A closer look

Black Mississippians Resist Voter Suppression

How did local and national organizations use the election of 1946 to fight back against Mississippi’s systemic denial of Black voting rights?

by Ellen Noonan, New York University

In early July 1946, Democrat Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi—former governor, ardent supporter of racial segregation, and a dominant figure in the state’s politics for decades—won the Democratic primary to become a candidate for reelection to his third term in the U.S. Senate. That fall, nineteen Mississippians filed a complaint with the U.S. Senate, claiming that Bilbo had incited violence against African American voters and made fraudulent use of campaign funds. They asked that he be removed from office. A Senate committee was formed to investigate the charges. During committee hearings in Jackson, Mississippi, in December 1946, nearly two hundred African Americans from all parts of the state appeared in person to testify; a majority were World War II veterans. Chaired by a fellow southern segregationist Democrat, there was little doubt that the committee would exonerate Bilbo. But the hearings were a watershed moment nonetheless, a signal of progress to come and the result of factors set in motion years (and even decades) prior to Bilbo’s reelection campaign. They illustrate how the century-long struggle for Black voting rights in Mississippi (and the U.S. South generally) operated on both the local and national levels. Locally, Black activists and citizens showed persistence, creativity, and courage as they risked livelihoods and safety to challenge voter disenfranchisement in communities across the state. At the same time, national organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), pressured the federal government to overthrow the Jim Crow practices that confined African Americans to economic subordination and deprived them of the right to vote.

Decades of Voter Suppression Tactics

The Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted African American men the right to vote. But by the 1890s, white-dominated Democratic governments in the former Confederate states had put in place seemingly neutral laws and procedures that targeted Black voters and prevented an overwhelming number of them from registering to vote. These included the grandfather clause (you could only vote if your grandfather had been eligible to vote), the poll tax (having to pay a fee to vote), and literacy requirements (being able to read and interpret part of the state or U.S. Constitution)—all administered by white local clerks who held the power to decide who could register. Another powerful suppression tactic was the “white primary”—by the late nineteenth century, the Democratic Party controlled Mississippi and other southern states so completely that the party primary contests effectively elected the candidate who would win the general election. As a private entity, the Democratic Party could, and did, determine that only white voters were eligible to vote in their primary elections. As a result of these measures, Black voter registration in Mississippi was at microscopic levels in the 1940s—most Black citizens, well aware of the potential economic retaliation and even violence that could result from their efforts to register, didn’t even try.

Voting Rights Activists See an Opportunity for Action

Two key events set the conflict over the Bilbo election in motion and spurred renewed campaigns to register Black voters. The NAACP sued the state of Texas (in a case known as Smith v. Allwright), arguing that the white primary there violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution. In 1944, the Supreme Court agreed, making all-white primaries unconstitutional. The 1946 primaries would be the first elections held in Mississippi after that decision. Also in 1944 (and again in 1945), the Mississippi state legislature passed a law exempting all returning World War II veterans from having to pay the poll tax. Approximately eighty thousand of the state’s returning servicemen were African American and would be eligible to apply for the poll tax waiver. These developments removed two major instruments of voter suppression (at least for Black veterans) and offered a promising opening for voting rights activists to attempt to register Black voters. As far back as the American Revolution, African Americans had used military service as a central argument against the suppression of their citizenship rights, and World War II was no different. As activist Charles Evers recalled, “As soldiers, we’d worked like dogs and risked our lives fighting for freedom, democracy, and all the principles this country was founded on. But we couldn’t vote. The law said we could, but the whites of Mississippi made sure we couldn’t.”

In 1944, the secretary of the Jackson branch of the NAACP organized a state chapter of the Progressive Voters League. Similar to the NAACP, Progressive Voters League members were largely middle class, based in urban areas, and somewhat less vulnerable to white economic retaliation than poorer and more rural Black Mississippians. Even so, they proceeded with caution, describing their work as a nonpartisan effort to educate and motivate potential Black voters and avoiding door-to-door voter registration drives in an attempt to prevent white backlash to their work. They weren’t the only organization springing into action. National and regional civil rights organizations (including the Civil Rights Congress, NAACP, the Congress of Industrial Unions, and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare) saw Bilbo’s campaign rhetoric as an opportunity to draw national attention to southern voter disenfranchisement. To prepare for their claim against Senator Bilbo, these national organizations funded an effort to interview Black Mississippians who had attempted to vote. The locally based Progressive Voters’ League helped them to find those who were willing to go on the record about their experiences. From these interviews they created affidavits (sworn documents that could be used in a legal proceeding) in which Black voters described the ways they had been discouraged or prevented from voting in the 1946 primary election.

Testifying to U.S. Senators About Voter Suppression

The congressional hearings investigating the primary, held December 2–5, 1946, drew nearly two hundred Black Mississippians, who traveled from across the state, prepared to testify in Jackson. Sixty-nine ultimately did—they included farmers, day laborers, doctors, ministers, and students who defied expectations and demonstrated extraordinary courage by appearing and telling their stories. The committee, with a majority of southern Democrats who supported Bilbo, exonerated the senator (who brazenly argued in self-defense that Black voter suppression had always been widely practiced in Mississippi, and thus could not be attributed to his speeches). Yet Bilbo did not escape punishment entirely. Republicans won control of both the Senate and House during the 1946 congressional elections, and Republican leaders, eager to gain favor with Black voters in the North, prevented Bilbo from taking his seat pending further investigation. Bilbo stepped aside on January 5, 1947, and never returned; he died of cancer eight months later. Nevertheless, his successor, James Eastland, became an even more powerful advocate within the Senate of Jim Crow and voter suppression.

But the inquiry had accomplished something of greater import. The willingness of so many to testify in public, and the resulting federal record of what they described about the various methods of thwarting Black voters, from registration to election day, drew the attention of the national press to the issue and spurred renewed optimism among African Americans that the struggle for voting rights might someday succeed. It would take nineteen long years more of local struggle, violent white opposition, and support from national civil rights organizations before passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Reflection Questions

What methods did the state of Mississippi use to prevent African Americans from registering to vote? How successful were those methods in practice?

What role did World War II veterans play in this attempt to challenge voting discrimination in Mississippi?

Why did the Chicago Defender describe the Bilbo hearings as “a new day for the South” in terms of the African American struggle for full citizenship? Do you agree with that characterization?

Additional Reading

John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

Steven F. Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–-1969 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976).

Susan Cianci Salvatore, “Civil Rights in America: Racial Voting Rights,” National Historic Landmarks Theme Study, National Park Service, 2007, revised 2009.

Related Chapters

A Nation Transformed: The United States in World War II, 1939-1946