“Brazil Did a Sensible Thing”: The Latin American Precedent for the Mississippi Plan, 1881–95

This paper explores the hemispheric impact of the Lei Saraiva—a law passed by the Brazilian Parliament in 1881 that made literacy tests a national voting requirement for the first time in Brazilian history. After the law’s passage, participation in Brazilian elections dropped from 10.9 percent of the total population to 0.8 percent in 1882; nearly all Brazilian freedpeople were barred from voting. I argue that the Lei Saraiva served as an important precedent for Southern planters constructing Jim Crow legislation in the 1890s. During the 1880s, hundreds of Confederate migrants to Brazil chose to return to the United States because they knew Brazilian slavery was coming to an end. They arrived just as the U.S. planter class was renewing its struggle against an interracial democratic insurgency, this time in the form of the Populist Movement. Planters needed a way to bar Black people from the polls that would not violate the 15^th amendment, which prohibited race-based disfranchisement. To solve this problem, the Confederados began advocating for the importation of the Brazilian plan for Black exclusion, which would effectively bar freedpeople from the polls without making reference to race. They advanced their agenda through the Atlanta Constitution, the most widely read newspaper in the region, which published dozens of articles about Brazilian literacy tests between 1888 and 1891. These articles were reprinted in local newspapers across the South and read by white delegates charged with re-writing state constitutions. The 1890 Mississippi Constitution was the first to make literacy a voting requirement; after its passage, fewer than 9,000 out of 147,000 voting-age Black men in Mississippi remained registered to vote. Over the next decade, the Brazilian plan became “the American Way.” In 1898, the Republican elites who led the invasion of Cuba began attempting to extend literacy tests there as well.