Alabama can’t look away from difficult history

  Rep. Ed Oliver (R-Dadeville) predicted in January that a “divisive concepts” bill — which presumes exposure to hard or unflattering history will melt children into gelatin — would pass in the first or second week of the legislative session.

  And happy Black History Month to you, too. The good news is that the 2024 Alabama Legislature finished its second week last Thursday without the bill — sponsored by Oliver over the last several years — rearing its rage-choked head in the Statehouse.

70 years after Brown vs. Board of Education, public schools still deeply segregated

  Brown vs. Board of Education, the pivotal Supreme Court decision that made school segregation unconstitutional, turns 70 years old on May 17, 2024.

  At the time of the 1954 ruling, 17 U.S. states had laws permitting or requiring racially segregated schools. The Brown decision declared that segregation in public schools was “inherently unequal.” This was, in part, because the court argued that access to equitable, nonsegregated education played a critical role in creating informed citizens – a paramount concern for the political establishment amid the Cold War. With Brown, the justices overturned decades of legal precedent that kept Black Americans in separate and unequal schools.

Martin Luther King Jr., union man

  If Martin Luther King Jr. still lived, he’d probably tell people to join unions.

  King understood racial equality was inextricably linked to economics. He asked, “What good does it do to be able to eat at a lunch counter if you can’t buy a hamburger?”

Steve Marshall doesn’t know what Jim Crow was

  Last Tuesday, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall issued a “statement on redistricting to the people of Alabama.”

  It said his office would abide by a federal court order creating a second majority or near-majority Black congressional district while appealing the ruling.

  That’s a standard comment when one loses cases like these. (The office on Friday appeared to have abandoned an immediate appeal of the order.)

  But Marshall said a lot more.

Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott pull from segregationists’ playbook with their anti-immigration stunts

  As a historian of racism and white supremacy in the United States, I’ve become accustomed to callous actions like those of Republican governors who organized transportation for Latin American migrants to states run by their political opponents.

  Governors Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida are following the playbook of segregationists who provided one-way bus tickets to Northern cities for Black Southerners in the 1960s. At that time, the fight for racial equality was attracting national attention and support from many white Americans, inspiring some to join interracial Freedom Rides organized by civil rights groups to challenge segregation on interstate bus lines.

Legacy of Jim Crow still affects funding for public schools

  Nearly 70 years ago – in its 1954 Brown v. Board decision – the Supreme Court framed racial segregation as the cause of educational inequality. It did not, however, challenge the lengths to which states went to ensure the unequal funding of Black schools.

  Before Brown, Southern states were using segregation to signify and tangibly reinforce second-class citizenship for Black people in the United States. The court in Brown deemed that segregation was inherently unequal. Even if the schools were “equalized” on all “tangible factors,” segregation remained a problem and physical integration was the cure, the Court concluded.

Once a symbol of desegregation, Ruby Bridges’ school now reflects another battle engulfing public education

  On Nov. 14, 1960, after a long summer and autumn of volleys between the Louisiana Legislature and the federal courts, Ruby Bridges, a 6-year-old Black girl, was allowed to enroll in an all-white school. Accompanied by federal marshals, Bridges entered William Frantz Public School – a small neighborhood school in New Orleans’ Upper Ninth Ward.

  If that building’s walls could talk, they certainly would tell the well-known story of its desegregation. But those same walls could tell another story, too. That story is about continued racism as well as efforts to dismantle and privatize public education in America over the past six decades.

What happens when black Americans leave their segregated hometowns

  Where someone grows up is profoundly important for their life chances. It influences things like the schools they attend, the jobs, parks and community resources they have access to, and the peers they interact with.

  Because of this comprehensive influence, one might conclude that where you grow up affects your ability to move up the residential ladder and into a better neighborhood than the one you grew up in.

Hank Sanders: Sketches #1681 - The breadth, depth, and reach of 400 years of oppression is still alive today

  Four hundred years. 400 years of struggle. 400 years being held down, being held back, being discriminated against, and being considered less than. 400 years of continuous oppression in North America. 400 years of struggle in this place that became the United States of America. 400 years is a long, long time.

