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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 ...
We took a 1964 Louisiana literacy test. The test was 30 questions and had to be completed in 10 minutes. ... and African American men could not vote until 1870. Eric Foner, a Columbia University ...
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 ...
In 1901, McClellan's great-grandfather was forced to take a literacy test in Alabama and had to have three white people vouch for his character so he could register to vote. In 1947, her father ...
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 Most states that had permitted free people of color to vote in early decades of the 19th century had rescinded that right before 1840.
These laws, along with unfairly implemented literacy tests and extra-legal intimidation, [7] such as by the Ku Klux Klan, achieved the desired effect of disenfranchising Asian-American, Native American voters and poor whites as well, but in particular the poll tax was disproportionately directed at African-American voters.