At the trial the court instructed that by the Fifteenth Amendment the States were prohibited from discriminating as to suffrage because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude and that Congress in pursuance of the authority which was conferred upon it by the very terms of the Amendment to enforce its provisions had enacted the following (Rev. And upon the assumption that this claim was justified and that the election officers had violated the Fifteenth Amendment in denying the right to vote, this prosecution, as we have said, was commenced.
The persons so excluded based their claim of right to vote upon the original Constitution and upon the assertion that the suffrage amendment was void because in conflict with the prohibitions of the Fifteenth Amendment and therefore afforded no basis for denying them the right guaranteed and protected by that Amendment. At an election for members of Congress which followed the adoption of this Amendment certain election officers in enforcing its provisions refused to allow certain negro citizens to vote who were clearly entitled to vote under the provision of the Constitution under which the State was admitted, that is, before the amendment, and who, it is equally clear, were not entitled to vote under the provision of the suffrage amendment if that amendment governed. Shortly after the admission there was submitted an amendment to the Constitution making a radical change in that article which was adopted prior to November 8, 1910. Suffrage in Oklahoma was regulated by § 1, Article III of the Constitution under which the State was admitted into the Union. We concentrate and state from the certificate only matters which we deem essential to dispose of the questions asked.
Grandfather clause history free#
“If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any citizen in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same, or if two or more persons go in disguise on the highway, or on the premises of another, with intent to prevent or hinder his free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege so secured, they shall be fined not more than five thousand dollars and imprisoned not more that ten years, and shall, moreover, be thereafter ineligible to any office, or place of honor, profit, or trust created by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”
Grandfather clause history code#
Stat., now § 19 of the Penal Code which is as follows: The prosecution was directly concerned with § 5508, Rev. Those issues arose from an indictment and conviction of certain election officers of the State of Oklahoma (the plaintiffs in error) of the crime of having conspired unlawfully, wilfully and fraudulently to deprive certain negro citizens, on account of their race and color, of a right to vote at a general election held in that State in 1910, they being entitled to vote under the state law and which right was secured to them by the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
This case is before us on a certificate drawn by the court below as the basis of two questions which are submitted for our solution in order to enable the court correctly to decide issues in a case which it has under consideration.
CHIEF JUSTICE WHITE delivered the opinion of the court. JUDGES: White, McKenna, Holmes, Day, Hughes, Van Devanter, Lamar, Pitney McReynolds took no part in the consideration or decision of this case.