Alabama in the Twentieth Century

ALABAMA

in the TWENTIETH CENTURY

WAYNE FLYNT

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2004

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designer: Michele Myatt Quinn

Typeface: Granjon

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Flynt, Wayne, 1940-

   Alabama in the twentieth century / Wayne Flynt.

        p. cm. — (The modern South)

   Includes bibliographical references and index.

   ISBN 0-8173-1430-X (cloth : alk. paper)

 1. Alabama—History—20th century. 2. Alabama—Civilization—

20th century. I. Title. II. Series.

   F326.F754 2004

   976.1′063—dc22

2004002841

The author acknowledges permission to reprint quotations from the following sources: From Booker T. Washington, Useful Living; and from Grover Hall to Major Howell, November 29, 1936, Grover Hall papers, courtesy the Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery Alabama. From E. B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1981), courtesy of John Sledge. From Gary Smith, Crime and Punishment, Sports Illustrated, June 24, 1996, courtesy of Gary Smith. From Nanci Kincaid, Balls: A Novel (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books), courtesy of Nanci Kincaid.

ISBN 978-0-8173-8186-8 (electronic)

To Dorothy,

As always, the light of my life.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction

PART ONE: Alabama's Political Economy

1. In the Beginning: The 1901 Constitution

2. Every Man for Himself: Politics, Alabama Style

3. Selling Alabama: The Economy

PART TWO: Alabama's Society

4. Life from the Bottom Up: Society

5. Teaching the People: Education

6. On and Off the Pedestal: Women

7. Counting behind White Folks: African Americans

8. Fighting Mad: Alabamians at War

9. Beyond the Game: The Social Significance of Sports

PART THREE: Alabama's Culture

10. What Would Jesus Do? Religion

11. Plain and Fancy: Folk and Elite Culture

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Map of Alabama Counties, County Seats, and Geopolitical Regions

South Alabama planters, 1920s

Delegates to the 1901 Constitutional Convention

Justice Hugo Black

Virginia Durr and Rosa Parks

Wallace campaign smear sheet for the 1970 gubernatorial runoff

Train track in the Wiregrass region used by the timber industry

Gov. George C. Wallace, Dr. Wernher von Braun, and Mr. James E. Webb

Italian coal miners' village

The streets of Mobile during the 1920s

Students of the Pinson rock school in the mid-1920s

African American students, 1938

Mrs. W. A. Kirkland of Henry County on a John Deere tractor

Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan

Carrie Tuggle

Booker T. Washington

The 167th Infantry Regiment victory parade, Montgomery

Railroad car from Mobile, with U.S. Army recruits in 1917

Airmen and a flight instructor, Tuskegee

Tom Daniels, Auburn's placekicker, 1893

Cartoon by Scott Stantis depicting Bobby Lowder's control over Auburn University

Congregation of Calvinistic Primitive Baptists on Sand Mountain

Worshipers at the Fairmont Baptist Church, tent revival, ca. 1925

Harper Lee

Hank Williams and the Driftin' Cowboys, 1938

Preface

I SUPPOSE ANYONE WHO SPENDS half a century pondering a single subject will become obsessed with it and want to write a book. One day as the words poured out of my fountain pen, I realized that I had lived in Alabama during 6 of the 10 decades I was describing. During 5 of them, I was an activist with pronounced opinions about these subjects. I was often deeply ashamed to be an Alabamian and once in graduate school at Florida State University even vowed never to live there again. More than one fellow citizen has expressed regrets that I did not keep my vow.

Trouble was, Alabama is like a disease. Once it infects a person, it is hard to cure the ailment. Every time I thought I had obtained a cure, I experienced a relapse. I still remember the first of many. Klan terrorists had just murdered four little girls at 16th Street Baptist Church. I read the attorney Charles Morgan's account of the event, detailing his decision to leave Birmingham and its mindless violence for good. He made perfect sense to me. Then I read Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird and changed my mind.

Across the years, I alternated between despair and hope. For every George Wallace, Bull Connor, Jim Clark, and Art Hanes, there seemed to be a George Washington Carver, Booker T. Washington, Rosa Parks, or Martin Luther King Jr. Every time I gave up on Alabama, I encountered a soldier, sailor, or airman, an athlete or teacher, an environmentalist or minister who prevailed against incredible odds and made me proud to be from the same place.

Every time I returned home, people who shared few of my opinions welcomed me back into a nurturing circle of kinship and community. And every research trip north or west or to Europe or Asia reminded me that Alabama had no monopoly on racism and injustice. Nor did many other climes match the state's beauty, kindness, neighborliness, or potential. Cleansed of its racism and fear of change, I often mused, this could be as fine a place to live, even with all its flaws, as any imperfect place on earth. And so I stayed, studied, observed, and wrote.

Not everyone who reads this book will be pleased with it. One person's honest appraisal often strikes another as unnecessary criticism. Some will say I spend too much time on the negative and not enough on the positive, that my historical glass seems perpetually half-empty rather than half-full. To me, the fullness or emptiness is of less interest than the halfness. Why does a state with so much human and natural potential settle so often for mediocrity? Why are Alabamians' expectations so low when excellence is so often within their grasp? The incidence of world-class performance in so many spheres of life makes more poignant the persistent waste and inefficiency and backwardness of so much of Alabama's collective life.

Alabamians who persist through the first painful chapters describing the state's political economy will grow increasingly proud of what they encounter. They will discover enough nobility of spirit, courage under fire (literally and figuratively), creativity, and accomplishment to make even the most cynical citizen proud. They will also encounter enough corruption, opportunism, cowardice, betrayal of power, and lack of vision to make even the most chest-thumping booster ashamed.

That is the way of history. In some respects, Alabama had a worse record in the 20th century than other states. It was definitely no century to relive for blacks and poor whites. In other ways, it was 100 years of uncommon accomplishment. Whether one's preference is for Bear Bryant or Hugo Black, George Wallace or Hank Williams, Joe Louis or Harper Lee, Booker T. Washington or E. O. Wilson, Helen Keller or Nat King Cole, Jesse Owens or Frank M. Johnson, the human saga occurred on a grand scale.

