It took some time to track down the specifics of what I think is the test, but... first! Some background!

It's difficult to capture how committed to segregation white New Orleans adults were but it's a helpful context for understanding the history around the test a group of Black New Orleans five- and six-year-olds sat down to take in 1960. It's also worth stating explicitly that children of all races born during the post-World War II baby boom were enrolling en masse in school, straining both the human and physical resources funded through public school taxes. Many states, including Lousiana, had functionally created two separate school systems - one for white children and one for Black children - and the population boom, plus the Civil Rights movement, meant a whole lot of white adults dug in hard to protect resources they felt were meant for white children.

During an annual convention led by the United States Commission on Civil Rights in 1961, one speaker from Louisiana described "5 days of hysteria" in November 1960 when the state legislature passed 21 bills during a special session convened to preserve segregation. The context for this special session started almost a decade earlier, before Ruby Bridges was born, with the case Brown v. Board and the eventual ruling for the parents and the resulting desegregation order, intended to end de jure (by law) segregation. While Northern states could mostly maintain segregated schools as their segregation came out through housing patterns and school attendance zones (known as de facto), Southern states had to change laws that mandated segregated schools. However, one of the key clauses in the ruling was "all deliberate speed." These three words allowed white school leaders and politicians who did not want Black children to have access to the same resources as white children to figure out all sorts of ways to slow down the process. And try they did. And each time they tried, their efforts worked their way through the courts and they were told, basically, to quit stalling and desegregate their schools. (As a quick aside, opinions vary but generally speaking, it's helpful to remember that "desegregation" isn't the same "integration." Desegregation could be achieved by the presence of a single Black child in a white school. Integration, which is more creating schools that reflect the American population at large, requires changes to housing, banking, education, disability, etc. laws and policies. To be sure, some historians and sociologists use them interchangeably.)

Each time a state or school district tried to propose a new way around the Brown v. Board ruling, the NAACP had to make a choice about responding or not. The leaders of the organization were incredibly systematic and thoughtful about where and when they intervened; they did it because they felt they would have the greatest chance of winning. While not everyone at the NAACP was on the same page around which actions to take, the consensus was that the New Orleans schools' efforts did not have firm legal standing. They were correct and in June 1960 a judge laid out a very specific ruling about desegregation. The plan stated all first graders, regardless of race, could attend the school closest to their home. White parents showed up to the next School Board meeting, saying fairly terrible things about white schools being overrun by Black first graders, about the possibility of Black teachers teaching white children... just. Whew. Terrible.

The school board took another look that their rules and leaned on a provision that said they alone had the authority to determine which child in the district went to what school. Different plans were proposed, the judge got testy, Black parents expressed concern for their children's safety, a board member quit when it looked like integration might actually happen, and then suddenly it was Fall and the school board had selected two schools that would be "integrated" and allow them to meet the letter of the law. So, in October 1960, the school board announced that Black families were welcome to apply to transfer their child to a designated all-white school. According to several sources, including The New Orleans School Crisis of 1960: Causes and Consequences by Alan Wieder, 136 families applied. Reports differ, but it appears as if the NACCP has been in contact with many, if not all, of those families.

As often was the case, the families were torn. Many Black parents were hesitant to participate in school desegregation cases out of fears of what it meant for their child's safety. According to Bridges' speeches and writing, her father was against the idea. He was a Korean War vet and deeply jaded by his experiences during the war. In effect, he was worried about what white adults would do to his daughter. Meanwhile, her mother felt confident teachers would keep her daughter safe and that attending a white school was the best way to get resources. So, now we've got that background set. Let's shift to the foreground: the tests.

But wait! There's more! Standardized testing in American has been around since the mid-1840s. Horace Mann, a leading advocate for public schools in America, advocated for their use in Boston and surrounding towns so he could use tests scores to demonstrate to lawmakers that by funding schools, students would perform better. (It also went the other way, schoolmen would use test scores to advocate for closing low-performing schools. And sometimes, Black school leaders at segregated schools, such as in Washington DC, would insist on their students sit for content-focused standardized tests so they could prove their students scored just as well as white students.) To be clear, these tests were administered before psychometrics was fully established. So, there was a lot of back-of-the-envelope calculating and sometimes, schools were compared with wildly different counts of students. For example, the average score on a spelling test at one school might be 75 while the average score at another was 50; except the first school had 100 students while the second one had 3. (This was all happening long before rural schoolhouses were consolidated into districts.) I'll spare you the entire complicated history around standardized testing in the late 19th and 20th century but it is worth laying out plainly that many of the leaders during the rise of intelligence tests, including what would become the SAT, were advocates of eugenics in one form or another. In addition, they were almost all white, meaning their worldview - and the tests that they created - were shaped by whiteness. What this meant in practice, was that reading tests for children often included content and questions that were based in white Protestant culture. (A classic example is: "A doctor shows up to a house, then a lawyer, then a priest. What happened?") Meanwhile, Black children often attended schools that were under, if not poorly, resourced while white children were more likely to experience what social scientists now identify as a construct called "slack," meaning the adults around them were less likely to experience financial stress or have to work multiple jobs which would impact the amount of time the adults could read to the child or expose them to background knowledge necessary for doing well at school. Black children would do poorly on an "intelligence" test, not because they weren't as smart as white children, but because the test asked them about content they did not yet know or understand.

So, here we are. About 100 5- and 6-year-old Black children filed into a large meeting room in New Orleans and sat for a standardized test. Based on a variety of sources, I'm 99% sure the test administered was the "Metropolitan Readiness Test." First administered in the 1930s and primarily designed by a psychologist named Gertrude Hildreth, the MRT was designed to assess children's readiness for formal education, which typically began in first grade. From a 1960 piece summarizing the test when it was administered to a group of children in Connecticut:

Since the pupils have not yet learned to read, the teat items are non-verbal — that is pictorial. The child is required to do such things as select pictures named by the examiner, recognize similarities and differences in pictures, forms, numbers, letters, and words. The child's score is gives a rating from A (an excellent risk) through E (a poor risk)

You can get a sense of the math questions here(from a 1959 piece in the Arizona Republic on the test. A few things to note: first, the picture on the student page was 3 times larger than what was in the article. Second, the answers are provided; clearly, the students didn't have that in their test booklet. Third, these children were five or six years old and this was the first time they'd been asked to sit and take a test; this was their first introduction to formal education. It's hardly surprising that only 5 children passed, including Ms. Ruby Bridges. In her autobiography, Ms. Bridges wrote about how long and hard the test was, which may mean the city also included a section that asked children to draw a man. How the adults scored their drawing would determine which rating they received.