Suffrage
and to indicate the unvarying attitude of the ruling classes of the
South towards it. In the light of this history, let us now briefly
examine these recent enactments in their relation to the political
rights of the Negro.

It is no secret that the avowed purpose of the framers of these
instruments was to deprive the Negro of the right to vote. Their purpose
is not more startling than is the defiance with which they have hurled
it from the housetops. This purpose they claim to have accomplished by
taking advantage of the ignorance and poverty of the Negro; but the most
cursory glance at these enactments will convince any one that neither
intelligence nor wealth constitutes the basis of electoral qualification
under them, while the confessions of the framers of them as well as
their operation proves that neither ignorance nor poverty serves to
disqualify.

In Mississippi a Negro may be as rich as Dives and as wise as Solomon
and yet he may not be able to satisfy an ignorant and partisan
registration officer that he is qualified to be an elector; while a
white man may be as poor as Lazarus and may not possess the intellectual
outfit of a Hottentot and yet he will experience no difficulty in
convincing the same individual that he is qualified to exercise all the
rights and privileges of that class whose "destiny it is to dominate."
This is the sort of educational qualifications these great
constitutional documents prescribe!

How to disfranchise the Negro by an educational test without at the same
time disfranchising a very large number of white men, was at first a
problem that presented many difficulties to the framers of the
Mississippi document. Such a problem, however, cannot long remain a
difficult one to men who are masters of the art of legalizing fraud.

That the illiterate white vote might not, by the play of accident,
become eliminated by an educational test, it was provided that that part
of the constitution which prescribes it, was not to go into operation
until one year after the adoption of the constitution. Before the
expiration of that time another standard of qualification was provided
and all who qualified under it were not to be affected by the subsequent
operation of the educational test.

This latter provision is as follows, being section 241 of Article 12 of
the constitution of Mississippi, defining who are electors:

"Every male inhabitant of the state, except idiots, insane per