Free Don Siegelman
'Yesterday’s Supreme Court opinion, unanimously overturning the conviction of the former Governor of Virginia, has given new energy to the effort to free former Governor Don Siegelman of Alabama. Let’s leave aside for a moment the question, important as it is, of whether he was railroaded to prison in a corrupt prosecution orchestrated by political enemies. Let’s ask instead: What sort of person is he? What are his values? How has he lived his life? When people are being asked to call the White House and otherwise advocate on someone’s behalf, they have the right to know these things.
So a few months ago, someone just getting involved with the Free Don Siegelman effort, wanting to know more about him, asked about his involvement with civil rights issues. The inquiry was passed on to Governor Siegelman, who sent a reply by email, first cautioning that it was “meant as an outline, not a finished piece of prose.” Here’s what he wrote:
I was raised by my Dad not to use the "N" word.
I convened African American students together at the University of Alabama and convinced them to organized the Afro-American Students Association, then helped secure funding. Two students were later elected to Alabama's House of Representatives.
I established the CCOP, the Campus Community Organization Project, to get public housing residents to organize to demand better housing, etc.
I went to Mississippi with Allard K. Lowenstein in the late 60's to organize old civil rights workers in a McCarthy-LBJ delegation to the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Lowenstein had led students from northern colleges into the Mississippi Summer, and had participated in sit-ins in North Carolina lunch counters. I went back with Al to Mayor Charles Evers’s inauguration as Mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, in 1969.
In 1967, I stopped the playing of "Dixie" at University of Alabama football games.'>>>
https://www.facebook.com/FreeDonSiegelman/posts/1736727609877626
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