DISFRANCHISEMENT

DISENFRANCHISEMENT AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE

The most extreme of the white supremacists of the South in 1865 were not reconciled to the abolition of slavery, and as time went on they recoiled in horror to citizenship rights for blacks and the vote for blacks. Indeed President Andrew Johnson had vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the Republican- controlled Congress overrode his veto. The Civil Rights Act became the basis for the 14th Amendment. The ex-Confederate states opposed citizenship for blacks, and voting. But after 1867 Congress would not end military occupation until the Southern states ratified the 14th Amendment, and then the 15th Amendment. As time passes the price of re-admission to the Union went up.

1. MILITARY RECONSTRUCTION

Under the Military Reconstruction bill of 1867, Congress required the Southern states to hold new state constitutional conventions to rewrite their state constitutions. They were REQUIRED by the Republican-controlled Congress to adopt black suffrage. Congress dictated that the blacks could vote. But for a number of years ex-Confederate whites could not. Congress passed an act of Amnesty and pardon in 1872 that restored the right to vote to the ex-Confederates. Of course, for white supremacists this situation was unsufferable. The Southern voters must ratify these new state constitutions, and then they could elect new state governments.

The new state legislatures were REQUIRED to ratify the 14th Amendment. Once the Southern states had met these requirements, they must submit their state constitutions to Congress for its approval. Once Congress was satisfied, it would vote to re-admit the state in question back into the Union, and then the army of occupation would be withdrawn and civilian government restored.

In the South as a whole, with the ex-Confederates excluded, there were 703,000 black voters and 627,000 white voters. These white voters were non-ex-Confederates and Northern whites moving to the South. In 5 states, with ex-Confederate whites excluded, blacks were a majority of the eligible voters. Those 5 states were S. Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.

In 1868 7 states met the requirements set by Congress, and drafted new state constitutions that included black suffrage, and also ratified the 14th Amendment. These 7 states were N. Carolina, S. Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama and Georgia. Once this was done, the federal troops were withdrawn and for these states Reconstruction came to an end.

Southern whites hated the army of occupation. In particular they hated the regiments of black troops. For the white supremacist South, the sight of a black soldior was horrifying. They were desperate to end federal occupation. Therefore they met the terms set by Congress, even though they didn't like them.

Georgia was readmitted to the Union. However in Georgia the whites in the legislature promptly voted to expel the blacks. Congress said this is unacceptable, and it expelled GA back out of the Union and placed it once again under military rule. .

As of 1868, Virginia, Mississippi, Texas and Georgia were the only four states still under military occupation and not re-admitted back into the Union.

In 1869 the Republican-controlled Congress rushed through the 15th Amendment, and now added this as another requirement which the last 4 states must ratify before they could hope to be re-admitted. As the Democratic Party revived, the Republicans felt they desperately needed the support of the black vote to remain in power at the federal level. By Feb. 1870 the required 3/4ths of the states (28 of 37) had ratified the 15th Amendment.

By July 1870, VA, Texas, Georgia and Mississippi had met the terms of Congress, and were re-admitted to the Union, and federal troops were withdrawn. Technically, Reconstruction was over.

2. RENEWED VIOLENCE CAUSES REINTRODUCTION OF TROOPS

But not quite. In 1870 new violence erupted in the South, and President Grant had to send the army back into the South, again, to restore order. These troops remained until 1877, and that is why traditionally we say that Reconstruction lasted until 1877. The last three Republican controlled state governments, in S. Carolina, Florida and Louisiana also collapsed in 1877. This is another reason why Reconstruction traditionally is said to have ended in 1877.

3. BLACKS IN POLITICS IN RECONSTRUCTION

If we look at population by state in the South in 1860 we can understand that the Afro-American population was substantial. These figures are the total for the state, not just the number of voters (Lerone Bennett, Before the Mayflower, p. 233-234).

STATE NUMBER OF BLACKS NUMBER OF WHITES

South Carolina 412,000 291,000

Mississippi 437,000 353,000

Louisiana 350,000 357,000

North Carolina 361,000 629,000

Alabama 437,000 526,000

Georgia 465,000 591,000

Virginia 548,000 1,000,000

(35 counties W.VA)

Florida 62,000 77,000

Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee did not elect any blacks to Congress during Reconstruction, though they did serve in the state legislatures and in municipal offices.

Texas 183,000 421,000

Arkansas 111,000 324,000

Tennessee 283,000 827,000

In South Carolina, during Reconstruction, there was a black majority in the lower house of the state legislature, for 6 years, from 1868-1872. It was the only state with a black majority in any house of the state legislature. From 1868-1872 blacks served as lieutenant governors of S. Carolina.

