The franchise section of the Mississippi Constitution of 1890 provides an educational qualification and requires payment of all taxes for two years before the election, and it eliminates all ignorant votes regardless of color, who cannot measure up to the test. The educational test is not exacting and only involves the power to read. It places the right to vote as a reward in the reach of the negro, which may be gained by effort. The negroes are slowly qualifying themselves to become voters, and there is no disposition anywhere to prevent them from doing so. If the negro is made to earn his full citizenship by his own efforts it will teach him to take pride in it.
Under the Mississippi system the disfranchisement of a few whites was unavoidable, but it was thought that they should pay the penalty of ignorance rather than endanger the safety of the State. The whites who were disfranchised accepted the situation without a murmur.
Five other Southern states have followed the lead of Mississippi in framing a new organic law for the purpose of disfranchising the ignorant voter. These states are South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana and Virginia. These states adopted the Mississippi plan of an educational qualification, and in addition incorporated in their constitutions the famous "grandfather clause," which prevents the disfranchisement of any whites whatever. That clause of these constitutions provides that all male descendants of those who were voters before 1868, shall continue to exercise the right to vote regardless of the required educational qualifications.
Here are the franchise sections of the Mississippi Constitution of 1890:
SEC. 241.--Every male inhabitant of this State, except idiots, insane persons, and Indians not taxed, who is a citizen of the United States, twenty-one years old and upwards, who has resided in this State two years and one year in the election district, or in the incorporated city or town in which he offers to vote, and who is duly registered as provided in this article, and who has never been convicted of bribery, burglary, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretense, perjury, forgery, embezzlement, or bigamy, and who has paid, on or before the first day of February of the year in which he shall offer to vote, all taxes which may have been legally required of him, and, which he has had an opportunity of paying according to law, for the two preceding years, and who shall produce to officers holding the election satisfactory evidence that he has paid said taxes, is declared to be a qualified elector; but any minister of the gospel in charge of an organized church shall be entitled to vote after six month's residence in the election district, if otherwise qualified.