Rachel Maddow on the New Poll Tax
By Heather Monday Nov 03, 2008 8:00am
From The Rachel Maddow Show Nov. 2, 2008.
In January 1964, the 24th Amendment to the Constitution abolished the poll tax. A poll tax was a fee you had to pay at the time of voting. If you didn't have the money to pay the poll tax, you couldn't vote. In other words the only people had an affective right to vote were people rich enough to be able to pay the poll tax. Anybody too poor to pay it had no real right to vote. That's why southern states had the poll tax. It was a handy way to keep poor African Americans from voting even if they technically had a Constitutional right to do so. Well it's 44 years down the road now since the poll tax was Constitutionally abolished and what do you know, we've got, sort of, another poll tax. It looks like this.
Full transcript to follow.
