In 1901, Alabama stripped voting rights from those convicted of crimes of “moral turpitude.” For more than one hundred years, though, the state refused to lay out what crimes actually fell under that broad, amorphous definition. In fact, some registrars interpreted it to mean misdemeanors, such as vagrancy, and other charges that law enforcement liked to reserve for black people. By the twenty-first century, 15 percent of African American adults in the state were, therefore, disfranchised by this 1901 Jim Crow statute specifically designed to limit black voters and, as the U.S. Supreme Court
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