Marie Bankhead Owen led campaigns to purge anti-Confederate lessons from Southern classrooms, and all but erased Black history from the Alabama state archives. (Art by David Jack Browning for DJB Design.)
About this project: Alabama has been poisoned by old lies. “State of Denial” is a year-long initiative looking at how Alabama’s past corrupts its present and deprives the state of a better future. You can follow this initiative by subscribing to the State of Denial Newsletter here.
Above the gates of hell, the poet Dante says, there’s an inscription: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
Above the front door of the Alabama Statehouse, there’s another warning: “Audemus jura nostra defendere.”
We dare defend our rights.
Last April, Keith Jackson passed beneath those words on his way to talk to lawmakers, to tell them of something that had bothered him for a long time.
Your first time entering the Statehouse, you might wonder whether you’re in the right place. This was once a Department of Transportation office building, and it looks like a place you’d go to get your drivers’ license renewed. In the 1980s — during renovations at the capitol across the street — the Legislature borrowed this place and never gave it back. The old capitol was pretty, but this building affords every lawmaker an office, however tiny, and it has an abundance of conference rooms for committee meetings.
It was at one such meeting where Jackson intended to speak.
Past the front doors, Alabama State Troopers processed visitors through the metal detectors and X-ray machines. The officers don’t wear their Smokey the Bear hats indoors, but they sport the same uniforms unlucky motorists see by the roadside. It’s a uniform Jackson knew well. He wore it for 20 years.
A retired Alabama trooper, he was there to say out loud what he’d kept bottled up his entire career. He despised a patch on that uniform — the Alabama Coat of Arms.
The Coat of Arms features, among other decorations, a Confederate battle flag.
Jackson is Black, and he believes that rebel banner needs to go.
Not only is the state symbol on troopers’ uniforms, it’s on their patrol cars, too. It adorns the seals of state agencies and decorates their stationery. When governors take the oath of office on the capitol steps, that crest is affixed to the podium where they speak, and when the inaugural balls are over, it hangs on the office wall where they go to work. Once you begin to look for it, you’ll see it all over the place in Montgomery.
And every time Jackson sees it, he sees that flag.
But little did Jackson know, he was there to undo the handiwork of an Alabama fixture, a force from a century ago whose influence persists. Her name was Marie Bankhead Owen, the second director of the Alabama Department of History and Archives.
Of Alabama women, there are only a few who compete with Owen for the most impact. Gov. Lurleen Wallace, maybe. Helen Keller, for certain. Rosa Parks, of course. Kay Ivey? It remains to be seen.
Owen, in comparison, might be little-known in Alabama today, but to say she’s just a figure in Alabama history is unfair. At one time she was Alabama history.
That Coat of Arms was her creation.
Those words of warning above the Statehouse door were hers, too.
Above the entrance to the Alabama Statehouse, there's as warning: "Audemus jura nostra defendere." Or, "We dare defend our rights." Those words are Marie Bankhead Owen's. (Photo by Kyle Whitmire | AL.com)
There’s a story — undocumented but passed down at Archives and History. As it goes, the Alabama Legislature would keep a special page stationed as a lookout in the old capitol’s south entrance. This boy (there were no female pages then) had one job — to alert lawmakers when “Ms. Marie” was headed their way.
“Legislators would scatter because they knew she was coming to put pressure on them for one thing or another,” says Steve Murray, director of Archives and History.
The Alabama Department of Archives and History was the first of its kind in the country, born out of her husband’s collection of historic artifacts and documents.
Thomas McAdory Owen was an amateur historian, but approached the discipline with zeal, collecting all the maps, newspapers, diaries and genealogical records he could lay hands on. At first, he kept the records in the House and Senate chambers when lawmakers weren’t in session. Later, he stored them in old houses across the street from the capitol — properties he acquired to build a museum.
His vision was to build Alabama’s equivalent of the Library of Congress. But between collecting and fundraising, he worked himself to exhaustion, dying of a heart attack before he could see his dream come true. After his death in 1920, the department board named his wife the new director.
At 50, Marie Bankhead Owen became only the second woman to lead a state agency, and she held on to her position for the next 35 years.
Owen was a more formidable figure in Montgomery than her late husband ever was.
“Ms. Marie” is what they called her to her face. Behind her back they called her “the Tiger Lady.”
