The South’s mixture of legal discrimination and racial terrorism worked. Within three years of the Civil War’s end, “black voter registration ranged from 85 to 94 percent in the Deep South, and almost one million freedmen were voting throughout the region,”7 records Mickey. Less than a century later, that fundamental freedom had been demolished. “By 1944, in the states of the old Confederacy, only 5 percent of age-eligible African Americans were registered to vote, which left millions of blacks politically voiceless,” writes Anderson.
