B. B. Comer - Comer Support For Redemption

Comer Support For Redemption

While living in Spring Hill, Comer served on the Barbour County Commissioners Court from 1874–1880. The historian Blackmon suggests Comer supported disfranchisement of blacks, who in black-majority areas comprised the majority of Republican voters. The Ku Klux Klan in the late 1860s, and later paramilitary groups such as the White League in the Deep South, conducted intimidation of blacks to reduce their voting participation in the period when white Democrats regained control of state legislatures.

In 1891 Alabama adopted the Australian ballot box, which made voting more complicated, and difficult for those who were illiterate. White Americans in the 1880s had literacy rates only slightly better than African Americans, but were given assistance by registrars. The blacks were not.

The legislature passed a new constitution in 1901 that included a suffrage amendment, which essentially completed the disfranchisement of blacks. It included provisions for voter registration depending on poll taxes, literacy tests, property requirements and grandfather clauses, which were applied in a discriminatory manner against blacks. Men with the right to vote prior to 1865 (and their descendants) were grandfathered in and exempted from the literacy requirements, which essentially eliminated black voters. In 1902 nine-tenths of African Americans in Alabama (who comprised more than 45 percent of the population) were excluded from voting, as were many poor whites. They were thus excluded from participation on juries or serving in local offices.