Black Power at the Dixie Polls

ON the surface, one interpretation of George Wallace's victory in Alabama is that it proves that the black vote is still ineffectual in the South. Yet few astute Southern politicians would be willing to gamble their own careers on that proposition. In Alabama last week, the black vote was so strong that the most skilled racial demagogue of the day had to pluck all of his fear-strumming oratorical strings to overcome it. And he succeeded by only a narrow margin. What the election really proved was that blacks alone control no state, but that even when facing a Wallace, they now constitute a factor that must be carefully calculated in most Southern elections.

This is true because blacks have been registering to vote in impressive numbers for the past five years. The starting point: passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, following the police attacks upon Martin Luther King Jr.'s Selma-to-Montgomery marches and the assassination of Civil Rights Worker Viola Liuzzo. Much of the excitement and publicity of those early voting drives is gone, but the campaign has continued -- quietly, tediously, but effectively, and with considerable agony for blacks threatened with loss of jobs or welfare benefits if they sign up to vote. In the past four years,510 separate voter-registration campaigns, costing $2,000 each, have been conducted among blacks in the eleven Southern states. They contributed to the addition of 1,740,000 blacks to the voting rolls. More significantly, while only one-third of all voting-age blacks were registered in the seven states covered by the Voting Rights Act in 1965, nearly 60% are now enrolled. White registration has also increased by about 1,000,000 voters, while the percentage of eligible whites registered has climbed from 73% to 84%. Out of the nearly 20 million registered voters in all Southern states, only 3,250,000 are black, but their concentration in some areas and their tendency to vote as a bloc give them an expanding political leverage.

No Pickup Trucks. The key to black progress in voting was the elimination of literacy tests, poll taxes and the erratic working hours of local registrars -- all designed to turn away blacks and all banned or discouraged by the Voting Rights Act. Federal registrars have stepped into about 60 counties to enforce fair procedures. These and other counties in the seven states can not change their registration regulations without federal approval. Yet it still requires many hours of door-to-door canvassing, personal persuasion and offers of transportation to break down the non-voting tradition of Southern blacks.

In Alabama's Greene County, for example, blacks now outregister whites by 2 to 1 , and drives are still being conducted to sign up more. The county has been carved into precincts and sub-precincts, with cochairmen in each to set up committees on transportation, babysitting, telephoning and finances. Car pools are organized to drive rural residents to the registrar's office. Blacks, well aware of their political image shun pickup trucks for such duty.

"That looks like you're hauling 'em in like cattle," explains the Rev. William McKinley Branch, the county's black voting chairman. Volunteer housewives in Kinston, N.C., decided the house-to-house approach was too slow. They invaded poolrooms and grocery stores in black neighborhoods, stopped pedestrians on sidewalks -- and managed in one two-week period to coax 850 blacks off the streets to register.

This kind of black power has enabled blacks to break the white stranglehold on local communities where whites are in the minority. The population of Greene County was 81% black in 1965, but only 452 blacks -- less than 11% of the county's votingage Negroes--were registered. Now there are 4,000 blacks registered, enough to put them in command of the local elections next November. The veteran white sheriff, Bill Lee, is so worried that he has publicly embraced S.C.L.C. President Ralph Abernathy and posed for pictures with S.C.L.C. Leader Hosea Williams, who showed him how to give the "soul power" clenched-fist salute. The sheriff needs, he says, "about 1,000 nigger votes" to win. In Tuskegee, Ala., blacks now control elections, and white politicians are asking blacks to work with, rather than against, them. "Until blacks got the majority vote, there were perhaps only three whites in this whole town calling for cooperation," scoffs the black vice-mayor, Frank Toland.

Watchdog Onus. In some larger cities, blacks now have the power to turn an election their way by voting as a bloc, much as have labor unions, ethnic groups and businessmen. No one knows that better than Atlanta Mayor Sam Massell, who was elected with more than 90% of the black vote last fall--fully half of his overall total. Much of the rest of his support came from labor unions, attracted by the promises of economic progress held out by the liberal Massell. In New Orleans last April, Mayor Moon Landrieu was elected on a similar black-labor-liberal coalition, picking up fully 92% of the black vote in the Democratic primary and 99% in the general election.

The black vote is, of course, diluted on state and district levels, although it is becoming increasingly significant. Its importance is certain to grow so long as the voting laws remain fair. That hinges on the fate of the Voting Rights Act, which is now before Congress.

President Nixon, in an effort to take the watchdog onus off the South, proposed to make the act apply equally to all 50 states, and to eliminate the requirement that local procedures cannot be changed without the approval of the Justice Department or a federal court. This would seriously dilute the act's effectiveness in the South. Overworked Government attorneys would have to detect any discriminatory changes in the maze of local laws and bring action in each such case. The Senate voted instead to make the law applicable nationwide but to retain the federal supervisory powers of the act. It also added an amendment lowering the voting age in all elections to 18. Last week the House Rules Committee decided that the House must either approve or kill the entire package. How Congressmen will react to that combination is much in doubt. But it seems wholly unnecessary that expanded voting rights for many long disenfranchised blacks should suddenly be jeopardized by a move, however worthy, to provide a similar gain for the nation's young.

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