Greene County Democrat

Tag: Southern Poverty Law Center

  • Newswire : Claudette Colvin, who refused to move before the nation was ready, dies at 86

    Claudette Colvin

    By Stacy M. Brown
NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent

    History often remembers movements by their most recognizable moments. It less often remembers the teenagers who moved first.
    Claudette Colvin, whose refusal to surrender her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus came months before the moment that would enter textbooks, died Tuesday at 86. Her death was confirmed by the Claudette Colvin Legacy Foundation, which said she died of natural causes in Texas.
    On March 2, 1955, Colvin was 15 years old and riding home from school when the bus driver ordered Black passengers to give up their seats to white riders. Three students stood. Colvin did not. Police arrested her, charged her under segregation laws, and placed her on probation. She later said she was thinking about the Constitution and the rights she believed belonged to her.
    Colvin’s arrest came at a time when Montgomery’s Black community was already pressing against the daily restraints of Jim Crow. Her stand did not ignite a boycott that day, but it did register. It landed in conversations, church meetings, and legal strategy sessions that would soon follow.
    “This nation lost a civil rights giant today,” Tafeni English-Relf, Alabama state director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said. “Claudette Colvin’s courage lit the fire for a movement that would free all Alabamians and Americans from the woes of southern segregation.”
    Unlike others whose names became shorthand for the era, Colvin paid a quieter price. She was young and outspoken and was later judged by standards that did not apply to older leaders. She was never elevated as the public face of the movement. Her life unfolded mostly outside the spotlight she helped create.
    Yet Colvin’s role proved decisive.
    She became one of four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, the federal lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court and ended bus segregation in Montgomery and across Alabama. The case dismantled the legal framework that made her arrest possible.
    “At age 15, Ms. Colvin was arrested on March 2, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, for violating bus segregation ordinances, nine months before Rosa Parks,” Phillip Ensler wrote. “In 2021, it was the privilege of a lifetime to serve on the legal team that helped Ms. Colvin clear her record from the conviction.”
    “As we worked on the court motion, I had the honor of spending time with Ms. Colvin to hear her story and get to know her,” Ensler wrote.
    “Today we lost an unsung yet significant hero of the civil rights movement,” Sen. Rev. Raphael Warnock said. “Her courage paved the way for Rosa Parks’ decision and the launching of a movement that would end segregation.”
    “History did not always give Claudette Colvin the credit she deserved, but her impact is undeniable,” Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said.
    “Her life reminds us that progress is shaped not only by moments, but by sustained courage and truth,” Bernice King said.

     

  • Rally to “Fight for the Vote” held August 6 in Selma

    Over two hundred people attended the “Fight for the Vote” rally in Selma at the Civil Rights Memorial Park at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge on August 6, 2025.
    The event was sponsored by twenty organizations across the state including the NAACP, Save Ourselves Movement for Justice and Democracy, Alabama New South Coalition, Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice, Black Voters Matter, Lift the Vote, Foot Soldiers Park, Bridge Crossing Jubilee, Ordinary Peoples Society, Southern Poverty Law Center and many others.
    The rally was held to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965, and to plan and fight to strengthen the VRA based on the challenges and attacks by the Supreme Court (Shelby vs. Holder) and many state legislatures.
    Speakers from the sponsoring organizations were interposed with rap and hip-hop performances, raffles of cash and other door prizes. There was food and a giveaway of children’s books and school supplies.


  • Eutaw City Council meets May 13 and tables action on many issues

    The Eutaw City Council held its regular meeting on Monday, May 13, 2024, because members were planning to leave the next day to attend the Alabama League of Municipalities convention. Mayor Latasha Johnson and all members of the Council were present for the meeting.

