Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville injects the ghost of Bull Connor into 2022 midterms

In the morally downhill midterms of 2022, there are dog whistles ... and then there are just whistles. Nowhere is that more obvious than a place called Minden, Nev. — a small town near the California border where Donald Trump brought his traveling dog-and-pony show on Saturday night, exactly one month before Election Day.

Amid the political cacophony and nonsense that accompanies The Former Guy — at 6 p.m. Pacific, to be precise — the rally attendees probably heard it: a loud siren, coming from the direction of the fire station downtown. The practice began in the 1920s — not coincidentally, the heyday of a Ku Klux Klan revival in America — and heralded the so-called sundown laws in Minden and surrounding Douglas County that required locals belonging to the native Washoe Tribe to get off the streets at night, or else be arrested.

“Skins, it’s time to go home,” an 82-year-old member of the Washoe People named Wyatt Vernon recalled in a 2020 article. “Get out of town.” The “sundown law’ was finally repealed in the 1970s, and yet Minden never stopped blasting the whistle at 6 p.m., alternately claiming it’s an emergency test or else copping to a warped historical tribute. Said the Minden town manager J.D. Frisby: “There’s a lot of sentimental feelings nostalgic to that siren.”

It must have been 6 p.m. — metaphorically, if not actually — when first-term Alabama GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville took the stage at Saturday’s Trump rally, encouraging voters to go Republican in Nevada’s neck-and-neck Senate election which may decide who controls that body in 2023. Tuberville surely drowned out the noise from the fire station with his own six-alarm siren appeal to voters’ darkest instincts — taking the greatest hits from a Republican fall campaign that has increasingly fallen back on racist fearmongering and making it much, much worse.

“They want to take over what you’ve got,” Tuberville warmed up the pro-Trump crowd — “they” his amorphous term that could have meant Democrats, or Black people, or the Washoe People, or some other “Other” — in what the journalist Matthew Chapman noted is a literal echo of language used by the KKK to rile up Southerners in the 1960s.

The Alabama senator made his pitch for Nevadans to elect Republican Adam Laxalt, the challenger with 2022′s best shot at unseating a Democratic incumbent in Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, by echoing the new party line that Democrats are “pro-crime,” in a year when voters are more alarmed than usual about that issue. But then he took it next level by leaving no doubt who he wants his audience to see as the criminals.

“They want to control what you have!” Tuberville told the assembled Trumpists. “They want crime because they want to take over what you’ve got! They want to have reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that. Bull—!” The crowd roared. “They’re not owed that.”

» READ MORE: Racist ‘Willie Horton’-style fearmongering on crime may win midterms for GOP

Suddenly, the ambiguity surrounding “they” was all cleared up, since the main (although not only) group that’s made a case for reparations are African Americans, once enslaved and then subject to racial apartheid, especially in Tuberville’s Alabama and the rest of the Deep South. A U.S. senator was openly equating Blackness with criminality, layering on the outrageous claim that “they” have the nerve to demand reparations while taking your stuff.

“I mean, I’ve watched and listened to A LOT of old George Wallace speeches,” Josh Moon, a columnist for Alabama Political Reporter, wrote on Twitter. “You’d be hard pressed to find many that were worse than this. In 2022. Just disgusting.”

Tuberville’s Minden speech was so blatantly racist that — just a few short years ago — it’s easy to imagine at least a few Republican Party elders condemning it. But on this Sunday morning in October 2022, the silence so far has been as loud as that Minden fire siren. A political party that weeks ago was in full panic mode after its overreaches on the Supreme Court and abortion rights had energized young and female Democrats has now found its footing with the same appeal to white supremacy as the “nostalgia” for an era of “sundown” laws.

Still, a part of me finds this so disappointing because of a personal connection to Alabama that I still carry with me. In the early 1980s, when I was just starting my odyssey through journalism in my early 20s, I spent more than three years as a reporter at the Birmingham News. It was an interesting place and a fascinating time, and as a young, optimistic, and, with hindsight, naïve young man, I initially took away more from the part of the glass that looked half full to me — not what remained half-empty.

To be sure, it was a conservative time — the dawn of the “Reagan revolution” — and I saw firsthand the birth of massive megachurches in the Birmingham suburbs and the growing ties between their new Moral Majority and the GOP. Wallace was also restored as governor when I lived there. I even wrote about a camp in the Alabama woods that trained mercenaries to fight against leftists in Central America.

But the many forward-looking friends I made — at the newspaper and in the comparatively cosmopolitan city of Birmingham — and the rise of Black politicians like Birmingham’s first American American mayor, Richard Arrington, who were empowered by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, had me telling friends and family back North that, barely a generation after the end of legal segregation, things were really improving in the American South.

And so Tommy Tuberville is living proof of just how wrong I was.

Instead, the current holder of Alabama’s Class 2 U.S. Senate seat is reviving the legacy of the notorious politician who occupied it from 1920-1931, James Thomas “Cotton Tom” Heflin, who in addition to his Klan-revival-era views that “God Almighty intended the negro to be the servant of the white man,” famously shot and wounded a Black man in a Washington, D.C., streetcar altercation, had the charges dismissed, and later bragged about it.

Look, the issue that Tuberville raised about reparations for African Americans for past wrongs is both fraught and highly complicated in every sense — political, financial, legal. But there is something rich about a politician like Tuberville — clearly grasping for the mantle of the segregationist Wallace as well as Birmingham’s notorious 1960s law enforcement chief Bull Connor, who treated the “them” of Black people seeking their civil and economic rights as “criminals” by siccing fierce dogs or blasting them with fire hoses — now claiming that Black people are not owed anything.

It gets even more outrageous when you remember that, pre-politics, Tuberville made millions of dollars in a modern industry that critics have aptly compared to a plantation: college football. Tuberville was earning more than $2 million a year in his last pre-Senate gig at the University of Cincinnati — money earned on the backs of student-athletes who aren’t paid a dime and who (43% at college football’s top level in 2020) are disproportionately Black. He literally made his fortune off the free labor of people that on Saturday he shamelessly branded as criminals trying to “take what you’ve got.”

Coaches like Tuberville (disproportionately white, of course) are often the highest-paid employees of America’s public universities like Auburn or Texas Tech. They are paid much more than faculty who are actual rocket scientists, even as Tuberville — elected to the Senate in 2020 despite thinking World War II was fought to defeat socialism and not knowing the three branches of federal government — is clearly no rocket scientist.

To be brutally honest, Tuberville is a mediocrity who — whatever you think of his mixed record as a football coach — got to his lofty Senate perch more on his whiteness than any claim to merit. In winning that 2020 election, he rode that white privilege to beat one of those decent, forward-looking Alabamians — Doug Jones, who courageously revived the case and prosecuted the KKK goons behind the 1963 church bombing that killed four Black girls — of the kind who’d given me hope back in the 1980s. But it turns out those whistles from our racist past — and present — that still ring at 6 p.m. are much harder to silence than I could ever have imagined.

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