Lawmakers feared her with reason. Her married name was Owen, but Ms. Marie was a Bankhead, a name still attached today to roads and parks throughout the state. Her father, John Bankhead, had been a U.S. Senator, as was her oldest brother, John Jr. Not to be outdone, her brother William Bankhead rose to become Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and one of the most powerful American politicians during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Owen did not lack her brothers’ ambition, but she was shut off from a career in politics because she was a woman. Despite this, Owen was adamantly and publicly opposed to women’s suffrage, which she campaigned against.
Her fear was not what would happen should women get the right to vote, but rather, what would happen next — if women could vote, it was only a matter of time before Black Alabamians reclaimed that right, too.
Owen was an adamant and unrepentant racist.
In a petition to lawmakers, the Woman’s Anti-Ratification League — one of two anti-suffrage organizations Owen led — explained opposition to the 19th Amendment as “essential for the preservation of social order and the maintenance of white supremacy.”
“For Marie, ultimately race trumps gender,” says Kari Frederickson, history professor at the University of Alabama and author of “Deep South Dynasty: The Bankheads of Alabama.”
Her family connections already gave her more power than most Alabamians, male or female. Empowering women, white or Black, was a threat to the influence she had.
“Getting the right to vote for her is more about the potential for opening up the ballot to Black women, and that is much more frightening and much more catastrophic,” Frederickson says. “It outweighs any benefits that might come.”
Owen had power, but often little money. In the 1920s she lost most of her inheritance in Florida real estate speculation. After that bubble burst, she lived off the generosity of her more famous movie star niece, Tallulah — and the government.
Throughout the second half of her life, Owen hustled for various government jobs, but the director position was her “meal ticket,” as she called it in a letter to her brother. Nepotism was part of her nature.
After one Alabama governor rebuked her in a board meeting for keeping her son on her department payroll during budget cuts, Owen wrote to her brother John that she had been embarrassed but kept her composure as their late father would have expected.
“If I would follow my instincts at the present moment I would cut his G___D___ throat,” she said.
Governors came and went in Montgomery, but for most of four decades, “Ms. Marie” was constant. Beyond subsistence, her professional life focused on three missions.
To build the building her husband envisioned.
To preserve the relics of the Confederacy her family cherished.
And to purge the state’s history, iconography and culture of all traces of Reconstruction.
To Ms. Marie, symbols mattered — one symbol in particular.
Alabama's state motto, "We Dare Defend Our Rights," seen here at an I-65 welcome center, has been a rallying cry of defiance. It's only a small part of Marie Bankhead Owen's impact on Alabama history — history she once, quite literally, controlled.
Keith Jackson was in third grade the first time someone called him that word.
Jackson’s mom had taken part in the civil rights movement, but he says his parents, then raising him and his brothers in Lawrence County in north Alabama, tried to protect them.
“It pains me to think of the stuff that she went through,” Jackson says. “But she never cried, she never gave that to us. As young men, my mom and my dad purposefully shielded us from that. We didn’t even know the difference until we got exposed to it.”
There were fights at the high school. That’s the first thing Jackson remembers. He was too young for that to be a danger to him, but not his older brother.
“I used to listen to my mom coaching him how to avoid things and get away from crowds, stay in athletics, don’t be involved in any of the disturbances that was going on,” he says.
Jackson’s class was the first in his school system to be integrated from kindergarten on, which went more or less smoothly for him until his last day of third grade. Jackson was getting off the bus when a boy several years older than him shouted that epithet at him from the back of the bus.
“I didn’t even know what the n-word was,” he says. “I turned around and an orange hit me in the face and exploded, and everybody on the bus laughed.”
Jackson tried to laugh it off, too, but when he turned to hug his bus driver goodbye for the summer, he saw tears on her face.
“She just told me to have a good time,” he says.
When Jackson asked his mom what the word meant, his mom told him only ignorant people used it. The next fall, when he climbed back on the bus, the same older boy was there to taunt him.
“I got on the bus and he stood up in the back of the bus and said, ‘Hey, n-word, how was your summer?’” Jackson recalls. “And I said, ‘Fine, ignorant, how was yours?’”
And this is how things went between them for about four years, Jackson says, until one day the older boy seemed to offer him an apology. The older boy told Jackson he was sorry for what he’d called him and gave him a gift.
“He took his hat off his head, and he gave it to me and said this is kinda a truce, and you can wear this proudly,” Jackson says. “And, I took the guy at his word and I said, OK.”
