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When northern newspapers complained about Mississippi’s new state constitution in 1890, charging that new anti-fraud voting restrictions were meant to disenfranchise Black voters, a White state senator defended it, saying, “I deny that the educational test was intended to exclude Negroes from voting … That more Negroes would be excluded is true … but that is not our fault.”
By 1903, as the “Mississippi Plan” spread throughout the South, Mississippi Gov. James Vardaman was less discreet about it. “There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter,” he said. “Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the n----- from politics.”
More than a century later, the Supreme Court has upheld new voting restrictions in Arizona, after a lower court said the restrictions discriminated against minority voters. In a 6-to-3 opinion critics say is reminiscent of the Jim Crow era, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. acknowledged that these restrictions could have a disproportionate effect on 0.5 percent of Black, Latino and Native American voters. Though Joe Biden beat President Donald Trump by 0.4 percentage point in Arizona and 0.3 points in Georgia, Alito argued that 0.5 percent of voters was too “small in absolute terms” to outweigh the state’s interests in protecting the vote from fraud.