Courts, Voting Rights, and Black Protest in the Early Twentieth Century (2024)

Pippa Holloway

Although civil rights organizations paid scant attention to laws disfranchising for crime in the early twentieth century, individual black citizens did challenge their operation in some cases when they felt unfairly excluded from suffrage. This chapter considers court cases initiated by three African American men between 1914 and 1916. None of these plaintiffs claimed discrimination based on race. Neither national nor local civil rights groups were involved in these cases. Nonetheless, these cases represent some of the first court challenges by African Americans—or indeed any individuals disfranchised for crime—to the enforcement of laws disfranchising for crime. The obstacles faced by these plaintiffs and the limitations of their legal strategies underscore the significance of the collective legal efforts that the NAACP would offer in other key cases. Despite these impediments, two of these three plaintiffs scored legal victories affirming their voting rights in an era in which legal triumphs for African Americans were rare. These cases also forecast Election Day scenarios and legal issues that remain present to this day.

This chapter begins with the story of Cornelius “Canary” Curtis, disfranchised in Knoxville Tennessee for a 1907 larceny conviction. In 1914, Curtis petitioned for the restoration of his rights of citizenship and was denied twice by the local courts. He brought his case to the Tennessee Court of Civil Appeals, which ruled in his favor. The Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed the appeal court’s judgment in 1915. The second incident in this chapter involves the 1916 election in St. Louis, Missouri. Democratic Party operatives in the city coordinated efforts to target African American voters, many of whom had recently migrated to Missouri from southern states, with stepped-up enforcement of laws disfranchising for crime. After the election two men, Henry Lucas and John Sullivan, who were among those wrongfully disfranchised by false accusations of prior criminal convictions, initiated civil suits against Democratic Party leaders. These court cases are some of the earliest legal actions by African Americans challenging the enforcement of laws disfranchising for crime.

For nearly half a century, laws disfranchising for crime had been crafted and enforced in the South with the intent of eroding African American electoral participation. These cases in Knoxville and St. Louis were in borders states, in places where African Americans were not entirely excluded from citizenship and electoral participation. But the relatively peaceful racial climate in both locales was under threat in these years. In St. Louis, white Democrats feared that African American migrants from the South were “colonizing” the city on behalf of the Republican Party.1Close Republicans, in turn, accused Democrats of “southernizing” elections—manipulating election practices, including laws disfranchising for crime, to target African American voters.2Close Knoxville, in East Tennessee, was historically known for more peaceful race relations than Tennessee cities to the west, particularly Memphis. But racial tensions were escalating there, too, and a race riot and a near-lynching would erupt in 1919.3Close In both these cities the degrading racial climate and challenges to African American citizenship are reflected in general assaults on African American civil rights as well as these specific incidents involving disfranchisem*nt for criminal convictions. And in both cities, African Americans turned to the courts when their right to vote came under attack.

These events occurred not only in pivotal locations but also at a critical time in the context of the black freedom movement nationally. What historian Rayford Logan called the “nadir” of African American history had come to an end, though this was not clear at the time.4Close The string of defeats—twelve in a row—for African American voting rights that occurred in federal courts between 1890 and 1908 was coming to a close; beginning in 1915 the NAACP would eke out a slow pattern of victories in the courts that would escalate over the next several decades.5Close When Curtis filed his appeal, the landmark case challenging Oklahoma’s “grandfather clause, ” Guinn v. United States, had been argued before the U.S. Supreme Court but had not been decided.6Close The two St. Louis cases were filed just a year after the remarkable success in Guinn. While there is no evidence that the NAACP or any other activist groups had any connection to these cases or that the national movement inspired these actions, it is striking that these three African American men were moved at this precise moment to go to court and challenge those who sought to disfranchise them.

In December 1907 a Knox County court convicted Cornelius Curtis of larceny for stealing some money that had been left in an office on Prince Street in downtown Knoxville where he worked as a janitor. The judge sentenced twenty-three-year-old Curtis to five years in prison and judged him infamous. After serving about three and a half years he was pardoned for good behavior in March 1911. Following his release from prison, Curtis resumed working as janitor for various Knoxville businesses.7Close

As a result of the infamy judgment, Curtis became disfranchised and disqualified from testifying in court (except in his own criminal case) because Tennessee law defined larceny as an infamous offense. Curtis’s loss of citizenship rights for an infamous conviction was the result of a number of constitutional and legislative developments that dated back to the early days of the state. In 1829 the legislature established a legal definition of infamy, categorizing a number of criminal offenses “infamous” and barring infamous individuals from testifying in court.8Close Tennessee’s disqualification of infamous individuals from court testimony was similar to that of many other U.S. states in this period, as was a clause in Tennessee’s 1835 constitution authorizing the legislature to exclude from suffrage individuals convicted of infamous crimes.9Close In 1851, the legislature established a process by which infamous individuals might have their civil rights restored, by petitioning the circuit court.10Close