It was a reddish-orange, with Budweiser written on it — and a rebel flag.
When he wore the hat in school, his history teacher yelled at him to take it off, but Jackson thought the teacher, who was Black, was mad because he was wearing a hat in school. It was only when he wore it home that he realized what was wrong with it.
“I will never in my life forget this day. I had that hat on and I went to my grandma’s house,” he recalls. “And when I walked in the door, my mom and my grandma were sitting there and my mom went off. She told me, ‘Get that hat off your head! Don’t you ever put that back on your head!’”
Jackson said he protested. He told his mom it was just a hat. But she told him to get it out of the house and to never bring it back in.
They never spoke about the hat again, and Jackson never wore the hat again, but he could tell his mom had been hurt by it.
“I didn’t notice it when it was happening,” he says. “But later on, when I learned what it was, when I looked back, that doggone flag was flying everywhere there was a fight or a disturbance. Watching it on TV, you know, somebody always had that flag.”
Ms. Marie benefited from her family connections, including her brother John H. Bankhead (left), chairman of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, and William Bankhead, Speaker of the U.S. House (right)
The Alabama Department of Archives and History has the third largest collection of Confederate flags in the nation — much of it compiled by Thomas McAdory Owen before his death.
The building, however, was the work of Ms. Marie. And like a lot of things in Alabama, it was paid for by the federal government.
In 1934, Bibb Graves replaced Gov. Benjamin Miller — whose throat Owen wanted to cut. After taking office, Graves arranged a meeting in Washington for himself, Owen and Harry Hopkins, the head of Roosevelt’s new Works Progress Administration.
“Aunt Marie had badgered Governor Graves into going to Washington and demanding this sum,” her niece Tallulah said in her autobiography
Owen made her best pitch before Hopkins asked to speak with Graves alone. Hopkins was somewhat irritated by the Alabama panhandling and told Graves that WPA didn’t have the money for “every little old lady who wanted an archive.”
Graves then reminded the president’s advisor that Owen’s brother was speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
And that her other brother was the chair of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee.
When Owen returned to the room, Hopkins asked where it was she wanted to build her archive.
“Hopkins saw the light,” Tallulah wrote. “Aunt Marie got her million.”
Today, the white marble home of the Alabama Department of Archives and History stands across Washington Avenue from the state capitol. The building has been expanded twice, and its grounds now take up a full city block, but for a small parcel — the First White House of the Confederacy.
Murray, the Archives and History director today, doesn’t criticize Owen without first acknowledging what good she did for the department. However, Owen was not a professional historian or archivist, he says. Her personal interests often clouded the department’s mission and cluttered its collections. More significantly, Owen was among the most significant purveyors of an antebellum “history” that had little or no basis in fact.
“Speaking more broadly, Marie was an extraordinary influence in the creation within Alabama of that Lost Cause mandate or cultural influence that pervaded much of Southern society and even nationally,” Murray says.
Owen wrote and distributed history plays for Alabama school children, and she penned Southern romance novels that depicted the Confederacy as a virtuous place that civilized African savages through benevolent slavery. One novel, Yvonne Braithwaite: A Delta Romance, she managed to get published.
Perhaps most crucially, Owen guided Alabama history curricula, writing the first textbooks covering state history.
“She defended the legality of secession,” Frederickson, the UA history professor, wrote, “and identified President Lincoln’s call for volunteers following the firing on Fort Sumter as the start of the Civil War, which she called the War Between the States.”
Owen’s view that Lincoln started the war was not uncommon in her day, just as it’s portrayed, too, in the racist, Klan-aggrandizing cinematic milestone, “The Birth of a Nation.”
Owen downplayed, marginalized or outright omitted contributions by African-Americans in her texts, focusing instead on the state’s abundance of rivers and other natural resources to explain its economic vitality before the war.
And she suppressed voices who contradicted her.
For 35 years, Marie Bankhead Owen ran the Alabama Department of Archives and History, a position from which she influenced history itself.
Owen had been active in the United Daughters of the Confederacy for much of her life, but in 1936 the Alabama division elected her to leadership — division historian, a job that usually involved collecting minutes of chapter meetings and assisting members’ research.
But Owen wasn’t a passive note-taker. No sooner than she had accepted the job than she received an alarming letter from the division president, Mollie Jones of Auburn. Jones reported that a junior high school teacher in Montgomery had told students there that Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and other Confederate heroes were traitors and the Confederacy had been a treasonous rebellion against the American government.