Non-Alabama readers will encounter a list of characters they didn't even know had Alabama roots. And if I do my job well enough, stereotypes will give way to increasing complexity, irony, and ambiguity. Even the state's harshest critics will have to concede ground in the face of so much positive exertion against such heavy odds.

Irony abounds. White evangelical Christianity played a major role not only in Alabama's legendary sense of community but also in its racism, sexism, and traditionalism. Black evangelical Christianity played a major role in racial justice, modernization, and social change despite its fundamentalism. As in religion, much of what is best and worst in Alabama traces its origins to common sources: racial differentness, folk culture, Jacksonian individualism, and populistic assumptions about the rights of ordinary people.

I have divided the book into 11 topical chapters, each spanning the entire century. The weakness of such an organizing principle is a certain level of redundancy. Was prohibition, for instance, primarily a political or religious movement? The subject fits in either chapter, or even in discussions of women or society. Does college football belong in chapters on sport, education, or religion? One could make a case for any or all of these locations. Did the black migration between 1915 and 1930 reflect more about societal transitions or about racial identity? On all these calls and many more, I chose to locate the primary discussion in one chapter with secondary references in another.

Nor will all agree with my 11 topics. In fact, nearly everyone would probably select at least one that I omitted. In the final analysis, the organization of this or any book is an intensely personal judgment. I had to decide what Alabamians value and consider most important. It may well be that citizens should value ballet over basketball and calculus over football. But they don't. If I had my way, the chapter on sports would mostly have been about college basketball, not baseball, football, boxing, track, and NASCAR. But I don't get to impose my preferences on fellow citizens. The book is about what Alabamians valued in the 20th century, not what I considered most important.

In determining the sequence of the 11 topics, I followed the most logical progression to help readers understand increasingly complex ideas and patterns. Leading with the 1901 constitution was simple. The document was crafted at the beginning of the century and still prevailed as the state's fundamental organic law when the century ended.

Both the inception of the constitution and its tenacious endurance were testaments to the power of the state's political and economic elites. So they constitute an obvious unit. In fact, the chapter on politics needs to be conceived as the hinge of a door, holding the panels in place. I introduce most of the topics and cast of characters there as well as the book's chronology. All following topics draw some of their life from politics and frequently interact with it.

To speed readers on their way, I have reduced scholarly trappings to a minimum. Only extended or essential quotations are footnoted. Only the rarest controversial, nonquoted assertions warrant documentation. In compensation, I list at the end of the book sources from which I derived my opinions and analysis. They constitute a grand lesson in learning. For the most inquisitive readers, these sources will carry them through life and into a pleasant and informative retirement.

Every historian leans heavily on all who preceded him, and I am in debt to one and all of them. I especially thank Clyde Bolton, Joey Brackner, William Christenberry, Wilson Fallin Jr., Virginia Hamilton, David Edwin Harrell, John Shelton Reed, Sam Webb, and the late Bailey Thomson for reading individual chapters and offering constructive criticism.

Thanks also are due to archivists and librarians in every nook and cranny of Alabama and even in places far afield. They live thankless and anonymous lives but make the historian's craft possible.

To the staff at The University of Alabama Press, I offer similar thanks. Scholarly presses are an endangered species these days, but they are no less important to the creation and distribution of learning.

Peggy Mason, typist extraordinaire, once again deciphered my scratchings, corrected my spelling, and expeditiously cranked out the pages. Laura Katz, my editorial assistant, tracked down photographs and assisted me in many other ways as well. My son Sean salvaged photographs I believed to be unusable.

Most of all, thanks to my beloved Dartie. Through nearly half a century of marriage, she more than anyone both encouraged my writing and made it possible. Her solicitude for my welfare, anger at my detractors, enlightened conversation about my subjects, assistance in my research, and help in turning my garrulous nature toward solitude made her in the absolute intellectual and spiritual sense a coauthor of all I wrote and a source of good humor in tense times.

Introduction

AMERICANS WERE SO ANXIOUS to greet the new century that they could not wait an entire hundred years. So the 20th century officially lasted only 99 years, beginning January 1, 1901, and ending December 31, 1999. It is no wonder they were glad to have the century over. It witnessed the greatest depression and the bloodiest war in human history. It also recorded momentous changes.

In 1901 journalists were just as happy to see the 19th century end. In fact, Chicago demanded that it cease on December 31, 1899, earning a scolding in the December 30, 1899, Mobile Daily Register: The twentieth century begins day after tomorrow, in Chicago exclusively.¹ The 19th century also had recorded great wars and incredible changes. Some journalists pronounced the world remarkably improved, with more creature comforts, reduced cost of living, and greater wealth even for ordinary people than ever before. The bicycle, steamboat, railroad, telegraph, telephone, elevator, gas and electric lighting, camera, sewing machine, typesetter, phonograph, typewriter, chloroform, ether, cocaine, cocktails, Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, searchlights, free libraries, iron bridges, and stenographers all began between 1800 and 1900.

So remarkable had been the changes of that century that journalists did not doubt even greater things to come. The Mobile Daily Register predicted that the marvels of this century now ended will doubtless be cast into the shadows of the discoveries of the twentieth century. Predictions were of course imperfect. Most notable among the disappointments of the previous epoch had been the failure of flight. Possibly, the hundred years of experiment, the Mobile editor speculated, teach us that we will never fly in the air as do the birds, or, if we do so, it will be merely for the pleasure of the thing. Flying in so variable an element as the air can never, we think, be reduced to a science.²

The Birmingham Age-Herald chose less technical subjects for speculation, featuring an essay by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. As long as American society assigned women an inferior place, she mused, refusing them the right to vote, hold office, or preach the gospel, so long would the condition of women be degraded and vice continue. Other guest editorialists predicted sweeping changes: the popular election of U.S. senators, trust regulation, and national divorce laws. The Birmingham journalists were also less enthusiastic about the 19th century than their south Alabama colleagues. The century had opened with promises of liberty, equality, and fraternity but had ended with kings and emperors abounding. America's common people lived little better than they had in 1801, and trusts had destroyed competition. Class cleavage between a multi-millionaire plutocracy and the masses had grown rather than diminished.³ Giving former slaves the ballot had not uplifted them nor had universal education. Religion was no stronger in its influence on society.

