South Carolina Vote
"Although unaccustomed to the use of voting machines, most Negroes went
through the process in an efficient manner." (August 10, 1948)
For the first time since the Reconstruction era, African Americans voted
in a Democratic primary in South Carolina on August 10, 1948. A federal
judge had recently ruled the exclusion of African Americans from the
Democratic Party to be unconstitutional. Thousands of African Americans
turned out, but it would be years before they were granted equal voting
rights to whites in South Carolina and most other Southern states. The
15th Amendment of the Constitution, ratified in 1870, guaranteed African
Americans the right to vote in the United States. To circumvent the
amendment, most Southern states imposed voting restrictions, including
poll taxes, literacy tests, and property requirements, which were
specifically designed to disqualify black voters. Federal judges began
to erode much of this "Jim Crow" legislation in the 1940s and '50s, but
Southern authorities used violence and intimidation to keep African
Americans out of the voting booths. In the early 1960s, the civil rights
movement focused on winning African Americans the right to vote in the
South, and many activists gave their lives to the struggle. In 1965,
Congress passed President Lyndon Johnson's Voting Rights Act, which
abolished Jim Crow voting restrictions and authorized U.S. Department of
Justice intervention against voter discrimination.
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