2.1. The long preparation for litigation

When Robert Kennedy assumed the office of the United States Attorney General in January 1961, he affirmed and expanded on the litigation strategy that had emerged in the Division in the previous year. Quoted below is Doar's own recollection of his first meeting with the new attorney general to discuss the Division's enforcement strategy:

The Division's focus on Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, while largely neglecting the remainder of the southern jurisdictions, appears to have been set at this meeting. After January 1961, the number of voting rights cases the Department filed in the court grew to an average of 15.75 cases per annum, a fivefold increase from the previous three years. But not only did the Department sue more frequently after 1961; an overwhelming number of those cases was pursued in the three states of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. Notably, growth in government litigation took place as the Kennedy administration pressed the civil rights organizations on the need to prioritize voter registration over direct action that called for desegregation in places of public accommodation, such as the Freedom Ride in the spring of 1961, in an effort to keep the racial tensions under control.Footnote ²¹

Based on my collection of data, over two thirds of the trial attorneys who worked in the Division at any time between 1957 and 1967 were non-southerners, while the remainder were either born or graduates of law schools south of the Mason-Dixon line. The Division's legal team at that time was overwhelmingly white and male. Of the seventy-two Division attorneys whose profiles I have identified, there were only four black men and three white women, all but one of whom had connections to the south either by birth or education.Footnote ²² The team also included three emigres who had fled from Nazism in eastern Europe at a young age, became naturalized citizens of the United States, and earned law degrees to later work for the government.

Regardless of the amount of lived experiences and local knowledge the individual attorneys already possessed on southern authoritarianism, the enforcement of voting rights in the region started from a position of little advantage for the federal government. The assignments required hands-on understanding of the modalities of rule that were specific to each locale. Doar later wrote of the experience: “Division lawyers had to master everything that goes into understanding the realities of a distant and unknown territory… [There] they found a complex legal and social network designed to protect and preserve the caste system. The scheme was not haphazard… They also saw that Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama remained largely a part of the American frontier, the rural white society riddled throughout with bewildering patterns of suspicion and silence.”Footnote ²³ Finding themselves much like strangers in their native land, the Division officials proceeded with caution, much to the consternation of the civil rights leaders and local residents who expected the redress to come quickly and in abundance.

In the face of the recalcitrant southern judiciary, the Division did not immediately resort to litigation. The cases had to be built on strong factual grounds first. Fact finding started from the Division's examination of local records. In the summer of 1960, the attorneys began actively requesting copies of voter registration records from the registrar's office in a few counties in each of the aforementioned three states.Footnote ²⁴ Their inquiry was gradually expanded to the remaining jurisdictions, most notably in Louisiana.Footnote ²⁵

Once the photocopies of the records were brought back to the Department's Washington headquarters, the Division's analysts first tried to compare the ratios between voting age population and the number of registered voters for both races in each county. Yet the summary tables showing numerical discrepancies in the proportions of registered voters by race did not in itself suffice as evidence of discrimination. Southern judges could easily counter that black voter registration was low not because registrars discriminated, but because black residents were not interested in registering or they did not possess the qualifications required by the state law. Against such assertions, the Division attorneys had to prove patterns and practices of discrimination by demonstrating that the registrars had given black citizens tests and standards at more stringent levels than they had done to white applicants.

The attorneys thus probed into the details of each one of the application forms. Voter registration records photographed in the field were typed into control cards, an unassuming but essential means for finding and establishing such patterns and practices.Footnote ²⁶ This labor-intensive work began with the attorneys’ own recitations into Dictaphones of the information found in the photographic images displayed on the microfilm screens. Then the in-house typists transcribed the attorneys’ dictations onto the control cards, creating by hand a searchable database of voter applications for each county. Among the clerical staff were African American women and recent graduates of business colleges who had been newly hired by the Division for the project.Footnote ²⁷

As they created the control cards, they examined rejected applications, identifying the applicant's race and causes of rejection, and compared them to ones that were approved despite flaws and errors in the form. The voter registration records did not always leave paper trails of authoritarian disenfranchisement practices because critical pieces of information, such as the race of the applicants, were not always noted. For instance, in Alabama's Bibb County, accepted applications contained race identification, but rejected forms did not. Consequently, identification of race for the rejected applicants was “partially made through extrensic [sic] sources,”Footnote ²⁸ the Division staff noted, likely suggesting the cooperation provided by local black leaders with the knowledge of applicants’ names. In other words, the Division staff had to pore through hundreds and sometimes thousands of documents to establish patterns and practices of racial discrimination just for one county.

Record inspection was the first step in the long preparatory process for litigation. After the registration record was examined and continued patterns of discrimination were found, the Division attorneys made trips to the field in order to find and collect evidence of discrimination from witnesses and to corroborate the complaints. Once on the road, the attorneys would usually stay in the field for sixteen straight days before returning, giving them time to examine the situation in the assigned counties.Footnote ²⁹ They conducted on-site interviews with both the white officials in county government, particularly the registrar's board, and with the black residents who attempted to register without success. In reporting back to the Division, the attorneys often noted not just the individual cases of voter discrimination, but also the degree to which the local black community was organized, and views regarding registration among the leading figures in the community. The attorneys also paid attention to recent incidents of racial strife and how it affected the registration activities in the area.

During the fieldtrips, the attorneys began informal negotiations with the local registrars and instructed them first to voluntarily cease discriminatory registration practices and segregated voting processes. In some rare instances, these informal talks by the visiting Division attorneys produced compliance on the part of the registrar's board. In Leake County of central Mississippi, the local registrars began accepting applications from black citizens after the Department reached an agreement with the county board. “So far this county is best negotiation situation in state [sic],” Bob Owen, the attorney working on the county, wrote in the report.Footnote ³⁰ Leake County was an exception and not the rule, however. In other jurisdictions, the Civil Rights Division regularly found that the voluntary compliance by the county government was not forthcoming after a round of informal negotiation. If no improvement was made, the Division attorney would first signal the intention to sue them, and after a period of waiting, eventually bring the suit to court.

