1963 Freedom Ballot


The 1963 Freedom Ballot was a mock-election organized in the United States to combat the disenfranchisement of blacks in Mississippi.

History

The effort was organized by the Council of Federated Organizations, a coalition of Mississippi's four most prominent civil rights organizations, with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee taking a leading role. By the end of the campaign, some 78,000 Mississippians had participated. The Freedom Ballot directly led to the creation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

Background

In addition to a poll tax, the Mississippi voting registration procedure in 1963 required Mississippians to fill out a 21-question registration form and to answer, to the satisfaction of the white registrars, a question on the interpretation of any one of the 285 sections of the state's constitution. As a result, African-Americans made up a large portion of the voting-age population yet only a small fraction of them were registered; in Mississippi's 2nd Congressional District, despite making up more than half of the total adult population, fewer than 3% of eligible black voters were registered. Statewide, between 5% and 6% of eligible blacks were registered to vote.

Freedom Vote

On October 6, 1963, a convention at the Masonic Temple in Jackson nominated Clarksdale, MS, pharmacist and NAACP leader Arron Henry for governor, and activist Rev. Edwin King for lieutenant governor. It was the first black-white integrated ticket for state leadership of Mississippi since Reconstruction. From October 14 to November 4, volunteers worked to spread information about the Freedom Vote as widely as possible amongst voters.
Beginning on November 2, polling stations set up in barber shops, churches, drug stores in black neighborhoods and began accepting ballots. When polling concluded on November 4, 78,869 ballots had been submitted by blacks across Mississippi, four times the number of blacks registered to vote.

Impact

The Freedom Vote accomplished four goals:It protested the exclusion of blacks by the Mississippi Democratic Party, educated black Mississippians about how to register and vote, proved that black Mississippians were interested in voting and interested in change, and helped attract the attention of the federal administration to the fact that voting rights were being violated in Mississippi.