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

This is super interesting. The Slate author who originally posted the Tangipahoa test followed up, with a bunch of extra information, and a pointer to a '63 Louisiana District Court case ruling the constitutional interpretation test you linked to unconstitutional:

https://web.archive.org/web/20161105050044/http://www.laed.u...

The original Slate article: https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/06/voting-rights-and-t...

The follow-up, in which the author chronicles their (unsuccessful) search for an original: https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/07/louisiana-literacy-....

The follow-up explicitly notes that the word-processed version shown in the original article is a modern update; a typewritten version that is supposedly closer to the original is shown at the bottom of that article (and available at https://web.archive.org/web/20160615084237/http://msmcdushis...), although the provenance of this version is also unclear ("McDonald reports that she received the test, along with another literacy test from Alabama, from a fellow teacher, who had been using them in the classroom for years but didn’t remember where they came from.")

Right, and you'd assume that if it was widely delivered in Louisiana, there'd be contemporaneous records; what that test is doing is pretty obvious.

Why would you assume that?

Because the test we're talking about is comically unfair, and people were complaining in the press about multiple-choice constitutional knowledge tests that were only subtly unfair.

Do you really think Black people would have been covered fairly in the press in the 1960's?

Nonsense, of course they were in some press.

There were many white Americans fighting for equality for all. Heck, look at the recent BLM movement, the woke discussions, #metoo and more.

All of these things were possible because of the 60s, because of white legislators, white judges, white supreme court judges, pushing for change, enacting change, creating the US today which, while imperfect, is quite supportive of equality, both legally and culturally.

So yes, there was all sorts of main stream media pushing for equality.

Heck, the first interracial kiss on US primetime was in the 60s on Star Trek ToS.