Serious about progress? Eliminate Alabama’s shame of 1901

Over the past two weeks, we’ve seen numerous business leaders and companies take a stand against racism and commit to building a better future for all in Alabama.

That’s a great thing. It’s also great that so many transformational changes can come from the companies themselves, simply by changing their status quos, implementing new policies and combating racism and bias in their organizations or industries.

But if Birmingham’s business community is really serious about eliminating racism and expanding opportunities for all, not all of the necessary work will fall in that category. As we and others have noted for years, Alabama’s 1901 constitution is one of the biggest impediments to equality and progress in our state. If corporations are truly looking to eliminate racism at home, the conversation has to include supporting a new constitution for Alabama.

It’s embarrassing and a miscarriage of justice that Alabamians – in 2020 – are still voting on amendments to remove racist language from the state constitution. Yet, here we are. But even if the latest amendment passes, and even if all racist language is eventually removed, it still won’t solve the real problem.

Yes, the most blatant and offensive language will be gone, but the undertones and the intent of the 1901 constitution will remain, as evidenced by this speech from the president of the constitutional convention: “And what is it that we do want to do? Why, it is, within the limits imposed by the federal constitution, to establish white supremacy in this state.”

If it’s more than a century later and we still haven’t even purged all of the actual racist language from the document, it’s unlikely we’ve even scratched the surface of the problems with the constitution and how it treats minorities.

The constitution was designed to concentrate the power in the hands of a select few and to also limit the power of cities like Birmingham.

We see its fingerprints often. We see them in an Alabama Legislature that – under either party’s leadership – sees no problems with our lackluster rankings in health care, education, poverty and metrics that disproportionately affect minorities.

We see them with decision after decision that ignores the real challenges facing so many in our state – both in rural areas like the Black Belt and highly populated urban areas like Birmingham.

We’ve seen them with hastily passed legislation designed to usurp power from cities like Birmingham.

Alabama’s 1901 constitution was a poorly built house with bad window-dressing and a rotten foundation. We can remove all of the words and window-dressing we want, but the rot will remain. The only choice is to tear it down and start over.

Frankly, Alabama’s business community is the best hope of making it happen. They are the only group with the power to effect that type of change with the state’s lawmakers, whom history has shown won’t do it on their own.

Getting a new constitution won’t be easy, and it would likely come at a cost for many businesses that supported the effort. It would mean changing the power dynamics in the state, giving more power to cities, counties and the executive branch. It should probably also include sweeping tax reform, which as we’ve noted, could make a huge difference in Alabama simply by adjusting the rates to neighboring states.

Those changes could eliminate some of the consistency that Alabama businesses currently enjoy from the state and local government.

But “it’s too hard” or “we don’t trust ourselves to pick the leaders to do it right” are lame excuses.

We think that’s a small price to pay to eliminate racism and ensure social justice in Alabama.

The question is: do Alabama businesses feel the same?

 

Four AUM Honors students turn class assignment into campaign to modernize Alabama Constitution

Four Auburn University at Montgomery Honors Program students are going above and beyond their class assignment to rally support for a proposed constitutional amendment on the November 3 ballot.

AUM Honors seniors Dottie Durango, Jessica Sweatt, Nour El Badawy and Haya El Badawy launched “Unite Alabama,” a political campaign to remove racist language from Section 256 of the Alabama Constitution, as a class project for the Honors seminar “Citizenship and Leadership” last spring. They’re now using Unite Alabama as a platform to support a constitutional amendment to purge racist language from the 119-year-old document. Continue reading “Four AUM Honors students turn class assignment into campaign to modernize Alabama Constitution”

Speech by Wayne Flynt at Induction of former Gov. Albert Brewer into Alabama Men’s Hall of Fame on September 17, 2019

 

“Albert the Good”

For historians, context, if not everything, is close to it. Gov. Albert Brewer’s brief term as Governor of Alabama occurred in the context of the so-called “New South Governors.” They came from both parties and were renowned for their repudiation of narrow partisanship, their attacks on political corruption, and their support of increased funding for public education. Georgia’s Jimmy Carter, Florida’s Reubin Askew, Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander, Mississippi’s William Winter, were prominent examples. Many of them were deeply though not ostentatiously Christian: Askew was a faithful Presbyterian who did not swear, drink alcoholic beverages, or smoke, and in fact was sometimes satirized as “Reubin, the Good!” And you already know about Baptist Jimmy Carter despite that PLAYBOY admission that he had lusted in his heart. In every case they rejected racial and class-based demagoguery despite its appeal to wide segments of their electorates. Reubin Askew famously defined a leader as “someone who cares enough to tell people not just what they want to hear, but what they need to hear.”

