In 1890, the Mississippi re-segregation constitution became the governing instrument of legal racism. In that same year, of the nine million African Americans in the United States, seven million lived in the South. From 1888 through the 1890s, the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad was selling land in Sunflower County at $5 an acre, on installment plans. The opportunity for wealth-based farming and land ownership brought the Byrds from Sumter County, Alabama, which itself was a settlement originated by Seminole Indians, to Sunflower County, Mississippi, some 205 miles away.