From “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: and the Path to a Shared American Future” by Robert P. Jones
The most powerful tool for restoring white supremacy was the creation of the new Mississippi Constitution of 1890, which implemented a series of measures aimed at stemming the power of Black voters, such as the poll tax and the literacy test. The new constitution effectively shut the door to political power among Mississippi’s Black citizens, who were already buffeted by violence and intimidation. In 1888, 71 percent of Black males did not vote in the presidential election, but this number rose to nearly 100 percent in 1895. In Bolivar County, nearly equal numbers of Black and white citizens had been summoned for jury duty in 1890, but no Black citizens were called by the early 1990s. In Lanterns on the Levee, William Alexander Percy, a lawyer, planter, and poet who was born in Greenville in 1885, openly described his father’s Redemption generation as the men who sought to “protect the country from overflow…bore the brunt of the Delta’s fight against scalawaggery and Negro domination during reconstruction,…stole the ballot boxes which, honestly counted, would have made very county official a Negro…[and] helped to shape the Constitution of 1890, which, in effect and legally disenfranchised the Negro.”