By the 1920s nearly all African Americans in the , South had been barred from participation in-the political process. Beginning in the 1890s and continuing through the first-decade of the twentieth century, southern states erected barriers and passed statutes that disfranchised blacks. The array of legal obstructions preventing blacks from registering and voting included property, literacy, and employment requirements; poll taxes; "understanding" clauses that required blacks to explain selected clauses from the Constitution; and even laws demanding that a would-be black voter must have a "good reputation." Even most blacks who met these strict standards were kept from exercising the franchise by fraud and intimidation. In 1920 in Mississippi 290,782 of the 453,663 African American adults over twenty-one could read and write. Yet fewer than a thousand of them were , registered to vote.-"Grandfather clauses," which extended voting rights to those who had voted before...