Holocaust Memorial Day & The Alabama Negroes
My Holocaust Memorial Day 2016 story is: How the negroes of Alabama came to love their Hitler.
For my generation of American negroes, I was born in 1956, the symbol and author of our oppression was Alabama Governor George Corley Wallace. Wallace was to racism what Kanye West is to narcissism, its embodiment. Wallace’s state troopers sicked the dogs on school children. His cops blasted them with high-pressure fire hoses and 1962 Wallace famously declared…
Yet, less than twenty years later, Wallace won a fifth term as governor with more than 90% of Alabama’s black vote. In Alabama, in 2008, Barack Obama only got 84%. The negro voters of Alabama defined, “getting beyond your historical pain.”
Three things sent Alabama’s negroes into forgiveness overload:
In 1972 George Wallace got shot; not by some negro who’d been beaten by Alabama state troopers or whose mom had been assaulted or brother lynched. Wallace was shot 5 times by a non-political white guy who wanted to be famous. To fifteen year old me, seeing Wallace lying, bleeding on the ground was like watching the Terminator T1000 get blown apart. I felt triumphant! But apparently many of Wallace’s actual victims, the negroes of Alabama, did not share my glee.
The second HUGE technology that helped Alabama negroes forgive George Wallace was their religion. Their broken tormentor was humbled before their eyes, in constant pain from the bullet they know is still lodged near his spine. After the shooting Wallace said he had pledged his remaining years to their version of Jesus. He didn’t have to feel their pain. They felt his. Christianity gave the Alabama negroes not just an excuse but actual obligation to indulge their better angels.
Wallace popped a wheelie, or a wheelchair conversion. The governor renounced his old ways, apologized to those he had wronged and asked for a another chance in office to make amends. And the Alabama negroes went for it. They did photo ops with him, contributed to his campaign, brought their kids to see him. At least 90% got over what had been done to them by him.
She was right. Wallace responded to better negro angels with better political ones. He appointed record numbers of Alabama negroes to his cabinet and assembled an integrated coalition to get his bills through the state legislature.
This Holocaust Memorial Day I quote the Pirkei Avot. “Who is mighty, the one who turns an enemy into a friend.” And I declare that in Alabama, negroes were mighty.