Freedom to Vote

Being able to vote in elections is a right Americans often take for granted. But for African Americans in the Deep South of the 1960s, even trying to register to vote could be fatal.

It had been that way for nearly 100 years. When the Civil War (1861-65) and slavery ended in 1865, white Southerners in some states found themselves outnumbered by the people they’d once enslaved. Then, in 1870, the 15th Amendment became law, guaranteeing African Americans the right to vote. Fearful of losing their grip on power, white legislators passed state and local laws to prevent Black citizens from exercising that right.

Some laws required voters to pass written tests to cast a ballot. Such tests were designed to be too hard for formerly enslaved people, who hadn’t been allowed to learn to read and write. Other laws set poll taxes that had to be paid to register to vote—and were purposely too high for poor Black people to afford. Even a century after slavery’s end, such tactics kept most Black Southerners from voting.

Oliver Viglas: What were you trying to accomplish in Mississippi?

Chris Williams: I was trying to get Black people registered to vote.

OV: Would you describe what you did as mostly organizing?

CW: Yes. [He hands Oliver a leaflet.] This is for voter registration in Panola County, Mississippi, where I worked. I must have handed out thousands of these. That is a piece of civil rights history you are holding in your hand.

OV: So really, your work was about the right to vote.

CW: [reading the leaflet] “Citizens of Panola County, you can register. There is no . . . test; anyone who can read and write can register and vote at the courthouse in Batesville.”

To give you a little background on what happened in Panola County, local Black farmers and ministers got together around 1960 to figure out how to overcome obstacles to voting. Then 16 Black men decided they would go to the courthouse to register to vote. Most of them were returning from World War II, and none of them succeeded in registering. This county was 55 percent Black, but no African Americans there were registered to vote.

OV: Did those 16 men persist?

CW: They tried multiple times, and that generated friction with some [local] white people. Willie Kuyken­dall, who was one of the 16, was run out of town by a white mob that burned a cross in his front yard. He ended up living the rest of his life in Gary, Indiana, because he couldn’t go back to Panola County.

With the help of the U.S. assistant attorney general for civil rights, Black men of Panola County filed a federal lawsuit to gain the right to vote. In May 1964—two and a half years later—they won. The judges ruled that tests for registering to vote in Mississippi would be temporarily stopped in Panola County. The court order went into effect in June 1964.

OV: Is this where you come in?

CW: Yes. I showed up in June of 1964 with nine other civil rights workers. We were there to change the shape of Black voting in Panola County, the first county in Mississippi to win a lawsuit on voting. By the end of the summer, we had registered 1,000 Black voters—from zero to 1,000 in three months!

OV: Is there a lesson you took away from that era that would be applicable today?

CW: I talk about it in the college course I teach by asking: How do people who have no money, and no political power, achieve equality?

That certainly was the situation of the Black citizens in Mississippi. The answer to the question is: People have to stand up, be united, and stick together. When enough people demand change, stuff changes. It doesn’t change fast, but it changes.

To be part of that was a tremendous gift to me because I saw history being made, and I knew it at the time. I was accepted at the University of Penn­syl­vania in August 1964. But I wrote to the university and said: “I’m going to stay in Mississippi instead of coming to your college. I think I’m learning more down here than you could teach me.”

It still seems like the right decision all these years later, because I was aware that I was looking at history being made and I wasn’t going to get that chance again in my life.

Editor’s Note: In the year following the court’s order halting registration tests in Panola County, Black people there turned out to register—and vote—in growing numbers. But in other parts of the South, they still struggled to do the same.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 added the power of the federal government to that fight. It outlawed registration tests and enforced already existing bans against poll taxes—defending every U.S. citizen’s freedom to vote.