THE SEGREGATED SOUTH ★^663“respectable” behavior as part and parcel of the struggle for equal rights. They
aided poor families, offered lessons in home life and childrearing, and bat-
tled gambling and drinking in black communities. Some poor blacks resented
middle- class efforts to instruct them in proper behavior. But by insisting on the
right of black women to be considered as “respectable” as their white counter-
parts, the women reformers challenged the racial ideology that consigned all
blacks to the status of degraded second- class citizens.
For nearly a generation after the end of Reconstruction, despite fraud and
violence, black southerners continued to cast ballots. In some states, the Repub-
lican Party remained competitive. In Virginia, a coalition of mostly black
Republicans and anti- Redeemer Democrats formed an alliance known as the
Readjuster movement (the name derived from their plan to scale back, or “read-
just,” the state debt). They governed the state between 1879 and 1883. Tennessee
and Arkansas also witnessed the formation of biracial political coalitions that
challenged Democratic Party rule. Despite the limits of the Populists’ interracial
alliance, the threat of a biracial political insurgency frightened the ruling Dem-
ocrats and contributed greatly to the disenfranchisement movement.
The Elimination of Black Voting
Between 1890 and 1906, every southern state enacted laws or constitutional
provisions meant to eliminate the black vote. Since the Fifteenth Amendment
prohibited the use of race as a qualification for the suffrage, how were such
measures even possible? Southern legislatures drafted laws that on paper
appeared color- blind, but that were actually designed to end black voting. The
most popular devices were the poll tax (a fee that each citizen had to pay in
order to retain the right to vote), literacy tests, and the requirement that a pro-
spective voter demonstrate to election officials an “understanding” of the state
constitution. Six southern states also adopted a grandfather clause, exempting
from the new requirements descendants of persons eligible to vote before the
Civil War (when only whites, of course, could cast ballots in the South). The
racial intent of the grandfather clause was so clear that the Supreme Court in
1915 invalidated such laws for violating the Fifteenth Amendment. The other
methods of limiting black voting, however, remained on the books.
Some white leaders presented disenfranchisement as a “good govern-
ment” measure— a means of purifying politics by ending the fraud, violence,
and manipulation of voting returns regularly used against Republicans and
Populists. But ultimately, as a Charleston newspaper declared, the aim was to
make clear that the white South “does not desire or intend ever to include black
men among its citizens.” Although election officials often allowed whites who
did not meet the new qualifications to register, numerous poor and illiterate
How did the liberties of blacks after 1877 give way to legal segregation across the South?