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40 Historical Markers on the Road to Prohibition

Khalid Elhassan December 2, 2019 31 min

Black and white - Monochrome — 19th century Brewery. Pintrest

14. Gaining Southern Support For Prohibition Through Racism

After Reconstruction, temperance advocates began making inroads in the South by appealing to anti-black racism. Southerners were obsessed with the specter of black men raping their women, so the Dries linked supposedly out-of-control randy blacks to alcohol. In The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, and The Leopard’s Spots, popular novels upon which D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was based, negroes with “eyes bloodshot with whiskey” invade the homes of whites, to rape and plunder.

As an official publication of the Methodist Church put it: “Under slavery, the Negroes were protected from alcohol … consequently they developed no high degree of ability to resist its evil effect“. A Dry congressman from Arkansas even argued that banning alcohol would result in fewer lynchings because fewer blacks would commit crimes if they had no access to liquor.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.