Guinn v. United States and the 1915 Ruling Against the Grandfather Clause

In August 1910, Oklahoma voters amended their state constitution with a sentence that never mentioned race and was designed to do almost nothing except sort voters by it. From now on, no one could register to vote unless he could read and write any section of the Oklahoma Constitution. Then came the exemption. The test would not apply to any man who, on January 1, 1866, had been entitled to vote under any form of government, or who had then lived in a foreign country, or to any lineal descendant of such a person. White Oklahomans, whose fathers and grandfathers could vote in 1866, walked past the test. Black Oklahomans, whose fathers and grandfathers had been enslaved or barred from the polls on that date, faced it before election officials who decided who passed. The date was the whole device. It fell just before the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments began to give Black men the vote, and it reached back to grandfathers so that the exemption would run down the generations. That is where the phrase "grandfather clause" comes from.

In short: Oklahoma's 1910 grandfather clause exempted descendants of men who could vote before 1866 from a literacy test, which in practice exempted white voters only. In Guinn v. United States, decided in June 1915, a unanimous Supreme Court struck it down under the Fifteenth Amendment, in a case where the new NAACP filed its first brief. Oklahoma answered with a new registration law the Court did not strike until 1939, a lesson in how voting rights are won and then worked around.

The device and its origins

Oklahoma did not invent the grandfather clause. Louisiana wrote one into its constitution in 1898, and several Southern states followed in the next decade, often as temporary provisions that let white men register permanently during a short window before literacy tests and property requirements took full effect. The purpose was not a secret at the time. Delegates to the constitutional conventions of that era spoke openly of restoring white political control, and the Fifteenth Amendment's ban on denying the vote "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude" forced them only to choose words that avoided naming race.

That is the important feature of the whole period. The Fifteenth Amendment did not stop disenfranchisement; it changed its vocabulary. Poll taxes, literacy and "understanding" tests, residency rules, white primaries and grandfather clauses all spoke in neutral terms. Their effect depended on who administered them and on facts about history that the drafters knew perfectly well.

Oklahoma became a state in 1907, and its leaders moved quickly to follow the Southern model. The grandfather clause amendment was approved in 1910 and applied in the elections that November.

How the federal government ended up in court

The case did not begin as a lawsuit by disenfranchised voters. It began as a criminal prosecution. Federal law, dating to the Reconstruction-era enforcement statutes, made it a crime to conspire to deprive citizens of their rights. Two Oklahoma election officials, Frank Guinn and J. J. Beal, were charged after Black citizens were turned away from the polls in the 1910 general election under the new rules. The officials were convicted, and they appealed on the ground that they had simply been following the state constitution.

The appeal put the clause itself on trial. If the amendment was valid, the officials had done nothing wrong. If it violated the Fifteenth Amendment, the state law was no defence.

The case was argued for the United States by the Solicitor General, John W. Davis, a West Virginia lawyer who would later run for president as the Democratic nominee in 1924. There is a twist worth keeping in mind: decades later, Davis would stand before the Supreme Court on the opposite side of a civil rights case, arguing for South Carolina in defence of school segregation in one of the cases decided together as Brown v. Board of Education. In 1915, he was the federal government's voice against Oklahoma's clause.

A young organization's first brief

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had been founded in 1909, only a few years earlier, by a group that included W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Mary White Ovington and others alarmed by the spread of lynching and disenfranchisement. It had little money and not much of a legal operation. What it had was a president with a national reputation as a lawyer: Moorfield Storey of Boston, a former president of the American Bar Association who had been, in his youth, secretary to the abolitionist senator Charles Sumner.

Storey filed a friend-of-the-court brief in Guinn. It was the NAACP's first filing before the Supreme Court, and it made an argument the government's brief could not make as forcefully: that the clause was transparently a racial classification dressed in historical language. The date of January 1, 1866, did not appear by accident; it was chosen because no Black man in the former slave states could vote then.

It would be easy to overstate the brief's role. The government was the party, and the Court's reasoning tracks the government's case. But the filing announced a strategy. The association would go to court, carefully and repeatedly, to make the Constitution's promises enforceable. That strategy would take decades and would lead, through a long chain of cases and lawyers, to Brown in 1954. Guinn was the first link.

What the Court held

The Court decided Guinn v. United States on June 21, 1915. Chief Justice Edward Douglass White wrote the opinion. White was a Louisianan and a former Confederate soldier, a detail that surprised some readers at the time and gave the opinion weight it might otherwise have lacked. The Court was unanimous; one justice, James McReynolds, did not take part.

White's reasoning was direct. The Fifteenth Amendment does not grant anyone the right to vote; states still set qualifications. But it forbids states from making race a qualification, directly or indirectly. A literacy test, standing alone, could be a permissible qualification, and the Court said so plainly. The problem was the exemption. By tying the right to vote to a status on a date before the amendment, the clause revived the very discrimination the amendment had abolished. The standard had no rational purpose other than to carry the old racial line forward. The Court said, in substance, that it could find no reason for picking that date other than the one everyone knew.

