The 1903 Giles v. Harris decision delivered the deathblow to America’s first experiment with multiracial democracy. After Democrats won the presidency and both houses of Congress in 1892, they repealed key sections of the Reconstruction-era Enforcement Acts that enforced voting rights. Nearing the end of his life, the great abolitionist and civil rights activist Frederick Douglass lamented that “principles which we all thought to have been firmly and permanently settled…have been boldly assaulted and overthrown.”
