Did they try to deny voting rights to women, gays, leftists, latinos, indians, etc?
American Indians were not considered citizens until 1924 and oftentimes were de facto refused voting registration until the 1960s.
Arkansas was the only former Confederate state that extended the franchise to women before the 19th amendment passed. After that, women were able to vote provided they did not belong to another restricted category.
There was no large enough population of visible gays in the South for their votes or the suppression o same to matter. There were some examples of openly gay people in the South prior to 1970 but few and far between for obvious reasons.
“Latino” was not a racial category in the South at this time. There was certainly discrimination against Mexicans in Texas but no one would have considered the linguistic affinity between Mexicans and, say, Chileans to be a “race” on par with white or black people; that idea didn’t really come in until the 60s. Texas did indeed suppress the vote of people who seemed too “Mexican.” In Florida, a black Dominican would be black but a Cuban might be white, depending on their appearance, ancestry, etc.
Outside of blacks, the biggest thrust of voter suppression was against anyone who didn’t support the Jim Crow machines. This would include “leftists” as well as Republicans, etc. Remember that most of the mechanisms of denying voting rights were designed to make it impossible for anyone to vote, and then certain loyal whites would be granted exceptions - impossible “literacy tests,” nonexistent registration offices, etc. States also used these systems to select a loyal group of voters; at its extreme, in Virginia, the Byrd Machine screened potential voters for their ideology at essentially a person-by-person level.
In his classic 1949 study, Southern Politics in State and Nation , V. O. Key characterized the organization as an oligarchy in which power was maintained by a remarkably small portion of the electorate. Fewer people voted in Virginia than in any other southern state, with only 10 or 12 percent of adults casting votes during the heyday of the Byrd Organization. This meant that the organization needed the support of only 5 to 7 percent of the voting-age population to control party nominations, which nearly guaranteed election in most districts in most elections.
The thrust of the post-Reconstruction era of restrictions in the South was not just “no votes for blacks” but a sham democracy in which many elections had no meaning at all and the power brokers of the Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic Party de facto hand-picked officeholders in many places and times.
There are numerous reports of white Republicans being threatened or attacked. This happened mostly in the Redemption period when the Democrats were rising back into power and saw the Reconstruction era Republicans as serious opponents. Once the Democrats had secured control, they eased up and allowed some token Republican opposition to exist.
Pretty much. Also, we didn’t really have the “fill out a card and mail it in” system. You registered in person to vote in front of a local registrar, which was a political patronage job, and as a local guy, he would know the members of the community.
At that time, most blacks “couldn’t be trusted” so unless he was really, really something, he didn’t get to register (even at the height of Jim Crow, you could get 7 percent or so blacks able to register, so some either had a heart or trusted that he would vote “correctly.”)
As for the other groups, including poor whites, if the local registrar just wasn’t too sure about you, then he picked one of the traditional devices (e.g. your reading isn’t good enough, your moral character is not good, etc.) and turn you away.
Looking at the “literacy tests” that were given to (mostly Southern) voters before the mid 60’s - some questions were virtually impossible to answer correctly.