literacy test

literacy test, exam for assessing a person’s ability to read and write. In addition to evaluating students in the classroom, literacy tests have historically been used by some countries to exclude people of a particular race or social class from voting or immigrating. Voting officials used the tests for discriminatory purposes through several means, including asking questions to which people of a certain background were unlikely to know the answers, making use of ambiguous wording or trick questions, and evaluating answers subjectively.

In the United States, the practice of using literacy tests to disenfranchise citizens began in Connecticut in 1855, when the state’s constitution adopted a measure requiring men to pass a literacy test to vote. Although the move was specifically aimed at Irish immigrants, it also legally disenfranchised other poor white citizens and African Americans.

After Reconstruction, Southern states began employing literacy tests to deny Black citizens their suffrage. In Mississippi, for example, a new law (1890) required that “every elector shall…be able to read any section of the constitution of this State; or he shall be able to understand the same when read to him, or to give a reasonable interpretation thereof.” Registration officers often required Black men to explain a difficult passage of the U.S. Constitution while allowing white men to explain an easy one; officers would let white men read haltingly while demanding Black men read fluently; and they would accept illegible scrawls from the former and only clear handwriting from the latter. In 1892 the Cape Colony in South Africa consciously copied Mississippi’s law with its own Franchise and Ballot Act, which limited the native vote by imposing financial and educational qualifications.

Anti-immigration activists in the United States believed that literacy tests would also be a useful tool for keeping those they termed “undesirables” away from American shores. Bills necessitating a literacy test for immigrants made it to the U.S. president’s desk on several occasions between 1897 and 1916, only for the president in office to veto them every time. When anti-immigration forces convinced Congress to override Pres. Woodrow Wilson’s veto in 1916, the resulting U.S. Immigration Act of 1917 proved ineffective in decreasing immigration. The literacy test mandated by the Immigration Act required immigrants over age 16 simply to demonstrate reading comprehension in any language. A small number of immigrants—about 1,450 of 800,000—were denied entry between 1920 and 1921 because of literacy. The literacy test’s failure to decrease immigration led to its replacement by a quota system soon after.

In the 1950s the American civil rights movement made ending the disenfranchisement of Black Americans a priority. Activists brought the issue of literacy tests before the Supreme Court in 1959 in Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections, but Chief Justice Earl Warren’s Court ruled unanimously that literacy tests did not violate the Fourteenth, Fifteenth , or Seventeenth Amendments; the remedy would have to come from Congress. In 1964 civil rights activists, including Martin Luther King, Jr., succeeded in pressuring lawmakers to pass the Civil Rights Act. Title I of that legislation guarantees equal voting rights by removing registration requirements and procedures that are biased against minorities and the underprivileged. Hence, the practice of applying literacy tests to all Black voters, and only to them, was banned. The Civil Rights Act’s constitutionality was tested that same year and upheld by the Supreme Court in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. U.S. (1964).

The Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 went further by banning literacy tests throughout the South. In addition, certain jurisdictions were required to obtain prior approval (“preclearance”) of any changes to their electoral laws or procedures. These districts included any state or political subdivision of a state that, as of November 1964, imposed tests or other devices as a condition of registration or of voting and was characterized by voter registration or voter turnout below 50 percent of the voting-age population. The provision required that these jurisdictions demonstrate to a federal court that the change “does not have the purpose and will not have the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color.” The requirement was effective in preventing Southern regions that had a history of voter discrimination from introducing new electoral restrictions that would have disproportionately reduced voting or voter registration among African Americans. Congress abolished literacy tests nationwide in 1970 via an amendment to the VRA. The law continued to provide far-reaching protection of minority voting rights until the early 21st century, when the Supreme Court issued two decisions— Shelby County v. Holder (2013) and  Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021)—that greatly weakened its power.