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.