Resurfaced literacy tests are a reminder of pre-Voting Rights Act era

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The consequences of these rulings and practices were devastating. According to Louis Menand’s article “The Color of Law” for The New Yorker, Louisiana had 130,334 registered African-American voters in 1896, but, by1904, their number had dwindled to just 1,342. Reportedly, no African-Americans voted in the 1904 presidential election in both Virginia and South Carolina.

Even when the Supreme Court struck down Oklahoma’s grandfather clause in Guinn v. U.S. in 1915, literacy tests continued. With Lassiter v. Northampton City Board of Education, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of literacy tests as long as they didn’t have a differential racial impact in 1959.

Of course Southern states found a way to sidestep this with their white voters. So literacy tests in the South were not outlawed until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and then nationwide in 1970.

Literacy tests a tool for segregationists

During the civil rights activity of the 1950s and 1960s, literacy tests were a huge deterrent to black voter registration.

“The greatest voter suppression was often in areas where blacks were in the majority,” Menand notes. “Selma was more than 50 percent black; in 1965, only 383 of the fifteen thousand African-Americans living there were registered to vote. Marion (where Coretta Scott King went to school) had no black voters. . . . .Mississippi was almost 50 percent black; 6.4 per cent of eligible African-Americans there could vote.”

Revered civil rights leader Septima Clark, a trained teacher who also studied at the influential Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, the famed civil rights leadership training ground, developed the critical Citizenship Schools program which, according to the book Sisters in the Struggle: African-American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement, Andrew Young credits as “the base on which the whole civil rights movement was built.”

Through these programs, which the SCLC, CORE, NAACP, SNCC and the Urban League launched as the Voter Education Project in 1962, illiterate adults in rural areas were taught to read and write, with some going on to become teachers themselves. Most importantly, many were able to tackle the more reasonable literacy tests.

Success breeds resentment

In her 1999 article “The Transformation of a Social Movement into Law? The SCLC and NAACP’s Campaigns for Civil Rights Reconsidered in Light of the Educational Activism of Septima Clark” for the Women’s History Review, Tomiko Brown-Nagin credits Clark’s efforts for the registration of 700,000 African-Americans before 1969.

In the wake of this success, many Southern states pushed back. Alabama reportedly changed the test four times between 1964 and 1965 and, by the time the Selma Voting Rights campaign was underway, had over 100 different tests in use across the state.

And, while today literacy tests are no longer legal, attempts to curb the voting of African-Americans and others like the recent proposal by North Carolina to end or amend early voting, which has been proven to bring out large numbers of black voters, are still very much alive.

Follow Ronda Racha Penrice on Twitter at @RondaRacha.