Voting Rights and Disfranchisement

During Reconstruction and after, when African Americans first held the right to vote, a number of African Americans were elected to the Arkansas General Assembly. Estimates put the number of African American legislators serving in the state between 1868 and 1893 at eighty-four. However, in the early 1890s, African American political influence rapidly declined. New measures handed white Democrats greater control of polling places and illiteracy became a bigger barrier to voting. A one-dollar poll tax robbed poorer Arkansans of the franchise. Moves by the increasingly dominant white Democrats to exclude African Americans from party primaries completed the project of disfranchisement. With less political power, the Republican Party abandoned its former black supporters. After the last African American left the Arkansas General Assembly in 1893, it was another eighty years before the next African American entered. I’m John Kirk of the UALR History Department and this has been an Arkansas moment.