By John Archibald is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for AL.com.
This is an opinion column.
Alabama voters will soon have a chance to ratify a new iteration of the state’s constitution, a model finally stripped of racist language that checkered that document for more than a century.
Good, but…
Whoop-de-freakin’-do.
Because racist language is the least of that pile’s problems. The document was built on a foundation of racism, written to weave white supremacy into the fabric of our laws, championed and defended by those who liked the order of things when Black people had no voice, no choice, no rights or recourse.
And much of it is with us still. So removing racist language is an empty gesture. One that should be taken, certainly, if our goal is to give our consciences cover and our corporate recruiters plausible deniability.
But recognize it for what it is. A shallow exercise of too-little-too-late. It’s like taking the n-word out of a racist joke. It’s still a racist joke. Just like – and just as unfunny as – this constitution.
Don’t get me wrong. Alabama voters on Nov. 8 should remove that language and accept a reorganization of the patchwork document. But our lingering problem is not the racist language, or even the writers’ racist intent. Our problem is its racist effect. And it haunts this state like original sin.
Our constitution denied Black people votes with poll taxes and tests and demanded voters hold property. Within two years of its passage the number of Black men eligible to vote fell by 98 percent. It led to criminalization and forced labor, stole political power and self-determination for individuals and communities alike, which created unequal systems of education, justice and opportunity that continue to this day.
Those things are a lot harder to erase than racist language. But they are on us like a stain, or a prison tattoo. Because this 1901 mockery did exactly what its writers set out to do.
John B. Knox, the president of the 1901 Constitutional Convention, laid it out as he argued for ratification.
“The menace of Negro rule still exists, and will continue to exist, as long as there are 180,000 ignorant Negro voters who are legally entitled, as much as you and I, to exercise the right of suffrage,” he said, to an affirming body of property-owning white men.
White Alabama said “Amen.”
So by 1903 only 3,000 Black voters were counted.
So many of Knox’s vile words echo across the history of this state. Not because he was an outlier, or thought leader, or radical, but because he said the things so many others believed and overwhelmingly ratified. He was the one who called for white supremacy to be put into law to avoid the appearance of something untoward. Because “if we would have white supremacy, we must establish it by law, not by force or fraud.”
That’s what this document set out to do, and did. Regardless of racist language, and regardless of the fact that it was a terrible document for running the state.
From the very beginning, as historian William H. Stewart laid out, governor after governor lamented how this constitution made actual governing impossible. And still does.
It made raising revenue difficult, hamstrung the state’s transportation systems, concentrated power in rural areas and in the state legislature, prevented cities and counties from taking care of their own business, protected the interests of Big Mules over working people and required constant amendment to the point it would become unwieldy, impossible to read, and the longest constitution in the world.
Still, that constitution has stood for 121 years in a state that went through five others in its first 82 years.
It was a terrible outline for democracy. But democracy is not what its writers were going for.
Take out the racist language, please. Go ahead and feel good about it, if you like. But we can’t fix this place simply by bleeping all the damning parts of that damning document.
Alabama needs to write its own story, its own constitution for the 21st century. Or it will forever live in the shadow of its own wrongs.
