United States of Alabama

About the Project

Why does Alabama matter?

To many national political commentators, it often doesn’t. Alabama shows up as a stop on the road where something colorful happens before the press moves on.

That is a failure of attention.

The political experiments tried in Alabama tend to show up elsewhere later. As AL.com columnist Kyle Whitmire says, Alabama’s past is America’s future.

In this package of video commentaries, Whitmire makes that case on five fronts.

• He shreds the voter-ID pretense, drawing on his investigation of the Alabama GOP chairman and RNC vice chair who tried to vote with an unofficial ID issued under a name he had never used officially.
• He blasts a pattern in the Alabama attorney general’s office of fighting to preserve wrongful convictions in death penalty cases — including one in which DNA evidence pointed to another man, and another in which the condemned man has 10 alibi witnesses.
• He challenges the militarization of American law enforcement — the body armor, the camouflage, the armored vehicles that look less like a community force than an army of occupation.
• He raises the residency questions dogging U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who is now running for Alabama governor — questions Whitmire has reported for eighteen months, and which the candidate has so far refused to answer.
• And from a snowy bench on the National Mall, he revisits the legacy of Alabama’s most notorious governor and shows how the public’s complicity empowers a similarly corrupt and brutal figure in Washington today.