Civil Rights in America: Racial Voting Rights

National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior National Historic Landmarks Program

Civil Rights in America: Racial Voting Rights

A National Historic Landmarks Theme Study

Cover photograph: NAACP photograph showing people waiting to register to vote, 1948. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records [reproduction number: LC-USZ62-122260]

CIVIL RIGHTS IN AMERICA: RACIAL VOTING RIGHTS

A National Historic Landmarks Theme Study

Prepared by:

Susan Cianci Salvatore, Project Manager & Historian, National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers Consultant

Essays prepared by the Organization of American Historians: Neil Foley, Historian Peter Iverson, Historian Steven F. Lawson, Historian

Produced by:

National Historic Landmarks Program Cultural Resources National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior Washington, D.C.

2007, Revised 2009

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................................................... 1

HISTORIC CONTEXTS

African American Voting Rights, 1865-1965 Part One, 1865-1900 ..................................................................................................................................... 3 Part Two, 1900-1941 .................................................................................................................................. 14 Part Three, 1941-1954 ................................................................................................................................ 20 Part Four, 1954-1965 .................................................................................................................................. 30

American Indian Voting Rights, 1884-1965 ........................................................................................... 73

Hispanic and Asian American Voting Rights, 1848-1975.................................................................... 102

NATIONAL HISTORIC LANDMARKS REGISTRATION GUIDELINES ................................... 111

METHODOLOGY ...................................................................................................................... 119

SURVEY RESULTS Properties Recognized as Nationally Significant ...................................................................................... 121 National Historic Landmarks Study List .................................................................................................. 123 Properties Removed from Further Study .................................................................................................. 125 Table 1. Properties Recognized as Nationally Significant ....................................................................... 129 Table 2. National Historic Landmarks Study List ................................................................................... 130 Table 3. Properties Removed from Further Study ................................................................................... 131

BIBLIOGRAPHY African American...................................................................................................................................... 132 American Indian........................................................................................................................................ 138 Hispanic .................................................................................................................................................... 142 Asian American ........................................................................................................................................ 144 General ...................................................................................................................................................... 144

APPENDICES Appendix A. Selma to Montgomery March: Chronology of Events ....................................................... 146 Appendix B. Chronology of the Mississippi Voting Campaign, 1961-1964 ........................................... 149 Appendix C. Chronology of African American Voting Rights-Related Cases........................................ 152

Introduction

1

INTRODUCTION

In 1999 the U.S. Congress directed the National Park Service to conduct a multi-state study of civil right sites to determine the national significance of the sites and the appropriateness of including them in the National Park System. To determine how best to proceed, the National Park Service partnered with the Organization of American Historians to develop an overview of civil rights history entitled, Civil Rights in America: A Framework for Identifying Significant Sites (2002, rev. 2008). The framework concluded that while a number of civil right sites had been designated as National Historic Landmarks, other sites needed to be identified and evaluated. Taking this into account, the framework recommended that a National Historic Landmarks theme study be prepared to identify sites that may be nationally significant, and that the study be based on provisions of the 1960s civil rights acts. These include the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (covering voting rights, equal employment, public accommodations, and school desegregation enforcement), the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. This specific portion of the study focuses on the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Inclusion in the National Park System first requires that properties meet the National Historic Landmark criteria, and then meet additional tests of suitability and feasibility. To establish guidance on meeting landmark criteria, this study provides a historic context within which properties may be evaluated for their significance in civil rights and creates registration guidelines for National Historic Landmark consideration. Completion of this study will also assist in the identification of sites for National Historic Landmark evaluation.

Voting Rights Overview

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is "generally considered the most successful piece of civil rights legislation ever adopted by the United States Congress."* Congress adopted this act in response to the ongoing obstruction African Americans faced in exercising their right to vote. As a result, African Americans were overwhelmingly disenfranchised in many Southern states. The act's adoption followed nearly a century of systematic resistance by certain states to the Fifteenth Amendment guarantee of the right to vote regardless of race or color.

While the Voting Rights Act was adopted in response to the African American struggle, other racial groups also fought for enfranchisement. Hispanics, Asian Americans, and American Indians faced the same methods states used to exempt African American voters from the ballot box. Therefore, this study also describes voter discrimination issues faced by Hispanics, Asian Americans, and American Indians.

