Step-by-step explanation:
Reconstruction was to deprive African-American men of their voting rights. While the 14th and 15th Amendments prevented state legislatures from directly making it illegal to vote, they devised a number of indirect measures to disenfranchise Black men. The grandfather clause said that a man could only vote if his ancestor had been a voter before 1867—but the ancestors of most African-Americans citizens had been enslaved and constitutionally ineligible to vote. Another discriminatory tactic was the literacy test, applied by a white county clerk. These clerks gave Black voters extremely difficult legal documents to read as a test, while white men received an easy text. Finally, in many places, white local government officials simply prevented potential voters from registering. By 1940, the percentage of eligible African-American voters registered in the South was only three percent. As evidence of the decline, during Reconstruction, the percentage of African-American voting-age men registered to vote was more than 90 percent.