The 1965 Voting Rights Act has banished the discriminatory literacy requirements that disenfranchised Southern Negroes for almost 100 years. But one of the fruits of becoming a registered voter is eligibility for jury duty, and if a strange case in Florida's Collier County is any guide, Southern courts may now face a problem of more illiterate Negro voters (in addition to already illiterate whites) becoming illiterate jurors.
In the Gulf Coast town of Naples, a previously convicted white moonshiner named Thomas D'Andrea was tried last month for systematically cutting telephone lines to steal the copper wire. By...