Predictions of change, as expansive as they were, could hardly capture the promise and potential of the 20th century. In the summer of 1900 the United States contained only 8,000 automobiles and 144 miles of paved roads. The average life expectancy was 47 years. Only 6 percent of Americans possessed a high school diploma; 11 percent were illiterate; and the average public school year lasted a mere 99 days. Barely 14 percent of American homes contained a bathtub and only 8 percent a telephone. Motion pictures had just been invented (1893-96); the radio was not patented until 1891 and would not be perfected for another decade. Heavier-than-air manned flight would not occur until December 1903, and Robert Goddard's early experiments with rocket engines would only commence in 1914. Diesel engines were introduced in 1897, the X-ray in 1913, the first motor-driven vacuum cleaner in 1899, rayon in 1902, and thermosetting plastic in 1909.

Even greater jolts were beginning in literature and morals. Literary realism and naturalism shocked traditionalists with their moral relativism and depiction of humans as near helpless pawns of an impersonal, rapacious environment. In 1909 Sigmund Freud visited America to lecture, and translations of his Interpretations of Dreams appeared four years later. Freudian theories, often exaggerated or distorted, encouraged the expression of feelings and urges previously repressed. Youthful rebels cited naturalism and Freudianism to justify what they intended to do anyway. Victorianism reeled in chaotic retreat. A revolution in morals, hastened by wider availability of birth control and greater freedom for women, accompanied changes in literature and psychological understanding. Economically, the age of iron and steel dawned; southerners moved north; northerners moved to Florida; cattle moved east and cotton moved west.

Amid all the chaos Alabamians greeted the new century with firm resolve that change was the order of the day. And they reckoned they knew just what needed to be changed and how it ought to be done.

PART ONE

Alabama's Political Economy

1

In the Beginning

The 1901 Constitution

September 27th 1902

Dear Stella,

I sent you the pen because I thought you would be more apt to keep it than any of the other grandchildren. I wrote my name to our new Constitution in September 1901 with it, and fifty or as many years as we live under that Constitution the signers names will be before the people. If it shall prove to be a wise thing we will be honored for making it. And if it should not prove to be a good one it can be amended to suit the people. This will never be forgotten: we have virtually disfranchised the negro, reduced the taxes, and largely increased the school fund. So keep the pen as a souvenir, remembering your Grand Pa wrote his name as a member of the convention that drew up said Constitution.

—Dabney Palmer of Leroy, Washington County, to Stella Palmer

FEW STATES OTHER THAN Alabama were governed throughout the 20th century by a single constitution. Other states updated their governing documents as they modernized. Alabama should have been so lucky.

As it was, most if not all the state's formidable problems had their origins in the 1901 document. The virulent racism of that original charter reminded one and all that at the beginning of the century chief among the issues of governance in the minds of white citizens was the subordination and exclusion of black citizens. That such a document could still govern Alabama at the end of the century is testimony to the continuing power of the economic and political elites that put it in place, the racial insensitivity of many whites, and lack of concern about the state's negative national and international reputation.

ORIGINS

The origins of the 1901 constitution demonstrate the folly of assuming that any pivotal historical event stands alone. It was shaped by a history of racial and class conflict, opposition to taxes, ambivalence about industrialization, and lack of commitment to public services, including public education, that dated well back into the 19th century.

Antebellum Alabama was slow to provide public schools, not establishing its first statewide education system until 1854. Even then the system was a mixture of state and private schools, all underfunded. Nor was the state inclined to adequately fund other social services such as prisons, mental hospitals, or public health.

Antebellum taxes, at least what few existed, were raised by a surprisingly equitable mix of levies on land, slaves, and luxury items. Those who owned most wealth paid most taxes. Like nearly all Americans, taxpayers bitterly resented paying any taxes at all and considered the governments that levied them profligate and inefficient.

Before the Civil War, virtually all whites farmed for a living and saw no reason to encourage manufacturing, banking, or business. In fact, the state legislature, the governor, or both regularly rejected requests by private entrepreneurs for state subsidies to help build roads, canals, railroads, or other economic infrastructure.

Because wealthier and better-educated Alabamians were more receptive to higher taxes and government inducements to encourage business, improve education, and provide public services, regional divisions developed along class lines. Jacksonian Democrats tended to be leery of any government activity or intrusion into their lives, while Whigs tended to be more supportive of business. No whites of any class believed that blacks should participate fully in government or society.

Civil War and Reconstruction shook all these assumptions to their foundations. Freedmen began to vote, hold public office, and draft laws. Together with their white Republican allies, they paid taxes, levied taxes, and dispersed the proceeds. They offered state financial inducements to private businesses. They favored increases in public services, particularly for education. With slavery ended and luxuries greatly reduced, they shifted the primary burden of taxation from affluent planters to struggling yeomen farmers. White small farmers cursed Reconstruction government, partly because it included African Americans, traitorous Alabama scalawags, and opportunistic northern carpetbaggers; but even more, they despised it because the new Republican government tripled property taxes.

The ensuing war—for that is what it was, complete with murders, fraud, and intimidation—between Republicans and Democrats continued for a decade until white conservative Democrats regained control of government in 1874. The winners institutionalized their victory in the 1875 constitution. Of the 100 delegates to that convention, 80 were Democrats, 12 were Republicans, and 7 called themselves independents. Only 4 were African Americans.

Conservative Democrats wrote their ideology into the document. They prohibited the state from loaning money or extending credit for internal improvements. They placed a cap on both state and local property taxes. They segregated schools and abolished the state Board of Education. Only fear of federal intervention prevented the convention from limiting black suffrage, segregating passengers using public transportation, and forbidding interracial marriages. As a consequence of the new constitution, taxes declined as did revenue for education.

During subsequent years, conservative white Democrats used a variety of methods to reduce the number of black voters: they gerrymandered town limits to reduce the number of enfranchised African Americans; they made state and local offices appointive rather than elective, especially in areas of majority black population; they complicated election laws (the 1893 Sayre Election Law arranged candidates alphabetically under the office they ran for without listing party, required voters to produce a certificate of identity, and only registered new voters during May).

All these measures fell short of their ideal. In 1900 more than 100,000 African Americans were still eligible to vote, and they had created significant mischief, along with their white allies, during the 1890s Populist insurrection.

