Anthony D. Sayre

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 (1896-97), and later as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama (1909-1931).^[2][1][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]

According to historians, 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 based on later writings,^[14][15] but there is no evidence confirming that Zelda was a victim of incest.^[16] According to scholars, Zelda idolized her racist 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 ashamed by 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.^[19] Despite such efforts, many black citizens living in Montgomery still viewed the Sayre family with disapproval as late as the 1970s, and they would not reciprocate their social overtures.^[20]