    At the request of Council member, Jonathan Woodruff, the Council voted to amend the resolution to not allow members of the Eutaw Police Department to drive city vehicles home, so it would be easier and faster to arrive at crime scenes if they are called. Woodruff said, “We recently voted to give the police officers a raise and we are discontinuing the perk of being able to drive police cars home, even to residences out of the county. We allowed this expenditure, in place of a raise, but now that we have given the raise, we are no long permitting the cars to be driven home.”

    In the first of several tabling motions, the Council tabled a request from the Goodson Storm Shelter at 871 County Road 181, which is in the fire district of Eutaw, to be reimbursed for costs of electricity, water and gas.
    This was discussed in the May 7th work session and moved to the agenda for approval. Council members wanted more information on whether they were legally responsible for these storm shelter expenses.

    A representative of Living Waters, contractor for the city’s sewage system, was present at the meeting and asked the Council to approve the Municipal Water Pollution Prevention Report to be sent to the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM). The report is a compilation of monthly reports. Several City Council members said that they had just received the report and had not had a chance to read it. The Council voted to table action on the report until its next meeting on May 28th, which will still enable the report to be filed on time.

    The Council then took up four requests for use of the Robert H. Young Community Center, by IRS 501c3, non-profit organizations, who may use the facility, at no charge, if the meeting has a ‘public purpose’. The Council approved the Greene County Childrens’ Policy Council for a public meeting and the Southern Poverty Law Center for a June 15th festival on voting rights. The Council tabled the requests of the Order of Eastern Stars and Eutaw High School Class of 1979, to determine if their meetings had a public purpose.

    The Council and the Mayor had a discussion of the prior decision to reduce the work time for employees to four days a week. Originally the Mayor tried to implement this with a half a day of work on Thursday and half day on Friday. Most of the employees thought it would be most effective to work a full day on Thursdays and take Friday off. The Council members want City Hall to be open on both Thursday and Friday for residents to transact business. Mayor Johnson said that as part of her day-to-day supervision responsibilities, she accepted the staff recommendations. Councilwomen Hunter asserted that the Council wants the City Hall open five days a week.
    The Council said they would come back to resolve this in the next meeting.

    Councilwomen Hunter also supported a motion for a hiring freeze, so no new staff are hired by the city. The Mayor said she was already abiding by a hiring freeze but felt this was again part of her “day-to-day supervising responsibilities”. This issue was not formally resolved with any actions. The Council also voted to pay outstanding bills.

    The Council also received several reports from Ralph Liverman, Financial Advisor. One report was on the status of the $500,370 loan from  Merchants and Farmers Bank for equipment and trucks. Liverman reported that as of April 30, 2024, 31 monthly payments of $11,169.08 had been made, leaving a balance of $185,014.81 to be paid by the end of 2025.

    Liverman also provided a report on 22 city operating bank accounts in Merchants and Farmers Bank for the first seven months of the FY2023-24. The General Fund had a balance of $185,002 as of April 30, 2024. Based on the budget, funds are available in most accounts to honor all financial obligations of the city through the end of the fiscal year on September 30, 2024. However, Liverman points out that the Council must be vigilant and not overspend and consider an increase in water and sewer rates because this department is operating at a deficit, that will need to be covered by the General Fund at the end of the fiscal period.

    Rick Harbin, CPA and the auditor of the city’s funds was present and informed the Council that he was 95% complete with the audit for Fiscal Year ending September 30, 2023. He said he hoped to have a complete report for approval by the Council at the meeting at the end of the month.
    The city needs the audit to qualify for certain grant funds.

