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      ‘It’s good to think strategically’: Thomas E Ricks on civil rights and January 6

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      Interview‘It’s good to think strategically’: Thomas E Ricks on civil rights and January 6Martin Pengelly in Washington In his new book, the historian considers the work of Martin Luther King and others through the lens of military thoughtThere is a direct connection from Freedom Summer to the January 6 committee,” says Thomas E Ricks as he discusses his new book, Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968.‘Now is a continuation of then’: America’s civil rights era – in picturesRead moreFreedom Summer was a 1964 campaign to draw attention to violence faced by Black people in Mississippi when they tried to vote. The House January 6 committee will soon conclude its hearings on the Capitol riot of 2021, when supporters of Donald Trump attacked American democracy itself.But the committee is chaired by Bennie Thompson. In his opening statement, in June, the Democrat said: “I was born, raised, and still live in Bolton, Mississippi … I’m from a part of the country where people justify the actions of slavery, Ku Klux Klan and lynching. I’m reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try and justify the actions of the insurrectionists of 6 January 2021.”Ricks is reminded of the insurrectionists as he retells that grim history. Watching the January 6 hearings, he says, he “was looking at Bennie Thompson. And I realised, his career follows right on.“Summer ’64, you start getting Black people registered in Mississippi. A tiny minority, about 7%, are able to vote in ’64 but it rises to I think 59% by ’68. Bennie Thompson gets elected alderman [of Bolton, in 1969], mayor [1973] and eventually to Congress [1993]. And then as a senior member of Congress, chairs this January 6 committee.“Well, there is a direct connection from Freedom Summer, and [civil rights leaders] Amzie Moore, Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer and Dave Dennis, to the January 6 committee. And I think that’s a wonderful thing.”Under Thompson, Ricks says, the January 6 committee is acting strategically, “establishing an indisputable factual record of what happened”, a bulwark against attempts to rewrite history.“It’s always good to think strategically,” Ricks says. Which brings him back to his book.As a reporter for the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, Ricks was twice part of teams that won a Pulitzer prize. His bestselling books include Fiasco (2006) and The Gamble (2009), lacerating accounts of the Iraq disaster, and The Generals (2012), on the decline of US military leadership. In Waging a Good War, he applies the precepts of military strategy to the civil rights campaigns.He says: “This book, I wrote because I had to. I had to get it out of my head. The inspiration was I married a woman who had been active in civil rights.”Mary Kay Ricks is the author of Escape on the Pearl (2008), about slavery and the Underground Railroad. In the 1960s, she was “president of High School Friends of the SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee], Washington DC chapter.“She would pick people up at Union Station and drive them wherever they needed to be. So her memory of [the late Georgia congressman] John Lewis is him arriving, saying, ‘I’m hungry, take me to McDonald’s.’ All our lives we would be driving along, and somebody would be on the radio, and she’d say, ‘Oh, I knew that guy’ or ‘I dated that guy. Oh, I thought he was crazy.’“So I was reading about the civil rights movement to understand my wife and the stories she told me. And the more I read, the more it struck me: ‘Wow. This is an area that can really be illuminated by military thinking.’ That a lot of what they were doing was what in military operations is called logistics, or a classic defensive operation, or a holding action, or a raid behind enemy lines. And the more I looked at it, the more I thought each of the major civil rights campaigns could be depicted in that light.”In 1961, campaigners launched the Freedom Rides, activists riding buses across the south, seeking to draw attention and thereby end illegal segregation onboard and in stations. It was dangerous work, daring and remote. Ricks compares the Freedom Rides to cavalry raids, most strikingly to civil war operations by the Confederate “Gray Ghost”, John Singleton Mosby.“The Freedom Rides as raids behind enemy lines. What does that mean? Well, it struck me again and again how military-like the civil rights movement was in careful preparation. What is the task at hand? How do we prepare? What sort of people do we need to carry out this mission? What kind of training do they need?“Before the Freedom Rides they sent a young man, Tom Gaither, on a reconnaissance trip, where he drew maps of each bus station so they would know where the segregated waiting rooms were. He reported back: ‘The two cities where you’re going to have trouble are Anniston, Alabama, and Montgomery, Alabama.’ There are real race tensions in those cities.”Activists faced horrendous violence. They met it with non-violence.“They did months of training. First of all, how to capture and prevent the impulse to fight or flee. Somebody slugs you, spits on you, puts out a cigarette on your back. They knew how to react: non-violent.“But this is a really militant form of non-violence. Gandhi denounced the term passive resistance. And these people, many of them followers of God, devoted readers of Gandhi, understood this was very confrontational.”In 1965, Selma, Alabama, was the scene of Bloody Sunday, when white authorities attacked a march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and southern racism stood exposed.Ricks says: “A line I love comes from Selma. People said, ‘What are we doing when the sheriff comes after us?’ The organisers said, ‘No, you’re going after the sheriff.’ A good example: CT Vivian, one of my heroes, a stalwart of civil rights, is thrown down the steps of the county courthouse at Selma by Jim Clark, the county sheriff. And Vivian looks up and yells, ‘Who are you people? What do you tell your wives and children?’“It is such a human question. And in this confrontational form of non-violence, I think they flummoxed the existing system, of white supremacism, which the world saw was a system built on violence inherited from slavery.”Bloody Sunday remembered: civil rights marchers tell story of their iconic photosRead moreRicks has written about his time in Iraq and post-traumatic stress disorder. At the end of Waging a Good War, he considers how those who campaigned for civil rights, who were beaten, shot and imprisoned, struggled to cope with the toll.“If you want to understand the full cost, it’s important to write about the effect on the activists and their families, their children. Dave Dennis Jr, the son of one of the people who ran Freedom Summer, he and I have talked about this a bit. We believe the Veterans Administration should be open to veterans of the civil rights movement. There aren’t a lot of veterans still alive. Nonetheless, it would be a meaningful gesture that could help some people who have had a hard time in life.”In a passage that could fuel a whole book, Ricks considers how Martin Luther King Jr, the greatest civil rights leader, struggled in the years before his assassination, in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968.Like many PTSD sufferers, King sought refuge in drink and sex. But for Ricks, “the moment that captures it for me is he’s sitting in a rocking chair in Atlanta, with his friend Dorothy Cotton. And he says, ‘I think I should take a sabbatical.’ This is about 1967. This guy had been under daily threat for 13 years. I compare him to [Dwight] Eisenhower and the pressures he was under as a top commander in world war two … yet King does this for well over a decade. The stress was enormous. I only wish he had been able to take that sabbatical.”The campaign took its toll on others, among them James Bevel, a “tactically innovative, strategically brilliant” activist who abused women and children, moved far right and died in disgrace.Ricks hopes his book might help make other activists better known, among them Pauli Murray, Diane Nash – a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom – and Fred Shuttlesworth, “a powerful character, a moonshiner turned minister”.Shuttlesworth lived in Birmingham, Alabama, scene of some of the worst attacks on the civil rights movement, most of all the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963, in which four young girls were killed.To Ricks, “If there’s a real moment of despair in Martin Luther King’s life, it’s the Birmingham church bombing. He says, ‘At times, life is hard, as hard as crucible steel.’ That was the focal point for how I think about what King went through.”But there is light in Birmingham too. Ricks recounts the time “the white establishment calls Fred Shuttlesworth up and says, ‘We hear Martin Luther King might be coming to town. What can we do to stop that?’ And he leans back and smiles and says, ‘You know, I’ve been bombed twice in this town. Nobody called me then. But now you want to talk?’“Shuttlesworth threw himself into things. He believed in non-violence as an occasional tactic, not as a way of life. He sent a carloads of guys carrying shotguns to rescue the Freedom Riders from the KKK in Anniston.“Then there’s Amzie Moore. I wish I could have written more about him. He came home from world war two, worked at a federal post office so he would not be under control of local government. He starts his own gas station and refuses to have whites-only bathrooms. ‘Nope, not gonna do it.’ To me, he’s like a member of the French Resistance but he does it for 20 years. When Bob Moses and other civil rights workers go to Mississippi, he’s the guy they look up. ‘How do I survive in Mississippi?’ And he tells them and helps them.”Waging a Good War also considers how campaigners today might learn from those who went before. Ricks says: “Some of the people in the Black Lives Matter era have reached back. I talked to one person who went to James Lawson, the trainer of the Nashville sit-ins in 1960, and asked, ‘How do you go about this? How do you think about this? What about losses? Instructions?’“A demonstration is only the end product, the tip of an iceberg. There has to be careful preparation, consideration of, ‘What message are we trying to send? How are we going to send it? How are we going to follow up?’ So James Lawson conveys that message. Similarly, Bob Moses, who recently died, attended a Black Lives Matter meeting. There are roots by which today’s movements reach back down to the movements of the forefathers.”Democrats see hope in Stacey Abrams (again) in a crucial US election – if she can get voters to show upRead moreHe also sees echoes in two major strands of activism today.“Stacey Abrams’ work on voting rights is very similar to a lot of the work Martin Luther King did with the SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference]. Fighting voter suppression, finding ways to encourage minorities to register and to vote, looking to expand the franchise.“Black Lives Matter reminds me of SNCC, if somewhat more radical, more focused not on gaining power through the vote but on abuses of power, especially police brutality.“It’s sad that the problems the movement tried to address in the 1950s and 60s still need to be addressed. We have moments of despair. Nonetheless, one of things about writing the book was to show people who went through difficult times, and usually found ways to succeed.“The more I learned, the more I enjoyed it. It was a real contrast. Writing about the Iraq war? It’s hard. This felt good. I was hauled to my writing desk every morning. I loved writing this book.”
      Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
      TopicsBooksCivil rights movementUS politicsRaceThe far rightProtestBlack Lives Matter movementinterviewsReuse this content More

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      ‘It just doesn’t let up’: Alabama state prisons rife with violence, inmates say

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      ‘It just doesn’t let up’: Alabama state prisons rife with violence, inmates say State’s corrections department says things are ‘under control’ after labor strike began in September over conditions, but images and interviews say otherwiseLast Friday, five days after Alabama prisoners launched a statewide labor strike, Republican governor Kay Ivey assured reporters that the head of the state’s beleaguered corrections department had things “well under control”.But images and interviews from inside the state’s prisons show a system in disarray, with deteriorating conditions, pervasive violence, multiple deaths and little oversight from staff.The strike started on 26 September after thousands of prisoners refused to leave their dorms and cell blocks for work in mess halls, factories and trash crews. Prison administrators said they had to cut back food rations from three meals a day to two, which prisoners saw as retaliation, but officials blamed on the fact that meals are generally prepared by the incarcerated workers themselves. Guards stopped letting people out for visiting, recreation or school. Cellphone footage shared with the Marshall Project shows trash piling up in walkways and dorms in some prisons.embedThen on Saturday – less than 24 hours after the governor’s declaration – prisoners recorded grainy cellphone footage of what appears to be a fatal stabbing in an Alabama lockup. The first of the two short clips, which prisoners said was filmed at Donaldson correctional facility in Bessemer, Alabama, shows one man apparently stabbing another in a common room as others watch from a few feet away. The second video shows a man sprawled out on the floor, struggling to lift his head up, while another prisoner leans over him as if to check whether he’s alive.The Alabama department of corrections did not dispute the authenticity of the videos, and confirmed that 30-year-old Denarieya Smith was killed on Saturday at Donaldson in an “inmate-on-inmate assault involving a weapon”, which officials are investigating. The department cited security concerns and refused to answer questions about whether the unit is understaffed. In the most recent numbers made public, the department of corrections was authorized by the legislature to have 3,326 employees in 2018. This summer, it had a little more than half that many, according to a staffing report from June.“We’re not going outside except for chow,” said one man who spoke to the Marshall Project from a medium-security facility and asked not to be named for fear of retaliation from prison officials. “There’s no visitation. There’s no trade school. No laundry. No ice. The officers have been working 16 hours a day since this started, but I noticed there’s less and less of them whenever we go to chow.”The man said he’d seen videos of fights and violence, including images of Smith’s killing. The county’s medical examiner confirmed that a second prisoner at Donaldson – 29-year-old Joseph Agee – had also been stabbed to death since the strike began. The medical examiner said both deaths are being investigated as homicides.“What we saw in that video is outrageous – but it’s been outrageous in DOC for so long, and it just doesn’t let up,” said Carla Crowder, executive director of the advocacy non-profit Alabama Appleseed. “It is not unusual to have multiple homicides or drug overdoses in a week, and videos circulating of sleeping guards and open-air drug use in the dorms. That is the new normal.”She added that the governor’s claims of control are “meaningless words, not grounded in reality”, she added.The Alabama prison system has been the target of a federal investigation for years, and in late 2020, the Department of Justice sued the state over concerns about overcrowding, violence and a high risk of death for incarcerated people. Despite the added scrutiny, prisoners and advocates said conditions have not improved. And as the case is not slated for trial until 2024, some hoped a collective action would spark legislative changes to sentencing and parole practices that could free people instead.Since the justice department’s suit began, “the death toll has risen significantly”, said Diyawn Caldwell, founder of the advocacy group Both Sides of the Wall. “They’re understaffed. The officers are bringing in the drugs that are killing people. The conditions are barbaric. You have people that are committing suicide. No one is making parole. What else do we do?”The corrections department did not respond to questions this week about the extent of the work stoppage, about violence and deaths in the prisons or about Caldwell’s allegations.After months of planning, prisoners and outside advocates publicly issued a list of policy-focused demands last week. The list included a streamlined review process for medical furloughs, clearer parole guidelines, retroactive repeal of the state’s habitual offender law, an end to life-without-parole sentences and the creation of a statewide conviction integrity unit. Prisoners who spoke to the Marshall Project acknowledged that most of the demands were outside the purview of the corrections department and would instead require the legislature to act.