data and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party pt i: battle of the forms

On Instagram yesterday, Sista Docta Alexis Pauline Gumbs (@alexispauline) reminded me, “exactly 60 years ago today, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and others were fundraising as the Mississippi Democratic party to pay for buses and cheap hotel rooms on their way to crash the 1964 Democratic National Convention.” This got me on a kick to dig into the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and their data practices, a helpful redirection from feeling morose on July 4.

Not familiar with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party? Read an excellent synopsis here.

There’s so much to love and learn about MFDP, I know I will barely scratch the surface in this blog post. Here’s one thing that stands out to me in this moment: moving beyond the binary of “reform from within” vs “third party.” Beating the Democratic Party at its own game (or trying to) earned Mississippi activists lasting changes over time. I think we could all learn from their precise strategies and visionary interventions on the subject of voter disenfranchisement.

battle of the forms

A lengthy packet in the Wisconsin Historical Society’s “Freedom Summer Digital Collection” tells the origin story of MDFP. I hope I can compel you to read the whole thing! As TDAA readers may already know, I am fascinated by forms and spend a lot of time building them and thinking about how they should be built. Apparently, so did MDFP!

Because, at the end of the day, what we all know to be true is: Forms are political. How we ask for information and how we use it are the basis for building organizations that treat their members with dignity.

In particular, MDFP and its allies issued a credible challenge to the practices of many Southern states (and reportedly “sixty-odd of Mississippi’s eighty-two counties”) in requiring unnecessary questions on voter registration forms. Determining the validity of form questions went through Circuit Courts, resulting in a 1964 decision that ordered, “Panola County to dispense with both the constitutional interpretation test and the “duties of a citizen” section of the form. At about the same time, a constitutional amendment outlawed the stipulation of payment of poll tax as a requirement for voting in Federal elections.”

Sidenote – sometimes it feels like going through litigation to get teams of people to agree on questions in a form. But this is the first I’ve read about actual litigation to agree on questions in a form!

I found copies of the old, unconstitutional Voter Registration forms. Let’s look at them together:

Here are some things that I notice. What do you notice?

• Using words like “Sworn” and “Oath” makes me concerned that any mistakes can be treated as perjury or fraud
• Two pages and 21 questions! Not enough room to answer questions in space provided
• Assistance filling out the form is prohibited
• Requirement to respond to random section of State Constitution (yikes!)
• Requirement to list crimes committed, and one of the crimes is bigamy (!!!) (Did white voters actually answer this question? or answer it honestly???). Why were these crimes singled out?
• Some questions are formatted as questions, others as statement. No consistency.
• I forgot that voting age was 21 in 1964! Voting age did not change to 18 until 1971 (reaction to youth draft in the Vietnam War)

MFDC goes on to say:

“… the whole pattern of voting requirements and of the registration form is calculated to make the process appear to the voter to be a hopelessly formidable one. The pattern is supposed to bristle with complexities which culminate in the publication of the would-be voter’s name in the local newspaper for two weeks. A major purpose of all this is to overwhelm the voter that he will not have the audacity even to attempt registration. Behind this approach is supposed to be – and all too often is – a collection of fears that someone will challenge the voter’s moral character, that he may be prosecuted for perjury, or that he may be subjected to economic or other pressures if he attempts to register.”

In the same document’s appendix, the MFDP explains why the battleground over forms was so important to the Party’s strategy:

“The FREEDOM REGISTRATION drive is designed to show that thousands of Negroes want to become registered voters. The Freedom Registration forms, which are similar to many in current use in the North, are much simpler than those used by the State of Mississippi. The forms demonstrate what we think to be the only necessary requirements for voting. People do NOT have to be able to read and write in order to register on the Freedom Registration book. Registrars will fill out the forms for those who cannot read and write as they answer the questions. Such people will sign with “X’s” in the presence of at least two witnesses.”

Can you tell that I get a little excited to see social movement ancestors writing a polemic on FORMS?

So, what did they come up with to make Voter Registration forms better?