In the nearly eight year period starting from the enactment of the Civil Rights Act on September 9, 1957, and ending with the Voting Rights Act taking effect on August 6, 1965, the Department brought a total of seventy-six cases of voting rights discrimination and intimidation to the court, beginning with the first eight cases already mentioned.Footnote ³¹ Even as the heads of the Civil Rights Division and the presidential administrations changed during the period, the central focus of the Justice Department remained on Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. Sixty-seven of the total seventy-six cases were concentrated just in these three states. More than half, thirty-five cases, were brought against individuals, political entities, and government organizations in Mississippi. Seventeen were located in Alabama and fifteen in Louisiana. In contrast, the number of cases filed against Georgia and Tennessee were just five and four, respectively.Footnote ³² During the same period, the Department sued no jurisdictions in any other states of the south for voting rights violation.

2.2. Geospatial locations of voting rights litigation

Figure 1 illustrates the locations where the Department filed litigations in the jurisdictions that were later covered by the 1965 Voting Rights Act.Footnote ³³ As a completed rendition of the aforementioned map Doar brought to the first meeting with Robert Kennedy in 1961, Figure 1 shows the footprints the Civil Rights Division attorneys left in the authoritarian territories of the south from 1957 to 1965. The counties where defendants were located are highlighted in unbroken, perpendicular stripes. The graded shades of gray indicate the proportion of black voting age population in each county in 1960.Footnote ³⁴

Figure 1.

Voting Rights Litigation by the Justice Department under the 1957, 1960, 1964 Civil Rights Acts, Within Jurisdictions to be Covered by the 1965 Voting Rights Act

Two subsections of the United States Code provided grounds for the Justice Department to seek court injunctions for the voting rights cases. Accordingly, the complaints were divided into two groups. One was racial discrimination in the processes of voter registration and elections. Examples were not just limited to the flat rejection of voter registration applications by the registrars based on the race of applicants. The discriminatory schemes also included literacy tests given at stricter standards for black applicants, as well as racially segregated spaces and times for voter registration and voting. Intentionally slowing down the processing of the application forms to indefinitely postpone registration was another method frequently used by the registration officials to block black citizens from the voter rolls. These incidents of procedural discrimination were filed under 42 U.S.C. section 1971(a), a provision that survived from a law passed in 1870 following the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. A total of fifty-nine cases, or well over three quarters of all the cases, were brought to the court under this subsection. On the map, counties with 1971(a) cases are represented by stripes slanting from bottom left to top right.Footnote ³⁵

Yet, the repressive schemes to control the exercise of voting rights extended beyond procedural discrimination. In their daily lives, civil rights workers and black residents who sought the franchise faced intimidation, coercion, and violence in connection to their registration activities. Complaints of this type were filed under subsection (b) of the 42 U.S.C. section 1971, which formed the second category of Department cases. Economic threats were one of the most effective pressures local white populations placed on black communities in order to deter them from engaging in voter registration activities. Because so few black residents possessed economic resources independent of the white property owners and employers in the rural south, a great majority were highly vulnerable to economic pressures. Termination of employment, evictions of tenant farmers and sharecroppers from the lot, and denying credits and renewals of insurance policies were just a few examples of such tactics used by the white community.

For instance, in Greene County, Mississippi, a black schoolteacher and librarian, named Ernestine Talbert, was denied the renewal of her employment contract by the board of education after she provided an affidavit for a federal government suit on a voting rights case in a neighboring county. The Department sued the board under 1971(b) on her behalf, arguing that the termination of her contract was an attempt to intimidate the woman and the people in the black community in the free exercise of their right to vote. The superintendent testified that the teaching position was replaced by a new hire who had better qualifications than Mrs. Talbert and denied the allegation that the affidavit was the sole factor in her termination. In the end, both the district court and the appellate court ruled in favor of the defendant.Footnote ³⁶

As frequently used by whites against the black community as economic reprisals was physical violence, coercion, and threats. Personal security was not to be taken for granted among civil rights activists and ordinary black citizens who wished to exercise the right to vote. In Wilcox County, Alabama, the Department filed a 1971(b) case against twenty-seven white landowners who signed a petition that outlawed a black insurance salesman from entering their land. The man and his wife were the first black residents who attempted to register to vote in the county that had black voting age population at seventy-percent. In June 1964, the district court dismissed the case without providing a reason.Footnote ³⁷ In neighboring Dallas County, the Department filed a total of four 1971(b) cases in 1963 and 1964. In one of them, the Department alleged that the local White Citizens Council intimidated the black community with the purpose of interfering with their right to vote. The Council also frustrated federal investigation: it placed an advertisement in the Selma Times Journal that called for white residents to resist federal enforcement.Footnote ³⁸

The perpetrators were not limited to private individuals. In over half of all the 1971(b) cases brought by the Department, public officials, particularly those in the local law enforcement, were implicated in the complaints. These public officials either rendered support to local white perpetrators or actively lead and authorized the coercive acts to prevent black citizens from seeking to apply for voter registration. In another case from Dallas County, United States v. McLeod, et al., the Justice Department encountered criminal processes that were used against themselves, as well as against the civil rights workers. The state of Alabama under Governor George Wallace had set up a grand jury to investigate the Department over a car originally rented by the Division for official use. Thelton Henderson, one of the few black attorneys in the Division, quietly allowed the car to be used for transporting Martin Luther King, Jr., from Birmingham to a voter registration campaign in Selma.Footnote ³⁹ When the locals found out, the grand jury alleged that the Department misused the car and incited racial unrest in the region: it subpoenaed the attorneys, including Robert Kennedy, Burke Marshall, John Doar, as well as Henderson who later resigned from the position, to testify. The federal government applied for a temporary restraining order asserting that the state lacked power to investigate the Civil Rights Division.Footnote ⁴⁰

Though the federal appeals court prompted the district court to issue the restraining order, Judge James Hare of the Alabama circuit court, who had convened the grand jury investigation, publicly expressed defiance. He told the jury panel that while the witnesses from the Department could not be called for questioning, the grand jury must continue to investigate the federal attorneys visiting the town. The judge's harangue is comparable to the conspiracy theories and xenophobic rabble-rousing of today: not only did the judge liken the federal agents to the Italian mafia, but he also called the White House “the Irish ‘family’ which reigns supreme in the ‘District of Congo’, on the Potomac.”Footnote ⁴¹ The Division had to appeal multiple times after the district court dissolved the restraining order. The case demonstrates that an attorney's misstep in the field could create opportunities for the local segregationists to prolong harassment and derail the enforcement efforts.

