literacy tests

July 9, 2020 - States across the country require people with felony convictions to purchase their voting rights back if they ever want to cast a ballot again. It is a mechanism that felony disenfranchisement schemes increasingly rely upon, and it marks a return to the sordid tactics of Jim Crow.

September 13, 2018 - In 1868, Southern states held constitutional conventions in which recently freed black men helped eliminate vestiges of the Confederacy and draft progressive blueprints for state government. While some of the provisions survived Jim Crow, conservative politicians today are chipping away at Reconstruction's radical legacy.

June 30, 2017 - In his famous July 4 speech delivered 165 years ago, abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, "With brave men, there is always a remedy for oppression." Now is the time for Congress to be brave for democracy and vote to restore the eviscerated Voting Rights Act.

September 8, 2016 - While Virginia's Democratic governor battles Republican lawmakers over restoring voting rights for ex-felons who've completed their sentences, almost 200,000 of the state's residents — almost half of them African-American — remain disenfranchised, mostly for nonviolent crimes.

March 26, 2013 - A provision of the North Carolina constitution designed to suppress the black vote is no longer enforceable under the Voting Rights Act, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers wants to give voters a second chance to remove it.

July 1, 1982 - This article originally appeared in Southern Exposure Vol. 10 No.