In the old days, black voter suppression took the form of terrorism (e.g., Ku Klux Klan), poll taxes, the grandfather clause, bogus literacy tests, and felony disenfranchisement. Unfortunately, felony disenfranchisement is still with us as a means of limiting the African American vote.
Felony Disenfranchisement is the state taking away the right of a person to vote because of their conviction on a criminal offense. The automatic loss of voting rights for people with felony convictions who have completed their sentences is unique to the United States among major democracies in the world. Thus, in another instance, we are exceptional—in a negative way.
States vary in how they treat people convicted of felonies. Two, Maine and Vermont, do not restrict voting by individuals with felony convictions, so prisoners can vote while they are in prison. In the other 48 states and the District of Columbia, prisoners cannot vote. Most of these states also prohibit voting by individuals while they are on probation and/or parole supervision.
The 12 most restrictive states in the country disenfranchise not only those under current criminal justice supervision but also some or all after they have completed their sentence. In four of these states – Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, and Virginia – anyone with a felony conviction is barred from voting for life. In these states voting rights can only be restored through the action of the governor or a pardons board.
With the huge increase in mass incarceration over the last 40 years or so the number of disenfranchised Americans has grown from a little over one million to over six million. In six states – Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia – more than seven percent of voters are disenfranchised, led by Florida with one of every ten residents excluded.
African American men make up a disproportionate share of people who have lost the right to vote as they are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white men (although they do not commit crimes at six times the rate of white men). According to a study by The Sentencing Project, over two million black Americans could not vote in last year’s election. One of every 13 African Americans of voting age is disenfranchised (7.4%), a rate four times that of non-African Americans. In four states – Florida (21%), Kentucky (26%), Tennessee (21%), and Virginia (22%) – more than one in five African Americans are disenfranchised.
Disenfranchisement of criminal offenders has been around since the 19th century; however, this practice has grown substantially. Whereas only 9 states disenfranchised at least 5 percent of their African American adult citizens in 1980, 23 states do so today. Many states instituted felony disenfranchisement policies after the Civil War, and often they were in response to the 15th Amendment giving black men the right to vote. By 1869, 29 states had enacted such laws.
Between 1890 and 1908, Southern state legislatures made several moves to limit further the ability of African Americans to vote. They created new constitutions, added constitutional amendments, and passed laws to make voting for African Americans more difficult. One of those laws was felony disenfranchisement.
The white supremacists who pushed for laws to take away the right of African Americans to vote were openly intentional about it. At the Virginia Constitutional Convention in 1901-02, Delegate Carter Glass made the following statement:
This plan [which included felony disenfranchisement laws] will eliminate the darkey as a political factor in this State in less than 5 years, so that in no single county…will there be the least concern felt for the complete supremacy of the white race in the affairs of government.
In a 2014 article in the New York Times Brent Staples described how in 1894 a white South Carolina newspaper advocated for that State’s voting laws to be amended to limit voting by African Americans, else whites would be swept away at the polls by the black vote. The president of the 1901 constitutional convention in Alabama argued that changing the ballot to exclude blacks was necessary, because not only were they inferior to whites, the state needed to avoid the “menace of Negro domination.”
With so many African Americans being incarcerated over the last 30 years, state disenfranchisement laws are doing their job—reducing the extent of black voting. The effects of this black voter suppression practice will be discussed in Part 2.