Between 1885 and 1908, all eleven post-Confederate states reformed their constitutions and electoral laws to disenfranchise African Americans. To comply with the letter of the law as stipulated in the Fifteenth Amendment, no mention of race could be made in efforts to restrict voting rights, so states introduced purportedly “neutral” poll taxes, property requirements, literacy tests, and complex written ballots. “The overarching aim of all of these restrictions,” historian Alex Keyssar observed, “was to keep poor and illiterate blacks…from the polls.”
Same stuff is going on now in GOP states
