They couldn't even talk…
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Over at Supreme Dicta there is an amusing, if disturbing, report by a grader for the Advanced Placement exam in US Government of some of the more comical statements made in response to an essay question about the 15th Amendment. Some of them are just ignorant, such as the statement that: "Strom Thurman [sic] was the first black man in Congress"¹ or weirdly imaginative, such as the report that:
MLK [Martin Luther King -WJP] marched down the streets of a small Alabama town singing songs. When he arrived at a voting booth, a woman was asked to guess how many jelly beans were in a jar. When she guessed wrong the police arrested her.
but there was one that I found truly incomprehensible:
Many blacks were illiterate, or couldn’t even talk, so voting was out of the question.
They couldn't even talk?
Footnotes
¹Senator Strom Thurmond was white and a virulent racist.
Nassira Nicola said,
June 21, 2008 @ 4:35 pm
Perhaps "talk" here has something to do with "speak 'proper' English"? It's a stretch, and probably an overinterpretation, but if it's not that, then I got nothin'.
The other thing that really struck me was the question of how the Thurmond answer even happened. It's a howler, to be sure, but there's got to be some sort of associative reasoning behind a substitution error of that magnitude. All I can think of is some sort of multiply-crossed wire between Sen. Thurmond and Thurgood Marshall (first African-American Supreme Court Justice, and a name one is likely to hear in a unit on midcentury civil-rights history). Anyone have any better ideas?
Dan Milton said,
June 21, 2008 @ 5:09 pm
"Weirdly imaginative", perhaps. But not on the part of the AP test-taker.
see: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8839169
which reports the installation in 2005 at the Martin Luther King Historic Site of:
"an interactive recreation of the 'jelly bean test,' a technique used by some Jim Crow-era registrars to prevent blacks from voting. The registrar would ask voters to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar. The tendency was for white voters to somehow get it right and for black voters to get it wrong.”
Other websites speak of aan "alleged jelly bean test". My guess is it's a myth.
Anybody know otherwise?
Saqib Ali said,
June 21, 2008 @ 8:56 pm
@Ms. Nicola
I am sure the student confused Governor and US Senator Strom Thurmond (the longest-serving senators in U.S. history (1954–2003)) with Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
Site note: USC Law Professor Mary L. Dudziak has published a new book that explores the Justice Marshall's participation in the formation of the Kenya's first democratic government.
Craig Russell said,
June 21, 2008 @ 10:55 pm
It's this kind of stupidity and ignorance of history that makes me think there should be some kind of literacy test required before you can vote.
Wait…
john riemann soong said,
June 22, 2008 @ 1:24 am
I'm going with Nicola here that "Couldn't even talk" IMO seems to me just a bigoted statement about the blacks' frequent use of AAVE that would have stigmatised them politically.
David Halsted said,
June 22, 2008 @ 1:25 pm
It's possible the test-taker vaguely remembered that Thurmond had something to do with both Congress and racial struggle, and guessed the rest. Faced with an essay question, many people feel compelled to fill the page, no matter how much or how little they know about the topic.
Ray Girvan said,
June 22, 2008 @ 1:38 pm
> jelly bean test
This NPR item – 'Until the Building Falls Down': A Fight to Vote – cites a specific account from a Theresa Burroughs from the late 1940s. Nevertheless, the story seems to be spreading via major media with neither citation nor evidence of how widespread it might have been. The NPS Martin Luther King Jr National Historic Site page qualifies it with "according to legend".
Kenny Easwaran said,
June 23, 2008 @ 3:10 am
It might also be because Strom Thurmond's illegitimate black daughter recently wrote a memoir about her relationship to him. Perhaps the student knew about the black daughter, and assumed he was black as well.
Anna said,
June 23, 2008 @ 12:25 pm
I've had a "couldn't even talk" type response on linguistics 101 exams; I had a student once write an essay in which he asserted that the ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphics and had no spoken language.
Max said,
June 24, 2008 @ 4:23 am
> I had a student once write an essay in which he asserted that the ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphics and had no spoken language.
Clearly, the ancient Egyptians were forced to use hand signs to properly replicate the nuanced meaning of their hieroglyphs. After all, one of them survives to this day. While I cannot convey it properly in text, it's commonly referred to by the animal in the hieroglyph that represents it, so people call it "the bird."
Stephen Jones said,
June 24, 2008 @ 7:11 am
—-"It's this kind of stupidity and ignorance of history that makes me think there should be some kind of literacy test required before you can vote."—–
Well, they had the jelly bean test for numeracy, so I'm sure some kind of literacy test could be cooked up.
TG Gibbon said,
June 27, 2008 @ 9:11 am
Reminds me of coal baron GF Baer's testimony to congress about mine coniditions in 1902: "These men don't suffer. Why, hell, half of them don't even speak English."