In the years immediately following the Civil War, landmark legislation granted African Americans citizenship rights, including the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, which gave African Americans the right to vote and prohibited racial discrimination in voting. But for years, many southern states resisted racial equality and skirted the law by administering tests designed to prevent African Americans from registering to vote in the first place. Black citizens who managed to pass the registration tests were often threatened, fired from their jobs, or beaten. In states where the Ku Klux Klan maintained power -- Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi, for example -- scare tactics and lynchings intimidated many African Americans from trying to register at all.

As black veterans returned from World War II to conditions of racial discrimination, there was a resurgence of interest in voter registration. Some southern states witnessed an increase in black voter registration, while other states merely reinforced their strict limitations. In 1940, the Texas Supreme Court had termed the Democratic Party a "voluntary association" and affirmed its right to deny black voting rights in the Democratic primary elections. The plaintiff, an African American man named Lonnie E. Smith, appealed the ruling, and in 1944 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Smith v. Allwight that racial discrimination in elections violated the Fifteenth Amendment.

In 1945, the Alabama state legislature adopted the Boswell Amendment, which stipulated that anyone registering to vote must be able to "explain any article of the Federal Constitution." The law was vague enough to avoid charges of discrimination, but it gave state officials the power to administer random registration tests and deny black citizens the right to vote. In many counties, less than one percent of black residents were registered to vote.

In 1948, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and attorney Thurgood Marshall successfully challenged the constitutionality of the Boswell Amendment. A district court ruling struck down the amendment: "We cannot ignore the impact of the Boswell Amendment upon Negro citizens [just] because it avoids mention of race or color; to do this would be to shut our eyes to what all others...can see and understand."

In the 1950s, the Civil Rights movement gained momentum and amplified the demand for voting rights. Students at Miles College, a black college on the outskirts of Birmingham, developed a voter registration tool. A question and answer sheet listed the answers to commonly asked questions from the tests, many of which were obscure enough to disqualify even the most knowledgeable citizens. For example, those trying to register were asked to name the county secretary and tax assessor. A separate questionnaire documented the experience of African Americans who were rejected by the board of registrars.

The voter registration tool encouraged black voters and gave the NAACP Legal Defense Fund information that could be used to challenge voter discrimination in the courts. Civil rights activists and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund would continue to challenge voter discrimination until President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed voter registration tests and guaranteed the right of African Americans to vote.