You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast.

A major change in a state's attitude towards an amendment started, as sometimes things do, not with a politician or court case, but with a

group of students asking a simple question.

It's 1989 at Hillside High School in Durham, North Carolina, and students are looking at the

Constitution during the bicentennial and beginning

to trace what had been added to it over time, not just what had been written in 1787. They found

that the 13th Amendment had been ratified by North Carolina, as that amendment banning slavery should have been.

But when they reached the 24th Amendment, the one that abolished the poll tax, they hit a gap.

North Carolina, decades after the amendment had taken effect, had never formally ratified.

Music I'm going to be That discovery might have remained a classroom curiosity, but instead became a project in citizenship.

The students learned what the poll tax had been, and they realized it wasn't just a tax and it didn't just fund polls or elections or even government it had another function it was a deliberate barrier to voting especially for

african-american citizens and for that matter also for poor white citizens as well, as we're going to

get into on this podcast. Many of them had never heard of it before. They were horrified by the

realization that Americans once had to pay to vote. And they work with local legislators to push a

ratification bill into the North Carolina legislature.

Now, this is 1989.

The time for states to ratify was 1962, 1963, and the very tip of 1964.

The amendment's already been added to the Constitution.

But it was a kind of civics lesson playing out in real time.

They tracked the bill.

They wrote letters.

And they watched as something symbolic, but long overdue, moved through the process.

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