MONTGOMERY-John B. Knox of Calhoun County solemnly opened the 1901 constitutional convention declaring its work as important as the decision the state faced 40 years earlier over secession.

   “Then as now the negro was the prominent factor in the issue,” Knox told the 155 all-white male delegates gathered at the Capitol to rewrite the 1875 constitution, according to the official daily journal of the convention stored in the State Archives building.

   Southerners, “with this grave problem of the races to deal with, are face to face with a new epoch in Constitution-making,” Knox told the delegates.

   “So long as the negro remains in insignificant minority, and votes the Republican ticket, our friends in the North tolerate him with complacency, but there is not a northern state, and I might go further and say there is not an intelligent white man in the North, not gangrened by sectional prejudice and hatred of the South, who would consent for a single day to submit to negro rule.”

   A host of economic and political issues also demandedthe attention of delegates, touching on the whole structure of state government and the bedrock issues of taxes, business regulation and education.

   Railroad interests, wealthy plantation owners and industrialists largely shaped provisions over regulation and taxation, resulting in the centralized system of government Alabama still has today.

   But historians agree the common interest of delegates was to keep blacks, poor white Populists and organized labor under control. The black suffrage issue particularly — black men were not prohibited from voting in the 1875 constitution — consumed much of the convention’s time. The constitution, said a convention resolution, “meets practically all the requirements requisite to the security of life, liberty and property, with the one exception, viz., that the negro is allowed to vote. “Be it therefore resolved, that the Committee on Suffrage and Elections be requested and instructed to report to this convention within the next five days an ordinance looking to the disenfranchisement of the negro.”

   Resulting articles set up poll taxes, literacy tests, poorly funded schools for blacks and other racist provisions.

   One delegate to the 1901 constitutional convention declared: “The disqualifying principle in the negro race is not color but character, and the qualifying principle in the white race is not color but mental superiority. I am willing to treat the negro fairly and honestly and give him his rights, but I believe he is incapable of governing himself.”

   A few discordant notes are recorded in the rush to keep blacks under heel.

   A black from Decatur, Dr. Willis E. Steers, pleaded with delegates to produce a fair constitution.

   “You are framing a Constitution for future government of generations of negroes of Alabama as well as other races,” Steers said. ”We are interested because we are law abiding, and must live up to your new Constitution or get out.”

   “Be conservative to us gentlemen. Do not deal a crushing blow. (Alabama) cannot afford to disenfranchise several hundred thousand of its citizens, cannot afford to remove the public educational fund from them. An educated dog is worth a hundred good for nothing curs,” Steers said.

   “We do not demand anything of you ... We simply entreat you as honest citizens to frame a Constitution that will not disgrace the wisdom of Alabama; that will not cause us to degenerate; that will not cause us discontent; that will not cause us to doubt your friendship which we have cherished for nearly 400 years ...”

   Steers’ eloquence did no good. The state’s new constitution effectively kept blacks from exercising the most fundamental right of democracy until Congress passed the Voting Rights Act 64 years later.

Return to: A State Buried in Paper, Introduction

Next: Putting the Six Constitutions of State into Historical Context

Reprinted with Permission from TheHuntsville Times.