Mississippi Plan

The Mississippi Plan of 1875 was developed as part of the white insurgency during the Reconstruction Era in the Southern United States. It was devised by the Democratic Party in that state to overthrow the Republican Party in Mississippi by means of organized threats of violence and suppression or purchase of the black vote. Democrats wanted to regain political control of the legislature and governor's office. Their success led to similar plans being adopted by white Democrats in South Carolina and other majority-black states.

To end election violence and formalize the exclusion of freedmen from politics, the Democrat-dominated state legislature passed a new constitution in 1890, which effectively disenfranchised and disarmed most blacks by erecting barriers to voter registration and firearms ownership. Disenfranchisement was enforced through terrorist violence and fraud and eventually, most black people stopped trying to register or vote. They did not regain the power to vote until the late 1960s after federal legislation was passed to prevent voter suppression.

During Reconstruction, former slaves were granted citizenship and the vote by the 14th and 15th Amendments. The consequences of this were far-reaching and almost immediate, as freedmen eagerly registered and flooded the polls. Of the 100 delegates to the constitutional convention that drafted the Reconstruction document, only 16 were black.

In Mississippi's 1874 election, the Republican Party carried a 30,000 majority in what had been a Democratic Party stronghold when only whites voted. Republicans took the governor's office and some legislative seats, but blacks never held a majority of seats in any of the state legislatures, although that was their proportion of the population. Freedmen and other blacks (some free blacks had migrated from the North), were elected to many local offices and 10 of 36 seats in the state legislature. (They comprised a large majority of the population and voted for white Republicans as well as blacks.)

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