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1334 An American Dilemma
15
«xhere is a growing school of thought in the South which holds that any man,
no matter what his race, who is qualified to vote ought to be permitted to vote, and that
it is wholly unjust for election officials to disqualify thousands of Negroes arbitrarily
while permitting other thousands of white illiterates to troop to the polls. It is the view
of the element that an educated and respectable Negro is a greater asset to the com-
munity and more deserving of the franchise than an unlettered white swineherd from
the pine barrens. It cannot be said that this view is held by anything remotely approach-
ing a majority of the Southern whites, but it undoubtedly is gaining in favor. As recon-
struction and its atrocities recede further and further into the background, more and
more white Southerners arc coming to feel that the cry of ‘white supremacy,’ raised so
often in the past, is in the twentieth century a mere rawhead and bloodybones without
substance or meaning.”*
^®The relevant section of the Fourteenth Amendment reads: . . when the right
to vote at any election for the choice of Electors for President of the United States,
Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a State, or the
members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such
State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way
abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation
therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens
shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.”
There was some discussion about applying the penalty to the South demanded by this
section of the Constitution after the disfranchising laws were adopted by the South.
In 1904, the so-called Crumpacker Resolution was before Congress demanding that
the representation of the disfranchising states be reduced after a careful investigation.
In 1904 the Republican Party platform carried the same demand. By the end of the
first decade of the twentieth century discussion on this point was dead.
There was some question as to the constitutionality of such a resolution. Some held
that the Fifteenth Amendment superseded the Fourteenth, and that a disfranchising
state’s representation should not be reduced but the disfranchising stopped. James G.
Blaine, the great statesman of the last decades of the nineteenth century, for example
said:
“Before the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, if ‘a State should exclude the
negro from suffrage the next step would be for Congress to exclude the negro from
the basis of apportionment. After the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, if a State
should exclude the negro from suffrage, the next step would be for the Supreme Court
to declare the act unconstitutional and therefore null and void.”**
The relevant section of the Fifteenth Amendment reads: “The right of citizens of
the JJnited States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any
State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Compare Charles S. Mangum, Jr., The Legal Status of the Negro (1940),. pp.
3S8 ff. J. W. Johnson comments from the Negro side: “More than once he took his
case to the Supreme Court of the United States, but the Court pointed out that he had
failed to show that the state had abridged or denied his right to vote or that persons
who prevented him from voting had done so because of his race, color or frevious
condition of servitude. So, unable to prove that the committee which had met him at
• Virginius Dabney, Liberalism in the South (1932), pp. 253-254.
” Twenty Years of Congress (x8S6), Vol. 2, pp. 418-419.
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