One Person, No Vote (YA edition): How Not All Voters Are Treated Equally

by Carol Anderson

The literacy test and understanding clause were tailor-made for societies that systematically refused to educate millions of their citizens and ensured that the bulk of the population remained functionally illiterate. By 1940, more than half of all black adults in Mississippi had fewer than five years of formal education. Almost 12 percent had no schooling whatsoever. The figures were worse in South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia, and Alabama. During World War II, for example, Louisiana spent almost four times as much per capita on white elementary schoolchildren as on black ones. What’s more, for most of the twentieth century, many Jim Crow school systems did not have high schools for black teens. Deliberate underfunding of black schools was critical to the disenfranchising success of literacy tests.