OMG – this is one of the coolest artifacts I’ve found so far in my research, second only to the Form to Sign Up for Mississippi Freedom Summer or maybe this form to sign up for SNCC Black Power Project in Chicago.

Here are some things that I notice. What do you notice?

• Only 1/2 page
• No question marks!
• Generally, there is enough room to answer each question
• Still curious about the “minister/wife of a minister” question. Also, can you be both?! Maybe not “back then”
• Warmer and more inviting (could also be scan quality)
• Are witnesses required to sign anything?
• This form is obviously far, far superior to its predecessor

what happens after a form is submitted?

The Mississippi Freedom Vote registration campaign was ambitious and audacious from the start. In one source I read, they said they needed to register 200,000 voters in about 4 weeks’ time and they were able to actually register about 50,000-60,000 (if any reader has more precise info on this, please let me know!) And of course, this is not only against the bitter backdrop of voter disenfranchisement but also, much of Mississippi is rural and people live far distances away from each other, which makes voter registration drives take a LOT more time.

In my research so far, I wasn’t able to ascertain exactly how the workers in the central offices “processed” forms. However, they must have had a system in place, given that they were able to produce tables like this:

Interpreting this table, I can infer that behind each cell is a proverbial pile of papers. Across the top, I see that they are tracking various statuses that represent degree of completion/location of completed forms. I think they also have some sort of mechanism to group by completed date/week, although how that works is not clear. It makes sense that they want to group by date, because on the next page of the document, they show goals for weekly intake. I can’t quite tell what’s happening with the Totals (since the columns don’t add up to the Total…). I’m also pretty curious about the “Completed Still in Project” column. When this is bigger than “Completed This Week,” does that mean the project is not sending the package to the central hub?

I love looking at this table because there is something so HUMAN about it. If you don’t agree, let me know in the comments… but first let me explain. The columns don’t all make sense; the totals don’t all add up; I’m not sure what’s going on with the question marks; and the “projects” are a combination of cities and counties that don’t seem intuitive to me but may totally work for organizing purposes OR make sense to someone from Mississippi.

I’m imagining a team of secretaries and organizers tallying/counting up the stacks of papers… recounting if they got distracted, or even rounding to the best of their abilities. Or maybe they had a system where they added a name to a numbered list and then put the stack aside? This would prevent some recounting week by week. Did they use file folders to group “like” papers? Did they use a scale to weigh forms when they became too many to count (I personally can’t reliably count to 200,000, I don’t know about you!). How much room did it take to store all of these papers? How often did they refresh their counts? Daily with the mail or weekly after completing some sort of tallying procedure?

Maybe this was a little sloppy but it’s paired with SO much determination. There is a NEED to know these counts in order to send memos, coordinate staff and volunteers, and determine how close they were to their goal. Unlike perhaps some of the metrics that we track now (and then never check the results?? sound familiar?), I can imagine everyone rallying to get this count completed and as accurate as possible. I can imagine people calling in from all over the state to hear the final numbers. Can you imagine taking data that seriously in your organizing context? And can you imagine pairing that sense of urgency with the reality of slow mail and manual procedures? It means that the PEOPLE doing the data work must have been really valued and appreciated. It means that it must have taken serious organizational commitment to accurately count and track the campaign. In a context where organizers were reacting to rampant voter disenfranchisement, getting the count right is a reflection of the organization’s purpose and values. I yearn to work on a data project that is connected to such rigor!

Last but perhaps most importantly, I feel human connection when I look at tables like this because each number represents a real person and each cell represents people power. You’ll rarely see me get excited about electoral projects (I’m SO glad that there are other people working on this, because I know it is so, so important, just not my work in the world). However, I have to admit that the ingenious pairing of voting and direct action makes my heart beat a little faster.

There’s a lot more to say about the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that I’ll have to save for another blog post. In the meantime, I hope studying data questions of social movement history makes us excited to deal with the data questions of the social movement present, because there are many of them! Let’s roll up our sleeves and tackle them together.