In 2016, the voter turnout rate among black voters fell after 20 years of steady growth.

That sudden reversal had lots of people asking why African-Americans didn't want to vote for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

But maybe that's the wrong question.

What if it wasn't that these voters didn't want to cast ballots, but that they weren't able to vote?

It's easy to assume the Voting Rights Act fixed voter suppression back in 1965 — by doing away with poll taxes, literacy tests and other requirements rigged to create an advantage for white voters and the candidates they preferred. But the cumulative effect of gerrymandering, restricted polling hours and measures enacted to combat widespread voter fraud that never existed has made it difficult — if not impossible — for millions of eligible Americans to exercise their constitutional right to vote.

That's according to Carol Anderson, professor and chair of African-American studies at Emory University. Her new book is "One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy."

I want to start with the fact that so many black voters who showed up in 2008 and 2012 did not cast ballots in November 2016. You say this is no mystery, that they were systematically blocked from voting.

Absolutely, and you're right. The day after the election, I'm reading through the pundits and they're just like, "Black people didn't show up. They just weren't feeling Hillary, she's not Obama, she doesn't have the Obama magic." And it was all of this anti-Hillary piece, without acknowledging that this was the first presidential election in 50 years without the protection of the Voting Rights Act, because the U.S. Supreme Court had gutted the Voting Rights Act in the 2013 Shelby County vs. Holder decision.

I want to go way back in history now. When the 15th Amendment was passed to give black men the right to vote in 1870, huge numbers of people registered immediately.

Oh yes. It was the same kind of hunger for education, there was the hunger for the vote, because the vote was in part a parcel of citizenship. So what you saw were large numbers, increases in voter registration. You started seeing African-Americans elected to government positions, that sort of thing. Unlike the myth of Birth of a Nation, there was never any kind of black takeover. It was just African-Americans participating in their government.

Voters cast ballots at a polling station in a Little Rock firehouse in November 1957, after black people were granted the right to vote as part of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. (George Tames / The New York Times)

But black voter participation was too much for white people, particularly in the South. So talk about the Magnolia Plan in Mississippi.

Oh yeah, that Mississippi plan of 1890. This is during the rise of Jim Crow, and how that worked was that Mississippi was like, "Oh my God, how do we stop black people from voting? But we can't just write the law saying we don't want black people to vote, because the 15th Amendment says your right to vote shall not be abridged on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude." So it's really hard to write a law saying we don't want black people to vote.

What they did, I call legislative evil genius. They came up with a way to identify the societally imposed characteristics on that black population, and then made those characteristics the gateway to the vote. So there's massive, systemic, endemic poverty, and that's born out of centuries of slavery. Then not being able to get the 40 acres to have the kind of economic foundation to build a life, moving then into sharecropping. Now you have massive poverty, so you just require the poll tax. People have to pay a tax in order to vote, but you make it sound reasonable: Democracy is expensive. Having all of these elections and people having to count the votes — that costs money. And so it's a way for people to show they really are invested in this democracy by paying a small fee, a small tax.

Again, that level of reasonableness cloaks what's really at play here. The same thing with the literacy test. The literacy test goes after the fact that black schools had been significantly underfunded, vastly underfunded, and in many places there were no high schools for African-Americans. So what Mississippi did was to say, "Well, it only makes sense that people who are voting know the laws of the state, know the laws of the nation. So let's have them read sections of the Constitution and then interpret it to the liking of the registrar." Poll tax and the literacy test combined were absolutely lethal. By the time we're in the 1940s, only 3 percent of African-American adults in the South were registered to vote.

And the poll tax was cumulative. So if you didn't pay for five years, you'd have to pay back poll taxes for all those years you didn't vote?

Yes. The way you have to start is when you turn 21, you're supposed to start paying your poll tax. But the rules are so arcane you're not sure where to pay your poll tax. If it takes you a long time to figure all of that out, you owe five years of back taxes. Or say it takes you 20 years. You owe 20 years of back poll taxes. This is on the base of a population that is systemically poor. It was lethal. I have no other word to describe how effective the poll tax was. It took a Constitutional amendment in the mid-1960s to ban the poll tax.

When there was a test of civic education and engagement, the questions potential voters were expected to answer were beyond ridiculous. It sounds like a riddle that a fairy-tale troll would ask you to get over the bridge. Can you talk about the bar of soap question?

There's the question of how many bubbles are in a bar of soap.

You didn't put the answer in the book by the way, and I'm still wondering.

I was talking to the man who helped raise me; he came out of Jim Crow Georgia. I was talking to him just last week and he said, "You know, Carol, I tried to register to vote and I got a question of how far is up."

Wow.

Wow. Wow. So these questions, the combination of how many bubbles in a bar of soap and how far is up, mixed with forcing people who have to come through a Jim Crow education without high school, and reading significant passages from the Constitution and then being able to interpret it as if you had a Harvard Law degree — it was designed to frustrate people and to make them fail.

Even in the Jim Crow South, Carol, there were people arguing "Look, the rules are set up around voting. They don't say anything explicit about race." At the risk of asking a really dumb question, how is it clear that these laws were only meant to keep black people from exercising their right to vote?

That's a great question, thank you. The U.S. Supreme Court said there was nothing unconstitutional about the poll tax nor the literacy test, that it didn't violate the 15th Amendment. But actually, it did. How do we know? We know because of the ways the laws were implemented. For instance, with the literacy tests, African-Americans would have a large passage to read. Whites were given one sentence. For the poll tax in Texas, what the Democrats would do — because it was the solid Democratic South at the time — would be to pay the poll taxes of whites they wanted to vote and collect the tickets, so that when the people came in to vote they'd hand the tickets to them and it looked legit. They weren't paying African-Americans' poll tax. The same in Mississippi. So you get the law that's written in a way that goes after the characteristics of a people. Then what you do is you implement the law so that you can further skew the results.

This Q&A was edited and condensed from a recent episode of Think with Krys Boyd. You can listen to the full episode at kera.org/think.

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