The Poll Tax: Twenty-Fourth Amendment Ratified
The Poll Tax: Twenty-Fourth Amendment Ratified
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.
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: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Projects, 1936 to 1940. Manuscript Division
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.
Sign, Mineola, Texas. Russell Lee, photographer, January 1939. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives. Prints & Photographs Division
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. ca. 1945. The Civil Rights Era. The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship. NAACP Collection. Prints & Photographs Division
Learn More
- Search the Civil Rights History Project collection on the term poll tax to find oral histories on the topic, including an interview with Carrie M. Young who worked to abolish the poll tax in West Helena, Arkansas. The collection also contains an essay on voting rights.
- View Rosa Park’s 1957 poll tax receipt in the Rosa Parks Papers.
- Search on the phrase “poll tax” to find additional images from the Library’s collections of prints and photographs.
- Suffrage Limitations At the South is one of many pamphlets pertaining to African-American disenfranchisement in African American Perspectives: Materials Selected from the Rare Book Collection.
- Search across A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774-1875 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).
- Learn more about the history of elections in the U.S. by viewing Elections…the American Way, a feature presentation of the Teachers Page that includes a section on Voting Rights for African Americans.
