How were black Southerners disfranchised?

Voting was important to the blacks. If they had have been allowed to vote, they could voted for someone who would have changed their situation and provided equal opportunities. It is vital that you mention this and show that you know how significant voting was.

They were forbidden from voting in many ways:

The Grandfather Clause

If you could prove your grandfather had been allowed to vote before reconstruction

Poll tax

Literacy test

They had to pass a test that even Harvard students would have studied with. Obviously as they had no education/no education of a good standard, they would never pass this. As well as the fact that the test was deliberately hard.

Violence

Lynching from the KKK

Fraud

The votes were deliberately not counted. For example, the whites would say that the donkeys ate them.

US Court Hierarchy

• US Supreme Court

• Federal District Court

• Each state had its own Supreme Court

• Each state has many courts

The exam question we were given in class was:

TO WHAT EXTENT WAS THE SUPREME COURT RESPONSIBLE FOR JIM CROW?

We will now look at court cases that were taken to the Supreme Court to evaluate this.

The notes on the cases are brief and you are welcome to look into them in detail in your own time, but know that in the exam, you should now what happened as a result and be able to talk about it rather than just tell the story.

Plessy vs Ferguson, 1896

An African American called Homer Plessy refused to sit in a Jim Crow car which broke Louisiana law.

The case was taken to the Supreme Court, who upheld the Jim Crow laws, saying that the laws of segregation 'implies merely a legal distinction between whites and blacks and did not actually go against the 14th Amendment'

The 14th Amendment referred to citizenship and as they ruled that segregation did not go against it, it suggested that the blacks were not considered citizens. Remember this for the essay.

This was the first case taken to the Supreme Court and set a precedence. This meant that for all future cases (such as the next one we will look at) , they would refer to the Plessy vs Ferguson and say that because of their decision, segregation was legal.

Williams vs Mississippi-1896

There was violence because blacks were prevented from voting by the whites, and so a compromise had to be reached.

They said that all illiterate black voters were to be disfranchised, meaning that in fact, all blacks were being banned from voting.

However, after the death of Marsh Cook, a white American who stood up for black rights and the agreement to continue disfranchising from Isaiah Montgomery, a literacy test was brought.