Poll taxes in the United States

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, Rhode Island, 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

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 ($62.00 in 2023). 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