Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Repeal of poll tax restored the vote to Black Arkansans
A poll tax is a uniform per capita tax levied upon a specified class of people as a requirement for the right to vote. Arkansas’ first state constitution, adopted in 1836, authorized a poll tax to be used for county purposes. But things changed following the Civil War.
Reflecting the more democratic spirit of the convention that authored it, the 1868 Arkansas state constitution declared, “The levying of taxes by the poll is grievous and oppressive; therefore the general assembly shall never levy a poll tax excepting for school purposes.” At the end of the Reconstruction era, however, a fifth state constitution was adopted in 1874, one that did not forbid the poll tax.
Collection of the poll tax proved difficult, and payment was at best sporadic. However, efforts at tax collection were redoubled during the agrarian revolt of the late 19th century. Angry at the failure of the state’s dominant Democratic Party to provide any meaningful economic relief, thousands of yeoman farmers began to “kick over the traces” and join new third-party agrarian insurgencies, acting first in 1888 and 1890 through the Union Labor Party and later, beginning in 1892, through the Populist or People’s Party. When Arkansas Republicans, half of whom at the time were Black, endorsed the Union Labor nominees for state office in 1888 and 1890, the effect was to create something largely unprecedented in Arkansas — a biracial coalition of poor Blacks and poor whites.
Conservative elites moved swiftly to deflect this threat. In 1891, the Arkansas General Assembly adopted a new state election law that effectively gave the state Democratic Party control over the appointment of voting officials in every county. The same Legislature also proposed a new poll tax amendment to Arkansas’ constitution.
In the 1892 election, the first under the new Election Law of 1891, the poll tax proposition received a plurality but not an absolute majority of all the votes cast in the election; some 23,750 people chose not to cast votes on the amendment at all. Although the state constitution clearly mandated that a proposed constitutional amendment had to be approved by a majority of voters, the Democratic-controlled Legislature nonetheless declared the amendment approved.
Nevertheless, complaints about its questionable ratification persisted for years. Hoping to deflect the judicial assaults that were beginning to take place, the Legislature submitted a second poll tax amendment, Amendment 9, to the voters in 1908. In this election, a voter had to possess a poll tax receipt before he could participate in the election and vote on the poll tax amendment. Under these circumstances, the new amendment received the necessary majority.
Together, the 1891 election law and the 1892 poll tax amendment had a revolutionary impact on Arkansas politics. There were 65,000 fewer voters in 1894 than in 1890, a drastic decline in turnout. The combined impact of both measures had by 1894 completely swept Blacks from the state Legislature, as well as from most local and county offices (not until 1973 would Black people again serve in the Arkansas General Assembly). The 1891 election law and the 1892 poll tax amendment also broke the back of the third-party agrarian insurgency and destroyed any hope that it might transform the lives of the state’s rural poor, both white and Black.
Aside from reducing Black representation in elected bodies, the poll tax fueled a pervasive climate of political corruption within Arkansas. The wholesale purchase of poll tax receipts by others not in the purchaser’s immediate family was widespread, and illegally obtained poll tax receipts were widely distributed by candidates to their supporters. Legal requirements that poll tax receipts be stamped or initialed by election officials at the polls were routinely ignored, allowing some dishonest voters to “vote early and often” at different precincts on election day.
Even many of those Arkansans who could afford to pay poll taxes increasingly did not bother to vote, with election turn-outs steadily declining. Gov. Sid McMath attempted in vain to obtain the repeal of the poll tax following World War II. Only in November 1964 did Arkansas voters approve a new state constitutional amendment that replaced the poll tax with a modern voter registration system. That same year, the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, prohibiting the use of the poll tax in congressional and presidential elections. Passage of the new Federal Voting Rights Act by Congress the following year and a 1966 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections, extended this prohibition to all state and local elections throughout the nation.