White freedom, federal power, and the Black vote

by Jefferson Cowie

“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Alabama Governor George Wallace’s most famous sentence echoes through history, a defining moment in the resistance to civil rights. Yet segregation was not the essence of his 1963 inaugural address. Rather, Wallace defended a more enduring logic on which segregation rested: freedom. Specifically, white freedom from federal power.

In Wallace’s world, federal authority to protect civil rights became the looming usurper, the illegitimate actor, the violator of American freedom. In his inaugural address, he mentioned segregation just one other time after his notorious demand for “segregation forever.” In contrast, he invoked freedom or liberty 25 times. Pointing to the threat of “federal bayonets” on the horizon, he warned, “The heel of tyranny does not fit the neck of an upright man.”

In an era of Black enfranchisement and civil rights, Governor Wallace spoke passionately of an enduring freedom from federal authority, a freedom that allowed for the domination of others, a freedom that claims if you cannot be a master then you are not free, a freedom that says if the government is not on your side, then it should not exist. The Civil Rights Act, he depicted as an “assassin’s knife stuck in the back of liberty,” an assertion of government overreach with “more power than claimed by King George III, more power than Hitler, Mussolini, or Khrushchev ever had.” By promoting national laws to end racial segregation, the “federal force-cult,” Wallace claimed, was trying to push the white South “back into bondage.”

The Governor hailed from Barbour County, an obscure corner of Alabama known for towns with streets lined with elaborate antebellum style mansions, and a countryside dotted with sharecropper shacks. On the day that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was going to be signed into law, the Black people of Barbour prepared for another of their marches. Where Wallace supporters saw white bondage in federal power, Black marchers in Barbour County saw freedom.

White people wanted their citizenship defined locally, free from what they saw as federal tyranny. Black people wanted to assert federal citizenship, which they could leverage against local power and exploitation.

On that soggy, hot day, the air as wet as the rain, the marchers in favor of the Voting Rights Act knew that nobody in the nation’s capital would hear their hopeful chants and songs ringing out from this obscure dot in the deep South, but the people sang and chanted anyway. As they marched in anticipation of the impending presidential signature, the parade ended with cascades of rain dropping from the sky. “Everyone was soaked to the skin,” civil rights worker Larry Butler recalled, “but on the way back you could hear the freedom songs for three blocks.” Then the sun burst through, and steam rose from the streets. “The sight of lines of now sunlit marchers dancing to the rhythm of freedom songs in wet clothes glued to swaying bodies,” he noted, “is one that cannot fail to strike a chord in the most ironclad throat.”

Where Wallace supporters saw white bondage in federal power, Black marchers in Barbour County saw freedom.

When word came that President Lyndon Baines Johnson had signed the bill, the raucous gathering turned solemn. Everyone stopped, drew quiet, and directed their prayers toward far away Washington. As a result of the struggles of Black people throughout the South, the world’s oldest democracy had finally committed itself to becoming an actual democracy—even in distant places like Barbour County.

As those marchers knew, at nearly every juncture in the long history of the African American freedom struggle, in places famous and obscure, the project was to create federal citizens as much as possible. People needed to be released from the vicious traps of local- and state-level citizenship. The federal government may often be a treacherous ally on civil and voting rights, but it is also the single most important instrument for guaranteeing a fighting chance for all people.

The Voting Rights Act appeared to have rescued people from the terror of the local. Before the Act, civil rights workers in rural Barbour County managed to register 611 people to vote after months and years of toil. On the first “registration day” protected by the Act, organizers were stunned to see an estimated five hundred people lined up to register at each of the two major courthouses in the county.

Everything about voting rights hinged on federal authority. The Barbour County story, and thousands of other unnamed, unknown, unfilmed places where dirt-level fights for political survival took place, nothing short of an unflinching commitment to federal enforcement of voting rights proved adequate to sustaining the promise of American democracy.

A few months after the passage of the Act, however, adding machines at civil rights headquarters in Atlanta spit out a mystery: Hosea Williams, Martin Luther King Jr.’s key lieutenant, pored over the numbers to figure out why some voter registration drives worked out so much better than others. No matter how important the Voting Rights Act was, no matter how good the county level organizing was, no matter who the leaders were, no matter what tactics were used, Williams found exactly one variable that explained the disparate rates of registration on the county level: the presence or absence of federal registrars, sponsored by the Voting Rights Act, that were on the ground in any given county.

By November 1965, Black Belt counties with federal registrars reported 84 percent of the “Negro Voting Age Population” registered. The figure for counties without federal oversight was less than half that—41 percent. Federal presence in a county, Williams concluded, was the “only significant variable we can consider responsible” for the different registration outcomes. The report singled out a comparison between a notoriously rough place like Wilcox County, where there was federal oversight, and Barbour County, where there was none. “Barbour County, the home of Governor George Wallace and one of the best movement counties in the Black Belt, has a voting age population roughly similar to that of Wilcox County,” the report concluded, “yet the registration in Barbour since the vra is only a little more than one-third of that in Wilcox County.”

