wo days killed or wounded two hundred victims; a pile of twenty-five bodies was found half-buried in the woods. By such atrocious practices were blacks "kept in their place"--that is, down. The Klan became a refuge for numerous bandits and cutthroats. Any scoundrel could don a sheet."
Attempts to empower African Americans failed miserably. The white South, for many decades, open flouted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Wholesale disenfranchisement of African Americans, starting conspicuously in 1890, was achieved by intimidation, fraud, and trickery. As Bailey observes, "among various underhanded schemes were the literacy tests, unfairly administered by whites to the advantage of illiterate whites. In the eyes of white Southerners, the goal of white supremacy fully justified dishonorable devices."
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