Take The Near Impossible Literacy Test Louisiana Used to Suppress the Black Vote (1964)

In William Faulkner’s 1938 nov­el The Unvan­quished, the implaca­ble Colonel Sar­toris takes dras­tic action to stop the elec­tion of a black Repub­li­can can­di­date to office after the Civ­il War, destroy­ing the bal­lots of black vot­ers and shoot­ing two North­ern car­pet­bag­gers. While such dra­mat­ic means of vot­er sup­pres­sion occurred often enough in the Recon­struc­tion South, tac­tics of elec­toral exclu­sion refined over time, such that by the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry the Jim Crow South relied large­ly on near­ly impos­si­ble-to-pass lit­er­a­cy tests to impede free and fair elec­tions.

These tests, writes Rebec­ca Onion at Slate, 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). Yet they were “in actu­al­i­ty dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly admin­is­tered to black vot­ers.”

Addi­tion­al­ly, many of the tests were rigged so that reg­is­trars could give poten­tial vot­ers an easy or a dif­fi­cult ver­sion, and could score them dif­fer­ent­ly as well. For exam­ple, the Vet­er­ans of the Civ­il Rights Move­ment describes a test admin­is­tered in Alaba­ma that is so entire­ly sub­jec­tive that it mea­sures the registrar’s shrewd­ness and cun­ning more than any­thing else.

The test here from Louisiana con­sists of ques­tions so ambigu­ous that no one, what­ev­er their lev­el of edu­ca­tion, can divine a “right” or “wrong” answer to most of them. And yet, as the instruc­tions state, “one wrong answer denotes fail­ure of the test,” an impos­si­ble stan­dard for even a legit­i­mate exam. Even worse, vot­ers had only ten min­utes to com­plete the three-page, 30-ques­tion doc­u­ment. The Louisiana test dates from 1964, the year before the pas­sage of the Vot­ing Rights Act, which effec­tive­ly put an end to these bla­tant­ly dis­crim­i­na­to­ry prac­tices.

Learn more about the his­to­ry of Jim Crow vot­er sup­pres­sion at Rebec­ca Onion’s orig­i­nal post here and an update here. And here you can watch video of Har­vard stu­dents try­ing to take the test.

Note: Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Har­vard Stu­dents Fail the Lit­er­a­cy Test Louisiana Used to Sup­press the Black Vote in 1964

Philoso­pher Richard Rorty Chill­ing­ly Pre­dicts the Results of the 2016 Elec­tion … Back in 1998

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness