From the 1890s to the 1960s, many state governments administered literacy tests to prospective voters, to test their literacy in order to vote. The first state to establish literacy tests in the United States was Connecticut. State legislatures employed literacy tests as part of the voter registration process starting in the late 19th century. Literacy tests, along with
poll taxes, residency and property restrictions, and extra-legal activities (violence and intimidation) were all used to deny
suffrage to
African Americans. The first formal voter literacy tests were introduced in 1890. At first, whites were generally exempted from the literacy test if they met alternate requirements that in practice excluded
black people, such as a
grandfather clause, or a finding of "
good moral character", the latter's testimony of which was often asked only of white people. Some locales administered separate literacy tests, with a more simplified literacy test being administered to whites. In
Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections (1959), the
U.S. Supreme Court held that literacy tests were not necessarily violations of
Equal Protection Clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment nor of the
Fifteenth Amendment. Southern states abandoned the literacy test only when forced to do so by federal legislation in the 1960s. 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 not obtained a sixth grade education. To curtail the use of literacy tests, Congress enacted the
Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Act prohibited jurisdictions from administering literacy tests, among other measures, to citizens who attained a sixth-grade education in an American school in which the predominant language was Spanish, such as schools in
Puerto Rico. The Supreme Court upheld this provision in
Katzenbach v. Morgan (1966). Although the Court had earlier held in
Lassiter that literacy tests did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, in
Morgan the Court held that
Congress could enforce Fourteenth Amendment rights—such as the right to vote—by prohibiting conduct it deemed to interfere with such rights, even if that conduct may not be independently unconstitutional. As originally enacted, the Voting Rights Act also suspended the use of literacy tests in all jurisdictions in which less than 50% of voting-age residents were registered as of November 1, 1964, or had voted in the
1964 presidential election. Congress amended the Act in 1970 and expanded the ban on literacy tests to the entire country. The Supreme Court then upheld the ban as constitutional in
Oregon v. Mitchell (1970), but just for federal elections. The Court was deeply divided in this case, and a majority of justices did not agree on a rationale for the holding. ==Immigration==