During Reconstruction 2 blacks served in the Senate. They were Hiram Revels (1870-1871), who served out the unexpired term of Jeff Davis, and Blanch K. Bruce (1875-1881) of Mississippi. Revels was a mulatto. During the Reconstruction period fourteen blacks served in the House of Representatives. The first of these was Joseph Rainey of S. Carolina (1870). For 43 days in the winter of 1872 Pinckney (P.B.S.) Pinchback served as acting governor of Louisiana. Thereafter he was elected to the House of Representatives. Pinchback was the son of a white Mississippi planter and a mulatto woman. The father took Pinchback and the 9 other children to the North, before the Civil War, and freed them. Pinchback had received private tutoring and a formal education. In the 1880s 6 blacks were in the U.S. House of Representatives, in the 1890s there were three. George White was elected from South Carolina and served 1897-1901 (Lerone Bennett, p. 271). He was the last black in the House of Representatives until the election in 1928 of Oscar DePriest, from Chicago.

4. WHITE SUPREMACY AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE

To repeat, as of 1867, Afro-American adult males are beginning to vote in most of the states of the South. And by means of the Fifteenth Amendment, Afro-American men are voting nationwide by 1870. White supremacists formed a number of organizations in the 1860s. One was the Ku Klux Klan, formed in Pulaski County in Tennessee in 1866. Others called themselves The Palefaces, the White Brotherhood and in Louisiana the Knights of the White Camelia. These groups sought to intimidate blacks and Northern white Carpetbaggers, and Southern whites who "collaborated" with the Carpetbaggers and the blacks. These traitorous Southertn whites were called "scalawags." The white supremacists wanted to end what they called "Black Republican rule" and restore a "white man's government."

However the violence and intimidation of the Klan and other groups was not random violence. It was calculated, and it had a motive. The purpose of the violence was to intimidate blacks and white Republicans from going to the polls to vote. It was electoral violence. It was political violence. What was at stake was political power. More specifically, what was at stake was the control of state government and county government, of the state and local police, the courts and the assessment of taxes and revenue. The struggle was over power, over who would control. That is why it mattered so much who controlled the government. The Southern white supremacists could not abide the thought that blacks and white Republicans had control over power in the states and counties.

Furthermore, in this time period there was no secret ballot. Voting was done out in the open, and everybody could see which box you put your ballot into. The Australian or secret ballot began to be used in some states in the 1890s, and became a reform of the Progressive Era. But up until that time voting was done out in the open. Whites who voted Republican had their businesses boycotted, and their names printed in the newspapers (see Kenneth Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction). The elections became war zones. White supremacists wanted to bring down the Republican regimes in the South, and replace them with white suprmacist Southern Democratic governments. The way to do this was to prevent the blacks and white Republicans from voting. White supremacists referred to this process of overthrowing the Republican state governments in the South as "Redemption."

Using these tactics of intimidation and violence and assassination, the Democrats recaptured power in Virginia and Tennessee in 1869, and North Carolina in 1870.

5. THE ENFORCEMENT ACTS

The violence in 1869 and 1870 prompted Congress to pass three Enforcement Acts in 1870-1871 (Tindall, p. 723). They are commonly referred to as the Force Acts. The first Force Act, of 1870, established penalties on persons who interfered with anyone's right to vote. The Act made it a federal crime for two or more people to conspire "to injure, oppress, threaten or intimidate any person in the free exercise of any right or privilege secured by the Constitution or the laws of the United States" (see Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court, p. 700). Thus, to threaten or initmidate or assault citizens attempting to vote, as one example, would be a violation of this law. Sadly, key provisions of this Act were invalidated by the Supreme Court in 1875.

The Second Enforcement Act, of Feb. 1871, placed the election of congressmen under surveillance by federal election supervisors and marshalls. It also placed Congressional and federal elections under federal protection.

The Third Enforcement Act, also called the Ku Klux Klan Act, was passed in April 1871. It was a response to violence by the Klan in elections in the South. The Act outlawed forming conspiracies, wearing disguises (such as Klans robes), resisting officers and intimidating officials. It defined Klan activity as rebellion against the United States. And it also authorized the president to suspend habeas corpus where necessary to suppress "armed combinations," and to declare martial law. Under habeas corpus the accused must be brought to court and charged with an offense. Historically, the suspension of habeas corpus has rarely been invoked, usually only in a period of emergency or war. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus to detain suspected collaborators during the Civil War. In effect, the suspension of habeas corpus allows people to be detained indefinitely without a charge being filed against them. However, after 1869, because of the violence taking place, President Grant sent troops to keep the peace during election season (Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court, p. 383).

In response to the growing violence, in June 1871 the government pursued mass prosecutions in Mississippi. 930 were indicted, and 243 tried and found guilty. In October 1871, with renewed violence, President Grant singled out 9 counties in South Carolina, suspended habeas corpus, and pursued mass prosecutions against the Klan and suspected Klansmen. But the violence would continue and worsen.

But the violence in the South continued. Perhaps the most infamous and appalling example was the Colfax Massacre of April 1873. It involved a dispute over the election returns in the race for governor. More than 100 blacks had gathered for a meeting at the courthouse, exercising their right to peaceful assembly. But a mob of whites gathered outside the building, set it on fire, and shot blacks who attempted to escape the inferno. About 100 blacks were shot or burned to death in this horrific episode of violence in Colfax, Louisiana.

In September 1874 there was more fighting in Louisiana, killing 16 whites and 11 blacks. In December 1873, at Vicksburg, Miss., white Democrats killed 75 Republicans. Incidents such as these prompted Grant to send in federal troops to Vicksburg in Mississippi and other counties in Louisiana where violence was occurring.

