664 ★ CHAPTER 17 Freedom’s Boundaries, at Home and Abroad
whites also lost the right to vote, a result welcomed by many planters and urban
reformers. Louisiana, for example, reduced the number of blacks registered
to vote from 130,000 in 1894 to 1,342 a decade later. But 80,000 white voters
also lost the right. Disenfranchisement led directly to the rise of a generation
of southern “demagogues,” who mobilized white voters by extreme appeals to
racism. Tom Watson, who as noted above had tried to forge an interracial Popu-
list coalition in the 1890s, reemerged early in the twentieth century as a power
in Georgia public life through vicious speeches whipping up prejudice against
blacks, Jews, and Catholics.
As late as 1940, only 3 percent of adult black southerners were registered
to vote. The elimination of black and many white voters, which reversed the
nineteenth- century trend toward more inclusive suffrage, could not have
been accomplished without the acquiescence of the North. In 1891, the Senate
defeated a proposal for federal protection of black voting rights in the South.
Apart from the grandfather clause, the Supreme Court gave its approval to dis-
enfranchisement laws. According to the Fourteenth Amendment, any state
that deprived male citizens of the franchise was supposed to lose part of its
representation in Congress. But like much of the Constitution, this provision
was consistently violated so far as African- Americans were concerned. As a
result, southern congressmen wielded far greater power on the national scene
than their tiny electorates warranted. As for blacks, for decades thereafter, they
would regard “the loss of suffrage as being the loss of freedom.”
The Law of Segregation
Along with disenfranchisement, the 1890s saw the widespread imposition
of segregation in the South. Laws and local customs requiring the separation
of the races had numerous precedents. They had existed in many parts of the
pre– Civil War North. Southern schools and many other institutions had been
segregated during Reconstruction. In the 1880s, however, southern race rela-
tions remained unsettled. Some railroads, theaters, and hotels admitted blacks
and whites on an equal basis while others separated them by race or excluded
blacks altogether.
In 1883, in the Civil Rights Cases, the Supreme Court invalidated the Civil
Rights Act of 1875, which had outlawed racial discrimination by hotels, the-
aters, railroads, and other public facilities. The Fourteenth Amendment, the
Court insisted, prohibited unequal treatment by state authorities, not private
businesses. In 1896, in the landmark decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court
gave its approval to state laws requiring separate facilities for blacks and whites.
The case arose in Louisiana, where the legislature had required railroad com-
panies to maintain a separate car or section for black passengers. A Citizens