“Maybe they have to start listening. I think they know something is wrong, but did they know we’re really tired of it? By stopping work now, we are sending this system that’s already in crisis into another crisis,” said K Shaun Traywick, an incarcerated activist who goes by “Swift Justice”.Prison strikes are not uncommon, and at least twice in recent years prisoners in Alabama have been at the forefront in launching work stoppages that spread to prisons in several states, garnering nationwide attention.Yet almost as soon as the strike began last week, people in prison said officials started retaliating, cutting back food to two paltry bagged meals a day. Pictures sent from inside show one meal made up of two hot dogs, two pieces of bread and a grapefruit. Another consisted of an unappetizing spread of coleslaw, prunes, two pieces of bread and baloney.“Meals have included slices of bread topped with some sort of sludge, uncooked hot dogs and minuscule portions of canned fruit,” a lawyer representing the prisoners wrote on the fifth day of the strike. In a court filing last week, attorney Clifford Hardy accused the corrections department of trying to starve prisoners into submission, citing as proof a memo circulated at Donaldson correctional facility “detailing that meal reductions would continue until the labor strike ended”.Prison officials have not yet responded to the allegations in court, but said in a press release that because mess hall workers had refused to come to work, the restricted feeding schedule was “logistically necessary to ensure that other critical services are being provided”.The same day the prisoners’ lawyer complained to the court, the governor held her press conference in Montgomery, calling the demands “just unreasonable” and offering assurances to the public that new prison construction would improve conditions.“Everything’s still operational,” she said. “There’s no disruption in essential services. We’ve still got our two prisons being built, so we can better provide safety for the inmates as well as the workers.”Prisoners and their advocates disputed the notion that the demands were unreasonable and scoffed at the governor’s assessment of the current state of Alabama’s lockups.It’s not clear how many prisoners are participating in the strike or how long the work stoppage might last. On Monday, the department told AL.com that some people had returned to work, but five prisons remained entirely shut down by the strike. Prisoners who spoke to the Marshall Project disputed the department’s characterization that the protest was winding down.Regardless, the collective action is attracting attention from people imprisoned in other states. In group chat messages shared with the Marshall Project, dozens of men in prisons in other southern states have begun talking about whether they could replicate Alabama’s work stoppage.“I wanna see Georgia do this,” said the man who spoke to the Marshall Project from a medium-security prison in Alabama. “I wanna see the whole south do this.”This article was published in partnership with the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the US criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.TopicsAlabamaUS prisonsUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      US supreme court hears case that could gut voting rights for minority groups

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      US supreme court hears case that could gut voting rights for minority groupsIn Merrill v Milligan, the court will decide whether Alabama’s new congressional map violates the Voting Rights Act The supreme court’s conservative majority appeared unsettled on Tuesday on whether it would gut one of the most powerful remaining provisions of the Voting Rights Act in a case that has profound implications for the representation of Black Americans and other minority groups.The case, Merrill v Milligan, centers on how much those who draw electoral districts should be required to consider race. It involves a dispute over the seven congressional districts Alabama drew last year. Only one of those districts has a majority-Black population, even though Black people make up a quarter of Alabama’s population. Earlier this year, a three-judge panel unanimously ruled that the configuration was illegal under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which guarantees minority groups equal opportunity to participate in the electoral process. It ordered Alabama to draw a second district with a minority population. The supreme court stepped in earlier this year and halted that order while the case proceeded.A court caught Republicans discriminating against Black voters – here’s howRead moreThe state’s solicitor general, Edmund LaCour, argued on Tuesday that the lower court’s ruling was incorrect because it required Alabama to consider race above traditional, race-neutral criteria. In order to require Alabama draw a second majority-minority district, he said, the plaintiffs should have first had to prove that such a map could exist without taking race into account at all. He argued that computer simulations programmed with race-neutral criteria never produced a map with a second majority-Black district.Justice Samuel Alito, one of the court’s most conservative jurists, seized on that point repeatedly in support of Alabama’s argument. “How can it be reasonably configured if you can’t get that map with a computer simulation that takes into account all of the traditional race-neutral factors?” he said.But even Alito acknowledged that some of the arguments Alabama made were “far-reaching”. