Martin Luther King’s Compromise That Turned the South Red
The source of the trouble was the poll tax. Civil rights activists, including Dr. King, believed that the tax was a significant obstacle for those who had succeeded in registering to vote. When Southern whites returned to power after the death of Reconstruction they embedded devices in their state constitutions designed to circumvent the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments—literacy tests, residency and property qualifications, and poll taxes. The intent of the laws was explicit: “The plan,” said one Mississippi official in 1890, “is to invest permanently the powers of government in the hands of the people who ought to have them—the white people.”
And so it was for nearly a century. When Rosa Parks, on her third attempt, succeeded in registering to vote in 1945, she faced one final hurdle: a poll tax of $1.50 cents. That may not seem like much, but black voters were forced to pay it retroactively, so Parks, at 42, paid $16.50 , “a considerable amount of money,” she later noted.
When the Voting Rights Act was submitted to the Congress in March 1965, liberal legislators saw it as an opportunity to abolish the tax. But Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and President Lyndon Johnson were reluctant to support them because of constitutional impediments.
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