Will Alabama Have The Courage?

     According to a story in The Atlanta-Journal-Constitution, that city is going to place historic markers next to confederate monuments that praise the confederacy. The markers will add context to the monuments, many of which were not installed till after 1900, decades after the war, as the Civil Rights Movement started.

     Georgia can not remove or tear down the monuments because of a state law protecting them. 

The Confederate Monument in Montgomery.

  

   Alabama has a similar law that protects monuments here, like

Sims

the one erected in 1939 on the State Capitol Building Grounds by The Medical Association of Alabama. It honors a doctor. J. Marion Sims, who performed surgery on enslaved women without anesthesia in the belief that the black women did not feel pain like white women.

     There have been protests over that monument, and in Birmingham too. City officials there blocked the view of a confederate monument in a downtown park with large pieces of plywood. A court decided that violated Alabama's confederate monument law, which was signed into law by Governor Ivy. In fact she bragged about signing it in her first election ad.

The N.Y. Times reported in August 2017 that scores of confederate monuments have been taken down since the attack on protestors in Charlottesville that same month that left one woman dead.

     Would any legislators in Alabama be willing to sponsor legislation doing the same here? Would the Medical Association take the lead on that effort?