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, another conservative justice, said at one point she would be “struggling in the same way others have about narrowing down exactly what your argument is”.Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson all seemed deeply skeptical about all of Alabama’s arguments. Embracing the state’s approach would upend how the court has long approached section 2 redistricting cases. Kagan said the case was a “slam dunk” case under the court’s existing precedent before laying out how she believed the lower court had correctly evaluated the facts. “It seems to me you’re coming here … and saying change the way we look at section 2 and its application,” she said.The supreme court has long allowed for the use of race and required those who challenge maps to meet a difficult three-part test to challenge the map. The first part of that test requires plaintiffs to show that the minority population is sufficiently large and compact enough to comprise a majority in a reasonably configured single-member district.Democracy, poisoned: America’s elections are being attacked at every levelRead moreAlabama’s congressional map easily meets the conditions needed to bring a section 2 challenge, experts have said. There is clear evidence Black and white voters prefer different candidates and mapmakers were easily able to draw a second majority-Black congressional district that comported with the traditional criteria Alabama uses.“There is nothing race-neutral about Alabama’s map,” Deuel Ross, a lawyer who represented some of the plaintiffs, told the justices. “Section 2 is not an intent test or about putting on racial blinders.”Requiring plaintiffs to draw that map without considering race at all would have profound consequences for Black representation across the US. It would make it much harder for plaintiffs to bring challenges to maps, essentially requiring them to show that discrimination is occurring without looking at race.“Alabama isn’t asking the court to apply section 2 as it’s been applied for the last 40 years,” said Elizabeth Prelogar, the United States solicitor general, which backed the plaintiffs in the case. “Instead, Alabama is asking the court to radically change the law by inserting this concept of race neutrality and effectively limiting section 2 to intentional discrimination.”A ruling in favor of Alabama could also produce a “broad upheaval” in the law and clear a pathway for Alabama and other states to get rid of existing majority-minority districts. “Make no mistake, every majority-minority district would become a litigation target,” said Abha Khanna, a lawyer for one of the groups of plaintiffs.The case marks the latest occasion in which the court has considered the Voting Rights Act, a crowning achievement of the civil rights era. In 2013, the court gutted a provision in the law that required states and other jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to get federal approval before enacting changes. In 2020, the justices made it harder to use section 2 to bring challenges to voting laws outside of redistricting.Kagan acknowledged that history of chipping away at the law on Tuesday. After calling the Voting Rights Act “one of the great achievements of American democracy”, she said: “In recent years, this statute has fared not well in this court.”“You’re asking us, essentially, to cut back substantially on our 40 years of precedent and to make this too extremely difficult to prevail on. So what’s left?” she said in a comment that appeared to be directed more at her colleagues on the bench than any of the lawyers.US supreme court to decide cases with ‘monumental’ impact on democracyRead moreSome of the most pointed and extensive questioning on Tuesday came from Jackson, the newest member of the court, who was participating in just her second day of oral arguments. She directly challenged LaCour’s argument that the prohibition against racial discrimination in the constitution’s 14th amendment does not allow mapmakers to consider race in redistricting.But Jackson questioned how that could be the case when history shows that the 14th amendment was adopted as part of a race-conscious effort to guarantee equal rights for Black Americans in the 19th century. “I don’t think that the historical record establishes that the founders believed race neutrality or race blindness was required,” she said, in what seemed to be an appeal to conservative originalists on the court. “It was drafted to give a foundational, a constitutional foundation for a piece of legislation that was designed to make people who had less opportunity and less rights equal to white citizens.“I’m trying to understand why that violates the 14th amendment given the history and background of the 14th amendment.”TopicsAlabamaThe fight for democracyUS politicsUS supreme courtLaw (US)US voting rightsnewsReuse this content More

