 Some could not accept that their former slaves were now equal under the law.When the state Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of African American suffrage in 1867, the reaction became stronger.The "Nashville Republican Banner" on January 4, 1868, published an editorial calling for a revolutionary movement of white Southerners to unseat the one-party state rule imposed by the Republican Party and restore the legal inferiority of the region's black population.