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By Dana Beyerle November 18, 2001 Most centennials call for celebration, but the 100th anniversary of the Alabama constitution this month won’t find anyone out in the streets lighting firecrackers. The only speeches now are by those who want to change the document, the longest in the nation with more than 700 amendments. The power brokers in Montgomery who like the status quo remain quiet, knowing their money is muscle enough to keep legislators from trying to send changes to voters who might want to control their future without interference from the handful who control the State House halls. Some say they fear taxes, others, gambling. Still others fear the mention of God will be removed from the constitution. As the constitution begins a second century on Nov. 28, one thing remains certain. The Legislature still operates under the auspices of the 1901 constitution that was created in a convention of 155 all white, male — and probably racist —- delegates who began meeting May 21, 1901, in Montgomery. They met to pass yet another of the segregation-era constitutions then in favor in the former Confederate states. Some of the convention members have prominent descendants alive today. Shoals lawyer Tom Heflin had two great-uncles and a great-great uncle involved in the constitutional conventions of 1875 and 1901. His great-grandfather and an uncle on his mother’s side also were members of the 1901 constitutional convention, and Heflin’s father is retired U.S. Sen. Howell Heflin of Tuscumbia. Sen. Heflin had a great-uncle in the constitutional convention of 1875 and two uncles in the constitutional convention of 1901, including the “flamboyantly racist” J. Thomas “Cotton Tom” Heflin who served in the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Senate for 24 years. “I sometimes tell my son that politics is in his blood,” said Sen. Heflin in his biography, “A Judge in the Senate.” “I don’t know if he’s proud of having all those relatives in the constitutional convention because they disenfranchised blacks.” For nearly four months, 1901 convention members worked under a few guiding principles: keeping blacks and poor whites from voting, keeping power centralized in Montgomery, keeping the state from getting involved in public works, keeping counties from going into debt, (which meant no financing public works on the backs of wealthy landowners) and not letting counties pass taxes without approval from Montgomery. After delegates heard the obligatory plea for blessing from Almighty God, within a minute or two after beginning his opening speech, convention President John B. Knox of Calhoun County, who already had said, “Then, as now, the negro was the prominent factor in the issue,” asked delegates, “What is it we want to do?” “Why,” he answered himself, “it is within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution, to establish white supremacy in this state.” Knox’s self-righteous sneer is almost evident in reading the convention record. Knox said citizens in the North were prejudiced against blacks and didn’t want black voters, either, implying that Alabama merely was doing overtly what northern states tacitly approved of. With that backdrop, convention delegates, most of whom represented big industrialists, planters or banking interests, or were themselves, did what was expected — stripped blacks and poor whites of their right to vote with a poll tax and installed a constitution that kept power away from the people. “But if we would have white supremacy, we must establish it by law — not by force or fraud,” Knox said at the time. A statewide campaign Convention members ratified the constitution on Sept. 3, 1901. A spirited campaign ensued and, supported by the state’s largest religious domination, north and south Alabama soon were pitted against each other. The editor of the Alabama Baptist said the “most important clause in the constitution is that which secures, beyond question, white supremacy, which is worth much to our people, and should cause every white man to vote for the ratification of the new constitution.” The largely white northern Alabama counties voted against it, but Black Belt counties voted for it, and it was their vote that carried the day. Voters approved a new constitution on Nov. 11, 1901, in an election that was, by all accounts, fraudulent. If it is to be believed that blacks voted, then most blacks in the so-called Black Belt counties cast votes to disenfranchise themselves. In some counties, there were more votes cast than the number of registered voters. Within two years of the election, most blacks in Alabama and poor whites couldn’t afford to register to vote because of the $1.50 cumulative poll tax; blacks were not granted the right to vote because, Knox explained, they didn’t have the right “character.” Alabamians who, since 1819, had exercised their right to govern themselves suddenly were kept from the polls. In order to vote, there was a two-year state residency requirement, a one-year county residency requirement and a six-month residency requirement in the precinct. A poll tax of $1.50 was cumulative to a total