I blame my daughters. Jennifer is a history teacher and I don’t know what Maria’s excuse is but both of them are always coming up with interesting facts that make the rest of the family say,
“Wait? What? Did that really happen?
- Source: Everyone else in our family before finding out that Jennifer was actually correct.
They were having a discussion about poll tests administered to African-Americans to keep them from voting and it sounded pretty extreme to me. So, I went to the Library of Congress site and the first thing I came across was a pamphlet in the rare books collection, “What a colored man should do to vote.”written in maybe 1900 (the Library didn’t have an exact date either) , newspaper articles like this one, from 1962 when Congress voted on getting rid of literacy tests and this newspaper from Mississippi which seems to be a Black-owned newspaper in the 1950s.
Just when I was getting back to work, Maria sent me links to literacy tests she’d seen at some civil rights museum she’d visited and Jennifer pointed out that most of our games focused on middle school and she was teaching some high school classes this year and what the heck.
At some point, I realized that I had been spending far too much time researching this when I’m supposed to be making games and working on our platforms to make games. So, to redeem myself, I made a game about literacy tests, So, you think you can vote – and you can play it here. It’s short – about five minutes – and you can use it as an introduction to voting or literacy tests in your Civics or American history class. You’re welcome.
If you are interested in the technical details, I made a game in two days using 7 Gen Blocks.