Kevin Hardwick rightly asks, "But what about in Virginia? To my knowledge, studies of white terrorism during reconstruction are thin on the ground for Virginia." The study we could look at is J. Douglass Smith's award-winning "Managing White Supremacy: Race Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia." The state avoided violence because white Virginians found non-violent ways to exclude blacks from the political process. Smith writes (p. 20) "Virginia became the only state of the former Confederacy to avoid post-war military rule by agreeing to a new constitution in 1869 that granted the suffrage to black men." Smith then goes on the describe how the suffrage was stripped away. The Danville Riot played a role in that process, but by and large the Democratic Party in Virginia didn't need to resort to the rope, the lash, or the torch. Great power can do nefarious work by other means, such as restrictive voting laws and a fresh state Constitution that undermined the 1869 document. In this way the Democratic Party managed to disenfranchise not only blacks, but poor whites as well. Smith writes (26), "By the end of 1902, determined registrars and literacy tests had eliminated all but 21,000 of an estimated 147,000 blacks of voting age from registration lists; three years later the new poll tax cut that number in half. The electorate was so thoroughly eviscerated that throughout the first half of the twentieth century the Democratic Party regularly elected its gubernatorial candidates with the support of less than 10 percent of the adult population." In 1905 Governor Claude Swanson said, "We have no Negro problem here. . . . The suffrage question has been determined with justice and fairness and has ceased to be a subject of discussion or agitation." Indeed. Henry Wiencek To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html