Defying Disfranchisement: Black Voting Rights Activism in the Jim Crow South, 1890–1908 (review)

In Defying Disfranchisement, R. Volney Riser examines the various individual and institutional efforts to end Jim Crow voting policies across the South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Although these legal challenges resulted in ambivalent decisions at best, they ultimately provided precedents for lawyers and activists to use in the half-century following the establishment of the NAACP. From the adoption of the first disfranchisement state constitution in 1890 in Mississippi, through the legal maneuverings in other parts the South, and the grassroots organization of black activists at the turn of the century, Riser brings together a wide array of sources to give a comprehensive account of a largely underrepresented story. Along the way, Riser seeks to strike a balance between the work of social historians (who he argues “do not understand the constitutional issues involved here”) and legal scholars (who “know too little of these cases’ grassroots origins,” 10). “So I sought the middle ground,” Riser writes, “and have constructed a narrative history of black voting rights activism in the disfranchisement era around the story of the antidisfranchisement cases of 1895–1908” (10).

Across nine chapters, Riser weaves an intricate tale of courthouse and congressional intrigue as southern states fought to embed white supremacy into their constitutions and African Americans struggled to maintain both the rights of citizenship as well as their personal dignity. Although focused generally on the entire South, Riser is particularly good at describing the contortions of Alabama law in this period. He is also adept at synthesizing a wide array of source material while maintaining a coherent narrative with both white and black voices. Despite this emphasis on Alabama and the Southeast, Texas enters the picture briefly—mainly in connection to Wilford H. Smith, the Galveston lawyer—and historians of the Southwest may find Riser’s book useful as a guide to some of the major cases that would inevitably affect the South as a whole. Riser could have done more with the material from the Southwest, taken more of a systematic approach to the South in general, or at least offered a clearer note on methodology to explain some of his omissions, which would have helped to underscore the legitimate similarities and differences between certain areas of the South.

Overall, Defying Disfranchisement will appeal most to southern historians interested in a molecular view of the tortured conspiracies surrounding disfranchisement during the Jim Crow Era. Riser, though, is a much more comfortable with the legal analysis than with dealing with the larger social context—a bias seen at times in his writing as the non-legal prose can be a bit overwrought—and more emphasis on the personalities involved in these cases would flesh out some of this material. For example, the final chapter on the black plaintiffs themselves is quite strong (especially considering the limited sources available) and more sections like this one would strengthen the book. Despite these few criticisms, Riser has written a solidly researched, engaging book on a complex topic that skillfully examines the rich topic of black voting rights activism in the Post-Reconstruction South.