Hank Sanders: Sketches #1757 - The spirit of Emmett Till is still rising

  Emmett Till's spirit is still with us. It began to rise in August 1965. Fourteen-year-old Emmett was on summer school vacation from Chicago, Illinois. He was brutally lynched on August 28, 1955. He would die an ugly brutal death. But his spirit would rise. And the spirit of Emmett Till is still rising.

  It all started with a Big Lie. Even if the Big Lie were true, there was no reason for Emmett Till to die. Big Lies are usually excuses to do terrible things. What was the Big Lie? It was that this 14-year-old Black boy whistled at a White woman in a grocery store or said something out of the way to her. Like most Big Lies, it grew and got bigger and more destructive. By the time of the trial, the Big Lie was that he grabbed the White woman around her waist and spewed forth obscenities. Whatever the size of the lie or the truth, there was absolutely no reason for Emmett Till to die. The spirit of Emmett Till is still rising.

Steve Flowers: Inside the Statehouse - We lost some good ones in 2020

  As is my annual ritual, this column pays tribute to Alabama political legends who have passed away during the year. 

  Sonny Cauthen passed away in Montgomery at age 70. He was the ultimate inside man in Alabama politics. Cauthen was a lobbyist before lobbying was a business. He kept his cards close to his vest, and you never knew what he was doing. He was the ultimate optimist who knew what needed to be achieved and found like-minded allies with whom to work. When he had something to get done, he bulldozed ahead and achieved his mission. Cauthen was a yellow dog Democrat who believed in equal treatment and rewarding hard work. He was an avid outdoorsman and hunter and mentored a good many young men in Montgomery.  

From preaching to the chickens to preaching to the angels

  News of the passing of Congressman John Lewis hit me hard. I have never met a more extraordinarily kind and generous man. He was a true testament to the goodness to be found in each of us. I never grew tired of hearing him tell his story.

  Congressman Lewis grew up just outside of Troy, Alabama, not far from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s headquarters in Montgomery. He was a wonderful storyteller in the tradition of Black family stories of struggle and triumph. And he was funny. I’ve heard the congressman’s story of “preaching to the chickens” dozens of times, and each time, I could see a young John Lewis preaching to the family chickens as he dreamed of becoming a minister one day.

Celebrating the Freedom Riders

  On May 4, 1961, seven Black and six white civil rights activists known as the Freedom Riders boarded a Greyhound bus in Washington, D.C. to travel through the Deep South to test the 1960 Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia – a ruling that found segregation of interstate transportation, including bus terminals, was unconstitutional.

Why is racism still America’s biggest problem?

  It rained on marchers from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, and it rained on them again this month they commemorated the day when police beat civil rights marchers so badly that the date became known the nation over as Bloody Sunday.

  Fifty-four years have passed since that historic march for voting rights, but as speakers lamented at the commemoration, we are still fighting for the right to vote today.

  However, as Rep. John Lewis told a crowd at the Civil Rights Memorial Center in Montgomery as part of the Bloody Sunday anniversary, “We come with the spirit and the belief that we can change things. We have the power. We have the ability. We can do it.”

Alexandra Werner-Winslow: State legislators attack the right to protest

  Fifty-two years ago Friday, famed civil rights judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. issued a momentous federal court ruling that prohibited Alabama Gov. George Wallace and a local sheriff from interfering with voting rights marchers.

  It came 10 days after Bloody Sunday, the day protesters began marching to the Alabama Capitol only to be turned back and brutally beaten by state troopers and a sheriff’s posse as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

  Four days after Johnson's ruling, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led more than 3,000 marchers across the bridge and then on to the steps of the Capitol in Montgomery – their right to protest upheld, their path unimpeded by law enforcement.

Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill's comments on voter registration are cynical, ignorant

  In an interview with a documentary filmmaker, Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill attacked automatic voter registration as the “sorry and lazy way out” and cited the sacrifices made by civil rights leaders like Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) as a reason not to make voting more accessible to more Americans.