Mastodawn

DoomsdaysCW Oct 27, 2024

Take The Near Impossible #LiteracyTest #Louisiana Used to Suppress the #BlackVote (1964)

in History, Politics | October 21st, 2024

"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 #BlackVoters and shooting two Northern carpetbaggers. While such dramatic means of #VoterSuppression occurred often enough in the Reconstruction South, tactics of electoral exclusion refined over time, such that by the mid-twentieth century the #JimCrowSouth 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 #CivilRights 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 #VotingRightsAct, which effectively put an end to these blatantly discriminatory practices."

Read more:
https://www.openculture.com/2024/10/take-the-near-impossible-literacy-test-louisiana-used-to-suppress-the-black-vote.html

#Disenfranchisement #VoterDisenfranchisement #VoterSuppression #History #USHistory #Elections2024

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.

Open Culture

Taking a Jim Crow-Era Literacy Test

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