Sixty-six years ago, for the first time since Reconstruction, the federal government directly challenged the South’s Jim Crow methods of voter suppression when the U.S. Department of Justice filed suit against white officials of Terrell County, Georgia. Its registrars had unjustly denied Black citizens, including Eddie and Edna Mae Lowe, their right to vote. Recently, news reports reveal that their daughter, Venita Epps, reciting her mother’s belief that “I ain’t no ways tired,” will be among officials helping Fulton County residents exercise their right to vote this year. This poignant, generational story personifies both how the struggles over voting rights in Georgia have changed – and how old patterns remain sadly the same.
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The Lowes were denied the right to vote in 1957 by local white registrars on the bogus grounds that they had failed to pass the state’s required literary test, although both were college trained and Edna Mae had a master’s degree. Back then, Georgia and other Southern states had tests for literacy and “good character” that local white registrars administered as a law unto themselves to restrict voting to only whites – and often to only a small group of whites. This practice stubbornly persisted across Georgia so that by late 1963, despite losing the Department of Justice’s lawsuit, white officials in majority-Black Terrell had permitted fewer than 100 African Americans to register to vote.
But after passage and renewal of the 1965 federal Voting Rights Act, there was a sea change. The law set in motion provisions that prohibited abridging the right to vote due to race or lack of literacy – and to have that vote count. And those who administer the voting regulations were no longer restricted to just white folks, as Venita Epps proudly proves.
Today Georgia’s voter registration rates among Black and white citizens are comparable, although white turnout does remain higher. This vast change is due to persistent, massive work in Black communities across the state over decades, backstopped by enforcement of the 1965 Act and the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which among other things made voter registration a part of getting a driver’s license.
Unfortunately, what has not changed in Georgia is the continuing opposition of the prevailing majority-white political party to the federal laws that advanced this progress. The political parties in power have changed, but opposition to Black voting by the prevailing party has remained the same.
Back in 1958 in the Terrell County case, Democratic state officials challenged as unconstitutional the new federal law authorizing the suit and later made corresponding legal challenges to the 1965 Act. Similarly, Georgia’s Republican attorney generals joined Alabama in 2013 in support of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision annulling the Act’s Section 5; two months ago, Georgia’s attorney general again joined Alabama and a few other states in federal court challenging the right of any private citizen to bring a voting rights lawsuit under the Act, although it has been common practice for almost six decades.
Also, Republican state officials continue to oppose the application of the act whenever it mandates that Black citizens be given a fair opportunity to have their vote count in electing the candidates of their choice in Georgia and elsewhere.
Another lingering pattern has been the creation of state oversight agencies, controlled by the prevailing majority-white political party, to oversee local and state elections whenever Black voting has become a major political force. In 1964, for example, as Black voting began to have an impact in Georgia politics, the Democratic state Legislature created a Democrat-dominated state election board to oversee registration and voting and to investigate fraud for the first time. Georgia officials were not as outrageous in public remarks as Alabama Governor George Wallace who declared that the Voting Rights Act was being pushed by “left wing liberals” who “need to open the way for fraudulent practices in the South” to win “the illiterate vote.”
But, with its members worrying about the so-called “bloc vote,” the Georgia Legislature passed a 200-page “honest” election law making it more difficult for Blacks to elect candidates of their choice, continuing literacy restrictions, barring voters from using sample ballots at the polls, and making it easy for anyone to challenge a person’s right to vote.
Now, after Georgia recently elected with huge Black support its first African American to serve in the U.S. Senate, the Republican legislature enacted a new Republican-dominated state elections board for the expressed purpose of fighting against voter fraud. It also passed new restrictions on voting and polling places while making it easier for anyone to challenge thousands of persons’ right to vote.
Old ways die hard. But real progress can continue and expand. It will require more white Georgians to support the right to vote for all citizens on the belief that protecting that right is more critical than partisanship for creating a good, prosperous society and a lasting, vibrant democracy. And it will need a new generation of Georgians to renew the vital work for voting rights that Edna Mae Lowe and many others undertook in the past.
Steve Suitts is an adjunct lecturer at Emory University and author of the book, “A War of Sections: How Deep South Political Suppression Shaped Voting Rights in America (2024).”
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