Happy 201st Birthday, Alabama!

       Today is the 201st anniversary of statehood for Alabama (though some would argue it has only been a U.S. state for 197 years because of the almost four years when it was self-proclaimed confederate territory.)

      It's said that newsrooms produce the first draft of History.

     But sometimes it takes a very long time for those drafts to be editorially refined (if not wholesale corrected).

     And that's what is happening in Alabama when it comes to clear-eyed, accurate reporting/writing about the state's racial & confederate history.

     Street names are being changed, building dedications are being undone, and statues of people supposedly deserving of recognition are being torn down or removed to less prominent locations. That's because many of them were installed and named decades after the Civil War...as push-back against the emerging Civil Rights movement.

Linn Park in Birmingham

 

    Yet Alabama and some other states (and The Trump White House) have placed legal impediments in the way of those corrections.      

     Alabama's is called the Monument Protection Law, and it ties the hands of municipalities (Alabama loves to do that!), preventing the the correction of those long-ago dedications, despite our woke-eyed 2020 vision.

     In multiple Alabama locations, a battle is underway between local communities that no longer want statues of confederate soldiers in their town squares, and state officials using the confederate monument protection law to keep history frozen as it was written in previous decades.

     One of the most recent skirmishes is the desire of Montgomery to change the name of Jeff Davis Avenue.

     I find it odd that there is so much objection to the change. The street itself is in a mostly African-American part of town. Paterson Court public housing is at one end of the street. That property was obtained by the housing authority in 1940. 

     The street's Confederate name dates to at least 1899.