Born: 11 September 1894, United States
Died: 25 July 1956
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Helen Douglas
The following is republished from the U.S. Congress. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
During her brief U.S. House term, Helen Douglas Mankin of Georgia brought national attention to her longtime political cause: advocating on behalf of poor and disenfranchised southern voters. “I earnestly believe that the election of a woman from this State to the House of Representatives will mean to the rest of the country another note of progress out of the South,” Mankin declared after her victory in a February 1946 special election in which she benefited from the support of African-American voters. Mankin’s bid for re-election later that summer, however, revealed the limits of voting reform in the South: the political machine of segregationist Governor Eugene Talmadge blocked her renomination to a full term.
Helen Douglas was born on September 11, 1896, in Atlanta, Georgia, the daughter of Hamilton Douglas and Corrine Williams Douglas. Her parents were teachers who had studied law together at the University of Michigan. Corrine became involved in education when the family moved to Georgia, where state laws prevented women from joining the bar. Hamilton eventually founded the Atlanta Law School. Their home was an intellectual parlor for the likes of reformer Jane Addams and former President and Supreme Court Justice William H. Taft. Helen Douglas attended Rockford College in Illinois, following in the footsteps of her mother and maternal grandmother. She graduated in 1917 with an AB but interrupted her law studies to join the American Women’s Hospital Unit No. 1 in France, where she served as an ambulance driver for more than a year. When Douglas returned to the United States, she resumed her academic career, graduating from Atlanta Law School in 1920. A year later, the state of Georgia admitted her to the bar along with her 61-year-old mother when the state legislature lifted the bar’s ban on women. For two years, she and her sister toured North America by car before she opened a law office in 1924, specializing in aid to poor and Black clients while supplementing her income as a lecturer at the Atlanta Law School.
Her first political experience came as the women’s manager of I. N. Ragsdale’s campaign for mayor of Atlanta in 1927. That year Helen Douglas married Guy M. Mankin, a widower with a seven-year-old son, Guy Jr. After traveling to several overseas locations following Guy Mankin’s job assignments, the family settled in Atlanta, where Helen Mankin resumed her legal career in 1933. In 1935, as chair of the Georgia child labor committee, she unsuccessfully urged the state legislature to ratify a proposed child labor constitutional amendment. The next year she won a seat in the legislature, serving for a decade as a critic of Governor Eugene Talmadge’s administration and as a supporter of constitutional, educational, electoral, labor, and prison reforms. In the process, she became an ally of liberal Governor Ellis Arnall, who had succeeded Talmadge in 1942. In 1945 Mankin and Arnall successfully steered a measure through the Georgia house of representatives to repeal the poll tax, a method southern states frequently employed to disenfranchise African-American voters too poor to pay a requisite fee in order to vote.
When Georgia Representative Robert C. Word Ramspeck resigned from the U.S. House at the end of 1945, Mankin entered the race to succeed him in a February 1946 special election. The only woman in the crowded contest for the three-county district, which included both Atlanta and Decatur, Mankin used a series of radio addresses to talk about the central issue of her campaign: the equalization of freight rates, which varied greatly from section to section of the country and which she believed inhibited southern industry and agriculture. She also used these opportunities to criticize her leading opponent, Thomas Camp, the handpicked successor of Ramspeck, warning voters that Camp was a “railroad employee” and therefore a part of the conspiracy to keep the people of Georgia trapped in poverty. Pledging to support price controls, federal housing programs, and federal aid to education, Mankin won the backing of Governor Arnall, women’s groups, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Her determination to pursue voting reforms, seen in her support for a constitutional amendment to abolish the poll tax, earned her the solid backing of African Americans. This bloc of voters was barred from primaries, but not from special elections, and Black voters helped Mankin prevail on February 12, 1946. Trailing Camp until the reporting of the final precinct tallies from the predominantly Black Ashby Street, Mankin ended up winning the election by nearly 800 votes. Of the 1,039 registered voters in the African-American neighborhood, 963 cast their vote for Mankin. The Atlanta Daily World newspaper noted that the election marked the first time in Atlanta history that Blacks served as precinct managers and clerks in a congressional contest.
Mankin’s election sent shock waves through segregationist Georgia. Her coalition of minority voters and white liberals caused great unease in the state. When Eugene Talmadge came out of political retirement that fall to run for reelection as governor of Georgia, he inveighed against “the spectacle of Atlanta Negroes sending a Congresswoman to Washington.” During his campaign, he mocked Mankin, nicknaming her the “Belle of Ashby Street.” Rather than retaliating, the Congresswoman adopted the title as a point of pride, as if she had invented the name herself.
