One more river to cross

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A version of this commentary originally appeared in the Alabama Reflector.

My family and I stopped at Buffalo Wild Wings in Georgia a few weekends ago after watching one of our kids take part in a marching band competition. Surrounding us in restaurant were wall-mounted televisions. Most showed sports, repeatedly punctuated by political ads.

At least half of them attacked transgender people. And I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anything more rancid on a TV broadcast.

One image after another of smiling human beings, framed as a monstrous threat.

A person’s existence is never a debatable point. But these ads weren’t even gesturing toward persuasion. They were harangues, treating transgender people as nothing but targets and receptacles for hatred. Certainly not people worthy of the most basic respect.

The spots reminded me of an equally rancid ad from Alabama’s past. Faced with an extinction-level political event in Alabama’s 1970 gubernatorial campaign, George Wallace circulated a flyer showing a white girl sitting with seven Black children. The text read “Wake Up Alabama! Is This The Image You Want? Blacks Vow To Take Over Alabama.”

Brute. Crude. Demeaning.

It’s the old shriek of privilege, directed at white men like me. You matter. They don’t. If they matter, you won’t.

It incites us to mad attempts at shoving the great shining rainbow of our nation back through the prism. Thinking we can make everything we see white.

That hateful struggle has warped our country. It’s ruined lives and communities. And all too often it means living in a cynical simulacrum of freedom. Democracy at its heart is an act of inclusion, of gathering voices to come to a consensus. In America, we have a disturbing tendency to elevate people obsessed with excluding men and women from the discussion because of one identifier or another. All too often, they use violence to shrink the circle. Alabama has logged more decades as an apartheid state than as anything like a responsive government.

And yet, we know that people pushed back. We know of countless Americans who faced tyranny and violence with a cool and clear demand to be treated as Americans.

I’m thinking here of Jackson Giles, a Black man from Montgomery who lived through an age of segregation and lynchings. Someone who had seen his rights yanked away by a small clique of elites. Hopelessness would be a natural reaction.

But Giles fought. He challenged Alabama’s 1901 Constitution, enacted through fraud to steal the vote from Black Alabamians and, later, poor whites.

Backed by the Tuskegee Institute’s Booker T. Washington, he took the state to the U.S. Supreme Court, where, in 1903, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. ruled against him in a manner that was both illogical and cowardly.

You could understand if Giles gave up there. He didn’t.

Black leaders from around the state gathered in Montgomery after the court’s ruling to continue the fight. Giles, a deacon in a local church, began the meeting with a hymn.

“One more river,” he said. “There’s one more river to cross.”

Giles did not win that battle. The 1901 Alabama Constitution is still our governing document. Its authoritarian provisions controlled the state until 1966, when the first elections under the Voting Rights Act took place. Giles lived a long life, but not long enough to see that day. It’s unlikely anyone who heard him sing in 1903 did, either.

But other Alabamians picked up the melody. Amelia Boynton Robinson. Arthur Madison. Jo Ann Robinson. E.D. Nixon. Rosa Parks. They marched through Alabama’s hopeless landscape in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, at considerable personal risk, trying to make freedom and rule of law something more than luxuries enjoyed by white elites.

They’re not unique. Look at any marginalized group in American history. You’ll see people who will not be silent, who will not be intimidated and who demand to be treated not as the powerful choose, but as the Constitution demands.

Their lives depend on us living our ideals. Not muttering them under our breath, but working to make our country the democracy it should be. Because when we decide that some people aren’t worthy of that, democracy dies.

It lives when people targeted for exclusion say no. When other people join them. And when the boundaries of belonging expand.

Progress is not ordained. Giles saw it go backwards. It could do so again. But it will not be complete until the day we accept that all of us are Americans, each with a right to representation and respect. Until we acknowledge our freedom is tied to the freedom of everyone else.

That destination is far over the horizon, with many obstacles ahead and nothing we can count on except the path that led us here and each other’s faith in the journey. Take a deep breath and step forward. There’s one more river to cross.

Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com. Follow Alabama Reflector on Facebook and X.