In 1901 Alabama dealt a final blow to the reforms instituted three decades earlier during Reconstruction when it all but eliminated African American voting in its new Constitution. John Knox, the president of the constitutional convention announce to voters that “The new Constitution eliminates the ignorant Negro vote and places the control of our government where God Almighty intended it should be — with the Anglo-Saxon race.” Now a commission in Alabama is examining the racist laws passed to overthrow Reconstruction.
The racist laws in the Constitution have been legally invalid for half-a-century, but Alabama has not removed the sections from the constitution.
According to the New York Times:
The effort will start by extracting passages like Section 256, which still says that “separate schools shall be provided for white and colored children, and no child of either race shall be permitted to attend a school of the other race,”
The state Constitution also includes a ban on interracial marriage, though the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such marriages to be fully legal in all states in 1967. “The Legislature shall never pass any law to authorize or legalize any marriage between any white person and a Negro, or descendant of a negro,” the state Constitution still says.
And it includes descriptions of former voting requirements that were generally used to disenfranchise Black residents, including literacy tests and poll taxes. (The Constitution, written before women won the right to vote nationally, also includes language restricting voting to men.)
The full text of John Knox’s speech can be found here.
I will be posting an analysis of how Knox used the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction to justify the 1901 Jim Crow constitution in an upcoming post.
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