Atlanta Daily World

Mechanical Disfranchisement Proposal

A Blackbelt lawmaker has designed a scheme by which he hopes to use mechanical machinery to restrict the full flow of voter-registration. Plainly the new scheme is aimed at keeping the names of Negro citizens off the poll lists.

Such a proposal makes even more urgent a national uniform voter-registration law. The Congress has the authority under the Fifteenth Amendment to implement the basic law so that no state may or does deprive any member of the Negro group of his right to vote solely because of his race.

No longer should the federal courts be the only reliance for knocking down these wacky-doodle devices of racial disfranchisement, but a new approach should be made through the Congress.

Scheme after scheme will continue to be enacted by Dixie lawmakers bent on violating the spirit and essence of the Fifteenth Amendment. The Congress needs to breathe life anew into this immortal freedom document.

Racial disfranchisement lawmakers try to make capital of the effort by civic-service leaders to provide adult education in voter-registration. They try to make a bugaboo about the conducting of voter-registration schools and political education projects. Such efforts are in finest American traditions. These adult schools on civic education result, in part, from a neglect of full civic education in the Negro division of the Alabama public school system.

If public schools did their duty and voter-registration officials administered the laws evenly and justly, in all instances, there would be no need for the privately-sponsored adult schools for civic education efficiency. The voter-registration schools are freedom schools.

No matter how difficult, or what manner of weird scheme, or how mechanical, the Negro civic-service leadership cannot afford to be discouraged or to turn back. A way will be evolved and formulated to overcome crude or sophisticated schemes formulated to take away from Negro citizens their civic birthright.

One road is to build a campaign for the enactment of a national, uniform, and specific law on voter-registration screening.

A second approach is for the legal scholars to find a formula for overturning the work of boards of registrars in those counties where Negro citizens outnumber white ones but where such boards exclude Negro citizens. An all-white board of registrars in a predominantly Negro county is not likely to be fair in its dealing. The all-white make-up of the board tends to suggest unfairness.

Thirdly, the Department of Justice should be urged to move harder and faster against board of registrars in these Negro concentrated counties and to demand federal referees. There must be a total effort to end political disfranchisement in Alabama.

Still there is work for our groups themselves to do. Our leaders should spread the campaign for new voters. Organizations like the Alabama State Teachers Association, the Prince Hall Masons, the Alabama Association of Women's Clubs, the Alabama Association of Elks and the Alabama Funeral Directors and Embalmers Association should throw their personnel and resources into this effort to eliminate racial disfranchisement.

Money used for dances, picnics, barbecue festivals, and banquets should be converted to a fight-for-suffrage fund.

The hour is late and the leadership is alerted. Where there is a will there is a way.