The women's poll tax repeal movement was a movement in the United States, predominantly led by women, that attempted to secure the abolition of poll taxes as a prerequisite for voting in the Southern states. The movement began shortly after the ratification in 1920 of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which granted suffrage to women. Before obtaining the right to vote, women were not obliged to pay the tax, but shortly after the Nineteenth Amendment became law, Southern states began examining how poll tax statutes could be applied to women. For example, North and South Carolina exempted women from payment of the tax, while Georgia did not require women to pay it unless they registered to vote. In other Southern states, the tax was due cumulatively for each year someone had been eligible to vote.
Payment of the tax was difficult for Black, Hispanic, and women voters, primarily because their incomes were much lower than those of white men. For married women, coverture prevented them from controlling their own assets. Recognizing that payment of the tax as a prerequisite to voting could lead to their disenfranchisement, women began organizing themselves in the 1920s to repeal the poll tax laws, but the movement did not gain much traction until the Great Depression in the 1930s. Both black and white women pressed at state and national levels for legislative action to abolish laws that required paying to vote. In addition, women filed a series of lawsuits to try to effect change. By the 1950s, the intersection of sexist and racist customs and law was apparent to those fighting the poll tax. This created collaborations between activists involved in the poll tax movement and those active in the broader civil rights movement.
Louisiana abandoned its poll tax law in 1932, and the number of women voters increased by 77 percent. Women's activism helped bring about the repeal of poll tax legislation in Florida in 1937, in Georgia in 1945, in Tennessee in 1953, and in Arkansas in 1964. That year, the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed, prohibiting poll taxes as a barrier to voting in federal elections. Passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 gave federal authority to the Department of Justice to institute lawsuits against the four states that still used poll tax to disenfranchise voters in state elections. The Supreme Court finally settled the four-decades-long struggle, abolishing the requirement to pay poll tax to be able to vote in any election, federal or state, in their ruling on Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections in 1966. (Full article...)
Image 7Kennedy meets with march leaders. Left to Right – Willard Wirtz, Matthew Ahmann, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Rabbi Joachin Prinz, Eugene Carson Blake, A. Philip Randolph, President John F. Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Walter Reuther, Whitney Young, Floyd McKissick, Roy Wilkins (not in order) (from March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom)
Image 10Poster from Office of War Information. Domestic Operations Branch. News Bureau, 1943 (from Civil rights movement (1896–1954))
Image 11Rosa Parks being fingerprinted by Deputy Sheriff D.H. Lackey after being arrested on February 22, 1956, during the Montgomery bus boycott. (from African-American women in the civil rights movement)
Image 12A diagram showing where Rosa Parks sat in the unreserved section at the time of her arrest (from Montgomery bus boycott)
Image 17Leaders of the March on Washington speak to the news media after meeting with President Kennedy at the White House. (from March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom)
Image 28Additional image of Civil Rights protestors executing a sit-in at a Woolworth's in Durham, North Carolina on February 10th of 1960. (from Sit-in movement)
Image 30Rosa Parks being fingerprinted by Deputy Sheriff D.H. Lackey after her arrest for boycotting public transportation (from Montgomery bus boycott)
Viola Fauver Liuzzo (née Gregg; April 11, 1925 – March 25, 1965) was an American civil rights activist in Detroit, Michigan. She was known for going to Alabama in March 1965 to support the Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights. On March 25, 1965, she was shot dead by three Ku Klux Klan members while driving activists between the cities and transportation.
Also in the pursuit car was an undercover informant working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). His role in this and other events was not revealed until 1978. To deflect attention from the FBI, its head J. Edgar Hoover made defamatory claims about Liuzzo. (Full article...)
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