The Supreme Court and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction

At the height of the First Reconstruction in the 1870s, over 300 African Americans were elected to the state legislatures and the U.S. Congress from the eleven states that had seceded during the Civil War. By 1880, however, violence, intimidation, ballot-box stuffing, poll-tax and voter-registration laws, and gerrymandering had reduced the number of blacks elected to those offices by more than two-thirds