The Readjuster Party
*The Readjuster Party was founded on this date in 1879. They were a bi-racial state-level political party formed in Virginia across party lines.
Formed during the turbulent period following the Reconstruction era, they sought to reduce the state's outstanding debt. Readjusters aspired "to break the power of wealth and established privilege" among the planter elite of whites in the state and to promote public education. The party's program attracted support among both white and Black residents of the Commonwealth.
The party was led by an attorney and a former Confederate general who was president of several railroads. One was a significant force in Virginia politics from around 1870 until 1883. The Readjuster Party refinanced the Commonwealth's debts and invested in schools, especially for Virginia's Black citizens, who gained access to teaching jobs. The party increased funding for what is now Virginia Tech and established its black counterpart, Virginia State University. They abolished the poll tax and the public whipping post. Because of expanded voting, Danville elected a Black-majority town council and hired an unprecedented integrated police force. While Republicans controlled the Presidency, Mahone controlled patronage in Virginia.
When Democrat Grover Cleveland was elected U.S. President in 1884, patronage switched to what had been the Conservative Party (which became the Democratic Party in 1883). The Readjusters lost control of the state legislature in 1883 after the Danville Massacre, which occurred immediately before voting began. J. Taylor Ellyson, who would serve several terms as Richmond's mayor and later become Lieutenant Governor, was elected a state senator from Richmond on an anti-Readjuster platform. Legislators elected had organized revitalization of the Democratic Party on conservative principles in 1883, and Virginia's Democratic legislature supported only Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate. Finally, in 1892, the General Assembly adopted the Olcutt Act, which forbade using the bond coupons to pay state taxes.
The collapse of the biracial Republican coalition was also related to a broader struggle over marriage and the legislature's attempt to ban miscegenation. John M. Langston, whose father was white and mother was of African and Native American heritage, ran for U.S. Congress in Mahone's Petersburg stronghold, criticizing the political boss for neglecting African Americans except on election day. Freedmen wanted to protect equality of rights in marriage, in part to gain protection for previous common-law marriages. After the Readjuster Party disappeared, the Republican Party lost its competitiveness in the state. Virginia's Democratic Party dominated and embedded Jim Crow laws in the Virginia Constitution of 1901/2.
Some such laws had been adopted in the previous two decades (including forbidding those ever convicted of minor theft or an offense involving a whipping penalty to vote) and effectively disenfranchised most Blacks and some poor whites. Legalized racial segregation of public facilities included all schools and transportation. Those with any African ancestry could not serve on juries or run for any office and so lost any political voice. Most blacks were disenfranchised until after the mid-1960s, when the 20th-century American civil rights movement gained passage of federal legislation to enforce integration and voting rights.
