In The Unvanquished by William Faulkner, Colonel Sartoris goes to extreme lengths to prevent a Black Republican candidate from gaining office after the Civil War, including destroying ballots and using violence. While such overt voter suppression tactics were common in the Reconstruction South, they evolved into more insidious methods by the mid-20th century, especially in the Jim Crow South. A significant barrier was the literacy test, which, as Rebecca Onion notes, was "supposedly applicable to both white and black prospective voters who couldn't prove a certain level of education." However, these tests were "in actuality disproportionately administered to black voters."
These literacy tests were manipulated to be practically insurmountable. Some tests had different levels of difficulty, with registrars often deciding who would receive the easier version based on race. The tests were intentionally ambiguous; one example from Alabama relied so much on subjective evaluation that it measured the registrar's own "shrewdness and cunning more than anything else," as described by the Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement.
One notorious example from Louisiana in 1964 asked vague questions with instructions stating that "one wrong answer denotes failure of the test." This impossible standard set Black voters up for failure, regardless of education level. Moreover, voters had a mere ten minutes to answer the 30-question, three-page document.
These oppressive practices persisted until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which aimed to put an end to this exclusionary system. For further exploration of Jim Crow voter suppression, Onion's post provides a deeper look, and a video captures Harvard students attempting to complete the Louisiana test, illustrating its daunting and unfair nature.
Link: Open Culture
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