Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Literacy Test for Voting purposes

Southern state legislatures employed literacy tests as part of the voter registration process starting in the late 19th century.
Literacy tests were used to deny suffrage to African Americans. The first formal voter literacy tests were introduced in 1890.

At first, whites were exempted from the literacy test if they could meet alternate requirements (the grandfather clause) that, in practice, excluded blacks. The Grandfather Clause allowed an illiterate person to vote if he could show descent from someone who was eligible to vote before 1867 (when only whites could vote). Grandfather clauses were ruled unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court in the case of Guinn v United States(1915). Nevertheless, literacy tests continued to be used to disenfranchise blacks. The tests were usually administered orally by white local officials, who had complete discretion over who passed and who failed. Examples of questions asked of Blacks in Alabama included: naming all sixty-seven county judges in the state, naming the date on which Oklahoma was admitted to the Union, and declaring how many bubbles are in a bar of soap.
Example of a Literacy Test administered in Louisiana (one of the most notorious), circa 1963:






http://www.crmvet.org/info/la-littest2.pdf

No comments:

Post a Comment