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this balance of power A generation after the turbulence of this era, though, the comprehensive regime of white supremacy had emerged. So, too, had one party political monopolization of Southern politics, in the form of the Democratic Party. blacks had been eliminated from politics and socially segregated. Because this regime endured until the modern civil rights era, it is easy to think its reign natural and inevitable. But this regime emerged through the struggles of this era it had to be self-consciously constructed, brick by brick, year by year, in conflicts with opposing white factions close to equipoise, in battles whose outcome was often in doubt. At critical junctures, the triumph of one set of forces would send politics and culture down a particular path a path that would then make the next step easier for those forces Contrary also to the limited attention these issues have received in modern constitutional scholarship, the forms of law played a central role in taking the fluid, open-ended welter of events and crystallizing them into a particular form. First, law was an instrument the oligarchs used to leverage fragile control at one moment into more persistent form; through laws that gerrymandered election districts, and through statutory suffrage restrictions, this faction undermined its political competition in incremental stages. Doing so then culminated in the new disfranchising constitutions and constitutional amendments of 1890-1908 that in the most enduring legal form available, froze into place an electorate drained of nearly all black, and many poor white, voters. Second, desperate black citizens, viewing the federal courts as their last hope, created and arranged financing for a social and litigation movement to challenge constitutionally these disfranchising constitutions. But in Giles v. Harris, a divided Court, in an 2189U.S.475(1903) #,%?1@$&#% . 0 *.* " *" + 0 * 1 " " 8 1 * " A ! > . >* * * + " * + .>* * * ; .< * * ".. ." . " 0 0 /* " . 0 * 0 *. 5* *" * 0 * * * 0 * " 0 * 6 " " *++ * " 0 * " < 0 + 8 * ) "00 * * + ; *0 " * * * " * A * 0 * * #,%<#%, " * +." 8 ." 0 "+ 1 " . 8 "+0 * " + * * >* " # " + * "