Warren G. Harding Quotes

Negro suffrage is political arsenic. If it is not, why do not the free States open wide their throats and gulp down the graceful and invigorating draught?

…I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races…nor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry

Negroes could not vote in those days. When I went to Massachusetts and ran for office, it was the first time in my life that I ever voted.

… we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban—read African American voter-turnout machine.

The great majority of negroes in the South who do not vote, do not care to vote and would not know for what to vote if they could.

History did not end in 1965. Largely because of the Voting Rights Act, voting tests were abolished, disparities in voter registration and turnout due to race were erased and African-Americans attained political office in record numbers.

Certainly let the black man have the franchise on the same terms as the white man, but while a Kaffir may make as good a Prime Minister as Lord Beaconsfield, for at least the next hundred years we shall not choose to be ruled by him.

I am not ... in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them ... to intermarry with white people.

Is there a single man among you who would vote for negro suffrage if he believed the negroes would vote the Democratic ticket? Not one, and you know it.

Votes for women didn’t come until the 1920’s. Votes for Blacks didn’t effectively come until the 1960’s.

Until the Negro votes on a large scale, we will have to rely more and more on mass direct action as the one realistic political weapon.

The Ballot or the Bullet

It is also unsatisfactory to some, that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.

In my home county—Lowndes County, Alabama--in 1964 Blacks were 80 percent of the population. Not one Black was registered to vote—Not one!!!

End racial and ethnic gerrymandering, stop voter I.D. laws that seek to suppress voters of color, and make sure everyone can add their voice and their vote to this great democracy.

I don't think everyone should vote. If you have to be dragged into the polls, carried into the polls and smelling salts have to be used, you probably shouldn't be voting. However, we shouldn't be putting up barriers to voting that target certain groups.

Americans of our own time - minority and majority Americans alike - need the continued guidance that the Voting Rights Act provides. We have come a long way, but more needs to be done.

The northern states, most of them, do not permit negroes to vote. Some of them have repeatedly and lately pronounced against it. Therefore, even if it were defensible as a principle for the Central Government to absorb by amendment the power to control the action of the States in such a matter, would it not be futile to ask three-quarters of the States to do for themselves and others, by ratifying such an amendment, the very thing most of them have already refused to do in their own cases?

American women who know the history of this country will always resent the fact that American men chose to enfranchise Negroes fresh from slavery before enhancing their wives and mothers.

The voting business in the South will regulate itself.

I am for the negro against the crocodile, but for the white man against the negro.

Registration is a necessary—but not sufficient—condition for voting.

I admit that we are not encouraging Negro voting. The Negroes prefer that control of the government remain in the white man’s hands.

Americans need national voter registration reform to break down the barriers that discourage and discriminate.

I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes.