Anthony Dickinson Sayre 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 (1896-97), and later as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama (1909-1931). 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.
Sayre's uncle and political patron John T. Morgan was the second Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan.
Alabama Governor Thomas G. Jones viewed the 1893 Sayre Act as a means to disenfranchise black voters.
Anthony D. Sayre's daughter was Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Zelda idolized her father until his death.
John Tyler Morgan was an American politician who was a brigadier general in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War and later was elected for six terms as the U.S. Senator (1877–1907) from the state of Alabama. A prominent slaveholder before the Civil War, he became the second Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama during the Reconstruction era. Morgan and fellow Klan member Edmund W. Pettus became the ringleaders of white supremacy in Alabama and did more than anyone else in the state to overthrow Reconstruction efforts in the wake of the Civil War. When President Ulysses S. Grant dispatched U.S. Attorney General Amos Akerman to prosecute the Klan under the Enforcement Acts, Morgan was arrested and jailed.
Morgan in 1877
A studio portrait of Morgan taken circa 1860-1869
Morgan and Edmund Winston Pettus (pictured) played key roles in overturning Reconstruction efforts in postbellum Alabama.
Morgan, age seventy-seven, circa 1901. He died six years later.
