What Confederate monument builders were thinking

On the afternoon of May 27, 1901, the clerk of the Alabama Constitutional Convention read out a letter to the delegates written by educator Booker T. Washington and signed by 23 other state black leaders. A couple of the delegates had objected to hearing it, as it was
already past adjournment time, but Thomas W. Coleman, a Princeton-educated lawyer from the town of Eutaw, urged that they all stay and listen:
The author of that communication is the most noted man of his race in the State, and perhaps in the South, and under the circumstances, as we are considering a question in which he and his race are vitally interested, I for one would be pleased to hear it read.
And so it was. The gist of the message was that:
The negro is not seeking to rule the white man. In this State the negro holds not a single elective office. Whenever he votes, he usually votes for some white man …
The negro does ask, however, that since he is taxed, works the roads, is punished for crime, is called upon to defend his country, that he have some humble share in choosing who shall rule over him, especially when he has proven his worthiness by becoming a taxpayer and a worthy, reliable citizen.
The delegates listened till the end, then adjourned. The next day they went back to work devising a way to bar all but a few of the most educated, affluent Alabama blacks from voting, with Coleman, a Confederate army veteran in his late 60s, leading the way as chairman of the Committee on Suffrage and Elections. There was no chance they were going to do anything else, given that their main reason for gathering in Montgomery was, as convention president John T. Knox had put it in his opening address a week earlier, “to establish white supremacy in this State.” And establish it they did, until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and a federal court ruling in 1966 invalidated the constitution’s voting provisions.
In 1991, I spent two weeks at the Alabama Department of Archives and History in Montgomery reading through the proceedings of the 1901 convention. I was a reporter in the statehouse bureau of the Birmingham News, and at the time Alabama reformers were pushing for changes in education and taxation that ran up against the bounds of the 1901 constitution, which apart from the voting bits was and is still in force, albeit with lots of amendments. I mostly concentrated on the convention debates on those two topics, which were eerily similar to what I’d heard during the legislative session earlier that year.
Still, I couldn’t resist putting that Booker T. Washington letter at the top of my story, and I’ve never forgotten it. The new uproar over Confederate monuments sent me back to my 1991 article, which I keep with all my old newspaper clippings in a box at home, and then to the proceedings of the 1901 Alabama convention, which are now available in their entirety online. The framers of the state constitution were of the political generation that began to carpet Alabama and the rest of the South with all those heroic statues of generals and soldiers and memorials to the lost cause. So what were they thinking? The opening address by Knox, which begins on page 7 of the first book of the proceedings, offers a remarkable window. A corporate lawyer from Anniston, an industrial city about midway between Birmingham and Atlanta, Knox wrote clearly and in places quite well. His two big messages were that:
It was time for blacks in Alabama to be deprived of all political voice. It was time for those Northern meddlers to butt out.
Knox described the decisions to be made in Montgomery 1901 as the most important since the state voted to secede from the Union in 1861. “Then, as now,” he went on, “the negro was the prominent factor in the issue.” There was none of the nowadays frequently heard cant about the South’s cause being one of state’s rights. The South’s chief cause in both 1861 and in 1901 was, as Knox put it a few lines later, “white supremacy.”
That said, there would of course have been no need to fight the Civil War it if hadn’t been for those meddling Northerners:
Some of our Northern friends have ever exhibited an unwonted interest in our affairs. It was this interference on their part that provoked the most tremendous conflict of modern times; and there are not a few philanthropists in that section who are still uneasy lest we be permitted to govern ourselves and allowed to live up to the privileges of a free and sovereign people!
That this “we” who were to “be permitted to govern ourselves” should necessarily exclude the 45 percent of Alabama’s residents who were black was not quite so self-evident that Knox did not think it needed some elaborating.
So long as 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.

— Bloomberg