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This Alabama civil rights hero is still being punished. Let’s fix that

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This Alabama civil rights hero is still being punished. Let’s fix that

Feb 20, 2023 | 8:00 am ET
By Brian Lyman
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This Alabama civil rights hero is still being punished. Let’s fix that
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The Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, as seen on February 8, 2023. (Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector)

Across from Montgomery City Hall is a little park named for Lister Hill, who represented Alabama in the U.S. Senate for three decades. 

In 1911, this park was the home of a store run by Arthur Madison, the son of formerly enslaved parents who helped create the Madison Park community in Montgomery. Madison was 27 that year, an alumnus of what is now Alabama State University and a recent graduate of Bowdoin College in Maine.

Madison would pursue success wherever he could. By the early 1920s, he had moved to New York, earned a law degree and opened an office.

But he kept in touch with his hometown. In 1943, he traveled to Montgomery to help organize a voter registration drive. He worked alongside E.D. Nixon, a longtime activist who would go on to play a major role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Madison filed a lawsuit against the local Board of Registrars on behalf of family members who wanted to vote.

When city authorities heard about this, they sent deputies to the homes of Madison’s relatives, who threatened their jobs, he said, and coerced them into making a statement that he’d acted without their consent.

Madison was arrested in April 1944.  A Bowdoin classmate later said law enforcement officers beat him. Madison was indicted on a charge of representing clients without their permission. Hill, the park’s namesake, was fighting a difficult battle to get renominated to the U.S. Senate and told his old law firm to assist the Board of Registrars, the defendants in Madison’s first lawsuit. 

Madison was convicted, fined $2,500 — about $43,000 today — and disbarred.

Most stories of heroism during Jim Crow end there. 

But Madison had energy, optimism and an entrepreneur’s ability to ignore discouraging facts. After his conviction, he told a waiting crowd that they had “just won a great victory” because the court hadn’t fully closed the door on future registration lawsuits.

Just weeks after his arrest, he and Nixon led about 750 Black voters to the local courthouse to register to vote. The crowds were so large that they had to be admitted two-by-two.

Over the next several years, many other Black Montgomerians followed. When Rosa Parks registered to vote in 1945, she asked Madison and Nixon to accompany her.

Madison’s efforts led to a noticeable uptick in Black voting in Montgomery, and his work inspired Nixon and Parks in their later activism, including the Bus Boycott.

But his punishment remains on the books, despite the questionable circumstances around it. Madison died in 1957, but as of last week, the Alabama State Bar still listed Madison as disbarred.

Arthur Madison, wearing a tie and looking off to his right.
Arthur Madison in an undated photograph published in the July 15, 1944 edition of the New York Amsterdam News. A native of Montgomery, Madison later moved to New York and became an attorney. In 1944, he was arrested and disbarred for trying to register family members to vote. But Madison launched a voting rights drive that drew in activists who later launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott. (Trenholm State Community College)

Let’s change that.

The Alabama State Bar doesn’t have a process for addressing license status after someone’s death.

“You have to get the people who make the rules, which would be the Alabama Supreme Court,” Roman Shaul, general counsel for the State Bar, told me last week.

But if death is no obstacle to disbarment in Alabama, it shouldn’t stand in the way of restoring a license. I’d like to think one of our one of the roughly 15,000 attorneys in Alabama could petition the nine justices on Madison’s behalf.

As to his conviction, overturning it seems like a long shot for now. There’s a state law allowing posthumous pardons, and in 2013, it led to pardons for three members of the Scottsboro Nine who hadn’t been exonerated in their lifetimes. But the law as written only applies to Class A or B felony convictions. The statute the city used to jail Madison is still on the books, but it’s neither a felony nor a misdemeanor. The pardon law likely won’t apply — unless the Legislature fixes it.

Correcting the historical record wouldn’t make up for what Madison faced. Nor does it excuse us from confronting the ongoing legacies of racism in Alabama, like chronic school underfunding, extreme disparities in health care outcomes or mass incarceration.

But it’s a necessary reckoning at a time when far too many of the state’s leaders want to turn away from our past

Alabama history is full of cruelty and violence, and of people sanctifying that cruelty and violence in stone monuments and shortsighted policy. Yet it’s also full of people who walked through that deadly valley with courage and integrity, edging toward something better. 

Confronting the past puts us face-to-face with everything that went wrong — and everyone who tried to make it right. People like Arthur Madison.

And that park outside City Hall in the state’s capital? Memorial Preservation Act or not, name it for Madison, a man who risked far more for his city than Hill ever did.