Even though African Americans constituted a majority or near-majority of the population in many states, and even though black suffrage was now enshrined in the Constitution, “legal” or neutral-sounding measures were used to “insure that the Southern electorate…would be almost all white.” Black turnout in the South fell from 61 percent in 1880 to just 2 percent in 1912. The disenfranchisement of African Americans wiped out the Republican Party, locking in white supremacy and single-party rule for nearly a century.
