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SALT LAKE CITY — After the Civil War, black citizens in southern states that wanted the right to vote were given a "literacy" test to qualify them as a registered voter. Several of the impossibly difficult and confusing questions are listed below.
The literacy test was administered to both white and black prospective voters who couldn't prove a certain level of education. However, the tests were disproportionately administered to black voters, according to The Vault.
The Civil Rights Movement Veterans website has a collection of materials related to civil rights, and they posted several samples of actual literacy tests used in the 1950s and 1960s in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Most of the tests contained a series of trivia questions related to civic procedure and citizenship. However, the literacy test for Louisiana had almost nothing to do with citizenship and instead used mental contortions to test the applicant.
The Louisiana test had 30 questions, many of which were confusing and poorly worded. A white registrar would correct the test and if the applicant missed one question, they would fail the test.
The printed test instructions at the beginning of the test read: "Do what you are told to do in each statement, nothing more, nothing less. Be careful as one wrong answer denotes failure of the test. You have 10 minutes to complete the test."
Here are a few of the sample questions given on the literacy test:
- "Spell backwards, forwards."
- "Print the word vote updside down but in the correct order."
- "Write right from the left to the right as you see it spelled here."
- "Draw a line around the number or letter of this sentence.
- "Draw five circles that one common interlocking part." (Editors Note: This is not a grammatical error by ksl.com. The sentence is written exactly as it appeared on the test.) The recent decision by the Supreme Court in the case of Shelby County v. Holder overturned Section 4(b) of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which mandated federal oversight of changes in voting procedure in jurisdictions and states that have previously had a history of using a test device to impede citizens from becoming voters.
