The correct answer to this question is letter A, literacy tests.
The 15th Amendment was a major amendment to the U.S. Constitution that effectively allowed freed slaves to vote in regular elections. The amendment prohibited both federal and state governments to disallow the voting of citizens based on their ‘color, race, or notation of servitude’.
The immediate problem with the amendment is that it did not address certain loopholes that states implement to restrict freed slaves voting rights, particularly in the South. A good example of this is some of the practices adopted by the state of Oklahoma.
When Oklahoma was admitted in 1907, they adopted a state Constitution that allowed ‘men of all races to vote’. In response to the 15th Amendment, the state passed an amendment that required voters to satisfy a literacy test.
An associated clause was put in place that said a voter did not have to take a literacy test if they could prove that either their grandfathers had been voters or had been citizens of a foreign nation, or had served as soldiers before 1866. This 'Grandfather Clause' allowed for illiterate white citizens to have the right to vote, while forcing illiterate African American citizens to take the literacy test for the right to vote.
In the case of Guinn v. United States (1915) The Supreme Court ruled that such Grandfather Clauses were unconstitutional because they violated the 15th Amendment.
Learning Point: The Supreme Court Case Guinn v. United States (1915) began to eliminate state constitution clauses that violated the 15th Amendment. Literacy testing was at the forefront of the case due to grandfather clauses that allowed illiterate white citizens to bypass the tests.
