RACIST SELMA, ALABAMA CITY COUNCILMAN ATTENDS RALLY HONORING KKK FOUNDER
That's the headline that the Selma Times Journal in Selma, Alabama should have written earlier this week. Including the caps lock. Instead, protesters had to picket the Selma paper claiming that the paper is biased in reporting racial issues.
Williamson presided at a meeting of the City Council on Tuesday night and was accused of not responding to a question about his attendance at a rally honoring the memory of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who helped organize the Ku Klux Klan.
The rally, held earlier this month, drew several members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and Williamson was one of them. He often mentions his pride in being a member of the organization and others that honor Confederate veterans.
Williamson declined to answer attorney Faya Rose Toure, who produced a photo of him at the event, and asked for an explanation about his attendance. Instead of answering her, he moved on to other business at the meeting.
Attorney Toure is right to raise this issue. The City Council members and the local paper should have been asking the same questions. I'm not sure that I would quite call the paper the Fox News Journal or the Tea Party Times, but I think it certainly conveniently avoided discussing the story in a "fair and balanced" manner.
Cecil Williamson has a long history of involvement with extremist groups like the League of the South and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. As a point of reference, Toure is a long time civil rights advocate and in fact represented Shirley Sherrod and other black farmers in a successful suit against the United States Department of Agriculture.
Williamson is also an unrepentant neo-Confederate. A longtime supporter and self-described former member of the League of the South, Williamson is currently identified by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a Southern heritage organization that in recent years has been largely taken over by political extremists, as the Lt. Commander of the group's Southwest Central Alabama Brigade.
In 2000, Williamson and Pat Godwin, another Selma neo-Confederate, raised a furor when they commissioned and erected a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest on public property in downtown Selma. It was later moved to a cemetery.
"The South and its heritage is the only thing restraining the liberals, multiculturalists and the politically correct from completely eradicating the values and principles upon which this nation was founded," Williamson wrote in a 2000 essay titled "The Real Reason Our Heritage Is Attacked."
"The South was right in 1861," he wrote. "We are right today!"
Selma has a long history of racial strife and perhaps the Selma Times Journal feels that it is best to ignore incidents when we are reminded of that past. Many people were beaten and bloodied as they marched across the Edumnd Pettus Bridge fighting for the right to vote. However, we cannot forget those painful memories just like we cannot act like the events that occur today did not happen. We've got to be willing to force honest dialogue on race to get anywhere close to a point of reconciliation.
We also need to keep a close eye on elected officials like Cecil Williamson who would prefer to live in the past. Williamson, is much like the extremists in Texas who want to rewrite history, to fit their narrow minded agendas fueled by hate and a myopic worldview.
In fact, Williamson in his "South Will Rise again" article, titled Real Reason, he said
If you examine almost every public school history – now called "social studies"– textbook you will find that in every chapter there is an obligatory feature about an African-American, a Hispanic-American, and a Native American. There is very little about Americans of European ancestry.
In 1998, I served on the State Textbook Committee to select textbooks for use in public schools in Alabama in the areas of social studies, arts, and foreign languages. I assure you that under the guise of the culturally diverse agenda, intellectual and literary goals are being replaced by social and political goals. Efforts to incorporate more ethnically varied readings into textbooks to raise minority students "self-esteem" have systematically "dumbed-down" the American educational system. Multiculturalism is needlessly limiting the academic achievements of the very students for whom most of those changes were made in the textbooks. It is no wonder that hundreds of thousands of parents are choosing to home school their children.
So not only does Williamson frame his political rhetoric in the 1800's, he has a distorted view of our education system. Another red flag.
The residents of Selma should demand that their elected leaders discuss involvement with such racist and extremist groups. The other members of the City Council should expect the same from the President of the City Council. I've talked to a number of residents from Selma today who are still dismayed at the fact that Williamson ascended to Council President from council pro-tempore after the death of the former President. Perhaps when some of this information comes to light he will be removed from this position of influence.
I have no idea whether Williamson associates with Tea Party groups. However, I certainly see the parallels in his past and present associations. The local media should do its job and discuss this issue. They claim that they will print a "more balanced" story about Williamson and the claims made at the City Council meeting. The citizens deserve to know the rest of the story. Selma cannot finally heal and work together when you have so called "leaders" that still promote living in remnants of the hateful past. America cannot heal when we punish the Shirley Sherrods and reward the Cecil Williamsons.