Governor Comer
B.B. Comer was elected as the 33rd Governor of Alabama and served from 1907-1911. Alabama historians have long agreed that Governor Comer ushered in Alabama’s Progressive Era of government. He enacted changes that revolutionized Alabama’s education system, attempted to mitigate the state’s fiscal reliance upon Alabama’s convict lease labor system, and developed industry that created well-paying jobs for thousands of Alabamians, black and white.
B.B. Comer was elected as the 33rd Governor of Alabama and served from 1907-1911. Alabama historians have long agreed that Governor Comer ushered in Alabama’s Progressive Era of government. He enacted changes that revolutionized Alabama’s education system, attempted to mitigate the state’s fiscal reliance upon Alabama’s convict lease labor system, and developed industry that created well-paying jobs for thousands of Alabamians, black and white.
Governor Comer is remembered today by scholars across the historiographical spectrum as a strong voice for the progressive movement. There is a reason the Comer name does not adorn skyscrapers, office parks, or shopping malls, but instead is found on urban elementary schools, rural county high schools, and halls at our state’s colleges and universities: the name Comer is and has been, synonymous with the criticality of education at all levels and all ethnicities in the State of Alabama.
Progressive Reforms:
- Increased appropriations to support better public health services – including championing a variety of social welfare reforms for state mental institutions and juvenile reformatories and the creation of a state tuberculosis commission and sanitarium
- Created a state tax commission and a state equalization board to increase state revenue through more accurate property tax evaluations and assessments
- Protected consumers from railroads charging excessive freight rates
- Encouraged the humane treatment of Alabama’s convict population
- Established the Alabama Soil Conservation Department to oversee a public park system in Alabama
- Supported the amendment to the 1901 Constitution authorizing the state to help finance public roads
- Promoted the expansion of direct primaries for broader representation of Alabama’s population in government
Educational Reforms:
- Several scholars have deemed Comer Alabama’s “Education Governor” in recognition of his contributions to education at all levels in the state.
- Comer “…aggressively promoted public and universal education through large appropriations for universities and colleges and the formation of a state high school system for both blacks and whites.”
- Mandated construction of a high school in every Alabama county
- Doubled the general appropriation for public schools. “…616 new rural schools were constructed and 368 repaired at a cost of some $500,000” during Comer’s tenure as governor.
- Assured appropriate funding for Alabama’s state-funded colleges and universities.
Child Labor Reforms:
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Comer signed into law, “A child labor law…[that] went beyond Alabama’s previous enactment, by preventing employment of children under 12 years of age and requiring school attendance for at least 8 consecutive weeks for those between the ages of 12 and 16.”
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Comer supported various measures to reign in child-labor abuses. By the standards of American manufacturing in the early 1900’s, his proposals were atypically broad in scope.
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In 1956, The Journal of Negro Education noted “B.B. Comer advocated the passage of a compulsory education law to alleviate the evils of child labor in the mines and the cotton mills.”
Convict Labor Reforms and Correcting Misconceptions About B.B. Comer’s Role::
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Avondale Mills did not use convict labor.
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B.B. Comer was not invested, nor did he derive any income from Eureka Mines or any other mining operation where convict labor was employed.
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While Governor, Comer extended a mass-pardon to convict-lease laborers.
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Comer’s attempts at reforming Alabama’s convict-lease labor system were often hamstrung by the state’s fiscal reliance upon income from the scheme. Convict- lease “…income paid all penal costs and subsidized other government expenditures as well. …any alteration in the system would jeopardize funding for the judiciary, schools and pensioners.” However, he worked diligently to reform the state penal system as it existed on his watch, including ending cronyism and nepotism in appointments to penal positions, which laid the foundation for the system to be abolished by Governor Kilby’s administration.
On May 30, 1919, B.B.Comer wrote in a bold letter to the editor of the Birmingham Age-Herald that shares his hopes for women’s suffrage, a position ahead of his time for an Alabama industrialist, and to “give women every right that we claim as our own.”
“Sectionalism has produced the utmost evils in the south. We have hardly yet recovered from the bad results of our first great sectional environment, slavery— human slavery. We are now again at the Mason Dixon line. This time, not the slavery of men, but the enfranchising of our women, is the issue. One of the most far-reaching questions in the world today is the absolute, equal, free rights of women. The south should strike hands with its sister states, its sister nations of the world, to establish firmly this greatest democratic measure ever brought before the peoples of the world.”
