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Literacy and the Black Vote

By Armon Hightower

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Fighting Back: C.O.R.E.

  • Writer: Armon Hightower
    Armon Hightower
  • Mar 5, 2019
  • 1 min read



Activists found ways to resist against discriminatory laws and practices that invented black disenfranchisement (like literacy tests and poll taxes), often resulting in organizations creating their own texts and documents. For instance, in 1941 Chicago, young college student-activists created the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), with the purpose of encouraging “personal nonviolent direct action to end discrimination” (Jones and Williams, 2018; n.p.). CORE resisted racist politics and policies by working around the voter registration laws in that era. The organization used texts that were designed to empower and provide disenfranchised Black voters with the information they would need in order to dodge racist policies. CORE chapters had formed in 19 cities across the country. In the mid 1950s, CORE had finally focused the issue of voting and, by the mid 1960s, had managed to facilitate the registration of 31,000 Black voters in South Carolina all within the span of a couple of years.


Jones, Natasha N, and Miriam F Williams. “Technologies of Disenfranchisement: Literacy Tests and Black Voters in the US from 1890 to 1965.” Technical Communication Online: Journal for the Society for Technical Communication, Society for Technical Communication, 4 Nov. 2018, www.stc.org/techcomm/2018/11/08/technologies-of-disenfranchisement-literacy-tests-and-black-voters-in-the-us-from-1890-to-1965/.

 
 
 

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