Expert Report of Orville Vernon Burton in Community Success Initiative v. Moore, No. 19-cv-15941 (N.C. Superior Court) May 8, 2020 TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Summary of Opinions II. Professional Background and Qualifications III. Aims, Methodology, and Materials Reviewed IV. Introduction: The Struggle for Voting Rights in North Carolina V. Antebellum Felony Disfranchisement VI. Post-Civil War Felony Disfranchisement VII. Felony Disfranchisement in the Twentieth Century VIII. Conclusions 1 I. Summary of Opinions My name is Orville Vernon Burton. I teach at Clemson University in South Carolina and am the Judge Matthew J. Perry Distinguished Professor of History. I have been asked by attorneys for the plaintiffs in this litigation to assist the court in assessing the history and intent underlying the North Carolina constitutional provision and statutes disenfranchising persons convicted of crimes. Based on my more than 49 years of experience as a historian focused on the American South, and my review and research of this question for the purposes of this report, it is my opinion that: North Carolina’s authorization of felony disenfranchisement by constitutional amendment in 1875 was racially motivated, with the end goal being the total disenfranchisement of not just persons who had committed a felony, but of all African Americans. North Carolina’s 1877 statutory disenfranchisement of persons who had committed a felony was motivated by a desire to disenfranchise black voters and maintain white supremacy in post-bellum North Carolina. At least as early as 1866, white North Carolinians had disfranchised black North Carolinians by rendering them “infamous” through corporal punishment, and the codification of felony disfranchisement was a continuation of that tactic. The 1875 constitutional amendment and the 1877 statute were importantly different from the pre-civil war disfranchisement statute. These new post-bellum laws disenfranchised all people with felony convictions, not just those convicted of “infamous” crimes like treason. It is no coincidence that after Reconstruction, when felony disfranchisement turned into a tool to disenfranchise African Americans, it was used much more broadly than it was before the war when it just applied to whites. Not only did white Democrats 2 expand the categories of crimes that exposed North Carolinians to disenfranchisement, they added additional punishments for voting by those with felony convictions. The latest iterations of North Carolina’s felony disenfranchisement statutes (in 1971 and 1973) represent a compromise between the original aims of black legislators who hoped to make it easier for North Carolinians to regain the right to vote and countervailing interests invested in limiting African American’s access to the elective franchise. Furthermore, these statutes recapitulate the 1875 constitutional felony disfranchisement and the 1876 statutory felony disfranchisement, both of which were infected by racially discriminatory aims. Felony disenfranchisement in North Carolina mirrors and intersects with the disenfranchisement of black voters throughout the state’s history. As black political activism threatened the power of the white ruling elite, legislators turned not only to felony disenfranchisement, but also to segregation, suffrage restrictions, and other measures designed to break the political and economic power of black communities. While felony disenfranchisement was primarily used as a barrier to black political activism, it also served to restrict the citizenship rights of all economically disadvantaged North Carolinians. While the white ruling elite claimed to forge an alliance with less wealthy North Carolinians, felony disenfranchisement restricted the voting rights of economically disadvantaged North Carolinians, beginning in 1776 and continuing to the present. Reformers, from the 1870s to the 1970s, recognized that disenfranchising people who committed felonies would disproportionately impact working class North Carolinians, who could ill-afford the expense of having their citizenship rights restored. These opinions are explained and supported in further detail in the discussion portion of this report. 3 BACKGROUND AND METHODOLOGY II. Professional Background and Qualifications I received my undergraduate degree from Furman University in 1969 and my Ph.D. in American History from Princeton University in 1976 and have been researching and teaching American History at universities since 1974. Currently I am a Professor of History, Pan-African Studies, Sociology and Anthropology, and Computer Science at Clemson University as well as the Director of the Clemson CyberInstitute. From 2008 to 2010, I was the Burroughs Distinguished Professor of Southern History and Culture at Coastal Carolina University. I am emeritus University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar, University Scholar, Professor of History, African American Studies, and Sociology at the University of Illinois. I am a Senior Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) where I was Associate Director for Humanities and Social Sciences (2004-2010). I was also the founding Director of the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS) at the University of Illinois and currently chair the ICHASS Advisory Board. I am the author or editor of more than twenty books and two hundred articles. I have received a number of academic awards and honors. I was selected nationwide as the 1999 U.S. Research and Doctoral University Professor of the Year (presented by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education). My book The Age of Lincoln, published in 2007, won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Literary Award for Nonfiction and was selected for Book of the Month Club, History Book Club, and Military Book Club. One reviewer proclaimed, “If the Civil War era was America's ‘Iliad,’ then historian Orville Vernon Burton is our latest Homer.” The book was featured at sessions of the annual meetings of African American History and Life Association, 4 the Social Science History Association, and the Southern Intellectual History Circle. Among the articles I have published are several related to the issues discussed in this report and at least two law review articles. I was one of ten historians selected to contribute to the Presidential Inaugural Portfolio (January 21, 2013) by the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies. I have been recognized by my peers and was elected president of the Southern Historical Association and of the Agricultural History Society and elected to the Society of American Historians. I edited two academic press series for the University of Virginia Press: The American South Series and the A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era Series. I was also elected by my university peers as president of the Faculty Senate at the University of Illinois. In 2007 the Illinois State legislature honored me with a special resolution for my contributions as a scholar, teacher, and citizen of Illinois, and in 2017, I received the Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities from the South Carolina Humanities Council. I have extensive experience in analyzing social and economic status, discrimination, and historical intent in voting rights cases, as well as group voting behavior. I have been qualified as an expert in the fields of districting, reapportionment, and racial voting patterns and behavior in elections in the United States. I have served as an expert witness and consultant in a number of voting rights cases beginning with McCain v. Lybrand (1984) and also as a consultant in state redistricting matters. My testimony has been accepted by federal courts on both statistical analysis of racially polarized voting and socioeconomic analysis of the population, as well as on the history of discrimination and the discriminatory intent of laws. My testimony and reports have been cited by the courts. For example, in 2012 my report was cited by the Justice Department as a reason for their objection to the in-person South Carolina Voter ID law. See Dkt. 118-1, South Carolina v. .United States, No. 1:12-cv-00203-CKK-BMK-JDB (D.D.C. June 5 29, 2012). My testimony and my report were also cited in 2014 by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas in finding that the Texas in-person Voter ID Law was racially motivated and had a disparate effect on minorities. Veasey v. Perry (2:13-CV-193). I have been retained to serve as an expert witness and consultant in numerous voting rights cases by the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), the Voting Rights Project of the Southern Regional Office of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Brennan Center, the NAACP, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) of the NAACP, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the California Rural Legal Association, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Legal Services Corporation, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and other individuals and groups. As a scholar, I have had a long-time relationship with North Carolina. I have researched and written about North Carolina, and I have researched in the archives of the State of North Carolina, at Duke University, and the University of North Carolina. I spent the 1994-95 school year at the National Humanities Center in Research