Following the abolishment of slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment (1866) extended citizenship to all native-born men and women and promised them equal protection under the law. However, the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) was needed in order to guarantee that no state could deny its qualifying citizens-that is, males over the age of 21- the right to vote on principle of race, color, or previous enslavement. In retaliation, many states established a poll tax with the intention of preventing poorer and newly enfranchised citizens from participating in elections. Virginia's Conservative Party amended the state constitution in 1876 to add the first state poll tax, but this provision was removed when the constitution was again amended in 1882.

In 1902, more changes to the Virginia Constitution prevented most of the state's African American men and about half of the state's white men who had voted in previous elections from exercising their rights. Beginning in 1904, new voting applicants were required to pay $1.50 in poll tax for the three years preceding an election in order to participate. All poll taxes were finally abolished in 1964, when the Twenty-Fourth Amendment made the institution illegal.

The practice of keeping separate registers for Black and White voters became a requirement in 1884 by the Virginia election boards. However, in 1920, women over the age of 21 were allowed to be added to these books-though still divided by race-when they received the right to vote through the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. In Richmond, some 13,000 women were registering by October of the same year, but Virginia itself did not ratify the amendment until 1952.