Maceo Snipes, a black man from Georgia, was determined to vote. Having recently returned from World War II, he went to cast his ballot in the summer of 1946, the first black person to do so in Taylor County.
A few days later, there was a knock on Snipes’ door. He answered it and saw a white man. Stepping outside, Snipes saw another three white men on his porch, who greeted him with shots from a firing squad.
“The message was really clear: You vote, you die,” said Carol Anderson, author of One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy, to Boston College students in a Zoom on Wednesday.
Anderson, a professor of African American studies at Emory University, spoke to BC students about how racial minorities have fought against oppression throughout American history. She also emphasized the importance of voting and discussed the country’s long history of disenfranchisement that has, in its extreme, proven fatal to Americans like Snipes.
“The things you want for you, for your family, for your community, those are public policy things,” Anderson said. “Public policy comes through that vote. So it’s making the connections about the things that you envision in your life, how the vote is attached to it, and how you have more control than you think. You’ve got more power than you think. Exercise that power.”
With the 2020 presidential election only 31 days away, Anderson encouraged students to make educated decisions while voting and to elect leaders who do not use their power to disenfranchise others.
Anderson argued that systemic barriers to voting—ranging from voter ID laws to felon disenfranchisement—can seem legitimate and legal, but end up immensely restricting voter turnout of certain populations.
“These multiple techniques are designed to create voter suppression, but also voter depression, where people believe that it doesn’t matter that their votes don’t count,” Anderson said. “It is designed to dissuade voters from engaging in democracy.”
Anderson also discussed how poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses were used to systematically bar black people from voting even after the 15th Amendment, which barred the denial of suffrage to U.S. citizens based on race, was passed.
Anderson emphasized the impact of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which immensely improved voter turnout. She also referenced the 2013 Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder, which ruled that states’ voting legislation was no longer subject to federal clearance.
This ruling resulted in some states passing voter-ID legislation, which requires the voter to present some form of identification at the polling booth. Many argue that these laws intentionally disenfranchise minority voters, and Anderson asserted that the voter fraud these laws are meant to target is not as prominent as some people believe.
“And that’s part of the problem with a corrupt system,” Anderson said. “That corruption doesn’t stay bounded in the target. Because it’s so corrosive and gnarles the system, it spreads out and it affects everyone. So when I talk about voter suppression destroying our democracy, that’s what I mean.”
Anderson also noted that the vote does not stop at the polls, and insisted that voters continue to pay attention to policies enacted by those they elect. She recognized that, although the country is in the midst of a pandemic with a dismantled postal system, voting in this coming election is more important than ever.
“I think that we’re still going to see a lot of people using mail-in ballots,” Anderson said. “And I think we’re going to see a lot of people voting early. I think we need to be ready. We need to be aware. We need to know our rights.”