During her short term on the Hill, Mankin championed reform in Georgia politics and looked to give African Americans a greater voice in their government. She served on four committees—Civil Service, Claims, Elections, and Revision of Laws—but was not appointed to her first choice, the House Education Committee. Mankin exhibited loyalty to the Democratic Party, voting with the party 92 percent of the time—an uncharacteristic trait for the typically conservative South. As a Representative, she supported price controls, a federal housing program, and the Hobbs Bill directed against the CIO’s Teamsters’ Union. Mankin voted against the Case Anti-Labor Bill, opposed funding for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and favored an end to the poll tax. “I am a liberal but not a radical,” Mankin said, when opposing plans for national health insurance. She also backed an internationalist foreign policy in which the United States played a greater role in maintaining world stability after World War II.
In the Georgia Democratic primary of July 1946, which the Supreme Court opened to African Americans for the first time, Mankin outpolled her opponent, James Curran Davis, by more than 11,000 votes. But to offset the African-American vote, state officials, unhappy with Mankin’s liberal voting record, revived Georgia’s county unit system, which had been out of use in the district since 1932. Designed to favor rural precincts and to mitigate the urban vote by awarding the winner of the popular vote in each county a designated amount of unit votes, it was employed—as a former Georgia Representative observed—“to beat Mrs. Mankin, nothing else.” The strategy also gave Talmadge, a leading spokesman of white supremacy in the South, a large lead over Governor Ellis Arnall’s endorsed candidate, James Carmichael, in the gubernatorial primary—despite the fact that more than 100,000 African Americans went to the polls. Mankin received six unit votes for carrying Fulton County (encompassing much of Atlanta’s suburbs), while Davis received eight for carrying two less-populous counties.
Citing her popular mandate, Mankin declared her intention to run as an independent in the general election. She refused to allow “anybody [to] frisk me out of my victory.” A special three-judge tribunal in the U.S. District Court in Atlanta upheld the unit system and rejected the Congresswoman’s petition to annul the primary results. Mankin appealed the decision while Governor Arnall and Georgia Democratic executive committee members loyal to him made the unprecedented move of putting Mankin’s name on the ballot as a Democrat alongside Davis’s. But Mankin suffered from a series of setbacks in October 1946. First, after Talmadge won official conf irmation as the Democratic gubernatorial nominee at the October 9 party convention, he wrested control of the executive committee from Arnall and promptly acted to remove Mankin’s name from the ballot, an effort that succeeded just four days before the election. The Georgia state Democratic convention approved a plan to create an all-white primary to exclude Blacks from future nominating processes. On October 29, in a six-to-three decision, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Georgia unit rule, dimming Mankin’s prospects. She remained in the race as a write-in candidate, despite threats from white supremacy groups and reports of voting fraud. She won 38 percent of the vote but lost by a margin of almost 12,000 votes to Davis. When she challenged the election results before the House Administration Committee’s Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections, the subcommittee rejected her charges. Bitterly disappointed when she realized she had no further legal recourse to contest the election, Mankin angrily commented, “I was written in and counted out, they stole my seat in Congress.”
Mankin mounted one more challenge to Davis in the 1948 election. But by that time, as a proponent of civil rights reforms, she had become a magnet for southern segregationist anger. She lost by a wide margin in the Democratic primary. Mankin returned to her law practice and waged a fight against the county unit system. When she initiated a federal suit (South v. Peters), the U.S. District Court in Atlanta ruled against her, and the decision was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, which would not rule the practice unconstitutional until 1962. She nonetheless remained active politically, volunteering on the presidential campaign of Adlai Stevenson in 1952. On July 25, 1956, Mankin died in College Park, Georgia, from injuries sustained in an automobile accident.
The following is shared from The New Georgia Encyclopedia, which allows the use of protected materials for noncommercial educational purposes.
Helen Douglas Mankin, lawyer and legislator, was the second woman elected to the U.S. Congress from Georgia.
She won in a special election on February 12, 1946, with a deciding margin of votes cast by African Americans. It was Black voters’ first major impact on Georgia politics since Reconstruction. Though Mankin won a large popular majority in the next general election, she was forced from office by Georgia’s white supremacist leadership, which invoked the state’s county unit system against her.
Born in Atlanta on September 11, 1894, she was the daughter of Corinne Williams and Hamilton Douglas, lawyers and educators, who had earned legal degrees together at the University of Michigan in 1887 and then moved to Atlanta, where Hamilton Douglas practiced law and helped found Atlanta Law School. Excluded from the Georgia bar as a woman, Corinne Douglas became a teacher and an innovator in women’s education.
A 1913 graduate of Atlanta’s Washington Seminary, Mankin earned an A.B. at Rockford College in Illinois in 1917. During 1918-19 she drove an ambulance in war-scarred France for an American hospital supported by suffragists, then returned home to earn an LL.B. from Atlanta Law School in 1920. She and her mother, then sixty-one years old, were together admitted to the Georgia bar in 1921, when the ban on women was lifted, and both joined the Douglas family firm. In 1924 Mankin established a small practice of her own, supplementing her income by lecturing at Atlanta Law School.
