#polltax — Public Fediverse posts

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#Racist #PollTax, #VoterSuppression

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https://www.democracynow.org/2026/9/3/voting_rights_tarrant_county_texas

#TarrantCounty #TX #Texas

#VotingRights #Midterms #FIGHTBACK 🧯

“I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore”*…

Your correspondent is headed into a melange of meetings (and their attendant travel), so (Roughly) Daily will be on pause for a few days. Regular service should resume on or around June 19. I’ll leave you with a (timely?) tale from the past…

“Steve” publishes a wonderful weekly newsletter, Dates With History. In a recent post he shares the story of Wat Tyler and the Peasants’ Revolt…

If you walked into Smithfield in the City of London in the small hours of the morning, you’d find the great Victorian iron-and-glass halls of the old meat market, traders hard at work while dazed club-goers spill out of nearby Fabric nightclub, uncertain for a moment what century they’re in.

A few steps away stands St Bartholomew’s Hospital—Barts—the oldest hospital in London still on its original site, patching people up since 1123.

On one of the blocked window bays of the hospital’s north wall, a memorial marks where the Scottish hero William Wallace was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1305, alongside remembrances of the Protestant martyrs burned here under Queen Mary between 1555 and 1558.

A third plaque, on another blocked window bay, recalls an event 645 years ago next Monday—15 June 1381.

That day, a man rode into Smithfield at the head of a rebel army and tilted the course of English history. The fact that he was dead before the day was out is beside the point.

His name was Wat Tyler…

[Steve explains the origins and workings of the feudal system in England, the (extraordinary) impact of the Black Death, the Poll Tax, the subsequent rise of peasant resistance, the Revolt itself, Wat’s demise, and the immediate aftermath. He concludes…]

… Wat Tyler enters the historical record on 7 June 1381 and exits eight days later, 15 June 1381, when he was executed. That’s his lot.

The revolt failed.

But the idea it carried—that labour had value, that taxation required some semblance of fairness, that the common man had rights—survived.

The Peasants’ Revolt echoed what the barons had done at Runnymede in 1215—confront a king and extract written concessions from him. Tyler’s rebels knew their history. Had they succeeded, those sealed charters would have amounted to a Magna Carta for the poor.

Over the three centuries that followed, the power of English rulers to do as they pleased eroded steadily. By 1689, the Bill of Rights made explicit what three hundred years had been quietly establishing—that rulers governed within limits they did not set themselves.

Wat Tyler hadn’t written that principle. But he had fomented one of its earliest and most violent proofs of concept.

There wouldn’t be another poll tax in England for six hundred years—until Margaret Thatcher introduced one in 1990 and was promptly removed from office.

History, it turns out, has a long memory for bad ideas…

(Trying to) hold power to account: “It’s 1381 and the peasants are revolting.”

* “Howard Beale” (Peter Finch) in Paddy Chayefsky‘s and Sidney Lumet‘s Network

###

As we ponder power, we might recall that it was on this date in 1939, at Hyde Park, that President Franklin D. Roosevelt hosted a luncheon for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of England. Despite his mother’s horror, FDR wanted to show the King and Queen an old-fashioned, American style picnic– featuring that most proletariat of dishes, the hot dog. In the U.S. to raise support U.S. for Britain’s cause in World War II, the royal couple at least appeared to enjoy the meal.

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What Is A #PollTax? Definition and Examples

By Robert Longley, July 27, 2022

Excerpt: "In the United States, the origin of the poll tax—and the controversy surrounding it—is associated with the agrarian unrest of the 1880s and 1890s, which culminated in the rise of the Populist Party in the Western and the Southern states. The Populists, representing low-income farmers, gave Democrats in these areas the only serious competition that they had experienced since the end of Reconstruction. The competition led both parties to see the need to attract Black citizens back into politics and to compete for their vote. As the Democrats defeated the Populists, they amended their state constitutions or drafted new ones to include various discriminatory disfranchising devices. When the payment of the poll tax was made a prerequisite to voting, impoverished #BlackPeople and often #PoorWhitePeople, unable to afford the tax, were denied the #RightToVote.

"During the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era in the United States, the former states of the Confederacy repurposed the poll tax explicitly to prevent formerly enslaved #BlackAmericans from voting. Although the #14thAmendment and #15thAmendment [s] gave Black men full #citizenship and #VotingRights, the power to determine what constituted a qualified voter was left to the states. Beginning with Mississippi in 1890, #SouthernStates quickly exploited this legal loophole. At its 1890 constitutional convention, Mississippi imposed a $2.00 poll tax and early registration as a requirement for voting. This had catastrophic results for the Black electorate. Whereas approximately 87,000 Black citizens registered to vote in 1869, representing almost 97% of the eligible voting-age population, fewer than 9,000 of them registered to vote after the state’s new constitution took effect in 1892.

"Between 1890 and 1902, all eleven former #Confederate states imposed some form of a poll tax to deter Black Americans from voting. The tax, which ranged from $1 to $2, was prohibitively expensive for most Black sharecroppers, who earned their wages in crops, not currency. Beyond the cost, voter registration and tax payment offices were usually located in public spaces designed to intimidate potential voters, like courthouses and police stations.

"The southern states also enacted #JimCrowLaws intended to reinforce #RacialSegregation and restrict Black voting rights. Along with the poll tax, most of these states also imposed literacy tests, which required potential voters to read and interpret in writing sections of the state constitution. So-called 'grandfather clauses' allowed a person to vote without paying the poll tax or passing the literacy test if their father or grandfather had voted before the abolition of slavery in 1865; a stipulation that automatically precluded all formerly enslaved persons. Together, the grandfather clause and the literacy tests effectively restored voting rights to poorer White voters who could not pay the poll tax, while further suppressing the Black vote.

"Poll taxes of varying stipulations lingered in Southern states well into the 20th century. While some states abolished the tax in the years after World War I, others retained it. Ratified in 1964, the #24thAmendment to the #USConstitution declared the tax unconstitutional in federal elections.

"Specifically, the 24th Amendment states:

'The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.'

"President Lyndon B. Johnson called the amendment a 'triumph of liberty over restriction.' 'It is a verification of people's rights, which are rooted so deeply in the mainstream of this nation's history,' he said.

"The #VotingRightsAct of 1965 created significant changes in the voting status of Black Americans throughout the South. The law prohibited the states from using literacy tests and other methods of excluding Black Americans from voting. Before this, only an estimated twenty-three percent of voting-age Black citizens were registered nationally, but by 1969 the number had jumped to sixty-one percent.

"In 1966 the U.S. Supreme Court went beyond the Twenty-fourth Amendment by ruling in the case of Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections that under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, states could not levy a poll tax as a prerequisite for voting in state and local elections. In two months in the spring of 1966, federal courts declared poll tax laws unconstitutional in the last four states that still had them, starting with Texas on February 9. Similar decisions soon followed in Alabama and Virginia. Mississippi's $2.00 poll tax (about $18 today) was the last to fall, declared unconstitutional on April 8, 1966."

https://www.thoughtco.com/poll-tax-definition-and-examples-5443130
#VoterDisenfranchisement #USPol #USHistory #TwentyFourthAmendment #FourteenthAmendment #FifteenthAmendment #VoterRights #LiteracyTests #USElections #VoterSuppression #BlackAmericans