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

The real racism was in all the ways to bypass the test. Grandfather clauses, land ownership clauses, "demonstrated understanding" options. Most White people challenged by the test wouldn't ever need to actually confront it.

These weren't the only requirements either. You had to be of "good character" and "understand the duties and obligations of citizenship under a republican form of government" and to be able to "read _and_ write."

Finally even if you were Black and managed all of this it wasn't at all a guarantee that your registration or vote would be accepted. Sometimes this understanding would be communicated in an act of violence.

The test is a tiny archival curiosity created by a much more overt system.

It's not possible to know the right answers because there never were any. This means the test has no predictive power, not that it's impossible, and again, since some Whites unable to prove education did have to contend with this, it was designed that way intentionally.

I feel "near impossible literacy test" is a terrible description. The "intentionally ambiguous literacy test" would be more apt.

More worrying is I am unable to find a definitive provenance for this document. It suggests it was used in the early 1900s but the print quality and format seems unusual in several ways to me. Which is why I attempted to reduce it in favor of considering the rest of the system.