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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.
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.
Grandfather clauses were first instituted as a means of allowing whites to vote while simultaneously disenfranchising blacks. [2] The grandfather clause in Guinn v. United States involved requirement that a citizen must pass a literacy test in order to register to vote. At the time, many poor whites in the South were illiterate and would lose ...
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]
Prior to the 1960s, many US states and municipalities used literacy tests to disenfranchise minorities. [ citation needed ] In 1959, the Supreme Court of the United States held, in Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections , that literacy tests were not necessarily violations of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment ...
A proposal to specifically ban literacy tests was also rejected. [21] Some Representatives from the North, where nativism was a major force, wished to preserve restrictions denying the franchise to foreign-born citizens, as did Representatives from the West, where ethnic Chinese people were banned from voting. [22]
Following the lead of 10 other states, Kentucky lawmakers are seeking to further change how children learn to read, proposing a law that would ban a form of instruction associated with Reading ...
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 ...