Two 1971(b) cases were pursued in Leflore, a county located in the Mississippi Delta. In United States v. Greenwood, the Department sought injunctive relief against public officials of the city of Greenwood, the county seat, as well as those of the county government: among the defendants were the mayor, fire commissioner, police chief, city prosecutor, Leflore County attorney, and the deputy sheriff. The complaints were raised by eight black registration workers who were convicted by local law enforcement after they had marched to the city hall to protest a shooting into the home of a civil rights worker in March 1963.Footnote ⁴² They were sentenced to four months imprisonment and $200 in fines. The defendants and the Justice Department attorneys reached an agreement that the case would be dismissed on the condition that the defendants set aside the convictions of the eight workers and state their intention not to interfere with the voter registration activities of the black community. The defendants complied and the case was dismissed by the court.Footnote ⁴³

The Justice Department initiated a total of seventeen 1971(b) cases by the end of 1964.Footnote ⁴⁴ Three of them were located in Tennessee and thus are not included in Figure 1. In the illustration, the fourteen cases filed under 1971(b) are marked by unbroken stripes running from top left to bottom right. Here again, Alabama and Mississippi had the largest number of 1971(b) cases: five and seven, respectively. One must note that some counties had both 1971(a) and 1971(b) cases, and sometimes more than one in each category. Thus, in these jurisdictions there are the crosshatch of unbroken stripes. In all cases, the Justice Department moved to intervene but only after the Division obtained enough evidence on the ground and the attorneys were convinced that their cases were strong enough to obtain relief from southern judges.

Figure 1 also highlights the jurisdictions in which the Justice Department initiated investigation over alleged incidents of voter discrimination and intimidation.Footnote ⁴⁵ The dashed stripes on the diagonal represent those counties in which the Civil Rights Division had sent either its own legal staff, or had requested the FBI to conduct investigation on its behalf in order to keep the matters under close watch. These counties mark the territorial reach of the Justice Department's investigation in the eight years prior to the 1965 Act.

2.3. The Justice Department's missed opportunities in southwest Georgia

Notably, Figure 1 reveals a vast range of areas into which the Justice Department could have intervened, but did not. Of this large area where the assertion of the federal authority was sporadic at best, the southwestern part of Georgia stands out because the area witnessed racial violence that was directly associated with voter registration activities. Here, the rise of local democratization movement, as well as the unflinching reassertions of authoritarian rule and white supremacy, were comparable to those in Mississippi. The overall reluctance of the federal government to enforce the laws in this section of Georgia raises questions about the government's willingness to provide equal protection under the law.

Between 1957 and August 1965, the Department filed to the court only five complaints against political and government entities in Georgia. Of the five, three were filed against counties in the southwestern corner of the state: two pertained to voting rights violations in Terrell and one in Sumter.Footnote ⁴⁶ In Terrell, as well as Baker, another black belt county in the rural southwest, the attorneys of the Civil Rights Division did make some enforcement efforts. The Department officials visited these counties multiple times to keep track of the progress of voter registration and investigate incidents of racial violence. However, in these two counties the Department kept itself from fully asserting the pressure. These filed cases, as well as incidents and complaints which the Division attorneys were aware of but did not formally bring to court, demonstrate the restraints they placed on enforcement activities in Georgia, as well as the effects of informal negotiation that eventually produced some voluntary compliance.

The first case the Department brought in Georgia was U.S. v. Raines, a 1971(a) complaint filed in September 1958 against the board of registrars in Terrell County. Brought as the very first case ever to be filed under the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the Department sought court injunctions to enjoin the county registrars from continuing to deny registration of qualified black applicants. The registrars had turned down the applications of five black residents on the grounds of illiteracy, even though all of them had either attended or graduated from college. James Griggs Raines, one of the registrars accused in the case, explained to a newspaper reporter that the disqualification was justified because in the literacy test the applicants either mispronounced a word in the state constitution or their handwriting was not legible.Footnote ⁴⁷ The Justice Department eventually won the case on appeal in the United States Supreme Court in 1960.

After Raines, the Division filed no additional voting rights complaint against officials and individuals in Georgia for well over three years and eight months. The state was pushed aside as Attorney General Kennedy instructed the Division attorneys to give priority to Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, which absorbed their time, resources, and attention. However, the Division did assign Jerome Heilbron, who worked under Doar, as one of the legal staff working full time on Georgia's rural southwest.

Heilbron first arrived in Baker County in July 1961, some three months before civil rights workers from outside the state started to test the waters for voter registration drives in southwest Georgia. From the outset, the county's voter registration rate signaled problems: its white voter registration list contained names of 1,670 voters while the 1960 Census had counted only 1,139 white persons of voting age living in the county. This set the proportion of white voter registration at 1.41, the most unusual of all counties in the state. The black registration roll meanwhile contained not a single name, even though the county had 1,285 black residents who were older than eighteen years, the state's minimum age for voting. “Why substantially more than 100 percent of eligible white persons are registered in Baker County,” Heilbron queried in a memo prepared at the time of record demands.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the next three years, Heilbron made at least seven visits to Newton, the county seat of Baker, in a quest to discover the reason behind the anomalous figure, as well as other fraudulent practices the registrars used for disenfranchising black citizens.

In Newton, the voter registration cards were kept in the office of the county tax collector, a position served by a man named R. I. Hudson, who was also a deputy registrar. From his own examination of the registration cards, Heilbron concluded that the tax collector failed to keep the voter registration list up to date by holding onto the cards of those who had not shown up to vote in the past five years, a designated window of time after which the names must be cleared from the list under the Georgia registration law.Footnote ⁴⁹ Hudson’s negligence made the list much more numerous than it should have been by retaining the cards of those who had died or moved out of the county.

