11 FREEDOM SUMMER
‘
H
ow many bubbles are there in a cake of soap?’ a Mississippi
registrar teased a black man registering to vote. The would-be
voter realized that the situation was hopeless and needled the registrar
back: ‘Well, I don’t want to be an ignorant man all the rest of my life....Tell
me how many bubbles are there in a bar of soap?’ The registrar grew angry
and, as expected, failed the black man in the literacy test [Doc. 12, p. 149].
Other registrars asked bewildered black applicants to translate unfamiliar
Latin phrases. By contrast, a white applicant passed who interpreted the sec-
tion, ‘There shall be no imprisonment for debt,’ as ‘I thank that a Neorger
should have 2 years in collage before voting because he don’t under stand.’
Behind the Magnolia Curtain, registration tricks kept black voter registra-
tion extremely low. Only 5.2 per cent of blacks could vote, compared to the
South’s average of one-third of blacks and two-thirds of whites. In heavily-
black Holmes county the registrar disqualified all but 0.02 per cent of blacks
and fraudulently enrolled more than 100 per cent of whites. In Amite,
Tallahatchie, and Walthall counties, not a single black voted. As a result, no
Mississippi black had held elective office since Reconstruction ended in
- Even if blacks voted, there was no choice but the Democratic party of
James Vardaman, Theodore Bilbo, James Eastland, and Ross Barnett, rabid
racists all. In campaigning for governor in 1903, Vardaman called for the
repeal of the 14th and 15th Amendments and described the Negro as ‘a
lazy, lustful animal which no conceivable amount of training can transform
into a tolerable citizen.’ The white man, he averred, ‘would be justified in
slaughtering every Ethiop on earth to preserve unsullied the honor of one
Caucasian home.’
Voting was the least of blacks’ problems in Mississippi, the poorest and
most racially violent of states. More than 80 per cent of blacks were locked
in grinding poverty, in part because chemical fertilizers and mechanical cot-
ton pickers displaced many field hands. When welfare was available, it went
to poor whites first. Education for blacks was pitiful, with the state spending