Banned taxes formerly required before voting; used to disenfranchise racial minorities and the poor
A
poll tax is a
tax of a fixed sum on every liable individual (typically every adult), without reference to income or resources. Although often associated with states of the former
Confederate States of America, poll taxes were also in place in some northern and western states, including
California,
Connecticut,
Maine,
Massachusetts,
Minnesota,
New Hampshire,
Ohio,
Pennsylvania,
Vermont and
Wisconsin.[1] Poll taxes had been a major source of government funding among the colonies which formed the United States. Poll taxes made up from one-third to one-half of the tax revenue of colonial Massachusetts. Various privileges of citizenship, including voter registration or issuance of driving licenses and resident hunting and fishing licenses, were conditioned on payment of poll taxes to encourage the collection of this tax revenue. Property taxes assumed a larger share of tax revenues as land values rose when population increases encouraged settlement of the American West.[2] Some western states found no need for poll tax requirements; but poll taxes and payment incentives remained in eastern states. Poll taxes became a tool of
disenfranchisement in the
South during
Jim Crow, following the end of
Reconstruction. This persisted until court action, following the ratification of the
24th Amendment in 1964, ended the practice.
Voter registration
Payment of a poll tax was a prerequisite to the registration for voting in a number of
states until 1965. The tax emerged in some states of the United States in the late nineteenth century as part of the
Jim Crow laws. After the right to vote was extended to all races by the enactment of the
Fifteenth Amendment to the
United States Constitution, a number of states enacted poll tax laws as a device for restricting voting rights. The laws often included a
grandfather clause, which allowed any adult male whose father or grandfather had voted in a specific year prior to the abolition of slavery to vote without paying the tax. [3] These laws, along with unfairly implemented
literacy tests and extra-legal intimidation,[4] such as by the
Ku Klux Klan, achieved the desired effect of
disenfranchisingAsian-American,
Native American voters and
poor whites as well, but in particular the poll tax was disproportionately directed at
African-American voters.
Proof of payment of a poll tax was a prerequisite to voter registration in Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia (1877), North and South Carolina, Virginia (until 1882 and again from 1902 with its new constitution),[5][6] and Texas (1902).[7] The Texas poll tax, instituted on people who were eligible to vote in all other respects, was between $1.50 and $1.75 ($59.00 in 2022). This was "a lot of money at the time, and a big barrier to the working classes and poor."[7] Georgia created a cumulative poll tax requirement in 1877: men of any race 21 to 60 years of age had to pay a sum of money for every year from the time they had turned 21, or from the time that the law took effect.[8]
The poll tax requirements applied to whites as well as blacks, and also adversely affected poor citizens. The laws that allowed the poll tax did not specify a certain group of people.[9] This meant that anyone, including white women, could also be discriminated against when they went to vote. One example is in Alabama where white women were discriminated against and then organized to secure their right to vote. One group of women that did this was the Women's Joint Legislative Council of Alabama (WJLC).[9] African American women also organized in groups against being denied voting rights. In 1942, an African American woman named Lottie Polk Gaffney, along with four other women, unsuccessfully sued the South Carolina Cherokee County Registration Board with the help of the
NAACP.[10] Gaffney sued for her right to vote after having been stopped from registering to vote two years earlier. As a result of her suing the county the mailman did not deliver her mail for quite some time.[11]
Many states required payment of the tax at a time separate from the election, and then required voters to bring receipts with them to the polls. If they could not locate such receipts, they could not vote. In addition, many states surrounded registration and voting with complex record-keeping requirements.[12] These were particularly difficult for sharecropper and tenant farmers to comply with, as they moved frequently.
The poll tax was sometimes used alone or together with a literacy qualification. In a kind of
grandfather clause, North Carolina in 1900 exempted from the poll tax those men entitled to vote as of January 1, 1867. This excluded all blacks, who did not then have suffrage.[13]
Judicial challenge
In 1937, in Breedlove v. Suttles, 302 U.S. 277 (1937), the
United States Supreme Court found that a prerequisite that poll taxes be paid for registration to vote was constitutional. The case involved the Georgia poll tax of $1 (equivalent to $20 in 2022). Georgia abolished its poll tax in 1945.[14] Florida repealed its poll tax in 1937.[15]: 346
The
24th Amendment, ratified in 1964, abolished the use of the poll tax (or any other tax) as a pre-condition for voting in federal elections,[16] but made no mention of poll taxes in state elections.
