May 25. 2023 Is the 6th Anniversary Of Kay Ivey's Protect Confederate Stuff Act.

     It was six years ago today that GOP Governor Kay Ivey signed legislation designed to protect Confederate names and monuments from being changed or removed.

The confederate flags were removed from the largest monument, next to the Capitol Building, by GOP Gov. Robert Bentley on June 25, 2015, before the Ivy law existed.

There was a mostly symbolic attempt to remove the confederate flag atop the capitol building by black legislators in 1988, and they were arrested. That flag had flown above the dome since 1963

That flag was finally removed by Governor Jim Folsom, Jr. in 1993.

     Yet the confederate flag remains inside the capitol...on the elevator doors, amid a coat of arms display that includes all of the entities that have controlled the land now called Alabama. But unlike the end of British and French and Spanish control, the four-year long U.S. Civil War ended with defeat for the confederates, and hundreds of thousands of deaths.
 

     The flag of The Lost Cause remains a part of the state's coat of arms. There was legislation introduced in 2021 by Rep. Laura Hall, a Democrat from Huntsville to remove it and other Confederate language and imagery. The bills failed to win enough support to even be voted on.