Even earlier (1871) Georgia had established the first poll taxes. Chapter 130 permitted discrimination in public places, from hotels and theaters to trains and streetcars. In fact, the state had passed a similar law, Chapter 130 of the Acts of Tennessee, even earlier – in 1875, the year after Sampson Keeble’s House term ended. Tennessee is often credited with the first Jim Crow* law (1881), which ordered segregation in train cars. Keeble became the first African American elected to the Tennessee General Assembly, serving one term (1873-1874). In November 1872 Nashville barber Sampson W.
The caption reads, “OF COURSE HE WANTS TO VOTE THE DEMOCRATIC TICKET!” The second line says, “Democratic ‘Reformer.’ ‘You’re as free as air, ain’t you? Say you are, or I’ll blow yer black head off!” (Tennessee State Library and Archives) This well-known cartoon from Reconstruction shows two white men threatening an apprehensive African American holding a voting ticket.
"Tennessee was the last Confederate state to secede from the Union (June 8, 1861) and the first to return (July 24, 1866), having already rewritten the state constitution to prohibit." Dunn, was elected governor of Louisiana.Ĭhapter 130 & the Black Vote in Tennessee
Later that same year, two African American delegates to the Republican National Convention voted for U.S. history to include significant numbers of black men. By early 1868 Southern lawmakers of both races were working together in constitutional conventions, the first political meetings in U.S. Alden’s ten newly-elected aldermen and at least five of the twenty members of the Nashville City Council were black. A year later, in September 1868, the state ban having been overturned, one of Mayor A. That September voters in Nashville elected an African American to the Board of Aldermen, but he was not permitted to take his seat because Tennessee law still prohibited blacks from holding office. Tennessee’s first statewide election to include black voters took place in 1867. Most of the other Southern states were much more tightly constrained by Federal Reconstruction restrictions, so they complied quickly, and the amendment passed into law on February 3, 1870. In fact, Tennessee did not ratify the 15th Amendment until more than a century later, on April 2, 1997. However, Tennessee, already readmitted to the Union (1866), refused to ratify, in part because the state had passed a law in 1867 allowing blacks to vote. As a result, all the former Confederate states except Tennessee ratified the amendment within a few months. Ratification by Southern states was, in most cases, a condition of their readmission to Congress.
Constitution was to give African American male citizens the right to vote. The purpose of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S.