A Black WWII veteran voted in Georgia in 1946. He was lynched for it.
Maceo Snipes was shot on his front porch, a new documentary on voter
suppression remembers.
Maceo Snipes in his World War II uniform. (Hank Klibanoff/Georgia Civil
Rights Cold Cases Project at Emory)
Maceo Snipes in his World War II uniform. (Hank Klibanoff/Georgia Civil
Rights Cold Cases Project at Emory)
By
Gillian Brockell <https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/gillian-brockell/>
Washington Post, September 13, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. EDT
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To Maceo Snipes, the future must have looked brighter than it ever had.
He had served honorably in World War II. Now home in Taylor County, Ga.,
he was working hard to bring the family farmback from the brink
<https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/us/18land.html>. He hadn’t made it
far in school, but he knew the power of education and rewarded his
nieces when they got good grades.
Plus, a federal court had just decided White officials in his county
couldn’t stop Black people from voting in the Democratic primary.
“When you have fought fascists, and you have fought for democracy, you
want some of that democracy for yourself,” says historian Carol Anderson
in the new documentary “All In: The Fight for Democracy.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6jVGswLPd8&t>”
While the documentary focuses on Stacey Abrams’s 2018 Georgia
gubernatorial run, filmmakers Liz Garbus and Lisa Cortés weave in the
history of voter suppression in the United States, including the
chilling story of what happened to Snipes.
Police brutality, voting rights, racial justice: Echoes from 1963′s
March on Washington
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/08/28/1963-march-on-washington-police-brutality-voting-rights/?itid=lk_interstitial_manual_8>
Snipes had been warned, Anderson says, “something to the effect of
‘First Negro that votes, that’ll be the last thing he ever does.’ ” But
he cast his ballot on July 17, 1946 — the only Black person to do so in
Taylor County.
AD
For a day or two, nothing happened. Then one night, as he and his mother
were sitting down to dinner, a White man he knew knocked on the door and
asked him to come outside.
“And then he sees three additional White men, and he hears ‘chk-chk.’ It
was a firing squad. And they laid Maceo out,” says Anderson, who is the
author of “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our
Democracy
<https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B07951DQVB&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_uL-wFbQ7K6MV7&tag=thewaspos09-20>.”
“The message was really clear: You vote, you die.”
After being shot in the abdomen, his mother helped him walk miles to get
a ride to the hospital, family members later told theGeorgia Civil
Rights Cold Cases Project <https://coldcases.emory.edu/maceo-snipes/>at
Emory University. There he waited for six hours before he was seen in a
room not much bigger than a closet.
Doctors were able to remove the bullets, but without a blood transfusion
he would die, they told him, and it just so happened the hospital was
out of “Black blood.” In the Jim Crow South, even blood was segregated.
‘You’ve got bad blood’: The horror of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/05/16/youve-got-bad-blood-the-horror-of-the-tuskegee-syphilis-experiment/?itid=lk_interstitial_manual_16>
Snipes died on July 20.He was 37
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/13/AR2007021300121.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_17>.
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Cassandra Jones-Deshazier never met her step-grandfather, but she has a
plaque and a photo of him hanging in her living room in Macon, Ga.
Snipes had been married to her grandmother Nezzie and took in
Jones-Deshazier’s mother as his stepdaughter.
Snipes was still married to Nezzie, according to military records, when
he was drafted into the Army in 1943, though the couple split up some
time before his death; Jones-Deshazier isn’t sure when. He spent more
than two years in the Pacific and was honorably discharged. He had been
home for less than a year when he had decided to vote.
“My grandmother told me that during the time after he died, they had
heard around that if anyone showed up at his funeral, that they would be
killed also,” Jones-Deshazier told The Washington Post in a phone
interview. Only Maceo’s ex-wife, stepdaughter and “three or four others”
attended “because everybody else was scared.”
AD
His nieces told Emory University he was buried in the town cemetery
under cover of darkness in an unmarked grave. No one knows exactly
where. Within days, the family moved to Ohio.
“People scattered out of Taylor County quick, just moved away,”
Jones-Deshazier said.
Before he died, Snipes told police exactly who had lured him out onto
the porch that night — a fellow World War II veteran named Edward
Williamson. A coroner’s jury was convened, and Snipes’s mother bravely
testified, but a headline in The Washington Post a week later says it
all: “Jury Calls Slaying of Negro Veteran ‘Self-Defense.’ ” No charges
were ever filed against the men who killed Snipes.
Cases like this one are what motivated the Black community to push for
civil rights and the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, Anderson says
in the documentary.
In fact, Abrams could be counted among those motivated by the Snipes
lynching. “It’s one of those stories about oppression and about Jim Crow
that those of us who focus on these issues, especially in this region,
you learn about early,” she told The Washington Post in a Zoom interview.
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In the aftermath of the 2018 election, young people who had worked on
her campaign were despondent. “There was this chatter about whether all
was lost,” she said. “And what became so very obvious was they grew up
under the protection of the Voting Rights Act, so they never conceived
of how real this could be.”
In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down key portions of the Voting Rights
Act that had prevented states like Georgia from making changes to its
voting laws without federal approval. Since then, the state has
instituted a strict voter-ID law, closed polling places and purged
voters from the rolls. Abram’s opponent in the governor’s race,
then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp, was also in charge of administering
the election.
“My goal was to tell the history of voter suppression so we could
understand it in the current context,” Abrams said.
AD
There’s an important coda to the story of Maceo Snipes. His murder, and
the lynchings of others in Georgia the next week, got the attention of a
17-year-old student at Morehouse College in Atlanta. The young man was
moved enough to write a letter to the editor published in the Atlanta
Constitution on Aug. 6, 1946.
“We want and are entitled to the basic rights and opportunities of
American citizens,”Martin Luther King Jr.
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/03/30/who-killed-martin-luther-king-jr-his-family-believes-james-earl-ray-was-framed/?itid=lk_inline_manual_39>wrote.
“Equal opportunities in education, health, recreation, and similar
public services; the right to vote; equality before the law; some of the
same courtesy and manners that we ourselves bring to all human relations.”
*Read more Retropolis:*
A Black man accused of rape, a White officer in the Klan, and a 1936
lynching that went unpunished
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/07/19/atlanta-lynching-police-ku-klux-klan/?itid=lk_inline_manual_41>
Racism denied Auburn’s first Black student a master’s degree. Then, at
86, he returned.
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/08/30/auburn-university-harold-franklin-racism-masters-degree/?itid=lk_inline_manual_42>
‘Ax Handle Saturday’: The Klan’s vicious attack on Black protesters in
Florida 60 years ago
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/08/27/axe-handle-saturday-klan-attack-civil-rights-protesters/?itid=lk_inline_manual_43>
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