DEMOCRATS ORIGIN OF JIM CROW LAWS...
During the Reconstruction period of 1865–1877, federal law provided civil rights protection in the U.S. South for freedmen – the African Americans who had formerly been slaves. In the 1870s, Democrats gradually regained power in the Southern legislatures, sometimes as a result of elections in which paramilitary groups intimidated opponents, attacking blacks or preventing them from voting. Gubernatorial elections were close and disputed in Louisiana for years, with extreme violence unleashed during the campaigns. In 1877, a national compromise to gain Southern support in the presidential election resulted in the last of the federal troops being withdrawn from the South. White Democrats had regained political power in every Southern state.[5] These conservative, white, Democratic Redeemer governments legislated Jim Crow laws, segregating black people from the white population.
Blacks were still elected to local offices in the 1880s, but the establishment Democrats were passing laws to make voter
registration and electoral rules more restrictive, with the result that political participation by most blacks and many poor whites began to decrease.
[6][7] Between 1890 and 1910, ten of the eleven former
Confederate states, starting with
Mississippi, passed new constitutions or amendments that effectively
disfranchised most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites through a combination of
poll taxes,
literacy and comprehension tests, and residency and record-keeping requirements.
[6][7] Grandfather clausestemporarily permitted some illiterate whites to vote.
