WITH BOTH THE MISSISSIPPI AND SOUTH CAROLINA Constitutions unqualified successes as instruments of disfranchisement, there was little question that other Southern states would follow along. Infighting among black belt and white county Democrats remained a problem, but with a goal as clear-cut and universally accepted as white monopoly at the ballot box, no family spat was going to derail the process.
Yet, considering the acquiescence of the Supreme Court on publicly announced plans to remove black citizens from voting rolls—and on civil rights violations of African Americans in general—most Southern states, even in the wake of Smith and Gibson, remained surprisingly queasy about the prospect of these plans being overturned. The “understanding test” adopted by Mississippi and South Carolina had elicited significant criticism among white supremacists in other states, who thought it so transparent as to ultimately fail to clear even the ankle-high bar of Strauder. Something more deft was needed, something that would disqualify blacks but not whites, while allowing the courts to continue to pretend that a rigged game was being fairly played.
Louisiana was the next state to take a run at a new constitution, and its aims were ambitious. Sixteen years later, a law professor at the University of Mississippi wrote,
On February 11th, 1898, Louisiana, with the blacks forming 43 per cent of the population, encouraged by the success of the franchise laws of Mississippi and South Carolina, called a constitutional convention which, says The Times-Democrat, ‘Aimed at placing every white voter on the poll list and keeping out nearly every negro, without violating the Federal Constitution.’ No scheme half so bold as this had ever before been seriously considered by any state since the adoption of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.1
Louisianans, like their Redeemer brethren, thought of purging black Americans from the political process as a higher calling. When convention president Ernest B. Kruttschnitt addressed his fellow delegates during the convention’s opening session on February 8, 1898, in the Mechanics Institute in New Orleans, he intoned, “May this hall, where, thirty-two years ago the negro first entered upon the unequal contest for supremacy, and which had been reddened with his blood”—referring to an 1866 riot at which thirty-four freedmen had been murdered—“now witness the elevation of our organic law which will establish the relation between the races upon an everlasting foundation of right and justice.”2 In case his message had not been clear enough, he added, “We are all aware that this convention has been called by the people of the state of Louisiana principally to deal with one question . . . to eliminate from the electorate the mass of corrupt and illiterate voters who have during the last quarter of a century degraded our politics.”3
Kruttschnitt was on record as declaring that Louisiana “could do better than the state of Mississippi,” and he felt similarly about South Carolina.4 The Mississippi and South Carolina Constitutions “lost their popularity when it became known that they would also disfranchise 20,000 white voters in the state. Louisiana was determined to go a step further and disfranchise the negro without sacrificing her white citizens who had the misfortune of being illiterate.”5
Illiterate or not, those white citizens wielded a good bit of power. In the mid-1890s, even more than in the other two constitutionally Redeemed states, the Louisiana Democratic Party was “split asunder,” largely due to low crop prices, with many small farmers deserting the Democrats for the Populists. These farmers were suspicious of a new constitution, and so the conservatives would need to make certain that the poorer and less educated were confident that they would remain a part of the political process. As in North Carolina, some had joined with Republicans in a Fusionist movement that, for a time, seemed a genuine threat to Democratic rule. As a result, The Times-Democrat had for years opposed calling a constitutional convention “with the wildest Populist ideas so prevalent.” Although most of the active rebellion had faded when the convention met in early February, simmering discontent had hardly disappeared.6
To mollify white farmers who suspected that black belt Democrats were targeting them as much as black voters, the convention came up with the “grandfather clause.”
“Grandfathering” as a legal concept was not new or particularly controversial, meaning simply that a new rule or law would apply only to those who come under its jurisdiction after passage and would exempt those who were in a certain situation before the rule or law existed. A fee or a price increase, for example, might be charged only to those who wished to access a service after the fee or price increase was instituted, exempting anyone who had accessed the service before.
