Episode #10
The Amendment They Gutted
Aug 21, 20268 minS1
<p>The 15th Amendment promised Black men the right to vote in 1870. Within one generation, Southern legislators reduced Black voter registration from hundreds of thousands to nearly zero—without ever repealing a single word of it. This episode maps the legal architecture of disenfranchisement: poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, white primaries, and character witness requirements. Each mechanism named. Each architect identified. Each consequence documented. From Solomon Calhoon's 1890 Mississippi convention to Thomas Semmes's grandfather clause in Louisiana, we trace how the Redeemers read the Constitution like a security system—looking not for what it protected, but for what it left unco...
