# Williams v. Mississippi **170 U.S. 213 (1898).** Argued 18 March 1898, decided 25 April 1898. Opinion by Justice Joseph McKenna. The Court upheld the suffrage provisions of the [[Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890]] and the state laws implementing them, and affirmed the conviction of a Black defendant who had argued that the same provisions produced the all-white juries that indicted and tried him. ## Why it matters *Williams* is the decision that made legal disenfranchisement safe. It established that a voting rule which never mentions race does not offend the [[Fifteenth Amendment]] merely because it hands officials the discretion to apply it by race — and that showing the rule *could* be abused is not the same as showing it *was*. Every Southern state that rewrote its franchise in the following years did so knowing the Supreme Court would not look behind the text. Together with *[[Plessy v. Ferguson]]* two years earlier, it is the judicial foundation of the [[Jim Crow Era]]. ## What the state required The Court's opinion sets out the Mississippi scheme. Under the constitution's franchise article a voter had to have lived two years in the state and one year in his election district, and to "produce to the officer holding the election satisfactory evidence that he has paid said taxes." He could not have been convicted of a listed set of crimes — bribery, burglary, theft, arson, perjury, forgery, embezzlement or bigamy. And he had to "be able to read any section of the constitution of this state," or to understand it when read to him, "or give a reasonable interpretation thereof" — the understanding clause, with the registrar choosing the passage. Separately, no one could serve as a grand or petit juror "unless a qualified elector and able to read and write," and the state code directed county supervisors to use the voter registration books in drawing jurors. That is how the franchise rules reached into the jury box, and it was the basis of Williams's appeal. ## The argument the Court heard, and rejected Williams's counsel did not have to speculate about intent, because Mississippi's own supreme court had said it out loud. Quoting *Ratliff v. Beale*, the opinion records that the 1890 convention > swept the field of expedients, to obstruct the exercise of suffrage by the negro race and that the convention had framed its crime list and its tests around what it took to be the characteristics of that race — describing Black Mississippians as "a patient, docile people, but careless, landless, migratory within narrow limits, without forethought," whose "criminal members given to furtive offenses, rather than the robust crimes of the whites." The state court concluded that "the convention discriminates against its characteristics." The Supreme Court acknowledged the passage and set it aside in a sentence: > But nothing tangible can be deduced from this. ## Holding The provisions, the Court held, "do not on their face discriminate between the races," and "it has not been shown that their actual administration was evil; only that evil was possible under them." On the jury question the Court relied on a Mississippi decision, *Dixon v. State*, holding that jurors were not in fact selected from lists furnished by election officers. The judgment against Williams was affirmed. > [!warning] The route around this ruling took most of a century > *Williams* was never squarely overruled on its own facts. The scheme it protected was dismantled instead by constitutional amendment and statute — the [[Twenty-Fourth Amendment]] against poll taxes in federal elections in 1964, then the [[Voting Rights Act of 1965]], which suspended literacy and understanding tests outright and put the covered states under federal supervision. ## Connections - [[Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890]] — the constitution this case upheld - [[Poll Tax]] · [[Literacy Tests]] · [[Grandfather Clause]] — the mechanisms it blessed - [[Plessy v. Ferguson]] — the companion doctrine - [[Voting Rights Act of 1965]] · [[Twenty-Fourth Amendment]] — what finally undid it - [[Voter Suppression]] · [[Jim Crow Era]] · [[Mississippi Plan]] ## Sources - [Williams v. Mississippi, 170 U.S. 213 (1898) — full text, Cornell LII](https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/170/213) - [Williams v. Mississippi — Justia](https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/170/213/)