Take The Close to Unimaginable Literacy Take a look at Louisiana Used to Suppress the Black Vote (1964)

In William Faulkner’s 1938 nov­el The Unvan­quished, the implaca­ble Colonel Sar­toris takes dras­tic motion to cease the elec­tion of a black Repub­li­can can­di­date to workplace after the Civ­il Conflict, destroy­ing the bal­a number of black vot­ers and shoot­ing two North­ern automobile­pet­bag­gers. Whereas such dra­mat­ic technique of vot­er sup­pres­sion occurred typically sufficient within the Recon­struc­tion South, tac­tics of elec­toral exclu­sion refined over time, such that by the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry the Jim Crow South relied massive­ly on close to­ly impos­si­ble-to-pass lit­er­a­cy exams to impede free and truthful elec­tions.

These exams, writes Rebec­ca Onion at Slate, have been “sup­pos­ed­ly applic­a­ble to each white and black prospec­tive vot­ers who couldn’t show a cer­tain lev­el of edu­ca­tion” (typ­i­cal­ly as much as the fifth grade). But they have been “in actu­al­i­ty dis­professional­por­tion­ate­ly admin­is­tered to black vot­ers.”

Addi­tion­al­ly, lots of the exams have been rigged in order that reg­is­trars might give poten­tial vot­ers a straightforward or a dif­fi­cult ver­sion, and will rating them dif­fer­ent­ly as effectively. For examination­ple, the Vet­er­ans of the Civ­il Rights Transfer­ment describes a check admin­is­tered in Alaba­ma that’s so complete­ly sub­jec­tive that it mea­sures the registrar’s shrewd­ness and cun­ning greater than any­factor else.

The check right here from Louisiana con­sists of ques­tions so ambigu­ous that nobody, what­ev­er their lev­el of edu­ca­tion, can divine a “proper” or “fallacious” reply to most of them. And but, because the instruc­tions state, “one fallacious reply denotes fail­ure of the check,” an impos­si­ble stan­dard for even a legit­i­mate examination. Even worse, vot­ers had solely ten min­utes to com­plete the three-page, 30-ques­tion doc­u­ment. The Louisiana check dates from 1964, the 12 months earlier than the pas­sage of the Vot­ing Rights Act, which effec­tive­ly put an finish to those bla­tant­ly dis­crim­i­na­to­ry prac­tices.

Study extra concerning the his­to­ry of Jim Crow vot­er sup­pres­sion at Rebec­ca Onion’s orig­i­nal put up right here and an replace right here. And right here you may watch video of Har­vard stu­dents strive­ing to take the check.

Notice: Notice: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this put up appeared on our website in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Har­vard Stu­dents Fail the Lit­er­a­cy Take a look at Louisiana Used to Sup­press the Black Vote in 1964

Philoso­pher Richard Rorty Chill­ing­ly Pre­dicts the Outcomes of the 2016 Elec­tion … Again in 1998

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