***** In June, the division of elections in Ms Harris's office drew up a list of more than 700,000 Floridians permanently disqualified from voting - more than any other state - because of a criminal past, and sent it to county election supervisors.
The idea was to enforce strictly an 1868 law disqualifying felons and ex-felons from voting for life. The law was originally part of the southern backlash against voter registration among freed slaves after the civil war, and was based on the assumption that black residents got in trouble with the law more often than their white counterparts.
That assumption holds true today, in a state where African Americans make up 13% of the general population but 55% of prison inmates. According to Human Rights Watch, around a third of African American men in the state were disqualified from voting because of a past conviction, mostly resulting from the "war on drugs" that has been raging in urban America for two decades.
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/US_election_race/Story/0,2763,406541,00.html> *****
***** Background to the 2000 US election
Florida's legacy of voter disenfranchisement
By Jerry White 9 April 2001
. . . Florida's current lifetime ban on voting by convicted felons -- which disenfranchised nearly a third of all black males during the 2000 elections -- dates back to the reactionary measures implemented in the late nineteenth century. At the time the state's vagrancy laws and convict lease system -- under which prison laborers were rented out to private contractors -- allowed the authorities to jail blacks and poor whites on the flimsiest of charges, and strip them of their constitutional rights. . . .
According to Professor Darryl Paulson of the University of South Florida, these measures [e.g., literacy tests, property qualifications, "grandfather clauses," lifetime ban on voting by convicted felons, the use of the secret ballot law to deny assistance to illiterate voters] were brutally effective. In the presidential election of 1888, prior to the passage of the disenfranchising laws, 75 percent of adult male Floridians voted. By the time of the 1892 presidential election, with the voting barriers in place, only 39 percent of adult males voted. Black male turnout fell from 62 percent in 1888 to 11 percent in 1892.
One measure of the reaction that dominated Florida politics for nearly a century is the fact that Josiah Walls -- a former slave and Union soldier, who was elected as Florida's first black member of the US Congress in 1870 -- would be the state's only black US congressman until November 1992. Although blacks made up anywhere from 10 to 50 percent of the state's population within this time frame, it would also take a century after the post-Civil War Reconstruction period for another African American to serve in the Florida state legislature.
In 1902, the Florida Democratic Party adopted a "white primary" policy, which excluded blacks from voting to nominate Democratic candidates for general elections. Given the Democrats' ascendancy in the "one-party" South, this meant blacks were excluded from participating in the only elections that mattered.
Such laws, which defined political parties as private clubs that had the right to exclude certain classes of people from voting, were adopted throughout the South. Even after the Supreme Court struck down Texas's white-only primary in 1944, the Florida legislature passed a law giving political parties inherent powers to restrict membership and in many counties blacks continued to be barred from joining the Democratic Party or participating in its primary elections.
If blacks found ways to overcome the array of legal obstacles to voting, state officials blocked the counting of their votes. One such method of vote fraud, for which Florida was notorious, was the use of tissue ballots and undersized ballots called "little jokers." Election officials in areas with large black populations would stuff the ballot boxes so there would be more ballots than eligible voters. Officials would then eliminate the number of ballots equal to the excess by removing the tissue ballots and "little jokers" that had been given to black voters.
Alongside racist legal measures, the disenfranchisement of African Americans was enforced through violence and terror. From 1900 to the 1930s Florida had the highest per capita rate of lynching in the South: 4.5 lynchings for every 10,000 blacks. This was twice the rate of lynchings in Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana, and three times that of Alabama. From 1921 to 1946 there were 61 reported lynchings in Florida -- twice as many as in Alabama, and topped only by Mississippi (88) and Georgia (68).
During the 1920s white mobs carried out pogroms in Ocoee, near Orlando, and Perry and Rosewood near the Gulf Coast, burning homes and killing scores of African Americans. The rampage in Ocoee began after a black resident, shotgun in hand, demanded the right to vote.
In the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan wielded enormous influence within the national Democratic Party. In Florida and throughout the South the Democrats sought to maintain the support of white small businessmen, farmers and laborers -- who were being uprooted by the economic and social changes following World War I -- on the basis of white supremacy and anti-black demagogy. In Florida, the real estate boom and the development of large-scale agriculture in the 1920s led to rising profits for land speculators, developers and agribusiness. But tens of thousands of small farmers, particularly in the state's northern counties, faced ruin from low farm prices. Basic social conditions, including rural diets, were no better in 1928 than they were in 1898.
During the Depression of the 1930s, while membership in the Klan fell throughout the US, in Florida the KKK continued to remain a force. With a statewide membership of about 30,000, the Klan was active in Jacksonville, Miami, and the citrus belt from Orlando to Tampa. In the orange groves of central Florida, Klansmen still operated in the old night-riding style, intimidating blacks trying to vote.
In addition to terrorizing African Americans, the KKK targeted union organizers and socialists. The business establishment was anxious to prevent common struggles by black and white workers. Moreover, some unions paid poll taxes for poor black and white voters. One of the most notorious Klan incidents in Florida history occurred in Tampa in 1935, when Joseph Shoemaker, a socialist and labor organizer, was flogged, castrated, and tarred and feathered, before dying of his injuries.
