"Federal intervention to change the institutions in the South started with the decision of the Supreme Court in 1944 that primary elections where only white people could stand were unconstitutional. As we have seen, blacks had been politically disenfranchised in the 1890s with the use of poll taxes and literacy tests (pages 351-357). These tests were routinely manipulated to discriminate against black people, while still allowing poor and illiterate whites to vote. In a famous example from the early 1960s, in Louisiana a white applicant was judged literate after giving the answer "FRDUM FOOF SPETGH" to a question about the state constitution. The Supreme Court decision in 1944 was the opening salvo in the longer battle to open up the political system to blacks, and the Court understood the importance of loosening white control of political parties."