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The 24th Amendment: A shocking history
Imagine having to pay to vote.
| Imagine having to pay to vote. The 24th Amendment — passed by Congress on August 27, 1962 (63 years ago today), and ratified by the states on January 23, 1964 — ensures Americans will never have to worry about such a terrible infringement. Nevertheless, it’s sobering to consider that may not have been the case as recently as the 1960s. The Reconstruction Amendments The Reconstruction Amendments were meant to secure the rights of recently freed Black Americans: the 13th abolished slavery, the 14th offered equal protection under the law, and the 15th guaranteed “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”  Congress proposed all three amendments in the 1860s. Unfortunately, Southern Democrats, bent on maintaining antebellum race relations, found their way around the rules for nearly a century, relying on threats of violence, intimidation, and constitutional loopholes to keep former slaves out of the polling places. Although imperfect in their enforcement, the post-war Republican presidents were settled on the issue: Ulysses S. Grant endorsed the 15th Amendment, Rutherford B. Hayes, while serving as Ohio’s governor, pushed for his state to adopt it, and James Garfield dismissed “the absurd and senseless dogma that the color of the skin shall be the basis of suffrage.” But as Northern support for Reconstruction gradually waned and federal troops withdrew from the South, Black Americans were increasingly left to the mercies of their former masters. The Rise of an American Caste System Thomas Dartmouth Rice may not be a name most Americans recognize, but he played a character of immortal notoriety. Known as the father of the minstrel show, Rice claimed to have based his blackface burlesque on a disabled slave who danced while he worked. The racist, mocking caricature, who sang a song titled Jump Jim Crow, became a popular icon, and “Jim Crow” evolved into a pejorative for “Negro” and the namesake behind a series of laws restricting Blacks’ rights. Jim Crow laws, which lasted into the 20th Century, subverted the clear intent of the Reconstruction Amendments by enforcing segregation and imposing restrictions on voting that disproportionately impacted former slaves. The poll tax, for instance, charged a fee to vote, while literacy tests required would-be voters to answer questions about the American government, including “If the two house of Congress cannot agree on adjournment, who sets the times?” and “If it were proposed to join Alabama and Mississippi to form one state, what groups would have to vote approval in order for this to be done?” (The previous questions appeared in an actual literacy test used in Alabama as recently as 1965.)  Such qualifications were not explicitly race-based, thus dodging accusations of violating the Reconstruction Amendments. However, the authors were not shy about their intentions, deliberately targeting former bondsmen, many of whom remained poor under an exploitative sharecropping system and had been blocked from proper education under slavery (anti-literacy laws made it illegal to teach slaves in many Southern states to read). In 1890, for example, Mississippi adopted a new state Constitution instituting a “uniform poll tax of two dollars.” The language may have seemed anodyne, but it was far from innocuous. “We came here to exclude the negro,” S. S. Calhoon, president of the Mississippi constitutional convention, bluntly proclaimed. “There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter,” agreed James K. Vardaman, an avowed white supremacist who participated in the convention. “Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the [N-word] from politics.” Whatever technical alibis they might have boasted, Mississippi lawmakers’ openly racial confessions should have exposed them as violators of the 14th and 15th Amendments. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court did not see it that way. In Williams v. Mississippi (1898), the federal judiciary defended Mississippi’s constitution, determining the poll taxes and literacy tests did not, “on their face, discriminate between the white and negro races,” while other prominent cases (Plessy v. Ferguson, Breedlove v. Suttles) emboldened the South’s defiance. “There is an allegation of the purpose of the convention, to disfranchise citizens of the colored race,” Justice Joseph McKenna admitted in the Williams v. Mississippi court opinion, “but with this we have no concern, unless the purpose is executed by the constitution or laws or by those who administer them” [emphasis added]. The justices, in other words, were willing to accept a thin veneer of constitutionality for the oppressors’ blatant attacks on constitutionally guaranteed voting rights. In doing so, they turned a blind eye to a growing problem. Even before the Supreme Court delivered its lenient verdict, other states had already followed Mississippi’s lead. South Carolina, for example, convened a constitutional convention with undisguised aims: “the retention of the supremacy of political power by the whites, by retaining the suffrage in their hands, so far as is possible.” (States like South Carolina relied on “grandfather clauses” to exempt men who had previously been allowed to vote — whites exclusively — from paying the tax, once again clearly expressing the race-based intentions behind technically race-free words.) Five years later, perhaps emboldened by the court’s permissiveness, the virulent racist Benjamin R. Tillman, former South Carolina Governor and sitting U.S. Senator, openly and proudly defended his state’s disenfranchisement (and lynching) of African Americans.  (Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman believed it was necessary to kill a thousand Negroes “before they learn their place again.”) “We did not disfranchise the Negroes until 1895,” he vaunted from the Senate floor. “Then we had a constitutional convention convened which took the matter up calmly, deliberately, and avowedly with the purpose of disenfranchising as many of them as we could under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.” “As to [the Negro’s] ‘rights,’” Tillman scoffed, “I will not discuss them now. We of the South have never recognized the right of the Negro to govern the white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.” Listening to “Pitchfork Ben,” there could be no doubt: the South held the 14th and 15th Amendments in contempt. Despite early post-war advancements, the moral arc of the universe had bent backwards. But, as ever, the Constitution served as a lodestar for those who aimed to create a more perfect Union. Woodrow Wilson — Clouds Without Water At the height of the Jim Crow Era, all 11 former Confederate states imposed poll taxes. Needless to say, however, Southerners lacked the support to ascend to the nation’s highest office. In 1912, Woodrow Wilson, having wooed many Blacks with a progressive mirage of racial justice (Black voters, he vowed, “may count on me for absolute fair dealing and for everything by which I could assist in advancing the interests of their race”), became the first Southern Democrat elected to the presidency since the Civil War (Grover Cleveland, the only other Democrat elected, hailed from the North). Commonly associated with New Jersey, Wilson grew up in the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction periods and was clearly sympathetic to the justifications for enforced disenfranchisement. White men, he argued in his book A History of the American People: Reunion and Nationalization, merely wanted to “rid themselves … of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes ….” Activist and founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) W.E.B. Du Bois, although supportive of Wilson over his opponents (Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft), sensed the disconcerting significance of the outcome: “For the first time since the emancipation of slaves the government of this nation—the presidency, the Senate, the House of Representatives—passes on the 4th of March into the hands of the party which a half century ago fought desperately to keep black men as real estate in the eyes of the law,” he wrote in an open letter to Wilson.  (NAACP headquarters in New York City.) Many trusted Wilson to break from a racist tradition. Black writers showered the president with letters expressing optimism. “Your deep interest in the Negro is widely appreciated,” one petitioner wrote. “From the training, high character, and christian sentiment expressed by President-elect WILSON, before and since his election, I see an OPEN DOOR OF HOPE for the Negro,” another effusively praised. Du Bois laid out their demands: “The education of colored children, the opening of the gates of industrial opportunity to colored workers, absolute equality of all citizens before law, the civil rights of all decently behaving citizens in places of public accommodation and entertainment, absolute impartiality in the granting of the right of suffrage—these things are the bedrock of a just solution of the rights of man in the American Republic” [emphasis added].” It did not take long, however, for Wilson to show his true colors. In flagrant contempt of the Blacks, including Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, who had endorsed him, Wilson issued an unexpected order to segregate the federal government. His former supporters were appalled. “Sir, you have now been president of the United States for six months and what is the result? It is no exaggeration to say that every enemy of the Negro race is greatly encouraged,” blared an outraged Du Bois. “Do you want Negro votes?” he demanded of the president. The answer, apparently, was no.  (Booker T. Washington was one of many leaders duped by Wilson.) Wilson’s supposedly “progressive” presidency marked the terrifying rise of Jim Crow-coded policies to the national level. Far from heralding “absolute impartiality in the granting of the right of suffrage,” it inaugurated a period in which federal officials, at a minimum, appeared impervious to Southern Democrats’ ongoing civil rights violations. It wasn’t until World War II that the federal government dared to address the issue again in a meaningful way. An Era of Change On September 10, 1942, Senator Tom Connally, a Texas Democrat and Jim Crow proponent, rose to protest House Bill 7416, which, in his words, “cloaks itself beautifully under the headline of ‘Vote for soldiers.’” “Of course, no one wants to deny a soldier the right to vote, if he has the right to vote,” Connally noted. “But under the cloak of undertaking to do this lofty and noble thing,” he complained, the bill had waged war on a key weapon in the South’s oppressive toolkit: “Under the bill it is declared that those in the land and naval forces of the United States absent from their places of residence may vote, irrespective of any poll-tax requirement in the respective States” [emphasis added]. The bill, in other words, exempted Americans serving overseas during the Second World War (including potentially African American soldiers) from the poll tax.  (More than a million African Americans served in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II.) But Connally did a bit of cloaking of his own. Couching his known segregationist views in purported concerns about the constitutional process, he argued the federal government did not possess the authority to override state laws about voting. Why, he wanted to know, citing the 14th, 15th, and 19th Amendments, had previous changes to voting laws required constitutional amendments? Proponents of the bill might have countered that it was a moot point considering the 15th Amendment already protected the right to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” but perhaps Connally was right about one thing: a constitutional amendment closing the loophole could settle the debate once and for all. Representative Arthur W. Mitchell, the only Black member of Congress from 1935 until 1943, and other opponents of the poll tax cast disenfranchisement on the home front as “the weakest point in our fight for world democracy,” linking the Allies’ fate in the global conflict to whether or not they would finally embrace racial justice. The bill abolishing the poll tax for soldiers serving abroad eventually passed, inflicting a small but meaningful dent in the edifice of Southern power. The topic was back on the table. The number of African Americans serving in politics slowly increased, a handful of states dropped the poll tax of their own accord (although they continued to suppress the vote in other ways), and in 1944, the Supreme Court struck down “white primaries” (primary elections excluding Blacks) in Smith v. Allwright. Subsequently, in 1947, Harry S. Truman formed the President’s Committee on Civil Rights. “I don’t want to see any race discrimination,” he stated plainly. The committee’s detailed report spotlighted the poll tax as a “legal obstacle to full suffrage in some southern states,” drawing the president’s attention to the dramatic impact poll taxes had on voter turnout in the 1944 presidential election. AD_4nXcCSzZSvy2-Y_FqnLOenHF_m3MWPGTWqmg4jeWfSx2VcLhW1QLXKhkJeIK1Ox76XOyRt38uIeBLCVTt6FOk6CoujLJYrg7KkFRlYTbJLAxcBUcMw_pWytukGtvHnZvf-VJpkPOVvw?key=NsNj0uluIh8w7oyqQ_z8Vw Source: Truman Library The 24th Amendment Despite the growing bad press surrounding the poll tax (even Tillman’s South Carolina abandoned it), another 15 years passed before Congress introduced what would become the 24th Amendment, permanently making poll taxes unconstitutional. On February 28, 1963, as the civil rights movement neared a crescendo, President John F. Kennedy delivered a “Special Message to the Congress on Civil Rights,” urging the body to advance Black suffrage. Forgetting prior court precedents, Kennedy denounced efforts “to discriminate against prospective Negro voters” as “contrary to the requirements of the 14th and 15th Amendments”; in his view, “the law should specifically prohibit the application of different tests, standards, practices, or procedures for different applicants seeking to register and vote in federal elections.” “Finally,” he said, referring to recent events, “the 87th Congress — after 20 years of effort — passed and referred to the states for ratification a Constitutional Amendment to prohibit the levying of poll taxes as a condition to voting. … I urge every state legislature to take prompt action on this matter and to outlaw the poll tax — which has too long been an outmoded and arbitrary bar to voting participation by minority groups and others — as the 24th Amendment to the Constitution. This measure received bipartisan sponsorship and endorsement in the Congress — and I shall continue to work with governors and legislative leaders of both parties in securing adoption of the anti-poll tax amendment.” Kennedy wouldn’t live to see his dream come true. But on January 23, 1964, two months after his untimely death, South Dakota became the 38th state to ratify the amendment: poll taxes were no longer permitted in federal elections. Two years later, in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections, the Supreme Court struck down the practice in state elections as well. After many decades of a terrible struggle to live out the true meaning of the 15th Amendment, the moral arc of the universe was bending back towards justice. The Power of Amendments The struggle showcased the Founders’ foresight in allowing the people to amend the Constitution. Knowing they could not anticipate every flaw or ambiguity future generations might encounter (just as the authors of the 15th Amendment could not have predicted the many ways in which the Southern states would circumvent its intent), the Framers included an internal amendment process in Article V. As George Washington urged in his famous Farewell Address, “If in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates.” Crucially, constitutional amendments do not have to radically alter the meaning of the Constitution but can close loopholes, tighten the language, and strengthen the authors’ original design. The story of America is a thrilling quest, a generation-by-generation journey to live up to the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The 15th Amendment served as an important but imperfect step in the right direction; the 24th Amendment certified its meaning and extended the right to vote to more Americans than ever before. |
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| Created: | 2025-08-27 16:35 GMT |
| Updated: | 2025-09-03 07:00 GMT |
| Published: | 2025-08-27 17:00 GMT |
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