Republicans, Democrats and Race (Cont.)

Jim Crow.

During the Reconstruction period of 1865–1877 federal law provided civil rights protection in the South for "freedmen" — the African Americans who had formerly been slaves. In the 1870s, white Democrats gradually returned to power in southern states, sometimes as a result of elections in which paramilitary groups intimidated opponents, attacking blacks or preventing them from voting. Gubernatorial elections were close and disputed in Louisiana for years, with extreme violence unleashed during the campaign. In 1877, a national compromise to gain southern support in the presidential election resulted in the last of the federal troops being withdrawn from the South. White Democrats had regained power in every Southern state. The white, Democratic Party Redeemer government that followed the troop withdrawal legislated Jim Crow laws segregating black people from the state's white population.

Blacks were still elected to local offices in the 1880s, but the establishment Democrats were passing laws to make voter registration and elections more restrictive, with the result that participation by most blacks and many poor whites began to decrease. Starting with Mississippi in 1890, through 1910 the former Confederate states passed new constitutions or amendments that effectively disfranchised most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites through a combination of poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests, and residency and record-keeping requirements. Grandfather clauses temporarily permitted some illiterate whites to vote. Voter turnout dropped drastically through the South as a result of such measures.

While the separation of African Americans from the general population was becoming legalized and formalized in the Progressive Era (1890s–1920s), it was also becoming customary. Even in cases in which Jim Crow laws did not expressly forbid black people to participate, for instance, in sports or recreation or church services, the laws shaped a segregated culture.

In the Jim Crow context, the presidential election of 1912 was steeply slanted against the interests of Black Americans. Most blacks were still in the South, where they had been effectively disfranchised, so they could not vote at all. While poll taxes and literacy requirements banned many Americans from voting, these stipulations frequently had loopholes that exempted white Americans from meeting the requirements.

President Woodrow Wilson (D) introduced segregation in Federal offices, despite much protest. Wilson appointed Southern politicians who were segregationists, because of his firm belief that racial segregation was in the best interest of black and white Americans alike. At Gettysburg on July 4, 1913, the semi-centennial of Abraham Lincoln's declaration that "all men are created equal", Wilson addressed the crowd:

How complete the union has become and how dear to all of us, how unquestioned, how benign and majestic, as state after state has been added to this, our great family of free men!