Poll Tax

Abstract

The poll or capitation (head) tax in the United States was a lump sum tax levied by state and local governments on individuals, who often had to pay the tax in order to vote. Popularly associated with racial and class restrictions on suffrage in the South, it actually expanded the suffrage when it was introduced shortly after the American Revolution, it unintentionally discouraged voting by white women after 1920, it was exaggeratedly blamed for many of the South’s ills in the 1930s and 40s, and after a long crusade against it, it was banned in the mid- 1960s as a mere footnote to the civil rights movement.