Black Political Representation in the American South

Introduction

African Americans have come a long way since the nation's inception. From the days of slavery to the present, many bridges have been crossed and many battles have been won. Gone are the days when Black Americans were required to sit at the back of the bus or told they must eat at a certain restaurant. Black and white children go to school together daily, grow up on the same streets, and marry into each other's races with increasing frequency. It is becoming the America that the founding fathers envisioned at the time the nation was created.

One of the reasons America is known as the most powerful nation on earth is the strength and stability of its political system. The democratic political system allows voters to elect those who they want to represent their thoughts, desires, and ideas. This system has been in place for more than 200 years and is respected throughout the world. The representation of voters can be changed whenever voters decide that those they have elected are no longer serving their best interests.

On the surface it appears to be the perfect political system — except for one problem. When one takes a closer look at the American political system, particularly in the southern United States, it becomes clear that Black Americans are significantly underrepresented.

The reasons for this have been debated in many arenas over the years. Some believe it has to do with a disinterest in the political system among Black Americans, while others argue that it stems from the long-standing oppression that Black people have had to endure for two centuries. The most constant factor in the problem of Black underrepresentation across the South, however, is the residual effect of slavery. Blacks and whites alike in the South have come to expect white leadership — a lingering form of oppression whose hold on the southern population has caused the political underrepresentation of Black America. This problem can be addressed through the theories and ideas of Black leaders such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and others.

Before one can begin to understand the current problem of political underrepresentation in the South, it is important to first understand the history of the situation.

History of Black Voting Rights in the South

In 1995, as the nation commemorated the 30th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, African Americans in the South were confronted with new challenges in voting rights and political representation. The proliferation of lawsuits challenging majority-Black congressional districts, escalating attempts to block implementation of the Motor Voter law, and recent decisions by the Supreme Court and Courts of Appeal limiting the scope of the Voting Rights Act and its application to judicial elections made voting rights advocates worry whether history could repeat itself. In Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act 1965–1990, authors Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman propose that "the Voting Rights Act must be seen as a mechanism to ensure that the second Reconstruction of the 1960s did not meet the same fate as that of the first Reconstruction of the 1860s and 1870s."

While the issue was being actively addressed, it was not a new one. The Voting Rights Act did not appear out of nowhere. It came to fruition after more than 100 years of work and effort to end the subjugation of African Americans and their disenfranchisement from political life, including the question of representation. This Act was an important step toward correcting a problem that had persisted for more than a century, though it was not a complete cure and has not been since.

Even before the Civil War, the Three-Fifths Clause in the Constitution "allowed the white South to exert far greater power in national elections than its numbers warranted," argues historian Eric Foner in Voting and the Spirit of American Democracy. Of sixteen presidential elections between 1788 and 1848, "all but four placed a Southern slaveholder in the White House," Foner continues.

Following the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 14th Amendment was ratified on July 28, 1868, providing citizenship rights to African Americans who had previously been denied them. The 15th Amendment, ratified on March 30, 1870, gave these new citizens the right to vote. However, the right of African Americans to vote and hold office was challenged from the very beginning. As early as 1871, Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act, which, according to the Reference Library of Black America, "was an attempt to force acceptance of Black suffrage in the South and end the intimidation and violence."

It is important to understand these events in the context of current Black political representation in the South. At a time when whites held full voting rights and the ability to run for public office, Black Americans were still being suppressed and oppressed.

In the period between 1864 and 1870, a vigorous debate raged over the question of the African American vote. Even then the debate had partisan overtones, as the readmission of Southern states to the Union was tied to the enfranchisement of African Americans and to Republican Party control of Congress. The Fourteenth Amendment — bestowing citizenship on African Americans — dictated congressional terms for readmission of the Southern states, and the counting of formerly enslaved people for apportionment added 15 additional congressional seats to the House of Representatives.

During the last 30 years of the 19th century, Black Americans were briefly provided with the majority vote and had 22 representatives in the United States Congress. The South Carolina legislature had a Black majority as well, with 87 Black members to 40 white members.

