What do you mean only whites could vote in the south?
Until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Democratic Party elites, controlled by whites in the fertile "black belt" where most of the population consisted of black sharecroppers, used poll taxes, literacy tests and property qualifications in a deliberately subjective way to exclude almost all blacks from the polls, and numerous poor whites with them. At the peak of Jim Crow in the 1920s, turnout in South Carolina was as little as
6.4 percent of the population over twenty-one in 1924 and 9.7 percent as late as 1944. In Mississippi it troughed out at
9.3 percent in 1920, and in Virginia at 18.0 percent in 1924.
Turnout improved substantially in the 1950s because most poor whites became able to vote, but even in 1964 most blacks could not vote in the former Confederacy or Oklahoma (though in the inland Upper South this could not help Goldwater because public works issues like TVA privatization outweighed Civil Rights).
In the interior Southern States some
urban blacks did vote before the Voting Rights Act, but it was not very significant even there.
