Craig--

I am not sure I follow your reasoning here.  The fact that large numbers of African Americans in Virginia are disenfranchised may or may not demonstrate racist intent, and may or may not stem from explicit earlier intent by white Virginia elites to remove African Americans from the ranks of those eligible to vote. But author does not rest her case entirely on such imputations of intent--she has evidence to support her interpretation, both from the 1830 Virginia constitutional revision, and from the 1902.  

Her argument in both cases strikes me as undeveloped, but plausible.  There is, for example, ample evidence that white concerns about the fitness of African Americans for citizenship were wide spread in Virginia in the 1820s and 1830s, and that such concerns did merge forcefully with arguments about the desirability of universal adult male suffrage.  This notion is supported, for example, by even a cursory reading of the Virginia debates  of 1829-1830 (helpfully edited by Merrill Peterson some years ago).  It thus strikes me as more likely than not that the provisions to disenfranchise felons in the 1830 constitution did in fact reflect a specific concern to prevent the enfranchisement of African American men, as author asserts.

Similarly, pretty much every account of the1902 constitutional revision understands it to be an explicit and successful attempt to roll back the franchise for African American and poor white men.  It is not much of a stretch at all to see disenfranchisement of felons in that Constitution as extending the concerns from 70 years earlier.  Again, author has adduced some direct evidence to support her argument, and her interpretation represents an easy extension of the standard interpretation of that constitutional revision and the politics behind it.

I think you are placing an unrealistically high burden of proof on this and similar arguments.  You seem to be suggesting that absent a statement at the beginning of a law that reads something like "in order to remove as many African American voters from the rolls as possible, we the authors of this bill enact that all felons will lose their voting rights."  But of course you will almost never find that kind of direct preamble to a law, often because it is politically unwise to write something like that in the law.  You do find it, though, in the arguments over drafting the law, which is precisely where author found it.

A final thought:  it is well known among students of criminal justice that it is very difficult to infer  actual incidence of crime from rates of criminal conviction.  That is because there are ample opportunities for discretion in the process between the committing of a crime and conviction.  So, for example, the confidence of observers like Thomas Dew, who in 1831 famously asserted that free blacks were intrinsically inclined towards criminality, is much more likely an artifact of cultural assumptions than it is of underlying reality.  

Today, we do confront a reality that a higher percentage of African Americans, even controlling for poverty, are convicted of crimes than are white persons.  It seems to me that this implies one of two possibilities:  either a higher percentage of innocent African Americans are convicted of crimes than are innocent white persons; or, alternatively, that a higher percentage of white criminals get away with crime and remain unconvicted than do black criminals.  A third possibility, after all--the possibility that black people, just as guys like Dew believed, are in their very essence racially inclined to commit more crimes than are white persons, founders on the biological fact that other than skin pigmentation, there simply are very, very few biological differences between black and white persons.  There are, it turns out, subtle biological differences between different populations of humans, but almost none if them correlate to skin color.  So it seems much more likely that differences in rates of conviction between poor black people and poor white people derive from nurture, and not nature.

All best wishes,
Kevin R. Hardwick
Associate Professor of History

Sent from my iPad

> On Jan 22, 2015, at 8:17 AM, Craig Kilby <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> With all due respect, disenfranchisement due to felony convictions is not a function of race. The young writer may wish to rehash the reasons why African Americans are convicted of felonies at a much higher rate than their fellow citizens, but this paper is lacking in logic. She might also want to examine why voter registration among Africans Americans is lower than the rest of the population, and why African American felons who are now eligible to be have their voting rights restored do so at a much lower rate than the rest of the population in the same circumstance. I do not see any connection to Jim Crow laws in today’s society. I don’t see any reference to any modern statute that singles out one race or another on the subject of felony convictions and the right to vote, or to have one’s right to vote re-instated. In fact, I don’t see any point in this paper that is at all relevant to anything.
> 
> Craig Kilby
> 
> 
> 
>> On Jan 21, 2015, at 4:52 PM, Henry Wiencek <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> 
>> The Virginia News Letter has just published "Felons and the Right to Vote
>> in Virginia: a Historical Overview" by a young scholar, Helen Gibson.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> http://www.coopercenter.org/publications/VANsltr0115
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> From the abstract: "Recent Virginia governors have made strong progress in
>> reforming laws regarding the restitution of voting rights for felons and
>> ex-felons. But the denial of voting rights for people with felony
>> convictions in Virginia and other states still disproportionately affects
>> black citizens. . . . Gibson writes that Virginia has had one of the most
>> discriminatory records for denying voting rights to felons and ex-felons
>> until recently.  But key steps by recent governors have made the path to
>> restoration of rights smoother."
>> 
>> 
>> Henry Wiencek
>> 
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