This is an opinion column.
Bit by bit, the Confederate monument in Birmingham’s Linn Park got shorter.
On Monday night, contractors removed the obelisk from its pedestal, one segment at a time. With cranes they loaded the three blocks of tapered sandstone onto a flatbed truck before it drove into the darkness toward an undisclosed location. Where it went, city officials said, will be secret for now.
On Tuesday night, those contractors returned to remove the plinth. For more than a century at the intersection of 20th Street and Park Place, those gray stones bore the weight of that Lost Cause lie.
By Wednesday morning, where there had been a monument, there was instead a dirty square on the sidewalk, littered with rubble and cordoned off with metal barriers and caution tape.
But all that was there is not gone.
I’m not talking about the remnant pile of broken stone or the protester’s graffiti nearby, but rather what kept that monument there until this week — what lies beneath.
And the lies beneath.
The footprint of the cornerstone of a confederate monument that was located in Linn Park. Construction crews removed the 52-foot obelisk on Monday night. The cornerstone was removed Tuesday night.
With all that’s happening in our country, the monument’s removal will be a footnote. If and when it gets mentioned in national news, they will say it’s gone because protestors demanded it.
What’s likely to be missed is why it was still there in the first place.
The City of Birmingham, more than 70 percent black, didn’t want the thing there. In 2017, city council members pushed then-Birmingham Mayor William Bell to tear the thing down. The riots in Charlottesville had only recently ended, and the mayor’s office seemed to worry a hasty demolition would invite that sort of unrest to Birmingham. Bell had built a plywood wall around the obelisk until tempers could cool and there could be a plan to deal with it in the least provocative way.
But the Alabama Legislature had other ideas.
Earlier that year, state Sen. Gerald Allen, R-Tuscaloosa, had sponsored the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act. In the Legislature, Allen has had a record of provocative legislation. He has advocated for gun rights in nearly all public spaces, including campuses, and he once proposed banning books with gay authors and gay characters from libraries. When asked whether the books should be burned, he told a reporter, no, they should be buried in a hole.
Many of the bills Allen sponsors go nowhere, but this time, his proposal made it through — passed by an all-white Republican majority over the objections of mostly black Democratic lawmakers.
Gov. Kay Ivey signed that bill into law, and when she campaigned for re-election in 2018, she boasted about it in her first TV spot. It was her signature accomplishment. In the ad, she blasted Washington, political correctness and special interests.
“When special interests wanted to tear down our monuments, I said no, and signed a law to protect them,” Ivey said.
But that was a lie. It wasn’t Washington special interests the law sought to thwart. It was black people in Birmingham, and the ad even featured the Birmingham monument unless anyone got confused by Ivey’s obfuscation.
Related: We didn’t need blackface to know who Kay Ivey is. She already showed us.
When Bell built the plywood screen around the obelisk, Alabama Attorney Gen. Steve Marshall promptly sued the city for violating the new law. That court battle lasted two years and bridged two administrations at Birmingham City Hall. Under the new mayor, Randall Woodfin, the city did not temper its words while fighting the law in court.
“Over the course of this litigation, the Act initially presented as a (purportedly) facially-neutral prohibition in the interest of historical preservation, has drastically morphed into the State of Alabama’s unwavering endorsement of a position which affords more protection to the ideals expressed by Confederate loyalists in 1905 than the State is willing to afford to the ideals of Alabama’s citizens and municipalities existing and operating today,” city lawyers said in their filings.
“The Attorney General’s argument is a blatant proclamation of the State’s intent to exercise control over any opposition to the prominent display of relics that honor Alabama’s open conflict as an enemy to the United States of America, and that mourn the Confederacy’s ‘lost cause’ to operate as a separate and independent nation that fosters the enslavement of African-Americans.”
The city and state fought all the way to the Alabama Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled Birmingham was in violation of the law.
But the bill had a weakness.
While Marshall had argued the city could face $25,000 fines per day until the monument was returned to its previous condition, the court said that was wrong. The most the state could impose on Birmingham was a one-time $25,000 fine.
The city has an operating budget in excess of $400 million. Paying a fine like that would be easy.
One state Supreme Court justice, Mike Bolin, said in a concurring opinion that the Legislature should strengthen the law to make it a deterrent, and earlier this year, Allen introduced a bill that would make what happened this week in Linn Park a civil offense that would bankrupt the city. That bills breezed through a Senate committee, but the coronavirus pandemic interrupted the session and stopped the bill from making its way into law this year.
When you see a bunch of white public officials in Montgomery coercing a majority-black city, against its will, to honor those who enslaved, tortured and murdered their ancestors, you might wonder — monument bill aside — how any such thing could be constitutional. But you must remember, that Alabama has its own constitution. Unyielding resistance to the U.S. Constitution and centralized white control is exactly how the Alabama Constitution of 1901 was designed to work.
Written after the end of Reconstruction, Alabama’s foundational document takes power away from local governments and gives it to Montgomery, and then men who wrote that document did not hide why they did this. It was, to use their words, for white supremacy.
“And what is it that we want to do? Why it is within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution, to establish white supremacy in this State,” an Anniston lawyer, John B. Knox said after being elected to preside over the 1901 convention.
In that speech, Knox told his colleagues that blacks were not capable of government and that the purpose of this new document would be white control. The minutes of that convention actually has a subhead that reads “White Supremacy by Law.”
“But if we would have white supremacy, we must establish it by law — not by force or fraud,” Knox said.
That wretched state constitution has been amended now more than 900 times and is now the longest such foundational document in the world. But even as racist language has been struck from it, even as the federal courts have nullified its more direct racist mandates, it still functions as it was designed to, just a few years before that monument went up in Birmingham’s Linn Park.
The monument is gone now, and I am going to miss it. Not for any kind of aesthetic affection or misplaced nostalgia, but because it neatly connected all the dots and made visible something horribly wrong in this state. It misrepresented history badly, but it made the forces at play in our present clear for all to see. It showed that a white power structure still exists, that our legislature still writes unjust laws, that our governor still signs them, and that our attorney general and our courts still enforce them.
If she wanted to, Gov. Ivey could call the Legislature into a special session tomorrow to repeal the monuments law. While there, lawmakers could rewrite Alabama’s calendar so it would no longer honor Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Confederate veterans with state holidays.
They could and they should, but none of that is going to happen — because doing so would be political suicide. When we excavate, layer by layer, what supported that monument there in Linn Park, somewhere between the sidewalk and the Earth’s molten mantle is us.
It wasn’t a memorial for some forgotten dead, but an exhibit of living racism.
The Birmingham monument and others like it around the state might disappear in a flurry of protests, late-night contractors, and $25,000 checks to the State of Alabama.
But all that held those statues up for so long — all the lies beneath — will still be there.
Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group.
You can follow his work on his Facebook page, The War on Dumb. And on Twitter. And on Instagram.
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