But the tactics of violence succeeded. In 1872 the Republican regime in Georgia fell. In 1874 the Republican regimes in Texas, Arkansas and Alabama expired. The elections in 1875 in Mississippi turned into a civil war, with riots and assassinations. In Mississippi in fall 1875 the white supremacist Democrats defeated the Republicans, and in spring 1876 the Democrats took power. Similar riots and massacres in South Carolina forced Grant to send troops into S. Carolina in October 1975.

The white supremacist South was resorting to violence to get rid of the Republican state regimes which were too closely tied to blacks. The white supremacists tested the North at every turn, to see how much they could get away with before the North would assert itself.

In the end the North got tired of this. And the simple fact is that the South wore the North down. When Congress passed an Act of Amnesty and Pardon in 1872, the ex-Confederates were free to vote, and a Democratic resurgence was only a matter of time. The only way the North could have stopped this violence would have been to re-impose martial law and full scale military occupation.

But after 1873 the North just did not have the unified will to do this. The nation had slipped into the Depression of 1873, and the North was preoccupied with problems of its own, closer to home. Furthermore, Kenneth Stampp argues that in the 1870s the Republican Party was gaining strength among farmers in the Old Northwest, which we would call the Midwest and the Great Plains (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa). Before 1860 this region had been Democratic. From 1868 to 1908, most of these states voted Republican in every presidential election (Stampp, Era of Reconstruction, p. 212) Stampp suggests that as these voters turned to the Republican Party, the Republicans no longer felt that they were so desperately dependent upon black votes in the South (Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, p. 212-213). A new political calculus emerged. To put it bluntly, some Republicans began to feel that, politically, the blacks were expendable.

More than this, they felt that the association with blacks had become a political liability that hurt the Repubican Party with white voters. The price of using more federal troops in the South seemed too high, and the rewards to be gained too few.

As previously noted, the outcome of the election of 1876 was disputed. Twenty electoral votes were disputed. In the Wormley House Agreement of Feb. 26, 1877 the agents of candidate Rutherford B. Hayes agreed inwriting to withdraw the federal troops from the South. In March, as promised, some of the Southern Democrats in the House of Representatives broke party ranks and voted with the Republicans to award the disputed electoral votes to Hayes. The next month, Hayes began withdrawing the last federal troops from the South. With the departure of the federal troops from South Carolina and Louisiana in April 1877, the Democrats took over power in the state from the Republicans.

The Reconstruction coalition between blacks and liberal white Republicans was on its deathbed. And a new reign of terror began to descend on blacks in the South.

6. JUDICIAL RETREAT FROM BLACK VOTING RIGHTS

As I mentioned earlier, during Reconstruction the Congress had passed the Enforcement Acts and other measures to protect the voting rights of blacks and others. However, recall that in 1883 the Supreme Court retreated from civil rights and equal protection of the laws for African-Americans, and struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and allowed racial segregation to be written into the law. And in the Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896 the Court permitted segregation and said that segregation is not discrimination as long as equal facilities or accommodations are provided to each race.

So too the Supreme Court retreated from the protection of voting rights for African-Americans. Ultimately this would lead to the effective disenfranchisement of African-Americans between 1890 and 1910. A series of court cases paved the way. First I will mention the cases involving the protection of citizenship rights and voting rights. Then I will discuss a case dealing with the Colfax Massacre.

a) Slaughterhouse Case, 1873

In 1873, in the Slaughterhouse cases, the Supreme Court made a distinction between federal citizenship and state citizenship. This was a conception of dual citizenship. In a 5-4 decision It said that only the rights deriving from federal citizenship were protected by the 14th Amendment. An example of a right derived from federal citizenship would be the right to protection on the high seas, or protection from aggression by a foreign nation. And it ruled that citizenship rights and civil rights derived from one's state citizenship, not one's federal citizenship. Furthermore, enforcement of the rights deriving from state citizenship were under the jurisdiction of the states, not the federal government. In the South, this would mean that the enforcement of rights lay with the states, not the federal government (see "Slaughterhouse Cases," Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court, p. 789-791).

b) Minor v. Happersett, 1875

In 1875 the Court ruled in the case of Minor v. Happersett, Here the Supreme Court went a step further. By a vote of 8-1 it now said that voting derives from state citizenship, not federal citizenship. In this case the Minors, Virginia Minor and her husband, sued over the denial of her right to vote in a federal election. (The husband had to be a party to the suit since women in those days did not have the right to sue, but their father or husband would have to sue on their behalf. The Minors argued that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited the abridgement of the privileges and immunities of citizens. But denying women the right to vote in federal elections was a violation of these privileges and immunities. The Supreme Court disagreed. The Court said that the Fourteenth Amendment only applies to citizenship rights, which does NOT necessarily include the right to vote. Voting is a separate matter from citizenship. The Court said that "the Constitution, when it conferred citizenship, did not necessarily confer the right of suffrage" (from p. 177 of the decision, quoted in "Minor v. Happersett," Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court, p. 551).

