Why do elites willingly bestow power upon excluded groups, thereby potentially reshaping the balance of power within society and political spheres? The democratization literature has grappled with these weighty questions since its inception as an organized field of study. While various explanations have been crafted to elucidate the dynamics surrounding working-class enfranchisement and women’s suffrage, our existing theories fall short of comprehensively addressing suffrage extensions to racialized minorities. Because racial enfranchisement often involves the extension of voting rights from a majority to a minority of the population, neither its determinants nor its consequences can be understood with frameworks developed to understand class-based extensions of the franchise from a minority to a majority (true for both manhood suffrage and to an extent viii also women’s suffrage). This dissertation seeks not only to carve out an analytical space for racial enfranchisement as both a distinct act of democratization and a novel concept with potentially profound implications for the basic concepts, focus, and assumptions of the democratization literature but also to study the case of the United States at two critical historical junctures: The Progressive Era and the complicity of major Republican players in the disenfranchisement of Black people in the Solid South, a case of failed enfranchisement, and the period between the 1930s and 1960s marked by the transformation of the Democratic Party from a staunched advocate of racial exclusion and suppression to the primary champion of a race reform, resulting with the enfranchisement of Black people through the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The former was marked by the entrenchment of a racially authoritarian regime despite the conducive electoral, structural, and political circumstances to the contrary whereas the latter saw an expansion of racial enfranchisement despite the absence of any clear electoral return and the presence of acute electoral risks for the Democrats as well as the existence of significant coalitions favoring racial exclusion. The dissertation demonstrates that racial enfranchisement takes place in a country under two circumstances: the emergence of an expansive vision of democratic peoplehood and its sway on actors in key governing institutions.