Early Mention of Instituting Poll Taxes Against Blacks.
Addressed to “Colonel” [Charles Wetmore Broadfoot] of Fayetteville, NC, on December 5, 1871, Edward P. Powers writes that he has canvassed the town, and, due to their losses in the August elections, advises delaying the next election beyond the holidays until May or risk certain defeat. In the left margin he anticipates an upcoming poll tax measure will be passed by jotting, “Every Negro will pay his poll,” thus inferring blacks not be permitted to vote without paying a substantial fee.
The poll tax was used in colonial North Carolina simply to raise revenue, yet attempts were made to reinstitute it to restrict voter registration after the state ratified the 15th Amendment on March 3, 1869, thereby enfranchising 50,000 black North Carolinians. The state’s 1870 constitution allowed a poll tax, but Republicans vigorously opposed enacting it. Consequently, Col. Broadfoot (1842-1919), elected to the state legislature from 1870-72, and Edward Powers (another ex-CSA officer, tax clerk, and by 1884, a Fayetteville tax board commission member), were alarmed that blacks would swell the 1872 voter rolls for Republican candidates.
As Reconstruction drew to a close, Democrats brought discriminatory poll tax bills to a vote in the Virginia, Georgia, and North Carolina legislatures in 1876, 1877, and 1881, respectively. Emblematic of the repressive “Jim Crow” era (c. 1878-1958), within thirty years, eleven southern states would adopt poll taxes. The one to two-dollar fee (equivalent of up to $60 today) effectively prohibited blacks, poor whites, and Native Americans from casting their ballots.
The poll tax was just one of several draconian measures that states adopted to disenfranchise black voters. It was finally rescinded by North Carolina, the last state to do so, in 1971.