MadCo sheriff at Civil rights museum

New recruits at the Madison County sheriff's department recently visited the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham. From left, Deputy Meagan Wimbs, Deputy Nicholas Maack, Deputy Michael Moore, VP Ahmad Ward, Curator-Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, Deputy Alex Huddleston Deputy Scott Neal. (Courtesy photo)

The story, for David Jernigan, begins in the basement of the Madison County Courthouse.

Two men's bathrooms sit side-by-side along the hallway and there was a matching set of women's bathrooms, too, until one was converted into a storage area.

Jernigan, the chief deputy of the sheriff's department and the right-hand man for Sheriff Blake Dorning, sees it as a piece of modern-day history. Keep in mind, Jernigan said, the courthouse was designed in the 1950s and opened in the 1960s.

Two bathrooms for the same gender - one for whites, one for blacks.

It's not that way now, of course, but it underscores Jernigan's latest project within the sheriff's department.

In early April, the chief deputy took five new sheriff's department recruits to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. It's the first time the sheriff's department has taken new deputies to the museum but it won't be the last, Jernigan said.

"In order to know where you're going," Jernigan said, "you've got to know where you've been."

The idea came from the FBI. Jernigan, a retired FBI agent, saw how new agents are required to visit the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington.

Birmingham police and fire fighter recruits also regularly visit the museum, Jernigan said.

"There's kind of this theme that I wanted to make sure our people really capitalize on is that power can be abused," Jernigan said. "It can be abused with a badge and a gun. It can be abused in government. It can be abused in the judiciary and the legislative as well."

Deputies said the museum visit provided a unique insight into the history of civil rights and how it applies to police work generations later.

"It was an eye-opener, to tell you the truth," said Alex Huddleston, one of the new recruits who made the trip. "When I was in school, they just brushed over civil rights. They went over the key things - Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks. That was about it. They didn't go into depth.

"When I was doing the tour, the tour guide was explaining it in depth why things occurred the way they did and why they did."

Said Meagan Wimbs, another new recruit on the trip, "There were several more things I learned there compared to what I learned in high school. There was a bunch of stuff that was completely overlooked."

To Jernigan, there was too much to be learned to not take new deputies to the museum. Before the visit, civil rights were not much more than a page - literally - in a history book.

"These are things I wanted our recruits - they are kids - these things, they didn't live," Jernigan said. "They're going to be encountering people who have been told stories about law enforcement.

"What's very critical for me is that any encounter with our people to the public should be, at the most part, positive. They might have been told don't trust anybody with a badge. Maybe their grandmother or grandfather or great aunt or uncle, they were in Birmingham in those events. I wanted them to kind of see where we have been, recognize they are going to run into different types of viewpoints and life experiences."

And while the civil rights movement might seem like tales from long ago about race relations, it's a topic still today.

"You would think in the 50-plus years since the Civil Rights movement, we've made progress," Jernigan said. "But look what's in the paper today? You've got transgender and lesbian and gay and bathrooms and whether or not businesses are going to follow their religious views."

And for the Madison County sheriff's department, there is another reason. A former deputy, Justin Watson, pleaded guilty in January to lying under oath about his role in stalking a Tennessee man and then beating him as part of a personal dispute. Watson is scheduled to be sentenced in August.

"He's looking at anywhere from 31 to 41 months in prison," Jernigan said. "If we don't learn from that, there's something wrong. You cannot deprive someone of their civil rights."

It's a lesson Huddleston and Wimbs said they have learned.

"Treat everyone the way you want to be treated," Huddleston said. "You don't want to take anything personally. And that's what I feel like the police officers did back then - they took everything personally and reacted to that instead of acting like a professional and going by the state laws and the Constitution.

"They wanted to enforce their own laws and how they felt. And that's not how policing is. You can't put your own feelings into the code book."

Wimbs agreed.

"No matter how somebody acts or how they treat you," she said, "everybody still has to be treated the exact same way."