The Court said further that the 14th Amendment did NOT confer the right to vote on women, any more than it conferred such a right on children, the insane or criminals ("Nineteenth Amendment," Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court, p. 589; see also p. 329, 551). By implication, the Court said that there was no positive guarantee of the right to vote. Rather, the right could not be abidged or denied by either the federal government or a state or locality on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. But theoretically, the Court seemed to imply, there might be other reasons not having to do with race for which the right to vote could be denied. Though this case actually involved women's suffrage, it was of course a cold wind, a chill, a foreshadowing, with future implications for the voting rights of Afro-Americans. Here was a loophole that the white supremacist South would soon find and exploit to violate the Fifteenth Amendment.

c) U.S. v. Reese, 1876

In 1876, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of U.S. v. Reese. This case involved the federal prosecution of a local election official in Kentucky. He had refused to count the vote of an Afro-American who had cast a ballot or vote in a local, minicipal election. The Afro-American had cast a vote, but the election official refused to count it as a valid vote.

The Enforcement Act of 1870 required that "administrative preliminaries to elections be conducted without regard to race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Another section forbade wrongful refusal to register voters.

The Supreme Court ruled that the federal government might enforce cases involving federal elections, but NOT state and local elections (see "Reese, U.S. v.," Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court, p. 714; also p. 293). Once again, enforcement of rights deriving from the state had to be enforced by the states only. Step by step the Court was curbing and limiting and circumscribing the power of the Federal Government to enforce the rights stated on paper. In effect, the ability of the Federal Government to police the enforcement of rights was being crippled.

d) U.S. v. Harris, 1882

The Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 (Force Act) had authorized the President to suspend habeas corpus and use troops to protect the rights of citizens, including the right to vote, against violence and conspiracies and intimidation. In this case the Supreme Court ruled the Ku Klux Klan Act unconstitutional. The Court said that the protection of individuals from private conspiracies was a function of the states, not the federal government (see "William Burnham Woods," Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court, p. 938; also p. 700, 870). Even federal efforts to punish private individuals for assault and murder of blacks were areas reserved to the states, not the federal government. This should be left to the states, since enforcement of civil rights was a matter under the jurisdiction of the states. In effect this meant that the white supremacist states of the South were entrusted with protecting the rights of blacks, rights which the white supremacists didn't believe blacks should have in the first place. The Supreme Court was asking the fox to guard the chicken coop.

e) U.S. v. Cruikshank 1876

Previously I described the Colfax Massacre of 1873, in which Afro-Americans were gathered at a meeting inside the courthouse in Colfax, Louisiana, and it was surrounded by a white mob and set on fire. One hundred Afro-Americans were shot trying to escape the burning building or died in the fire. The federal government prosecuted three (3) men it managed to catch. They were accused to violating the Enforcement Act of 1870, which outlawed conspiracies to deny the constitutional rights of any citizen, or to "injure, oppress, threaten or intimidate any person in the free exercise of any right or privilege secured by the Constitution or the laws of the United States."

The defendants appealed their indictment. In 1876 the Court ruled, unanimously, 9-0, that the indictments must be dismissed ("Cruikshank, U.S. v.," Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court, p. 209 and 700). The Court said that the charges against the men did not allege the denial of any federal rights as distinct from rights derived from state citizenship.

In the Colfax Massacre the right of Afro-American citizens to peacefully assembly, or the right of peaceful assembly, had been violated. But the Court said this was not a federal right. It was a state right. The right of peaceful assembly, or to bear arms, or vote, or testify in court were all rights derived from state citizenship. Thus only the states could enforce these rights, and the federal government could not intrude. In the Colfax case, the state of Louisiana would have to bring charges, and the aggrieved Afro-Americans would have to appeal to their state for the protection of their rights. Of course, in Louisiana and most Southern states, the names of Afro-Americans were always removed from the jury rolls, and so in practice--down to the Nineteen Sixties--any trial would be before an all-white jury that would never convict a white man accused of anything against a black person. The legal procedures might be followed. The substantive result made such prosecutions an exercise in futility.

Further, in this case the Supreme Court said again that the equal protection and due process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment limited action by the states ("no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law, nor deny any personn the equal protection of the law"). This applied only to states, and their subdivisions such as counties and townships. It DID NOT APPLY TO ACTION BY PRIVATE INDIVIDUALS. Thus the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to the actions by these private individuals, though it would apply if committed by a state government or a subdivision of a state.

The message of the Cruikshank case was that even where black people had been the victims of mass murder, the Supreme Court held that the federal government was powerless to interfere to protect their rights. Liberal white Northerners had tried to protect the rights of Afro-Americans. The federal government had prosecuted three individuals for the murders. But in this case, and others like it, the Supreme Court tied and shackled the hands of the federal government.

The result was that Afro-Americans were left to the mercy of the white South, and the state governments of the South, and the all-white juries of the South, for the protection and enforcement of their rights, and for justice. Again, the chickens were to be protected by the fox. And the hound dog, the Federal Government, which might have protected them, was banished from the farmyard.

