The plaintiff, Henry Williams, claimed that Mississippi's voting laws were upheld with the intent to disenfranchise African Americans, thus violating the Fourteenth Amendment.

[1] The poll tax and literacy clauses disproportionately affected African Americans, who tended to be less wealthy and less educated than whites due to lack of resources.

Although some northern Congressmen proposed reducing southern states' apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives to reflect the numbers of African Americans who were disenfranchised, no action was passed.

With one-party rule, white Southern Democrats had a powerful voting block which they exercised for decades, for instance, to reject any Federal legislation against lynching.

The Supreme Court indirectly overturned one aspect of this decision in Guinn v. United States in 1915 where it held that the use of grandfather clauses to enable whites to avoid the literacy tests used to exclude blacks was unconstitutional.

In 2023 the Supreme Court refused to consider reviewing the felonies, in a case arguing that their perpetuation and continued enforcement under the Mississippi Constitution was still tainted by an original intent to disproportionately disenfranchise African-American Mississippians.