The South purged Black voters through racially veiled literacy tests and poll taxes

Evidence

Mississippi Democrats remembered Lodge’s closing statement when they gathered for their constitutional convention on August 12, 1890. Surprising Lodge, Mississippi Democrats adapted the North’s anti-poor literacy test, reformulating it into an anti-Black and anti-poor literacy test for their fourth constitution. The highly subjective “understanding clause” asked for someone to interpret something in the Mississippi constitution, allowing racist registrars to pass ignorant Whites into voting, and fail knowledgeable Blacks into not voting. When the new constitution went into effect on November 1, 1890, antiracist White lawyer and activist Albion Tourgee immediately recognized it as “the most important event” in American history since South Carolina had seceded from the Union. Over the next decade, the progression of racism came to all the former Confederate states and even several border states. They all followed Mississippi’s example, instituting race-veiled voting restrictions, from literacy tests to poll taxes, that would purge their voting rolls of the remaining Black (and many poor White) voters without saying a racial word. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 720

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s test of Kendi’s inversion — the literacy-test codification shows policy (disenfranchisement) made to look like neutral ignorance-based standards while racists know exactly who it targets. — connects to: Literacy tests and poll taxes were written to let local officials disenfranchise black voters — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2063