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.

There is an actual SCOTUS case on these tests, confirming that they indeed actually exited, see Louisiana vs. U.S. (1965).

Also this sample test (https://lasc.libguides.com/c.php?g=940581&p=6830148) is from the Law Library of Louisiana, aka, the State Bar of Louisiana. Are you accusing the State Bar of Louisiana and the Louisiana Supreme Court of lying about the history of their state?

And this article (https://www.nola.com/news/politics/civil-rights-victory-50-y...) by NOLA actually goes through the history of the tests, citing contemporaneous reporting of the tests over several decades, though you would probably need physical access to the microfiche archives to confirm them yourself.

Unless you are suggesting that SCOTUS, SCLA, and the biggest newspaper in Louisiana are all conspiring together to make up these tests, the historical record for these tests existing is very well established.

The example literacy test you link to is dramatically more level headed than the one in the article. It's what you would expect a fifth grade level assessment to be.

In fact the site you link to even calls out the test mention in the article, stating that it seems it was used in one parish for one summer.

Quick: how is the President of the Senate selected?

It's a trick question. It's the Vice President, who is elected by the people (a)... but not for the role of president of the senate. But it could also be the President pro tempoire, who is elected by the senate (b).

Also the first question presupposes we all go to church. What about synagogues or temples?

Question #5 is entirely discretionary depending on the context of what power you are discussing.

And that's the point: these literacy tests were filled with questions like these that let the test giver choose the right answer based on whether they wanted the test taker to pass.

Yes. Which is why, even in the 1960s, even in Louisiana, state courts struck these tests down. I agree with you about them. The only disputed fact here is whether the "write backwards forwards" test was ever administered.