24th Amendment Ratified Abolishing Poll Tax in Federal Elections After Decades of Voter Suppression

The 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is ratified on January 23, 1964, abolishing the poll tax as it applies to primary elections leading to general elections for federal office. The poll tax—a fee required to vote—has been used primarily in Southern states since Reconstruction as a means of preventing Black Americans and poor whites from voting.

Poll taxes require payment at a time separate from the election, with voters required to bring receipts to the polls. Citizens who cannot locate receipts cannot vote. Although often associated with former Confederate states, poll taxes have also been in place in some northern and western states, including California, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin.

The poll tax works in conjunction with other voter suppression tactics deployed systematically from the 1890s to the 1960s: literacy tests (requiring voters to read and explain sections of state constitutions, with white clerks determining who passes), residency and property restrictions, grandfather clauses, and extra-legal activities including violence and intimidation. The literacy test proves the most formidable voting barrier, as county clerks (always white) select complicated technical passages for Black applicants to interpret while giving whites simple sentences to explain.

The Williams v. Mississippi ruling (1898) has eased the implementation of voter-suppression statutes in many southern states, including Louisiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, Virginia, and Georgia. These combined tactics reduce Black voter registration in the South to minimal levels despite the 15th Amendment’s guarantee of voting rights regardless of race.

The 24th Amendment represents a significant victory for the civil rights movement, which made ending the disenfranchisement of Black Americans a priority in the 1950s. Civil rights activists launch voter registration drives in many Southern communities, and in the early 1960s, Black and white protesters called Freedom Riders come from the North to join demonstrations throughout the South.

However, the 24th Amendment only addresses federal elections. Poll taxes remain legal in state and local elections until the Supreme Court rules them unconstitutional in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections (1966). More significantly, literacy tests remain legal—the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections (1959) that literacy tests did not violate the 14th, 15th, or 17th Amendments. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally bans literacy tests throughout the South and requires certain jurisdictions to obtain prior approval (“preclearance”) of any changes to their electoral laws or procedures. Congress abolishes literacy tests nationwide in 1970 via an amendment to the VRA.

The infrastructure developed to suppress voting through poll taxes and literacy tests—administrative barriers, documentation requirements, and discretionary enforcement—provides a template later adapted for modern voter suppression tactics: voter ID laws, purges of voter rolls, reductions in early voting periods, and restrictions on voter registration drives.