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      He challenged his all-white city council in Alabama. Now he’s on it

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      He challenged his all-white city council in Alabama. Now he’s on itEric Calhoun, a Black resident who sued Pleasant Grove’s discriminatory voting system in 2018, was sworn in as council member on Monday A few years ago, Eric Calhoun felt out of touch with his city council in Pleasant Grove, a small Alabama city of just under 10,000 people outside of Birmingham.Calhoun, who is 71 and has lived in the city for nearly three decades, couldn’t find contact information for any of the five council members online. During the 2016 election, none of the white candidates running asked him for his vote. Voters in the city had never elected a Black person to the city council. Calhoun, like 61% of the city, is Black.In 2018, Calhoun became a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit that argued the racial makeup of the city council in Pleasant Grove was not an accident. The way the city was choosing its city council candidates made nearly impossible for a Black candidate to get elected. Essentially, the city allowed city council candidates to run citywide, instead of in districts, allowing blocs of white voters in the city to come together and defeat candidates preferred by Black voters.The city eventually agreed to settle the lawsuit and change the way it held city council elections.The results were immediate – in the first election under the new system last fall, the city elected three Black candidates to the five-member council. And on Monday, Calhoun became part of that majority. He was sworn in to fill a vacancy on the council after one of the council members resigned.“Color is not the issue,” Calhoun said in an interview. “The issue is representation and to make sure that we have a diverse city.”Calhoun’s appointment cements a Black majority on the council, said Yolanda Lawson, another councilmember who was elected last year. The city’s white mayor has the option of voting with the council and had regularly been doing so, resulting in a 3-3 split. Calhoun is replacing a white council member.“Not knowing what it was like prior to us being on the council, but I do notice more constiuents will begin with ‘I just never said anything because I didn’t think it would make a difference,’” Lawson said. “I personally feel that it is helping us to accomplish one of the things that I said myself I wanted to see, which is someone to represent me as a citizen. Not necessarily because I’m Black, but because it’s someone that’s willing to listen to my issues and my concerns.”In his new role on the council, Calhoun wants to promote neighborhood associations, local businesses and local parks. And he wants to make sure that anyone who calls him up with a concern feels heard.Pleasant Grove has long not been welcoming to Black citizens – in 1985 a court observed it had “an astonishing hostility to the presence and the rights of black Americans”. But in recent years, the Black population has surged.After decades of being locked out from political power, the majority-Black city council showed the importance of having Black representation at the local level, said Deuel Ross, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which helped represent Calhoun in the suit.“The city council has a lot of power over the police force. Over distribution of municipal resources. All things that the Black community has felt like it was being ignored in the past. So it’s wonderful to see the Black community has not only representation but the majority of the board at this point,” he said.This fall, the US supreme court will hear a hugely consequential redistricting case involving Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act – the part of the law that Calhoun sued Pleasant Grove under. The provision prohibits racial discrimination in voting practices, but the 6-3 conservative majority on the court has signaled deep skepticism of the provision and appears poised to narrow it.Such a ruling could make it harder to bring future cases that challenge election systems, like the one that existed in Pleasant Grove, that prevent minority voters from exercising their full political power.“[What] Alabama is arguing in the supreme court, is that any consideration of race in redistricting raises constitutional concerns. And I think that is an extreme position that the supreme court has never taken,” said Ross, who is also involved in that case. “If it did take that position, it would make it difficult not just in Pleasant Grove not just to have Black representation, but in Congress and county commissions and state legislatures all over the country.”TopicsUS voting rightsFight to voteUS politicsAlabamanewsReuse this content More

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      Female journalist told skirt too short when reporting on Alabama execution

