Measures against voting

• In theory, African Americans could vote, as a result of the changes made from 1866. But each state was free to establish its own qualifications.
• Southern states were able to introduce restrictions such as literacy tests which were deliberately intended to exclude African Americans.
• The most outrageous were the ‘grandfather’ clauses, which said that if a man’s family has voted before, then that man could vote. African Americans were excluded by this clause.
• Mississippi began the process of setting stringent voter registration tests in 1890 and other states followed. The 13,000 African American voters in Louisiana in 1896 had fallen to 5000 in 1900.
• If registration did not stop them voting, then violence and intimidation could finish the job. A key element in ending the civil rights of African Americans was the lack of action taken over violence and lynching.
• By the 1890s, on average, an African American was brutally killed every two days.
• Violence was common in the days of slavery; it escalated during the Civil War when African Americans fighting for the Union were often tortured and killed; it grew in the aftermath of the Civil War, and, without federal forces to suppress it, became a regular way of life well into the 1950s.
• Congress had played a major role in extending civil rights whereas state governments had played a major role in restricting and weakening those rights.