What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?

[Rev. Rye]

Something in the category of "The Reverend Probably Should Have Known This Shit Earlier": For the longest time, when I was told that the Jim Crow-era South kept Black people from voting using literacy tests, I assumed that at least the tests would be relatively straightforward, and presumably banking on the assumption that the barely-funded black schools would do the work of failing them.

In reality, they were alarmingly difficult and often with nonsensical questions and a single wrong answer meant you failed the entire test.. An example from Louisiana's literacy test: "Draw a line around the number or letter of this sentence." It took me several minutes to figure out that maybe they're talking about the letter A used as an article, likely meaning a single line. Probably like this: "Draw a line around the number or letter of this sentence." You needed to do the whole thing in 10 minutes.

Reportedly, one Constitutional Law professor sent it to as many others as he could find, and asked them to fill it out. 70% of America's top legal minds failed the test. So, naturally, the average black person, who probably would have only had an average of five or six years' worth of schooling*, would almost certainly be fucked.





* And given the poor quality of black schools in the Jim Crow South (school would be in session for a lot less of the year, the building itself would often be a run-down version of the one-room schoolhouses of yore, textbooks [if they even had them] would be out-of-date hand-me-downs, and teachers would often only have about 10 years of schooling under their own belt), even these five or six years would probably be worth less than a white person with as many years on them.