Mom found this poll tax receipt while helping Grandpa clean out the old house. I'd heard about the old poll taxes all my life, but had never seen an actual receipt for one until now.* (I've edited this one to remove the voter's name.) What makes this one particularly interesting is its date of issue: April 1, 1957. I'm sure few people who paid their poll taxes on that day would have imagined that the Central High Crisis would occur in September of that year.

I did a little research on poll taxes, and found out that they had been adopted by all eleven of the original Confederate states by 1904. In order to vote, one had to save the receipts and present them at the polls, which would explain why this one was carefully tucked away. This article, by a Prof. J. Morgan Kousser at Cal Tech, notes that "in five states, the poll tax could accumulate for more than one year - in Georgia after 1877 and Alabama after 1901, indefinitely. One knowledgeable observer termed Georgia's cumulative poll tax "the most effective bar to Negro suffrage ever devised." Kousser also observes that most of the African-American population sharecropped at that time, which meant that while they had a low annual income in general, their cash income was even lower. If they bought most of their necessities on credit, then they'd be lucky to see even a few dollars in cash a year. A $1 poll tax was an impossible amount for them to pay.

Because everyone, regardless of color, had to pay the poll tax, the states claimed that it was a nondiscriminatory policy. Kousser writes that the Southern Conference on Human Welfare took action against the taxes in the 1930s, and their efforts continued on into the 50s. Several states repealed their taxes during this time, but it wasn't until the 24th Amendment in 1964 that the poll taxes were finally abolished in all Southern states.

*I'd also never seen anything that referred to any part of the city as "Big Rock."