  • Newswire: President Biden announces first nominees for Board to Review Civil Rights Era Cold Cases

    Poster for three murdered Civil Rights Workers in Mississippi

    By Stacy M. Brown NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent

    Fourteen years ago, thesent the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice a list of 74 cold cases involving African Americans allegedly murdered in racially motivated circumstances by White people between 1952 and 1968. Most of the crimes took place in Mississippi, which contained nearly half of the 74 cases. Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee all made up the rest. All went cold, and the victims’ families never received justice. Today, a new path to justice has opened to crack these cold cases. On Friday, June 11, President Joe Biden announced the first set of nominees for the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board. The panel would have the power to declassify government files and subpoena new testimony that could reopen cases and reveal publicly why many racially motivated lynchings and killings of Black people were never adequately investigated. “The White House hopes that the Senate moves quickly to [confirm] these nominees,” an administration official told the National Newspaper Publishers Association. “The Board was established with nearly unanimous bipartisan support in 2019,” the official noted. President Biden’s nominees are: • Clayborne Carson has devoted most of his professional life to the study of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the movements Dr. King inspired. Since receiving his doctorate from UCLA in 1975, Dr. Carson has taught at Stanford University as the Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor of History (Emeritus). • Gabrielle M. Dudley, an Instruction Archivist at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University. In this role, she partners with faculty and other instructors to develop courses and archives research assignments for undergraduate and graduate students. • Hank Klibanoff, a veteran journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize in History in 2007 for a book he co-wrote about the news coverage of the civil rights struggle in the South. Klibanoff is the creator and host of Buried Truths, a narrative history podcast produced by WABE (NPR) in Atlanta. • Margaret Burnham has served as a state court judge (appointed by Governor Michael Dukakis, 1977), civil rights lawyer, and human rights commissioner. A graduate of Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Burnham has been on the Northeastern University faculty since 2002. She was named to the 2016 class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows, an honor recognizing a select group of scholars for their significant work in the social sciences and humanities. The panel could consider cases like the three civil rights workers in Mississippi – James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner – killed by the Ku Klux Klan in June 1964. Two months later, the activists’ bodies were riddled with bullets, burned, and buried in a dam in Neshoba County. The “Mississippi Burning” case has largely gone unsolved and primarily unpunished. In 2005, Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of three counts of manslaughter and sentenced to 60 years in prison, but authorities closed the case and put an end to hopes of prosecuting others involved. In Lowndes County, Alabama, there is the case of 18-year-old Rogers Hamilton. On a brisk night in October 1957, two white men arrived at Rogers’ home, summoned him outside, and put him in a truck. His mother, Beatrice Hamilton, trailed the truck on a dusty road and watched in horror as they pulled Rogers out of the vehicle and shot him in the head. When she notified the sheriff, he told her she didn’t see what she “thought she saw” and closed the case. “No one cared, except his extended family, now scattered from Chicago to New York,” John Fleming, an editor at the Center for Sustainable Journalism, wrote in a 2011 column. “The case remains open, though the reality is that this case will never be prosecuted,” Fleming decided. “Though the family wants justice, even if it means getting the local district attorney to indict a dead deputy, what’s equally important to them is the fact that the story of a long-dead [man] in faraway Alabama has finally been told.”

  • Newswire: Southern Poverty Law Center, NAACP, others launch campaign to remove racist symbols in Georgia

    Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Southern Poverty Law Center

    (TriceEdneyWire.com) – The Southern Poverty Law Center, a premiere monitor of race hate across America, has joined other advocacy organizations and elected officials in demanding change to a Georgia state law that prohibits local communities from removing Confederate monuments.
    This is the first phase of a broader statewide effort that seeks to empower local communities to determine whether they want to keep Confederate symbols in their public spaces, and – if not – to remove them.
    It joins a national movement in which dozens of Confederate statues and symbols have been torn down in various states. However the issue is still being debated across the nation as thousands of the symbols remain.
    “Although individuals and institutions across the country have made remarkable efforts to stop glorifying the men who fought to divide this nation and maintain slavery, backwards legislation has blocked significant progress in Georgia,” said Heidi Beirich, director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project. “In order to enact real change, the local community must have the ability to speak freely about the racist legacy of these symbols, and how they are still being used as emblems of white supremacy. These symbols should be understood and placed into their historical context in museums. They should not be displayed without the proper frame of reference in public spaces.”
    Four days before the Georgia General Assembly session is set to begin, the SPLC, Georgia and Atlanta NAACP, Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Georgia Alliance for Social Justice, Moore’s Ford Movement, and Concerned Black Clergy are leading the fight to remove Confederate symbols and monuments by seeking to activate a united South around racial reconciliation.
    The organizations will establish statewide chapters, and are organizing a rally on Saturday, Feb. 2, to strengthen the call for change.
    State Sen. Nikema Williams and state Rep. Renitta Shannon supported the campaign, urging the Legislature to grant local governments the power to decide whether to keep or remove monuments in their public spaces.
    Currently, there are 1,747 Confederate symbols and 722 monuments in the United States, according to Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy, a special report of the SPLC that catalogs examples of monuments, statues, flags, city, county and school names; and other symbols that honor the Confederacy.
    After Virginia and Texas, Georgia has the most Confederate symbols in the country, with at least one in 58 percent of the state’s counties.
    Importantly, there is precedent for wanting to remove these symbols in Georgia. In late 2017, the Decatur City Commission voted unanimously to move a 30-foot-tall obelisk from its city square to another location. However, the city commission was unable to move forward because state law prohibits such monuments from being “relocated, removed, concealed, obscured, or altered in any fashion.”
    Similarly, a 2017 petition to remove a Confederate flag from public display in downtown Kennesaw gained thousands of signatures. That city passed a resolution asking state leaders to “allow local municipalities the ability to determine, in their sole discretion and within the jurisdictional limits,” the ability to determine the fate of the Confederate symbol.
    Georgia’s House of Representatives and Senate drafted legislation in response, seeking to allow local governments to take action involving monuments in their communities. If passed, the legislation would simply move power back to local control and would grant local governments the ability to make and execute decisions about the placement of Confederate symbols. Organizations that made presentations at today’s press conference will support the bill after it is reintroduced in the 2019 legislative session.

  • Governor Kay Ivey signs jury override bill

    In one of her first official acts as Governor, Kay Ivey, on Tuesday, April 11, signed into law a bill that says juries, not judges, have the final say on whether to impose the death penalty in capital murder cases.
    Ivey signed the bill, which had been passed by the Alabama House of Representatives on April 4, by a vote of 78-19. The same bill had previously passed the Alabama Senate by a vote of 30- 1.
    Alabama was the only state left in the nation had these judicial override provisions.
    Senator Hank Sanders of Selma had sponsored the bill in the Senate for several years along with a bill requiring a moratorium of the death penalty until Alabama studies and reviews the equity of the death penalty.
    Sanders said, “Senator Dick Brewbaker, a Republican from Montgomery asked me if he could sponsor the jury override bill in this session and I agreed because my interest was to end this practice.”
    According to the Equal Justice Initiative. Alabama judges have overridden jury recommendations 112 times. In 101 of those cases, the judges gave a death sentence. Sanders said that a quarter of the persons presently on death row are there because the judge overrode the jury’s decision on their case.
    Rep. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa, sponsored a bill to end judicial override in the House. On the House floor, England substituted Brewbaker’s bill for his, and it won final passage. This bill was pending the Governor’s signature when Robert Bentley resigned and Kay Ivey moved up from Lieutenant Governor to the Governor’s position.
    “Having judicial override almost undermines the constitutional right to trial by a jury of your peers,” England said.  England’s bill, as introduced, would also have required the consent of all 12 jurors to give a death sentence. Current law requires at least 10 jurors. Brewbaker’s bill left the threshold to impose the death penalty at 10 jurors.
    Ebony Howard, associate legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, issued a statement applauding the bill’s passage.
    “Alabama should do everything it can to ensure that an innocent person is never executed,” Howard said. “The bipartisan effort to pass a bill that would keep a judge from overriding a jury’s vote in capital cases is a step in the right direction. As of today, Alabama is one step closer to joining every other state in our nation in prohibiting judicial override in the sentencing phase of death penalty cases.”
    Alabama Arise, a statewide advocacy group on social justice issues and ending poverty in Alabama, also supported passage of the bill as one of its legislative priorities for this session.

