I had seen the news that Alabama voters in November's election had rejected an amendment to the state constitution that would have removed outdated language, long since overruled in law and practice by the federal courts and the Congress, that required racially segregated public schools. Initially, I didn't think much about it. I did think it was the same kind of shoot-yourself-in-the-foot vote that Mississippi made in 2001 in selecting a Confederate state flag.
Many white Southerners whine still about about how mean Yankees "stereotype" them. But votes like that play directly to the "stereotype." When a clear majority votes for the Confederate flag, or votes to retain legal provisions requiring racial segregation, what are other people supposed to think?
Of course, not all whites in Mississippi or Alabama voted that way. But the ones who vote against those things are not normally the ones who do the whining about "stereotyping." The whine comes down to, "Sure, I'm for segregation and the Confederate flag, but you shouldn't just assume I'm a racist or a bad person." It's not a very convincing whine.
Still, in the Alabama case, I was inclined to be more sympathetic than in the case of Mississippi's flag vote or last year's Mississippi governor's race, where the racist White Citizens Council group openly supported the successful Republican candidate, Haley Barbour. I had followed both the Mississippi races while they were under way, and I knew the racial overtones involved in both the pro-Confederate-flag and the Barbour campaigns. But in the Alabama case, I didn't know if it was just a case of someone getting a "clean-up" item on the ballot that was little discussed and it failed just because people didn't know anything about it.
Seeing some of the incomprehensible propositions that show up on the ballot every election in California, I can easily see how that would happen. Up until the last election, my own approach for years had been to vote against almost every proposition on the ballot because I thought it was a rotten way to make law. So no one could tell my own political leanings from my votes on statewide propositions the last several years.
(I still think that it's a bad way to make law. But I've decided thatsince the Republicans are escalating their use of propositions that it's better to vote for ones that are based on good ideas until the legislative tangle gets so bad that both parties will have to face the next to change the initiative/referendum system here.)
But now that I've read a bit more about the Alabama vote, I see that there was a campaign against the change in the constitutional language. The opponents fastened on one of the provisions, dating from 1956 in the early years of white resistance to court-ordered desegregation, which states explicitly that there was no right to a public education. The opponents said that repealing this provision might empower some federal judge to raise taxes by court order. (Alabama already has one of the lowest tax burdens in the nation.)
Roy Moore, the 10 Commandments ex-state-justice, opposed the repeal, as did Alabama's Christian Coalition. The Republican governor, Bob Riley did support repeal. But five Alabama Republican Congressmen opposed the repeal.
Also, I've been saying for years that even a majority of whites in the Deep South would not want to go back to a system of formal legal segregation. But with Alabama's vote on Amendment 2 (the ballot item that would have removed the segregation provisions), it looks on the face of it like my assumption is wrong, and I would have preferred not to think that. But for the pro-segregation vote to be a majority, it would have to have had a large majority among white voters. So I guess I'll have to stop saying that for a while.
An editorial in the Huntsville (AL) Times (Do it and move on 12/18/04) calls on the opponents to follow up on their claims:
On Nov. 2, Amendment Two failed to gain voter approval by a narrow margin. Had it been ratified, it would have removed from Alabama's constitution the racist, segregationist and discriminatory language of the past.Nobody was against that. Or at least that's what they said. Instead, they opposed Amendment Two because, they claimed, the provision added by the Legislature to repeal a 1956 amendment would have allowed judges to raise taxes. That provision said that Alabama children did not have a constitutional right to a public education.
Why, if that had been repealed, some federal judge could have raised taxes or ordered the Legislature to do it, the opponents asserted. (Never mind that other statutes and provisions could have prevented that.)
The editorial suggests a new vote, with the right-to-education and the racial segregation issues separated. In any case, they note, the argument against the appeal of the no-right-to-education provision was silly:
It's utterly absurd, of course, to debate the education provision when Alabama has compulsory school-attendance laws and when the state has long provided a public education, even under its antiquated constitution. In fact, public schools and colleges get most of the tax money collected in Montgomery.
Columnist Frances Coleman doesn't buy the notion that race had nothing to do with the organized opposition to the repeal: The past comes home to roost again in 'Bama Mobile Register 12/05/04.
Opponents vehemently deny that racism, however subtle it might have been, was among the weapons that some of them used to defeat Amendment 2.I was inclined to believe them -- who would use racist tactics in this day and age? -- until a friend of mine, who's black, set me straight.
"You don't get it, do you?" he said to me and a white colleague. "You just don't get it.
"Remember the amendment in 2000 that would have gotten rid of the ban on interracial marriage? Forty percent of the state voted not to take it out of the constitution. There wasn't anything else in the amendment; just that.
"And 40 percent of the voters said no.' Don't tell me it's not about racism. Because it is."
The opponents' strategy was straight out of the segregationist playbook for "respectable" whites: "We aren't against the nigras. We just want to keep the federal gubment from messin' around with our schools."
Check out the state Christian Coalition's tortured justification for their position in favor of the segregation provisions: The Truth About Amendment Two 10/25/04. They are also working from the segregationist playbook. This is a good example: "If the Alabama Legislature passes an amendment that deals only with the racist language in the Alabama Constitution, we will work diligently to see the removal of such language."
The problem is one of manners, you see. Of course, we don't approve of racist language. (We're just supporting racial segregation nudge-nudge, wink-wink.) At the bottom, they list a number of sinister groups that support communistic ideas like public education: the United Nations, UNICEF and the Communist Party USA. It's stock John Birch Society type stuff.
This report offers and explanation of this "segregation not racism" song-and-dance from a late expert on Alabama race politics, George Wallace: Alabama segregation vote stirs memories of Wallace by DeWayne Wickham USA Today 12/07/04.
Onetime segregationist governor George Wallace once explained to me the distinction many Southerners make between a racist and a segregationist - a mind-set that may help explain why Alabama voters recently failed to remove some Jim Crow language from the state's constitution."A racist hates people because of their color or religion or ethnic background," he told me in 1991. "A segregationist is one who really thought it (forced racial separation) was in the interest of both races."
In this view, racial segregation is an act of caring, not an expression of racial hatred.
It was for the good of "the nigras," of course! I would note that this quotation from Wallace seems to have been from the time after his supposed conversion from his segregationist past. I would be curious to know if that's so, because if he was still peddling nonsense like this, you have to wonder how far-going his "conversion" really was. He also offers another quote from Wallace, illustrating the good-ole-boy cynicism that was part of segregationist culture:
"You see, a lot of these people who appeared to folks like you to hate folks really were doing it politically, to be elected," Wallace said of the race-baiting behavior of the Southern politicians of his day.
And in today's national Republican Party, this stuff is perfectly acceptable. Haley Barbour, former national party chairman, can run for Mississippi governor with the open support of the White Citizens Council, and President Bush and Vice President Cheney come down to campaign for him. Alabama Congressmen can actively oppose repealing segregation provisions out of the state constitution, and it doesn't make a ripple in the national Party.
Today's Republican Party looks more and more every day like the Southern Democratic Party of the 1950s.
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