Study Format

To establish guidance on meeting landmark criteria, this study provides a historic context within which properties may be evaluated for their significance in civil rights and establishes registration guidelines for National Historic Landmark consideration. The historic context contains separate essays on African American, American Indian, and the Hispanic and Asian American voting rights experience. All three stories begin at a different time period. The African American essay begins in 1865 with the abolition of slavery and the quest for the ballot. The American Indian essay begins in 1884 when the U.S. Supreme Court determined that

* Quote from "Introduction to Federal Voting Rights Laws," at , United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, accessed on August 25, 2003.

Introduction

2

Indians were not American citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment with the right to vote. The Hispanic essay begins in 1848 when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo granted U.S. citizenship to those who did not wish to retain their Mexican citizenship, and the Asian essay begins in 1878 when a federal court upheld the bar against naturalizing Chinese immigrants. The African American and American Indian essays end in 1965 when Congress passed the Voting Rights Act and the emphasis in voting rights changed from an individual right to one of fair representation. The Hispanic and Asian American essays end in 1975 when Congress extended protection of the Voting Rights Act to language minorities.

Registration guidelines then outline how properties may qualify for National Historic Landmark designation under this theme study. Subsequently, the methodology section describes how the survey proceeded. Properties identified during the course of the study are divided into three categories: 1) Properties Recognized as Nationally Significant, 2) National Historic Landmarks Study List, and 3) Properties Removed from Further Study. Three appendices conclude the study. Appendix A provides a chronology of the Selma to Montgomery march. Appendix B provides a chronology of the Mississippi Summer voting drive. Lastly, Appendix C lists African American voting rights-related cases.

African American ? Part One, 1865-1900

3

AFRICAN AMERICAN VOTING RIGHTS, 1865-1965

An illustration in Harper's Weekly entitled, "The first vote," 1867. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division [reproduction number: LC-USZ62-97946]

African American ? Part One, 1865-1900

4

PART ONE: 1865-19001

The right to vote has held a central place in the black freedom struggle. With abolition of slavery, African Americans sought the ballot as a means to claim their first-class citizenship. When emancipated blacks pursued equality, they demanded the franchise on the same basis as that exercised by whites. Indeed, when Abraham Lincoln delivered his historic Gettysburg Address in 1863, universal white manhood suffrage existed in the North and the South. Democratic reforms over the previous half-century had whittled down property qualifications that excluded working class and poor white Americans from voting. Once slaves obtained freedom with passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, they intended to participate actively in the political process and help advance their interests.

Before emancipation, blacks residing in five New England states could vote. Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont, which contained only 6 percent of the northern black population, had extended the right to vote to blacks. In New York, blacks owning $250 in freehold property could also cast a ballot; however, the same property qualification did not apply to whites. In the South, where the overwhelming number of African Americans labored as slaves, the right to vote was limited to whites.2

Emancipation

Even before the end of the Civil War, African Americans organized to campaign for the right to vote. In 1864, free blacks gathered in Syracuse, New York, to form the National Equal Rights League (NERL). One of those in attendance was Abraham Galloway, a fugitive slave, abolitionist, and Union spy. He and a delegation of blacks met with President Lincoln to endorse the suffrage for all African Americans. The president did not commit himself and was assassinated in April 1865 before the issue came to a resolution. After the war, Galloway moved to North Carolina and started chapters of the NERL to voice the political concerns of the state's African American population. Galloway told an audience in New Bern, if the "Negro knows how to use the cartridge box, he knows how to use the ballot box." In Wilmington, the NERL chapter demanded "all the social and political rights of . . . white citizens" and insisted "that blacks be consulted in the selection of policemen, justices of the peace, and county commissioners."3

Throughout the South in 1865 and 1866, ex-slaves and free blacks convened statewide

conventions to agitate for their political rights. At these assemblies, speaker after speaker argued

that the suffrage was "an essential and inseparable element of self government," and the delegates invoked the spirit of the Declaration of Independence to justify their cause.4

Blacks in Norfolk, Virginia pressed vigorously for the franchise. On April 4, 1865, the Colored Monitor Union Club met at Mechanic's Hall with the Reverend William I. Hodges presiding. The group resolved to "promote vision and harmony among the colored portion of the

1 The author of this study's African American context, Steven F. Lawson, professor of history, Rutgers University,

wishes to acknowledge the superb research assistance of his graduate student, Danielle McGuire. 2 Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 91. 3 David Cecelski and Timothy Tyson, eds., Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 55 for the first quote; Eric Foner, Reconstruction:

America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 111 for the second quote. 4 Foner, Reconstruction, 114; Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, Proceedings of the Black National and State

Conventions, 1865-1900 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), xxi.

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