The 'Mississippi Plan' to keep Blacks from voting in 1890: 'We came here to exclude the Negro'

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:
Tonya Pinkins
@tonyapinkins
The ‘Mississippi Plan’ to keep Blacks from voting in 1890: ‘We came here to exclude the Negro’ https://washingtonpost.com/history/2021/05/01/mississippi-constitution-voting-rights-jim-crow/?tid=ss_tw… Today the South has risen again

The ‘Mississippi Plan’ to keep Blacks from voting in 1890: ‘We came here to exclude the Negro’
More than 130 years after Mississippi imposed a poll tax and literacy test to keep Blacks from voting, President Biden others warn that Jim Crow-style disenfranchisement is resurfacing in efforts by...
washingtonpost.com
7:52 AM · May 4, 2021

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/05/01/mississippi-constitution-voting-rights-jim-crow/


On a hot August day in 1890, delegates gathered at Mississippi’s Capitol Building in Jackson to begin work on a new state constitution. The overriding topic was the “suffrage question.”

The convention’s president, Solomon Saladin Calhoon, a White county judge, put the voting issue bluntly. “Let’s tell the truth if it bursts the bottom of the universe,” he said. “We came here to exclude the Negro. Nothing short of this will answer.”

Delegates eventually adopted a literacy test and a poll tax geared to suppress the Black vote in a state with a Black majority. The “Mississippi Plan” became the model throughout the South, part of a raft of racially oppressive Jim Crow laws that ended Reconstruction.

President Joe Biden and others warn that Jim Crow-style disenfranchisement is resurfacing in efforts by Republican legislatures in Georgia, Texas and other states to restrict voting. The moves are in response to former President Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Republican Gov. Brian Kemp denies Georgia’s new law is discriminatory, but many will disproportionately affect areas where large turnouts by African American voters in 2020 helped Biden and two Democratic senators win.

Mississippi’s 1890 convention sought to find a way around the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which gave African Americans the vote.

*snip*

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R