Rep. John Lindsay (R-N.Y.) held the legislation was flawed because it failed to also protect black voting rights in state and local elections. House approves poll tax ban as a constitutional amendment, Aug. 27, 1962

On this day in 1962, the House voted 295 to 62 to outlaw the poll tax as a requirement in federal elections. The lawmakers acted by approving a proposed 24th Amendment to the Constitution. At the time, five states — Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas — maintained poll taxes which, critics argued, fell most heavily on would-be African-American voters.

The amendment was submitted to the states on Sept. 24, 1962, after it also cleared the Senate with the requisite two-thirds majority. It reads:


“The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, 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.

“The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

Some critics held the legislation was flawed because it failed to also protect black voting rights in state and local elections. Rep. John Lindsay (R-N.Y.) said, “If we’re going to have a constitutional amendment, let’s have a meaningful one.” But Rep. Emanuel Celler (D-N.Y.) chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, where the amendment process originated, dismissed the criticism.

The 24th Amendment went into effect on Jan. 23, 1964, when South Dakota became the 38th state to ratify it. President Lyndon B. Johnson called passage of the amendment a “triumph of liberty over restriction” and "a verification of people's rights.”

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In the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke out against the tax, terming it “a remnant of the Revolutionary period” that the country had moved past. However, in 1938, when entrenched conservative Southern Democrats defeated liberal challengers in primaries, FDR backed off. He felt he needed Southern Democratic votes to pass his cherished New Deal programs.

Still, efforts at the congressional level to abolish the poll tax continued. A 1939 bill to abolish the poll tax in federal elections was tied up by Southerners whose long tenure in office from what was then a one-party region gave them seniority and command of numerous key committee chairmanships.

Meantime, in 1937, the poll tax had survived a legal challenge when the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Breedlove v. Suttles, that “[The] privilege of voting is not derived from the United States, but is conferred by the state and, save as restrained by the 15th and 19th Amendments and other provisions of the [f]ederal Constitution, the state may condition suffrage as it deems appropriate.”

The judicial pendulum had fully swung by 1966 when the court, by a vote of 6 to 3, found in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections that poll taxes at any level of elections were unconstitutional because, it said, they violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

SOURCE: WWW.HISTORY.HOUSE.GOV

