Voter Suppression- The Election Law of 1891

The Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to vote regardless of “race, color or previous condition of servitude.” In attempts to suppress the black vote, states have therefore had to devise mechanisms to indirectly rather than directly target black voters. Take, for example, Arkansas’s Election Law of 1891, which created standardized ballot papers, centralized control of the voting process, and introduced a secret ballot system. These measures meant that it was much more difficult for illiterate voters to cast their ballots. A much larger percentage of the African American population, a generation from slavery, were illiterate. Thus, between the elections of 1890 and 1892, while the white vote dropped from seventy-five percent to sixty-seven percent of eligible voters, the black vote dropped from seventy-one percent to thirty-eight percent of eligible voters. I’m John Kirk of the UALR History Department and this has been an Arkansas moment.