Theoretically the end of Reconstruction and the 1875 constitution had restored law, order, and integrity to Alabama. In reality none of these occurred. Violence, especially lynching, had become more common rather than less. And political corruption reached new heights during the 1890s as well.

The object of much of this political violence and corruption was the Populist movement. Populism was rooted in the decline of agriculture that impoverished so many small farmers after 1865. Only about 10 percent of Alabama white farmers had been bereft of both personal property and land when the Civil War began; by 1880 nearly half of all farmers were landless tenants. Populism was born in this decline. In fact, the single most important factor in determining whether or not a county voted Populist was the rate of tenancy increase and the decreases in the percentage of owner-operated farms.

Although Populist demands varied, at heart these agrarian radicals sought to expand the power of government in order to enlarge opportunities for ordinary citizens. By appealing to Democrats, Republicans, and independents, blacks and whites, on a frankly class-based platform, Populists terrified conservative Democrats, especially in the Black Belt, where planters envisioned a neo-Reconstruction coalition taking over and imposing higher taxes.

Their worst fears nearly came true. In 1892 and again two years later, planters had to steal black votes in the Black Belt in order to deny Populist leader Reuben Kolb the governorship. The first time Kolb reluctantly conceded. The second time he ordered his legions to Montgomery on inauguration day, determined to be sworn in as the lawful chief officer of the state. He marched up Dexter Avenue at the head of his followers to confront a line of Montgomery police, the Montgomery Mounted Rifles, and other militia units. More people probably expected civil war that day in 1894 than had expected it in 1861. Kolb's statesmanship saved the day. He mounted a wagon, had himself sworn in, then told his bellicose supporters: Let us be peaceable, and justice and right will reign in Alabama. He was only half right. His followers did not provoke violence, but their forbearance did not cause justice and right to prevail.

By 1900 whites agreed that something must be done to change the political climate. Political corruption threatened the very existence of orderly government. Even ministers participated in stealing votes in order to maintain white supremacy. And the Selma Times frankly admitted in December 1895: "The Times is one of those papers that does not believe it is any harm to rob or appropriate the vote of an illiterate Negro. We do not believe they ought even to have had the privilege of voting."¹

The U.S. senatorial race in Alabama that year became a referendum on suffrage, with the incumbent U.S. senator arguing for a disfranchisement convention to rewrite the state's constitution and the sitting governor opposing both disfranchisement and constitutional revision. The proconvention incumbent won, causing the legislature to poll voters about their desire for a new document that would disfranchise blacks. More than 60 percent of voters supported the call for a convention. Strongest enthusiasm came from the Black Belt and greatest opposition swelled in the northern hill and southeastern Wiregrass counties.

Of the 155 delegates elected to the 1901 constitutional convention, 141 were Democrats, 7 were Populists, 6 were Republicans, and 1 was an independent; 96 of the delegates were lawyers and 12 were bankers. No Negroes or women were elected.

THE 1901 CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION

Delegates set the tone for their proceedings by electing a corporation lawyer from Anniston, John B. Knox, president of the convention. Knox's presidential address left no doubt about the chief agenda of the gathering: And what is it that we want to do? Why it is within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution, to establish white supremacy in this State. This is our problem, and we should be permitted to deal with it, unobstructed by outside influences. But if we would have white supremacy, we must establish it by law—not by force or fraud. These provisions are justified in law and in morals, because the negro is not discriminated against on account of his race, but on account of his intellectual and moral condition. There is in the white man an inherited capacity for government, which is wholly wanting in the negro.²

The 155 delegates represented four divergent points of view. The weakest delegation contained Populist remnants, but these delegates could do little more than wage a rearguard action against those seeking to disfranchise poor whites. A larger cadre of urban Progressives expressed support for humanitarian causes, clean government, better funding for education, expanded public services, antilynching legislation, and prison reforms.

The two groups that dominated proceedings—as well as the political and economic life of the state during the new century—were planters and Big Mules. Planters were large landowners most prevalent in the Black Belt. Big Mules represented the state's banks, railroads, and industries, and were centered in the so-called Birmingham district, a belt of industrial towns stretching from Anniston and Gadsden to Tuscaloosa. They were the coalition that elected Knox president and dominated the proceedings.

With their purpose clearly stated and their opponents either unrepresented or divided and dispirited, the planter-Big Mule coalition set about their business. Suffrage restriction had driven the call for a convention and now dominated debate. With no African American delegates and with virtually no support for them among any white faction, blacks had no way of protecting themselves from disfranchisement. The main question to be resolved was whether blacks would be eliminated in a process entirely aimed at them or whether delegates would add poor whites as secondary casualties of a process transferring all governmental power into the hands of the intelligent and virtuous.

Some delegates among the predominant planter-Big Mule coalition left no doubt about their objective. To them, poor white Populists—the great unwashed, uneducated masses of white tenant farmers; textile, steel, and sawmill workers; coal and iron ore miners—were as much a threat to their class hegemony as were black voters. Why discriminate against blacks, who knew their place within the social and political hierarchy, when the greater threat came from uppity whites? Former governor William C. Oates, himself a near political casualty of Reuben Kolb's populistic masses, maintained that there are some white men who have no more right to vote than a negro and not as much as some of them. Newspapers in Alabama's major cities agreed, with the Birmingham Ledger dismissing out of hand the plea to spare Confederate veterans and their sons from the literacy requirements of the new constitution: if Confederate soldiers and their sons who have not pride enough to learn to read tried to vote, they should be laughed back to the woods.³

Nor were the most insightful Populists surprised at such sentiments. The Populist Tuscaloosa American noted prophetically that past history teaches us that the rule of the so-called ‘virtuous and intelligent,’ the rule of the rich and the favored has ever been one of the most tyrannical and despotic. Under such rule, but two classes exist, the master and the slave.⁴

About blacks there was even less equivocation. One planter delegate proposed to replace the doubtful methods used to disfranchise blacks in the past with legal disfranchisement. J. Thomas Heflin, future U.S. senator and a delegate from Chambers county, believed that God almighty intended the negro to be the servant of the white man, claimed that race war was inevitable, and therefore concluded, I do not believe it is incumbent upon us to lift up and educate him [the black man] and put him on an equal footing that he may be armed and equipped when the combat comes.⁵

