A Triptych of Racism: Three Developing Stories of Systemic Inequity in Alabama
The "Party of Law and Order" is blatantly ignoring SCOTUS and the rule of law down in the Heart of Dixie.
The following post contains three examples of systemic racism in Alabama government, illustrating how racism warps electoral outcomes on the local, state and federal levels.
LOCAL: Black Mayors Need Not Apply
“If you knew somebody and you was white, and your grandfather was in office when he died or got sick, he passed it on down to the grandson or son, and it’s been that way throughout the history of Newbern.”
-James Ballard, a Braxton-appointed councilmember of Newbern, AL
Patrick Braxton is the first Black mayor of Newbern, Alabama. Well, he should be…The town of Newbern has allegedly not held a mayoral election in over 60 years. Instead, the title of mayor is treated more like a royal designation: handed down from white person to white person for generations. According to Braxton, “[Newbern residents] didn’t even know they could vote for mayor… It was always just passed from one friend to another.”
Since elections had been fiction in Newbern for decades, Braxton was the only candidate to submit candidate filing paperwork in the 2020 election. Since he was the only qualifying candidate, he was sworn in as mayor that November. He was then tasked with appointing the town’s councilmembers as no one had filled out the appropriate paperwork for those positions either. He quickly tapped councilmembers and created Newbern’s first ever majority-Black council. Cue the white supremacy…
The former city council held a secret meeting to convene a special election for council and mayoral positions because they “allegedly forgot to qualify as candidates.” Since these city council-members were the only people to qualify for this special election, they swore themselves in and declared the incumbent, Haywood “Woody” Stokes III as the town’s mayor. This happened at a breakneck speed: so quickly that no town residents have claimed that they were aware of the special election. Within ten days of Patrick Braxton taking his oath of office, the former white power structure reasserted itself and proceeded to lock Braxton out of city hall.
“This is a clear case of white [people] attempting to seize and maintain political power in the face of someone who went through the appropriate steps to qualify and to run for office and by default wins because no one else qualified. This raises a number of questions about democracy and a free and fair system of governance.”
-Emmitt Riley III, associate professor of political science and Africana Studies at The University of the South
Fast forward nearly three years and almost nothing has changed. Braxton has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit and is still awaiting a decision. In the meantime, he is still being prevented from discharging his mayoral duties. Newbern residents themselves don’t even know who the mayor is. What they do know is that they haven’t had a voice in their government for decades and simply want a leader that’s actually committed to rebuilding their community.
“Mr. Pat is a big influence in this community. When my dad died, he came out and helped tremendously. When you need a helping hand, he’s the first one to help you out — no questions asked… I haven’t seen anything the old mayor did. There’s no been no kind of help for people.”
STATE: Racial Gerrymandering
Alabama’s redistricting process has been a confusing, racist mess. To recap: Alabama Republicans packed Black voters into a single congressional district and diluted their vote in all other areas of the state. A federal district court quickly struck down the map for racial gerrymandering and SCOTUS put a stay on that ruling when deciding to hear the case. This meant that this biased map was used in the 2022 elections. After Alabama Republicans picked up more seats than they were owed in Congress, SCOTUS turned around and sided with the former ruling. SCOTUS ruled that the state is required to create two congressional districts where Black voters could feasibly elect a representative, as the state’s Black population (28% of residents) is too large to be represented by only one district. This meant that Alabama Republicans were forced to go back to the drawing board immediately to create new districts that comply with SCOTUS’s decision.
Alabama Republicans just flat out ignored SCOTUS: they drew two different maps (one in the state house, one in the state senate), both of which ignored SCOTUS and gave Black voters a majority in only one district. In a stunning display of arrogance, the current Speaker of the Alabama State House shared that his party believes that they could shift SCOTUS’s ruling by not following it:
“If you think about where we were, the Supreme Court ruling was 5-4, so there's just one judge that needed to see something different. And I think the movement that we have and what we've come to compromise on today gives us a good shot.”
Legal experts largely expect these maps to be struck down in court again and assume that a special master will be tasked with drawing new maps in lieu of giving Alabama Republicans a third opportunity to draw unfair maps. So while Alabama is likely to get fairer maps eventually, the racist arrogance of Alabama’s Republican Party has been put on full display. Even when faced with clear demands to stop with their racist behavior, they just couldn’t help themselves. Amidst all the bluster from Supreme Court justices about the dangers of questioning the court’s legitimacy, this move by Republicans is a direct shot against SCOTUS and its power.
FEDERAL: Sen. Tommy Tuberville
I’ve already created an in-depth post on Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s blockade on military promotions, check that out here. But we need to spend some extra time addressing the way that Sen. Tuberville relied on existing facets of white supremacy to gain power.
If you couldn’t tell from his official congressional photo, Tuberville is a former head coach for Auburn University’s football team. In fact, Tuberville served as head coach for several college football teams, leading four separate institutions over the course of 21 years. While Tuberville himself is considered an accomplished coach (he has a winning record of 159—99 across all college games he’s coached) the head coaching position in football is notoriously reserved for white men.
The leadership ladder of football still mirrors the horrendous inequities of a plantation economy: the more important the leadership position, the less likely you are to see a Black man in that role. Just look at statistics from the NCAA: more than half of football athletes in D1 schools are African American, yet only 11% of all D1 football head coaches are Black. While Tuberville may have ascended the ranks due to his accomplishments, his whiteness shielded him from fierce backlash during his 99 losses. (It’s well documented that Black head coaches aren’t given the same grace as White coaches in football.) Tuberville relied on that deference from locals to launch his campaign for US Senate. Had Tuberville been Black, not only would he have had severely diminished chances at winning an Alabama Senate seat, he likely wouldn’t have been given the chance to be a football head coach in the first place.
Bringing it back to today’s controversy: Tuberville’s background is especially relevant when he repeatedly dismisses the dangers of white supremacy. He denies its dangers explicitly because he’s a beneficiary of it. From the ground up, his state party machine has been tacitly structured around a commitment to preserving the South’s racist status quo. When he says “if the Democrats want to say that white nationalists are racist, I’m totally against that” he’s signalling to fellow Republicans like illegitimate mayor Woody Stokes and racist House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter that he’s on their side. Because whether Tuberville will admit it or not, he relies on the machine for votes and will do whatever is necessary to keep these White voters in his corner.