CRUSADE FOR CITIZENSHIP

By 1957, the Tuskegee Civic Association had been making significant inroads in voter registration, and could boast 420 registered Black voters inside Tuskegee city limits and around 1,000 in Macon County. Although nowhere near equitable, the rising numbers of Black voters made white supremacist officials nervous. 

On June 7, 1957, Sam Engelhardt, Jr. introduced Senate Bill No. 291 to reduce the size of Tuskegee, effectively removing 3,000 of its 5,397 Black residents from the city limits. All of Tuskegee’s white residents remained in the city limits. At the time there were 600 registered white voters in Tuskegee and 420 Black voters. TCA kept pushing its voter registration efforts. Fearing that Blacks would soon be a voting majority in Tuskegee, white officials supported Engelhardt’s bill. 

In response, TCA wrote an open letter to citizens across the state which ran in the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper requesting that citizens to call their representatives and ask them to oppose the bill. TheTCA appealed to Tuskegee’s City Council, Chamber of Commerce, “Responsible white citizens”, and Governor Jim Folsom. Despite their efforts, Senate Bill 291 passed both houses of the Alabama legislature on June 13, 1957, becoming law as Act. No. 140, although without the Governor’s signature. 

In response to their ouster from the city limits, Black Macon County residents decided that if the city didn’t want them, the city didn’t need their money either. On June 25, 1957, The TCA called the first of many weekly Tuesday Mass Meetings. Three to five thousand people gathered at Butler Chapel AME Zion Church, many listened on a PA system outside. The TCA continued to advocate that Blacks “Trade with your Friends.” They held special Tuesday meetings in addition to the regular Sunday meetings in order to raise funds, keep up morale, and give people a place to come together. Jessie P. Guzman was one of many distinguished speakers featured at these meetings. Read her 1959 speech here. 

Macon County was home to a significant middle class Black population because of the town’s two largest employers - the VA Hospital and Tuskegee Institute. These two organizations had combined payrolls of about $9 million a year and large professional Black workforces. Before the boycott, Blacks would normally spend about $150,000 per week in Tuskegee stores. After 15 months of boycott, around 12 businesses closed and 26 businesses were bankrupt.

Alabama Attorney General John Patterson investigated the TCA, supposedly on the grounds that they were violating the state’s 1921 Anti-Boycott law. He raided TCA offices without the approval of the Governor, and took the TCA to court. The TCA expertly countered all of his arguments and were not charged with violation of the anti-boycott law. The TCA’s case against Tuskegee’s mayor and city council for the unconstitutional redrawing of city limits went to the United States Supreme Court. On November 14, 1960, the court ruled unanimously in favor of the TCA. Here is an excerpt of the opinion delivered by Justice Frankfurter: 

“The Alabama Legislature has not merely redrawn the Tuskegee City limits with incidental inconvenience to the petitioners; it is more accurate to say that is had deprived the petitioners of the municipal franchise and consequent rights, and to that end it has incidentally changed the city’s boundaries. While in form this is merely an act redefining metes and bounds, if the allegations reestablished, the inescapable human effect of this essay in geometry and geography is to despoil colored citizens, and only colored citizens, of these heretofore enjoyed voting rights…

When a State exercises power wholly within the domain of state interest, it is insulated from federal judicial review. But such insulation is not carried over when state power is used as an instrument for circumventing a federally protected right. This principle has had many applications. It has long been recognized in cases which have prohibited a State from exploiting a power acknowledged to be absolute in an isolated context to justify the imposition of an “unconstitutional condition.” What the court has said in those cases is equally applicable here, viz., that “Acts generally lawful may become unlawful when done to accomplish an unlawful end… and a constitutional power cannot be used by way of condition to attain an unconstitutional result… The petitioners are entitled to prove their allegations at trial”*

Image (right): Charles Gomillion's letter to the citizens of Alabama urging them to take action against Senate Bill 291. This ran in the Montgomery Advertiser on June 16, 1957. (Courtesy of Newspapers.com)

Photo (below): This photo was taken at the June 24, 1958 TCA mass meeting in commemoration of the one year anniversary of the Crusade for Citizenship. The meeting was held at Butler Chapel AMEZ Church. (Tuskegee University Archives)

*Guzman, Jessie P. Crusade for Civic Democracy: The Story of the Tuskegee Civic Association, 1941-1970. Vantage Press: New York. 1984.