Literacy test

Literacy tests were typically administered by white clerks who could pass or fail a person at their discretion based on race.

Literacy tests, along with poll taxes, residency and property restrictions, and extra-legal activities (violence and intimidation)[5][better source needed] were all used to deny suffrage to African Americans.

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.

[11][12] When introduced in the 1890s, the literacy test was a device to restrict the total number of immigrants while not offending the large element of ethnic voters.

[13] The American Federation of Labor took the lead in promoting literacy tests that would exclude illiterate immigrants, primarily Eastern Europe and countries that had national waters in the Mediterranean Sea.

[15] In 1906, the House Speaker Joseph Gurney Cannon, a conservative Republican, worked aggressively to defeat a proposed literacy test for immigrants.

He worked with Secretary of State Elihu Root and President Theodore Roosevelt to set up the "Dillingham Commission," a blue ribbon body of experts that produced a 41-volume study of immigration.