Member-only story
The Origin of "I'm Free, White, and 21!"
"I Can Vote And You Can’t”
The expression, "I'm free, white, and 21," can only ever mean that the speaker is entitled to do whatever they please, as their status means nothing can get in their way. In the lengthy period during which it was popular, free could have meant not being imprisoned, or it could have referred to an enslaved person. 21 is an age when you are no longer restricted due to youth. It's the implication that being white means you can do what you like, and being other than white means you can't that's most troubling.
The first known usage was in 1828, when property ownership was removed as a prerequisite for voting. You needed to be free, white, 21, and male. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, should have taken care of the "white" part. Still, it didn't apply to most Native Americans, most of whom weren't recognized as citizens until 1924 by the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.
In 1915, in the Supreme Court in Guinn v. The United States, Chief Justice Edward Douglass White wrote an opinion that outlined why Louisiana violated the 15th Amendment when they used a "grandfather clause" requiring literacy tests for those ineligible to vote before 1866. A Louisiana state judge had previously ruled in 1898 that the new legislation was simply a way of maintaining the "right of manhood,"…