  It was late August in 1619 when the pirate ship White Lion put down its anchor at the mouth of the James River in a place called Point Comfort near Jamestown, Virginia. There were 20 or more enslaved Africans aboard. They had been robbed from Africa and placed on a Portuguese ship now referred to as the San Juan Bautista. Subsequently, the captains and the crews of two British pirate ships, the White Lion and the Treasurer, robbed the Portuguese ship of about 50 of its enslaved Africans who had been robbed from what is now Angalo, West Africa. That was the inception of this enslavement in what is now the United States of America.

Ben Carson wants HUD to stop fighting housing segregation

  Today, a child born to a low-income family and raised in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans will have beaten the odds if they live past age 67. They can also expect to make just $20,000 a year by the time they reach their thirties.

  Just a 20-minute drive away, in the Uptown/Carrollton neighborhoods near Tulane and Loyola Universities, that same child could expect to live 20 years longer and take home roughly $53,000 more in annual salary.

Growing up as a child of the Little Rock Nine

  On May 27, 1958, Ernest Green became the first black student to graduate from Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas. He was among the group of black teens - known as the Little Rock Nine - who had integrated the school in 1957.

  Sixty years later, we sat down with Green and his daughter, MacKenzie Green, to talk about graduation, Hollywood, and activism today. We conducted the interviews separately but asked them the same questions. Their responses have been edited and condensed, and are presented together.

MacKenzie, what is it like being the child of one of the Little Rock Nine?

  MacKenzie Green: It’s funny because it’s not pressure from him; it’s pressure from me once I figured out who he was. Because it’s not like I grew up with him being like, “I’m Ernest Green, capital E, capital G,” no, it was — he was dad.

  Ernest Green: She’s absorbed this legacy and the history, and she wanted to be her own person. That’s kind of where I started out. I wanted to be my own person. I believed that [Little Rock] Central High at the time offered the best alternative for me, and I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t there.

Ernest, how did you end up attending Little Rock Central High School?

  EG: This was three years after the Brown [v. Board of Education] decision. The Little Rock school board was under a court order to desegregate in 1957, and spring of ‘57 I decided that I wanted to transfer. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the process. All I did was to sign a piece of paper that I was willing to be a transfer student. I lived in the Central district, and I sort of left it at that.

What did your parents think?

  EG: My dad had passed, and my mother and my aunt were both schoolteachers. My grandfather was a retired letter carrier. I’m certain they had reservations about my going there, but they never imposed that on my decision. They said they would support me as much as I needed support, and that they were standing behind me. They didn’t think I was making a wrongheaded decision, but I’m certain they took some negative responses from people in the community because everybody in the black community wasn’t sold that this was something they wanted to support.

What kind of pushback did you receive?

  EG: I had a job for the summer as a locker room attendant at the country club. Sometime during the middle of the summer, the school board published the names of the students who were eligible to transfer, and I suspect that they did that to try to intimidate and whittle down the numbers. Of course, that’s what occurred. But while I was working at the country club, I had developed a friendship with one of the members’ sons who was about my age. The day they published my name in the paper, he came screaming into the locker room, very upset, agitated, wanted to know how I could do that. “You seemed like such a nice guy!” So that gave me some indication that this was not going to be a day at the beach, but we clearly didn’t anticipate that they were going to call out troops to bar our entrance.

What has it been like watching MacKenzie get an education in a system very different from the one you integrated?

  EG: It’s what I thought we were fighting to change.

  MG: I just finished my MBA at Columbia, and I remember the last day of orientation fell on the same day as the first day that he got to [Little Rock] Central High. I remember sitting there with one of my classmates and saying, you know, “This is kind of heavy.” I said, “I am starting at this Ivy League institution that didn’t take people who looked like me, and getting a degree that most people that look like me still don’t get.”

  EG: It’s rewarding to see that they don’t have to go through the same hassle that I had at their age. That’s the outcome we wanted to see occur.

