Library of Congress
When northern newspapers complained about Mississippi’s new state constitution in 1890, charging that new anti-fraud voting restrictions were meant to disenfranchise Black voters, a White state senator defended it, saying, “I deny that the educational test was intended to exclude Negroes from voting . . . That more Negroes would be excluded is true . . . but that is not our fault.”
By 1903, as the “Mississippi Plan” spread throughout the South, Mississippi Gov. James Vardaman was less discreet about it. “There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter,” he said. “Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the n—– from politics.”