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A Lynching in Alabama

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Message Pam Miles

A Lynching in Alabama

(With permission) by James Centric

 

Growing up in Ohio in the "60s I watched the Civil Rights Marches in Selma and Birmingham on the national news.  Along with footage of flailing police batons and snarling attack dogs were vintage photos of lynchings documenting the struggle of Blacks in the South.  I spent a lot of time in the South over the next twenty-five years.  I fell in love with the people, the climate and the way of life.  When I retired, I settled in my adopted home of Alabama.  I reassured my Yankee relatives that Alabama was no longer the state portrayed on the six o'clock news of my youth.  Alabama was now my home.  Then, in 2006, I saw my first lynching. 

 

The lynching was not engineered by a group of masked, bigoted KKK or an angry White mob in the heat of passion.  The noose didn't swing from the limb of an old oak on a tree-studded boulevard outside the local jail.  This travesty of justice occurred "all legal like" in a U.S. District Court in Montgomery.  The victim was the last Democratic Governor of Alabama, Don Siegelman. 

 

The trial may have appeared a prima facie case for justice, but in reality it was still a lynching.  At a glance, you had a trusted underling with his hand caught in the cookie jar.  He subsequently flips on his boss and low and behold a dedicated public defender, a federal prosecutor no less, uncovers corruption at the highest level of Alabama politics - end of story, or was it? 

 

The Playing Field is Set

 

Alabama has reached the end of a calculated Republican campaign begun in the 1990's to take over the state.  I watched Republican activist Bill Canary, his mentor and close friend former Bush White House Strategist Karl Rove and U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donahue and their acolytes flood the statehouse and the airwaves.  Their attorneys, PACs and public relations folks spent more time and money in Alabama than even most Alabama residents.  Rove and Donahue used Chamber funds and other corporate sponsor monies to turn the Alabama Supreme Court and appellate court system from Democratic-control to Republican.  Couple that with a Republican-emplaced federal legal system overseeing the state and you have the tree and the rope ready for a lynching.

 

The Victim

 

I met Gov. Siegelman only twice.  Both meetings were at political rallies.  His political background was impressive, having served as state attorney general, secretary of state, lieutenant governor and as governor from 1999 to 2003.  I liked what I saw and heard.  I voted for him and kept voting for him. 

 

In November 2002, as I went to bed, Siegelman was re-elected governor.  Morning light brought victory to Republican Bob Riley and word of a midnight ballot recount in Baldwin County without a single Democrat observer present.  Republican Attorney General William Pryor immediately sealed the ballot boxes.  Wow!  Recounts and legal actions were then stonewalled, most notably by Attorney General Pryor and ORHP's - other Republicans in high places.

 

In spite of the state investigations started in 1998 by Attorney General Pryor, 2003 polls still showed that Siegelman had a good chance at regaining the governorship.  Then, in 2004, Alice Martin, U.S. Attorney General for the Northern Middle Alabama District, in Birmingham stepped up with an indictment.  Siegelman, Dr. Philip Bobo, and Paul Hamrick were indicted in a state Medicare "bid-rigging" scheme.  Dr Bobo won a separate trial and the charges against Siegelman and Hamrick were thrown out "with prejudice" by an exasperated federal judge.  Dr. Bobo was retried in 2007.  Nick Bailey, a former Siegelman aide, was the key witness, but Dr. Bobo was found not guilty.

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Democratic Activist and Strategist, doing most activist work thru a nationwide email listserv, referred to as "Pam's List". Elected member of the Alabama State Democratic Executive Committee as well as a member of my county, (Madison) Democratic (more...)
 
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