The Racial History Of The 'Grandfather Clause' : Code Switch : NPR

The Racial History Of The 'Grandfather Clause'


Various states created requirements — literacy tests and poll taxes and constitutional quizzes — that were designed to keep blacks from registering to vote. But many poor southern whites were at risk of also losing their rights because they could not have met such expectations.

"If all these white people are going to be non-citizens along with blacks, the idea is going to lose a lot of support," says James Smethurst, who teaches African-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts.

The solution? A half-dozen states passed laws that made men eligible to vote if they had been able to vote before African-Americans were given the franchise (generally, 1867), or if they were the lineal descendants of voters back then.

This was called the grandfather clause. Most such laws were enacted in the early 1890s.

Earthquakes Turn Water Into Gold

Earthquakes Turn Water Into Gold

Earthquakes have the Midas touch, a new study claims.

Water in faults vaporizes during an earthquake, depositing gold, according to a model published in the March 17 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience. The model provides a quantitative mechanism for the link between gold and quartz seen in many of the world'sgold deposits, said Dion Weatherley, a geophysicist at the University of Queensland in Australia and lead author of the study.

Ceremony for Monitor sailors stirs familial ties

Ceremony for Monitor sailors stirs familial ties - Yahoo! News RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — A century and a half after USS Monitor sank, the interment of two unknown crewmen found in the Civil War ironclad's turret is bringing together people from across the country with distant but powerful ties to those who died aboard.

Common-place: Meeting, Merriment, and Massacre

Common-place: Meeting, Merriment, and Massacre When three English ships sailed into the Chesapeake Bay in late April 1607, they did so amid a soundscape of groaning masts and spars, crew members heaving on the capstan and furling the sails, and the strains of song and instrumental music. This simple claim reminds us that music provided one of the most significant yet underreported dimensions among the first encounters between indigenous and invading cultures as the English established a permanent presence on the western shores of the North Atlantic Ocean. The 2010 commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the founding of Hampton, Virginia, the oldest continuous English-speaking settlement in North America, was also the 400th anniversary of the dispossession of the Kikotan people, routed in a military attack enabled by a musical ruse.