The women's poll tax repeal movement was a movement in the United States, predominantly led by women, that attempted to secure the abolition of poll taxes as a prerequisite for voting in the Southern states. The movement began shortly after the ratification in 1920 of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which granted suffrage to women. Before obtaining the right to vote, women were not obliged to pay the tax, but shortly after the Nineteenth Amendment became law, Southern states began examining how poll tax statutes could be applied to women. For example, North and South Carolina exempted women from payment of the tax, while Georgia did not require women to pay it unless they registered to vote. In other Southern states, the tax was due cumulatively for each year someone had been eligible to vote.
Payment of the tax was difficult for Black, Hispanic, and women voters, primarily because their incomes were much lower than those of white men. For married women, coverture prevented them from controlling their own assets. Recognizing that payment of the tax as a prerequisite to voting could lead to their disenfranchisement, women began organizing themselves in the 1920s to repeal the poll tax laws, but the movement did not gain much traction until the Great Depression in the 1930s. Both black and white women pressed at state and national levels for legislative action to abolish laws that required paying to vote. Poll taxes were a fixed tax that citizens had to pay in order to vote. This prevented and suppressed certain groups of individuals from voting. These taxes were common in states like Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia, and Texas. Some states had poll taxes that would add up overtime for several years before a person could vote. In addition, women filed a series of lawsuits to try to effect change. By the 1950s, the intersection of sexist and racist customs and law was apparent to those fighting the poll tax. This created collaborations between activists involved in the poll tax movement and those active in the broader civil rights movement.
Louisiana abandoned its poll tax law in 1932, and the number of women voters increased by 77 percent. Women's activism helped bring about the repeal of poll tax legislation in Florida in 1937, in Georgia in 1945, in Tennessee in 1953, and in Arkansas in 1964. That year, the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed, prohibiting poll taxes as a barrier to voting in federal elections. Passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 gave federal authority to the Department of Justice to institute lawsuits against the four states that still used poll tax to disenfranchise voters in state elections. The Supreme Court finally settled the four-decades-long struggle, abolishing the requirement to pay poll tax to be able to vote in any election, federal or state, in their ruling on Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections in 1966.
Background When the initial governing documents of the United States were created between 1776 and 1789, they established prerequisites for casting a ballot. After the passage of the Constitution in 1789, ownership of real estate was the primary requirement for voting. As the merchant class grew, modifications were made, instead requiring ownership of personal property of a certain value. By the end of the American Civil War in 1865, property requirements had been abolished in almost every state. In 1875, with the passage of a poll tax law in Virginia, a precedent was established for using tax legislation as a means of restricting the franchise. Between 1890 and 1900, similar legislation requiring payment of a poll tax as a prerequisite for voting became common across the South. By 1914, the constitutions of 22 states allowed for the collection of poll taxes and in 14 states the tax was a prerequisite for voting.
One of the reasons for the adoption of poll tax laws in the Progressive Era was the rise of the leftist, agrarian Populist Party, which was seen as a threat to the prevailing two-party system, in particular to the Democratic Party. As Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party had traditionally been the party with which blacks affiliated, the rise of organized, discontented small farmers was seen as a bigger challenge to political power at the turn of the century. In principle, poll taxes were adopted to ensure that eligible voters had sufficient financial independence to prove they were qualified and their vote could not be bought. In practice, they were often used to disenfranchise blacks and poor whites, in order to maintain supportive constituencies for business and political interests. The ramifications were deeper than political disenfranchisement, because in states where juries were selected from those on the electoral roll, those who could not pay poll taxes were also denied the opportunity to serve or have their case evaluated by their peers. As women could not vote, the tax did not apply to them until 1920, when the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution legally enfranchised them.
After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, states that had poll tax as a prerequisite for voting responded in different ways. Some states exempted women entirely, others defined women's obligations equally with men's, while still others left the ambiguity in the law as an open question. In Georgia, married women had no separate legal identity; as payment of poll tax for women was seen as an extra burden on their spouse, women were exempted if they chose not to register to vote. In North Carolina, women agitated for the abolition of the tax and were instrumental in obtaining both an exemption for women from payment and its repeal from the state constitution in 1920. Although North Carolinians had won their fight, Carolinian activists involved in the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee, such as May Thompson Evans, continued to press for poll tax repeal in other states. In South Carolina, women's groups took an opposite approach to those in most of the South. Exempted from paying poll taxes, they fought for at least a decade to have the tax imposed upon women as recognition of their equal status.
