The Twenty-Fourth Amendment

The poll tax was one of the principal tools used to disenfranchise Black voters in the South after Reconstruction. Several states required payment of a small tax, often a few dollars, before a citizen could register to vote. The amount was modest in nominal terms but significant for poor agricultural laborers, and the requirement was often paired with other obstacles like literacy tests and grandfather clauses. The poll tax also disenfranchised many poor white voters, which was, in some accounts, part of its political purpose. By the mid-twentieth century, five Southern states still required the tax.

The Twenty-Fourth Amendment was proposed by Congress in 1962 and ratified in January 1964, on the eve of the Civil Rights Act. The text is direct: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax." Section 2 gives Congress the power to enforce the amendment by appropriate legislation.

The amendment applied only to federal elections. Two years later, in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections in 1966, the Supreme Court held that poll taxes in state elections also violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, completing the work. The amendment is part of a sequence of franchise-expanding measures in the civil rights era, alongside the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Twenty-Sixth Amendment. Together they removed most of the formal legal barriers that had kept large numbers of Americans away from the ballot box for the better part of a century.