"In 1860, Southern Democrats, flush with the disproportionate power granted to them by the Electoral College, had torn the Union in half and instigated four years of bloody internecine warfare.
"Mindful of this history, in December, 1868, Senator Aaron Cragin, of New Hampshire, and Representative William Kelley, of Pennsylvania, introduced drafts of what eventually became the Fifteenth Amendment.
“Black voters were meant to be a bulwark against a similar regime arising to again threaten national unity—which is to say that people who had scarcely ever experienced democracy were now among its chief safeguards.
“The lynching campaigns and terrorism that disenfranchised Black people in the South in the decades that followed weren’t only an expression of racism, though they were very much that;
... they were an attack on the mechanisms that were put in place to inhibit one of the nation’s worst habits: a gleeful expression of defiance toward a government that dared try to uphold democracy." @jelani9 @NewYorker
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