The 1902 constitution, written in Richmond to end Black voting
Convention 12 June 1901 - 26 June 1902; in force 10 July 1902The Virginia State Capitol, Capitol Square, Richmond City, VA
A convention sitting at the Capitol in Richmond wrote a new state constitution whose purpose its own architect stated out loud: to eliminate every Negro voter who could legally be got rid of. Black voting fell by about eighty per cent, and the delegates never let the voters ratify it.
The convention met in Richmond on 12 June 1901 and sat until 26 June 1902. It had been called to do one thing, and its delegates did not pretend otherwise. Carter Glass of Lynchburg, the architect of the suffrage article, said the plan was "to eliminate every Negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate".
The machinery was threefold. A poll tax of $1.50 had to be paid six months before an election and kept current for the three preceding years. An "understanding clause", adopted as a temporary measure for 1903 and 1904, required an applicant to explain any section of the constitution to the satisfaction of a local registration board - a test with no standard and no appeal, administered face to face. And every Civil War veteran, Union or Confederate, and every son of one, was exempted from all of it, which let white men through the gate that was closing on Black men.
The delegates then declined to submit the constitution to the voters, having concluded that the electorate would not vote to disfranchise itself. They proclaimed it in force instead, and the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals held in Taylor v. Commonwealth in 1903 that it had become law on 10 July 1902.
It worked as designed. Black voter participation fell by about eighty per cent and white participation by about fifty; 88,000 fewer ballots were cast in the 1905 election for governor than in 1901. The National Park Service's account of Jackson Ward, the Black ward a few blocks north of the Capitol, puts it at roughly ninety per cent of Black voters stripped of the vote. The poll tax outlasted almost everything else in the document: it stood until the Twenty-fourth Amendment removed it from federal elections in 1964 and the Supreme Court struck it from state elections in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections in 1966.
Black voter participation fell by about eighty per cent and white participation by about fifty. 88,000 fewer ballots were cast for governor in 1905 than in 1901.
Sources
- Constitutional Convention, Virginia (1901-1902)Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanitiesencyclopediavirginia.orgThe convention's dates in Richmond, the poll tax and understanding clause, the veterans' exemption, the refusal to submit it for ratification, Taylor v. Commonwealth, and the 88,000 ballots lost by 1905.
- Carter Glass (1858-1946)Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanitiesencyclopediavirginia.orgGlass's own statement of the convention's purpose, and the reduction of Black voting by eighty per cent and white voting by fifty.
- On Account of Race: Disenfranchisement of Black Voters in VirginiaThe UncommonWealth, Library of Virginiauncommonwealth.lva.virginia.govThe state's own records of the mechanisms: the poll tax, the blank-paper registration test, the literacy and grandfather provisions, and the convention as an attempt to reinstate white supremacist rule.
- Poll TaxEncyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanitiesencyclopediavirginia.orgThe tax's operation in Virginia and its survival until the Twenty-fourth Amendment and Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections.