Long before Donald Trump proclaimed that there were some “very fine people, on both sides” of the alt-racist eruption in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, Alabama Lieutenant Governor R.M. Cunningham gave similar equivocations at the 1905 dedication ceremony for the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument that was being installed in Birmingham’s Linn Park. Cunningham told the gathering that “the characterization of either side [of the Civil War] as rebels is false” because “both parties were loyalists and patriots.” The then-mayor of Birmingham Mel Drennen cosigned and said that his city’s new Confederate monument “memorialized … a cause that will ever remain fresh in the memories of our Southern people.” [...]
In 2017, Birmingham would join a wave of cities that decided Confederate monuments were no longer welcome, largely in response to the Charlottesville debacle. Birmingham’s solution was to wall off the monument with large planks of plywood, obscuring it from public view. However, also that year Alabama lawmakers passed the Alabama Heritage Preservation Act, which forbade Birmingham or any city in the state from removing or altering Confederate monuments that had stood for more than 40 years.[...]
Birmingham first began exploring taking down the monument in 2015, when then-Mayor William Bell asked the city’s attorneys and its parks and recreation board to investigate a legal path towards removal. It seemed like a safe time to do this given that Alabama’s then-Governor Robert Bentley had taken down Confederate flags from the state’s capitol grounds. However, the state legislature immediately began crafting legislation to ensure that other Confederate symbols would not meet the same fate. In May 2017, Bentley’s successor as governor, Kay Ivey, signed the Heritage Preservation Act into law. The act’s supporters intended it to obstruct Birmingham’s plans to obstruct the view of the Confederate monument in one of the city’s public parks. The city built the wall around it anyway, triggering the state’s lawsuit against the city. [...]
The judge affirmed Birmingham’s right to craft its own city narrative, something that has lately proved challenging for the “cradle of civil rights” that currently has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation. In 2016, when the city of Birmingham passed an ordinance to raise the minimum wage to $10.10, the Alabama legislature voted the following day to pre-empt and reverse the wage ordinance. (The city’s lawsuit against the state’s preemption is still pending). Meanwhile, Birmingham has been trying to futurize, or at least modernize its woeful public transit system in one of the few states that historically has not funded public transport. The state seems unwilling to allow the city to help its most oppressed residents, but a court has ruled that it must at least get out of the way of the city’s efforts to erase the symbols of that oppression.
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