Turning back the clock, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision on Shelby County v. Holder, struck down the key Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which originally required nine states (Texas, South Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Virginia and Alaska) with a history of racial discrimination to get federal permission to change their voter laws.
In recent years, parts of Florida, California, New York, North Carolina, South Dakota, Michigan and New Hampshire also fell under this mandate.
Although discussions about the history of African-American disenfranchisement in this country largely center on poll taxes, literacy tests were also a primary tool used to keep black voters from the ballot box, especially in the South. Beginning around 1890, literacy tests, many impossible to pass, were routinely given to African-Americans.
A history of voter suppression revisited
In the wake of the devastating Supreme Court decision, several websites have posted examples of these tests to illustrate the absurdity found in many of them.
For example, “In the space below, write the word “noise” backwards and place a dot over what would be its second letter should it have been written forward” is one of the questions that appears on a literary test once given in Louisiana.
Interestingly, the first known literacy test did not originate in the South. In an effort to keep Irish-Catholic immigrants from voting, Connecticut adopted the nation’s first literacy test in 1855, with Massachusetts following suit in 1857. Angered by the many advances of Reconstruction that sent former slaves to state legislatures in large numbers, as well as some federal offices, the white power structure in Southern states began actively blocking such progress, with literacy tests becoming one of its most sinister tools.
South Carolina’s “eight-box” ballot in which voters were required to place ballots for separate offices in separate boxes, adopted in 1882, is considered the first literacy test in the South specifically used to disenfranchise black voters. Illiterate voters could not be assisted by anyone literate and any miscast ballot was thrown out. At this time, it is estimated that 40 to 60 percent of African-Americans were illiterate in comparison with only 8 to 18 percent of whites.
By 1890, Mississippi and many other states began using literacy tests as well. When white voters also failed the test, the “grandfather clause” exempting men whose grandfathers could vote prior to 1870 — when black men’s right to vote was ratified — from the test was widely adopted.
Separate but equal
Obviously the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling by the Supreme Court in 1896 declaring segregation or “separate but equal” to be constitutional provided a tremendous boon to practices that disenfranchised African-Americans. That vicious momentum continued in 1898 when the Supreme Court upheld that literacy tests and other provisions from the Mississippi constitution passed in 1890 as constitutional in Williams v. Mississippi.
Perhaps even more devastating was the Supreme Court’s dismissal of Giles v. Harris in 1903. In the case, which Booker T. Washington, who was known for his silence on African-American voting rights, secretly funded, Jackson W. Giles, a literate black man who had voted from 1871 to 1901, sued to have the federal court require Alabama to register him and more than five thousand other black Montgomery citizens to vote. A test of the potential voter’s understanding of citizenship was administered to prevent blacks from voting.
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.