The 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in July 1868, guaranteed basic civil rights to all citizens; it was intended to persuade Southern states to grant suffrage to blacks by threatening a reduction of their congressional representation. To further the cause of black suffrage, the Radical Republican Congress, which had swept away the Southern regimes organized under presidential Reconstruction, required Ex-Confederate States to adopt new state constitutions allowing black suffrage before senators and representatives from those states would be readmitted to Congress. The United States was thus faced with a situation in which all the Ex-Confederate States granted blacks the right to vote, while 16 of the loyal Uni

After decades of demonstrations, Congress finally recognized the desire to the part of the American population for legislative changes. First, it passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which declared certain private acts of discrimination unlawful. In 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act. The Act outlawed such devices as literacy tests, which had been deliberately fashioned to disqualify blacks from voting, and assigned the supervision of new registration procedures to the U.S. Department of Justice

The civil rights activism of the late 1950s and 1960s reached a high point when the Reverend Martin Luther King lead the Selma march that focused America's attention on this unforgivable inequity, and moved a sympathetic President to work with Congress to achieve a quick passage for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Before the passage of the Act, only 383 African-Americans of voting age, out of approximately 15,000, were registered to vote in Dallas County, Alabama. In the three months following the enactment of the Voting Rights Act, 8000 African-Americans were registered. (http://www.15thAmendement.com)

In 1898, Mississippi adopted the Grandfather clause, which suspended the education requirements for those males eligible to vote in the United States on or before January 1, 1867. Since few blacks had been qualified to vote prior to that date, this exemption applied exclusively to whites. Statutory or constitutional device enacted by seven Southern states between 1895 and 1910 to deny suffrage to American blacks; it provided that those who had enjoyed the right to vote prior to 1866 or 1867, or their lineal descendants, would be exempt from educational, property, or tax requirements for voting. Because the former slaves had not been granted the franchise until the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, these clauses worked effectively to exclude blacks from the vote but assured the franchise to many impoverished and illiterate whites. In 1915 the Supreme Court declared the grandfather clause unconstitutional because it violated equal

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