Grandpa Boxx always voted, even though he had to pay a poll tax of anywhere from three to six dollars to cast a ballot. Some years the crops were flush and he had the cash, some years he had to work on a county road crew at the legally mandated rate of 15 cents an hour until he earned the poll tax fee.
Missouri’s poll tax, passed around the turn of the 20th Century, was designed to keep blacks from voting, but it also had the effect of burdening every poor person in the state, white and black. The 24th Amendment finally abolished poll taxes in 1964. The murder of little girls in a Birmingham church in 1963 and the brutal killings of civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964 and the bloodshed in Selma in 1965 gave moral weight to the push for that amendment and the Voting Rights Act.
Two things have happened since then. One is that a majority of white Americans vote for the Republican presidential candidate, no matter who it is. 1964 was the last year most voting whites went Democratic for president, a clear backlash to the Civil Rights Movement that continues today. The other is that, despite everything, blacks vote at substantially lower rates than whites in almost all elections.
The situation in Ferguson illustrates what happens when black people – for whatever reasons – fail to register or vote. Ferguson is majority black, but most of the 12,697 registered voters in Ferguson are white. The most likely voters are the people least likely to have negative encounters with police or see police and racism as problems: white and over age 50.
So it was no big surprise that an aldermanic candidate forum in Ferguson the night after two police officers were shot drew a large crowd, a crowd almost exclusively white. The candidates know who actually votes: not one candidate at the forum supported disbanding the Ferguson Police Department and turning police control over to St. Louis County.
So despite the Justice Department report and subsequent Ferguson firings, despite the trauma of the Michael Brown Jr. saga, despite all the attention and angst, no one should expect much of anything to change even after the April 7 elections.
That’s because politics, and the public policies that result from politics, aren’t magic; they’re math. It’s all simple arithmetic – the side with the most votes wins. That doesn’t necessarily mean the side with the most money wins. Conservative white Tea Party insurgents have run successful campaigns against better-funded opponents by simply tapping into the deep vein of white rage and resentment that runs through American life these days.
Politicians and public officials in Ferguson who tolerated racism in the police department and the use of black folks as walking ATMs in the municipal court never had to worry about blowback prior to Michael Brown Jr.’s killing, simply because the people who elected them didn’t have a problem with the way things worked. And that’s because black people in Ferguson just don’t vote.
After the Brown shooting, activists pushed hard to register new voters, but only managed to sign up a few dozen. Earnest students from various historically black colleges spent time in Ferguson in late February and early March registering voters.
From the numbers provided by the St. Louis County Board of Elections, they might as well have stayed home.
In the one month before voter registration closed on March 11, precisely 35 new voters registered in Ferguson. Between the time Darren Wilson opened fire on August 9, and the close of registration March 11, 483 new voters registered in Ferguson. So despite all the efforts, the number of registered voters in Ferguson has gone up less than four per-cent.
Given that the black population of Ferguson is mostly young and low-income, and very few are college graduates, those numbers shouldn’t really shock anyone. Young people – those under age 30 – make up one-third of all non-voters. Almost half of all non-voters are people of color. Almost half of all non-voters have household incomes less than $30,000 a year, while over half never attended college.
Those are all compelling reasons, but none of them are excuses. The marchers in Selma, the freedom riders in Mississippi, the civil rights pioneers across the U.S. all fought, and occasionally died, to make sure black people had the right to vote. But if people won’t use it, you have to ask, why did they bother?
Charles Jaco is a journalist, novelist and author who has worked for NBC News, CNN, Fox 2, KMOX and KTRS.
