Take The Utterly Ridiculous Literacy Test Louisiana Used to Suppress the Black Vote (1964)

In his 1938 novel The Unvanquished, William Faulkner portrays Colonel Sartoris as a figure emblematic of post-Civil War Southern resistance to Black enfranchisement. In a stark act of defiance against Reconstruction-era reforms, Sartoris intercepts the democratic process by destroying ballots cast by Black voters and killing two Northern officials—commonly referred to as carpetbaggers—who had come South to support the new social order. While Faulkner’s depiction is fictional, it reflects a broader historical truth: in the years following the Civil War, violent suppression of Black suffrage was both widespread and systematic across the former Confederacy.

However, as the decades progressed, such overt acts of voter intimidation gradually gave way to more bureaucratic, but no less effective, methods of disenfranchisement. By the mid-twentieth century, much of the Jim Crow South had adopted literacy tests as a principal means of excluding Black citizens from the electoral process. These assessments were nominally intended to apply to all individuals—Black or white—who could not demonstrate a minimum level of formal education, often defined as completion of the fifth grade. Yet in practice, as historian Rebecca Onion notes, the tests were “disproportionately administered to Black voters,” and the discretion afforded to local registrars allowed for considerable manipulation.

Indeed, many such examinations were constructed and scored in ways that made successful completion nearly impossible. The Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, an organisation preserving first-hand accounts of the era, recounts an example from Alabama in which the test’s criteria were so vague and subjective that the outcome depended more upon the whims of the registrar than the ability of the applicant. A 1964 version of the Louisiana literacy test further illustrates this systemic inequity: it contained thirty questions across three pages, many of which were phrased in deliberately ambiguous language, lacking any clear right or wrong answers. Nonetheless, applicants were required to answer every question correctly within a ten-minute time limit—failure on a single question resulted in disqualification.

This Louisiana test was administered in the very year before the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, landmark federal legislation which aimed to dismantle the legal mechanisms of voter suppression long entrenched in Southern states. The Act effectively outlawed the use of literacy tests and authorised federal oversight in jurisdictions with a history of discriminatory practices. Yet concerns over the durability of these protections have re-emerged in recent years. The 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder invalidated a key provision of the Voting Rights Act—namely, the requirement for jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to obtain federal preclearance before changing voting laws. As a result, there is renewed apprehension that such exclusionary measures, albeit in more subtle forms, could once again take hold in regions where progress remains tenuous.

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