Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908

Abstract

Taking the vote from the black man was accomplished throughout the South in the last decade of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth centuries. The events are familiar. Beginning with Mississippi in 1890, disfranchisement went forward in the name of white supremacy. The result of what Michael Perman refers to as “ruthless acts of political surgery” was the consignment of blacks to a status of political irrelevancy. Considerable scholarship recently has been devoted to the political banishment of the black man. Still, Struggle for Mastery represents the first full-length study of the topic tying the movement together regionally. Although it was a southern phenomenon, stripping blacks of the vote was a strategy resorted to for different reasons from state to state. It is accurate to say that an overt racism accounted for eliminating blacks from the voting rolls in Louisiana and Georgia. Significantly different motivations in those two states are also clear, as are those in other states. Some southern disfran-chisers feared the black vote as potentially dangerous since it might aid insurgent movements that challenged the status quo. In a confessional mood, Alabama Democrats from the state's black belt admitted to using black votes to count out the opposition in the past. For them, at least partially, disfranchisement made for cleaner elections and consciences. Whatever the circumstances, the results were the same. The Fifteenth Amendment was emasculated in a way that would have outraged its Reconstruction framers. One Arkansan succinctly summed up the mind-set. He labeled the amendment “the blackest crime of the nineteenth century.”