Blacks: `Does my vote really matter?'

Apathy meets push to raise numbers at polls

WAYNE WASHINGTON

Knight Ridder  24 September 2004

After black Americans fought for generations for the right to vote, black South Carolinians are less likely than whites to cast ballots on Election Day.

Slightly more than half of registered nonwhite voters in South Carolina cast ballots in 2002, according to State Election Commission figures.

That is far below black voter turnout nationwide, where about 68 percent of registered blacks voted in 2002, a Census Bureau survey found. It also is below the 56 percent turnout of registered white voters in South Carolina that year.

(The state does not track black voting specifically. However, most nonwhites in the Palmetto State are black.)

Church officials and political activists working to get more S.C. blacks to the polls this fall say their efforts are complicated by apathy and a pervasive sense that the participation of blacks in the political process is irrelevant.

"There are times when I want to just throw up my hands," said Aisha Brown, director of the Missing Voter Project, aimed at finding unregistered voters and getting them registered.

Fifty-one percent of nonwhite S.C. registered voters cast ballots in 2002, down from 56.3 percent in 2000, according to the state. The low rate of black voting contributes to the political ineffectiveness of S.C. blacks.

Blacks account for nearly 30 percent of the state's population. But no black has won a statewide election, and only one of the state's six U.S. congressmen is black.

Low black voter turnout rates also are a serious problem for Democratic office-seekers, who win the lion's share of black votes.

Democratic voter registration efforts, aiming to help U.S. Senate candidate Inez Tenenbaum, are targeting blacks.

Party staffers pulled aside tailgaters before the recent Palmetto Capital City Classic between Benedict College and S.C. State to extol the virtues of voting.

Nu Wexler, coordinated campaign director of the S.C. Democratic Party, said many black voters intensely dislike President Bush and are eager to register.

Republicans are not targeting blacks or any other specific group in their voter registration efforts, a party official said. Instead, Republicans are conducting a broad get-out-the-vote drive, setting up tables at large gatherings and mailing out fliers carrying a message from President Bush urging South Carolinians to vote.

`Does my vote really matter?'

Others who have attempted to register S.C. blacks to vote have found their entreaties are not always well received."The apathy just makes you wonder sometimes," said H.S. Tate, past president of brotherhood ministries at West Columbia's Brookland Baptist Church, which is trying to register blacks.

Tate, whose church held a voter education forum Saturday, described a recent effort to register black voters at a local public housing complex.

"One lady said she just didn't care," Tate said. "She doesn't get into politics."

Tate, mindful of congressional debates about cutting money for public housing, said he struggled to stifle his anger. He said he has heard a wide range of reasons from blacks who are not interested in registering.

"There's been a systematic programming of black folks," Tate said, with whites hammering home the message that: "It doesn't matter. It's OK. You'll be taken care of."

Like many Southern states, South Carolina has had a dogged, creative history of depriving blacks of their right to vote.

Passed in 1882, the "Eight Box Law" allowed the state to place eight candidate boxes on the ballot, requiring voters to know how to read in order to vote, according to a 1998 S.C. history written by Walter Edgar.

The majority of blacks in the state, who had been slaves just two decades before, did not know how to read.

The 1882 law also required voters already registered to register again. The law imposed a lifetime ban on those who did not follow that provision.

In 1898, "Pitchfork'' Ben Tillman, an S.C. governor and U.S. senator, orchestrated a new state constitution requiring potential voters to be able to "read and write any section of the constitution submitted to him by the registration officer."

If the voter could not read, he had to own or have paid taxes on property another hurdle black South Carolinians were unlikely to clear.

Similar efforts to keep S.C. blacks from voting were repeated until the 1960s, when federal laws prohibited poll taxes and literacy tests.

`This isn't 40 years ago'

But those 40-year-old voting rights battles don't resonate with many black voters, said Brown of the Missing Voter Project.

"I had one young brother who said, `This isn't 40 years ago,' " she said.

Anthony Lewis, a 36-year-old black man who works as a supervisor in an AIDS/HIV mobile testing unit, said he does understand that history.

But he is not able to vote.

Lewis was released from prison in 1996 after serving six years for manslaughter. Still on parole, he is ineligible to vote.

That has not stopped Lewis from working with the S.C. Progressive Network, a coalition working to register voters. He has talked to other blacks, focusing particularly on young black men, telling them he can't vote and pushing them to do so.

"If I can convince one person to vote, then that would make a big difference," he said.

Lewis also said he keeps his mind focused on August 2008, when his parole ends.

That's when he said he will feel like a full citizen again. "As soon as I get off parole, I'm going to register to vote."