Martin Luther King, Jr's Role in Ending the Poll Tax

Writing for The Daily Beast, Gary May gives a long-form account of the part played by MLK in the congressional battles over ending the poll tax in 1965. May explains how the poll tax was used as part of a strategy to disenfranchise southern blacks de facto, even if they had the right to vote de jure. He also argues that ending the poll tax had a large beneficial impact on poor whites in the four southern states which continued to collect poll taxes at that time.