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

TIL voting right depends on literacy in America. Illiterate people have more rights in third world countries apparently.

No, this is incorrect. This has not been the case for 60 years now. These tests were discontinued as part of the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1964. That information is in the linked article, which is short and only takes a minute to read.

This example was also far from universal, certainly across the entire USA but even in Louisiana.

edit: reading other comments, it isn't clear whether this information is even true for a small subset of Louisiana 60+ years ago

TIL yet another way MLK changed America.

Voting rights in parts of America before the Voting Rights Act depended on passing an arbitrary test that differed from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and may or may not have measured literacy and civics knowledge… if you were black (or native American, depending on state). You could be a well-regarded English literature professor at a black college and still have to subject yourself to what you knew was a farce being administered by someone far less literate than you in order to attempt to vote.

If you were white (“your grandfather could vote”), you were usually exempt, even if you could barely sign your name on your voter registration.

The US talks up its history of freedom, but wasn't really a fully democratic country until the moon landings.

And by that definition much of Europe isn’t fully democratic?

Most of Europe never had the level of formal, legal racism of the US. But it is worth remembering which European countries were dictatorships at around the same time (Spain, Portugal, Greece) and that Eastern Europe came to democracy even more recently.

The South was historically dependent on slavery and rebelled against the freedoms that the North always provided. The North won the war and only after that is there a country in the South to look down on. But the North, and the birth of the nation, was always about freedom. It just took a long time to get the South to come along.