When Cornelius Curtis first petitioned the Knox County Circuit Court for the restoration of his citizenship rights in 1914 he had good reason to believe that his request would be granted. Petitions for restoration of citizenship rights were fairly common in Tennessee in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The Knox County court had restored citizenship rights to twenty-nine individuals in the previous two decades.11Close Nor should Curtis have been particularly concerned that his race would be a barrier to the restoration of his citizenship. Two men, Alfred Easley and Zack Hale, who successfully applied for restoration of citizenship in 1901 and 1902 respectively, are identified in the court records as African American. But Easley and Hale may have been the last African American men whose petitions were approved by the county court for some time. In the two decades after Curtis’s case I have found no more petitions from African American citizens, successful or unsuccessful, in the Knox County records. This absence suggests that African American residents of Knoxville understood the local court to be inimical to their petitions based on Curtis’s experience there.12Close

Successful applications for the restoration of citizenship rights were relatively common for blacks and whites alike across Tennessee in these decades. In Giles County, a mid-state county with a relatively large African American population, twenty-nine men, sixteen of whom were African American, sought the removal of infamy judgments at the circuit court in Pulaski between 1885 and 1920. All but one of these African American petitioners was successful. Court records in Maury, Crockett, and Haywood Counties likewise contain successful petitions from African Americans.

In other southern states African American men met with mixed success in getting citizenship rights restored after convictions in this period, as discussed in the previous chapter. African American voters in Tennessee, however, seemed to face the fewest obstacles to restoration of citizenship of all the states surveyed here—at least until the Curtis case. This is partly due to the fact that Tennessee did not have the same historic commitment to black disfranchisem*nt that other southern states did. Political machines dominated Tennessee in this period, and rival factions sometimes sought African American votes to tip close races in their favor. In Knoxville, where the Republican Party controlled local politics, opposing candidates sought the support of African American voters. The city’s relatively small African American population meant that black voting would never threaten white political dominance but it could be important in close races. Though African American electoral participation dropped in the 1890s following the enactment of voter registration, secret ballot laws, and a poll tax, it recovered somewhat in subsequent decades.13Close

The process for restoration of citizenship rights in Tennessee varied little from county to county, and Curtis’s application followed the standard procedure. Individuals had to demonstrate to the circuit court that they had “sustained the character of a person of honesty, respectability, and veracity.”14Close The most common way to demonstrate such character was to present petitions attesting to it. These petitions generally stated the date of the infamy judgment and the crime that provoked it, verified the petitioner’s residence in the county, and attested to the petitioner’s good character. Signatories usually included neighbors, employers, local businessmen, and sometimes individuals connected to the criminal justice system, such as the judge, prosecutor, or court clerk.

Most individuals seeking restoration of citizenship waited one to three years to petition the court, as this would support their claim of “sustained” good character. However, some successful petitions were submitted within months of the petitioner’s release from prison.15Close Applying for the restoration of his citizenship rights about three and a half years after his release from prison put Curtis well within the average bounds of such petitions. The obstacles he faced do not appear to be due to his failure to follow standard procedure.

In November 1914, Curtis filed a petition in the Knox County Circuit Court to be restored to his rights of citizenship. The court notified the district attorney of Curtis’s filing ten days before the hearing, as prescribed by Tennessee law, and he declined to challenge it. Four witnesses accompanied Curtis to court and testified to his good character. They were present and former employers, some of whom had known Curtis for many years, even before his conviction and sentence to prison. And all were among the white elites of Knox county—two prominent lawyers, a deputy sheriff and secretary of the Knoxville Board of Commerce, and a court reporter. These men testified that Curtis had been a “trusted, faithful servant.” They “had trusted him in their houses and were willing to trust him again.” Curtis, they assured the court, was an “honest and faithful colored man.”16Close

Like many of the African American men who petitioned for the restoration of their citizenship in the state, Curtis was not a wealthy man. Successful petitions from illiterate individuals and landless tenant farmers can also be found in Tennessee court records, despite the financial and logistical challenges such individuals faced in seeking the restoration of citizenship.17Close But Curtis had connections among the city’s white business elite, likely stemming from his employment downtown, that would soon prove useful. Among his duties was cleaning the Women’s Building on Main Street, and one story holds that Curtis had identified the cause of the 1906 fire that had destroyed the building on Christmas Eve. Following the fire, Curtis had found the remains of a firecracker in the alley behind the building. Curtis was clearly a well-known figure in downtown Knoxville.18Close

Curtis’s case was unusual only in that witnesses presented their testimony directly in court. Signatures on the petition ordinarily sufficed as evidence, but the actual appearances of these witnesses at the court that day suggest that Curtis may have anticipated opposition to his petition. Given the prominence of these men in the local community, he must have assumed their presence would have been particularly helpful should the judge be inclined to question his application.

While the image of white southern men supporting their African American employees’ efforts to regain the rights of citizenship might seem anomalous, this was not uncommon.19Close For example, in 1897 John W. Arnow Jr. wrote to Georgia governor William Atkinson to recommend his two farmhands for restoration of citizenship rights. Arnow explained, “Allonzo Jones and Robert Cowan lived with me for the last 5 years and have been good faithful servants and had no trouble and I think they deserve a pardon.” Jones and Cowan signed the document with “X” indicating they were illiterate.20Close

