A history lesson on literacy tests for voting

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Thane objected to Meghan McCain's assertion that Tom Tancredo's call for literacy tests for voting is "innate racism":

"Can't Meghan McCain make a case that literacy tests are a bad idea? For her to claim racism is the same as admitting that she can't make make a case against a literacy test."

Thane's ignorance of history and racial code words invites a beat down. It allows me to introduce a new feature, my enforcer "Glove," who I will call upon to beat down the truly ignorant things people say.

Fortunately, the Rachel Maddow Show did an excellent summary on literacy tests and racial code words in this segment 'The Rachel Maddow Show' for Monday, February, 8:

[I] want you to know first, that this is what it was like. You would head down to the courthouse to register to vote, if you dared. In order to register, you‘d face an exam. It was sometimes called a literacy test, but it wasn‘t testing to determine necessarily if you could read or write. If you were black, the test was designed purely to afford a legalistic veneer of justification for denying you your constitutional right to vote.

The questions weren‘t about ABCs. They were—they were questions like this one, from Alabama‘s literacy test in 1965. If a person charged with treason denies his guilt, how many persons must testify against him before he can be convicted? Do you consider yourself qualified to vote in this country? Can you answer that question?

You want to hear it again? If a person is charged with treason—if a person charged with treason denies his guilt, how many persons must testify against him before he can be convicted?

Or how about this one from the same test: In what year did the Congress gain the right to prohibit the migration of persons to the states? Do you know the answer to that one?

Again, these are from Alabama‘s literacy test in 1965. It was applied selectively, of course, to black voters, to keep them from registering.

If you lived in Georgia in 1958, you would have faced questions like this one: Who is the solicitor general of the state judicial circuit in which you live and who is the judge of such circuit? If such circuit has more than one judge, name them all.

How did you do on that one? Or how about this one: What does the Constitution of Georgia provide regarding the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus?

If you wanted to vote in Georgia in 1958, those are the questions you would have to answer. But, of course, not everyone would face those questions. The board of registrars had the sole authority to determine who got asked which literacy test questions and whose answers to those questions rendered them ineligible to vote.

The idea was that black voters weren‘t being denied the right to vote based on race. That would be illegal. No, those voters just couldn‘t pass this literacy test.

This isn‘t the plot of some Kagzi Klansman gothic short story. This isn‘t a theoretical for first-year law students. This isn‘t some State Department report on some tin pot dictatorship halfway around the world that we can‘t pronounce.

This is American history. This is really, really recent American history—as in this lifetime for a lot of people American history.

And the opening night speech at the national tea party convention this weekend proposed bringing the literacy test for voting back. And that proposal got a warm round of applause.

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The whiplash wakeup point here is not that somebody with a record like Tom Tancredo‘s would suggest something like this. He‘s made a living out of this shtick for sometime. What‘s important here is that a suggestion like that would be greeted with cheers from an American crowd. Hey, let‘s go back to the ways we used to keep black people from voting in this country.

Bravo. Tom Tancredo, what an idea.

The crowd cheering the proposed return to literacy tests for voting. The day after Tom Tancredo‘s speech, one of the convention‘s organizers was asked his response to this proposal.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What do you think the message is when you‘re saying Obama voters cannot pass a basic, civics literacy test?

JUDSON PHILLIPS, TEA PARTY CONVENTION ORGANIZER: Well, you know, Tom Tancredo gave a fantastic speech last night. I think he‘s an amazing politician.

Amazing yes. The tea party convention crowd that cheered the proposed return to literacy tests—the literacy tests that were used for 70 years to keep black Americans from voting, also hosted Sarah Palin as the event‘s keynote speaker.

SARAH PALIN (R), FORMER ALASKA GOVERNOR: The Republican Party would be really smart to start trying to absorb as much of the tea party movement as possible because this is the future of our country, the tea party movement is the future of politics.

The future.

On September 12th, 1895, “The New York Times” reported on the state of South Carolina‘s attempts to suppress the black vote. The article was titled “Negroes Must Be Barred. White Supremacy Demanded by the South Carolina Convention.”

Among the things South Carolina was considering to preserve white supremacy, to prevent black people from voting, was something they called the Mississippi plan, a plan which, quote, “requires an educational qualification, consisting of the ability to read or understand any section of the Constitution of the state, such ability to be determined by the registration commissioners.”

“The New York Times” explained at the time—again, this is 1895 — that the result would wholly abolish the Negro majority and any immediate fear of it.” And, of course, that‘s exactly what happened.

Literacy tests were how African-Americans were kept from voting in this country for some 70 years. This isn‘t ancient history. The Alabama test I quoted from before? That‘s from 1965. These tests were one of the main targets of the Voting Rights Act pushed by President Lyndon Johnson that same year.

LYNDON JOHNSON, FMR. U.S. PRESIDENT: The harsh fact is that in many places in this country, men and women are kept from voting simply because they are Negroes. Every device of which human ingenuity is capable has been used to deny this right. He may be asked to recite the entire Constitution, or explain the most complex provisions of state law. And even a college degree cannot be used to prove that he can read and write. Well, the fact is that the only way to pass these barriers is to show a white skin.

President Johnson later signed into law a bill that he hoped would prevent what he called the systemic and ingenious discrimination of literacy tests for voting.

There are African Americans who are members of Congress today who were not—during their lifetime—allowed to vote because of literacy tests for voting. And now, the tea party movement is applauding a proposal to bring literacy tests for voting back, and they are shocked and horrified to be called racist for doing so.

Joining us now is Harvard law professor, Charles Ogletree. He‘s director of Harvard University‘s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice.

* * *

MADDOW: Let me ask you first if I have fairly characterized the use of literacy tests in America as a tool for denying people the right to vote.

OGLETREE: You‘ve only under stated it. I mean, you talk about all types of poll taxes and literacy tests, my pastor, Reverend LeRoy Attles, had to tell the poll watcher how many marbles were in a jar, hundreds of marbles, and he had to get the number right. And all of these questions were designed to keep blacks from voting.

But what Tancredo said, Rachel, is really remarkable. Most of the people who voted for Barack Obama were white. And if you talk about literacy tests, are you saying that those people did not have the right to exercise one person, one vote? And I think it‘s part of thinking of using the buzz words, literacy test, that implies blacks, because blacks have been denied that right.

And I think Tom Tancredo needs to read the Constitution. He needs to think about what he means because there are a lot of black, white, and brown citizens all over America who have worked very hard to earn the right to vote and to tell them that they‘re not capable of making a right decision, he‘s wrong.

They lost the election in 2008. Get over it. It‘s time to live in 2010.

I am a child of the Civil Rights Movement. While I was a child at the time, I can bear living witness to Blacks being denied the right to register to vote through literacy tests, intimidation and violence. I have witnessed men beaten for simply attempting to register to vote. When I see Confederate Republicans and Dixiecrats talking about "secession" and "states rights" and "literacy tests" for people of color at their inappropriately-named Tea Party Convention, it is nothing new; it is something one would have heard at any Klan rally or White Citizens Council meeting in the 1950s and 1960s. These are the unrepentant segretationists who still believe in the supremacy of white Christian males. It is innate racism.

This is the "future" to which these teabaggers want to return. Americans are never going to return to a sanitized and idealized vision of a segregated America in the 1950s. The Civil War is over.