In 1880, 50 percent of Black men in the former Confederacy voted. By 1920, less than 1 percent exercised this fundamental right. Restaurants and grocery stores, drinking fountains and swimming pools, theaters and bars, buses and trains, playgrounds and schoolhouses, even phone booths—all were segregated by race. The Supreme Court backed the electoral disenfranchisement and the lower-class citizenship of millions, finding novel ways around the civil rights amendments to the Constitution.
