The Prohibition Movement in the South by Booker T. Washington

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jun 25, 1908

The Prohibition Movement in the South

By Booker T. Washington

A FEW months ago a well-known New York publisher said to me that in his opinion the next great issue in this country was to be the liquor traffic. At the time, I confess, his words made very little impression upon me. A few months later when Birmingham “went dry,” I remembered the publisher’s prophecy. Prohibition has long been popular in the country districts, but no one expected to see it triumph in the cities, and particularly not in Birmingham, where the population is so largely made up of the foreign laboring classes to whom some form of alcoholic beverage has come to be regarded as almost a necessity of life. The fact that a man in New York had so understood what I may call the “social weather” as to practically force a change in public sentiment sufficient to bring about this result, indicated to me that there were some forces at work in the South which did not appear on the surface.

As I have said, prohibition has long been popular in the country districts of the South. The method by which it was secured there is what is known as the “beat” system. Laws were passed prohibiting the sale of liquor within a certain radius of a schoolhouse or church. In other places the dispensary system was established.

The dispensary was generally a storehouse with nothing but liquor on its shelves. But it was not a lounging place; there were no chairs, no table, and no one was allowed to drink on the premises where the liquor was purchased. Before the last legislature met, twenty-two of the sixty-seven counties of Alabama were dry, fifteen had dispensaries, twenty-one had licensed saloons, and nine had dispensaries and saloons. But the people in the districts became tired of the dispensary. Although drinking on the premises was not permitted, it brought into existence other places where loungers might gather and drink the liquor they obtained there. At the last legislature a bill was passed which permitted prohibition by counties. This meant that the anti-saloon men intended to drive liquor out of the small towns, where it had taken refuge.

But the strongholds of the liquor traffic were the big cities like Birmingham, Montgomery, and Mobile. It was not expected that the agitation would succeed there. One motive for prohibition heretofore has been the effect of liquor on the negro; it tends to destroy his value as a farm laborer. That was urged as a reason for doing away with the traffic in the country districts. But there was a stronger reason for doing away with liquor in the cities. That was because it tended to make the city negro a criminal.

The prison system of Alabama, as of other Southern States, has been a very profitable investment. To a large extent it has paid the expenses of the school system of the State. The labor which the prison provides is cheap, and Southerners have not the same prejudice as Northerners against that kind of labor. But the Atlanta riot, in calling attention to the enormous amount of crime which existed in that and other Southern cities, aroused the better people of the city to a sense of moral responsibility for its existence. It was only too clear that among the negro as well as the white population this crime was very closely associated with the so-called “dives,” that had been allowed to exist in the city. It needed only a little investigation to show that these places were pouring a moral poison into the veins of the lower strata of the population,—white and black,—and that in the end this poison must infect the whole people. These breeding places of crime produced the conditions which made the Atlanta riot possible. But it was this Atlanta riot which resulted in clearing Atlanta of its saloons, and it was, to a large extent, the example of Atlanta which Birmingham followed.

I am convinced that, if we look far enough into this movement, we shall find that there is a deep-rooted feeling in the masses of the law-abiding citizens in the South, that some thorough-going measures must be taken to reduce the enormous amount of crime that exists in the Southern States. My observation has led me to believe that this feeling has taken hold of many men who have themselves been addicted to the liquor habit: that the present temperance movement is, in short, a very deep and genuine one, a sort of moral revolution.—Booker T. Washington, in the Southern Workman.