## Facts

- Oklahoma adopted a 1910 constitutional suffrage amendment that imposed a literacy test for voting but exempted men (and their lineal descendants) who had been eligible to vote on or before January 1, 1866 (or who had resided in a foreign country at that time).
- Frank Guinn and J. J. Beal, white Oklahoma election officials, enforced the amendment at a general election by refusing to permit certain Black citizens to vote.
- The United States indicted and convicted Guinn and Beal under Rev. Stat. § 5508 (later Penal Code § 19) for conspiring to deprive Black citizens, because of race and color, of the right to vote secured by the Fifteenth Amendment.
- The court of appeals certified questions to the Supreme Court concerning whether the grandfather clause violated the Fifteenth Amendment and, if so, whether the literacy test could remain in force independently.

## Issues

1. Whether Oklahoma’s 1910 “grandfather clause,” keyed to voting eligibility as of January 1, 1866, violated the Fifteenth Amendment’s ban on denial or abridgment of the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
2. If the grandfather clause was unconstitutional, whether the literacy test provision was severable and could remain valid on its own.

## Decision

- The Court held the grandfather clause unconstitutional as repugnant to the Fifteenth Amendment.
- The Court concluded the literacy test and the grandfather clause were so connected that the invalidity of the grandfather clause rendered the entire amendment invalid.
- The Court’s answers to the certified questions sustained the federal government’s prosecution and left the convictions in place.

## Legal Principles

- The Fifteenth Amendment does not itself grant the right to vote, but it is self-executing in nullifying state measures that deny or abridge voting on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
- A state may, in general, adopt facially neutral voter qualifications such as literacy tests; the constitutional defect arises when the scheme uses a pre-Fifteenth Amendment baseline to create or continue race-based exclusion.
- A voting qualification is unconstitutional when it relies on conditions that existed before the Fifteenth Amendment and makes those conditions the controlling test for suffrage in a way that produces race discrimination.
- When valid and invalid parts of a state suffrage amendment are interdependent, the unconstitutional portion may render the entire amendment unenforceable.

## Conclusion

The Supreme Court invalidated Oklahoma’s grandfather clause as an indirect racial device forbidden by the Fifteenth Amendment and held the literacy-test framework inseverable from that clause, thereby sustaining federal convictions for conspiring to deprive Black citizens of the right to vote.


Guinn v. United States, 238 U.S. 347 (1915)