After the Civil War, Confederates were banned from voting. This left northerners an African Americans to hold office and vote. Democrats disapproved negro-domination, many of whom were white southerners. They were enraged and took action. In Document 1b: “A White Man’s Day.
Blacks fell subject to discrimination and harassment again. Voting deterrents were at new high, with violence keeping blacks at home and fearful to go near the polls. Jim Crow laws were welcomed to the south and it seemed when African American to a step forward in American history, they were placed two step back. Eventually blacks were extinguished from state legislature in every southern state and positive colored influence came to a
While these small successes started to seem as if freedmen were finally gaining back rights, they would soon be erased as white citizens in the South started to work around them. Long-term policies such as literacy tests and poll taxes were put in place to try and prevent Black Americans from getting involved in the government. The Louisiana Literacy Test gave voters a very limited amount of time to complete, what seemed to white men to be a simple task, of finding letters in the alphabet or circling certain numbers (Document G). This was a very difficult and almost impossible job for new freedmen who had never been allowed an education before. Those who were able to pass the test and vote were then harshly threatened and mocked.
While a literacy test, elaborate registration systems, and a poll tax do not appear to be meant to eliminate a race from voting, these factors were designed to exclude colored voters, and it was successful. For example, in Mississippi, fewer than 9,000 of the 147,000 voting- age African Americans were registered after 1890. (Whites Only; Jim Crow in America). The Jim Crow laws also violated the fourteenth amendment. “, Anyone born or naturalized in the United States is a citizen and that “, no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the united States, nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person the equal protection of the law”.
Fleming’s article, ‘"We Shall Overcome": Tennessee and the Civil Rights Movement,’ was the right for blacks to vote. Even though the blacks had received the right to vote after WWII, many white Tennesseans had found reasons to stop the black people from being able to cast their votes. These included clauses, poll taxes, and even literacy testing. The threat of violence was also used to stop black citizens from voting. Some Tennesseans knew that the violence and unfair laws were something that needed to be changed.
Whites used literacy tests such as those similar to Alabama 's in order to keep as many blacks from registering to vote. Many of the blacks during this time weren’t well educated having the literacy tests with words that they could not understand gave the whites the upper hand. A large part that played into making literacy tests were because of fear. The Whites feared that if blacks were able to exercise their constitutional right to vote they would have the ability to change the government that the whites built. The blacks would be able to voice their own opinion and change laws and regulations such as those implemented for segregation.
After the Civil War in 1865, Republicans in Congress introduced a series of Constitutional Amendments to secure civil and political rights for African Americans. The right that gave black men the privilege to vote provoked the greatest controversy, especially in the North. In 1867, Congress passed the law and African American men began voting in the South, but in the North, they kept denying them this basic right (“African Americans,” 2016). Republicans feared that they would eventually lose control of Congress on the Democrats and thought that their only solution was to include the black men votes. Republicans assumed that all African American votes would go to all the Republicans in the North, as they did in the South and by increasing the
In the Jim Crow context, the presidential election of 1912 was steeply slanted against the interests of black Americans. A majority of African Americans are still settling in the South, where they are currently facing stringent restrictions so they could not vote at all. While
After the end of the Civil War, Black Codes were created by Southern states to make it illegal for African Americans to vote, testify in court against a white citizen and serve on juries. The ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment ended the Black Codes but the Southern states found a way around this. They used literacy tests and poll taxes to prevent blacks from voting. They also created a grandfather clause. It stated that anyone whose father or grandfather had been eligible before 1867 has the right to vote but before that time, slaves didn’t have the right to vote.
Through Jim Crow, the whites recreated the racial hierarchy of the antebellum period. Jim Crow effectively made blacks second-class citizens in the eye of the law, with voting laws that disenfranchised against poorly-educated and under-employed blacks by requiring literary tests and poll taxes, and which discriminated against blacks through the “separate but equal” doctrine. This codified racism was a leftover from the Civil War, in which whites believed that blacks were incapable of running society, businesses, or exercising political rights. In one study of a community in Mississippi, one historian argues that newspapers warned readers that “idle darkies” were lazy, lacked morals, and threatened white civilization (Oshinsky 18). These reasons were also used during the antebellum era to justify slavery and this continuing mentality demonstrates a southern lifestyle that was immune to change.
This act added a literacy test for black to be able to vote. This was the beginning of the suppression of former slaves and
This law reinforced the notion that white people were superior to Black people in the eyes of the law, thus creating a systemic issue of racial inequality in the Reconstruction era. By banning Black people from voting in 1870, the Florida Black codes also set a major path for racism during Reconstruction. They stated, “No freedman, free Negro, or mulatto shall have the right to vote at any election provided for by the laws of this State.” By banning Black people from voting in 1870, the Florida Black Codes made it clear that African Americans still did not have the same rights as white people, even after emancipation. Not only did this deny Black people the right to vote and participate in their own government, it also served as a powerful reminder of the oppression they had suffered and continued to suffer.
But, when these officials were elected to Congress, they passed the “black codes” and thus the relations between the president and legislators became worst (Schriefer, Sivell and Arch R1). These so called “Black Codes” were “a series of laws to deprive blacks of their constitutional rights” that they were enacted mainly by Deep South legislatures. Black Codes differ from a state to another but they were stricter in the Deep South as they were sometimes irrationally austere. (Hazen 30) Furthermore, with the emergence of organizations such as the Red Shirts and the White League with the rise of the Conservative White Democrats’ power, efforts to prevent Black Americans from voting were escalating (Watts 247), even if the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S constitution that gave the Blacks the right to vote had been ratified in 1870.
In order to vote, citizens had to do some things before They had to do Poll Taxes, in which required a person to pay before an election occurred so that they could vote. Anyone that paid the fee was eligible to pass the Poll Tax. Literacy tests had to be completed too, which was a requirement to prove that their education was high enough to vote. The test was given to anyone who wanted to vote. But for the African Americans, they had made the test where is was like impossible for them to get the answers right.
Even though the government adopted the Voting Rights Act in 1965, African Americans’ suffrages were still restricted because of southern states’ obstructions. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was important for blacks to participate in political elections, but before this act was passed, there were several events led to its proposal. The government gave African Americans’ the right to vote by passing the 15th Amendment, but in the Southern States, blacks’ suffrages were limited by grandfather clauses, “poll taxes, literacy tests, and other bureaucratic restrictions” (ourdocuments.gov). As times went on, most African Americans couldn’t register their votes.
