Government

With Nothing Better To Do, Alabama AG Sues City For Removing Confederate Statue

Protecting Confederate monuments is apparently a top priority in a state routinely ranked in the bottom 5 of... everything.

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Alabama AG Steve Marshall

While most attorneys general occupy their days investigating consumer fraud or bringing charges against violent cops, in Alabama those are considered features rather than bugs, so the AG’s office occupies its time squandering public tax dollars trying to ban abortion and trying to strip citizens of health insurance. It’s less a public watchdog than an expensive press release mill for conservative virtue signaling, but wouldn’t you rather pay for FedSoc fan fiction than drinkable water?

But while environmental catastrophes may not rouse Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, a city’s government making the decision to take down a Confederate statue prompts immediate action!

While protests for racial justice are happening throughout the country after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, in Birmingham these took on an additional dimension with the city playing host to a giant monument to the Confederacy’s second place finish in the Civil War. After protesters rallied around tearing down the monument, Mayor Randall Woodfin elected to follow-up the protest by having the monument taken down in order to address the concerns of his citizens.

Marshall’s office, leapt at the opportunity to sue Birmingham, citing the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act, a 2017 law seeking to prevent monuments from being “relocated, removed, altered, renamed, or otherwise disturbed,” and thus placing a Jane Jacobs veneer on the cause of racial intimidation. The law identifies the historical monuments worthy of protection as those over 40 years old, just in case there’s some sort of deep historical significance to a building thrown up in 1980. If the “40 year” definition seems confusing, it’s worth noting that Confederate monuments aren’t really “historical” but rather tokens erected long after the Civil War, with most only dating back to the 1950s and 60s when they were erected as symbols of defiance to the Civil Rights Movement.

How disconnected is Birmingham from the removed monument ostensibly dedicated to the fallen soldiers and sailors who might have been from the city? Birmingham wasn’t even a city during the Civil War.

Why is there a state law meticulously crafted to give the state government control over local monuments? Birmingham is, of course, a majority African-American city governed by a democratically elected African-American mayor. With a high level of geographic segregation, the overwhelmingly Republican state government knew that predominantly black localities would eventually look around and wonder why they have to keep statues that were built for the purpose of intimidating them to remember their place at the bottom of the state’s brand of white supremacy.

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This isn’t the first challenge that Birmingham has faced over this monument. A previous mayor attempted to cover the statue and was slapped with a fine. This time around, Mayor Woodfin says they’ll just pay the fine to be rid of the thing.

If the city’s attorneys would like any advice on how to respond to the Alabama Attorney General’s complaint, perhaps they could draw inspiration from an era when Alabama’s Attorney General was cool. When then-29-year-old Bill Baxley held the job, he elected to reopen the investigation into the Birmingham church bombing that killed four black girls after the FBI dropped the case. When he received threats from white power organizations he replied on Alabama AG letterhead, “kiss my ass.”

(You can read the complaint on the next page.)

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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