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In the race for Alabama’s newly drawn 2nd Congressional District, new detailed reporting that spans “thousands of documents covering nearly three centuries” reveals a sharp contrast between “the son of a civil rights hero fac[ing] a gerrymandered map, racial dog whistles, and a wealthy descendant of slave-owning confederate Klansmen.”
Shomari Figures and Caroleene Hardee Dobson “come from two entirely different Americas,” TheGrio’s Michael Harriot writes. While Dobson has touted her “Alabama roots and values,” new reporting reveals she has hid the truth of her ties to this Black-opportunity district.
According to TheGrio:
Dobson is a product of her ancestors. Her family’s origin story also contains ties to slavery, the confederacy and racial terrorism.
Caroleene Dobson attended Monroe Academy, a private, historically white segregation academy created as a loophole for white parents who didn’t want their children attending integrated schools.
Dobson is the great-great-great-great-great-great granddaughter of John Hardee, a “prominent state senator and slaveholder” … placing Dobson’s ancestors in the top .1% of American enslavers.
To this day, the Dobsons continue to financially benefit from the slave labor camp. […]
Dobson did not respond to theGrio’s request for an interview.
Meanwhile, on Figures:
Figures was born and raised in Mobile, Ala., and attended a segregated high school… [and] stayed in-state to attend college and law school at the University of Alabama, the school his father desegregated in 1969.
He left the state to work… first as a field organizer for a young senator named Barack Obama, then as an attorney for a big law firm called the U.S. Department of Justice.
Shomari’s father, Michael Figures, eventually filed a civil suit… that bankrupted the United Klans of America, the organization responsible for the 16th Street Church Bombing, the murder of Viola Luizzo and a half-century of racial terrorism.
“This political contest is more than just about the candidates and their family background,” Harriot says. “It’s about Black history and whitewashed white history.”
Read the full story in TheGrio here. |
