Alabama voters agree to strip racist language from state Constitution
Alabama voters overwhelmingly approved a measure Tuesday to strike racist language from the state Constitution and reorganize one of the world’s longest governing documents.
The recompilation proposal received over 886,000 votes (76.5%), according to unofficial returns compiled by the Alabama Secretary of State’s office. Just over 272,000 voters (23.5%) voted against it.
“I believe we’re sending a message,” said Sen. Merika Coleman, D-Pleasant Grove, the sponsor of the measure, who said she was “overjoyed” at the passage. “We do have our challenges, but we are doing all we can. We are a diverse society. We support diversity, and we are open for business.”
The vote was the third attempt in the past 20 years to strip racist language from the 1901 Constitution, framed to disenfranchise Blacks and poor whites.
“And what is it we want to do?” John Knox, the president of the constitutional convention, told the delegates as the convention opened in May 1901. “Why, it is within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution, to establish white supremacy in this state.”
The Constitution was passed through fraud by white planters in the Black Belt. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to block the voting provisions in 1903's Giles v. Harris, which closed off challenges to voting restrictions in Jim Crow constitutions for six decades.
The recompilation does not alter any other provisions of the Constitution, such as the severe caps on property taxes and the centralizing of power in Montgomery.
The recompilation, approved by a committee chaired by Coleman, will:
In the Constitution’s ban on slavery, strike a clause allowing slavery “for the punishment of crime, of which the party shall have been duly convicted.” The language was the legal basis for Alabama’s infamous convict-labor system, used until 1928 to arrest Black Alabamians and force them into difficult and deadly work.
Remove language directing poll tax revenues to counties for educational purposes. The poll tax was a key element in the state’s disenfranchisement scheme. Voters had to pay any back poll taxes before they could cast a ballot.
Strike language from a 1956 amendment to the Constitution, passed amid white hysteria over Brown v. Board of Education, that authorized the Legislature to allow children to “attend schools provided for their own race,” as well as a provision allowing the Legislature to intervene in schools in the name of “peace and order.” “Peace and order” was a dog whistle phrase for violence used by segregationists; Alabama Attorney General John Patterson said in 1956 that Montgomery could not maintain “peace and order … if, by court decree, a Negro man is permitted to sit by a white woman.”
An earlier attempt in 2004 that would also have stripped language saying there is no right to public education in Alabama drew the opposition of former Chief Justice Roy Moore and his allies, leading to a narrow defeat. A 2012 proposal that would have kept the school language in drew the opposition of Black legislators and education groups, leading to its defeat.
The proposal also reorders constitutional amendments according to the county they affect. The Constitution does not allow home rule, and the Legislature must often pass amendments to address particular county needs. Voters have amended the Constitution more than 975 times, making it the longest governing document in the United States, and making it difficult to find amendments specific to counties.
“You will be able to find that in one spot, instead of searching for that,” Coleman said.
Efforts to change the state Constitution have gone back as far as 1915. The Legislature has authorized relatively minor changes to the document but has never allowed proposals for a new constitution or new constitutional convention to move forward, due mainly to the opposition of groups like the Alabama Farmers Federation. Coleman said she was not optimistic about big changes in the future, but said they could look at replicating the recompilation approach.
“Can we take bites out of it?” she said. “Sure. This was a bite. This was a big one.”
Brian Lyman covers politics and state government for the Montgomery Advertiser. Contact him at blyman@gannett.com or 334-240-0185.
This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Alabama voters OK move to strip racist language of state Constitution
