Defying Disfranchisement

Download or read book Defying Disfranchisement written by R. Volney Riser and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2010-05-24 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Defying Disfranchisement, R. Volney Riser documents a number of lawsuits challenging various requirements---including literacy tests, poll taxes, and white primaries---designed primarily to strip African American men of their right to vote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Twelve of these wended their way to the U. S. Supreme Court, and that body coldly ignored the systematic disfranchisement of black southerners. Nevertheless, as Riser demonstrates, the attempts themselves were stunning and demonstrate that even at one of their darkest hours, African Americans sheltered and nurtured a hope that would lead to wholesale changes upon the American legal and political landscape.