Google kept giving me the same answers,and I wasnt able to find this certain one on there.Sure could you give a little more explanation.
Okay, cool. Quick source: I took APUSH junior year. It was basically my life for ten months, but I got a five on the exam and a 102 in the class, so I guess I got my money's worth? This is all from memory, so correct me if I'm wrong, people.
Okay, so this starts post-Civil War in the Reconstruction Era. Basically, slavery was suddenly very unconstitutional, and all the white supremacists down South were not taking the news well. Some other things that were angering them: the fact that, thanks to the Fifteenth Amendment, black men could now vote, and thanks to all their traitorous rebel activities, former Confederates lost their voting privileges. Those former Confederates, by the way, would've mainly supported Southern Democrats, who were chill with slavery, and, not to be controversial or anything, but pretty damn racist. The new black (male) voters definitely weren't about that life, though! They were voting for radical Republicans, AKA the late Abraham Lincoln's party, who were super bitter at the South and wanted to punish them. Some of those radical Republicans were carpetbaggers, or Northern politicians who moved down South to take over their government. Some of them were even black guys! So basically, these Southern white supremacists were freaked.
Then some stuff happened. One, the economy hit a recession, so the federal government started focusing on the economy instead of the South. Two, in 1876, the electoral college tied, so the election was decided by the House of Representatives. In the Compromise of 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican, got to become president on the promise that he would chill on Reconstruction, which, you know, was a good move for him, but probably a bad move for all the newly-freed slaves, because Reconstruction died off. So then the white Southerners had a little more leg room, and they realized that, while they couldn't repeal the Fifteenth Amendment, they could always just make life hell for black voters.
Enter the KKK, who terrorized black and Republican voters to keep them from the polls.
With a little power back, the South started doing other stuff. Grandfather clauses were basically rules that said you could only vote if your grandfather had, and pretty much no former slave in the late 1800's had had any voting grandparents, so that kept them from voting. Poll taxes worked because, post-slavery, there weren't a lot of economic opportunities for free black Southerners, and many of them were forced to work as sharecroppers on former plantations for basically no money, which kept black Southerners trapped in a cycle of poverty and largely unable to pay the tax. The literacy tests were just hard in general - I've seem things where college students today couldn't pass them, for example - but again, black Southerners lacked opportunities, so they were generally uneducated, especially way at the beginning here.
So the racist white guys got control of the government back, and they implemented and kept their racist laws because those laws benefitted them. And who was going to stop them? Voter suppression meant the chances of anyone doing that politically was pretty low.
Does that answer your question?