Laws mattered, but federal enforcement made the difference. For want of federal registrars, the frustrating and often violent struggle to get people registered continued. Without aggressive enforcement of citizenship rights, even the Voting Rights Act combined with a vibrant social movement was not going to get the job done. Hosea Williams, after tabulating those county-level results, summed up the history of the United States. “In short states’ rights and civil rights (human rights) don’t mix.”

Both Hosea Williams and George Wallace struggled for their respective ideas of freedom in what founding father James Madison celebrated as the “compound republic.” A productive tension, Madison believed, was built into the American system in which local, state, and federal arenas form a conflicted political whole. Yet when it came to the right to vote, Madison’s symphony of political interests ends up being an ongoing political, at times actual, war over the right to vote. Since there is no guarantee of the right to vote in the United States Constitution, whites have tried to preserve control over voting rights by keeping it on the state and local level.

Such racialized versions of anti-statism sustained George Wallace through his decades of governorship and his two major presidential campaigns. And the truly stunning thing is that Wallace was not wrong. Resistance to federal power has very much been an enduring catalyst in the political chemistry of American freedom. It was not a reflexive rhetorical dodge, but a constituent dimension of the American creed. His contemporary “fight to win and preserve our freedoms and liberties” was as old as the republic itself.

After the Civil War, when the federal government used unprecedented force to ensure Black voting rights, whites in Barbour County attacked their occupiers as “a flagrant and dangerous invasion of the ancient conservative principles of personal liberty and free government.” As it so often did, “free government” meant white rule.

Had federal power been wielded firmly and justly after the Civil War, in fact, the Voting Rights Act might never have been necessary. For all the importance of the Reconstruction Amendments—the 13th (emancipation), 14th (equal protection), and the 15th (non-discrimination in voting rights)—they were only as good as the federal enforcement that stood behind them.

Laws mattered, but federal enforcement made the difference. For want of federal registrars, the frustrating and often violent struggle to get people registered continued.

Reconstruction started well in Barbour County. With a slim Black majority population, the county elected several African American state legislators, had Black people on juries, and even sent a Black Congressman, James T. Rapier, to Washington. During this short-lived burst of genuine democracy supported by military occupation, white people roiled under what they called “Negro Republican domination,” and they organized themselves, not in protest groups parading around town squares, but in armed militias and Klan chapters.

During the November 1874 elections, hundreds of organized Black voters from the countryside marched into Barbour County’s largest town of Eufaula in rank-and-file formation, disciplined and strong but strategically unarmed, so as not to provoke a violent backlash. At noon, a single pistol shot cracked the air. The town’s “best” citizens quickly appeared, armed and ready. All opened fire on Black people in line to vote. Shots came from both sides of the street, out windows, and from porches. Bullets, one survivor recalled, rained down “like hail from the clouds.”

“In a twinkling of an eye,” recalled a Black Republican organizer named Henry Fraser, “the street was foggy with powder-smoke.” Bullets whizzed overhead, and glass shattered as indiscriminate firing hit storefront windows. Fraser hid under some nearby steps and witnessed how “the colored people all broke and ran” in every direction. Some were shot from the upper part of the city, and some from the lower part,” he remembered. Shooters followed Black voters “as long as they had anything to fire with.”

As the smoke cleared, eighty wounded and dead Black voters lay in the streets around the polls. Corpses were taken away in carts. They eventually found the body of one missing person by following the circling buzzards to where he had fled, bleeding to death, into the woods. Local whites blamed the riot on unruly and violent Black people. But when Congressional investigators later asked US Marshal James D. Williford about what he witnessed at the Eufaula election “riot,” he responded, “My opinion of that Eufaula riot is that it was simply a massacre.”

The Black voters thought they had the protection of federal troops and federal marshals, both of whom were in the county to oversee the election.

Everyone knew that election day 1874 hinged on what the federal troops would do. The Black voters thought they had the protection of federal troops and federal marshals, both of whom were in the county to oversee the election. Unknown to the Black voters, however, regional Army headquarters had given orders to stand down in any local disputes. As the shooting began, one federal marshal begged the commanding Army officer to stop the bloodshed, but he refused based on orders not to intervene. The body count mounted while federal soldiers stood by.

Twenty miles away, in the northern part of Barbour County, a white mob shot up a polling place and burned a ballot box full of votes cast by Black citizens. They tried to kill a prominent white Republican judge, a “scalawag” as those sympathetic to Black voters were known, but they killed his teenage son instead. Here, too, the commanding officer of the United States Army watched the destruction, clutching a telegram that said, “Keep your troops away from crowd.”

