Voter rights were the main point of contention for the delegates at the 1868 and 1890 constitutional conventions. Arguments about who could vote stemmed from Mississippi’s refusal to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment. The Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed the right to vote to Black men, but the 1890 Constitution’s requirements to qualify made it nearly impossible to exercise their right.
Adopting a new state constitution was required for Confederate states to rejoin the Union. The required majority of registered voters passed the referendum for a constitutional convention. Black freedmen voted in large numbers. Most Mississippi newspapers, sympathetic to White conservatives, painted the convention in scathing language, calling the convention, "the Jackson Monstrosity" and other racially-charged names.
Economic independence earned some Black leaders the ability to be more politically outspoken. Black landowners, railroad employees, professionals, business owners, and federal employees—mainly in larger communities— tended to have a greater degree of independence. While they could still be pressured, they were better able to withstand economic intimidation.
From 1867 to 1869, Mississippians elected 13 Black state senators and 102 representatives. In the 1870s, Alexander K. Davis served as lieutenant governor, Rev. James D. Lynch and James Hill each as secretary of state, and John R. Lynch and Isaac D. Shadd as Speakers of the House. At a time when US senators were elected by state legislators, Mississippi sent Hiram Rhodes Revels (1870-1871) and Blanche Kelso Bruce (1875-1880) to Washington.
Black leaders around the country called for federal laws to ban lynching. They labeled lynching a tool of repression. Holly Springs native Ida B. Wells published numerous pamphlets documenting the injustice of lynching. In 1917, US Rep. Leonidas C. Dyer introduce a bill to outlaw lynching, but it was killed in the Senate by a filibuster. Similar bills failed to pass through the 1930s.
White supremacists sealed their control in a compromise where they backed President Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the removal of federal troops from Mississippi. In 1875, legislators created the First Mississippi Plan, assigning voter registration to White registrars and redrawing districts to favor Whites. Klan intimidation became commonplace, causing a drastic decline in Black voters.
Black communities grew from the ashes of the Civil War. In Jackson, Biloxi, Vicksburg, and elsewhere, separate Black quarters, business districts, schools, and churches sprang from the desire and need to be independent. Though a small Black middle class prospered by serving Black customers, the experience of American culture was colored by the lens of racism.
To build Mound Bayou, Booker T. Washington—one of the most well-known activists of the time—raised funds from Northern supporters such as Andrew Carnegie, Collis P. Huntingdon, and Julius Rosenwald. By 1907, Mound Bayou was a thriving community and expanded to include 13 stores, six churches, three cotton gins, and a newspaper.
The KKK formed after the Civil War, recruiting Whites who were bitter over the war and opposed to federal interference in the South. They often threatened Black voters and sympathetic Whites until the Enforcement Act was passed in 1870. After 1871, the activity declined. In 1915, D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation romanticized the Klan as heroes, and a new wave of membership began. Black, Jewish, and Catholic people quickly became targets of violence.
The term lynching applies to anyone taken outside the law and killed by a mob. From 1877 to 1950, Mississippi ranked first in nearly every category—most lynchings, most multiple lynchings, most per capita, most female victims, most victims taken from police custody, most lynchings without arrest or conviction of mob leaders, and most public support for vigilantism.