State Supreme Court Justice Henry Frye still remembers the day in 1956 when he failed the literacy test to register to vote in his hometown of Ellerbe.
"You had to be able to read and write to the satisfaction of the registrar,'' Frye recalled during a recent interview in his chambers. "Some registrars were very hard to satisfy.''
At the time he tried to register, Frye was fresh from service in the Air Force as a first lieutenant and had been accepted into the law school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Here was the test. Name five of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the12th president of the United States (Zachary Taylor). Undoubtedly, if Frye had answered those questions correctly, there would have been additional questions. Frye said he didn't know the answers and he didn't need to know the answers. The registrar said he had failed.
Frye later went to see the chairman of the Richmond County Board of Elections, who apologized and told him to try again. This time there was a different registrar.
"Oh, you're the one we wouldn't let vote,'' the registrar said.
The literacy test was passed by the legislature 100 years ago on Feb. 19, 1899. It was part of a white supremacy campaign orchestrated by Democrats both to disenfranchise black voters and to crush the political power of the Republican Party. To make sure that illiterate whites were not barred from voting, the amendment had a grandfather clause that said no one who could vote on or before Jan. 1, 1867, or their descendants, should be denied the right to vote.
Arguing for the measure in the House, Rep. George Rountree, a Democrat from Wilmington and the bill's chief sponsor, said: "The results of the last four years in North Carolina and especially the last two years, have completely demonstrated the fact that the Negro is unsuited for self-government.''
The voices against the bill were few.
"To me, this is the most serious thing on earth,'' said Rep. Isaac Smith, a black Republican from Craven. "I ask you most kindly to consider well what you are about to do. Take away from the colored man this privilege, and he will never again consider you his friend.''
The literacy test was approved by voters in 1900, in a campaign marked by raw racial appeals, voter intimidation and massive ballot fraud. North Carolina followed Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina in barring blacks from politics.
When Frye arrived in Raleigh 30 years ago as the first black elected to the General Assembly in this century, he made it his top priority to amend the state constitution to abolish the literacy test.
Frye persuaded the legislature to put a constitutional amendment repealing the test on the ballot, but it was rejected by the voters in 1970. Frye, who went on to become the state's first black Supreme Court justice, is still disappointed that the N.C. Bar Association failed to endorse the amendment.
In 1964, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act outlawing literacy tests in areas with a history of discrimination, and in 1970 it extended the ban everywhere. Although it no longer is valid, the literacy test is still part of North Carolina's Constitution: Article VI, Section Four. You can look it up.