7. Prohibition’s Advocates Turned to Anti-Black Racism to Gather Support in the South
Before the Civil War, Southerners had not been big supporters of the temperance movement, mainly because it was formed and backed by the same Northern progressive types who had been staunch abolitionists. As to white prohibitionists, they initially saw the newly enfranchised freed black slaves as natural allies, and they actually did gain the support of some black leaders, such as Booker T. Washington. That changed after black votes proved decisive in defeating an amendment to Tennessee’s constitution in 1887, that would have banned liquor in The Volunteer State.
Persuasion did not work, so the advocates of temperance turned to suppression, and began to appeal to white Southerners by playing up the image of black men with a bottle of booze in one hand, and a ballot in the other. After Reconstruction, temperance advocates began to make inroads in the South with stark appeals to anti-black racism. Southerners were obsessed with the specter of their white women getting ravished by black men, so the Dries linked supposedly out-of-control randy blacks to alcohol.
