Editor's note: Today and on the two Sundays to follow, USF St. Petersburg professor emeritus Darryl Paulson will lay out the many ways that Florida has discriminated against black voters from the Civil War forward.
Blacks
Editor's note: Today and on the two Sundays to follow, USF St. Petersburg professor emeritus Darryl Paulson will lay out the many ways that Florida has discriminated against black voters from the Civil War forward.
Blacks composed almost half of Florida's population at the end of the Civil War. Like in other Southern states, most blacks in Florida were slaves and none had the right to vote.
As a condition for rejoining the Union, Florida and the rest of the Confederate states had to draft new constitutions protecting the political rights of the newly freed slaves. And the federal Constitution's 13th, 14th and 15th amendments ended slavery, protected against state discrimination and guaranteed that blacks could not be denied the right to vote because of their race.
But despite common perception, the 15th Amendment did not guarantee blacks the right to vote. Rather, it is a negative statement. It says the right to vote cannot be denied because of race. The distinction is critical. It allowed the South to develop barriers to voting that would eliminate blacks' votes without coming into conflict with the 15th Amendment.
Soon after the Civil War, there was an explosion in the number of black voters (male only) and black elected officials. Nineteen blacks were elected to the 76-member Florida Legislature, and Josiah Walls, a former slave and Union soldier from Alachua County, became Florida's first black member of Congress when he won election in 1870. He would be the only black member of Congress from Florida for the next 116 years.
By 1876, Reconstruction was over, and Florida politicians would adopt many provisions to eliminate black voting. The Sunshine State would "legally" eliminate black votes without violating the 15th Amendment. Between laws passed by the Legislature and the adoption of the 1885 Constitution, almost every black vote was eliminated.
Florida, like every one of the former Confederate states, adopted a white primary, grandfather clause, poll tax, literacy test, long residency requirements and other obstacles to black voters. It was a virtual fail-safe system. If one barrier failed, there would always be another to stop them from voting.
Florida was also a leading innovator of discriminatory barriers to voting. Some Florida counties used tissue ballots or undersized ballots in areas where there were significant numbers of black voters.
Election officials would stuff the ballot boxes so there would be more ballots than legal voters. To remedy the problem, election officials would pull out the excess ballots. Not surprisingly, they pulled out the tissue or undersize ballots that had been given to blacks.
Another Florida innovation was the "multiple ballot box" or "eight-box" law of 1889. This law required voters to place eight separate ballots into eight ballot boxes. Since blacks were denied an education and 40 percent were classified illiterate in 1900, they could not read to know which ballot was supposed to go in which box.
Even the secret ballot, a hallmark of democracy, was used in Florida to discriminate against blacks. Because of their high illiteracy rates, blacks needed assistance in casting their ballot. Under the guise of preserving the integrity of the ballot, Florida either denied assistance to illiterates or limited the number of illiterate voters a person could assist.
The white primary
One of the major barriers to black voting in Florida was the white primary, which said that only whites could vote in the primary election. This seems like a clear violation of the 15th Amendment.
But it did not violate the Constitution, according to the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1921 case of Newberry vs. the United States. This case involved a contested Michigan primary election in which the court held that Congress could not regulate primary elections.
The South saw its opportunity. If the federal government could not regulate primaries, then Southern states could limit who participated in those elections. In the one-party South, whoever won the primary won the general election. Florida's white primary dates back to 1892 when the Democratic Party banned blacks from voting in its elections to preserve the "purity and integrity of the party."
Beginning in 1927, the NAACP began its assault on the white primary laws. In Nixon vs. Herndon, a unanimous Supreme Court struck down the Texas white primary as a clear violation of the 14th Amendment's "equal protection" clause since state discrimination was involved. Texas slightly altered the law, but the court again found it violated the 14th Amendment in the 1932 case of Nixon vs. Condon.
Texas altered the law again. This "legislate and litigate" strategy was an essential part of the Southern strategy to deny and delay blacks the right to vote.
On April Fool's Day in 1935, the Supreme Court upheld the Texas white primary.
Finally, in the 1944 case of Smith vs. Allwright, the court declared the white primary was unconstitutional and a violation of the 15th Amendment. South Carolina sought to evade the court's decision by repealing all laws relating to elections so that the court could not find any state discrimination. Florida considered doing the same, b