Between 1955 and 1957, some black residents had organized a Voters League in Baker and attempted registration. Yet Hudson willfully refused to enlist them by claiming that he had just run out of the application cards or by sending the black applicants on a false chase, instructing them to find someone else to place them on the roll. Another tactic he used was to tell the applicants to wait for a summons to a qualification hearing and subsequently never sending the order. Under Georgia state law, the ability to fill out the card correctly should have made qualification hearings unnecessary. A black resident named Josh Williams found out, only on the day of the election in 1956, that his name was not on the registration list, even though he had filled out the registration card and Hudson had not notified him of any errors that may have disqualified him.Footnote ⁵⁰

In Baker, as in other southern counties of Georgia, those who tried to register were pushed back as much by coercion and violence, as by procedural discrimination at the registrar's office. A witness, who had once lived in the county and worked as a schoolteacher, told Heilbron that many of those who attempted to register in 1957 were subsequently fired by their white employers.Footnote ⁵¹ And the authoritarian pressures did not just end with economic retaliation. Within a few months, two cars owned by members of the Voters League were bombed. Williams, a founding member of the League, was also targeted with explosive devices that blew his house apart. The FBI investigated these blasts, but no suspects were caught: as a result, the Justice Department did not bring a 1971(b) suit in those incidents.Footnote ⁵²

Witnessing the violence, the black community entirely ceased its attempt to register by the end of the decade. These examples of voting rights violation, harassment, and intimidation in Baker present striking similarities with the incidents that ravaged the black belt counties of Mississippi and Alabama, where the Justice Department actively filed 1971(a) and (b) complaints in court. “[S]omething must be done to pave the way for Negroes to register without fear of intimidation,” a Division memo on Baker noted.Footnote ⁵³ Yet in this corner of Georgia, the Division tended to restrain itself.

Instead, the Department largely relied on informal negotiations. During his second trip to the county in late September 1961, Heilbron met for the first time with the three members of the registrar's office, as well as the tax collector. Heilbron asked them to comply with the federal requirements of voting rights law: not only did he orally communicate the requests point by point at the meeting, but he also put them into writing in a letter signed by Burke Marshall and sent to the board.Footnote ⁵⁴ The board members agreed, and their first meeting ended amicably. Warren E. Rooks, the chief registrar, together with R. B. Tabb and Luther Timmons, the other two members of the board, returned the signed letter to Marshall, attesting their willingness to comply with the requests.Footnote ⁵⁵ Rooks also told Heilbron that he received words of assurance from the sheriff and other county officials that he would be “permitted to conduct registration according to the law and that Negroes would be permitted to register, if qualified.”Footnote ⁵⁶ For the next few months, things seemed to go as planned.

But their assurances did not hold. In early February 1962, Heilbron noticed that Rooks lapsed in failing to send him a list of newly registered voters since his last visit. When Heilbron inquired about the list over the phone, Rooks explained that it was troublesome for him to furnish copies of the list and have them mailed to Washington. Rooks added that he was advised by a local circuit judge, a man named Walter Geer.Footnote ⁵⁷ He also informed Heilbron that between 35 to 40 black applicants, as well as two whites, had been registered in the past months. Seeing the local judge's involvement and Rooks’ own refusal to mail the list as a sign of trouble ahead, Heilbron visited the county in late March and inspected the registration records himself. Heilbron found out that the board accepted only twenty out of seventy-eight black citizens who had applied. Over a third of those rejections were due to the applicants’ failure to show up to the additional hearing, and the remainder for not passing the test provided by the board.Footnote ⁵⁸ Heilbron concluded that the registration officials were “not acting in good faith in the registration of qualified Negro applicants and in the representations they are making to the Department of Justice.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Throughout the summer of 1962, Heilbron started drafting a formal complaint to seek injunctions against the registrars. In late June, he conducted interviews with at least fourteen black residents as witnesses in preparation for a trial.Footnote ⁶⁰ The draft complaint, titled U.S. v. W. E. Rooks, R. B. Tabb, Luther Timmons, R. I. Hudson, and the State of Georgia, was tentatively approved by Doar, who wrote to Burke Marshall that “[t]here is every indication that the Board has fraudulently falsified registration records made during the [sic] November and December 1961. If this is true, then we really have a lock on the case.”Footnote ⁶¹

While the Division was working on the draft complaint, democratizers made incursions into southwest Georgia. Since the previous winter, the civil rights movement, led by the Southern Christian Leadership Coalition (SCLC), was running desegregation and voter registration campaigns in Albany, the region's urban hub in nearby Dougherty County. Even though the campaign was short lived, it created a foothold for other civil rights organizations in Georgia's southwest. Undeterred by SCLC's withdrawal, the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC), which was also present on the scene, decided to extend its efforts to challenge the authoritarian rule further out in neighboring rural areas, including Baker County. The SNCC named their campaign the Southwest Georgia Project and diverted the organization's personnel and funds they received from the Voter Education Project to the effort.Footnote ⁶² In January 1962, the SNCC began to send racially integrated teams of student volunteers as fieldworkers to be stationed in the black belt counties. Their primary mission was to offer citizenship education programs and carry out voter registration drives for the local black community.

During the visit to the county in the summer of 1962, Heilbron asked Charles Sherrod, the leader of Southwest Georgia Project, to wait and assess the situation before the organization began its activities in the county. “I told them,” Heilbron noted, “that I was not at liberty to tell them what to do or not to do but that the Department of Justice was active in Baker County and that, unless they felt it was necessary for them to do so, I believed it would be expedient in so far as the work we were doing was concerned, for them to stay out of Baker County for at least two weeks.” The SNCC workers assured him that “they would be glad to do this and that there was plenty of other work for them to do and that they had no deadline or specific program worked out with respect to Baker County.”Footnote ⁶³ The SNCC kept their words and stayed away from Baker for a few more weeks.

Despite the initial signs of approval Doar gave to Heilbron for bringing the case to the court and Heilbron's request to the democratizers to hold back for a moment, United States v. Rooks, et al. was eventually shelved by the Division. In February 1963, Doar notified Heilbron that the Department was writing another letter to the registrars “outlining what we would require the Board to do in order to avoid litigation and give them a reasonable opportunity to do it.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Because the county government could not afford the legal fees to defend itself in court, the local registration officials began to comply with the Division's requests.Footnote ⁶⁵

