The Intercept: McConnell on Voting Rights: “This Is Not a Federal Issue”
By RYAN GRIM
IN 1890, responding to a wave of violent suppression of Black voters in the South, Rep. Henry Cabot Lodge, a Northeastern Republican, pushed through a bill to ban poll taxes and give the federal government the power to enforce the 15th Amendment, which allowed all men regardless of race the right to vote. That amendment had been run through Congress on a party-line vote.
The Lodge bill passed the House by six votes, again along party lines, and it headed to the Senate, where it was filibustered for months by Democrats. Despite having majority backing, supporters couldn’t bring it to a final vote, and it was finally taken off the floor in January 1891. With the threat of federal intervention removed, the terror campaign of lynchings and mob violence accelerated. The multiracial populist movement collapsed, as white populists turned on their erstwhile Black populist allies. Deprived of political power and beset on all sides by violence, as many as 6 million Black residents of the South eventually decamped for the North.