A similar example occurred in Alabama in 1886. Two African American men, Daniel Butler and Elias Peavy, petitioned Governor Edward O’Neal for citizenship rights they had lost following conviction for grand larceny. In addition to a petition recommending both men for citizenship, signed by twelve people, each man sent a letter from his employer. Peavy’s employer, William Gaddis, told the governor that the two had a long history of business transactions. Peavy had bought land from him after renting the property for several years. Gaddis wrote, “He has made an uncommonly good citizen for a colored man, and the petition he will offer will show you in what estimation he is held by his white neighbors.” Butler in turn offered a letter written on his behalf from the man he had been convicted of stealing cotton from twelve years earlier. Edmund Williams wrote that Butler had “resided on my place” much of the time since his release from prison, and that “his conduct has been entirely exemplary and honorable.”21Close

The letters from Arnow, Gaddis, and Williams indicate the complex intersection of social structures and personal relationships that marked southern life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. White men of property were on occasion willing to use their social status to assist efforts by African American employees and acquaintances to gain certain rights. White men were the gatekeepers of citizenship, but in some circ*mstances they clearly were willing to open those gates to African American men who they knew and respected. Such respect might even transcend prior animosity; Williams was willing to advocate for an African American man whom he had accused of criminal conduct in the past.22Close

On the other hand, such assistance by white men reaffirmed their status as guardians of citizenship. Benevolence can function as a means of articulating and even strengthening social hierarchies. By extending assistance to poor African American men, Gaddis and Williams, as well as the other white signatories, were confirming their own standing in the social and political hierarchy of their community. Similarly, while the assistance Curtis received from his white employers may have had a basis in genuine friendship and affection, Curtis’s relationship to them was nonetheless grounded in hierarchies—the occupational hierarchy of employer and employee and the social hierarchy of race. Helping their African American janitor with a legal problem was a way to highlight the benevolence of paternalism, thereby obfuscating the unequal power relations and violence also endemic to such a system.

For Curtis, electoral politics may have been an additional factor in drawing the support of prominent Knoxville men for his petition, and they may explain the opposition his claim faced. In Knoxville, 1915 was an election year, and voters would soon elect a new Mayor, Democrat John E. McMillan. McMillan had spoken out against the Ku Klux Klan and had solicited votes from the city’s black population, even dispatching operatives to African American neighborhoods to distribute blank poll tax receipts. Though there is no direct evidence connecting Curtis to McMillan’s campaign, African American votes were valuable in Knoxville in 1915.23Close Curtis may have sought to use this situation to get his citizenship rights restored; his advocates may have been hoping to gain votes for McMillan from Curtis and others in the African American community. In refusing the petition, Judge Von A. Huffaker may have been seeking to obstruct the franchise of a potential supporter of McMillan.

Following the testimony by the witnesses, Curtis himself took the stand. The judge questioned Curtis, who described his former offense and told of his release for good behavior. Curtis said he had never had any legal trouble since leaving prison, but did mention that he had been accused of stealing keys from “Mr. Turner.” More questioning of Curtis and the witnesses clarified that no one believed that Curtis had been involved in the theft of Turner’s keys. In fact, a cook in the Turner household admitted to misplacing the keys and located the keys a few hours after they had been lost.24Close

Despite the testimony of prominent witnesses in Curtis’s favor, Judge Huffaker refused to grant Curtis restoration. Huffaker dismissed Curtis’s petition and charged him a court fee. Curtis was not willing to abandon his quest for restoration of citizenship rights and applied for a rehearing the following January. Again the judge heard the petition, again the district attorney failed to appear in court to contest the petition, and again the judge dismissed the case after charging Curtis another fee.25Close

Curtis, still undaunted, decided to file an appeal. At some point in the process he secured legal representation from a prominent Knoxville attorney, Malcolm McDermott. McDermott was dean of the University of Tennessee law school and would soon become president of the Tennessee Bar Association.26Close One must assume that McDermott’s involvement came through Curtis’s professional connections.

Curtis needed money to pursue an appeal because the court required an appeal bond. This was basically a prepayment of the court costs, guaranteeing that the appellant could pay the court costs, should the court find against him. Such bonds could be either in cash or property. Curtis offered neither cash nor property but instead filed a “pauper’s oath.” This provided a mechanism by which he could avoid paying the appeal bond. Filing an appeal and applying for a pauper’s bond would all have required an extensive knowledge of the workings of the criminal justice system, another area where legal advice or assistance would have been valuable.

The Tennessee Court of Civil Appeals granted the appeal and heard the case. At the court hearing, the counsel for the attorney general contested Curtis’s claim on several counts. First he contested the Appeals Court’s jurisdiction on the matter, claiming that such petitions could only be heard in circuit court. Second the attorney general asserted that Curtis had lost his citizenship when he was rendered infamous and therefore was not eligible to file as a pauper. According to this argument, Curtis’s infamy made him incompetent to testify in court and therefore incompetent to take the pauper oath.