“For Montgomery of all places to have such heresy taught is beyond words an outrage,” Jones wrote. “In every town where there is a chapter and in others, if possible, if such as this is going on, we could investigate and it would be a real contribution.”
Owen accepted the challenge and quickly organized a campaign to purge anti-Confederate lessons from Alabama classrooms.
“She comes up with all these talking points and then encourages members of the UDC to begin surveilling schools,” Frederickson says. “What are they teaching? How are they teaching it here? This is what you say when you go and meet with the principal of the school.”
I ask Frederickson if Owen’s campaign seems familiar or contemporary.
“You think?” she says before a nervous laugh.
First, Owen encouraged chapter presidents to interrogate their school superintendents and history teachers. In addition to portraying Davis and Lee as heroes, the United Daughters of the Confederacy fought to ban the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” from school recitals, to remove “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” from classrooms and to rename the Civil War the “War Between the States.”
“In case any one of them is so illy informed as to be teaching this false history, the truth of the matter should be placed in their hands with the view of having the coming generations realize that what the South fought for was the same kind of independence as our Revolutionary fathers,” Owen wrote to the chapter presidents.
But Owen didn’t limit her advocacy to what should be banned. She solicited Douglas Freeman, the author of a Robert E. Lee biography, to draft a new “Confederate Catechism” for school children to memorize, and she pressured publishers to include the Confederate Catechism in history textbooks.
“We will just have to let them know that we will not take false history supinely and that it is money out of their pockets when they try to force such false teaching upon the younger generations,” Owen wrote to the division president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
Owen expanded her campaign beyond Alabama. She wrote letters to UDC leaders and elected officials throughout the South, pushing them to follow Alabama’s example. Through pamphlets, plays and radio shows, the UDC spread Owens’ agenda throughout the region.
A particular target of her campaign, Frederickson says, were any cultural vestiges of Reconstruction.
“To her Reconstruction was this time in which the federal government, aided by carpetbaggers and unqualified Black men, had their boots on the neck of the white south,” Frederickson says. “It was a time of humiliation, a time of great corruption, and anything that is a result of that time is absolutely illegitimate.”
Through their political power, her father and brothers had done much to erase Reconstruction from politics and government, expanding convict leasing and helping to enact the Alabama Constitution of 1901.
Owen used her influence to target the historical artifacts and symbols of Reconstruction.
“She is trying to make it a regional thing as well: Let’s reclaim these important symbols from the carpetbaggers and Negroes,” Frederickson says of Owen’s campaign. “And she’s successful.”
In 1939, the Birmingham News Sunday Magazine introduced Alabama to a new state emblem and a new state motto, both the work of Marie Bankhead Owen.
During his time as a State Trooper, Jackson says, it would have been a career-killer to complain about the patch on his arm. The officers in what was then called the Highway Patrol got angry enough when the state changed their department’s name to ALEA. The iconography and symbolism of those uniforms are important to them, he says. He waited until he was retired to do something about it.
First, he approached the NAACP with the hope of convincing ALEA to change the patch. When that didn’t work, he began talking with state Rep. Laura Hall, D-Huntsville, about what it would take to change the state coat of arms.
First, they wrote to the governor, asking her to do something about the symbols, Hall says, but the governor’s office didn’t respond.
Hall introduced a bill in January of last year, but the State Government Committee did not take it up until the end of April when it was too late to pass in the 2021 legislative session.
HB 43 was dead before Jackson passed the metal detectors.
But Jackson signed up to speak anyway. Committee chairman Chris Pringle told him he would have just three minutes to speak.
“I’m going to wave my gavel at you when two and half minutes is up,” Pringle gently warned.
“Roll Tide,” Jackson said back.
Jackson told the story about the boy on the bus, about the orange and about the hat.
“Later, I became frustrated with my parents, because they allowed me to be so gullible,” he said. “They didn’t tell me what the hat meant.”
Then, for 20 years, Alabama forced him to wear that same symbol on his arm.
Pringle raised the gavel for his 30-second warning.
“If you look at the State Trooper patch, that coat of arms is there …”
“Thank you so much,” Pringle said.
Like the bill before the committee, Jackson’s time was up before he could finish.
By 1939, five years after Owen’s trip to Washington, work on Archives and History’s new home in Montgomery was nearing completion. It was a stately government building, with white marble drawn from Sylacauga and a walnut-paneled director’s office about twice the size of the governor’s office across the street.
