6. Prohibitionists Were Major Advocates for the Disenfranchisement of Black Votes
The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, and The Leopard’s Spots, were examples of fiction that played up prohibitionist tropes. Popular novels upon which D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was based, they depicted negroes with “eyes bloodshot with whiskey” invade the homes of whites, to violate 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. The suppression of the black vote proved highly effective for the cause of prohibition. In southern state after southern state, blacks were disenfranchised, and once the ballot was ripped out of their hands, the enactment of local or statewide prohibition was a cinch. An Alabama Baptist publication gleefully predicted an upcoming temperance victory thus: “The stronghold of the whiskey power in the state has been eliminated by the disenfranchisement of the Negro“.
