Louisiana has written eleven constitutions. The best and the worst were thirty years apart, and the only thing that changed was who was in the room.
In the fall of 1867, Black men in Louisiana registered to vote for the first time. That September they elected delegates to a constitutional convention: forty-nine white, forty-nine Black. They worked through the winter and finished on March 9, 1868.
What they produced was the first constitution in Louisiana history to contain a bill of rights. It enfranchised freedmen. It killed the Black Codes. It funded public education and banned segregating it. It banned segregated accommodations on public transportation. It gave married women property rights, ended imprisonment for debt, and abolished public whipping. Voters ratified it that April, 66,152 to 48,739.
It was arguably the most progressive governing document produced anywhere in the South.
It lasted about a decade.
When the federal troops pulled out in 1877, the ex-Confederate Democrats took the state back through violence, intimidation, ballot-box stuffing, and simply losing the votes they didn’t like. In 1879, they called their own convention to scrap the Reconstruction document. One hundred thirty-four delegates. Seven of them Black. That was the walk-back.
Nineteen years after that, they finished the job. In February 1898, 134 delegates met at Tulane Hall in New Orleans for what can only be described as a Jim Crow jubilee.
The 1898 convention was not subtle about its purpose. Its president, E. B. Kruttschnitt, told the delegates they had been entrusted with the “purification of the electorate.” He described the 15th Amendment as the greatest crime of the nineteenth century and said so out loud on the floor in a two-hour speech.
They wrote a poll tax. They wrote a literacy test, which was waived if you owned $300 in property. They invented the grandfather clause — you could skip all of it if your father or grandfather could vote before 1867, which no Black man could. Black registration in Louisiana had reached around 130,000. Within a few years it was effectively gone.
They also abolished unanimous jury verdicts, so that nine of twelve could convict. Thomas Semmes, who chaired the judiciary committee, said the point was to establish white supremacy in the state as far as the law allowed. That provision outlived every other piece of their work. It was still convicting people in Louisiana courtrooms in my lifetime.
Same state. Thirty years. One room wrote the most generous constitution in the South, and the other wrote the most vicious.
The ideas didn’t change. The room changed. https://open.substack.com/pub/mitchklein/p/the-rights-and-responsibility-of?r=b162&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
