A per-person tax that Southern states required for voting to disfranchise Black and poor citizens; outlawed in federal elections in 1964, all in 1966.
A poll tax is a flat tax levied on each person. After Reconstruction, Southern states made payment of one a condition of voting, and alongside literacy tests, intimidation, and other devices it became a central tool of Jim Crow disfranchisement. The tax fell hardest on African Americans and on poor citizens of every race who lacked the money to pay it.
Virginia shows how the device worked. The state first tied voter registration to payment of the poll tax in 1876, and its 1902 constitution made the requirement lasting: beginning in 1904, an applicant had to prove that he had paid $1.50 for each of the three years before an election. A 1941 report commissioned by Governor James H. Price called the tax a source of political corruption. In Breedlove v. Suttles (1937) the Supreme Court upheld poll taxes as constitutional.
Criticism mounted during the Roosevelt years, and President Harry S. Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights examined the tax, but repeal stalled for years. By the early 1960s five states still required it: Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia. On 27 August 1962 the House approved the Twenty-fourth Amendment by a vote of 295 to 86, and South Dakota’s ratification made it part of the Constitution on 23 January 1964. It forbids denying any citizen the vote in a federal election for failure to pay a poll tax or any other tax. Mississippi was the only Southern state to vote against ratification.
The amendment did not reach state and local elections, and several states kept their taxes for those. In Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections (1966) the Supreme Court held poll taxes unconstitutional in all elections. Together with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the decision ended the poll tax as a barrier to the ballot, and Virginia removed the tax from its constitution in 1970.
See also: Literacy Test, Jim Crow, Reconstruction, Voting Rights Act of 1965, Civil Rights Act of 1964
Sources
- U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives, “The Twenty-fourth Amendment.” Link
- National Archives, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, “Constitutional Amendments Series: Amendment XXIV, Elimination of Poll Taxes.” Link
- Encyclopedia Virginia, “Poll Tax.” Link
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