"During the last two decades of the nineteenth century black Americans experienced a relentless attack on their social, political, and economic rights. This resulted in a decline the their status throughout the United States and especially in the South, where slightly less than 90 percent of them lived. Beginning in 1890, measures designed to disfranchise blacks began to be written into the constitutions of southern states; and, by 1910, most blacks had been eliminated as voters. It was in this same period that racial segregation, or Jim Crow ideas, began to be translated into law and steadily extended to all areas of life in the South."