 Democrats passed Jim Crow laws and in 1890 a new constitution including requirements for poll taxes; these and later literacy tests were used in practice to disfranchise most blacks and many poor whites, preventing them from registering to vote.This second-class status was enforced by whites until after the civil rights movement gained passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.The county's economy was based on agriculture, and after the Civil War, the system of sharecropping developed.