A Brief History of Literacy Tests
Election violence and voter intimidation have been recurring threats to American democracy throughout its history. From Reconstruction-era terrorism by groups like the Ku Klux Klan, to the murders of civil rights activists and vote organizers like Andrew Goodman, James Earl Chaney, and Michael Henry Schwerner who were brutally killed on March 7, 1965, a date known as Bloody Sunday, to armed poll watchers in recent elections, attempts to restrict voting through violence and intimidation represent a direct assault on democratic participation.
Remember Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss? These election workers represented three generations of election workers before they got caught up in Donald Trump’s madness. Ruby was asked why she worked in elections. She talked about her grandmother:
“She always took me with her to vote ... and give me her sticker," Moss recalled. "It's always been important to my grandmother to vote ... she always said, 'If you didn't go vote, then I don't want to hear you complaining.”
"Because," asked Moran, "she grew up in a time when...?"
"...she could not vote," Moss replied.
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Historically, literacy tests have targeted racial minorities, particularly Black voters in the South, but in the 21st century, conservatives have had to change their tactics to accommodate more sophisticated laws protecting voter rights.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965, which has been gutted by a conservative Supreme Court, managed to outlaw literacy tests:
“The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) has been called one of the most effective pieces of civil rights legislation in U.S. history, having generated dramatic increases in black voter registration across the South. [In this paper] we show that the expansion of black voting rights in some southern states brought about by one requirement of the VRA – the elimination of literacy tests at voter registration – was accompanied by a shift in the distribution of state aid toward localities with higher proportions of black residents, a finding that is consistent with models of distributive politics.”
What makes current concerns particularly acute is the combination of heightened political polarization, widespread disinformation about election integrity, and the emergence of groups focused on confrontational poll watching. Although efforts to impact voter registration laws are ongoing, they no longer have the tool of literacy tests.
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Symbolic violence in the form of literacy tests may have had more durable impact on voting activity than our history of physical violence like the KKK. Senator Sam Ervin, Jr., of North Carolina (1954-1974) was a staunch defender of literacy tests as a voter qualification even while fashioning himself as a Constitutional scholar and as defender of civil rights. From a lengthy commentary he wrote on the topic during a period of debate:
“Supporters of the Administration bill… fail to realize that the equal protection clause only forbids unreasonable classification. Classification of prospective voters on grounds of literacy is certainly not unreasonable. …[T]here is a universal policy of encouraging literacy—a policy reflected in the compulsory education laws existing in many states. [How does]…a state act unreasonably in distinguishing between the literate and illiterate in determining who may vote[?]”
The levels of absurdity in Ervin’s comment are rich. Consider the “universal policy” fallacy. Ervin cites compulsory education laws in states that had systematically denied education to black Americans, maintained segregated and underfunded black schools, and criminalized teaching enslaved people to read.
The “reasonable classifications” argument is tautological at best: Distinguishing the literate from the illiterate is not unreasonable because distinguishing the literate from the illiterate is reasonable. These tests were deliberately designed to be failed. White illiterates routinely passed, black educated voters routinely failed. Even if the classification argument held, evidence of consequences refutes it.
The Constitutional sleight-of-hand uses equal protection language to defend unequal treatment. This argument invokes the 14th Amendment designed to protect black rights to justify denying those same rights. The height of absurdity is the failure to acknowledge that the state created illiteracy through segregation and discrimination and then used that state-created condition to deny voting rights.
Ervin’s historical blindness presents the argument as if in a vacuum. It is blind to centuries of education withheld or forbidden. It is blind to Jim Crow and the KKK. It is blind to a documented and well-known history of discriminatory intent. It best exemplifies how seemingly “reasonable” legal arguments can mask and sustain systematic racial and ethnic discrimination.
Efforts to restrict voting in the United States through the use of literacy tests became ontologically a Constitutional fact in the mid-19th century. By 1855, Connecticut’s state constitution was the first to require adults to pass a literacy test to qualify as a voter, ostensibly to ensure an informed voter in the booth, apparently to keep immigrants from voting. By the 1950s, Connecticut was one of 12 states that still used literacy tests, still keeping the door open to their use to intimidate would-be voters.
I’m not able to locate the specific language stipulating the requirements for the literacy test in the 1855 Connecticut Constitution, but by 1925, Connecticut required that prior to registration, every person must be abled to “…read at least three lines of the constitution or of the statutes of this state, other than the title or enacting clause, in such manner as to show that he is not prompted, nor reciting from memory” (Conn., Laws, 1925). NOTE: It’s unclear what the assessor would do with semantically plausible or self-corrected miscues.
In the reading classroom of today, methods of assessing literacy competence are varied and nuanced, to be sure. Nonetheless, the assumption of fair and standard administration of, say, a comprehension or vocabulary test, is pretty much mainstream. For example, giving the test to one group free to use their laptops while restricting access to the internet for another group renders any comparison rationally impossible.
Somehow, literacy tests used in the realm of qualifying voters have never been held to any reliability and validity standards, no test-retest data to ensure comparability of forms, and the like:
“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.”
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Literacy tests held great significance for immigration policy near the turn of the 19th century. During a period of economic instability, a nativist coalition of Americans tried to limit immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, especially from rural areas of Europe where the shift from an agricultural to an industrial economy led to widespread poverty.
The Immigration Restriction League, founded in 1894, became the first organized movement to advocate for such measures:
“…[T]he League's members were Harvard-educated elitists who feared the influx of undesirables from southern and Eastern Europe. They worried that America was becoming the world's dumping ground for paupers, criminals, and madmen fleeing the Old World” (Jones, 2013).
In 1896, the first literacy test bill for immigrants passed Congress but was vetoed by President Grover Cleveland. He believed the bill violated America's role as a refuge for those fleeing oppression, noting that literacy was often denied to people in their home countries through no fault of their own. Cleveland did not, however, comment on the irony that the same applied to America.
Cleveland made an argument of invalidity against literacy tests, though not for the reason I referred to above, namely, lack of comparability of scores due to lack of comparable conditions of testing. Cleveland argued that literacy was not a valid measure of an immigrant's character, or their intent to be a good citizen, the strength of their work ethic, or their ability to contribute to American society.
Cleveland’s veto message echoes themes embedded in “give us your huddled masses” and is worth remembering when we conflate measures of literacy with measures of character and citizenship:
“I cannot believe that we would be protected…by limiting immigration to those who can read and write…. In my opinion, it is infinitely more safe to admit a hundred thousand immigrants who, though unable to read and write, seek among us only a home and opportunity to work than to admit one of those unruly agitators and enemies of governmental control who can not only read and write, but delights in arousing…the illiterate and peacefully inclined… to discontent and tumult. Violence and disorder do not originate with illiterate laborers.”
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The history of voter suppression and restrictions on immigrants in America reveals a devastating pattern of both physical and symbolic violence in the name of keeping the power of the vote in the hands of the oligarchs, from Reconstruction-era terrorism through modern voter intimidation tactics. The story of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss's grandmother and her family illustrates the generational trauma of voter suppression, while Senator Sam Ervin's defense of literacy tests exemplifies how legal rhetoric was weaponized to maintain systemic discrimination under the guise of "reasonable" policy.
Perhaps the most literate reading of this history comes from those who were denied the right to read. They understood perfectly well that literacy tests had nothing to do with literacy, just as today's "election integrity" measures have nothing to do with integrity. True illiteracy belongs to those who cannot—or will not— read the writing on the wall, as the poet says “whispered in the sounds of silence.”