When was the grandfather clause passed

SECTIONS 1 AND 2. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Annotations

Grandfather Clauses.—Until quite recently, the history of the Fifteenth Amendment has been largely a record of belated judicial condemnation of various state efforts to disenfranchise African-Americans either overtly through statutory enactment or covertly through inequitable administration of electoral laws and toleration of discriminatory membership practices of political parties. Of several devices that have been held unconstitutional, one of the first was the “grandfather clause.” Beginning in 1895, several states enacted temporary laws whereby persons who had been voters, or descendants of those who had been voters, on January 1, 1867, could be registered notwithstanding their inability to meet any literacy requirement. Unable because of the date to avail themselves of the exemption, African-Americans were disabled to vote on grounds of illiteracy or through discriminatory administration of literacy tests, while illiterate whites were permitted to register without taking any tests. With the achievement of the intended result, most states permitted their laws to lapse, but Oklahoma’s grandfather clause had been enacted as a permanent amendment to the state constitution. A unanimous Court condemned the device as recreating and perpetuating “the very conditions which the [Fifteenth] Amendment was intended to destroy.”

The Court did not experience any difficulty in voiding a subsequent Oklahoma statute of 1916 that provided that all persons, except those who voted in 1914, who were qualified to vote in 1916 but who failed to register between April 30 and May 11, 1916, with some exceptions for sick and absent persons who were given an additional brief period to register, should be perpetually disenfranchised. The Fifteenth Amendment, Justice Frankfurter declared for the Court, nullified “sophisticated as well as simple-minded modes of discrimination. It hits onerous procedural requirements which effectively handicap exercise of the franchise by the colored race although the abstract right to vote may remain unrestricted as to race.” The impermissible effect of the statute, the Court said, was automatically to continue as permanent voters, without their being obliged to register again, all white persons who were on registration lists in 1914 by virtue of the previously invalidated grandfather clause, whereas African-Americans, prevented from registering by that clause, had been afforded only a 20-day registration opportunity to avoid permanent disenfranchisement.

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SECTIONS 1 AND 2. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Annotations

The White Primary.—The Court displayed indecision, however, when it was called upon to deal with the exclusion of African-Americans from participation in primary elections. Prior to its becoming convinced that primary contests were in fact elections to which federal constitutional guarantees applied, the Court had relied upon the Equal Protection Clause to strike down the Texas White Primary Law as well as a later Texas statute that contributed to a similar exclusion by limiting voting in primary elections to members of state political parties as determined by the central committees of such parties. When exclusion of African-Americans was thereafter perpetuated by political parties not acting in obedience to any statutory command, this discrimination was for a time viewed as not constituting state action and therefore as not prohibited by either the Fourteenth or the Fifteenth Amendments. This holding was reversed nine years later when the Court declared that, where the selection of candidates for public office is entrusted by statute to political parties, a political party in making its selection at a primary election is a state agency, and consequently may not under the Fifteenth Amendment exclude African-Americans from such elections. An effort by South Carolina to escape the effects of this ruling by repealing all statutory provisions regulating primary elections and political organizations conducting them was nullified by a lower federal court with no doctrinal difficulty, but the Supreme Court, although nearly unanimous on the result, was unable to come to a majority agreement with regard to the exclusion of African-Americans by the Jaybird Association, a countywide organization that, independently of state laws and the use of state election machinery or funds, nearly monopolized access to Democratic nomination for local offices. The exclusionary policy was held unconstitutional but there was no opinion of the Court.

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Justia › US Law › US Codes and Statutes › US Constitution Annotated › Fifteenth Amendment -- Rights of Citizens to Vote › Literacy Tests

SECTIONS 1 AND 2. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Annotations

Literacy Tests.—At an early date the Court held that literacy tests that are drafted so as to apply alike to all applicants for the voting franchise would be deemed to be fair on their face and in the absence of proof of discriminatory enforcement could not be said to deny equal protection . Voter qualifications But an Alabama constitutional amendment, the legislative history of which disclosed that both its object and its intended administration were to disenfranchise African-Americans, was held to violate the Fifteenth Amendment.

“Mr. Solid South” (African American looks on as white voter writes on wall)

Editorial cartoon–Harper’s

Weekly
Library of Congress

In 1896, in unabashed defiance of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, Louisiana passed the “Grandfather clause” in order to keep former slaves and their descendants from voting. Amendments to the state constitution required would-be voters to be able to read and write English or his native tongue, or own property assessed at $300 or more. The clause allowed a man to vote if his grandfather or father had voted prior to January 1, 1867. Neither free people of color, even if they owned property, nor freedmen could vote before this date. Thus, illiterate whites who could not pass a literacy test could vote; meanwhile, the number of registered black voters in Louisiana dropped from nearly 45% in 1896 to 4.0% in 1900. Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, and Virginia soon enacted their own grandfather clauses. The political voice of African Americans was silenced.