The suffrage provisions of the new constitution reflected these ideological debates. Residency requirements of two years in the state and one year in the county were aimed at transient tenant farmers and industrial workers. The poll tax of $1.50 per year, cumulative if unpaid to a maximum of $36, effectively struck down both white and black tenants and laborers; the average tenant farm family earned less than $100 a year and few industrial laborers made more than a dollar a day (with many days of unemployment during a typical year). Crimes that disqualified voters included not only felonies such as murder, rape, and robbery, but also homosexuality, bigamy, adultery, vagrancy, and hoboing. Perhaps the most obvious intent of delegates could be found in the property requirement. In a state with ever increasing numbers of yeoman farmers losing their land to mortgage foreclosures or inability to pay property taxes, the constitution required that registrants own 40 acres of land with all taxes paid or $300 worth of personal property. The one concession to poor whites was a one-year window when military veterans or their descendants could register without being subject to the state's new literacy test.

After severely restricting suffrage, delegates moved to other matters. Having been sufficiently bold to challenge the will of the federal government to protect black political rights, delegates did not hesitate to restrict their social freedoms. The new constitution required segregation of schools and banned interracial marriages.

Freedom to vote was not the only liberty denied by the 1901 document. So was the right of local communities to govern themselves. Once again, the origin of this restriction was located squarely within the politics of the Populist revolt. Half of Alabama counties had voted Populist during the 1890s. Only the suspiciously one-sided Democratic vote in a handful of Black Belt counties had preserved that party's hegemony. If counties were left to their own devices, who knew what mischief local officials, elected by poor white constituencies, might foist on property owners. Restricting the vote only to those who owned property helped ensure dominance by wealthier Alabamians. But just to ensure that radical local officials were stripped of their powers, control was transferred to the legislature in Montgomery. To accomplish virtually any change in a county, officials after 1901 had to hold a public hearing, gain the consent of the local legislative delegation, have a bill introduced in the legislature amending the constitution (even a single no vote sent the amendment to a statewide referendum), then win support both of a majority of the statewide vote and within the county. Planters and Big Mules reasoned that their power would be significantly diluted if they had to wage electoral campaigns in 67 counties, in hundreds of local political races, or on behalf of thousands of pieces of local legislation. How much simpler it would be to concentrate all their energy, resources, and lobbying on the governor, lieutenant governor, and 140 state legislators. Control more than half those 142 offices and they controlled every town and county in the state. Even governors not beholden to them could be effectively checked by a sympathetic lieutenant governor or Speaker of the House who could load key committees with sympathizers of the rich and powerful.

Next, delegates turned to taxes, enacting little that was new. They set county and municipal tax caps at 5 mills (a mill is one-tenth of a cent), reduced the top state millage rate from 7.5 to 6.5, limited the power of a county or municipality to enter into debt, and stripped school districts of the ability to raise taxes for schools. Delegates did provide a minimum guarantee of 3 mills for education, which caused some to praise the constitution for providing liberal education for Alabama's children. But in fact, the tax provisions remained essentially the same as in the 1875 constitution. To fund schools adequately, local and state governments could not rely on revenue from property taxes. They either had to sell bonds, with attendant high interest payments, or enact sales or income taxes or license fees. Voter resistance to higher taxes ultimately forced reliance on sin taxes, such as those on alcohol or tobacco products, or on bonds, which made Alabama a bond lawyer's paradise. Nor would communities have flexibility to raise taxes in order to recruit industry, build roads and bridges, or fund other internal improvements.

THE BATTLE FOR RATIFICATION

The only democratic aspect of the new constitution was the provision to ratify it. The constitution was completed in September. Delegates provided for a public referendum on November 11 during state elections.

Former governor Joseph F. Johnson led whites who opposed ratification, rallying supporters mainly in the traditional Populist strongholds of mountainous north Alabama and the southeastern Wiregrass. Booker T. Washington, president of Tuskegee Institute and arguably the most influential black American, led opposition within his race.

Confusing the Populist faithful were a multitude of former leaders who endorsed the constitution, praising especially disfranchisement of blacks. Among these was the 1890s Populist standard-bearer Reuben Kolb, who went over to his historic enemies on the issue of race. Their defection did not convince the majority of ordinary whites, but it did make the vote in Populist counties close enough to leave the decision with the Black Belt.

The debate during September, October, and November focused nearly exclusively on race. Proratification forces adopted a simple mantra: White supremacy, suffrage reform and purity in elections. The planter-oriented Montgomery Advertiser led the charge with an ironic prediction that all white voters who are not carried away by prejudice would vote to ratify. Then the paper, completely carried away by prejudice, used little else but race to convince readers to ratify: The great incubus of unlimited negro suffrage will undoubtedly be removed by ratification. This alone ought to commend it to white voters concerned about [the] Negro vote.⁶ Few African Americans cared one way or the other, the editor assured readers, because they had found the right to vote of little benefit anyway. Negro voters had thus decided to allow whites to resolve the issue among themselves.

Other papers agreed. The Choctaw Advocate in southwestern Alabama called for whites to stand together: The new constitution was made by white men for white men and now will any one of them turn his back upon his race. Mobile's Daily Register was persuaded to back ratification after discovering that under the requirement that voters must own property, only 168 Negroes in Montgomery County would control enough wealth to be eligible to vote. And in most counties, even fewer Negroes would be qualified. The Birmingham Age-Herald argued that a vote for legal disfranchisement was a vote for lower taxes, economical government, better schools, and white supremacy, and against the political corruption that had been required to control black voters. What is most wanted for the general good, the editor summarized, is assured white supremacy.⁷

Only occasionally did a state paper take the opposing side. The Orphan's Call in Evergreen bucked the trend, arguing against ratification. The editor wrote prophetically that the low fixed tax rate for education would not provide adequate funding for schools, and the grandfather clause exempting illiterate white veterans from literacy tests while excluding blacks was unjust. Such moral sensibilities were rare in the 1901 debate.