If local compliance was finally induced by financial cost of litigation, Heilbron's visit also added pressures on the local board. During Heilbron's fifth visit to Newton in late March of 1963, he met with the registrars for another round of negotiations. His pleas to change their registration practices turned personal and emotional this time. “I asked [the registrars] if any of them had served in the armed services,” Heilbron reported days later to Burke Marshall. “None had. I told them that I had spent six and one-half years in the Army, some of that time flying and being shot at in New Guinea.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Then he told them that he knew a black soldier who had attempted to apply for voter registration by mail while he was stationed overseas. The soldier did not hear from the registrar of his hometown even though Georgia's election law allowed active-duty service members abroad to sign up to vote.Footnote ⁶⁷ “I emphasized very strongly,” Heilbron noted, “that if the soldier was overseas in the service of his country, as far as I was concerned, I was going to see that he had the right to vote.” Heilbron went on: “I then talked to them about Josh Williams.” He had met with Williams before he passed away in the fall of previous year. “In my opinion he was a remarkable man,” the attorney wrote. “With all the abuse to which he had been subjected there was no bitterness—he was a man of tremendous strength of character… I told the Board that I was disappointed to learn that Josh had died without ever having voted.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Thereafter Heilbron began to see significant changes in the attitudes of the local white officials. For the Democratic primary election for the sheriff's office in January 1964, local officials requested Heilbron to send federal representatives in the hope to prevent a potential breakout of violence. “After talking with these people,” Heilbron noted, “it became apparent that they have all accepted the idea that the Negroes in Baker County who are qualified are going to be registered and are going to vote and that federal government is interested in keeping an eye on things. They were all very friendly to me.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The local registrars began to accept an increased number of voter applications from black residents: Heilbron learned that while the white registration list was still in need of purging for maintenance, 502 of 1,285 eligible blacks were newly enrolled by the middle of April 1964.Footnote ⁷⁰

In addition to Baker, the Department also returned to Terrell, the county home to Rains, the first 1971(a) case. Terrell became another hot spot for federal intervention as the SNCC began grassroots voter registration drives in 1962. “If we are able to cut through the fear in the minds of the people there,” an SNCC worker noted, “the gate will have been opened to southwest Georgia as “Terrible Terrell” is infamously known all over the area.”Footnote ⁷¹ As in other counties, the SNCC's democratization efforts met hostile white resistance. Coercion and violent attacks were directed at the visiting volunteers who helped organizing registration drives and local blacks who went along with them.

In Terrell, the local police actively led the resistance. On July 21, 1962, Ralph Allen, a white SNCC worker, was knocked down and beaten while being told to leave the area by three unidentified men. Earlier in the day, he had accompanied six black residents for voter registration at the county courthouse, but they were stopped by Zeke Mathews, the County Sheriff, and his deputy who warned them to leave.Footnote ⁷² Just four days later on the night of July 25, the police broke up a voter registration meeting organized by the SNCC in the Mount Olive Baptist Church in Sasser, a small town in the county. Sheriff Mathews, this time accompanied by two of his deputies, walked into the church and intimidated the participants, while more than a dozen white residents stood in the back. “We are a little fed up with this voter registration business,” Mathews told the group of thirty-eight blacks and two whites gathered inside, “we want our colored people to live like they've been living for the last hundred years, peaceful and happy.”Footnote ⁷³ Chief Deputy Mansfield E. Mathews, Sheriff's nephew—and who was about to take over the position of chief voter registrar in the county board—took the names of the attendees and strolled around in the sanctuary while placing his hand on a revolver. Meanwhile, Deputy Sheriff R. M. Dunaway slapped a flashlight against his palm repeatedly as he looked over the group.Footnote ⁷⁴ Only days later, Allen, as well as Sherrod, the SNCC's director, were arrested and jailed on vagrancy charges when they accompanied another group of black residents seeking to register to the courthouse.Footnote ⁷⁵

Because the police breakup of the registration meeting was reported in a special dispatch in The New York Times, it came to the attention of President John Kennedy. He immediately directed the Justice Department to pursue the intimidation case in court.Footnote ⁷⁶ Thus in August 1962, after nearly four years of a hiatus in Georgia, the Justice Department sought court injunctions in U.S. v. Mathews, et. al, this time filed under subsection 1971(b). The Department requested a temporary restraining order for sixteen people, including Mathews, Dunaway, as well as the mayor of Sasser, from continuing the prosecution of the two SNCC activists.Footnote ⁷⁷ The Justice Department negotiated with the local prosecutor who agreed to postpone the prosecution. The federal district court in Americus eventually issued a permanent injunction against fifteen of the defendants, prohibiting them from intimidating the SNCC workers for their voter registration activities.

U.S. v. Mathews was the first and only 1971(b) case that was ever sought in Georgia, even though the white resistance against voter registration activities did not cease that summer night. Into the fall and winter of the following year, white supremacists continued to perpetrate a spate of violence against the registration workers and the local black community that hosted them. Within three months of the Mount Olive Baptist Church incident, two black churches in Terrell and another in Lee had been burned to the ground. Fearful of further retaliation, the pastors who had provided leadership for voter registration drives soon began to cease working with the SNCC. On September 3, three SNCC workers were chased out of Sasser at gunpoint by the town's Deputy Sheriff, Denver Edgar Short.Footnote ⁷⁸ The Justice Department charged him in a criminal case for civil rights violation in federal court, but he was acquitted by an all-white jury.Footnote ⁷⁹

These acts of white retaliation grew even more violent. Three days after the Sasser Deputy Sheriff intimidated the SNCC workers at gunpoint, Jack Chatfield, a college junior who had just arrived from Connecticut, was wounded in the arm by a gunshot when a group of men attacked the house where he was staying. Owned by Carolyn Daniels, a local host in Dawson, the house served as a headquarters for the SNCC's registration drive.Footnote ⁸⁰ Ms. Daniels ran a beauty shop and built the house on a lot she owned, a condition that had made her relatively independent from the structure of white economic power. Not only did she let the SNCC workers meet and stay in the house, but she actively taught voter education classes for local residents and encouraged the patrons of her hair salon to get registered to vote. In November, she successfully helped thirty residents register.Footnote ⁸¹

The defenders of white rule took no time to retaliate. Around midnight on December 8, 1963, Daniels's house was shot into—for the second time—while she was getting ready to sleep. The shooter fired more than fifty bullets from a machine gun into the windows and the wooden walls of her home. As she hid under the bed to take cover from the bullets and shards, an explosive device was thrown into the bedroom. The bomb rolled on the floor toward her but did not go off immediately. Minutes after Daniels left the house to seek medical care, the bomb exploded. She returned to find her home destroyed.Footnote ⁸²

The local police investigation on the attack led to no arrests, let alone prosecution.Footnote ⁸³ The Justice Department, for its part, was informed of the shelling and the bombing. Yet other than placing the incident under active investigation for a potential 1971(b) case, it pursued no formal action. Heilbron was again stalled. “I requested [the FBI] to push all leads in the above matter to a conclusion,” he wrote to Doar. “These include interviews with certain KKK members and searching fingerprint and arrest records. None of the FBI reports I've received since I last talked with you about this matter have contained helpful clues.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Nine months later, the Division left a curious sidenote to the Carolyn Daniels case in the file: “[a]t least one suspect located but is also defendant in another civil rights criminal action.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Neither the source of that piece of information, nor the identity of the unnamed suspect and the criminal case the note refers to, can be identified. But given the inaction of the law enforcement, it is plausible that the suspect was aided by local officials in uniform. That the Justice Department did not pursue the attackers in Ms. Daniels’ case under 1971(b) is remarkable given that there was a clear connection between the violence and her voter registration activities, and it also had information pointing to at least one suspect.