During a 1934 debate on a federal anti-lynching law, Florida Democratic Senator Claude Pepper -- a moderate by Southern standards -- blurted out the racist philosophy that lay behind the violent disenfranchisement of black voters. "Whatever may be written into the Constitution," he said, "however many soldiers may be stationed about the ballot boxes of the Southland, the colored race will not vote, because in doing so they endanger the supremacy of a race to which God has committed the destiny of a continent."
Harry T. Moore
A pioneer and martyr in the struggle for black voting rights during the 1930s and 1940s was Harry T. Moore, a Florida school teacher who became state leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1944 Moore co-founded the Progressive Voters League, which registered 100,000 new black voters over the subsequent six years. By 1951, due in large part to his efforts, 31 percent of all eligible blacks in Florida were registered to vote, a rate that was 50 percent higher than any other Southern state.
On Christmas night, December 25, 1951, Moore and his wife Harriette were killed when a bomb planted under their bedroom exploded at their home in Mims, Florida, near Cape Canaveral. Moore's life and murder were the subject of a recent Public Broadcasting System television documentary, Freedom Never Dies: The Story of Harry T. Moore.
Moore joined the NAACP in 1933 and began teaching elementary school students about the vote, even though the state's $3 poll tax and "white-only" primaries all but excluded African Americans from voting. Moore saw the franchise as a weapon to remove officials who supported or were indifferent to the lynchings, mob violence and police brutality victimizing African Americans. He also saw the vote as a means of winning equal pay for black school teachers, equal funding for "colored" schools, and other social and civil rights.
Moore helped defeat efforts to reinstate a literacy test and maintain "white only" primaries on the county level, after the Florida Supreme Court struck down the practice. In May 1945, for the first time ever, over 30,000 blacks voted in the state's Democratic primary, in what Moore described as the "greatest political activity among Florida Negroes since Reconstruction." For his efforts, state and local officials branded him a "troublemaker" and "Negro organizer" and in 1946 the Brevard County School Board fired Moore after 20 years of service as a teacher.
In 1948, during the Truman administration, the Southern "Dixiecrat" wing of the Democrats rebelled against the national party's plan to adopt a moderate civil rights plank. The Dixiecrats temporarily left the Democratic Party and formed the States' Rights Party, running South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond for president. . . .
Anxious to avoid further alienating the Dixiecrats, Democratic President Harry Truman did little to stop the racist violence. As The Militant, the newspaper of the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, declared on December 31, 1951: "The Truman administration brings the full power and resources of the government to bear in its persecution of radical and minority political groups, but it is indifferent and pretends helplessness in the face of a widespread Ku Klux Klan conspiracy to beat, bomb and shoot the Negro people into submission and acceptance of second-class citizenship."
The FBI, led by J. Edgar Hoover -- a staunch opponent of civil rights -- conducted an investigation of the Moore bombing, but dropped the case without any convictions. To this day, no one has ever been held accountable for the murders.
The civil rights movement
The eruption of mass civil rights struggles throughout the South during the 1950s and 1960s led to the final dismantling of the Jim Crow system and the achievement of voting rights for African Americans. In addition to Alabama, Mississippi and other states, Florida was an important battleground in the struggle.
In 1955, African Americans in Florida's state capital, Tallahassee, carried out a successful bus boycott, a year after a similar protest integrated public transport in Montgomery, Alabama. Sit-ins and demonstrations, led by Florida A & M students, occurred in the capital during the early 1960s; protesters defied bombings, beatings and mass arrests to integrate public facilities in St. Augustine, where Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders were arrested in 1964; and black sanitation workers waged a bitter four-month strike in St. Petersburg-Tampa in 1968. The latter struggle erupted into violence and coincided with the urban upheavals that spread across Florida and the US after King's assassination in April 1968. . . .
In 1957 the Eisenhower administration proposed the extension of black voting rights in the South. The final bill, the first civil rights bill enacted since 1875, was trimmed to meet the opposition of Southern Democrats and lacked strong enforcement provisions. But the Civil Rights Act of 1957 did create a Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department, authorized to prosecute registrars who obstructed the right of blacks to vote. The bill also established the United States Civil Rights Commission as an independent agency charged with gathering facts about voting rights violations and other civil rights infringements.
In 1964-65, the national exposure of the murders of civil rights workers registering black voters in Mississippi and the violent attack by state troopers against voting rights marchers in Selma, Alabama spurred the Johnson administration to support the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The act prohibited several Southern states from using voting laws, practices or procedures, such as literacy tests and other devices, to discriminate against voters on the basis of race, color or their reading or writing knowledge of the English language. The Act authorized the US Attorney to provide observers to register voters and monitor elections, and also required these states to submit any changes in their voting laws to the federal government for approval. The passage of the law followed the adoption of the 24th Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibited the use of poll taxes to deny voting rights.
By the early 1960s the registration rate among black voters in Florida had risen to 35-40 percent. After the passage of the Voting Rights Act it increased to nearly 60 percent. Throughout the South nearly one million new black voters were added to voting rolls by 1970. In 1975 Congress expanded the coverage of the Voting Rights Act to include political jurisdictions in Florida and other states with language minority groups, and required officials to furnish bilingual assistance to language minority citizens at all stages of the voting process and in all elections. It is noteworthy that in the recent presidential elections many Haitian American and Hispanic voters complained of being denied language assistance in the voting booth. . . .
<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/apr2001/flor-a09.shtml> ***** -- Yoshie
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