USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -When Reconstruction ended in 1877, states across the South implemented new laws to restrict the voting rights of African Americans. These included onerous requirements of owning property, paying poll taxes, and passing literacy or civics exams.

Detailed explanation-2: -Poll taxes, literacy tests, fraud and intimidation all turned African Americans away from the polls. Until the Supreme Court struck it down in 1915, many states used the “grandfather clause “ to keep descendents of slaves out of elections.

Detailed explanation-3: -This was “a lot of money at the time, and a big barrier to the working classes and poor.” Georgia created a cumulative poll tax requirement in 1877: men of any race 21 to 60 years of age had to pay a sum of money for every year from the time they had turned 21, or from the time that the law took effect.

Detailed explanation-4: -What would happen if African Americans left the South in huge numbers? The white Southerners economy and plantations would collapse.

Detailed explanation-5: -Though many black leaders decried Lincoln’s tardy efforts to act definitively on slavery, when he finally did release the Emancipation Proclamation, both the freed and enslaved African-American community rejoiced at this decisive step towards freedom.