more"--clauses which it is hardly necessary to say the registrars
regularly interpreted in favor of white men and against the Negro. In
1898 Louisiana passed an amendment inventing the so-called "grandfather
clause." This excused from the operation of her disfranchising act all
descendants of men who had voted before the Civil War, thus admitting
to the suffrage all white men who were illiterate and without property.
North Carolina in 1900, Virginia and Alabama in 1901, Georgia in 1907,
and Oklahoma in 1910 in one way or another practically disfranchised the
Negro, care being taken in every instance to avoid any definite clash
with the Fifteenth Amendment. In Maryland there have been several
attempts to disfranchise the Negro by constitutional amendments, one in
1905, another in 1909, and still another in 1911, but all have failed.
About the intention of its disfranchising legislation the South, as
represented by more than one spokesman, was very frank. Unfortunately
the new order called forth a group of leaders--represented by Tillman
in South Carolina, Hoke Smith in Georgia, and James K. Vardaman in
Mississippi--who made a direct appeal to prejudice and thus capitalized
the racial feeling that already had been brought to too high tension.

Naturally all such legislation as that suggested had ultimately to be
brought before the highest tribunal in the country. The test came
over the following section from the Oklahoma law: "No person shall be
registered as an elector of this state or be allowed to vote in any
election herein unless he shall be able to read and write any section
of the Constitution of the State of Oklahoma; but no person who was on
January 1, 1866, or at any time prior thereto, entitled to vote under
any form of government, or who at any time resided in some foreign
nation, and no lineal descendant of such person shall be denied the
right to register and vote because of his inability to so read and
write sections of such Constitution." This enactment the Supreme Court
declared unconstitutional in 1915. The decision exerted no great and
immediate effect on political conditions in the South; nevertheless as
the official recognition by the nation of the fact that the Negro
was not accorded his full political rights, it was destined to have
far-reaching effect on the whole political fabric of the section.

When the era of disfranchisement began it was in large measure expected
by the South that with the pra