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| Confederate Flag was removed by Gov. Bentley |
" June 19th, or Juneteenth, marks the date that, in 1865, the last
enslaved African-Americans were emancipated in the United
States. It’s a day for celebrating resilience and resistance,
for honoring how far we’ve come and the sacrifices we’ve made to
get here, and, for many, for reckoning with our complicated, often
violent and sometimes shameful, collective history.
This week, we saw results of that reckoning in Washington, DC, when
Congress voted nearly unanimously to make Juneteenth a federal
holiday (Alabama Representatives Mo Brooks and Mike Rogers were
among just a handful to vote against the bill). But while we
make strides like these towards confronting a holistic view of our
national history, there are those intent to dig in deeper, to honor
hateful causes instead of celebrating milestones of progress."
"Although in the past year more than a dozen monuments have been removed, across Alabama, there are more than 100 public spaces alone where monuments to the Confederacy still stand. In Tuskegee, a town with a 97% Black population, a memorial honoring Confederate soldiers stands in the town center. In Montgomery, Black students attend Robert E. Lee High School, where they walk past a statue of the Confederate general daily. Mourners are confronted with a bust honoring KKK-founder Nathan Bedford Forrest in a Selma cemetery.
Many of these monuments stand despite overwhelming community support for their removal, and they do so because of a 2017 Alabama law called the Memorial Preservation Act* that criminalizes, at the risk of incurring a steep penalty, removal of Confederate monuments. It’s an assault on liberty of local governance and on the rights of Black Alabamans to safety in their own neighborhoods, and extremists in the legislature are trying to strengthen its power."
*aka Kay Ivey's Confederate Protection Law. She not only signed it, but bragged about it in a campaign ad.
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