After the bombing, the SNCC activists and local residents began to reconsider their commitment to voter registration drives in the county. Sherrod sensed the terror that pervaded the black community after the bombing was left unresolved. “In our canvassing since the bombing we have not met with any success so far,” he noted. “The effect of the bombing has not been to arouse people to action, at least not in any of the people we have seen. Instead, it seems to have re-entrenched the old idea that there is nothing a Negro can do against the power of the white man here, and any effort to change the status quo will meet with reprisals.”Footnote ⁸⁶ In the midst of the violence, Terrell County voters—still mostly white—returned Zeke Mathews to the office of Sheriff for another two-year term. The white support for the incumbent was overwhelming: Mathews easily defeated a challenger, 2,058 to 655, in the Democratic primary that was held in the following spring, March 1964.Footnote ⁸⁷ His renomination and reelection affirmed the tenacity of authoritarian rule and white supremacy. With only curtailed federal intervention, justice, freedom, and democracy remained elusive in Terrell County.

2.4. Bureaucratic resource allocation and the President's calculations

The limitation on the Department's bureaucratic resources, including personnel, budget, and time may partially explain the unevenness in the Department's litigation activities. The financial strain was not immediately obvious, though it was inevitable given the growth in the division's caseload. In the five years between 1961 and 1965, the Civil Rights Division saw a significant increase in resources: the Division's budget more than tripled from 627,000 to two million dollars; and the number of attorneys general allotted to the Division had doubled from thirty-five to seventy-two.Footnote ⁸⁸ Meanwhile, as previously noted, the number of voting rights cases filed by the Department grew more than five times during the same period. Even with the double and triple increases in budget and personnel, they had to be used much more efficiently to adjust to the even larger expansion in the number of court cases the Department filed.

And the voting rights suits were not the only tasks that the attorneys had on their work schedules. Sixty-four of the Division attorneys were placed on the two regional sections newly organized in the fall of 1964. These two sections covered the geographic areas of the authoritarian south: the Southwestern Section handled cases in Mississippi and Louisiana and the Southeastern Section worked on Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida.Footnote ⁸⁹ These sections were responsible for all civil rights matters arising in those states, including not just voter registration discrimination, but also criminal prosecution of violence against civil rights marchers, and desegregation in schools and other places of public accommodation. Thus, despite the reorganization and budgetary expansion of the Division, its staff was quickly and frequently inundated, particularly in the years between 1962 and 1964. The spike in racial tension during those years took the attorneys’ time away from pursuing cases of voting rights discrimination in court. Nevertheless, it is too simple to claim that lack of resources can fully account for the Department's almost exclusive focus on three states at the expense of others in voting rights enforcement. Rather, the litigation strategy and the bureaucratic procedures for investigating incidents and preparing evidence for cases, which commenced in 1960 and 1961, played a role.

Notably, one cannot find documentary evidence that presidential pressures withheld the Department from enforcing the federal law in the home districts of southern Democratic members of Congress. Had President Johnson really meant to refrain from angering Mississippi Senator James Eastland, the chairman of Committee on the Judiciary and a plantation owner in Sunflower County, he would have pressured the Attorney General to withdraw its ongoing complaint case, U.S. v. Campbell, which was filed in early 1963 against the Sunflower County Board of Registrars. The Justice Department did not do so, and the trial was held in the middle of October 1964. The Federal District Court ordered that thirty black applicants who had been rejected by the board be registered for the general election in the following month.Footnote ⁹⁰ Even after the court granted the motion, the Division attorneys kept the county under close watch. “Negro registration activity commencing in the late summer of 1962 resulted in widespread economic reprisals against participating Negroes by city officials, merchants, and farmers,” Robert Owen observed about the county in the report. He kept the matter open “because the information developed may tie in with future intimidation as registration by Negroes continues.”Footnote ⁹¹ His note contradicts the widely accepted allegation that the President pressured the Justice Department to refrain from enforcing voting rights in the county.

3.1. Department priorities for administrative enforcement

In practice, however, neither the law's coverage automatically prompted the Department to make county certification, nor did all certification lead to examiner appointment. The Justice Department remained highly circumspect and selective in carrying out the federal enforcement of the law on the ground. Figure 2 demonstrates the geographic scope of examiner appointment under the Voting Rights Act within the law's covered jurisdictions. It juxtaposes the scope of administrative enforcement against three elements: the Department's litigation activities over the previous eight years, the progress of black voter registration, and the Department receipts of resident complaints.

Figure 2.

Appointment of Federal Examiners in the Southern Jurisdictions Covered by Section 4(b) of the 1965 Voting Rights Act

Counties marked by red boundary lines received federal examiners within the first two years of the law's enactment.Footnote ⁹³ Only fifty-eight of all covered jurisdictions were certified and sent federal examiners by the Department in that time period. In jurisdictions where the Justice Department either pursued or prepared for voting rights litigation under the previous Civil Rights Acts, perpendicular lines are used following the same keys as in Figure 1. The variant shades of gray in Figure 2 indicate the ratio of black registered voters to the black voting age population as of 1967.Footnote ⁹⁴ The darker the shade, the lower the level of black voter registration, and thus the more extensive the scope of the disenfranchisement remained.

When deciding where to send the federal examiners, the Department continued to disproportionately concentrate efforts on selected jurisdictions in Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, while making severely curtailed incursions into Georgia and South Carolina. Virginia and the covered counties of North Carolina received no federal examiners. As Figure 2 makes clear, neither the numeric indicators of voter registration progress, nor complaints from local residents appear to have directly shaped the Department's decisions for appointing federal examiners. While the rate of black voter registration grew in counties where examiners were appointed—as evidenced in the lighter shade of gray within those red boundaries—the Department did not extend its administrative decisions to other counties where black registration remained low.

