Terror from the Top Down: Violence and Voter Suppression in the Postwar South Open Access
Charak, Hannah (Spring 2022)
Abstract
After the Supreme Court held in Smith v. Allwright (1944) that state laws barring African Americans from voting in Democratic primary elections violated the Fourteenth Amendment, key political figures in three states— South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi— went to extreme lengths to obstruct state and national efforts aimed at expanding voting rights. Just days after the Court handed down its ruling, South Carolina Governor Olin Johnston organized the privatization of the state’s Democratic Party in an effort to legally maintain its lily-white membership. Two years later, Georgia gubernatorial candidate Eugene Talmadge made headlines for his racist speeches while quietly suppressing thousands of votes through what the Federal Bureau of Investigation identified as the “wholesale purge of Negroes from the registration lists.” In the Magnolia State, Senator Theodore Bilbo’s direct appeals for racial terrorism in his 1946 campaign for reelection warranted a Senate investigation on the grounds that his campaign operated with a direct view toward denying African Americans their right to register and vote.
This thesis seeks to uncover and compare the strategies adopted by key political figures in the Deep South to resist the abolition of the white primary, as well as additional executive and legislative efforts to expand voting rights, in the years immediately following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Smith v. Allwright. By framing the Smith decision as a major regional turning point in the history of voter suppression, I argue that legal disfranchisement in the postwar South took on a more clandestine nature than it had since the end of Reconstruction. This study aims to challenge scholarly interpretations of Southern politics that emphasize violence and overtly racist rhetoric while only briefly touching upon the seemingly mundane yet equally impactful forms of legal disfranchisement that evolved during the postwar era. Instead, I argue that violence and voter suppression were two sides of the same coin in the postwar South. Unearthing the specific ways in which whites legally resisted the Supreme Court’s ruling in Smith v. Allwright, this thesis argues, offers necessary context behind the forms of disfranchisement that continue to persist in the American South more than a half century later.
Table of Contents
Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………pg. 1
Chapter One: The Second Secession..……………………………………………………….pg. 10
Chapter Two: The “Fruits of Talmadgeism”.…..……………………………………………pg. 31
Chapter Three: Suppression Through Speech…………….………………………………….pg. 51
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………..pg. 70
Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………pg. 74
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