A historical parallel can be drawn between the attacks on African American voting rights that followed the successes of the Reconstruction era and the attacks on minority voting that followed the tremendous gains made under the Voting Rights Act. Between 1972 and 1992, the number of African Americans in Congress from the South grew from 0 to 17. Likewise, the overall number of Black elected officials in the South grew from 1,179 in 1973 to 4,924 in 1993. While these numbers appear impressive, they still represent an underrepresentation of Black Americans in the political arena of the southern states.

The Reconstruction-era representation of African Americans was to be short-lived. In 1876, after three years of controversy, the U.S. Senate refused to seat H. R. Pinchback, an African American who had been elected in 1873. Also in 1876, the Supreme Court began to retreat from African American voting rights, ruling that "the right of suffrage is not a necessary attribute of national citizenship" (U.S. v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542, 1876). Then came the infamous Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877, which led to the removal of presidential authority to use federal troops to guarantee fair elections. In that same period, the U.S. attorney general revealed widespread intimidation of African Americans attempting to vote, as well as ballot box stuffing in several states. In Georgia, African American representatives had been expelled from their seats on account of their race. In summary, the post-Reconstruction era saw the racial cleansing of African Americans from the Southern political landscape; the right not only to vote but also to hold office was fundamentally restricted.

Cycles of Progress and Suppression

This proved to be a persistent obstacle to the growth of Black political representation. For every step forward, Blacks in the southern states were immediately forced to take two steps back. The end of the 19th century saw riots throughout the South over Black voting rights. By 1890, Mississippi had inaugurated the first of the constitutional conventions that would sweep the South and systematically exclude African Americans from the political arena. By 1896, voting rights for African Americans triggered riots across the South, and Representative George White of North Carolina became the only African American remaining in the U.S. Congress. Between 1896 and 1900, the number of Black voters in Louisiana was reduced from 130,000 to 5,000.

This pattern is another example of Black southerners being politically oppressed and forced to begin again. Each time they had to restart, white leaders continued building on momentum accumulated over more than a century. To make this tangible: consider a foot race in which two runners head for the same goal simultaneously. If one runner is allowed to run at full speed without interference while the second is constantly told to return to the starting line, it is not difficult to predict who would win. If all Black runners except one were repeatedly sent back to the starting block while all white runners and that one Black runner were allowed to continue, the finish line results would be telling. The lone Black runner would arrive alongside the whites, and it might appear that Black runners were underrepresented by choice — when in reality the other Black runners had been held back by the rules of the race itself.

This analogy applies again and again to the way political representation in the South has operated. It would take 72 years after Representative White left Congress for African American voters in the South to once again elect a candidate of their choice to the U.S. Congress, and another twenty years and two amendments to the Voting Rights Act before that opportunity became a reality across most Southern states.

In 1964, two-thirds of the nation's states adopted the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, prohibiting Southern states — the only places where the practice persisted — from denying citizens the right to vote through the use of a poll tax. Within months after national television cameras recorded "Bloody Sunday" in Selma, Alabama, where John Lewis and other civil rights marchers were brutally attacked by state troopers, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. In the 1970s and 1980s, due to the record of continued violations of the Act primarily in Southern states, Congress renewed and strengthened the law.

Because of continued resistance in the South to African American voting rights, it took the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 to realize rights that had been granted by the 15th Amendment some 95 years earlier. To argue in 1995 that race-conscious redistricting violated the principle of a color-blind Constitution was to ignore what had been a bitter reality for African Americans since the Three-Fifths Clause — neither the Constitution nor American society had ever truly been color-blind.

While no one can deny the impact that these constant setbacks have had on the political representation of Black Americans in the South, there are remedies that can accelerate the process of correction. It is important to draw lessons from those who fought for the freedoms won thus far, and to build on those lessons to improve Black political representation in the South.

Conclusion

The responsibility for the lack of political representation of Black Americans in the South is two-pronged. It involves both the history of repeated setbacks that Black Americans have endured and the current attitudes about race that still persist in America. The answer lies in implementing a quota system that will allow Black Americans to catch up to the political freedom and support that white Americans have long enjoyed. Such a system, rooted in the lessons of leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and informed by the boldness of Malcolm X, offers the most direct path toward genuine political equality in the American South.