What were grandfather clauses, and what was its purpose with respect to literacy tests?
This editorial cartoon from a Jan 1879 edition of Harper's Weekly pokes fun at the use of literacy tests for blacks as voting qualifications. Wikimedia Commons hibernate caption
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People aren't exempted from new regulations because they're former 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 language. It's an piece of cake way to describe individuals or companies who get to keep operating under an existing set 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 Care Human action was enacted in 2010. One-time ability plants are sometimes grandfathered from having to meet new clean air requirements.
Just similar so many things, the term "grandfather," used in this way, has its roots in America's racial history. It entered the lexicon not just considering it suggests something old, simply because of a specific set of 19th century laws regulating voting.
The 15th Subpoena, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting, was ratified by united states of america in 1870. If you know your history, you'll realize that African-Americans were nevertheless kept from voting in large numbers in Southern states for almost a century more than.
Various states created requirements — literacy tests and poll taxes and constitutional quizzes — that were designed to keep blacks from registering to vote. But many poor Southern whites were at risk of likewise losing their rights because they could not accept met such expectations.
"If all these white people are going to be noncitizens along 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 vi states passed laws that fabricated men eligible to vote if they had been able to vote before African-Americans were given the franchise (generally, 1867), or if they were the lineal descendants of voters back then.
This was called the grandfather clause. Most such laws were enacted in the early 1890s.
"The gramps clause is actually not a means of disenfranchising everyone," says Michael Klarman, a Harvard law professor. "Information technology was a means of enfranchising whites who might have been excluded by things similar literacy clauses. Information technology was politically necessary, because otherwise y'all'd have too much opposition from poor whites who would have been disenfranchised."
But protecting whites from restrictions meant to utilise to African-Americans was apparently some other form of discrimination itself.
"Considering of the 15th Amendment, yous can't laissez passer laws saying blacks can't vote, which is what they wanted to exercise," says Eric Foner, a Columbia University historian. "But the 15th Amendment immune restrictions that were nonracial. This was pretty prima facie a way to permit 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 granddad clause even though one of the state'south own U.S. senators warned it would be "grossly unconstitutional."
For that reason, nearly every state put a fourth dimension limit on their grandad clauses. They hoped to get whites registered before these laws could be 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 black people are non."
African-Americans typically lacked the fiscal resources to file suit. The NAACP, founded in 1909, persuaded a U.S. chaser to challenge Oklahoma's 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's book From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality.
In 1915, the Supreme Courtroom ruled unanimously in Guinn v. United States that grandfather clauses were unconstitutional. The courtroom in those days upheld whatever number of segregationist laws — and even in Guinn specified that literacy tests untethered from grandfather clauses were OK.
The justices were concerned that the grandfather clause was not only discriminatory but a clear endeavor by a state to nullify the federal Constitution. Information technology "was so obvious an evasion that the Supreme Court could non accept failed to declare it unconstitutional," The Washington Mail wrote at the time.
The decision had nearly no result, however. The Oklahoma Legislature met in special session to grandfather in the grandfather clause. The new law said those who had been registered in 1914 — whites under the old organization — were automatically registered to vote, while African-Americans could just annals between April 30 and May xi, 1916, or forever be disenfranchised.
That law stayed on the books until a Supreme Courtroom ruling in 1939.
The intent of the grandfather clause, notwithstanding, was not strictly to placate some whites while discriminating against blacks, says Spencer Overton, writer of Stealing Democracy: The New Politics of Voter Suppression. Information technology was as well nigh power.
In that era, well-nigh 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, 'Nosotros're Democrats; they're Republicans; and we're going to exclude them.' I'm not saying there weren't racial overtones, but there were significant partisan overtones every bit well."
The same play a joke on had been used against white immigrants in the Northeast. It's worth remembering that Massachusetts and Connecticut were the first states to impose literacy tests, in hopes of keeping immigrants — who frequently supported Democrats in a largely Republican region — from voting.
At least ane grandpa clause in the South was based on a Massachusetts statute from 1857, says Overton, who teaches constabulary at George Washington University.
Perhaps it's because the grandfather clause was not solely almost race — and because information technology was banned a century ago — most people use the term "grandfathered in" and never realize information technology once had racial connotations.
"This term 'grandfather' has been kind of deracialized," Overton says. "It's really a very user-friendly, shorthand term. We probably would non be as comfy with using it if we associated information technology with grandfather clauses in the past and poll taxes and things like that."
Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/10/21/239081586/the-racial-history-of-the-grandfather-clause
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