Existing comment:
Freedoms Denied:
However, in the years after the war, whites used terrorism and the courts to force African Americans away from voting booths and other public places. States excluded black voters by enacting literacy tests, poll taxes, elaborate registration systems, and whites-only Democratic Party primaries. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld these measures. The laws proved very effective. In Mississippi, fewer than 9,000 of the 147,000 voting-age African Americans were registered after 1890. In Louisiana, where more than 130,000 black voters had been registered in 1896, the number had plummeted to 1,342 by 1904. |