history and perspective on the struggle for African Americans to attain the right to vote, including the experience and impact of the Great Migration from the South to the South Side of Chicago. My perspective is shaped by growing up on the South Side of Chicago in the early 1960s and 1970s and my active participation in the electoral process, learning politics in Chicago, Illinois, where we refer to politics as a blood sport.

It is also important to note that, in this book, I will attempt to summarize without excruciating detail the relevant portions of nearly three centuries. There are numerous other sources, some of which I reference, that cover voting and civil rights in much more detail in each of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, including works that focus on only certain decades or periods therein. Therefore, this book is not a complete history of civil rights, voting rights, or the evolution of Black political power.

Millions of people from around the world have come to the United States to live because of our freedoms, including democracy, and the rights that we, as Americans, enjoy and often take for granted. How do we, as citizens, utilize those rights to our advantage to improve our lives—and the lives of future generations? The 2020 election set records for voter turnout. We have to believe and ensure that voter engagement and participation remain high.

In explaining how inefficient and corrupt our government often performs, evidence abounds that we get the democracy we deserve. This supports the case that voter participation is an underutilized civic obligation for all citizens rather than simply one of our rights. Our nation’s democracy seems threatened and fragile right now, largely as a result of Trumpism. We now know that citizens who care about how our democratic nation operates, are dependent upon each other to use the power of the vote to select representation and leadership and further each and everyone’s best economic and social interests. We will not always agree, but the freedom to peaceably disagree is the essence of democracy, and it makes America a great place to live.

Not everyone realizes the extent that many fought, shed blood, and gave of their lives in the battle to gain the right to vote. This partially explains why far too many Americans, unfortunately, take our democracy for granted by not voting. People often ask, Why should I vote? The answer is in the rugged path to attain the right to vote and the power that comes from continuing the battle to keep and expand voting. Just Buy My Vote makes the case that voting is both a civic responsibility and a moral obligation on the part of Americans. By helping the reader understand the evolution and struggles to attain voting rights, my intention is to educate the reader with history and provide new perspectives to help motivate more people to vote.

The voting history of African Americans in Chicago is result of the influx of large numbers of Black people migrating and establishing segregated communities. Voter suppression has taken a different form in Chicago than in many other cities and states. In Chicago, the Black vote was more manipulated and exploited rather than the typical forms of voter suppression.

I use Chicago as a case study of how voting rights and voter apathy enabled systemic corruption in Chicago to take place for more than forty years under the rule of Richard J. Daley (Daley I) and then his son Richard M. Daley (Daley II). Unfortunately, the Chicago electorate, for decades, failed to use the most important tool of the vote to combat the corruption of the Daley machines and thus remained in social, financial, and political crisis. A very important question to answer is this: What did the masses of Chicagoans get from their participation in the local political process?

In the introduction of Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Richard Wright wrote that Chicago is the known city. Perhaps more is known about Chicago—how the city is run, how it kills, how it loves, how it steals, how it helps, how it gives, how it cheats, and how it crushes—than any other city in the world. Some still consider Chicago a Black metropolis. Having personally experienced or seen many of the things described by Wright, I felt compelled to complete my research and share this manifesto regarding the great city of Chicago.

I was also heavily influenced by the late attorney and author Leon Despres and his Challenging the Daley Machine: A Chicago Alderman’s Memoir. Despres, a native Chicagoan, served in the Chicago City Council as alderman of the Fifth Ward from 1955 until 1975. Despres was known as a shrewd observer of machine politics and Black politics in Chicago. A White lawyer from the South Side, he was sometimes referred to as the dean of anti-machine aldermen. I had the opportunity to get to know him up close for a brief period since Despres served as co-counsel during my lawsuit against the Chicago Board of Education. Despres and I shared a great disdain and contempt for corrupt political leaders, specifically the Daley’s.

Just Buy My Vote is the accumulation of more than twenty years of observations, articles, note-taking, and research. I wrote Just Buy My Vote out of my passion to tell a story that matters, describe the significance of voting rights and the African American experience, and share my compassion for the city of Chicago and its citizens. This book shares my personal experiences in Chicago government and politics and years of historical research. This manifesto hopefully will serve to educate, enrage, enlighten, and inspire a community to action. Unfortunately, when electing mayors, with rare exceptions, in many ways the Black community in Chicago was complicit and served largely as an unconscious electorate for more than decades, giving way to two Mayor Daley’s and the power to nearly destroy the Black community in an otherwise great city.

