Some People Still Think It Was a Mistake to Give Black People the Right to Vote

At a time when political developments seem to have lost the ability to shock, many gasped at Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore’s 2011 remarks, reported by CNN, that getting rid of constitutional amendments after the 10th Amendment would “eliminate many problems.” But Moore is hardly the first to indicate such distaste. And Alabama’s black voters responded with a shock of their own, turning out at record levels for an off-cycle election and delivering a win to Moore’s opponent.

The amendments “beyond the 10th” that bothered Moore and his ideological forebears the most are the amendments that conferred political rights on African-Americans and women. The 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865, ended slavery. The 14th Amendment declared that blacks, whether formerly enslaved or formerly free, were citizens and that all citizens enjoyed “equal protection of the laws.” The 15th Amendment extended voting rights to African-American men, that they might use the ballot to ward off further abuse. Together, these amendments constituted the most basic terms of the new contract that stitched back together a Union of the states that seceded with the states that stayed, and by the end of 1870, 10 Confederate states embraced these terms. Together with the 19th Amendment, these amendments extended democratic rights to the two largest segments of the American population to whom they had been denied.

But the ink on these amendments had hardly dried when some critics began to assert that granting voting rights to African-American men had been a mistake. Black men turned out to vote at incredible rates for decades, their turnout at times topping 90 percent. In response, white supremacists repeatedly attempted in the 1900s and 1910s to repeal the 14th and 15th Amendments or argued that, given the 10th Amendment’s reserve of unenumerated rights to the states, that the amendments had never been legal to begin with. In 1904, the House of Representatives engaged in a long-running debate over whether the 14th and 15th Amendments should be repealed. In 1911, southern legislators called for a plebiscite on the matter. And in 1916, a Mississippi congressman asked the Justice Department to bring a court case that would test whether the amendments were legal. These efforts all failed, but the sentiment behind them — that black enfranchisement was a mistake — justified the poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation, and violence that dropped black turnout to near zero by the early 20th century. ...