The use of literacy test during the post reconstruction years was primarily an attempt to drive which group out of politics

In spite of the 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the USA, and the ratification of the 15th Amendment, which gives African Americans the right to vote, the government went on finding different ways to keep them from voting. One of the methods applied were literacy tests.

Literacy tests determine a person's literacy skills, that is, they indicate their ability to read and write. They were introduced together with Jim Crow Laws, which were state and local regulations preventing African Americans the right to vote in the South. Therefore, they were primarily an attempt to drive blacks out of politics, to keep white and blacks segregated. In fact, said tests were meant to be taken by both white and black voters, yet they were only administered to black voters. They were made up of questions that were intentionally unanswerable and, in Louisana, for instance, the test was designed to be taken in 10 minutes and if you got one answer wrong, you failed it.

To sum up, literacy tests were a means to keep black population from voting, to keep the population segregated. They were not designed to determine whether someone was skilled enough to be granted the right to vote. They were made up of questions which were mainly impossible to answer. In this way, they justify discrimination since Southern governments could possibly state that the person failing the test was not "well-read enough" when in fact they ridiculously prevented someone from voting.