Ratliff v. Beale, 74 Miss. 247

While doing some research for my book I cam across this case concerning black disfranchisement in Mississippi. I shouldn't be surprised by this, but southern courts were unabashedly racist. 

"By reason of its previous condition of servitude and dependence, this race had acquired or accentuated certain peculiarities of habit, of temperament and of character, which clearly distinguished it, as a race, from that of the whites--a patient, docile people, but careless, landless, and migratory within narrow limits, without forethought, and its criminal members given rather to furtive offenses than to the robust crimes of the whites. Restrained by the federal constitution from discriminating against the negro race, the convention discriminated against its characteristics and the offenses to which its weaker members were prone."

Amazing huh?