literacy tests
Voter suppression tools
Literacy tests were examinations supposedly measuring reading and writing ability, historically used in the American South to prevent Black citizens from voting.
Administered selectively and graded subjectively, they asked impossible questions or demanded perfect answers from Black applicants while waving white voters through.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed their use.
Today the term evokes any policy designed to exclude people under pretense of neutral standards.
- poll taxesPer-person voting levies
- grandfather clauseExemption preserving prior status
- disenfranchisementRemoval of voting rights
- right to voteLegal power to elect
- Jim Crow lawsPost-Reconstruction racial separation statutes
voter suppression · Black voters · reading comprehension · segregation · Brown v. Board of Education · exclusion · suffrage · inequality · civil rights movement · voter ID laws · poll workers · access to education · federal oversight · constitutional amendment · equal protection · marginalization · systemic racism · voting
- Black HistoryMartin Luther King Jr., MLK, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass
- school testsexam, quiz, pop quiz, final exam, pretest
- civil rightsequal protection, equal rights, Civil Rights Act, right to life, Voting Rights Act
- discriminationracism, systemic discrimination, Jim Crow laws, sexism, racial harassment
- Voting Rightsvoter registration, voter suppression, voter turnout, voting access, enfranchisement
- historical lawattainder, Justinian Code, Roman law, curtesy, Napoleonic Code
literacy testsuniversal suffrage
All adults may vote
Voting Rights Act · open enrollment · open access · universal access · enfranchisement
literacy testsVoting Rights Act
Law against electoral discrimination