Addressing the 103rd NAACP Convention in Houston, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder likened new voter ID laws to poll taxes. Referring specifically to Texas voter ID laws, Holder said that “many of those without IDs would have to travel great distances to get them — and some would struggle to pay for the documents they might need to obtain them.”
Poll taxes to disenfranchise black voters were not always so indirect. From roughly 1890 to 1908, Southern states actively adopted poll taxes to disenfranchise black Americans. During Reconstruction, black Southerners, the majority of whom had been enslaved, voted heavily, often sweeping those antebellum politicians out of office and widely electing black leadership, especially on the state level.
Because black Americans comprised as much as 40 percent of the population or more in many Southern states, their votes were very significant, and that power infuriated white Southern leaders, especially those who had fought hard to maintain slavery. And, back then, they were not at all shy about voicing their frustrations and what they intended to do to eradicate them.
Across the South, there was a great push to rewrite state constitutions where such policies of black voter disenfranchisement could be institutionalized. As a result, state conventions popped up all over the South. In these sessions, which were being recorded, these men did not hold their tongues regarding their intentions. There was no covert plan.
At a constitutional convention in South Carolina in 1895, the former governor and then U.S. Senator Benjamin R. Tillman, according to Frederic D. Ogden’s 1958 book The Poll Tax in the South published by the University of Alabama Press, claimed that black voters had been largely responsible for the reconstruction government and he, along with the men gathered there, was determined to prevent this from occurring again.
“. . . this must be our justification, our vindication, and our excuse to the world that we are met in convention openly, boldly, without any pretence [sic] of secrecy, to announce that it is our purpose, as far as we many, without coming in conflict with the United States Constitution, to put such safeguards around this ballot in the future, to so restrict the suffrage and circumscribe it, that this infamy can never come about again,” he spoke.
The president of Louisiana’s 1898 state constitutional convention, Ernest B. Krusttschnitt, was even more direct. “We have not drafted the exact Constitution that we should like to have drafted; otherwise we should have inscribed in it, if I know the popular sentiment of this State, universal white manhood suffrage, and the exclusion from the suffrage of every man with a trace of African blood in his veins,” he proclaimed.
“What care I whether the test we have put be a new one or an old one?” he continued. “What care I whether it be more or less ridiculous or not? Doesn’t it meet the case? Doesn’t it let the white man vote, and doesn’t it stop the negro [sic] from voting, and isn’t that what we came here for?” to applause.
And there was little doubt in any of these men’s minds that the poll tax was one of the best ways in which to achieve this. Embracing the rational that white men could more easily pay the tax, or even that they would remember to pay the tax, poll taxes sprouted up throughout the South.
Of course there were some politicians then, as now, who maintained that the tax had the nobler task of ensuring fairer elections. Texas politician Lee Satterwhite, who had been a member of the 1901 legislature when a poll tax amendment had been proposed and approved, made this claim in a 1947 interview.
Interestingly, Ogden identifies Florida as a leader in imposing the poll tax, noting that a legislative act in 1889 authorized the practice after it had been sanctioned by their 1885 state constitution. Mississippi and Tennessee followed suit in 1890, with Arkansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, Alabama, Virginia and Texas falling in line between then and 1902.
Perhaps the poll tax was easy to enact because it was not a foreign practice. Andrew Jackson’s presidencies in 1828 and 1832 are largely characterized as Jacksonian Democracy for Jackson’s championing of the common white man because even white men were largely not allowed to vote unless they owned property. Some historians say that it wasn’t until 1860 that all white men could vote in this country but it is widely accepted that by 1840, 90 percent of white men could vote. Women of any race could not vote until 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.
Before civil rights activities in the 1950s and 1960s, the poll tax had already been a hotbed issue. FDR and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt supported opposition to the poll tax. The National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax, whose papers are now archived by Tuskegee, even sprouted up in 1940. Of course the NAACP and the ACLU also worked to destroy it. Members of the House of Representatives even passed five anti-poll tax bills by end of the 1940s, only to have Southern Democrats filibuster them in the Senate.
Officially the poll tax ended with the passage of the Twenty-Fourth Amendment on January 23, 1964. Through the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the U.S. Government guaranteed the voting rights of black men and black women secured through the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments throughout the South, resulting in unprecedented numbers of black votes.
Sadly, the challenges, as Holder noted, have not ended. But the resolve to protect voting rights for African-Americans cannot weaken in Florida, Texas, Georgia, South Carolina or anywhere. “We will simply not allow this era to be the beginning of the reversal of that historic progress,” Holder vowed to the NAACP Convention in Houston. But, as history shows, the battle will be a weary one.
Follow Ronda Racha Penrice on Twitter at @rondaracha