Pay to play

In the South, two big obstacles to voting up until the passage of the Voting rights act were poll taxes and tests.  Poll taxes were a fee everyone had to pay in order to vote.  

Though the fee was applied to everyone, according to Brooker (2012), it would have been around $25-$50 in today's money.  That would have been enough to make voting too expensive for poor whites and many blacks.  Even if you were an African American who could easily afford the money, in many places you had the extra obstacle of...

...a literacy test.