But no person who was, on January 1, 1866, or at any time prior thereto, entitled to vote under any form of government, or who at that time resided in some foreign nation, and no lineal descendant of such person, shall be denied the right to register and vote because of his inability to so read and write sections of such constitution."

Question

We have difficulty in finding words to more clearly demonstrate the conviction we entertain that this standard has the characteristics which the Government attributes to it than does the mere statement of the text. It is true it contains no express words of an exclusion from the standard which it establishes of any person on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude prohibited by the Fifteenth Amendment, but the standard itself inherently brings that result into existence since it is based purely upon a period of time before the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment and makes that period the controlling and dominant test of the right of suffrage." -Guinn v. United States, 1915

Answer 1

The excerpt you provided is from the Supreme Court case Guinn v. United States (1915), which dealt with the issue of voting rights and literacy tests in the context of racial discrimination. The case involved a challenge to an Oklahoma law that imposed literacy tests as a prerequisite for voting, effectively disenfranchising many African American voters.

The passage highlights the problematic nature of the literacy test standard established by the law. Although the text does not explicitly mention racial exclusion, it points out that the reliance on a voter’s status before the Fifteenth Amendment inherently created a discriminatory effect. By limiting the voting rights to individuals who could demonstrate entitlement to vote prior to 1866, the law effectively excluded African Americans, who had been enslaved and denied the right to vote at that time.

The Court's decision in this case ultimately established that such standards and requirements for voting were unconstitutional if they resulted in racial discrimination, reinforcing the protections provided by the Fifteenth Amendment. The case was significant in the broader struggle for civil rights and suffrage, as it underscored the need to eliminate laws that perpetuated racial discrimination in voting.