"A Trap, Not a Test"

The first U.S. poll tax on voters, a ten-shilling levy enacted by New Hampshire in 1784, did away with property qualifications for voting, thus served as an important halfway step to full suffrage. Though almost all the states abandoned even this vestige of moneyed privilege before the Civil War, Southern legislatures subsequently revived it as a device to disfranchise the Negro.

Most of them eventually dropped the levy in favor of more effective literacy tests, and the 24th Amendment to the Constitution (1964) barred it altogether in federal elections. Nonetheless, four states--Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas--still tax voters in local and state elections.* Last week, in accordance with a congressional directive in the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department interceded in a suit brought against the Virginia levy by four Negroes "of very limited means," formally asked the Supreme Court to outlaw "for once and for all" this "serious clog in the exercise of the vote."

While the Virginia tax is only $1.50 a year, residents who have not been voting must pay for three years--a total of $5.01 with penalties and interest. Attorney Robert L. Segar in a companion suit pointed out that the tax lay most heavily on Virginia Negroes, 54% of whom have family incomes below the Federal Government's $3,000 poverty line. "The tax represents a trap, not a test," he asserted. "A person who cannot afford three meals a day is going to think twice about paying for the right to vote." Negro Attorney Joseph Jordan noted that no member of his race has served in the Virginia legislature since the pretax days of Reconstruction. The poll tax, he said, had removed Negro legislators as effectively as "a magic wand."

Though the Supreme Court has widely extended the guarantees of the due-process clause of the 14th Amendment in recent years, Congress has made the court's decision in this case more difficult by having refused to include state and local elections in the 24th Amendment. How, asked Virginia's Counsel George D. Gibson, can the court kill the tax in state and local elections when a constitutional amendment was required to kill it in federal elections?

*Vermont has a tax, ranging from $3.50 to $18, for voting in town meetings, town elections and school board elections.

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