Nor did the “grandfather clause,” when applied to voting—exempting certain members of the electorate from certain qualifications—have a malevolent history. In Delaware’s 1792 constitution, for example, men twenty-one or twenty-two years old who were sons of eligible voters could vote even if they had not paid taxes. In 1818, Connecticut enacted a constitution that grandfathered anyone eligible to vote under the previous constitution, with an additional exemption to the property-owning requirement for those who had previously served one year in the militia. Massachusetts had a provision that exempted older voters from a literacy requirement instituted in 1857. New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and many other states had certain grandfather provisions written into their laws as well.
But in each of those cases, the grandfather clause had been inserted to ensure that certain classes of potential voters were not shut out of the process. Louisiana intended to turn the principle on its head and use a grandfather clause to ensure that a certain class of potential voter could not help but be shut out of the process.
To achieve their objective, Louisiana delegates became the first to insert actual grandfathers into the grandfather clause. Along with the now standard literacy and property requirements, the Louisiana convention inserted,
No male person who was on January 1st, 1867 (the date of the first Reconstruction Act) or at any date prior thereto, entitled to vote under the Constitution or statutes of any State of the United States, wherein he then resided, and no son or grandson of any such person not less than twenty-one years of age at the date of the adoption of this Constitution . . . shall be denied the right to register and vote in this State by reason of his failure to possess the educational or property qualifications prescribed by this Constitution.7
The grandfather clause was not universally popular among whites, any more than the understanding clause had been, and for the same reason. Louisianans knew full well how transparent they had been, and many were convinced the Supreme Court would finally see through the artifice and throw the rule out.
Also, unlike the understanding clause, which could be applied subjectively, the fate of the grandfather clause in the courts had far more potent consequences. It was the only feature in significantly more stringent suffrage requirements that protected poor, illiterate whites from suffering the same fame as almost all blacks. Registrars could always cheat, of course, and dummy up records to allow poor, illiterate whites to register anyway, and then give them help marking their ballots, but Southern states wanted very much to move away from obvious fraud. The grandfather clause, then, represented the sort of high risk/high reward strategy that made even the staunchest opponents of black suffrage fear to include it. But no one could think of anything better, so it stayed in.
Speaking to that point, Ernest Kruttschnitt closed the convention as succinctly as he had opened it.
We have not drafted the exact constitution that we should like to have drafted; otherwise we should have inscribed in it, if I know the popular sentiment of this state, universal white manhood suffrage, and the exclusion from the suffrage of every man with a trace of Negro blood in his veins. We could not do that on account of the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States . . . What care I whether the test we have put be a new one or an old one? What care I whether it be more or less ridiculous or not? Doesn’t it meet the case? Doesn’t it let the white man vote, and doesn’t it stop the Negro from voting, and isn’t that what we came here for?8
After the convention concluded, The Times-Democrat editorialized the result. Without a hint of irony, the editor wrote,
The convention was called (1) to secure white supremacy for all time in Louisiana, and (2) to assure honest elections and put an end to the frauds which have so long debauched the public sense of the State. The frauds have been excused heretofore on the ground that they were necessary to white supremacy. With that supremacy secure by means of a new honest suffrage, all trickery becomes unnecessary, and we can have honest elections.9
As in Mississippi and South Carolina, Louisiana African Americans did not sit by and passively accept what was happening. As they would in all the states that would alter their constitutions, blacks fought furiously to maintain their right to vote. The problem was not will; it was weaponry. They had no allies—not the president; not Congress; and certainly not the courts. They were fighting an enemy with vastly more resources, virtually all the power to employ them at will, an unbreakable belief in their own righteousness, and determination to succeed that would not be mitigated by morality, pity, or even religious dogma.
So African Americans were reduced to futile attempts to influence the registration process and even more futile attempts to influence the white supremacists who controlled it. During the convention, Booker T. Washington, likely the most respected black man in the nation—at least among whites—wrote an open letter to the convention that was published in newspapers across Louisiana.
