Grandfather clause

After the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 barred denying the vote on account of race, Southern states needed a way to keep Black citizens from the ballot without saying so out loud. Their tools were literacy tests and poll taxes, hard hurdles aimed at the formerly enslaved.

But those hurdles caught poor white voters too. So the states invented an escape hatch. Starting with Louisiana in 1898, they wrote a clause exempting anyone from the literacy test if he, or his father or grandfather, had been eligible to vote before January 1, 1867.

The date was the whole trick. Before 1867, almost no Black person in the South could vote. So the exemption let illiterate white men skip the test, while Black men, whose grandfathers had been enslaved and barred from voting, had to face it. Same law, opposite effect, race never mentioned.

In 1915, in Guinn v. United States, the Supreme Court struck the device down 8 to 0 as a plain violation of the Fifteenth Amendment. But the states simply pivoted to other barriers, and meaningful federal protection did not arrive until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, fifty years later.