Jackson W. Giles knew Alabama had changed, but the fury of the new order shocked him. Musty court records at the state's archives tell how he lost his right to vote in Alabama in only a day, and why he never got it back.

   Mr. Giles had voted for 20 years and had been active in Montgomery's 4th Ward. But like other men, he had to register under the rigid voting laws of Alabama's new constitution of 1901.

   The stiff qualifications didn't deter him. Mr. Giles had a good job at the Post Office. He could read and write. He and his wife, Mary, owned their home, and he had paid his poll tax of $1.50.

   But Mr. Giles was black, and he had to satisfy three white registrars that Thursday, March 13, 1902. And they turned him away, as they did thousands of other African-Americans who sought to sign up that year, among them a Methodist bishop.   Meanwhile, no white applicant left the Montgomery courthouse - at least during 1902 - without being a voter, the old records show.

   As Mr. Giles and other blacks had feared, the democratic lights were dimming across Alabama. The Montgomery Advertiser of the day explained, "It was generally understood that the spirit of the new constitution would be carried out and the Negro barred from participating in the future government of the state."

   By 1908, only 2 percent of black men in Alabama could vote, a stark reversal of African-Americans' enfranchisement after the Civil War.

   The new constitution had done its job effectively, but it hadn't stopped there. Indeed, it wasn't supposed to stop.

   Whites who had the misfortune to be poor became snared in Alabama's new punitive laws and lost their rights, as well. In time, the number of disfranchised whites exceeded that of blacks who had lost the vote.

   In the decade before 1901, nearly 80 percent of eligible Alabamians, white and black, voted. By 1940, only about a third of adults were even registered to vote.

   The document that did this wicked work, the 1901 state constitution, remains Alabama's fundamental charter, the malicious child of a coalition of big planters and industrial magnates. Through fraud, these bosses enshrined their rule in the state's organic law and eliminated their political enemies.

   Alabamians have yet to reverse this century of shame, though we keep amending the decrepit 1901 document. The fathers of this deed have gone to dust, but their sins haunt the living.

   In this series of editorials, the Mobile Register will show specifically how the 1901 constitution continues to harm many Alabamians. We will examine how this document sustains selfish special interests, imposes a dreadfully unfair tax system and denies Alabamians the right to govern themselves at the local level. And we will consider how Alabamians can renounce this shameful legacy by writing a new constitution for new, invigorating times.

   But first, let us continue with the history.

   Jackson W. Giles became less than a full man under the law because the state's reactionary political bosses were determined to strangle dissent and perpetuate their power. They had been frightened by the turbulence of the 1890s, when hard times stalked the land. A coalition of small farmers and workers, white and black, had risen to demand reforms.

   This Populist movement insisted on fair labor laws. It opposed leasing convicts to mines and sawmills - a brutal industrial slavery that competed with free workers. And the Populists wanted honest elections. They were tired of the bosses winning statewide contests by stuffing boxes in the vast plantation region known as the Black Belt, which girdled the state's middle.

   The champion of these reformers was Reuben F. Kolb, a former commissioner of agriculture. In some places, his supporters joined callused hands across the racial line, which frightened the bosses. Twice, in 1892 and 1894, Mr. Kolb apparently won the governorship - only to have his victories nullified by fraudulent votes in the Black Belt, according to the state's historians. To protest, Kolb's backers held their own shadow inauguration in Montgomery on Dec. 1, 1894.

   In response to such challenges, conservative forces began agitating for a new state constitution to replace the 1875 version, which allowed all men to vote. Their cry became "white supremacy."

   Opportunity arrived when the bosses tightened their control of state government with the election of 1900. They called for a referendum on whether to summon a constitutional convention. In counties where Populist discontent simmered, yeoman farmers smelled a conspiracy. Many stayed away from the polls.

   The bosses got their convention the same way they had destroyed Mr. Kolb: through a fraudulent vote count in the Black Belt, where an African-American majority labored under the planters' domination. Since the waning of Reconstruction in 1874, planters in that region had refined their vote stealing into an art. They would throw out thousands of legitimate ballots and substitute fakes - "counting in and counting out," they called it.

   The convention began at noon on Tuesday, May 21, 1901, when 155 delegates, all white and all male, assembled in the state House of Representatives. Montgomery's skies cleared, and the temperature rose into the 70s, inviting spectators to fill the galleries. The delegates elected as their president John B. Knox of Anniston, who was said to be the state's highest-paid corporate lawyer.

