<P> In addition to being disfranchised, African Americans and poor whites were shut out of the political process . Southern legislatures passed Jim Crow laws imposing segregation in public facilities and places . The discrimination, segregation, and disfranchisement lasted well into the later decades of the 20th century . Those who could not vote could not run for office or serve on juries, so they were shut out of all offices at the local and state as well as federal levels . </P> <P> While Congress had actively intervened for more than 20 years in elections in the South which the House Elections Committee judged to be flawed, after 1896 it backed off from intervening . Many Northern legislators were outraged about the disfranchisement of blacks and some proposed reducing Southern representation in Congress . They never managed to accomplish that, as Southern representatives formed a strong, one - party voting block for decades . Although educated African Americans mounted legal challenges (with many secretly funded by educator Booker T. Washington and his northern allies), the Supreme Court upheld Mississippi's and Alabama's provisions in its rulings in Williams v. Mississippi (1898) and Giles v. Harris (1903). </P> <P> People in the movement chose the term "Redemption" from Christian theology . Historian Daniel W. Stowell concludes that white Southerners appropriated the term to describe the political transformation they desired, that is, the end of Reconstruction . This term helped unify numerous white voters, and encompassed efforts to purge southern society of its sins and to remove Republican political leaders . </P> <P> It also represented the birth of a new Southern society, rather than a return to its antebellum predecessor . Historian Gaines M. Foster explains how the South became known as the "Bible Belt" by connecting this characterization with changing attitudes caused by slavery's demise . Freed from preoccupation with federal intervention over slavery, and even citing it as precedent, white Southerners joined Northerners in the national crusade to legislate morality . Viewed by some as a "bulwark of morality", the largely Protestant South took on a Bible Belt identity long before H.L. Mencken coined the term . </P>

When oakes talks about redemption and redeemers he means