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A poll tax is a tax of a fixed sum on every liable individual (typically every adult), without reference to income or resources. Various privileges of citizenship, including voter registration or issuance of driving licenses and resident hunting and fishing licenses, were conditioned on payment of poll taxes to encourage the collection of this tax revenue.
Poll taxes are regressive, meaning the higher someone's income is, the lower the tax is as a proportion of income: for example, a $100 tax on an income of $10,000 is a 1% tax rate, while $100 tax on a $500 income is 20%. Its acceptance or "neutrality" depends on the balance between the tax demanded and the resources of the population.
The Civil War Income Tax and the Republican Party, 1861–1872. (New York: Algora Publishing, 2010) excerpt; Stabile, Donald. The Origins of American Public Finance: Debates over Money, Debt, and Taxes in the Constitutional Era, 1776–1836 (1998) excerpt and text search; Thorndike, Joseph J. Their Fair Share: Taxing the Rich in the Age of FDR.
In the 1st century AD, Jewish Zealots in Judaea resisted the poll tax instituted by the Roman Empire. [3]: 1–7 Jesus was accused of promoting tax resistance prior to his torture and execution ("We found this fellow perverting the nation, and forbidding to give tribute to Cæsar, saying that he himself is Christ a King" — Luke 23:2). [4]
The poll tax mechanism varied on a state-by-state basis; in Alabama, the poll tax was cumulative, meaning that a man had to pay all poll taxes due from the age of twenty-one onward in order to vote. In other states, poll taxes had to be paid for several years before being eligible to vote. Enforcement of poll tax laws was patchy.
Suttles (1937) that the Constitution did not bar states from requiring a poll tax to vote, the NCAPT focused on federal protections rather than trying to achieve state action. [5] To achieve those ends, they built coalitions with major civil rights organizations, labor groups, and liberal political organizations. [2]
History of the poll tax by state from 1868 to 1966. Southern states had adopted the poll tax as a requirement for voting as part of a series of laws in the late 19th century intended to exclude black Americans from politics so far as practicable without violating the Fifteenth Amendment. This required that voting not be limited by "race, color ...
The Texas poll tax "required otherwise eligible voters to pay between $1.50 and $1.75 to register to vote – a lot of money at the time, and a big barrier to the working classes and poor". [60] Georgia created a cumulative poll tax requirement in 1877: men of any race 21 to 60 years of age had to pay a sum of money for every year from the time ...