Niedziejkore
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By DeWayne Wickham
Republished from USA Today
The wording is chilling: "Separate schools shall be provided for white and colored children, and no child of either race shall be permitted to attend a school of the other race."
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.
That may have been the thinking of a good number of voters in the state that calls itself the “Heart of Dixie” when they went to the polls Nov. 2. In addition to naming their choice for president, they were asked to decide whether a section of the state’s behemoth constitution that mandates racial segregation in public schools should be stripped from the document.
The wording is chilling: “Separate schools shall be provided for white and colored children, and no child of either race shall be permitted to attend a school of the other race.” The repeal provision, called Amendment 2, also would have removed from the constitution language that says the state’s schoolchildren do not have a right to a public education.
Repeal defeated
The amendment was defeated by 1,850 votes out of the more than 1.38 million cast. The results of a statewide recount are expected this week [ed. – The recount found the measure failed by a narrow margin]. Supporters of the repeal effort worry that the measure’s defeat will send the wrong message.
Nevermind that the U.S. Supreme Court (news – web sites)’s 1954 decision in the Brown vs. Board of Education case long ago rendered the Alabama constitution’s Jim Crow language null and void. Supporters of Amendment 2 wanted voters to send an unambiguous message to the world beyond the state’s borders. They wanted to erase the stain that the segregation clause has on Alabama’s efforts to get beyond its racist past.
“I don’t believe that this vote demonstrates that our people are racist, but it does show that some of them are vulnerable to organized confusion and political demagoguery and fear,” says Lenora Pate, a Democrat who co-chairs a bipartisan panel created by Gov. Bob Riley to overhaul the state’s constitution. Pate says that the document has been amended more than 750 times since 1901.
Fears of a state tax hike
Opponents of Amendment 2 include Roy Moore, the former chief justice of the state’s Supreme Court who was ousted after his fight to display the Ten Commandments in the state courthouse.
He is believed to be eyeing a run for statewide office. He argues that removing the clause, which says schoolchildren have no right to a publicly funded education, would open the way for a judge to order an increase of state taxes to improve the education system.
Although Riley, a Republican, and other supporters of Amendment 2 say the removal of that clause would create no such opening, voters appear to have rejected it. The awaited recount is expected to sustain that decision.
For too many Alabama voters, rejecting a constitutional amendment that would remove segregationist language from their state’s constitution probably falls far short of racist behavior. Like Wallace, who died in 1998, they no doubt see a big distinction between the overt act of racism and the more subtle actions of segregationists. And when confronted with a choice between cleansing segregationist language from their state’s constitution and risking a tax increase, and doing nothing about that ugly blot and fending off a feared tax hike, Alabama voters opted for the latter.
Pate believes that those who voted against Amendment 2 were misled by people who had good reason to know the case against it was bogus. She says that while the election results are disappointing, the intentions of most of those voters were not hateful.
I’m not so sure.
“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.
In other words, they were followers – not the leaders – of the voters they sought to serve.
DeWayne Wickham writes weekly for USA TODAY.
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Worker bees can leave
Even drones can fly away
The queen is their slave.
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