South Carolina
The separatist, disillusioned ideology of black power has so far been but an undertone in the South. (Weaker, too, and far less virulent has been the threat of riot, though it is present in every Southern city, as is the threat of something like guerrilla warfare across the rural Black Belt.) The standard explanations for this anomaly have centered on the relative recency of Negro victories in the South securing basic American rights, most notably the right of the ballot and political participation. Disillusionment, goes this thesis, has not yet had time to set in. Recent events in the politics of South Carolina arc suggestive of the amount of hope, indeed the degree of faith in American democratic processes, still alive, almost incredibly, among Negro Southerners. And they indicate also the ways in which this hope is disappointed.
In September, 1967, names of every registered voter in the state were wiped off the books, and the electorate was required to reregister; this occurs every 10 years by state law. Whites, accustomed to the nuisance, took it in stride. But for Negroes, it was the occasion for renewal of a crusade: the old, anguished struggle to register voters. Now it is near success in much of the South, but only a few years ago registration was one of the most difficult and dangerous activities of the Southern civil rights movement. Negroes went to work across the state with registration meetings (often in churches), with canvassing, with registration booths at shopping centers, pool halls, dances, churches, wherever people gathered; in Columbia at a large car wash.
Bag of tricks
In South Carolina, the denial of democracy to Negroes was accomplished less often by force than by administrative procedure, that bag of many tricks dating to post-Reconstruction whereby whites could register, Negroes could not. Even with the 1965 Voting Rights Act wiping out the maze of tests and infrequent and irregular registration periods, South Carolina still ranked ninth among the eleven Southern states in percentage of potential Negroes registered in 1967. In rural areas, especially, Negroes still fear the proffered ballot. So the reregistration was seen as an opportunity to increase Negro voting power.
State law had been changed to make the process far simpler than ever before, and Negroes were pleased to find that registrars generally were obeying instructions from Governor Robert McNair that all citizens be treated equally. Previously registered citizens could have applications notarized, and register by mail. New registrants could have the forms processed by deputy registrars away from the courthouse. Negroes were on the board of registrars in three counties and were deputy registrars in thirteen.
Most of the registration effort was coordinated by the South Carolina Voter Education Project, a confederation of registration organizations formed in 1962-1963, the first such in the South. James L. Felder, twenty-seven, a graduate of Howard University Law School and a native of Sumter, directs the organization, and financial help comes from the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council. Mr. Felder said about half the registration organizations were chapters or offshoots of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the others were independents, ministerial alliances, civic leagues, and the like. This reflected the rarity, even during the early 1960s, of activity in the state by the more militant civil rights organizations. One consequence is that South Carolina Negroes are probably more inclined than most to work within the system, to rely on the old NAACP strategy of court suits and voting efforts. Thus a test of the system in South Carolina has special significance.
A major weakness of the rather old-fashioned civil rights approach in South Carolina is that the energies and free time of students and young adults are infrequently used. This was true in the reregistration effort. Absence of the young might account for less than effective civil rights progress in South Carolina generally; failure in political efforts only intensifies the estrangement of the young from conventional forms of American democracy. All too rare was the kind of attitude expressed by Virgil Dimery, middle-aged funeral director in Kingstree and leader of a voter effort which has gone to great pains to involve high school students and young people generally: “We work in vain if we don’t train them to take over.”
Like Greek
A political development in February gave hope of things to come from the reregistration. This was a campaign organized in part to spur interest in reregistration by the Voter Education Project for involvement of Negroes in party organizations. Instructions were sent out, workshops were held on procedure, and Negroes by the hundreds turned out for precinct meetings, often outnumbering the more or less professional whites who bother with such things, and capturing many of the organizations. More than 5000 Negroes participated in precinct organization meetings in 28 counties and elected 182 Negro officers. Twelve hundred were named delegates to county conventions where they elected 78 Negro officers, and 175 were delegates to the state convention. There they elected no Negro officers but did get 5 Negroes named as delegates and 4 as alternate delegates to the Democratic National Convention.
One of the delegates was George Holman, a fifty-nine-year-old undertaker in Moncks Corner. A short, modest man, he continued to canvass daily for registration as chairman of the local voter organization. He drove deep into surrounding rural areas to call on farms and cabins miles apart from each other an exercise in democracy probably rare among those he will meet in Chicago. He said the success with party organizations had encouraged many Negroes in his area to register for the first time. “People are beginning to see it will work. Our people have been so far from politics. They were never told about it. It is like Greek to them. But if you get them person to person and begin to explain it, you’ll see them light up. and they’ll say, ‘Oh, I get it.'”
