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United States, 238 U.S. 347 (1915), was a United States Supreme Court decision that found certain grandfather clause exemptions to literacy tests for voting rights to be unconstitutional. Though these grandfather clauses were superficially race-neutral, they were designed to protect the voting rights of illiterate white voters while ...
A literacy test assesses a person's literacy skills: their ability to read and write. Literacy tests have been administered by various governments, particularly to immigrants. Between the 1850s [1] and 1960s, literacy tests were used as an effective tool for disenfranchising African Americans in the Southern United States.
States also used grandfather clauses to enable illiterate whites who could not pass a literacy test to vote. It allowed a man to vote if his grandfather or father had voted before January 1, 1867; at that time, most African Americans had been slaves, while free people of color , even if property owners, and freedmen were ineligible to vote ...
[60] [61] Between 1890 and 1910, ten of the eleven former Confederate states, starting with Mississippi, passed new constitutions or amendments that effectively disenfranchised most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites through a combination of poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests, and residency and record-keeping requirements.
Voting in the 1972 Presidential Primary Election in Birmingham, Alabama. 1970. Alaska ends the use of literacy tests. [48] Native Americans who live on reservations in Colorado are first allowed to vote in the state. [54] 1971. Adults aged 18 through 21 are granted the right to vote by the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The clause waived literacy tests and additional requirements for men whose descendants could vote before 1867, and African American men could not vote until 1870. Eric Foner, a Columbia University ...
It wasn't until 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, that discriminatory tactics such as literacy tests were outlawed and women could vote. Marie ...
These laws, along with unfairly implemented literacy tests and extra-legal intimidation, [7] such as by the Ku Klux Klan, achieved the desired effect of disenfranchising Asian-American, Native American voters and poor whites as well, but in particular the poll tax was disproportionately directed at African-American voters.