Unanimous is Not Enough Report: The true history of Jim Crow laws in Louisiana

6th May 2019   ·   0 Comments

In 1898, Louisiana held a state convention. The purpose of the convention was to come up with laws to systematically exclude African Americans from the electoral process. The marching order for the convention was to whitewash the voter rolls as far as possible without running afoul of Federal Law. Our purpose is “to exclude every Negro from the electoral process,” said delegate, Mr. L.J. Dossman.

Here are the two laws they adopted.

The first law they adopted was the Jim Crow Law that created the 3-9 verdict. They knew that this would impact African Americans because the they could limit the Blacks on a jury, and their vote would not count in a jury dominated by white racists. In the Louisiana state convention in the 1970’s, the law was amended to a 2-10 verdict for felony convictions.

This law stayed in effect until State Senator J.P. Morrell of New Orleans, presented a bill in the Senate to abolish this law. It passed and then it was made into state wide referendum that passed by a 2 to 1 popular vote in 2018.

The second law passed by this constitutional convention of 1898 was the Section 5 law or the Grandfather Clause. This was adopted on March 24, 1898.

This law stated that no man who was eligible to vote on January 1, 1867, would be required to meet literacy or property-ownership requirements in order to register to vote; neither would his son or grandson be required to meet those requirements. Since Black men were not granted the right to vote until the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1870, they were excluded from this exemption. The vote on passing Louisiana’s 1898 Constitution was 96 for, 28 against and 11 absent.

It was Oklahoma’s grandfather clause that was finally declared unconstitutional in 1915 in a federal court case that ended this avenue for Black disenfranchisement in the United States.

Pro-segregationist, Mr. E.B. Kruttschnitt, served as president of the convention in 1898. He was a lawyer and president of the New Orleans Parish School Board. He said the goal of the convention was to “eliminate the mass of corrupt and illiterate voters who have during the last quarter of a century degraded our politics.”

These racist laws have dominated our state since 1898 and still dominate our state. Today, Louisiana leads the world in mass incarceration. The non-unanimous jury law ensured many innocent people would be convicted and subjected to being free slave labor in Louisiana.

Louisiana United International, Inc. and many others fought to end the 10-2 verdicts, but Belinda Parker Brown has declared “unanimous is not enough.” Now we must “get redress for the estimated 2,000 plus incarcerated citizens whose convictions were not grandfathered into the State of Louisiana’s 2018 change to the constitution requiring a unanimous jury verdict to obtain a felony conviction.

We won a victory getting rid of the 10-2 verdict law, but that victory can be reversed if we are not vigilant and prepared to defend it. The racist will not give up keeping their slaves in prisons. So, they are preparing a constitutional convention for 2020. You can be sure on that agenda is reversing this victory and creating more barriers to our right to vote.

– Belinda Parker Brown,
Louisiana United International

Carl Galmon,
National Voting Rights Museum and Institute in Selma Alabama

Ted Quant,
Voter Education Project, Inc. Atlanta GA

This article originally published in the May 6, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.