Georgia’s layered disfranchisement laws erased black voters by 1908.
Evidence
For the first half of the twentieth century, Georgia was dominated by the politics of rural racism. In the decades after Reconstruction, the state steadily robbed blacks of their hard-won right to vote. The first stage of disfranchisement came in 1877, when the legislature installed a cumulative poll tax. Most freedmen, along with many poor whites, proved unable or unwilling to pay all their back taxes. By 1900 only one out of every ten eligible blacks remained on the rolls. That same year, hoping to rid themselves of that remnant of voters as well, the state Democratic Party began to bar blacks from its primaries. With the Populists in disarray and Republicans reduced to numbers of no consequence, a whites-only Democratic primary effectively removed black voters from the political process altogether. As an added precaution, the state assembly pushed through a constitutional amendment in 1908 to establish the additional burdens of a grandfather clause, literacy test, and property qualification. Taken together, this coordinated attack on black Georgians erased their presence from state politics for decades to come. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 54
Categorization
- CANDY: Compact explanation of the four stacked mechanisms Georgia used to strip black voting within thirty years.
- XREF: connects to: Oklahoma’s 1907 statehood symbolically and legally erased Black Native presence. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New American Origin…, 508
Broader Connections
- Oklahoma’s 1907 statehood symbolically and legally erased Black Native presence.
#exemplifies(0.83) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 508