Then
Southern states used poll taxes alongside intimidation and discriminatory administration to strip Black citizens of the vote.
On January 23, 1964, South Dakota became the 38th state to approve the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, completing ratification. The amendment prohibited the United States and the states from denying a citizen the vote in federal elections because a poll tax or other tax had not been paid.
Poll taxes were not neutral revenue measures. After Reconstruction, states used them with literacy tests, white primaries, violence, and selective enforcement to evade the Fifteenth Amendment and reduce Black voting. Because the fee also burdened poor white voters, the system fused racial control with economic exclusion. Black citizens and civil-rights organizations challenged that machinery for decades.
The amendment was a major victory, but not a complete one. Its text covered presidential and congressional elections, not state contests. In 1966, the Supreme Court’s decision in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections held state poll taxes unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment. Accuracy means honoring January 23 without pretending one ratification removed every barrier to the ballot.
Poll taxes worked through accumulation as well as a single fee. In some states, unpaid taxes carried forward from year to year, making registration increasingly expensive. Complicated receipts, deadlines, and discretionary enforcement created additional opportunities for officials to reject applicants. The burden operated alongside economic retaliation and violence, so paying the tax did not guarantee that a Black citizen could vote safely.
Opponents fought through organizing, litigation, journalism, federal legislation, and constitutional amendment. The ratification campaign required approval from three-fourths of the states, making South Dakota’s action the decisive threshold. The amendment then became part of the Constitution, giving Congress enforcement authority and removing payment as a condition for participating in federal elections.
January 23 honors a structural change won through long pressure. It also teaches why voting rights must be examined as systems. A ballot can be denied through fees, registration rules, district lines, intimidation, inaccessible polling places, or selective administration. The Twenty-Fourth Amendment eliminated one device, while the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and later court decisions addressed others. Democratic achievement lies both in securing a rule and in continuing to test whether eligible citizens can exercise the right that rule promises.
Ratification also shows how constitutional change accumulates through many decisions. Legislatures across the country had to act before South Dakota supplied the decisive approval. Civil-rights advocates then had to monitor enforcement and challenge remaining barriers. The victory was a threshold, not an endpoint, in the continuing work of making political equality practical.