what were two methods to keep african americans from voting in the early 1960s
Following the ratification in 1870 of the 15th Subpoena, which barred states from depriving citizens the right to vote based on race, southern states began enacting measures such as poll taxes, literacy tests, all-white primaries, felony disenfranchisement laws, grandfather clauses, fraud and intimidation to keep African Americans from the polls.
Focused on retaining white supremacy in the electoral process, legislators used loopholes in the 15thursday Amendment to implement a range of measures to disenfranchise Black voters without explicitly characterizing them on the footing of race.
Later more than than a half one thousand thousand Blackness men joined the voting rolls during Reconstruction in the 1870s, helping to elect nigh 2,000 Black men to public office, Mississippi led the way in using measures to circumvent the xvth Amendment. Mississippi's Jim Crow-era laws then ready a precedent for other southern states to use the aforementioned tactics to assault Blackness enfranchisement for nigh a century until the passage of the Voting Rights of 1965.
TIMELINE: Voting Rights in the U.s.a.
1890 Mississippi State Convention
At the 1890 Mississippi State Convention a new constitution was adopted that included a literacy exam and poll tax for eligible voters. Under the new literacy requirement, a potential voter had to be able to read any section of the Mississippi Constitution or understand whatsoever department when read to him, or requite a reasonable interpretation of any section.
"There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter," said James Vardaman in 1890. Vardaman served in the Mississippi Legislature at the time of convention and later became governor of the land. "In Mississippi we have in our constitution legislated against the racial peculiarities of the Negro. . . . When that device fails, we volition resort to something else."
The impact of the legislation was swift. By 1910, registered voters among African Americans dropped to fifteen percent in Virginia, and nether two percent in both Alabama and Mississippi, co-ordinate to historian, Donald G. Nieman, in his book Promises to Continue: African-Americans and The Constitutional Society, 1776 to the Nowadays.
In the 1898Williams V. Mississippi ruling, the U.Southward. Supreme Courtroom upheld the state's poll taxation, disenfranchisement clauses, gramps clause and literacy tests on the basis that the new constitution didn't "discriminate betwixt the races and it has been shown that their actual administration wasn't evil: but that evil was possible under them." The Williams ruling eased the implementation of voter-suppression statutes in many other southern states, including Louisiana, Southward Carolina, N Carolina, Alabama, Virginia and Georgia.
John B. Knox, an Alabama consul to that land'due south 1901 convention, revealed the mindset of white legislatures when he stated that, "The convention'southward goal is to institute white supremacy in the State, within the limits imposed past the Federal Constitution."
While many of the voting suppression measures could as well impact poor white people, they unduly impacted African Americans.
1. Literacy Tests
Analogy depicting freedmen voting in New Orleans, c. 1867.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Anti-literacy laws in many southern states made it illegal to teach enslaved people to read. In 1880, according to the U.Southward. Agency of Census, 76 percent of southern African Americans were illiterate, a rate of 55 per centum points greater than that for southern white people. In 1900, 50 percent of voting-historic period Black men could not read, compared to 12 pct of voting-anile white men. These disparities made literacy tests one of the well-nigh effective tools at suppressing the African American vote. The voting clerks, who were e'er white, could too pass or fail a person at their discretion based on race.
Whorl to Continue
Illiterate white people were oft excluded from these literacy tests through the use of grandfather clauses, which tied their voting rights to their grandfathers' before the Civil War. Former slaves, who had no voting rights until the 15th Amendment, could patently non benefit from this provision. The grandfather clause also practical to poll taxes, which were some other measure created by white-dominated southern legislatures to suppress the Black vote.
2. Poll Taxes
For the offset time since adoption of the State Constitution in 1890, Black voters participate in the Mississippi Democratic primary, 1946.
Bettmann Annal/Getty Images
While southern legislatures claimed that poll taxes for voting were designed to enhance state revenue, to many white political leaders, the main purpose was to suppress the African American vote. "This newspaper believes in white supremacy," said a Tuscaloosa (Alabama) News editorial in 1939, "and it believes that the poll tax is ane of the essentials for the preservation of white supremacy."
Eleven states in the South had laws that required citizens to pay a poll taxation before they could vote. The taxes, which were $1 to $2 per twelvemonth, disproportionately impacted Blackness registered voters. In Georgia, which implemented a cumulative poll tax in 1877 that required all citizens to pay back taxes before being permitted to vote, Blackness voter turnout went down 50 percent, according to Morgan Kousser inThe Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party S, 1880-1910.
3. All-White Primaries
Picketers walking outside of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, demanding equal rights for Black Americans and an Anti-Jim Crow plank in the Party platform, July 12, 1948.
Irving Haberman/IH Images/Getty Images
When literacy tests, poll taxes, granddaddy clauses and the many other ways to circumvent the xvthursday Amendment didn't work to suppress Black voter turnout, white legislators in several southern states used all-white primaries to all only eliminate Black voters' presence in the balloter process.
In Texas, for example, the legislature gave the Democratic Party the authorisation to set its own rules. The political party adamant that information technology was for white voters only, excluding African Americans from its elections and effectively making local balloter politics dominated by ane party that upheld Jim Crow laws.
After a white election official blocked a Black man, Lonnie E. Smith, the right to vote in the 1940 Texas Autonomous master, the NAACP's Thurgood Marshall and William H. Hastie challenged the case all the fashion to the Supreme Courtroom. In 1944, the U.S. Supreme Courtroom ruled in Smith V. Allwright that the Texas white main system was unconstitutional.
"The right to vote in a primary for the nomination of candidates without discrimination past the State…is a correct secured by the Constitution," said the courtroom in its viii-one determination.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965
WATCH: Voting Rights Act of 1965
Signed into law 95 years after the 15thursday Amendment was ratified into the Constitution, the Voting Rights Human action of 1965 outlawed about discriminatory voting practices in southern states such equally literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses that had been designed by southern legislatures to suppress the African American vote.
Most as swift as the resistance to Black voter participation had been nearly a century earlier, so had the response to this landmark legislation. Within a year, merely 4 of the 13 southern states had fewer than fifty pct of African American registered voters.
Shelby County 5. Holder
In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court walked back part of the Voting Rights Human activity when it ruled in a 5-four vote that constraints placed on certain states and federal review of states' voting procedures were outdated. In the wake of the Shelby Canton v. Holder conclusion, several states have enacted laws limiting voter access, including ID requirements, limits on early voting, post-in voting and more than.
Source: https://www.history.com/news/jim-crow-laws-black-vote
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