Take the impossible "Literacy" test Louisiana gave black voters in 1964

boing
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Oh, I grew up taking all kinds of standardized tests, and generally excelled at them (wooo CCAT!). I understand where you’re coming from, and in general, I came up with answers that I deemed to be the logically correct answers to most of these questions. The thing is, those strange attempts at parsing the questions are exactly the type of weasly ways that black people were failed. Look at the link I posted above from the source site of the tests, where he is talking about his experience of how the tests were graded at the time. Actually, I’ll just quote a quick one for question #21:

Check out question 21. It says: "Spell backwards, forwards". If a Black person spelled "backwards" but omitted the comma, he/she would be flunked. If a Black person spelled "backwards," he/she would be flunked. If a Black person asked why, he/she would be told either "you forgot the comma," or "you shouldn't have included the comma," or "you should have spelled 'backwards, forwards'". Any plausible response by a white person would be accepted, and so would any implausible response.

So, your answer here:

Would have been incorrect, were you a black person taking this test in Louisiana 1964.

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Oh, and I forgot to reply to thse bits as well:

Well, it’s readable (it’s all readable). But define “curved horizontal line” for me? My answer to that question (as written) probably would been something like this, to include an actual straight line at the point of bisection (MSPaint, excuse the horrendousness):

However - how MUCH of a straight line at the point of bisection is required? Does mine have too much of a straight line? It could. And then, what if you did something like this:

It’s technically a straight line at the point of bisection, but at each end it’s also vertical, so could probably be considered a fail. But at the same time, one could also logically argue (having been forced to take 3 calculus courses to get my computer science degree, I spent too much time thinking about stuff like this) that ANY line that isn’t perfectly straight cannot be considered a horizontal, as it has at least SOME vertical component to it. And then do you consider anything in your curved horizontal line that exceeds the 45° point a fail? There is SO much room for interpretation on some of these questions, the answers are pretty subjective…

(I’m aware that neither of my awesome MSPaint drawings actually TRULY bisect the line, but you get the idea).

It’s hard to say. I can’t really put myself into the position of a person of colour in 1964 Louisiana, as that is so far out of my real of experience (as a suburban white male who grew up in a pretty racially integrated Canadian neighbourhood in the 80’s and 90’s) that I honestly have NO idea what I would do, were I in that position. But I’m pretty sure that I would not have bothered, as you say. Although, the smartass in me today would want to say to the test giver “Ok, I want to see one of these fancy white people that aren’t being required to show proof of education write the test, and if any of their answers are the same as mine, they can’t vote either”. But I have a feeling that said smartass comment would have gotten me a serious ass whooping in Louisiana, in 1964, and I’m frankly not that brave.

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If I know that most people will not be able to pass the test in the time limit given, and I know that privileged citizens will not be given the test at all, why set myself up for accusations of impropriety by not distributing a key? That assumes that racism correlates 100% with extreme stupidity in all other areas. I have not found this to be the case - many brilliant scientists and statesmen have been over-the-top racists.

I have a book called “Games for the Super Intelligent”, published in the late 60s or early 70s, that has hundreds of questions like this in it. The answers are in the back of the book. Most people still can’t solve them, of course, not because they aren’t “super intelligent”, but because they haven’t had the right training. The Louisiana test only has to segregate out the people who haven’t had the “right” training - i.e. the poor and disadvantaged.

So, I’m arguing that the Louisiana legislature could achieve their goal of restricting voting rights perfectly with a test that did have a key, and did have an appearance of objectivity, and that having such an appearance would be valuable to them for (I hope) obvious reasons. I find this far more believable than the idea that every single white person in charge of a voting booth was a cackling, hand-rubbing Klu Klux Klan member, gleefully hand-grading the literacy tests of black citizens as the slavering white citizenry howled accolades. Which is the narrative we’re being asked to accept - that every single person involved in voting was personally complicit - instead of the much simpler proposition that the test was designed to be very difficult, and have an impossible time limit, and that some of the voting officials abused their powers.

@WearySky has posted a link to the original document that supports the position that there was no key. (Kudos to him for that!) This one source, Jeff Schwartz’s account of his single summer in Louisiana, seems to be where every other such claim I can find comes from. However, the person who wrote that document doesn’t claim to have personally witnessed the test being administered or graded, and later in the same document he says:

Yet the courage of the Black community led many determined souls to go to Freedom Schools, learn how to take the test and make no easy mistakes, endure the slights, derision, and stonewalling (and even threats) from white registrars, and come back again and again, more determined than ever to win the right to vote and demonstrate the illegitimacy of the system that kept them from exercising that right.

He goes on to say (and quotes numbers) that Louisiana Black citizens were able to increase their number of votes, which would clearly be impossible if the test could not be passed by anyone dark-skinned. His account is logically inconsistent (must… refrain… from… snark…) if we interpret it as saying there was no key.

And finally, here is the key to the 1963 test. Why would they suddenly stop using one in 1964? It fails Occam’s razor - their goals were achievable while maintaining an appearance of objectivity, and individual judges could (and no doubt did) apply the test unfairly even with a key… which I believe is a more reasonable interpretation of Schwartz’s memoir. If there are no right answers, you can’t train people to answer right, and activists did train people to answer right, according to the same memoir being quoted to support the idea that there was no right answer.

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Not sure why you always seem to feel the need to disparage engineers. You must not ever deal with the ones that have to write contracts and specifications on a regular basis. Accuracy in communication is critical for those folks. Broad brushes make for some unsightly paintings.

In your posting that I responded to, you did not provide the context, you simply asserted that the incorrect answer was the correct answer. Frankly, I’m somewhat relieved that you are aware of the correct answer even if your HR people are total asshats. :wink:

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Yes, and the answer given is incorrect. I don’t say that out of sheer hubris. I’m oddly good at these stupid things. I was reading at a post-grad level by age 12, and approved for law school prior to receiving a bachelors based on the test the Bar Examiners gave. (And God, if there are people who will play some word games, lawyers own it!)

I understand about the temptation to do it just out of rebellious spirit. But I’m familiar with LA, from the 50’s forward. I wouldn’t have bothered under any circumstances. My own family’s multi-racial status there has been a source of untold drama. I get it, in ways a lot of people wouldn’t. It is as politically corrupt a place as could compete with Chicago or New York. But, like Atlanta, it has a strange social thing where, in certain circles, being white is the wrong position - particularly New Orleans. You would not be acknowledged or respected in those circles on the basis of race alone. And they are seats of considerable political and financial power that don’t always fit the usual pictures we have drawn for us.
In some ways, those and a few other places simply don’t fit the generalities we hear stated. I don’t claim that it is a bad thing at all - except that racism and resentment runs in both directions, and the message there is that there has not yet been a sufficient amount of healing. At this point, I see a good deal of the vocal outrage over past issues as non-productive. In a bizarre sense, carrying on about past racism almost becomes a means of promoting it even further. It only stirs up past resentments, rather than creating mutual acceptance and cooperation in the present. And, it’s even weirder when white people do it.

I have a huge stake in that position, because I have kids. I want them to question the truisms and rhetoric we hear today, just as younger women have to actually ask me about feminism in the late 20th century because they don’t get it as a personal struggle. And that is an approach I am happy to say everyone in the family has agreed to, because it’s so entirely obvious that a resentful, injured person is not going to be success-bound, no matter where they wish that success to lie. To identify oneself racially or ethnically out of love and pride for one’s own is NOT a bad thing! It’s a form of appreciation. And I’ve never yet heard anyone but white North American people even say that. (It’s ok to be white. It’s ok to be Something-American or Something-Canadian. You were born that way, lol. It doesn’t make you less patriotic or engaged in our present culture to acknowledge your roots, lol.)

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I don’t need the lecture about fundraising and how the two parties work and who they’re beholden too. As somebody who’s way left of any Obamacrat I’ve been voting Green for over a decade unless I particularly think the candidate is an exception to the rule.

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I remember taking a GSP (Grammar-Spelling-Punctuation) test at UT-Austin. It was required for communication (e.g. journalism) students. The test consisted of questions such as “find the mistake in the following text.” I wasn’t sure how to answer when the text contained several mistakes.

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I have not had that happen, but I’ve lived most of my life in an inner city Chicago neighborhood where whites have been a minority. I have also enjoyed some time as a race traitor…

Nice use of “yankee” btw…

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The link title suggests that’s a literacy test, but it actually appears to be a citizenship test. If it is indeed a literacy test, perhaps the answer to “why would they suddenly stop using an answer key in 1964” is the same as the answer to “why would they suddenly stop using a multiple choice question about civics in 1964?”

In any event, it’s a completely different style of test: a multiple choice quiz with a clear right and several wrong answers and not much chance for misinterpretation. An answer key there is easy to publish and distribute, compared to the literacy test, where there might be multiple ways to “draw three circles, one engulfed by another” (since you state nothing about where the third one is with respect to the one that engulfs the other) or “draw a line from circle 2 to 5 that goes below circle 2 and above circle 4” (do you rise up before the 3 or after the 3? Both are valid, so do you draw both versions in the answer key?)

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Which of you is engaging in revisionist history, exactly?

