Mankin, Helen Douglas, 1896-1956

Helen Douglas Mankin (September 11, 1896 – July 25, 1956) was an American lawyer and politician. She was the second woman to represent Georgia in the United States House of Representatives, serving from February 1946 to January 1947.

Born Helen Douglas in Atlanta, she attended public and private schools there before attending Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois, where she graduated with an A.B. in 1917. After serving as a civilian ambulasnce driver in a Red Cross unit attached to the French army in 1918 and 1919, she earned a LL.B. 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, Douglas married Guy M. Mankin.

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 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. 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.

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. Mankin exhibited loyalty to the Democratic Party, voting with the party 92 percent of the time—an uncharacteristic trait for the typically conservative South. She also backed an internationalist foreign policy in which the United States played a greater role in maintaining world stability after World War II.

She was an unsuccessful candidate in that year's Democratic Party primary election when she sought renomination to run for reelection. She won the popular vote, gaining major support from Atlanta's African-American community, but lost in the county unit system, a voting system similar to the presidential electoral college that Georgia then used for primary elections. The county-unit system gave disproportionate weight to the votes of rural counties, severely discounting the votes of large urban areas, such as Atlanta's Fulton County. Mankin then was an unsuccessful write-in candidate in the general election of 1946.

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.