Jackson Advocate

Hattiesburg
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missed their complaint. The appeals court, however, agreed with the District Court that the petitioners must exhaust their state-provided remedies but remanded the case to the lower court to allow the petitioners and other colored citizens to ask L. M. Cox, the county registrar, to register them.

The controversy arose out of an order of the Forrest County Board of Supervisors requiring the registrar to make a new registration of voters for elections to be held in the county after June 1, 1950.

The petitioners and a large group of other colored persons applied to the registrar for registration along with white citizens. The petition states that all of the petitioners are able to read any section of the Constitution of Mississippi, several of them being college-trained and professional men.

Mississippi law requires that, to be eligible to register and vote, a person must be "able to read any section of the Constitution of this state," or be "able to understand the same when read to him or give a reasonable interpretation thereof."

The registrar examined the petitioners and the other colored applicants on the Mississippi Constitution. He decided that their answers were unsatisfactory and refused to register them.

The petition asserts that only colored citizens are examined on their ability to read or understand the Mississippi Constitution, and that this practice is designed solely to prevent colored citizens from registering and voting, regardless of their qualifications.

While there are almost as many colored citizens as whites in Forrest County, the petition states, several thousand white citizens have been registered under the new registration and only about fifty colored citizens.

Mississippi statutes provide that a person denied the right to register may appeal to the county election commissioners and if there denied the right to register, may appeal to the county circuit court upon posting a $100 bond to guarantee payment of costs, and then to the Mississippi Supreme Court upon posting a $500 cost bond.

The petitioners did not follow this procedure, instead they filed suit in the Federal District Court for injunctive relief on the ground that the registrar had flagrantly discriminated against them because of color, and that they and other colored citizens ought not be put to the enormous expense in the aggregate which the prescribed procedure would place upon them.

The petition points out that colored people in the south, as a whole, are "wretchedly poor," and to have a "crushing burden" cast upon them of having to post two cost bonds—one for $100 and the other for $500—and pay attorneys' fees and court costs, is enough to "shock the conscience of a court of equity and to galvanize it into activity."