disregarding the principles of the Fifteenth Amendment. Elsewhere the populists sought to win Negro votes, either through fusion with the Republican minority or through the raising of issues with a broad appeal to the Negro farmers. It was no accident that in the South the third-party movement was strongest in those states where it sought not only black votes but active black support. The notion that African Americans had somehow betrayed populism would haunt the Georgia People's Party from the very beginning. Populists had realized the political importance of blacks. Of the state's forty thousand Republicans voters, a considerable majority were former bondsmen. If the white votes were to split, they might decide the outcome of any state election. But therein lay a predicament. How were Populists to court the black votes without losing the whites? How were they to keep whites from supporting the "negro party"? An attempt had to be made to win over blacks. It was a risky scheme, but it contained a degree of precedent in state politics. In the 1870s and 1880s, democrats and independents had sometimes used the same device when the white votes splits. In those days many whites were willing to allow African American men the ballot, especially when it could be sometimes bought for so little. Black populism was destroyed, marking the end of organized political resistance to the return of white supremacy in the South in the late 19th century. Nevertheless, black populism stood as the largest independent political uprising in the South since the "general strike" during the Civil War, until the modern Civil Rights Movement. References Sources . . or 978-0-8214-1807-9. . . , Ph.D. dissertation, UMI Number 3104783. Du Bois, W. E. B. [1935] 1992. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Atheneum. () Gaither, Gerald H. 1977. Blacks and the Populist Revolt: Ballots and Bigotry in the 'New South'''. University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press. () Goodwyn, Lawrence 1976. Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Hahn, Steven. 2003. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ( or ) Kantrowitz, Stephen. 2000. Ben Tillman & the Reconstruction of White Supremacy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina. ( and ) Trelease, Allen. W. 1995. White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana