More than one hundred African American men served in the Virginia General Assembly between 1869 and 1890 — in the House of Delegates and the Senate of Virginia, representing the plantation counties and cities of a state that had been the capital of the Confederacy. Encyclopedia Virginia lists 84 Black delegates and 14 Black state senators across those two decades.

Virginia’s Black legislators were sustained longer than most by the Readjuster Party, a biracial coalition that briefly controlled the state in the early 1880s, repealed the poll tax, and expanded public education. When the coalition collapsed under Democratic pressure and violence, Black political power collapsed with it — from eight legislators elected in 1884 to four in 1889. They were the last until 1968.

The 1902 Constitution

In 1902 Virginia rewrote its constitution in open daylight. A poll tax and an “understanding clause” — requiring a would-be voter to explain any section of the constitution to a registrar’s satisfaction — handed local officials the power to disqualify Black citizens at will. Registration was not merely suppressed; it was designed to be impossible. The convention’s own delegates said plainly that the purpose was to eliminate the Black vote. It worked for half a century.