Question

Discuss how Democrats disenfranchised African Americans with the
Election Reform Act of 1891.
Explain how these laws prevented African Americans from voting.
What other group was affected and why?

Answer 1

Answer:

Disenfranchisement after the Reconstruction Era[1] in the United States of America, especially in Southern states, was based on a series of laws, new constitutions, and practices in the South that were deliberately used to prevent black citizens from registering to vote and voting. These measures were enacted by the former Confederate states at the turn of the 20th century, and by Oklahoma when it gained statehood in 1907,[2] although not by the former border slave states. Their actions were designed to thwart the objective of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1870, which sought to protect the suffrage of freedmen after the American Civil War.

During the later elections of Reconstruction era, beginning in the 1870s, white Democrats used violence by paramilitary groups, as well as fraud, to suppress black Republican voters and turn Republicans out of office. After regaining control of the state legislatures, Democrats were alarmed by a late 19th-century alliance between Republicans and Populists that cost them some elections. After achieving control of state legislatures, white Democrats added to previous efforts and achieved widespread disenfranchisement by law: from 1890 to 1908, Southern state legislatures passed new constitutions, constitutional amendments, and laws that made voter registration and voting more difficult, especially when administered by white staff in a discriminatory way. They succeeded in disenfranchising most of the black citizens, as well as many poor whites in the South, and voter rolls dropped dramatically in each state. The Republican Party was nearly eliminated in the region for decades, and the Democrats established one-party control throughout the southern states