Grandpa

Yesterday, I posted about the various laws that have been passed in the last eight-to-ten years that effectively disenfranchise the poorest of voters. In my reading, I discovered that the term "grandfather clause" arises from Reconstruction-era laws that swept through the South in order to prevent newly-freed slaves from voting.
Many of the laws passed were in the form of a literacy test because very few slaves were given even a rudimentary education. So the racist whites established laws saying that voting was contingent on being able to read and/or write. The problem was that this would necessarily disenfranchise the poor dumb white sharecropping population who were eager to re-elect the racist politicians already in place.
So they added an addendum to the new literacy requirements that said that if your grandfather could legally vote, so can you, even without passing the new test. Hence the term being "grandfathered in."