Expansion of Voting Rights

The Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 set January 1, 1863 as the date on which the United States’ 3.5 million enslaved Africans would legally be considered freed. The new law was ignored by the Confederate states.

Although the Civil War had formally ended weeks before, news of their freedom did not reach enslaved Africans in Texas until June 19th, what is now celebrated as “Juneteenth”.

The 14th Amendment was ratified, granting freed slaves US citizenship and making the infrequently used reference (at the time), “African Americans”, more a fact than a simple geographic description.

The 15th Amendment passed, stating that voting rights cannot be denied to any citizen at federal or state levels based on race. The federal presence in the South during this period of Reconstruction helped to jumpstart African American voter participation and led to the election of approximately 2000 Black candidates to public office; 16 Black men served in the US Congress during this period.

With the Compromise of 1877, infamously known as “The Great Betrayal”, federal troops were withdrawn from the South and the former Confederate states, led by southern Democrats, soon began to use intimidation and a range of institutional mechanisms, including poll taxes and literacy tests, to disenfranchise Black voters.

In a ruling on five civil rights cases that it had combined due to their similarity, the Supreme Court declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to be unconstitutional. The 8-1 decision struck down the Act’s provision against racial discrimination in public places like trains, restaurants, and hotels. In the ruling, the Court denied that Congress had the power to legislate against expressions of racial discrimination by private individuals and businesses. The ruling opened the door to the Southern states to enact more Jim Crow laws.

By the 1890s, Jim Crow laws and the segregated culture of “separate but equal” were becoming enshrined in Southern culture. In 1898, Louisiana adopted a “Grandfather Clause” as part of its state constitution. This clause exempted poor white voters from the tests and taxes used to prevent former slaves and their adult children from voting. By 1902, all 11 former Confederate states had passed laws intended to limit Black voters’ electoral participation. Violence and threats of violence were also used to deter Southern Blacks from voting. The efforts succeeded, as voter turnout began a steep decline. In Louisiana, the percentage of registered Black voters dropped from 44.8% in 1896 to 4.0 % four years later.

The US Supreme Court struck down grandfather clauses in Guinn v. United States.

The Civil Rights Act of 1957 authorized the US Attorney General to file lawsuits on behalf of African Americans who were denied the right to vote. The 1957 Act was the first civil rights act since Reconstruction.

The 24th Amendment was ratified, eliminating the poll tax for all federal elections.

In separate rulings, the Supreme Court determined that districts for electing members of both the US House of Representatives (Wesberry v Sanders) and state legislatures (Reynolds v Sims) had to be approximately equal in population.

Passage of the Civil Rights Act included a prohibition on the unequal application of voter registration requirements, a common practice in the Jim Crow states of the South. The Act’s passage also proved to be a turning point in American politics as many southern Democrats who opposed the legislation switched allegiance to the Republican Party.

Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which among other things, banned the use of literacy tests and gave the federal government oversight of election laws in states that had previously participated in egregious discriminatory practices.