History of The 1901 Alabama Constitution
by Wayne Flynt
Distinguished University Professor: Auburn University

As with most important moments of history, the 1901 Alabama Constitution began many years earlier. Following two decades of tax cuts that strangled education and public services, together with a steady decline of white yeoman farmers into tenancy and sharecropping, Alabama politics exploded in the late 1880s and 1890s. The politics of rage known as Populism galvanized north Alabama industrial workers and yeoman farmers and tenants statewide into a political protest movement that threatened to topple the Conservative-Democratic party.

To desert the party was not as fashionable then as it is now. To do so was tantamount to renouncing the White Man's party and opened Populists to Democratic race-baiting. Alabama Populists appealed frankly for class-based biracial politics. A white Populist orator, speaking to an integrated audience in Opelika in 1892, advised: "Let the colored man stand up for his race and vote for a free ballot and civil liberty. . . . If you don't, [Conservative-Democrats] will soon have you back in worse than slavery again." Such frank appeals made Populists vulnerable to charges of racial iconoclasm. In the opinions of Conservative-Democratic editors, the Populist party became the "nigger party," or as one imaginative Southern editor phrased it, "the Populite-nigger-Communist Social Equality Ticket." In such a political climate, to desert the Democratic party was to split families and churches, divide communities, and invite physical violence. It also led to political corruption. In both 1892 and 1894 ample historical evidence suggests that the Jeffersonian-Democratic (Populist) candidate Reuben F. Kolb of Eufaula won gubernatorial elections. But in 1892 official returns gave the election to Thomas G. Jones by a vote of 127,000 to 116,000, a margin of barely 11,000 votes. Jones carried 29 counties, only eight of them north of the Black Belt, and these by a small margin. Kolb carried 37 counties, only five in the Black Belt. Outside the Black Belt, where vote stealing was a white Democratic tradition (and is not entirely unknown even now), Kolb won the state by 15,000 votes. Although Kolb lost the governorship, many Populists were elected to the legislature, where they blocked a Conservative-Democratic attempt to disfranchise anyone who did not own 40 acres of property worth 250 dollars.

The Populists returned to the hustings with a vengeance in 1894. Kolb ran for governor again on a platform that promised: to protect Negro voting rights; regulate trusts; end the convict lease system by which the state leased convicts to private businesses to reduce prison costs (a practice that resulted in frightful abuse and inhumanity); expand the currency supply with silver coins; abolish national banks; enact a graduated federal income tax; and nominate Democratic officials in a direct statewide primary rather than in a party nominating convention. Strengthened by a fusion with the Republican party and supported by African American leaders, the Populists had high hopes for beating William C. Oates, the "one-armed hero of Henry County," and win control of the state.

But it was not to be. Using emotional campaign issues such as loyalty to the white race, Conservative-Democratic promises of law and order vs. Populistic radicalism and chaos, the Democrats again won a narrow victory, largely through huge margins in a handful of Black Belt counties. Once again Kolb won north Alabama and the Wiregrass. Once again Conservative-Democrats counted him out in the Black Belt.

Again the Jeffersonian Democratic / Populist / Republican coalition did well in legislative races, winning nearly a third of the seats in the house and senate. This time Kolb did not blithely accept the results. He vowed to appear in Montgomery on inaugural day and take his oath of office. When the appointed day arrived, Oates took his oath on the steps of the capitol while around the corner a justice-of-the-peace swore Kolb in on a buckboard wagon surrounded by angry farmers armed with Winchesters and shotguns. Probably more Montgomerians expected civil war that day in 1895 than had expected it on that fateful day in December of 1860 when delegates gathered in the same place for Alabama's secession convention. But Kolb decided not to precipitate violence and sent his supporters home.

Kolb and the Populists served a useful purpose in Alabama politics. They popularized needed reforms, changes that would in time be enacted by subsequent Democratic administrations.

They also made the populace aware of the extent to which political corruption dominated state politics. They also appealed forthrightly to black and Republican voters.

However, the movement was crippled by white racism, lack of effective leadership and a central vision, was too diverse, and was split by a variety of ideological and policy differences. Many white north Alabama Populists became permanently alienated from the Democratic party and voted Republican henceforth.

Without this historical context, one cannot understand the Constitutional Convention summoned only a half-decade after the events I have just described. Although the delegates to that convention addressed a multitude of issues, the two central objectives of the 1901 Constitution were simple: to eliminate blacks once and for all from Alabama's political process; and to preserve the economic and political power of Alabama's property owners from the capricious winds of a new Populist storm.

