MISSISSIPPI A Vote for Reason

"The poll tax won't keep 'em from voting," Mississippi's infamous Senator Theodore Bilbo used to snort. "What keeps 'em from voting is Section 244 of the Constitution of 1890." That section stipulated that voters -Negro voters, anyway -must be able to interpret a state constitution that, as Bilbo chortled, "damn few white men and no niggers at all can explain"

The requirement was largely responsible for the fact that Mississippi's Negro voter-registration rate is the South's lowest -6.7%. Last week Section 244 was as dead as slavery. By a majority vote of 130,832 to 49,330 or almost three to one, Mississippians overwhelmingly approved a new voting law that eliminates virtually the whole artful apparatus of legalisms that has successfully disfranchised the Negroes in their state for nearly a century -including the requirements that a voter be of "good moral character" and be able to define good citizenship. Though Mississippians must still pay a $2 state poll tax and show minimal literacy to qualify for the voting rolls, the first of these barriers is under challenge in federal courts, and the second has been circumvented by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, under which federal registrars can enroll anyone without regard to literacy. Thus it is only a matter of time before Mississippi's voting system is as liberal as any in the U.S.

"Federal Snoopers." Mississippians had good reason to change their constitution, since it patently could no longer be used to keep Negroes from registering. Nonetheless, in a state that has found endless ways to defy federal authority on racial issues, the new voting law is a signal victory for Governor Paul B. Johnson. Though he won office two years ago on a segregationist platform, Johnson has since tried to lead his state along a more moderate path.

He cut off state funds to the white Citizens' Council, welcomed the visiting U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Last June, when it was plain that Congress would pass a voting rights bill, Governor Johnson called a special session of the legislature and submitted the proposed constitutional amendment. The Senate went along, but the House balked, twice voted it down, endorsed it the third time around only after Johnson threw all his prestige behind the bill.

Stumping the state from Biloxi to Neshoba County, Johnson urged ratification of the amendment in language the crowds could understand. "I would prefer," he said, "that our own registrars retain responsibility over qualifications and voting rather than see them swept aside and replaced by federal snoopers in every county of the state." Ratification of the amendment, he declared, would be "a vote of confidence in our lawmakers and will show the rest of the nation that Mississippians are reasonable people."

Tool of a Tool. The Ku Klux Klan, in a desperate attempt to block popular ratification, vilified the Governor in language that, in his words, "would make a back-alley degenerate ashamed of himself." The Klan even accused the Governor of being a Communist, on the convoluted theory that the Communists had made a tool of President Johnson, who had made a tool of Mississippi's Senator James Eastland, who had made a tool of the Governor. Also battling the amendment was the Association of Christian Conservatives ("neither Christian nor conservative," charges Johnson), composed of leaders of the state's John Birch Society, Citizens' Council, Women for Constitutional Government, and Americans for the Preservation of the White Race. On the eve of the referendum, however, the state's two U.S. Senators, Eastland and John Stennis, segregationists both, came out in favor of the measure, declaring that "such changes will place our state and county officials in a better position to minimize federal control of the registration of voters and elections."

The new law will not of itself exempt Mississippi from federal intervention under the Voting Rights Act. The state has yet to persuade the Attorney General or the U.S. District Court in Washington that it no longer practices voter discrimination, and registrars in many Mississippi counties are plainly paying little, if any, attention to the new state and federal laws (see previous story). Yet Governor Johnson says that he is confident that Mississippians "will try to comply with the new law as far as reasonable." And in any event, he firmly believes that the new Negro vote may have a decisive effect on the next gubernatorial campaign in 1967 -in which Johnson's predecessor, Segregationist Ross Barnett, reportedly hopes to make a comeback.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.