Not all of Alabama’s six constitutions have garnered the scorn critics heap on the current one.

   In fact, the first — drafted when Huntsville was a territorial capital — was regarded at that time and by historians since as the most democratic constitution of its time, allowing universal white manhood suffrage without regard to wealth, literacy or church affiliation.

   The next revision came in 1861 near the beginning of the Civil War, when Gov. Andrew Barry Moore issued a proclamation calling for a constitutional convention following the election of Abraham Lincoln as president.

   The Legislature had empowered the governor to call a convention in the event of the election of a president not sympathetic to Southern issues. The finished product largely mirrored the 1819 constitution and was enacted without voter approval. The third constitution followed defeat of the Confederacy. Provisional Gov. Lewis Eliphalet Parsons called the convention in 1865 to have Alabama readmitted to the Union, but the resulting blueprint never went into effect because Alabama was under military rule. Reconstruction Republicans, who deemed the ‘65 document far too lenient toward whites who had engineered secession, forced through another constitution just three years later which gave newly freed blacks considerable rights.

   But just eight years later, with Federal military rule ended, voters demanded another constitutional convention. The resulting document reflected strong anti-Reconstruction sentiment. Its white, wealthy authors went to great lengths to limit government spending and regulatory control and to diminish the role of blacks in the election process. The turn of a new century ushered in less federal concern for protection of the rights of blacks.

   In 1901, Alabama, like other states throughout the old Confederacy, adopted a constitution designed to remove blacks even further from any meaningful political role. The 1901 constitution that remains in effect today still harbors many of those racist provisions such as a system of separate schools for whites and blacks, a poll tax, literacy tests and a prohibition against interracial marriage.

   All have since been struck by the courts or rendered moot by subsequent constitutional amendments.

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Reprinted with Permission from TheHuntsville Times.