Tachquoak - Fall
Vote
Denogean: 60 years ago in Arizona, Indians won
right to vote
Published: 07.25.2008 ANNE T.
DENOGEAN Tucson Citizen
When Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian famous for helping
raise the flag at Iwo Jima, returned to Arizona after World War II, he
couldn't vote.
Neither could the Navajo and Hopi men who served as
code talkers. And more important for history's sake, neither could
veteran Frank Harrison, a Fort McDowell Yavapai who did something about
it.
Harrison, along with his friend Harry Austin, a
tribal chairman, filed a suit that ended 60 years ago this month with a
state Supreme Court ruling that confirmed the right of American Indians
to vote in Arizona.
In the July 15, 1948, decision, Judge Levi S. Udall
wrote, "To deny the right to vote where one is legally entitled to do
so, is to do violence to the principles of freedom and equality."
Patricia Mariella and Violet Mitchell-Enos
researched the story of Harrison and Austin for an Inter Tribal Council
of Arizona project nearly 30 years ago.
They interviewed Frank Harrison, now deceased. He
told of how he and Austin walked into the Maricopa County Recorder's
office to register on Nov. 8, 1947, and were turned away.
"A young man - he refused to register us: 'You're
under the ward of (the) government,' " Harrison said.
By Arizona law, American Indians were considered to
be under federal guardianship and, along with "mental incompetents,"
were ineligible to vote.
This unfair treatment was troubling to American
Indians of Harrison's generation, but what drove him on the issue was a
desire to make things better, rather than dwell on the negative, said
Mitchell-Enos, a Prescott Yavapai.
"He was not just thinking about the limitations
that were placed on him at the time but what could be in the future for
the children," she said.
Indians who lived on reservations were not American
citizens prior to World War I and were exempt from the draft, according
to the ITCA report. In spite of that, more than 8,000 American Indians
signed up to protect the United States.
Dr. Carlos Montezuma, a Yavapai who was one of the
first American Indian physicians, wrote editorials about the irony of
American Indians fighting for freedoms abroad that they didn't share at
home and pushed for citizenship. His efforts and those of other Indian
rights leaders helped persuade Congress to pass the Indian Citizenship
Act in 1924.
In 1940, a Congress that needed all able bodies for
the impending war reaffirmed the citizenship of American Indians both on
and off reservations, in the Nationality Act, ITCA said.
But citizenship didn't mean American Indians could
vote. States set voting procedures and some states, including Arizona,
used every possible justification to deny American Indian voting rights.
Indians were federal wards, didn't pay state taxes, were residents of
the reservation not the state or, as participants in tribal communities,
they weren't "civilized."
Utah kept Indians from voting until 1957. Maine
denied American Indians the right to vote in national elections until
1954 and in state elections until 1967. New Mexico overtly prohibited
American Indians from voting in state elections until 1962.
When Harrison returned from the war, he saw that
the elderly in his community were being denied old age assistance and
other federal benefits based on the same rationale by which the native
people were denied voting rights, the ITCA report said.
Harrison and Austin filed a lawsuit that would
dually challenge the denial of voting rights and federal benefits. The
American Civil Liberties Union, the National Congress of American
Indians and the U.S. Attorney's Office later filed briefs in support.
The men lost in Superior Court but won on appeal to the Arizona Supreme
Court, ITCA said.
The ruling, while it gave American Indians the
right to vote, didn't break down all barriers to Indian voting.
Arizona still had a literacy requirement to vote.
Literacy laws were a device used mostly by Southern states and Western
states with significant native populations to disenfranchise minority
voters
To be able to register to vote in Arizona after
1948, Indians still had to be able to write and to read the U.S.
Constitution without prompting, a requirement that disqualified 80
percent or more of American Indian voters, ITCA said. Arizona repealed
the requirement only after the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965
prohibited the use of literacy tests to deny people the right to vote.
That won the state some special attention from the
feds that continues today. Arizona, along with Alabama, Alaska, Georgia,
Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia were singled
out as discriminatory jurisdictions. Under the 1965 act, Arizona, cannot
enact voting procedural changes through 2031 without the approval of the
U.S. attorney general.
John Lewis, ITCA's longtime executive director,
said ITCA honored Harrison in 1980 and found that many in his own
community on the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation didn't know of his role in
American Indian voting rights. Harrison didn't talk much about the
historic case.
"He felt had done what needed to be done," Lewis
said.
Sixty years after that court decision, the American
Indian voting bloc is widely recognized and wooed by politicians.
"They are out there meeting and
greeting and going to events on all the reservations," Lewis said.
"Politicians can count and they can count the Indian vote."
American Indian clout in Arizona sometimes
manifests as the swing vote. An
exceptional Indian turnout in 2002 helped put Janet Napolitano into
office as governor in a race decided by 11,819 votes.
Anne T. Denogean can be reached at adenogean@tucsoncitizen.com and 573-4582. Address letters to P.O. Box 26767, Tucson, AZ 85726-6767. Her columns run Tuesdays and Fridays.