7. DISENFRANCHISEMENT

Between 1890 and 1901 twelve Southern states acted to effectively disenfranchise black voters. The methods used to accomplish this were the literacy test and the poll tax. (HANDOUT)

Mississippi 1890 literacy test state const. convention

S. Carolina 1895 literacy test state const. convention

Louisiana 1898 literacy test state const. convention

N. Carolina 1900 literacy test amendment to state const.

Alabama 1901 literacy test state const. convention

Virginia 1902 literacy test state const. convention

Georgia 1908 literacy test amendment to state const.

Oklahoma 1910 literacy test amendment to state const.

Tennessee, Florida, Arkansas and Texas enacted poll taxes to achieve disenfranchisement between 1890 and 1910.

The first state to start all of this was Mississippi. The Mississippi law included a residency requirement of two years in the state and one year in the electoral district. This hit tenants who sometimes changed jobs from year to year. All taxes, including a poll tax, had to be paid by Feb. 1 of the election year. And voters had to be literate. (Tindall, America, A Narrative History, p. 749). The law was fought in the courts by a black man named Williams, who challenged it up to the Supreme Court. In 1898, in the case of Williams v. Mississippi, the Supreme Court upheld the Mississippi law as constitutional. It ruled that it would be impermissible to deny a man the right to vote because of race, color or previous condition of servitude. But the right to vote derived from one's state citizenship, and therefore the states could set the requirements and criteria for voting. The states could not deny the right to vote for the 3 reasons given in the 15th Amendment, but they could establish other criteria and qualifications if they wished. A literacy test or requirement, and poll taxes, were non-racial matters. They applied to everyone equally.

Theoretically this was true. However in practice an individual had to pass the test, which was often verbal and not written, to the satisfaction of the registrar. The registrar was the sole determinant of whether you passed or failed. (GIVE EXAMPLES). If you were black, you failed, even if your answers had been correct. If you were white and illiterate, you passed, as long as you were a good ole boy and a loyal Democrat. Of course if you were a Populist you failed. The fact that passage of the test was based solely on the discretion of the registrar is what made a non-racial mechanism - the literacy test - a very racial and very arbitrary and subjective matter. A white supremacist registrar registered whites, no matter how illiterate, and failed blacks, no matter how literate.

The case of Williams v. Mississippi gave the green light to other states to do the same thing.

Thus, what the white supremacists did was to erect a wall to shut out blacks and keep them from voting. But there were many poor and illiterate whites as well. Therefore some holes or loopholes had to be put in the wall. In Mississippi they used an understanding clause. Illiterate whites who could not read a section of the state constitution could qualify by explaining the meaning of the passage - that is, explaining to the satisfaction of the registrar. Here again was room for bias and subjectivity. In 1895 South Carolina added on a proviso that a property qualification of $300 would qualify an otherwise illiterate person. In 1898 Louisiana invneted the grandfather clause. This allowed illiterate persons to vote if their fathers or grandfathers had been eligible to vote on January 1, 1867. Of course at that time blacks in Louisiana could not vote. So the grandfather clause was actually a loophole for illiterate whites. By 1910 Georgia, N. Carolina, Virginia, Alabama and Oklahoma had all adopted the grandfather clause. It remained in force until it was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1915 (Guinn v. U.S).

The poll tax hurt all who were too poor to pay it. In practice it was often on top of a property qualification. Thus, there was a property qualification of $300 to $500, and on top of this a poll tax of $1. But many people in the South were only getting $220 a year. And you had to keep the receipt to prove that you had paid. The tax was cumulative. Most people under-reported their property to avoid taxes. In effect many people had to choose between declaring their property and paying taxes, and then being able to vote, OR under-reporting their property to avoid taxes, but them giving up their eligibility to vote. Of course this hurt the poor, which meant most black people.

In Louisiana in 1896 there had been 130,000 black registered voters. Following adoption of the literacy test, in 1900 there were only 5,320 registered African-American voters. In 1900 Alabama had 121,159 literate black males over the age of 21. In 1900 3,742 of them were registered to vote (Tindall and Shi, America: a Narrative History, p. 750). John Hope Franklin, From Slavery To Freedom, says that in Alabama in 1900 there were 181,471 black males of voting age, and only 3,000 were registered after the new provisions took effect.

LOUISIANA (C. Vann Woodward, Origins, p. 342-343)

WHITE NEGRO TOTAL

Registered 1-1-1897 164,088 130,344 294,432

Registered 3-17-1900 125,437 5,320 130,757

Net Reduction 38,651 125,024 163,675

After 1900 Louisiana also added a poll tax: This further reduced the number of voters, so that in 1904 registration looked as follows:

WHITE "NEGRO" TOTAL

91,716 1,342 93,058

In Louisiana in 1900 the profile had looked like this:

WHITE NEGRO TOTAL

Under educational qual. 86,157 4,327 90,484

Under property qual. 10,793 916 11,709

Under grandfather clause 29,189

There is a slight discrepancy in these figures because the records from 1900 for the grandfather clause do not give race, and a handful of people qualified under more than one category. However the closest records that DO give race for the category of the grandfather clause in Louisiana are from 1902. In that year 37,877 whites who were illiterate were registered, and 111 colored people. It seems reasonable to infer that likewise, in 1900, the vast majority of persons qualifying under the grandfather clause were white. The small handful of Colored people who had a father or grandfather who had been eligible to vote in 1867 were mixed race people (Woodward, Origins, p. 342-343).

