Fifteenth Amendment, Section 1:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude–

The history of the Fifteenth Amendment has often been a record of belated judicial condemnation of various state efforts to disenfranchise African Americans, either overtly through statutory enactment or covertly through inequitable administration of electoral laws and toleration of discriminatory practices.1 One of the first devices declared unconstitutional by the Court was the “grandfather clause.” 2 Beginning in 1895, several states enacted laws in which persons who had been voters or descendants of voters before the ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments could be registered without meeting any literacy requirement. Black voters were therefore unable to avail themselves of the grandfather clause, and then kept from voting on grounds of illiteracy or through discriminatory administration of literacy tests. Meanwhile, illiterate White citizens could register without taking any literacy tests. With the achievement of the intended result, most states permitted these laws to lapse, but the State of Oklahoma’s grandfather clause had been enacted as a permanent amendment to the state constitution.3 A unanimous Court in the 1915 case Guinn v. United States condemned the device as recreating and perpetuating “the very conditions which the [Fifteenth] Amendment was intended to destroy.” 4

The Court voided a subsequent Oklahoma statute providing that persons who were qualified to vote in 1916, but who failed to register between April 30 and May 11, 1916, should be perpetually disenfranchised.5 The effect of this statute was that Black voters only had a twenty-day registration opportunity to avoid permanent disenfranchisement by virtue of the invalidated grandfather clause in Guinn. In striking down the law, Justice Felix Frankfurter declared for the Court that the Fifteenth Amendment nullified “sophisticated as well as simple-minded modes of discrimination. It hits onerous procedural requirements which effectively handicap exercise of the franchise by the colored race although the abstract right to vote may remain unrestricted as to race.” 6

Footnotes

1

See e.g., Neal, 103 U.S. at 388–89 (holding a state constitution that limited the franchise to White males unconstitutional).

2

Guinn v. United States, 238 U.S. 347, 359 (1915).

3

Id.

4

Id. at 360.

5

Lane v. Wilson, 307 U.S. 268 (1939).

6

Id. at 275.