The amount of tax was typically $1 to $2 per year (equivalent to $ to $ in ), increased in some areas by cumulative tax, interest, and penalties for each year a voter had not paid but was eligible to vote; it disproportionately impacted women voters. Coverture prevented women from legally accessing money without their husband's consent and in some cases wages earned by wives belonged to their spouse. As men controlled the funds available to pay poll taxes, they could withhold payment for their wives. In cases where women had access to funds, they were disadvantaged as the proportion of their income required to pay the tax was greater as women earned far less than men. For example, white men's median income in the U.S. in 1949 was $2,255 and in 1959 was $3,734. In those years, the median income of non-white males was $1,221 and $1,906 respectively, while white women earned $1,171 and $1,499 and non-white women earned $530 and $737.
Overview of the movement Development Several court cases in the early 1920s resulted in a legal consensus that the Nineteenth Amendment allowed enforcement of the national law without actually amending state legal codes. In other words, the federal amendment overrode state law, effectively striking out the word "male" from any state law defining a voter by gender. One of the first legal cases involving poll tax in the South was Graves v. Eubank (87 So. 587, 205 Ala. 174, January 13, 1921) in Montgomery County, Alabama. Mary Lou Graves attempted to pay her poll tax to enable her to register for the next election. The tax collector, A. H. Eubank, refused to take her payment, prompting Graves to sue. The Supreme Court of Alabama concurred with Graves that she could not be denied the right to pay the tax and register.
By the early 1920s, some women had begun to form anti-poll tax groups, but for many women the goal in the years following enfranchisement was to register women and to encourage payment of the tax. Though they identified an inability to pay poll taxes as an obstacle, most women activists did not strive for its abolition. It was not until the 1930s that women's organizations throughout the South were involved in state and national efforts to repeal poll tax legislation. Breedlove v. Suttles (302 U.S. 277, 284), a major US Supreme Court case heard in 1937, determined that though the Georgia election poll tax statute imposed the tax on both men and women, women who chose not to register to vote were exempt from paying. The decision confirmed that voting rights were determined by the rules established by individual states, rather than by the federal government. Thus, if states established paying tax as a prerequisite to registering, it was within their constitutional authority. As Georgia law required payment of the tax for his spouse from the man who was the head of a family, paying tax twice was seen as an extra financial burden on him. Non-payment also allowed women to opt out of civic responsibilities to concentrate on motherhood. The ruling reinforced the view that women were second class citizens and the legal dependents of men. It solidified the constitutionality of poll tax collection as a voting prerequisite for federal and state elections for nearly three decades.
Black and white women activists in the poll tax movement often worked together, as did the organizations they represented. People contacting the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for information on voting or citizenship were provided with materials developed by the League of Women Voters, which also held citizenship training in conjunction with the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. Granting women the vote had undermined the separation of the races, as the presence of white women, registering and voting in the same election facilities as black men and women, had a restraining effect on white men's intimidation of black would-be voters. In 1920 in Richmond, Virginia, The News Leader carried a story about how black and white women were helping each other to understand the requirements to register to vote. Even so, the majority of white women did not challenge segregation policies.
Women and organizations involved The motivations of women in the movement differed. Some came to the anti-tax movement from former work with women's suffrage, some from labor union activism aimed at improving working conditions for women, and others from the early civil rights movement. Unlike the single-focus on women's rights by elite white middle- and upper-class activists of earlier women's organizations, activists involved in the movement to repeal poll taxes acknowledged the racial component of the struggle. According to the historian Rachel Gunter, activists "strategically deployed (and refrained from deploying) racial arguments when it best suited their cause". White women used white men's negrophobia in their arguments for why poll taxes should be abolished. Their reasoning was that if white women could vote then white voters would outnumber black, securing white political power. Activists stressed that if the majority white voters did decline because of poll tax repeal, white supremacy would still be protected by other disenfranchising policies, especially literacy tests and white primaries. This was shown to be the case in states which abolished the tax. In some cases, cross-racial groups found that building a support base for legal change required black women in the South to work in the background, allowing white women to lead, so that their agenda was not threatening to white males.