What Were Grandfather Clauses In The Southern State Laws Of The US Constitution?
The end of the American Civil War marked the abolition of slavery and the freedom of African Americans whose generations had been leading lives of servitude to their white owners who had kidnapped them from their native homeland of Africa. In their minds, they could not accept the fact that the people who were once their slaves and whose ancestors had spent their entire lives serving to their ancestors, could actually be given a status that was equal to their own status. Nerved by this very fact, the southern whites tried every trick in the book to make the African Americans realize their inferior status in the society, regardless of what the law says. One of the ways to do that was to put restrictions on the African Americans’ right to vote. However these laws were carefully not applied to poor whites, even when they were as poor and as illiterate as the African Americans. To avoid any legal contradictions and empower the poor whites to vote without involving any kind of legal problem
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