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"Mississippi Laws" Noenoe Silva explains the "Mississippi Laws" put into effect by the Provisional Government: "Sanford Dole and Lorrin Thurston, they were quite racist: they wanted to make sure that the Asian immigrants couldn't vote and they wanted to make sure that as few as possible of the Kanaka [Hawaiians] were eligible to vote. They really thought that people with money, the elite, are the ones who should run the government. They said those other people are just ignorant and they shouldn't have a say or a vote. Dole corresponded with John W. Burgess, a Professor of Political Science at Yale whose philosophy was that the Teutonic races were the ones that know how to govern themselves, and everybody else needs to be governed by them. "So they put in what was called at the time, 'Mississippi Laws,' which were things like, at the polling place people could be asked to explain fine points of the Constitution and if they couldn't do it, they would be denied the right to vote. And they also put in language requirements so you had to be able to read and write in English or a European language in order to vote. It was very racist, and that went into effect in July 1894 against the expressed wishes of the majority of Hawaiians. "Hawaiians signed protest memorials, they had a giant rally. They sent letters to all sorts of people protesting this, but on that same day that the Republic was proclaimed, the United States Minister, Albert Willis, recognized it as the de facto government of the Islands. That was July 4, 1894. So the Hawaiians were very, very upset and they felt so betrayed. Here Cleveland had said he was going to help them. So they started saying 'Well, we've got to take matters into our own hands now; he says one thing and then this Minister does this, there is really no real help forthcoming.' "So they started to amass arms, and they tried to have an armed overthrow in January of 1895. And that war actually happened up in Nu'uanu." "Mississippi Laws"
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