How did Jim Crow laws undermine the promise of the Fifteenth Amendment?
About this video
After the 15th Amendment, African American men voted and registered at high rates, sometimes over 80%, and kept voting through the 1880s. Disenfranchisement came slowly, taking root after Mississippi's 1890 constitution, and the Supreme Court in Giles v. Harris (1903) refused to help. Congress then also stopped using its power to throw out discriminatory elections, leaving Black Southerners without support.
You'll be able to
- explain why the end of Reconstruction was gradual rather than sudden.
- describe how Giles v. Harris affected African Americans' voting rights.
- explain how both the courts and Congress stopped protecting Black voters.
Key words
- disenfranchise
- To take away someone's right to vote.
- Jim Crow
- Laws and practices in the South that segregated and disenfranchised African Americans.
- Giles v. Harris
- A 1903 Supreme Court case that refused to stop Alabama's disenfranchising constitution.
- Article I, Section 5
- The part of the Constitution letting each house of Congress judge the elections of its members.
Transcript
The 15th Amendment, at least initially, it was challenged, but at least initially, in some areas, you did see African American voting in registration and turnout north of 80%. African American men were very active in exercising their hard fought and new political rights. I think it's important to understand that this was like a slow and steady march towards disenfranchising African Americans.
It didn't happen suddenly. I think in school, we're taught that when troops were withdrawn from the South after the 1876 election, that was the ends of reconstruction. It didn't actually happen that abruptly. African Americans continued to vote in large numbers across much of the South throughout the 1880s and 1890s. Really in 1890, when Mississippi amended its Constitution to disenfranchise African Americans, other Southern states followed suit. That's when you saw Jim Crow really take root in the South and African Americans have difficulty exercising their right to vote. Now, they didn't go quietly. There were a number of cases throughout the 1890s and early 1900s where they challenged these disenfranchising Constitutions. The problem is that you had a Supreme Court that was
completely unsympathetic to the plight of African Americans in the South. Now, one case in particular, a case called Giles V. Harris was decided in 1903 by the Supreme Court, where the Supreme Court looked at the Alabama Constitution, acknowledged that it was disenfranchising, but said, there's nothing we can do about it. It became pretty clear at that point that African Americans could not turn to the court as a vehicle for trying to vindicate their rights.
Now, it wasn't that Giles was the first case where the Supreme Court made it difficult for African Americans to vindicate their voting rights, but it is one of the most famous in part because the Court was just so absolute in doing nothing. Congress quickly followed suit. Congress under Article I Section 5, has the authority to judge the elections of its members.
Throughout the 1890s and early 1900s, it had used this authority to set aside elections in which there was rampant racial discrimination in voting and violence and fraud. It wasn't that Congress was powerless, and people running for these seats recognized that this was a way to get at some of the racial discrimination in voting, even if the courts were unsympathetic. But after Giles, Congress also decided that it wouldn't use its power in this way anymore. Essentially, African Americans in the South no longer had Congress, and they had long before lost the support of the courts.
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