<P> One device which the Democratic Party began to use more widely in Southern states in the early 20th century was the white primary, which served for decades to disfranchise the few blacks who managed to get past barriers of voter registration . Barring blacks from voting in the Democratic Party primaries meant they had no chance to vote in the only competitive contests, as the Republican Party was then weak in the South . White primaries were not struck down by the Supreme Court until Smith v. Allwright in 1944 . </P> <P> In 1880, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303 (1880) that African Americans could not be excluded from juries . But, beginning in 1890 with new state constitutions and electoral laws, the South effectively disfranchised blacks in the South, which routinely disqualified them for jury duty which was limited to voters . This left them at the mercy of a white justice system arrayed against them . In some states, particularly Alabama, the state used the criminal justice system to reestablish a form of peonage, through the convict - lease system . The state sentenced black males to years of imprisonment, which they spent working without pay . The state leased prisoners to private employers, such as Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, a subsidiary of United States Steel Corporation, which paid the state for their labor . Because the state made money, the system created incentives for the jailing of more men, who were disproportionately black . It also created a system in which treatment of prisoners received little oversight . </P> <P> Extrajudicial punishment was more brutal . During the last decade of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, white vigilante mobs lynched thousands of black males, sometimes with the overt assistance of state officials, mostly within the South . No whites were charged with crimes in any of those murders . Whites were so confident of their immunity from prosecution for lynching that they not only photographed the victims, but made postcards out of the pictures . </P> <P> The Ku Klux Klan, which had largely disappeared after a brief violent career in the early years of Reconstruction, reappeared in 1915 . It grew mostly in industrializing cities of the South and Midwest that underwent the most rapid growth from 1910 to 1930 . Social instability contributed to racial tensions that resulted from severe competition for jobs and housing . People joined KKK groups because they were anxious about their place in American society, as cities were rapidly changed by a combination of industrialization, migration of blacks and whites from the rural South, and waves of increased immigration from mostly rural southern and eastern Europe . </P>

Who fought for rights in the struggle of the orders