John Tyler Morgan (June 20, 1824-June 11, 1907) was a U.S. senator from the state of Alabama. He was elected as a Democrat to six terms in the Senate, and served from March 4, 1877 to his death on June 11, 1907. The remainder of his term was served by John H. Bankhead. An article by history professor Thomas Adams Upchurch in the April 2004 Alabama Review says:
His congressional speeches and published writings demonstrate the central role that Morgan played in the drama of racial politics on Capitol Hill and in the national press from 1889 to 1891. More importantly, they reveal his leadership in forging the ideology of white supremacy that dominated American race relations from the 1890s to the 1960s. Indeed, Morgan emerged as the most prominent and notorious racist ideologue of his day, a man who, as much as any other individual, set the tone for the coming Jim Crow era." In 1894, Morgan chaired an investigation into the Hawaiian Revolution which concluded that the U.S. had remained completely neutral in the matter. He was a strong supporter of the annexation of Hawaii and visited Hawaii in 1897 in support of annexation. He believed that the history of the U.S. clearly indicated it was unnecessary to hold a plebiscite as a condition for annexation.
