The 24th

It’s Black History Month, which got me thinking about poll taxes. Every American schoolkid learns about them (although now that could be changing), and a lot of people probably view poll taxes as racist ancient history that has nothing to do with today. But history is never dead and buried in this country.

After the Civil War, the United States ratified the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery. But now that the full population of Black people in the South would be counted toward congressional representation, rather than the three-fifths mandated by the Three-Fifths Compromise, Republicans were worried that they would lose power to southern Democrats. They were also concerned that mere legislation conferring fundamental rights on Black people would be deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. So two more amendments were proposed and ratified: the 14th, which established citizenship for Black people (among other things), and the 15th, which ensured for Black people the right to vote.

The 14th Amendment ended up being much more extensively applied in constitutional law than the other two, but I’d like to focus right now on the 15th Amendment, the text of which is very short – here it is:

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

One could imagine much more sweeping language, and in fact, there were such proposals, including one banning restrictions based on "race, color, nativity, property, education, or religious beliefs," which was rejected by Congress. Also rejected was a specific ban on literacy tests. Some representatives in the North and West wanted to continue denying the franchise to foreign-born citizens, and Republicans across the country worried that broad suffrage language would re-enfranchise the traitors in the South who had supported the Confederacy. Obviously, the amendment also says nothing about gender, and the women’s suffrage movement split in two over support for it.

Despite the messiness of the Reconstruction Amendments, for a brief moment after the Civil War, there was a flowering of Black political participation in the South. Hundreds of thousands of Black people registered to vote, and some 1,500 held public office during Reconstruction, including 15 U.S. congressmen and two US senators. Another Black candidate, P.B.S. Pinchback of Louisiana, was elected in 1873, but the Senate refused to seat him.

It’s been the case throughout American history though – each major Black social advancement is invariably followed by a whitelash. And sometimes, you just shake your head in disbelief at the brazenness of it. Since the 15th Amendment forbids voting infringement only on the basis of race, color, or prior slave status, white Southerners became ruthlessly creative in suppressing the Black vote without explicitly targeting those three bases. Literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, white primaries, not to mention white supremacist terrorism – all served to virtually eliminate the Black vote. The Supreme Court made a willing partner in the years immediately following the 15th’s ratification, for example ruling in 1876 that the Amendment did not confer a right to vote, and it did not prohibit facially neutral suppression measures. By 1898 then, the number of Black voters in Louisiana fell from 130,000 to 5,000; in Virginia, from 147,000 to 21,000; in Mississippi from 147,000 to 8,600.

Interestingly, a poll tax is actually a general term for a fixed tax per head. It’s been around as long as there have been governments, but apparently only in America has it been used to suppress the vote; thus, it became synonymous with voting here. And the term grandfather clause itself originates in the US – according to such a law, those whose ancestors had the right to vote were exempted from the new suppression measures. This was a way to keep poll taxes and literacy tests, while still offering the ballot to poor and illiterate white men.

But such efforts to carve out white men from voter suppression apparently weren’t as successful as lawmakers in the South had hoped, and states began repealing poll taxes in the early 1900s. Attempts in Congress to abolish the poll tax federally were killed by filibuster in the 1930s and 1940s, but by the 1960s, momentum had swung just enough for a constitutional amendment. This corresponded with the Supreme Court’s evolution on voting rights – predictably, as the Court began to strike down suppression laws through the course of the 20th century, Black voter registration increased, from five percent in 1940 to 28 percent in 1960.

By 1964, when the 24th Amendment, banning poll taxes for federal elections, was ratified, five states still had them: Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia. To this day, eight states still haven’t ratified the amendment, although the Supreme Court found in 1966 that poll taxes are unconstitutional, even at the state level. The actual amounts of the poll taxes being levied in 1964 ranged from one to two dollars, which today would be the equivalent of nine to 18 dollars. Not very much, but enough to make a poor person think twice.

Since the 2020 election, Republicans have introduced hundreds of voter suppression and election interference bills in dozens of state legislatures across the country. Many of these measures include stricter voter ID requirements. And while there might be a host of obstacles in the path of a Black person’s right to vote, even without new suppression laws, the fact that a poll tax in 1964 could cost less than a driver’s license fee today gives one pause. Former felons in Florida have a different hurdle – after a popular referendum in 2018 restored their right to vote, the Republican legislature passed a law requiring that all legal fees be paid before a former felon is re-enfranchised. Those fees usually amount to hundreds or thousands of dollars. And as it always has been in America, Black people are disproportionately incarcerated, disproportionately poor, and disproportionately likely to vote Democrat, which of course is the point. What honest broker will say with a straight face that these aren’t poll taxes in everything but name?

It bears repeating that poll taxes and the myriad other voter suppression measures enacted after the 15th Amendment’s ratification were “color blind”. None of them explicitly targeted race – they accomplished their goal without articulating it. Instead, they offered a pretext: preventing voter fraud. Today we see the same pretext offered for voter suppression measures. Every now and then in history though, true intentions slip out:

If the poll tax bill passes, the next step will be an effort to remove the registration qualification, the educational qualification of Negroes. If that is done we will have no way of preventing the Negroes from voting. - Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi

Meanwhile, Republican defenses of their own suppression efforts treat the whole endeavor like a game of Taboo – as long as the word “race” isn’t specifically stated in the language of a bill, then the goal can’t be to suppress the Black vote. Republican justices on the Supreme Court appear to be operating under the same assumption. It’s hard to believe that governors and senators and Supreme Court justices don’t know what a poll tax is. That only leaves one possibility – they think you don’t know.