The 1901 constitutional convention assembled amid a South-wide drive to eliminate blacks from the voting lists. Beginning with the Mississippi constitutional convention of 1890 -- which enacted poll taxes and literacy tests for prospective voters -- five states (including Alabama) drafted new constitutions as a vehicle of disfranchisement: South Carolina (1895), Louisiana (1898), Alabama (1901), and Virginia (1902). Another belt of states -- North Carolina (1900), Georgia (1905), and Oklahoma (1910) --accomplished the same purpose through amendments to existing constitutions. Florida (1889), Tennessee (1890), Arkansas (1891), and Texas (1902) eliminated African American voters by way of new state laws imposing a poll tax as a condition of voting.

Blacks were not the only targets of disfranchisement. After all they had been merely bit players in the stormy drama of Populism. When Democratic governor Joseph F. Johnston (1896-1900) first urged disfranchisement, he did so as a way of ridding the electorate of a class of voters that he called "a constant menace to . . . [Alabama's] growth and to the security of . . . property." Hence the need for a poll tax which would fall as heavily on poor whites as upon poor blacks. Former governors Thomas G. Jones and William C. Oates, both nearly defeated by the hordes of the poverty-stricken, agreed. They justified disfranchisement as the best guarantee against assaults on property by neo-Populist agitators. Since Jones always believed that the majority of black voters in 1892 had voted for him over the Populist Kolb, there can be little doubt that he had white Populists in mind when he proposed to purge voter lists. Indeed, Black Belt Conservative-Democrats in the legislature proposed bills to establish literacy and property requirements for voting throughout the 1890s, but Populist legislators and their Jeffersonian-Democratic allies turned back such efforts. But Alabama accomplished in 1901 by constitutional convention what Conservative-Democrats could not enact through the legislature.

Factors other than eliminating poor voters also played a role in the Constitutional Convention: the need for authority to levy special local taxes for education; expansion of municipal borrowing capacity; authority to use state funds for internal improvements; desire of many reformers to abolish the convict lease system; and the need to reorganize Alabama's judicial system.

Opposition to a constitutional convention came from a wide variety of special interests which feared such proceedings might get out of hand: large corporations that feared stricter regulation and higher taxes; property owners who feared increased property taxes; Negroes and poor whites who feared disfranchisement; even some Black Belt leaders who believed the convention might change legislative representation from total population to some formula that would favor the mainly white hill counties and Wiregrass region.

Before these interests would agree to call a convention, the legislature had to offer certain guarantees: the convention would not change legislative representation, limits on taxation, or move the capitol from Montgomery. The legislature also called for a popular referendum on the summoning of a convention, which passed 70,000 to 46,000 in an election with abnormally low turnout. Opposition was strongest in the Wiregrass, hill, and coal mining counties, precisely where Populists had run strongest during the 1890s. In fact 17 of 24 anti-convention counties had voted Populist half-a-decade earlier.

When delegates gathered for the convention in 1901, they split into four broad groups. The most disorganized and weakest group consisted of Populist / Jeffersonian-Democrats. This tradition of Alabama politics would later furnish Senator Tom Heflin and Governor James E. Folsom. Planters were well represented. Ideologically, they were much in the tradition of William L. Yancey, affirmed states' rights, were centered in the Black Belt, and disliked hill county Populists, with whom they had warred in the 1890s. This camp would dominate gubernatorial politics for decades, producing Emmet O'Neal, Charles Henderson, William W. Brandon, Benjamin Miller, and others. The Progressive block of 32 members (of 155 total delegates) tended to represent towns and cities, was better educated than most delegates, generally consisted of active church men, and was concerned especially about urban problems. These delegates wanted stronger government regulation of railroads and great wealth, more government provision of public services, clean government, honest elections, termination of the convict lease system, higher taxes to support better schools and public health, and a strong anti-lynching law. In short, they desired to create a modern, prosperous, efficient, just state. This tradition would soon produce two governors, B. B. Comer and Thomas Kilby. The strongest group at the convention consisted of the "Big Mules" or "bosses." More in the lineage of New South industrial advocate Henry Grady, these delegates actively lobbied for a climate friendly to industry. Although they represented a block of only 60 delegates, they often allied with planters to dominate the proceedings. This interest group would produce governors such as Frank M. Dixon and Gordon Persons.

Note two obvious and important omissions from the starting lineup: there were no black delegates representing one third of Alabama's population, and no women, representing one half.

