Qualifying to Vote Under Jim Crow
In this activity you will learn about literacy tests and other barriers that kept black Southerners from being able to vote. You also
take a 1960s literacy test from Alabama.
Objectives
You will describe the barriers black voters faced in the Jim Crow South.
2. You will examine a 1960s literacy test and evaluate its effectiveness at keeping African Americans from
being able to vote.
1.
Instructions
Step 1: Let’s review the meanings of (and examples of) de jure (by law/legal) and de facto (by
custom/extra-legal) discrimination.
2. Step 2: Please locate the worksheet "Qualifying to Vote Under Jim Crow." Take a moment and jot down
what you know about voting in the Jim Crow South. Consider who could and could not vote, what barriers
(including laws) prevented them from voting, and what changes may have occurred since the end of slavery.
 Hopefully your answers include some of the following points:
o Women (white or black, poor or rich) could not vote until after the 19th Amendment passed
in 1920; literacy tests, poll taxes, and other forms of legal and informal methods kept
African-Americans from voting; the same restrictions also prevented many poor whites from
voting (though Registrars could waive fees or use easier sections of the literacy test if they
wanted to allow whites the franchise)
o Under Reconstruction, the Federal Government briefly protected the rights of African
American men to vote in the South (who promptly elected black representatives to local,
state, and federal government); after the Compromise of 1877, states put in place their own
laws, effectively ending blacks' rights to vote.
o Various de jure restrictions included poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses (one could
vote only if his grandfather had also been able to, limiting blacks' and immigrants' access).
3. Step 3: Please locate the set of three documents -- in groups you are to analyze them to answer the
questions.
4. Step 4: As a class, we will discuss your responses.
 Responses may include:
o De Jure Segregation: a literacy test (required by law), only two African Americans
1.
o
o
allowed to be in the Registrar's office at a time
De Facto Segregation: Registrar could choose hardest portions of the test, Hamer evicted
from her home, police taking pictures of voters to later intimidate them
Challenges to Jim Crow: the meeting Hamer attended, organized to help African
Americans understand their rights; the sample literacy test created by SNCC, used to help
new voters prepare for the real thing; African Americans going to vote despite
intimidation; Hamer's statement to her landlord; photograph part of a report compiled by
SNCC to document abuse and intimidation; some might argue that voting was an act of
resistance, since so much of society was organized to prevent this basic civil right
Historical Context
During the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, the United States government passed three Amendments
(13th, 14th, and 15th) to the Constitution granting certain rights and liberties to African Americans. One of these
was the right to vote. This right was seen as a threat to white southern society. Local laws known as Black Codes
were passed that made voting nearly impossible for African Americans. Central to these codes was a literacy test
that African Americans had to take. As slaves, black Southerners had never been taught to read and write. Some of
these tests were extremely difficult and usually involved reading and interpreting sections of the Federal and State
Constitutions. The situation continued until the passage of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The registration procedures and the Registrars who enforced them, were just one part of this interlocking system of
racial discrimination and oppression. The various state, county and local police forces, all white of course, routinely
intimidated and harassed African Americans who tried to register. They arrested would-be voters on false charges
and beat others for imagined transgressions. Often this kind of retribution was directed not only at the man or
woman who dared try to register, but also against their family members, including children.
Qualifying to Vote Under Jim Crow
1.
Create a concept map or write a paragraph of what you know about voting
in the Jim Crow South before World War II. Things to consider: who could
vote and who could not; who made the rules about voting; what barriers
were in place; changes over time.
2.
Read the documents:
 An Alabama Literacy Test Keeps Black Voters Off the Rolls 
 Fannie Lou Hamer Recalls the Mississippi Voter Registration
Campaign 
 Police Photograph Black Voters in Mississippi 
3.
What evidence in the documents is there of de jure segregation? Please
cite specific phrases or sentences.
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4.
What evidence in the documents is there of de facto segregation? Please
cite specific phrases or sentences.
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5.
What evidence in the documents indicates how African-American activists
challenged Jim Crow? Please cite specific phrases or sentences.
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6.
If you were taking the literacy test today, how well would you score? Do
you think literacy tests were an effective barrier to voting? Explain your
answer.
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Police Photograph Black Voters in Mississippi
This photograph was published in a report chronicling the intimidation and violence towards African-American voting activists. As the original
photo caption notes, police documented voters as they entered courthouses so that the "evidence" could later be used to identify them to
employers and landlords for possible firing and eviction. The report was most likely published and distributed by SNCC, though it was based on
research that was originally compiled and entered into the United States Congressional Record in 1963.
Negro citizens attempt to cast ballots in Greenwood, August 1963. Note helmeted policemen photographing each of them as
they enter the courthouse. The photographs can later be used to intimidate them, and perhaps to force them from their jobs or
homes because they tried to vote.
