Sherrilyn Ifill
speaker
219 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 5 May
Sherrilyn Ifill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So that was supposed to mean Black people could vote.
And for a while, Black people could vote in the South.
I mean, we had eight members of Congress elected during that Reconstruction period, two United States senators.
Then what you had at the turn of the century was all of these states making new constitutions and coming up with the kinds of laws that you described, poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses.
If your grandfather could vote in 1850, then you could vote.
That's where grandfather clauses were?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So so they came up with all these tactics to keep black people from voting.
And of course, it was overall enforced by just mob violence, the violence of the Klan.
Right.
That really controlled so many.
No, and when Black people tried to challenge it, like in 1911 in a case called Giles v. Harris, where a Black man said, Alabama won't let me register to vote.
I meet all the criteria.
I should be able to register.
The Supreme Court of the United States, in a decision by the esteemed jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, said, there's really nothing we can do about it.
Because if we tell Alabama that they have to register you to vote, they're not going to do it anyway.
The Supreme Court was going, we could do what's right, but.
So that meant that Black people, and remember, a majority of Black people lived in the South.
A majority of Black people still live in the South, right?
And so, yes, there were communities in the North where Black people could exercise the right to vote, but most Black people could not vote until the civil rights movement pushed for voting rights.
Showing 21–40 of 219 · page 2 of 11
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