Paradoxically the constitution that was intended to eliminate electoral corruption in Alabama was adopted by the very corruption it was designed to end. The vote to ratify carried by a vote of 108,613 to 81,734. Thirty-four counties went for ratification, 32 against. The vote in 54 counties was 76,263 against ratification to 72,389 in favor. The victory margin came from 12 Black Belt counties with a Negro population of more than two-thirds that reported late returns. The vote in those 12 counties was 36,224 to ratify and 5,471 against. Dallas, Hale, and Wilcox Counties cast 17,475 votes for the constitution and only 508 against, or 12,360 more than the total white male voting population, assuming that every white male voted and every one favored ratification. So much for the purity of elections ratifiers had promised.

Of course, it is possible to argue that the Montgomery Advertiser had been correct. Negroes had decided the ballot counted for nothing and determined to let whites decide the issue. But this apathy apparently did not extend far. Mobile's Daily Register attributed the close vote statewide to larger than expected black turnout that solidly opposed ratification. In Montgomery, where the Advertiser had earlier predicted a light Negro vote, black turnout was instead heavy and solidly antiratification. One contemporary analysis of Opelika precincts found that only 85 of 912 antiratification votes had been cast by whites; all the rest had come from blacks.

In the light of such returns statewide, how can one explain why a majority African American population in the Black Belt overwhelmingly supported ratification while blacks elsewhere overwhelmingly opposed? The answer is embarrassingly obvious. White planters who dominated the Black Belt and employed virtually all blacks as landless, powerless sharecroppers either intimidated black voters to support ratification or, more likely, simply reported the necessary huge majority without bothering to cast votes at all. Such irregularities in the same Black Belt counties had cost Reuben Kolb the governorship in 1892 and 1894, and now fraudulently gave Alabama a new constitution. The organic law that governed Alabama during the 20th century was, like the political process that created it, stained with racism and corruption. And the progenitors of this political bastardy were Alabama's finest, wealthiest, and self-proclaimed best citizens. In 1905 John B. Knox, president of the 1901 constitutional convention, conceded that for all the talk of ridding politics of the Negro, the objective of the convention in fact had been to place the power of government in the hands of the intelligent and virtuous.⁸ The intelligence of the delegates after a century of their rule cannot be doubted. Whether that intelligence was employed on behalf of civic virtue is a more doubtful proposition.

Given the alleged lassitude, apathy, and timidity of African Americans, ratification should have been the end of the matter. That it was not is a powerful argument for revising Booker T. Washington's historical reputation as an Uncle Tom accommodationist and the image of Alabama's black males as hapless victims of their own political emasculation.

Jackson W. Giles worked at the Montgomery post office. After opposing ratification, he sought to register in 1902 under the provisions of the new constitution. He was a perfect candidate to vote even under the restrictive terms of the new document. He could read and write. He and his wife owned their home. And he had paid his poll tax. But he was also black, and Montgomery's three white registrars rejected his registration. Giles was one of many African Americans rejected by the board, including a Methodist bishop. That same year the registrars rejected not a single white applicant. Giles protested. In fact, he organized the Colored Man's Suffrage Association and became plaintiff in a series of lawsuits, two of which reached the Supreme Court, both challenging whether the new Alabama constitution violated the U.S. Constitution, with its guarantees of equal protection. Booker T. Washington privately raised money from sympathetic blacks and whites to retain lawyers. Giles's counsel became the first black lawyer to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. He contended that Montgomery's registrars had rejected more than 5,000 black applicants solely because of race. As evidence of intent, he quoted the words of John Knox to the convention. Proving that racism was by no means confined to Alabama, the Supreme Court brushed aside his pleas and certified the new state constitution. Giles lost his job at the Montgomery post office, then disappeared into the shadows of history.

CONSEQUENCES OF THE CONSTITUTION

The most dramatic consequence of the new constitution was the one most desired by its drafters, the sudden and dramatic decline in voting. In 1900 approximately 181,000 Negro voters had been eligible under the old 1875 constitution. By January 1, 1903, only 2,980 had been permitted to register under the new. Particularly dramatic was the decline in the Black Belt, where Negro registration in 14 counties declined from 79,311 to 1,081.

Among white voters the decline was less dramatic but still substantial. In 1900 the state contained 232,800 eligible white voters; three years later, only 191,500 white males were registered, a decline of 41,300 despite increasing population. Some 25,000 to 50,000 who registered did not pay their poll tax during the first year, hence becoming ineligible to vote.

As decades passed, the effect of the poll tax became more punitive and exclusionary because of the accumulative feature that required voters to pay it every year from age 21 to 45 whether or not there was an election (a feature found elsewhere only in the Georgia constitution). When the Alabama Policy Institute carefully studied voter participation in 1941-'42, it estimated that some 600,000 whites and 520,000 Negroes were disfranchised by various provisions of the 1901 constitution. In most counties more whites were disfranchised than registered, limiting the vote to a select elite. Negroes remained totally shut out of participation in their own government despite the fact that some of them were at that very moment fighting in the armed services to protect it.

The most obvious consequence of suffrage restriction was the decline in voting. Ironically, by the middle of the century Alabamians would grouse about low turnout for elections. Yet that was precisely the intent and effect of the state's constitution. In 1900 153,300 voters cast ballots in the gubernatorial election. Six years later only 94,700 voted in the highly contentious 1906 governor's race, nearly a 40 percent decline despite a population increase. In presidential elections Alabama's turnout declined from 34 percent in 1900 to 21 in 1904 and 14 in 1924. In the decade before 1900, as many as 80 percent of eligible Alabamians, white and black, voted. In 1940 only a third of adults were even registered.

What makes the 1901 suffrage provisions even more significant is comparison with the state's first constitution. Otherwise one might assume that the operative principle in Alabama public policy had always been antidemocratic. Actually, the opposite was true. The 1819 constitution, which ushered Alabama into the Union, was a projection of the towering presence of Thomas Jefferson and the democratic aspirations of the American Revolution. Delegates to that convention had pointedly refused to restrict suffrage based on literacy, ownership of property, or even church affiliation. Any white male 21 years of age or older could vote, whether or not he could read, write, owned property, belonged to a church or even believed in God. But the democratic assumptions of that first gathering of founding fathers at Huntsville in July 1819 were not shared by their successors in Montgomery in the summer of 1901.

