Jim Crow Laws in Mississippi: Poll Tax, Pig Law, and Parchman

Jim Crow laws in Mississippi were a coordinated body of state statutes and constitutional provisions, in force from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 through the mid-1960s, that stripped Black residents of the vote, segregated nearly every public space, criminalized interracial marriage and even advocacy of racial equality, and channeled Black labor into forced or coerced work through vagrancy statutes, convict leasing, and crop liens. The system rested on the 1890 state constitution and did not fall until federal legislation and Supreme Court decisions dismantled it piece by piece between 1964 and 1969.

The 1890 Constitution as the Foundation

The Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890 replaced the Reconstruction-era 1868 constitution with a document whose delegates openly described its purpose. Delegate Solomon S. Calhoon told the assembly, “We came here to exclude the Negro. Nothing short of this.” Delegate George P. Melchior said it was “the manifest intention of this Convention to secure to the State of Mississippi, ‘white supremacy.'”¹

The drafters had a problem: the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments forbade explicit racial disenfranchisement. Their solution was to write requirements that never mentioned race and then leave enforcement to local registrars. Within nine years, the share of eligible Black voters registered fell from over 50 percent to roughly 9 percent.²

Other Southern states copied the approach, which became known as the “Mississippi Plan.” In 1898, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitution in Williams v. Mississippi, reasoning that the provisions “do not, on their face, discriminate between the white and negro races” and that the plaintiff had shown only that “evil was possible under them.”³ That ruling shielded the system for decades.

How Black Voters Were Kept From the Polls

The Understanding Clause

Section 244 of the 1890 constitution required every prospective voter to read any section of the state constitution, or to understand it when read aloud, or to “give a reasonable interpretation thereof.”¹ No standard defined a “reasonable interpretation,” which was the point. A registrar could pick an obscure provision on eminent domain for one applicant and a plain procedural sentence for another. College-educated Black applicants were routinely failed while white applicants with minimal schooling passed.

In 1954, the state amended Section 244 to add a requirement that applicants demonstrate “a reasonable understanding of the duties and obligations of citizenship.” The U.S. Supreme Court later found the 1954 amendment was part of a “longstanding, carefully executed plan” to keep Black citizens from voting.²

The Cumulative Poll Tax

Section 243 imposed a poll tax of two dollars per year on every male resident between twenty-one and sixty, with county boards authorized to raise it to three. For sharecroppers earning a few dollars a month, the tax was a real barrier. It was also cumulative: voting required receipts showing payment for the two preceding years.¹ A young man who could not pay at twenty-one owed four dollars by twenty-three and six by twenty-five. The longer someone missed, the harder catching up became.

The Result

By 1954, roughly 5 percent of voting-age Black Mississippians were registered. The understanding clause, the poll tax, and registrar discretion operated as one system, each catching anyone who slipped past the others.²

Segregation in Schools and Public Spaces

Beginning in 1878, Mississippi law prohibited educating white and Black children in the same school. The two systems ran on wildly unequal funding, and the state made no serious effort to make them equivalent. White schools received newer buildings, more qualified teachers, and larger per-pupil budgets. Students found in violation of school-segregation rules faced fines and jail time.

Transportation followed. An 1888 statute required railroads to provide “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races.” Streetcars were segregated in 1904. Passengers who sat in the wrong section or refused to move could be arrested. Hospitals maintained separate wards and entrances, cemeteries were restricted by race through local ordinances, and parks, waiting rooms, and restrooms all required posted signs indicating which race could use them.

The legal cover came from Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which permitted “separate but equal” facilities. In Mississippi, “equal” was a fiction the state did not bother to maintain.

Marriage Bans and Criminalized Speech

Interracial marriage was prohibited by the 1890 constitution itself, which banned marriage between white residents and anyone with one-eighth or more Black ancestry. A 1906 statute extended the prohibition to people of Asian descent. These marriages were void from inception, carrying no legal effect for inheritance or property.

Penalties escalated over time. An 1865 statute made interracial marriage a felony punishable by life in prison. By 1880, the penalty was a fine up to $500, up to ten years in prison, or both. The 1942 code kept the ten-year maximum and added the $500 fine as an alternative. Prosecutors enforced these laws.

Mississippi went further than most states. A 1920 statute made it a misdemeanor to print, publish, or circulate any material “in favor of social equality or of intermarriage between whites and Negroes,” punishable by a fine of up to $500, up to six months in jail, or both. The 1942 code reaffirmed the prohibition. Advocating repeal of segregation was itself a crime.

Vagrancy, the Pig Law, and Forced Labor

Vagrancy and the Black Codes

The 1865 Black Codes built the template for economic coercion. The vagrancy statute swept up anyone deemed idle or unemployed, and covered anyone “unlawfully assembling” or associating across racial lines “on terms of equality.” Fines reached $150 for Black defendants and $200 for white defendants, though enforcement fell overwhelmingly on Black residents.

