Anthony D. Sayre

Anthony D. Sayre
Associate Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court
In office
1909–1931
Member of the Alabama Senate
from the 2nd district
In office
1894–1897
Member of the Alabama House of Representatives
from the 2nd district
In office
1890–1893[1]
Personal details
Born
Anthony Dickinson Sayre

(1858-04-29)April 29, 1858
Tuskegee, Alabama, U.S.
DiedNovember 17, 1931(1931-11-17) (aged 73)
Montgomery, Alabama, U.S.
Political partyDemocratic
Spouse
Minerva Buckner Machen
​
​
(m. 1883)​
Children8, including Zelda Sayre
EducationRoanoke College

Anthony Dickinson Sayre (April 29, 1858 – November 17, 1931) was an Alabama lawyer and politician who notably served as a state legislator in the Alabama House of Representatives (1890–1893), as the President of the Alabama State Senate (1896–1897), and later as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama (1909–1931).[1][2][3] Influential in Alabama politics for nearly half a century, Sayre is widely regarded by historians as the legal architect who laid the foundation for the state's discriminatory Jim Crow laws.[4][5][6]

Sayre played a key role in undermining the protections guaranteed to black citizens in Alabama by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution and in enabling the ideology of white supremacy.[4][5][6] As an ambitious state legislator in the post-Reconstruction era, he authored and introduced the landmark 1893 Sayre Act which disenfranchised black Alabamians for seventy years and ushered in the racially segregated Jim Crow period in the state.[7][5][8] Sayre boasted in newspaper interviews that his law forever eliminated "the Negro from politics" in the Cotton State.[9]

Sayre's uncle and patron was U.S. Senator John Tyler Morgan (D-Alabama),[10][11] the second Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan and one of the most notorious racist ideologues of the Gilded Age.[12][13] Sayre's daughter was Jazz Age socialite Zelda Sayre, the wife of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald.[2] There is scholarly speculation regarding whether Anthony Sayre sexually abused his daughter Zelda as a child,[14][15] but there is no evidence confirming incest.[16] According to scholars, Zelda idolized her father as a Southern gentleman of "great integrity".[17]

In contrast to her mother Zelda,[17] Anthony's granddaughter and F. Scott Fitzgerald's only child Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald felt guilt and embarrassment over her racist grandfather and the Sayre family's political legacy.[18] Scottie committed herself to initiatives aimed at encouraging African American residents of Alabama to vote. Despite such efforts, many black citizens did not reciprocate their social overtures.[19]

  1. ^ a b Alabama Register 1915, pp. 49–50.
  2. ^ a b Tate 2007, p. 373.
  3. ^ The Dothan Eagle 1931, p. 1.
  4. ^ a b Levitsky & Ziblatt 2018, p. 111.
  5. ^ a b c Warren 2011.
  6. ^ a b Kousser 1974, pp. 134–137.
  7. ^ Levitsky & Ziblatt 2018, p. 111; Kousser 1974, pp. 134–137.
  8. ^ Lanahan 1996, p. 444.
  9. ^ Kousser 1974, p. 134.
  10. ^ Cite error: The named reference Morgan Friendship was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  11. ^ Kousser 1974, p. 133.
  12. ^ Davis 1924, pp. 45, 56, 59; Bowers 1929, p. 310; The Montgomery Advertiser 1960, p. 4.
  13. ^ Svrluga 2016; Hebert 2010; Holthouse 2008.
  14. ^ Bate 2021, p. 251.
  15. ^ Cite error: The named reference Incest Allegations was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  16. ^ Tate 1998, p. 59.
  17. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference Father Worship was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  18. ^ Cite error: The named reference Family shame was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  19. ^ Cite error: The named reference Social ostracization was invoked but never defined (see the help page).