This is an opinion column.

Be careful where you put the city Christmas tree this year, Mayor Randall Woodfin. You might be breaking the law.

For years, the city’s tree has stood at the intersection of Park Place and 20th Street, where for a month each year it has blocked pedestrians’ and motorists’ view of the Confederate monument in Linn Park.

Now the Alabama Supreme Court says obscuring that monument is illegal.

It’s not a war on Christmas. It’s a war against Alabama cities and counties — especially majority black cities and counties — having a say in their own affairs, and it’s been going on since before the Daughters of the Confederacy ever built that obelisk to the Lost Cause.

While most of us were making our last-minute grocery runs ahead of Thanksgiving dinner last week, the state’s high court snuck a major ruling under the table. In a unanimous decision, the justices ruled Birmingham is violating state law by obscuring the Confederate monument with plywood panels. One justice, Mike Bolin, said in a concurring opinion that the law didn’t go far enough to penalize the city.

The previous administration at City Hall built those panels after constituents and city council members demanded Mayor William Bell tear the thing down. Bell had the plywood box put around the base as an interim measure while the city could figure out what to do with the monument. Attorney General Steve Marshall sued the city, saying it was violating the new Alabama Memorial Preservation Act by blocking it from view.

Since then, the box has stood while Marshall and the city have fought in court. A Jefferson County circuit judge ruled Birmingham had a First Amendment right to pick and choose its monuments for itself and for its citizens. Marshall’s office argued that, while corporations might have free speech rights in this state, municipal corporations don’t, and he appealed the lower court’s decision.

Last Wednesday, the state’s highest court sided with Marshall. The monument bill took away the city’s ability to pick what goes in its parks — by the Legislature’s authority under our state Constitution. The city is a creation of the state, the court said, it has only the rights and powers the state gives it.

Don’t we know it.

Home rule (or the lack of it) isn’t a new problem in Alabama, where our state constitution hoards power and legal authority in the Alabama Legislature. That power imbalance was designed that way in 1901, when the framers of our state constitution set out to rebuild and maintain white supremacy in Alabama after Reconstruction.

I’m not projecting white supremacy onto the 1901 framers’ motives. Those are their words, not mine.

“And what is it that we want to do? Why it is within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution, to establish white supremacy in this State.”

That’s straight from the minutes of the 1901 convention, spoken on the second day by John B. Knox, a lawyer from Anniston elected at the convention to preside over its business.

Want some more?

“But if we would have white supremacy, we must establish it by law — not by force or fraud,” Knox said.

How reassuring. And Knox made it clear where he thought black Alabamians stood in the natural order of things.

“There is in the white man an inherited capacity for government, which is wholly wanting in the negro.”

I’m not cherry-picking here. There’s a subhead to the convention minutes that says “White Supremacy by Law.”

No one objected to what Knox said that day. Instead, those men wrote the abominable document that’s still the foundation of Alabama law today. It’s a constitution that gives the Legislature power to overrule local governments in their affairs, and it has to be amended for cities to so much as sneeze. It’s been amended so many times, it’s now the longest constitution in the world, and it grows further each year.

Four years after the convention wrote that wretched document, the Daughters of the Confederacy dedicated that monument in Linn Park. A lot has happened since then. A lot has changed.

But at least one thing hasn’t.

It’s by the authority granted by that constitution that, two years ago, a white majority of Alabama lawmakers passed the monument bill over black lawmakers’ objections. And it’s by that law now that a 70 percent black city can’t remove a monument to people who fought to preserve slavery and all else that came with it — the torture, rape and murder of their ancestors.

This is our history, not a granite obelisk in Linn Park but a racist, oppressive foundation of law. And here we are 118 years later, and the Alabama Constitution of 1901 is still doing what it was meant to do — keeping agency and authority away from black people and giving it to white people.

So be careful where you put that tree this year, mayor.

It’s going to be a very white Christmas.

Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group.

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