58 pages • 1 hour read
Carol AndersonOne Person, No Vote
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “A History of Disfranchisement”
Republican Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory in the 2016 presidential election shocked the world. Despite Trump frequently denigrating people of color, the election saw a 7% decrease in African American turnout since the 2012 election. Anderson charges that the drop in African, Hispanic, and Asian American turnout is “the campaign’s most misunderstood story” as this statistic is the result of voter suppression policies in Republican-controlled states (1).
These laws are the successors of Jim Crow laws in the Southern United States. White aristocrats disdained the new Black elected officials of Reconstruction and devised laws like the Mississippi Plan of 1890 to target African Americans without violating the Thirteenth Amendment. A prominent part of these laws was the literacy test, which officials claimed was necessary for a well-informed electorate even though states left many Black students with a limited education. Meanwhile, registration offices gave jargon-filled legal passages to Black candidates and deliberately failed aspiring voters. By 1953, 11 Deep South counties with majority-Black populations only registered 1.3% of the voter-eligible population. Meanwhile, the poll tax forced voters to pay both an annual fee and back pay for previous years of eligibility, which disqualified poor Black farmers.
Lincoln-era Republicans had no chance of winning in the South, making the Whites-only Democrat primary the de facto election. The Supreme Court struck down a 1923 Texas statute that explicitly banned other races from participating in primaries, but the Texas Democratic Party got around this after several attempts by declaring itself a private organization and changing its rules by convention decree. It wasn’t until United States v. Classic (1941) that the Court gave Congress the right to control primary processes that have a clear impact on electoral processes.
Politicians like Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo and Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge encouraged the Ku Klux Klan and other White supremacists to attack Black voters. This mentality led to massacres in Louisiana, North Carolina, and Florida with local police participating in the violence. In 1946, a group of White men shot veteran Maceo Snipes to death for voting in defiance of their threats. Despite this violence, the number of Black voters in the state slowly rose from 20,000 to 135,000 because of Supreme Court decisions and increasing political awareness after World War II. As the South became an international embarrassment that the Soviet Union exploited in propaganda, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 to strengthen the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) enforcement capabilities. Yet the DOJ couldn’t proactively investigate violations and dealt with procedural delays and destroyed documents.
After the nonviolent protests in Selma, Alabama, and acts of police brutality like Bloody Sunday, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act (VRA) on August 6, 1965, which banned literacy tests and poll taxes, allowed the federal government to supervise elections in regions with a history of discrimination, and required preclearance to change election law in those areas. The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren blocked efforts to circumvent the law. However, the Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan administrations enforced these rules less frequently. Over time, several factors brought the Voting Rights Act into jeopardy:
1. The federal approval requirement enabled messaging about an intrusive big government.
2. The 62% jump in Black voter registration and election of President Barack Obama suggested that the VRA wasn’t needed anymore.
3. Southern politicians switched to the Republican Party and framed themselves as victims.
4. States promoted voter fraud investigations as a scare tactic, particularly after the election of Black officials. This includes the imprisonment of two Alabama activists and a baseless crusade by future Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
5. A 5-4 Supreme Court ruling stopped the Florida recount in the 2000 election despite a razor-thin margin, handing the presidency to Republican George W. Bush.
Bush encouraged the reauthorization of the VRA in 2006 but also nominated John Roberts as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, whose past career showed a disdain for the VRA. This led to Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, a decision that would “eviscerate” the Voting Rights Act (26). A city in Shelby County, Alabama used annexation to turn Black representation in one district from 65% to 29%, leading to its lone Black councilman losing his next election. A 1950s precedent considered this a violation of the Fifteenth Amendment, but the Court ruled 5-4 in favor of the county. The decision crushed Section 4 of the VRA, which determined which localities came under federal oversight. The 2016 federal election showed the consequences of this decision: Wisconsin’s Black voting rate fell from 78% to under 50%, and North Carolina saw a reduction of 50,000 Black votes in a state that Trump won by 27,000 votes.
Chapter 1 Analysis
Anderson frames her investigation into voter suppression around the 2016 presidential election. Political analysts float various factors that led to Donald Trump’s victory, such as his populist appeal in troubled industrial states and limited enthusiasm for controversy-laden Democrat Hillary Clinton after a bitter primary against progressive Bernie Sanders. However, Anderson points to a century of efforts to limit voting access for people of color, the young, and other Democrat-leaning groups, and the first chapter covers the early ancestors of today’s voter suppression tactics.
