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Political Factors And Negro Voter Registration In The South*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Donald R. Matthews  and
James W. Prothro
Donald R. Matthews
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina
James W. Prothro
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina
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Extract

A recent Herblock cartoon in the Washington Post depicts three bare-footed backwoodsmen. The oldest and most tattered of them (labeled “poll tax”) lies wounded, his head propped against a boulder, his rifle abandoned near his side. As the other rifle-bearing rustics-identified as “literacy tests” and “scare tactics”- bend sorrowfully over him the older man says, “I think them Feds got me, boys, but I know you'll carry on.” Perhaps it is premature to anticipate the ratification of the anti-poll tax amendment proposed by the 87th Congress as the newest addition to the federal constitution. No doubt the cartoonist is correct, however, in picturing both “literacy tests” and “scare tactics” as less vulnerable to federal government attack. These presumed barriers to equal participation by Negroes in the politics of the South may “carry on” for some time to come.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 57 , Issue 2 , June 1963 , pp. 355 - 367
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1963

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Footnotes

*

Grants from the Rockefeller Foundation [to UNC's Institute for Research in Social Science], and a Senior Award for Research on Governmental Affairs from the Social Science Research Council made this research possible and are gratefully acknowledged. A portion of this paper was presented at the Duke University Conference on “The Impact of Political and Legal Changes in the Postwar South,” Durham, N. C., July 12-14, 1962.

References

1 U. S. Commission on Civil Rights, Report (Washington, G. P. O., 1959), pp. 40–41Google Scholar.

2 “Social and Economic Factors and Negro Voter Registration in the South,” this Review, Vol. 57 (1963), pp. 24–44.Google Scholar.

3 A complete list of sources used to obtain county frequencies for the independent variables used in this analysis is too lengthy to reproduce here. A mimeographed list will be supplied by the authors upon request.

We are indebted to the following research assistants for their help in collecting these data: Lawton Bennett, Lewis Bowman, Barbara Bright, Jack Fleer, Donald Freeman, Douglas Gatlin, and Richard Sutton. All told, the collection and coding of these data took one man-year of work.

4 The 1958 registration data contained in the 1959 Report of the Commission on Civil Rights are more complete than the 1960 registration data contained in the Commission's 1961 Report (Washington, 1961), Vol. I, “Voting,” and were used in all states except Tennessee, for which 1958 data were not available.

There are 1136 counties in the 11 southern states (counting Virginia's independent cities as “counties”), of which 1028 had populations containing at least 1 per cent Negroes in 1950. Negro registration figures are not available for 31 of these.

5 For a more extended discussion see Matthews and Prothro, op. cit.

6 Computations were made on the University of North Carolina's UNI VAC 1105 high-speed digital computer.

7 See Matthews and Prothro, op. cit.

8 Key, V. O. Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York, 1949), p. 531Google Scholar.

9 Ibid., p. 579.

10 Ibid., p. 617. See also Ogden, F. D., The Poll Tax in the South (University, Ala., University of Alabama Press, 1958), ch. 5Google Scholar.

11 Key, op. cit., p. 460.

12 The returns of an Advisory Committee questionnaire mailed to county registrars are reported, in part, in “Voting and Voter Requirements in North Carolina” (mimeographed), June 4, 1961.

13 Key, op. cit., ch. 23.

14 Lane, Robert E., Political Life (Glencoe, Ill., 1958), p. 308Google Scholar.

15 Ibid., Lane's conclusion is based primarily upon an analysis by Miller, Warren E., “One-Party Politics and the Voter,” this Review, Vol. 50 (1956), pp. 707–725Google Scholar. Additional support may be found in Robinson, James A. and Standing, William H., “Some Correlates of Voter Participation: The Case of Indiana,” Journal of Politics, Vol. 22 (1960), pp. 96–111CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Primary election returns were compiled from Scammon, Richard M. (ed.), Southern Primaries ′58 (Washington, Governmental Affairs Institute, 1959)Google Scholar; from various issues of the Congressional Quarterly Almanac, and Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report; legislative manuals and Reports of Secretaries of State; and the New York Times. Contests involving incumbents in Arkansas and Texas—the only southern states in which governors may succeed themselves—and uncontested races were omitted in computing medians.

17 The above is not intended to imply a single direction of causality: a meaningful choice may lead more Negroes to register, the registration of more Negroes may lead candidates to take positions more favorable to Negroes, or both. So far as bifactional as opposed to unifactional or multi-factional politics is concerned, however, one can conceive of the pattern of factionalism as the independent variable associated with Negro registration but one can hardly imagine the registration rates of Negroes as the independent variable.

18 The New York Times was consulted from January, 1945, to February, 1961, and the Southern Educational Reporting Service's “Facts on Film,” Rolls 1-40, first supplement Rolls 1-3, second supplement Rolls 1-11, were examined in a search of news about these organizations. Letters of inquiry were addressed to known national and statewide organizations seeking the location of their local chapters. Persons known to be knowledgeable about the racial politics of specific states and localities also were contacted.

19 Cash, W. J., The Mind of the South (New York, Vintage [reprint], 1960), p. 52Google Scholar.

20 The Tuskegee data are reported, by county, in Johnson, Charles S. (ed.), Statistical Atlas of Southern Counties (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1941)Google Scholar. The reports on racial violence, 1955-59, may be found in Intimidation, Reprisal, and Violence in the South's Racial Crisis, published jointly by American Friends Service Committee, Southeastern Office, High Point, N. C; National Council of Churches of Christ, Department of Racial and Cultural Relations, New York; Southern Regional Council, Atlanta, Georgia, 1960.

21 Raper, A. F., The Tragedy of Lynching (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1933), p. 1Google Scholar.

22 Ibid., p. 4.

23 Intimidation, Reprisal, and Violence, p. 15.

24 These variations are, of course, also the result of chance factors and of the fact that the 21 social and economic variables do not reflect all of the complex social and economic realities of the world. Moreover, the 21 measures we did employ were not themselves perfect measures of the variables they represented.

25 These 10 political variables are (1) states; (2) per cent of presidential vote States' Rights, 1948; per cent of presidential vote Republican (3) in 1928, (4) in 1948 and (5) in 1956; (6) per cent of vote Republican in race for statewide office in year of highest Republican vote, 1950-59; (7) presence or absence of Negro race organization in county; (8) presence or absence of white race organization in county; (9) presence or absence of desegregated school in county; and (10) number of incidents of racial violence in county.

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