U.S. Court Bans Legal Term ‘Grandfathering’ Over Ties to Racism

The Massachusetts Appeals Court banned the legal term “grandfathering” on Monday due to its origins in the racist history of the South, where “grandfather clauses” were used to deny black people the right to vote in the post-Civil War era.

In common parlance, to be “grandfathered” means being able to exercise a right or power that was granted by government in a previous era, before some new restriction was enacted. For example, many older skyscrapers in New York City today are able to evade new building codes because they are “grandfathered” out of having to obey many of the newer rules. In Massachusetts, 18-year-olds were recently “grandfathered” out of restrictions banning cigarette and vape sales to those under 21 if they had already turned 18 — the previous minimum age — by the date of the new regulation’s enactment.

However, the term has a specific origin in the post-Civil War South, where several states wrote “grandfather clauses” that restricted the right to vote after the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which banned racial discrimination in voting rights. The states required black voters to pass certain tests to determine their eligibility to vote, but exempted those who had held the right to vote before the Civil War, and their descendants. These “grandfather clauses” allowed white Southerners to vote but limited the voting rights of black Southerners until the civil rights era. (Read more from “U.S. Court Bans Legal Term ‘Grandfathering’ Over Ties to Racism” HERE)

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