This Day in Civil Rights History (24th Amendment, Banning Poll Tax, Ratified)

January 23, 1964—One more brick in the vast edifice of American apartheid was knocked loose, as South Dakota became the 38th state to ratify the 24th Amendment to the Constitution. The amendment, which had now achieved the required three-fourths of states to go into effect, outlawed the poll tax that had been used in the South since Reconstruction to prevent the poor—and especially African-Americans—from voting.

Nobody could miss on inauguration day the symbolism of Barack Obama taking the oath within sight of the Lincoln Memorial, where Dr. Martin Luther King had proclaimed his dream of equality for America. One of the props that had kept African-Americans from taking their rightful place among the American electorate had been not just violence, as bad as that was, but clever subterfuges meant to deny them suffrage, such as literacy and poll tax requirements.

The poll tax was especially insidious. It relied on a long history that proponents could point to, dating back to Europe, of raising funds through such taxes (“Poll” was an old English word for “head.”), as well as a more recent colonial America belief that property holders would be more likely to have a stake in the outcome of an election.

Under the poll-tax system, if you wanted to vote, you had to pay the tax. The genius of the system, from a segregationist’s point of view, was twofold:

* If a voter couldn’t pay the tax one year, he still had to pay that tax –as well as for the next election’s—if he wanted to vote again.

* Though seemingly race-neutral, the tax disproportionately affected blacks, since they were mired in poverty through lack of educational opportunities, the denial of voting rights, and the sharecropping system in the South that kept them in a condition of quasi-slavery.

Eleven of the former Confederate states had adopted the poll tax as part of what they thought of as the “Redemption” period after the war, when the federal government signaled that it would no longer enforce rights due African-Americans. As early as 1873, in Lexington, Ky., institution of the poll tax resulted in two-thirds of African-Americans being denied the right to vote, giving the election to Democrats rather than Republicans who favored equal rights.

Attempts to eliminate the poll tax had begun in 1939, but it took an entire generation—and the onset of a wider civil-rights movement—for the effort to have a chance at succeeding. Even then, it was not the all-out assault on systematic segregation represented by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

* By the time the proposal passed Congress in 1962, only five Southern states still had the tax left on their books.

* The amendment only applied to federal, not state, elections.

* The best evidence of the incremental nature of the bill might have been its sponsor: Senator Spessard Holland of Florida, who only a decade before had been one of the Congressional signers of the “Southern Manifesto” decrying the Supreme Court’s move against segregated schools in Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Though aware that African-Americans had been disenfranchised by the tax, his real aim was to eliminate the tax as a source of corruption for political machines, who, when it suited them, simply paid to buy the votes of those who couldn’t pay the bills themselves.

An unbelievably astute politician who never lost a race throughout his long career, Holland believed—correctly—that he could sell this to voters who otherwise would have run away from other forms of civil-rights legislation. Knowing the historical tendencies of courts, he believed that it would take not a simple piece of legislation, but an entire constitutional amendment to ensure this legislation would not be undercut. Each year for 13 years, he introduced his bill for the amendment, finally seeing it ratified in 1964.

In witnessing the certification of the amendment a week and a half after South Dakota passed it, President Lyndon B. Johnson noted, “There can now be no one too poor to vote. There is no longer a tax on his rights. The only enemy to voting that we face today is indifference.”

The saddest part of that statement is the last sentence. LBJ bemoaned the fact that in the 1960 Presidential race, less than two-thirds of the eligible population cast ballots. Despite a chance to make history and inflamed political passions owing to a recession and war, only 61% of the eligible American electorate turned out to vote in the 2008 election—the highest since 1968, and only a slight improvement over the 60% recorded for the 1960 race.

Nevertheless, elimination of the poll tax opened up opportunities not only for African-Americans to vote but for African-Americans to take office—and white Americans to become accustomed to that prospect. The 24th Amendment was an incremental measure in the larger story of civil rights in the U.S., but that is the essence of the American system—an evolutionary rather than revolutionary process.