From The Huffington Post: By Keith Rushing Posted: 10/4/11 01:16
PM ET Last week, a federal court’s decision allowed parts of a
law to go into effect that essentially requires police to
racially profile people while criminalizing undocumented
migrants for being without immigration documents. The law and
the decision upholding it shows that Alabama — in passing the
harshest anti-immigration law in the nation — is still mired in
its racist, segregationist past. The message Alabama sent to
brown people by passing this law — especially those thought to
be migrants — is a simple one: Get out of Alabama. We don’t want
your kind here. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Alabama was a
place of intense racial hatred. Montgomery, Ala., central to the
Civil Rights Movement, is the city where, in 1955, Rosa Parks
was arrested after sitting in the whites-only section of a city
bus, leading to a massive and ultimately successful boycott of
the city’s public bus system. A year later, the U.S. Supreme
Court overturned segregation