Southern states used poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses primarily 3. to keep African Americans from voting.
These measures were enacted after Reconstruction to circumvent the 15th Amendment, which granted African American men the right to vote. Poll taxes and literacy tests were used to create barriers that disproportionately affected Black voters and, to a lesser extent, poor white voters. Grandfather clauses allowed individuals to bypass these requirements if their grandfather had been eligible to vote before the Civil War, effectively excluding many African Americans from the electoral process while allowing some poor whites to retain voting rights.