Oct 21, 2024 Story by: Editor
In William Faulkner’s 1938 novel The Unvanquished, the unyielding Colonel Sartoris resorts to extreme measures to block the election of a Black Republican candidate following the Civil War, destroying Black voters’ ballots and even shooting two Northern carpetbaggers. While such violent tactics were common in the Reconstruction-era South, methods of voter suppression evolved. By the mid-20th century, Jim Crow laws in the South primarily relied on literacy tests, nearly impossible to pass, to hinder fair elections.
Rebecca Onion, writing for Slate, explains that these literacy tests were “supposedly applicable to both white and black prospective voters who couldn’t prove a certain level of education” (typically up to the fifth grade). However, in reality, Black voters were disproportionately targeted. Many of these tests were manipulated, allowing registrars to decide whether to administer an easier or more challenging version and to grade them inconsistently. The Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement highlights an Alabama test designed so subjectively that it more accurately measured the cunning of the registrar than the knowledge of the applicant.
An example from Louisiana illustrates how these tests were rigged. The test included questions so ambiguous that even highly educated individuals would struggle to identify a “right” or “wrong” answer. As the instructions made clear, “one wrong answer denotes failure of the test,” setting an impossibly high bar. To make matters worse, voters had just ten minutes to complete a three-page, 30-question document. This Louisiana test, dated 1964, appeared only a year before the Voting Rights Act was enacted, which put an end to such openly discriminatory practices. Source/Literacy Test: Open Culture
