The Convention of 1943-44 Discussion
PLEASE respond to the discission using 100 words or more.
Searching through “Debates of the 1943-1944 Constitutional Convention of Missouri”
No unread replies. No replies.
The current Missouri Constitution, as you know from our prior investigations, was the product of debates in a 1943-1944 Missouri state constitutional convention. Consider this excellent summary of that convention’s origins and significance:
CONSTITUTIONAL REVISION IN MISSOURI: THE CONVENTION OF 1943-1944Minimize File Preview
- Now, imagine how useful it would be if you could search instantly through transcripts of the 1943-1944 Missouri Constitutional Convention’s debates. You can! University of Missouri Kansas City School of Law has created this portal for that purpose (Links to an external site.). There, if, for example, you search for “1787,” (Links to an external site.) the year of the U.S. Constitutional Convention, you can find examples of delegates to the 1943-’44 comparing their work to that of the 1787 federal convention, as you can see if you click the below:
- Of course, not everything that was said at the Missouri Constitutional Convention in 1943 and ’44 was quite so high-minded, Delegates remarks, sometimes reflected moral weaknesses in the dominant culture of that time and place, as when one delegate blithely used, an evil racist pejorative, the n-word, as he reported the fear of a Missouri lawyer that the new Constitution would somehow effectively force consolidation of taxation and governance between St. Louis’s increasingly Caucasian-dominated suburbs and African-American populations in inner St. Louis, undoing the so-called “Great Divorce” between St. Louis city and St. Louis County (Links to an external site.) and forcing whites and blacks from those areas into one body politic. . Note: the ugly language, which we will not be repeating in any format, can be seen here. (Links to an external site.)
- Run a few intriguing keyword searches of your own at the site (Links to an external site.), and share here an example or two of what you find. How might historians, Missouri legislator, or students in a a course such as this, use this site to gather evidence about the original intent of the framers of the current Missouri Constitution?