In 1963, on the day the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed, it had nothing to do with me. I was in school in the Midwest. The bombing was in Alabama, another country. It never occurred to me I might someday live in such a backward, mean, foreign place, best characterized by the Ku Klux Klan.

   Alabama is my place now, has been for 10 years. The carpet bag has long since been discarded. Don’t need it; I expect to stay for the rest of my days. Although Huntsville is in many ways Alabama Brite, I like much about the state as a whole. I have been thinking about two Alabama stories that were prominent on Times front pages this past week ... one about the arrests of two men charged with killing four little girls in the church bombing, one about the Huntsville rally for a new constitution.

   They are contrasting examples of the Alabama of our lifetimes: people attempting to hold back a social movement, people attempting to move forward. And they are contrasting examples of our treatment of race, a subject that defined the Alabama of the past. (As speakers at the constitution rally noted, the constitution Alabama adopted to open the past century, the one we still have in this new century, was designed to create a whites-only government.)

   The series The Times ran leading up to the rally noted many of the peculiarities of our constitution ... it’s the longest in the world, it ties government’s hands by earmarking practically all tax money for particular purposes, it forces local governments and legislators to jump through bureaucratic hoops to do the smallest tasks.

   More importantly, it cements into place an unjust and inefficient tax system. And perhaps even more importantly, it still stands as a symbol of bad old Alabama, not of the state that has maintained its character while discarding much of what kept it out of mainstream America for all those years. As bad as the reality of the constitution may be, its symbolism may be worse.

   So here, on Tuesday, were a couple of hundred Madison Countians together in a white-hat civic enterprise. It could have been a scene out of your junior high history textbook, the part about the Benjamin Franklins and Thomas Jeffersons and John Hancocks: Citizens met, appropriately, at EarlyWorks Children’s Museum’s paean to history. They listened to speeches about the very structure of their government.

   For the most part, the audience was not the political or economic leadership of the community. In reputation and reality, much of the impetus for a new constitution is from the do-gooder crowd. The pols are waiting for “the people,” and the people of Alabama, too many of them, are part of what speaker Sid McAnnally called “the tyranny of low expectations.” Yes, we’re dragging while everyone else is peppy, but, hey, that’s how it is in Alabama.

   McAnnally, a Decatur lawyer-minister who’s a North Alabama leader in this movement, joined other speakers in warning that bringing change this way won’t be easy. Bailey Thomson, a journalist-turned-professor at the forefront of the campaign, told the crowd that Alabama can’t wait for a political messiah to show the way. They’re right. Those who have power in Alabama got it through the current system. We don’t have many John Hancocks, willing to stick their necks out for the common good. (He’s the guy who supposedly said he signed the Declaration of Independence in large letters so King George III could read the signature without his spectacles.)

   “What great movement ever began with guaranteed success?” Thomson said Tuesday. I hope the optimism I saw at EarlyWorks is justified. I’d like to see Alabama make its government more efficient, its tax system more fair, its local officials more empowered, its mission more focused. I’d like to see Alabama with a constitution that discards a past that blatantly discriminated against blacks, women, poor people ... all but a few powerful interests. I’d like to see Alabama rid of a document that codified the racism that led to that painful day in Birmingham.

   I have a stake in this. It’s my state.

Return to: A State Buried in Paper, Introduction

Next: Speakers Vow that this Time State Will Break Free of a Crippling Law

Reprinted with Permission from TheHuntsville Times.