I became acquainted with Governor George Wallace when I was a young page in the Alabama Legislature.
I was elected to the legislature in 1982. Ironically, my district was comprised of my home county of Pike and also the portion of Barbour County that was Wallace’s home, including Clayton and Clio.
A few weeks ago I started learning Irish via an app.
The lessons progress like any foreign language course. Start with food and water and how to get them. Gloine uisce, le do thoil. A glass of water, please.
Step outside and describe the weather. Tá sé grianmhar. It’s sunny. Or Tá sé dorcha agus scamallach. It’s dark and cloudy.
There are two sorts of conservatism.
There’s the kind espoused by the 18th-century British politician Edmund Burke. It emphasizes restraint; reverence for tradition and maintaining political and social order through mutual duty. Laws must prevent mob rule at the bottom and tyranny at the top. Change is acceptable but not revolution. One should work with the world as it is, inside a moral framework aware of human shortcomings.
By middle school, we’re all taught that the word “democracy” combines “demos,” the Greek word for people, with “kratos,” meaning rule.
Rule of the people.
That doesn’t describe the government we live under.
Alabamians say they want Medicaid expansion. They don’t seem keen on the state’s effective abortion ban. If you let Alabama voters decide whether the state should have a lottery, odds are that it would pass, and it wouldn’t be close.
Whenever Alabama’s senior U.S. senator makes a statement, I usually have one reaction.
Has Tommy Tuberville thought this through?
It’s rare to see evidence that he has on anything he shares his opinions on. The senator seems like an old player piano, mechanically striking the notes of whatever melody Fox News or Newsmax feeds him.
Anticipatory obedience, a term we will all be familiar with by Jan. 20, describes how major figures and institutions appease an authoritarian before he takes power.
It’s hard to maintain a straight posture against threats and coercion, particularly if you think no one else will stand with you.
So they bow and scrape, hoping it will spare them pain or punishment. They pull punches. They accommodate. They hope to maintain what used to be normal life.
Alabama has some of the nation’s highest percentages of households struggling to afford everyday expenses, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
The Household Pulse Survey, which collected data from Aug. 20 to Sept. 16, 2024, shows 41% of households in Alabama said they had a somewhat difficult or very difficult time in the week leading up to the survey. Only Kentucky and Wyoming ranked worse than Alabama, at 43% each.
Back in July, I wrote about a prefiled bill that would allow the governor and attorney general to appoint interim police chiefs for cities, effectively allowing the state to take over their police departments.
The bill from Sen. Will Barfoot (R-Pike Road) doesn’t name Montgomery explicitly. But lawmakers have signaled that’s who they have in mind.
The end of American democracy won’t be a man declaring himself dictator for life or crowning himself king.
It will come incrementally. Through a rapid narrowing of the electorate that can vote without facing state intimidation.
The forms and rituals of the republic will remain in place. But the spirit will be entirely gone.
Earlier this spring, a group of college students from Auburn University, Chicago’s Governors State University, and members of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Auburn traveled by boat to a narrow stretch of the Mobile River, just north of the Mobile Bay Delta in Alabama. Along with them were a journalism professor and a handful of people whose ancestors had traveled the same route in 1860.
Fifty-two years after the U.S. banned the trafficking of African people to this country for the purpose of slave labor, 110 people who had been kidnapped from present-day Benin arrived in Mobile in anguish, hands bound. After the Clotilda was unloaded, the captain sank it upstream from the port city to conceal his crime. It was the last known ship engaged in trafficking enslaved African people to the U.S.
A recent episode of Dan Carlin’s “Hardcore History” podcast offered an appropriate metaphor for Alabama politics.
Carlin discussed Alexander the Great, the ancient Greeks and their methods of fighting. When those kingdoms and city states came to blows, they put on their armor, grabbed their shields, and formed tight units called phalanxes. Each man in the phalanx – which could run dozens of rows deep — carried a tall spear in his right hand and a shield in his left.
Jenice Fountain could not believe what she was hearing.
Was that Steve Marshall, the attorney general of Alabama, on talk radio, threatening to go after her tiny organization, which is dedicated to supporting pregnant Alabamians seeking legal abortion care?
Gov. Kay Ivey did something good last year. And as far as I can tell, she never told anyone about it.
As Alander Rocha recently reported, the governor’s office used a plan submitted to the federal government to increase the monthly benefit paid to recipients of Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) in Alabama from $215 a month to $344.
Even Jim Crow Alabama couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for Jefferson Davis.
When an Alabama House representative filed a bill in 1900 to make his birthday a holiday, the Birmingham Post-Herald called it “an event which the general public does not remember and has no wish to be reminded of.”
For the 2022 midterm elections, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Alabama to use congressional districts that violated the law and diluted the voting power of Black citizens.
A 5-4 vote by the Supreme Court in February 2022 let Alabama use these illegal districts during the election while the court heard the state’s appeal on the case known as Allen v. Milligan. In that case, voters had sued Alabama, arguing that its new congressional district map violated the Voting Rights Act by unfairly reducing Black voting power. Only one of seven congressional districts on Alabama’s new map had a majority Black population despite Black residents making up a quarter of the state’s population.
In March, Alabama became one of at least 10 states that have signed anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bills into law.
The bill, which follows a nationwide trend, bans public institutions, such as public colleges and other state-run institutions, from maintaining DEI offices and programs. Despite DEI programs being used to correct inequities within an organization and promote anti-bias efforts, supporters of the Alabama law and similar legislation across the nation have attacked DEI programs as “divisive.”
There’s a lot that can get an Alabama politician mad.
Black history lessons. Voting assistance. Acknowledging the danger of firearms.
But nothing, and I mean nothing, sets officials off like a worker who lacks an attitude of gratitude.
Four members of Alabama’s congressional delegation attacked a private citizen last week.
And now we’re all in danger.
See, U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville and U.S. Reps. Robert Aderholt of Haleyville; Gary Palmer of Hoover, and Dale Strong of Madison went after someone who works at Space Camp.
Not a person accused of harming anyone, much less committing a crime. Not a person who, by any rational standard, counts as a public figure.
It was a good day to be in Selma, even if the misting rain kept people away until the afternoon sun broke through.
But while the gray clouds threatened before they were vanquished, the smell of barbecue competed with the low throb of bass powering old R&B classics along Water Avenue to draw people out for the 59th Anniversary Selma Bridge Crossing Jubilee. The weeklong event, commemorating the March 7, 1965 attack on 600 voting rights marchers, culminated March 3 with a speech from Vice President Kamala Harris before she led thousands on a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River.
Editor's note: This article originally appeared in the March 17, 2000 edition of the AUMnibus, the student newspaper of Auburn Montgomery. It was also released through two national college news wires.
I will freely admit that I had strong misgivings about letting loose on the grand city of Mobile, Ala. during the madness of Mardi Gras -- especially with my girl-crazy assistant, Matt "lookin' for love in all the wrong places" Jorgensen.
