Mississippi's 1890 constitution set the model. It let registrars require voters to read or interpret a section of the state constitution. Other Southern states copied the approach. Because white officials decided who had to take the test and who passed, the tests could exclude Black applicants with college degrees while waving white applicants through.
The Supreme Court upheld literacy tests in Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections (1959). Six years later, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 suspended them in the jurisdictions it covered. Amendments in 1970 extended the ban nationwide, and the Court upheld that ban in Oregon v. Mitchell (1970). Congress made the ban permanent in 1975.
Literacy tests matter now because they show how a rule that sounds neutral can be written and enforced to exclude by race. Voting-rights advocates use that history to evaluate modern requirements, such as strict ID rules and registration purges, by their effects on who actually gets to vote.