Following the abolition of slavery after the Civil War, white evangelicals embarked on a reform campaign, aiming to purge society of what they viewed as religious and social ills. They founded powerful advocacy organizations like the American Economic Association and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to, in the words of one reformer, “bring to pass here a kingdom of righteousness.”
Advocacy organizations like these sought to pass laws beginning in the 1890s criminalizing drinking, swearing, and loitering while working to restrict integrated spaces, immigration, voting, and reproductive rights. While these laws and organizations varied based on locality—the Asiatic Exclusion League in San Francisco targeted Asian Americans, for instance—the legal and organizational framework they created promoting white Christian power, at the expense of other groups, was national in scope.
Frances Willard was among the most prominent of these Christian reformers and longtime president of the national Women’s Christian Temperance Union. A northern daughter of abolitionists, her biographer noted that “she never let go of her belief that a healthy democracy required all its citizens to conform to a singular standard of morality.”
To achieve that end, Willard worked to ban the sale and consumption of alcohol while supporting the suppression of groups she found morally unfit. For example, during the Mississippi Constitution of 1890, convened specifically to formally disenfranchise Black voters, Willard touted its work as an example of moral reform and called for it to grant limited voting rights to white women while disenfranchising Black men. The convention failed to give the vote to women, but it used poll taxes and felon disenfranchisement to restrict Black suffrage. Often considered to be one of the foundational texts of Jim Crow, the new constitution framed its work as seeking to harmonize civic life with the divine, with the text “invoking His blessing on our work.”
Willard’s comments in support of Mississippi’s disenfranchisement convention were especially egregious because she made them amid public debate over lynching. After the Civil War, white conservatives had pioneered mass violence and intimidation tactics to prevent Black suffrage and undermine civil rights. The pervasiveness of these tactics and the inability of Black survivors to get justice from white police, public officials, and juries, led federal officials to consider legislation protecting those “whose votes are now suppressed under the pretense of maintaining race supremacy as against the negro.” It was against this measure and this backdrop of racial violence that Willard spoke out.