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?
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.
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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