A study published by the University of Illinois at Chicago (2012) named Chicago as the most corrupt city in America, but Richard M. Daley (Daley II) is touted by some as the best and most powerful mayor in American history. This book challenges that myth and rhetoric with truth and facts. Daley II presided over twenty-two years of systemic corruption, and this book explains some of the reasons why—in a city of rigid racial bloc voting—Daley II came to power and maintained absolute power for more than two decades.

As for Daley’s great legacy, history shows how the City of Chicago was in far worse shape when he left than when he initially took office, a direct result of public corruption. This manifesto proves that a more informed and active voter participation in Chicago could have changed the history and future of the city in many positive ways. The Black community in Chicago bears responsibility for being complicit in the political manipulation. Chicago today demonstrates some of the most difficult and dire urban crises in the nation, to which I offer the solution of a Reconciliation and a Third Reconstruction.

In a review of United States historical voting rights laws and activities such as this, I explain how the voting rights and political activities of African Americans have facilitated some major political party shifts—in political activities and philosophies—at the local, state, and national levels. African Americans have fought long and hard for political equality in America. Many Black leaders and activists have accomplished great things and attained high elected positions in the political arena. The level of voter support from African Americans obviously helped make Barack Obama’s election as president possible. It is ironic that the city that President Obama began his political career is a city that suffers such racial, social, financial, and political crises.

In many places around the world, millions of people have protested against corruption and the lack of real freedom and true democracy. How can we justify not taking advantage of the rights already attained and granted to us by nature of our citizenship in this great country? We often forget that we hire and fire our elected public officials through the voting process. It is what helps make our country great! While knowing our history is important and instructive, it is more important to look forward to the future we want for ourselves and our children.

Just Buy My Vote is intended to bring about action and encourage more voter participation by all citizens in the present and future. It is about educating, organizing, mobilizing, and electing individuals who will serve all our best interests.

Just Buy My Vote is intended to provide history, education, and a new perspective on the Chicago condition and to ignite supporters of a more politically active agenda around the country to exercise the right to vote. In 2012, the National Urban League president and CEO, Marc Morial, released Occupy the Vote to Educate, Employ, and Empower, which stated, More than the economy, more than jobs, more than an excellent education for all children, the single issue that arguably stands to have the greatest impact on the future of Black America is the vote. The 2012 election was a record-setting year for Black voter turnout, which reelected President Obama. Black America’s vote was also extremely impactful in the 2020 election against Trumpism on the ballot.

Just Buy My Vote is a story that will interest anyone who cares about the history and relevance of voting rights, particularly the granting and exclusion of voting rights for African Americans in the United States. All students of the Voting Rights Act—as well as those interested in civil rights, politics, history, and race relations in America—will enjoy this comprehensive summary. Americans of all races and ages, will enjoy this comprehensive, easy-to-read summary of many voting rights pioneers and their successes and struggles. Just Buy My Vote makes the case that voting is a civic responsibility and a moral obligation on the part of all Americans by helping readers to understand the evolution and struggles that have provided the right to vote.

My goal is to show nonvoters how voting is the most important tool for addressing issues and interests—as well as fighting public corruption and bad public policy—by providing an interesting and multifaceted assemblage of historical facts about Chicago and the nation. This will hopefully compel every reader to make more informed social and political actions in their everyday lives, especially on Election Day.

SECTION I

History and Context of Voting

Rights: A Chronology of

African American Voting Rights

CHAPTER 1

Understanding Voting Rights:

Only Some White Men Can Vote

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This book, at least in part, is intended to discuss the issue of suffrage in America. The term suffrage means the political franchise or simply the franchise of voting rights gained through the democratic process. We’ll discuss what specifically was the genesis of the right to vote in the United States and how that right ultimately was shared with all citizens, including women and African Americans. However, plainly stated, from the start in this country, voting rights were denied on the basis of wealth, religion, sex, and race. It is safe to say that the issue of voting rights has been fairly contentious since the founding of this country.

