Beginning in the early 19th century, many southern leaders supported denying alcohol to blacks and poor whites, believing that this measure would reduce crime. Although the first attempt at statewide prohibition was defeated in the Tennessee House of Representatives, temperance advocates succeeded in banning liquor sales near churches (1824) and chartered rural schools (1877 and 1887). Such organizations as the Tennessee Anti-Saloon League, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and a number of religious organizations took up the cause in the late 1800s and between 1899 and 1907 succeeded in establishing the local option, which allowed each city to decide independently whether to be wet or dry. Full statewide prohibition was finally enacted in 1917 and Tennessee ratified the Eighteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution in 1919. Prohibition did not fare well during the 1920s, however, and the state returned to the local option model in 1939.