Poll Tax

A tax levied on every adult in a given community, which was commonly used in the South during the period of Jim Crow to prevent African Americans from voting. Between 1889 and 1910, all the Southern states passed legislation requiring the payment of poll taxes as prerequisites to voting.

After the Civil War, Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was ratified by the states and adopted in 1870. This amendment prohibited states from preventing people from voting based on race or color.

To circumvent the amendment, Southern states enacted poll taxes with the specific purpose of denying blacks the right to vote. Although the taxes were levied equally on all blacks and whites, they had the effect of discriminating against the poor. Thus, many poor whites and the majority of blacks were kept from voting. To return the franchise to poor whites, some states enacted grandfather clauses, which stated that any male whose father or grandfather had voted could vote without paying the tax. Since no blacks could vote before the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, they could not be “grandfathered.”

In 1964, the Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, making it illegal for any state to levy a poll tax as a prerequisite in federal elections. Two years later, in 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed poll taxes in all elections, declaring that such taxes violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.