Anthony Dickinson Sayre (April 29, 1858 – November 17, 1931) was an American lawyer and politician who served as a state legislator in the Alabama House of Representatives (1890–1893), as the President of the Alabama State Senate (1896–1897), and as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama (1909–1931). 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 Jim Crow laws.
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. As a white supremacist and 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. Sayre boasted in newspaper interviews that his law forever eliminated "the Negro from politics" in the Cotton State.
Sayre's uncle and patron was U.S. Senator John Tyler Morgan (D-Alabama), the second Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction and one of the most notorious racist ideologues of the Gilded Age. As a U.S. Senator, Morgan advocated for black disfranchisement, racial segregation, and lynching African-Americans. Sayre's daughter was socialite Zelda Sayre, the neo-Confederate wife of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. There is scholarly speculation regarding whether Anthony D. Sayre sexually abused Zelda as a young girl, but there is no evidence confirming incest.
Whereas F. Scott Fitzgerald disliked his Sayre in-laws and mocked their family's Confederate beliefs, Zelda embraced her family's beliefs and revered her father as a Southern paragon whose life embodied the "categorical imperatives of Confederate ethics". She later espoused fascism as a political ideology. In contrast to her mother Zelda, Anthony's granddaughter Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald, felt guilt over the Sayre family's legacy of white supremacy. She undertook initiatives encouraging voter outreach to black Alabamians, but despite such efforts, they declined her social overtures.