SOURCE | Jack Minnis, A Chronology of Violence and Intimidation in Mississippi Since 1961, (Mississippi, circa 1963), 4, from the University of Southern
Mississippi McCain Library and Archives, http://digilib.usm.edu/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/manu&CISOPTR=3118&REC=16.
CREATOR | Unknown
ITEM TYPE | Photograph
An Alabama Literacy Test Keeps Black Voters Off the
Rolls
Prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, many southern (and some western) states had devised "literacy tests" and other voting
requirements whose primary purpose was to deny African Americans the vote. The tests consisted of written and oral questions about oftenobscure aspects of state law and the United States Constitution. They were usually overseen by a registrar who had wide discretion over portions
of the test and could choose easier or more difficult versions of the test or try to confuse potential voters by mumbling the oral portions. The
entire registration process was aimed at intimidating and discouraging black voters. This document from 1965 was used by civil rights workers in
Alabama to teach potential voters what to expect when they registered to vote. While not an actual copy of the literacy test as it appeared in
Alabama in 1965, the document closely mirrors the "B" and "C" (written) portions of the test that potential voters were required to complete. In
some areas where African Americans were the majority, black registration was close to zero, while the white rate was often over 100% due to the
illicit inclusion of the "tombstone vote," white voters whose names were kept on the roles despite being deceased.
COPY OF TEST FOLLOWS THIS PAGE.
SOURCE | Sample Voter Registration Worksheet, Citizenship School, 1965, from Civil Rights Movement Veterans, http://www.crmvet.org/info/litques.htm.
CREATOR | Citizenship School
RIGHTS | Permission to use this document was obtained from Civil Rights Movement Veterans.
ITEM TYPE | Pamphlet/Petition
Fannie Lou Hamer Recalls the Mississippi Voter
Registration Campaign
Fannie Lou Hamer, the last of 20 children and a Mississippi tenant farmer, leapt to national prominence during the 1964 Democratic National
Convention, when she eloquently challenged Mississippi's segregated Democratic primary on national television. In 1962, she had become a
leader of the African-American voting rights movement in Mississippi that culminated in 1964’s Freedom Summer. Forced off her land when her
landlord demanded that she take her name off the voter registration list, Hamer was repeatedly jailed and beaten during her voting rights
activities. "The only thing they could do to me was kill me," Hamer said, "and it seemed like they'd been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever
since I could remember."
HAMER: Well, I didn't know anything about voting; I didn't know anything about registering to vote. One night I went to the
church. They had a mass meeting. And I went to the church, and they talked about how it was our right, that we could register
and vote. They were talking about we could vote out people that we didn't want in office, we thought that wasn't right, that we
could vote them out. That sounded interesting enough to me that I wanted to try it. I had never heard, until 1962, that black
people could register and vote. . . .
Well, when I first tried to register it was in Indianola. I went to Indianola on the thirty-first of August in 1962; that was to try to
register. When we got there—there was eighteen of us went that day—so when we got there, there were people there with guns
and just a lot of strange-looking people to us. We went on in the circuit clerk's office, and he asked us what did we want; and we
told him what we wanted. We wanted to try to register. He told us that all of us would have to get out of there except two. So I
was one of the two persons that remained inside, to try to register, [with] another young man named Mr. Ernest Davis. We
stayed in to take the literacy test. So the registrar gave me the sixteenth section of the Constitution of Mississippi. He pointed it
out in the book and told me to look at it and then copy it down just like I saw it in the book: Put a period where a period was
supposed to be, a comma and all of that. After I copied it down he told me right below that to give a real reasonable
interpretation then, interpret what I had read. That was impossible. I had tried to give it, but I didn't even know what it meant,
much less to interpret it. . . .
Well, when we got back I went on out to where I had been staying for eighteen years, and the landowner had talked to my
husband and told him I had to leave the place. My little girl, the child that I raised, met me and told me that the landowner was
mad and I might have to leave. So during the time that my husband was talking about it, I was back in the house. The landowner
drove up and asked him had I made it back. He [my husband] told him I had. I got up and walked out on the porch, and he [told]
me did Pap tell me what he said. I told him, "He did." He said, "Well, I mean that, you'll have to go down and withdraw your
registration, or you’ll have to leave this place." I didn’t call myself saying nothing smart, but I couldn’t understand it. I
answered the only way I could and told him that I didn't go down there to register for him; I went down there to register for
myself. This seemed like it made him madder when I told him that.
SOURCE | Fannie Lou Hamer to Neil McMillen, "An Oral History with Fannie Lou Hamer," interview, 14 April 1972 and 25 January 1973, McCain Library and
Archive, University of Southern Mississippi, Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive, http://www.lib.usm.edu/~spcol/crda/oh/hamer.htm.
CREATOR | Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive
INTERVIEWER | Neil McMillen
INTERVIEWEE | Fannie Lou Hamer
ITEM TYPE | Oral History