A near impossible literacy test Louisiana used to suppress the black vote

Note: there are questions about this test's authenticity. Per a note on https://www.crmvet.org/info/la-test.htm:

> [NOTE: At one time we also displayed a "brain-twister" type literacy test with questions like "Spell backwards, forwards" that may (or may not) have been used during the summer of 1964 in Tangipahoa Parish (and possibly elsewhere) in Louisiana. We removed it because we could not corroborate its authenticity, and in any case it was not representative of the Louisiana tests in broad use during the 1950s and '60s.]

Each parish in Louisiana implemented their own literacy tests, which means that there wasn't really much uniformity in the process. Another (maybe more typical) test: https://www.crmvet.org/info/la-littest2.pdf

It's interesting that the Slate and crmvet pieces have updates about the search for authenticity, but this piece published today doesn't mention it.

It's been cited in other scholarly work that cites crmvet, so it's not surprising that, if it's not authentically a Louisiana test, it'll take awhile to clean up in the literature.