The 24th Amendment was ratified on this date in 1964, making poll taxes illegal in federal elections.
Poll taxes were one way that the states of the former Confederacy circumvented the 15th Amendment. These taxes became common at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Many states included grandfather clauses in their version of the poll tax, allowing people whose parents or grandparents had voted to do so as well. In this way, the taxes disfranchised African-Americans while allowing whites, with some exceptions, to vote.