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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.
States also used grandfather clauses to enable illiterate whites who could not pass a literacy test to vote. It allowed a man to vote if his grandfather or father had voted before January 1, 1867; at that time, most African Americans had been slaves, while free people of color, even if property owners, and freedmen were ineligible to vote until ...
The grandfather clause, which allowed voters to automatically be registered if their grandfather had voted, effectively exempted illiterate whites, but not blacks, from the literacy test. [2] Blacks received the right to vote in 1870 under the Fifteenth Amendment, [3] so almost no African Americans at this time had voting grandfathers because ...
The clause waived literacy tests and additional requirements for men whose descendants could vote before 1867, and African American men could not vote until 1870. ... had to be completed in 10 ...
In Macon County, Alabama in the late 1950s, for example, at least twelve whites who had not finished elementary school passed the literacy test, while several college-educated African-Americans were failed. Literacy tests were prevalent outside the South as well, as they were seen as keeping society's undesirables (the poor, immigrants, or the ...
As a result, illiterate whites were able to vote — but not illiterate blacks, whose grandfathers had almost all been slaves and therefore barred from voting or serving as soldiers before 1866. Most states that had permitted free people of color to vote in early decades of the 19th century had rescinded that right before 1840.
Voting in the 1972 Presidential Primary Election in Birmingham, Alabama. 1970. Alaska ends the use of literacy tests. [48] Native Americans who live on reservations in Colorado are first allowed to vote in the state. [54] 1971. Adults aged 18 through 21 are granted the right to vote by the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Not one to shy away from fighting for the advancement of civil and human rights, Lewis, who served 17 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, played a pivotal role in changing the course of ...