The disenfranchisement of African Americans after the Reconstruction era was based on a series of laws, new constitutions, and practices that deliberately were used to prevent black citizens from registering to vote and voting. Former Confederate states enacted these measures at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States. The states' actions defied the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1870, which was intended to protect the suffrage of freedmen after the American Civil War.
Considerable violence and fraud had accompanied elections during Reconstruction, as white Democrats used paramilitary groups from the 1870s to suppress black Republican voting and to turn Republicans out of office. After regaining control of the state legislatures, Democrats were alarmed by a late nineteenth-century alliance between Republicans and Populists that cost them some elections. In North Carolina's Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, white Democrats conducted a coup d'état of city government, the only one in U.S. history. They overturned a duly elected biracial government and widely attacked the black community, destroying lives and property.
Ultimately, white Democrats added to previous efforts and achieved widespread disenfranchisement by law: from 1890 to 1908, Southern state legislatures passed new constitutions, constitutional amendments, and laws that made voter registration and voting more difficult, especially when administered by white staff in a discriminatory way. They succeeded in disenfranchising most of the black citizens, as well as many poor whites in the South, and voter rolls dropped dramatically in each state.
Voting Restrictions
Following continuing violence around elections as insurgents worked to suppress black voting, the Democratic-dominated Southern states passed legislation to create barriers to voter registrations by blacks and poor whites, starting with the Georgia poll tax in 1877. In 1890, Mississippi adopted a new constitution, which contained provisions for voter registration that required voters to pay poll taxes and pass a literacy test. The literacy test was subjectively applied by white administrators, and the two provisions effectively disenfranchised most blacks and many poor whites. The constitutional provisions survived a Supreme Court challenge in Williams v. Mississippi (1898). Other Southern states quickly adopted new constitutions and what they called the "Mississippi Plan."
By 1908, all Southern states of the former Confederacy had passed new constitutions or suffrage amendments, sometimes bypassing general elections to achieve this. Legislators created a variety of barriers, including longer residency requirements, rule variations, and literacy and understanding tests, which were subjectively applied against minorities, or were particularly hard for the poor to fulfill. Such constitutional provisions were unsuccessfully challenged at the Supreme Court in Giles v. Harris (1903). In practice, these provisions, including white primaries, created a maze that blocked most blacks and many poor whites from voting in Southern states until after passage of federal civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s. Voter registration and turnout dropped sharply across the South, as most blacks and many poor whites were excluded from the political system.
The disenfranchisement of a large proportion of voters attracted the attention of Congress, and in 1900, some members proposed stripping the South of seats, related to the number of people who were barred from voting. Apportionment of seats was still based on total population (with the assumption of the usual number of voting males in relation to the residents); as a result, white Southerners commanded a number of seats far out of proportion to the voters they represented. In the end, Congress did not act on this issue, as the Southern bloc of Democrats had sufficient power to reject or stall such action. For decades, white Southern Democrats exercised Congressional representation derived from a full count of the population, but they disfranchised several million black and white citizens.
Racist campaign poster
A campaign poster from 1866 that depicts a white man and a black man and explains which parties and politicians support "negro suffrage" and which "platform is for the White Man."
Jim Crow Laws
Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities in Southern states of the former Confederacy, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans. The separation led to treatment, financial support, and accommodations that were usually inferior to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational, and social disadvantages. De jure segregation mainly applied to the Southern United States. Northern segregation was generally de facto, with patterns of segregation in housing enforced by covenants, bank lending practices, and job discrimination.
Examples of Jim Crow laws are the segregation of public schools, public places, and public transportation, as well as the segregation of restrooms, restaurants, and drinking fountains. The U.S. military was also segregated. These Jim Crow laws were separate from the 1800–1866 Black Codes, which had previously restricted the civil rights and civil liberties of African Americans. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) was a Supreme Court decision that ruled that "separate but equal" facilities were constitutional. The ruling contributed to 58 more years of legalized discrimination in the United States.
State-sponsored school segregation was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education. Generally, the remaining Jim Crow laws were overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The origin of the phrase "Jim Crow" often has been attributed to "Jump Jim Crow," a song-and-dance caricature of blacks performed in blackface by white actor Thomas D. Rice. As a result of Rice's fame, "Jim Crow" had become a pejorative expression meaning "Negro" by 1838. When the laws of racial segregation were enacted at the end of the nineteenth century, they became known as "Jim Crow" laws.