Southern Poverty Law Center

Friend,

If you were living in Alabama in the early 1960s and wanted to vote, you first had to answer some very difficult questions.

At least if you were Black, you did.

You can see for yourself how challenging these questions are by taking this sample test.

TAKE THE SAMPLE TEST

Before you could even register to vote, you had to pass a “literacy test,” which typically included many questions about the law and government, and was administered and evaluated by a white elections official. While white applicants always seemed to get the easiest questions, or perhaps even none, Black applicants got the hardest.

When a Duke professor sent four questions from an Alabama literacy test to every constitutional law professor in the country in 1965 and asked for their impromptu answers, 70 percent of the responses were wrong.

Literacy tests were one of the most effective ways the white power structure in Alabama and across the Deep South kept Black Americans from voting. Today, the SPLC is leading the fight against a new wave of modern Jim Crow laws.

A group of SPLC staff and supporters are pictured attending the historic Edmund Pettus Bridge crossing on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday.

We cannot afford to go back to the dangers of 1960s-style literacy tests, poll taxes and other barriers designed to keep Black and Brown people out of the voting booth.

With a hugely consequential election on the horizon this year, the Southern Poverty Law Center is excited to launch The South’s Got Now | Decidimos. A bilingual voter engagement campaign in English and Spanish, The South’s Got Now | Decidimos (which means “we decide”) will educate and energize young people of color in the Deep South as they build their power as changemakers in our democracy.

For too long, Black and Brown people in the South have experienced what it means to be shut out of the rooms where decisions are made – and know too well the consequences of terrible policy decisions, sometimes repeated over decades, that further entrench systemic racism and economic inequality.

It doesn’t have to be that way. With our vote, we can usher in a new way of caring for each other and our communities – and young people know it.