What could the State of Oklahoma in 1915 possibly have in common with the State of Hawaii and the U.S. territories of Guam and Northern Marianas in 2014? Believe it or not, the answer is Jim Crow. Those were the infamous measures adopted throughout the old South following the Civil War that were intended to keep black citizens from voting. Oklahoma wasn’t a state during the Civil War, but much of what was then known as Indian Territory was a hotbed of Confederate sympathizers. The last Confederate general to surrender was Brig. Gen. Stand Watie of the Cherokee nation in Indian Territory.
When Oklahoma became a state in 1907, its constitution included a provision exempting from voting literacy requirements anybody whose grandfather had been eligible to vote prior to 1866 or who had been a soldier of “some foreign nation.” This “grandfather clause” effectively disenfranchised blacks, since their grandfathers were slaves. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Oklahoma grandfather clause unconstitutional in 1915, thus ending the Sooner State’s first Jim Crow law as well as similar statutes in a half dozen other Southern states. Still, it would be decades before the rest of the Jim Crow laws would be wiped out by the federal courts.
