 In 1931, the Negro Voters League was formed in Raleigh to press for voter registration.The city had an educated and politically sophisticated black middle class; by 1946 the League had succeeded in registering 7,000 black voters, an achievement in the segregated South, since North Carolina had essentially disfranchised blacks with provisions of a new constitution in 1899, excluding them from the political system and strengthening its system of white supremacy and Jim Crow.The work of racial desegregation and enforcement of constitutional civil rights for African Americans continued throughout the state.