As construction on the Archives’ new home neared completion, Owen set out to leave a different sort of mark on Alabama — and to erase one more vestige of Reconstruction.
Owen called Alabama’s state seal a “monstrosity” and successfully lobbied to replace it with an updated version of a seal used before the Civil War. Of the Reconstruction-era seal, Owen did not disguise her contempt.
“The intention of these aliens was to stamp a defeated people with the insignia of a conquering nation,” Owen wrote.
Simultaneous to replacing the seal, Owen commissioned a wholly new symbol — the Alabama coat of arms.
On April 23, 1939, the cover of The Birmingham News Sunday magazine featured the debut of the new design, approved by the Legislature the week before. The new symbol would hang in both houses of the Legislature, the governor’s office, the governor’s mansion “and in suitable places in our institutions of higher learning and in our public schools,” Owen wrote inside the magazine.
At the top is a sailing ship bringing the first French settlers to the state’s shore. Two bald eagles face each other, between them a shield decorated with symbols of the five governments of Alabama — a Union shield atop French, Spanish, British and Confederate flags.
The Confederate banner included is not one of the three official flags of the Confederacy but the rebel battlefield banner already adopted by defiant Southerners.
Beneath them, the two eagles clutch a banner with a Latin phrase few Alabamians would understand.
Owen seems to have come up with the words — the new state motto, passed by the Legislature to replace the old “here we rest” — on her own. Owen explained she took inspiration from an 18th century poem, “What Constitutes a State?”
“Men who their duties know,” the poem concludes. “But know their rights, and knowing, dare maintain.”
Or as Owen condensed it for the 20th century into a mantra of Alabama stubbornness and Southern defiance …
“We dare defend our rights.”
1948, Marie Bankhead Owen, led the women's division of the States' Rights Democratic Party, also known as the Dixiecrats, and gave speeches in which she compared President Truman's support for civil rights to Nazi Germany.
Jackson wasn’t the only person to speak on that day last April. Two members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans stood to make arguments that have been mostly debunked by historians — that there were African-Americans Confederates, too, and that taxes had been the true cause of the war. Like Jackson, their time expired before they could finish.
But the bill drew one peculiar ally who also spoke in its favor — Steve Murray, the director of Archives and History.
Murray’s argument before the committee was a simple one that seemed to pique the interest of at least a few lawmakers: The Coat of Arms is bad history.
Not only was the battle flag never a government flag of the Confederacy, but the British and Spanish flags on the crest are historically inaccurate, as well.
Perhaps more significantly, the state’s symbol does nothing to acknowledge the Native Americans who lived in Alabama thousands of years before that French ship on the crest landed in what’s now Mobile Bay.
Murray shared with the committee some ideas — changing the symbol to incorporate historically accurate symbols as well as Native American iconography.
Pringle, the committee chairman, promised to work with Hall and Murray to move something forward. But for now, the bill died in committee, without a vote.
Despite the resistance, Hall says she hasn’t given up hope for redrawing the coat of arms. After almost 30 years in the Alabama Legislature, she’s accustomed to the slow walk of lawmaking.
“‘I’m going to continue to have faith and believe — even if it’s not going to happen this year — we will be in the process of making sure that it happens,” she said. “My first bill took me 13 years.”
“Just empty,” he said when I asked him how he felt after that committee meeting. “It left me empty.”
I asked him why. It wasn’t the legislative dead-end, he said. Rather, it was the other speakers that day — folks who still believed the Civil War wasn’t about slavery.
“I hate to think that you grow accustomed to it, but people around here, they believe it with all their heart and soul, and it’s nothing you can do to change their minds,” Jackson said.
Tallulah Bankhead bucked her family's racist politics, but she stayed close with "Aunt Marie" frequently supporting her financially.Alabama Media Group
In 1945, John Hope Franklin visited the Archives and History building in Montgomery to pore over records there. Franklin would become one of the leading Black history experts in the country, but at the time, he was a relatively recent Harvard graduate and young college professor nosing through Alabama Civil War records.
The documents he sought, Franklin recalled in his memoirs, could only be seen with permission from the director.
“I hear there is a Harvard n—-r here,” Owen said to anyone within earshot, including Franklin who was standing right in front of her. “Have you seen him?”
Owen’s secretary explained that Franklin was the man she was looking for.
“You don’t look like a Harvard n—-r to me,” Owen said to him. “Have a seat.”
