Voting Rights and Literacy Tests - YouTube

In the tumultuous years following  the United States Civil War, the  

federal government was faced  with two conflicting challenges:  

reincorporate the eleven states that had seceded  from the Union and define and implement a  

strategy for ensuring the economic political  and social rights of newly-freed black Americans.  

Radical Republicans, with support from the  United States Army and the Freedmen's Bureau,  

led the effort to pass and implement laws that  ensured first-class citizenship for blacks.  

The 14th Amendment to the Constitution in  1868 affirmed that black Americans were  

citizens of the United States and entitled to  due process and equal protection under the law.  

The 15th Amendment in 1870 stated  that the right of citizens to vote  

"shall not be denied... on account of race,  color, or previous condition of servitude."

Conservative white southerners, and their northern  allies in the Democratic Party opposed all efforts  

to extend human rights to blacks. By 1877, the white  southerners who wanted blacks" re-enslaved" had won; 

the new "slavery" was Jim Crow segregation. The  re-enslavement of blacks during the Jim Crow  

period hinged, in large part on denying blacks  the right to vote. "White primaries" permitted  

only white citizens to vote. Poll taxes  were used to keep poor people from voting.  

Blacks who tried to vote were routinely  intimidated. Sometimes the intimidation  

meant having your name placed in the town's  newspaper. This was done so that the white people  

in town knew the identities of "troublemakers."  If your employer saw your name you were fired.  

African-Americans who tried to vote  were sometimes beaten by police officers  

and incarcerated in local jails. In some cases, a  black person was physically assaulted because one  

of their relatives tried to vote. And when African  Americans were brave enough to register to vote  

and lucky enough to get to vote they sometimes  received "tissue paper ballots," made of thin paper  

and discarded before the votes were counted.

Literacy tests were also used to  keep African Americans from voting.  

"Grandfather Clauses" exempted those persons  with an ancestor who had voted before 1867.  

This kept poor and illiterate  whites in the voting pool.  

These tests were not really designed to test  civic knowledge or basic literacy. Some of the  

literacy tests were unnecessarily difficult; for  example, a would-be-voter might be asked to recite  

the entire Declaration of Independence  or the entire United States Constitution  

from memory. Such tasks were assigned at the whim  of the registration official. Even if the applicant  

recited the document correctly they might be told  that they had failed the test. Please remember that  

during the Jim Crow period blacks could not argue  with whites; therefore the black person taking the  

literacy test could not dispute the claims of the  white person serving as the registration official.  

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 effectively  abolished the use of literacy tests.

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