Guinn v. United States

Guinn v. United States, :z38 U.S. 347 (1915), argued 17 0ct. 1913, decided 21 June 1915 by vote of 8 to 0: White for the Court, McReynolds recused. To convince poor and illiterate whites to support literacy and property qualifications for voting, southern Democrats in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included escape clauses in their suffrage restriction laws. The least subtle of these was the grandfather clause, which allowed anyone to register to vote if he had been eligible in 1867, before the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, or it he were a legal descendant of such a man. Some representatives of the southern upper class opposed this as too transparent an attempt to evade the Constitution, or because they wished to disfranchise the white, as well as the black, lower class.