June Freeman: Poll Taxes and Founding the League of Women Voters, Arkansas

Between December 2019 and January 2020 (just weeks before the pandemic), Smithsonian staff and their storytelling partners at the Peale, Baltimore, traveled to multiple states in the U.S. to ask residents of those states about voting experiences, the current state of American democracy, what issues brought them to the polls, how they made a difference in their communities, and what Americans' civic responsibilities were, among other complex questions.

June Freeman (00:01): I married into a family in 1950. I was a student at the University of Chicago at the time in graduate school, and I had never been to the South. A girl from New Jersey and wound up here. And shortly after I arrived to live here, that was a couple of years after we were married. People were friendly and they asked several questions. Do you play bridge? And I said, no. What was the other question that they asked? What church do you go to? I said, I don't go to church. I happen to be Jewish. So I had several strikes against me, you might say, when I moved into this community.

(00:46): I didn't quite fit in. People didn't know what to do with me. And to be honest, I didn't know what to do with myself when I got there. But at the time, there was an inventor that perhaps that you know somebody who invented the cotton picker, John Rust. Does that name sound familiar to you? Well, his wife was an attorney and they had come to Pine Bluff because they were manufacturing the cotton picker at a plant there. And we got together and decided it was time to start the League of Women Voters, do we did. We did establish that organization.

(01:19): There had been an effort, I think, in the northwest part of the state to have a league here in Arkansas. And of course, I don't think it appealed to too many people, but I think it did a lot of good. And one of the first things that I did as a member was to put on something called a Freedom Forum. And the idea was to bring in people and let them know what their rights, their responsibilities were. And to my amazement, maybe because I was sort of an oddball, people were curious about me. We filled a room. There must have been about 50 people who turned out.

(01:59): I was just amazed. I didn't think we'd get more than a handful, you might say. I don't know what difference this made, but we tried very hard to give people a voice, people who perhaps didn't have one. We were just talking before you started this about my voting experience in Arkansas. I had been a student at the University of Chicago before I came here, and of course my perspective was quite different than that of people in the South at that time. But I remember that my father-in-law to enable me and my husband to vote bought poll taxes for us at that time.

(02:35): That was the way in which you were enabled to vote. And of course, this disenfranchised a number of people who couldn't afford to pay the poll tax or sometimes they attempted to do that and they were turned down for one reason or another. But that was a long, long time ago. And of course after that, I certainly had the experience of registering all people voting here. And I was an active voter and sometimes supported candidates. So, that's how it happened.

Asset ID: 2023.02.09.a-b
Themes: Voting, Poll Taxes, Voter Suppression, Voting Rights, History, Community, Women's History
Date recorded: December 4, 2019
Length of recording: 0:03:07
Related traveling exhibition: Voices and Votes: Democracy in America
Sponsor or affiliated organization: Arkansas Humanities Council, Little Rock
More information or related assets: https://arkansashumanitiescouncil.org/voices-votes-democracy-in-america/