On the same day, the Court decided a companion case, Myers v. Anderson, striking down a similar grandfather provision in an election law for the city of Annapolis, Maryland. Together the decisions ended the grandfather clause as a legal device.

The objections the Court had to set aside

The state's defenders made arguments worth understanding, because some of them still circulate in different forms.

First, Oklahoma argued that the clause did not mention race at all. Its text applied to every citizen who could not show a qualifying ancestor, white or Black, and the state insisted the test would fall on anyone of any race who lacked one. A facially neutral law, the argument went, could not violate an amendment about race. The Court's answer was that a court is not required to pretend it does not know what everyone knows. The reference date was itself the racial classification, translated into the calendar.

Second, the state leaned on its broad power over voter qualifications. States had always set rules about age, residence and literacy, and the Fifteenth Amendment did not hand the federal government control of the ballot. The Court agreed with the premise and rejected the conclusion: states could set qualifications, including literacy, but they could not choose one whose only function was to restore a racial line.

Third, there was a question about what to do with the rest of the amendment. If the exemption fell, should the literacy test now apply to everyone, white voters included? The Court treated the provisions as a single scheme the voters of Oklahoma would not have adopted without the exemption, and struck the clause as a whole. That practical judgment mattered. A ruling that left the test in place for all would have been a strange victory, and Oklahoma's white voters would never have accepted it.

Oklahoma's answer, and the long road to Lane v. Wilson

If the story ended there, it would be a clean victory. It did not end there.

In 1916, Oklahoma's legislature passed a new registration law. Anyone who had voted in 1914, when the grandfather clause was still in force, was automatically registered for life. Everyone else, which in practice meant the Black citizens who had been kept off the rolls, had a window of less than two weeks to register, after which they would be permanently barred. The law did not mention race. It simply froze the results of the unconstitutional system in place.

It took more than two decades to undo. A Black voter named I. W. Lane, who had been unable to register, sued, and in 1939 the Supreme Court struck down the 1916 law in Lane v. Wilson. Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote the opinion and supplied one of the most quoted lines in voting rights law: the Fifteenth Amendment, he wrote, "nullifies sophisticated as well as simple-minded modes of discrimination."

The span between Guinn and Lane is the real lesson. A unanimous Supreme Court victory in 1915 did not translate into Black Oklahomans voting freely in 1916, 1920 or 1930. The state found a new path to the same place, and it took another lawsuit, another generation and another trip to Washington to close it. Across the South, the white primary, the poll tax and discriminatory administration of literacy tests did the work grandfather clauses had done, until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 attacked the problem in a different way, by suspending tests and requiring federal approval of changes in places with a history of discrimination.

Why the clever workaround keeps coming back

Here is the argument, and I want to make it carefully: the shape of the Guinn story repeats because the incentives that produced it repeat. When a court strikes a rule, the people who wrote it rarely give up the goal. They look for a rule that achieves it without the feature the court objected to.

That does not mean every voting rule is a grandfather clause in disguise. States have legitimate interests in accurate rolls and secure elections, and people who support stricter ID or registration rules often hold those views sincerely. The fair way to judge a rule is to ask what Guinn and Lane asked: what does it actually do, to whom, and is there a reason for its design other than the effect it produces? A rule that burdens some voters while serving a real purpose is a policy debate. A rule whose only plausible purpose is the burden is something else.

The history also argues for a particular kind of law. Case-by-case litigation, as Oklahoma showed, can take a generation per round. The 1965 act worked because it shifted the burden: in covered places, new rules had to be cleared before they took effect, rather than challenged after. When the Supreme Court ended that preclearance formula in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, the country went back toward the older model of suing after the fact. Whether Congress should restore a modern version is one of the live questions for the new Congress in 2027.

It is also a reminder of who keeps the gains. Courts can strike a law; they cannot register a voter. In the decades between Guinn and Lane, the work of making the ruling real fell to local organizers, ministers and lawyers who kept pressing, often at personal risk.

Those people rarely appear in the casebooks, but without them the opinions would have stayed on paper.

The people the case was about

It is worth ending with the people who never appear in the opinion by name: the Black men in Oklahoma who went to the polls in November 1910 and were turned away. Some had come to the territory hoping it would be a place of opportunity; Oklahoma had more than a few all-Black towns founded on that hope. They paid taxes, worked the land, raised families. The state told them that their grandfathers' status in 1866 decided whether they were full citizens in 1910.

The people who fought it, from Storey's office in Boston to the plaintiffs who kept suing into the 1930s, did not live to see the fight finished. They did it anyway, and the work handed down to us is the same: notice the device, name its effect, and keep at it longer than the people who designed it.

What you can do

• Check your own registration and your state's rules. Registration deadlines, ID requirements and early voting differ by state. The voting page links each state's election office.
• Help others register. Local voting rights groups and civil rights organizations run registration drives and voter protection hotlines. Find them in the organizations directory.
• Follow the current voting cases. Our topic page on voting rights and redistricting gathers news on new state laws and the lawsuits against them, and the page on racial justice follows the civil rights fights around them.
• Ask Congress about the Voting Rights Act. Find your representatives and ask where they stand on restoring federal preclearance.