The Negro does not object to an educational or property test, but let the law be so clear that no one clothed with state authority will be tempted to perjure and degrade himself by putting one interpretation upon it for the white man and another for the black man . . . I beg of you, further, that in the degree that you close the ballot box against the ignorant that you open the school house. More than half of the population of your State are Negroes. No state can long prosper when a large part of its citizenship is in ignorance and poverty and has no interest in the government. I beg of you that you do not treat us as an alien people. We are not aliens.10
But, as Washington seemed to realize, to the white supremacists who were meeting at the Mechanics Institute, black people were precisely that.
By the time the Louisiana convention ended in early May, Williams v. Mississippi was a matter of record, which meant also that while the justices were deliberating the case, Louisiana was flouting the Fifteenth Amendment right under their noses. A legal challenge to Louisiana, not a promising prospect to begin with, then became that much more difficult. One would be undertaken—a lawsuit on behalf of a sixty-year-old illiterate, propertyless black man—but it went nowhere. Booker T. Washington was urged by some to support the action, but he, and an African American lawyer he had recently met, Wilford H. Smith, thought the case too weak to be pursued. Both would feel quite differently about a different challenge in a different state a few years later.
* * *
After Wilmington, North Carolina had all the motivation it needed, but it chose a different route. The election of 1898, which had been as race-baiting as Daniel Schenck had predicted, went overwhelmingly for Democrats—with Republicans terrorized across the state and their votes destroyed, the result could hardly have been otherwise—and the new governor and state legislature set to work on ensuring that they never had to resort to such distasteful tactics again.
To try to determine the best way to proceed, the state Democratic Committee dispatched Josephus Daniels to Washington. Daniels, whose white supremacist credentials were unquestioned, was editor of the state’s largest newspaper, The News and Observer. During the run-up to the Wilmington coup, the newspaper, with Daniels at the helm, “led a campaign of prejudice, bitterness, vilification, misrepresentation, and exaggeration to influence the emotions of whites against the Negro.” They published such articles as “Negro Control in Wilmington,” “Greenville Negroized,” “Arrested By A Negro: He Was Making No Resistance,” “Negroes Have Social Equality,” and “The Negro In Power In New Hanover.”11
Daniels’s job in Washington was to speak with Southern congressmen as to the best way to purge African Americans from the voting rolls without running afoul of either Congress or the courts. (Daniels would return to the nation’s capital in 1913 to become Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of the navy, where he would serve for eight years, which remains the longest tenure of anyone in that post. He would also serve as Franklin Roosevelt’s ambassador to Mexico.) When Daniels had gotten what he needed, he traveled to Louisiana to see for himself how their recently enacted plan was working. “Upon returning to North Carolina, his report was most favorable; the ‘Grandfather Clause’ was proving quite effective in caring for the illiterate white ‘Cajans,’ while most of the Negroes were being disfranchised by the educational tests.”12
Leading Democrats quickly made a decision. Rather than rewrite its constitution entirely, which would involve a convention and a level of uncertainty as to the demands its delegates might bring to the table, Democrats in North Carolina’s legislature would draft amendments to the constitution it already had. There was an unknown here as well—rather than adopting what a convention had drawn up, the state would be forced to place the amendments before the voters for approval. Still, as in Louisiana, there did not seem to be a better way to go about it, and after the 1898 elections, black, Republican, or even Fusion voting did not seem much of a threat.
The suffrage amendment was drafted within weeks. It contained the usual residency and poll tax requirements and barred from voting anyone who had served a term in state prison. (It also barred anyone “who shall deny the being of Almighty God” from holding public office.) The amendment also contained a literacy and a grandfather clause that mimicked Louisiana’s, with a couple of added wrinkles. Section Four required that “every person presenting himself for registration shall be able to read and write any section of the Constitution in the English language,” but Section Five stated, “No male person, who was on January 1, 1867, or at any time prior thereto, entitled to vote under the laws of any State in the United States wherein he then resided, and no lineal descendant of any such person; shall be denied the right to register and vote at any election in this State by reason of his failure to possess the educational qualifications prescribed in section 4 of this Article: Provided, he shall have registered in accordance with the terms of this section prior to Dec. 1, 1908.” Making the clause temporary, it was argued, would make it less likely to be vulnerable to a successful court challenge.
