Leadership Quote by Artur Davis

Progress, here, is framed as a legal and moral housekeeping job: you cannot build a credible future on a document that still carries the stains of the past. Artur Davis’s line is doing two things at once. On the surface, it’s a procedural argument about constitutional language. Underneath, it’s a critique of the state’s self-image - Alabama can’t keep insisting it has moved on while its governing charter still nods to segregationist logic.

The phrasing “was and still is” matters. It anticipates the classic backlash: that repealing offensive language is cosmetic, symbolic, “political correctness.” Davis flips that charge. He treats symbolism as infrastructure. Words in a constitution aren’t a footnote; they’re the state’s official biography, the story it tells courts, schools, and citizens about who belongs and on what terms. Leaving racist language in place doesn’t merely offend; it normalizes a hierarchy by refusing to disavow it.

Context sharpens the intent. Alabama repeatedly struggled to pass amendments removing segregation-era provisions, even long after they were unenforceable. That pattern became its own message: not that the law demanded racism, but that enough voters tolerated the reminder. Davis, as a Black Alabama politician navigating Southern pragmatism, is staking out a reformer’s realism. He’s not claiming language changes life overnight. He’s arguing that a state that won’t revise its own founding text is a state choosing stagnation - and that “progress” begins with the courage to edit the record.