The Mississippi literacy test was a voter registration requirement, written into the state constitution in 1890, that forced applicants to read and interpret a passage of the state constitution chosen by a local registrar whose decision was final. On paper it tested reading ability. In practice it was a tool for keeping Black citizens off the voter rolls, and it worked: by 1964, only 6.7 percent of eligible Black adults in Mississippi were registered to vote.1U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Voting Rights and Political Representation in the Mississippi Delta The Voting Rights Act of 1965 suspended the test, and Mississippi formally repealed the provision from its constitution ten years later.
Why Mississippi Wrote the Test Into Its 1890 Constitution
The delegates who drafted Mississippi’s 1890 constitution were open about what they were doing. Convention president Solomon Saladin Calhoon told the gathering: “We came here to exclude the Negro. Nothing short of this.” The problem the convention set itself was how to accomplish that exclusion without running afoul of the Fifteenth Amendment, which forbade denying the vote on the basis of race.
The solution was a set of voter qualifications that said nothing about race on their face but could be administered to reach the intended result. Section 244 of the new constitution required every voter to “be able to read any section of the constitution of this state; or he shall be able to understand the same when read to him, or give a reasonable interpretation thereof.”2Justia Law. Williams v. Mississippi, 170 US 213 (1898) The “understanding” alternative was the key. It gave the registrar room to pass an illiterate white applicant on a loose oral answer while failing a literate Black applicant whose written interpretation was deemed inadequate.
How the Test Worked
In its original form, the test was administered orally. The applicant either read a section of the Mississippi Constitution aloud or listened to it and gave a spoken interpretation. The registrar picked the section. The state constitution ran to hundreds of sections, from short declarations to dense passages on corporate regulation and municipal bonds. A sympathetic registrar could assign something simple; a hostile one could assign something impenetrable.
The test grew harder in 1954. An amendment that year — passed the same year as Brown v. Board of Education — required applicants to copy a designated section of the constitution by hand and then write out an interpretation. The amendment also added a separate written statement explaining the applicant’s understanding of “the duties and obligations of citizenship under a constitutional form of government.”3Jim Crow Museum. Mississippi Voter Registration Form Everything had to be done “in his own handwriting in the presence of the registrar and without assistance or suggestion of any other person.” What had been a basic reading check became a timed written exam under direct observation.
The results showed up fast. Black voter registration in Mississippi, which had reached 22,000 in 1954, dropped to 12,000 the following year.1U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Voting Rights and Political Representation in the Mississippi Delta
The Registrar Decided Everything
The system depended on one person. The county registrar picked the constitutional section, watched the applicant write, read the answers, and decided alone whether they passed. There were no standardized answer keys, no scoring rubrics, and no objective standard for what counted as a “reasonable interpretation.”4National Museum of American History. Literacy Tests The decision was effectively final, with no meaningful review through state courts or any administrative channel.
That absence of oversight was the design. A registrar could fail every Black applicant who came through the door without ever articulating a consistent rule, and could shift the standard from one week to the next in response to civil rights organizing. The test looked like an assessment of reading ability and functioned as a racial gate, with plausible deniability built in.
The Poll Tax and Other Barriers Worked Alongside It
The literacy test was one of several hurdles the 1890 constitution erected. Section 241 required every male voter to have “paid, on or before the 1st day of February of the year in which he shall offer to vote, all taxes which may have been legally required of him” for the two preceding years.2Justia Law. Williams v. Mississippi, 170 US 213 (1898) The poll tax ran two dollars per year, with counties authorized to add another dollar, and it had to be paid months before election season, when agricultural workers had the least cash. Missing a single year’s payment could disqualify a voter for later elections.
Even an applicant who passed the registrar’s examination could still be turned away over an unpaid two-dollar tax from a prior year. The Twenty-Fourth Amendment, ratified in January 1964, eliminated the poll tax in federal elections.5U.S. House of Representatives. The Twenty-Fourth Amendment Two years later, the Supreme Court struck down poll taxes in state and local elections as well in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, holding that conditioning the right to vote on any payment violated the Equal Protection Clause.6Justia Law. Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, 383 US 663 (1966)
Why Early Court Challenges Failed
The first major constitutional challenge went nowhere. In Williams v. Mississippi (1898), the Supreme Court held that the literacy test and poll tax did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment because the provisions “do not on their face discriminate between the races, and it has not been shown that their actual administration was evil; only that evil was possible under them.”2Justia Law. Williams v. Mississippi, 170 US 213 (1898) That reasoning let Mississippi’s scheme stand for generations and gave other Southern states a template.
Nearly seventy years later, the Department of Justice sued Mississippi, its election commissioners, and six county registrars, alleging a “longstanding, carefully executed plan to keep Negroes in Mississippi from voting.” In United States v. Mississippi (1965), the Supreme Court ruled the complaint should proceed, writing that the allegations “were too serious, the right to vote in this country is too precious, and the necessity of settling grievances peacefully in the courts is too important, for this complaint to have been dismissed.”7Justia Law. United States v. Mississippi, 380 US 128 (1965)
How the Voting Rights Act Shut the Test Down
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 did what litigation had not. It suspended “tests and devices,” defined to include any requirement that a voter demonstrate the ability to read, write, understand, or interpret any material, in jurisdictions where less than half the voting-age population had been registered or had voted in the 1964 presidential election.8Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 52 USC 10303 – Suspension of the Use of Tests or Devices in Determining Eligibility to Vote Mississippi, with Black registration at 6.7 percent, was covered.
Enforcement went beyond prohibition. The Act authorized federal examiners to enter covered jurisdictions and register voters directly, bypassing state officials.9National Archives. Voting Rights Act (1965) Those examiners operated under federal rules that ignored state literacy requirements, taking the gatekeeping power away from county registrars after seventy-five years. The Act also set the broader standard, now codified at 52 U.S.C. § 10301, that no voting qualification may be applied in a way that results in denial of the vote on account of race.10Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 52 USC 10301 – Denial or Abridgement of Right to Vote on Account of Race or Color
Black voter registration in Mississippi rose from 6.7 percent in 1964 to 59.8 percent by 1967.1U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Voting Rights and Political Representation in the Mississippi Delta Congress extended the ban on literacy tests to every state in 1970 and made that nationwide ban permanent in 1975.11Congress.gov. The Voting Rights Act: Historical Development and Policy Background
When Mississippi Repealed Section 244
Mississippi erased the literacy test from its own constitution in two steps. In August 1965, weeks after the Voting Rights Act became law, the legislature proposed an amendment to Section 244 that cut certain voting qualifications, and voters ratified it that month. Ten years later, the legislature moved to remove Section 244 entirely. Voters ratified the full repeal on November 4, 1975, and the Secretary of State deleted the section from the constitution on December 8 of that year.12Mississippi Secretary of State. Constitution of the State of Mississippi The text of the state constitution now shows a single word where Section 244 used to be: “Repealed.”