“A Great Religious Octopus”: Church and State at Virginia's Constitutional Convention, 1901–1902

A hundred years ago Virginia drafted a new state constitution designed to disfranchise African American voters. That objective was transparent from the outset of the convention. As John Goode, the presiding officer, assumed his seat, he called black suffrage “a great crime against civilization and C...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Buckley, Thomas E. 1939- (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Cambridge Univ. Press 2003
In: Church history
Year: 2003, Volume: 72, Issue: 2, Pages: 333-360
Online Access: Volltext (JSTOR)
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Summary:A hundred years ago Virginia drafted a new state constitution designed to disfranchise African American voters. That objective was transparent from the outset of the convention. As John Goode, the presiding officer, assumed his seat, he called black suffrage “a great crime against civilization and Christianity.” At the age of seventy-two, Goode was the grand old man of the convention. A graduate of the University of Virginia and life-long Democrat, he had served in the state legislature, the Secession Convention of 1861, the Confederate legislature, and the U.S. House of Representatives before his appointment as Solicitor General of the United States in 1885. Goode reflected the mentality of the vast majority of convention delegates when he stated that African Americans were incapable of education or citizenship. “The omniscient Ruler of the Universe … made [them] inferior,” he proclaimed, and sometime in the future, when the North knew better, the Fifteenth Amendment would be repealed.
ISSN:1755-2613
Contains:Enthalten in: Church history
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1017/S000964070009987X