Literacy test in the context of "Harper's Weekly"

The civil rights movement was a social movement in the United States from 1954 to 1968 which aimed to abolish legalized racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement in the country, which most commonly affected African Americans. The movement had origins in the Reconstruction era in the late 19th century, and modern roots in the 1940s. After years of nonviolent protests and civil disobedience campaigns, the civil rights movement achieved many of its legislative goals in the 1960s, during which it secured new protections in federal law for the civil rights of all Americans, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Following the American Civil War (1861–1865), the three Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery and granted citizenship to all African Americans, the majority of whom had recently been enslaved in the southern states. During Reconstruction, African-American men in the South voted and held political office, but after 1877 they were increasingly deprived of civil rights under racist Jim Crow laws (which for example banned interracial marriage, introduced literacy tests for voters, and segregated schools) and were subjected to violence from white supremacists during the nadir of American race relations. African Americans who moved to the North in order to improve their prospects in the Great Migration also faced barriers in employment and housing. Legal racial discrimination was upheld by the Supreme Court in its 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which established the doctrine of "separate but equal". The movement for civil rights, led by figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, achieved few gains until after World War II. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman issued an executive order abolishing discrimination in the armed forces.

The ideology of nativism—favoring native inhabitants, as opposed to immigrants—has been very common and contentious within American politics for centuries. In this context "native" does not mean Indigenous Americans or American Indians, but refers to European settlers and their descendants. Nativist movements have existed since before American independence, and have targeted a wide variety of nationalities. Historically, nativism was present even in colonial America. During that era, anti-German feelings, particularly towards the Pennsylvania Dutch, ran deep. Later on, when the U.S. became its own nation, the Federalist Party expressed opposition to the French Revolution, and also passed the 1798 anti-immigrant Alien and Sedition Acts. When immigration rates to the nation exploded in the 1840s and 1850s, nativism returned with a renewed fervor, with the word nativism itself coined by 1844, and the formation of the Know Nothing Party.

In the late 19th century, going into the early 20th, nativism began to reappear. Contemporary laws and treaties included the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1907 Gentlemen's Agreement (preventing Japanese immigration), the 1921 Emergency Quota Act, and the 1924 Immigration Act. Nativists and labor unions also argued for literacy tests, arguing that it would stop illiterate immigrants from Southern or Eastern Europe. In the 1970s, the immigration reductionism movement, which exists to this day, was formed. In the 2010s, the Tea Party Movement, which split off from the Republican Party, brought a new form of nativism. Donald Trump introduced several nativist policies, such as the 2017 Trump travel ban. Racially, American nativists have focused on a wide variety of ethnicities. Historically, targets have included Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, German Americans, Irish Americans, and Hispanic Americans.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark U.S. federal statute that prohibits racial discrimination in voting. It was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson during the height of the civil rights movement on August 6, 1965. Congress later amended the Act five times to expand its protections. Designed to enforce voting rights protected by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the Act sought to secure the right to vote for racial minorities throughout the country, especially in the South. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Act is considered to be the most effective piece of federal civil rights legislation ever enacted. The National Archives and Records Administration stated: "The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the most significant statutory change in the relationship between the federal and state governments in the area of voting since the Reconstruction period after the Civil War".

The act contains numerous provisions that regulate elections. Its "general provisions" provide nationwide protections for voting rights. Section 2 is a general provision that prohibits state and local government from imposing any rule that "results in the denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race or color" or membership in a language minority group. Other provisions outlaw literacy tests and similar devices that were historically used to disenfranchise racial minorities. The act also contains "special provisions" that apply only to certain jurisdictions. A core special provision is the Section 5 preclearance requirement, which prohibits certain jurisdictions from implementing any change affecting voting without first receiving confirmation from the U.S. attorney general or the U.S. District Court for D.C. that the change does not discriminate against protected minorities. Another special provision requires jurisdictions containing significant language minority populations to provide bilingual ballots and other election materials.

All US states and territories, except North Dakota, require voter registration by eligible citizens before they can vote in federal, state and local elections. In North Dakota, cities in the state may register voters for city elections, and in other cases voters must provide identification and proof of entitlement to vote at the polling place before being permitted to vote. Voter registration takes place at the county level in many states or at the municipal level in several states. Many states set cutoff dates for registration or to update details, ranging from two to four weeks before an election, while 25 states and Washington, D.C. have same-day voter registration, which enables eligible citizens to register or update their registration on the same day they cast their vote. In states that permit early voting, and have voter registration, the prospective voter must be registered before casting a vote.

Some historical registration requirements, including poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses, were part of the systematic disenfranchisement of African Americans in the Jim Crow South.