Giles v. Harris: Supreme Court Refuses to Enforce Black Voting Rights Against Alabama Constitution

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Giles v. Harris that federal courts cannot enforce Black voting rights under the Fifteenth Amendment, effectively sanctioning the wave of disenfranchisement sweeping the South. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., writing for the majority, acknowledged that Alabama’s 1901 constitution was designed to disenfranchise Black voters but held that courts were powerless to remedy such “political” questions.

Jackson Giles, a Black resident of Montgomery and leader of the Colored Men’s Suffrage Association of Alabama, sued on behalf of over 5,000 Black citizens denied the right to register under Alabama’s new constitution. The 1901 Alabama Constitutional Convention had explicitly stated its purpose: convention president John Knox declared the goal was to establish white supremacy “within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution.” The constitution imposed cumulative poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and “good character” requirements administered by all-white registrars with unfettered discretion.

Holmes’s opinion presented a cynical catch-22: if Alabama’s scheme was unconstitutional, then federal courts ordering Giles registered would make him “a party to the unlawful scheme”; but if the scheme was lawful, Giles had no grievance. Holmes admitted the Court was simply unwilling to enforce voting rights: “Relief from a great political wrong, if done, as alleged, by the people of a State and the State itself, must be given by them or by the legislative and political department of the government of the United States.”

The decision demolished the Fifteenth Amendment’s promise of voting rights protection. In the decade following, every Southern state implemented similar disenfranchisement constitutions. Black voter registration in Louisiana dropped from 130,334 in 1896 to 1,342 by 1904. In Alabama, only 2% of eligible Black men were registered by 1903. The Court would not meaningfully enforce voting rights for another sixty years.

Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented, calling the ruling a “sacrifice of the rights of citizens.” Booker T. Washington secretly funded the litigation, demonstrating that even “accommodationist” Black leaders fought disenfranchisement. Giles v. Harris established the template for judicial abdication on voting rights that persisted until the Civil Rights Movement—and echoes in modern decisions limiting voting rights enforcement.