This Day in Wall Street History - 1964: Poll tax is abolished

The 24th Amendment Ended the Poll Tax January 23, 1964

On this day, Americans waved good-bye to the poll tax, as the Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified by the South Dakota legislature, becoming the law of the land.

Many Southern states adopted a poll tax in the late 1800s. This meant that even though the 15th Amendment gave former slaves the right to vote, many poor people, both blacks and whites, did not have enough money to vote.

"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" to Mr. Pike, interviewer, Atlanta, Georgia. American Life Histories, 1936 - 1940.

More than 20 years after "Mr. Trout" spoke those words, the poll tax was abolished. At the ceremony in 1964 formalizing the 24th Amendment, President Lyndon Johnson noted that: "There can be no one too poor to vote." Thanks to the 24th Amendment, the right of all U.S. citizens to freely cast their votes has been secured.

Payment of the tax stood as a potent prerequisite, and sometimes outright barrier, to voting in national elections. And, for the Southern Democrats who designed and helped pass the tax in a number of Southern states during the 1880s and 1890s, this was precisely the point: the poll tax was a blunt tool for barring poverty-stricken African-Americans and whites from participating in the electoral process. As such, the tax was also a means for stemming the rise of the Populist Party, which had used a racially mixed coalition of poor and lower class voters to gain a place on the national stage. Attempts to roll back the poll tax were generally blocked in the Senate. However, in 1949, Senator Spessard L. Holland of Florida took up the cause of killing the tax forever via a constitutional amendment. When the Senate finally passed the Twenty-Fourth Amendment in 1962, the poll tax remained in effect in five Southern states: Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas and Alabama. After 1964, it was constitutionally legal in none.

Source: www.history.com