(MintPress) – Voters Tuesday opted to preserve Jim Crow era language in Alabama’s state constitution, not for lack of political will but for the sake of public education. While the state constitution contains anachronistic passages supporting illegal poll taxes and segregated schools, some African-American legislators have lent their support for maintaining the current wording because Jim Crow amendments also “guarantee public education” to all children in Alabama.
The fear of a stratified education caste system, exacerbating economic divides is justified. However, maintaining the current constitution in a state that already has an apartheid duality in public services is equally as damaging to progress and equality in “The Heart of Dixie.”
The flaws of the bill
Although there is support to amend the 1901 constitution among Democrats and Alabama’s large African-American communities, the original Jim Crow era passages remain because the proposed amendment would have threatened the current state funding for public schools.
State Rep. Demetrius Newton, a Birmingham Democrat, supports removing the racist language from the constitution, but says, “The amendment on Tuesday’s ballot takes away more than the language.”
Newton adds, “If they wanted to, they could have proposed legislation that removes the language without taking away the right to public education. If this does not pass, I believe the Legislature will come back and pass laws to do just that.”
A similar amendment in 2004 failed to gather sufficient support among legislators. While outwardly the poll taxes and segregation have not been enforced since the end of the Civil Rights era, major structural inequalities persist in Alabama and other U.S. states.
Racial inequalities
While Barack Obama may be the embodiment of progress as the first black president in U.S. history, vast racial inequalities still persist on state and national levels.
The enduring lesson of 1954 Brown v. Board of Education demonstrated that “separate but equal” was inherently unjust. This notion is supported by the de-facto duality that persists in state constitutions today and in practice.
Consider the investigation last year by the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division examining the mistreatment of African-American students at schools in Huntsville, Ala.
The ongoing investigation has resulted in a correspondence between DOJ officials and Alabama officials. Among the claims made by the DOJ are “several outstanding desegregation issues that the school district must address,” including statistics showing that “that predominantly black schools have too few advanced courses” and “that black children at predominantly white schools are punished and suspended at alarming rates.”
When confronted with these facts, Hugh McIntosh, a member of the Madison County Republican executive committee, was dismissive, saying, “Life is unfair.”
Additionally, the racist lawmaker justified these disparities saying “blacks misbehave on average more frequently than whites do,” and “blacks are incapable of performing as well as white students.”
Mr. McIntosh may be the personification of bygone Jim Crow era racism and segregation in Alabama, however, the problem goes beyond the opinions of one influential legislator.
Huntsville city schools are just one of 201 school systems under order to end segregation practices. The vast majority of these school systems are in the Southern United States.
This inequality extends to other aspects of life as well, including unequal access to health care. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there was more than an eight year difference in the average life expectancy of blacks compared to white residents in the state of Alabama from 1989-1991.
More recently, a study conducted by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) found that, according to 2009 data, majority black counties in Alabama lagged far behind national averages in terms of average life expectancy.
In Bullock County, where three-quarters of the county is African-American, the average life expectancy is 67.9 years, well behind the national average of 78 years.
Other majority African-American counties Macon and Greene, among others, also lagged well behind other majority white counties according the IHME statistics.
The U.S. government has made significant headway in abolishing slavery, ending segregation, extending voting rights and guaranteeing equal rights for all citizens under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. However, inequalities in education, health care and housing persist especially in Southern states like Alabama.
School to prison pipeline
This has created what some scholars call “a school to prison” pipeline in poorer communities of color.
“The school-to-prison pipeline begins in deep social and economic inequalities, and has taken root in the historic shortcomings of schooling in this country. The civil and human rights movements of the 1960s and ’70s spurred an effort to ‘rethink schools,’ to make them responsive to the needs of all students, their families, and communities,” write the editors of Rethinking Schools, an influential online education forum.
Michelle Alexander, professor of law at Ohio State University and author of the best seller, “The New Jim Crow,” claims that Americans of color are much more likely to be incarcerated, a trend that has a direct, negative impact on children already limited by the prospects of an unequal education system.
“For children, the era of mass incarceration has meant a tremendous amount of family separation, broken homes, poverty, and a far, far greater level of hopelessness as they see so many of their loved ones cycling in and out of prison. Children who have incarcerated parents are far more likely themselves to be incarcerated,” says Alexander in an interview.
Indeed, merely amending Alabama’s state constitution will not provide the panacea to structural violence against communities of color. However, removing Jim Crow era language will be the first necessary step to demonstrate the political will for racial equality on a legal level.