RedEye's Year in Review Top 10 Countdown Part 1

I would like to wish readers, fans and foes, best wishes for a  healthy, peaceful,  and   Happy New Year.  May the upcoming year bring the change we all hope  for.  RedEye

Top 10 Countdown Part 1

10.  Dr. John L. Cashin, An American Hero

9.  Update~Let's talk about the history of New Century Technology High School

8.  New Education Policy Director to push for segregated schools

7.  The DoJ to Huntsville Schools-"Don't even think about it".

6.  The Huntsville City Schools Broad Civil Rights War

In honor of Myrna Copeland, the finest democratic woman I know

I'm trying to remember if I told Mryna Copeland she was one of my Shero's .  I hope I did, because she was right up there with Viola Luizzio  in my book.  She was a privileged, white woman who used her position of privilege and power  to fight for equal rights, civil rights and human rights for all people.

On a personal note, Myrna was, in my Daddy's words, his buddy.  She drove him to Eutaw, Alabama in Greene County, in her car in the Spring of 1970, along with Dr. John Cashin and others, to introduce him to the community and the School Board when he was named Superintendent of the Green County School System.  Dad says he was scared to death to be riding in the car with a white woman in Alabama at night in 1970, but Myrna was not. My Dad would have been the first African American School Superintendent in the nation if it had been embroiled in the same racial politics that prevail in Alabama and the nation today, and the racial politics Myrna devoted her life to fighting.

It's so like Myrna to be found dead at the health food store she founded and operated for 40 years appropriately named the Pearly Gates.  She died as she lived.  Fighting the good fight.  We will miss her vital presence, her courage, her sense of humor and her comittment to making this world a better place for all of God's people.

 HUNTSVILLE, Alabama -- She was considered a woman of strong will, and she had to be to do all that she did during one of the most socially turbulent periods in the history of the Deep South.She was a white woman, one of the few from Alabama, who marched from Selma to Montgomery, belonged to the NAACP and attended strategy sessions at the home of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Late in her life, she still lived by the motto she had adopted when she was active in the civil rights movement: "Not to have taken part in the actions and passions of your time is to have never lived.''

Rest in the peace you deserve for a life well lived beyond the Pearly Gates.

The White Elephant in the Alabama Democratic Tent

Allow me to give you a history lesson of the Alabama Democratic Party in the words of someone who not only lived the overt racism of a political party that refused to accept blacks as members, but continues to work tirelessly to make sure marginalized voices are heard in the body politic of Alabama. H/T RevJZ

Back in 1966, after an election in which, having won voting rights after the
1965 Selma to Montgomery March, in which I lost two dear friend, Rev Jim
Reeb and Viola Liuzzo, blacks rushed to register to vote and to run for office, most considered themselves to be Democrats . Gov Wallace (a democrat) refused to allow them to run for office as Democrats. To combat the continuing absolute racism of the Alabama Democratic Party, some of us created another Democratic Party, the National Democratic Party of Alabama (NDPA), went through a difficult struggle, and elected the first blacks to office in Alabama as Democrats! But the ADP fought as a fully segregated party for almost 10 years as the NDPA came to hold over 100 elected offices,more than any other state!!! Then and only then did the ADP want us, and we forgivingly moved into the ADP. But of course its leadership remained fully racist and we have been struggling to change that ever since. But racists continued to run for and hold office as Democrats. It never fully changed. That makes it clear why people are still very suspicious of attitudes in the ADP.

It was the party of George Wallace then, it's the party of George Wallace now.The question is, will it be the party of George Wallace forever?

Links for clarity;
Viola Luizzo

Rev. James Reeb

Voting Rights Act 1965

Selma to Montgomery March

George C. Wallace

"We were living in terrible times. We were fighting for the right to breath"

African American Alabama democrats are still fighting for the right to be members of the ADP because everyone tiptoes around the big white elephant standing in the middle of the Alabama Democratic Party Tent.

In the end we will not remember the words of enemies, but the silence of our friends.~Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.