Jim Crow Constitutions Leaders of the “straight-out movement” pushed for new state constitutions in order to reduce black power permanently and in some cases, eliminate legislative gerrymandering that had given Bourbons disproportionate power. In 1890, Mississippi enacted a new constitution with voting restrictions that were racially neutral on their face but effectively prevented almost all blacks (and some whites) from voting. South Carolina workers and farmers elected one of their own, Ben Tillman, to the governorship in 1890, and five years later Tillmanites enacted a new, “straight-out” constitution that effectively eliminated the black vote. Most other Deep South states soon followed suit.
"We are told the law of injustice will roll on until it reaches its climax, and then a reaction is bound to come.” - Robert Anderson, one of six black delegates to South Carolina constitutional convention (1895) Jim Crow Laws
| “I insist that the federal government, the conqueror and public enemy of my country, has injected into the social organization and political body 500,000 savages, who, whatever their rights, are not fit to exercise the powers of government. … They are to be governed as every race of paupers are governed: by those who own the property and who given them bread, and just the same as the red man is governed.” – Robert Toombs, in 1877 Georgia constitutional convention “They [blacks] are in our power, and they have yielded us their suffrages for the time, and … it is for the people of Georgia to say what you will do for them from a sense of justice and duty.” - _ Wofford, in 1877 Georgia constitutional convention “There is in the white man an inherited capacity for
government, which is wholly wanting in the Negro.” - __Knox, Alabama constitutional
convention (1901)
“[W]e are met in convention openly, boldly, without any pretense of secrecy, to announce that it is our purpose, as far as we may, without coming in conflict with the United States Constitution, to put such safeguards around this ballot in future, to so restrict the suffrage and circumscribe it, that this infamy [black suffrage] can never come about again … [We must] reduce [blacks’] voting strength so that there will never be enough of them to do more than to put either one white faction or the other in control of the government.” – Benjamin Tillman, South Carolina constitutional convention (1895) |
EMPIRE OF LAWS - The Legal History of the 50 American States > 6. DEEP SOUTH LEGAL HISTORY > 6.5 Deep South (1877-1920): Bourbons, Straight-Outs, Jim Crow and Southern Progressivism >