The court sided with Curtis in all of these matters. First, it asserted its right to overturn a circuit court’s judgment, claiming appellate jurisdiction on all judgments of the circuit court, including petitions for restoration of citizenship. It also upheld Curtis’s right to apply for a pauper’s oath. The court found that since infamous individuals could testify on their own behalf in criminal cases, they should also be able to make an affidavit on their own behalf in order to appeal judgments against them. Though the court recognized that infamous individuals had limitations on their citizenship, they were nonetheless residents and therefore entitled to make such an affidavit. Finally, the court ruled to restore Curtis’s rights to vote and testify in court. The controversy over the missing keys, the court found, did not amount to a reason to deny Curtis’s petition. “This record satisfies us that the petitioner had nothing to do with the loss of those keys, and the Circuit Court should have…granted him the relief sought in his petition.” Curtis was granted the restoration of his citizenship rights and charged for the cost of the court proceedings. A few months later the Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed the judgment.27Close

Curtis was able to use his personal and professional connections to successfully navigate the legal process, scoring a victory in the Tennessee Court of Civil Appeals. The historical record does not indicate why his original petition was denied in the circuit court. Presumably the missing key story was not the real issue, as that appears to have been resolved quite easily, but it is not clear why the circuit court twice refused to grant his petition. Race or political inclinations may have been an issue, or it may have been something else entirely. Whatever the reasons for the initial refusal at the circuit court level, the appeals court found the local court’s reasoning inadequate and agreed that Canary Curtis should have full citizenship rights.

A year after Curtis’s victory in Tennessee, a dispute over the enforcement of laws disfranchising for crime brought two African American men to court in Missouri as well. Missouri’s 1875 constitution disfranchised individuals convicted of felonies or infamous crimes.28Close The question that had been raised in other states as to whether petit larceny was a disfranchising crime had been answered in the affirmative in Missouri through both legislative and judicial action. State law dating back to 1845 disfranchised for a variety of criminal offenses including larceny “in any degree.”29Close Then in 1912 the state supreme court affirmed that the civil disabilities incurred for felony grand larceny should also be assigned to those convicted of misdemeanor petit larceny.30Close The court’s decision helped set the stage for the controversy that would unfold in the 1916 election in St. Louis.

The 1916 election was also important because it occurred during a shift in the balance of political power in the city. St. Louis was an important destination in the Great Migration. As African Americans migrated from the South into the city in the early twentieth century, they enhanced the political power of the Republican Party. In 1910 St. Louis had 43, 960 African American residents, and this number climbed to 69, 854 by 1920, a 58 percent increase. In comparison the white population of the city only increased 9.4 percent in this period.31Close Voting by the new migrants helped put the GOP in control of city politics until the 1930s.32Close Democrats, in this period of social and political transition, sought to limit the electoral impact of the new southern migrants in various ways.

Legal challenges to the voting rights of the new southern migrants to St. Louis began in 1910 during a hotly contested election for State Superintendent of Public Schools. Democrat Howard A. Gass filed a court challenge to the victory of Republican William P. Evans, claiming that 1, 100 African American votes had been illegally cast for the Republican candidate. These illegal votes, Gass argued, had come from recent African American migrants who had improperly registered. Many had listed their residence as lodging or boarding houses in African American neighborhoods, and sometimes many individuals claimed to live at the same address. Gass suggested that those who listed temporary addresses did not really live there and were engaged in election fraud. Furthermore, Gass pointed out, individuals who did live in such “disreputable” residences should not be able to vote. He argued that these votes should be stripped from Evans’s total, which would give Gass the victory.33Close

The court responded to these arguments by defending black voters and taking issue with suggestions of African American immorality and criminality. First, the court explained why African Americans tended to live in temporary residences in segregated neighborhoods: “prevailing social conditions irresistibly drive negroes to herd together.” So, contrary to the claim by the appellant, the court did not believe it to be irregular or suspicious for large numbers of African American voters to be registered to vote in the same or adjacent residences was. The court also pointed out that these new migrants moved frequently, so the fact that many voters could not be located weeks and months after they voted was no surprise and did not prove electoral corruption.34Close

As for the claim that African American voters, by virtue of their residence in disreputable locations, should be disfranchised, the court responded this way: “Exconvicts [sic], unpardoned, may be disfranchised; but up to this time technical or actual sexual morality is not made a statutory test of a voter by the Missouri lawmaker. When that day comes, if ever, there will be fine grinding in the mill—but no matter about that. As the law now stands, we do not understand it would avail contestant aught to show that all or any of those negroes were ethically incorrect.”35Close

The tactics used by Democrats to dispute African American votes failed in 1910, but with partisan and racial tensions escalating in 1916 some party leaders tried again. In March St. Louis had held a special election to consider a residential segregation ordinance, which passed by a large majority. Despite the new law’s title, “An Ordinance to Prevent Ill Feeling, Conflict and Collisions Between the White and Colored Races, and to Preserve the Public Peace, ” its passage indicated an escalation in racial tensions.36Close That fall’s presidential election was hotly contested, and many correctly predicted that Missouri would be a key battleground. Democrats hoped the state would go to Woodrow Wilson, while Republicans hoped to put the state’s electoral votes in Republican Charles Evans Hughes’s column. The result in densely populated St. Louis was critical to both sides.

