Joseph F. Haas; Promoted Voter Registration

Joseph F. Haas, 89, the Atlanta lawyer credited with creating the Voter Registration Project, which helped register Southern black voters in the 1970s and 1980s. As chief legal counsel for the Southern Regional Council, Haas developed the Voter Registration Project to register disenfranchised voters while staying officially nonpolitical to maintain a tax-exempt status. The project sent staff members through 11 Southern states to conduct nonpartisan registration workshops, classes and get-out-the-vote campaigns. “It was based on the idea that it was research into why blacks were not participating in the political process,” said U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.). “Of course, everybody knew why not, but this kept its tax-exempt status.” The project was credited with helping to increase black voter registration from 3 million in 1971 to 5.5 million in 1989. Haas graduated magna cum laude from the University of Michigan before getting his law degree at Harvard and setting up a practice in Atlanta. Lewis recalled Haas as having had a profound impact on civil rights strategy in the South. “He was the person in the meetings who would say, ‘You can do this!’ ” Lewis said. On Tuesday of pneumonia at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta.