Poll Tax

A tax had to be paid in order to be able to vote, and most black people were too poor to pay the tax.

Literacy Tests

In order to be able to vote, people had to prove that they could read difficult extracts.

The video below looks at American controls on voting rights from 1870s.

American controls of voting rights

White people believed that the Jim Crow laws made races ‘separate but equal’. However, this was disputed by most black people.

They agreed that the laws kept the races apart but that facilities were overwhelmingly unequal.