ducation. Its compulsion was disregarded at the South, where
social equality between the races could not be attained. Innkeepers and
railroads continued to separate their customers, and in time a few of
them were haled into court to answer for violating the law. Their
defense was that the Fourteenth Amendment forbade discrimination by the
States, but did not touch the private act of any citizen; that it
protected the rights of citizens, but that these rights, complete before
the law, did not extend to social relations,--that attendance at a
theater is not a civil right at all, and may properly be regulated by
the police power without conflict with the Constitution. In the Civil
Rights Cases, decided in 1883, the Supreme Court released the
defendants, ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment was too narrow in its
intention to justify Congress in the passage of a code of social
relations at the South. This part of reconstruction thus broke down,
leaving the negro population at the discretion of its white neighbors.

The Fifteenth Amendment, too, had been limited in its protecting force
before 1890. It forbade a denial of the right to vote by any State. The
Supreme Court easily determined that no violation could occur when a
hostile mob excluded negroes from the polls. It had been settled before
1890 that the negro was defenseless against personal discrimination. It
remained to be seen whether he could be disfranchised by law and yet
have no redress. Not till the South found some of its people appealing
for the negro vote in the crisis of the Farmers' Alliance did it take
the last steps in the undoing of reconstruction.

The Fifteenth Amendment was not explicit. Instead of asserting the right
of the negro to vote, it said, by negation, that the right should not be
denied on account of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
The three qualities of race, color, and servitude separated the races,
but the South learned that they were separated by other qualities that
were not proscribed by the amendment as a basis for the franchise. The
negro was generally poor, and any qualification based on property would
exclude him. He was shiftless, and often vagrant, and hence could be
touched by poll-tax and residence requirements. He was illiterate, and
was unable to meet an educational test. Tired of using force or fraud,
the South began in 1890 a system of legal evasion of the Fifteenth
Amendment.

The State of Mississippi,