From the link below:

In 1901, delegates drafting a new constitution for Alabama knew their mission. “Within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution,” convention president John B. Knox explained, the delegates aimed “to establish white supremacy in this state. If we should have white supremacy, we must establish it by law — not by force or fraud.”

Unable to explicitly ban black voters without violating federal law, the resulting state constitution declared persons “convicted of a felony involving moral turpitude” could not vote without having their rights restored.

Alabama’s 1901 Constitution remains in force today, and felony disenfranchisement schemes with similar origins still shape electorates throughout the country. According to the Sentencing Project, more than 6 million Americans cannot vote due to unprecedented mass incarceration and a patchwork of laws in 48 of the 50 states. Increasingly, debates over the practice of conditioning voting rights on criminal record reference the laws’ historically racist motivations.

Felony disenfranchisement has an undeniable racial present, not just past. Black Americans constitute 2.2 million of the disenfranchised, banned from voting at four times the rate of all other racial groups combined. Its history betrays a truth the nation has continuously refused to recognize in the experience of its most intimately reviled child: enslaved Africans and their descendants.