Anderson states that the Grand Old Party (GOP) faces a generational crisis as its platform mostly appeals to older White Americans in a rapidly diversifying country. The Bush administration’s reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act was in part a way to appeal to Latino voters, and a postmortem on the 2012 presidential election that stressed the need to promote diversity. Trump ascended within the party through false claims about Obama’s citizenship and violent illegal immigrants, as well as a Make America Great Again slogan that implies a return to pre-civil rights norms. It is possible for an ailing party to coalesce around an authoritarian, but not for him to win the election. (Cheney, Kyle. “Trump kills GOP autopsy.” POLITICO, 4 March 2016).
A key part of Anderson’s argument is her use of individual stories to depict systemic racism. An early example is Leon Alexander in WWII-era Alabama. When the coal miner applied to vote, the registrar deliberately ignored him in the office and threw away his test without looking. His coworkers intervened and took his case to the governor. After Alexander obtained approval, the registrar neglected to add him to voter rolls.
Another necessary part of this history lesson is understanding that racist views do not disappear; they adapt. One example is the chicanery of the Texas Democratic Party, which changed its organization status and membership rules to preserve the White primary. After the Voting Rights Act banned literacy tests, Virginia tried to make illiterate voters handwrite their candidates, and the state funneled funding to White private schools while dismantling Black public schools. Lawmakers considered any poor White people who suffered as a result an acceptable sacrifice.
The transition of the South from a Democrat to Republican stronghold takes place over several decades. Before and immediately after the Civil War, the Republican Party largely represented Northern states in favor of abolishing slavery, while slave-owning aristocrats controlled the Democrats. As Reconstruction stalled and Republicans became the party of business interests, Black groups began defecting to the Democrats. The passing of the Voting Rights Act and Richard Nixon’s appeal to Southern states finalized this transition (Prokop, Andrew. “How Republicans Went from The Party of Lincoln to The Party of Trump, in 13 Maps.” Vox, 10 November 2016).
Anderson highlights two early crusades against voter fraud, both involving absentee voting. In 1979, Pickens County Voters League President Julia Wilder and local NAACP Chapter President Maggie Bozeman collected absentee ballots from three dozen elderly and disabled African Americans in a rural Alabama county. When one of the voters tried to vote a second time, it triggered a voter fraud investigation. Despite a haphazard trial and the support of the other alleged victims, the all-White jury convicted the two leaders to multi-year prison sentences.
In 1985, US attorney Jeff Sessions indicted civil rights leader Albert Turner Sr. and two others. When studying why White candidates won in Black Belt elections, Turner discovered that absentee voting would allow more African Americans to participate and guided a voting drive that elected the first Black officials in Perry County, Alabama. Using the FBI, Sessions arrested Turner in the following election for allegedly tampering with 75 letters. The courts threw out or found Turner not guilty of all 21 charges, but Sessions used the investigation to target Black counties and force alleged victims to provide fingerprints.
The 2000 election pitted Republican Governor George W. Bush against Democrat Vice President Al Gore. While Florida’s razor-thin results and malfunctioning voting machines are well known, Anderson points out the role of voter suppression on Election Day. This includes the purging of 20,000 Black and Hispanic votes using faulty data as well as police intimidation and jammed communications in poorer districts.
The Supreme Court serves a vital role in squashing discriminatory laws and preserving civil rights legislation. Anderson incorporates commentary from Black leaders including future Justice Thurgood Marshall and civil rights attorney Hank Sanders, who recognizes the Voting Rights Act as a revolutionary step towards a true democracy. Conversely, poor decisions and unsympathetic justices undermine progress. For example, the Supreme Court’s decision on the 2000 election called the recount a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment because it only focused on districts with malfunctioning units, but it ignored how that decision would infringe on the Fifteenth Amendment, leading some to call it a “judicial coup d’état” (37). The Shelby decision is equally shortsighted; future chapters demonstrate how the VRA was a buffer against racism, as states had legislation waiting for a decision like this.
