Reconstruction, Redemption, and the Constitution of Eighteen Seventy-Five

In the years immediately after the Civil War, something briefly extraordinary happened in Alabama. Black men voted, held office, and served in the state legislature in numbers that would not be seen again for a hundred years. Alabama was readmitted to the Union in eighteen sixty-eight under the Reconstruction Acts, which required the state to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and write a new constitution guaranteeing Black male suffrage.

A convention dominated by a coalition of Black Alabamians, white Southern Unionists, and Northern newcomers drafted a document that established the state's first public school system, abolished property qualifications for voting and officeholding, and made the judiciary elective. It was the most democratic constitution Alabama had ever had. Black Alabamians participated in extraordinary numbers.

During the eighteen seventies, more than a hundred Black men served in the state legislature. James T. Rapier of Florence was elected to the United States House of Representatives in eighteen seventy-two.

Benjamin Turner of Selma had been elected two years before him. Jeremiah Haralson of Dallas County followed. These men served in Washington while their families lived under the daily threat of violence at home.

Because violence was constant and organized. The Ku Klux Klan, and later the White League and other paramilitary organizations, conducted a sustained campaign of terror against Black voters, officeholders, and their white allies throughout the Reconstruction period. Churches were burned.

Men were pulled from their homes at night and beaten or killed. Federal intervention, through the Enforcement Acts and the deployment of troops, suppressed the Klan for a time in the early eighteen seventies, but enforcement was uneven and faded as Northern political will ebbed. In eighteen seventy-four, Democrats swept back into power in Alabama under the banner of Redemption, the term they used for ending Reconstruction.

The following year, eighteen seventy-five, they called a new constitutional convention and wrote a document designed to systematically undo what the eighteen sixty-eight constitution had built. The new constitution restricted state spending on public education, weakened the courts, and laid the groundwork for the disenfranchisement that would follow. In nineteen hundred and one, a new Alabama constitution completed the work, using poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses to effectively remove Black Alabamians from the electorate.

It also entrenched a system of local legislative control that made it nearly impossible for cities to govern themselves without the approval of state lawmakers dominated by rural white elites. The echoes of those choices shaped everything that came after.