Were imposed by state statutes and constitutions after the Reconstruction era and required prospective voters to “understand and explain” selected laws to the satisfaction of local registrars before being allowed to cast their ballots. Such tests were part of a broad array of subterfuges used in southern states from the 1890s through the mid‐1960s in an avowed attempt to evade constitutional prohibitions against race discrimination in voting. In their actual administration, understanding tests were applied laxly if at all to whites while being invoked to disfranchise many blacks for their failure to comprehend arcane legal language. As Gunnar Myrdal reported in An American Dilemma (1944), one southern official boasted, “I can keep the President of the United States from registering, if I want to. God, Himself, couldn't understand that sentence. I, myself, am the judge” (p. 1325, n. 34).
Although the Supreme Court in 1949 summarily affirmed a federal district court's invalidation of Alabama's understanding test, several other southern states persisted in using the contrivance into the 1960s. It was not until Louisiana v. United States (1965) that the Court issued a full opinion striking down the practice as “not a test but a trap” turning upon the unchecked “whim or impulse” of individual registrars (p. 153). Although the Court held open the possibility that standardized, fairly administered “citizenship tests” might be constitutional, Congress in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and later amendments subsequently restricted the use of all literacy, “understanding,” and other educational tests in determining voter eligibility. The Court upheld these broad bans in South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966) and Oregon v. Mitchell (1970).
See also Fifteenth Amendment; Race and Racism; Vote, Right to.
— Charles G. Curtis, Jr., and Shirley S. Abrahamson
