Constitution which, in fact, granted blacks the right to vote. The legislature passed a law requiring new voters to pay a poll tax, and passed a state constitutional amendment requiring prospective voters to demonstrate, to local elected officials, that they could read and write any section of the Constitution – practices that discriminated against poor whites, and more than 50,000 black men. However, to make sure that as few poor whites as possible would be hurt by the law, and prevented from voting Democrat, Rountree invoked a "Grandfather clause". The clause guaranteed the right to register and vote, bypassing the literacy requirement, if the voter, or a voter's lineal ancestor, was eligible to vote in his state of residence prior to January 1, 1867. This excluded practically any black man from voting. Rountree bragged of his work: The clause remained in effect until 1915, when the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. Ushering in "Jim Crow" After the coup, the Democrats began to pass the state's first racial hierarchy laws, prohibiting blacks and whites from sitting together on trains, steamboats, and in courtrooms, and even requiring blacks and whites to use separate Bibles. Nearly every aspect of public life was codified to separate poor whites and blacks. These laws, a direct result of the brief political alliance between blacks and poor whites, not only encouraged whites to see black people as outcasts and pariahs, but also rewarded them for doing so, socially and psychologically. This contributed to voluntary separation; prior to the insurrection, whites and blacks in Wilmington had lived close to one another, but over the following years, physical segregation increased between blacks and whites throughout the state, with home value, social status, and quality of life improving for whites the further they physically lived away from blacks. This served to lessen political democracy in the area, and enhance the oligarchical rule of the descendants of the former slaveholding class. Through 1908, Democrats in other southern states began following North Carolina's example by suppressing the black vote, through disenfranchisement laws or constitutional amendments, of their own. They also passed laws mandating racial segregation of public facilities, and martial law-like impositions on African Americans. The US Supreme Court (at the time) upheld such measures. Election of 1900 Two years after the coup, the Democrats again ran on "negro domination" with disenfranchisement of blacks on the ballot. Gubernatorial candidate Charles Aycock (one