The Poll Tax: Twenty-Fourth Amendment Ratified

Do you know I've never voted in my life, never been able to exercise my right as a citizen because of the poll tax?

"Mr. Trout."
Homer L. Pike, interviewer,
Atlanta, Georgia.
American Life Histories, 1936-1940

Over twenty years after Atlanta textile worker "Mr. Trout" lamented his inability to vote to a WPA interviewer, collection of poll taxes in national elections was prohibited by the January 23, 1964, ratification of the Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Passage of the amendment affected voting in Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, and Virginia.

At ceremonies formalizing ratification in February, President Lyndon Johnson noted that by abolishing the poll tax the American people:

…reaffirmed the simple but unbreakable theme of this Republic. Nothing is so valuable as liberty, and nothing is so necessary to liberty as the freedom to vote without bans or barriers…There can be no one too poor to vote.

Farmer and His Son On Election Day,
Stem, North Carolina,
Jack Delano, photographer,
May 1940.
FSA-OWI Photographs, 1935-1945

Adopted by many Southern states in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the poll tax circumvented the Fifteenth Amendment, disenfranchising many blacks and poor whites. In the 1890s, the Populist party momentarily succeeded in uniting poor black and white Southerners on the basis of common economic interest. Some historians argue that this threat to the Democratic Party and upperclass control of Southern society led to the institution of poll taxes and segregation laws.

With his history of union leadership and his chronic poverty, Mr. Trout was exactly the kind of man the poll tax was intended to disenfranchise.

On five separate occasions in the 1940s, the House of Representatives passed anti-poll tax legislation, only to be blocked or filibustered in the Senate. In 1949, Senator Spessard L. Holland of Florida initiated efforts to abolish the poll tax by constitutional amendment. The Senate finally approved the measure in 1962 by a vote of 77 to 16. The amendment was submitted to the states for ratification on September 14, 1962.

Voters at the Voting Booths,
circa 1945.
Copyprint, NAACP Collection, Prints and Photographs Division.
Courtesy of the NAACP
African American Odyssey

• Search across American Memory on the term poll tax to see a variety of items, including Rhode Island's 1790 declaration that no capitation or poll tax shall ever be laid by Congress, found in The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution (Elliot's Debates) in A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation, 1774-1875.
• In 1756, Virginia governor Robert Dinwiddie calculated there were at least a million taxable polls in the colonies. He proposed a poll tax to build a chain of forts during the French and Indian War. Dinwiddie's May 1756 letter to George Washington mentions the proposed forts and is available in George Washington Papers, 1741-1799.
• Suffrage Limitations At the South is one of many pamphlets pertaining to African-American disenfranchisement in African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A.P.Murray Collection, 1818-1907. Search the collection on voting to access these documents.
• Taxation of Women in Massachusetts examines the legal and political status of women in Massachusetts from 1780 to 1871 highlighting the amount women paid in taxes while denied the right to vote. This pamphlet is available through Votes for Women, a collection of artifacts documenting the woman suffrage campaign.
• Learn more about the history of elections in the U.S. by viewing Elections…the American Way, a feature presentation of the Learning Page.

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