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Revisionist history? Not just you, to be fair… lots of people like to use that phrase to mean “changing history to suit their ideology”, when that is not what it really means at all…

Just wanted to put that out there. It really is just… you know, history.

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If you research it a little, you will find that the 1964 test is actually the atypical one, and the 1963 test (which as you mention resembles a modern citizenship test or a 1960s Civics Exam) was more the norm. It took me no more than five minutes to discover this online.

The three circles question would be typical of the math tests I took in the 1960s. Language and usage change over time, but nonetheless if this question were encountered on a test by any of my children today, they would be expected to draw three nesting circles. I am fairly confident that when it is found, the test key will show three nesting circles.

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Sorry, didn’t mean to disparage engineers. I meant that in an engineering discussion, it doesn’t matter as much whether you are conventionally polite, or whether you can cite references - what matters is whether you are right and the ultimate proof is empirical. This tends to lead to a certain terseness that the HR department feels is rude - they claim you should never say “that’s stupid” when somebody says something stupid, but a working engineer would probably say “why?” instead of saying “how dare you call me stupid” and if you said “because there’s a valve under there, and if you knock it off it’ll blow liquid sodium” he’ll likely say “thanks” or “you’re right, that would be stupid, let’s not do that”.

But my HR people are indeed total asshats. I try to stay as far out of their zone of perception as possible, normally, and whenever I break that rule I regret it. At least it gives me stuff I can send to Scott Adams for his “tales of induhviduals”.

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Then perhaps your superior searching skills can also uncover the official answer key for 1964? Surely it couldn’t be that hard to find, considering it must be far more notable a document, having been a presidential election year (that might also be a reason they suddenly went for the far more ambiguous and stringent literacy test, rather than the far simpler citizenship style one, if they wanted fewer blacks to successfully register), and would have been preserved for historical interest. I couldn’t, but admittedly, I only looked a little.

So was there an answer key? Maybe, maybe not. There may have been a ‘this is a valid example of a proper answer’, but there are multiple proper answers (words that could be written the same backwards as forwards, for example), and I doubt they listed them all, and any one of them that was not on the list could be pointed to as an error. I have no doubt that this happened in many cases… others earlier in the thread have pointed out rules that said interpretation was solely up to a small panel of supervisors or the registrar. If there was an absolute answer key, why need interpretation?

Why NOT have an answer key? Because it’s easier to deny it to people who answer correctly like that. You suggested earlier that that conflicts with the notion that blacks were sometimes trained to successfully answer the tests… but (leaving aside whether those references actually refer to this particular test and not the easier ones), it assumes that all racist whites doing the tests are monolithic. Which you accused others of doing, but I don’t think anybody’s actually saying that EVERY registrar used it in that way, that no blacks could ever pass it. There are probably a range of behaviors, from “let’s find anything we can make into an error whether it’s actually wrong or not”, to “the test may be unfair but if they don’t make any outright mistakes I’m going to pass them” and training people to pass it correctly STILL has a beneficial effect if even some of them are in the later category (and I also think there were probably registrars who realized how crap the test was, and allowed more than the official time allotted, or ignored errors, as a way to quietly protest, because people are strange and varied). But if you have an official answer key, people who were denied could raise a stink based on “this is the answer given in the key, and that’s what I gave.” And they might like to avoid that. In previous years, they had an answer key because they could obtain their goals while still having an illusion of objectivity… except, they apparently DIDN’T obtain their goals, so they changed the test, and apparently given the difficulty of the test and the time period allowed, the illusion of objectivity wasn’t all that important to them either. So, yeah, I think it’s possible that maybe they changed the need for an answer key, too, and decided instead to leave it up to the judgement of individual white registrars who could, by and large, be trusted to use the built-in dirty-tricks to deny more black people the vote. Maybe. I don’t know. Unless you can provide an official answer key or a reference that says there was one, that’s all we can say, that we don’t know whether there was one or not.

Still, it’s pretty clear to me the test was not designed as a ‘literacy’ test, but as an exercise in ‘gotcha’. The ‘Paris in the the spring’ example is a good example. It actually DOES have a single correct answer… but plenty of literate people would make the mistake (particularly if they were rushing to complete a test in 10 minutes!)… perhaps ironically, an illiterate person could copy the letters directly, although they wouldn’t be able to understand the written direction to do so. But the test is full of trick questions with ambiguous phrasing and outright errors that you seemed earlier to refuse to admit should stop anybody from automatically knowing the correct answer if they just read carefully enough and worked fast enough. But it’s not a test designed to test, like the 1963 one was, it’s a test designed to exclude. And I think it’s a little naive to think that the ambiguity often wasn’t used to additionally exclude.

