J. M. Jones Quotes
If you pass this 19th Amendment, you ratify the 15th .... Any Southerner doing this is a traitor to his section.
Georgia rejected ratification. It was argued that even if one believes that white women should have the right to vote, the price would be in to institutionalize forever the right of the Black woman and then the Black man to vote as embodied in the 15th Amendment. Some southerners had always claimed that the 15th Amendment was invalid as it was ratified by southern state legislatures controlled by reconstructionists and was not the will of the people.
J. M. Jones, *, Georgia State legislator, Ratification Debate of the 19th Amendment in the Georgia legislature
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Opposing national attempts to give Blacks the vote in the South:
This was art of the Nixon "Southern Strategy" to alienate the white supremacists and racists from the Democratic Party with Civil Rights legislation and rhetoric, and get most of them to become Republicans. But as Phillips observed, when Negroes began voting in significant numbers in the South the party switching really accelerated.
The concept of taxpayers being entitled to vote to avoid taxation without representation was fundamental to the Founding Fathers. However, the only people who paid taxes were those who owned property as there was no income tax at the time. Since the male controlled the family property, not allowing women to vote did no injury to the basic principle. However, the sexist attitude of the times ran up against this basic principles in the case of widows and unmarried women who owned property. Faced with this contradiction, some of the Founding Fathers like Lee actually favored the voting franchise for women who were widows and property owners or even unmarried female property owners. There were not enough people who saw this contradiction so that all women were originally prohibited from voting, but this quotation shows that it was a political issue at the time.
In 1639 the Maryland Assembly recorded what was probably the first American attempt to obtain the vote for women.
The switch was critical in that Tennessee ratified the 19th Amendment by a majority of a single vote. Had Burn not followed his mother’s advice, women would not then have gained the right to vote.
The large majority of the American people opposed legal segregation and for years, the segregationist, racist, Southern white minority were able to prevent any Civil Rights legislation by using the filibuster until President Lyndon Johnson, formerly a Southern Senator who understood the legislative process better than any other American president used his great skill to pass Civil Rights legislation instead of opposing it which he had done for years as a Texas Senator and the Majority Leader of the Senate.
The following year, women got the right to vote, the first nation to reach that level of enlightenment.
In the South racism was so extensive that Blacks were not allowed to even vote. Brooke had moved from the South to Massachusetts and there as in the North, Midwest and West, African Americans could vote. So the first time Brooke ever voted he was a candidate.
The editorial was in support of women’s suffrage—the right to vote which at the time women did not have in Britain. Women were very active in protests and demonstrations. Tactics sometimes involved civil disobedience and chaining themselves to public buildings. It was the civil disobedience and disruptions that the newspaper referred to as the “follies and excesses.” In retrospect today, it is amazing how threatened the society felt and how they reacted to the “threat” of females voting. It does however give us a perspective on those contemporary societies which restrict women’s voting rights.
The speaker predicted the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, but was off by three years.
It was used as a whipping boy and led to a re-alignment of Southern politicians to the Republican party.