The trap was in the consequences. Anyone who failed to pay a vagrancy fine within five days could be “hired out” by the sheriff to any white person willing to cover it, with preference given to the person’s existing employer. Failure to pay any tax was itself declared evidence of vagrancy. Poverty triggered arrest, arrest triggered fines, and inability to pay triggered forced labor.

The Pig Law

In 1876, the first post-Reconstruction legislature lowered the grand-larceny threshold from twenty-five dollars to ten and made theft of any farm animal worth a dollar or more, whether a hog, cow, sheep, or goat, punishable as grand larceny carrying up to five years in state prison. The prison population nearly quadrupled, from 272 in 1874 to 1,072 by 1877, mostly Black men convicted of minor property offenses that had previously been misdemeanors.

Convict Leasing and Parchman

The prison surge fed a business model. Mississippi leased its convicts to private farmers, plantation owners, and railroads at roughly nine dollars a month per worker. Men, women, and children as young as six or seven worked under conditions contemporaries recognized as functionally identical to slavery.

Beginning in 1901, the state bought thousands of acres of Delta cotton land and worked prisoners on it directly at Parchman Farm. One historian called Parchman “the closest thing to slavery that survived the civil war.” Profits went to the state.

Crop Liens

For Black workers outside the criminal system, an 1867 law let landlords claim a lien on their workers’ crops for any debts incurred during the growing season. Sharecroppers had to pledge each year’s future harvest to obtain food and supplies. When settlement debts exceeded the crop’s value, the sharecropper either signed on for another year with the same landowner or moved and started over.⁴ Combined with vagrancy laws, the arrangement meant leaving an employer could lead to arrest and forced labor.

The State Sovereignty Commission

After Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Mississippi’s response was institutional. On the day in 1956 that the legislature passed a resolution declaring Brown “invalid,” it created the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. The agency was tax-funded, and its charge to “protect the sovereignty of the state” meant, in practice, fighting desegregation.

The Commission functioned as a domestic intelligence agency. It ran informants inside the NAACP and civil rights organizations, paid Black residents to publicly oppose integration, sent officials on speaking tours to Northern and Western states, produced propaganda films, and conducted a “subversive hunt” against civil rights workers. The legislature abolished it in 1977 and sealed its records until 2027, though litigation later opened them.

How Jim Crow Ended in Mississippi

Public Accommodations

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title II, entitled all people to “the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation” without racial discrimination, and specifically targeted segregation “carried on under color of any law, statute, ordinance, or regulation.”⁵ The state statutes requiring separate railroad cars, separate hospital wards, and separate waiting rooms became unenforceable.

Voting

The Twenty-Fourth Amendment, ratified in 1964, abolished poll taxes in federal elections.⁶ In 1966, the Supreme Court finished the job in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, holding that conditioning the right to vote on payment of any fee violates the Equal Protection Clause and that “voter qualifications have no relation to wealth nor to paying or not paying this or any other tax.”⁷

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 dismantled the rest. It suspended literacy tests in states where less than 50 percent of voting-age residents had been registered or voted in 1964, a formula that covered Mississippi. It required the state to submit any new voting requirement to the Attorney General before enforcement. And it authorized federal examiners and poll watchers to oversee elections on the ground.⁸

In 1964, only 6.7 percent of eligible Black Mississippians were registered. By 1967, the figure was 59.8 percent.⁸

Schools

Fifteen years after Brown, Mississippi was still operating fully segregated schools under the theory that “all deliberate speed” set no deadline. In 1969, the Supreme Court in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education held that the “all deliberate speed” standard was “no longer constitutionally permissible” and required every district to end segregated systems immediately.⁹

Marriage

In 1967, Loving v. Virginia struck down all remaining state bans on interracial marriage under the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses.¹⁰ Mississippi’s statutes became unenforceable that day, though the state did not formally remove the prohibition from its constitution until 1987.

1
Mississippi Secretary of State. Constitution of the State of Mississippi
2
Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. United States v. Mississippi – 380 U.S. 128 (1965)
3
Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Williams v. Mississippi – 170 U.S. 213 (1898)
4
Mississippi History Now. Farmers Without Land – The Plight of White Tenant Farmers and Sharecroppers
5
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 U.S. Code 2000a – Prohibition Against Discrimination or Segregation in Places of Public Accommodation
6
National Constitution Center. 24th Amendment – Abolition of Poll Taxes
7
Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections – 383 U.S. 663 (1966)
8
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Voting Rights and Political Representation in the Mississippi Delta
9
Oyez. Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education
10
Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Loving v. Virginia – 388 U.S. 1 (1967)