True Richmond Stories by Harry Kollatz Jr

Author:Harry Kollatz Jr. [Kollatz, Harry Jr.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV)
ISBN: 9781540217721
Google: _P5ftAEACAAJ
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing (SC)
Published: 2007-07-15T16:20:27+00:00

The Unconstitutional Constitution

The Legacy of 1902

The Virginia Constitution of 1902 caused half the state’s electorate to lose the vote, in addition to codifying the split of cities from counties and restricting the governor from serving a second successive term. The document also established effective statewide apartheid and maintained political power in the hands of a few. Virginia thus entered the twentieth century shackled by provincialism, elitism and racism.

Vestiges of 1902 linger in law today, despite a successful 1970 overhaul. The chairman of the advisory commission for that 1970 extreme legal makeover was University of Virginia legal scholar and Richmond native A.E. Dick Howard. Howard explains, “The problem was the rather tempestuous nature of Virginia politics in the 1870s and 1880s. The [Democratic] conservatives saw wholesale buying of votes, mass corruption…[The 1902 representatives] saw themselves as rescuing Virginia from the temptations of gutter politics. Virginia was in an unstable mode—that was the best face. The worst face was racism.”

Other Southern states had rewritten their constitutions with similar reactionary language, but Virginia came to it late. From the mid-1870s to the early 1880s, Virginia blacks served on juries and sat in both houses of the state legislature. Statute didn’t regulate by race in most aspects of public society, although in certain situations integration was discouraged. The most glaring example was public schools. Attitudes hardened over time, particularly after the collapse of former Confederate Major General William Mahone’s reformist (but somewhat opportunistic) Readjuster Party, built by an alliance between the poor and working-class whites and blacks.

By 1891 not a single person of color sat in the Virginia General Assembly. Charlotte County’s Joseph R. Holmes, an African American, sought to run in 1892, but while making a speech he was shot dead by a white man. The General Assembly passed the state’s first Jim Crow laws in 1900. Virginia’s Democrats advocated for a constitutional convention. An underwhelming public referendum of May 24, 1900, cleared the way for the appointment by state lawmakers of one hundred delegates. The convention convened at the capitol on June 12, 1901. Deliberations continued for more than a year.

The convention’s chairman was Bedford County Democratic Congressman John Goode. At seventy-two, he was a righteous old man who had served in the state and Confederate legislatures and the U.S. House of Representatives. Goode described black voting rights as “a great crime against civilization and Christianity.” Former state Senator Carter Glass of Lynchburg (future architect of the Federal Reserve system) described black enfranchisement as “a crime to begin with and a wretched failure to the end.” As Howard notes, “You can say this about Glass: he wasn’t trying to hide the ball. He was forthright in his opinions. Everybody knew what the convention was trying to accomplish.”

The convention was required to submit the completed constitution to a public vote. The delegates knew, however, that its provocative clauses wouldn’t pass a referendum; thus the Virginia Constitution of 1902 wasn’t voted upon, but proclaimed like a royal decree. It became law on July 10, 1902.

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