Suffrage

Racial Minorities

The Fifteenth Amendment, passed by Congress as part of the Civil War Amendments and ratified by the several states on February 3, 1870, established that the right to vote of a citizen would not be “denied or abridged …on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” While this offered a formal protection in the Constitution, full suffrage for racial minorities remained elusive.

After ratification, state and local legislation, especially in the south, still erected barriers, which were more inventive than bans on voting rights. Often referred to as “Jim Crow” laws, these barriers, despite appearing to be race neutral, had the purpose and effect of denying the right to vote to racial minorities, particularly African Americans. The states have the power to restrict voting rights in Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, which allows the states to determine the qualifications of electors. Therefore, states, in theory, had the power to determine the requirements a citizen needs in order to vote.

All that the Constitution required is that the laws not abridge the right to vote based on race, color or previous condition of servitude. As a result, Jim Crow laws arose in the south. Several of the methods included white-only voting in Democratic Party primary elections, hefty registration requirements, literacy and understanding requirements, ownership or rental of real property as a requirement for voting on property tax issues, and poll taxes. These laws had the intended [Page 772]effect; African-American participation in voting in the south was rare.

It was not until the federal government, working from the Enforcement Clause (Section 2) of the Fifteenth Amendment in the 1960s, that removal of these barriers began. Bringing suit against the discriminatory laws, the federal government sought to rectify the denial of full suffrage to racial minorities. The Supreme Court, in several pivotal cases concerning voting rights ruled that state laws that discriminated and denied access to the ballot box would not be tolerated. In Louisiana v. United States (1965), the court struck down the use of literacy and understanding tests as a qualification for voting. In Kramer v. Union Free School District (1969), the court struck down the ownership or rental of real property requirement. In Dunn v. Blumstein (1972), the residency requirement of a year as a qualification for voting was deemed unconstitutional.

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