African Americans were emancipated through the Thirteenth Amendment and were then given the right to vote. However, states, particularly those in the South, imposed a literacy test on African Americans that was impossible for them to take and pass in order to vote (Hevron, 2015). If the national government passed legislation to allow African Americans regardless of whether they were truly literate or illiterate, African Americans would likely have more right to vote depending on the given policy than each individual state's policy. Another reason is how the Supreme Court, in 1883, struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and held that “the Fourteenth Amendment did not confer on Congress the power to regulate private conduct” (Bianco and Canon, 2015). It had only influenced the conduct of state governments and left the national government without any power to prevent Southern states from implementing state and local laws that aimed at the segregation of whites and blacks in the South, also known as Jim Crow laws. , and had denied the many fundamental rights of African Americans