# Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890 In the summer and autumn of 1890 a convention met in Jackson and rewrote Mississippi's constitution with the purpose of ending Black voting in the state without saying so on the page. It worked, it was upheld by the Supreme Court, and within about a dozen years every other Southern state had copied it. ## Why it matters This is the document that converted violence into law. Mississippi Democrats had already overthrown the state's Reconstruction government by force in 1875 — see [[Mississippi Plan]] — but force was expensive, embarrassing and legally exposed. The 1890 constitution replaced it with a set of rules that disqualified almost all Black voters while naming no race at all, and so survived the [[Fifteenth Amendment]]. Everything in the Southern suffrage toolkit that followed, and much of what [[Voter Suppression]] still looks like, descends from this convention. The stakes were plain demographically: Black Mississippians outnumbered white Mississippians in thirty-nine of the state's seventy-five counties. ## The convention Governor John Stone approved a legislative call for an August convention. Democrats held 134 of its 137 seats; the single Black delegate, Isaiah T. Montgomery, was a Republican. Delegates sat for about ten weeks and approved the new constitution by 129 to 8, rather than submitting it to the voters. The finished document ran to 15 articles and 285 sections. The convention's two factions disagreed about method, not goal. Delta planters — the "Bourbons" — wanted literacy, property and tax qualifications. Poorer hill-county delegates, the "Rednecks," objected that those same tests would disqualify poor whites too. The compromise was a franchise article with enough discretion built into it that registrars could apply it to one race and not the other. ## How the franchise article worked Article 12 combined several requirements, each individually race-neutral: | Requirement | Effect | |---|---| | Two years' residence in the state, one year in the election district | Disqualified sharecroppers and farm labourers, who moved frequently | | A [[Poll Tax]] of at least $2 a year, with receipts produced at the polls | Made voting a cash purchase for the poorest electorate in the country, and cumulative, so a missed year compounded | | Ability to read any section of the state constitution, **or** to understand it when read, **or** to give a reasonable interpretation of it | The "understanding clause" — the registrar chose the passage and judged the answer | | Disqualification for a list of specified crimes | A list chosen, Mississippi's own supreme court said, for the offences it took to be characteristic of Black defendants | | Jurors drawn only from qualified electors | Purging voter rolls emptied jury boxes of Black citizens at the same time | The Mississippi Encyclopedia records that no citizen could vote without paying the poll tax and showing valid receipts for the two previous elections, making the tax cumulative in practice. The effect was immediate and close to total. By 1892, according to Mississippi Today, fewer than 6 percent of eligible Black men in the state were registered to vote — down from a majority of the electorate in many counties two decades earlier. The jury consequence was not incidental. Juries were built from the rolls of qualified electors, so a system that disqualified Black voters also produced the all-white juries that would later refuse to convict white defendants in racial killings — the pattern that let the man who shot [[Medgar Evers]] walk free twice in 1964. ## Upheld, then copied In **[[Williams v. Mississippi]]** (1898) the Supreme Court let the scheme stand, holding that the provisions "do not on their face discriminate between the races" and that only the possibility of abuse, not abuse itself, had been shown. In the course of its opinion the Court quoted Mississippi's own supreme court saying that the convention "swept the field of expedients, to obstruct the exercise of suffrage by the negro race" — and then concluded that "nothing tangible can be deduced from this." With that ruling in hand, the template spread. Other Southern states wrote versions of the same franchise article into their own constitutions over the following years, several adding a [[Grandfather Clause]] to shelter white voters from the tests. [[Literacy Tests]] and the [[Poll Tax]] remained in force across much of the South until the [[Twenty-Fourth Amendment]] and the [[Voting Rights Act of 1965]]. ## Connections - [[Mississippi Plan]] — the 1875 campaign of violence this constitution made unnecessary - [[Williams v. Mississippi]] — the ruling that upheld it - [[Poll Tax]] · [[Literacy Tests]] · [[Grandfather Clause]] — the mechanisms - [[Hiram Revels]] · [[Blanche K. Bruce]] — the Black senators whose era this ended - [[Medgar Evers]] · [[Citizens' Councils]] — who enforced the result in the next century - [[Reconstruction and Its Overthrow]] · [[Jim Crow Era]] · [[Suffrage]] · [[Voter Suppression]] ## Sources - [Mississippi Encyclopedia — Mississippi Constitution of 1890](https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/constitution-of-1890/) - [Williams v. Mississippi, 170 U.S. 213 (1898) — full text, Cornell LII](https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/170/213)