The Harper ruling was one of several that relied on the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment rather than the more direct provision of the
15th Amendment. In a two-month period in the spring of 1966, Federal courts declared unconstitutional poll tax laws in the last four states that still had them, starting with
Texas on February 9. Decisions followed for
Alabama (March 3) and
Virginia (March 25).
Mississippi's $2.00 poll tax (equivalent to $18 in 2022) was the last to fall, declared unconstitutional on April 8, 1966, by a federal panel.[17] Virginia attempted to partially abolish its poll tax by requiring a residence certification, but the Supreme Court rejected the arrangement in 1965 in Harman v. Forssenius.
^Legislation was passed by the House of the Assembly in 1891 and confirmed by voter referendum in 1892.[20]: 246
^Though poll tax legislation was approved in 1885, charging the tax as a condition of voting did not occur until 1889.[18]: 471
^While the Constitution of 1877 allowed collection of poll taxes to fund schools,[26] the requirement to pay as a prerequisite to voting was not authorized until 1908.[25]
^The State Constitution established a poll tax in 1870, but it remained unimplemented until 1890 when the legislature activated it.[18]: 471 [35]
Citations
^State of Maine Special Tax Commission (1890). Report of the Special Tax Commission of Maine. Maine: Burleigh & Flynt. pp. 39–41.
OCLC551368287.
^Bullock, Charles J. (1916). "The Taxation of Property and Income in Massachusetts". The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 31 (1): 1–61.
doi:
10.2307/1885988.
JSTOR1885988.
^
abcdeWilkerson-Freeman, Sarah (2002). "The Second Battle for Woman Suffrage: Alabama White Women, the Poll Tax, and V. O. Key's Master Narrative of Southern Politics". The Journal of Southern History. 68 (2): 333–374.
doi:
10.2307/3069935.
JSTOR3069935.
^ Cherisse Jones-Branch. ""To Speak When and Where I Can": African American Women's Political Activism in South Carolina in the 1940s and 1950s". The South Carolina Historical Magazine. Vol. 107, No. 3 (Jul., 2006), pp. 204–205
https://www.jstor.org/stable/27570823
^Jones-Branch, Cherisse (July 2006). "'To Speak When and Where I Can': African American Women's Political Activism in South Carolina in the 1940s and 1950s". The South Carolina Historical Magazine. 107 (3): 206.
JSTOR27570823.
^Mohl, Raymond A. (1995). "Race Relations in Miami since the 1920s". In Colburn, David R.; Landers, Jane L. (eds.). The African American Heritage of Florida. University Press of Florida. pp. 326–365.
ISBN978-0813013329.
^Room, Anne T. Kent California (June 18, 2021).
"History of the California Poll Tax". Anne T. Kent California Room Newsletter. Retrieved July 29, 2022.
^Gigantino, Jim (August 20, 2020).
"Constitutional Convention of 1877". georgiaencyclopedia.org. Atlanta, Georgia: Georgia Humanities.
Archived from the original on November 12, 2020. Retrieved December 15, 2020.
^
abAlexander, Seth; Blentlinger, Kaitlyn; Hagemann, Amber; Bean, Nathan (April 29, 2015).
"1963, 1966: Campaigns to Repeal Texas Poll Taxes". South Texas Rabble Rousers History Project. Corpus Christi, Texas.
Archived from the original on June 6, 2016. Retrieved October 31, 2020.
Wechsler, Herbert (April 1954). "The Political Safeguards of Federalism: The Role of the States in the Composition and Selection of the National Government". Columbia Law Review. 54 (4): 543–560.
doi:
10.2307/1119547.
JSTOR1119547.