Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by David J. Garrow

Author:David J. Garrow
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781504011549
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2015-02-17T07:00:00+00:00

Estimated Percentage of Voting-Age Blacks Registered Estimated Number of Black Registrants

1966 1967 1968 1966 1967 1968

Alabama

51.2 53.1 56.7 246,396 255,000 273,000

Arkansas

59.7 62.8 67.5 115,000 121,000 130,000

Florida

60.9 64.6 62.1 286,446 304,000 292,000

Georgia

47.2 54.5 56.1 289,545 334,000 344,000

Louisiana

47.1 53.2 59.3 242,130 273,000 305,000

Mississippi

32.9 45.1 59.4 139,099 199,000 251,000

North Carolina

51.0 50.3 55.3 281,134 277,000 305,000

South Carolina

51.4 50.8 50.8 190,609 189,000 189,000

Tennessee

71.7 71.7 72.8 225,000 225,000 228,000

Texas

61.6 61.6 83.1 400,000 400,000 540,000

Virginia

46.9 55.6 58.4 205,000 243,000 255,000

All Southern States

52.2 56.2 62.0 2,620,359 2,820,000 3,112,000

Sources: 1966: Southern Regional Council, Voter Registration in the South, Summer 1966 (Atlanta: SRC, 1966), as quoted in Congressional Quarterly, Revolution in Civil Rights, 3rd ed. (Washington: Congressional Quarterly Service, 1967), p. 74. 1967: VEP News 1 (September 1967): 1. 1968: VEP News 2 (September 1968): 1. As with the pre-1965 years, it should be emphasized that the majority of these figures represent observers’ best—and often somewhat imaginative—estimates, and not precise tabulations.

The most notable victories for moderation in November occurred in Arkansas, where strong black support propelled Republican Winthrop Rockefeller into the governor’s chair, and in South Carolina, where black voters supplied the margins for Senator Ernest F. Hollings and Governor Robert B. McNair. Blacks themselves also began to register some notable election victories, as Lucius Amerson won election as Macon County, Alabama sheriff and as blacks gained five seats in the Tennessee legislature, bringing their total in the eleven southern legislatures to twenty. Those twenty, however, served in only three states—eleven in Georgia, six in Tennessee, and three in Texas—leaving black southerners in the eight other states without even one member of their race in the state legislatures. Furthermore, while some moderate victories—including a second defeat of Clark by Baker—and a continued decline of explicit racism marked the November races, the darker side of southern politics by no means had disappeared. As one reporter noted, with the South Carolina contests in mind, even though open references to the race issue had all but disappeared, “it is the underlying and motivating issue in all contests.”31

Although most observers chose to concentrate on the positive electoral gains registered by blacks, such as the increase in black elected officials throughout the South from about 72 to 159 as a result of the 1966 elections, far less attention was devoted to a trend whose effect was to reinforce the racial conservatism of white southern politicians: the unprecedented increases in white voter registration across the South which all but outstripped the widely heralded black gains. As two southern political historians recognized a number of years later in commenting upon the numerous 1966 victories of racially conservative whites, “The Maddoxes and Wallaces rode the vote of an expanded white electorate to victory.”32 While it has been suggested that at least some of this white registration increase was a “countermobilization” produced by the initial, heavily publicized black gains, increasing partisan competition, education levels, affluence, and migration in the South may well have affected the growth as well. While no precise explanation for the growth of the white electorate

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