In Mississippi, from 1890 to 1892, the number of registered voters declined sharply. In 1892 in Mississippi there were 110,100 white males over the age of 21. Just more than half, some 68,127, were registered to vote. In Mississippi in 1892 there were 147,205 black males over the age of 21. Of that number, 8,615 were registered to vote. (Woodward, Origins, p. 344).

In Virginia the total vote in 1900 was 264,240. In 1904 it was 130,544.

If these measures had denied the vote to all illiterate persons, equally, without regard to race, that might have been fair and consistant. But that is not what happened. Instead these measures discriminated MOST against black illiterate persons, and even blacks who were NOT illiterate. However many of the poorer and lower class whites were effectively disenfranchised too. Which was exactly what the elite wanted. In Virginia, it was not until 1928 that the vote cast returned to the same level as 1888. Not until the 1930s and 1940s would voter registration levels rise again in the South.

Williams v. Mississippi

The disenfranchisment of African Americans had a devestating impact for several reasons. First, it deprived them of any electoral or political power at all. Second, only rgistered voters could serve on a jury. By throwing most African Americans off the voting rolls, the South was at the same time assuring that juries would in practice be all-white. Since women at this time could not vote either, by default juries would be all-male as well. Third, if African Americans cannot vote, then the politicans are not accountavble to them in any way. The politicans could do anything to African American people that they wanted to do, and get away with it, with full impunity, without any concrn for the consequences at the polls. There weren't any concequences at the polls. Instead, the politicans were exclusively accountable to the white community, the white electorate, and white voters.

In the case of Williams v. Mississippi, Williams had been convicted of murder by an all white jury and sentenced to be hanged. He appealed, arguing that the all-white jury deprived him of his constitutional Sixth Amendment right to a trial by an impartial jury of his peers. The Court rejected his argument, and said that the states could use means such as the literacy test to determine who was qualified to vote or to serve on a jury (Oxford Companion, p. 932). Williams had not shown that the literacy test was intended to disenfranchise African Americans specifically. Intent of racial discrimination had not been shown.

THE BLACK CODES

In 1865, following Appomattox, a number of Southern states adopted the infamous Black Codes. These laws were disallowed by the Congress in 1866. But they are important because of what they tried to do. They are important because of what they reveal about the motives and intentions of the authors. The Codes generally prohibitted inter-racial marriage. In Florida, they defined anyone with 1/8th Negro blood or more as a Negro (blacks, mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons) (Shofner, The Black Codes, p. 25). Blacks wer prohibited from serving on juries or testifying against whites. In Florida blacks were prohibited from carrying gubs, knives and swords without a license from a probate judge (Shofner, p. 25). In South Carolina the Code prohibited blacks from entering any employment except agricultural labor without first obtaining a special license. Mississippi would not allow blacks to buy or rent land. Most Southern states enacted laws stating that blacks found without lawful employment were to be arrested as vagrnats and fined. If thye could not pay the fine, they were to be auctioned off or hired out to landowners who would pay the fine. Louisiana required all black agricultural laborers to make contracts with landowners during the first ten days of January. These contracts were binding for 1 year. Under the Black Codes blacks could not leave their place of employment without permission. Blacks who refused to labor for their employer were to be arrested and put to hard labor on public works, without compensation, until they agreed to go back to work for their employer.

Again, Congress threw out the Black Codes in 1866. But the Codes reveal the desire of the white supremacists to re-impose slavery by a new name. The Black Codes also reveal the strong desire of the white South to maintain blacks as a landless peasantry and a cheap labor force. The white South did everything it could to prevent blacks from acquiring land of their own, even to the point of trying to pass laws forbidding blacks to rent or own land, and forbidding them to have any occupation other than agriculture without a special license from a judge. If a black man acquires land and gets a farm of his own, he is going to work on his own land, for himself, and not work on your land for you. If you are a white landowner you don't want blacks to have land of their own. You don't want them to pursue the American dream of ownership and self-employment. Instead, you want them to remain poor and landless so that they will have no alternative but to work for you, on your land, at whatever wage you give. You want to keep them trapped in poverty abnd dependency. That is part of what the Black Codes were about.

VIOLENCE: LYNCHING AND THE REIGN OF TERROR

Rhetorically, we may ask why did blacks in the South submit to disenfranchisement and segregation. For one thing, the Supreme Court had ruled against them. Secondly, Northern protection and the federal army were gone. Thirdly, the masses of black people were sharecroppers and indebted, and economically dependent. They were economically vulnerable. They were completely at the mercy of their landlords and furnishing merchants. They in no position whatsoever to challenge the landlords. A black man who tried to vote would be subject to dismissal from his job, being taken to court for not paying his debts, or being thrown off the land. An indebted sharecropper could be taken to court at any moment, and he would end up on the chain gang. This threat hung over the head of all debtors. The exonomic dependency and powerlessness of the masses of black people made them powerless to defend and fight for their political rights. Blacks were excluded from juries. Through disfranchisement their votes did not count, and politicians and government were not accountable to blacks in any way. The government was white. The sherriff and the police were white. The judge, the jury and the court system were white. The prison guards were white. The black person who resisted had the deck stacked against him from beginning to end.

