Williams v. Mississippi, 170 U.S. 213 (1898), argued 18 Mar. 1898, decided 25 Apr. 1898 by vote of 9 to 0; McKenna for the Court. An all‐white grand jury indicted Williams, a Mississippi black man, for murder. An all‐white petit jury convicted him and sentenced him to be hanged. Williams attacked the indictment and trial for violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because blacks had been excluded from jury service. Only qualified voters could serve on juries, and a Mississippi constitutional convention in 1890 had adopted literacy and poll‐tax qualifications for voting, drastically reducing the number of registered black voters and effectively eliminating blacks from jury rolls after 1892. Nevertheless, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rejected Williams's contention, distinguishing the principle of Yick Wo v. Hopkins, (1886) that a law fair on its face would be voided if it was administered by public authorities in an unequal manner. Williams had not shown that the actual administration of the Mississippi suffrage provisions was discriminatory.

Other southern states followed Mississippi's lead, and the new laws, together with white primary elections, effectively disfranchised southern blacks until the white primaries were ended in the 1940s. Williams was, for practical purposes, superseded by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which banned exclusionary tests and devices in states and areas where minority turnout was unusually low.

See also Equal Protection; Trial by Jury; Vote, Right to.

Ward E. Y. Elliott

WILLIAMS V. MISSISSIPPI

WILLIAMS V. MISSISSIPPI, 170 U.S. 213 (1898), a test by Henry Williams, an African American, of Mississippi's constitution of 1890 and code of 1892, which required passage of a literacy test as a prerequisite to voting. Williams claimed that the franchise provisions denied blacks equal protection of the law guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court decided on 25 April 1898 that mere possibility of discrimination was not grounds for invalidating the provisions. Mississippi's ingenious exclusion device thus was upheld and blacks continued to be disfranchised under it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ayers, Edward L. The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Curtis, Michael K. No State Shall Abridge: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986.

MackSwearingen/a. r.

See alsoAfrican Americans ; Civil Rights and Liberties ; Disfranchisement ; Equal Protection of the Law ; Jim Crow Laws ; Mississippi Plan .