Anthony D. Sayre
[1][2][3] Influential in Alabama politics for nearly half a century, Sayre is widely regarded by historians as the legal architect who laid the foundation for the state's discriminatory Jim Crow laws.
[4][5][6] Sayre played a key role in undermining the protections guaranteed to black citizens in Alabama by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution and in enabling the ideology of white supremacy.
Senator John Tyler Morgan (D-Alabama),[10][11] the second Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan and one of the most notorious racist ideologues of the Gilded Age.
[2] There is scholarly speculation regarding whether Anthony Sayre sexually abused his daughter Zelda as a child,[14][15] but there is no evidence confirming incest.
[1][3] His family—particularly his maternal uncle, John Tyler Morgan—were prominent slave-holders and outspoken defenders of the transatlantic slave trade before the American Civil War.
[20][21][22] His father Daniel Sayre served as the influential editor of The Montgomery Post,[2][11] an Alabama newspaper described by historians as a propaganda outlet for the Southern Confederacy.
[23] According to historian J. Morgan Kousser, the young Sayre was a model of Southern conservatism and "had all the proper family connections for a conservative politician.
[29] After graduation, Sayre returned to Alabama in order to study law under Judge Thomas M. Arrington (1829–1895), a former Lieutenant Colonel in the Confederate Army.
"[5] According to historian C. Vann Woodward, Sayre's discriminatory legislation explicitly "prohibited assistance in marking ballots, thus providing means of disfranchising thousands of illiterate voters, white as well as black.
[33][5] Sayre and other Bourbon Democrats overcame the Populist and Republican opposition to his controversial legislation via procedural stratagems in the Alabama State Senate.
[34] When the final legislation appeared on the desk of Alabama governor and former Confederate officer Thomas G. Jones, he openly proclaimed that he was eager to sign Sayre's bill to disenfranchise black Alabamians, and Jones allegedly declared: "Let me sign that bill quickly, lest my hand or arm become paralyzed, because it forever wipes out... all the niggers.
"[35] According to historian J. Morgan Kousser, Sayre's racist bill resulted in a precipitous decrease in black Alabamians voting after 1892: "The fact that the estimated black voting percentage dropped by 22 points from 1892 to 1894, and remained below 50 percent thereafter, shows that the Sayre law was administered to disenfranchise Negros—especially those hostile to the Democratic party".
[16] In contrast to Zelda who venerated her father as a man of "great integrity",[17][47][48] Anthony's granddaughter Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald felt guilt and embarrassment over her grandfather and the Sayre family's political legacy.
According to Scottie, many black citizens living in Montgomery still viewed the Sayre family with askance as late as the 1970s, and they did not reciprocate her social overtures.