In the weeks before Election Day a group of Missouri Democrats came up with a plan. In charge of the effort was Breckenridge Long, a local attorney and Democratic Party operative, who would later serve as Woodrow Wilson’s assistant secretary of the navy and Franklin Roosevelt’s ambassador to Italy. Long is also remembered as a key player in the Roosevelt administration’s decision not to relax immigration laws to allow Jewish refugees from the Holocaust to enter the United States.37Close First, Long dispatched about twenty young attorneys to comb the criminal court records and compile lists of African American voters who had been convicted of crimes.38Close This research produced a list of approximately three thousand names, about 25 percent of the registered African American voters in the city.39Close Later, accounts of this controversy in the press emphasized that Democrats collected names only of African Americans. Democrats would use these lists to challenge African American voters at the polls. Long later testified that the plan had been hatched by Edward A. Glenn, a long-time Democratic Party activist.40Close

Then, Long and his allies used their influence over the Police Board, which was dominated by Democrats, to undermine the authority of the Election Commission, where Republicans held a majority. The Election Commission had ordered that police officers be “shifted”—moved around town to different neighborhoods—on Election Day, arguing that officers who worked in particular neighborhoods had built connections with local citizens and thus might be more liable to corruption. Thus on Election Day, the police department was supposed to transfer officers to new districts for the day, with the hope they would enforce the laws more fairly. Long, however, asked his allies on the Police Board to refuse to comply with this plan.41Close

The day before the election, the St. Louis Republic published a statement by Long warning African American voters: “Democratic challengers in every affected precinct in the sixteen wards have been given a precinct list of the negroes who have registered illegally. AS RAPIDLY AS THEY ARRIVE AT THE POLLS THEY WILL BE CHALLENGED. IF THEY INSIST ON CASTING THEIR BALLOTS AND START TO SWEAR IN THEIR VOTE, THEY WILL BE ARRESTED AT ONCE, CHARGED WITH PERJURY.”42Close The police geared up to help. Chief of Police William Young instructed his officers that election laws should be “rigidly enforced.43Close Republicans responded by publishing a notice in the local African American newspaper, the St. Louis Argus, reassuring their supporters. Voters who were properly registered “need not fear any man, ” and free legal counsel would be available for those that needed it.44Close

Motivating the Democrats was the specter of “negro colonization.” Democrats claimed that Republicans intentionally brought African Americans in from the South and registered them to vote in attempt to boost Republican ballots. The Republic asserted that Republicans had “colonized” three thousand illegal voters in St. Louis. Fred English, a former Democratic candidate for Congress, claimed to have personally witnessed this importation of voters: “On October 19 I went to Union Station to take a train to Maysville, KY…. I saw a Mobile & Ohio train come into Union Station with fifteen coaches full of negroes. There were so many negroes on the train that they blocked up the midway of Union Station. I questioned about twenty of the negroes as to their reason for coming and they said that they had come from Mississippi on a $3 excursion, but nearly all of them stated that they intended to stay in this part of the country for a few weeks. This sort of thing went on in several of the States bordering Missouri in an attempt to swing the election, and the committee finding this out began the investigation which resulted in the uncovering of about 3, 000 illegally registered negroes in this city.”45Close St. Louis Police Chief William Young did his part to heighten tension and animosity, claiming, “Thousands of negroes in the south were…invading St. Louis, East St. Louis and other northern cities in an effort to carry close states for the Republican Party.”46Close

Highlighting “colonization” and tying migration to political corruption would offer an excuse to disfranchise black voters while energizing the Democratic base. A similar set of circ*mstances was simultaneously unfolding across the river in East St. Louis, Illinois. There, allegations of crime and electoral manipulation by recent black migrants led to escalated racial tensions and rumors of a “colonization conspiracy, ” culminating in the East St. Louis race riot in July 1917.47Close

While Democrats had claimed that black southerners were entering the city to aid Republicans, Republicans suggested that voter suppression tactics from the South had come to the city instead. The St. Louis Argus wrote, “This effort on the part of St. Louis Democracy is an effort to Southernize the ballot.”48Close Indeed, the events that would unfold on Election Day in St. Louis closely resembled the 1888 election in Richmond, Virginia.49Close

On Election Day in St. Louis, Democrats dispatched workers to precincts in African American neighborhoods. These “challengers” had lists of African Americans in each precinct identified by Long’s men as having prior, disfranchising convictions. When African American men tried to vote, challengers would consult the list they held of convicted individuals, to determine if that voter was on the list.50Close Newspaper accounts are at variance as to exactly what information the challengers possessed. One challenger claimed that his list included full names and addresses of targeted voters.51Close However, in a statement released ten days after the election, the city’s election commissioner, a Democrat, said that challengers confronted any black voter whose last name matched one on their lists regardless of the address.52Close In fact, the techniques of challengers may have differed from precinct to precinct. Court records did not list addresses, so it is not clear how address data, if it existed, was gathered.53Close

When men whose names appeared on the lists attempted to vote, the challengers would step forward and dispute their right to vote. At this point, apparently, some voters gave up and left without voting. However, other voters contested the challenge. According to protocol, when this happened, the “precinct judges” would have to decide how to proceed. Each precinct had four judges charged with assessing the qualifications of each voter, two Democrats and two Republicans. In the event of a challenge, the judges would ask the voter to swear that he had never been arrested or convicted and the challenger to swear to the challenge. Then the four had to decide between these two conflicting stories. Generally, they voted along party lines, two to admit the challenged vote and two to reject it. This split decision resulted in the voter being allowed to vote, but the ballot placed in a separate envelope for “rejected ballots.” The legitimacy of the vote would be assessed later.

