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When northern newspapers complained about Mississippi’s new state constitution in 1890, charging that new anti-fraud voting restrictions were meant to disenfranchise Black voters, a White state senator defended it, saying, “I deny that the educational test was intended to exclude Negroes from voting . . . That more Negroes would be excluded is true . . . but that is not our fault.”
By 1903, as the “Mississippi Plan” spread throughout the South, Mississippi Gov. James Vardaman was less discreet about it. “There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter,” he said. “Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the n – from politics.”
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How Jim Crow-Era Laws Suppressed the African American Vote for Generations
In the wake of the passage of the 15th Amendment and Reconstruction, several southern states enacted laws that restricted Black Americans access to voting.
Author:
Black men voting in 1868./Credit: Corbis/Getty Images
In the wake of the passage of the 15th Amendment and Reconstruction, several southern states enacted laws that restricted Black Americans access to voting.
Following the ratification in 1870 of the 15
th Amendment, which barred states from depriving citizens the right to vote based on race, southern states began enacting measures such as poll taxes, literacy tests, all-white primaries, felony disenfranchisement laws, grandfather clauses, fraud and intimidation to keep African Americans from the polls.
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