Many people don’t realize that Jim Crow laws existed in the North, perhaps most notably in New York.
Our new study of the Empire State’s constitutional history,
Jim Crow in New York, traces the current criminal disenfranchisement law to a century-long effort to keep African-American citizens out of the voting booth. And as our report makes it disturbingly clear: New York’s felon voting bar has deep roots in Jim Crow.
More than 108,000 New Yorkers are currently disenfranchised under the law. And 80% of those who have lost the right to vote are people of color.
Here is the history. For about 100 years, New York lawmakers found various ways to keep African Americans from voting. First, of course, there was slavery. After emancipation, two laws continued to be especially effective: one that required blacks – and only blacks – to own a certain amount of real property in order to vote; and another that allowed counties to disenfranchise those convicted of “infamous crimes.”
African-American suffrage was the subject of much debate at the 1821 and 1846 constitutional conventions, and the transcripts contain some astounding racist rhetoric. One theme that occurs again and again is an alleged criminal propensity among African Americans as a reason to restrict the black vote. In a refrain that echoes throughout the century-long suffrage debate, Delegate Samuel Young implored in 1821: “Look to your jails and penitentiaries. By whom are they filled? By the very race whom is now proposed to cloth with the power of deciding upon your political rights.”
By 1872, New York distinguished itself as the only state in the union to make property ownership a voting requirement exclusively for African Americans. But the
Fifteenth Amendment forced New York to revisit its constitution. Governor John Hoffman convened a few dozen “eminent citizens” to figure out what to do.
Governor Hoffman’s commission eliminated a few sections, and added some words here and there. The result was a Jim Crow “bait and switch” that continues to be the law today.
In 1874, four years after the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified and long after the rest of the country, New York’s legislature had no choice but to accept the commission’s recommendation and eliminate the property requirements for African-American voters. However, the same commission also recommended a small and barely noticed change to the wording of the criminal disenfranchisement provision which had an enormous – and lasting – adverse impact on African-American suffrage. During slavery and the period when the property requirements were imposed on African-Americans, New York’s criminal disenfranchisement law was merely permissive: that is, the state constitution left it to the discretion of individual counties whether to disenfranchise those with criminal convictions. The same year the Fifteenth Amendment forced New York to eliminate its property requirement, the state
amended the constitution from
allowing counties to decide whether to disenfranchise those convicted of crimes, to
requiring disenfranchisement throughout the state of anyone convicted of an “infamous crime.”