There were sad stories of how, more than once, Negroes with a majority at a precinct meeting would be talked into a compromise on offices by the whites, a Negro getting a ceremonial one like chairman, and whites holding on to the powerful one of committeeman. “These damn white boys have been playing this game of politics for three hundred years,” said a Charleston leader. “We’ve just been in it since 1948. We’ve been learning. But we’ve got a lot to learn.”
Heartened by the success in party organization affairs, and perhaps as part of the enthusiasm of the reregistration drive, more Negro candidates qualified for the June 1 1 Democratic primary than at any other time in recent history. (South Carolina was the only Southern state during Reconstruction in which Negroes controlled the state legislature. They had a majority in the House from 1868 to 1873, and enough white support in the Senate to prevail.) This time 12 Negroes ran for the legislature, one for Congress, and 31 for local offices. Statewide, only 11 Negroes held office prior to the primary, and none was in the legislature.
The maxim that Negro candidates spur Negro registration was reinforced by the efforts of candidates themselves to register people. Most were assuming that each Negro they signed up was a vote for himself. In Sumter, Miss Dorothy Sampson, a formidable lady lawyer, brusque of speech, fierce in a futile fight to get Negro deputy registrars in her county through the reregistration, drove around the town and countryside in a blue Cadillac festooned with stickers (“Lawyer Sampson Should Be State Senator”), cajoling or bullying the unregistered to get right in and be hauled in splendor to the registrar. She spoke of rounding up and registering 305 people in five days. “Well,” she said, “it’s self-serving . . .”
White alert
Little attention was paid to the Negro reregistration effort until the South Carolina Secretary of State’s office, responding to requests, reported results through February 24. Negroes had, it was announced, outregistered whites in seven counties. Five of these, along with four others of the forty-six, had Negro voting-age majorities. In those counties particularly, and in the state generally, the news stirred white registration efforts. Booths began to appear in shopping center parking lots in white sections. Deputy registrars showed up with forms at civic clubs (the Southern affiliates are still generally all white), and at factories. Radio, television, and newspaper advertising urging reregistration increased. U.S. Representative L. Mendel Rivers, powerfid chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was opposed by a Negro candidate. Rivers took out a full-page ad in the Charleston News and Courier urging registration, an advocacy not notable in his previously uncontested races.
While some Negro leaders looked on the contest for reregistration as a healthy manifestation of democracy, others were rueful that the whites had been alerted. Some held back registration forms until the last minute on the supposition that white efforts were spurred each time Negroes pulled ahead.
Final results announced after the May 11 cutoff indicated, however, that white registration had declined from 730,000 in 1967 to 566,271. Negro registration, 24.4 percent of the total, stood at 182,514 — still less than 50 percent of the potential, and lowest on this score in 1968 in all of the South. Moreover, in no county did Negroes emerge with a voting majority, not even in the potential store of nine with majority Negro voting-age populations.
The ensuing primary was more disappointing to Negro hopes than the registration figures would have augured. Of 31 Negro candidates for local offices (county council, board of education, superintendent of education, magistrate, coroner), only 10 survived runoffs. Ten of the 12 legislative candidates were defeated. The other 2 lost in runoffs. George A. Payton, Negro attorney of Charleston, who challenged ultra-hawk Mendel Rivers, campaigned against him on a platform including the peace issue. Payton, with about one third of his district Negro, had hoped to see the white vote split between Republicans and Democrats. This hope died when the Republicans, after unsuccessful legislative efforts to allow them to join the Democrats in nominating Representative Rivers, switched over to vote for Rivers. But perhaps even more bitter were returns showing considerable Negro support going to supersegregationist Rivers. One explanation was that they feared losing Charleston’s outsized version of the military-industrial complex, for which Rivers has claimed credit.
Part of Payton’s problem was less than enthusiastic support (if not covert opposition) from some Negro leaders. Division of Negro leaders’ support helped account for defeats of at least two other congressional candidates and one senatorial challenger who had notions of welding Negro and working-class white votes.
