How To Color Old Joe Crow In Animated Literacy

This editorial cartoon from a January 1879 edition of Harper's Weekly pokes fun at the use of literacy tests for blacks as voting qualifications. Wikimedia Eatables hibernate caption

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People aren't exempted from new regulations considering they're old and crotchety, even if that'south what it sounds like when nosotros say they're "grandfathered in."

The term "grandfathered" has become part of the linguistic communication. It's an like shooting fish in a barrel style to describe individuals or companies who get to keep operating under an existing set up of expectations when new rules are put in identify.

The troubled HealthCare.gov website reassures consumers that they tin stay enrolled in grandfathered insurance plans that existed before the Affordable Intendance Act was enacted in 2010. Old power plants are sometimes grandfathered from having to meet new clean air requirements.

But like so many things, the term "grandfather," used in this style, has its roots in America's racial history. It entered the lexicon not just because it suggests something old, but considering of a specific gear up of 19th century laws regulating voting.

The 15th Amendment, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting, was ratified by the states in 1870. If y'all know your history, you'll realize that African-Americans were nevertheless kept from voting in big numbers in Southern states for nearly a century more.

Various states created requirements — literacy tests and poll taxes and constitutional quizzes — that were designed to proceed blacks from registering to vote. Simply many poor Southern whites were at take a chance of also losing their rights because they could not accept met such expectations.

"If all these white people are going to be noncitizens forth with blacks, the idea is going to lose a lot of support," says James Smethurst, who teaches African-American studies at the University of Massachusetts.

The solution? A half-dozen states passed laws that made men eligible to vote if they had been able to vote earlier African-Americans were given the franchise (generally, 1867), or if they were the lineal descendants of voters back and so.

This was called the grandfather clause. Virtually such laws were enacted in the early 1890s.

"The grandpa clause is really not a means of disenfranchising anybody," says Michael Klarman, a Harvard police force professor. "It was a means of enfranchising whites who might have been excluded past things like literacy clauses. Information technology was politically necessary, because otherwise you lot'd have too much opposition from poor whites who would have been disenfranchised."

But protecting whites from restrictions meant to apply to African-Americans was obviously another course of bigotry itself.

"Because of the 15th Amendment, you lot can't pass laws maxim blacks tin't vote, which is what they wanted to do," says Eric Foner, a Columbia Academy historian. "But the 15th Subpoena allowed restrictions that were nonracial. This was pretty prima facie a mode to allow whites to vote, and not blacks."

Some state legislatures enacted grandfather clauses despite knowing they couldn't pass constitutional muster. The Louisiana state constitutional convention adopted a gramps clause even though ane of the state'southward ain U.S. senators warned it would be "grossly unconstitutional."

For that reason, near every country put a fourth dimension limit on their grandpa clauses. They hoped to get whites registered before these laws could exist challenged in court.

"Once you've got people removed from the rolls, it becomes less necessary," Smethurst says. "The white people are on the rolls, and the blackness people are non."

African-Americans typically lacked the fiscal resource to file suit. The NAACP, founded in 1909, persuaded a U.Southward. chaser to challenge Oklahoma'southward grandfather clause, which had been enacted in 1910.

Of the more than 55,000 blacks who were in Oklahoma in 1900, only 57 came from states that had permitted African-Americans to vote in 1867, according to Klarman'due south volume From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality.

In 1915, the Supreme Courtroom ruled unanimously in Guinn five. U.s.a. that grandfather clauses were unconstitutional. The court in those days upheld any number of segregationist laws — and even in Guinn specified that literacy tests untethered from gramps clauses were OK.

The justices were concerned that the grandfather clause was non only discriminatory merely a clear attempt by a state to nullify the federal Constitution. It "was so obvious an evasion that the Supreme Courtroom could not have failed to declare it unconstitutional," The Washington Post wrote at the fourth dimension.

The decision had almost no consequence, nevertheless. The Oklahoma Legislature met in special session to grandfather in the grandfather clause. The new police said those who had been registered in 1914 — whites nether the former system — were automatically registered to vote, while African-Americans could only annals between April xxx and May eleven, 1916, or forever be disenfranchised.

That law stayed on the books until a Supreme Courtroom ruling in 1939.

The intent of the gramps clause, however, was not strictly to placate some whites while discriminating confronting blacks, says Spencer Overton, author of Stealing Democracy: The New Politics of Voter Suppression. It was also about power.

In that era, virtually African-Americans voted Republican, the party of Abraham Lincoln.

"The whole objective of excluding African-Americans was not but white supremacy," Overton says. "It was, 'We're Democrats; they're Republicans; and we're going to exclude them.' I'chiliad not maxim in that location weren't racial overtones, only there were meaning partisan overtones every bit well."

The aforementioned trick had been used confronting white immigrants in the Northeast. It's worth remembering that Massachusetts and Connecticut were the starting time states to impose literacy tests, in hopes of keeping immigrants — who ofttimes supported Democrats in a largely Republican region — from voting.

At to the lowest degree 1 grandfather clause in the Southward was based on a Massachusetts statute from 1857, says Overton, who teaches police at George Washington University.

Perhaps it'south because the grandfather clause was non solely about race — and because information technology was banned a century ago — most people use the term "grandfathered in" and never realize it once had racial connotations.

"This term 'grandad' has been kind of deracialized," Overton says. "It'due south really a very convenient, shorthand term. We probably would not be as comfy with using it if nosotros associated information technology with grandfather clauses in the past and poll taxes and things similar that."

Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/10/21/239081586/the-racial-history-of-the-grandfather-clause

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