page_title: John Marshall Stone
section_title: Political career
hierarchical_section_title: John Marshall Stone / Political career
caption_attribution_description: Collection: Governors Portraits photograph collection Call number: PI/1989.0008 System ID: 98791. Link to the catalog Governor John M. Stone, March 29, 1876 to Jan. 29, 1882, Jan. 13, 1890 to Jan. 20, 1896. Please see our profile page for information on ordering. Scanned as tiff in 2008/09/22 by MDAH. Credit: Courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History
context_page_description: John Marshall Stone was an American politician from Mississippi. A Democrat, he served longer as Governor of that state than anyone else, from 1876 to 1882 and again from 1890 to 1896. He approved a new constitution in 1890 passed by the Democratic-dominated state legislature that disfranchised most African Americans, excluding them from the political system. They were kept out for nearly 70 years.
context_section_description: At the end of the war, Stone returned to Tishomingo County. He was elected mayor and treasurer. In 1869, he won a race to become state senator, winning re-election in 1873. State elections were marked by fraud and violence; the Red Shirts, a paramilitary group, worked to disrupt and suppress black voting, and turned Republicans out of office. After Governor Adelbert Ames resigned in 1876, Stone, who was President Pro Tempore of the Mississippi Senate at that time, served as the acting governor.
  In the 1877 election, Stone won the Governor's office in his own right, as a Democrat; in 1881 he was defeated for re-election by Robert Lowry. Stone became Governor again after winning the 1889 election. The gubernatorial term was extended through 1896 by the new state constitution of 1890. Determined to keep control and maintain white supremacy, the Democratic-dominated legislature effectively disfranchised most African Americans in the state by adding a requirement to the constitution for voter registration for payment of poll taxes. Two years later, they passed laws requiring literacy tests (administered by white officials in a discriminatory way), and grandfather clauses (the latter  benefited white citizens). These requirements, with additions in legislation of 1892, resulted in a 90% reduction in the number of blacks who voted in Mississippi. In every county a handful of prominent black ministers and local leaders were allowed to vote. African Americans were essentially excluded from the political system for 70 years, until after passage of federal civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s. When this constitution and laws survived an appeal to the  US Supreme Court, other southern states quickly adopted the "Mississippi Plan" and passed their own disfranchising constitutions, through 1908. Voter rolls dropped dramatically in other southern states as well, and politics was dominated by white Democrats.
caption: Governor John M. Stone
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