January 23, 1964: The Twenty-fourth Amendment is passed, prohibiting poll taxes in federal elections.
On this day fifty years ago, South Dakota became the thirty-eighth state to ratify the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibited the denial or abridgment of a U.S. citizen’s right to vote “by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax”.
In many states, the poll tax emerged after the end of Reconstruction as part of Southern states’ systems of Jim Crow laws, which maintained de jure racial segregation in those states over a period of eighty years. Because of voting restrictions like poll taxes, the “grandfather clause”, and literacy tests, the black population in the South was largely disenfranchised after the end of Reconstruction despite the promise of the Fifteenth Amendment, until efforts to reverse this gained traction in the mid-20th century. In 1940, three percent of voting-age black voters were registered to vote in the South. Much of the high-profile civil rights activism that took place during the 1950s-60s involved voting rights and registration, including the 1964 Freedom Summer and the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March.
Poll taxes for state elections were ruled unconstitutional under the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1966 Supreme Court case Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections.