The legal restrictions completed the work which had been begun by intimidation. Under the new constitution of 1890 in Mississippi, only 8615 negroes out of 147,000 of a voting age were registered. In four years, the number registered in Louisiana fell from 127,000 in 1896 to 5300 in 1900. This was the exact result which the advocates of white supremacy desired to attain, and in this they were warmly supported by eminent Democrats in the North. "The white man in the South," said Mr. Bryan in a speech in New York, in 1908, "has disfranchised the negro in self-protection; and there is not a Republican in the North who would not have done the same thing under the same circumstances. The white men of the South are determined that the negro will and shall be disfranchised everywhere it is necessary to prevent the recurrence of the horrors of carpet bag rule."
Several attempts have been made to test the constitutionality of these laws in the Supreme Court of the United States, but that tribunal has been able to avoid coming to a direct decision on the merits of the particular measures--and with a convincing display of legal reasoning. The Constitution of the United States simply states that no citizen shall be deprived of the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, and that the representation of any state in Congress shall be reduced in the proportion to which it deprives adult male citizens of the franchise. The ingenious provisions of the southern constitutions do not deprive the negro of the right to vote on account of his color, but on account of his grandfather, or his inability to expound the constitution, or his poverty. In one of the cases before the Supreme Court, the plaintiff alleged that the Alabama constitution was in fact designed to deprive the negro of the vote, but the Court answered that it could not afford the remedy, that it could not operate the election machinery of the state, and that relief would have to come from the state itself, or from the legislative and political departments of the Federal government.[4]
_Social Discrimination against the Negro_
The whites in the South were even less willing to submit to anything approaching social equality with the negro than they were to accept political equality. Discriminations against the negro in schools, inns, theaters, churches, and other public places had been common in the North both before and after the Civil War, and had received judicial sanction; and it may well be imagined that the southern masters were in no mood, after the War, to be put on the same social plane as their former slaves, and the poor whites were naturally proud of their only possession--a white skin. Knowing full well that this temper prevailed in the South the radical Republicans in Congress had pushed through on March 1, 1875, a second Civil Rights Act designed to establish a certain social equality, so far as that could be done by law.