Although the Amendment protected Black men’s right to vote, many southern whites came up with ways to keep Black people from voting.

By 1900, , or blocking the Black vote, was almost complete, hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan used violence, intimidation, and to keep blacks from exercising their right to suffrage.

often surrounded polling places, so many black voters stayed away from the polls for fear of racial violence.

Some legislatures passed a , which required voters to pay money before they could vote. Many African-Americans were too poor to pay the tax and could not vote.

test laws required voters to be able to read a passage before voting. At the time, about of African-Americans could not read so they could not vote. Questions were designed so that the test-takers would pass or fail simply at the discretion of the test administrator.

Wouldn’t these practices exclude the vote? Southern policymakers found a way around this by enacting the clause, which anyone whose grandfather had voted from having to pay poll taxes or take literacy tests.