When the convention completed its work, a central pillar of the proposed constitution was the section on suffrage. The rights of Alabamians to govern themselves, zealously guarded and enthusiastically exercised since 1819, was heavily eroded by: a residence requirement (two years in the state, one year in the county, six months in the precinct); a poll tax ($1.50 per year, cumulative to a maximum of 36 dollars, persons over 45 exempt if they had paid the past 24 years; county registrars received considerable latitude over eligibility and how it would be exercised; literacy tests; ownership of land or property worth at least $400; exclusion of anyone guilty of a long list of petty crimes (vagrancy, perjury, selling votes, etc.).

That the suffrage section resulted from racist assumptions about blacks became clear during convention debate when one delegate 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."

Other provisions of the constitution extended the terms of state officials from two to four years without possibility of succession, recreated the office of lieutenant governor, restricted the powers of local governments by denying self-rule, improved education by providing for a "liberal" system of public schools, and required reapportionment of the legislature every ten years.

Their work finished, delegates retired to participate in a spirited public debate over whether or not to ratify the new constitution. Alabama was the only Southern state to submit a new disfranchisement constitution to voters. And the campaign was a doozy! Favoring ratification were the planter and industrial interests who had crafted it and even some religious and education reformers. As the editor of The Alabama Baptist put it, reforms that provided higher taxes on corporations, better financial support for public schools, and stricter regulation of railroads justified a vote for ratification. But, he added, "the most important clause in the constitution is that which secures, beyond all 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."

Opposition came from former Populists, especially in the hill counties, from many reformers, and from blacks (who were mobilized effectively but quietly by Booker T. Washington, who later twice appealed the constitutionality of the document to the U.S. Supreme Court). As one black journalist wrote frankly: "It is goodbye with poor white folks and niggers now, for the train of disfranchisement is on the rail and will come upon us like an avalanche. . ."

In Camp Hill, blacks organized an Afro-American Exodus Union, and advocated leaving Alabama. As one black journalist wrote: "Those who clamor to take the Negro's place at the ballot box may take his place in the cotton patch."

The bitterly contested campaign ended when voters ratified the new constitution by a vote of 109,000 to 82,000. Twenty-four counties, all predominantly white, voted AGAINST the new Constitution. Black Belt counties voted heavily in favor (70,000 to 45,000). Dallas County, with a voting population of 9,285 whites and 45,371 blacks, cast 5,668 votes for ratification and 200 against. Lowndes County had 1,000 white and 5,590 black voters, cast 5,326 for and 338 against.

Seventeen counties cast more votes for disfranchisement than the total number of white registered voters.

Twelve Black Belt counties provided the margin of victory. In the other 54 counties, the vote was AGAINST ratification by a vote of 76,000 to 72,000. In these 12 Black Belt counties the vote was 32,000 in favor and 5,000 against. Over half this majority to disfranchise blacks came from blacks, if we can believe these figures.

Virtually all the historical evidence suggests that we CANNOT believe these figures. In some Black Belt counties the returns force us to conclude that virtually every registered black male voted, and that they voted for their own disfranchisement. Returns in adjacent counties require that we believe that virtually every registered white male voted and that virtually no registered black males did so!

The result of ratification became apparent in subsequent elections. There was a 90 percent reduction in the number of registered black voters in Alabama. Within five months of ratification, only 30 blacks were registered in Birmingham out of a black population of 18,000. In 1900 voting lists in 14 Black Belt counties had contained the names of 79,000 Negroes. Only 1,081 were registered under the new constitution. Dallas and Lowndes Counties, where 75 percent of registered voters had been black in 1901, had only 59 and 44 Negroes registered. Statewide the number of eligible Negro voters declined from 181,000 in 1901 to 3,000 in 1902. By 1908, 3,700 blacks were registered to vote.

The effect on white voters was less dramatic but still striking. In 1900 there were 233,000 eligible white voters. Three years later there were 191,000, a reduction of 41,000, mainly due to inability to pay the poll tax (the poll tax disfranchised more white voters than any southern state other than Georgia). Whereas more than 78 percent of Southern voters had cast ballots in the 1888 elections, less than 50 percent did so after disfranchisement. The 1901 Constitution had done its work well: it had eliminated most black and poor white Alabama voters; it had centralized power in the legislature by denying home rule; it had limited authority to tax; and it had protected interests of Black Belt planters and north Alabama industrialists for decades to come.

Sources
Randy Sparks, "Alabama Negro Reaction to Disfranchisement," M.A. thesis, Samford University, 1973.

W. W. Rogers, The One Gallused Rebellion: Agrarianism in Alabama, 1865-1896, 1970.

Sheldon Hackney, Populism to Progressivism in Alabama, 1969.

Malcolm C. McMillan, Constitutional Development in Alabama, 1798-1901, 1955.