A Primer on Reconstruction Voting Rights
Many southern governments passed legislation that reinstated the status quo of the Antebellum era. Two of the most prominent were South Carolina and Mississippi, who passed laws known as Black Codes to regulate black behavior. While they granted African Americans rights according to the 14th and 15th Amendments, they also denied other fundamental rights. Mississippi's vagrant law required all freed African American men to carry papers proving they had means of employment. Section 1 of the 14th states:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.[1]
However, the Mississippi 1865 Black code Vagrancy law states in the second section:
Be it further enacted, that all freedmen, free Negroes, and mulattoes in this state over the age of eighteen years found on the second Monday in January 1866, or thereafter, with no lawful employment or business, or found unlawfully assembling themselves together either in the day or nighttime, and all white persons so assembling with freedmen, free Negroes, or mulattoes, or usually associating with freedmen, free Negroes, or mulattoes on terms of equality, or living in adultery or fornication with a freedwoman, free Negro, or mulatto, shall be deemed vagrants; and, on conviction thereof, shall be fined in the sum of not exceeding, in the case of a freedman, free Negro, or mulatto, 150, and a white man, $200, and imprisoned at the discretion of the court, the free Negro not exceeding ten days, and the white man not exceeding six months….[2]
The Mississippi state government acknowledged the first part of the 14th but ignored the second entirely.
The 15th Amendment states that:
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.[3]
In theory, African-Americans were allowed to vote – but in practice, a considerable number of totally unfair obstacles were placed in their way. One of the most significant obstacles to people being able to vote was the voter registration test. After taking the test, it was clear that I would not have been qualified to vote in an election. I scored a consistent zero on the test, not due to a lack of competence, but due to the instruction's confusion. This is an unfair way of measuring college-educated people's competence to vote, much less underprivileged peoples who have not had educational opportunities. The reason that these laws lasted for so long is a simple one: the Dixie Democrats who made these laws wanted to stay in power. If African Americans could vote freely, their power would be in jeopardy.
[1] “14th Ammendment,“Cornell Law School, https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv#
[2] “Mississippi Black Code, 1865,” American Yawp, https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/reconstruction/mississippi-black-code-1865/
[3] “15th Ammendment,” Cornell Law School, https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxv