Just as whites in Southern states were passing laws establishing
legal segregation barriers, they also began to develop legal justifications for denying
blacks their ballots. North Carolina began this trend in 1889 by demanding very precise
information about a potential voter's age and birthplace, information many former slaves
did not have.
White Mississippians however, quickly took the lead in innovative
ways to circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment. They came up with the poll tax, requiring
people to have paid it for the previous two years before voting. Since most African
Americans were poor and confined to a credit economy, this measure greatly restricted
access to the voting booth. In some states, this became a cumulative poll tax; voters had
to pay off all their taxes before voting. Once a person got behind, it was virtually
impossible for him to catch back up again. This also ended the eligibility of many poor
whites as well.
Other devices included the grandfather clause, which said that a
person was eligible to vote if his grandfather had been eligible to vote. In the 1890s,
that applied almost exclusively to whites. In the South, where the Democratic Party was
the only game in town, the party primaries represented the real electoral battles. In
another move designed to deny black voices, the Democratic Party made their primaries for
whites only.
The literacy tests and understanding clauses were the most
imaginative ways to exclude black voters while keeping white voters eligible. Aspiring
voters had to read a passage of the state constitution selected by the county registrar
and explain its significance to the registrar's satisfaction. The idea, of course, was
that whites could "satisfactorily" answer any question while blacks could do
nothing to appease their inquisitor. Edward Ayers explains the whites' attitude by
offering the contemporaneous quote, "if every Negro in Mississippi was a graduate of
Harvard, and had been elected as class orator . . . he would not be as well fitted to
exercise the right of suffrage
Next
|
indicates an external link 
