Before 1962, citizens in some U.S. states had to pay a tax to vote in federal elections. This is how Congress banned the practice.
Published: January 5, 2024
In 1962, Senator Spessard Holland of Florida, a Southern Democrat with a longstanding aversion to the poll tax, attached anti-poll tax language to a proposal everyone could get behind—a bill designating Alexander Hamilton’s home, the Grange, a national monument.
Holland changed the language of the Grange bill outright, turning it into a Constitutional amendment that would invalidate the poll tax. This tricky procedure flummoxed the Southern Old Guard and, after a lackluster filibuster, allowed the amendment to pass through the Senate by a 77-16 vote.
The resulting 24 th amendment advanced the rights of all American voters by guaranteeing that a U.S. citizen’s right to vote could “not be denied or abridged…by reason of failure to pay any poll tax.”
Black CodesBetween 1870 and 1902, all 11 formerly Confederate states implemented a poll tax, alongside a range of other racially-motivated disenfranchisement measures. Adjusted for inflation from the moment of passage, these taxes ranged from $22.66 in Tennessee to $65.24 in Mississippi. Proponents of Black citizenship mounted vigorous judicial and legislative campaigns to undermine the restrictions. The NAACP, for example, waged legal battles against all-white primary elections, segregated schooling, and anti-miscegenation laws.
At the same time, most Southern states began to see the poll tax as more of nuisance than an actual impediment to Black enfranchisement. By the late 1940s, as historian Keith Finley of Southeastern Louisiana University explains, “everyone recognized that the literacy test, not the poll tax, was the key stumbling block to Black suffrage.”
Looking back on his governorship, for example, Senator Strom Thurmond recalled in January 1960, that he was “personally no advocate of the poll tax as a qualification for voting” and had proposed that South Carolina “work toward repeal of the tax by constitutional means rather than by some more expedient manner.”
When Senator Holland proposed his amendment to the Grange bill in 1962, only five former Confederate states—Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Texas and Virginia—still utilized the poll tax. Nonetheless, legislators from those states, as Finley explains, maintained their opposition to federal oversight using “Constitutional arguments that soft-pedaled their prejudices.”
Despite proposing the 24 th Amendment, Senator Holland was not interested in challenging segregation. He signed the Southern Manifesto condemning the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, and when asked about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he remarked, “We’ll stand up and fight [against it] as long as we can.” Holland’s opposition to the poll tax stemmed from a disdain for corruptive machine politics. He believed that political machines, given their huge financial coffers, could subvert the democratic process by paying peoples’ poll tax and buying their votes.
Nonetheless, the 24 th Amendment was a civil rights bill, and the Senate’s Southern coalition treated it as such. Most race relations bills never even reached the Senate floor, particularly after Mississippi Democrat James “Big Jim” Eastland assumed the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee. As chairman, Eastland had broad control over when the committee met and what bills they discussed. Therefore, every civil rights bill assigned to Judiciary languished and died. Eastland even bragged that he had extra pockets sewn into his trousers to conceal more civil rights bills.
By the early 1960s, however, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and their Congressional allies were emboldened by the growing national support for civil rights reforms following public demonstrations of racial violence. Instead of requesting a legislative solution to the poll tax, however, President Kennedy called for a constitutional amendment, which would invalidate Southern lawmakers’ claims of constitutional legitimacy.
Securing the amendment would require Senator Holland’s support and a crafty legislative solution to outflank “Big Jim” Eastland.
On March 14, 1962, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Montana) opened the Senate floor for debate on an innocuous bill to designate the Grange, Alexander Hamilton’s historic home, as a national monument. At this time, Mansfield reported that Spessard Holland would “move the adoption of a substitute amendment involving the payment of poll taxes as requirement for voting.”
Senator Richard Russell (D-Georgia), the general of the Southern coalition, immediately denounced this procedural maneuver. The next day, Senator Lister Hill of Alabama condemned Holland’s proposal as “unusual and extraordinary and almost unprecedented and…preposterous.” Meanwhile, on March 15, Senators Jacob Javits and Kenneth Keating of New York proposed alternative legislation to make the Grange a national monument, and President Kennedy signed that bill into law on May 2.
By offering an amendment to a bill already on the Senate floor, Holland bypassed Eastland and forced each member of the Senate to make their stance on the actual poll tax a matter of public record.
When pressed, the segregationists resorted to reactionary arguments. Russell questioned whether he would have supported the 19 th amendment, as “the states had the power to grant women the right to vote.” Eastland and Lister Hill threatened to introduce a targeted alternative amendment prohibiting “the requirement of the payment of a poll tax to operate a motor vehicle on the public highways.” Senator John Stennis (D-Missouri) proclaimed that voting was “a privilege; it [was] not a right.”
Following a 10-day filibuster, the Senate adopted Holland’s language and the House of Representatives approved the resolution on August 27. On January 3, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared the measure a “triumph…of liberty over restriction” that “eliminated an unattractive growth on our national countenance.”
The 24 th amendment inscribed civil rights protections into the U.S. Constitution and suggested the possibility of future civil rights legislative action. And, none of it would have been possible if Holland, a segregationist, had not highjacked a bill commemorating Alexander Hamilton’s Grange.
A look at one of the defining social movements in U.S. history, told through the personal stories of men, women and children who lived through it.
