I Thought I Knew About the Poll Tax, but I Was Wrong
How a bunch of vintage documents gave me a fascinating history lesson.
I periodically look at eBay and Etsy listings of old paper ephemera, which has occasionally led me to write posts about vintage invoices and letterhead. But while recently browsing some ephemera listings, I came across something I’d never seen before: a receipt for the payment of a poll tax (shown above).
As you can see, the receipt was issued on January 23rd, 1923, to one O.P. Stevens, a 37-year-old White woman living in Lufkin, Texas. Her occupation is listed as “Hw,” which presumably means she was a housewife. She paid a poll tax of $1.75, which would translate to about $33 in today’s money.
I learned in junior high, just as you probably did, that Southern states often used poll taxes to disenfranchise Black citizens during the Jim Crow era. But I hadn’t realized, or maybe I just forgot, that the poll tax was also applied to White voters. In addition, I was confused by the date on the receipt — was Texas holding some sort of election in January? Of 1923?
Moreover, as I searched eBay and other sites for more poll tax receipts, I found many of them from non-Southern states. These next three, for example, are from Massachusetts, Maine, and California, respectively: