In the U.S. federalist system, where the power to govern elections, school districts, police, and most court systems resides at the local level, the overthrow of local governments by hostile state actors is deeply undemocratic. Majority-Black communities have been experiencing these overthrows of their local governments since the post-Civil War period, and the most recent wave of these undemocratic overthrows could affect the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election.
Following the Civil War, Southern states that were part of the Confederacy had to draft constitutions granting suffrage to Black men in order to rejoin the Union. The presence of federal troops in the South to enforce Reconstruction allowed for the expansion of democratic rights for African Americans. During Reconstruction, Black politicians were elected to thousands of seats throughout the South. Although several were elected to the U.S. Congress, the overwhelming majority were elected to state and local offices.
In response to the growth of Black political power in localities throughout the South, the Ku Klux Klan, working along with Southern Democrats—the party identified at the time as the “white man’s party”—organized campaigns of terror to intimidate Black voters. Terror campaigns began after the end of the Civil War and accelerated when the federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877. This resulted in the massacre of Black people in cities and towns where Black votes had led to the rise of Black elected officials and Republican control of state and local governments. Violent mobs overthrew Black and Republican political power in cities throughout the South, including in Wilmington, N.C., in 1898.
By the early 1900s, violent massacres were no longer needed to overthrow Black local governments in the South. As the federal government withdrew, Southern states rewrote their constitutions to include mechanisms for state oversight of local government functions like appointing officials to school boards and county boards of elections.
Most importantly, the new state constitutions implemented “Dillon’s Rule”—an 1870s doctrine named after an Iowa state judge named John Forrest Dillon—which stated that local governments only have the powers explicitly granted by their state governments. The power to suppress Black political power had shifted from the Klan to the courts, as states developed legal powers to control local governments. During the Jim Crow Era, state constitutions denied Black communities self-governance. Laws that disenfranchised voters legally sanctioned the violent overthrow of local governments.