15th Amendment
Sadly, the amendment did not prohibit states from voting discrimination on the basis of education, property, religious beliefs or ancestry. Southerners were not morally bound to any of the Civil War amendments. Georgia’s Governor Smith gloated that “his state could hold inviolate every law of the United States and still so legislate upon our labor system as to retain our old plantation system.” In search of “rule by intelligent property holders,” Southern governments created barriers that would eradicate electoral participation by both blacks and poor whites. Poll taxes, literacy tests, property qualifications, arbitrary registration practices, and the grandfather clause were barriers to voting implemented by states until each was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). States would then find another avenue to inhibit African American suffrage. Though it was a gradual process to eliminate voter registrations, in Louisiana in 1896, there were 130,334 Negroes registered to vote; in 1900, there were only 5,320. The trend repeated throughout the South. It would be not until passage of the 24th amendment, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and South Carolina v Katzenbach that electoral discrimination would end.
