Referencing the literacy test referred to here, I was just curious if this test was an actual real-life test, or maybe just something that was cooked up by the 1960's version of The Onion. I've seen it referenced in a lot of conversations, but it always looked just a little bit too over-the-top clever to be real.
And as a further question, how would a historian actually go about deciding if a document of this sort was real or not? This one seems to have been used by a teacher as a classroom demonstration, and eventually worked its way into the archives of a civil rights organization. What kind of proof would a historian look for to verify its authenticity?
On the question of authenticity, what historians look for is more evidence. Do we have contemporaneous mentioning of it by other sources? Can a copy be found in an archive? Can we stack up enough "facts" so that the easiest narrative to explain them is that it is legitimate? If we cannot — or we have facts that stack up to build a different narrative — then we deem it dubious or outright false. But really, ultimately, this as with all historical documents is a question of "at what point do we decide that one explanation of this is most likely?" At the moment I would say: it is very unclear. There is nothing that looks like a contemporaneous version floating around (wrong font, etc.), the only sources are the aforementioned classroom demonstration and the potentially fallible memory of someone who there. If this was something produced in great numbers and administered by an American state in the late 20th century there should be copious examples on hand, either as specimen copies or in other forms of recording (mentions in newspapers, mentions in diaries, mentions in oral histories, what have you). This is an awfully slim evidence base presented so far.