The closest Alabama has come to one of those transformational leaders is Albert Brewer. As most of you know, he served only two years of Governor Lurleen Wallace’s term after her death. So, historians can judge him not so much by WHAT he did, but what he promised to do if elected to a full term.

As many of you know from my books, I am generally not a fan of Alabama governors, most of whom earned their obscurity or opprobrium the old fashioned way: they worked hard for it.

A pivotal moment in the state’s history occurred in the middle of the George Wallace years when term limitations and his own presidential aspirations caused him to convince his reluctant wife to run for governor. As their daughter, Peggy Wallace Kennedy, will explain in a stunning memoir scheduled for December publication, Lurleen accepted this unwelcome task despite a childhood of psychological abuse, her surgery for ovarian cancer, and her husband’s womanizing. After confronting the horrific abuses within the state’s mental institutions which the Supreme Court ruling in WYATT V. STICKNEY revealed, the entire structure of state government understood that draconian changes had to be made in state revenue and reform. In the interregnum between her election in 1966 and her death in 1968, Brewer worked tirelessly to organize the legislature on behalf of all the systemic reforms that had for so long been sacrificed on the altar of white nationalism. Though given our political history, many of you will not believe me, that legislature contained an unprecedented number of dedicated, visionary public servants who wanted to tackle the state’s REAL problems. Furthermore, the chief obstacle to that agenda, former Governor George Wallace, who was obsessed with his own immodest ambition to become President of the United States, abandoned the state for Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland, where an assassin’s bullets ended his dream of becoming president (which , incidentally, no longer seems so fantastical in 2019 as it did in 1972). Wallace hoped that legislative leader Brewer would work with the sometimes independent-minded Lurleen, and he promised Brewer that he would not run for another gubernatorial term (Alabamians were to learn shortly not to pay much attention to what politicians promised and also that lying didn’t carry much of a penalty).
Wallace, of course, needed control of Alabama’s statehouse to leverage money from those who wanted to do business with the state and to assure the assistance of a variety of state troopers and other civil servants in his national campaigns, and thus reneged on his promise not to run.

As a result, the 1970 gubernatorial campaign was arguable the dirtiest in Alabama history. Collections in the state archives contain more than enough evidence to make any decent person look for the first barf bag they can find once leaving the building. In one of Alabama’s most amazing ironies, Charles Woods, a horribly disfigured World War II Air Force veteran, barely won enough sympathy votes to prevent either Brewer or Wallace from winning the race on the first ballot, though Brewer led by a substantial margin. In the run-off, Wallace unleashed all the worst demons that reside in this state (and, I assure you, the number of such demons from Reconstruction to the present is vast).

What I am convinced would have been one of the most progressive eras in Alabama history under governor Brewer was instead just more of the same old demagoguery and corrupt special interest politics, where we blame all our troubles on outside agitators, liberals, and Federal judges. Albert Brewer offered us a different path to the future: massive changes in educational funding and policy; racial fairness; civility; a new constitution. And he already had organized the House and Senate leadership to launch this journey toward a new and better Alabama.

At the beginning of my remarks, I emphasized the religious origins of many New South governors. I did not have to remind Albert Brewer that the second most frequently mentioned subject in the Bible after condemnation of idolatry was condemnation of injustice. He had read the Bible, taught Bible classes, listened to prophetic preachers at Decatur’s First Baptist Church just as I had at Parker Memorial Baptist in Anniston. He knew where to find the origin of the beloved community that Jesus envisioned in Matthew 25 (where we care for widows, orphans, and the poor, feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, visit the sick). And despite every opportunity to wallow in the gutter with George Wallace in 1970, he refused to lower himself to that level.

Hurt deeply by exposure to the worst Alabama politics has to offer, the soft-spoken Brewer struck out in a new direction more compatible with his reliance on reason, good sense, civility, and the future rather than the past. Indeed, it was those qualities that served him so well after 1970 that had doomed him to political defeat. He simply was incapable of believing that people could lie so blatantly, wallow in the political mud so happily, violate all vows to marital, moral or human decency so cavalierly.