Because we so often take democracy and the right to vote for granted, it is easy to forget where it all began. It began with the right to vote for some White males, and is now such a familiar doctrine that it would be easy to believe that it always existed in America, but it did not. Five years after Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence (1776), he estimated that more than half of the White men in Virginia who paid taxes and served in the militia were not permitted to vote, and when John Adams wrote a state constitution for Massachusetts to replace the old colonial charter, he did not expand the franchise. Instead, he narrowed it.¹

The majority of men in the late eighteenth century still believed that the vote was a privilege to be conferred only upon those who possessed enough money or land to be politically reliable. Only a minority insisted that it was a right and that a White man who lived under a country’s laws was entitled to a share or voice in its government.² Universal suffrage, meaning the right of all to vote and have representation, was not even a consideration by those making the laws at the time. The thinking was why should men who are not wealthy, potentially without a dollar, in any way determine the rights of property. Furthermore, it was thought that the uneducated could not be trusted to vote wisely because they might simply fall for the political favorite of the moment.

During these times, there was a high qualification for voting and holding public office. In South Carolina, in the mid-1700s, it was necessary for the voter to own a hundred acres of land or to have paid an annual tax of ten shillings. And to be eligible for a seat in the lower (state) house, a man had to own five hundred acres of land and ten slaves or property worth a defined amount.³

In 1765, before the Declaration of Independence was signed, and before the US Constitution was enacted, the British Empire attempted a stamp tax on the American colonists. Many Americans believed that taxation without representation was the first step toward slavery, and a Massachusetts lawyer, John Adams, was willing to risk his life rather than submit.⁴ In retrospect, of course, the problem was that while they were not willing to subject themselves to such conditions, slavery had already been established wherein Black people were made to exist with an inferior status. The first record of African slavery in colonial America was around 1619 in Virginia.⁵ Therefore, even before the establishment of the US Constitution, there would be a pervasive mindset of both inconsistency and hypocrisy regarding the legal and human status of African Americans, including the right to vote.

Religion was also a determinant of voting and for running for public office. In several British North American colonies, before and after the 1776 Declaration of Independence, Jews, Quakers, and Catholics were excluded from the franchise and/or from running for elections. The Delaware Constitution of 1776 stated the following:

Every person who shall be chosen a member of either house, or appointed to any office or place of trust, before taking his seat, or entering upon the execution of his office, shall … also make and subscribe the following declaration, to wit: I, A B. do profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His only Son, and in the Holy Ghost, one God, blessed for evermore; and I do acknowledge the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration.

This was later repealed by article 1, section 2, of the 1792 Constitution: No religious test shall be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, under this State.⁶ And the 1777 Constitution of the State of Georgia required that anyone holding public office shall be of the Protestant religion.⁷

By the time of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, slavery in the United States was a grim reality. In the census of 1790, there were slaves counted in nearly every state; Massachusetts and the districts of Vermont and Maine were the only exceptions. In the entire country, 3.8 million people were counted, and more than seven hundred thousand of them, at least 18 percent, were slaves. In South Carolina, 43 percent of the population were slaves. In Maryland, 32 percent were slaves, and 26 percent were slaves in North Carolina. Virginia, with the largest slave population of almost three hundred thousand, had 39 percent of its population made up of slaves.⁸ In 1787, the first census counted 757,363 African Americans in the United States, comprising 19 percent of the total population, and only 9 percent were free.⁹

In the Articles of Confederation, the nation’s first constitution, there is no mention of slavery. The states were represented in Congress by state, and each state picked its own representatives. Population numbers, which became critical in the future House of Representatives, were not relevant at the time. And because fugitive slaves and the abolition movement were almost unheard of in the 1780s, there is no mention of this issue in the Articles, except regarding the return of fugitive slaves.¹⁰

On August 6, 1787, the Constitutional Convention finished writing the US Constitution. And when all the states ratified the US Constitution, the conflict between the ideologies of democracy and White supremacy was evident due to slavery and the Three-Fifths Compromise of the US Constitution. The number of people counted in each state was important because it determined how many representatives each state had in Congress. The southern states refused to sign the United States Constitution with the northern states because they wanted the slaves to be counted for the purpose of voting and taxes. The only way to get the southern states to sign the Constitution was to make some compromises between the North and the South. Northerners were concerned that if the South was allowed to count each slave as one person, they would have many more representatives in Congress than the North. By counting the slaves as three-fifths of a person, the South did not have quite as many representatives. This made it almost fair with the North and their representatives. The Three-Fifths Compromise (a.k.a. the Three-Fifths Clause) was about how every slave was to be counted as only three-fifths of a White or freed Black person for the purpose of voting or taxes. This was only one of the many compromises the South had with the North when the Constitution was being written.¹¹

