Bilbo was pointing to the power of the literacy test and understanding clause, which were tailor-made for societies that systematically refused to educate millions of their citizens and ensured that the bulk of the population remained functionally illiterate...for most of the twentieth century, many Jim Crow school systems did not have high schools for African Americans.

In short, Virginia ensured that there would be schooling for whites but not blacks; and after that, the state changed its laws so that those who were illiterate would not be able to vote.

The goal of all the GOP voter ID laws is to reduce significantly the demographic and political impact of a growing share of the American electorate. To diminish the ability of black, Latinos, and Asians, as well as the poor and students to choose government representatives and the types of policies they support. Unfortunately, it's working.

All that had to happen was for the GOP to reinforce the lie of voter fraud, create the public perception of democracy imperiled, increase the groundswell to "protect the integrity of the ballot box," require exactly the type of identification that blacks, the poor, the young, and the elderly did not have, and, equally important, mask these acts of aggressive voter suppression behind the nobility of being "civic-minded.

Paul Weyrich, a conservative activist and founder of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which eventually crafted voter suppression legislation that spread like a cancer throughout the United States, was brutally clear: "I don't want everybody to vote.

Based on a perception that had been carefully crafted, cultivated, and stoked by the GOP, state governments believed they had a mandate, a calling even, to wrestle this virtually nonexistent voter impersonation fraud to the ground.

In 1890...the Magnolia State passed the Mississippi Plan, a dizzying array of poll taxes, literacy tests, understanding clauses, newfangled voter registration rules, and "good character" clauses—all intentionally racially discriminatory but dressed up in the genteel garb of bringing "integrity" to the voting booth.

One delegate questioned him: "Will it not be done by fraud and discrimination?""By fraud, no. By discrimination, yes," Glass retorted.

Despite the fact that this scene played out over and over in registrars' offices across the South—where a registrar in Mississippi could even ask African Americans, "How many bubbles in a bar of soap?" —the law itself was just race-neutral enough to withstand judicial scrutiny.