A variety of scenarios unfolded across the city. At each of the city’s five hundred polling places, police officers were stationed inside. In some precincts police officers arrested African American voters immediately after they were challenged. In other instances, they waited until the judges had allowed the individual to vote and then arrested him. Police escorted others out of the polling place without arrest but prevented them from voting. The St. Louis Argus, the city’s African American paper, reported that some individuals simply left without voting, “refus[ing] to be humiliated.”54Close By noon eighty-nine African American men had been arrested at polling places.55Close The final count held that police arrested ninety-six African Americans and two whites upon allegations of trying to vote with prior, disfranchising convictions.56Close

As word of the proceedings spread, Republican leaders sought to halt these tactics. By 9:30 a.m. a group, including Republican City Committee chair John Schmoll and Republican mayor Henry Kiel, came to city hall seeking intervention. They met with the Board of Police Commissioners who agreed to tell officers to cease arresting voters based solely on the accusations of challengers; three of the four precinct judges now had to request the arrest for the police to act. The Board of Election Commissioners issued an order that challengers should have personal knowledge of people they challenged. They could not simply read names from a list.

At midday Circuit Court Judge Karl Kimmel, a Republican, issued an injunction to restrain police from intimidating voters.57Close This slowed the arrests, but Democrats continued to use other tactics to suppress Republican votes throughout the rest of the day. Democratic operatives continued to challenge African American voters with allegations of former convictions.58Close About one thousand voters cast ballots that judges marked as rejected.59Close

The Seventeenth Ward saw the largest number of challenged voters.60Close For example, when Matthew Bell, a forty-one-year-old black fireman, tried to vote in the Seventeenth Ward, he was confronted by Democratic challenger John McFadden. Bell was allowed to vote but judges placed his ballot in the provisional ballot envelope. When Joseph P. Crofts, a thirty-six-year-old porter, tried to vote in another Seventeenth Ward precinct, Democrat Michael Weisman challenged him. The judges allowed Crofts to vote but then police arrested him. Events like this took place in African American neighborhoods in other parts of the city as well.61Close

On Election Day the Republican Party did its best to protect African American voters, using the parts of city government under the party’s control. Republicans held the majority of the seats on the Election Commission, and Mayor Henry Kiel was a Republican as well.62Close Bondsmen hired by the party waited at the police stations to free arrested men as soon as possible. Judge Kimmel and another Republican circuit court judge, Calvin Miller, signed bonds so that individuals who were arrested were immediately released. Then, Republican Party workers drove them back to the precincts to try to vote again. Their efforts were still, sometimes, unsuccessful. For example, when William Baker tried to vote that morning in the Fourth Ward, he and two other men were arrested. When he was released on bond later in the day, he returned to the polling place but the election officers there still refused to let him vote.63Close

Democrats used their power over the police department to try to block the participation of African American voters while Republican leaders tried, in kind, to protect these voters. African American Democrats, though, were not so lucky. Police mistakenly arrested a Democrat named Frank Edge along with a number of other African American men. Edge’s vocal insistence that his arrest was a mistake led Republicans to realize that he was a Democrat. They refused to bail him out with the others. While all the Republicans were freed, Edge remained in jail the rest of the day.64Close

An important side effect of all this controversy was significant delays for voters, particularly at precincts in African American neighborhoods.65Close A Republican Party official told the press that he knew of precincts where the wait stretched to two hours while challengers and judges interrogated the voters.66Close In a precinct on Laclede Avenue, according to another Republican leader, sixty voters waited two hours to vote, but only eight were successful.

Like Canary Curtis in Knoxville, several voters used their professional connections to protect them or aid their efforts to vote. When James Cole tried to vote, a challenger claimed that he had served a term in the county workhouse in 1905. Cole, though, was exceptionally well-known and respected locally. He had, according to the Argus, “served in some of the fashionable and well-known families in St. Louis for nearly fifty years at various functions.” He was also personally acquainted with all of the judges, who therefore allowed him to vote.67Close Police also arrested two men who worked as janitors in the Municipal Court Building, as well as the porter of the former mayor and the chauffeur of an Election Board member. Their arrests were among those highlighted in reports to the press.68Close Julius S. Walsh Jr., the industrial commissioner of the Wabash Railroad, protested when his stableman, James Siler, and his butler, George Miller, met with threats and intimidation when they tried to vote. Siler insisted that these men had led crime-free lives and had valid registrations.69Close A subsequent newspaper article confirmed that “businessmen and others, whose employees had been arrested without cause, protested against this action.”70Close

The day after the election, the St. Louis Daily Globe Democrat published a list of arrested voters in an article titled “GOP Voters Arrested in Police Intimidation.” The article chronicled the experiences of forty-nine individuals arrested on Election Day. All but two of these men were African American, and most had tried to vote in the Seventeenth or Sixth Wards. Averaging just over forty years of age, these men worked in a variety of professions, including as porters, laborers, waiters, firemen, barbers, teamsters, cooks, and drivers.71Close

Three days after the election Republican Circuit Court Judge Calvin Miller discharged all of the men arrested at the polls that day.72Close The police continued to insist they had done nothing wrong in arresting them. In an angry rebuttal, Chief Young told his officers to assist fully with the prosecution of “all negro criminals who voted or attempted to vote last Tuesday.”

