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.
Read more about this topic: B. B. Comer
Famous quotes containing the words comer, support and/or redemption:
“Many more children observe attitudes, values and ways different from or in conflict with those of their families, social networks, and institutions. Yet today’s young people are no more mature or capable of handling the increased conflicting and often stimulating information they receive than were young people of the past, who received the information and had more adult control of and advice about the information they did receive.”
—James P. Comer (20th century)
“Surely, ‘tis one step towards acting well, to think worthily of our nature; and as in common life, the way to make a man honest, is, to suppose him so ... so here, to set some value upon ourselves, enables us to support the character ... of generosity and virtue.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)