of $36, which meant if you skipped one year in order to vote next year it would cost $3, and so on, up to age 45 but only if they had paid for the last 24 years. There also was a rule requiring would-be voters to own $400 worth of property or land. Another restriction for voting was the prohibition for a list of petty crimes. The resurgent Democratic Party stealing black votes was nothing new for the moneyed interests who feared the Populist movement of the 1890s, which may have elected a progressive governor in 1892 but who didn’t take office because the election had been stolen. “By keeping blacks from voting they were able to steal black votes and turn back the populists in 1892 and 1894,” said Harvey Jackson III, a Jacksonville State University history professor. “How brazen they were.” Gov. William D. Jelks stamped the state’s Great Seal on the constitution on Nov. 21, 1901. And what would become the nation’s longest constitution became law on Nov. 28, 1901. “Knox, five years later, basically admitted up front that also was the agenda to a significant number of people like north Alabama industrialists,” Jackson said. “What they were fearing was revival of another populist movement.” Revising from the start Almost immediately efforts were made to change the constitution. In 1915, outgoing Gov. Emmet O’Neal said the constitution was faulty. Change either would be sought or advocated every decade since the 1930s. The biggest change to the constitution came in the 1950s and 1960s, when federal court rulings outlawed many of the provisions, such as the poll tax. One of the main knocks against the constitution is its disenfranchisement of a different sort — that of local control of economic and tax affairs. “They did not want counties to have populist ideas and start a reform movement that might spread,” Jackson said. Six of six Alabama has had six constitutions, with the Civil War and its aftermath having a hand in creating the last five. The first constitution, crafted in the territorial capital of Huntsville in 1819, allowed the frontier of Alabama into the Union. It was a liberal provision, as liberal as any in a slave state could have been at the time, providing for universal suffrage for white men without regard to wealth, literacy or religion. When war threatened in 1861, delegates ordered a pre-secession constitution that deleted references to the United States and inserted references to the Confederate States of America. Its main provisions outlawed emancipation of slaves and enfranchised only white males. After suffering defeat in the Civil War, Alabama under military rule created the 1865 constitution as a condition of rejoining the Union. The U.S. Congress, taken over by Radical Republicans by 1867, demanded a new constitution that enfranchised blacks and Alabama followed suit with its third constitution. Suffrage now included former slaves. Every male over 20 could vote and anyone voting had to affirm an oath of allegiance to the civil and political equality of all men regardless of race, color or privilege. Just 26 years later, with the war largely forgotten in Congress and with Southern states emboldened by the drafting of restrictive constitutions, Alabama turned the century with a new convention that kept blacks out of the political and social mainstream. “By the end of the 19th century the [U.S.] Supreme Court pulled back and said you can discriminate on the basis of characteristics but not on race, like illiteracy, good character,” Jackson said. The 1901 constitutional journal described the importance of registrars making blacks and whites read and interpret passages from various texts: “The decision as to who are sufficiently intelligent to meet the requirements of the understanding clause is exclusively in the hands of the registrars,” Knox said. Like O’Neal, Gov. Thomas Kilby in the 1920s called for constitutional reform. The Brookings Institution in 1931 found constitutional defects, which affected the fundamental law. In 1936 the Alabama Policy Committee chose George Lemaistre of Tuscaloosa to draw up a new constitution, and the model was approved in 1939. Nothing happened, and the group dissolved in the mid-1940s. Gov. Jim Folsom in his first term in 1947 and in his second term in 1955 called for constitutional reform. Folsom called five special sessions between June and Aug. 9, 1950, but the Legislature never considered reform. Gov. Albert Brewer tried reform in 1968, but his defeat in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in 1970 by George Wallace doomed reform until 1982, when Bill Baxley ran for lieutenant governor and won on a platform of a new constitution. But a Supreme Court ruling in 1983 doomed Baxley’s constitutional rewrite and voters didn’t get to consider it. In 1995, Rep. Jack Venable, D-Tallassee, began trying to submit the constitution’s articles to the Legislature in an attempt to change them. That was followed by the creation of a new group, Alabama Citizens for Constitution Reform, last year. Reach Dana Beyerle at dana.beyerle@tuscaloosanews.com. Return to: Editorials Index Return to: Newspaper Series |
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