Quotes About Poll tax

I think there should be a literacy test and a poll tax for people to vote.

We should be forced to give so many exemptions and concessions (inevitably to the benefit of high spending authorities in Inner London) that the flat-rate poll tax would rapidly become a surrogate income tax.

My early years as a political activist were dominated by the poll tax.

I fail to understand how you can justify a poll tax on the entire population, yet exclude a significant proportion of that population from programmes that this tax is paying for.

I think there should be a literacy test and a poll tax for people to vote.

I grew up under Thatcher; the era of apartheid; the era of the poll tax; the era of riots. I remember Neil Kinnock was a hero.

Workers who campaigned for Populist tickets were blacklisted and could not find jobs. Barriers to voting, such as the poll tax or education requirements, were stiffened. Press aligned with one party or the other "systematically played on racial, sectional, and class fears to alert readers to the Populist menace.

When I ran for governor, I talked about the disenfranchisement of voters. I talked about the history that we've had. We've had a horrible history here in Virginia going back to 1901 - the poll tax, literacy tests, disenfranchisement of felons. We're one of the worst four states in America on allowing people back in with voting rights.

As late as 1942, for instance, only 3 percent of the voting-age population cast a ballot in seven poll tax states.116 Just 3 percent of an electorate in these states decided who would sit in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives to shape federal policy.

For this project I interviewed the Reverend William Barber, Fred Harris, and Jim Hightower, three men who were enormously helpful in explaining the reform tradition and the power of mass movements. There are moments with all of them that I will never forget, but the one I am truly sorry I could not work into the text was when Hightower showed me a framed Texas poll tax receipt from 1964, a memento of a thankfully bygone era.