A statue of civil rights activist Rosa Parks is seen from behind on the grounds of the Alabama State Capitol on Nov. 14, 2025 in Montgomery, Alabama. The Alabama Legislature is scheduled to begin a special session on Monday that could eliminate one and possibly more majority-minority or near majority-minority districts. (Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector)
It’s spring in Alabama. But it’s winter for democracy.
And we are left facing some cold truths. We do not live under the clear dictates of the U.S. Constitution. The only laws are the vindictive whims of the U.S. Supreme Court.
We thought we were rebuilding, however haltingly and imperfectly, the multiracial regime lost after Reconstruction. But Alabama is still Alabama. And self-serving, self-justifying power is the state’s only civic virtue.
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So Monday, Alabama legislators will return to their soon-to-be demolished Statehouse to destroy what remains of democracy.
Technically, they plan to reschedule primaries should the U.S. Supreme Court allow the use of congressional maps that were ruled discriminatory less than three years ago. But Republicans are brazenly discussing plans to deny Black Alabamians proper congressional representation. Maybe it won’t all happen this week. But that’s where the arc is bending.
Don’t believe the lies about “keeping communities together.” Not from the legislators who maintain GOP control of Democratic-leaning Jefferson County by drawing Republicans living outside the area into it.
Don’t fall for the pieties about “fair maps.” For two years — for the first time in Alabama history — Alabama’s U.S. House delegation has reflected the proportion of Black residents in the state.
This week, Alabama legislators will take that away. With all the smugness they can summon, Republicans will return state government to its founding principle: attacking Black Alabamians.
Those are the “activist groups who think they know Alabama better than Alabama,” as Gov. Kay Ivey claimed on Friday. Black Alabamians. Whose right to have a voice in their governance is not debatable.
Except to Republicans. Does the GOP control 78% of the state’s congressional delegation? Why, they should control all of it. To give Black Alabamians one-fifth of the state’s congressional platform is outrageous.
And now they’re backed by the U.S. Supreme Court. In gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — preventing racial discrimination in election practices and procedures — Justice Samuel Alito made white victimhood constitutional law.
“Lower courts have sometimes applied this Court’s (Section) 2 precedents in a way that forces states to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids,” he wrote in Louisiana v. Callais, the decision last week that allowed Alabama to reinstall apartheid government.
There may be some complications. Alito’s majority opinion seemed to draw distinctions between Callais and Alabama’s situation. In at least one iteration of Republican plans, we could see different primary dates around the state, a surefire way to sow confusion and depress turnout.
But who expects our leaders to act with restraint? The momentum of the moment is toward smothering freedom. Hate finds a way.
And it has no interest in the crimes that require laws to fix them. Slavery? Violent disenfranchisement? That was all so long ago, the court seems to think. The real problem, in the conservative mind, is when people try to do something about these poisonous legacies and recognize Black Americans as citizens and not bodies for exploitation. “Small government” always means letting crooked white men exploit and abuse Black Americans, without fear of the law.
Laws like the Voting Rights Act, which the U.S. Supreme Court has rendered little more than a relic of the second Reconstruction, a lost time when people believed the Constitution should do what it says.
So the Legislature convenes for the first Jim Crow session of the 21st century. I believe Democrats, nearly all of whom are Black, will put up a fight. I believe Republicans, nearly all of whom are white, will stay silent or applaud the efforts to silence their fellow Alabamians and shove them out of public life.
It may not end this week. But I know where this is headed.
In this primary season, Republicans like to talk about “Alabama values” — churches, trucks and guns.
What they actually value is a Thucydidean world where the strong take, the weak suffer and no person owes anyone anything. Not compassion, not understanding, and certainly not respect. Nothing except blind obedience to authority, where — in Alabama — authorities seem selfish and unworthy of the power they hold.
We will see this craven, obsequious behavior on full display this week. And right now, there’s not much we can do. The state opposes democracy. The courts oppose the Constitution. Much as I would love to see an act of bravery from Team Red, its orientation toward President Donald Trump prevents that.
What we can do is remember. We can remember the millions of Alabamians who came before us, who bled and suffered and died to build a shelter against the numbing blasts of Alabama’s ceaseless nihilism.
And we will remember what happens this week. Who stood up for representative government. And who submitted to tyranny.
But most of all, we must persevere. The cold winds of Jim Crow are roaring. The work of rebuilding democracy is in front of us. And if we cannot see it to the end, we must carry the memories of what was lost to those who will.
From Alabama Reflector Post Url: Visit
Author: Brian Lyman