After the ratification of the 15th amendment in 1870, it seemed as though the voting rights for African Americans were secured. The amendment explicitly states that all citizens of the United States, regardless of race, have the right to vote. However, in the years following the passage of the reconstruction amendments, it became clear that the disenfranchisement of African Americans, especially in the south, would still be a huge issue. During the 1870s, Reconstruction was retreating as dissent with corrupt presidential cabinets and a renewal of racism beliefs began to prevail. People in both the north and south went back to believing strongly that the “natural leaders” in government should only be whites. This resurgence of white supremacist values led to more and more southern states finding “legal” ways to prevent African Americans from voting.
One of the most notorious ways that southern states tried to dictate who could vote were with literacy tests. Although they varied from state to state, these tests generally consisted of reading and writing assessments that were supposed to test whether the voter was “educated” enough to vote. The proctors for these tests had complete jurisdiction over who passed, which meant that an overwhelming majority of African Americans were deemed illiterate. These tests exclude immigrants and poor white people from voting as well. Another method to disenfranchise voters were the poll taxes. Many southern states required voters to pay before they could cast a ballot. This forced many African Americans and poor whites to choose between paying for their basic needs or voting. Furthermore, the grandfather clause was another law implemented by seven southern states that allowed people whose ancestors had been able to vote before 1867 to be exempt from the discriminatory voting requirements. Since the 15th amendment was ratified in 1870, this act allowed many poor whites to vote, but still excluded the vast majority of African Americans.
All of the aforementioned strategies that the southern states implemented were laws that they passed and thus deemed completely legal. However, if these practices failed to completely stop African Americans from voting, many people took it upon themselves to terrorize them into stopping. Numerous white terrorist organizations sprung up to intimidate African Americans at polling stations. Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Red Shirts committed violent crimes against African Americans in the name of white supremacy. Although Congress passed three Enforcement Acts in 1870 to stop the terrorist groups, they were repealed three years later. Most of the white community in the south did not see these groups as terrorists, instead, they supported the idea that blacks were not fit to vote.
Many of these discriminatory practices were not officially outlawed until the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 provided that the practices were illegal and finally worked to enforce the 15th amendment, almost a decade after it was ratified.
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