Owen gave Franklin the records he wanted, but not before quizzing him about where he was from and where he’d received his education. When he told her he’d done his undergraduate schooling at Fisk University in Nashville, she called it “a good old Confederate State!”
“She spoke of the end of the war and how relieved she was that the ‘boys’ would be coming home,” Franklin wrote in his autobiography, “Mirror to America.” “It was equally obvious that she hoped that the segregated South she was so enamored of would last forever too unaffected by peace or war.
“Days of infamy had passed,” he wrote. “More days of infamy yet remained.”
Owen was reaching the end of her career, and her influence was waning, as was her family’s power. By 1946, both her brothers had died, and with the death of Franklin Roosevelt, a new Democrat from Missouri was changing the party her family once controlled. The new president, Harry Truman, embraced a civil rights agenda, integrating the military and commissioning studies of abuses in the South. When Southern Democrats formed the States’ Rights Democratic Party in 1948, Owen was appointed head of the women’s division.
In that job, she toured the South again giving speeches to civic groups. She compared Truman’s push for greater civil rights for African-Americans to the fascism the Allies defeated in Nazi Germany.
In Ms. Marie’s twisted view of history, America had been the one fighting for white supremacy.
In 1955, she survived a car wreck, but her injuries triggered a steep decline in her health.
She soon retired and died three years later at the age of 88.
A bust of Marie Bankhead Owen look out into the hall of the Alabama Department of History and Archives, a building she made a reality and an agency she ran for 35 years. (Kyle Whitmire | AL.com)
Near the entrance to her old, first-floor office sits a bust of Ms. Marie. The bronze sculpture is true to its subject, with a stern, serious face that looks out of its white marble enclave as if still watching the hall. Next to the bust, there’s a photograph of Owen with a paragraph describing her opposition to women’s suffrage and her support for Jim Crow.
“Owen believed that the right to vote should be governed by state law because federal protection would lead to increased voting by African Americans,” it says.
Wherever Owen’s image appears in the public parts of the building, there are similar descriptions nearby.
Murray, the director, says the department has no intention of erasing Owen’s contributions but is focused instead on correcting her mistakes and filling in the gaps she left behind.
He understands that without her, this office and this building might not exist. Reminders are everywhere, including her old office, where he works. The furniture is the same she brought here 80 years ago. The walnut paneling is still there, as is the private bathroom. Between two tall windows looking out at the capitol, a canvas portrait of Ms. Marie stares down.
But the Archives has grown.
In 2014, the department rebuilt and redesigned much of the Museum of Alabama on the second floor. While it still includes some artifacts collected by Owen and her husband, it also shares slave narratives, as well as exhibits on Reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement. Near the exit, there’s a space set aside for the modern-day, with a small white sign saying “Exhibit in Progress.” Behind the glass, there’s a gray mannequin torso with a “Black Lives Matter” t-shirt.
When George Floyd’s murder set off a national movement in 2020, Archives and History was still under COVID lockdown. Murray said he and the department staff felt they needed to do something to match the significance of the moment
“We could have released a statement saying, if you want to learn more about the history of race and racism in the United States, here’s some great online material,” Murray says. “But from the first moment that we contemplated that, I knew that it was incomplete to the point of being dishonest, because we knew that we could speak to the fact that systemic racism was a reality in our country because we can see it in our own work as an agency.”
In the department’s Fall 2020 newsletter, Archives and History published a 12-point plan, called its Statement of Recommitment, and Murray wrote a candid admission of the damage the Owens family had caused the state.
“The fault of the Owens was not in the decision to collect Confederate history, which is of indisputable importance, but in the disproportionate use of agency resources to preserve the Confederate past while declining to do anything remotely similar for the history of African Americans in Alabama,” Murray said in the newsletter.
From now on, Murray promised, the department would do whatever it could to repair as much of that damage as possible.
Ms. Marie haunts this place, but not through her bronze likeness in the hall, nor through her Haunted Mansion-like portrait in the director’s office. What she’s left here lives in the basement — 24 boxes of her personal papers. Among pressed flowers and birthday cards are brittle, yellowed letters, speeches and research notes on Alabama history.
Among the strategy memos for the school curricular campaign are letters that by themselves seem mundane — moms asking where they can buy tiny Confederate flags for their children, and campaign pitches for new Confederate monuments, including a statue of Jefferson Davis that still stands outside the Alabama capitol.
