SELMA, Ala. — The assignment was one of the biggest of J.C. Towns' photographic career: Snap the official campaign portrait of eastside Selma's leading politician, a man vying to become the city's first black mayor.
For several weeks now, Towns' picture of the candidate has been plastered on billboards across this fabled Southern community, hallowed ground in the struggle for African American voting rights. But when the candidate asked Towns for his vote--black turnout being the key to toppling the nine-term incumbent--the founder of New Life Photo Ministries had to shake his head.
"I'm a criminal, man, a convict, a stain on society," said Towns, 50, who does most of his work at church socials and school proms. Nineteen years ago, he explained, he was found guilty of possessing stolen property, an offense that disqualifies him from voting in Alabama despite having served four years in prison and two on parole.
"I'm not a trouble person," Towns said, "but I ain't got no rights."
As the nation heads to the polls this election year, a large and growing segment of the population is being excluded from the practice of democracy: Nearly 4 million felons--some incarcerated, others long since free--are without the right to vote. In most states, including California, that right is automatically restored after a convict completes his sentence or the terms of his parole. But in 12 states, convicts lose their voting rights indefinitely, leaving at least 1.7 million adults disenfranchised for life, according to estimates by the Washington-based Sentencing Project, a liberal think tank that studies the social costs of America's prison boom.
Black men, disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system to begin with, bear the brunt of these laws: At any given time, one in seven cannot vote. In the states that continue to penalize felons after their sentences have been served, the rate is closer to one in four. In Alabama, the nation's disenfranchisement leader, roughly one in three black men is stripped of his vote--a penalty that, to many here, echoes the Jim Crow tactics that once kept nearly all African Americans from being counted.
"This is the modern-day version of the poll tax and the literacy test," said J.L. Chestnut Jr., Selma's first black lawyer.
