It is not a coincidence that Jeff Sessions was a senator for the last 20 years in Alabama. Alabama has got a lot of racist people living there. Now, before you get bent out of shape, when I say that Alabama has a lot of racist people living there I mean that a lot of the people living in Alabama are racists. Got it? The almost 90 percent white and small Birmingham suburb of Gardendale, Alabama, is better off financially than the predominantly black Jefferson County of Birmingham. Gardendale isn’t a rich suburb, it’s just wealthier than the city. As the Washington Post reports, they have wanted to secede from Birmingham proper for some time now and control their own public school system, and more importantly, their tax contributions to the public school system.
Gardendale’s secession effort began four years ago, when a small group of parents began lobbying their neighbors and city council members. In 2013, residents voted in favor of raising property taxes to establish their own school system.
On Monday, the Judge hearing the case agreed to allow Gardendale the chance to resegregate themselves. As The Root explains:
U.S. District Judge Madeline Haikala heard the case of Jefferson County Board of Education v. Gardendale City Board of Education and issued an extensive, wide-ranging ruling Wednesday. The case was not overly complex, and was mostly black vs. white. The white residents of Gardendale wanted to break away from the county’s schools, creating a new district that reflected the demographics of the city. The parents of black students in Gardendale’s schools said the white parents just wanted to get rid of the schools’ black students.
In her 190-page ruling, Haikala admitted that Gardendale City’s motivations were based on race and inequality. She pointed to a Facebook group with thinly veiled racist messages and wrote about flyers that listed “some of the best” white schools that had already left Jefferson County Schools alongside a list of “bad” racially mixed schools, with a white child asking, “Which one will you choose?” The report noted that the flyers delivered an “unambiguous message of inferiority.” The ruling reprimanded the parents for their continued reference to “Smithfield kids” (a reference to a mostly black section of Jefferson County whose children attend Gardendale schools) in a degrading manner.
You can read the 190-page ruling here at Al.com. A lot of the ruling is a walk down memory lane of desegregation cases in Alabama’s school system. Judge Haikala relies heavily on more recent, and similar, rulings that allowed white enclaves to begin their own district school systems.
Given these findings, the Court would be within its discretion if it were simply to deny Gardendale’s motion to separate. Were it not for a number of practical considerations, the Court would do just that. As was the case in Stout II, though some of the circumstances surrounding Gardendale’s attempt to separate are deplorable, a number of practical considerations counsel against wholesale denial of Gardendale’s motion.
While Gardendale separatists are pretty happy, they didn’t get everything they wanted. Specifically, they were hoping that the $50 million school building that had been paid for by Jefferson County and Gardendale, that they would get in this separation, would be free to keep. But as Al.com highlights some of the “conditions” that Judge Haikala requires in her ruling, that isn’t the case.
One condition is that the city pay the county for the seven-year-old Gardendale High School that cost the county more than $50 million to build.
At an emergency meeting to discuss the implications, Chris Segroves, the president of the Gardendale Board of Education, released this statement about the meeting:
"This has been a test of patience along many fronts. We know that the community is anxious and ready to achieve its goal of a locally led public school system. We are too," Segroves stated. "Please understand this process is ongoing, and while the Court's order is progress and represents a significant development in that process, we must ask for your continued patience and prayers in the coming days as we work through this together for the betterment of our community."
"We must also evaluate whether we can feasibly operate within the order and provide the best possible educational opportunities for our community," Segroves stated. "Finally, we will seek legal counsel's advice as to the best methods for us to move forward in the creation of the Gardendale City Schools System."
Pray for them, y’all! Gardendale’s Mayor Stan Hogeland, a big proponent of the separation, seems not to be too excited about the paying for the building thing, and probably the allusion that he’s kind of a racist.
“I don’t agree with everything in her ruling,” Hogeland said. “But I respect her opinion as a federal judge and I’m appreciative that she has laid a path for us to start and a path where we can show that through a smaller system and local control, we can do it better."
You might remember Birmingham from your history classes in grade school. Here’s a famous quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., from his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good-faith negotiation.
I’m sure history isn’t repeating itself here.