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Disenfranchisement after the Reconstruction Era deals were a series of laws and other measures deliberately set up in order to prevent black citizens from registering to vote and voting enacted by former Confederate states at the turn of the 20th century in the United States. Their actions defied the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1870, which was intended to protect the suffrage of freedmen after the American Civil War. Considerable violence and fraud had accompanied elections during Reconstruction, as the white Democrats used paramilitary groups from the 1870s to suppress black Republican voting 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. In North Carolina's Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 (long called a race riot by whites), white Democrats conducted a ''coup d'etat'' of city government, the only one in United States history. They overturned a duly elected biracial government and widely attacked the black community, destroying lives and property. Ultimately, 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. This turn of events achieved the intended result of disenfranchising most of the black citizens, as well as many poor whites in the South. The Republican Party was nearly eliminated in the region for decades, until the late 20th century, when a wholesale party realignment took place. Southern Democrats controlled the southern states based on white supremacy. As Congressional apportionment was based on the total population, the Southern white Democrats, the Southern bloc, had tremendous legislative power for decades. Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment could have reduced Congressional representation for states that denied suffrage on racial grounds, but this provision was not enforced, as opponents of the Southern bloc could not overcome their political power.〔(Richard M. Valelly, ''The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement'' University of Chicago Press, 2009, pp. 146-147 )〕 In 1912, Woodrow Wilson gained an Electoral College bonus as a result of this black (Republican) disenfranchisement; he was elected as the first southern President since 1856. He was re-elected in 1916, in a much closer presidential contest. During his first term, Wilson instituted overt racial segregation throughout federal government workplaces and established racial discrimination in hiring. During World War I, American military forces were segregated, with black soldiers poorly trained and equipped; they were often sent on suicide missions. Disenfranchisement had other far-reaching effects in Congress, where the Democratic South gained "about 25 extra seats in Congress for each decade between 1903 and 1953."〔 Also, the Democratic dominance in the South meant that southern Senators and Representatives were entrenched in Congress, gaining seniority privileges and control of chairmanships of important committees, as well as leadership of the national Democratic Party.〔 During the Great Depression, legislation establishing numerous national social programs were passed without the representation of African Americans, leading to gaps in program coverage. In addition, because black Southerners were not listed on local voter rolls, they were automatically excluded from serving jury duty in local courts. Racial segregation in the U.S. military was ended by Executive Order of President Harry S. Truman in 1948, after World War II. Disenfranchisement did not end until after passage of federal civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s, which included authority for the federal government to monitor voter registration practices and elections and enforce constitutional voting rights. ==Background== The American Civil War ended in 1865, marking the start of the Reconstruction era in the eleven former Confederate states. Congress refused to re-admit these states back to the Union until they were reconstructed and freedmen's rights to vote safeguarded. In 1866, ten of these states did not provide suffrage and equal civil rights to freedmen. The exception was Tennessee, which had adopted a new constitution in 1865.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Chronology of Emancipation during the Civil War )〕 Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts, starting in 1867, establishing military districts to oversee the affairs of these states pending reconstruction. During the Reconstruction era, blacks constituted absolute majorities of the populations in Mississippi and South Carolina, were equal to the white population in Louisiana, and represented more than 40% of the population in four other former Confederate states. Southern whites, fearing black domination, resisted the freedmen's exercise of political power.〔Gabriel J. Chin & Randy Wagner, "The Tyranny of the Minority: Jim Crow and the Counter-Majoritarian Difficulty,"(43 ''Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review'' 65 (2008) )〕 In 1867, black men voted for the first time. By the 1868 presidential election, Texas, Mississippi, and Virginia had still not been re-admitted to the Union. Radical Republican Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant was elected president thanks to 700,000 black voters. In February 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified; it was designed to protect blacks' right to vote from infringement by the states. White supremacist paramilitary organizations, allied with Southern Democrats, used intimidation, violence and assassinations to repress blacks and prevent them from exercising their civil rights in elections from 1868 until the mid-1870s. The insurgent Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was formed in 1865 in Tennessee (as a backlash to defeat in the war) and quickly became a powerful secret vigilante group, with chapters across the South. The Klan initiated a campaign of intimidation directed against blacks and sympathetic whites. Their violence included vandalism and destruction of property, physical attacks and assassinations, and lynchings. Teachers who came from the North to teach freedmen were sometimes attacked or intimidated as well. Under the Force Acts of 1870, the KKK was suppressed by federal prosecution. Klan murders led Congress to pass laws to end the violence. In 1870, the strongly Republican Congress passed the Enforcement Acts, imposing penalties for conspiracy to deny black suffrage. The Acts empowered the President to deploy the armed forces to suppress organizations that deprived people of rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Organizations whose members appeared in arms were considered in rebellion against the United States. The President could suspend ''habeas corpus'' under those circumstances. President Grant used these provisions in parts of the Carolinas in late 1871. United States marshals supervised state voter registrations and elections and could summon the help of military or naval forces if needed.〔 These measures led to the demise of the first Klan by the early 1870s. New paramilitary groups unleashed a second wave of violence, resulting in over 1,000 deaths, usually black or Republican. The Supreme Court ruled in 1876 in ''United States v. Cruikshank,'' arising from trials related to the Colfax Massacre, that protections of the Fourteenth Amendment, which the Enforcement Acts were intended to support, did not apply to the actions of individuals, but only to the actions of state governments. More significant were paramilitary organizations that arose in the mid to late 1870s as part of continuing insurgency in the South after the Civil War, as armed veterans in the South began varied forms of resistance to social changes, including preventing black Americans from voting and running for office. Such groups included the White League, formed in Louisiana in 1874 from white militias, with chapters forming in other Southern states; the Red Shirts, formed in 1875 in Mississippi but also active in North Carolina and South Carolina; and other "White Liners," such as rifle clubs and the Knights of the White Camellia. Compared to the Klan, they were open societies, better organized and devoted to the political goal of regaining control of the state legislature and suppressing Republicans, including most blacks. They often solicited newspaper coverage for publicity to increase their threat. The scale of operations was such that in 1876, North Carolina had 20,000 members of rifle clubs alone. Made up of well-armed Confederate veterans, a class that covered most adult men who could have fought in the war, the paramilitary groups worked for political aims: to turn Republicans out of office, disrupt their organizing, and use force to intimidate and terrorize freedmen to keep them away from the polls. Such groups have been described as "the military arm of the Democratic Party."〔George C. Rable, ''But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction'', Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984, p. 132〕 They were instrumental in many Southern states in driving blacks away from the polls and ensuring a white Democratic takeover of legislatures and governorships in most Southern states in the 1870s, most notoriously during the controversial 1876 elections. As a result of a national Compromise of 1877 arising from the 1876 presidential election, the federal government withdrew its forces from the South, formally ending the Reconstruction era. By that time, Southern Democrats had effectively regained control in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida – they identified as the Redeemers. In the South, the process has been called "the Redemption". African-American historians sometimes call the Compromise of 1877 "The Great Betrayal." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Disenfranchisement after the Reconstruction Era」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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