Thanksgiving dinner with someone Covid positive? Here are your chances:

Hmm, . . . poor old DonDiego notes Kevin Lewis has still provided no evidence regarding the asssertion that small counties "were designed to disenfranchise Black voters".

Perhaps, poor old DonDiego should inquire more directly:

In his post of 15 November at 4:52pm Kevin lewis wrote: "I was reading about how Georgia, for example, has a shitload of little bitty counties and how this was deliberate, as part of the strenuous centuries-long efforts to disenfranchise Blacks."

It seems there were indeed attempts to disenfranchise Blacks.  Although there's no specific reference to "small counties" it seems somebody did try to disenfranchise Blacks.

So, poor old DonDiego requests that Kevin Lewis provide the identity of the source document for his assertion regarding disenfranchisement, i.e. the document he was "reading".

n.b. For the record poor old DonDiego has done a teeny bit of research on wikipedia addressing attempts at disenfranchisement.  

quote:

During the later elections of the Reconstruction era, beginning in the 1870s, white Democrats used violence by paramilitary groups (such as the Ku Klux Klan), as well as fraud, to suppress black Republican voters and turn Republicans out of office. After regaining control of the state legislatures, Democrats were alarmed by a late 19th-century alliance between Republicans and Populists that cost them some elections. After achieving control of state legislatures, white Democrats added to previous efforts and achieved widespread disenfranchisement by law: from 1890 to 1908, Southern state legislatures passed new constitutions, constitutional amendments, and laws that made voter registration and voting more difficult, especially when administered by white staff in a discriminatory way. They succeeded in disenfranchising most of the black citizens, as well as many poor whites in the South, and voter rolls dropped dramatically in each state. The Republican Party was nearly eliminated in the region for decades, and the Democrats established one-party control throughout the southern states.

endquote

Source: wikipedia

Although there's no specific reference to "small counties" it seems somebody did try to disenfranchise Blacks, . . . White Democrats!  Hmm, . . . no wonder Kevin Lewis was reluctant to provide his source.

Surely DonDiego is not so ignorant as to be unaware that the Southern Democrats in the 1870s did not in any way resemble the Democratic Party of today. In fact, they quite closely resembled today's Republicans.

In any event, I did not ascribe voter suppression to any one political party. I certainly expect that DonDiego, if outraged by Democrats' voter suppression efforts in the 19th century, would be similarly outraged by such efforts by Republicans in the 20th and 21st centuries. Because if he wasn't---well, that would be hypocritial in the extreme.

DonDiego, had he done his research, would have discovered that Georgia added fifteen counties in the early 20th century---even though many existing counties were so small and so poor as to not be able to afford elected county officials or things like courthouses. The expansion of counties was in response to the Black population becoming concentrated in the cities as they were systematically denied the right to own land. 

I have already (at least twice) explained that many of the measures taken in the Deep South, including having many small counties (in Georgia and elsewhere), made no economic or governing sense but DID function to disenfranchise Blacks. Since this was the only "benefit" and actually cost quite a bit of money and trouble, one must conclude that such disenfranchisement was the sole objective.

I regret that I do not have any tape recordings of Georgia legislators saying, "We'll do this so the Blacks can't vote." For one thing, no one is likely to have said that except behind closed doors; for another, there were no tape recorders in 1870.