Disfranchisement After Reconstruction Era - State Disfranchising Constitutions, 1890-1908

State Disfranchising Constitutions, 1890-1908

Despite white Southerners' complaints about Reconstruction, several of the Southern states had kept most provisions of their Reconstruction constitutions for more than two decades, until late in the 19th century. In some states, the number of blacks elected to local offices reached a peak in the 1880s although Reconstruction had ended. Subsequently, state legislatures passed restrictive laws that made election rules and voter registration more complicated. In addition, most legislatures drafted new constitutions. Florida approved a new constitution in 1885 that included provisions for poll taxes as a prerequisite for voter registration and voting. From 1890 to 1908, ten of the eleven Southern states rewrote their constitutions. All included provisions that restricted voter registration and suffrage, including new requirements for poll taxes, residency, and literacy tests.

With educational improvements, the rate of black illiteracy in the South by 1891 had declined to 58%. The white rate of illiteracy in the South was 31%. Some states used grandfather clauses to exempt white voters from literacy tests. Other states required otherwise eligible black voters to meet literacy and knowledge requirements to the satisfaction of white registrars who applied subjective measurements and, in the process, rejected most black voters. By 1900, the majority of blacks were literate, but even many of the best-educated of these men continued to "fail" literacy tests administered by white registrars.

The historian J. Morgan Kousser noted, "Within the Democratic party, the chief impetus for restriction came from the black belt members," whom he identified as "always socioeconomically privileged." In addition to wanting to affirm white supremacy, the planter and business elite were also concerned about voting by lower-class and uneducated whites. "They disfranchised these whites as willingly as they deprived blacks of the vote." Other historians have found more complexity underlying the goals of disfranchisement; competition between white elites and lower classes, for example, and a desire to prevent alliances between lower-class white and black Americans have both served to motivate voter restrictions.

With passage of new constitutions, Southern states adopted provisions that caused disfranchisement of large portions of their populations by skirting US constitutional protections of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. While their voter registration requirements applied to all citizens, in practice they disfranchised most blacks and also "would remove the less educated, less organized, more impoverished whites as well - and that would ensure one-party Democratic rules through most of the 20th century in the South."

A number of negative effects were associated with Reconstruction. For some members of the Republican Party, Reconstruction was viewed as an opportunity to humiliate Southern whites even further in defeat. This treatment so infuriated and consolidated Southerners that they flocked to the Democrats where they remained for virtually a hundred years. For the Democrats, Reconstruction gave them a Southern anchor that was useful for congressional clout but at the same time inhibited the party from fulfilling center-left initiatives prior to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

As white Democrats regained political power in the South in the 1870s, they worked to suppress black voting. First, the Ku Klux Klan and later paramilitary groups, such as the Red Shirts (Southern United States) and White League, intimidated and attacked black voters. Secondly, the Democratic legislatures passed Jim Crow laws to assert white supremacy, established racial segregation in facilities, and make blacks second-class citizens. Their new constitutions passed Supreme Court review, but practically disfranchised blacks. The landmark court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) held that "separate but equal" facilities, as on railroad cars, was constitutional.