But in the final analysis, what caused compliance by blacks was violence. In the 1880s and 1890s a reign of terror descended upon the South, and it was called lynching. Technically, lynching means being murdered by a mob of three or more persons without benefit of a trial and conviction (Giddings, p. 21).

From 1840-1860 there are 300 recorded cases of lynching in the South. Thirty of the 300 were black. During slavery a black slave was a valuable asset. The lynching of blacks was relatively rare.

Between 1885 and 1900, 2,500 black people were lynched in the South. In the 10 year period 1889-1899 an average of 187 lynchings of blacks occurred each year. Between 1900 and 1909 an average of 92 blacks were lynched each year. The lynching of black people was a regular event right down to the 1930s. Until the 1930s not a single year went by in which some black person was not lynched in the South.

1840-1860 300 official cases of lynching:

30 were black

1885-1900 2,500 blacks lynched

1900-1910 average of 92 lynchings per year

The ultimate means of enforcing segregation and disfranchisement and black subordination was violence, and the ultimate in violence was lynching. In fact black people did not passively submit to the new order. And the ones who did not, the ones who got out of line, the ones who were too assertive got lynched for it. It was precisely because black people did not just tamely submit that this violence is taking place.

JERRELL SHOFNER: THE BLACK CODES

In your BULKPACK is the article entitled The Black Codes, by Jerrell Shofner. In particular he examines Florida. The Black Codes of 1865 were struck down by Congress in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the 14th Amendment ratified in 1868. But the Southern states found other ways to salvage parts of them.

The Florida Black Code of 1865 defined a Negro as anyone with one-eighth Negro blood (or ancestry) (p. 25). Marriages between black men and white women were expressly prohibitted (p. 25). In 1903 Florida adopted a law banning inter-racial marriage, including anyone with one-eighth Negro blood (p. 33). Either party to such an illegal marriage could be subject to a fine of $1,000 or a prison term of up to 10 years (p. 33). In 1905 Florida required separation of the races on street cars, and required separate ticket windows and waiting rooms by railroad companies (p. 33). The Black Codes had been nullified, but individual provisions reappeared.

Shofner suggests that violence was the ultimate means of enforcing compliance with the laws of white supremacy. For example, on p. 35, he describes how in Ocoee, Orange County, Florida, in 1920, one July Perry tried to vote, apparently without having paid his poll tax. It was said that he even threatened election officials. Whites followed Perry home and ordered him out of his house. He fired at them. There followed a three day rampage in which the entire black section of Ocoee was burned and 4 innocent people died in the fire. Shofner reports that the "grisly episode ended only after a mutilated July Perry was finally put to death by the mob which had tired of torturing him" (p. 35). Shofner desribes other incidents of lynching and other atrocities in his articles.

In 1923 an unknown black man was alleged to have raped a white woman. A white mob searched for him in the black neighborhood of Rosewood, near Cedar Key. The mob burned the homes of the blacks, and the church. The blacks fought back. Five blacks and two whites were killed. In the 1980s Ed Bradley of Sixty Minutes interviewed elderly survivors of the Rosewood Incident, who had been children back in 1923 (see Shofner, p. 35-36).

In 1934 Claude Neal of Jackson County was accused of having murdered a white woman, with whom he had been involved in an illicit affair(p. 36). Neal was taken out of the jail, tortured, mutilated, and dragged behind a car until dead. In vain did the NAACP appeal for federal anti-lyncing legislation. This legislation was always killed by a filibuster by Southern Democrats in the Senate.

Shofner also describes how in the 1930s, in one county in north Florida, black school teachers received $37 to $40 a month, which was about half of what white teachers got. Likewise, there was even discrimination in the administration of welfare or relief funds in Jacksonville. There were three times as many poor blacks as poor whites in Jacksonville. Whites got 55% of the funds, and blacks got 45% (p. 36).

IDA B. WELLS-BARNETT

In Chapter 1 of When And Where I Enter, Paula Giddings describes the anti-lynching campaign of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell. Wells was the editor and co-owner of a black newspaper in Memphis, called Free Speech. She condemned the lynchings taking place in Memphis and in 1892 an angry mob burned the offices of her newspaper. Her life was threatened and she had to flee to exile in Chicago. There she established the Negro Fellowship League.

