How does Tennessee still show echoes of the old poll tax?
As long as there have been elections, there have been efforts to limit who can vote. Plus, the local news for August 3, 2026, and Shakespeare in prison.
Below is a partial transcript of the episode.
It’s August 3rd, 2026.
Today, we’re in that lull between the end of early voting and a primary election day. But this day in 1950 was significant in Tennessee as the last time voters in this state had to pay a poll tax in order to cast a primary ballot.
I’m Nina Cardona, and this is your daily digest of what’s happening around Middle Tennessee with context and backstory from Nashville Public Radio — WPLN News.
As long as there have been elections, there have been politicians trying to create systems around voting that favors their own viewpoint, party or platform. And they’ve found a variety of methods for trying to nudge things in their own direction.
This year, we’ve seen a whole drama play out around one classic option: redistricting to gerrymander the political maps into a sure bet for the majority group.
In the earliest days of the United States, most states pulled the lever of limiting the right to vote to white, male landowners. State by state, the requirement to own property fell away by the 1850s. And after the Civil War, the 15th Amendment made it illegal to bar men from voting based on race.
And at that point, the people who wanted to make sure things didn’t get, um, “out of hand” (as they might say) had to get a little more creative. Their main concern with voting, one which they shared with many of America’s founding fathers, was making sure that the privilege was only extended to people that they considered smart enough, moral enough, and invested enough in the outcome of the election. And because of their bigoted ideas about race and class, they simply could not accept the idea that the average Black or poor person met that standard. And especially not poor Black people.
Or women, but they didn’t have to worry about that half of the population yet, since it would be decades before female suffrage became the law of the land.
After the Civil War, when Tennessee rewrote its Constitution in order to rejoin the United States, its authors included a clause that required voters to pay an annual tax in order to obtain a ballot. The tax was to be at least 50 cents, and no more than one dollar. That sounds like literal pocket change today. But back then, that amount was basically a full day’s wage for a farm worker. And for a lot of poor people, which at the time included most Black people, every cent they earned was pretty much wiped away immediately by the basic costs of food and shelter.
So for those folks at the bottom of the economic ladder, paying the poll tax was basically the equivalent of fasting for a day. Combine that with everything in society communicating the idea that there would never be a candidate who really cared about them. Altogether, it was a pretty powerful message saying to poor and Black people “why bother…just don’t even try to vote.” Meanwhile, they had kids to feed. They had hard, manual labor that demanded hours of their time every day. Just living was a lot.
In other words, the poll tax worked to depress the vote.
Which isn’t to say it was exactly popular. Think about the Republican voter these days who looks at the redistricting and says, “well, I like that our side will have more people in Congress, but I do feel a little weird about the 9th District stretching halfway across the state.” There are people now who feel a little queasy about the political gamesmanship, but ultimately shrug it off.
It was the same with the poll tax. Now, the average white Tennessean at the time might not have been bothered by efforts to suppress the Black vote, but they at least seemed to feel like the poll tax was kind of a pain.
There was significant debate on the matter. There was confusion about who was supposed to collect it and how people were supposed to prove that they’d paid it.
The government tried to smooth over some concerns the same way they did generations later when new forms of gambling were made legal: proceeds from the poll tax were earmarked for education.
In some communities, that led to the school board becoming very concerned about making sure that poll tax was collected. In some places, they took over the job themselves.
By the late 1880s, the legislature decided it needed to put more roadblocks in between Black voters and the ballot box. Tennessee adopted a secret ballot – that meant voters had to be able to read what was on the ballot. There was initially a clause allowing certain illiterate voters to get a little help. It said anyone who had cast a ballot as far back as 1857 or before could have someone read the ballot to them. 1857 was the last election before the Civil War, and by this point it was four decades in the past. So that help was only available to older white men, not Black voters who lacked access to schooling.
Voter registration was instituted for the first time – but only in urban areas where there were large concentrations of Black voters. The way it worked back then, that meant two separate trips to a central location – one to register and one on election day. And the people the officials considered undesirable voters didn’t have any option for paid leave or time off in the middle of the day. Popping over to the courthouse to fill out some forms during normal business hours meant going without pay for however long that errand took. It was almost like another tax.
The state’s newspapers heralded the passage of those laws as the end of Black voting in Tennessee.
The whole time these laws were in force, there were people crying out for them to be overturned. There were people decrying the racism of it all. There were advocates for the poor saying they weren’t fair to anyone with a low income. Ultimately, in 1953, the state’s Supreme Court determined the central tentpole of that cluster of laws, the poll tax, was unconstitutional.
And then, in 1965, the federal government adopted a landmark piece of legislation that wiped away a wide array of discriminatory practices, called the Voting Rights Act. That is, you may recall, the law that was partially overturned by this year’s US Supreme Court decision that opened the door to the recent redistricting.
Now, the redrawing of Tennessee’s Congressional map is not the only controversial move regarding voting that’s been made in recent memory. 15 years ago, there was a lot of outcry when the state started requiring voters to show photo ID. It was billed as an election security measure, but activists and advocacy groups were quick to point out that it put people who didn’t drive at a distinct disadvantage. That’s the overlapping factor in a Venn diagram of poor folks, older folks, some of the youngest voters and disabled people. The state did make it easier to get a photo ID that isn’t a drivers’ license, but you’ve still got to make the trip to the DMV and the headaches that are involved in that. So, some pointed out, it’s another of those requirements that functions as a sneaky, hidden poll tax.
And the complaint we hear now is that sneaky and hidden has become the name of the game in trying to cut certain voters out of the democratic process. Back in 1889, Tennessee’s governor said very clearly that he wanted to put up obstacles to voting in order to stomp out the Black vote. Nobody is going to say that out loud anymore.
But that is exactly the assertion being made in lawsuits that still hang over our state’s election system at the moment. The courts did not move to stop the new districts from going into effect for this election, but the lawsuits alleging that redistricting was motivated by race, not partisanship, are still moving forward, combined into one large case in the federal court system.
Credits:
This is a production of Nashville Public Radio.
Host/producer: Nina Cardona
Editor: LaTonya Turner
Additional support: Mack Linebaugh, Tony Gonzalez, Megan Jones and the staff of WPLN and WNXP
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