What was required in order for freedmen to vote

Black voting fell off sharply in most areas because of threats by white employers and violence from the Ku Klux Klan, a ruthless secret organization bent on preserving white supremacy at all costs. White majorities began to vote out the Republicans and replace them with Democratic governors, legislators, and local officials. Laws were soon passed banning interracial marriages and racially segregating railroad cars along with the public schools.

Laws and practices were also put in place to make sure blacks would never again freely participate in elections.

But one problem stood in the way of denying African Americans the right to vote: the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed them this right. To a great extent, Mississippi led the way in overcoming the barrier presented by the 15th Amendment. In , Mississippi held a convention to write a new state constitution to replace the one in force since Reconstruction. The white leaders of the convention were clear about their intentions. Because of the 15th Amendment, they could not ban blacks from voting.

Instead, they wrote into the state constitution a number of voter restrictions making it difficult for most blacks to register to vote. First, the new constitution required an annual poll tax, which voters had to pay for two years before the election. This was a difficult economic burden to place on black Mississippians, who made up the poorest part of the state's population.

Many simply couldn't pay it. But the most formidable voting barrier put into the state constitution was the literacy test. It required a person seeking to register to vote to read a section of the state constitution and explain it to the county clerk who processed voter registrations.

This clerk, who was always white, decided whether a citizen was literate or not. The literacy test did not just exclude the 60 percent of voting-age black men most of them ex-slaves who could not read. It excluded almost all black men, because the clerk would select complicated technical passages for them to interpret. By contrast, the clerk would pass whites by picking simple sentences in the state constitution for them to explain. Mississippi also enacted a "grandfather clause" that permitted registering anyone whose grandfather was qualified to vote before the Civil War.

Obviously, this benefited only white citizens. The "grandfather clause" as well as the other legal barriers to black voter registration worked. Mississippi cut the percentage of black voting-age men registered to vote from over 90 percent during Reconstruction to less than 6 percent in These measures were copied by most of the other states in the South.

By the turn of the century, the white Southern Democratic Party held nearly all elected offices in the former Confederate states. The Southern Republican Party, mostly made up of blacks, barely existed and rarely even ran candidates against the Democrats. As a result, the real political contests took place within the Democratic Party primary elections.

Whoever won the Democratic primary was just about guaranteed victory in the general election. In , Mississippi passed a law that declared political parties to be private organizations outside the authority of the 15th Amendment.

This permitted the Mississippi Democratic Party to exclude black citizens from membership and participation in its primaries. The MFDP elected delegates to attend the Democratic National Convention and demanded to be seated in place of the segregationist Democratic delegates. The MFDP refused this compromise and left the convention.

The Voting Rights Act has been amended and renewed several times since , and has been tested in over twenty U. Supreme Court cases, including Shelby County v. Holder , which ruled part of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional and made racial discrimination in voting easier.

The portal for Black Americans and the Vote highlights many of the National Archives holdings that relate to the long struggle for equality in voting rights. The National Archives holds records relating to mass voting actions such as Freedom Summer, as well as records about the organizations and people that championed voting access for Black Americans.

This subject portal is not meant to be exhaustive, but to provide guidance to researchers interested in African Americans and the vote in relation to the Federal government. Blogs relating to the Electoral College in Pieces of History. Library of Congress: Voting Rights. A voter is a citizen who has the legal right to help make decisions for the nation. After the United States Civil War, state governments that had been part of the Confederacy tried to limit the voting rights of black citizens and prevent contact between black and white citizens in public places.

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Interactives Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. Related Resources. Reconstruction Their votes and leadership helped create access to jobs, housing, and education for African Americans. However, in the s many Southern states passed laws that made it more difficult for African Americans to vote.

The Fifteenth Amendment had a significant loophole: it did not grant suffrage to all men, but only prohibited discrimination on the basis of race and former slave status. States could require voters to pass literacy tests or pay poll taxes -- difficult tasks for the formerly enslaved, who had little education or money.

Because of these discriminatory laws, only a small number of African Americans voted over the next 70 years. During the twentieth century, African Americans fought for civil rights through organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League and through the efforts of individuals like Booker T.

Washington and W. The Voting Rights Act , adopted in , offered greater protections for suffrage. Though the Fifteenth Amendment had significant limitations, it was an important step in the struggle for voting rights for African Americans and it laid the groundwork for future civil rights activism.