  MG: It was a weird time to drop into Columbia, though, because you had the beginning of Black Lives Matter, and then the [2016] election. Sometimes, my peers would look at me for a perfect answer, or to be stressed or outraged. I was actually having a fight with a classmate recently, who was like, “I’m so stressed!” And I said, “That’s not a choice. That’s a state of paralysis that I can’t be in with you.”

MacKenzie, what’s next now that you’ve graduated from Columbia?

  MG: I looked around and said, “Why are there no black people? Why are there no women?” And I thought, “Oh my God, Hollywood!” It’s entertainment, it’s this world where there’s another glass ceiling — in my case a stained glass ceiling — to be broken. Sometimes he’ll look at me and say, “You know you don’t have to be the first at something. You know you can just find something you like,” and I’m like, “Well, I knew you'd say that,” and I go, “But for me, I’ll feel disappointed if you did all of this and then people are like, ‘Well what became of his daughter?’ and they’re like, ‘I heard she’s a really great soulcycle instructor!’”

  EG: MacKenzie has a lot to say. She really knows the subject matter, and I’m proud of what she’s achieved.

  MG: During my time at Columbia, I interned at a bunch of different entertainment brands, Harper’s Bazaar, Paramount Pictures, NBC Universal, so eventually my dream of all dreams is to be the chief marketing officer of a Hollywood studio. I just think there’s something very poetic and beautiful about an industry that was built on “Birth of a Nation” eventually having somebody sitting there looking like the faces that they said were going to destroy the business.

  EG: She has the vision, she has the energy, and I think she has the intelligence that she can achieve that.

  MG: Actually one of his gifts to me when I got the Paramount gig was a “Birth of a Nation” vintage poster. He was like, “When you’re ready, we’ll get it framed and put it up in your office right next to your Columbia MBA.”

  EG: I think she’s the kind of person that needs to be there.

Ernest, what was it like watching MacKenzie graduate from Columbia?

  EG: She’s a lady with a mission. She’s staying on point and trying to complete the things she wants to do.

  MG: There is no finish line to this. My dad taught me that the first one through the wall is the bloodiest.

  EG: I’m sure there’s somebody right now in Little Rock who thinks that we brought down the bubonic plague, we nine, but all you can do is just continue to push.

What was your graduation from Little Rock Central High School like?

  EG: Principal Matthews told me I didn’t have to attend the ceremony, that they would mail me my diploma. I thought about that for about half a millisecond. I didn’t go through all this not to participate in it. The night of the ceremony, they called out all the students who had received awards and scholarships, and I had received a scholarship from Michigan State. They didn’t cite me.

  MG: I was talking about this with my dad today, and he said, “I went to my 50th high school reunion” — not the anniversary of the Little Rock Nine [integrating the high school], but his actual senior high school reunion — and he said, “There was not a single person who was at that 50th reunion who did not think me going to Little Rock was the greatest thing that ever happened. They were so happy I was there, everybody was apparently my friend.” And he says, “That’s the funny thing about right now,” he goes, “Yes, there’s divisiveness, there is fighting, there are these moments of complete and total chaos, but I can guarantee you when, God willing, we have the 60th anniversary of the Colin Kaepernick kneel, people will be sitting around and saying, “I’ve always thought it was the greatest idea ever. I just thought it was so brave.”

  EG: I think there’s no reason to let up and not continue to push.

Especially when Martin Luther King Jr. personally attended your high school graduation.

  EG: Unbeknownst to me, Dr. King was speaking at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, which is 35 to 40 miles from Little Rock, and he wanted to come up and witness my graduation. He was close to Mrs. Bates, who was the head of the NAACP. This was the beginning of his career, so it’s almost impossible for anybody of this generation to believe anybody didn’t know who Dr. King was, but in fact, I’ve always said if local police had known who he was they probably wouldn’t have allowed him into the ceremony. Anyway, he sat with my mother and aunt and grandfather. Afterward, we had a chance to get together briefly. I had a party at the house and after, we said our hellos and all that. I’m a 16-year-old teenager that just graduated from high school, so I was more interested in hanging out with my friends.

