The 24th Amendment prohibited poll taxes or other taxes as qualifications for voting.
Poll taxes had been a way states had discriminated against black voters, by using their lower income status and poll taxes as a way to prevent them from going to the polls. During the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, this was challenged. The 24th Amendment, ratified in 1964, said: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax," and added: "The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."
Simply the Age of Enlightenment inspired the American Revolution that sparked the creation of the American Government.
European politics, philosophy, science and communications were radically reoriented during the course of the “long 18th century” (1685-1815) as part of a movement referred to by its participants as the Age of Reason, or simply the Enlightenment.
Enlightenment philosophers John Locke, Charles Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau all developed theories of government in which some or even all the people would govern. These thinkers had a profound effect on the American and French revolutions and the democratic governments that they produced.
The ideas of the French Enlightenment philosophes strongly influenced the American revolutionaries. French intellectuals met in salons like this one to exchange ideas and define their ideals such as liberty, equality, and justice.
This intermingling of powers was a determining condition in the struggle between church and state that was a main theme in the history of the West in the Middle Ages
