This is an opinion column.
Stop for a minute and think about what happened in the last two weeks.
The Voting Rights Act is gutted, Black representation across the South cut off at the knees. It’s as if what happened in Selma no longer matters. The courts, the legislatures, rubbed its import away like chalk on a blackboard.
The blood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge is hosed off into an Alabama River run red with racist history. The scars of John Lewis, the flowers on the graves of Jimmie Lee Jackson, James J. Reeb and Viola Liuzzo, are dried and blown by the winds of forgetfulness and the quest for absolute power. All in the disingenuous name of color blindness.
Erased are the bold rulings of Judge Frank M. Johnson, the conscience of President Lyndon B. Johnson, the fearless steps, one foot after the other, of regular men and women who marched in prayer and pain and resolve to demand a scrap of what their neighbors took for granted.
It is unsurprising, even expected, that Montgomery would rush to seize even more power from Democrats as it did last week, knowing that Black Alabamians would suffer the most. Alabama, after all, is a place that met the end of slavery with war, the end of reconstruction with a new constitution that ordained white supremacy as law, the end of segregation with bombs and burning crosses, the integration of cities and schools and buses with desertion, flight, anger.
When Gov. Kay Ivey signed bills last week calling for a special election to approve newly gerrymandered districts, she said without irony, “Alabama knows our state, our people and our districts best.” But who is Alabama if not almost a third Black? When Attorney General Steve Marshall said Black Alabamians would be “better off” with Republican leaders, did he intend to sound like an antebellum overseer?
It is one thing to contemplate the shame of our state’s past. It is another to participate in it, to pass it forward to future generations.
That Alabama would erase the brave, peaceful, legacies of Lewis and Martin Luther King and so many more is not surprising. That the federal courts would ignore those moments of hard fought freedom, the acts that gave meaning to the promise of equality, is something else.
It is heartbreaking, a halt to the progress of the 20th century, a twisting of the arc of the universe away from its just destination.
Now, Alabama voting maps that just three years ago were considered racist will surely be put into practice. It’s not about race, they tell you with a straight face. It is only about politics. In a place where race is politics, and politics is always racial.
It is not just the soul of Alabama, the soul of the South that is in the balance here. It is the soul of a country that calls itself the land of the free.
