North Carolina Constitutional Amendment Completes Black Disfranchisement in South

North Carolina's 1900 constitutional amendment, adopted following the Wilmington coup of 1898, imposed literacy tests and poll taxes that effectively disenfranchised Black voters. Combined with the earlier disfranchisement campaigns in Mississippi (1890), South Carolina (1895), Louisiana (1898), and Alabama (1901), the completion of disfranchisement in North Carolina represented the final consolidation of a one-party white supremacist political system across the South. Black voter registration in the South fell from approximately 900,000 in 1867 to under 100,000 by 1903. No Black person would represent a Southern state in Congress for 71 years.