Disenfranchisement after the Reconstruction Era

Disenfranchisement after the Reconstruction Era in the United States of America was based on a series of laws, new constitutions, and practices in the South that were deliberately used to prevent black citizens from registering to vote and voting. These measures were enacted by former Confederate states at the turn of the 20th century. Their actions defied the intent of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1870, which was intended to protect the suffrage of freedmen after the American Civil War.

Considerable violence and fraud had accompanied the later elections during Reconstruction, as the white Democrats used paramilitary groups, beginning in the 1870s, to suppress black Republican voting and turn Republicans out of office. After regaining control of the state legislatures, Democrats were alarmed by a late 19th-century alliance between Republicans and Populists that cost them some elections. In North Carolina’s Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 (long called a race riot by whites), white Democrats conducted a coup d'etat of city government, the only one in United States history. They overturned a duly elected biracial government headed by a white mayor, and widely attacked the black community, destroying lives and property. Many blacks left the city permanently.

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