And say a black person could afford to pay the poll tax, there was the intimidation factor. You see, it was members of law enforcement who collected the poll tax. White sheriffs and sheriffs’ deputies were notorious in the black community for their brutality. A 1965 Commission on Civil Rights report told of a sheriff who “instructed his deputies to require all persons paying poll taxes for the first time to apply to him personally.” This was in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, where “most whites but few Negroes had registered to vote.”