Owen and her fellow Confederate Daughters understood something important. Confederate iconography and monuments were not relics, but vessels — filled with racist ideology and false knowledge, and designed to carry their contents into the future.
And it’s still working.
“We must have something of this sort, as the present generation is getting further and further away from the faiths of their fathers,” Owen wrote. “Of course, no historian wishes to perpetuate animosities but ‘truth is mighty and must prevail.’”
In 2014, the Alabama Department of Archives and History opened a new exhibit space, Alabama Voices, which attempts to tell a more complete version of Alabama history, and in 2020, the department issued a "Statement of Recommitment" in which is promised to correct for its neglect of Black Alabama history.
While Owen’s influence on her old department is fading, her stamp on Alabama remains. The coat of arms still hangs on the wall at Archives and History, as required by law. You’ll have to look hard to find it, but it’s still there.
And on highway patrol cars.
And on agency seals and state stationery.
And on the troopers’ uniforms.
“When Mississippi changed its flag, I thought our thing would gain some traction,” Jackson said. “If they can change their thing, when are we going to change ours?”
But it’s not only the iconography that lives on here. It’s the cruel racist joke that still hangs above the Statehouse door.
We dare defend our rights. But whose rights?
The answer has always been clear. Every right Jackson and other Black Alabamians have today, they have in spite of, not because of, the Alabama Legislature.
It’s in the Statehouse, not the Archives, where Owen’s handiwork perhaps best reveals itself — when Sons of Confederate Veterans repeat the lies of the Confederate catechism in committee meetings.
And when lawmakers perpetuate the lies of their white supremacist forebearers.
At that hearing last year, the committee chairman, Rep. Chris Pringle, seemed receptive to Jackson’s arguments, and perhaps more so to Murray’s plans for updating the state crest.
But after that legislative session adjourned, he took a turn in the other direction. Pringle introduced the first bill in Alabama to ban teaching critical race theory from Alabama public schools.
Since critical race theory isn’t taught in Alabama schools, I called Pringle to ask him what he thought CRT was. Pringle struggled. He sputtered a stop-and-go story about corporate reeducation camps for white executives before telling me he was concerned about history.
“I mean, history is being rewritten and I’m not exactly sure of the accuracy of what’s there now and what they’re trying to change it into,” he said.
But history isn’t being rewritten. Owen and the United Daughters of the Confederacy did that a century ago.
And once again, the Alabama Legislature is rushing to the defense of an incomplete Alabama story.
Already in 2022, there are three anti-CRT bills filed in the Alabama Legislature with another one expected to drop soon. The question isn’t whether a CRT bill will pass, but which one.
Meanwhile, there are more bills to protect Confederate monuments, never mind the Legislature made moving most Confederate monuments illegal in 2017.
One bill would make vandalizing monuments during a protest a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
Unlike Hall’s bill last year, the new monuments bills weren’t delayed until the last day of the session. Two recently sailed through the state Senate’s first 2022 committee hearing and will soon go to the full body for a vote.
And after the Alabama Legislature redrew district lines last year, a panel of three federal judges, including two Republican Trump appointees, found that the map had purposely diluted Black votes. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the ruling, not because it disagreed with its conclusions, but because, as Justice Brett Kavanagh said, redrawing the district lines so close to the election would cause too much confusion.
As it happens, Pringle co-chaired the joint legislative redistricting committee, too, alongside state Sen. Jim McClendon, R-Springville, who is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Were someone to quiz them, it’s unlikely many Alabama lawmakers would know who Marie Bankhead Owen was. Like the Alabamians they represent, most have forgotten the woman who captured Alabama history for the Confederacy.
But when you watch what the Legislature does, it’s like Ms. Marie never left.
Only the page is missing, listening for her footsteps through the Statehouse hall.
An initiative through 2022, “State of Denial” will explore the connections between Alabama’s past and present — and how they might affect our future.
Read Part One of State of Denial: Alabama’s capitol is a crime scene. The cover-up has lasted 120 years.
Read Part Two: Ambushed in Eufaula: Alabama’s forgotten race massacre
Subscribe to the State of Denial Newsletter.
Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group, 2020 winner of the Walker Stone Award, winner of the 2021 SPJ award for opinion writing, and 2021 winner of the Molly Ivins prize for political commentary. You can follow his work on his Facebook page, The War on Dumb. And on Twitter. And on Instagram.
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