The $2 Tax That Erased 130,000 Black VotersThe $2 Tax That Erased 130,000 Black Voters

Why Reconstruction failed and how Jim Crow erased Black voting rights in America. This documentary follows Black political power after the Civil War — from 65% Black voters in Louisiana and 2,000 Black officeholders including Robert Smalls and Hiram Revels, through the 1873 Colfax Massacre, the Cruikshank and Plessy v. Ferguson rulings, and Mississippi's 1890 poll tax and literacy tests. It traces how law, terror and sharecropping debt built a system that lasted until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.