“If the Negroes of the south should move in such numbers to the State of Massachusetts, or any other northern state, as would enable them to elect the officers, levy the taxes, and control the government and policy of that state, I doubt not they would be met in the spirit that the Negro laborers from the south were met in the State of Illinois, with bayonets led by a Republican governor, and firmly but emphatically informed that no quarter would be shown them in that territory. “And what is it that we do want to do? Why, it is, within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution, to establish white supremacy in this state.” And so throughout the debate on these provisions the same or similar language was indulged in. Some of the delegates proposed openly to defy the Fifteenth Amendment by frankly writing it in the law that no Negro should be eligible to vote in Alabama. The prevailing opinion seemed to be that the enfranchisement of the Negro in the beginning was an insult and an outrage upon the southern white people to humiliate and degrade them, and it now became their duty in self-defense to disfranchise him as far as they could under the Amendment to the Federal Constitution. Upon the authority of the Supreme Court of the United States, one cannot do indirectly unlawfully what one cannot do directly lawfully. How could Mr. Knox keep his pledge not to disfranchise a single white man, made to his party, and at the same time keep his oath to support the Constitution of the United States? Which, think you, had the greater building force upon him? There being only white and black men in Alabama, and the convention being pledged not to disfranchise the whites, who else were there to be disfranchised but the Blacks. No matter how the thing was done, whether by a soldier clause or a grandfather clause, a temporary plan or a permanent plan, its purpose was unlawful and repugnant to the Fifteenth Amendment. The well-settled rule of construction is that the form of a law by which an individual is deprived of constitutionality is immaterial. The test of the law’s constitutionality is whether it operates to deprive any person of a right guaranteed by the Constitution. If it does, it is a nullity, whatever may be its form. Only one of many similar illustrations can be given of the administration of this law. In the postoffice at Montgomery there are about eight or ten Colored clerks and carriers, all of them qualified under the United States Civil Service, who own their homes, each valued at upwards of a thousand dollars. Not one of these men, however, has been able to satisfy the board of registrars in Montgomery county of his good character, his ability to read or write, or that he was assessed with three hundred dollars’ worth of property. The Constitution thus administered has brought about the following results: