What three methods did southern states use to disenfranchise African Americans in the time after the 15th Amendment?

After returning home from World War II, veteran Medgar Evers decided to vote in a Mississippi election. But when he and some other black ex-servicemen attempted to vote, a white mob stopped them. “All we wanted to be was ordinary citizens,” Evers later related. “We fought during the war for America, Mississippi included. Now, after the Germans and Japanese hadn’t killed us, it looked as though the white Mississippians would....”

Grave of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in Arlington National Cemetery. (Wikimedia Commons)

The most basic right of a citizen in a democracy is the right to vote. Without this right, people can be easily ignored and even abused by their government. This, in fact, is what happened to African-American citizens living in the South following Civil War Reconstruction. Despite the 14th and 15th Amendments guaranteeing the civil rights of black Americans, their right to vote was systematically taken away by white supremacist state governments.

Voting During Reconstruction

After the Civil War, Congress acted to prevent Southerners from re-establishing white supremacy. In 1867, the Radical Republicans in Congress imposed federal military rule over most of the South. Under U.S. Army occupation, the former Confederate states wrote new constitutions and were readmitted to the Union, but only after ratifying the 14th Amendment. This Reconstruction amendment prohibited states from denying “the equal protection of the laws” to U.S. citizens, which included the former slaves.

In 1870, the 15th Amendment was ratified. It stated that, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

More than a half-million black men became voters in the South during the 1870s (women did not secure the right to vote in the United States until 1920). For the most part, these new black voters cast their ballots solidly for the Republican Party, the party of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln.

When Mississippi rejoined the Union in 1870, former slaves made up more than half of that state’s population. During the next decade, Mississippi sent two black U.S. senators to Washington and elected a number of black state officials, including a lieutenant governor. But even though the new black citizens voted freely and in large numbers, whites were still elected to a large majority of state and local offices. This was the pattern in most of the Southern states during Reconstruction.

The Republican-controlled state governments in the South were hardly perfect. Many citizens complained about overtaxation and outright corruption. But these governments brought about significant improvements in the lives of the former slaves. For the first time, black men and women enjoyed freedom of speech and movement, the right of a fair trial, education for their children, and all the other privileges and protections of American citizenship. But all this changed when Reconstruction ended in 1877 and federal troops withdrew from the old Confederacy.

Voting in Mississippi

With federal troops no longer present to protect the rights of black citizens, white supremacy quickly returned to the old Confederate states. Black voting fell off sharply in most areas because of threats by white employers and violence from the Ku Klux Klan, a ruthless secret organization bent on preserving white supremacy at all costs.

White majorities began to vote out the Republicans and replace them with Democratic governors, legislators, and local officials. Laws were soon passed banning interracial marriages and racially segregating railroad cars along with the public schools.

Laws and practices were also put in place to make sure blacks would never again freely participate in elections. But one problem stood in the way of denying African Americans the right to vote: the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed them this right. To a great extent, Mississippi led the way in overcoming the barrier presented by the 15th Amendment.

Hiram Rhodes Revels was the first African American to serve in the U.S. House of Representative and later the Senate. Revels served in Congress from 1870 to 1871, representing Mississippi. (Wikimedia Commons)

In 1890, Mississippi held a convention to write a new state constitution to replace the one in force since Reconstruction. The white leaders of the convention were clear about their intentions. “We came here to exclude the Negro,” declared the convention president. Because of the 15th Amendment, they could not ban blacks from voting. Instead, they wrote into the state constitution a number of voter restrictions making it difficult for most blacks to register to vote.

First, the new constitution required an annual poll tax, which voters had to pay for two years before the election. This was a difficult economic burden to place on black Mississippians, who made up the poorest part of the state’s population. Many simply couldn’t pay it.

But the most formidable voting barrier put into the state constitution was the literacy test. It required a person seeking to register to vote to read a section of the state constitution and explain it to the county clerk who processed voter registrations. This clerk, who was always white, decided whether a citizen was literate or not.

The literacy test did not just exclude the 60 percent of voting-age black men (most of them ex-slaves) who could not read. It excluded almost all black men, because the clerk would select complicated technical passages for them to interpret. By contrast, the clerk would pass whites by picking simple sentences in the state constitution for them to explain.

Mississippi also enacted a “grandfather clause” that permitted registering anyone whose grandfather was qualified to vote before the Civil War. Obviously, this benefited only white citizens. The “grandfather clause” as well as the other legal barriers to black voter registration worked. Mississippi cut the percentage of black voting-age men registered to vote from more than 90 percent during Reconstruction to less than 6 percent in 1892. These measures were copied by most of the other states in the South.

