Alabama could lead the way in expunging criminal records of people arrested for breaking racist laws
Julian Borger in Montgomery, Alabama
Tuesday April 4, 2006
The Guardian
It is nearly 55 years since Lillie Mae Bradford was charged with "disorderly conduct" for sitting in the whites-only seats on an Alabama bus, and she is still waiting for a pardon.
A lot has changed in Alabama since that day in May 1951. The civil rights movement took off and when another black woman from Montgomery, Rosa Parks, followed Ms Bradford's example more than four years later, her arrest provoked a bus boycott that marked the beginning of the end for segregation in the South. By that quirk of history, Rosa Parks is the name everyone knows. She became a civil rights icon, and when she died last October her body lay in state in Congress in Washington, a tribute normally reserved for presidents.
Only afterwards was it widely reported that Parks had died with a police record - and that thousands of other black southerners had similar records - for disobeying racist laws.
So while the South abolished Jim Crow (the epithet, derived from a minstrel show character, given to the segregation laws) and claimed to move on, a large number of African Americans were left carrying its burden decades later. Ms Bradford felt it every time she applied for a government job.
>>>>snip
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1746147,00.html?gusrc=rssGee, Alabama after 50 years ya think?
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