The Twenty-Fourth Amendment -- Poll Tax Outlawed

Although the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed them the right to vote, many African Americans living in southern states found themselves unable to exercise this right because of poll taxes. Imposed in the last decades of the nineteenth century following the end of Reconstruction, poll taxes were fees collected at the voting booth, and they were intended to deter poor blacks from participating in elections. Along with various Jim Crow laws enforcing racial segregation, poll taxes were a means of maintaining the system of political and legal discrimination against African Americans.

Efforts to outlaw poll taxes were periodically successful in the House of Representatives, but never made it past the Senate. Finally, in 1949, a senator from Florida undertook a campaign to prohibit poll taxes by constitutional amendment, and thirteen years later, the Senate finally approved the Twenty-Fourth Amendment by a vote of 77 to 16. The ban on poll taxes went into effect in January 1964, after the amendment had been ratified by the required number of states.

In a ceremony marking the ratification of the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, President Lyndon Johnson declared that "Nothing is so valuable as liberty and nothing is so necessary to liberty as the freedom to vote without bans or barriers . . . There can be no one too poor to vote." The following year, Congress passed the historic Voting Rights Act, which removed additional barriers to African American political participation.