Apparently, it was not lack of statistical information that held the Department back from carrying out proactive enforcement in Georgia and South Carolina. A week before the Act was signed by President Johnson, the Department had obtained from the FBI the most recent voter statistics of those two states in addition to the three priority states. When the enactment of the Voting Rights bill was within sight, Doar, by then the head of the Civil Rights Division, prepared a memorandum to Attorney General Nick Katzenbach. Doar explained the status of the Division's preparedness for implementing the Act, particularly for assigning the federal examiners, as the personnel had to be subsequently furnished by the Civil Services Commission. He reported that he gave the Commission a planned schedule of federal examiner appointment to selected counties.Footnote ⁹⁵ Because the schedule had not yet been reviewed by the Attorney General for final authorization, it reveals the Division's initial plans.

At this early stage, the voter registration numbers appear to have informed the attorneys in the selection of jurisdictions. Doar divided covered counties into three categories based on the scope of disenfranchisement. The Division gave priority to counties with lowest percentages of voter registration among black residents of voting age, usually below ten percent, and planned to send federal examiners there within three days of the Act's enactment. In the memorandum, these priority counties were placed in Group A. Then within ten to fifteen days after the initial round of appointments, the Division planned to extend their enforcement efforts into the next set of counties, categorized as Group B, which had relatively limited, yet less severely curtailed, numbers of black registered voters. A third round of appointments, Group C, was planned for after federal efforts in Group B made progress. A total of fifty-six jurisdictions across five states were listed in Groups A, B and C, based on the statistical information. This initial plan demonstrates that even though the Department's primary focus was on Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, it did not intend to entirely neglect the counties of the remaining states. Indeed, two counties each in Georgia and South Carolina were included in the Group A schedule, and eleven other counties from these two states were also placed in Groups B and C.

In implementing the Act, however, the Department swiftly deployed examiners in only ten of those fifty-six jurisdictions in the initial plan, all of them in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The bureaucratic rationalization for this appears to have originated not in the summer of 1965, but much earlier in the preceding several years during which time the Civil Rights Division conducted voting rights investigations and pursued litigations. This initial focus created path dependency in the very sense described by Paul Pierson.Footnote ⁹⁶ Over the years, the Division attorneys had accumulated knowledge on the political and socioeconomic landscapes of these localities, such as state laws, the local ordinances, the actors and the organizational dynamics of the political power structures on the ground through record examination, investigation and litigation.

After the 1965 Act became law of the land, the Division continued to place most of its enforcement resources and personnel in these already familiar places, and not in areas where they had to start from scratch. The Division attorneys’ experiences in interacting with the key local figures and their knowledge of past incidents of violation provided increasing returns in the form of their familiarity which eased administrative decision-making for examiner appointments. Positive feedback in the Division's enforcement activities was at work here, to the extent that statistical information, and as the next subsection makes clear, local residents complaints, did not significantly alter the Department's administrative decisions of where and when to send federal examiners. Rather, it was the Division's experiences of prior litigation and investigation that determined the swiftness and geography of federal examiner deployment under the 1965 Act.

3.2. Attorney General designations and local resident complaints

Under Section 6 of the 1965 Act, local residents did file complaints to the Division either by directly contacting it or, in a number of occasions, through referrals from non-southern members of Congress. In Figure 2, a star marker is placed in jurisdictions from which the Department received resident complaints under the subclause.Footnote ⁹⁷ Nevertheless, these complaints appear to have had only limited influence on the Department certification of counties. The wordings of Department's notices printed in the Federal Registrar make clear that the certifications were made entirely on the basis of the Attorney General's own judgement that they were necessary for the enforcement of the guarantees of the Fifteenth Amendment, rather than on the merit of local complaints.Footnote ⁹⁸

More specifically, the Civil Rights Division often justified its administrative decision to appoint examiners based on preceding cases already brought to the court. Every time county certifications were made under the Act, Doar and the Division attorneys prepared internal documents, called justification memoranda, addressed to the Attorney General and explaining why the decisions were made. In thirty-five of the fifty-eight counties to which the Department appointed examiners in the two years, the Division cited 1971(a) and (b) cases filed under the previous Civil Rights Acts as the sole justification for determining that voting rights violation persisted in these jurisdictionsFootnote ⁹⁹. In three jurisdictions the Department had not pursued 1971(a) and (b) cases, other kinds of actions in court—record inspection orders the Division had obtained from the court, and in the case of Louisiana's Bossier Parish, Byrd v. Brice, a private lawsuit from 1952 in which the U.S. District court had ordered that black applicants be registered as voters—were given as the justifications.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Three more counties were appointed examiners in April and June 1967, all of which had 1971(a) cases but they are not included in the binder of the justification memoranda in Doar's personal papers. All combined, forty-one out of the fifty-eight examiner appointed jurisdictions, or seventy percent, were counties against which complaint cases had already been filed in court.

As the administrative enforcement began, Doar noted that “our objective was to obtain full compliance with the 1965 Act in all states before the next election, but to attempt to do this with a minimum amount of federal intrusion into the registration business of the states.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ What caused the Division's circumspection and heavy reliance on preceding litigations, even though the Act did not require them? Though Doar and those working under him have left no explicit rationale for the restraints, southern oppositions to the Act explain the political contexts the attorneys faced.

At every turn in the Voting Rights bill's enactment process, southern Democrats had tried to discredit the local democratizers and demanded that the state governments be given a process to contest the Department's certifications under Section 6. During an executive session of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sam Ervin, Senator of North Carolina, contended that local complaints that were “entirely false” could still prompt examiner appointment.Footnote ¹⁰² Ervin, alongside Chairman James Eastland of Mississippi and John McClellan of Arkansas—all staunch opponents of the bill—argued that the southern states should be permitted to question the validity of local complaints and to bring Attorney General's certifications to an appeals process.Footnote ¹⁰³ In the Voting Rights Act, however, Sections 4(b) and 6 made the Department's decisions final and not reviewable in court, unlike many other federal agency decisions that were rendered contestable under the 1946 Administrative Procedures Act.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Southern segregationists continued to make the same argument in South Carolina v. Katzenbach, filed in less than a couple of months after the Voting Rights Act came into effect. The plaintiffs challenged the constitutionality of Sections 4 to 6. Each of the five southern states that were fully covered under Section 4(b) submitted its own amicus curiae brief in support of South Carolina. Alabama's George Wallace wrote in his brief that the Act was not just a bill of attainder that legislatively adjudicates guilt. “[U]nder this Act,” he also contended, “there is a brazen transfer of judicial authority to the minions of the Executive Department, the crudity of which is compounded by a specific provision that the exercise of the judgement or adjudication by the Attorney General ... is not subject to judicial review.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The Supreme Court nevertheless ruled against the southern state governments and upheld the constitutionality of the Act in March 1966.

The Department's self-defense against the southern oppositions was to use what has already been argued in front of the federal judges as the proof of voting rights violation. Local resident complaints, unless they had previously been proven in court, carried little weight in this context. The subtlety is found in the division manual Doar prepared for the incoming attorneys in late 1966. The manual sets out the Division's procedures for drafting the justification memoranda. Doar wrote that the first two items the memo should note are the jurisdiction's latest statistics of voter registration by race and the past history of litigation. “Set out any court cases concerning voter discrimination within the county. Set out the status of any suits which have not come to decision,” the manual instructed.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ “Care should be exercised throughout the justification memorandum to identify statements which have not been established either by a court finding or by the filling of a civil or criminal complaint,” Doar emphasized. “Open investigations should only be referred to as such. Unproven allegations of intimidation, for instance, should not be included. The tone of the memorandum should be factual—use nouns and verbs, no adjectives.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The Division remained unmoved by the calls from the local democratizers as long as they did not conform to the Division's positions on what constituted as facts, in other words, through the accumulation of its own investigation and the history of litigation.

There were counties, seventeen in total, that were certified and appointed examiners without prior history of litigation. In South Carolina's Clarendon County, the resident complaints may have led to examiner appointments. The Department had not previously sought injunctive relief, and the Division attorneys lacked fieldwork experience there. When James Thomas, a Department attorney, was sent to observe voter registration in Clarendon on October 4, 1965, he received signed complaints with twenty-one signatures from Billie S. Flemming, Chairman of the South Carolina Voter Education Project. Thomas subsequently requested to Doar that federal examiners be sent to the county. Three weeks later, the Department appointed examiners.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In Mississippi's Jefferson, Franklin and Wilkinson Counties located in the state's southwestern corner, the Division cited neither previous litigation nor local complaints in the justification memoranda. What exactly prompted the Department attorneys to designate these jurisdictions remains unclear.

But the geospatial illustration may offer some answers. Many of the jurisdictions that became subject to the Department enforcement, either through the court litigation or by the administrative decisions, or both, are located contiguously. The geographical proximity suggests the physical paths along which the Civil Rights Division attorneys traveled as they investigated cases, collected records, interviewed witnesses, and negotiated with local officials. As one can see in Figure 2, the vertical alignment of those examiner appointments in eastern Mississippi follow state highway 15, along which the Division attorneys drove their rented cars, worn out the soles of their own shoes, carrying heavy camera equipment on their back for records inspection in the previous eight years. After August 1965, the new law should have allowed the Division attorneys to respond to the local democratizers’ calls for examiner appointments wherever such requests were made. But that was not what the Justice Department did. Instead, it repeated the same old paths: those counties with prior judicial enforcement, and ones without it but were neighbors to the former, were appointed examiners because the attorneys were familiar with the local communities they had travelled through.

3.3. Southwest Georgia not on their mind

In Figure 2, southwestern Georgia stands out again for the paucity of federal administrative intervention. Doar and Katzenbach did in fact discuss Georgia on August 8, 1965, as they considered the first round of county certifications. Over the phone the Attorney General even talked with Carl Sanders, the governor, who assured that he would instruct the registrars to comply with the Act. In the same phone call, Doar notified the governor that four counties in Southwest Georgia, including Terrell and Baker, needed local efforts.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Yet after that conversation with the governor ended, the Justice Department paused and took no further action in the state.

The attorneys were aware of the selective allocation of resources they were making in the three priority states and the lackluster efforts in the rest of the covered areas. “Georgia counties are small and it takes a lot of shoe leather to cross and recross the State. Georgia has suffered from neglect of enforcement program,” Doar later admitted. “Ever since I've been here, we have always given high priority to Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Logistical difficulties further hindered the enforcement. Just a month after the Voting Rights Act took effect, the Division began cutting back its effort to collect voter statistics in Georgia. A Division memo proposed terminating statistics collection in twenty-six counties, all but six of them located in the northern half of the state.Footnote ¹¹¹ Nine months later, the FBI field office suggested further reductions in the frequency of data collection. Instead of reporting the numbers every week, monthly collection was now considered adequate. “This is really a manpower problem,” a Division attorney wrote in the memo. “In Georgia, the most burdensome, the Bureau is required to make approximately 139 contacts per week. Mr. Hines [the FBI field officer] suggested that we have the Bureau contact each board on a monthly basis. I personally think this is a good suggestion.”Footnote ¹¹² In short, lack of personnel necessitated scaling down the Division's record inspections in the state.

It took until late June 1966 for the Division to bring their attention back to the state. Frank Dunbaugh, the Division's Southeastern Section chief, circulated a memo and a map regarding the situation. “The attached chart and map shows the counties in Georgia where we may have to consider appointing examiners and observers, if the facts warrant it. The counties were selected on the basis of close voting age population between whites and Negroes. It should be noted that Negro voter registration lags behind white persons registered in most of the counties.”Footnote ¹¹³ That same year the Division designated Hancock, a county with over two-thirds black majority in the voting age population, as the state's first jurisdiction to receive election observers for the general election. Two black candidates were running unopposed for county commissioner and the school board in the election, and there were allegations that local whites refused to allow black citizens to serve as election clerks.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Still, no federal examiners were appointed there.

Ultimately, only two of the counties in Georgia's southwestern corner, Terrell and Lee, along with Screven, a county situated on the state's eastern border, were designated and sent examiners in March 1967, some twenty months after the enactment of the 1965 Act. No other counties received examiners in the state. The federal examiners enrolled a total of 3,413 Georgians, equivalent to about one-nineteenth of the federally enlisted voters in Alabama.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Carolyn Daniels, the victim of the bomb attack on her house, and the SNCC workers must have been delighted to finally see the arrival of federal enforcement officers in Terrell. While democracy began to take hold in the county, however, justice remained tenuous for her and for many others in the black communities of Georgia's southwest.