Let's have a brief analysis of several means that were used against Black suffrage. The first and easiest to use subterfuge was the literacy test. According to this, the voter was required to be able to read a section of the Constitution in order to be allowed to vote and on many, this test was imposed. Nevertheless, white voters usually avoided taking it, while black voters were held as illiterate and, according to the law, they could not vote.
One legal escape that was used was the so called grandfather clause. This ensured the fact that people that had been voters in the past or were descendants of people who had voted in the past (virtually the entire white population, that is), prior to the 1st of January 1867, could vote even if they did not pass the literacy test. Because the African-American population did not hold the suffrage until after this date, they obviously were not included in the respective category and failed the literacy test.
Additionally, in some States, a poll tax, charged before the vote for each voter, meant that poor Black voters could not afford to exercise their right. Of course, because of the non-discrimination imposed by the Fifteenth Amendment, this was often imposed on poor white people as well.
Finally, in several Southern states, the white primary election was in place well until the 1900s (it was disallowed by a Supreme Court decision in 1944). This was an election prior to the actual elections (thus exempted from the Amendment) and only white voters were allowed here. As in general, until the 70s, the Southern states had voted the Democrats, it was actually the primary choice and vote that counted and the Blacks had no right here.
These were more or less legal subterfuges to the existing legislation. However, the white population had also more brutal and usually more efficient means of restricting the African-American right to vote. Terrorism and lynching were among the most terrible of them. Especially in the years after the Civil War, history notes several such acts and massacres in the Southern states, usually with tens of Blacks killed.
As we have seen from...
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