The haste with which North Carolina legislators had produced the amendment did not necessarily work in its favor. The referendum on its acceptance would not take place until a special election scheduled for August 1900. It faced opposition from white populists who were convinced that they were every bit as much targets as blacks. At the People’s Party convention in Raleigh in April 1900, the delegates included in their official platform:
We denounce the machine leaders of the Democratic party for laying the whip on the backs of the Democratic Legislature and forcing them into enacting and submitting a disfranchising constitutional amendment in violation of the solemn pledges of the party . . . We denounce them not only for doing this in violation of their pledges, but also for submitting a measure most odious in form and dangerous in effect. That General Assembly being composed of some of the best lawyers of the party, must have known, or at least had a reasonable doubt, not only as to the unconstitutionality of the monstrous provision of Section 5, known as the “grandfather clause” in said amendment, but also of the great danger of that unconstitutional section failing, leaving the remainder of the amendment to stand, thus disfranchising by an educational qualification fifty or sixty thousand white voters of North Carolina, who in 1898 gave the Democratic party power in the Legislature, and whose ignorance is no fault of their own but is chargeable to the neglect of the Democratic party, which now seeks to disfranchise them and make their ignorance a crime alongside that of the felon.13
But North Carolina whites, like their brethren in other states, were more than willing to take a risk with black disfranchisement as the reward. With almost no African Americans allowed to vote and many white Republicans too terrified to cast ballots, the amendment passed by approximately 50,000 votes. North Carolina newspapers reported that “the negro vote was very light. Thousands of them had not registered and thousands that were registered failed to vote.” The reports added, “A considerable number of negroes in the towns voted for the amendment.”14 While it is likely that the ballots of those black voters favored the amendment, it remains questionable whether those black voters actually cast them.
The result was generally trumpeted as a triumph of government. The Semi-Weekly Messenger proclaimed,
A fair analysis of the vote of Thursday would astonish the North Carolina enemies and slanderers in the northern press. It is almost certain that the state has gone for white government by from a 50,000 to 60,000 majority. It is known that thousands of the best and most intelligent Republicans voted for white government because they tired of negro rule. It is thought that more than half possibly three-fourths of the original populists voted for freeing the whites from bad bossing and negro control.15
* * *
And so the spotlight shifted to Alabama, the next stage on which “legal” disfranchisement of black voters would be played out. “We cannot afford to live with our feet upon fraud,” exclaimed an Alabama Democrat in 1900. “We will not do it. We have disfranchised the African in the past by doubtful methods, but in the future we will do so by law.”16
But Alabama faced the same two problems as had the other secessionist states—fear that the new constitution would not survive a test in federal court, and the more significant fear that it would not survive an assault by white populists who saw the new constitution as a power grab by the elites. In 1893, those elitist Democrats, called “Bourbons,” had forced through the Sayre Act, which empowered the Alabama governor to appoint election officials; restrict voter registration to May, the busiest month for farmers; list candidates on the ballot alphabetically, with no party; and require voters to display registration certificates. Although Alabama also gerrymandered election districts to limit the impact of black voters, the Sayre Law infuriated white farmers so much that “they flirted with civil insurrection, even threatening in 1894 to seat their candidate by Winchester rifle and shotgun.”17
A Fusionist movement sprang up, similar to North Carolina’s, which
advocated a reformist platform that promised to protect the voting rights of Negroes, regulate trusts, end the convict lease system, inaugurate labor reforms, expand the supply of currency with silver coins, abolish national banks, enact a graduated income tax, and nominate political candidates in a direct statewide primary rather than in a closed party convention, the insurgents fundamentally threatened Conservative Democratic control.18
Unlike in North Carolina, however, the movement was beaten back statewide by fraud and ballot box stuffing in the black belt, although the reformers did win control in some hill country counties. In addition, white racism was more intense in Alabama, which rendered any coalition with blacks short-lived.
Still, the split in the white electorate made it possible that black voters, those that remained, could play a key role. “The emotionalism surrounding the insurgents’ frank appeal for black votes was not lost on white voters. If whites divided politically, they invited black voters to control the balance of power. If freely allowed to vote, blacks could not themselves govern, but they could decide which of the two white factions would rule.”19 Whites, however, had no intention of sitting idly by. “To prevent such racial assertiveness during the disruptive 1890s and keep blacks ‘in their place,’ whites turned to violence and committed 177 lynchings during the decade—more than in any other state.”20
Suppressing the black vote, however, had not healed the rift among the whites, and so calling a constitutional convention remained a very risky proposition. The Bourbons could not be certain to what degree they would be forced to make concessions to the agrarians. By 1900, however, the direct populist threat had largely faded, and there did not seem to be much of a choice. Also, Alabama whites had been able to watch a similar process play out in other states, and could employ whatever refinements they chose in fashioning the document.
Early the following year, the Alabama legislature passed a resolution calling for a referendum on whether or not to call a convention. Proponents were surprised at the degree of resistance that remained among populists, and so felt forced to include in the resolution a unique proviso—the draft document would not be adopted by a vote either by the delegates or by the state legislature, but rather would be submitted to the electorate in a second referendum. In April 1901, the state voted 70,000–45,000 to hold the convention, although rumors of fraud were rife.
When the delegates were chosen, there was a clear tilt toward the Bourbons. Of the 155 delegates, ninety-six were lawyers and twelve were bankers. All were white men, of course, and 141 were Democrats. They were to meet in Montgomery on May 21 and would sit until September, working every day except Sunday and the Fourth of July. The constitution those delegates would draft would prove to be perhaps the most important document of the post-Reconstruction era, not because it was in any way unique or a departure from prevailing trends, but rather because it would be the vehicle by which white supremacy in the Redeemed South was irrevocably assured.
From the first speech, convention president John B. Knox left no doubt as to why these men had assembled. He opened the convention with these remarks:
In my judgment, the people of Alabama have been called upon to face no more important situation than now confronts us, unless it be when they, in 1861, stirred by the momentous issues of impending conflict between the North and the South, were forced to decide whether they would remain in or withdraw from the Union. Then as now, the negro was the prominent factor in the issue.
The Southern people, with this grave problem of the races to deal with, are face to face with a new epoch in Constitution-making, the difficulties of which are great, but which, if solved wisely, may bring rest and peace and happiness. If otherwise, it may leave us and our posterity continuously involved in race conflicts, or, what may be worse, subjected permanently to the baneful influences of the political conditions now prevailing in the State.21
Morality was to play a big part in their deliberations.
But if we would have white supremacy, we must establish it by law—not by force or fraud. If you teach your boy that it is right to buy a vote, it is an easy step for him to learn to use money to bribe or corrupt officials or trustees of any class. If you teach your boy that it is right to steal votes, it is an easy step for him to believe that it is right to steal whatever he may need or greatly desire. The results of such an influence will enter every branch of society; it will reach your bank cashiers, and affect positions of trust in every department; it will ultimately enter your courts, and affect the administration of justice.22
Knox also expounded on the nation’s racial attitudes, which, sadly, were not misplaced:
So long as the negro remains in insignificant minority, and votes the Republican ticket, our friends in the North tolerate him with complacency, but there is not a Northern State, and I might go further and say there is not an intelligent white man in the North, not gangrened by sectional prejudice and hatred of the South, who would consent for a single day to submit to negro rule.
If the negroes of the South should move in such numbers to the State of Massachusetts, or any other Northern State, as would enable them to elect the officers, levy the taxes and control the government and policy of that State, I doubt not they would be met, in spirit, as the negro laborers from the South were met at the State line of Illinois, with bayonets, led by a Republican Governor, and firmly but emphatically informed that no quarter would be shown them in that territory.23
Finally, Knox sought to reassure delegates representing poor whites that whatever the product of the convention, it would not be aimed at them.
