The 1964 Louisiana Literacy Test was a better piece of legislation than I anticipated. I thought it was designed to weed out black voters who might be uppity enough to want to participate in our electoral process, but it appears that the test was also a flawless way of filtering out snot-nosed Yankee undergrads at Harvard. Call it a “twofer.”

Recently, a group of Harvard students were asked to take the 1964 Louisiana Literacy Test — one of the extreme efforts to stop African Americans from voting that eventually led to the passing of the Voting Rights Act. Since racism is no longer a thing in America, according to the Supreme Court, and the Voting Rights Act has been effectively gutted, it might be time for a lesson from the past.

The test required those who took it to correctly answer 30 questions in 10 minutes — something even a group of Harvard students could not do today. The students were recorded struggling with the vaguely-worded questions. Under Louisiana law at the time these students would each require a 100% score on the test to be able to vote.

If we flash forward to today, we can see how far we’ve come by looking at the colored governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal (on left).

bobbyjindalduckdynasty

In a Politico op-ed Sunday, Jindal lamented that minorities place “undue emphasis” on heritage, and urged Americans to resist “the politically correct trend of changing the melting pot into a salad bowl” comprised of proudly ethnic identities.

Jindal insisted that, “while racism still rears its ugly head from time to time” since Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic “I have a dream” speech, the major race problem facing modern America is that minorities are too focused on their “separateness.”

I was thinking that it is a grand thing indeed that fifty years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 there are black congressmen representing some of the good people of Georgia. For example, there’s Rep. Hank Johnson, a Democrat (of all things) from Lithonia. Just this week, he made the following remarks about our racial progress from the House floor.

“It feels like open season on black men in America and I am outraged.

“In fact, all Americans are at risk when bad actors in law enforcement use their guns instead of their heads.

“Despite bipartisan, nationwide calls for action; and despite my bills to reform the broken grand jury process, hold police accountable, and end militarization; and despite my colleagues’ bills to encourage body cameras, this Congress does nothing.

“No hearings, no blue ribbon commissions, no nothing.

“I would like unanimous consent to enter this list of people killed by police into the record, so my colleagues will no longer ignore this crisis.

“Mr. Speaker, here are just a few names of our colleagues and neighbors and relatives:

“Walter Scott from [South] Carolina; Michael Brown from Missouri; Anthony Hill from Georgia; Tony Robinson from Wisconsin; Kevin Davis – Georgia; Nicholas Thomas – Georgia; Daniel Elrod – Nebraska; Antonio Zambrano-Montes – Washington; David Kassick – Pennsylvania; Jessica Hernandez – Colorado; Kevin Davis – Georgia; Dennis Grigsby – Texas; Rumain Brisbon – Phoenix; Tamir Rice – Ohio; Akai Gurley – New York; Carlos Perez – Nevada; Kajieme Powell – Missouri; Ezell Ford – California; Dillon Taylor – Utah; John Crawford III – Ohio; Naeschylus Vinzant, of Colorado; Charly Leundeu Keunang, of California; and the list goes on.”

One thing to consider is how difficult it is to get over your “separateness” when the cops are insisting upon it.

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