The Cost of the Vote: George Elmore and the Battle for the Ballot
Carolyn Click
University of South Carolina Press
On August 13, 1946, George Elmore arrived at his regular polling place in Columbia, South Carolina. He requested a ballot to vote in the Democratic Party primary but was turned away. While the general election would not occur until November, everyone in South Carolina understood that the results of the election would really be decided on that late summer afternoon. South Carolina was a one-party state, and the segregationist Democratic Party had endured as the uncontested rulers of state politics since the end of political Reconstruction in the late 1870s.
No Black man or woman had cast a meaningful ballot in South Carolina in nearly as long. For Elmore and others in the state, the day had come to reclaim this most precious American right.