   The next day, Mr. Knox announced the ruling Democrats' intention to disfranchise African-Americans, who a generation earlier had stepped up from bondage to citizenship. "There is in the white man an inherited capacity for government, which is wholly wanting in the Negro," bellowed Mr. Knox.

   After hearing dissent from a minority of delegates, the convention followed Mr. Knox's lead and drew up the most restrictive voting rules it could muster against blacks. One effective method gave registrars discretion to determine whether an applicant was of "good character" and thereby worthy of voting.

   But the conspirators had another, quieter motive: They wanted to remove as many poor white voters as they could, thereby reducing the chance of another Populist revolt. In asking for a convention, the bosses had promised that no white man would lose his vote. (Of course, they never considered women to be worthy of suffrage and refused to grant them rights.) The fine print in the proposed new constitution, however, called for registering white males during a one-year grace period - then slamming the door shut with stringent literacy and property-holding requirements.

   Their new document included another particularly sharp weapon: the poll tax. To be eligible to register, a citizen first had to pay $1.50 each year. Many families didn't have that much left over in a week or even a month. Worse, if a voter missed paying for any year, he had to pay the back taxes, too, up to $36.

   Apart from the new voting rules, however, the framers largely readopted the themes of the state's 1875 constitution, pampering their benefactors with low taxes and expressing such distrust of local government that counties received no power to pass laws.

   With their work finished, the framers turned to winning ratification in the face of widespread opposition, particularly in the heavily white counties of Alabama's northern hill country and the rolling Wiregrass region in the southeast.

   The Montgomery Advertiser, mouthpiece for the reactionaries, let slip the framers' plan for victory when it declared that the Black Belt "will roll up one of those old-time Democratic majorities for the new Constitution." In other words, they intended to steal it.

   Returns were late arriving on Nov. 11, 1901, but slowly the great deceit unfolded. The planters had outdone themselves: If we are to believe the results, the "yes" vote was more than 95 percent in six Black Belt counties where African-Americans accounted for 75 percent of the population.

   Elsewhere, the new constitution lost, 76,263 to 72,389, in what was, no doubt, an accurate reflection of the majority's will.

   Despite the certainty of fraud, Gov. William D. Jelks certified the new constitution on Nov. 21, 1901.

   Four months later, Jackson W. Giles was busy fighting back.

   Black opponents of the new constitution had promised that legal challengers would emerge. Mr. Giles was one of those challengers. After organizing the Colored Man's Suffrage Association in Montgomery, he became the plaintiff in a series of lawsuits later known as the "Alabama Cases."

   The first stop was a lawsuit against the three white registrars in the City Court of Montgomery, presided over by Judge A.D. Sayre. Predictably, Mr. Sayre had no sympathy. The judge was the epitome of the Black Belt aristocrat, as his son-in-law, novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, later wrote.

   So began the appeals that took Mr. Giles all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where his counsel, Wilford H. Smith, became the first black lawyer to argue a case before the justices. Mr. Smith informed them that Montgomery County registrars had refused to enroll more than 5,000 black voters solely because of their race, in violation of the 14th and 15th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. As evidence of foul intent, he introduced the vitriolic speeches of Mr. Knox and other leaders of the 1901 convention.

   But the high court's justices, influenced perhaps by a rising tide of racism nationwide, rejected the plea. The majority declined to act on what Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. dismissed as a political question.

   As democracy's lights flickered, Mr. Giles drifted into obscurity. He and several other black men lost their jobs at the Montgomery Post Office. The 1904 city directory shows Mr. Giles living above a small grocery store at 120 South Highland, a short street less than a mile from the Alabama Capitol. Records in the state archives fall silent about him soon after that date.

   Nearly a century later, the tragic chapter that Mr. Giles saw open in 1901 has yet to close, although the federal government gradually guaranteed suffrage for all - first to women, in 1920 with the 19th Amendment; then to blacks, in 1965 with the Voting Rights Act; and finally to poor people in general in 1966, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the poll tax.

   The persistence of the 1901 constitution, spiked as it is with antiquated provisions and contemptible notions, demonstrates that Alabamians have yet to show much genius for self-government - or justice, for that matter.

   Yet the renewed flame of democracy beckons. More people than ever sense the possibilities for writing a new state constitution. Rallies in cities such as Huntsville, Tuscaloosa and Jacksonville and Mobile demonstrate reform is on the public's agenda. These aroused citizens want not only to atone for past sins, but also to brighten every corner for the future.

  Most of all, they want to proclaim their faith in a new Alabama.

Return to: Century of Shame, Introduction

Part 2: The Beast in the Garden

Reprinted with Permission from the Mobile Register.