I'm with you on all counts. My ham-fisted point was that Tuberville (or his supporters) couldn't use race as an excuse, so I deliberately chose white people, just as I chose a fellow Auburn coach (Pat Dye).

One of the commenters on my original post here mentioned Tuberville's predecessor Douglas Jones, who is an exemplary white politician. But this is not to deny that there is a wealth of historically important illustrious Black artists, intellectuals, freedom fighters, etc. from Alabama. Of course Black Alabamians have fought for justice over the centuries.

As an example, here's a largely ignored or undervalued woman: Eunice Rivers, the Black nurse who participated in the Tuskegee experiment. The fictionalization in "Miss Evers' Boys" suggests that Rivers was an unwilling dupe of the heinous white researchers. The situation is much more complex. Rivers actually wrote an article for a medical journal about how nurses could help doctors with their research. At first glance, this statement would reveal her complicity in one of the most egregious nonconsensual experiments in American history. But if you read between the lines of her treatise, she is actually suggesting that nurses (especially Black nurses) may have to act as buffers between white racist researchers and Black victims.

I'm not a historian, but I suspect that there are thousands of Alabamian Black heroes and heroines from 1865 to the present who have advanced the arc of justice forward but who have been ignored by the standard histories of the era.

A shameless promo for my article about denialism by white Alabamians in my own family tree: https://medium.com/@slhale/my-fake-confederate-great-grandfather-and-me-27fa80991cf3