African-American Vote

IN 1789, AFRICAN Americans were defined in the U.S. Constitution as three-fifths of a person for determining representation and could not vote. In 1870, African Americans were given the right to vote and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments rescinded the three-fifths clause. The Fifteenth Amendment prohibited federal or state government from infringing on a citizen's right to vote, “on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.” For nearly 90 years thereafter, some states still attempted to abridge many African Americans' right to vote.

The main means were seemingly objective criteria such as “literacy laws,” which required that persons be able to read before they could register to vote. Since most African Americans were illiterate at the time, they were prevented from voting, and in many cases were removed from the voting polls. In many cases, voting officials exempted poor whites who could pass a “good [Page 17]conduct test,” by having a person of good standing in the community vouch for them. After 1898, southern states adopted “grandfather clauses,” which allowed illiterate and property-less men to vote, if their grandfathers had been eligible to vote prior to the abolition of slavery in 1865. Almost no blacks could meet this requirement. Despite the law, there were many roadblocks that prevented African Americans from exercising their voting rights. Voter qualifying tests (such as literacy tests), discriminatory enforcement of registration rules, poll taxes, and outright racial gerrymandering were just some of the devices standing between African Americans and their constitutionally guaranteed rights to both register to vote and exercise that right. However, the most effective barrier to black political power was the white primary election. The primary determined the candidates who would run in the general election, but because the Democratic Party was the majority party, the candidates nominated in its primary always won the election. Primaries were the real election. Beginning in the 1890s, Democrats were able to bar blacks from voting in primaries on the pretext that the party was a private club and thus, not subject to federal laws prohibiting discrimination. As Democrats reasserted political authority in the south, African Americans had few legal or humanitarian protections. Throughout Reconstruction, African Americans were hanged without formal charges or trials. It was reported that lynchings increased from about 50 a year in the early 1880s, to about 75 a year in the mid-1880s, and averaging well over 100 a year during the 1890s. Between 1890 and 1900 more than 1,200 African American men and women were lynched in the United States. Thus, by the end of the 19th century, southern black people lived under the constant threat of terrorism, were denied access to public facilities supported by their taxes, were relegated to the worst schools, and labored under the unjust economic system enforced by discriminatory laws.

A young African-American woman casts her vote at Cardozo High School in Washington, D.C. on November 3, 1964. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 applied a national prohibition against the denial or abridgment of the right to vote based on the literacy tests.

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