There is a difference it is claimed with great force, between the uneducated white man and the ignorant negro. There is in the white man an inherited capacity for government which is wholly wanting in the negro. Before the art of reading and writing was known, the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxon had established an orderly system of government, the basis, in fact, of the one under which we now live. That the negro, on the other hand, is descended from a race lowest in intelligence and moral perception of all the races of men.24
A record of the convention proceedings was published verbatim in an Alabama newspaper, and Knox knew he was not speaking only to his fellow delegates. Disfranchisement had become important news, and the Alabama convention was widely covered by newspapers across the nation. Some took issue with disfranchisement of black Americans. The Vermont Watchman called it “bare-faced violations of right and justice,” and the Sacramento Evening Bee wrote, “Alabama is About to Wrong the Negro.” The Duluth News Tribune called grandfather clauses “dishonest” and “odious.”25
But the most important newspaper in the United States took a different view of the proceedings. The New York Times devoted two columns on the front page of its June 9, 1901, Sunday edition to the convention. After noting that “the intelligence of the people of the State is represented in its composition, and it has thus far shown a disposition to approach the performance of the delicate and difficult task intrusted [sic] to it with judgment and deliberation,” the article continued, “it is understood that the people of Alabama will not ratify its work if the political status of the negro is not so well defined as to remove him from his present position as a menace to the supremacy of the white citizen in the control of State and local affairs.”26
The Times reporter, whose initials were J. C. B.—this was a “Special to The New York Times”—did not make much of an attempt to disguise whose side he was on.
As to the restriction of the franchise to exclude from the right to vote the mass of ignorant and mercenary negroes who cannot be trusted with the privileges of full citizenship, and who showed their incapacity for the proper use of the ballot when they had it, a Constitutional amendment was necessary . . . Some idea of the difficulty which confronts members of the Alabama convention may be gained from the fact that they are expected and pledged to do what is practically impossible—to take away from the negro the voting privilege without depriving any white man of the ballot.
The reporter did acknowledge that there was a serious impediment that these serious and upright Alabamans were forced to overcome—the United States Constitution. “Congress has the unquestioned power not only to reduce representation in a State which, in contravention of the Fifteenth Amendment, denies the negro as a negro the right to vote, but to declare that such State has not a republican form of government.” Remedies might even include “overthrowing the existing State Government and displacing from office those elected under void suffrage provisions.” Significantly, the reporter did not mention the Supreme Court, although the delegates to the convention were well aware that the judiciary was a more likely battleground than the legislature. John Knox, in fact, had mentioned Williams v. Mississippi in his opening remarks.
What the delegates settled on, which was agreed to by a 122–12 vote in the Alabama legislature on September 3, 1901, was the most complex disfranchisement scheme ever undertaken by any state. In addition to the usual residency and poll tax requirements, it consisted of two separate plans, a “temporary plan”—which made registration permanent—and “a permanent plan”—which made registration temporary.
The temporary plan, Section 180, introduced the “fighting grandfather clause.” It granted permanent voting rights to any male over twenty-one years of age who registered before December 20, 1902, and had
honorably served in the land or naval forces of the United States in the war of 1812, or in the war with Mexico, or in any war with the Indians, or in the war between the States, or in the war with Spain, or who honorably served in the land or naval forces of the Confederate States, or of the State of Alabama in the war between the States; or, the lawful descendants of persons who honorably served in the land or naval forces of the United States in the war of the American Revolution, or in the war of 1812, or in the war with Mexico, or in any war with the Indians, or in the war between the States, or in the land or naval forces of the Confederate States, or of the State of Alabama in the war between the States.
To make certain that those few whites whose ancestors hadn’t fought anywhere would not be shut out, an additional category was included: “All persons who are of good character and who understand the duties and obligations of citizenship under a republican form of government.”