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      Female journalist told skirt too short when reporting on Alabama executionOne journalist reporting on the lethal injection was told her skirt was too short and another said she had a full-body inspection Last Thursday night, the state of Alabama took three hours to find a vein in Joe Nathan James Jr through which officials could pump lethal injection drugs and execute him, a process that the department of corrections insisted was “nothing out of the ordinary”.Alabama appears to specialize in its extraordinary sense of the ordinary, particularly when it comes to the death penalty. It has now emerged that, during that execution, prison officials subjected female reporters who came as witnesses to the proceeding to a clothing inspection, attempting to bar one woman from the death chamber on grounds that her skirt was too short.Ivana Hrynkiw, a journalist for Alabama’s pre-eminent news outlet AL.com, recounted how she was pulled aside by a prison official and told that her skirt was too diminutive to meet regulations. “I tried to pull my skirt to my hips to make the skirt longer, but was told it was still not appropriate,” she recounted on Twitter.The paradox that the state went to such lengths to uphold what it regards as propriety in clothing even as it prepared to kill a man appears to have been lost on the department of corrections. Officials also subjected an Associated Press reporter, Kim Chandler, to a full-body inspection, making her stand to have the length of her clothing checked. Chandler said that such an indignity had never happened to her before in the many times she had covered executions since 2002.Hrynkiw was eventually allowed to enter the death chamber after she borrowed a pair of waterproof fisher’s waders from a photographer, attaching their suspenders under her shirt to keep them up. That was deemed appropriate attire when watching a judicial killing.But even then it didn’t stop. The reporter was informed that her open toe heels were a breach of regulation and she was forced to change into tennis shoes retrieved from her car.“I felt embarrassed to have my body and my clothes questioned in front of a room of people I mostly never met,” Hrynkiw said. “I sat down, tried to stop blushing, and did my work.”After all that, the reporter did her job, and so did Alabama. After three hours digging around for a vein, it found one, and went ahead with the execution.James Jr was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in the 1994 killing of 26-year-old Faith Hall. James Jr and Hall had briefly dated before she rejected him, authorities have said.Hall’s daughters wanted James Jr to spend the rest of his life in prison but pleaded for him to not be executed.TopicsUS newsAlabamaUS politicsWomenWomen in journalismnewsReuse this content More

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      Abandoned by Trump, Mo Brooks Is Now Open to Testifying About Jan. 6

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      Stinging from his resounding defeat in Alabama’s Republican runoff for the Senate on Tuesday and a snub from former President Donald J. Trump, Representative Mo Brooks now appears to be willing to testify as part of the Jan. 6 investigation.Mr. Brooks signaled on Wednesday that he would comply with an impending subpoena from the bipartisan House committee that is leading the inquiry into the attack on the Capitol — but only under certain conditions.His comments to the media, reported by CNN on Wednesday, came one day after he lost a bitter primary runoff to Katie Britt. Mr. Trump withdrew his endorsement of Mr. Brooks in March when he began slipping in the polls, and gave his support to Ms. Britt in the final weeks of the campaign.Mr. Brooks bemoaned his loss, telling a Politico reporter that the “bad guys won.”He hinged his willingness to testify before the House committee on being able to do so “in public so the public can see it — so they don’t get bits and pieces dribbled out,” Mr. Brooks said, according to CNN.The congressman added that he would only testify about matters related to Jan. 6, 2021, and that he wanted to see copies of documents that he might be asked about beforehand, the network reported.Mr. Brooks was not available for an interview on Thursday, and his office declined to elaborate on his comments.Mr. Brooks, a hard-right Republican and a once-fierce ally of Mr. Trump’s whom the former president has accused of becoming “woke,” has drawn intense scrutiny for his actions preceding the violence on Jan. 6.Outfitted in body armor at a rally before the siege, Mr. Brooks exhorted Mr. Trump’s election-denying supporters to start “kicking ass.”Investigators have also sought to question Mr. Brooks about his interactions with Mr. Trump in the aftermath of the attack. They zeroed in on Mr. Brooks’s comments in March, when he said that Mr. Trump had, since leaving office, repeatedly asked him to illegally “rescind” the 2020 election, remove President Biden and force a new special election.But as of Wednesday, Representative Bennie G. Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the head of the Jan. 6 committee, acknowledged that Mr. Brooks still had not been served with a subpoena. Mr. Thompson said that process servers in Washington had been unable to track down Mr. Brooks because he had been campaigning in Alabama.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 6Making a case against Trump. More