Two years after the ratification of the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, the Supreme Court overruled its prior decision, and ruled that poll taxes were unconstitutional in federal as well as state and local elections.Īnother way voting rights were denied to Blacks was by threats or acts of intimidation. Less than thirty years later, and only one year before the VRA was enacted, the US ratified the 24th amendment which explicitly abolished the use of poll taxes or any other taxes used as a pre-condition to voting in federal elections (the amendment did not bad poll taxes in state or local elections). Like literacy tests, poll tax laws often had grandfather clauses which exempted voters who qualified to vote before the Civil War or, whose ancestors qualified to vote.Īs late as 1937 the US Supreme Court ruled that in some instances poll taxes cold be constitutional, meaning that those too poor to pay the poll tax or those whom the poll tax was discriminatorily applied to would not be able to seek refuge in the courts. Poll taxes are a kind of tax that requires someone to pay a fixed rate in order to exercise his (and after the 19th amendment, her) right to vote. Poll taxes were yet another way that states could “legally” disenfranchise Blacks, as well as Native Americans and poor Whites who immigrated after the Civil War. Rather than expanding voting rights to Blacks as a practical matter, the decision had the unintended effect of disenfranchising poor Southern whites for a great deal of the early 20th century, while states and localities used other tactics to continue to disenfranchise Blacks. In 1915 the Supreme Court ruled that grandfather clauses in the context of voting were unconstitutional. Though these clauses were written without reference to race, the date chosen for the grandfather clause always dated back to just before the Civil War, when no Black person, freed or enslaved, would have legally qualified to vote. A grandfather clause means that there is a rule that applies to everyone generally except those who qualified to vote, or persons whose ancestors qualified to vote, prior to a particular date. One way literacy tests operated was by virtue of something called a grandfather clause.
Generally, literacy tests were labeled as general application laws-meaning every voter would be potentially required to sit for a literacy test in order to vote-but as a matter of practice were only enforced against Black voters. Literacy tests were first adopted by Southern state legislatures as a means to deny newly enfranchised Blacks the ability to vote in local, state, and federal elections. 299 (1941).Barriers to Voting: Literacy Tests, Poll Taxes, and Intimidation That the Oklahoma voting regulation did in fact violate the Fifteenth Amendment and unconstitutionally deprive African Americans of their right to vote. None (James Clark McReynolds did not participate) Place William Rufus Day, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Evans Hughes, Joseph Rucker Lamar, Joseph McKenna, Mahlon Pitney, Willis Van Devanter, Edward Douglass White (writing for the Court) Justices Dissenting Solicitor General Chief Lawyer for Plaintiff That the federal government had been wrong to prosecute these two Oklahoma election officials for enforcing an Oklahoma voting regulation that became known as the "Grandfather clause." The government believed that the "Grandfather clause" deprived African Americans of their right to vote.