The committee and the Citizens Councils also began a wholesale challenging of Negro names already on the voting rolls, with the result that thousands of Negroes, but virtually no whites, were purged from the rolls of voters. The legislative committee and the Citizens Councils set up programs, which parish voting registrars were required to attend, to instruct the registrars on how to promote white political control.

The chairman of this committee also helped to organize a semi-private group called the Association of Citizens Councils, which thereafter acted in close cooperation with the legislative committee to preserve white supremacy. The Louisiana Legislature created a committee, which became known as the 'Segregation Committee,' to seek means of accomplishing this goal. Soon after that decision, Louisiana, in 1921, adopted a new constitution replacing the repudiated 'grandfather clause' with what the complaint calls an 'interpretation test,' which required that an applicant for registration be able to 'give a reasonable interpretation' of any clause in the Louisiana Constitution or the Constitution of the United States. From the adoption of the 1921 interpretation test until 1944, the District Court's opinion stated, the percentage of registered voters in Louisiana who were Negroes never exceeded one percent.įrom Louisiana v.

The 1898 constitution adopted what was known as a 'grandfather clause,' which imposed burdensome requirements for registration thereafter, but exempted from these future requirements any person who had been entitled to vote before January 1, 1867, or who was the son or grandson of such a person. Such a transparent expedient for disfranchising Negroes whose ancestors had been slaves until 1863 and not entitled to vote in Louisiana before 1867 was held unconstitutional in 1915 as a violation of the Fifteenth Amendment in a case involving a similar Oklahoma constitutional provision.

Grandfather clause history