Arrangements
Successful coalitions were generally on the model of one in Beaufort County. With only about half the voting strength of whites, Beaufort Negroes worked out an accommodation two years ago with the established white leadership — the more enlightened part of it, true, but a part which had been strictly segregationist until Negro voting strength rose. In the elections two years ago, a Negro was elected to city council, and this year, 6 of 13 Negro candidates won and one was in a runoff. In such a coalition, there is no formal slate, but by word of mouth among both races slates are elected. The difference between this arrangement (which recalls the brief experiment in patrician whitepoor black alliance by South Carolina’s Wade Hampton after the Civil War) and the kind of coalition between Negroes and white liberals often espoused in the modern South is that the white powers of Beaufort can deliver a vote, which white liberals are seldom able to do.
It is a bleak harvest to spring from all the idealism and sacrifice that went into the Negro voter struggle of the past decades, but one based on reality, and founded in the Negro tradition of making do with what is available. There is a classic story of the folk wisdom of this tradition, about the late federal judge Waties Waring, sometime after he had been ostracized by white Charleston because of his ruling against the white primary. He was admonishing Negro leaders in Beaufort to push harder for their rights. Finally one leader arose and said, “Judge Waring, you ain’t been a nigger now but four years. I’ve been one for fifty-five years, and I know what I’m doing.”
The other Southern states have had the same experience of finding it more difficult to elect Negro or Negro-favored candidates than to register formidable Negro voting strength. The common causes are honest choice of whites by Negro voters, fraud or intimidation at the polls, and the casting of imperfect ballots by people not yet accustomed to the process.
There is obvious danger if Southern Negroes continue to see all the hope they have built up in the ballot disappointed. One statistic in South Carolina seems ominous. Despite all the political activity and the reregistration campaign, only 55 percent of all those Negroes who were reached by the campaign turned out to vote in the primary. Leaders were expecting 75 percent. Many factors were involved, not least a tendency to regard the effort to register as sufficient civic duty. But the demoralizing bleakness of so many no-choice races (certainly no unique Southern phenomenon), and of the coalitions of convenience, must be considered part of the cause. And there must be taken into account the dispiriting effect of the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert Kennedy, as well as the national drift toward riot and repression.
South Carolina’s new biracial politics does not yet touch the gut problems of the state — the typical Southern profile of poverty extremes, inadequate education, ancient racial animosities, and unpreparedness of citizens in the transition from rural to urban, farm to industrial, society. Mrs. Victoria DeLee, grass roots leader in Dorchester County, described a typical day of canvassing for voter registrants: “People, every day we go out, starvin’, children purely naked, shacks like goat shacks, people sick, down, sick with poverty, all out in those woods.”
Not ready to burn
Can conventional politics contain the wrath of a people? One answer came from Mr. Dimery in Kingstree who believes in involving young people in politics. Expecting a black majority out of the registration, he said he didn’t foresee an allblack government. “I feel everybody ought to be represented. If a man will work for the people, I don’t care about his color. In a country like America, with Negroes a minority, we’ve got to have a working coalition with whites. I’m not” — and he chuckled with the dry disdain of the practical man for the suicidal gesture, his aging brow wrinkling humorously — “ready to burn things down. There are still good words there— still the Bill of Rights there. They’ve just never, until here lately, been executed.”
He didn’t get his black majority in time for the primary; the two Negro legislative candidates there lost. On the other end of the state, in Spartanburg, another kind of answer was evolving in the mind of seventeen-year-old J. Wayne Watson, a high school senior. With the most infectious of grins, he told a white man of his distrust for whites. He led a boycott at his all-Negro high school that won new textbooks, the teaching of Negro history, improvement of the library, and other salubrious concessions. He led picketing of the YMCA, and got it integrated. He was forming a Black Youth Awareness Coordinating Committee among high school students and dropouts. And he was leading them in taking an active part in the voter registration effort.
His influence extended to black adults. They spoke of him fondly (“That Wayne”), and proudly recounted his achievements in school, his reading, his articulateness. They fell naturally into discussion with him, transcending the generation gap, arguing the fundamentals of black power. The adults urged not so much moderation as self-preservation. One sensed that for them Wayne was a spokesman, the articulation of a buried part of them, speaking their anger and their courage. The King assassination, he said, had convinced most young people in Spartanburg that “the conference table is a futile place.”Whether there would be violence in such Southern towns as he lives in, he said, “depended on the white people.” He spoke of one mass march to protest everything that is wrong, on the grounds that it would take too long to pick off the multitude of evils single-shot. But he indicated little faith in the idea. He seemed conversant with the extremes of Negro protest radicalism.
Why, then, was he working so hard on voter registration — the epitome of Negro participation within the system? “I guess,” he said slowly, “you can say I am divided within myself.” —Pat Watters