©Scott Sines
On Dec. 31st, I involuntarily left the Alabama Media Group (AL.Com) one of a bunch of people caught up in a large reduction in force. I loved that job editing opinion and commentary for the Birmingham News, The Huntsville Times and Mobile Press-Register.
There was a ton of news in my short time there. In one week the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act and same sex marriage. Imagine Alabama’s reaction. A church shooting in Charleston echoed hard against memories of The 16th Street Baptist Church bombings that killed four little girls. When the Charleston shooter surfaced on the web with the Confederate battle flag hell broke loose over how we honor the past. It’s going on right now in Mississippi and New Orleans.
The newspaper thundered away at the South’s inability to unshackle itself from its racist past and imagine a new future. Shortly thereafter, Governor Robert Bentley ordered the flags removed from the state capital.
Flashback to 2011, Alabama enacted one of the most stringent Voter ID laws in the country. Fast-forward to 2015 and Governor Bentley reacting to a severe budget shortfall closed 31 Drivers License Offices across the state. Twenty-seven of them were in predominately African-American counties. So not only are the Voter ID laws severely strict, the most common credential necessary to vote is out of reach for many African-Americans in Alabama. At the same time, NPR had contracted with a Texas design studio to create a marketing campaign for a ‘New South.’
The Opinion pages roared against the hypocrisy of marketing a new South when the state government was continuing its sad history of voter suppression. The Opinion section resurrected historic pictures and accounts of the painful voter registration efforts in the 1960’s. Shortly thereafter Bentley relented and reopened some offices on a limited basis.
When ‘Straight outta Compton’ debuted many Alabamians reacted negatively to the language and misogyny in the rap-based movie. The Opinion pages put the music and movie in historical context as the modern protest anthems they are, not much different from Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan. We continued to celebrate the significant progress made by African-Americans in the arts and placed them in the context of a very painful year for race relations.
So my question is… Who will carry on the crusade? Do you know anyone? Give them my name. I can start on Monday.
