In 1870, the 15th Amendment was ratified, the last of the three Civil War Amendments, which made the denial of voting based on race illegal. This expanded voting rights by allowing former slaves to cast ballots and have a voice in the national, state, and local elections. Considering these changes, Georgia reinstated poll taxes, and local officials often made it difficult for African Americans to pay those taxes by making them payable to the sheriff’s department and creating an intimidation factor to register to vote. These tactics limited voting without directly saying that Black men could not vote. By the 1880s, many African-American voters understood that even when they were allowed to cast ballots, their votes were not always fairly counted. In 1883, one African-American man testified before the U.S. Senate that even in places where Black voters were the majority, their votes seemed to disappear before they could affect the outcome. His testimony reflected the use of fraud, intimidation, and manipulation to suppress African-American political participation.

By 1900, Black voters in Georgia were banned from voting in Democratic primaries, creating what became known as “White Primaries.” This was especially important because Georgia was effectively a one-party state. If African-American voters could not participate in Democratic primaries, they had little real influence over who would hold political power.

In 1908, Georgia passed the Felder-Williams Act, which further restricted voting. The law included requirements connected to military service, ancestry, property ownership, literacy, and “good character.” These rules created exceptions that allowed many White voters to remain eligible, while literacy tests and poll taxes eliminated almost all Black voting in the state. By 1910, only about 4 percent of Black men in Georgia were registered to vote. While the Felder-Williams Act was designed to limit Black voting, it also limited some illiterate Whites from voting. Despite having other avenues to qualify as a voter, like military service, not completing the literacy test was acknowledging publicly that the person was illiterate. As a result, all Blacks and many lower-class Whites were no longer eligible to vote. In fact, between 1920-1944 elections in Georgia rarely had more than one-third of the eligible White voters show up to the polls.

Women also faced exclusion from the political process. In 1916, as the push for women’s suffrage hit a fever pitch in the United States, the Georgia State Senate scheduled a hearing on women’s suffrage for the day after the legislature adjourned, effectively avoiding serious debate on the issue. This reflected the resistance many women and African Americans faced as they fought for the right to vote.

In 1917, Georgia adopted the county unit system through the Neill Primary Act. This system worked like the Electoral College, giving political power to counties rather than counting every vote equally statewide. As a result, smaller rural counties received outsized influence compared to large urban counties. By 1960, the small counties of Echols, Glascock, and Quitman, with a combined population of 6,980 people, had the same voting power as Fulton County, which had a population of 556,326. This gave rural counties and their more conservative views far more influence in statewide elections than their population justified.

Despite the pushback from Southern states, like Georgia, the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920. It prohibited the denial of voting based on sex. This expanded political participation to women of all races. However, Black women faced the same literacy test and poll taxes that Black men had faced since the 1870s. They had a desire to vote and the legal standing to do so, but now the rules and regulations of the local voter registration were the final hurdle before they could cast a ballot. Despite being officially ratified in 1920, Georgia did not officially ratify the amendment until 1970, after initially rejecting it in 1919.