White Supremacy Entrenched, 1922

 

By 1922, black disenfranchisement had been essentially complete for about 12 years. In this map of the 1922 Congressional vote, notice that virtually all counties in the Deep South reported returns for Republicans below 3%. This was not so much because the Republican party stood for black rights--it had long since abandoned that cause--but because the Democratic party was the chosen vehicle of whites to establish and enforce white supremacy. This system was to remain unchallenged by any mass political movement for another 30-odd years, until the birth of the civil rights movement. Black voting rights were not to be secured by law for another 43 years, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.