An incarcerated educator was fired from his teaching job at an Illinois prison after arguing with a prison counselor about whether he could teach students that literacy tests given to voters during the Jim Crow era were a racist attempt to suppress the Black vote.

Now the instructor, Anthony McNeal, is suing in federal court, claiming the counselor and the prison warden violated his First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

McNeal was teaching a peer-led civics class the state is required to provide for people exiting prison at Centralia Correctional Center in southern Illinois. At the end of February, a federal lawsuit against the counselor and the prison warden was filed on behalf of McNeal, who said he was fired because he told students the literacy tests were racist.

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Nathan Tucker, the prison counselor supervising the class, interrupted McNeal and instructed him to present literacy tests “as having a legitimate nondiscriminatory purpose of ensuring that voters ‘knew what they were voting for’,” according to the complaint. Tucker did not respond to a request for comment.