  MG: But you know, he didn’t stop. He got to Lehman Brothers and looked at young black men who were coming in, and people would say, “I don’t think he has the potential,” and he’d say, “I see potential. I’m willing to take him on.”

  EG: I feel really recognized that Martin Luther King attended my high school graduation. My mother kept a diary of gifts and things I received, and in that diary is a notation of M.L. King of Montgomery, Alabama. He wrote a check for $15. I’m pretty certain I’m in some very rare company there.

Ernest, how did you juggle carrying on a civil rights legacy with raising small children?

  EG: We really didn’t start getting this kind of recognition until the 25th or 30th anniversary.

  MG: It didn’t seem strange to me that my father had to travel a lot during February, or that sometimes when I picked up the phone and said hello, it’d be like, “This is a call from the White House,” and I’d be like “Dad, it’s for you!” These things felt normal because he created a sense of normalcy. And yet he was on a plane traveling the world! But he traveled with my storybooks and read them to me every night.

  EG: Partly you’ve got duties as a parent, so some of that doesn’t interfere with the weight of history. But I’ve always said that I’m the oldest show-and-tell for each of my kids, from kindergarten through to graduate school. So I’ve gotten used to it.

  MG: I remember I didn’t know he’d been at Nelson Mandela’s inauguration, but he got home on a redeye, slept in the living room in his suit, woke me up the next morning to go to swim practice, and sat through the entirety of practice at 6 o’clock in the morning. He never said like, “Oh, honey, mom’s gonna have to take you to swim practice, I’m so tired, I was at Nelson Mandela’s inauguration.” It’s like, “She’s 8! She doesn’t know or care about any of this, this isn’t what she’s going to remember.”

  EG: We attended a lot of swim practices. But if she was willing to work that hard at it, there’s no reason I couldn’t get up and get her to events and practices and meets. I’ve been to more horse shows and swim meets than any other American I think.

  MG: I’m very good friends with Andy Young’s granddaughter — she and I grew up together — and we used to always tell our peers, “Our parents are alive, as are your parents and your grandparents, and they had an opinion on my father and her grandfather.” And I think now is that time when history is being created where I’m like, “You’re picking the stories you’re either going choose to omit to your grandchildren or the stories you’re going to be proud to tell.”

  EG: I call it the microwave generation, in which you put something in and it pops out in ten seconds. That’s not the case here.

  MG: I think the interesting thing is how the trials of now have created potential for the next generation of great thought leaders and activists to step into their own.

  EG: I always saw it as a very long-term situation. If those who had some opportunity to influence the opinions of other students [at Little Rock Central High] had spoken up a little more, it probably wouldn’t have been as tough a year for us as it turned out to be. I think we’re going to experience this for some while, that the pioneers are the ones who have to create the road and the path and all that.

  MG: That’s what I would hope to impart to my children: that the first step towards change is not easy, but you create an opportunity busting through that wall for others to come behind you.

  EG: [MacKenzie] understands the importance of it. I’m going to be a supporter of hers to the very end.

  This article was published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based civil rights organization.

Hank Sanders: Senate Sketches #1582: The Invitation

  I received an invitation to attend services at a “White church” (a church whose pastor and members are all White). I wondered about the invitation. This may have been the first time in 46 years of living in Selma and 34 years of serving in the Alabama Senate that I was specifically invited to a “White church” on a particular Sunday. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Eleven o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week in America.”

Hank Sanders: Senate Sketches #1556: Bending the arc of history

  Bending the arc of history: African Americans and the University of Alabama School of Law. This was the name of the conference at the law school last week. This phrase springs from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1965 speech at the Alabama State Capitol at the end of the Selma-to-Montgomery March. Dr. King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Theodore Parker rendered a version of this concept years earlier. The conference was about the University of Alabama Law School’s exclusion of Black people from its inception in 1831 to the first graduating class of African Americans in 1972 and the impact of subsequent classes. I was one of several panelists.

Dorian Warren: Trump romanticizes the White America of the past - It’s time to stop

  I’ve been reading a lot about how many of the people who ushered in the Trump era were driven by a longing for a white Christian America of the past. They harken back to a heyday when white men were the power brokers in all situations, women stayed home, and America was a stratified society where everyone knew their place.

  These folks hope the new president will bring us back to this romanticized vision: the U.S. as Mayberry, the small town from the The Andy Griffith Show that has become synonymous with an idealized, folksy life.

  The problem is, that America never actually existed.

Sam Fulwood III: Bending toward justice

  As Donald Trump prepares to move into the White House, his impending presidency nonetheless refutes the now-fraught notion of American exceptionalism—an idea that our society is self-governed by informed citizens whose individual actions collectively work for the best interests of those who live in the nation. As this political theory goes, the United States stands alone among nations in world history as the “shining city upon a hill.”

  Rarely is this argument challenged as the nationalistic hubris that it is. Americans—and many others around the world—accept it as fact, I suspect, because they want to believe its veracity. Until now. Donald Trump promises to plunge a wooden spike through the heart of anyone who fantasized that the political horrors that befuddle lesser nations could never happen here.

Sam Fulwood III: Stepping away from racism

  During a 1960 televised interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. decried, “One of the shameful tragedies [is] that 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours, if not the most segregated hours, in Christian America.”

  Much in American life has changed in the more than half century since King argued that no Christian church could follow the teachings of Jesus Christ and remain segregated. Legal segregation of public facilities and transportation systems are no longer enshrined in law. Yet the intimacy and privacy of worship remains, for the most part, racially separate.

Hank Sanders: Senate Sketches #1518: I am afraid, but I summon my courage

  Every time I am stopped by law enforcement, I’m afraid. I recently shared this fear with a friend who is White. He said he understood, but it is very hard for most Whites to understand what it is like to be stopped by law enforcement when you are Black. I understand that difficulty, so I want to share why I’m afraid in spite of being a lawyer, a state senator, a graduate of Talladega College and Harvard Law School, a father of three lawyers, a husband of a lawyer, a grandfather of nine, and a senior citizen. I am afraid, but I summon my courage.

Hank Sanders: Senate Sketches #1496: Black history is critical for white Americans

  Black history is critical for White Americans. Wait! Wait! Wait! Don’t dismiss this idea out of hand. I know Black history is supposed to be for African Americans. Black history, however, is critical for White Americans because it is the flip side of White history (American history).

  We recognize that Black history started way before Columbus stumbled upon this place now called the Americas. Black history was in Egypt, Timbuktu, etc. But I want to start with slavery. I know that we don’t talk about slavery, but we must understand it. Black history is critical for White Americans because it’s the flip side of White history.

Steve Flowers: Inside the Statehouse: How segregation ruled the ’58 governor’s race

  As the 1958 Alabama governor’s race dawned, the shadow of Big Jim Folsom loomed over the scene. Even though Big Jim could not be on the ballot, because the Alabama Constitution prohibited a governor from succeeding himself, his larger than life presence was pervasive.

  Although Big Jim was prohibited from seeking a record third term in 1958, the aspirants could not decide if they wanted his support or not. On one hand he was popular with rural Alabamians, but on the other hand, his second term had been as tumultuous and chaotic as his first and probably more scandalous and corrupt.

Robert Wilkerson: Another day of infamy - September 15, 1963

  My eyes puddled with tears and they began to trickle down my face, faster than I could wipe them away. Soon, they became a solid stream that I could not hide from my children, who saw me crying and came to comfort me. They sat on each side of me on the sofa, put their arms around me, and asked, "Why are you crying, daddy? What’s wrong? What’s the matter?"

  I was crying because I was watching the live television coverage of the aftermath of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Firefighters and emergency workers were going through the rubble. Then, it was announced that four little girls, about the same age of my own children, had been killed in the blast.