They did it through poll taxes, literacy tests, and other measures that targeted blacks’ poverty and lack of education. White politicians were not shy about what they were doing. “Let us tell the truth if it bursts the bottom of the Universe,” the president of the Mississippi convention announced. “We came here to exclude the Negro.”25 This was exactly what Section Two of the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to block—if anyone had ever bothered to enforce it.
December 26, 2020. Page 118.
