But for many people the poll tax, ranging from $1 to $2, was no trifling thing. Not if you were poor, as many Southerners were. Many of them were sharecroppers. In his 1940 article “Suffrage in the South: The Poll Tax,” George C. Stoney noted that in Mississippi, the average farm family’s income was “less than $100 a year.” The poll tax would eat up almost 2 percent of the family’s income. If there were two would-be voters in that household, the poll tax would eat up nearly 4 percent. If three or four would-be voters . . . What’s more, for many states, the poll tax was cumulative. For every
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