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.
