Word: alabamas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Freedom amendment, a constitutional revision proposed by House Republican Ernest Istook of Oklahoma, which would reinstate full-scale school prayer. It passed the Judiciary Committee, 16 to 11, last month but will probably fare less well when the full House votes in May. One of many local battlefields is Alabama, where last week the state senate passed a bill mandating a daily moment of silence--a response to a 1997 federal ruling voiding an earlier state pro-school prayer law. Governor Fob James is expected to sign the bill into law, triggering the inevitable church-state court challenge...
...Alabama, the new school-prayer bill attempts to skirt those boundaries. The legislation requires "a brief period of quiet reflection for not more than 60 seconds with the participation of each pupil in the classroom." Although the courts have upheld some moment-of-silence policies, civil libertarians say they have struck down laws featuring pro-prayer supporting language of the sort they discern in Alabama's bill. In the eyes of many church-club planters, such fracases amount to wasted effort. Says Doug Clark, field director of the National Network of Youth Ministries: "Our energy is being poured into what...
...world now calls human-rights offenses were both law and custom in much of America. Before King and his movement, a tired and thoroughly respectable Negro seamstress like Rosa Parks could be thrown into jail and fined simply because she refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus so a white man could sit down. A six-year-old black girl like Ruby Bridges could be hectored and spit on by a white New Orleans mob simply because she wanted to go to the same school as white children. A 14-year-old black boy like Emmett Till...
...also discussed a victory in a voting rights case in Selma, Alabama in 1985, as an example of how she had learned from those she was representing...
...that moment, rejoicing on the steps of the federal courthouse in Selma, Alabama, I realized how central Derrick Bell's advice to me had been four years earlier to go south, to mix it up, to become a civil rights advocate, not just a civil rights technician, "she read from her book...