Imagine going to register to vote in your local election. You go to the government office during the appropriate hours and request the form needed to register. Rather than give you the form, they begin to ask you questions. Was your grandfather able to vote? Can you prove that you have completed your education through fifth grade? Can you prove that you are of good moral character? Even if you were able to satisfy these questions, you would then have to take a literacy test. Here are a few questions you might encounter. 

1. If election of the President becomes the duty of the U.S. House of Representatives and it fails to act, who becomes President and when? 
2. If the two houses of Congress cannot agree on adjournment, who sets the time?
3. Divide a vertical line in two equal parts by bisecting it with a curved horizontal line that is only straight at its spot bisection of the vertical.
4. Draw five circles that one common inter-locking part. [sic]
5. Spell backwards, forwards.
6. Print the word vote upside down, but in the correct order.
7. Transcribe and interpret the following section of the state constitution: To the end that justice be established, public order maintained, and liberty perpetuated, we, the people of the State of Mississippi, grateful to Almighty God for the free exercise of the right to choose our own form of government, do ordain this Constitution. 
8. Write an essay on the responsibilities of citizenship. 
9. Are you a minister of the gospel in charge of an organized church, or the wife of such a minister? If so, what church? (Give address in each instance)
10. Write a statement setting forth your understanding of the duties and obligations of citizenship under a constitutional form of government.

This was a common experience for Black people attempting to vote from the 1860s through the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. During Reconstruction in the U.S. South, many Black men were able to vote and did so. They voted Black representatives into national office (learn more about this in 1860s Unboxed) and began to influence local politics too. But with the end of Reconstruction, many of these gains were lost. One way to prevent Black people from voting was by creating restrictive laws about who could vote including requiring someone to pass a literacy test with questions like the ones above. The goal was to disenfranchise Black people and prevent them from having any political power. And the laws worked. 

Enslaved people were prevented by law from learning how to read and write. They had been provided no formal schooling and continued to be excluded from the limited public schooling options into the twentieth century. Most Black people would be ineligible to vote by default even before attempting the written literacy test.

In the early twentieth century, there was even a widespread, bipartisan push to make literacy tests mandatory at the federal level in an attempt to curtail the influence of newer immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Across the globe, Australia also instituted policies to prevent Indigenous Australians from voting from the late-19th century to the 1960s. 

Want to try to pass a literacy test of your own? There are several available either online or to print out. Try your luck, and see if you would have been allowed to vote. Keep in mind too that these tests were designed for people to fail. Often, there would be unrealistic time limits where you would be required to finish a 10 page test in 10 minutes. Other times, people would be failed for spelling or capitalization errors. Sometimes, the questions would be subjective or have no right answer. Ultimately, the decision would be up to the white registrar providing the test. If you were white, you were likely to pass. If you were Black, you would likely fail.