Voting is the core right of a democracy—the way in which the voice of each citizen finds its way into government. Efforts to keep someone from voting should therefore be of paramount concern. In the Jim Crow era, states enacted a number of laws to impede black people from voting, including residency and property restrictions, literacy tests, and poll taxes. The effort was enormously effective and only with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the use of these discriminatory restrictions banned.
It should be unfathomable to think that in 2020 we would still be fighting the same types of restrictions that impinged the right to vote during the Jim Crow era. But in several states, a form of poll tax persists, banning people who have failed to pay fines and fees from voting. The ABA has taken a stand against conditioning the right to vote on payment of fines and fees and, recently, efforts to abolish these discriminatory limitations on voting have gotten traction.
A (Ridiculously) Brief History of Voting Rights
The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” According to the Constitutional Rights Foundation, when the amendment was ratified in 1870, more than 500,000 black men became voters (Race and Voting in the Segregated South). In Mississippi, “former slaves made up more than half of [the] state’s population.” During the next few elections, the impact of these voters was extraordinary. Mississippi elected the first two black U.S. senators: Hiram Rhodes Revels in 1870 and Blanche Bruce in 1875. A number of other black officials were elected throughout the state of Mississippi, including Alexander K. Davis, who served as lieutenant governor of Mississippi from 1871–76. Similar milestones were occurring throughout the South. In 1868, Louisiana elected Oscar Dunn, the first black lieutenant governor, and then, in 1872, Louisiana elected P.B.S. Pinchback, the first black governor.
This sudden and impactful progress gave way to an equally impactful backlash. Federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877, ending Reconstruction. Reactionary forces, including the Ku Klux Klan, became more active, and throughout the mid-1870s, political power in the South switched from Republicans to Democrats, who began passing laws to institute segregation and limit the voting power of black citizens.
In 1890, Mississippi held a state constitutional convention. The president of the convention declared its purpose plainly: “We came here to exclude the Negro” (Constitutional Rights Foundation, Race and Voting in the Segregated South). Because they could not ban black citizens from voting, they devised less direct restrictions that would have the same impact. One was the poll tax, which voters were required to pay for the two years prior to the election in which they sought to vote. Eventually, 11 southern states would impose a form of poll tax on residents. Another restriction was the literacy test, which required voters to read a section of the state constitution and explain it to the county clerk. The literacy test automatically excluded the approximately “60 percent of voting-age black men (most of them ex-slaves) who could not read.” (Id.)
These voter suppression efforts were incredibly effective. By 1890, the number of black voters registered in Mississippi fell below 9,000 or roughly 6 percent of voting-age black residents. (Kelly Phillips Erb, “For Election Day, A History of the Poll Tax in America,” Forbes, Nov. 5, 2018.) “In Louisiana, where more than 130,000 black voters had been registered in 1896, the number plummeted to 1,342 by 1904.” (Id.)
Despite their harmful impacts, courts largely upheld these restrictions. In Breedlove v. Suttles, 302 U.S. 277 (1937), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Georgia poll tax stating, “payment of poll taxes as a perquisite of voting is not to deny any privilege or immunity protected by the Fourteenth Amendment . . . the state may condition suffrage as it deems appropriate.” Similarly, in Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections, 360 U.S. 45 (1959), the Court held that because literacy tests were applied equally to all citizens regardless of race, they were not discriminatory.
It was not until the 1960s that these laws drew effective opposition. In 1964, the Twenty-Fourth Amendment was ratified, providing “The right of the citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election . . . 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.” Then, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned the use of literacy tests, established federal oversight of voter registration in key areas where minority voter registration was low, and authorized federal investigations into the use of poll taxes.
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