In the final stage of his life, all these positive qualities made him in my opinion the best FORMER governor in Alabama history. He served many years as a trustee at Samford University. Samford president Tom Corts and Brewer worked so closely together that they formed a backstage duet for just the sort of Alabama Brewer had spent his life trying to establish. The two of them inspired creation of the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama with headquarters on the Samford campus, which is the only source of independent data about the state I trust. He was the founder and driving force for Alabama Citizens for Constitutional Reform. He was a key backer of the Alabama Poverty Project (now Alabama Possible), also initially headquartered at Samford. Brewer lent his name and influence to the A+ education reform coalition, Voices for Alabama’s Children, and Alabama Arise. If you did not already know all this that is because Governor Brewer never called attention to himself; it was his causes that mattered. He was quite content to begin some transformational group, support it behind the scenes, help raise money for it, endorse it publicly when called upon to do so, and to let someone else assume leadership and receive credit for its accomplishments.

Governor Brewer knew Alabama and Alabamians, and he believed we are better than we often act and vote. I was more of a Calvinistic Baptist who concluded that in a democracy we generally get the kind of government we deserve. So he was a wonderful tonic to my cynicism. He was a builder, not a demolisher. He appealed to our higher angels, not to our fearful demons. He was that rare Alabama politician who was willing to lose an election rather than besmirch his honor. He had as keen an historical vision as anyone I have known in the state’s public life. As a prophetic statesman, he opted always for the long view of history rather than the near view of successful politician.

I choose to end this homily not as historian but as Baptist Sunday school teacher. This is a paraphrase of the Apostle Paul’s introduction of his most loyal disciple to the church at Philippi. But I think God might have had this in mind when He sent Albert Brewer our way: “I hope to send {Albert} to you . . . . There is no one else here who sees things as I do and takes a genuine interest in our concerns; they are all bent on their own ends not on the causes of justice and fairness. {Albert’s} record of service is known to you; he has been like a father to us all.” He might even deserve designation as “Albert the Good!”

Family of former Governor Albert Brewer

Editorial: Lack of home rule limits powers of Limestone County Commission

The News Courier Editorial Board

The Limestone County Commission heard Monday from a group of residents who are concerned about what’s being built on property adjacent to theirs.

Commissioners tend to be sympathetic when such concerns are aired at public meetings. In September 2017, a group of residents from the Capstone subdivision on Mooresville Road came to bend commissioners’ ears about a storage unit development being built nearby.

In both circumstances, property owners voiced concerns about how their property values would be affected. In Monday’s case, residents were concerned by the prospect of duplexes diminishing the value of their $300,000-plus homes. Continue reading “Editorial: Lack of home rule limits powers of Limestone County Commission”

Alabama cities suffocated by a system designed for failure

For a moment, let’s assume a few things about the Birmingham metro area.
That the Birmingham mayor and council are the best we’ve had in generations.
That the Jefferson County Commission is in peak form.

And, finally, that cooperation among the many municipalities in our metro area is at an all-time high.

Things are better around here–and there are signs of hope. However, even in a perfect “metro” world we would collectively still have a huge millstone around our necks: A lack of home rule in Alabama. Our state is one of the few in the U.S. that gives up very little power to local governments. Continue reading “Alabama cities suffocated by a system designed for failure”

Roy S. Johnson: Alabama Gets Another Chance to Remove Racist Language from Constitution

By Roy S. Johnson | [email protected]

Maybe we’ll get it right this time.

Maybe.

Maybe this time, we’ll show we’re not the Alabama of more than a century ago when white men from throughout the state gathered in Montgomery to devise a constitution for the Alabama of 1901.

Continue reading “Roy S. Johnson: Alabama Gets Another Chance to Remove Racist Language from Constitution”

Editorial: An Alabama Bill That Makes Sense

By the editorial board of The Anniston Star

Here’s a novel idea for Alabama, home to one of the nation’s most overcrowded prison systems: Instead of treating inmates as societal lost causes, treat many of them as reclamation projects who can contribute when they are released.

One step has already been taken. In 2017, a change in Alabama state law restored voting rights to thousands of residents who’d lost the franchise because of previous felony convictions. The rub was the nebulous definition of “moral turpitude,” which, in Alabama’s legal mishmash, could be almost anything. All crimes, though, are not equal. Continue reading “Editorial: An Alabama Bill That Makes Sense”

How Alabama Laid the GroundWork For It’s Own Wrongdoing

By John Archibald | [email protected]

What’s better, you think? Doing the wrong thing in the right way, or the right thing in the wrong way?

As a state, Alabama chose the former.

It was clear on Day 2 of the 1901 Alabama Constitutional Convention, when newly elected convention president John B. Knox got up to speak in favor of white supremacy. As a matter of law. Continue reading “How Alabama Laid the GroundWork For It’s Own Wrongdoing”