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I’m not sure I understand. Are you saying the Southern Strategy and the disillousionment in the Democratic Party that came with Jack Kennedy’s social justice work is a work of fiction, or what? If you’re an expert in the area, I’d love to hear about it. I’d heard about the role reversal of the parties long before people like Allen West tried to claim that Democrats are the real racists, but if that’s wrong and you have a source, I’d welcome it. I’m always willing to learn. :smile:

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It is funny, though, that you apparently knew exactly what he meant.

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I was just talking about the use of the term “revisionist history”, and how people generally use it to mean revising history to fit an agenda. Like I said, I was not just using that term in regards to you, but to the general idea…

As for the southern strategy–I am not an expert–but from my POV, having read a few books this summer on the topic, the reasons people left are rarely able to be boiled down to “they’re racist”–though it’s a factor and for some a major factor. Many left the democratic party for the republican, in part due to their dissatisfaction with a more racial diverse party–no one I think would argue contrary. But I’d argue that it was not immediate or en mass, and is still a trickle. There were and are still strong democratic pockets all across the south, and not just in the cities. There are still swaths of labor arrayed around places like North Carolina and West Virginia. I’d say that many working class people felt left behind, not just by inclusion of blacks, but by some economic factors, too, such as deindustrialization that they saw no one doing anything about. Keep in mind, it’s been the democrats who have signed into law things like NAFTA, which many see as accelerating deindustrialization. I’m not sure any of that really qualifies as “revisionist” history, per se. I tend to think of that as rewriting history in the immediate post war to better include people who had been excluded.

But my point was not just to use, but about the use of the term. and I meant it as kind of a light-hearted jest too. I did use an inigo gif.

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A fair point. I assume (and I know, ass out of you and me…) he meant rewriting history for an ideological purpose, which is how many people use the term. Do you think I was wrong to assume that?

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I’m still not sure that I abused it, since I was taking exception to the painting of “Republicans bad racists, Democrats good” in a historical context, since real life was way more messy than that, and felt that the narrative reeked of historical revisionism by any accepted definition I’m aware of, but okay…I give. We have to keep our prejudices because admitting that things change over time would, um…I actually don’t know what’s wrong with admitting that the Democrat and Republican parties did a flip-flop on race issues. I do think it’s ridiculous that the GOP is trying to use Abraham Lincoln as proof that they’re the party of civil rights, though.

Medievalist offered a way better rebuttal than I ever could, anyway.

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I agree, with change over time, of course. I also agree that life is messy. No arguments there. No, I’m not saying that the parties didn’t “flip-flop” on the race issue–but as you say, life is messy. I think it would be a mistake to think that the whole system wasn’t rife with racism from the start, and in many ways continues to be. Just because the republicans “ended slavery” (which was not their goal, like ever, the abolitionists were just jumping in the with the republicans, because ), a few radical republicans tried to overturn the social order, and Eisnehower integrated the military, doesn’t mean that the party was not full of racist. Afterall, they allowed incredible racist laws to exists, even when they were in power during the course of Jim Crow. They often paid lip service to black activists, while allowing the system to exist. And both sides approach desegregation reluctantly, and only after YEARS and YEARS of grassroots action that threatened to make the American government look bad on the world stage. Penny Von Eschen argued that the only reason Eisenhower moved on Little Rock was in part due to Satchmo’s very public refusal to go on one of the jazz tours set up by the state department to promote American democracy.

As for “historical revisionism”, my general beef, I’ll say again, is that people in generally tend to say that as a pejorative, rather than acknowledging that it is just what historians actually DO for a living. When I write my dissertation, I will be revising an aspect of how we understand the cold war (well, hopefully :smiley: when it’s a book one day, we can see) . And again, this is not necessarily directed at you, it was more of a light hearted jab at what I perceive to be a “misuse” of the word, from a specific thing, to a pejorative.

Quite honestly, I’m kind of sick of the whole I hate that other party, they are the devil incarnate. Both sides just suck. They are all beholden to the people who give them loads of money and they could care fuck all about the rest of us. Obama cares about you and I, about as much as Boenher or Cruz does. All they care about is that they get our votes in november. They will continue to shove these divisive culture war issues down our throats, as long as it keeps up ignoring the real issues in this country–the neo-liberal, let corporations have it all, endless accumulation of capital, ever shrinking public square, free-trade, free for all… They both suck and have the same agenda. they are just appealing to different “sides” and always have. I hope that we can see beyond that one day, and see we are actually all on the same side, and that they are vampires draining us dry.

Medievalist is a smart dude. No doubt.

EDITED to include this link–Ta-Nehisi Coates discussing James Baldwin’s view of black nationalism, and nationalism, more broadly. See his quite regarding Brown V. Board and its relationship to the Cold War, which is relevant to our discussion: