Feldman, Glenn. The Disfranchisement Myth: Poor Whites and Suffrage Restriction in Alabama.

• Author: Friedman, Barry D.
• Position: The Disfranchisement Myth: Poor Whites and Suffrage Restriction in Alabama - Book Review

Feldman, Glenn. The Disfranchisement Myth: Poor Whites and Suffrage Restriction in Alabama. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2004. xiv + 311 pp. Cloth, $39.95.

This book relates the history of the efforts of a coalition of white Democrats, Populists, and Republicans in Alabama to circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, whose purpose was to enfranchise black Americans, by calling a constitutional convention in 1901. The convention drafted a new state constitution to disfranchise blacks; subsequently, the constitution was ratified in a referendum.

In a theme familiar to students of southern discrimination, Alabama's poor whites were trapped between the racism that they shared with privileged whites, on one hand, and their inferior socioeconomic position relative to privileged whites, on the other hand. Some poor whites evidently voted "no" in the April 1901 referendum authorizing a convention and in the November 1901 ratification referendum because they recognized the danger of being disfranchised themselves.

White officials had been resorting to "fraud and ballot manipulation" since the Civil War in order to impede voting by blacks and to ensure electoral victories for privileged whites (p. 50). They decided, by 1901, that legal provisions were safer and more reliable than the extralegal measures on which they had been relying. However, as some poor whites anticipated with worry, the constitutional convention institutionalized literacy tests and poll taxes, contained a vagrancy clause, and arranged for the appointment of registrars to determine voter qualifications. Several years later, John B. Knox, the former chairman of the State Democratic Executive Committee who had presided over the constitutional convention, admitted that the "true philosophy of the movement" had been to disfranchise blacks and poor whites in order to "place the power of government in the hands of the intelligent and virtuous" (quoted on p. 138).

Feldman engages in some revisionist history of sorts by seeking to...