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Jim Crow and More: Delays in Effective Emancipation for Blacks

© Kathryn Morse

1890-1954

Near the end of the 19th century, some black Americans were advancing out of the practical slavery of sharecropping. More blacks were learning to read and write and were learning trades that made it possible for them to become skilled and valuable laborers able to market their skills. Sharecropping was failing as a system to keep blacks as a whole in what was regarded as their proper place by some whites. Where the agricultural economy was failing some whites determined to use the law to prevent the advancement of their black neighbors.

Racial segregation had been a custom, but became Louisiana law in 1890. That year the Louisiana legislature passed the now infamous "separate but equal" law which was challenged but upheld by the U. S. Supreme Court in its Plessy v. Ferguson ruling. The Supreme Court's blessing of the law opened the floodgate to numerous similar laws throughout the South and permanently changed Southern culture and business. The original Louisiana law applied particularly to railroad facilities, but the principle was applied to all public facilities and private businesses serving the public.

Louisiana marital laws were also changed during this period. In 1894 marriage between blacks and whites was forbidden. Later, as if to correct an oversight, blacks were also forbidden to marry Indians. And cohabitation became a felony to discourage cohabitation by those wanting to avoid the marriage restrictions.

In 1894, Governor Murphy Foster (grandfather of current Louisiana Governor Mike Foster) suggested that it was time to disenfranchise "the mass of ignorance, vice and venality without any proprietary [property] interest in the state." The difficulties the state Democratic party experienced during the 1896 election convinced party officials that relying on the party loyalty of voting commissioners to get the desired election results was no longer a dependable method of election control. Governor Murphy Foster's ideas about elitism came together with ideas about control and the state adopted a new constitution in 1898 to bring forth a new era of voting restrictions.

The 1898 constitution restricted voting privileges in these significant ways:

• Voters had to prove that they could read and write in their native language, OR

• Prove a property assessment of at least $300. Since assessments are generally lower than actual property value, then they must have had property worth several times $300.

• A "grandfather clause" allowed for white men to register if they could prove that their father or grandfather had voted in Louisiana before 1867. The 31 year time period made family voting records almost impossible to obtain.