After black men won the right to vote in the state in 1868, nearly eighty thousand registered. By 1900, the two white supremacy campaigns had whittled that number to just fifteen thousand. Perhaps half of them were able to vote. For the first time since just after the Civil War, no black man was elected to either the state house or the state senate in the 1900 election. Not a single black man was elected to a local office in the Black Second.
