Grandfather clause

Minority Exclusion and its Effects Throughout the United States’ history, there have always been forms of minority exclusion that have strongly effected minorities. There are two models of minority exclusion that have become prominent in the US. The first type is apartheid where the government, whether it be State or the Federal government, creates laws that make it legal to discriminate against nonwhites. The other form of minority exclusion is economic and political disempowerment where…

excuses like they were elected under suspicious circumstances. During the years 1873-1896 the southern states try to come up with strategies for the disenfranchisement of black power, Ku Klux Klan appears in this era. Grandfather clause was that you were only eligible to vote if your grandfather was too, came into effect (Shaw et. al. 2015: 126). Overall blacks had got more out of this model. Black voter registration grew from 0 to 703,000, five Southern states had majority black voters, blacks…

The time after the Civil War in the United States is one of the most important times in our country’s history. The country was divided over the issue of slavery and the South had been destroyed in the Civil War. The North used a military tactic called “total war” which damaged much of the South. Now African Americans are free from slavery and the people want the South to be punished. This era after the Civil War is called the Reconstruction era. During this time the United States worked to unify…

Without blatantly stating it, society has found a way to ensure the legal separation of the African Americans from the whites. White people (mostly, of course) aren’t going to deliberately say, “We want to live in a segregated lifestyle; the whites to one side and the African Americans to the other.” They are, however, going to do anything in their power to make this happen without actually coming out and saying it because that would be rude and politically incorrect. David Roediger states that…

Ever since the year 1619 the African-American population has been oppressed to belonging to the lower class of the society. As time has gone on the perspective of these people has changed from slaves to useless vermin to thugs, but they were the ones losing their rights as humans. To be an individual was their first right stripped away, second was their right to vote, and finally their right to speak freely. To triumph after 300 years of oppression the African-American people would have to speak…

of “The New Jim Crow” is supported throughout much of the book with various studies, statistics and narratives. One similarity between Jim Crow and “The New Jim Crow” is not having the right to vote. In much of the South, obstacles such as grandfather clauses, literary tests and poll taxes prevented African-Americans from voting. This idea is similar to “The New Jim Crow” because once someone is convicted of a felon; their right to vote is forfeited. While it could be argued the removal of all…

In the case of Guinn v. United States the supreme courts ruled that the “Grandfather Clause” which made people pass a literacy test in order to vote, was unconstitutional. However, Civil rights took a back seat for about the next 25 years, as America was facing a bigger crisis at the time. Although America was just finishing up with…

In Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Alexander calls mass incarceration the “New Jim Crow.” In this way, Alexander connects the past of the Jim Crow era to the present way in which criminals are treated today. The Jim Crow era refers to the racial caste system of laws and policies once set in place during the end of Reconstruction through the late 1950s by which white southerners reasserted their dominance over African Americans by denying…

In 1619, twenty blacks were brought to Jamestown colony. From inception, black presence in the Americas has been characterized by prenatal alienation, gratuitous violence, and a harsh form of bondage. A result of increasing tensions between the North and South over sectionalist issues such as slavery, the Civil War represented a critical turning point in the history of United States. For some, the Civil War was seen as a fight to uphold states rights while for others, the Civil War was seen as a…

American Exceptionalism runs so deep that sometimes it’s hard to admit when our democracy fails to uphold the values laid out in the Constitution. And at first glance it may appear as though Benjamin Franklin’s quotation regarding the relationships between Democracy and Liberty with minorities buys into this traditional pro-democracy, pro-American narrative that gets perpetuated by mainstream academia. By asserting that “liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote,” Franklin provides an…