Defending Black Suffrage: Poll Taxes, Preachers, and Anti-Prohibition in Texas, 1887–1916

On Tuesday, July 9, 1912, the African American Baptist preacher John B. Rayner penned an irate letter to a prominent agent of the Texas Brewers' Association (TBA). The TBA had bankrolled and coordinated anti-prohibition activities for brewers and distillers throughout Texas to the tune of over a million dollars for more than a decade, but this minister was not writing to condemn the brewers for their iniquitous enterprise. Instead, he admonished them for failing to adequately compensate him for his unstinting labors in their behalf. A self-described "protagonist in the cause of anti-prohibition," Rayner listed his sacrifices for the cause over the previous seven years. He had, he wrote, "wet a score of dry counties in Texas or kept them from drying"; exercised "Machiavellian diplomacy" against African American "religious, educational and business gatherings" to mute prohibition advocacy; worked "to make the colored pastors … political friends" of the brewers; "stood undaunted before the frowns of religious women"; and "endured the imprecations of mad prohibitionists." By herculean effort, Rayner had mobilized tens of thousands of voters over the previous several years, including "the colored farmers," who "saved the State from the blighting hand of the prohibitionists" in the narrowly decided 1911 election, which kept alcohol legal in parts of Texas for the better part of a decade. Rather than profiteering from his anti-prohibition activism, Rayner had "been forced to lose personal property and mortgage the best of my property." Despite his losses, he claimed he could forgive or ignore the brewers' slights "when the liberty of man is in danger," because he fought out of "my fidelity to that liberty."¹

Rayner's letter illumines how African Americans, who have been largely absent from scholarly accounts of prohibition, could and did vitally participate in the contest even after the imposition of poll taxes across the South. This finding raises challenges for studies contending that African Americans' disenfranchisement aided the rise of prohibition. Howard N. Rabinowitz and Richard F. Hamm contend that African Americans' tendency to vote against prohibition, especially in close elections, provided a major argument for their disenfranchisement, which in turn helped prohibition succeed in the South.² Ann-Marie E. Szymanski sums up the scholarly consensus: "the disfranchisement of blacks principally enhanced the opportunities for dry success by eliminating one of the leading rationales for Democratic unity in the South." Yet Szymanski also claims that African Americans' impact on prohibition elections in the South is difficult to verify since drys lost statewide referenda in Alabama (1909), Florida (1910), Texas (1911), and Arkansas (1912) "despite the diminished voting power of southern blacks."³ The same evidence could also suggest that wets won precisely because African Americans continued to vote despite those states' restrictive voting laws. A look at one such state, Texas, provides definitive answers.

This article uses Texas as a case study to gauge African Americans' impact on prohibition elections before and after the institution of poll taxes. It focuses on the three decades between Texas's first statewide prohibition election in 1887 and the state attorney general's crackdown on the brewers' political influence in 1916, which spelled the end of significant black participation in the contest. African Americans, though divided, voted mostly against prohibition, and both sides engaged in the effort for a variety of reasons: the protection of black suffrage and upholding racial dignity; success as vote-getters; deep religious and political convictions; and material advancement. These motivations sometimes conflicted, and priorities shifted over time, especially in the face of poll taxes. Yet for a time, African Americans played a decisive role in Texas prohibition contests.

This article complements a recent, nuanced account of black Texans on prohibition in Joseph L. Locke's Making the Bible Belt: Texas Prohibitionists and the Politicization of Southern Religion (2017). He observes that African Americans on both sides of the issue sought to advance their race, and the black majority of wet voters sometimes decided prohibition elections. Yet overall Locke focuses on white prohibitionists, who increasingly blamed black...