POLL TAX

POLL TAX. A tax levied on each person within a particular class (for example, adult male) rather than on his property or income is called a poll, head, or capitation tax. Poll taxes were employed in all the American colonies at one period or another. It was Virginia's only direct tax for years, and before the Revolution Maryland had practically no other direct tax. Poll taxes continued to be levied by most states through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. In 1923 thirty-eight states permitted or required the collection of poll taxes. The amount of the tax varied from one to five dollars, and the proceeds were often allocated to specific public facilities, such as state schools or roads.

For many years states (five states as late as 1962) used the poll tax as a means of discouraging blacks from registering to vote by making the payment of the tax a prerequisite to the exercise of the right to vote.

In 1964 the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, nullifying all state laws requiring payment of a poll tax as a condition "to vote in any [federal] primary or other [federal] election."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Perman, Michael. Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Weisbrot, Robert. Freedom Bound: A History of America's Civil Rights Movement. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Origins of the New South, 1877–1913. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951.

Eric L.Chase

Harold W.Chase/a. g.

See alsoBallot ; Civil Rights Act of 1957 ; Literacy Test ; Primary, White ; Suffrage, Colonial ; Suffrage, Exclusion from the .