Nor was the democratic assumption of Alabama's own past the only principle violated in 1901. So was the dominant democratic thrust of the 20th century both in America and throughout the world. It was the federal government and not the state of Alabama that enfranchised women in 1919. It was the Supreme Court that demanded that every vote count the same by compelling reapportionment after the Alabama legislature refused to do so for six decades. It was Congress in the 1965 Voting Rights Act that finally enfranchised Alabama blacks. And it was the U.S. Supreme Court in 1966 that ensured the right to vote for all the state's poor of whatever color when it struck down the poll tax. If the century-long wail for states' rights by Alabama's white elite struck many Americans as hollow and hypocritical, perhaps it was because that otherwise noble ideal for restricting tyranny was so often employed in Alabama on behalf of tyranny. For in Alabama, the constitution did not empower the people; it empowered the legislature. Without recall, initiative, referendum, or home rule, power was vested in government, not in citizens. Democracy was forfeited to the federal Congress and to federal courts.

White power was the central, though not the only, consequence of the new constitution. The Alabama Democratic State Campaign Committee urged party members to ratify the new constitution with a curious modification of America's motto e pluribus unum (of many, one). Printed on each envelope soliciting a vote to ratify the new constitution was the motto White Supremacy, Honest Elections, and the New Constitution One and Inseparable.

Living in a nation newly engaged in building an American empire, colonizing dark-skinned people, and rationalizing white supremacy by way of Darwinian science, the architects of the 1901 constitution were not surprised when the Supreme Court upheld their handiwork. After all, their racial ideology had taken root in the most elite American universities, in government offices in the nation's capital, and in popular culture. Why not in the chambers of the Supreme Court as well?

So the constitutional fathers of 1901 operated with immunity for their racial assumptions. An earlier generation that had written the 1875 constitution had sought the same racist ends but was restrained by uncertainty regarding federal reaction. No such qualms prevailed in the summer of 1901. What had been merely implicit in 1875—that African Americans must expect far less in government services—became explicit in 1901: African Americans could not vote; they could not marry whites.

Black anger focused on these matters. But greater long-term damage was wrought by the cap on taxes. As the state's poorest citizens, African Americans had most to gain from public services. Free public schools, universal public health programs, humane prisons, and mental hospitals all would disproportionately favor them. After 1901 there was neither the will nor the money to provide such services.

Some, such as constitutional convention delegate Tom Heflin, sought to deny rights because they envisioned a future race war, which education would better equip blacks to wage. Others, like John Knox, were paternalists who discriminated according to class rather than race. All poor and uneducated people should be denied full rights of citizenship; there was no reason to set blacks apart for special discrimination. But whether one were a hill country racist like Heflin or an urbane, well-educated paternalist like Knox, the effect of the constitution was the same. Blacks would attend inferior schools, die more frequently of most diseases, experience worse health, and be overrepresented in the convict lease system. Striking down overtly racist sections of Alabama's constitution became the easy task of the civil rights movement. The less obvious and more profound discrimination was deeply embedded in provisions dealing with tax policy, education, and home rule.

Tax policy was central because taxes funded virtually all public services. Alabama ranked throughout the 20th century at or near the bottom among all states in three interrelated categories: property taxes, public services, and quality of life. This was no accident. It was the intent of the 1901 framers that government have a difficult or impossible task taxing property. Even those with little property, black and white, joined in concert with those who had much.

Virtually all Alabama's 20th-century problems were somehow related to the state's tax structure. The Brookings Institution concluded in 1932 that the taxing authority of the 1901 constitution warped and distorted revenue production and created a gravely defective budgetary system. With property taxes capped by the constitution, officials struggled to locate alternative sources of revenue to fund state services: license and privilege taxes, sales and occupational taxes, personal and corporate income taxes—a hopeless conglomeration, as the Brookings's experts phrased the situation. By 1940 more than 75 percent of the state's tax revenue came from sales or other direct taxes on individuals.

As sales taxes increased, property taxes as a proportion of state revenue declined. In 1920 property taxes provided 63 percent of state tax revenue. In 1978 the figure was 3.6 percent. By 1992 it was less than 2 percent. The next lowest state's property taxes were 30 percent higher than Alabama's, and the national average was 375 percent higher.

Reliance on sales taxes also shifted the tax burden from those best able to pay to those least able. By century's end Alabama had the nation's most regressive and unfair tax system. The wealthiest 1 percent of Alabamians paid some 3 percent of income in state and local taxes. The poorest one-fifth paid 12 percent. In 1933 Birmingham spent less money on vital city services than 67 of 68 American cities of 120,000 population or more.

Even sales taxes applied differently to various businesses, which hired lobbyists to win individual exemptions. Tobacco distributors purchased tax stamps from the state that granted them discounts (a tax exemption that amounted to $5.5 million in lost revenue in 1990). Farm interests were particularly adept at winning exemptions. Sales of food and milk carried sales taxes; sales of fertilizer and chicken litter did not.

Because local governments could levy sales taxes without legislative approval, these taxes steadily increased after they were first permitted in the late 1930s. The original state sales tax was 2 percent; by 1963 the rate had doubled. In 1969 local governments gained the authority to add taxes on retail sales, and the combined city/county/state sales tax sometimes reached 10.5 percent, with 8 percent being common statewide.

Despite the nation's lowest property taxes, some special interests—notably the forest products industry and the Alabama Farmers' Federation, or ALFA—demanded still greater protection. At their urging, Gov. George Wallace and the legislature passed Amendment 373 in 1978, placing yet another cap on the amount of taxes that could be collected. The amendment also changed the way land was assessed. This legislation applied value to land based on current use rather than its actual market value. The state set a single standard for farm and timberland statewide, and determined the value of each category, $443 per acre for farmland and $275 per acre for timberland, well below market value in most cases. Tax assessors were responsible for determining current use and enforcing payment of taxes. But they were locally elected and feared suits challenging assessments. So the easy way to do business was simply to grant all applications for current use.