Republican leaders also sought to prevent Democrats from using such tactics again. The Election Board met and voted to revise the challenger statutes.73Close The St. Louis Argus supported this plan, editorializing that the law gave “judges of election booths arbitrary power to reject ballots of challenged voters.”74Close A grand jury investigated, calling members of the election board to testify and indicting several election officials working in the Sixth and Seventeenth Wards for feloniously hindering the election. However, it is doubtful that these cases actually went to trial.75Close A group of individuals formed the “Citizens’ Nonpartisan Committee, ” aimed at prosecuting all election frauds, but it is unlikely to have had much impact.76Close

The most dramatic outcome of the events on Election Day, however, were two lawsuits filed in the weeks after the election by African American men who had been refused the right to vote. The first to file was Henry Lucas, a thirty-two-year-old teamster and Missouri native. Lucas had been arrested in the fifth precinct of the Eighth Ward following an accusation from a Democratic challenger, Theodore Sandman, that he had a prior grand larceny conviction and had spent time in prison for it in 1906.77Close

The arresting officer, James. E. Sullivan, later testified that Sandman requested the arrest. Sullivan explained, “I said to Lucas: ‘This man accuses you of illegal voting and orders you arrested.’ Lucas said ‘I am not guilty. I was never arrested before in my life.’ We stood there awhile, and then Sandman said: ‘Let’s go up to the station with him.’”78Close When the three arrived at the Soulard Street station, Captain George T. McNamee asked why Lucas was arrested. Sandman said Lucas was guilty of fraudulent voting. Sandman claimed to have a “slip of paper” with Lucas’s name on it. Later Sandman said that a man named “Briney” Kennedy had given him the paper. The police kept Lucas in jail for two and a half hours until Republican Party workers bailed him out.79Close

Lucas sued Sandman, Breckenridge Long, and John J. Kennedy, the Democratic city committeeman in the Eighth Ward. He asked $5, 000 in actual damages, $5, 000 in punitive damages, and court costs.80Close Lucas had support from the local Republican establishment and was represented in court by a prominent St. Louis law firm, Ferris and Rosskopf, which had close connections to the Republican Party.81Close Not only was support obviously useful in providing him with counsel, he likely also had help paying the court costs. Records from the trial indicate that the court costs amounted to $251.85, and Lucas had been required to give bond or deposit security in advance to cover these costs. He had opted to deposit cash.82Close

A few weeks into the trial Lucas chose to drop the suit against Long and focus on Sandman and Kennedy.83Close Then the judge upheld a motion for an “involuntary non suit” against Kennedy, effectively dismissing that case and leaving Sandman the sole defendant.84Close Lucas and his attorneys took depositions from police officers, precinct workers, and Democratic Party officials.85Close Lucas’s suit explained that Sandman caused him to be wrongfully arrested and detained in an attempt to intimidate him, “disgrace” him, and “deprive him of his liberty.”86Close Sandman replied that he had the right under law to challenge voters. Sandman maintained that the decision by the police to arrest Lucas was not his fault; he did not have the power or authority to arrest anyone.87Close

The suit dragged out until 1920 when the jury ultimately found in favor of Lucas, awarding actual damages of $250 and $50 in punitive damages. Lucas received full payment of the judgment.88Close Sandman moved for a new trial but the judge refused his request.89Close Lucas had won.

Another disfranchised African American voter, John L. Sullivan, filed suit shortly after Lucas. Sullivan claimed that when he tried to vote, a Democratic challenger asserted that he had been convicted of petit larceny in 1896 and had served a forty-one day sentence in the workhouse. Sullivan denied all of this. He said he had never been in the workhouse nor convicted nor arrested anywhere. He was not even living in St. Louis in 1896, having moved there in 1910.90Close He was freed on bond after about two hours and returned to the polling place to again try to cast his ballot. The Democratic precinct judge again refused him the vote, saying he had already voted. As Sullivan continued to argue, the judge finally gave him a ballot but warned him it would be put in the “rejected” envelope.91Close

His $11, 000 claim—$1, 000 in actual damages and $10, 000 in punitive damages—charged a large group of individuals with intimidating him on Election Day. Sullivan, who was represented by attorney Taylor R. Young, identified a total of twenty people in his suit: Long, four members of the Police Board, Police Chief William Young, George Warner (who he identified as “president of the Democratic machine” of the Sixth Ward), the two Democratic precinct judges, members of the Democratic Central Committee, the local police captain, and the two police officers who arrested him. Finally he named Horace Rumsey, identified as “a Democrat and anxious and willing to assist in the perpetration of the fraud herein mentioned.”92Close Sullivan’s agenda was more ambitious than Lucas’s. Lucas had simply sued those who had tried to block him from voting. Sullivan hoped to reach further into the police department and larger Democratic establishment, essentially claiming a conspiracy. He sued not just on his own behalf but also on behalf of the black community, asserting that the twenty defendants conspired together to “concoct a scheme to prevent the plaintiff and thousands of other people of his color” from voting. He also claimed that the defendants “employed a number of young lawyers” to search criminal records and compile a list of disfranchised voters. Then these lists were used to target the plaintiff and “voters of his color.”93Close

Sullivan had a much harder time than Lucas paying the court costs, due in part to the large number of defendants. About fifty people were subpoenaed and deposed in preparation for the trial, for a total cost (according to a defense motion) of about $700.94Close Court documents indicate multiple requests for dismissal by the defense due to failure to pay the costs. On February 17, Sullivan deposited $50 with the clerk with the agreement that he would pay another $50 in thirty days.95Close A March 1918 motion to dismiss was set aside when Sullivan paid another $50 on March 30, 1918.96Close However, the records of the case cease at that point, and it appears that the case was never heard in court.97Close

Lucas and Sullivan undertook their efforts independently of the small but growing effort to secure civil rights through legal challenges in this period. The NAACP was active in St. Louis but does not seem to have responded to the events on Election Day or supported these two lawsuits. The articulated strategy of the group was to take cases “which show actual discrimination because of color” and those that “test broad principles.”98Close The cases of Sullivan and Lucas did not fit the bill. They were not incidents of clear racial discrimination by the standard of the day—certainly not as clear as the racially restrictive residential segregation ordinance or grandfather clause case, for example.

