The means by which the negro vote is eliminated in various Southern States are generally similar, though Alabama has, perhaps, been more thorough in the matter than some other States.  The importance of this issue to the southern white man is very great, for if all negroes were allowed to vote the control of certain States would be in negro hands.  To the Southerner such an idea is intolerable, and it is my confident belief that if the State of Alabama were resettled by men from Massachusetts, and the same problems were presented to those men, they would be just as quick as the white Alabamans of to-day to find means to suppress the negro vote.  With all my heart I wish that such an exchange of citizens might temporarily be effected, for when the immigrants from Massachusetts moved back to their native New England, after an experience of the black belt, they would take with them an understanding of certain aspects of the negro problem which they have never understood; an understanding which, had they possessed it sixty or seventy years ago, might have brought about the freeing of slaves by government purchase—­a course which Lincoln advocated and which would probably have prevented the Civil War, and thereby saved millions upon millions of money, to say nothing of countless lives.  Had they even understood the problems of the South at the end of the Civil War, the horrors of Reconstruction might have been avoided, and I cannot too often reiterate that, but for Reconstruction we should not be perplexed, to-day, by the unhappy, soggy mass of political inertia known as the Solid South.

I asked a former State official how the negro vote had been eliminated in Alabama.  “At first,” he said, “we used to kill them to keep them from voting; when we got sick of doing that we began to steal their ballots; and when stealing their ballots got to troubling our consciences we decided to handle the matter legally, fixing it so they couldn’t vote.”

I inquired as to details.  He explained.

It seems that in 1901 a constitutional convention was held, at which it was enacted that, in order to be eligible for life to vote, citizens must register during the next two years.  There were, however, certain qualifications prescribed for registration.  A man must be of good character, and must have fought in a war, or be the descendant of a person who had fought.  This enactment, known as the “grandfather clause,” went far toward the elimination of the negro.  As an additional safeguard, however, an educational clause was added, but the educational requirement did not become effective at once, as that would have made illiterate whites ineligible as voters.  Not until the latter were safely registered under the “grandfather clause,” was the educational clause applied, and as, under this clause, the would-be voter must read and write to the satisfaction of his examiner, the negro’s chance to get suffrage was still more reduced.