Prelude to the movement: Disfranchisement in Alabama's 1901 Constitution and the anti-disfranchisement cases

Disfranchisement was not simply about restricting voting rights, it was a fight to redefine the Constitution---the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments especially---as the nation moved into a new century. The U.S. Constitution, the Courts, and Congress loomed large in southern disfranchisers' minds, and questions about what they would or would not do persisted at the turn of the last century. Southern state legislatures and constitutional conventions debated those concerns constantly, as did journalistic outlets at the national, state, and local levels. And too, black activists participated in that debate and saw in it an opportunity to strike against disfranchisement and Jim Crow. Their "Anti-Disfranchisement Cases" of 1895-1908 bore out all of the disfranchisers' fears and demonstrated that their debates were more than political theater.; The most significant iteration of the disfranchisement debates took place in Alabama. Alabama's 1901 constitution convention saw the most detailed examination of the disfranchisement question, and the plan of suffrage restriction it adopted gave rise to the era's most significant voting rights cases. Just as the disfranchisement debates were more than political theater, black activists' attempts to have the Supreme Court thwart disfranchisement were not the quixotic efforts that extant analyses suggest and anticipated the legal strategies of the mid-twentieth century civil rights movement by several decades. The men who funded and argued these cases were not interested in moral victories--they played to win. Nonetheless, they laid the a foundation for future litigation and helped to define the enemy. Thus we can say that those cases, and the debates from which they grew, served as prelude for the modern civil rights movement.; The disfranchisement debates and the Anti-disfranchisement cases were mutually affirming episodes in a single historical narrative, one that grew out of a disfranchisement-era "constitutional culture." To capture some sense of that culture, and its bearing on the Alabama constitution, I drew from all of Alabama's daily papers and another eighty county-level weeklies. Further, I examined nearly one-hundred daily papers published regionally and nationally in addition to an exhaustive survey of primary and secondary materials. They show that disfranchisement was as much a national question as a southern question, revealing a very different disfranchisement-era from that depicted in the standard texts of Southern and U.S. history.