A conversation with Scotty Kirkland, coordinator of exhibits, publications and programs at the Alabama Department of Archives and History. During the Civil Rights Movement, Black voting rights activists developed legal strategies to challenge Jim Crow in court. But white supremacists had their own countertactics. The Boswell Amendment to the Alabama Constitution was one of the most infamous – a nebulous “education requirement” approved by Alabama voters in 1946 to sidestep U.S. law and disenfranchise Black citizens.

Episode 3 poems by Ashley M. Jones:

“There is a Bell at Morehouse College”

“Redlining”

Read the article that inspired this conversation:

“Freedom on Trial: NAACP v. Alabama,” Alabama Heritage Magazine (Issue 121, Summer 2016)

By Scotty Kirkland