Southern leaders were able to protect their sectional interests during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, preventing the insertion of any explicit antislavery position in the Constitution. Moreover, they were able to force the inclusion of the Fugitive Slave Clause and the Three-Fifths Compromise. Nevertheless, Congress retained the power to regulate the slave trade, and twenty years after the ratification of the Constitution, Congress prohibited the importation of slaves—effective January 1, 1808. In March 1807, President Thomas Jefferson signed a bill ending the importation of slaves into the United States. The importation of slaves into the United States was banned; this was the earliest act under the US Constitution that an amendment was made restricting slavery. But while the North and South were able to find common ground in order to gain the benefits of a strong union, the unity achieved in the Constitution masked deeply rooted differences in economic and political interests.

Fast-forward to 1865, at the end of the Civil War, which ended the period of enslavement that had lasted almost 250 years. The Thirteenth Amendment of the US Constitution was hugely significant because it served to legally abolish slavery in the United States. In fact, passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were constitutional legacies of the first Reconstruction era (1865–1877). These Reconstruction amendments established the rights that, through extensive litigation, set the stage for US Supreme Court rulings starting in the early twentieth century that struck down discriminatory state laws and subsequently led to a Second Reconstruction, sparked by the civil rights movement, resulting in civil rights laws in 1964 and 1965 that were intended to protect and enforce full civil rights of African Americans.

Today, we believe that the right to vote is the foundation of any democracy. However, it is important to note that the right to vote is not something that was provided for originally in the United States Constitution. In fact, each state still determines who, when, and where to vote. The Fourteenth Amendment gave Americans their first clear-cut definition of citizenship. However, the right to vote is expressly mentioned in five other amendments to the US Constitution. These five amendments limit the basis upon which the right to vote may be abridged or denied:

• Fourteenth Amendment (1868): Regarding apportionment of representatives. As significant, if not more, the Fourteenth Amendment states in section 1, All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

• Fifteenth Amendment (1870): The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

• Nineteenth Amendment (1920): The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

• Twenty-Third Amendment (1961): Residents of the District of Columbia can vote for the president and vice president.

• Twenty-Fourth Amendment (1964): The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.

• Twenty-Sixth Amendment (1971): The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.

In the absence of a federal law or constitutional amendment, each state is given considerable discretion to establish qualifications for suffrage and candidacy within its own jurisdiction. At the time of ratification of the Constitution, most states used property qualifications to restrict the franchise; the exact amount varied by state, but by some estimates, more than half of White men were barred from voting. And even though Native Americans were born in the United States, they were denied the right to vote because they were not considered citizens by law; therefore, they were ineligible to vote. Many Native Americans were told that they would become citizens if they gave up their tribal affiliations in 1887 under the Dawes Act, but this still did not guarantee their right to vote. It was only in 1924 that many Native Americans became United States citizens through the Indian Citizenship Act. However, many western states continued to deny the right to vote through property requirements, economic pressures, hiding the polls, and condoning of physical violence against those who voted or attempted to vote.¹²

It has been said that equality of human and civil rights can only be made sure through political equality. However, political equality is not something that those in power have ever sought to provide to all, particularly not to Black people in America. In 1962, churches in the North and South were being burned because they were being used to register Negro voters. President John F. Kennedy was asked about the church burnings at a press conference, and the vast majority of the nation agreed with him when he replied, The right to vote is very basic. If we’re going to neglect that right, then all our talk about freedom is hollow.¹³

Barbara C. Jordan, the legendary African American congresswoman from Texas and the first African American Congresswoman elected from the Deep South. She spoke before the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearing for Richard Nixon on July 25, 1974:

We, the people. It is a very eloquent beginning. But when that document [the Preamble to the US Constitution] was completed on the seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in that We, the people. I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decisions, I have finally been included in We, the people.¹⁴

The US Constitution, the US Supreme Court, and state legislatures and courts across the country have mainly been the determinants of voting rights by enacting laws that govern voting. Therefore, US Supreme Court decisions help prove that elections do matter. And because the US Supreme Court members are selected by the president, which we elect by voting, the importance of the selection of the US Supreme Court members cannot be overstated. The US Supreme Court is the highest court in the land, which means that the persons that We, the people indirectly appoint to the high court ultimately decide many issues of justice for us all.