The cases of Lucas and Sullivan illustrate the shortcomings of a lack of coordination in legal strategy—a coordination that the NAACP would bring to civil rights cases in years to come. While it is possible that there was an agreement that Lucas would pursue a narrow claim and Sullivan a broader one, this is unlikely, and there is no evidence of it. There remains no other reasonable explanation for why they would pursue separate claims. Their duplication of efforts was costly and inefficient, and it must have reduced the impact of their assertions. In particular, Sullivan’s claim that Long et al. conspired to disfranchise a wide swath of the black population certainly would have been bolstered by more plaintiffs.

The difficulties that all three of these plaintiffs—Canary Curtis in Knoxville, and Henry Lucas and John Sullivan in St. Louis—faced in financing their lawsuits underscore the significance of the NAACP’s subsequent contribution to the black freedom movement. Lack of financial resources proved a challenge to Curtis and an insurmountable obstacle to Sullivan because filing civil suits costs money. With assistance from the dean of the University of Tennessee law school, Curtis solved the problem of covering court costs by filing a pauper’s oath. Lucas, too, received assistance from white allies, in this case allies with an explicitly partisan agenda. Sullivan may have also had help from Republican allies, but not enough to pursue his case to the finish.

White attorneys stood up for these black plaintiffs in the courts, but African American ancestors and community members also made their victories possible. Curtis was following in the footsteps of other African Americans who had succeeded in getting voting rights in Knox County and Tennessee more generally. His sense of entitlement to those rights clearly motivated his claim and stemmed at least in part from the fact that other black men had won their voting rights in Tennessee courts. Reaching back even further into history demonstrates that both of these victories were due to the fact that African Americans had obtained the right to equal standing in court in the Reconstruction years. In the American constitutional system, the right to standing in court is a critical element of citizenship and a right that is essential to the defense of other rights.99Close

While Lucas and Sullivan were the only men to take St. Louis officials and local Democratic operatives to court, a collective outrage in the black community about the events that day must have encouraged them to pursue their cases. Many of those who faced obstacles on Election Day confronted their accusers, challenged their assertions, and demanded the right to vote. Many who were arrested returned to the polls to try again. Dozens told their tales to the newspapers.100Close When Sullivan and Lucas went to court they spoke for all these disfranchised voters in the city.

In Re: Curtis set two important precedents for convicted individuals in Tennessee. First, this case determined that individuals whose civil rights had been denied due to prior convictions could still file a pauper’s oath in Tennessee. Furthermore, the court held that Curtis had the right to the restoration of his citizenship since he demonstrated that he was a respected citizen. The court rejected the idea that restoration was a kind of favor handed out when judges felt benevolent. Rather, the court saw restoration as a right: a convicted individual who behaved well and had several “unimpeachable” citizens who can testify on his or her behalf was “entitled to be restored to his rights as a citizen.”101Close Curtis proved that former convicts could and would demand their legal rights.

Curtis’s triumph was not followed by successful petitions for citizenship by other African American men in Knoxville. Records indicate that he was possibly the last African American man to be restored to citizenship in that city for at least several decades.102Close Perhaps sensing the degenerating racial environment in the city or concerned about negative responses to his legal victory, Curtis and his family moved away at some point in the next five years. In the 1920 Census he is listed as living in Belmont, Ohio, and working as a laborer in a steel mill; ten years later the family had settled in Cleveland, where Curtis was employed as a janitor at a florist.103Close

The 1916 election in St. Louis offered images that foreshadowed recent elections in the United States, most famously the 2000 election in Florida in which African American voters were disproportionately affected by false accusations of prior, disfranchising convictions. But for now the “southernization” of elections in St. Louis stopped. A growing tide of Republican power in St. Louis meant that the party would strive to protect the political rights of its voters in the coming decade. Black southern migrants to St. Louis would find a new political landscape, in which their votes counted, unlike the one they left behind.

While the victories of Lucas and Curtis were limited, they were nonetheless victories that were achieved by mobilizing personal resources, forming alliances, and doggedly pursuing legal action in times and places where the odds were stacked against African American plaintiffs and in which a national consensus on African American voting rights had yet to be reached. Despite the fact that all three of these men acted independently of the NAACP and despite the fact that none claimed to have been victims of racial discrimination, their insistence on their right to vote at this critical moment in history was part of the larger struggle by African Americans for the rights of citizenship. Beyond the key court battles fought by the NAACP, and beyond the organized civil rights movement, were unorganized acts of protest that also fanned the flames of resistance. African Americans challenged laws and practices that denied them access to the ballot box in diverse settings.

Metrics

View Metrics

More from Oxford Academic