Rountree’s committee seized on two schemes to help disenfranchise black voters: the poll tax and the literacy test. Both had been imposed in other Southern states. The US Supreme Court had upheld Mississippi’s literacy test and poll tax in 1898; it ruled that both satisfied the Fifteenth Amendment because they applied to all voters, not just black men. But white politicians in North Carolina realized a poll tax would create financial hardships for poor whites, and a literacy test would disenfranchise illiterate whites at a time when nearly a quarter of the state’s whites could not read or
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