White Supremacy In Alabama Essay

Following the end of Reconstruction, the state and local politics of Alabama remained undemocratic. Bourbons that consist of elite, educated Alabamians, had complete control over the state of Alabama. Soon they started to notice change that could affect their power and control of government. There were places in Alabama where black people started to outnumber white people. The Populist Party, which consists of poor farmers and the uneducated, emerged and protested for the use of the silver dollar, tax reform, and direct elections of senators. When the federal courts started to allow southern states to disfranchise ‘ignorant, vicious and the incompetent” voters, the Bourbons started to get inspired. White supremacy triumphed due to the undemocratic methods that were being used such as, having a Bourbon majority, disenfranchisement of the black vote, and the unchanged restrictions of the 1875 constitution.
To begin with, one of the reason why white supremacy triumphant was because there was Bourbon majority in the constitutional convention. Most of your convention delegates consist of lawyers, industrialist, planters, and businessmen, which are the main constituents of the Bourbon Party. For example, the delegate leader of the convention was John B. Knox, a

In Harvey H. Jackson III’s, “Democracy Undone”, gives examples of ways that blacks and poor whites were disenfranchised. For example Jackson mentions that one of the requirements to vote is to be a male at least twenty-one years, pay a poll tax of $1.50 a year, could read or write in English, and had to be in a lawful business for twelve months or owned $300 worth of property. Another example is a requirement that a person could not vote if he was convicted of one of more than thirty crimes that ranged from treason to vagrancy, which was a list that most African Americans were accused