The women of Georgia finally got the right to vote on this day in 1921 when Governor Thomas Hardwick signed the act that made it official. The suffrage movement had been slow to gain ground in the South. Many women joined men in arguing that there was no more important job than wife and mother, […]
The poll tax, a bulwark of the Jim Crow era, was one of many roadblocks thrown up to keep African-Americans from exercising their right to vote. Although the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1870, guaranteed former male slaves the right to vote, the poll tax, which all voters had to pay was […]
It was a major blow to the rights of black Georgians. At the same time, a new phrase was born – the Grandfather Clause. In 1907, Georgia Governor Hoke Smith, who had campaigned promising to disenfranchise black voters, signed an act that would amend Georgia's constitution and impose a literacy test as a requirement for […]