  • Black Lives Matter is not a hate group

    July By B19, 20BJ. Richard Cohen is president
    of the Southern Poverty Law Center

    IF
    HUNTS POINT, BRONX, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES – 2016/07/17: On the second anniversary of the death of Eric Garner by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, the Black Lives Matter community organized the Stop The Violence Rally, March and Healing Circle in the South Bronx to remember Eric Garner and other victims of police brutality with a peaceful demonstration around the neighborhood culminating the march at the 41th Precinct where participants held a moment of silence followed by chanting “I CAN’T BREATHE” 11 times as Eric Garner did before his tragic death by an illegal choke-hold. (Photo by Erik McGregor/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

     

    Each year, the Southern Poverty Law Center, of which I am the president, compiles and publishes a census of domestic hate groups. Our list, which is cited extensively by journalists, academics and government officials alike, provides an important barometer—not the only one, of course—to help us understand the state of hate and extremism in America.

    In recent weeks, we’ve received a number of requests to name Black Lives Matter a hate group, particularly in the wake of the murders of eight police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge. Numerous conservative commentators have joined the chorus. There is even a Change.org petition calling for the hate group label.
    In our view, these critics fundamentally misunderstand the nature of hate groups and the BLM movement.
    Generally speaking, hate groups are, by our definition, those that vilify entire groups of people based on immutable characteristics such as race or ethnicity. Federal law takes a similar approach.
    While it’s no surprise, given our country’s history, that most domestic hate groups hold white supremacist views, there are a number of black organizations on our hate group list as well.
    A prime example is the New Black Panther Party (NBPP), whose leaders are known for anti-Semitic and anti-white tirades. Its late chairman, Khalid Abdul Muhammad, famously remarked: “There are no good crackers, and if you find one, kill him before he changes.” Bobby Seale, a founding member of the original Black Panther Party, has called the NBPP a “black racist hate group.”
    We have heard nothing remotely comparable to the NBPP’s bigotry from the founders and most prominent leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement and nothing at all to suggest that the bulk of the demonstrators hold supremacist or black separatist views. Thousands of white people across America—indeed, people of all races—have marched in solidarity with African Americans during BLM marches, as is clear from the group’s website. The movement’s leaders also have condemned violence.
    There’s no doubt that some protesters who claim the mantle of Black Lives Matter have said offensive things, like the chant “pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon” that was heard at one rally. But before we condemn the entire movement for the words of a few, we should ask ourselves whether we would also condemn the entire Republican Party for the racist words of its presumptive nominee—or for the racist rhetoric of many other politicians in the party over the course of years.
    Many of its harshest critics claim that Black Lives Matter’s very name is anti-white, hence the oft-repeated rejoinder “all lives matter.” This notion misses the point entirely. Black lives matter because they have been marginalized throughout our country’s history and because white lives have always mattered more in our society. As BLM puts it, the movement stands for “the simple proposition that ‘black lives also matter.’”
    The backlash to BLM, in some ways, reflects a broad sense of unease among white people who worry about the cultural changes in the country and feel they are falling behind in a country that is rapidly growing more diverse in a globalizing world. We consistently see this phenomenon in surveys showing that large numbers of white people believe racial discrimination against them is as pervasive, or more so, than it is against African Americans.
    It’s the same dynamic that researchers at Harvard Business School described in a recent study: White people tend to see racism as a zero-sum game, meaning that gains for African Americans come at their expense. Black people see it differently. From their point of view, the rights pie can get bigger for everyone.
    Black Lives Matter is not a hate group. But the perception that it is racist illustrates the problem. Our society as a whole still does not accept that racial injustice remains pervasive. And, unfortunately, the fact that white people tend to see race as a zero-sum game may actually impede progress