What made the plan “temporary” was its expiration date. After January 1, 1903, the permanent plan kicked in. For these men, registration would not be permanent—they would need to reregister personally for each election in which they wished to vote. In addition to paid-up poll taxes, each would need to prove that he or his wife owned at least forty acres of land with paid-up property taxes of at least $300. Those who owned no property needed to be able to “read and write any article of the Constitution of the United States in the English language” and, unless “physically unable to work,” must have “worked or been regularly engaged in some lawful employment, business, or occupation, trade or calling, for the greater part of the twelve months next preceding the time they offer to register.” Low-end workers were paid in cash, so whether or not to accept the word of a black man who claimed to have been employed was left to the discretion of the registrar.
Section 182 listed conditions under which a man could be denied registration, which again included a laundry list of crimes of which black men were regularly convicted, or could be convicted if a local sheriff was of a mind to arrest him:
All idiots and insane persons . . . those who shall be convicted of treason, murder, arson, embezzlement, malfeasance in office, larceny, receiving stolen property, obtaining property or money under false pretenses, perjury, subornation of perjury, robbery, assault with intent to rob, burglary, forgery, bribery, assault and battery on the wife, bigamy, living in adultery, sodomy, incest, rape, miscegenation, crime against nature, or any crime punishable by imprisonment in the penitentiary, or of any infamous crime or crime involving moral turpitude; also, any person who shall be convicted as a vagrant or tramp.
So proud were the delegates in fashioning an electorate committed to “good government” and “traditional values” that they began their new constitution, with total seriousness, by mimicking the Declaration of Independence: “All men are equally free and independent; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
The date for the ratification referendum was November 11, 1901. As in South Carolina and Louisiana, opposition was intense. Many white farmers in northern Alabama were unconvinced by the fighting grandfather clause, which, if it was struck down, left them in the position of passing a literacy test. They were also none too pleased about the poll tax requirement, which was made cumulative. So much opposition surfaced that the black belt Bourbons, who most favored the new plan, thought rejection was a genuine possibility. To avoid it, they resorted to the same sort of fraud and dishonesty that John B. Knox had condemned when he opened the convention.
With egregiously shoddy journalism, The New York Times reported on the result. “The instrument has carried by a majority ranging between 25,000 and 35,000”—it was actually 108,000 to 82,000, so they at least got the vote count correct—and although “the negroes voted in much larger numbers than expected [they] were unable to control the result.”27 In fact, it was black votes that provided victory for the Bourbons—or to be more precise, the presence, for the last time, of a sizable number of African Americans on the voting rolls. In the state’s black belt, where all those black men had supposedly voted, the totals reported out were 36,224 for ratification and 5,471 against, which was larger than the ratification majority of the entire state.28 So, unless African Americans voted by a 7–1 margin to enact a constitution that would strip away their right to vote, that ballot fraud had been responsible would seem to have been undeniable.
Giving a sense of why the Times, and most Northern newspapers, refused to even hypothesize the obvious, the newspaper ran another article in the next column, this one taken from the New Orleans Picayune. It opened: “Nothing could be more false than that there is any general hostility, or any hostility at all, on the part of the white people of the Southern States of the Union toward the negroes who live among them. On the contrary, the most complete kind feeling and friendliness are the rule.” For proof, the article cited the one million white babies and small children, “every one of whom is in the care of a negro woman nurse.” There could never be political or social equality, of course, but “negroes who obey the laws and perform their ordinary duties are never disturbed unless it be by some individual criminal and they have all the protection that the laws and enlightened public sentiment, expressed in force when needed, can give them.”29 This, while dozens if not hundreds of innocent black Americans were beaten, raped, and murdered every year by whites who were never called to account for their crimes.
The only real denunciations of the vote came from erstwhile allies, white populists and African Americans. The former restricted their activities to voicing outrage, but the latter, under two unlikely leaders, would do far more, and would force the Supreme Court to once and for all decide if the United States Constitution meant what it said.