In Arkansas,[629] in 1867, a law granting certain rights to Negroes had the following provision: “That nothing herein contained shall be construed to repeal or modify any statute or common law usage of this State respecting ... service on juries.” Though nothing is said of it, one may infer that this meant that Negroes were not to sit on juries. A Louisiana[630] law of 1880 states that, in the selection of jurors, “there shall be no distinction made on account of race, color, or previous condition.” This State at the time was in the hands of the Reconstructionists. Mississippi,[631] in 1867, provided that freedmen should not be competent to serve as petit or grand jurors. A law of Tennessee[632] of 1866, giving Negroes the right to testify, had the provision that it should not be construed to give colored persons the right to sit on juries in that State. The same year, a law[633] repealing certain other acts had the provision that nothing in the act should be construed to admit persons of color to serve on the jury. But in 1868, the Negroes of Tennessee[634] were given full rights in this respect. This appears to be all of the legislation as to Negro jurors in the South between 1865 and the present. That the statute of 1875 prohibiting the exclusion of persons from jury service on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude is constitutional, has been decided in a series of cases before the Supreme Court of the United States.[635] The mere fact that no Negroes are on a certain jury does not indicate that the Fourteenth Amendment, under which all these jury cases arise, has been violated; it must be shown that the Negroes were kept off the jury consciously by State officials because of their race, color, or previous condition.[636] The Fourteenth Amendment is violated, however, when the officers of the State keep Negroes off the juries for these causes. The Supreme Court[637] of the United States said in 1899: “Whenever by an action of a State, whether through its legislature, through its courts, or through its executive or administrative officers, all persons of the African race are excluded, solely because of their race or color, from serving as grand jurors in the criminal prosecution of a person of the African race, the equal protection of the laws is denied to him contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.”