In William Faulkner’s 1938 novel The Unvanquished, the implacable Colonel Sartoris takes drastic motion to cease the election of a black Republican candidate to workplace after the Civil Warfare, destroying the balnumerous black voters and shooting two Northern automobilepetbaggers. Whereas such dramatic technique of voter suppression occurred typically sufficient within the Reconstruction South, tactics of electoral exclusion refined over time, such that by the mid-twentieth century the Jim Crow South relied massively on close toly impossible-to-pass literacy exams to impede free and truthful elections.
These exams, writes Rebecca Onion at Slate, have been “supposedly applicable to each white and black prospective voters who couldn’t show a certain level of education” (typically as much as the fifth grade). But they have been “in actuality disprofessionalportionately administered to black voters.”
Additionally, lots of the exams have been rigged in order that registrars might give potential voters a simple or a difficult version, and will rating them differently as effectively. For examinationple, the Veterans of the Civil Rights Transferment describes a take a look at administered in Alabama that’s so wholely subjective that it measures the registrar’s shrewdness and cunning greater than anyfactor else.
The take a look at right here from Louisiana consists of questions so ambiguous that nobody, whatever their level of education, can divine a “proper” or “improper” reply to most of them. And but, because the instructions state, “one improper reply denotes failure of the take a look at,” an impossible standard for even a legitimate examination. Even worse, voters had solely ten minutes to complete the three-page, 30-question document. The Louisiana take a look at dates from 1964, the 12 months earlier than the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which effectively put an finish to those blatantly discriminatory practices.
Study extra in regards to the history of Jim Crow voter suppression at Rebecca Onion’s original submit right here and an replace right here. And right here you possibly can watch video of Harvard students striveing to take the take a look at.
Observe: Observe: An earlier version of this submit appeared on our web site in 2014.
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Josh Jones is a author and musician based mostly in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
