McKissack and F. McKissack 57), and when Rutherford Hayes was elected, he retrieved all federal troops from the South, ending the Reconstruction era, and also ending the enforcement of civil rights (59-60). The South returned to the new discrimination called Jim Crow, backed by the infamous 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson, and blacks were persecuted once more.
Some of the most heinous innovations of the Jim Crow era sprang from the "Negro voting problem." The Southern government devised ingenious ways to keep blacks from voting, made possible by the absence of federal troops (62). Variations on the poll tax included odd registration requirements -- if a registration was "accidentally" printed on blue paper instead of pink it would be null and void (or something equally preposterous) (63). Another innovation was the literacy test, supposedly designed to determine if a voter was competent to vote. However, with questions such as "How high is up?" and "Recite the Constitution," no one could pass the tests. In addition, a grandfather clause in the test requirement stated that if no one "who had voted before 1867 or who had relatives who had voted needed to take the literacy test. Of course, no blacks had voted before 1867, so they were required to take the literacy test (64) . . ." One black man actually did complete a literacy test; he recited the Constitution at the request of .
the testors! The KKK eliminated him (64). The Solid South was no less than "totalitarian (Duncan 73).".
Then came the Progressive Era in the early twentieth century. Booker T. Washington, called by Boyer and others as "the nation's foremost black leader from the 1890s until . . . 1915," hypothesized that blacks could create social equality by achieving economic equality, and he also founded a vocational school in Alabama, now Tuskegee University (Boyer, et al. 716). Washington proposed that until blacks achieved this economic equality, they would have to bear with the racial inequality in the meantime.
