Voter Suppression- Poll Tax

The Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to vote regardless of “race, color or previous condition of servitude.” In attempts to suppress the black vote, states have therefore had to devise mechanisms to indirectly rather than directly target black voters. Take, for example, Arkansas’s adoption of a poll tax amendment in 1893. On the face of it, it was argued that a one-dollar poll tax would reduce voter fraud. In practice, it disfranchised large numbers of African American voters that could not afford even the nominal fee. And, contrary to its original intent, the poll tax only increased rather than decreased voter fraud in the state. The Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution added in 1964 outlawed the use of poll taxes in federal elections. Arkansas dropped the poll tax the same year. I’m John Kirk of the UALR History Department and this has been an Arkansas moment.