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A near impossible literacy test Louisiana used to suppress the black vote

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319 points rcarmo | 5 comments | 21 Oct 24 21:29 UTC | HN request time: 0.619s | source
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esalman ◴[22 Oct 24 04:51 UTC] No.41911296[source]▶
TIL voting right depends on literacy in America. Illiterate people have more rights in third world countries apparently.
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baumy ◴[22 Oct 24 04:54 UTC] No.41911309[source]▶
No, this is incorrect. This has not been the case for 60 years now. These tests were discontinued as part of the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1964. That information is in the linked article, which is short and only takes a minute to read.

This example was also far from universal, certainly across the entire USA but even in Louisiana.

edit: reading other comments, it isn't clear whether this information is even true for a small subset of Louisiana 60+ years ago

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esalman ◴[22 Oct 24 05:07 UTC] No.41911353[source]▶
TIL yet another way MLK changed America.
replies(1): >>41912434 #
1. pjc50 ◴[22 Oct 24 08:54 UTC] No.41912434[source]▶
The US talks up its history of freedom, but wasn't really a fully democratic country until the moon landings.
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2. refurb ◴[22 Oct 24 08:58 UTC] No.41912454[source]▶
And by that definition much of Europe isn’t fully democratic?
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3. pjc50 ◴[22 Oct 24 09:34 UTC] No.41912656[source]▶
Most of Europe never had the level of formal, legal racism of the US. But it is worth remembering which European countries were dictatorships at around the same time (Spain, Portugal, Greece) and that Eastern Europe came to democracy even more recently.
4. trimethylpurine ◴[22 Oct 24 14:55 UTC] No.41914909[source]▶
The South was historically dependent on slavery and rebelled against the freedoms that the North always provided. The North won the war and only after that is there a country in the South to look down on. But the North, and the birth of the nation, was always about freedom. It just took a long time to get the South to come along.
5. throw16180339 ◴[23 Oct 24 00:20 UTC] No.41920169[source]▶
I'd personally move the date forward quite a bit. There are some fairly basic freedoms that were lacking up until recently.

Spousal rape started to be criminalized in the 1970s, but it took until 1993 for it to be criminalized in every state (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape_in_the_United_Sta...). Oklahoma and South Carolina were the two holdouts. It's still treated differently under the law in many states.

The Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws in 2003. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_v._Texas)

Same sex couples couldn't marry in every state until 2015. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obergefell_v._Hodges) Some counties in the usual states ignored the ruling for years.

There are still some significant gaps in federal protection. Gender identity and sexual orientation are protected in the workplace and for housing, but not elsewhere.