The Winds of Change

As a result of intimidation, violence, and racial discrimination in state voting laws, a mere 3 percent of voting-age black men and women in the South were registered to vote in 1940. In Mississippi, less than 1 percent were registered. Most blacks who did vote lived in the larger cities of the South.

By not having the power of the ballot, African Americans in the South had little influence in their communities. They did not hold elected offices. They had no say in how much their taxes would be or what laws would be passed. They had little, if any, control over local police, courts, or public schools. They, in effect, were denied their rights as citizens.

Attempts to change this situation were met with animosity and outright violence. But in the 1950s, the civil rights movement developed. Facing enormous hostility, black people in the South organized to demand their rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. They launched voter registration drives in many Southern communities. This set the stage for great changes in the 1960s, but not without tragedy. Medgar Evers, the black veteran stopped by a white mob from voting, became a civil rights leader in his native Mississippi. Because of his civil rights activities, he was shot and killed in front of his home by a white segregationist in 1963.

For Discussion and Writing

What legal devices did Southern states use to exclude most of their black citizens from voting? What other methods were used to stop blacks from voting?
What was unfair about the way literacy tests were used for voter registration in the South from 1890 to 1965?
What were the consequences to African Americans of being excluded from voting in the segregated South?

For Further Reading

McMillen, Neil R. Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

Bond, Julian & Juan Williams. Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965. New York: Penguin Books, 1988.

A C T I V I T Y

Who Should Not Vote?

All states have some voting restrictions. Are they necessary? Below are five traditional restrictions on the right to vote. Form small groups to decide whether your state should retain each of these restrictions. Before making a decision on each restriction, the group should discuss and write answers to these two questions:

The struggle over voting rights in the United States dates all the way back to the founding of the nation. The original U.S. Constitution did not define voting rights for citizens, and until 1870, only white men were allowed to vote. Two constitutional amendments changed that. The Fifteenth Amendment (ratified in 1870) extended voting rights to men of all races. However, this amendment was not enough because African Americans were still denied the right to vote by state constitutions and laws, poll taxes, literacy tests, the “grandfather clause,” and outright intimidation. The Twenty-fourth Amendment (ratified in 1964) partly addressed this injustice by prohibiting the use of poll taxes in federal elections. In addition to these constitutional amendments, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 secured voting rights for adult citizens of all races and genders in the form of federal laws that enforced the amendments. Continue reading about Black Americans and the vote below, or jump to another section on this page.

20th Century Leaders and Voting Organizations

Like the Fifteenth Amendment, the Twenty-fourth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act emerged from their historical contexts, in this case the civil rights movement and voting rights initiatives of the 1960s. The push for voting rights was led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and by activists Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis, Diane Nash, Ella Baker, Bob Moses, Stokely Carmichael, and others. In 1963, SNCC organized Freedom Vote, a mock election among southern Black people that was designed to encourage these citizens to register to vote. In 1964, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a coalition of the Mississippi chapters of the four aforementioned organizations, coordinated the Freedom Summer Project, which worked to register Black people in Mississippi to vote. This project was powered by local activists and by over one thousand college student volunteers (most of whom were white) from the northern and western regions of the U.S.

Voting rights activists faced violent opposition in the South, both from law enforcement and white residents. Many Freedom Summer activists were arrested by local police officers, some were beaten, and three young men (James Chaney of Mississippi and Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman of New York City) were killed in June 1964 by the Ku Klux Klan. In addition, dozens of homes, businesses, and churches were destroyed. Another violent incident occurred on March 7, 1965 when hundreds of protestors, led by John Lewis of SNCC and Rev. Hosea Williams of SCLC, marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge leading out of Selma, Alabama while marching to Montgomery to demand voting rights and civil rights for African Americans. The marchers were blocked by state troopers and deputized white men, who then attacked the marchers with clubs and tear gas.

John Lewis, Hosea Williams, Albert Turner and Bob Mants Leading Marchers over the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday (NAID 16899023)

Grass Roots Organization and Modern Action

What's in this Portal

The portal for Black Americans and the Vote highlights many of the National Archives holdings that relate to the long struggle for equality in voting rights. Through this portal, users can explore the historic events, individuals, organizations, and the Federal government’s actions to both limit and expand access to the vote. The National Archives holds records relating to mass voting actions such as Freedom Summer, as well as records about the organizations and people that championed voting access for Black Americans. This subject portal is not meant to be exhaustive, but to provide guidance to researchers interested in African Americans and the vote in relation to the Federal government.