The past that Alabama chooses to honor says a lot about us

  When you come out from under the rusty monoliths inscribed with the names of lynching victims and the counties that bear the guilt of their deaths at Montgomery’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice, you come to another set of monoliths lying on the ground.

  They’re duplicates of what you’ve just seen. The Equal Justice Initiative, which runs the memorial, has offered them to each American county where a lynching took place. It’s a reminder that the past lines our paths and runs beneath our feet.

  EJI says about 120 counties named in the memorial have erected local monuments to the victims of these terrors. But that’s a fraction of the counties that experienced those killings.

  Historians and activists have to work all the time to remind us of the horror Black Americans experienced. For the most part, white American communities have forgotten. Or erased the memories.

  Too difficult. Too reflective of the evil we are capable of.

  Far too many people view Black history in the U.S. that way — not as a powerful current that has carried the nation forward but as a tributary dumping unpleasant debris into the stream.

  This may explain why Alabama struggles to honor victims of slavery.

  There’s no question we should. Almost half the state was enslaved in 1860. Each one of those men and women lived with the threat of physical and sexual assault every day of their lives. Each one could lose a parent, a sibling, or a child if a white Alabamian could make a buck off their lives.

  Black legislators, all Democrats, have spent years pushing the state to honor Juneteenth, celebrating the end of slavery, a state holiday. HB 165, sponsored by Rep. Rick Rehm (R-Dothan) and passed by a House committee a few weeks ago, would do that.

  But under the bill as filed, the original bill, Juneteenth would have been a second-class holiday.

  Alabama state offices would not close on Juneteenth as they do for other state holidays. Instead, state employees would have to choose between Juneteenth, celebrating freedom, or Jefferson Davis’ Birthday, honoring a violent traitor and white supremacist.

  Rehm removed this appalling provision last Wednesday.

  In the past, white Republicans have claimed they worry about creating another state holiday. Last year, Republicans forced Rep. Juandalynn Givan (D-Birmingham) who is Black, to include the Juneteenth-or-the-racist provision in her bill that would have established the state holiday. It was a disgraceful, dishonorable demand to make of any Alabamian, let alone anyone who happens to be Black.

  But Givan agreed because of the importance of marking the holiday. (The bill passed the House but died in the Senate.)

  Now the GOP has decided that Juneteenth should be a holiday, full stop. And that a white man should get credit for it.

  After forcing a Black woman to make accommodations for a Confederate who killed hundreds of thousands of Americans to keep millions more in slavery.

  “My ancestors are crying,” Givan said as she left the committee hearing last Wednesday.

  This is the pattern in Alabama. We can’t acknowledge the oppressed without giving the oppressor his due. We can’t celebrate the bravery of the Alabamians who fought an anti-democratic government without insisting that government can’t change.

  The state treats the victims of slavery as intrusions on a perverse hero story about Davis or Robert E. Lee being slightly misguided defenders of liberty, not the authoritarian thugs they were.

  So they pass laws threatening educators who teach honest history. And protect statues honoring slaveholders and lynchers.

  The state quite rightly has a Holocaust Commission funded with taxpayer dollars to tell people about the horrors of Nazi Germany, a regime dedicated to the industrial slaughter of minorities.

  But Alabama has no equivalent commission to teach children about slavery, a system of building this state on millions of Black bodies. There are few state-funded memorials to slavery or segregation. The Alabama Historical Commission operates the Freedom Rides Museum in Montgomery, but it also operates Confederate Memorial Park. EJI’s lynching and slavery memorials in Montgomery are privately funded.

  Black lawmakers have to work with a system that has no interest in honoring our real past, one that forces terrible choices on them. Rep. Alvin Holmes (D-Montgomery) got the Alabama Legislature to make Martin Luther King Day a state holiday in 1984 by tying it to the existing Robert E. Lee holiday.

  They shouldn’t have to do this, any more than Alabama should cling to its Confederate fetishes.

  But in our state, our leaders push fantasies into the public sphere without question. And force actual history to be negotiated.

  Like those rusty columns at the lynching memorial, the past lays before us: hard. Heavy. Difficult to grasp.

  All too often, Alabama chooses to stick with the fantasy. And trample the stark and indelible wreckage it leaves behind.

  About the author: Brian Lyman is the editor of Alabama Reflector. He has covered Alabama politics since 2006 and has worked at the Montgomery Advertiser, the Press-Register, and The Anniston Star. A 2024 Pulitzer finalist for Commentary, his work has also won awards from the Associated Press Managing Editors, the Alabama Press Association, and the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights.

  This article was published by Alabama Reflector, which is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.