"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet renounce controversy are like people who want crops without plowing the ground." -Frederick Douglass

Although the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution stated that any male citizen, aged 21 and above, could vote this was not the reality. Poll taxes barred both poor whites and poor blacks from voting. Literacy tests were enacted by some states to keep the mainly illiterate minority and poor white population from voting. And even those blacks who were educated would still be told they had failed the literacy tests and thus could not vote. The Ku Klux Klan and similar hate groups conducted night rides and even lynchings to harass and frighten blacks who attempted to organize their votes or show up at polling stations. But Americans, black and white, who were disenfranchised, were determined to vote and have a voice in their government, which they paid taxes to like anyone else.