The end of federal enforcement meant the end of democracy in Barbour County. The murderous violence in 1874 ended substantive Black voting there until the 1960s. Whites called it “redemption.” In the vacuum left by federal retreat rose the neo-slavery of convict leasing, the vigilante justice of lynching, the degradation and debt of sharecropping, and the official disenfranchisement of blacks under a new state constitution. Most activists—including the surviving scalawag judge, fled the county, and Black Republicans who so much as talked of testifying about the election massacres were sent to jail. “Not one escaped a conviction,” a judge explained, “no matter whether the evidence showed a violation of law or not.”

In places like Barbour County, long shaped by the politics of white supremacy, the drive to escape the “oppression” of federal power inevitably led to Black disenfranchisement. The contemporary historian of Reconstruction, Gregory P. Downs, put the answer to the problem succinctly in his After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War. “A government without force,” he writes “means a people without rights.”

Today the pattern of local–federal tension seen during the Reconstruction and Civil Rights Eras continues. While Black Lives Matter and other hopeful movements of our time might suggest a third era of “reconstruction,” so far the story looks more like  another slow moving “redemption” since the Voting Rights Act. Gerrymandering, hundreds of pending and successful state voter restriction bills, crackpot ideas like the “independent state legislature” theory, and a Supreme Court poised to roll back voting rights, all fall under the same states’ rights brand of freedom that ended Reconstruction, flummoxed Hosea Williams, and made George Wallace’s career.

As Bush v. Gore (2000) reminds us, there is no affirmative right to vote on the federal level, only a theoretical protection from discrimination in whatever voting systems states may have set up. This leaves a never ending political war over the right to vote, in which the struggle over who gets to vote supersedes what political concerns people would like to express. When Shelby County v. Holder (2013) severely rolled back the federal oversight provisions of the Voting Rights Act, Chief Justice John Roberts supported on the idea that “the country has changed.” Yet the change has been away from federal support of voting, not towards it.

The truth might set us free: if the right to vote is not in the federal constitution, and it is not in the state constitution, where is it?

Even when the current conservative Supreme Court tried to end discriminatory “cracking and packing” pattern of gerrymandering that corralled Black representation into a single district in Alabama (in the 2023 decision Allen v. Milligan), the Republican legislature maintained the state’s historic resistance to federal authority by simply defying the Court’s decision. The Supreme Court had to return with a court-ordered special master to draw the second Black district, which, after an exhausting struggle, finally placed Barbour County in a redrawn district with enhanced Black voting power.

Voting rights cases have continued to bear particularly odd fruit as of late. In a fight similar to Alabama’s, South Carolina found the ultimate work-around in 2024. The State argued that their redistricting plan was not a race-based gerrymander, but a partisan one, and the Supreme Court agreed. In other words, gerrymandering by party affiliation is just good old American politics—an elegant if pernicious sidestepping of the racial justice provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Most recently, the Kansas Supreme Court may have done the country a big favor by rattling the shaky foundations of the house of democracy to its core. It concluded, in a split decision, that there is no guarantee of the right to vote in the Kansas state constitution. The truth might set us free: if the right to vote is not in the federal constitution, and it is not in the state constitution, where is it?

The only option is to establish the right to vote on the federal level in clear and affirmative ways. The noble efforts of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the For the People Act are extremely important but will maintain the feeble system that promotes voting rights as a question of state-versus-federal power, making voting rights a political tactic rather than a right. Demanding vigorous federal enforcement is good, but better yet would be a constitutional guaranteeing of an unambiguous right to vote for every citizen—full stop.

Yet American freedom, especially its white version, has too often been constructed as autonomy from that much-needed federal power. The legitimacy of federal authority found its most sustained challenge on January 6, 2021. That day, Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks rallied the rightwing shock troops to defy the duly elected federal government. Wrapped in body armor, he claimed it was time to be “taking down names and kicking ass” in his efforts to promote the Big Lie about the 2020 election. When it came to defending his inflammatory remarks about the illegitimacy of the fairly elected president—and federal authority more broadly—Brooks explained that everyone should read his speech and decide what kind of republic they want: “One based on freedom and liberty or one based on Godless dictatorial power.”

If the forces of democracy do not seize federal authority to enforce equitable voting rights, authoritarians, as they have before, will seize those same levers of power to enforce a narrow and militant brand of white freedom. Lest another 150 years go by with this issue still a central problem in American politics, the struggle for voting rights is urgent and imperative—despite maudlin cries of “Godless dictatorial power.” □

Photo: President Lyndon B. Johnson and Martin Luther King, Jr., Clarence Mitchell, and Patricia Roberts Harris. following the signing of the Voting Rights Act, August 6, 1965. President’s Room, U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C. Photo Yoichi Okamoto. Courtesy LBJ Library.

This article appears in the 2024-25 Berlin Journal (38). Parts of this essay were excerpted from Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power (Basic Books, 2022), which received the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2023.