I was born in Alabama 4 weeks, to the day, after the March on Montgomery arrived at our capital steps.
After Obama was elected president, I went to visit those steps. They were the very steps where Jefferson Davis was inaugurated president of the Confederacy. They were the steps where Wallace’s inaugural speech rang with “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” And just before my life began, they were the steps where King’s speech “How Long, Not Long” met the marchers who had endured three shut downs, including Bloody Sunday, and persevered with a rallying hope. That moment lead to the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed into law when I was 4 months old.
When I stood on those capital steps, I pondered how far we had come in my lifetime.
At least I thought so.
I’m not sure what to make of all this, but I fear Archibald is right.
John Archibald’s column can be found in its entirety below.
—
A lot of people think of Alabama as the cradle of the civil rights movement.
Seems reasonable.
Alabama did give America the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the law that finally made it illegal to discriminate against people because of their skin color, or their religion, or country of origin.
It passed because of Birmingham, a city that defied court orders, that blew itself up in its own racism, that demanded black people separate themselves in parks and pools, schools, motels, restaurants, buses, water fountains, clothing stores and every other part of a good life.
It passed because of Bull Connor, of course. Because the world got an up-close look at what Birmingham’s snarling police commissioner would unleash to maintain such a lopsided world.
The dogs and firehoses were the images etched into people’s brains. They couldn’t get their heads around 50 racist bombs that went unsolved because of this police commissioner.
Martin Luther King Jr. pretty much thanked Connor after the signing of the Civil Rights Act.
“That civil rights bill came as a result of Alabama,” King said.
King was shot dead a few years later. Connor went on to win statewide office.
Alabama gave America the Voting Rights Act of 1965, too. That act was signed into law just months after Gov. George Wallace sent goons to Selma to pummel peaceful marchers on a bridge named for a grand dragon of the KKK. The world, and President Lyndon B. Johnson, again saw what many white Alabamians still refuse to concede — a place where white supremacy was maintained by violence, by illegal laws, by poll taxes, tilted literacy tests and any means necessary.
“Literacy tests” is one of those phrases, like “Alabama family values,” that sounds better than it is. Registrars held tremendous power. They might ask black people to estimate the number of peanuts in a jar, or to recite the U.S. Constitution. They had been misused to deny generations of black Alabamians the power of the vote.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned poll taxes and tests and, initially anyway, forced states with proven records of racial chicanery — you know the ones — to get federal approval before they could gerry-rig election districts to devalue the vote of people they feared or disrespected.
King recognized that Wallace’s belligerence paved the way for the passage of the ‘65 law, that it was pushed across the finish line only because America got to see such violent, scheming, unashamed racists that it finally made the nation uncomfortable.
“We got our voting rights bill written in pen and ink with human sacrifice,” King said. “This happened in Alabama.”
On signing the act into law, Johnson said, “The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.”
Wallace would go on to be elected by the people of Alabama three more times.
Many still call Alabama the cradle of the civil rights movement. It is also the cradle of its destruction.
The beginning of the end for the Voting Rights Act came in 2010 when Shelby County, a place where white people fled as black people found political voice in Birmingham, sued Eric Holder, arguing that the oversight section of the act was unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court three years later agreed, and the writing was on the wall.
The U.S. Supreme Court last week killed, for all intents and purposes, the Voting Rights Act. The majority on the court said states are free and clear to gerrymander for political advantage, as long as they pretend it’s not about race. So in places like Alabama where politics, like everything else is divided by race, it is 1965 again.
Selma doesn’t matter. Birmingham is forgotten. The civil rights era is over.