THE CASE OF THOMAS MOSS (MEMPHIS, 1892)

Paula Giddings (p. 17 and 18) also describes the case of Thomas Moss, in 1892. He was a black postal worker in Memphis. He and his partners, Calvin McDowell and Henry Stewart, opened a store called the People's Grocery. It became a gathering place for blacks in Memphis. The store became a target of white resentment. A white store owner had previously enjoyed a monopoly in selling to blacks, and he resented the competition from the People's Grocery. In 1892, a group of white armed thugs came to attack the grocery on a Saturday night. The blacks repelled the attack and shot 3 whites. The white men had been shot, but they recovered from their wounds. Nevertheless, Moss. McDowell and Stewart were arrested, along with 100 other blacks charged with conspiracy. On March 9, 1892 Moss, McDowell and Stewart were taken from their jail cells and lynched. The mob then looted the store and it was shut down. In the year 1892, some 255 blacks were lynched. In almost all instances of lynching, no trial has taken place. The accused person has not been convicted of anything. There has been no due process. A mob simply takes the law into its own hands and appoints itself judge, jury and executioner.

Paula Giddings writes (p. 26) "Thomas Moss' only crimes were to succeeed at a business of his own, and to defend himself when whites tried to destroy it."

Ida B. Wells-Barnett investigated 728 of the lynchings taking place in the South. She found that frequently blacks were accused of "incendiarism," "race prejudice," "quarelling with whites" and "making threats."

On page 28 Giddings quotes Wells. Wells said that in many cases "lynching was merely an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property, and thus keep the race terrorized and "keep the nigger down." Wells reached four conclusions:

1. Lynching was a tool of the caste system (p. 26)

2. Southern whites resented that the Negro was no longer his plaything, his servant, his source of income.

3. Lynching was a direct result of the gains blacks were making. In 1900 187,000 blacks in the South owned their own farms. In 1900, in Montgomery, Alabama, with 2,000 black residents, there were 23 black-owned restaurants, a gry-goods store, 30 shoemakers, 12 contractors, 15 blacksmith shops, wood and coal yards, butchers, greengrocers, a lawyer, a dentist, 400 preachers, 5 physicians and 2 undertakers. Although 3/4ths of blacks in the South in 1900 were sharecroppers, there were some blacks who owned their own farms and a small black business class. In 1900 there were 8,833,994 blacks in the US, in a total US population of 75,994,575 (8.3%).

4. Lynching was a way to maintain race purity and punish inter-racial liaisons.(p. 28).

Another tragic episode that Wells desribes was the hanging of thirteen year old Mildrey Brown in South Carolina. Evidently Brown was a babysitter, and when an infant died after being in her care she was accused or poisoning the child. She was hastily tried, found guilty, and hanged (Giddings, p. 28).

OVERT IDEOLOGY OF RACISM AND WHITE SUPREMACY

Along with official segregation, disfranchisement and lynching there was an open, overt ideology of raciam and white supremacy. The South openly proclaimed a white man's government and a white man's country, and the biological superiority of whites and the inferiority of blacks. This was expressed in popular form in the "Racial Credo of the Southern People," which was widely circulated and publicized in newspapers and magazines in the early 1900s by Thomas Pearce Bailey.(Quoted in Woodward, Origins of the New South, p. 355).[Handout]

A FINAL WORD ON SEGREGATION AND DISENFRANCHISEMENT

As a generalization, the drive for segregation came from the lower class whites who were impoverished and wanted some symbolic and psychological way to still feel superior to blacks. But it is awfully hard to feel superior to somebody else when you are dirt poor yourself. The rituals of Jim Crow segregation gave poor whites this false and artificial sense of superioroty despite their impoverishment. It is also important to note that black nurses and nannies could still ride on the trains and cars with the white children or elderly or sick whites they cared for. A black servant or valet might ride with the white person they were taking car of. The point of the segregation laws was not that there could never be contact between blacks and whites. Rather, the point was they must not interact as equals. As long as the interaction was unequal, as long as the black person was in a servile role or a caretaker, that was okay. Then exceptions could be made. It was interaction as competitors, on an equal basis, that was taboo. For a black person to interact as an equal was what was forbidden.

The drive for disfranchisement came from the elite. In fact many in the elite wanted to get rid of the poor whites and yeomen as voters as well as the blacks. They wanted to control the franchise by restricting the lower classes as a whole, both black and white. The poll taxes and literacy tests did in fact disenfranchise tens of thousands of whites. And in the first few decades after 1890 it disenfranchised more whites than blacks. However as Populism receded, and poor whites returned to the Democratic Party, the elite was more willing to let the yeomen and the lower class whites vote again. Of course by returning to the Democratic Party they were demonstrating that they could be trusted with the vote once again.

America in this time period did not practice "equality of opportunity." Opportunity and economic upward mobility had a sign written across them. It said "for whites only." Black people who were successful or prosperous or upwardly mobile became targets of resentment. America told people to work hard and pull themselves up by their boot straps. When black people did precisely that, they were hated for it, and punished for it. They paid for it with their lives. The European immigrant was allowed the privilege of having a job, and not killedf for it. Blacks were killed because they were "too successful."

SOURCES ON LEGAL CASES

Lee Epstein and Thomas Walker, Constitutional Law for a Changing America

Lucius Barker and Twiley Barker, Civil Liberties and the Constitution

William Cohen, Murray Schwartz and DeAnne Sobul The Bill of Rights: A Sourcebook

The Supreme Court Review (by years)