At the time, the Republican Party drew wide support from African-Americans. This desire to suppress blacks was based on just in white supremacy, but also in the desire of the Democratic Party to retain dominance in the face of this new and significant voting bloc(1). During the Reconstruction era, the period following the end of slavery when the federal government tried to empower African-Americans across the South, many whites felt that African-Americans were a threat to their power. Racial voter suppression began as soon as the Fifteenth Amendment freed Black slaves and continues to exist in the systems we see today. It has been said that “everything is bigger in Texas.” The practice of voter suppression in Texas is a big, well honed, mastered process, meant to deter the young, the poor and the nonwhite from the polls. In Texas, minority representation and participation are at nationwide lows. Texas is one of the architects of voter suppression.
To this day, Texans suffers from the scourge of discrimination and racism, particularly in the political arena. However, to be “declared free” and to “live freely” are two completely different things. On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas and declared that all slaves in Texas, the last remaining state with enslaved Africans, were free. These troubling roots begin with disputes over slavery with Mexico and continue in the present. Texas has a long shameful history of racism and voter suppression. Edward Ayers explains the whites' attitude by offering the contemporaneous quote, "if every Negro in Mississippi was a graduate of Harvard, and had been elected as class orator. The idea, of course, was that whites could "satisfactorily" answer any question while blacks could do nothing to appease their inquisitor. Aspiring voters had to read a passage of the state constitution selected by the county registrar and explain its significance to the registrar's satisfaction. The literacy tests and understanding clauses were the most imaginative ways to exclude black voters while keeping white voters eligible. In another move designed to deny black voices, the Democratic Party made their primaries for whites only. In the South, where the Democratic Party was the only game in town, the party primaries represented the real electoral battles. In the 1890s, that applied almost exclusively to whites. Other devices included the grandfather clause, which said that a person was eligible to vote if his grandfather had been eligible to vote. This also ended the eligibility of many poor whites as well. Once a person got behind, it was virtually impossible for him to catch back up again. In some states, this became a cumulative poll tax voters had to pay off all their taxes before voting. Since most African Americans were poor and confined to a credit economy, this measure greatly restricted access to the voting booth. They came up with the poll tax, requiring people to have paid it for the previous two years before voting. White Mississippians however, quickly took the lead in innovative ways to circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment. North Carolina began this trend in 1889 by demanding very precise information about a potential voter's age and birthplace, information many former slaves did not have. Just as whites in Southern states were passing laws establishing legal segregation barriers, they also began to develop legal justifications for denying blacks their ballots.