Major changes occurred in her life in 1927. She became active in city politics, serving as women’s manager of I. N. Ragsdale’s successful mayoral campaign. And on September 11, their mutual birthday, she married Guy Mark Mankin, an engineer and widower with a seven-year-old son. During the next five years, her husband’s career took them to Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, New York, and Chicago. In 1933 the couple returned to Atlanta, where Mankin resumed her law practice and began lobbying the Georgia legislature to ratify a child labor amendment to the federal constitution. When this effort failed, she decided to try “from inside.”
Running against five male opponents in the 1936 Democratic primary, she won a two-year term as state representative from Fulton County and was reelected four times, serving from 1937 to 1946—longer than any woman before her. With her imposing figure and independent, forthright, and abrasive personality, Mankin was the legislature’s first “strong” woman member. An opponent of powerful Governor Eugene Talmadge (1933-37, 1941-43), she promoted electoral reform, child welfare, labor causes, and improvements in the educational and prison systems. During the administration of Governor Ellis Arnall (1943-46), she championed his liberal reforms, such as repeal of the poll tax and enfranchisement of eighteen-year-olds.
When U.S. congressman Robert Ramspeck of the Fifth District resigned in 1946, Governor Arnall called a special election in February to fill the unexpired term, and Mankin left the legislature to seek the seat. In 1944 the Democratic white primary, long tantamount to election in the region’s one-party states, had been outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Georgia, which claimed immunity from the decision, by 1946 was the defendant in a lawsuit seeking full implementation of the court’s intent. In this special election, however, the white primary, though still available, was not invoked, and African Americans, holding new hope for the franchise, doubled their registration for it. Mankin was the only candidate of the seventeen in the race who sought their support, and she won, 11,099 votes to 10,329 for her nearest opponent. Until the heavily Black precinct 3-B on Ashby Street reported, the last to do so, Mankin had been narrowly behind, but 3-B delivered Mankin 963 of its 1,039 votes, a winning margin.
Running again for governor, Eugene Talmadge called her “the Belle of Ashby Street” and heaped scorn on “the spectacle of Atlanta negroes sending a Congresswoman to Washington.” Mankin refused to disavow her Black supporters, declaring, “I’m proud of every one of those votes and I hope I’ll get them again.” She also drew support from labor and white progressives, becoming the focus of a Black-white voting alliance that Georgia’s dominant groups had feared since the Populist uprising of the 1890s.
In Washington, Mankin stood out as a Georgia maverick. A consistent supporter of U.S. president Harry S. Truman’s administration, she was among the few southerners who upheld his veto of the Case antistrike bill, which labor strongly opposed.
In April 1946 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Georgia’s Democratic white primary, and in the party’s July primary Mankin was renominated to Congress by 53,611 votes to 42,482 for her principal opponent, James C. Davis, but under Georgia’s county unit system Davis was declared the winner. Designed to favor rural areas, the county unit system had not been used in the urbanized Fifth District since 1932, and it was resurrected to nullify the African American vote and “to beat Mrs. Mankin—nothing else,” declared William Schley Howard, a former congressman. Under the system the candidate receiving a plurality of a county’s popular vote was awarded all its assigned unit votes; the one with the most unit votes won the election. Mankin won her large popular majority in Fulton County, giving her its six unit votes, but she lost to Davis the eight unit votes of the district’s smaller counties. Mankin challenged the outcome, and the State Democratic Executive Committee, loyal to outgoing Governor Arnall, put both candidates on the general election ballot for the November general election, a rare procedure.
But Talmadge, having won the gubernatorial nomination, had Mankin’s name removed when he inherited control of the state committee before the general election. Mankin organized a last-minute write-in candidacy but encountered violent opposition from a white supremacy group known as the Columbians, who worked closely with Davis’s staff; despite obstacles she received 19,527 write-in votes to Davis’s 31,444 regular ballots. She challenged Davis’s right to a seat, but the Eightieth Congress upheld him. Racial disturbances in the South sparked national demands for civil rights laws, which further excited tempers in the region, and as Mankin’s public positions placed her among advocates of racial justice, the atmosphere was heavily charged when she ran against Davis again in 1948. This time her defeat was decisive.
Mankin continued her law practice but never again held public office. In 1950 she initiated a federal suit, South v. Peters, against the county unit system. The Supreme Court ruled against her, holding the system was a political issue in which it was powerless to intervene, a ruling that was reversed in 1962 in Baker v. Carr, the court’s “one man, one vote” case. Mankin did not live to see the reversal. Her election had inspired an upsurge in Black voter registration and participation and, as the Atlanta Constitution stated on November 7, 1982, “Georgia politics haven’t been the same since.” In 1956 she died in Atlanta from injuries suffered in an automobile accident.