Literacy test

A literacy test assesses a person's literacy skills: their ability to read and write. Literacy tests have been administered by various governments, particularly to immigrants. In the US, between the 1850s and 1960s, literacy tests administered to voters had the effect of disenfranchising African Americans and other groups with diminished access to education. Other countries, notably Australia, as part of its White Australia policy, and South Africa adopted literacy tests either to exclude certain racialized groups from voting or to prevent them from immigrating. From the 1890s to the 1960s, many state governments administered literacy tests to prospective voters, to test their literacy in order to vote. The first state to establish literacy tests in the United States was Connecticut. State legislatures employed literacy tests as part of the voter registration process starting in the late 19th century. Literacy tests, along with poll taxes, residency and property restrictions, and extra-legal activities (violence and intimidation) were all used to deny suffrage to African Americans. The first formal voter literacy tests were introduced in 1890. At first, whites were generally exempted from the literacy test if they meet alternate requirements that in practice excluded blacks, such as a grandfather clause, or a finding of "good moral character", the latter's testimony of which was often asked only of white people, many of whom, especially most post-Civil War Southerners, were against any non-whites' voting rights. In Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections (1959), the U.S. Supreme Court held that literacy tests were not necessarily violations of Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment nor of the Fifteenth Amendment. Southern states abandoned the literacy test only when forced to do so by federal legislation in the 1960s. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 stated that literacy tests used as a qualification for voting in federal elections be administered wholly in writing and only to persons who had completed at least six years of formal education.