The challenge remains to this day to enact federal voting rights legislation that overcomes and overrules laws brought by states intended to restrict voting—and lately even go so far as to subvert elections. Therefore, it is not enough to read and/or write about the cruel past, which thousands endured while being denied their right to vote and their human dignity. This book is an attempt to make the reader aware of the history of the struggle to get the right to vote so that, going forward, we each realize why it is our obligation to exercise our voting rights.

The vote is the most basic nonviolent vehicle for the public’s voice, and it is also the most important tool for fighting corruption and bad public policy in this country. Many of the laws and court cases that established the right to vote were the result of mass political pressure felt by public officials from voters. There have been very few instances, if any, of benevolent legislators enacting civil rights laws or magnanimous judges ruling against discrimination without being forced to do so by pressure from We, the people.

CHAPTER 2

Freedom, Suffrage, and

Terror: African Americans’

Tease at Democracy

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I. Antebellum Era (1781–1860)

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was unthinkable for a people who had not been allowed education or physical freedom to be granted political opportunity and a taste of liberty for the first time. For more than two hundred years, African Americans were seeking humanity, freedom, acknowledgment, and proof that they too were Americans, worthy and entitled to the same rights as any other American citizens, including the right to vote.

For African Americans, the war commenced not in 1861, but in 1661, which was when the Virginia Colony began passing America’s first Black codes, the charter documents of a slave society that rendered Blacks a permanent servile class and Whites a mass aristocracy. These acts were essentially a declaration of war on the entire Black culture in America. Over the next two centuries, the vast majority of the country’s Blacks were robbed of their labor and subjected to constant and capricious violence. They were raped and whipped at the pleasure of their owners. Their families lived under the threat of existential violence; in just the four decades before the Civil War, more than two million African American slaves were bought and sold. Slavery did not mean merely coerced labor, sexual assault, and torture; it meant the constant threat of having a portion, or the whole, of your family consigned to oblivion. In all regards, slavery was war on the Black family and culture.¹

In 1854, the Republican Party emerged to combat the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which threatened to extend slavery into the territories and to promote more vigorous modernization of the economy. The Kansas-Nebraska Act opened Kansas Territory and Nebraska Territory to slavery and future admission as slave states. They vigorously argued that free-market labor was superior to slavery and the very foundation of civic virtue and true republicanism; this is the Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men ideology. Imagine standing up for freedom. Since the inception, its chief opposition had been the Democratic Party, but the amount of flow back and forth of prominent politicians between the two parties was quite high between 1854 and 1896. The Republicans became known as the party of Abraham Lincoln and deliverance. During and after the First Reconstruction, a vote for Democrats was considered to be a vote to return to slavery.

Before the Civil War, the North had maintained a long strategy of appeasement and compromise, stretching from the Fugitive Slave Act back to the Constitution itself,² but slavery became the central source of escalating political tension in the 1850s. The Republican Party—the Grand Old Party (GOP) as it is often called—was determined to prevent any spread of slavery, and many Southern leaders had threatened secession if the Republican candidate, Lincoln, won in the 1860 election. Following Lincoln’s victory, many Southern Whites felt that disunion had become their only option.³

The US Supreme Court decision of 1857 in Dred Scott v. Sandford escalated the controversy over slavery. Dred Scott, a slave who had been brought to a free state by his master, filed suit for his freedom on the grounds that he had lived with his master on free soil. The Supreme Court declared that slaves were not citizens and that Congress had no power to outlaw slavery. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s decision said that slaves were so far inferior that they had no rights which the White man was bound to respect.

Southern Democrats praised the Dred Scott decision, but Republicans branded it a willful perversion of the Constitution.⁴ And while Chief Justice Roger B. Taney (in upholding slavery) had hoped to settle issues related to slavery and Congressional authority by this decision, it aroused public outrage, deepened sectional tensions between the northern and southern states, and hastened the eventual explosion of their differences into the American Civil War.⁵ On June 16, 1858, while still a candidate for the US Senate in Illinois, Abraham Lincoln delivered his prophetic A house divided against itself cannot stand speech. The political map and nation divided has remained somewhat similar over the years, and we now have predictably red states and blue states.

In his collection of historical essays, This Mighty Scourge, James McPherson noted that before the war, Jefferson Davis (president of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War, 1862–1865) defended secession, saying it was justified by the alleged radicalism of Lincoln’s plan