The result was incredible abuse of the system and chronic underfunding of schools, which otherwise would have received the money. In 2000 a parcel of land in Montgomery County was taxed at $1.84 an acre based on its current use to grow trees; later it sold for $200,000, meaning it could have been assessed at its actual value of $35,000 an acre. In Fairhope, the owner of a house and a half acre lot valued at $41,000 paid 25 times more property taxes than owners of a prime piece of Gulf Shores waterfront property valued at $95,000 but taxed under current use for its timber value. In 1994 three dozen subdivisions in Baldwin County contained lots whose current use was listed as timber. Half a decade later CG Investment Venture in Mobile paid taxes of $38 on a 19-acre tract in a choice timber-covered Mobile suburb. When CG Venture sold the property in June 2000, the buyer paid $912,871 or $48,046 per acre. For the county as a whole, half the property in 2000 enjoyed current use protection and produced 1 percent of the county's property taxes. Taxed at its real market value, that property would have generated $2.4 million in taxes; taxed under current use, it yielded $1.3 million.

Current use gave Alabama a tax advantage over other southern states. An Alabama home owner in 1984 with a house valued at $100,000 paid $352 in ad valorem taxes compared to $1,069 in Georgia, $1,090 in Florida, and $1,410 in Mississippi. Businesses valued at $500,000 paid $4,160 in Alabama compared to $5,600, $7,250, and $3,750 in the other states. Timber and farm owners with property worth $500,000 market value paid $1,475 in Alabama compared to $3,150, $7,250, and $5,625 in the three neighboring states. But the advantage in property taxes translated into an equally huge disadvantage in comparisons of per pupil expenditures for education.

As each new funding crisis struck Alabama, public officials desperately sought another bandage to stop the bleeding. After much of the state's school system closed in 1933 for lack of funding, educators lobbied legislators to allocate specific new taxes exclusively for education. As a consequence of this practice, called earmarking, Alabama ended the century with the highest percentage of state spending restricted by law (Alabama earmarked 87 percent of its revenue, compared to Nevada, in second place with 65 percent, or the national average of 22 percent). Ideally, state constitutions omitted reference to specific rates of taxation, leaving such policies to legislative bodies. Not Alabama. The constitution dedicated most of the state income tax to paying teacher salaries and nearly half of the state's property tax revenues to education. Gas taxes and state motor vehicle registration fees went exclusively to expenses for roads and bridges.

Inadequate revenue and excessive earmarking tied the hands of legislators, who were restricted from moving revenue from one location to a more critical need during financial crises. As a result the state was frequently sued for violations of the constitutional rights of state prisoners, the physically and mentally handicapped, juveniles in protective custody, and children in foster care programs or public schools. One mental health suit took 30 years to resolve. A case challenging the child welfare system remained ongoing at the turn of the century after 13 years. So did the equity funding lawsuit after a decade. Legislators could not resolve these cases for lack of revenue. But they could and did allocate tens of millions of dollars in legal fees to litigate cases.

Another palliative that legislators tried unsuccessfully was to tax out-of-state corporations at rates higher than in-state businesses. Section 232 of the constitution required companies incorporated outside Alabama to establish in-state headquarters and pay a special franchise tax. Reynolds Metal Company sued the state in 1989, charging that foreign corporations should not be made to pay higher taxes than their native competitors. ALFA helped sponsor this discriminatory legislation and advertised the fact that it charged lower insurance rates than competing companies. Of course, there was an obvious reason it could charge lower rates. It forced competitors to pay higher taxes that had to be added to operating costs. As a result of section 232, 18,556 companies based out of state in 1994 paid a total of $90 million in state taxes; 63,777 Alabama-based companies paid a total of $10 million.

As almost all tax experts predicted, the U.S. Supreme Court declared section 232 of the Alabama constitution unconstitutional at the end of the century, throwing the state into yet another financial crisis. At least by then the state had nearly a century's experience dealing with financial crises generated by the flawed tax structure created by the 1901 constitution.

The primary state function crippled by insufficient tax revenue was education. The problems were fourfold: citizens' historic resistance to taxation; lack of commitment to education; inadequate funding; unpredictable and unreliable existing funding. The first two problems were rooted in culture. The last two were rooted in the 1901 constitution.

Because property taxes were so constitutionally difficult to increase, school systems relied ever more heavily on revenue from sales and income taxes. By 2000, for instance, the city of Mobile derived $524 (56 percent of total revenue) per person from local sales taxes. It generated only $41 per capita from property taxes. This distribution not only unfairly taxed the city's poorest citizens but also created a volatile budgetary system. During economic good times, revenue from retail sales and income taxes flooded into state coffers, encouraging wasteful and duplicative expansion of community colleges and state universities. During recessions, sudden and precipitous declines in sales and income taxes required prorating education budgets. But property taxes virtually never declined; they moved slowly, predictably higher as property values were reassessed every four years. The result of overreliance on sales and income taxes was painfully obvious. On average about every three or four years the state education budget had to be prorated in midyear because of unanticipated declines in state tax revenue. Most other states escaped such severe disruptions by obtaining a much larger share of education funding from property taxes.

Complicating the problem still further was the constitutional bar against local education funding, which was set extraordinarily low. A local community or county had to generate only 10 mills in taxes (which produced less than $100 per student in some school districts). As a result, the state furnished more money and the local community less for education than any other state.

Differing land values across the state compounded the lack of local revenue. The 10 mills of local effort produced sharp variations in revenue depending on the value of local property. If one lived in Huntsville, Hoover, Homewood, Vestavia Hills, or Mountain Brook, where property values were high, local millage rates produced a great deal of money. And well-educated citizens in those communities, who both valued education and were committed to excellent public schools, raised local property taxes from 3 to 10 times above the state minimum.

The situation was quite different in rural Coosa county, where parents cared less about education and had fewer resources. Acres of timber outnumbered people in the county by 32 to 1. But the 360,000 acres of timber-land generated insufficient revenue to balance the education budget, and the state had to bail out the county. The top four county landowners together controlled 130,000 acres in 1994 but paid only $98,000 in property taxes, averaging less than a dollar an acre.

When the school system was unable to balance its books, the superintendent proposed a 12 mill increase in property taxes (the increase would have cost $58 a year more on a house valued at $48,600). Angry voters defeated the referendum by a three to one margin.

County commissioners, under terms of the 1901 constitution, had the authority to obtain the needed money by raising sales taxes without a public referendum. But in addition to requiring more political courage than most commissioners had, there was only one grocery store and one hardware store in the entire rural county (and no Wal-Mart), so sales taxes were not