A reading or “understanding” exam required to register to vote, used by Southern registrars to disfranchise Black citizens until Congress banned it.
A literacy test made the right to vote depend on an applicant’s ability to read, write, or interpret a passage — often a section of the state constitution — to the satisfaction of a local registrar. After Reconstruction, Southern and border states paired such tests with poll taxes, white primaries, and grandfather clauses to strip Black men of the ballot the Fifteenth Amendment had promised. The NAACP won an early victory in Guinn v. United States (1915), when the Supreme Court struck down Oklahoma’s 1910 grandfather clause, which had effectively spared white voters from that state’s test, as a violation of the Fifteenth Amendment.
The tests themselves rarely measured literacy. Surviving application forms from Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia show how much discretion county registrars held: the same clerk could pass a barely literate white applicant and fail a Black college graduate. In Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections (8 June 1959), the Supreme Court upheld North Carolina’s requirement that voters read and write any section of the state constitution, holding that a fairly applied test was valid on its face while warning that a test used as a device for racial discrimination would not be.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended literacy requirements in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia and in many North Carolina counties. When the act was adopted, only about one-third of voting-age African Americans in those specially covered states were registered, against two-thirds of eligible whites. Congress extended the suspension to the entire country in 1970, and on 21 December 1970 the Court unanimously upheld that nationwide ban in Oregon v. Mitchell, finding substantial evidence that literacy tests had been used against minority voters well beyond the South. In 1975 Congress made the ban permanent.
See also: Poll Tax, Jim Crow, Voting Rights Act of 1965, Freedom Summer, Reconstruction
Sources
- U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, “Introduction to Federal Voting Rights Laws: The Voting Rights Act of 1965.” Link
- Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections, 360 U.S. 45 (1959). Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. Link
- Oregon v. Mitchell, 400 U.S. 112 (1970). Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. Link
- Library of Congress, “The Segregation Era (1900–1939),” The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom. Link
- Civil Rights Movement Archive, “Voter Registration & Literacy Tests.” Link
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