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A literacy test assesses a person's literacy skills: their ability to read and write. Literacy tests have been administered by various governments, particularly to immigrants. Between the 1850s [1] and 1960s, literacy tests were used as an effective tool for disenfranchising African Americans in the Southern United States.
Williams v. Mississippi, 170 U.S. 213 (1898), is a United States Supreme Court case that reviewed provisions of the 1890 Mississippi constitution and its statutes that set requirements for voter registration, including poll tax, literacy tests, the grandfather clause, and the requirement that only registered voters could serve on juries.
The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth Century City (Academic Press, 1979). Graff, Harvey J. ed. Literacy and social development in the West: A reader (Cambridge UP, 1981), scholarly studies of many countries; Guzzetti, Barbara, ed. Literacy in America: An Encyclopedia of History, Theory, and Practice (ABC-CLIO, 2002)
The Immigration Act of 1917 (also known as the Literacy Act or the Burnett Act [1] and less often as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act) was a United States Act that aimed to restrict immigration by imposing literacy tests on immigrants, creating new categories of inadmissible persons, and barring immigration from the Asia–Pacific region.
These were particularly difficult for sharecropper and tenant farmers to comply with, as they moved frequently. The poll tax was sometimes used alone or together with a literacy qualification. In a kind of grandfather clause, North Carolina in 1900 exempted from the poll tax those men entitled to vote as of January 1, 1867. This excluded all ...
Despite election violence and fraud, African Americans were still winning numerous local seats. By 1902, all eleven states of the former Confederacy had enacted a poll tax, many within new constitutions that contained other provisions as barriers to voter registration, such as literacy or comprehension tests administered subjectively by white ...
United States (1915), [55] a unanimous Court struck down an Oklahoma grandfather clause that effectively exempted white voters from a literacy test, finding it to be discriminatory. The Court ruled in the related case Myers v. Anderson (1915), that the officials who enforced such a clause were liable for civil damages. [56] [57]
The term "test or device" is defined as literacy tests, educational or knowledge requirements, proof of good moral character, and requirements that a person be vouched for when voting. [123] Before the Act's enactment, these devices were the primary tools used by jurisdictions to prevent racial minorities from voting. [124]